Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the dire warning to President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a 44-page emergency brief on Wednesday, on the heels of Biden’s trip to the Middle East. There, Biden reiterated his administration’s unwavering support for Israel — even as the Israeli government wages an unprecedented bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip in retaliation for a horrific attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israeli citizens.

“Israel’s mass bombings and denial of food, water, and electricity are calculated to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza,” Katherine Gallagher, senior attorney with CCR and a legal representative for victims in the pending ICC investigation in Palestine, told The Intercept. “U.S. officials can be held responsible for their failure to prevent Israel’s unfolding genocide, as well as for their complicity, by encouraging it and materially supporting it.”

“We recognize that we make serious charges in this document — but they are not unfounded,” she added. “There is a credible basis for these claims.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying, “As a general matter, we don’t offer public evaluations of reports or briefs by outside groups.” The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, the U.S. vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned all violence against civilians and urged humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. The U.S. opposed the resolution because it did not reference Israel’s right to defend itself.

Israel has invoked that right in its assault on Gaza, which has already killed more than 4,200 Palestinians and displaced more than 1 million. But collective punishment — including measures like Israel’s blockade on fuel, food, and electricity into the occupied territory — and the indiscriminate targeting of civilians constitute war crimes under international law. A number of legal experts have argued the actions may also amount to crimes against humanity and genocide, as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. On Thursday, a panel of U.N. experts issued a separate statement that condemned the bombings of schools and hospitals in Gaza as crimes against humanity and warned that there is a risk the crimes might escalate to genocide.

“We are sounding the alarm: There is an ongoing campaign by Israel resulting in crimes against humanity in Gaza,” the experts wrote. “Considering statements made by Israeli political leaders and their allies, accompanied by military action in Gaza and escalation of arrests and killing in the West Bank, there is also a risk of genocide against the [Palestinian] people.”

While warnings about a potential genocide have grown more numerous in recent days, some international law experts cautioned that the war crimes and crimes against humanity — including the crime of apartheid — of which Israel has long been accused are no less serious. As one international law scholar put it: “[T]here is no hierarchy of international crimes.” The problem is that Israel has not been held accountable for any of its past crimes, making accountability for its ongoing offensive unlikely.

Under international law, the crime of genocide implicates not only those carrying out the crime, but also those complicit in it, including by “aiding and abetting.”

“Rather than continuing to enable Israeli crimes, the U.S. should pressure Israel to stop its military operations and secure a ceasefire.”

According to the CCR brief, Israel is attempting to commit, if not already committing, the crime of genocide, specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The U.S. government is failing to uphold its obligation to prevent a genocide from happening, the brief adds. Additionally, there is a “plausible and credible case” to be made that ongoing and unconditional U.S. military, diplomatic, and political support for Israel’s military intervention against the people of Gaza may make it complicit in the genocide under international law. (The U.S. has its own version of the law, making it a crime for any U.S. citizen — including the president — to commit, attempt, or incite genocide.)

“Rather than continuing to enable Israeli crimes, the U.S. should pressure Israel to stop its military operations and secure a ceasefire, and to ensure the provision of urgently needed humanitarian assistance and basic necessities for life to Palestinians in Gaza,” Gallagher said.

The CCR briefing also calls on the government to address the root causes behind the recent violence, including Israel’s 16-year siege on Gaza, its 56-year-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, “and the apartheid regime across all of historic Palestine.”

Unconditional Support

As Israel continues to plan for a ground invasion of Gaza, the U.S. sent it a shipment of armored vehicles on Thursday, following shipments of U.S-made advanced weaponry earlier this month. Biden is expected to argue for greater military support for Israel in a Thursday night address.

Israel has historically been the largest recipient of U.S. military assistance — to the tune of $158 billion since the country’s establishment in 1948. That funding has increasingly come under scrutiny in the U.S., including following Israeli forces’ killings of several U.S. citizens. On Wednesday, a senior State Department official resigned from his post, citing the U.S. government’s ongoing provision of lethal arms to Israel.

“I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse,” Josh Paul, the former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, wrote in a letter. “If we want a world shaped by what we perceive to be our values, it is only by conditioning strategic imperatives by moral ones, by holding our partners, and above all by holding ourselves, to those values, that we will see it.”

Asked about the resignation on Thursday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “We have made very clear that we strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, we’re going to continue providing the security assistance that they need to defend themselves.”

This week, legal experts also testified before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, specifically calling on members of the international body to urgently address the unfolding crimes and particularly hold the U.S. accountable for its role in them.

“If such a body fails in this particular genocidal moment to reassert its commitment to the right to life our collective humanity will be profoundly diminished,” Ahmad Abuznaid, a human rights lawyer and director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told the committee.

He also warned against the rippling effects of U.S. support for Israel and dehumanization of Palestinians, referring to the killing of a 6-year-old in Chicago last week. “As U.S. politicians and mainstream media beat the war drums for genocide, repeating dehumanizing rhetoric and misinformation about our people, that has not only emboldened Israel’s genocidal acts but also had alarming consequences in the U.S.”

The post Going All-In for Israel May Make Biden Complicit in Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

Herzog’s remarks represent Israeli policymakers’ longtime conflation of Hamas with all Palestinians in Gaza and often with all Palestinians everywhere. Such attitudes have hardened in the past week. The Israel Defense Forces, for example, posted that “you either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.” Many U.S. politicians have issued similar claims. “Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Hamas, in that sense, has been a convenient presence for Israel, whose leaders have favored the militant group over the Palestinian Authority, or PA, the pseudo-government established during the Oslo peace process to administer the Palestinian territories until the details of a sovereign Palestinian state could be negotiated. While Hamas has been enemy No. 1 in Israeli rhetoric for years, offering a cover for Israel to maintain its blockade and periodically kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it has also offered Israel an alibi to avoid abiding by its supposed commitment to Palestinian statehood.

Israeli leaders seemed to believe this strategic calculation could hold indefinitely.

“They have determined that this situation of constant political instability and violence is preferable over making some kind of larger political agreement that would actually lead to a final status outcome to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Palestinian political analyst Yousef Munayyer told The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast this week. “And they’ve chosen this path over that, and I think we are seeing the results of that on full display in recent days.”

Indeed, some Israeli officials have at times been explicit about their preference for Hamas over the PA. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most extremist members of the most extremist Israeli government coalition to date, offered an unusually frank assessment of the government’s approach to Hamas in a 2015 interview.

“The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset,” Smotrich said at the time. “It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.”

The comments came as the PA, whose authority was effectively limited to the West Bank after a 2007 split with Hamas, was making strides on the international scene, winning U.N. recognition of Palestine and an ICC probe of Israeli crimes in Palestine. Israeli officials dubbed those efforts “diplomatic terrorism,” a more difficult sell to the rest of the world than the terrorism label they apply to Hamas.

Lamenting the “international delegitimization” of Israel, Smotrich talked openly about Israel’s need for Hamas to counter the diplomatic successes of the PA. “Abu Mazen is beating us in significant spaces,” he said in the interview, referring to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. “And Hamas at this point, in my opinion, will be an asset.” Elsewhere, as The Intercept recently reported, he argued that the PA was causing “great harm to Israel in international forums, and it is better for Israel to work towards its collapse.”

Others have long held the same view but expressed it more discreetly. A 2007 diplomatic cable reveals that’s been Israel’s tacit position since Hamas took control of Gaza. According to the cable, then-Israel Defense Forces intelligence chief Amos Yadlin — who this week said that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe” — said at the time that “Israel would be ‘happy’ if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” That is effectively what happened.

A Convenient Boogeyman

Israel has illegally occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967. For decades, it maintained both settlements and a regular military presence inside Gaza, as it continues to do in the other territories it occupies. That changed in 2005, when Israel dismantled the settlements in Gaza, withdrew the military, and embarked on what it called a policy of “disengagement.” Since then, Israel has often argued that it is no longer occupying the strip — even as it controls virtually all access of people and goods in and out of it. (Gaza is still considered occupied under international law, given Israel’s near-total domination over it, as evidenced this week by the announcement that it would cut off electricity, fuel, and food from the strip following Hamas’s attack.)

The so-called disengagement from Gaza, which was widely unpopular among some Israelis and has since fueled the growth of Israel’s far-right settler movement, was a strategic maneuver. “When the Israeli government decided to quote unquote disengage from Gaza, [it] effectively meant to change the nature of their occupation of Gaza,” Munayyer said, noting that adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had equated the withdrawal to “formaldehyde” for the peace process.

“It brings the idea of a peace deal to an end,” Munayyer added. “And, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite being opposed to disengagement at the time, has made a career out of saying, ‘If we withdraw from the West Bank, look at Gaza. That’s what we’re going to get.’”

Then, in 2006, Hamas — which is not just a militant group, but also one of the two largest political parties in Palestine — won a decisive majority in the Palestinian legislative election. Its victory was in large part a response to Palestinians’ frustrations with Fatah, the party that had governed the territories since Oslo and that many Palestinians viewed as corrupt. To this day, many Palestinians blame the PA for overseeing the collapse of their hopes for sovereignty and capitulating to Israel’s tightening occupation. 

At the time, some saw Hamas’s political victory as an opportunity for the party to distance itself from its more militant element. But the democratic victory was fiercely rejected by Israel and the United States. In 2007, after several failed bids at a unity government, a U.S.-backed coup — carried out in conjunction with Fatah — unseated Hamas. In the bloody civil strife that followed, Hamas ceded the West Bank and seized control of Gaza by force, effectively bifurcating Palestinian political authority between the two territories, already physically divided by Israel’s occupation.

“The U.S. directly intervened and tried to initiate a regime change,” Tareq Baconi, board secretary of the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told The Intercept. “There was a moment in time when Hamas was developing a political platform that could have ended us in a very different position. That was entirely blocked by the Americans, primarily the Bush administration. So the idea that this is something that was inevitable is untrue, and it removes American responsibility in landing us wherever we’re at.”

A Backfiring Strategy

Until last weekend, Israeli officials seemed to believe that the delicate balance with Hamas could last forever. The government’s strategy was to periodically “mow the grass” to repress Hamas’s militant efforts through regular ground invasions and bombing campaigns that have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians over the years.

“On the one hand, yes, Hamas, and Hamas’s governance of the Gaza Strip specifically, has been a great asset, mainly because it allowed Israel to believe that it can put two million Palestinians in a cage,” said Baconi. “There would be escalations of violence every now and then, but fundamentally, [Israel] would have successfully severed the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. And it could have done that only by having Hamas in power because it can claim that there’s this bloodthirsty terrorist organization that’s bent on its destruction that justifies the blockade and make the world forget that the blockade and efforts to strangulate Gaza started well before Hamas was even established.”

“In that sense,” Baconi said, “Hamas became a perfect excuse for Israel.”

But the strategy backfired. Regardless of the outcome of Israel’s quest for vengeance, Baconi said, the time for Israel viewing Hamas as an asset is over, as is the sense that a solution to the conflict can be indefinitely postponed. 

“There’s a before and after. I think that before, there was the idea that the Palestinians have been pacified and that Israeli apartheid is invincible, and now both of those things have shattered,” said Baconi. “Even if no one knows where we go from here — and the genocidal language is frightening — wherever we go, I just don’t think there’s a return to the status quo of thinking, ‘We can just continue to manage the Palestinians.’”

“Unfortunately, it’s going to unleash a lot more violence before they recognize and come to terms with what they aren’t able to see now,” he added, “which is that this is a political problem.”

The post Before They Vowed to Annihilate Hamas, Israeli Officials Considered It an Asset appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israel Defense Forces could not confirm a horrific claim that Hamas beheaded babies during a weekend assault, a spokesperson for the military told The Intercept on Tuesday. The claim went viral, becoming a headline-grabbing aspect of a massacre that left more than 1,000 Israelis dead.

“Women, children, toddlers, and elderly were brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action and we are we are [sic] aware of the heinous acts Hamas is capable of,” the spokesperson wrote in response to questions from The Intercept about the viral reports. “We cannot confirm it officially, but you can assume it happened and believe the report,” she reiterated in a follow-up phone call.

Despite the IDF’s inability to confirm the report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson Tal Heinrich repeated it on Wednesday — a window into how unverified reports become part of the historical record.

The claim about beheaded babies is the latest in a series of harrowing reports that have emerged over the last few days while Israeli forces regained control of communities attacked by Hamas militants. As Israeli officials responded by pledging vengeance and launching a mass bombing campaign over 2 million Palestinians living in the besieged Gaza Strip, reports of Hamas crimes against civilians fueled rage among the public, elected officials, and policymakers.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I never really thought that I would see…have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” only for the White House to later clarify that the president had not seen such photos and was basing his remarks on Heinrich’s comments and media reports. 

Claims that Hamas militants raped several Israeli women have also gone viral, though the allegation has not been thoroughly substantiated, and at least one news outlet has retracted a reference to it. In his remarks on Tuesday, Biden said that women had been “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.” 

The viral spread of dubious information at the same pace as credible reports has become a staple of modern warfare, exacerbated over the last year by the transformation of Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk. Once an important source for breaking news, Musk’s changes to the platform’s verification requirements have made it difficult to separate fact from fiction — making it all the more important for journalists and public officials to vet the information before repeating it. 

Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which tracks and studies how nonfactual narratives propagate online, said that viral lies and misconceptions tend to balloon during or in the wake of a war or other emergencies, reflecting a spike in concern and greater appetite for information. “People share content that they find compelling,” she said. “In crisis situations, often the viral content includes a lot of rumors — it’s unverified material right now, and it may turn out to be true.” 

As uncorroborated reports are broadcast alongside legitimate, equally horrific ones, the consequences of the rapidly escalating rhetoric are all too real and dangerous. 

“It’s been about four days since this incredible and tragic escalation of violence and the level of misinformation — even disinformation — seems near unprecedented,” media critic Sana Saeed told The Intercept. “We have seen journalists, in particular, spread unverified information that is being used to justify Israeli and even American calls and actions to annihilate an entire population.” 

“From unsubstantiated accusations of Palestinian fighters raping Israeli women to unsubstantiated accusations of Palestinian fighters beheading babies: These claims have spread like wildfire especially thanks to many journalists who are repeating things without any semblance of critical thinking or journalistic caution.” 

“What’s at stake here is literal human life,” Saeed added. “But Palestinian life matters so little, that spreading incendiary information that justifies Israeli war crimes isn’t a concern for those tasked to punch up to power by virtue of being journalists.”

Gunshots and blood stains are seen on a door and walls of a house where civilians were killed days earlier in an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza, on Oct. 10, 2023, in Kfar Aza, Israel.

Unverified Reports

The claim about beheaded babies, which spread quickly online and was repeated by prominent journalists and politicians, originated with reporters who visited the community of Kfar Aza on Tuesday, the site of a horrific massacre of civilians by Hamas. Reporters with i24NEWS, an Israeli TV network, were among the first to report the claim, which they attributed to soldiers who recovered the bodies of victims. The Turkish news agency Anadolu first reported on Tuesday that the IDF would not confirm the claim. The IDF later told other outlets that it would not confirm the reports because it is “disrespectful for the dead.” 

According to Oren Ziv, a journalist who participated in the tour, “journalists were allowed to speak to the hundreds of soldiers on site, without the supervision of the army’s spokesperson team.” 

The IDF spokesperson told The Intercept that a soldier told journalists “that this is what he saw” but that the military had not independently confirmed the claim. 

“When we were there, all the bodies were in body bags. … We couldn’t see it with our own eyes, but obviously, it happened. We cannot confirm it officially from the military but you have seen, I guess, videos on social media, you’ve seen girls with blood over their thighs, it’s obvious that this stuff happens.” 

“Specifically about the beheaded babies report, we cannot confirm the amount and specific place and everything like that,” the spokesperson added. “There have been so many horrible situations and we don’t have time, and we’re currently busy fighting and defending our country. We don’t have the time to check every report.” 

Ziv also noted that while the scene was “horrific, with dozens of bodies of Israelis murdered in their homes,” he had not seen evidence of the beheaded babies. Other reporters on the ground said that an Israeli soldier told a BBC journalist that “some of the dead had been beheaded,” while at least two other journalists later deleted tweets referencing the reports. 

“Just looked at today’s UK front pages and I am horrified by the headlines claiming ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ in Kfar Aza,” Guardian reporter Bethan McKernan tweeted on Tuesday. “Yes, many children were murdered. Yes, there were several beheadings in the attack. This claim, however, is unverified and totally irresponsible.”

The uncorroborated reports were repeated by veteran journalists and politicians, from Fox News to CNN anchors, as well as U.S. politicians from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. Fox News reporters chased Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D- Mich., the only Palestinian American in Congress, saying that “Hamas terrorists have cut off babies’ heads” and asking her to comment on “terrorists chopping off babies’ heads.” On Wednesday, the reports continued to circulate, including on major news outlets like CNN.

New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel wrote on BlueSky on Wednesday that reporters should approach such claims carefully, try to verify their origin and sourcing, and seek to corroborate them in other ways. “Save the IDF coming out with an official statement (and it hasn’t, it’s declined to confirm) or someone confirming they saw it with their own eyes,” she added, “it’s a rumor being widely shared.” 

Fog of War

Online disinformation has become ubiquitous in recent conflicts, including in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. 

On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, firsthand accounts by journalists and others on the ground in Israel and Gaza were at times drowned out by verified users of dubious legitimacy. While some claims remain disputed, X is also awash in rapidly spreading incendiary posts that are patently false, many being used to justify increasingly violent rhetoric and potentially worsening an already grisly war. 

Attempting to even measure the volume of viral falsehoods currently spreading throughout X has become difficult, if not impossible, due to changes implemented under the new ownership of Musk. “It’s very difficult for academic research teams to gauge the volume question on X at this point because many, including us, no longer have API access,” said DiResta, of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Under X’s prior ownership, when the company was still known as Twitter, it provided research organizations like Stanford’s with software access to track public user activity on the platform, which made it easier to track how a hoax or online myth spreads.

DiResta said that X’s decision to sell account verification, which previously indicated some official association with an organization or news outlet, has exacerbated the trade in wartime rumors. “As curation algorithms have changed on Twitter/X, current blue checks” — those who purchased verification — “are prioritized in the feed and in replies,” she explained. “The composition of the blue check community has also shifted. There are many commentators, but fewer journalists.”

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, has pointed out different examples of false information spreading on the platform over the last few days, including by “multiple blue tick accounts repeating an unverified claim that had no evidence to back it up.” 

“Musk has created a fundamental issue with Twitter’s credibility in moments of crisis,” he wrote. 

On Wednesday, Bellingcat published other examples of misinformation surging online, including viral social media posts presenting years-old footage, or footage from other countries, as depicting the latest Israeli bombing of Gaza. “Misinformation is particularly nefarious in this case as it often entwines authentic information with hearsay,” the outlet wrote, “and may lead to something genuinely worthy of record — such as a military strike in an urban area — becoming associated with a viral falsehood.”

Others echoed that frustration. “As a journalist, I’ve been using social for news since, well, since that became a thing,” the journalist Barry Malone noted. “And I cannot recall ever seeing disinformation spread with such lightning speed around a big story as it is right now.”

Meanwhile, in Gaza, as besieged residents lost access to electricity and at least six journalists were killed in bombings, local writers who regularly report on life in the strip reported being unable to do so. 

“My phone and laptop have died. No electricity as we’re running out of fuel for the power generator, after Israel cut electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza,” one of them, Maha Hussaini, tweeted earlier this week. “I will be off until we find alternatives, This is what Israel wanted, to commit genocide against a silenced people.”

Update: October 12, 2023
This article was updated to note that President Joe Biden made a comment about the decapitated babies on Wednesday that the White House later walked back.

The post “Beheaded Babies” Report Spread Wide and Fast — but Israel Military Won’t Confirm It appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant used genocidal language and ordered mass war crimes in the occupied Gaza Strip on Monday in response to Hamas’s weekend assault and massacre of Israeli civilians, setting the stage for a large-scale escalation of the violence that has already led to the killing of at least 800 Israelis and more than 500 Palestinians.

Gallant said that he had ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

What Gallant ordered — the collective punishment of a civilian population — amounts to a war crime under international law, as well as potentially a crime against humanity and the crime of genocide, some international law experts have pointed out. Hamas’s massacre of civilians and taking of at least 150 hostages, whom it has reportedly threatened to execute in response to the targeting of civilians in Gaza, are also war crimes.

Hamas and Israel’s crimes against civilians, which are likely to escalate in the coming days, come after years of impunity for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. The historical lack of accountability has bred a culture of disregard for international law that directly resulted in the weekend’s violence, human rights advocates say.

“Deliberate killings of civilians, hostage-taking, and collective punishment are heinous crimes that have no justification,” Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The unlawful attacks and systematic repression that have mired the region for decades will continue, so long as human rights and accountability are disregarded.”

In the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on Saturday, the Israeli military launched a bombing campaign on Gaza. Israeli raids flattened residential buildings and targeted a densely populated refugee camp over the weekend. Humanitarian workers in the strip have also reported that hospitals are completely overwhelmed by the number of casualties and ambulances are coming under fire. A ground invasion of the occupied territory is also widely expected in the coming days.

Experts have noted that Israel’s practice of “warning” civilians — like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call on Gaza’s residents to “leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere” — is not sufficient. There is nowhere for people to seek safety in the strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, since Israel imposed an air, land, and sea blockade on the territory in 2007, effectively trapping them in. 

War crimes fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which, in 2021, opened an investigation on war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories. The investigation prompted fierce opposition by Israel and the United States — neither of which are members of the court — and it has largely stalled.

Human rights advocates quickly pointed to Gallant’s words as an “admission of intent” to commit crimes, calling on ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to take notice. But international officials’ responses to his comments were largely muted. The Biden administration has repeatedly stated its support for Israel since Saturday’s attack, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledging the U.S.’s “unwavering focus on halting the attacks by Hamas” but offering no immediate comment on Israel’s declared retaliation against Palestinian civilians.

A spokesperson for Khan’s office wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the ICC’s mandate in Palestine “is ongoing and applies to crimes committed in the current context.” The spokesperson called on those with information relevant to investigation to provide it to the office, but did not comment on Gallant’s words or on criticism that the stalling of its investigation might have contributed to recent crimes.

The Consequences of Impunity

As human rights advocates and international law experts have long warned, impunity for war crimes only leads to more. Last year, as Russia staged a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many pointed to the impunity for war crimes it committed in Syria and elsewhere and argued that the lack of accountability directly enabled similar crimes to be committed in Ukraine. The ICC, for its part, responded to Russian crimes in Ukraine by immediately dispatching investigators there, leading to charges implicating Russian leadership all the way up to President Vladimir Putin earlier this year. But there was no such response following Israeli crimes in Gaza, including after military campaigns in 2018, 2021, and 2022 that left hundreds of Palestinian civilians dead.

“If we’ve learned anything through prior escalations, it is that so long as there is impunity for serious abuses, we will continue to see more repression and shedding of civilian blood,” said Shakir. Human Rights Watch called on the ICC “to accelerate its investigation into serious crimes committed by all parties in Palestine.”

While both parties committed heinous crimes, Gallant’s call for a complete siege on Gaza revealed the underlying imbalance at play: While Hamas’s attack shocked Israelis and the world and amounted to the most serious attack on Israel in five decades, it paled in comparison to Gallant’s threat to starve 2 million trapped civilians. “This is why this never was and never will be a ‘war’ of equals,” media critic Sana Saeed noted on Monday. “Because one side has the power to entirely eliminate an entire population, to control whether they live or die.”

Gallant wasn’t the only Israeli leader to tap into genocidal rhetoric in response to Hamas’s attack, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declaring, “It’s time to be cruel,” and Knesset member Ariel Kallner calling for a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48,” a reference to the massacre and expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians upon Israel’s founding. 

Other observers denounced efforts by either party to use crimes committed by the other as justification for committing more crimes.

“Failure of one party to a conflict to abide by the laws of war does not absolve the other party from complying with the laws of war,” noted Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

“Israel certainly cannot claim the upper moral hand. Israeli government ministers now calling to kill, destroy, crush and even starve the residents of Gaza forget that this is already Israeli policy,” the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem echoed in a statement. “Intentional attacks on civilians are prohibited and unacceptable. There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” 

Palestinian and international human rights groups also called on the United Nations to address the underlying causes behind this weekend’s events.

“Israel has a horrific track record of committing war crimes with impunity in previous wars on Gaza,” Amnesty International wrote in a statement that called on Palestinian armed groups to refrain from targeting civilians. 

“The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.” 

Palestinian human rights groups echoed that call. 

