Israel Committing Indisputable War Crimes

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00:00And the fact that you compared the situation in Gaza to a genocide, and here we are, you

00:07know, more than a year after you made those comments, I mean, does that mean that you

00:11would characterize what's happening in Gaza as a genocide as well?

00:18I mean, I'm not actually sure how useful it is to say that.

00:22What is absolutely indisputable is that Israel is committing and has been committing since

00:28October 2023, a very, very wide range of war crimes, which are in the legal parlance known

00:35as violations of international humanitarian law.

00:37That seems to be indisputable.

00:39And in a way, it doesn't really matter to the victims, whether they are the victims of

00:44a war crime or the victims of a genocide.

00:46So I don't particularly want to go into that.

00:48I mean, it looks very, very likely.

00:50And I think that it would be extremely hard for lawyers to say that it isn't genocide.

00:57But there needs to be a proper investigation for that.

01:00But as I said, it's a slightly, it's not a particularly fruitful debate.

01:06I mean, if I may, and if I may make one other comparison, in 1994, I was a very junior UN

01:13official in New York, and I was the note taker in the Security Council.

01:18And day after day, I reported to the Secretary General and other senior UN staff what their

01:23delegations were saying.

01:25And it's pretty embarrassing reading, because day after day, the American, French and British

01:29ambassadors insisted that it wasn't genocide.

01:32Because, of course, had they admitted that it was genocide, they would have then been obliged

01:37under an international law to take action to stop it, which they didn't want to do.

01:40So, of course, what happened?

01:42The killing went on.

01:43The genocide was declared later.

01:45Everybody said frightfully sorry, so terribly sorry, and all that.

01:47But actually, they didn't really do much to stop it.

01:52And the great fear is that, similarly, the great powers, and not just those three powers

01:57and the permanent members of the Security Council, but regional powers in the Middle East

02:00too, what have they done really to stop this?