"The illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank [PALESTINE] is one of the most well-established positions in international law, resting on four distinct pillars: GENEVA CONVENTIONS, UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS, ICJ RULINGS, & UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY... No serious legal scholar disputes this consensus. The settlements are illegal. The only remaining question is whether the international community will act on it." William Dalrymple of Empire: World History

@EmpirePodUK  

Empire: World History

 William Dalrymple

@DalrympleWill

 

The illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is one of the most well-established positions in international law, resting on four distinct pillars:

 

GENEVA CONVENTIONS Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. Israel ratified the Convention in 1951. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the authoritative interpreter of humanitarian law, has consistently held that this provision applies directly to the settlements.

 

UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS The Security Council has repeatedly affirmed settlement illegality — including in binding resolutions the US did not veto: • Res. 446 (1979): settlements have "no legal validity" • Res. 465 (1980): calls on Israel to dismantle existing settlements • Res. 2334 (2016): passed 14-0 (US abstained), explicitly states settlements constitute "a flagrant violation of international law" and have "no legal validity"

 

ICJ RULINGS • Advisory Opinion on the Wall (2004): the Court found settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, had been established in breach of international law, and that the wall built to protect them compounded that illegality • Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2024): the Court went further, ruling that Israel's continued presence in the OPT — including the settlement enterprise — is itself unlawful, and called on all states not to recognise or assist it

 

UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY Countless UNGA resolutions have reaffirmed settlement illegality, including Res. 77/247 (2023), which requested the landmark 2024 ICJ opinion.

 

No serious legal scholar disputes this consensus. The settlements are illegal. The only remaining question is whether the international community will act on it.

      

https://x.com/DalrympleWill/status/2066831885519528191 

 

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United Nations HumanRights: I condemn disinformation campaigns & attempts to undermine the credibility of the UN human rights system, including United Nations Special Procedure Experts mandate holders. Criticism & debate are legitimate & necessary; efforts to intimidate, discredit, or even sanction, are not. They are unacceptable. - UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk

@UNHumanRights

I condemn disinformation campaigns & attempts to undermine the credibility of the UN human rights system, including @UN_SPExperts mandate holders. 

 

Criticism & debate are legitimate & necessary; efforts to intimidate, discredit, or even sanction, are not. They are unacceptable. - UN Human Rights Chief @volker_turk

 

https://x.com/UNHumanRights/status/2066558393678999873 

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UN Special Procedures

@UN_SPExperts

The Special Procedures of @UN_HRC are human rights experts independent from any govt or organisation, serving in their individual capacity. #StandUp4HumanRights

Geneva, Switzerland

Stanford students walk out of Sundar Pichai’s commencement speech... "According to Al Jazeera, the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus was signed between Google, Amazon and Israel in 2021. It aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, A.I. and other technological services to the Israeli government and military.​"

MSN story by Owen Scott

6/15/2026 

Around 200 students walked out of the CEO of Google’s commencement speech at Stanford University, according to reports. ​

Other attendees could be seen blowing whistles and waving Palestinian flags, amid Project Nimbus, a scheme under which Google and Amazon provide the Israeli government with technological services. 

In footage obtained by an SFGATE reporter, students can be heard chanting “free, free Palestine,” as they left CEO Sundar Pichai’s speech.

“I must warn you all, this is only the second commencement speech I have ever given,” Pichai says in the video. “The first was literally in my backyard.”

​According to that same reporter, Pichai did not mention artificial intelligence in his speech. The topic had been mentioned in several commencement speeches by speakers throughout the year, leading to viral moments in which they were booed by the crowd... READ MORE  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/stanford-students-walk-out-of-sundar-pichai-s-commencement-speech/ar-AA25G2aN

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Students who walked out of Pichai’s speech held their own “People’s Commencement,” featuring activist Mahmoud Khalil as the keynote speaker, according to SFGATE. 

Khalil had been detained for more than 100 days by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over his pro-Palestinian activism on Columbia University’s campus in 2024. ​

According to Al Jazeera, the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus was signed between Google, Amazon and Israel in 2021. It aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, A.I. and other technological services to the Israeli government and military.​

Tallying the global cost of the US-Israel war against Iran From thousands of lives lost to an economic shock likely to plunge millions into poverty, the world is paying dearly

Among the lives lost were 120 primary schoolchildren killed on the first day of the war in Iran.

Photograph: Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News/WANA/Reuters

By Oliver Holmes, graphics by Paul Scruton

Mon 15 Jun 2026

It would be hard to find a human on Earth unaffected by the US-Israel war against Iran. Several thousand have been killed. Millions more pay are paying each day in steeper food prices or at the petrol pump, and as inflation eats away at the value of their earnings.

For many, the final bill has not yet come, but it will eventually. They will pay for the long-term damage caused by the biggest threat of all to the global economy: uncertainty.

Uncertainty is hard to measure, but one way is to look at geopolitical risk, which stalls investment and employment. The US Federal Reserve economists Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello have created an index that tracks reports of global tension. It shows the Iran war has been more destabilising than the Covid-19 pandemic, but on a par with either the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or that of Iraq in 2003.

So how does the world tally the cost of this war? Some costs are easier to calculate than others, such as bills for surface-to-air missiles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Others are harder to quantify, including the damage caused to Iranian and Lebanese hospitals and power networks. Much cannot be valued at all – the lives lost, including the 120 primary schoolchildren in Iran killed on the first day of the war.

Then there are hypothetical costs. A senior UN aid official framed the conflict in terms of opportunity cost, noting that the $2bn (£1.5bn) a day spent on military operations could otherwise cover lifesaving aid for roughly 87 million people.