“For decades, Palestinians have been calling on the international community to take concrete and meaningful actions, beyond statements of condemnation, to put an end to these violations,” Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights wrote in an open letter to the United Nations on Monday. “The international community’s lack of political will to hold Israel to account only emboldens Israel to continue committing crimes against the Palestinian people as a whole.”

Update: October 10, 2023
This article was updated to include a statement that the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor provided after publication.

The post Israel Responds to Hamas Crimes by Ordering Mass War Crimes in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

This article includes descriptions of sexual violence.

BUCHA, UKRAINE — The first Russian soldiers arrived several days after Bucha had fallen, looking for any men left behind. Anna, a widow, lived alone with her mother and teenage daughter.

“We have no men,” Anna told the soldiers, speaking in Russian. She warned her mother not to speak, worried that the soldiers would pick up on her distinct Western Ukrainian speech and mark her as a banderivka, a pejorative Russians often use to refer to Ukrainian nationalists or people they think of as such.

Anna showed the Russians her father’s death certificate, which noted that he had been born in Russia’s far east. “It’s what saved us,” she later told me.

She tried to appear welcoming, heeding a neighbor’s advice. “It’s going to be worse if you don’t let them in,” the elderly woman had warned. 

At first, the fact that they were three women alone did not feel uniquely threatening to Anna. Some of her neighbors were hiding male relatives in the basement — a far more dangerous proposition. In the early days of the occupation, Anna and her daughter, Maria, ventured into town, where they collected humanitarian aid from the local hospital and scavenged for melted ice cream in abandoned stores. They saw the mutilated bodies of men on the streets.

Anna’s friendliness seemed to appease the first group of soldiers — the “orcs,” as she and many Ukrainians routinely call Russian troops. After searching the home, they gave Anna and her daughter white armbands to wear, a signal that they had been “filtrated” and posed no threat to the occupiers. 

It wasn’t until the second group of soldiers barged into Anna’s yard when she realized that women, alone in the occupied ghost city, faced a different sort of risk. Their leader, a tall man in his early 20s, struck her temple with the back of his weapon and demanded oral sex. He also threatened to rape Maria, who was 13 at the time. Anna acquiesced to his threats to protect her daughter, she says, setting off a chain of events that would lead her own government to investigate her for collaboration with the Russian occupiers even as it eventually came to recognize her as a victim of wartime sexual violence.

I met Anna and Maria this summer at their home in Bucha: the city that first became synonymous with the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They spoke for hours, talking excitedly over one another, repeating a story they had told many times but rarely, it seemed, to a willing listener. (Anna and Maria are pseudonyms; I am withholding their full names to protect their privacy.) Well into the conflict’s second year, as Ukrainian forces seek to liberate territories that remain under Russian occupation, their story is emblematic of the fissures tearing through Ukrainian society. On the one hand, Anna’s ongoing ordeal is a product of enduring stigma around sexual violence. On the other, it reflects deep-seated social divisions that have plagued Ukraine for years and have only escalated amid the current conflict.

As survivors in each liberated town revealed fresh evidence of Russian atrocities, Ukrainians clamored for justice and nursed a growing vindictiveness against those perceived to have helped the occupiers. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set the tone, signing a sweeping and unforgiving law targeting collaborators just days after last year’s invasion.

In Bucha, neighbors summarily judged Anna’s wartime choices and shunned her as a traitor. But her interactions with Russian soldiers also posed a set of challenges for law enforcement officials, who have pledged that no crime stemming from the conflict will go unpunished. Local and international prosecutors have opened hundreds of investigations targeting Russian soldiers over wartime atrocities, including sexual violence. At the same time, local authorities have investigated thousands of Ukrainian citizens for collaboration.

At once a victim and a suspected collaborator, Anna was caught between overlapping quests for justice, facing neighbors — and a law enforcement apparatus — unable to reconcile those contradictions.

“People don’t understand exactly what collaboration is, and so they think that any contact with the enemy is collaboration.”

“At the beginning no one believed that the Russians were capable of such things. People believed that those under occupation were not exactly collaborators but were quite friendly with the Russians,” said Kateryna Ilikchiieva, Anna’s attorney, referring to the sexual assault her client described. “People don’t understand exactly what collaboration is, and so they think that any contact with the enemy is collaboration.”

The legislation passed last year further entrenched that belief. The law does not specifically prohibit relationships with Russians, but it does bar Ukrainians from sharing information that could have “serious consequences” with enemies of the state. In practice, any contact with Russians is fodder for speculation. “People understand even sex with Russian soldiers as collaboration,” said Alena Lunova, advocacy director at the Ukrainian human rights group ZMINA.

In Anna’s case, the suspicion alone prompted relentless questioning by multiple law enforcement agencies and the dismissal, for months, of her reports that she was abused. She is probably not alone; human rights advocates warn that some victims of Russian sexual violence are not speaking out because they fear being labeled and possibly investigated as collaborators.

In that sense, Anna’s story is a cautionary tale.

Anna walks in her backyard in Bucha, Ukraine, on July 6, 2023. During the occupation, Russian soldiers regularly came to her home and sexually abused her.

Pasha Giraffe

Long before Russian troops invaded Bucha in February 2022, Anna’s all-female household generated rumors. Neighbors had gossiped for years about her supposed drinking and promiscuity. They even whispered about Maria, who stopped going to school after the pandemic. The two lived with Anna’s 74-year-old mother in a disheveled house surrounded by a large, overgrown yard — on the margins of both the city and society, not caring much about what people said about them. Anna, with her blue hair and extravagant jewelry, looks at once much older than her 41 years and also like a sister to Maria, who dyes her hair bright red and wears artsy makeup.

While most of Bucha’s residents fled as the Russians advanced, Anna and her family stayed put. Her mother, who is largely bedridden, didn’t want to leave her home. Besides, they had little money and nowhere to go. They followed news of the incursion on TV until the power went out and the sky filled with smoke.

When the first group of soldiers came knocking, Maria noticed many of them seemed barely older than she was. She tried hard to seem friendly, thinking it safer.

The terror began in mid-March, when the leader of the second group of soldiers, called Pasha Giraffe by his compatriots due to his towering height, told Anna that some man would eventually have his way with Maria, so why not now. It had taken them three months to get to Ukraine, another soldier said; they missed women and “needed relaxation.” Anna insisted that Maria was a child and pleaded with the soldiers; she told them she knew they were good men. She agreed to sleep with them so they would not touch Maria. “I took everything on myself,” she told me.

After that, different groups of soldiers started coming by the house several times a day. They would announce themselves by firing shots in the air and hang around a pit fire in the yard, bragging about the people they had killed. Sometimes they would tell jokes and ask Anna and Maria to sing with them. Other times they were more menacing; Pasha Giraffe would cock his weapon when talking as if to remind them that he was in charge. Some of the soldiers were convinced that Anna and her daughter were spies for the Ukrainian army: They once burned Maria’s L.O.L. dolls — plastic figurines that are popular around the globe — because they believed that a laser light in the toys was a recording device. The soldiers were unpredictable and “twisted,” Anna and Maria said. They were always drunk, and most came to the house for sex.

Anna didn’t want her mother to know what was happening, so she never took them inside. Instead, one by one, they filed into a garage in the back of the yard, “like they were waiting in line for the bathroom,” Anna said. There were sometimes up to 10 men a day, she recalled, maybe 30 to 50 different soldiers in a two-week period.

Meanwhile, the other soldiers lingered in the yard with Maria. They put their arms around her waist, sometimes touched her legs, but never more, she said. She credits her mother, but also what she described as her wits. “I learned how to be around them,” she said. “We were playing nice, trying not to be rude. We played their game, said Zelenskyy is a jerk, Putin is great, telling them they were liberators.”

Anna believes most of the soldiers must be dead by now, but she said she would kill Pasha Giraffe herself if she could. She got to know some others by their nicknames as well: There was Sergeant, Shamil, Puppy, and Monarch, who broke down toward the end of the occupation and apologized to Anna. He didn’t know why they came to Bucha, he said, nor why they did what they did.

Her familiarity with the soldiers would come in handy, months later, when Anna was summoned to identify perpetrators of war crimes.

Maria sits in her backyard, where Russian soldiers would often linger during their occupation of Bucha, Ukraine.

Return to Bucha

Throughout the monthlong occupation of Bucha, Russian soldiers killed at least 501 people, according to a newly erected memorial that officials warn is incomplete. When the city was liberated in early April 2022 and residents returned, they found dozens of Ukrainian bodies in mass graves. There was a mound of partially burnt corpses in a shallow patch in Anna’s neighborhood. Others were scattered in the streets, some with their hands tied behind their backs, bearing signs of torture.

Not far from Anna’s home, on the leafy outskirts of the city, three brothers were found slain, at least one of whom had worked as a police officer. There was also a woman who taught the Ukrainian language, whom neighbors believe was targeted along with her husband and son for refusing to speak Russian to the occupiers. Some people who had fled found their homes looted and burnt; other homes were untouched.

Ira, a neighbor who lives down the street from Anna and asked me to use only her first name, was among those who returned. On April 4, the first day returning residents were allowed into the city, she walked through her yard, cradling her cat, as the executed bodies of her husband and two other male relatives lay on the ground nearby.

Ira remembers seeing Anna and Maria that day. Like other residents, she had heard rumors that the two were among those looting abandoned houses. Blurry photos and videos had circulated on social media, some taken surreptitiously through slits in neighbors’ fences. In one, Anna is pushing a wheelbarrow carrying a large piano. In another, she stands next to a resident whom neighbors also accused of looting; after the invasion, he killed himself because of the shame, Ira said. In yet another photo, Anna appears to be smiling.

The smile is what bothers Ira most. The day she returned to Bucha, she photographed Maria and Anna: the daughter flashing a wide grin, the mother a more subdued one. Ira said they had greeted her from down the street waving a victory sign. “We were so happy to see living souls,” Maria told me.

But to Ira and others, the fact that they were still alive, seemingly in good spirits, and that their house was mostly intact, were indisputable signs of their treason. “They are smiling at the same time that there are bodies in my yard,” she said. “Does a victim act like that?”

Rumors about Anna grew worse as more residents trickled back into the city. On social media, people referred to her as a “whore”; some asked for her address and threatened to kill her. Some neighbors said that she had been “in charge” of the looting, an offense they put on par with the actions of Russian soldiers. They also reported her to the police.

The looting is not all that neighbors blame Anna for. Some municipal workers who had stayed during the occupation and were beaten by soldiers accused her of riding in an armored vehicle with the Russians and guiding the soldiers to them. Neighbors speculated that two elderly residents, whose bodies were found piled among others not far from Anna’s home, were targeted by the Russians after yelling at her for looting. Some neighbors wondered how the soldiers had been able to identify the police officers, former members of the military, and community leaders they executed. “Someone told them,” said Ira. “Maybe it was Anna.”

As I spoke with Ira, an elderly woman stopped to listen, interjecting that the white armband the soldiers gave Anna was a sign “she was in their camp.” Another neighbor, who only gave her name as Svitlana, noted with scorn that Anna had taken to wearing earrings with a Ukrainian flag after the city was liberated. “She started working on her new image after the occupation,” said Svitlana. When residents hurled insults at her, she added, Anna told them that the Russians would be back. Her father was Russian, Svitlana stressed. “It’s in her DNA.”

Then there was the sex with soldiers. Her neighbors accused her of enjoying it. They told me about rumors that she drank with the soldiers, danced with them, and even fired their weapons.

Anna doesn’t deny taking the piano, which she said she found in the street and took into her home, with the help of some neighbors, after the Russians left the city. Many residents who remained in Bucha looted, she added, thinking that those who fled wouldn’t return. But she said she never gave the soldiers information about her neighbors, nor did she fire their weapons. She laughed when I told her what the neighbor said about her riding in an armored vehicle. And she says she spoke openly to her neighbors of having slept with soldiers, telling them she had done it to protect her daughter.

Ira doesn’t believe her. She noted that several other women in Bucha who were raped by soldiers had been killed afterward, while another woman who emerged from a cellar after the invasion looked barely alive and was unable to speak of the abuses she had survived. “That’s an example of how a person goes through violence, not smiling,” Ira said. Anna, she insisted, “either is a very good actress, or has a mental problem, but it’s not sexual violence.”

Anna next to the garage where she was sexually abused by Russian soldiers, in Bucha, Ukraine, on July 6, 2023.

Our Orcs

As Anna’s neighbors whispered, Ukrainian authorities began to investigate her. 

For several weeks, a steady stream of law enforcement officials came to her house. Throughout the visits, Anna took every chance to report the soldier’s abuses, repeatedly asking for a lie detector test to prove she was telling the truth. Nobody believed her, she said, because she wasn’t beautiful and because her clothes were dirty. “If you survived the occupation, you were a collaborator,” she said. “People who were not in the occupation just do not understand what happened here and what it was like.”

Ukrainian soldiers were the first to stop by, looking for weapons the Russians might have left behind. After that, most of the officials who came didn’t explain what they were looking for, and Anna didn’t always know what agency they were with. Photos Maria took on her phone show that several worked for the Department of Strategic Investigations, a special unit of Ukraine’s national police.

“If you survived the occupation, you were a collaborator.”

Someone from the local prosecutor’s office came too. Anna is not sure how the office learned of her ordeal but said the prosecutor, Roman Pshyk, was the only one who appeared to take her account of the sexual violence seriously. Pshyk accompanied her to a gynecological exam shortly after the city was liberated, where she was horrified to see many elderly women. In the waiting room, she thanked herself for having protected her mother in addition to Maria.

Pshyk, who has since left the office, told The Intercept that Anna’s case was one of more than 100 investigations into Russian crimes the prosecutor launched after Bucha’s liberation. “Any report of sexual harassment prompts a criminal prosecution investigation,” he said. “We can’t only take the position of the victim. We need evidence.” He added that his office had not yet heard the rumors about Anna and focused only on her testimony. He said the office later referred the case to national police and to Ukraine’s intelligence services, the SBU, though Anna didn’t hear from them until several months later.

When the local police came to her house, they found cans of spray paint in the garage and claimed that it was used by Russians to mark the homes of allies. Other officers searched every room in the house, rummaging through drawers and asking for receipts to prove that items weren’t stolen. Svitlana, the neighbor, told me that police shared photos of items they discovered at Anna’s home with other residents, in an effort to identify stolen property. The police did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Some of the officers were rough. In June last year, they demanded all the phones in the house, with no explanation. When Maria yelled at them and tried to film them, they snatched her phone and shoved and handcuffed her. Vitaliy Pelehatiy, a senior investigator with the Department of Strategic Investigations who was in charge that day, told The Intercept that officers were searching for stolen property and confiscated the phones as part of the investigation.

“They behaved like orcs,” said Anna. “Our orcs.”

A Slow Reckoning

Sexual violence goes substantially underreported virtually everywhere, but in conflict zones, the stigmatization of victims can be exacerbated. As Ukrainian forces seized back control of occupied territories last year, reports began to emerge of widespread sexual violence by Russian troops. The true toll may never be known, particularly in large swaths of the country that remain under occupation. Even in liberated areas, advocates caution that fear and persistent taboos about sexual violence make the scale of the abuses virtually impossible to assess. Often, they say, law enforcement agencies’ own biases and failures only compound the problem.

“Because it is a shame to talk about sexual violence, our society charges these people as if they’re not a victim but more of a perpetrator,” said Gyunduz Mamedov, a deputy to Ukraine’s previous prosecutor general and a rare, outspoken critic of the collaboration law. The suspicion with which sexual violence victims are routinely treated, he said, amounts to “a double victimization.”

Seven months into the war, in September 2022, Ukraine’s prosecutor general opened an office within the war crimes division to investigate and prosecute conflict-related sexual violence, or CRSV. It was a formal recognition of systemic abuses — and the fact that an array of Ukrainian agencies has failed to adequately support survivors.

It was around this time that Anna’s interactions with the authorities took a turn. “After that, they started to work on the sexual violence case more sensitively, or to work on it at all,” said Ilikchiieva, her attorney, a volunteer who was connected to Anna by a legal nonprofit earlier this year.

Late last summer, two SBU officers came to Anna’s house and handed her a document recognizing her status as a victim. In the months that followed, they asked more questions about her contacts with soldiers, and last November they finally gave her the polygraph she had been demanding for months.

In a two-hour interview with the SBU officers, she told me, they asked her a wide range of questions: Was she raped? By how many people? What about the looting? Did she work with Russia’s security services or kill anyone? It felt just as much an investigation into war crimes by the Russians as a probe into Anna herself. The officers warned her she would go to jail if she lied, and she answered all their questions. Afterward they drove her home, and a few days later an officer called to say she had passed the test.

The officers’ questions were the closest Ukrainian officials came to acknowledging that they suspected Anna of collaboration. The SBU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Anna’s lawyer said she was never notified of a formal investigation, though Anna’s various interactions with law enforcement authorities pointed in that direction. Despite the lack of formal charges against her to this day, Anna’s neighbors in Bucha have no doubt about her guilt. 

Iryna Didenko, the prosecutor in charge of conflict-related sexual violence at the office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine, acknowledged in an interview that “huge mistakes” were made in the first months after the invasion and that law enforcement officials were unprepared to deal with victims. Investigators often didn’t keep information confidential, she noted, at times sharing it widely within the community. When she came in, she took over cases involving sexual violence from other agencies and overhauled the investigative interview process. Now, there must be a woman on every team, and investigators have been instructed to speak to witnesses and victims more empathetically. Didenko launched pilot programs in Kherson and Kharkiv, territories that Ukrainian forces liberated last year, where multiagency teams were trained by international experts on best practices when dealing with conflict-related sexual violence.

Changing the culture of law enforcement, Didenko said, will take time. She also said there is a need for greater public education about sexual violence. She cited a USAID-led survey, published in May, in which most respondents noted that survivors of sexual violence “constantly face biased attitudes from Ukrainian society,” discouraging them from seeking help. “People will sometimes say a victim of rape may not have been against it,” she said. “But we are seeing changes; there is stronger support for victims.”

Didenko declined to comment on Anna’s case specifically, citing confidentiality, but Anna said Didenko visited her earlier this year and was shocked to learn about how investigators had treated her. A week later, the phones Anna had been trying to get back from police for nearly nine months were returned to her. 

By the end of last year, Didenko’s office had opened more than 220 sexual violence investigations; the office ultimately filed charges against Russian soldiers in 62 cases. Didenko acknowledged that there are likely many more incidents that are not on her office’s radar because of the stigma associated with sexual violence and fear, in some liberated areas, that the Russians might return. Earlier this summer, Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin introduced a new plan to strengthen protections for victims of wartime sexual violence. Russia often uses such violence, he wrote, “as a form of torture, a way to humiliate and break resistance.”

Bodies of civilians lie on Yablunska Street in Bucha, Ukraine, after the Russian army retreated from the city on April 2, 2022.

Splitting Society

The first calls for legislation to punish Ukrainian collaborators came on the heels of the 2014 Donbas conflict, during which Ukrainian separatists, backed by Russian troops, seized large swaths of land in the country’s east, in a precursor to the current war. Russia went on to unilaterally annex those lands following last year’s full-scale invasion. 

Vitaliy Ovcharenko, a prominent blogger-turned-soldier from the Donbas’s Donetsk region, helped draft a law in 2017 that would have imposed civil penalties on officials and administrators who had supported the separatist effort, including banning them from holding public office. In towns that remained under Ukrainian control, he told me, residents who had aided pro-Russian forces, at times leading to the abuse or death of their neighbors, roamed freely. It wasn’t uncommon for people who had been tortured to run into their torturers at local shops. “There was a crisis of justice in Ukrainian cities, and no one cared, no one was taking responsibility, and no one knew how to bring these collaborators to justice,” Ovcharenko said.

Ovcharenko’s proposal stalled after being introduced in Parliament in 2018. He and other local activists believed there was no appetite among Ukraine’s political leadership for criminalizing collaboration. He said that human rights advocates in Kyiv, some 500 miles away, accused him of being a traumatized veteran out for vengeance and warned that the proposed law had a violent, “vigilante” connotation to it. “They said, ‘We don’t need this confrontation in society.’ I told them, ‘If you left Kyiv and got to the ground, you would see that there are already confrontations,’” he said. “When society feels that there is no regulation from the government, it starts mass regulation by the people — and that ends with broken tires, broken windows, Molotov cocktails, and violence.”

Several parties, including Zelenskyy’s, introduced similar proposals in later years, but they never came up for a vote, partly because of Ukrainian legislators’ concerns that they would enflame social divisions. It was also unclear how collaboration would overlap with existing laws, including on treason.

Until last year: After the invasion, legislators voted Zelenskyy’s version into law so hastily that the legal advisers who evaluated the bill noted that they had done so under time pressure and “in extraordinary circumstances.” The result, many critics charge, was a “bad law” whose overly vague contours effectively criminalize a much broader range of behavior than originally intended. In some parts of the country, it could potentially apply to tens of thousands of people.

The law prohibits participation in political, legal, and law enforcement activities under the occupying authorities and the transfer of resources to them, as well as acts that lead to the “death of people or other serious consequences.” It bans Russian propaganda in educational institutions and the “public denial by a citizen of Ukraine of the armed aggression against Ukraine.” Penalties range from bans on holding government jobs to confiscation of property and prison sentences of up to 15 years.

The legislation leaves little room for the complexities of war and people’s need to survive it.

While its proponents argue that it serves as a deterrent, the legislation leaves little room for the complexities of war and people’s need to survive it. The law applies to Ukrainians providing Russian forces with information about military or civilian targets — as was the case with the agent who helped direct a Russian missile attack on a crowded café earlier this summer that killed 13 people. But it has also been used against local officials who remained in their posts under the new authorities, teachers showing up for work in occupied areas, and private citizens selling hogs or other goods to Russians or expressing opinions, including via social media, that are seen as supportive of the invasion.

So far, prosecutors have investigated more than 6,000 cases of alleged collaboration, according to Ukrainian government records. While many were tried in absentia, scores of people have been convicted already.

Some civil society groups and officials have called on the government to amend the law and apply it more selectively. Iryna Vereshchuk, the Ukrainian minister responsible for reintegration, warned against branding “everybody” who remained in occupied territory a collaborator. “Many people look to the future with fear because they don’t know if they fall under those categories,” she said last year. Tamila Tasheva, the government’s permanent representative for occupied Crimea, also called for a separate approach for Ukrainians who have lived under occupation for years.

But lawmakers have so far refused to budge, with few politicians willing to be seen as soft on those who are considered traitors in the popular imagination.

“The government is pretty understanding of what’s going on. It’s not a secret for those who are working with the issue, but the problem is that you need to explain to society why we need to change this law,” said ZMINA’s Lunova. “They can split society with this issue of collaboration.”

The phenomenon is hardly unique to Ukraine. “Every war has its collaborators, and every war has an often brutal response to those collaborators,” said Shane Darcy, deputy director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, who has researched the issue globally. Still, models for how to address it are scarce. Even international humanitarian law — the body of law that rules conduct in armed conflict — has a “blind spot” when it comes to collaboration, Darcy added.

International law posits that life should continue as normally as possible under occupation and requires occupying authorities to continue providing administrative services to civilians, allowing them to recruit former public servants to keep running them so long as it is not by coercion. “Of course, in a situation of occupation, it’s very hard to draw a fine line between what’s coercive and what’s not,” said Darcy. At the same time, international law also allows states to punish collaborators, provided they do so humanely. “Ukraine — to their credit — seem to be subjecting everyone to a legal process,” he added. “They’re not stringing collaborators from lampposts.”

Ukraine’s justice system is grappling with how to handle some 80,000 alleged crimes by Russian forces. Critics of the collaboration law argue that, at best, it’s impractical because it places more strain on a system that’s already overburdened. “We understand the situation, but you can focus on those whose crimes are really critical, against state security, whose actions really have heavy consequences,” said Lunova. “You shouldn’t prosecute those who put a like on Facebook.”

“They are pitting people against each other.”

Nadia Volkova, a human rights attorney and director of the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group, who helped draft a never-implemented transitional justice plan after the 2014 conflict, argued that the mass prosecution of low-level collaborators risks causing long-term harm. Already, last year’s invasion deepened divisions that had long split Ukraine. “They are manipulating these differences that have always existed in Ukraine, because it was never a unified nation in a way,” she said. “They are pitting people against each other. One might think that they want to show everybody that if you’re not going to be supporting Ukraine, this is what is going to happen to you, you’re going to be held responsible. But if they want to unify the nation, it’s not really the way to go.”

Neighbors and Traitors

As Ukrainian forces wrestle territory back from Russian control, accusations of collaboration have become ubiquitous across the country. Old conflicts are sometimes recast in light of the ongoing conflict. Victims turn on victims.

“Sometimes it’s real cases, with real records, real evidence,” Leonid Merzlyi, the chief judge in Irpin city court, whose jurisdiction includes Bucha, told me when I visited his courtroom. “In other cases, it is neighbors’ fights.”

