The Israeli ‘Detention Review Tribunal’ has upheld the continued detention of fourteen volunteers who were aboard the Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship Handala, and who refused to agree to an expedited deportation process, until they are eventually deported. Palestinian human rights law group Adalah is providing updates as they become available.
On Monday 28 July hearings concluded at Israel’s Givon Prison concerning the continued detention of the fourteen volunteers who were aboard the Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship Handala and have refused to consent to an expedited deportation process. All fourteen volunteers are on hunger strike.
The hearings were held by the so-called Detention Review Tribunal at Givon Prison facility in Ramleh and lasted over six hours. Adalah lawyers Dr Suhad Bishara and Nareman Shehadeh-Zoabi represented the volunteers before the tribunal, where the volunteers stressed that their mission was humanitarian and motivated by the need to act against Israel’s illegal siege and the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The genocide, now in its twenty-second month, has caused mass starvation and deaths from malnutrition, as well as the slaughter of hundreds of thousands beneath bombs, shells and bullets.
US volunteer Christian Smalls reported suffering severe physical violence by Israeli forces. Several female activists described similar abuse and deplorable detention conditions, including a lack of ventilation despite extreme heat, and the absence of basic sanitary supplies for women. The activists told the tribunal that they remain on an open-ended hunger strike in protest against their unlawful detention.
The activists who appeared before the tribunal today are: Braedon Peluso (US), Robert Martin (Australia), Tania (Tan) Safi (Australia), Justine Kempf (France), Emma Fourreau (France–Sweden), Antonio La Picirella (Italy), Christian Smalls (United States), Chloé Fiona Ludden (UK–France), Sergio Toribio Sanchez (Spain), Vigdis Bjorvand (Norway), Hatem Aouini (Tunisia), Santiago González Vallejo (Spain), Ange Sahuquet (France), and Dr Frank Romano (US–France). Several of the volunteers reported that Israeli authorities applied intense pressure on them yesterday, forcing them to waive their right to meet with a lawyer and preventing Adalah’s legal team from meeting them at the time; however, the team was able to meet with all volunteers on Monday.
Under Israeli law, the tribunal does not rule on deportation itself but only on continued detention pending deportation. For a full explanation of the process and Adalah’s legal position, see Adalah’s Q&A.
Adalah stressed before the tribunal that the ongoing detention of civilians who were forcibly taken into Israel from international waters while attempting to break the blockade on Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid constitutes a flagrant violation of international law. Adalah will continue to pursue their immediate release through all available legal channels.
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On the genocide from Secular Talk in the USA:
The Dark Truth About Israel Finally Comes Out | The Kyle Kulinski Show
Listening to the latest emphatic NO from the Israeli FM……..
……..and the response of the USA totally rejecting yesterday’s UN Conference initiative by breaking with it’s “allies” (vassals)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsFqG0KXwg&ab_channel=TimesOfIndia
……it is becoming clearer by the day that Kyle Kulinski’s conclusion at the end of that video that the only way to stop this and to create the conditions for a just and sustainable outcome may be for the real International community – minus the irrelevant to a solution USA – to urgently instigate joint military action to force Israel to stop and to impose a solution.
“International” and “Humanitarian” Law don’t apply in rogue states, especially the world’s professional victim state. I know because President Starmer told the entire world this was so. And what he says is the only thing that matters.
“Humanitarian” Law don’t apply in rogue states………nor in the states of its sponsors and their willing minions who supply the financing, munitions, intelligence, political and media cover, and protection from any and all criticism.
Adiuvare et incitare Genocidium crimen capitale facere
Once again the Zionist entity has demonstrated its inhumanity, its cruelty and its arrogance in the face of international denunciation.
Only in the Zio-fantasy world of Starmer, Lammy and Trump is there a pretence that Israel is anything other than a pariah state.
Zionism is doomed.
Its advocates are digging its own grave – Daily !
Powerful piece by Caitlin Johnstone:
It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza
As western pundits, politicians and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.
People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?
Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.
Burning children alive wasn’t enough.
Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.
Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough…..
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/it-shouldnt-have-taken-this-much-for-mainstream-voices-to-start-speaking-up-about-gaza-3c31523753bb
From the same Caitlin Johnstone article:
“But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.
That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.”
A tentative conclusion which fails to ask the question as to why it is now considered too much.
A blatant clue can found in the six series podcasts featured by North East Bylines and journalist for the Independent, David Keys, featured on the Skwawkbox a few articles ago……
https://david-keys.com/podcast/israel-and-palestine-episode-1
……which inadvertently reveals that the real breaker is the negative impact this is having on good ol’ Exceptionalist elite Western Liberal Interventionism, its wider Geopolitical project and the maintenance of its hegemonic pretensions rather than any road to Damascus conversion.
Apparently the situation has got to the point where it is undermining “International Law” – i.e The Rules based International Order. Making the West (i.e. the Western Oligarch class and its comprador classes) look bad and hypocritical in front of the Global South/Global Majority vis-a vis their other proxy war in 404 using the Western Oligarchies other neo-Nazi clients.
As though it was not NATO that moved its border a thousand or so kilometres east towards Moscow; or does not have a published policy of Balkanising Russia (and China) into controllable ethnic states to plunder resources in the same way the same Western elites and their comprador puppets (regardless of which nominal first eleven of the Uni-party in administration is batting) have Balkanised Syria, Lebanon, Libya, West Asia (Middle East) and, well, the Balkans.
In much the same way in which the same elites don’t really have a published policy of using Israel to break up Persia (Iran) as a means to continue their ambitions into the Eurasian heartland via the soft underbelly of the Caucuses.
Or have not publicly admitted to instigating a proxy war against Russia or deliberately entering into the Minsk agreements in bad faith, which was designed to buy time for its neo-Nazi proxies to regroup and rearm from the drubbing they were getting in the Ukrainian civil war following the illegal Maidan coup of 2014 whilst shelling and murdering civilians in the Donbass Oblasts (as a prelude to invasion) who speak the wrong language and have the wrong culture and who are considered as “Orcs” in the same way as the Zio-Nazis illegally occupying Palestine consider the Palestinians as equally sub-human cockroaches.
Go tell it to the Marines.
It’s got bugger all to do with suddenly finding a humanitarian streak and everything to do with the optics which are undermining the wider Geostrategic and Geopolitical Great Game objectives designed to impose by force the failed unworkable neo-Feudal paradigm of the self-defined “Garden” onto the rest of the “Jungle” (as ethnocentrically defined by those same Western elite classes) which is the Global majority.
David Hansell’s excellent post ought to be widely-distributed.
He correctly states that the “people who run western imperialism” have recognised that they are losing the “narrative”, that Israel is increasingly seen to be the settler-colonialist pariah state, and that there is an urgent need to keep the sheeple on board.
Even the sheeple can see mass-murder and news-manipulation when it is stuffed down their throats.
This was on the BBC News website today:
” ….. Keir Starmer says the UK will recognise a Palestinian state at a UN meeting in September unless Israel meets certain conditions …..”
Can you all recognise when you are being played ?
Any news/information/clue as to precisely where such a State might be located?
The Sinai desert mayhap?
Sharm El Sheik, perhaps?
Libya? Tunisia? Turkey? Afghanistan?
Alsace-Lorraine? The New Forest? Rotherham?
A reservation in the Nevada desert? Iceland? The Antarctic? Mount Etna? 404?
‘Cos it sure as hell ain’t going to be anywhere near the borders of the Greater Judea project. And it certainly won’t be the real estate playground for the Western elite wet dream of Gaza or the West Bank.
Has anyone opened a book on this yet?
Because my money is on somewhere where there is already an indigenous population who will resent their land being stolen from them to house people recovering from a Holocaust.
Because we know that’s how the arrogant, ignorant, exceptionalist know nothing, learn nothing British Establishment like to do things.
It worked out so well last time, did it not?
Don’t you just love the Liberal Interventionism of those in the self-identifying “Garden”?