And what about the beneficiaries of this war, the oil companies and the shareholders of arms manufacturers?

Here are some ways the impact of the war has been assessed: 

READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/15/tallying-the-global-cost-of-the-us-israel-war-against-iran

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"Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map." Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago. In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced families, according to medics, is carried at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on 25 May, 2026 (Reuters)

Jonathan Cook

11 June 2026

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. 

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”. 

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders. 

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct. 

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4. 

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration. 

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war. 

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. 

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt. 

The 1967 war was... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago

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The power of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the power of ideas to change the world. It inspires us to continue working to ensure all people can gain freedom, equality and dignity...

 United Nations

@UN

 

In December 1948, the UN General Assembly met in Paris to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

 

The principles laid out in this historic document have been key in helping guide humanity toward a world of greater freedom, equality & justice. 

 

 https://ohchr.org/en/universal-d

 

https://www.ohchr.org/en/universal-declaration-of-human-rights 

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, it set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected.

Discover the Declaration

The power of the Universal Declaration is the power of ideas to change the world. It inspires us to continue working to ensure that all people can gain freedom, equality and dignity.

• Read the Declaration
• Discover the articles in social media
• Listen to the Declaration
  UDHR Audio/Video Project

The most translated document in the world

The original records

The Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 during its 183rd plenary meeting.

• View the original resolution.

• Explore the meeting record for the historic adoption.

• Examine the voting record.

• And for more information about the history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, discover research guides and resources.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Exhibit

We maintain a worldwide collection of materials on the Declaration, which is permanently based... READ MORE  https://www.ohchr.org/en/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

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Ali Louis Bourzgui dedicates Tony award to immigrants and Palestine ...Accepting the award, the 26-year-old dedicated it to "the people of Palestine who deserve to live a fruitful life, a free life, a full life without occupation", drawing applause from the audience...

 

Ali Louis Bourzgui was born to a Moroccan-American father and an Italian-Irish mother [Getty/file photo]

Tony winner Ali Louis Bourzgui dedicates award to Palestinians

Tony winner Ali Louis Bourzgui dedicated his award to Palestinians and called for greater Arab representation in the arts.

Moroccan-American actor Ali Louis Bourzgui used his acceptance speech at the Tony Awards on Sunday night to speak out in support of Palestinians, immigrant communities and LGBTQ people after winning Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his role in Broadway's The Lost Boys.

Accepting the award, the 26-year-old dedicated it to "the people of Palestine who deserve to live a fruitful life, a free life, a full life without occupation", drawing applause from the audience.

His remarks come as Palestinians in Gaza continue to endure Israel's devastating military campaign, while Palestinians in the occupied West Bank face escalating attacks by Israeli settlers and military forces, alongside ongoing displacement linked to settlement expansion.

Bourzgui also paid tribute to immigrant families and LGBTQ communities in the United States, telling them they should not have to "audition for the empathy" they deserve.

Speaking about immigrant communities, he said the "beautiful tapestry" they create is what makes the United States special.

"May you one day not have to audition for the empathy that should be freely given by this country that benefits from your beauty," he said.

The actor also used the moment to celebrate Arab artists and theatre makers, calling for greater visibility and representation.

Addressing underrepresented Arab creatives, he said he hoped they would continue telling their stories and showing their faces so that "our humanity becomes undeniable, and our families can no longer be written off as merely collateral damage."

"May they know the beauty of our kisses upon each cheek and the romance of a language rooted in passion for love and life itself," he added in his speech. 

 https://www.newarab.com/news/tony-winner-ali-louis-bourzgui-dedicates-award-palestinians

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"We live in an age saturated with Holocaust books, films, documentaries, and lessons that teach us how dangerous dehumanization can be. We are reminded time and again that before people can be mistreated, displaced, or killed on a mass scale, they are first stripped of their humanity through words and imagery. And yet, when similar language is used today to describe Palestinians, much of the world remains silent—or worse, offers its support. If history has taught us anything, it is that when human beings are reduced to weeds, thorns, insects, or any other nuisance, the groundwork is being laid for people to accept what would otherwise be unacceptable. That is why the language matters. And that is why the silence is so troubling." ~ Mike Odetalla

Mike Hanini Odetalla

tspoSnerodf2f7m4000m15847f1l64fh32m5a97380l7tu1f0g4u14518m4f  ·

Morning reflections regarding Gaza with coffee as I look over my yard:

6/08/26

I can't look at my lawn without thinking about the terminology that has been used over the years to describe military assaults on Palestinians.

"Mowing the lawn" was one such phrase used to describe repeated assaults on Gaza, reducing Palestinian men, women, and children to little more than blades of grass to be cut down.

More recently came "Field of Thorns," a term associated with the current Israeli leadership, where Palestinians are once again reduced to an unwanted nuisance that must be removed.

What I find most disturbing is not merely the language itself, but the world's reaction to it.

We live in an age saturated with Holocaust books, films, documentaries, and lessons that teach us how dangerous dehumanization can be. We are reminded time and again that before people can be mistreated, displaced, or killed on a mass scale, they are first stripped of their humanity through words and imagery.

And yet, when similar language is used today to describe Palestinians, much of the world remains silent—or worse, offers its support.

If history has taught us anything, it is that when human beings are reduced to weeds, thorns, insects, or any other nuisance, the groundwork is being laid for people to accept what would otherwise be unacceptable.

That is why the language matters.

And that is why the silence is so troubling.

~ Mike Odetalla

 https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10166147366441977&set=a.10150390714236977

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