Though collaboration cases are usually investigated by national authorities and heard before higher courts, Merzlyi was well aware of their nuances. “If someone didn’t leave an occupied area, we need to know, why? And if someone had Russian soldiers visiting their house, why?” he said. “We need to analyze every case. It’s very crucial for Ukrainian society.”

While some Ukrainians in occupied areas “were supporting the enemy before, and it was clear,” he continued, others may have been “protecting their children, and they were forced by this natural feeling of protection, and it’s hard to judge in that case.”

Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha for 24 years, noted that there were fewer allegations of collaboration there as compared to other areas that were occupied for longer periods of time, but he acknowledged that long-standing hostilities between neighbors were exacerbated by the conflict. “Often, people on the same street or even in the same family are ready to eat each other,” he said. “We are a civilized society and we do not prove things by conjecture: There should be evidence — whether of collaboration or of rape — not rumors.”

When we met, Fedoruk said that he wasn’t familiar with Anna’s case and couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations. The next day, however, a team of municipal workers came to inspect Anna’s rooftop. It had been damaged by shelling, and she had been asking the city to repair it for months. (They still haven’t fixed it, she recently told me.)

Anna and Maria’s war crimes case is currently in the pretrial phase, Ilikchiieva told me. As part of the prosecutor general’s investigation, the two have traveled to Kyiv in recent months to identify soldiers in hundreds of photos authorities pulled from Russian social media. During one visit, Pelehatiy, the senior police investigator who had repeatedly visited Anna at home and who had been in charge when police handcuffed Maria, stood on a side of the room, watching skeptically. Pelehatiy told The Intercept he had heard about Anna’s reports of sexual violence by soldiers, but that she had never told him directly about them. “He does not believe her,” Ilikchiieva said.

He’s not the only one. According to Ira, she and other neighbors have spoken with officers who agree that Anna is a liar, playing the part of the victim. “Everyone can see it,” she said, “but they can’t do anything with it.”

For Anna, it makes little difference whether she will ever face criminal charges for looting or collaboration. Either way, she is now an outcast in Bucha.

Last winter, someone vandalized her fence. On Christmas Eve, while she and Maria were out, two young men from the neighborhood smashed their windows with baseball bats, stole a TV, and beat her mother, she said. After she reported the attack to police, one of the men returned to fix the fence and brought a different TV; he told Anna that he had not touched her mother. In January, the same men attacked Maria as she walked home, threatening her with a knife. Again, Anna reported the incident to police. She said they did nothing.

Anna has come to resent her neighbors and the Ukrainian officials who failed her just as much as she hates the Russian soldiers who abused her. “The worst part,” she said, “was not the orcs.”

The post A Ukrainian Woman Protected Her Daughter From Russian Soldiers — and Was Accused of Collaborating With the Enemy appeared first on The Intercept.

Abbas, whose spokesperson disputed that his remarks were antisemitic, was one of the architects of the Oslo peace process, which commenced with a historic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn 30 years ago this week. Oslo has long been dead to Palestinians, whose hopes in the statehood promised to them under the deal collapsed years ago.

Now, faced with the most far-right extremist Israeli government to date, escalating settler and military violence that have laid bare the PA’s inability to protect its people, and Abbas’s increasingly authoritarian rule, many Palestinians have also begun to question the future of Oslo’s most enduring legacy: the PA itself. As Palestinians look with growing concern to an unclear succession path following Abbas, who is 87 and has ruled since shortly Arafat died in 2004, they are also asking whether the institution itself can — or should — survive a political moment so profoundly distant from that of its establishment.

“There’s a very big question mark about the sustainability of the Palestinian Authority,” said Ammar Dwaik, director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine’s official rights ombudsman.

It was a question I heard from many Palestinians across class, generation, and political allegiance during a trip to the occupied West Bank earlier this year.

“What’s the point of the PA?” asked Ehab Bseiso, a former minister of culture whom Abbas fired in 2021 after he publicly criticized Palestinian security forces’ killing of an outspoken critic of the PA. “What’s the point of having a PA if we still have expansion of settlements, incursions, killings, shootings, and so on? There’s nothing that the PA can offer. It’s been trapped in one function: maintaining order, condemning Israeli violations, addressing the international community. It doesn’t match the anger and frustration on the ground.”

Bseiso pointed to Abbas’s rule-by-decree governance, with no elections held in a generation and Parliament dissolved years ago. “The whole Palestinian political future is linked to, ‘What’s going to happen after Abbas is gone?’” Bseiso said. “That’s a failure in itself, because if we had institutions, this question wouldn’t have been emerging. In a healthy political system, one president goes and another comes. But we have no institutions, there is no Parliament, no elections for the last 18 years.”

The authority has become “irrelevant” to many Palestinians, echoed Mustafa Barghouti, a co-founder of the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, a third party aiming to overcome the split between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, Abbas’s party.

Abbas Zaki, a veteran Fatah member, put it more bluntly. “The PA is over, they are finished,” Zaki said. “We need to reorganize ourselves.”

Subcontractors for the Occupation

The Palestinian Authority was established as part of the Oslo agreements as a transitional body to administer the territories Israel has illegally occupied since 1967: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement until the contours of a sovereign Palestinian nation could be finalized in negotiations. That, of course, never happened. Instead, Israel has spent the last 30 years seizing control of most of the territory that was intended to constitute the basis for a Palestinian state. In the five years that Oslo set aside for negotiations, the population of settlers in the occupied territories more than doubled, ballooning to some 700,000 today.  

With prospects of a two-state solution all but vanished, so has the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority itself. While Abbas is deeply unpopular, his potential successors fare hardly better, a clear sign that the institution, more than the man himself, is the problem.

Still, even the PA’s most outspoken critics stress that its failures must be understood in the context of an Israeli occupation of which the authority is but an extension. From the start, the PA had no real sovereignty or power. While a series of agreements technically gave it administrative and security control over 17 percent of the West Bank — the most densely populated areas known as Area A— Israeli forces frequently invade those lands, exposing the meaninglessness of those arrangements. Meanwhile, the PA has virtually no control over the majority of the West Bank, what’s known as Areas B and C.

The PA is charged with running the functions of local government — such as education, health care, trash collection, and policing — even though under international law, the occupying power is responsible for the care of the people under its control. Israel, meanwhile, controls all movements outside and within the West Bank, its natural resources, and its economy.

The Oslo agreements also resulted in one of the most fraught features of the authority’s existence: its obligation to a deeply controversial security coordination with Israel. While PA officials need to coordinate with their Israeli counterparts to administer a host of services, including policing, the security coordination also sets up Palestinian security forces, trained and funded largely by the United States and European countries, to work with the Israeli military to suppress Palestinian resistance. That, in addition to the PA’s inability to protect Palestinians against violence by the military and settlers, has deepened its delegitimization in the eyes of Palestinians.

A growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations.

At the same time, the authority’s role as civic administrator has made it indispensable to maintaining a modicum of normalcy and services for the population. Crucially, the donor-funded PA has become the primary economic engine in Palestine, employing at least 150,000 people in a bloated bureaucracy designed to inject liquidity in an otherwise strangled economy. (Some 942,000 Palestinians, a quarter of the population, are entirely dependent on PA salaries). But even those economic benefits are subject to Israel’s whims. Israel collects taxes and tariffs from Palestinians and transfers them to the PA, frequently withholding funds to apply political pressure and leaving tens of thousands of people without income.

Against that backdrop, a growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations. 

“The people look at it as a subcontractor,” said Shawan Jabarin, the director of the prominent Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, echoing a common refrain. “The PA, at the end of the day, is not an independent state, it’s still not a sovereign state. We don’t like to say that, for national reasons, not to harm them, but purely speaking, it is a subcontractor.”

The End of the PA

In Ramallah, the authority’s de facto capital, foreign-sponsored ministry buildings bear the insignia and flags of a “State of Palestine.” That statehood was recognized by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ General Assembly in 2012, perhaps Abbas’s greatest political accomplishment, but it does not exist in practice.

In fact, mostly powerless at home, the PA’s leadership has staked its hopes in international forums and mechanisms, including bids to bring Israeli crimes before both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. It’s a strategy that has slowly earned Palestinians global solidarity while also angering Israeli officials, who dubbed the efforts “diplomatic terrorism.” But it also put the fate of Palestinians in the hands of fickle global trends and left many of them feeling alienated by efforts that have no real impact on their daily lives.

“We cared more about the outside. We worked so hard in the international arena to get some recognition and support,” said Zaki, the Fatah veteran. “Now we’re shifting, we’re turning inside. We need a plan to protect our people and help people confront the settlers. We need to focus on national unity and reorganizing the Palestinian household.”

He and others pointed to the current moment in Israeli politics, with the country’s most extremist government to date — headed by third-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in coalition with some of the country’s most far-right parties — attacking its institutions and enflaming internal divisions, as one of great danger but also of opportunity for Palestinians. “The big difference between the Israeli governments of the last 20, 30 years is that some of them were working under the table, and this one is working in front of the whole world,” Mousa Hadid, the former mayor of Ramallah, told me. “This government will take us to a place that the whole world must stop and start thinking about.”

Israeli leaders have relied on the PA for the last 30 years, understanding the strategic need for maintaining its administrative role and security cooperation. Yet the current Israeli government has shown little interest in its survival. Instead, the country’s leadership has made no secret of its disdain for the PA. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, for instance, has called on Israel to “work towards its collapse.”

Whether that will happen or not, many Palestinians have already begun to think about a future not only after Abbas, but also with leadership and a political process that is more representative of their aspirations. With some 70 percent of the population younger than Oslo, many Palestinians are also pushing for different goals and frameworks than those laid out by the agreements.

“I do believe our goal as Palestinians should not only be fighting the occupation, I think we should call for ending and bringing down the whole system of apartheid and racial discrimination in the whole of Palestine,” said Barghouti, the Palestinian National Initiative secretary. “They’re killing the two-state solution? We can have a one-state solution. But we will not live as slaves in a system of apartheid.”

The post Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust Controversy Spotlights Deep Disillusion With Palestinian Authority appeared first on The Intercept.

As the U.S. and its allies airlifted people out of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, they helped set up what were supposed to be temporary processing sites in third countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kosovo. Two years later, thousands of Afghans are in effective detention at those sites, which are largely closed off to visitors, according to human rights lawyers, amid deteriorating conditions and with no updates about their refugee, humanitarian parole, or other pending applications for entry to the U.S.

“It’s extremely concerning that people have just been waiting in limbo for two years now, and it is extremely difficult to receive further information, because there is a denial of access to visitors,” Sadaf Doost, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, told The Intercept. “That creates a situation where much of the information that we’re relying on depends on those who are able to provide a sneak peek of what’s going on in the camps.”

CCR and Muslim Advocates, another legal nonprofit, sued the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security on August 30 over the agencies’ failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act laws. Earlier this year, the groups had filed public records requests with each agency seeking to establish the exact number of Afghans awaiting resettlement to the U.S., as well as the terms of their confinement and the exact role played by the U.S. government in running the sites where they are being held. According to the lawsuit, the Departments of State and Homeland Security did not respond to the records requests at all. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, agreed to release some of the records but has so far failed to do so.

The lawsuit also raises humanitarian and human rights concerns at three of the processing sites: Camp Liya, in Kosovo, which is inside a U.S. Army base; Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, which is on a former U.S. Army base; and Humanitarian City, in the UAE, which U.S. officials say is “solely” controlled by the Emirati government, though State Department representatives reportedly visit the camp twice a week.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on pending litigation, while a spokesperson for the State Department did not answer questions about the lawsuit or the status of Afghans awaiting resettlement at processing sites abroad. The Pentagon did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“There’s just no information as to how much longer these Afghan civilians have to wait.”

Advocates say that the Biden administration has a responsibility to provide an accounting of the conditions facing the Afghan evacuees — and the status of their applications — rather than forcing the public to rely on information that is leaked out of the camps in a piecemeal way. “There’s just no information as to how much longer these Afghan civilians have to wait,” Doost said. “And there’s no oversight, really, because of the lack of information.”

Mursel Sabir, a co-founder of the community organization Afghans Empowered, works with several groups supporting Afghan refugees that have also been trying to get information about the camps — and are frustrated with the lack of transparency by the U.S. government.

“They’ve been very quick to move on from the situation in Afghanistan,” she told The Intercept. As for the Afghans who are stuck at the processing sites, she said, “they’re at the hands and mercy of United States government and Western powers essentially, that are trying to pick who is loyal and who is worthy of coming to this country.”

“Like A Prison”

According to the lawsuit, family members, counsel, and media have been largely denied access to the camps, making it harder for advocates to assess conditions there. Recent human rights and media reports, however, indicate a growing humanitarian crisis, with evacuees facing human rights abuses including rape, medical neglect, and the denial of food and water. 

Human Rights Watch warned in a report published in March that at least 2,400 people had been held “in cramped, miserable conditions” for more than 15 months at “Emirates Humanitarian City,” a temporary site in Abu Dhabi. People who had been held at the camp described constraints on their freedom of movement, lack of access to refugee status determination processes, and inadequate education services for children. They also denounced overcrowding, decay of infrastructure, insect infestation, and deteriorating mental health conditions for many of those held there, according to the report.

One interviewee described the refugee facility as “exactly like a prison.”

At Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, some evacuees have attempted suicide and staged hunger strikes, according to reporting in Middle East Eye. Kosovo’s Camp Liya has earned the nickname “little Guantánamo” because individuals held within its confines were told that if they left the premises their humanitarian parole applications would be disqualified, according to the lawsuit. “They are constructively confined in the camps,” Doost said.

It’s unclear what responsibility the U.S. government bears at each site, and the advocates have requested records concerning the agreements made between U.S. officials and the host governments.

The U.S. government is responsible for the delay in processing the evacuees’ resettlement, with homeland security officials effectively stonewalling the applications of many of those held in confinement abroad. More than 1.6 million people have left Afghanistan in the last two years, with U.S. officials coordinating the evacuation of some 124,000, including former officials, human rights advocates, and scores of individuals who had worked for the U.S. government and military.

A year after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security division charged with reviewing applications, had processed only 8,000 of the 66,000 humanitarian parole applications it had received from Afghan citizens, according to an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. It had approved only 123. Other resettlement avenues, including a special visa category known as SIV for Afghan nationals who worked for the U.S. government and military, have also been marred by uncertainty and delays.

The DHS spokesperson did not address questions about Afghans stuck abroad as they await resolution of their immigration applications. With regards to Afghans who have already arrived in the U.S., the spokesperson said that USCIS had approved 9,000 of the 24,000 SIV applications as well as 5,000 of 19,000 asylum applications.

Chris Godshall-Bennett, a staff attorney at Muslim Advocates, told The Intercept that while the U.S. government has failed to address most of the questions raised by advocates, the treatment of Afghan evacuees and lack of transparency about it are in line with other U.S. policies targeting predominantly Muslim populations, including the no-fly list and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

“It is unsurprising, unfortunately, that a predominantly Muslim population ends up trapped in these sort of never-ending, unclear processing cycles, where nobody’s giving them any information,” he said.

The groups behind the lawsuit hope that it will force the U.S. to be transparent not only about the conditions at the sites, but also the steps the government is taking to process the Afghans’ applications for resettlement. “This information is desperately needed to facilitate a bigger conversation about how the U.S. government is treating these people, and what we owe to the Afghan people that have been displaced by what is at the end of the day our own actions.”

The post The Biden Administration Is Keeping Thousands of Afghans in Limbo Abroad appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin, who was Putin’s close associate before he attempted a mutiny against him two months ago, was reportedly on board his private plane when it crashed outside Moscow on Wednesday. On board were nine other senior members of the Wagner Group. The mercenary outfit that made Prigozhin a household name worldwide is infamous for having committed widespread atrocities in multiple countries and most recently for having fought alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, where it sacrificed tens of thousands of hired fighters as cannon fodder. In June, Prigozhin, long an outspoken critic of Russian military leadership’s performance in Ukraine, marched some of his forces toward Moscow in a spectacular but short-lived rebellion.  

Prigozhin explained the mutiny by saying he “had a meltdown,” and Putin publicly pardoned his rebellion in a Belarus-brokered deal aimed largely at demobilizing Wagner forces. Still, few believed there would be no consequences for the former ally Putin labeled a traitor — with the exception perhaps of Prigozhin himself, who seemingly continued to move and speak with relative freedom. Earlier this week, he turned up in what appeared to be an undetermined African country to boast of Wagner’s plans of “making Russia even greater on all continents.” It was his last public appearance.

Little is known about what led to the plane crash, but there seems to be little doubt about its mandate, with some commentators referring to it as a “very public execution.” While U.S. officials have only tentatively confirmed reports of Prigozhin’s demise, President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that “there’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”

“I think we all realize who is responsible for this,” echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who also noted “probably this will also help [Ukraine] in some sense.”

For those who expected Putin to avenge the humiliation of Prigozhin’s attempted coup, the mercenary leader’s killing appears to be a message to others, particularly among Russia’s elites, who may attempt to replicate it.

“Everyone will see this as an act of retaliation and retribution, and the Kremlin won’t particularly counteract this view. From Putin’s perspective, as well as many among the security and military officials, Prigozhin’s death should serve as a lesson to any potential successors,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “A lively, energetic, and idea-filled Prigozhin was undoubtedly a walking issue for the regime, embodying Putin’s political humiliation.”

The method by which Prigozhin was apparently killed — by downing his plane, rather than poisoning his food or causing an accidental fall from a window, both practiced ways for Russian leadership to dispatch with internal rivals — also had the effect of eliminating a potential successor to Prigozhin. Among those believed killed in the crash was Wagner’s co-founder Dmitry Utkin, a former member of Russia’s intelligence services who reportedly named the group after Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. The crash came just hours after Russia sacked Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a high-level military commander close to Prigozhin who is believed to have had advance knowledge of the June mutiny.

But it’s not clear that Prigozhin’s death will restore Putin’s hold on power after it was so publicly challenged earlier this summer.

“The Russian elites are likely to see this as evidence not that Putin is strong but that he is increasingly and murderously erratic,” wrote Mark Galeotti, an analyst specializing in Russian politics and security. “That he flip-flopped so quickly from lambasting Prigozhin as a traitor to inviting him to his recent Africa summit to murdering him will do nothing to calm nerves about Putin’s state of mind and grip on the system.”

“The mark of a well-organised authoritarianism,” Galeotti added, “is that the regime does not need so openly to kill insiders, because they are deterred from breaking the rules of the system in the first place.”

Prigozhin’s death — and the weakening of Wagner — is unlikely to have an impact on the battlefield in Ukraine, where 120,000 Russian troops and 20,000 Wagner fighters are reported to have died. The mercenary group’s role in Ukraine diminished after the failed mutiny, when its troops redeployed to Belarus. There, they trained alongside Belarusan forces, a development that raised alarm among other countries in the region, which fear potential Belarusian involvement in Ukraine. In recent weeks, Wagner also signaled it would double down on its already established presence in multiple African countries, where it has committed large-scale atrocities against civilians. Even with Prigozhin out, some analysts caution, Wagner will continue to operate so long as the business interests behind it endure.

If anything, Prigozhin’s most lasting legacy is likely the manner in which Wagner — hardly the first mercenary outfit of our times — has normalized the outsourcing of state conflict to private groups. An array of other paramilitary groups — including some effectively, if unofficially, acting at the behest of governments — have expanded their influence in recent years. 

“The world is better place without them,” said Jack Margolin, an analyst who has spent years investigating Prigozhin and Utkin. “Wagner will change fundamentally, but [private military companies] aren’t going away.”

The post Prigozhin’s Legacy Is the Global Rise of Private Armies for Hire appeared first on The Intercept.

But his greatest challenge came six months later, when the Taliban seized back control of Afghanistan, two years ago this month. Since then, the Taliban have shut down the attorney general’s office and freed thousands of people who had been locked up, sending many former prosecutors into hiding. Targeted by the people they helped convict, some 29 prosecutors have been killed in the last two years, including three in the last two weeks.

“They were released,” said Hamidi, referring to scores of individuals his office had prosecuted, including many Taliban members, “and they are looking to find the prosecutors who tried them.”

All along, Hamidi has been trying to help his former colleagues; last month, with the U.S. Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, or APA-US, he helped launch the “Prosecutors for Prosecutors” campaign, which aims to get 1,500 Afghan prosecutors and their families to safety. APA-US and its Afghan counterpart, now operating in exile, have partnered with a number of organizations to raise $15 million to fund nongovernmental organizations that can relocate them to safe countries. Their partners include Jewish Humanitarian Response, the International Association of Prosecutors, and No One Left Behind, as well as a number of local district attorneys across the U.S.

“They stood for law and justice in Afghanistan for the past 20 years, shoulder to shoulder with the international community, with the people of Afghanistan, with the government of Afghanistan,” Hamidi told The Intercept. “Withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t be a withdrawal from all promises, all ethical obligations, human rights obligations.”

More than 1.6 million Afghans fled the country in the last two years, with more than 100,000 resettling in the U.S. In the chaotic weeks following the dramatic collapse of the former Afghan government, foreign states and international organizations helped evacuate Afghans they had worked with, prioritizing those they deemed at the highest risk, including women activists, human rights defenders, and members of the former government and military.

No such priority group was carved out for Afghan prosecutors, who also did not qualify for the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program, reserved for Afghans who had been employed by the U.S. government. While some prosecutors were able to flee through personal connections, thousands were left behind.

There was “no plan” by U.S. officials to get prosecutors to safety, Hamidi said, even as they had been targets of attacks for years. “They knew many people like prosecutors would be in danger. And there was no plan or program to provide them any opportunity to be included in any of these categories, SIV, P-1, P-2,” he said, referring to priority refugee status for certain categories of vulnerable Afghans.

That makes no sense to David LaBahn, president of APA-US, which had helped train Afghan prosecutors. “Here are the prosecutors who put terrorists and drug smugglers in prison — who have now been released from prison — and because they didn’t have a government contracting card, they are at the bottom of the list,” LaBahn told The Intercept. “It defies all logic.

“They’re being hunted right now,” he added. “People who are begging for their lives and who feel completely deserted.”

An Ongoing Emergency

Hamidi was in the U.S. when Kabul fell. He immediately knew that years of his work would be wiped out, that he wouldn’t be able to return home, and that the lives of thousands of his colleagues were at risk. As soon as the Taliban seized the capital, he started writing to all the international agencies that had worked alongside his office over the years, including the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

USAID and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had funded his office’s initiative to train 250 female prosecutors, but now that those women were in hiding, he heard nothing from them. “They financed this program, and we implemented it. I sent letters to USAID and mentioned this, but no response,” he said. “The U.S. government, U.S. entities, the U.S. people — they have a responsibility to support the people of Afghanistan and those people who are at risk and in danger because of their work, because of their dedication to law and justice.”

The U.S. government, he stressed, did “nothing” for them.

That’s despite the fact that Afghan prosecutors had been responsible for jailing thousands of Taliban members, as well as narcotraffickers and members of other extremist groups and organized crime networks who helped fund the Taliban insurgency. Hamidi said that some 50,000 Taliban and Islamic State members were imprisoned between 2001 and 2021. “The fight against terrorism was in two main areas: One was in the battlefield, and the other was when the Taliban were arrested and handed over to the attorney general’s office for investigation,” he said. “Many ministers, commanders, governors who are now holding positions of power in the country were in jail at a time or another.”

Asked about Hamidi’s outreach to the U.S. government, a spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email to The Intercept that “the Biden-Harris Administration continues to demonstrate its commitment to the brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with the United States over the past two decades.” The spokesperson added that the agency “does not comment on who is in the refugee processing pipeline due to privacy and protection reasons” but that the resettlement of eligible Afghans is one of its “top priorities.” USAID did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the last two years, the plight of Afghans in the country and outside has largely fallen off the news cycle as fatigue and new conflicts have replaced global shock at the country’s unraveling. That indifference stands in stark contrast with the sense of emergency that still dominates countless Afghans’ lives. APA-US continues to field desperate requests for help from dozens of former prosecutors still in Afghanistan. Through its Afghan counterpart, the group compiled a verified list of 3,850 former prosecutors and other staff and shared it with U.S. officials. But because there’s no visa path available to them in the U.S., the groups are looking to fund private efforts to relocate the prosecutors and help them secure employment. Already, some U.S.-based prosecutors have answered the call, promising help with relocation efforts and jobs for Afghan prosecutors arriving in the U.S.

“People are being killed, and there appears to be no action, or limited action, by those who should be acting.”

For the time being, LaBahn stresses, the need is urgent and short-term.

