Israel Doubles Down on Its War Crimes with Two Committed Yesterday
In Syria, IDF planes destroy a Iranian Embassy building, killing more than 10, while in Gaza, seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen are killed delivering food aid by Israeli planes
Video screen grab of the still-smoking ruins of a consular building on the compound of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Syria, following an Israeli Air Force bombing.
Israel’s government, led by PM Benjamin Netanyahu, seems hell-bent at this point on embarrassing the Biden Administration, even at the cost of a Middle East war or worse.
How else to explain two serious war crimes and provocations in one day as were committed yesterday?
That’s when the Associated Press reports Israeli warplanes attacked and completely demolished a building that was part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus Syria, The bombing killed two Iranian generals and five other officers, as well as others in the building, including two Syrian civilians and two embassy police guards.
Oddly left out of the AP report, but at least mentioned in other news reports on the attack, Israel, in this case, was in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Optional Protocol on disputes, adopted in Vienna in 1961 and passed into law in the US by the US Senate in 1966 and by Israel in August 1970. That Convention’s Article 22 states unambiguously:
Article 22
1. The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
2. The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.
3. The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property, thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.
That said, the tradition that embassies and consulates are protected properties and that they are considered the sovereign territory of the nation that they represent, making an attack on such properties an attack on the country they represent reaches back at least two centuries.
A furious Iran has already warned that it will respond in kind against Israel for this attack at a time and place of its own choosing. It also, noting the US’s heavy involvement in backing Israel both diplomatically and militarily, said Washington bears responsibility for the attack on its Embassy in Syria.
Now perhaps that is all bluff, but Iran has plenty of allied groups in the Middle East, like for example Hezbollah, that can retaliate without direct orders from Iran, providing Tehran with cover. It’s possible then that Israel’s goal in this war crime of attacking a foreign embassy and killing diplomatic personnel or people under their Embassy’s protection under the Vienna Treaty, is to elicit a reprisal attack that could lead to war with Iran, either by Israel or the US or both.
It’s also possible that the attack was an effort to embarrass President Biden for having the US abstain from the March 25 UN Security Resolution that called for a Cease Fire by Israel, and separately by Hamas in Gaza.
But Israel did more. Just a day after the Wall Street Journal did a glowing article about the heroic efforts by a food aid organization called World Central Kitchen headed up by celebrity chef Jose Andre to get significant food aid to starving Palestinians, , Israeli jets attacked the delivery of food supplies by the organization to a warehouse in central Gaza, killing seven people involved in the delivery. The cold-blooded massacre includied a Palestinian driver and six foreign aid workers hailing from Britain, Australia, the US and Poland. The three trucks hit during the delivery were all clearly marked with the aid organization’s name and logo, as were the individual workers. Furthermore, after Chef Andre had the organization boldly and creatively build its own pier out into the Mediterranean Sea from the shore out of rubble collected from Israel’s massive bombing of Gaza (shaming the US, which is still constructing a massive floating pier and preparing to send in troops to protect it before it can be used for delivering needed food ), he said he had cooperation from the Israeli military with the relief plan. Indeed the Israeli government had praised the organization, which initially came to the area of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack to provide food aide to those Israelis living in that shattered region just outside walled-off Gaza.
Netanyahu has admitted that the attack on he aid deliverers was an ‘intended hit’ by Israeli planes, but attributed it to a mistake that will be “investigated.” He said “Unfortunately, during the last day there was a tragic case of an unintentional hit by our forces of innocent people in the Gaza Strip. This happens in war.”
That cold explanation seems highly unlikely, given the IDF’s total control of the air over Gaza, with drone surveillance coverage that can identify individual faces and the Israeli military surely would have known the trucks being attacked were from World Central Kitchen, as it would have tracked them from the initial loading of the supplies to be delivered.
World Central Kitchen obviously isn’t buying the Israeli line. Its CEO Erin Gore tweeted yesterday on X, “Today, @WCK lost several of our brothers and sisters in an IDF air strike in Gaza. I am heartbroken and grieving for the families and friends and our whole WCK family.”
A day later he issued a sterner rebuke saying, “This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war. This is unforgivable."
Today the organization—which began 10 years ago by providing emergency food aid to Haiti following the island’s major earthquake, and has already delivered hundreds of tons of food to starving Gazans—suspended its relief operation in Gaza.
Again, what was the purpose of this Israeli atrocity and war crime?
Some have suggested Netanyahu is trying to undermine Biden’s re-election campaign by showing him to be a weakling, on the theory that the embatttled Israeli leader would be better off with Trump as president again. But with the election still eight months away, it seems like an odd strategy for a man who is widely loathed now in Israel both for alienating the US and for the secure ty failure that overlooked the growing military competence of Hamas and that failed abysmally to get a organized response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Natanyahu’s remaining tenure as PM could be a lot shorter than eight months at this rate, with growing numbers protesting his continuation as the country’s leader.
My guess. Is that what Netanyahu hopes will cement his position and allow him to avoid prosecution for his corruption is a wider war, whether with Lebanon and Hezbollah, and/or with Iran.
Since I don’t think Biden, despite his continued shameless support for Israel (as demonstrated by his slippery provision of 1800 2000-lb bombs and 500 blockbuster 500-lb bombs as well as an additional 35 F-35 fighter-bombers to the IDF for use on the already thoroughly pummelled and brutalized Palestinians in Gaza), really wants such a war. He’s already widely criticized at home by Democratic voters for his slavish dedication to Zionism, and has lost a significant portion of the US Jewish vote as well as the vote of Arab Americans, Palestian-American citizens and African American Muslims, which in a tight election is probably enough to hand the election to Trump.
I don’t know where that leaves things, but it’s not in or to a good place.
The peace movement is growing in the US. That and domestic and international demands that Israel and the US obey the UN Security Resolution’s Immediate Cease Fire Resolution, and stop pretending it is ‘non-binding,” are the best news and the best strategy going forward.