“Oct 7 2023”

The International Criminal Court was founded on the notions of impartiality and independence.

Karim Khan, its chief prosecutor, might therefore have been expected to move particularly cautiously in appointing a “panel of experts” as he weighed what action to take against Hamas and Israel over the October 7 attacks and Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza. His subsequent decision to pursue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leaders, has proved explosive.

Hamas seen taking part in Islamic prayer as 5 terrified teenage girls sit behind them, covered in blood from severe beatings with indications that one of them, Naama Levy had been brutally r*ped.

After the prayer, one of the kidnappers tells a girl “You are so beautiful.” pic.twitter.com/xMWamJFri2

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 22, 2024

Egypt altered ceasefire terms before handing agreements to Hamas, three anonymous sources told CNN News in a report published on Tuesday.

According to the report, Egypt changed the details of the deal submitted to the Hamas terrorist organization after it had been signed by Israel and before reaching Hamas. It was also reported that this move led to great anger among Israel, the US, and Qatar against the Egyptians.

One source even claimed that the Egyptians “deceived us all.”

Night-time raids, kicking down doors, arresting people in bed, pulling posters off fridges, handcuffing family members.

These are some of the actions Toronto police are accused of taking, not in the interest of nabbing dangerous weapon-wielding criminals — and even then some of this would be excessive — but for the act of plastering a store with posters and washable red paint.

Spain, Ireland and Norway said Wednesday that they would recognize a Palestinian state on May 28, a step toward a long-held Palestinian aspiration that came amid international outrage over the civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip following Israel’s offensive.

The almost simultaneous decisions by two European Union countries, and Norway, may generate momentum for the recognition of a Palestinian state by other EU countries and could spur further steps at the United Nations, deepening Israel’s isolation.

As anti-Israel encampments at Canadian universities grow in both size and vitriol, some are accusing the schools of harbouring double standards when it comes to banning dissenting viewpoints from campus.

The now three-week-old encampment occupies a lawn at King’s College Circle in the university’s downtown Toronto campus — and despite other schools requesting police to forcibly remove the activists from school property, the U of T has so far allowed the encampment to continue.

The Montreal police used tear gas and batons to disperse a pro-Palestinian protest they say was blocking a busy downtown street Monday afternoon.

Video of the intervention circulating on social media shows officers in riot gear firing tear-gas canisters, as well as shoving and aggressively striking protesters with police batons.

Montreal Police (SPVM) using force and riot equipments against pro-palestinian peaceful protesters. #palestine #montreal #spvm #israel pic.twitter.com/9rxGlg5KqF

— Jack Ryan (@ryan_sixt1) May 21, 2024

Israel will not engage in a full-scale military offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. Instead, it will continue its limited operation in the last Hamas bastion, with the blessing of the Biden administration, according to Washington Post analyst David Ignatius.

In an opinion piece published on Monday citing sources familiar with the matter, the newspaper’s senior commentator wrote that the framework for eventually ending the Gaza war became more clear after a just-wrapped trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel by U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, the U.S. National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa.

It was with unexpected interest that I read Elizabeth Spiers’s “guest essay” for the New York Times over the weekend, titled “Dear Boomers, the Student Protesters Are Not Idiots,” and not just because it was akin to a brief visitation from the tattered ghost of cocaine-addled early 2000s New York City online scenester “journalism.” (She was the founding editor of Gawker, although she left when it was still just a catty, petty upstart devoted to vandalizing the pieties of the New York publishing scene rather than the worst den of sleaze to ever exist.) Now she lectures to journalism students at a prestigious school — a very apropos post-career sinecure — and is here to tell us that she knows these kids, she has met these kids in her classes, and people like me are simply just getting these kids all wrong.

There are 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza. We already know, thanks to the relentless investigations conducted by Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, that some of those UNRWA members joined Hamas operatives on October 7, taking part in the atrocities inflicted that day, joining in the fun of rape, torture, and murder of Israeli men, women, and children. Other UNRWA members in Gaza have subsequently expressed support for Hamas’ actions. UNRWA schools still use textbooks full of antisemitic passages. UNRWA’s European and American donors have repeatedly demanded that such material be excised from the schoolbooks; UNRWA solemnly promises that it will comply, and then never does, and the farce continues. UNRWA never objects when Hamas hides its rocket launchers and weapons in UNRWA schools and other facilities. Some Palestinians working for UNRWA may be afraid to raise that issue with the agency, but many more approve of aiding and abetting the terror group. Unlike Palestinians, the Europeans who head UNRWA need not fear reprisals from Hamas if they were to demand that it remove its weapons and fighters from UNRWA schools. They have chosen not to do so; worse still, some of them have denied that Hamas hides weapons in those schools, when everyone in Gaza knows the truth.

From 2009 until 2021, Israel succeeded at preventing the International Criminal Court from opening a full war crimes probe against it, holding it at bay with a preliminary review of jurisdictional issues.

From June 2021 until October 2023, Israel also held ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan at bay, who barely talked about Israel and the Palestinians for his first two-and-a-half years, and absent the current war, many believe that Khan would have given Jerusalem a pass both on the 2014 Gaza conflict, and maybe even on the settlement enterprise.

Everything changed in less than a month.