“People are being killed, and there appears to be no action, or limited action, by those who should be acting,” he said. “What we’re trying to do right now is just get people to safety, get them food, and get them housing, and then we can worry about the process of what country will ultimately protect them.”

One Prosecutor’s Escape

Najia Mahmodi was one of the women Hamidi hired into the attorney general’s office. She was born before the U.S. toppled the Taliban in 2001 and remembers seeing them beat women in the street when she was a child. But she was part of a generation of Afghan women who grew up during a time of opportunity. She received a law degree from the American University of Afghanistan. While a student, she survived a Taliban attack that killed 16 of her classmates. Later, she became chief prosecutor for crimes against women and survived other attacks near the prosecutor’s office. Her role involved investigating crimes such as rape, battery, forced marriage, and prohibiting a woman or girl from going to school or work. Many of those offenses were criminalized under the U.S.-backed former Afghan government, and the Taliban rescinded the laws when it returned to power.

As the Taliban seized province after province two summers ago, Mahmodi’s 3-year-old son would greet her when she came home from work with updates on which part of the country had fallen. Her friends and family urged her to leave Afghanistan, knowing she would be an immediate target. She delivered her second child, a daughter, just as the Taliban advanced on Kabul, choosing to have an early C-section because she wasn’t sure she would be able to access a hospital when the time came. Thousands of the men her office had helped convict were being freed, and she began to have nightmares about them.

On August 15, she went into hiding. For 10 days, she tried to make sure her toddler wouldn’t be too loud because she feared being discovered and handed to the Taliban. Meanwhile, she reached out to all her foreign contacts for help. Eventually, she got a call back and was told to head to the airport immediately, instructed to wave her phone at U.S. Special Forces so they would recognize her. Her contact told her that the soldiers would shoot toward the crowd to disperse those around her but that she should not run and keep walking toward them.

Hours later, she was in Qatar with her children; she eventually resettled in the U.S., where she is enrolled to start a master’s in law program in the fall.

After leaving, she was able to rile up international support to get some of her colleagues from the elimination of violence against women division of the attorney general’s office moved to Pakistan through a private sponsorship. But only women benefited from that initiative, and many more remain in Afghanistan. They are struggling to survive without jobs in a country where more than 15 million people are currently facing food insecurity. Passports are hard to obtain, particularly for those who are trying to hide their identity.

“They are in constant fear for their lives,” Mahmodi said. “They are a target.”

The post As the Taliban Hunts Prosecutors, Afghan and U.S. Lawyers Team Up to Bring Their Colleagues to Safety appeared first on The Intercept.

Spending too much too fast, with little oversight, would lead to “unanticipated consequences,” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said at an event sponsored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft last week. The U.S. has sent more money to Ukraine in one year than it spent in Afghanistan over 12 years, Sopko pointed out. “I’m not opposed to spending that. I just want to make sure it’s done correctly and there’s oversight,” he said.

Sopko especially warned about the risk of fueling corruption, perhaps the most damaging legacy of the billions the U.S. spent in Afghanistan and a major factor in the collapse of its effort in the country. “If that much money is coming in, you know some of it is going to be stolen,” he said. “In Afghanistan, corruption was the existential threat. It wasn’t the Taliban. It was corruption that did us in.”

Debate over installing a special inspector for Ukraine modeled after SIGAR began swirling on Capitol Hill as it became clear that U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion would reach unprecedented levels. The push for a special inspector for Ukraine aid has been heralded by some of the Biden administration’s most vocal opponents, including Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; and J. D. Vance, R-Ohio; and Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.; and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. That factor, as well as a conflation of calls for greater oversight with opposition to sending the aid in the first place, has made the idea of a watchdog to oversee all aid to Ukraine somewhat toxic for many Democrats.

Following multiple failed efforts to pass standalone legislation on this issue, Republican lawmakers tried to include such a provision in the annual defense budget, the National Defense Authorization Act. 45 Democrats, joined by Sens. Angus King, I-Maine; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Rand Paul, R-Ky.; voted against it last Wednesday, blocking its passage. The provision was also opposed by the White House, which wrote in a statement to lawmakers that the Pentagon Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.”

Opponents of a special inspector for Ukraine have argued that existing agency-specific oversight mechanisms are sufficient, with Elizabeth Hoffman, director of congressional and government affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, telling VOA last month that the special inspector office could have “a chilling effect.”

For proponents of the office, the unprecedented rate of aid to Ukraine naturally calls for greater oversight. Sopko has called for a holistic “whole-of-government” approach, focused on a broader evaluation of U.S. overall spending, rather than one limited to each agency’s scope and to tracking how much money was spent and on what. “The U.S. government,” he said, “whether it’s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.”

In Ukraine, many of the same groups lobbying for greater international support against Russia’s invasion are also speaking out about the need to make sure that money gets to its intended recipients. “Huge money always comes with corruption,” said Vita Dumanska, leader of the Chesno movement, a Ukrainian anti-corruption group. “We can’t keep silent on this.”

Lessons From Afghanistan

U.S. involvement in Ukraine is fundamentally different from the role it played in Afghanistan. Reconstruction and state-building efforts came to Afghanistan after the U.S. and its allies invaded a country that was roiled by civil conflict and remains so after a two-decade U.S.-led war there. In Ukraine, U.S. assistance has so far been primarily of a military nature and has come largely in an effort to keep the U.S. from getting more directly involved — this time in support of the sovereignty of a nation that was invaded by another. If in Afghanistan the U.S. spent billions in an effort to establish, train, and equip a local military that ultimately faltered amid political failures, in Ukraine, it is responding to local calls for help bolstering a highly motivated military that is defending its country against what many Ukrainians see as an existential threat.

Still, there are important parallels, said Sopko, whose office tracked at least $19 billion that was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse over the last decade in Afghanistan. In response to requests from senators advocating for more oversight, he has suggested how lessons learned in Afghanistan may serve U.S. efforts in Ukraine. SIGAR was established in 2008, nearly eight years after the U.S. first invaded the country and after it had already spent – and lost track of — billions in reconstruction money there. Given those experiences, Sopko, who was appointed to the role in 2012, has stressed the importance of starting the monitoring in Ukraine early in the process. “No matter who is doing the oversight, it’s important to start now, not eight years from now,” he said.

Already, U.S. assistance to Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s aggression and relentless bombing campaigns has reached unprecedented levels, though the money, equipment, and other assistance is not always easy to track. Congress approved some $113 billion in aid to Ukraine last year, and some analysts put the full figure to date at closer to $137 billion.

By comparison, the U.S. spent some $146 billion in reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2022 (although it spent far more going to war there in the first place). “By the end of this year, we will have spent more money in Ukraine than we did to do the entire Marshall Plan after World War II,” Sopko said.

“By the end of this year, we will have spent more money in Ukraine than we did to do the entire Marshall Plan after World War II.”

SIGAR issued dozens of audits and assessments over its ongoing mandate, often despite stonewalling by government agencies that are legally required to disclose information to its investigators. While the reports occasionally made headlines for the exorbitant waste they exposed, they did little to change the trajectory of U.S. spending in Afghanistan, in part because there were plenty who benefitted financially from it and because of a short-sighted system — including annual appropriations schedules and brief deployments — that incentivized fast spending over effective investment.

In Afghanistan, Sopko said, the U.S. never developed a workable, coherent strategy as priorities and approaches kept shifting. There was also no coordinated effort between agencies, he added, noting that, that is likely going to be an even greater problem in Ukraine, where more actors, states, and international organizations are involved.

Currently, individual agencies are tasked with monitoring different elements of the U.S. government’s assistance to Ukraine. Speaking alongside Sopko last week, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, noted those offices are under-resourced and have a poor track record. “In order to ensure that the Ukrainian people receive the support that the U.S. are sending them, we need far stronger systems in place here in the U.S.,” she said.

It’s not just the money that needs monitoring: In Afghanistan, the U.S. lost track of expensive and dangerous equipment, including some $7.1 billion worth of defense articles the Pentagon left behind when it pulled out of the country. In Ukraine, there has been some reporting of misplaced equipment, but because most U.S. monitoring programs were not designed for war zones, there are few people on the ground who are able to track it.

Brian called out the Defense Department’s abysmal oversight, with the Pentagon unable to account for some 61 percent of its assets in 2021. Earlier in the war in Ukraine, she noted, defense officials learned that U.S.-issued small arms and bulletproof vests had ended up in the hands of criminals only after Ukrainian intelligence services discovered that. She also noted that key oversight positions at other agencies have long remained vacant, hindering individual agency efforts at better monitoring aid in the absence of a more comprehensive approach. (The White House just announced nominees for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development watchdogs last week.)

Brian contrasted lawmakers’ opposition to an inspector general for Ukraine to their passage of emergency procurement powers in the annual defense budget, allowing the Pentagon to enter into multiyear contracts to buy munitions to send to Ukraine.

“More money does not solve acquisition issues. It exacerbates existing ones and creates a path for more waste, fraud, and abuse,” she said. “Lawmakers cannot allow the war in Ukraine to become another pathway for contractors to pursue excess profits at the expense of the Pentagon and taxpayers.”

Fighting Corruption

While Ukraine has a long history of corruption, over the last decade, the country has developed a strong infrastructure to fight that corruption, leading, for instance, to the creation of a system of tracking public procurements that some watchdogs note is far more transparent than its U.S. counterparts. Chesno, Dumanska’s group, is part of a burgeoning Ukrainian civil society that’s grown exponentially in the aftermath of the Maidan Uprising in 2013.

But following Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, many Ukrainian groups found themselves softening their criticism of their own government in order to focus on Russia’s crimes and avoid feeding Russian propaganda. It was “self-censorship” in a moment of crisis, Dumanska told me during a recent interview in Kyiv. “We had in civil society some kind of consensus not to criticize the government. We were working together with the state, begging for military help, closing the sky and everything, so there was unity there, and we were trying not to focus on troubles inside the country.”

With the war now well into the second year and no clear end to the fighting in sight, however, Dumanska noted that Ukrainian civil society is beginning to once again focus on internal corruption and abuses of power, even as they fear alarming the international donors the country desperately needs.

“If nobody is saying anything, then the situation becomes even worse, and those in power can feel that nobody’s watching corruption, nobody is monitoring them,” said Dumanska. “We do understand that it might influence the position of international partners, because at every international meeting, they are asking us about corruption, and if they understand that we have a lot of corruption scandals, a lot of money stolen, and that money is coming from their taxpayers, that’s not very good.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also taken a hard line on corruption, firing some senior officials and issuing increasingly stern warnings that there will be no tolerance for those seeking to profit from the conflict. But Zelenskyy himself has faced corruption scandals in the past, and despite significant improvement over the last decade, Ukraine remains low on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

That’s not an argument against aid as much as in favor of stronger guardrails to ensure it reaches the Ukrainian people it is actually intended for, something Ukrainians themselves are increasingly calling for. In the devastation brought by Russia’s invasion, and as the country prepares to embark on what will be a massive reconstruction effort, some there see an opportunity to rebuild the country more equitably.

“With the war, we had huge changes in our oligarch structure: some oligarchs lost their assets, some oligarchs moved, some were prosecuted,” said Dumanska. “We can expect that during reconstruction, we will see new oligarchs. Those who are close to the president, they might create a new pool of oligarchs. Now the question is, do we build a new oligarch structure? Or do we refuse the oligarch approach and develop something else?”

The post Senate Democrats Blocked Watchdog for Ukraine Aid — Ignoring Lessons From Afghanistan appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin’s sprawling businesses include not only the Wagner mercenary group that became a household name when it joined Russian forces in Ukraine — before launching an armed insurrection against Moscow last week — but also an online army that has fought wars over information from Sudan to the United States, where Prigozhin remains under federal indictment over his alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“The misinformation piece is a huge part of the narrative,” Raphael Parens, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program who has long researched Prigozhin and Wagner, told The Intercept. He added that influencing public discourse is one of Wagner’s “top tools.”

Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the government of his once close associate Vladimir Putin played out online as much as on the ground, as he successfully utilized the messaging service Telegram to communicate with the public. Social media’s prominent role in the rebellion echoed Prigozhin’s earlier online battles, where he often seized on a vacuum of reliable information to seek to control the narrative or actively worked to sow doubt and chaos around what was happening.

Over the weekend, as the world’s intelligence agencies and pundit classes scrambled to analyze rapidly shifting developments, Prigozhin himself was often the source of the little information around the attempted coup, which he said was not a coup but a “march for justice.”

Prigozhin launched his short-lived insurrection against the Russian government in a series of social media posts on Friday, in which he accused Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering deadly airstrikes on Wagner mercenaries. (Some analysts concluded that the video he posted purportedly showing evidence of such an attack was likely staged.) He also challenged Putin’s official narrative for launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year — a significant act of defiance in a conflict Prigozhin and his forces have actively participated in. 

Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the Putin government played out online as much as on the ground.

“There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” Prigozhin said in a Telegram video on Friday. “The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block.”

For the next 36 hours, Prigozhin kept posting online. Telegram channels that often share Wagner-related content circulated videos of Wagner men who had seized control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub near the Ukrainian border. On Saturday, Prigozhin turned his men around 120 miles outside Moscow after reaching a deal with Putin brokered by Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko.

For an episode with the potential for monumental global repercussions, accurate, reliable information remained wildly elusive even days after Prigozhin’s forces retreated. That is in part due to the Russian government’s tight control of the media, with independent outlets forced to shut down or move abroad since last year’s invasion and foreign media still in the country operating in extremely difficult circumstances. Within hours of the uprising starting, Russian internet service providers began to block access to Google News, while observers outside Russia rushed to verify whether reports and videos emerging on social media were real. 

Eventually, Russian officials spoke publicly, with Putin addressing the nation on Saturday and then again on Monday. But by that point, Prigozhin’s message had already spread through Russia, where people are increasingly turning to Telegram for alternative — if hardly more reliable —  information than that coming from official state sources.

“He kind of hit this media space that has eroded in the last 10, 15 years,” said Parens, referring to a Russian media landscape that has shrunk under Putin’s rule, but also to a phenomenon — the rise of disinformation — hardly unique to Russia. “He and the organization managed to hit a gap in Russian society, and you could also say a gap in Western society and the way that we are able to deal with misinformation.”

Criminal to Chef, Warlord to Mutineer

Born in 1961 in Leningrad — today’s St. Petersburg — Prigozhin was once sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony following a conviction on charges ranging from armed robbery to fraud to “involving minors in criminal activity,” according to a leaked resume published by The Intercept earlier this year. Once released, he launched a fast-food chain that soon boomed into a sprawling catering business serving the Kremlin, which earned Prigozhin the nickname “Putin’s chef” and brought him face to face with dozens of heads of state. 

As he grew closer to Putin following his 2012 reelection to the presidency, Prigozhin expanded his relationship with the Kremlin by financing the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” behind a series of online disinformation campaigns, including a bid to influence the 2016 U.S. election. And he built Wagner — a successor of the Slavonic Corps, a paramilitary group involved in the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine — into an infamous and brutal mercenary force that has been accused of widespread atrocities across multiple continents.

Until last year, Prigozhin denied any involvement in the more shadowy businesses he is today most known for, fiercely fighting U.S. and European Union sanctions against him and suing journalists who reported on his connections to Wagner. But he abruptly switched course last year, as the war in Ukraine raised his global profile and that of his mercenaries. Since then, he has embarked on an intensive media offensive: appearing in videos that showed him recruiting prisoners in Russian prisons, on the battlefield in Ukraine, and alongside dozens of corpses of Wagner fighters whose deaths he blamed on the incompetence of Russian military leadership.

The social media blitz around the weekend insurrection was a culmination of Prigozhin’s monthslong campaign to dominate the narrative about Wagner and its role in Ukraine. As his name became as recognizable as Putin’s over the last year, leading to speculation that he might be angling to replace him, Prigozhin issued dozens of often bombastic statements to journalists — including to The Intercept — through the PR arm of his catering business, while also increasingly turning to Telegram to launch screeds against his rivals in Russia and finally, to chronicle his rebellion against them in real time.

“He likes to be in the limelight. It does feel like he’s playing into the whole theater of the moment.”

“He’s certainly one of the people who is more plugged in than others with the Russian government and who has recognized the use of Telegram and social media and that actually uses that to get what he wants,” John Lechner, an independent researcher and author of an upcoming book about the Wagner Group, told The Intercept. “Prigozhin has been at the forefront of really effectively using Telegram and social media to advocate for his own objectives vis-à-vis other rivals in the Russian government who either don’t have the permission or the ability to pull that off.”

Prigozhin’s online persona — and his skill at commandeering attention to himself by frequently issuing over-the-top statements — is also a product of the time.

“He likes to be in the limelight,” said Parens. “It does feel like he’s playing into the whole theater of the moment. In order to get the attention, and in order to get retweets are reposting and all that, you have to kind of go to the extreme. It’s the social media effect of — the way the military and political spheres look to the public now is just completely different than the way it looked maybe 10 years ago; there’s just this need to dramatize things to show your point of view.”

Prigozhin’s Playbook

Prigozhin’s mastery of social media to serve his business and political goals goes at least as far back as the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. federal grand jury indicted him in 2018 in one of the highest-profile prosecutions to emerge from the two-year Mueller investigation. Prigozhin was accused of “conspiracy to defraud the United States” along with 12 other individuals, two companies he controls, and the Internet Research Agency. At a press conference announcing the charges, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein accused Prigozhin and his co-defendants of seeking to spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

Last year, Prigozhin boasted of having been involved in that interference. “We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012,” Prigozhin wrote through a representative in an email to The Intercept. “50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass. And we will continue to do so as many times as needed.” The charges against him remain active, though prosecutors dropped the charges against his companies in 2020.

In several African countries, too, where Wagner has worked with local governments to quash rebellions or political rivalries —committing widespread human rights abuses in the process — it has also engaged in information warfare. In Mali and the Central African Republic, Wagner has promoted social media pages as well as local radio stations advancing its clients’ interests, for instance by amplifying rhetoric against the French and United Nations presence in those countries. “They’re very media savvy,” said Lechner, noting that those efforts vary from country to country. “They’re turning out these narratives that are specifically crafted to the local environment.”

At times, Wagner’s media campaigns seemed aimed at bolstering its business, creating an opportunity for a formal relationship with various governments. In Mali, for instance, the Foundation for National Values Protection, a Russian think tank under U.S. sanctions over its role disseminating disinformation, released an opinion poll just before Wagner finalized a deal with the Malian government claiming to show widespread popular support among Malians for such an involvement. The think tank, headed by Maxim Shugaley, a close associate of Prigozhin, had run and promoted similar polls in the Central African Republic.

In Burkina Faso last year, hours after a military coup, crowds cheering the takeover waved Russian flags. Months later, Wagner forces were reported to be supporting the military junta in the country. (This year, Burkina Faso’s government denied contracting with Wagner, but said it would work with “Russian instructors” to train soldiers using equipment purchased from Russia, a phrase often used by Russian officials themselves to obliquely refer to the mercenaries). In Sudan, before the ousting of former President Omar al-Bashir, Wagner, which had business dealings in the country’s mining industry, was also involved in disinformation campaigns against regime rivals.

“They’re definitely experimenting with disinformation in these different contexts,” Parens said, “and trying to figure out how to influence populations.”

The post Information Warfare Was Key to Prigozhin’s Mutiny Against Putin appeared first on The Intercept.

In the months since then, as Ukraine has sought to liberate more territory occupied by Russia, the Ukrainian government has intensified its efforts to control the narrative of the war by tightening journalists’ access to the conflict. “After that, things started getting worse. … They have tried to place more control on journalists,” Katerina Sergatskova, editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, an independent Ukrainian publication, told The Intercept. “Now it’s really hard to make reports from Kherson, for example.”

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian authorities have threatened, revoked, or denied press credentials of journalists working for half a dozen Ukrainian and foreign news outlets because of their coverage, the news outlet Semafor reported earlier this month. In one recent example, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense did not renew the press credentials of a Ukraine-based photographer who accused the country’s security services of subjecting him to interrogations, a lie detector test, and accusations that he was working against Ukraine’s “national interest.” Government officials restored Anton Skyba’s accreditation last week, following a pressure campaign by colleagues and press freedom advocates, who have been denouncing tightening restrictions on media access to the front lines. But the episode put a spotlight on tensions between Ukrainian authorities and the journalists covering the conflict that have quietly escalated in recent months. Veteran war correspondents, for their part, are accusing Ukrainian officials of making reporting on the reality of the war, with rare exceptions, nearly impossible.

“The Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”

“I’ve covered four wars, and I’ve never seen such a chasm between the drama and intensity and historic import of the reality of the conflict on the one hand, and the superficiality and meagerness of its documentation by the press on the other,” Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer for the New Yorker, told The Intercept. “It’s wild how little of what’s happening is being chronicled. And the main reason, though not the only one, is that the Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”

Mogelson added that the restrictions come from military and political brass and run counter to rank-and-file soldiers’ desire to share their experiences. “The guys who are actually out doing the killing and dying and enduring the misery of the front are almost always thrilled to have journalists witness what they’re going through,” he added. “It’s not just politically or ethically problematic for Ukraine to prevent journalists from seeing the war. It’s also quite cruel to the Ukrainian men who are being forced to conduct it in total silence and obscurity.” 

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, which issues press accreditation and controls journalists’ access to the front lines, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Some Ukrainian journalists have also warned that military handlers’ tight oversight of journalists is skewing coverage of the war. “If a soldier tells me, ‘I hate this war so much,’ the press officer asks him to reply, ‘Yes, the war is hard, but we are keeping our spirits up,’” Skyba, a freelancer who regularly works with Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

That is the narrative much of the Ukrainian public is getting. Following Russia’s invasion, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered a 24-hour, unified “news telethon” in which some of the country’s major broadcasters — two that are public and the rest owned by oligarchs — provide war coverage in alternating, six-hour blocks. Late last year, Zelenskyy also signed legislation giving the government vast powers over the media; the European Federation of Journalists had called an early draft of the bill “worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.”

Sergatskova said that it has become increasingly difficult for independent publications like hers to cover the war — at a time when Ukrainians are increasingly turning to the news seeking coverage of the war ravaging their country. A survey published earlier this year suggests that trust in media among the public is currently at 57 percent, up from 32 percent before the invasion. “This is good for journalism,” said Sergatskova. “But it’s a big responsibility.”

In a recent op-ed, Sergatskova accused authorities of manipulating an opaque accreditation system to limit coverage of the conflict and of favoring foreign media while overlooking local outlets. (Zelenskyy, for instance, has given plenty of interviews to international news organizations but none to Ukrainian ones, she noted.)

“Ukraine has been fighting two wars for a long time. One is against Russia and Russian colonialism. The second is the war for democracy,” she wrote. “Many people are sabotaging this war for democracy. This is particularly evident in the relationship between the government and the media.”

“Transparency Is Messy”

The clash between reporters and Ukrainian authorities burst into open view just as the Ukrainian military embarks on a much-anticipated counteroffensive, a phase of the conflict that some journalists warn risks only being told through official accounts and tightly controlled access. While lobbying for greater military assistance throughout the war, Ukrainian authorities have carefully managed what is disclosed about their performance on the field: for instance, keeping a tight lid on the number of casualties among their forces. Such effort to control the narrative is not comparable to Russia’s full-scale propaganda campaign or its crackdown on journalists, including the March arrest and ongoing detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Many Russian journalists have also been forced to flee the country.

But some journalists warn that the Ukrainian government’s approach to the press is growing increasingly authoritarian. The Ukrainian military doesn’t have a formal embed system — the process by which war journalists cover conflicts by tagging along troops in the field — and most press access consists of short, chaperoned visits to military positions further back than the actual front lines. As a result, stories about the front lines are often told by journalists visiting recently liberated areas or as secondhand accounts relayed by military leadership.

The war has largely been waged using long-range missiles, artillery, and airstrikes, and it’s true that the release of information from the field could pose serious operational risks for the Ukrainian military, some journalists who have reported from the country concede. But seasoned war reporters know how to navigate such complexities, and it would be easier for them to avoid careless exposure of sensitive information if they had better access to the military.

“If the Ukrainians had an embed system, that would actually give them much more supervision over operational security concerns,” Mogelson said. “But they don’t have anything like that. All they have are these press officers who aren’t really press officers, who are there not to facilitate, but to prevent journalists from seeing, writing about, and photographing what’s going on.”

Some exceptions, like Mogelson’s own vivid account of life in the trenches published by the New Yorker in May, were not authorized by officials with the Ministry of Defense, who threatened to revoke the credentials of both Mogelson and Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk after the story was published. (Natalie Raabe, a spokesperson for the New Yorker, wrote in a statement to The Intercept, “Our writer and photographer had permission from the battalion commander; their press credentials remain in place.”)

Those critical of the limitations imposed on journalists argue that they have less to do with operational security than with an effort to control the narrative. Authorities have retaliated against journalists who have offered a more honest, if unflattering, view of the impact of the war on troops, and against at least one military commander who shared a frank but pessimistic view of the war effort, even as some Ukrainian officials have argued that such authentic assessments are needed to pressure allies into providing the aid the country desperately needs.

“Their posture toward the press is very short-sighted, and ultimately, beyond whether or not it’s anti-democratic, I don’t think it’s in their interest,” said Mogelson. “Transparency is messy. Not every story is going to have immediate practical benefits for Ukraine or its armed forces, and that’s what they want. That’s why they’re so obsessed with controlling the narrative. But that control comes at a long-term cost of an erosion of trust in any news about the conflict, both among Ukrainians and, crucially, among the Americans and Europeans on whose continued support and solidarity the war effort depends.”

Closing In on Journalists

Ukrainian military authorities rushed to accredit thousands of media workers covering the conflict in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. It was an especially dangerous assignment, with 17 journalists killed so far, the vast majority of them in the first few weeks of the war.

Within a couple months, Ukrainian authorities began to pull credentials from reporters whose coverage they didn’t like, including Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times, who was the lead reporter on an April 2022 story about Ukrainian forces using banned cluster munitions, and New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks. Yet the revocation of credentials really ramped up after Ukraine regained control of swaths of Russian-occupied territory late last year.

Many of the journalists whose credentials were revoked more recently had at some point worked in Russian-held territories, sometimes as far back as 2014, when Russia first invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities prohibit travel to occupied territory from Russia, even as it is virtually impossible to get there from Ukraine today.

That appears to have been the justification for authorities to revoke the accreditation of Italian journalists Andrea Sceresini and Alfredo Bosco in February, although officials never provided the two with an explanation. Instead, the freelancers, on assignment for the Italian broadcaster RAI, were traveling from Bakhmut to Kramatorsk when they received an email from the Ministry of Defense, warning them that their credentials had been suspended. The journalists, who had covered the conflict on and off since February 2022 and who had previously reported in Ukraine following the 2014 invasion, later learned from local colleagues that authorities had accused them of being collaborators and propagandists for the Russians. That day, a local journalist they had hired for an assignment canceled last minute, citing the same rumor.

Sceresini said he and Bosco were told by the Ministry of Defense to wait for an interview with the Security Service of Ukraine that never materialized. They barely left their apartment in Kramatorsk, wary of the risks of being labeled collaborators in an active war zone, until Italian Embassy officials told them to move to Kyiv for their safety. There, they contacted colleagues, lawyers, and diplomats to try to understand why their credentials had been suspended; informally, Italian authorities told them that Ukrainian officials had taken issue with trips the two had made to Russian-held territory after 2014. Sceresini reported from both sides of the conflict at the time. In particular, he worked on an investigative documentary about the 2014 killing of an Italian photojournalist by Ukrainian forces, and on a 2015 dispatch that highlighted the divide in communities split by their allegiances to Russia or Ukraine.

“They are running a check on all journalists. And one by one, those who are not perfectly dutiful to the directives and Kyiv’s political line are out.”

“At the time, you could go from Kyiv to Donetsk by bus,” Sceresini noted, but even though he had traveled there legally, Ukrainian authorities banned him from the country for five years in 2015, and he did not return until last year. After his and Bosco’s credentials were revoked this year, they learned of half a dozen Italian journalists and others dealing with revoked or denied credentials.

“They are running a check on all journalists,” Sceresini said. “And one by one, those who are not perfectly dutiful to the directives and Kyiv’s political line are out.”

In February, Ukrainian officials introduced additional restrictions on journalists: a controversial zone system divided the country into green, yellow, and red areas, with the latter accessible to civilians but off limits to journalists. Media advocates condemned the policy, warning that it unduly restricted access to relatively safe areas while also creating confusion about where it was actually dangerous for journalists to work. Two journalists were killed after the zone system was introduced; there had been no journalist deaths for nearly a year prior to that. 

The authorities later quietly revised those restrictions, substituting them with a process that critics say is both arbitrary and confusing. Now regional commanders make decisions about press access on a case-by-case basis. In May, military authorities also canceled all existing credentials and made journalists apply for new ones; several journalists said their new credentials were denied.

“It’s chaos,” said Sergatskova, the editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, “and it’s getting more complicated.”

A Narrative War

Until recently, local and foreign journalists alike have been reticent to openly discuss their conflict with authorities, for different reasons. Local journalists — many of whom have joined the military or left the country — have, at times, hesitated to criticize the government, split between allegiance to their profession and to their nation.

Ukrainian journalists “feel that they are part of this, part of the Ukrainian nation struggling for survival,” said Kyrylo Loukerenko, executive director of the independent Hromadske Radio, “so this is a very difficult situation for us.”

He stressed that some journalists are choosing to scale back their criticism rather than responding to top-down pressure to do so, out of concern that any criticism would feed into Russian propaganda efforts.

“It’s more about self-control,” he said. “When you are trying to be critical, people just ask, ‘Are you patriotic?’”

Karol Luczka, Eastern Europe monitoring and advocacy officer with the International Press Institute, said that, in addition to self-censorship stemming from a “moral obligation towards your country,” journalists are also aware that certain topics will earn them additional scrutiny from the authorities. “Ideas like, there’s a civil war, or there are people who are pro-Russian … these are very touchy issues,” he said. “If a reporter either knowingly or unknowingly starts using these kinds of talking points in their report, it’s going to be something that Ukrainian authorities look at.” 

Sergatskova added that for Ukrainian journalists, the choice of stories is also a function of priorities. While she noted that there has been some investigative journalism by local outlets exposing corruption among military leaders, many Ukrainian journalists are consumed by documenting Russian crimes. “This is something that is really important for us,” she said.

The government’s restrictions put foreign journalists in a similarly delicate position, with some publications prioritizing access at the cost of pushing back against the rules imposed by officials. “Some of us are not guiltless in this either. Some are kind of going along with it,” said Mogelson. “There’s a general reluctance to alienate the Ukrainian government because what little access we do have is contingent on staying in its good graces.”

The post Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship appeared first on The Intercept.

It was a vivid opening to the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, a member of the Ansar Dine Islamist group, which took over swaths of northern Mali in a 2012 coup. Al Hassan stands accused of leading the Islamic police and committing widespread crimes, including torture, rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriages.

“Mr. Al Hassan’s work was not confined within the four walls of his office,” the prosecutor, Sarah Coquillaud, said in her opening statement, as Al Hassan watched quietly, his reactions hidden behind a face mask. “His work did not only consist in dispatching men and writing reports at his desk; he took it outside in open places and preferably places where his idea of justice could be seen and taught to everyone.”

The trial against Al Hassan ended late last month, with a verdict expected in the coming weeks. It will not only determine the fate of a man whom prosecutors accused of being an “enthusiastic” war crimes perpetrator, but will also answer a key question facing human rights advocates: Can sophisticated digital evidence platforms, part of a rapidly growing arsenal of technology deployed in the documentation of human rights abuses, help secure convictions?

“Many of us are watching to see how visual and other forms of digital evidence become useful or are challenged, what the judges think,” said Alexa Koenig, a co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and a leading expert on the use of emerging technologies in human rights practice.

The Al Hassan case marks the first use of an immersive virtual environment — or IVE, in the court’s lingo — in an international criminal trial. (SITU, the visual investigations team that built the model, developed a simpler platform for a 2016 war crimes prosecution that was resolved with a guilty plea before trial.) Yet these types of tools — which are increasingly being used by human rights groups and media organizations, and have even contributed to landmark settlements in cases involving police violence in the U.S. — are likely to become a critical part of international justice efforts moving forward.

Take Ukraine, where scores of alleged crimes have been documented almost in real time by an unprecedented number of actors. As prosecutors increasingly rely on digital evidence and reconstructions in their work, they will face the challenge of sorting through massive amounts of data efficiently, a process that experts say will inevitably need to become automated in some way. Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor’s office launched what it called “the most ambitious technical modernization initiative in its history,” including a new evidence management platform to handle the influx of large amounts of digital evidence.

The proliferation of such tools and their expected contribution to criminal accountability efforts raises a number of pressing questions, human rights experts caution, like issues of fairness in judicial proceedings, particularly as prosecutors’ teams in international criminal tribunals are often better resourced than the defense. It also raises ethical questions, for instance about the re-traumatization of victims.

“Will this be in any way prejudicial to the accused and violate some fair trial norms that are so important to the effectuation of justice? What does it mean for the psychosocial well-being of the people in the courtroom, let alone the survivors of something so horrific, if you are able to immerse yourself in the scene of an atrocity?” asked Koenig.

“They can be really helpful for people to situate themselves at the scene of a series of atrocities and be able to explore what that atrocity means to the surrounding community,” she added. “But there are a lot of unknowns still in the field about how we control to give ourselves the best that can come from these digital platforms while at the same time minimizing the risks and the harm.”

Is Seeing Believing?

SITU researchers assembled the Timbuktu reconstruction through a combination of satellite imagery, drone footage, and other materials. They populated the reconstruction with evidentiary videos, some that witnesses provided directly to prosecutors and others that prosecutors collected from the internet. During the trial, prosecutors used the platform to show some instances of violence — like the floggings of a couple accused of adultery and of two young men accused of drinking alcohol, both of which Al Hassan allegedly participated in — as well as the places where other alleged crimes, which were not caught on video, took place.

In exchanges with the court, Al Hassan’s defense team raised concerns about the platform. “Unfair prejudice arises from the inherently persuasive and unduly demonstrative nature of the material,” they wrote in one email. They cited research that argues that “at first glance, these graphical reconstructions may be seen as potentially useful in many courtroom situations,” but cautioned against “the undue reliance that the viewer may place on the evidence presented through a visualisation medium, this is often referred to as the ‘seeing is believing’ tendency.” The court overruled the defense team’s objections. Al Hassan’s lawyers did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Gilles Dutertre, the lead prosecutor in the case, referred questions to the ICC’s office of the prosecutor, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

The team at SITU — with which The Intercept has collaborated in the past — said that while they worked with evidence provided by the prosecution, the platforms are designed to be used by all parties to the proceedings, including the defense. “It’s not a linear narrative that walks a viewer through specific sets of events, tries to make an argument and to thread a line through all of the pieces of evidence,” Bora Erden, a senior researcher and technical lead at SITU, told The Intercept. “Instead, it allows any user to query the platform for their own purposes.”

Koenig, who advised the former ICC prosecutor’s office on the use of emerging technologies, told The Intercept that the office’s interest in such tools was inspired in part by the realization, a decade after the court first started operating in 2002, that many of its cases were falling apart early on because prosecutors were not bringing enough corroborating evidence to support what witnesses were saying. The growing availability of a range of digital evidence sources — from geospatial imagery and drone footage to the spread of the smartphone and the rise of social media — offered not only new ways to corroborate witness testimony, but also ways to link evidence of crimes on the ground to the higher-level perpetrators the court was tasked with pursuing. “All of these were tools that the prosecutor needed to become more effective and efficient,” she said.

Still, the new tools were met with some resistance, in part because those developing them worked in fields — from architecture and design to computer programming — that fell outside the disciplines more traditionally associated with forensic work. “When you’ve been doing your job for decades, and you have a set methodology for how you find the evidence, verify the evidence, introduce it into court … there’s a very healthy skepticism that comes with introducing new ways of working with evidence,” Koenig added. “I have definitely seen some reticence to engage with these newer methodologies.”

More Accessible Courtrooms

The immersive nature of these platforms can make them a more effective way to engage survivors and eyewitnesses, proponents say.  

Anjli Parrin, a Kenyan human rights advocate and lawyer and director of the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic, told The Intercept that in many countries, courtrooms are elitist settings, “not an environment where victims groups, survivors, and impacted communities are going to feel welcome.”

But when they can see a recreation of places they know and experiences they lived through, “it helps make the courtroom accessible,” she added, drawing a contrast to technical reports that can be difficult for the layperson to understand.

“What is actually exciting and revolutionary about this is how it can simplify the problem, not how it’s an exciting, shiny new thing that looks cool.”

Yet these tools are not a panacea, cautioned Parrin, who has investigated mass atrocities and served as an expert witness in international criminal proceedings, especially when it comes to communities without access to certain technology. She cited a recent visit to a Central African Republic village where she interviewed witnesses after 30 people were massacred. “Not one person had a smartphone,” she said.

“What is actually exciting and revolutionary about this is how it can simplify the problem, not how it’s an exciting, shiny new thing that looks cool,” Parrin said. “It’s about how you actually make this meaningful to the people who are affected.”

Update: June 14, 2023
This article has been updated to clarify the accusations against Al Hassan.

The post How 3D Models and Other Technology Could Make it Easier to Convict War Criminals appeared first on The Intercept.

Her words, which the university administration condemned as “hate speech,” kicked off a new round of public debate about the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Republican members of Congress responded by introducing legislation that would deny federal funding to academic institutions that “authorize Anti-Semitic events.”

The bill cites a definition of antisemitism that the Israeli government and its supporters have been pushing in the United States and elsewhere, one that conflates prejudice toward Jews with criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel. And it comes on the heels of President Joe Biden nodding to the definition in the White House’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, released in late May.

In the 60-page document, the Biden administration referred to the IHRA definition — named after the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which promotes it — as the “most prominent” of several definitions of antisemitism and one the administration has “embraced.” But it emphasized that it has no legal value and does not supersede existing laws or constitute binding guidance for public agencies and local government.

Still, by providing neither a rejection nor a full endorsement of the definition, the Biden administration left room for further lobbying for its adoption. Indeed, conservative and pro-Israel groups hailed the strategy as a victory, even as the single reference fell far short of what they had lobbied for: a full-throated endorsement of the IHRA framework as the “sole definition” of antisemitism and as the foundation for federal policy.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The Intercept that some of those groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, were already treating the document “as if it had wholeheartedly adopted” the IHRA definition.

“So that what the text actually says will be made irrelevant,” Friedman said. “And we see this happening already with the CUNY case.”

The push for U.S. entities to adopt the IHRA definition has had limited success so far. While 31 states and dozens of counties and municipalities have embraced it in resolutions, strong constitutional protections for free speech have made more meaningful implementation challenging. In Europe, meanwhile, where the definition was first drafted, many states and institutions have adopted it, leading to dozens of human rights violations, according to a report published Tuesday by the European Legal Support Center, a group fighting legal attacks on groups and individuals advocating for Palestinian rights in Europe.

The ELSC recorded some 53 instances between 2017 — when the European Parliament first called on member states to adopt the IHRA definition — and 2022 in which the definition, despite its nonlegally binding nature, was cited as the premise for firings, withdrawn job offers, canceled public events, and disciplinary procedures in Germany, Austria, and the U.K. The report noted that all of those facing accusations of antisemitism were advocating for Palestinian rights and stressed that when legally challenged, the allegations were almost always dismissed as unsubstantiated. Still, by repeatedly endorsing the definition as part of their policy platform, European officials gave it “soft law” power, Alice Garcia of the ELSC told The Intercept.

“The EU basically has been repeating for years that this definition does not violate free speech because it’s not binding,” she said. “But if you give it the power that you are actually giving it, it creates concrete effects on people which actually concretely restrict freedom of expression and freedom of assembly fundamental rights, and then it becomes de-facto binding.”

The European Union coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, Katharina von Schnurbein, did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, she has defended the definition when challenged about its impact on fundamental rights. It “does not stifle free speech as hate speech laws remain unchanged,” she once wrote, adding that the potential for the definition to be politicized “does not mean that the tool is flawed.”

Anti-Zionism vs. Antisemitism

The IHRA definition was first drafted in the early 2000s in an effort to standardize data collection on incidents of antisemitism. The definition codified a notion espoused by proponents of the so-called new antisemitism theory, which argued anti-Zionism — opposition to the ethnonationalist project behind the state of Israel — amounted to antisemitism. Since then, the definition has been condemned by a growing number of critics, including its original author, for conflating the two concepts, threatening academic freedom and free speech, and seeking to silence criticism of Israel.

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia originally drafted the definition, but by 2013, the Fundamental Rights Agency, its successor body, had abandoned it. In 2016, the IHRA, a 35-member organization promoting education about the Holocaust, adopted a reworked version of it.

In addition to defining the term, it lists 11 examples of what constitutes antisemitism, including denials of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, claims that the state of Israel is a “racist endeavor,” and comparisons of contemporary Israeli state policy to that of the Nazis.

The examples effectively change the nature of the definition from a tool intended to address hatred and harassment to one designed to intervene in a political debate. Its proponents, critics have long charged, have used it to silence Palestinians and their supporters by seeking to deny them the right to speak about their oppression. Lina Assi, advocacy manager at the U.S.-based Palestine Legal, noted that efforts to inflate the definition’s authority have already done damage, particularly on U.S. campuses where accusations of antisemitism referencing the definition are most frequently wielded.

“The IHRA working definition is a culmination of lobbying efforts to instrumentalize and accelerate the use of false accusations in order to censor protected speech, to target any sort of viewpoint that is critical of Israel, and to chill one side of an important political debate by saying that anyone who supports Palestinian rights is antisemitic,” Assi told The Intercept. “It has always been used as a propaganda tool and Israel groups want to give it the veneer of the law.”

Critics of the IHRA definition note that it also endangers the fight against antisemitism itself by diverting resources that could be spent toward targeting real hatred and by confounding the public about what antisemitism is. The ADL for instance, one of the most vocal proponents of the IHRA definition in the U.S., tracks reports of antisemitic incidents and has warned that they have been on the rise. But the group’s tally includes dozens of references to Israel and Zionism, particularly on college campuses. While the ADL notes that it does not count all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, it says that “public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the Audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”

“It makes people unsure about what antisemitism is or isn’t, and then it starts to feel like maybe it’s not real.”

That conflation creates confusion and skews data, said Carinne Luck, international director of Diaspora Alliance, a group dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its politicization. “It makes people unsure about what antisemitism is or isn’t, and then it starts to feel like maybe it’s not real,” she told The Intercept. “I’m being told it’s real, but actually what I’m seeing is criticism of Israel, or kids on college campuses being pro-[boycott, divestment, and sanctions], or hosting apartheid week, and that doesn’t strike me as antisemitic and so, is antisemitism real? And of course we know it is.”

She added, “This is essentially a political conversation about Israel and Palestine, and not actually about antisemitism.”

Attacking Critics

The ELSC report offers a detailed assessment of the consequences of adopting the definition in Europe, where critics of the IHRA definition have long questioned officials about its impact on fundamental rights like freedom of expression and assembly. In dozens of case studies, individual accused of antisemitism based on the definition described consequences ranging from damaged career prospects to severe mental health repercussions.

“It has become impossible to voice any critical opinion about Israeli policies in public or in academia without the risk of losing your job, contract, funding or future employment opportunities,” Anna-Esther Younes, a German Palestinian critical race scholar, told the report authors. Her invitation to a panel was rescinded following allegations of antisemitism, based on her support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement; the abstract of a paper she wrote about the women’s movement in Hamas; and a number of academic petitions she signed.

“I had crippling anxiety of who I could even trust, as it felt like the IHRA definition was a mode of surveillance in my day-to-day life,” one of several British students who was investigated by her university after her social media posts supporting Palestinians were flagged as antisemitic told the authors of the report.

The report also cites the example of Deutsche Welle, a prominent German broadcaster that fired seven Arab employees who were accused of antisemitism based on the IHRA definition. According to the ELSC, the employees were not given specific examples of their alleged misconduct, but in the investigation preceding their dismissal, they were quizzed about their “upbringing, what I thought about Hamas, and, most troublingly, how I felt about Israeli children getting killed,” one of the employees later told reporters. (Some of those fired sued the broadcaster, and the case is pending.)

Both in Europe and the U.S., critics of the IHRA definition stress that efforts to codify it have intensified in response to growing recognition and condemnation of Israeli human rights abuses. The Israeli government itself has recognized that, and it has promoted a more proactive approach to countering criticism. In a presentation published this year, for instance, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs referenced the IHRA definition and called for an “offensive” strategy to fight what it described as “demonization, delegitimization, [and] double standards” toward Israel.

“This shift recognizes that ‘defending’ Israeli policies is not working since more and more people are recognizing the horrific treatment of Palestinians for the fundamental injustice that it is,” Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, recently tweeted, referring to the ministry’s platform. “Instead of defending these policies, the strategy calls for attacking critics of them.”

While global solidarity with Palestinians has been rising for years, public opinion in the U.S., Israel’s staunchest ally, has also begun to change, with a Gallup poll showing earlier this year for the first time that more Democrats sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, while overall U.S. support for Israel is on the decline.

“The tide is definitely shifting, embracing more pro-Palestinian views at universities and in the media, and also, Israel has embraced its most fascistic government yet, and violence against Palestinians has only escalated,” said Assi of Palestine Legal. “In this context, it should be especially clear that anything like the IHRA definition, restricting what Palestinians can say about their conditions, is clearly not viable as a policy.”

The post Biden Embraces Antisemitism Definition That Has Upended Free Speech in Europe appeared first on The Intercept.

Weeks after the attack, which targeted an aid worker whom intelligence officials had mistaken for someone else, the U.S. made a public commitment to condolence payments and pledged to help survivors relocate. With the help of U.S. officials, some of those survivors made it to California last year, including two of the aid worker’s brothers, Emal and Romal Ahmadi, and their families.

As they struggle to adapt to life in a new country, however, they feel abandoned by the U.S. government, according to volunteers and community groups that have assisted them. One volunteer recently started a fundraiser to help cover some family members’ living costs while they wait for the U.S. government to deliver on its promise.

“They are living day to day in a very stressful environment of bills, and making sure they have their rent, and do they have enough food, and why did the utility bill go up this month?” Melissa Walton, who regularly visits members of the family, told The Intercept. “It’s stressful, and they didn’t ask for any of this, to have to leave their country and come to a different country and start over.”

The Pentagon declined to comment, citing the family’s privacy. John Gurley, Sylvia Costelloe, and Joanna Naples-Mitchell, attorneys representing the Ahmadi brothers, said they are having ongoing discussions with the U.S. government but declined to further discuss the case.

“Now that Emal and Romal Ahmadi’s families have been resettled in the United States, we look forward to productive discussions with the Department of Defense regarding the compensation promised to them,” the lawyers wrote in a statement. “Our clients arrived in the United States penniless, after suffering unimaginable losses. For that reason, a community volunteer has launched a fundraiser to help them meet their basic needs while our confidential discussions with the U.S. government continue.”

Zuhal Bahaduri, executive director of the 5ive Pillars Organization, an Afghan American-led group that was established following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to support the thousands of refugees resettling in the U.S., said the Ahmadi family’s trauma compounds the many challenges facing the 76,000 Afghans who have arrived in the U.S. over the last two years.

“There’s a lot of hurt and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. The country that is responsible for the death of their children has helped them out by getting them here, but they do not feel fully supported,” Bahaduri told The Intercept.

“I don’t understand why it’s taking this long,” she added, referring to the condolence payments “Do they think that all they had to do was relocate the family and that’s it? That that’s where their responsibility ends?”

Malika, left/top, and Aayat, right/bottom, ages 3 and 2, were killed on August 29, 2021 by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photos: Courtesy of the Ahmadi family

A “Horrible Mistake”

When she offered to drive Romal and his wife Arezo to pick up donated clothes and household items for their temporary, unfurnished apartment, Walton was warned not to gush too much over their newborn baby boy.

Hadis, now 8 months old, was not the couple’s first child, Walton was told: Their three older children, 7-year-old Arwin, 6-year-old Benyamin, and 2-year-old Aayat, were all killed in the Kabul drone strike.

The strike was the U.S. government’s final act before withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan after losing its two-decade war there. The announced withdrawal precipitated the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the Taliban’s takeover of the capital, which led to days of chaos as tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to flee the country. Three days before the drone strike, the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, had carried out a suicide bombing that killed more than 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops outside the Kabul airport.

Zemari Ahmadi, an electrical engineer working for a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization and the primary breadwinner for his extended family, had been driving colleagues to work and unloading water canisters from his white Toyota Corolla all day, on August 29, 2021, as U.S. intelligence officials, believing that a second attack near the airport was imminent, tracked his movements for hours. The officials flagged his “erratic route” and concluded that the car contained explosives, according to an internal review obtained by the New York Times earlier this year. An American MQ-9 Reaper drone shot a Hellfire missile at his car just as Zemari arrived home and as a group of children from his family rushed outside to greet him. The California-based Nutrition & Education International, Zemari’s employer, did not respond to a request for comment.

Within hours of the drone strike, U.S. officials announced that they had successfully thwarted an attack but made no mention of civilian casualties, even as it later emerged that intelligence analysts had observed children on the scene moments beforehand. In the following days, as family members, journalists, and Zemari’s employer shared evidence that the drone strike had targeted the wrong person, U.S. officials defended the action, which a Pentagon official called “a righteous strike.”

The Defense Department did not admit to its mistake until more than two weeks later, after video reconstruction of the strike raised serious questions about its version of events. In a rare acknowledgment of responsibility, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin conceded that Zemari had no connection to ISIS-K and that he and his family were all innocent victims of a “horrible mistake.” Later, then-commander of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, took personal responsibility for the error. “As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for this strike and its tragic outcome,” he said.

By October, the Pentagon promised to compensate the survivors — but only after family members told reporters that they had not been contacted by U.S. officials yet.

Romal and Arezo were the first to arrive in the U.S. last summer, followed a few months later by another brother, Emal, his wife, Royeena, and their 8-year old daughter Ada. (Emal and Royeena’s other daughter, 3-year-old Malika, was killed in the strike.) Other relatives have since joined them in California, although some remain in Afghanistan or in refugee camps in Kosovo and Qatar.

“They had a lot of faith that once they got to the U.S. they would be safe and secure and stable. And that’s not where they are at.”

But life in the country responsible for their family’s tragedy has been difficult for the Ahmadis. “They have put a lot of trust in America and the U.S. government,” said Walton. “They had a lot of faith that once they got to the U.S. they would be safe and secure and stable. And that’s not where they are at.”

U.S. officials have not publicly committed to a specific timeline or amount to compensate the Ahmadis, but in the past, condolence payments for families of Afghan victims ranged between $131 and $35,000, with most around a few thousand dollars. Walton noted that the family left Afghanistan in part because the public announcement of the condolence payments put their safety at risk in a country that was plunged into a deep economic crisis after the Taliban takeover — even as the payments had not materialized.

Benyamin, left/top, age 6 and Arwin, right, bottom, age 7, were killed by the August 29, 2021 U.S. drone strike on their family's car in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photos: Courtesy of the Ahmadi family

Like tens of thousands of Afghans who have resettled in the U.S. since 2021, the Ahmadis found that the 90 days of refugee support services they received upon arrival fell short of addressing many of their immediate needs, let alone helping them land on their feet. A federal refugee cash assistance program covers $325 per adult and $200 per child monthly for eight months, hardly making a dent in the exorbitant Bay Area rents and cost of living they are now facing.

Most of the Ahmadis don’t speak English. Walton, who communicates with them with the help of an interpreter, described their experiences to The Intercept. One of them was robbed in broad daylight outside his Oakland apartment and lost all his documents. There was no space for Ada, the 8-year-old, in the school closest to the family, so she walks to a school further away, as her family has no car. A host of resources — including counseling and mental health support services — exists in theory but is largely inaccessible in practice because of overwhelmed agencies, an intricate bureaucracy made even more intractable by language barriers, and because it’s difficult for family members to get around on their own.

Meanwhile, the trauma from the drone strike lingers. Romal’s barebones apartment is decorated only with a photo of the 10 relatives killed in the strike — a reminder of the tragedy that forced his family to leave home.

“He keeps saying, ‘I lost all my kids,’” said Bahaduri, of the 5ive Pillars Organization. “He hasn’t had a chance to deal with that, but on top of that, he has to find a way to make ends meet now, so it’s trauma after trauma, one crisis after another crisis.”

Correction: May 18, 2023
This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Aayat’s name. A photo caption has also been updated to clarify that Malika was 3 years old.

The post The U.S. Still Owes Money to Family of 10 Afghans It Killed in “Horrible Mistake” appeared first on The Intercept.

This week marks one year since an Israeli soldier killed the Palestinian American journalist with a single shot to the head while she was reporting from the city of Jenin. For her former colleagues, her absence is as dominating as her presence once was.

“She was a legend,” Rania Zabaneh, an Al Jazeera producer and friend of Abu Akleh told The Intercept during a visit to the office earlier this year. Abu Akleh was universally loved among her peers and a household name across the Middle East. While she spent her career covering the daily tragedies of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, her co-workers remember her as funny and upbeat, always seeking out stories about joy and resilience. “She dug for fun, happy stories in a place where everything else is dark,” said Zabaneh.

Over the last year, Abu Akleh’s colleagues have continued to report on Israeli violence across occupied Palestine, including increasingly frequent military invasions of West Bank cities like the one she was covering the day she was killed. They have also found themselves at the center of the story: regularly updating the public about the various probes into their colleague’s death while actively participating in global calls for justice.

No one has been held accountable for Abu Akleh’s killing to date. While Israeli officials quickly closed the case, declining to bring charges, the most significant movement has so far come from the United States. Last fall, the FBI launched an investigation last fall following a sustained public pressure campaign, including by members of Congress; that probe is ongoing. Meanwhile, the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the liaison on security issues in the region, has delayed issuing its own report into the killing.

Along with Abu Akleh’s family, Al Jazeera has filed a formal request to investigate the killing to the International Criminal Court, whose probe into an array of alleged crimes committed in Palestine has not made much progress since it was launched in 2021.

As those probes stall, many of Abu Akleh’s colleagues still struggle to cope with the void she left.

“At first, we were on autopilot; we were like, she’s gone and we have to cover her killing,” said Zabaneh. “But it’s getting harder as time passes, because now we have to come to terms with the fact that she’s not coming back; she’s gone, gone.”

No Accountability

When Abu Akleh was shot on May 11, 2022, she was wearing a clearly marked press vest in an area with no active fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters. (Israel initially claimed that she was killed at the scene of a firefight, a claim that was quickly debunked.) In the weeks following her killing, half a dozen independent reviews, including one by the United Nations, found that Israeli forces were responsible. Last July, Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and the U.K.-based research agency Forensic Architecture released a detailed reconstruction of the shooting, which concluded that Abu Akleh had been deliberately targeted.

While the killing sparked significant international condemnation, it was hardly an isolated incident.

Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. This year is on track to be worse, as Israeli forces make military incursions into cities like Nablus and Jenin with increasing frequency. According to the U.N., Israeli forces have already killed at least 94 Palestinians this year, including at least 19 children, more than double last year’s number in the same period.

Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians almost never face consequences. And there also hasn’t been any accountability when they have killed citizens of other countries, including several Americans. As The Intercept reported last year, the U.S government never investigated Israel’s killing of 23-year-old peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death with a bulldozer while protesting a home demolition in Gaza 20 years ago, nor of 78-year-old Omar Assad, a former Milwaukee grocery store owner who died of a heart attack last year while in the custody of a notoriously violent Israeli military unit.

The Justice Department’s investigation into Abu Akleh’s death, which came only after serious outrage at U.S. inaction in the case, marked the first time the U.S. government moved to independently probe Israel’s killing of an American. As standard with criminal investigations by the FBI, Justice Department officials have not spoken publicly about the case. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Last July, the USSC, the U.S. security coordinator in the region, issued a cursory statement on the killing that sparked widespread condemnation and questions about the office’s independence. Since then, the coordinator has launched a new review of the killing, which has included a meeting with members of Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq earlier this year.

Following a formal request by Sens. Bob Menendez and Cory Booker, the security coordinator was expected to provide a classified congressional briefing on his office’s investigation of the case. That never happened, and a report by the coordinator, which was expected to be released earlier this year, has also been delayed. During a press briefing last week, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that the USSC “has not changed” the conclusions it had reached last summer, “which is that [Israeli Defense Forces] gunfire was likely the reason, unintentionally.”

In a letter published last week, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who has consistently raised Abu Akleh’s case, criticized the delay and reiterated a request for the report to be released. “Most recently, we were informed that, before congressional release of the USSC Report is authorized, the Administration plans to make unspecified changes to its contents,” Van Hollen noted. “While the Administration has characterized its proposed changes as ‘technical,’ any actions to alter the USSC’s Summation Report in any way would violate the integrity of this process.”

The State Department declined to comment on government communications about the report. “We are determined to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future and continue to engage with Israel in this regard,” Patel wrote in an email.

A Chilling Effect

Abu Akleh was not the first journalist killed by Israeli forces. In a report published this week, the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, documented at least 20 instances of Israeli Defense Forces killing members of the media since 2001.

Like Abu Akleh, the majority of those killed — at least 13 — were clearly identified as journalists or inside vehicles with press insignia when they were killed, according to the report. Many more journalists were injured by Israeli forces, which also repeatedly targeted media headquarters. During a military assault on Gaza in 2021, for instance, Israel bombed buildings where more than a dozen local and international media outlets were headquartered, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. As The Intercept has previously reported, Israel also regularly detains and questions Palestinian journalists, including 16 who are currently being held without charges.

“To be a journalist in Palestine is a very dangerous job,” said Ammar Al Dwaik, the director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine’s national human rights institute, adding that journalists also face daily intimidation by settlers and soldiers.

Al Dwaik, who was a friend of Abu Akleh, said that her killing was a reminder that nobody was safe from Israeli violence, and that journalists were no exception. “Shireen was visible, in the broad daylight. Soldiers could see her wearing the vest and yet they shot her, which means that no one is safe and everyone could be a target,” he said. “Being a journalist doesn’t give you any protection with Israeli soldiers.”

Nor has being a clearly identifiable journalist led to greater accountability. “The degree to which Israel claims to investigate journalist killings depends largely on external pressure,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, wrote in a statement. “There are cursory probes into the deaths of journalists with foreign passports, but that is rarely the case for slain Palestinian reporters. Ultimately, none has seen any semblance of justice.”

In its report, CPJ warned that Israeli violence against journalists has a “chilling effect” that undermines press freedom. That chilling effect, some Palestinian journalists told The Intercept, comes not just in the form of fear but also of a lost sense of purpose and the impression that their lives are considered unworthy.

Those feelings intensified after Abu Akleh was killed. A few days after the shooting, Zabaneh was with a team who traveled to Jenin, to report on Israel’s incursion into the city’s refugee camp. As they parked on the camp’s outskirts, the group of seasoned journalists froze, unsure of what to do. “We were like, do we go in? We got stuck there for 10 minutes before deciding,” said Zabaneh. “We’re not talking about a bunch of rookies. … Everybody’s coming in with at least 10 years of experience. It was like, what do we do now?”

Dalia Hatuqa, a freelance Palestinian American journalist who has written for The Intercept and was a friend of Abu Akleh, echoed those sentiments. “Fear has permeated our work.”

In February, when Israeli settlers invaded the city of Hawara, outside Nablus, setting fire to homes and cars in the most severe episode of settler violence in years, Hatuqa hesitated before deciding not to go cover the news as she would have in the past. “It was a combination of fear, but also of, ‘What’s the point?’” she said. “The whole thing has had a depressive effect on our ability to work.”

Despite the lack of accountability, many members of both the U.S. government and the U.S. media seemed to have moved on, lamented Hatuqa. She noted that at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last week, President Joe Biden spoke of journalists Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria since 2012, and Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia. Biden made no mention of Abu Akleh. Neither did Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, at a recent event commemorating World Press Freedom Day.

“It’s almost like, it happened, let’s all move on,” Hatuqa said. “But some of us haven’t moved on at all.”

Update: May 9, 2023, 4:00 p.m. ET
This article has been updated to include a response from the State Department that was provided after publication. The article was subsequently updated to clarify the attribution on that statement. 

The post Shireen Abu Akleh’s Colleagues Are Still Waiting for Justice appeared first on The Intercept.

“Mr. Khan, you have not been given leave to withdraw. You don’t just get up and waltz out of here,” the presiding judge warned the defense attorney, Karim Khan, according to a transcript of the 2007 proceedings in The Hague. Khan did just that.

The walkout, following a dispute regarding the resources allotted to the defense, was a bold, spectacular move that angered many but successfully delayed Taylor’s trial by several months. Khan’s gesture became legendary in international law circles, earning him either admiration or disdain, depending on who you ask. Stephen Rapp, the prosecutor who Khan walked out on, wrote in an email to colleagues years later that Khan’s behavior had been “an act of profound disrespect for international criminal justice.”

The court eventually granted more resources to Taylor’s defense, but he was ultimately found guilty, becoming the first former head of state to be convicted by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials. And the move didn’t harm Khan’s career, which also saw him involved in proceedings over crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Lebanon, as well as at the helm of the United Nations team investigating crimes committed by the Islamic State group.

In 2021, Khan, a British citizen, was elected as the third prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, a struggling institution whose record he pledged to improve. Khan’s election was controversial, with observers questioning the ethics of his involvement in the defense of current Kenyan President William Ruto and lobbying by several governments in support of Khan, who did not initially make it through the formal vetting process.

Nearly two years into a nine-year term, Khan has developed a reputation as a forceful and sometimes brutal operative who is as savvy in the political arena as he is in the courtroom. The Intercept spoke with more than a dozen people who have known him professionally over the years, including some who left the ICC prosecutor’s office after he arrived. They painted a picture of a divisive yet respected litigator, who can commandeer attention to himself and resources to his institution, and whose skills are better used going after war criminals rather than defending them. His aggressive demeanor inspires fear in the small world of international criminal law, with many people requesting anonymity to discuss their experiences with Khan, citing fears of retribution. Khan declined an interview request, and in response to questions from The Intercept, a spokesperson for his office mostly pointed to past public statements by Khan.

Now, the prosecutor faces his biggest test yet. Last month, he stunned the international law community when he obtained an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior Kremlin official Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, over their alleged role in the deportation of Ukrainian children: a war crime.

The announcement catapulted the ICC into the spotlight and earned Khan the approval even of many of his critics. Like the walkout from the Taylor trial, seeking an arrest warrant for Putin himself was a risky, spectacular move — in line with the combative, scorched-earth style that has defined Khan’s career.

“He understands when it’s necessary to be bold to push the accountability agenda,” said Christopher Gosnell, a senior legal officer at the U.N., who has known Khan for years and worked with him at UNITAD, the U.N. team investigating crimes by the Islamic State group. “The whole history of international criminal law is these moments where things are pushed forward by quantum leaps. And there are those who are passive and there are those who spot the right moments, and he knows how to do that and does it really well.”

Seeking an arrest warrant for Putin himself was a risky, spectacular move — in line with the combative, scorched-earth style that has defined Khan’s career.

The warrant helped raise the ICC and Khan’s profile and demonstrated that the court can be responsive to the moment. And pressure continues to build for the Russian president to face accountability under international law, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy giving a speech at The Hague on Thursday. Yet Putin is unlikely to find himself in a Hague courtroom anytime soon, and the warrant could put other governments in a bind as they seek a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine. Last week, South Africa — where Putin is invited to a summit later this year — declared its intention to leave the court over the warrant, before backtracking.

The announcement also seemed aimed at siphoning some of the momentum around establishing a special tribunal to investigate Russia’s aggression against Ukraine — a crime the ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction over in this instance. Khan has long opposed calls for a special tribunal that would sideline the ICC and compete for resources, at one point calling such ad hoc prosecutions “self-indulgent.”

By going straight to the top of the command chain, to Putin himself, Khan demonstrated that the ICC can take on the most senior officials responsible for the crimes committed in Ukraine, even when its jurisdiction is limited. But if his move backfires, it could further damage the court’s battered reputation and make it even harder to pursue accountability from heads of state who commit war crimes.

“He really has to show that he can be effective on this,” said Rapp, the Special Court for Sierra Leone prosecutor and a former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, who praised Khan’s work in Ukraine. “And at the same time, he’s got to show that [Ukraine] is not the only situation in the world.”

A Court in Crisis

At the ICC, Khan took over an office that had been struggling to find its footing since the court began operating in 2002. The first prosecutor, the Argentine Luis Moreno Ocampo, at first treaded cautiously, targeting relatively low-level rebel leaders, before suddenly reversing course and rushing into risky, high-profile cases against former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer who succeeded Ocampo, was largely credited with bringing order to the court. She opened several preliminary probes and full-scale investigations, though many moved at a pace that court insiders and advocates often found frustratingly slow. Bensouda built a reputation as a meticulous, sober leader, who was nonetheless not particularly effective at getting cases to trial and securing convictions. By the end of the first two prosecutors’ terms, the office had a rather underwhelming record: only a handful of convictions, all in Africa, and none of state officials.

In his application for the ICC job, Khan addressed those failures and pledged to reverse them.

“We have witnessed many instances of survivors — as well as the international community and civil society — being promised much, but receiving little,” he wrote in a letter submitted as part of the process. “An [Office of the Prosecutor] that can conduct independent and impartial investigations and build cases on solid evidence is one that will meet expectations and help foster fair trials.”

Khan was not originally on a shortlist of candidates recommended for the position by a committee tasked with vetting prospective prosecutors, but his supporters lobbied hard for him, buoyed by British support as well as by a campaign by Kenyan officials. (Khan’s spokesperson declined to comment on his initial exclusion from the shortlist). The latter’s involvement was particularly fraught as Khan had represented Ruto, who was deputy president at the time, when the ICC charged him with crimes against humanity in connection to pre-election violence, in 2007, that led to hundreds of people being killed.

The ICC dropped the charges against Ruto in 2016, citing “troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling.” A key witness in the case had been killed two years earlier. Khan maintains he did everything in his power to protect the witness, but many people have nonetheless questioned his role in the case. A former member of the prosecutor’s office, who left before Khan’s election and has knowledge of the case, framed the concern around possible witness tampering this way: “The interference was so rampant that it’s hard to see a circumstance where he might not have had at least some form of knowledge as to what was going on.”

Some Kenyan civil society groups opposed Khan’s ICC candidacy, with Gladwell Otieno, founder and executive director of the Africa Centre for Open Governance, condemning his “over-enthusiastic embrace of his client’s and the Kenya government’s political vendetta against the ICC, going far beyond the trenchant defence of his client’s interests in court.”

In an open letter written at the time, Khan firmly rejected the accusations. “Four Kenyan NGO’s attempt to create a spectre against me in this election process relating to the death of Mr. Meshack Yebei some years ago,” he wrote, referring to the witness who was killed, whom he had referred to the ICC’s witness protection program. “Their very limited knowledge of the details and the lack of publicly available information on the subject has, perhaps, been fodder for their misinformed statements. … I am not able to disclose the source of alleged threats against Mr. Yebei that grounded my request for his protection, save to say I did everything ethically within my power to ensure Mr. Yebei and his family were safe.”

In an interview he gave shortly before taking office, Khan suggested his actions during the Ruto trial — including fierce criticism of the prosecutor’s office for bringing the case — were “part and parcel of courtroom advocacy.”

“It’s much better to have Karim Khan as prosecutor of the ICC than to have Karim Khan as defense lawyer for Vladimir Putin.”

Despite the controversy, Khan’s supporters praised him as the bold leader they say the field of international justice needs. “I always hoped to have him on our side, because he was winning all these cases on defense,” said Alain Werner, a Swiss lawyer who has represented victims for years and worked with Khan on the Khmer Rouge trials. “It’s much better to have Karim Khan as prosecutor of the ICC than to have Karim Khan as defense lawyer for Vladimir Putin.”

When he came into office, Khan had to contend not only with a poor conviction rate under his predecessors, but also a long-standing credibility problem and a widespread sense that the ICC is, as Werner put it — quoting a colleague in the field — “strong against the weak and weak against the strong.”

“I think we have to be clear about the fact that the court was not working the way everybody had hoped,” said Werner, who runs Civitas Maxima, an international network of lawyers representing victims of mass crimes. “There was a very big efficiency issue, and the fear that the ICC at some point would become so ineffective that it would not bother anyone anymore.”

Gosnell, Khan’s colleague at UNITAD, said Khan was the leader to turn the court’s fate around.

“The ICC was kind of drifting, frankly, by the time he arrived,” Gosnell said. “He actually is able to achieve results, and this is a very hard field in which to do that.”

A New Sheriff in Town

While he’s only been on the job for two years, Khan has shaken things up at the prosecutor’s office. “I think we needed a bit of a swing on the pendulum to another direction,” said a former staffer who left shortly after Khan arrived for reasons unrelated to him. “It felt like things had become a little complacent.”

But Khan’s dogged courtroom demeanor has carried into the workplace, where he has developed a reputation as a tough, demanding boss who shuts out critical perspectives. “The governance model has changed into something completely vertical,” one person with knowledge of the dynamics said, “with no checks and balances internally.”

The prosecutor quickly restructured the office, sidelining some of the prosecutors who had been there for years and pushing others who had enjoyed close access to his predecessor to leave. He ordered investigators to move to the field, a request that some viewed as a tacit way to pressure people to resign. He also fired a staff member who had an informal conversation with representatives of a state without seeking prior authorization. Several people saw the firing as a disproportionate, retaliatory gesture contributing to a culture of fear at the office. That person, who is formally challenging the dismissal, did not respond to a request for comment. The prosecutor’s spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Intercept that “any personnel decisions by the Prosecutor are made in strict adherence to the applicable codes, policies, and procedures regulating human resources matters of the ICC.”

Khan also brought in an outside team to investigate sexual harassment allegations against a dozen current and former members of the office, an issue that four people told The Intercept his predecessor had been slow to address. Some of those under investigation were encouraged to leave before the end of the probe, according to an internal report.

“Karim doesn’t need new friends.”

Khan’s tenure has also been characterized by a sometimes tense relationship with human rights groups and international nongovernmental organizations — many of which worked closely with his predecessor. Some NGOs, for instance, have pressed Khan to seize on the power of his office, the way Bensouda did, to issue preventative statements of concern about various ongoing human rights abuses, warning perpetrators that their actions may fall under the court’s jurisdiction. Khan has resisted those calls. “The Prosecutor considers that the work of the Office should be focused on delivering results in investigations and, ultimately, through successful prosecutions in the courtroom,” his spokesperson wrote to The Intercept.

Khan also recently issued guidelines for civil society groups documenting crimes that signal a departure from the office’s historic relationship with such organizations, which Rapp described as “the engine of the criminal justice system worldwide.”

In the guidelines, Khan and his co-author praised civil society groups’ documentation work, before warning that some of that work has “the potential to be harmful or prejudicial to criminal accountability efforts.” They continued: “Civil society organisations cannot replace or substitute the actions of competent investigative authorities.”

The prosecutor’s tone was viewed in the civil society space as an effort to further distance his office from those at the front lines of war crimes documentation. Yet it was consistent with Khan’s resolve to maintain his independence, even as it has earned him a number of detractors. “Karim doesn’t need new friends,” said Werner, who is close to Khan. “From his perspective he may be thinking, ‘You want me to independent? Well, I’m going to be independent from everyone — from the states and from the NGOs.’”

Politics and Priorities

Khan’s resolve to turn around the ICC’s losing streak has inevitably come up against the court’s limited resources. With a budget of some $170 million a year to pursue probes in 17 different countries, Khan has shaken up the office’s docket. He closed two of the investigations opened by his predecessor, in Georgia and the Central African Republic — the first time the office had closed active investigations in the court’s history. And in one of his most controversial decisions to date, he announced six months into his tenure that he would “deprioritise” an investigation of crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan, focusing exclusively on crimes committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State group’s affiliate there.

As The Intercept reported at the time, the decision to stop investigating crimes committed by U.S. forces and the former Afghan government followed a yearslong effort to kill the probe by the U.S., which has long obstructed the ICC’s work. While Khan presented the decision as a matter of necessity, citing the court’s limited resources, the fact that the announcement came within a few months of his election — with U.S. support — prompted criticisms and questions about his independence.

“The fact that we learned about the de-prioritization from a press release I think encapsulates so much about his approach to victims.”

For some advocates representing Afghan victims, the way the de-prioritization was announced was also indicative of Khan’s desire to keep victims at an arm’s length. “The fact that we learned about the de-prioritization from a press release I think encapsulates so much about his approach to victims,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented victims of U.S. torture before the ICC. “He’ll go to the field and have a press release showing him with victims, but it can feel like a very paternalistic instrumentalizing of victims.”

The U.S. government has long held a hostile stance toward the ICC, at first fighting to restrict its mandate and later fiercely opposing investigations into itself and its allies. In 2002, one month after the court began operating, Congress passed legislation, quickly dubbed “The Hague Invasion Act,” which authorized the use of military force to liberate U.S. citizens or allies being held by the court. At the height of hostilities, under the Trump administration, the U.S. government sanctioned former ICC prosecutor Bensouda and another prosecutor — an unprecedented move against officials of an international body. President Joe Biden revoked those sanctions in 2021.

Since he came into office, Khan has sought to restore the court’s relationship with the U.S., including by recently welcoming a congressional delegation to The Hague.

“What we’re seeing with the current prosecutor is that the U.S. certainly has a greater role if not in defining the agenda, at least in furthering and shaping it,” said Gallagher.

Related

Momentum Grows on Special Tribunal to Prosecute Putin’s Aggression in Ukraine

So far, Khan’s case priorities have fallen in line with the foreign policy priorities of major global powers. While the prosecutor moved quickly to investigate possible war crimes in Ukraine, for instance, he has done little to advance an investigation in Palestine, opened by his predecessor in 2021 and strenuously opposed by the U.S. and Israel, neither of which are ICC members. Though Khan has indicated that he hopes to “visit Palestine,” the investigation is minimally staffed and has largely stalled, according to people familiar with it.

In Khan’s effort to rehabilitate the reputation of the court, he has focused on the cases he can win or that enjoy broad political support. Evaluating a case’s prosecutorial viability involves considerations about the likelihood a suspect can be apprehended and brought to trial, which in turn requires assessing the political landscape and countries’ willingness to cooperate with the court. In Afghanistan, for instance, the prosecutor might currently prioritize cases against the Islamic State because the Taliban government, which is also battling the group, may be willing to aid in efforts to prosecute its members — even if that means crimes by the Taliban themselves are not pursued at this point.

“An international prosecutor cannot just sit there and wish the powers they don’t have,” said Gosnell. “You have to take into account what is realistic, what is practical. … You don’t achieve results by announcing grandiose plans and investigations that cannot yield a case.”

While agreeing that prioritization is both difficult and essential, Khan’s critics inside and outside the office have taken issue with the lack of transparency around those decisions. “The question is, on what basis to do that prioritization, and that’s what people have been critical of,” said Rapp. “It needs to be done in a transparent way in which one explains to the victims and survivors the basis for doing it.”

Prosecuting Putin

While neither Ukraine nor Russia are members of the court, the Ukrainian government gave the ICC jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed there after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Days into last year’s full-scale invasion, Khan launched a new probe into war crimes committed in the ongoing conflict; he was one of the first senior international officials to visit Ukraine, and he successfully lobbied states to pledge millions in funding for the court’s work there. He tapped Brenda Hollis, an American attorney with a reputation as an “iron lady,” to lead the case.

Ukraine presented a unique set of circumstances for the prosecutor: an ongoing conflict in a country where the court was already active, in Europe, and where mass atrocities were being documented at an unprecedented level and investigated real-time by a host of human rights groups, international institutions, and local prosecutors. It was also a conflict that captured the world’s attention in a way many equally horrific ones had not, and that united much of the international community in condemning Russia’s actions. Against that backdrop, Khan seized the moment.

“It was a brilliant move to go to the top — it sent exactly the right signal,” said Werner. Referring to Hollis, he added, “You now have two of the most experienced and hardworking prosecutors you could ever dream of. And of course one is American and one is English, but I mean, the truth is that these two know how to prosecute efficiently defendants at the highest possible level.”

Whether Khan’s arrest warrant for Putin and Lvova-Belova can yield a trial remains to be determined — though it’s highly unlikely anytime soon. The Kremlin responded to the warrants by stating it would consider any arrest attempt a “declaration of war.” It’s also uncertain whether some countries would be willing to comply with the warrant should Putin choose to travel internationally. In an interview with CNN, Khan was vague about the prospects of seeing Putin in The Hague.

“Our job is to independently and impartially, without any political motivations or agendas, apply the law to the facts,” he said. “Now it’s for others to decide whether or not arrest opportunities are available and if so, to enforce them.”

“If they choose to ignore it, it really waters down the significance of the court.”

While Khan’s decision to target Putin earned him the praise of many states, including significant donors to the court, some officials have also quietly worried about what would happen in the event of a negotiated end to the conflict. “If there’s an effort to normalize relationships with Russia, especially by European countries, they’re going to be faced now with the very, very difficult circumstance of either having to arrest a head of state or ignore the validity of an arrest warrant,” the former attorney with the prosecutor’s office said. “And if they choose to ignore it, it really waters down the significance of the court.”

While the future of prosecuting Putin is uncertain, the effort raises questions about if and how Khan will build upon the momentum the Ukraine war has given to the ICC to push for accountability in other scenarios.

In Khan’s first speech after he was elected prosecutor, he described his view on what it would take to be successful in the role. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” Khan said at the time. “We have to perform in trial. We cannot invest so much, we cannot raise expectations so high and achieve so little, so often in the courtroom.”

The former attorney from the prosecutor’s office pointed to that speech and said, “Right now, we’re still waiting for the proof. The proof is not issuing an arrest warrant; the proof is whether you’re actually able to bring trials, and bring solid cases, and convict people.”

The post The Polarizing Prosecutor Trying to Nail Putin for War Crimes appeared first on The Intercept.

Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the pastoral hills surrounding Yatta, is one of several areas across the occupied West Bank where the Israeli state has for decades forced out Palestinians and replaced them with Israeli settlers. The goal, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated plainly after returning to power last year, is to give the state absolute and ultimate control over what he called “all areas of the Land of Israel” —including land widely expected to one day form the territory of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli government has deployed an array of legal and policy pretexts to extend its domination of the West Bank, most notably by supporting the more than half million Israeli settlers who illegally moved there. Since a new, far-right coalition took power, Israel has been roiled by mass protests that reached an apex this week, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to oppose plans by Netanyahu — who is currently fighting corruption charges — to severely curtail the independence of the country’s judiciary. But the political crisis means little to Palestinians, including the 1.6 million with Israeli citizenship, who have long viewed Israel’s courts as complicit in their oppression, and the legal system many Israelis are now rushing to defend as an enabler to the regime of racial domination forced upon them.

“Palestinians know that Israel has only ever been a democracy for its Jewish citizens, and never for us,” George Bisharat and Jamil Dakwar wrote in an op-ed for Haaretz this week. “What we are witnessing today is an internal Israeli Jewish struggle over who will administer an apartheid regime over the Palestinians, not a genuine fight for democracy for all.”

Few Israelis took to the streets last May, for instance, when Israel’s highest court put an end to a decadeslong legal battle Palestinian residents of a dozen communities in Masafer Yatta had been fighting to stay on their lands — inside what Israel had unilaterally declared a “firing zone.” The proceedings followed Israel’s declaration in the 1980s of a large section of Masafer Yatta as a restricted, military area for the army to train in. Since then, Palestinians living there faced forcible expulsions, frequent home demolitions, rising settler violence, and a host of other coercive measures seeking to drive them off the land — all while illegal Israeli settlements expanded around them with no consequence. Last May, their legal battle ended when the same court whose legitimacy hundreds of thousands of Israelis are now fighting to preserve ruled definitively that there are no “legal barriers” to the planned expulsion of Palestinians from the firing zone. The court — which is Israel’s Supreme Court but rules as the High Court of Justice when deciding matters of state authority, as in the Masafer Yatta case — is made up of 15 judges. The court is being targeted by Netanyahu, who wants to change the way judges are selected as well as the laws the court can rule on, in addition to giving Parliament the power to overturn its decisions.

Last May’s ruling, the final one on the Masafer Yatta case, essentially sanctioned the forcible transfer of Palestinians from the firing zone — even as the forcible transfer of an occupied population is a form of ethnic cleansing and, under international law standards, a war crime.

Performative Law

The Masafer Yatta ruling has brought renewed international attention to this pocket of the southern West Bank and prompted widespread condemnation of Israeli actions. But it has also intensified the Israeli military’s and settlers’ joint efforts to force the nearly 1,200 Palestinians who remain in the firing zone to leave. Harassment of local residents has become a daily affair, and violent attacks by settlers are on the rise. For the Palestinians who have already lived in limbo for three decades, the court’s decision means that they may now face forcible transfer any day — even as human rights observers note that efforts to drive them out are likely going to be more insidious so as not to draw further global condemnation.

“We don’t believe we’re going to see people put on trucks and being transferred — although it could happen — because of the optics of it,” said Dror Sadot, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, during a recent visit to the firing zone, noting that Israeli authorities did force people onto trucks in an earlier effort to evacuate the area in 1999. “Instead, what we’re seeing already, and what we think we’re going to see even more, is efforts to make their lives impossible to live. Demolitions, checkpoints, confiscating cars. They really isolate these communities and basically try to do everything they can to make them leave.”

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces wrote in an email to The Intercept that “in the ruling of the Supreme Court on May 4th, 2022, the Court approved the State’s position which determined that at the time of the declaration of the area as a closed zone, the area was uninhabited” — even though dozens of families lived in the area at the time.

“In recent months dialogue has been held with the Palestinians in the area, in order to enable them to leave the closed zone in an agreed upon and independent manner,” the spokesperson added. “The training zone has great importance for training security personnel including in the use of live fire, which cannot be carried out effectively with civilians present in the area.”

In recent years, a growing number of global human rights organizations has begun to describe the Israeli state’s control of Palestinians as a form of apartheid — a parallel to South Africa that Palestinians themselves had been drawing for decades. The political backlash has been fierce, even as those reports — by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but also the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the Israel-based B’Tselem — have offered careful legal analysis to explain their conclusions, and referred to an established, legal definition of the crime of apartheid as defined under multiple international statutes. Left with no other recourse, Palestinians have increasingly taken their plight to the international community and international mechanisms of justice like the International Criminal Court, which includes apartheid under the crimes against humanity over which it has jurisdiction, and which in 2021 opened an investigation on the situation in Palestine.

Until now, those seeking to defend Israel’s conduct have largely done so by referring to its democratic character, including the integrity and independence of its judiciary, even as Palestinians have long argued Israel is no democracy when it comes to them.

Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School who has researched legal policies pertaining to land in Israel and the West Bank, noted that the Israeli state has perfected the use of the law as an instrument to control Palestinians, shrouding its actions in a façade of legitimacy. Dispossession is often disguised as a bureaucratic matter of enforcing the law, with Israeli officials declaring homes illegal and subjecting them to demotion orders, designating land as restricted, and issuing eviction orders.

“The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

“There is definitely this culture of hyper legalization and performative law,” Eghbariah told me, pointing for instance to a legal distinction Israel draws between settlements and outposts — even as it mostly treats both equally, and even as both are illegal under international law. “The whole distinction between outposts and supposedly legal settlements is absurd. But it’s part of the legitimizing force of the law to try to use this façade of rule of law, of supposedly a democratic state, that practices so-called measured violence, and that has checks and balances in place. The law serves as a tool, a technology even, to legitimate atrocities, to rationalize them, and to make them more palatable.”

The protests in Tel Aviv, many Palestinians have pointed out, are an effort to preserve rather than challenge the system that has enabled Israel’s regime of racial domination. “Now all these liberals are roaming the streets outraged because of the idea that the independence of the judiciary is going to be supposedly compromised,” Eghbariah said. “It makes perfect sense: because Israel tries to maintain and use the law in its service.”

That was well on display this week in Tel Aviv, when amid a sea of protesters waving Israeli flags, a lone man waving a Palestinian one — which Israel has banned — was quickly tackled by police and protesters.

The Firing Zone

For the Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta’s firing zone, the court’s decision sanctioning their forcible transfer has exacerbated the uncertainty and fear that has dominated their lives for generations. Nasser Nawajah, a community organizer and field researcher for B’Tselem, has been living with his family in Khirbet Susya, a cluster of homes and verdant vegetable gardens near the firing zone, since the 1980s, when the village’s families were forcibly expelled from their original homes in Susya, a few hundred meters away, which Israel had declared an archaeological site. Since then, Khirbet Susya’s residents have been living with no connection to water and electricity. When they formally applied for access to infrastructure, they were told “No, you’re illegal,” Nawajah told me, even as nearby Israeli outposts were quickly connected to infrastructure. “At the end of the day it’s just a policy to make Palestinians’ lives miserable in all kinds of ways, firing zones, declaring buildings illegal, calling land ‘state land.’ All the roads lead to making Palestinians’ lives miserable.”

“All the roads lead to making Palestinians’ lives miserable.”

For years, residents of the area have relied on ingeniousness and the solidarity of nongovernmental organizations and activists who have provided them with a microgrid of solar panels and water tanks that the army regularly confiscates and that settlers vandalize. Settlers also regularly damage olive trees, set fields on fire, uproot vegetables from gardens, and destroy Palestinian property. In Khirbet Susya, Nawajah pointed to a stone monument that settlers had ripped out, a tribute to a Palestinian baby who was burnt to death along with his family in a 2015 settler attack. Not far from the village, a patch of olive trees was shriveled dry by poison. Signs in Hebrew called on people to report international peace activists to Israeli police.

Nawajah described a combination of daily harassment, increasingly violent attacks, and a seemingly endless stream of new techniques devised by settlers, under the watch of the army, to seize ever-larger swaths of Palestinian land. Sometimes, he said, settlers fly drones over herds of sheep to scare them off course; often, they send their own sheep and livestock to graze on Palestinian crops. And a new practice was taking hold in the area, by which a lone, armed settler would set up a “pastoral outpost” on a hilltop, bringing animals to graze on the lands below — a faster and more efficient way to stake a claim on a piece of land than to set up an entire residential community. Where residential outposts are often made up of a few caravans and makeshift homes, a pastoral outpost only requires some tools, animals, and one person who, using this tactic, can significantly alter control of the land. “It’s enough to set up something like this to clear out a lot of land that belongs to Palestinians,” Nawajah said, noting that most Palestinian farmers would give up trying to reach that land for fear of being attacked.

During my visit to the South Hebron Hills, one such settler, a young man standing alone on a hilltop overseeing Palestinian crop lands, used binoculars to watch me, Nawajah, and a couple Israeli human rights observers. Then he approached us to ask about the purpose of our visit. Moments later, a “civil administration” vehicle pulled up: a quiet reminder that we were in the firing zone, where the army could choose to confiscate our car at any point. “Don’t be fooled by the word ‘civil administration,’” said Roy Yellin, B’Tselem’s director of public outreach, who was with the group that day. “It’s a part of the army that’s in charge of running the civil aspects of the life of Palestinians — but it’s the army.”

Palestinians and human rights observers stress that while the army is ubiquitous in the firing zone, it is not there to protect Palestinian land or lives: It is there to protect settlers or stand by when they attack Palestinians. In Khirbet Susya two years ago, Palestinian residents filmed a group of adult settlers playing with the children’s toys in the village playground while soldiers watched without intervening. (The IDF spokesperson wrote in reference to the playground incident that “the video that was published on social media represents only the beginning of the encounter and does not depict the rest of the incident in which the settlers were removed from the playground premises within minutes.”)

The army generally stands by and does little while settlers engage in violence, but sometimes the violence goes too far even for them. In Tuba, a Palestinian village inside the firing zone near the outpost of Ma’on, settler attacks on Palestinian children have become so frequent and violent that the army now escorts the children on their way to school and back home.

“They’re not doing anything to the settlers, they just escort the children,” noted Sadot, of B’Tselem.

“This is why when we talk about settler violence, we talk about state violence, because you can’t separate it.”

“This is why when we talk about settler violence, we talk about state violence, because you can’t separate it,” she added. “A lot of people will say, those settlers are a few bad apples, or something like that. But first of all, they are being allowed to live there even though it’s been declared an illegal outpost, and they get electricity and water, and the army protects them, and nobody’s getting charged when they are being violent. They have the backing of the state and they are all going for the same goal: to take over land from the Palestinians.”

Often the harassment and threats turn into open violence. Nawajah, who has been documenting dozens of such incidents for years, tells his neighbors to continue to report settler attacks to the army so as to create documentation of what happens — even as most Palestinians have given up reporting them because they fear retaliation and because they have come to view settlers and the army as one.

The IDF spokesperson wrote to The Intercept that soldiers are required to stop violations of the law by Israeli citizens, including by detaining them. “A Palestinian who was harmed as a result of an incident of violence or damage to his property can also file a complaint with the Israel Police,” the spokesperson added.

A day before I arrived, a Palestinian farmer was attacked by settlers with brass knuckles and hospitalized. The settlers were residents of a one-family outpost, Talia Farm, named after a South African convert to Judaism who moved to the West Bank from South Africa in the 1990s, after the end of apartheid there.

“I loved apartheid,” Yaakov Talia, the outpost’s founder, once told an Israeli journalist. “I still think that apartheid is the best thing in the world.”

Palestinian homes are demolished by Israeli forces in Area C in the village of Mufagara south of Yatta near Hebron in the occupied West Bank on Sept. 11, 2019. Photos: Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images

Apartheid’s Playbook

In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords, with the aim of creating a Palestinian state, divided the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip into different areas. The carved-up territory would allow limited Palestinian self-governance in anticipation of an eventual state while, in a nod to Israeli security concerns, letting Israel maintain full control of much of the land. “Area A” contains the largest Palestinian cities, where 2.8 million people live under the civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority, the home-rule body and the closest thing to a sovereign government Palestinians were ever granted. “Area B” includes the areas immediately surrounding the cities, under Palestinian civil management and, in theory, joint Palestinian and Israeli security control. Then there is “Area C”: the largest swath of the West Bank. In addition to encompassing all the Israeli settlements, whether urban or rural, Area C included the pastoral and agricultural land from which Palestinians have drawn their sustenance for generations, and the economic lifeline of any future state. Covering 60 percent of what after Oslo was widely understood to be the land of a future Palestine, Area C remained under full Israeli military control, with the army frequently and increasingly making incursions into other areas as well.

Over the years, the Israeli government seized on Oslo’s unresolved parameters to deploy an intricate framework of land policies and legal justifications for taking territory that belonged to Palestinians. Perhaps the most effective tool has been the development of settlements.

The Israeli government seized on Oslo’s unresolved parameters to deploy an intricate framework of land policies and legal justifications for taking territory that belonged to Palestinians.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law. As part of the Oslo process, in order to preserve the possibility of Palestinian statehood, Israel committed not to change so-called facts on the ground. That should have meant no new settlements, but Israeli officials cited what it described as natural population growth as justification to expand existing settlements, building more neighborhoods and towns in the hills surrounding existing ones, often naming each new development with a numeral next to the name of the original settlement. In addition to those settlements, which in some cases have grown into cities fully supported by the state, more than 140 outposts have sprung up over the years. Those were built by settlers without official authorization, but while authorities occasionally issue — and rarely carry out — demolition orders against outposts, they more often provide them with electricity, water, public transportation, and army protection.

In Masafer Yatta, for instance, the rural areas surrounding Yatta have been cut off from the city by a circle of ever-expanding Israeli settlements and outposts, the latter of which are illegal not only under international law but also even under Israeli law. Yet in several cases, outposts that were built illegally were later recognized and legitimated by Israeli authorities — as is the case of Avigail, an outpost near Masafer Yatta that the Israeli government “legalized” along with several others in February, ostensibly in response to two attacks carried out by Palestinians in east Jerusalem that month.

Over the years, the settlement enterprise has turned the prospect of a viable Palestinian state into a near-impossibility by precluding both territorial integrity and access to enough land to sustain a future state’s population. Settlements, usually built on hilltops, often with unnaturally narrow and long footprints so as to create a longer barrier, have not only encroached on Palestinian land: They have also effectively cut off one Palestinian community from the other. Each settlement is also surrounded by a — usually unofficial — “security zone,” in theory a buffer between Palestinians and settlers where nobody is supposed to stand. But settlers have regularly expanded into those areas too, therefore pushing the security zone further and taking over more land.

Overall, in the West Bank, Israeli officials have confiscated more than 2 million dunmas, or nearly 800 square miles of Palestinian land, more than one-third of the West Bank — much of it the private property of Palestinians. They have done so under an array of justifications, including the designation of much of it as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now, which tracks the expropriation of Palestinian land, estimated that the Israeli government declared up to a quarter of the West Bank state land. B’Tselem, which also tracks Israeli land grabs, found that settlements and the roads and infrastructure that serve them have effectively encircled Palestinians in the West Bank into “165 non-contiguous ‘territorial islands’” — a fragmentation that observers have long compared to apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans.

The reference to Bantustans evokes the pockets of territory that South Africa’s apartheid government designated for Black residents, forcing their resettlement there with the goal of ultimately creating independent “homelands.” This is one of many ways in which Israel’s regime of racial domination over Palestinians has been compared to apartheid South Africa.

The references to apartheid, however, offer not only a historical comparison, but also a legal one. While the South African experience coined the term itself and popularized the concept of apartheid, the crime of apartheid has since been defined and codified in a number of international treaties, including the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute, the International Criminal Court’s founding document.

“Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy,” Human Rights Watch concluded in its 2021 report on Israeli apartheid. “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity.”

Maximum Land, Minimum Palestinians

While apartheid policies encompass a range of institutionalized discrimination practices — from restrictions on residency for non-Jews to the recent introduction of legislation that would seek the death penalty for Palestinians only — the element of racial domination that is intrinsic to the concept is particularly evident in Israeli land policies.

“They want maximum land with minimum Palestinians,” said Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans opposed to the occupation. “They don’t want to annex tens of thousands of Palestinians because eventually they’ll have to give them citizenship.”

Givati, who served in the military in the West Bank, described a close collaboration between the state — through the military — and the ideological settlers driving the land grab in the West Bank. The two regularly worked together, he said, with representatives of the settlement movement often participating in military drills and speaking to soldiers sent to serve in the territory.

“Basically we’re seeing a system which deprives Palestinians of their lands and aims to push them away from living in Area C, into Areas A and B,” he added, during a visit to the South Hebron Hills. “And that element of using settlements in order to divide the land is very visible here.”

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In many ways Masafer Yatta is a microcosm where the dynamics playing out across the entire West Bank are magnified by the designation of the firing zone. Daily harassment of Palestinians, illegal settlement expansion, and settler violence have been growing steadily throughout the occupied territory for years. So has the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces — which last year reached the highest toll since the end of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. So far, 2023 has been even worse, with Israeli raids in cities like Nablus and Jenin killing dozens, and settlers setting fire to homes and cars in a series of attacks that have been compared to “pogroms” and that were encouraged by top officials of Israel’s new fundamentalist government.

The extremism of the current Israeli government has in many ways laid bare the reality of Israel’s project of domination. As settler violence in the West Bank has reached historic records in recent months, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently called for a Palestinian village attacked by settlers to be “wiped out,” before being forced to apologize. And as protests in Israel reached a peak this week, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a settler once convicted of supporting an Israeli terrorist organization, worked out a deal with Netanyahu to delay the controversial judicial reforms in exchange for the establishment of a new security force that will operate under Ben-Gvir’s direct orders — a prospect that some have likened to handing the extremist minister a “private militia.”

But before the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reached the highest level of the Israeli government, the groundwork for the supremacist project they have championed had been in motion for years, advanced under more liberal Israeli governments as well — much of it unfolding with at best tepid criticism from Israel’s closest allies, including the U.S.

Across the Green Line

While Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land is most visible in Area C of the West Bank, it is a reality also in Jerusalem, as well as inside Israel, defined as the territory of Israel before the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, even though Israel’s borders remain an unsettled matter. There, like in the occupied territories, an array of laws and legal justifications have resulted in the seizure of much of the land belonging to Palestinians who became citizens of Israel after an estimated 750,000 others were made refugees during the 1948 establishment of the state. Today, there are approximately 1.6 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, comprising more than 20 percent of Israel’s population.

Eghbariah, the human rights attorney and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, argued a particularly effective tool deployed by Israel has been the legal fragmentation of Palestinians themselves into different categories, with different IDs, rights, and legal frameworks applying to each. “It’s a regime of legal fragmentation that classifies some Palestinians as citizens, and some as residents of the West Bank, or Gaza, and some as residents of Jerusalem, and each of them have different legal statuses,” he told me. “It designs different tools to experiment. It’s labs of oppression and domination.”

Land grabs inside Israel are often overlooked, Eghbariah added. But there too “is dispossession, there is segregation in the ways that accessibility to resources and land is distributed,” he said.

Since 1948, for instance, officials have authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” inside Israel, but have only granted a handful of permits for government-planned townships for Palestinians. Most of those are communities the Israeli state has created for Bedouins that it continues to displace across the Negev desert — even as those Bedouins have for years resisted forced relocation to these poverty-stricken townships.

In the Negev, the historical land of the Bedouins dating back centuries, Israel has announced plans to forcibly displace 36,000 people living in roughly 40 “unrecognized” communities, in order to expand military training areas and implement what it called “economic development” projects. In total, some 90,000 people live in unrecognized Bedouin communities in the desert, and also face an uncertain future. Adalah, an Israel-based human rights group, has been representing many of the Bedouin communities facing eviction as they fight in court for the right to stay on their land.

“The plan provides clear confirmation that Israel’s Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouins in the Negev overtly discriminates against the Bedouin population,” the group wrote, referring to the government agency set up to handle Bedouin affairs — which Bedouins view as the agency tasked with their oppression. The agency, according to Adalah, views Bedouins “as an obstacle that must be removed from the landscape in order to clear a path for Jewish settlement and ‘development’.”

That dynamic is not unlike that unfolding in Masafer Yatta, even as the Bedouins targeted for displacement are Israeli citizens. For those Bedouins, who over the decades have watched the desert become urbanized and threaten their way of life, the eviction orders are a bitter irony.

“They call us invaders, they say we are trespassers in this land,” Freij Al-Hawashleh, an 86-year-old Bedouin man, told me when I visited his community, Ras Jrabah, on the outskirts of the industrial city of Dimona.

Al-Hawashleh remembers when the area was under the control of the British Mandate, before the establishment of the state of Israel. One day, after 1948, some officials came to hand the members of his community blue ID cards: their Israeli citizenship. The Bedouins stayed on their land and continued growing their crops. Then, in the early 1950s, came the first settlers; Al-Hawashleh said that the Bedouins shared water and milk with them when they arrived. “Dimona was established on our land,” he added.

Left/Top: Moussa Al-Hawamsha, a resident of Al-Bqea’ah, an unrecognized Bedouin community that is facing eviction in the Negev Desert. Right/Bottom: Freij Al-Hawashleh, a resident of the unrecognized community of Ras Jrabah, facing expulsion, has lived there since long before the nearby city of Dimona was established. Photos: Alice Speri/The Intercept

Today, Dimona is a rapidly expanding city, with construction projects underway on multiple sides. A campaign launched under the previous Israeli government offers an array of benefits to convince Jewish Israelis to move here. On the city’s main thoroughfare, a monument nods to the roots of the city: a mural with the figure of a man in Bedouin dress walking camels across a desert landscape. But that’s as far as Dimona’s recognition of its Bedouin residents will go. Al-Hawashleh’s community is one of the unrecognized Bedouin villages under eviction orders. The government wants its residents to move to Gasir as-Sirr, one of the townships it has designated for Bedouins, five miles away. When that proposal was announced, the Bedouins petitioned to stay in Dimona and presented a plan to establish their own recognized neighborhood there — but they were denied and told they could only move to towns specifically created for them.

For now, as construction has continued in the city, the Bedouins have stayed put. Feet away from to their homes, the municipality has built a large new playground for Dimona’s children, but the dozens of children living in the Bedouin village only play there late in the evenings, if nobody else is there, adhering to an unwritten rule that they are not wanted there. Still, members of the community have no plans to leave.

“If they want me to move, they can take a gun and shoot me,” said Al-Hawashleh. “I will sit here and never move.”

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The Israeli government has shrouded its policy of displacement in the language of modernization and the promise of better services. But the towns Bedouins are moved to are among Israel’s most impoverished and with poorest access to resources, with some of the country’s worst unemployment and crime rates. “The government always tries to tell the Bedouins, ‘If you want services, you need to move. If you want water, you need to move,’” Marwan Abu Frieh, a coordinator with Adalah, told me. “When that doesn’t work, they try to move them by force, by demolition orders.”

Home demolitions, he noted, are becoming increasingly common inside Israel. And as in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Israel often forces those facing demolition orders to destroy their own homes themselves — or face hefty fines to cover the cost of the bulldozers.

“The same things that are happening in the West Bank are happening here,” Abu Frieh added, noting that the practice has deeply traumatized the Bedouin population. “The same apartheid that’s there, is here.”

Al-Bqea’ah, another of the unrecognized communities facing eviction, stands against the backdrop of Masada, one of Israel’s most iconic tourist attractions, but the state is seeking to forcibly relocate its residents to the township of Mar’it, some 20 miles away. Next to Al-Bqea’ah, an Israeli-run tourist village offers visitors rides and photos with camels. But while camels have been a part of Bedouins’ lives for centuries, it has become increasingly difficult for them to keep them, as officials have refused to recognize camels as farm animals and have denied their owners grazing rights on lands where they traditionally kept them. Officials regularly confiscate camels “trespassing” into areas declared off-limits — sometimes lifting them with cranes to transport them away. They then charge exorbitant fees to return them to their owners.

The government’s resettlement plan — in addition to having been established without consulting the Bedouins — is fundamentally at odds with their traditional lifestyle.

“You can’t take a Bedouin from the desert and move him to a town; the Bedouins need freedom,” Moussa Al-Hawamsha, an elderly resident of Al-Bqea’ah, told me. His family has been living there since 1953, when they were moved there by Israeli authorities who evicted them from their original lands near Dimona, to make room for an industrial zone. When a Jewish man came in the 1980s to set up the tourist village next door, Al-Hawamsha said, they gave him camels and helped him get established; many residents of the village still work at the tourist site. At times, they helped authorities search for hikers lost in the desert, which they know intimately.

“Now, he has a permit to stay, and we are in court,” Al-Hawamsha added, stressing that Al-Bqea’ah’s residents do not want to leave. “If they want to move us again, they should move us back to the land we came from.”

Holding Onto the Land

Sami Huraini grew up in Al-Tuwani, a village in Masafer Yatta just outside the firing zone, near a large settlement and its surrounding outposts. He was 3 years old when Israeli authorities began evicting people from the area. “When I was young, I was terrified of the army; I was kind of traumatized; when I saw the army was coming to the village, I would run,” he said. “They would come search our house, they would wake everybody up and encircle them in one place in the middle of the village and then they’d go and search all the houses.”

“They want to delete us from this land, delete our identity from this land.”

Huraini grew up in an activist family, although merely choosing not to heed to pressure to abandon one’s home is an act of resistance in this area. “As I grew up, I understood the situation, and I understood that I don’t have to run; I need to stand on the land and defend this land,” he said. “They want to delete us from this land, delete our identity from this land.”

Al-Tuwani, a smattering of homes constantly under construction — even as authorities frequently demolish them — has in recent years become a hub for global solidarity with the residents of Masafer Yatta. The village is home to international and Israeli activists whose presence offers a measure of protection against violence by settlers and the army, even as the activists have increasingly been targeted for attacks as well. “The international presence is very important for documentation purposes, the army is a little more quiet when there are internationals than when it’s Palestinians alone,” noted Huraini.

Last fall, his father was attacked and severely injured by settlers, but when the army came, they stopped his relatives from taking his father to an ambulance and arrested him instead. The older Huraini spent 10 days in jail and was only released because a 20-minute video filmed by an international activist left no doubt about the dynamics of the incident. International pressure, Huraini added, has helped stave off the demolition and eviction of other communities, such as Khan al-Ahmar. That community, a group of Bedouin villages in the central West Bank, was slated for forcible eviction a few years ago, but it remains in place largely thanks to widespread international condemnation of the Israeli plans.

Still, Huraini noted, the reliance on international support is not sustainable. During the pandemic, when Israel imposed severe travel restrictions, the residents of Masafer Yatta were left to fend for themselves. “Settler violence was crazy during the pandemic,” he said.

In 2021, the army arrested Huraini, who had begun organizing regular Friday protests, and accused him of assaulting a soldier. The IDF spokesperson said that a verdict in the case is pending. Meanwhile, every Friday morning, Huraini has to turn himself in to the military, who hold him until the afternoon. “The main goal was to stop the protests and the organizing,” he said. “They thought that by putting me in prison and giving me these charges they could stop my work and my activism.”

But Huraini and others here live by the principle of sumud, an Arabic word that translates as “steadfastness” and that has long been a cultural pillar of Palestinian resistance.

“Police and army and settlers are all working hand by hand to evict us from our land,” he said. “But despite this, we need to continue to live our life here. Despite this court decision, we have no other place to go, and we’ll remain and struggle here. Even if the eviction happens, we’ll go back, because this is our land. We’ll continue to live in our land. At some point, this is going to end.”

Many Palestinians in Masafer Yatta refer to the notion of sumud. In Khalet a-Daba’, a small village inside the firing zone that is home to more than 90 people, half of them children, Jaber Dababsi described the daily harassment residents are subjected to. In the last couple years, the village, which is powered by solar panels provided by NGOs and reliant on a network of water cisterns, saw much of its infrastructure demolished. When residents planted 12,000 trees, the army destroyed their water system, killing the plants. Soldiers also cut 500 olive trees that they claimed were planted on “state land.” Once, the military held a drill so close to the village that a large bullet pierced the roof of Dababsi’s home. The drill, with helicopters flying by the village, causing a large dust storm, “didn’t feel like real training,” he said. “It felt a little bit staged, like they were doing it for the purpose of harassment, intimidation.”

Older children in the village go to school in Al-Tuwani and often face settler intimidation on their way there. When residents built a school in Khalet a-Daba’ for the younger kids, the civil administration shut it down. The younger children began to take classes in the home of Dababsi’s brother, so the army came and demolished it. In total, he said, the army demolished his and his brother’s homes five times. Many people from the area, he added, started moving into caves: traditional dwellings in this part of the West Bank that locals are now returning to in order to avoid the constant demolitions.

“It’s not life,” said Dababsi, noting that the recent court decision only adds to the instability so many families have already faced for years. “The civil administration has a plan for us, we don’t know what it is. They can come here and shoot us and force us to leave, but this will be the only way that we will go: if they kill us.”

Clowns and Cactuses

On a cold, sunny afternoon, earlier this year, a handful of Palestinian farmers — surrounded by twice as many children and a group of British, German, and Israeli activists — unloaded dozens of cactus plants wrapped in black plastic and distributed them across a patch of shrubby land where they would plant them for their animals to graze on. The Palestinians were residents of Jawia, in Masafer Yatta. This was their land, but it had become increasingly dangerous for them to go there alone.

Just before I arrived, a group of soldiers had come to the field and loaded half the cactuses into their jeep. The activists on the scene said the army left without taking the remaining cactuses after there seemed to be a disagreement between soldiers about what justification to cite for taking them.

As the group returned to work with the remaining plants, a few men watched with binoculars from a jeep parked on a hill. The Palestinians and international activists drank coffee and an Israeli woman dressed as a clown in army uniform helped the children take the cactuses to their planting spots. The men on the hill were in plainclothes and appeared to be settlers, but on the road atop the hill, a line of soldiers in uniform also monitored the scene. Standoffs like these, the Palestinians in the field told me, would sometimes last hours and other times erupt into violence. The presence of international activists reduced the risk of being attacked while farming their lands.

The farmers knew that if the remaining cactuses were not planted, they would be stolen by the settlers. If they were planted, there was still a chance the settlers would come and rip them out of the ground. But today, the Palestinians would plant the cactuses and hold onto their land.

The post As Israelis Protest Mounting Authoritarianism, Apartheid Regime Over Palestinians Goes Unchallenged appeared first on The Intercept.

Hateful anti-Palestinian remarks grew by 10 percent in 2022, compared to the prior year, according to the new report, based on an aggregated analysis of mentions of “Arabs,” “Palestinians,” and related keywords by Israeli social media users. 7amleh attributes the increase to a spate of real-world violence, including the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and Israeli military raids at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. As The Intercept previously reported, 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada, with 2023 already on track to surpass that toll.

“The 10 percent increase in violent speech against Arabs and Palestinians is alarming and should be taken on serious matter from the tech giants so that everyone enjoys their rights and freedoms in this digital space,” said Mona Shtaya, the advocacy and communications director of 7amleh.

“The 10 percent increase in violent speech against Arabs and Palestinians is alarming.”

The 7amleh report also claims a pronounced increase in bigotry and violent incitement directed against Palestinian members of the Knesset, Israeli’s parliamentary body, a spike attributed to the coalition government formed by Knesset members Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Much of Bennett’s hateful rhetoric flagged in the report took the shape of claims that Arabs are terrorists, that Arab members of the Knesset support terrorism, and calls for the death or forced displacement of Palestinian Arabs.

While the report states Facebook remains a hotbed of anti-Arab hate, “Twitter continues to be the main platform for violent discourse against Palestinians inside Israel.”

Civil society groups like 7amleh have long tracked the ways in which social media platforms censor Palestinians online through biased, lopsided enforcement of content moderation policies, using rulebooks that often conflate nonviolent political speech with the endorsement of terrorism.

Following The Intercept’s publication of Meta’s roster of so-called Dangerous Individuals and Organizations, content moderation scholars noted that Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Muslim people and groups were overrepresented. 7amleh and other groups say these biases result in imbalanced censorship for Palestinians and relative latitude for Israelis during periods of violence.

7amleh is one of hundreds of global civil society organizations Meta has worked with in an effort to “better understand the impact” of its platforms around the world. “We partner with expert organizations that represent the voices and experiences of marginalized users around the globe and are equipped to raise questions and concerns about content on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta says on its website. “In addition to reporting content, Trusted Partners provide crucial feedback on our content policies and enforcement to help ensure that our efforts keep users safe.”

Advocates for Palestinian rights say those efforts have fallen flat.

“The Israeli right wing has been more than happy to declare on social media what they’d like to do to the Palestinian people,” Ubai Al-Aboudi, a Palestinian human rights activist and executive director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development, a prominent civil society group, told The Intercept. “There is a proliferation of hate speech against Palestinians. And this is the result of an asymmetrical power relation where big tech is happy to endorse the Israeli narrative while meanwhile suppressing the Palestinian narrative.”

Proliferation of online anti-Palestinian rhetoric and explicit incitement to violence was on display earlier this year during one of the worst episodes of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank to date. Hundreds of settlers went on a nighttime rampage in the town of Huwara, near the city of Nablus, torching homes and cars. One Palestinian was killed, and dozens more were injured.

The incident, which was widely condemned and referred to as a “pogrom,” was also widely celebrated on social media, including by top figures in Israel’s new extremist government. Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is Israel’s current finance minister and a minister of defense in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank, liked a tweet that made a call “to wipe out the village of Huwara today.” Later, Smotrich publicly repeated the remark himself, before being forced to apologize. (Two weeks after making those comments, Smotrich was in the U.S., where he was shunned by officials and several prominent Jewish organizations, but welcomed by others.)

The rampage in Huwara, which was documented in real time on social media, was launched following public calls for an attack against the town after a Palestinian man killed two Israeli settlers as they drove through. In the days following the attack, incitement to violence only escalated, with several accounts, including one popular among settlers, calling for yet more “vengeance.”

“The Israeli right wing is promoting hate speech on social media against Palestinians, like the pogrom on Huwara,” said Al-Aboudi of the Bisan Center. “They were calling for it, before it happened, on social media. And even after the incident, the celebrations were well tolerated by big tech.”

7amleh’s findings on the proliferation of anti-Palestinian online speech stand in stark contrast with social media companies’ active crackdown on Palestinian speech online. As The Intercept has repeatedly reported, platforms’ content moderation policies are regularly enforced in an arbitrary manner that has resulted in the censorship of Palestinian voices, including the frequent suspensions of Palestinian journalists’ accounts.

Last year, a review commissioned by Meta concluded that the company’s actions during a May 2021 Israeli bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip had an “an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred.”

The report’s conclusions also point to a glaring double standard in Israeli officials’ efforts to moderate online speech. Israel has long worked with social media companies in an effort to remove content that it considers incitement, frequently flagging posts for removal.

Earlier this year, Israeli officials with the Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs revealed that they had proactively lobbied TikTok for content removal to rates significantly higher than those of most other countries. The officials cited partial reports from TikTok for 2022 that it received 2,713 requests from various governments around the world to remove or limit content or accounts, with the Israeli government coming second only to Russia in calling for content removal. Israel made 252 official requests, 9.2 percent of the total number of requests to TikTok worldwide. By comparison, the U.S. government submitted only 13 applications, the French government submitted 27, the United Kingdom 71, and Germany 167.

“The Israeli right wing is promoting hate speech on social media against Palestinians, like the pogrom on Huwara.”

“Incitement on social media is a problem that needs to be dealt with in-depth,” Knesset member Oded Forer, the committee’s chair, said at the time, referring specifically to antisemitic speech. “It is clear to everyone that the extreme discourse on social networks increases and encourages acts of terrorism against Jews.” The committee made no reference to anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian speech in that context.

Lobbying for content removal is not the only way Israeli officials have worked to control speech on social media platforms. This week, the Israeli military acknowledged orchestrating a covert social media operation during the May 2021 Gaza campaign to “improve the Israeli public’s view of Israel’s performance in the conflict,” the Associated Press reported. As part of the operation, Israeli Defense Forces officials created fake accounts to “conceal the campaign’s origins and engage audiences” on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and coordinated the effort with real social media influencers.

While Israeli military officials regularly use social media to monitor and gather intelligence on Palestinians, this was seemingly the first time that an Israeli influence campaign targeted the Israeli public.

The post Anti-Palestinian Hate on Social Media Is Growing, Says a Facebook Partner appeared first on The Intercept.

Neither the U.S. nor Russia are members of The Hague-based international court, whose jurisdiction includes war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ukraine is not a member either, but it has granted the court authority to investigate crimes committed on its territory. The U.S. government has long held a hostile stance toward the ICC, at first fighting to restrict its mandate and later fiercely opposing investigations into itself and its allies, including Israel. As The Intercept reported, the U.S. went to great lengths to derail an investigation of crimes committed in Afghanistan by U.S. forces and the U.S.-supported former Afghan government.

The ICC’s inability to hold the U.S. accountable — and the lack of legal proceedings at the domestic level for U.S. officials responsible for abuses — has meant that two decades into the war on terror, U.S. crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have largely remained unpunished. “There hasn’t been any kind of proper accounting and reckoning,” Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented victims of U.S. torture before the ICC, told The Intercept.

“In general, the discussion today seems to be, ‘Let’s move on,’” she added. “The whole discussion as to whether or not to have a tribunal on aggression [for Russia] is in my mind sort of schizophrenic when you have the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq coming up.”

Still, the invasion of Ukraine has brought renewed momentum to the quest for international justice and support for the ICC even from countries that have long opposed it — the U.S. first among them.

“We’re living a Ukraine moment in international justice, a Nuremberg moment,” Reed Brody, a human rights attorney specializing in mass atrocities, told The Intercept. “Previous objections and qualms and hesitations are being swept away by the response to Ukraine, and frankly by the massive war crimes that Russia is committing.”

While much of the Biden administration, including the State and Justice departments and some intelligence agencies, support turning U.S.-gathered evidence of Russian crimes over to the ICC, defense officials have so far sought to stop those efforts, the New York Times reported this month. Those officials oppose U.S. involvement in the ICC’s investigation because they fear it would set a precedent that could one day lead to the prosecution of Americans for past or future crimes — a concern long voiced by multiple U.S. administrations, including the current one.

State Department officials have repeatedly said that they do not believe the ICC should exert jurisdiction over citizens of nonmember countries, but they have not explained why an exception should be made for Russian citizens. A department spokesperson did not answer The Intercept’s questions about that and about what assistance, if any, the administration has so far provided for the court’s investigation of Russian crimes in Ukraine.

“As a general matter, we do not discuss what specific support we provide to the ICC, as it may implicate the investigations and the safety of victims and witnesses,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “We are working with our interagency partners to consider how best to support these efforts, including in light of the recent legislative changes.”

“The bottom line is that the U.S. wants an ironclad guarantee that no American official will ever be prosecuted by the ICC or any other institution of international justice.”

While most critics of the U.S. stance toward the ICC stress that the court should investigate Russian crimes, the administration’s sudden change of tune has prompted accusations of hypocrisy.

“The Pentagon is the one who is actually being consistent here, saying, ‘How can we support the investigation of Russian nationals when we are opposed to the investigation of American nationals in Afghanistan?’” said Brody. “The bottom line is that the U.S. wants an ironclad guarantee that no American official will ever be prosecuted by the ICC or any other institution of international justice.”

Brody also cautioned that growing U.S. support for the ICC — even as parts of the government continue to oppose it — is unlikely to extend beyond Ukraine and is only possible because investigations of U.S. crimes by the court are no longer an immediate prospect. Two years ago, the ICC prosecutor “deprioritized” its Afghanistan investigation to only include acts committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State there — essentially leaving the U.S. off the hook for its own crimes in the country.

“This would be a little harder for the U.S. if there was actually an active investigation,” Brody noted, referring to the U.S. support for the investigation of Russian crimes. “And I certainly don’t see the U.S. getting behind an investigation of Israeli war crimes in Palestine. That’s never going to happen.”

Another War of Aggression

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, it did so neither in self-defense nor with the authorization of the U.N. Security Council — making the war illegal under international standards. “That was a war of aggression,” said Gallagher, of CCR. “It was an unlawful war.”

Because neither Iraq nor the U.S. are members of the court, the ICC had no jurisdiction to investigate potential crimes committed by U.S. forces there. Because the United Kingdom is a member state, however, the court did twice open, and twice close, a preliminary probe of acts committed by British troops in Iraq, including murder, torture, and other “forms of ill-treatment.”

The fact that the investigation of British crimes never went further, and that the court had no jurisdiction over crimes committed by the U.S. during its yearslong war in Iraq, has contributed to a long-running credibility problem for the ICC, which since its early days has been mired in accusations of double standards and a widespread perception that it is impotent to take on the world’s most powerful countries.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has also been an unspoken point of contention as a growing coalition of countries has been seeking ways to hold Russia accountable for the invasion of Ukraine, both foreign officials and international law experts have told The Intercept. “Discussion about prosecuting aggression by Russia — I am not saying that that is unjustified, but it is selective,” said Gallagher.

“They don’t want to deal with the crime of aggression because they know that if it’s used against Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, today, it might be used against them tomorrow,” Philippe Sands, a prominent international law specialist and staunch supporter of a special tribunal for Ukraine, told The Intercept last fall. “The big elephant in the room in Ukraine is Iraq, which was also a manifestly illegal war and produced a very different response in Britain and in the United States.”

The U.S. vs. the ICC

The U.S. government has opposed the ICC’s mandate since it tried and failed to write into the 1998 Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the court, an exemption from prosecution for nationals of nonmember states.

That means the ICC is now able to investigate Russian nationals for crimes they committed in Ukraine, even though Russia is not a party to the court. But that also means that Americans accused of crimes committed in member states — like Afghanistan — or U.S. allies from nonmember states like Israel committing crimes in places that are members of the court — like Palestine — can be investigated and potentially prosecuted by the ICC.

That’s a prospect the U.S. has fiercely fought off for more than two decades.

In 2002, one month after the court began operating, Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, quickly dubbed “The Hague Invasion Act,” which sought to protect U.S. personnel from international prosecution by authorizing the use of military force to liberate any U.S. citizens or allies being held by the court. At the time, U.S. officials also pursued dozens of bilateral agreements to pressure other countries not to collaborate with the court. The U.S. again lobbied to restrict the ICC’s jurisdiction in 2010, as part of the Kampala amendments process to the Rome Statute, when it successfully insisted that the court should only be able to investigate the crime of aggression by a nonmember party with the authorization of the Security Council, where the U.S. — and Russia — hold veto power.

“The U.S uses international law as a tool of foreign policy, and so it has engaged in the production of law to really suit its own political, diplomatic, military, and economic agendas,” said Gallagher. “The ICC, in theory, is a place that could challenge the U.S. in its superpower interpretation of international law. … And so what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is that the U.S. has tried to maintain a level of control. And it’s succeeded at different points to varying levels.”

U.S. tensions with the ICC escalated after the court launched a widespread probe of crimes committed in Afghanistan, including torture, to which the Trump administration responded by sanctioning former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another top prosecutor — the first time the U.S. had ever taken such action against officials of an international body.

Under the Biden administration, relationships with the court have thawed somewhat, and the State Department lifted the sanctions against the ICC officials — even as it reiterated its opposition to the court exercising jurisdiction over nationals of nonparty states.

Following last year’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. was one of dozens of countries that pledged support for the ICC’s investigation of war crimes committed by Russian forces. Last December, Congress voted to loosen legislation restricting support for the court, paving the way for U.S. officials to share evidence with ICC prosecutors. Separately, the Biden administration has also cautiously indicated support for Ukrainian officials’ call for a special tribunal to prosecute Russian aggression against Ukraine (which the ICC cannot do because of the very restrictions to its mandate that the U.S. lobbied for in Kampala).

“When you look at the situation of Ukraine, and the significant political support that that accountability effort has garnered domestically, it’s quite stunning,” said Gallagher. “The fact that you had Republican members of Congress traveling to The Hague and meeting with the prosecutor … it would be unthinkable when many of the same members of Congress were supporting sanctions against the ICC just two years ago.”

“There is a shift, but it’s limited to Ukraine, which calls into question selective justice and whether the rule of law is really what the United States is about here, or whether it’s about using the court to pursue foreign policy agendas,” Gallagher added, referring to the legislative changes last year, which specifically enabled U.S. support for the ICC’s Ukraine probe.

“Those kinds of limitations demonstrate that when it comes to the U.S. being held to the same standards, whether it’s Afghanistan, whether it’s U.S. torture, whether it’s Iraq, we’re not going to have that same level of cooperation.”

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