Foreign News
ICJ orders Israel to halt its offensive on Rafah, Gaza in new ruling
Judges at the top United Nations court ordered Israel to halt its offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and withdraw from the enclave, in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide, citing “immense risk” to the Palestinian population.
Friday’s decision marked the third time this year the 15-judge panel has issued preliminary orders seeking to rein in the death toll and alleviate humanitarian suffering in Gaza. While orders are legally binding, the court has no police to enforce them.
Reading out a ruling by the International Court of Justice or World Court, the body’s president, Nawaf Salam, said provisional measures ordered by the court in March did not fully address the situation in the besieged Palestinian enclave now, and conditions had been met for a new emergency order.
Israel must “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” Salam said, and called the humanitarian situation in Rafah “disastrous”.
South Africa’s lawyers had asked the ICJ in The Hague last week to impose emergency measures, saying Israel’s attacks on Rafah must be stopped to ensure the survival of the Palestinian people.
Reporting from The Hague, in the Netherlands, Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen said that 13 of the 15 ICJ judges agreed to call on Israel to halt its assault.
“Salam said 800,000 are displaced, and that he doesn’t believe Israel’s word that they are provided safety and humanitarian access. He said there was no evidence of that,” she noted.
“That’s why the court has now made a very strong order that Israel should immediately stop its offensive and military operation in Rafah and withdraw its troops from there. He also made a ruling on border crossings, that they must be reopened as soon as possible to get humanitarian aid in,” Vaessen added.
She said that the judge also stressed that observers from the UN have to get access as soon as possible to make sure that no evidence of any possible war crimes disappear from the region.
The ICJ has also ordered Israel to report back to the court within one month over its progress in applying measures ordered by the institution.
Israel launched its assault on the southern city of Rafah this month, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee a city that had become a refuge to about half of the population’s 2.3 million people.
Rafah, on Gaza’s southern edge, has also been the main route in for aid, and international organisations say the Israeli operation has cut off the enclave and raised the risk of famine.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Al Khoudary said that people in the Gaza Strip have not yet reacted to the ICJ ruling since many of them do not have internet connection.
“People here in the Gaza Strip are currently trying to feed themselves … after being constantly displaced. So people are not very well aware of what’s going on. They’re asking journalists … if there is anything positive,” she said.
Khoudary added that, as journalists in Gaza, they do not want to give people in the region false hope and are waiting to hear more information about how the ICJ’s ruling will be implemented in Rafah, where the situation remains tense.
The Palestinian Authority has welcomed the decision on Friday from the International Court of Justice, saying it represents an international consensus to end the war on the Gaza Strip, Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told the Reuters news agency.
Shortly after the ruling, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich said on the social media platform X that “the State of Israel is at war for its existence.”
“Those who demand that the State of Israel stop the war, demand that it decree itself to cease to exist. We will not agree to that,” he said.
“We continue to fight for ourselves and for the entire free world. History will judge who today stood by the Nazis of Hamas and ISIS [ISIL],” he added.
Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan said that diplomatic sources have told Israel’s Channel 13 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will convene an emergency meeting.
“Foreign Minister Israel Katz, war cabinet minister Benny Gantz and the government’s judicial adviser will be in the meeting. This is how seriously they are taking this ruling,” Khan said.
“We are hearing from political sources speaking to local media that Israel will not respond to the decision of the court, both politically or militarily,” he added.
According to war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody, the ICJ has stepped up to confront the reality in the Gaza Strip.
“I’m really impressed, first of all by South Africa’s tenacity and perseverance and coming back to the court. And the court has responded almost unanimously,” he told Al Jazeera.
Brody noted that South Africa has been asking for an order for Israel to stop its military offensive since the start of the war on Gaza, with the court saying it cannot make a move because Hamas and the Palestinian side is not present on the stand.
“But that’s what they have finally chosen to do here and it’s a testament to this court and what it does,” he said.
“Together with the decision by the ICC prosecutor [to recommend arrest warrants against top Israeli officials], it is a real one-two legal punch.”
against top Israeli officials], it is a real one-two legal punch.”
The ICJ, also known as the World Court, is the highest UN body for hearing disputes between states. Its rulings are final and binding, but have been ignored in the past.
In a highly charged ruling in January, the court ordered Israel to do everything in its power to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, but stopped short of ordering a halt in the fighting.
Israel has repeatedly dismissed the case’s accusations of genocide as baseless, arguing in court that its operations in Gaza are self-defence and targeted at Hamas fighters who attacked Israel on October 7.
(Aljazeera)
The execution of a Tennessee death row inmate has been postponed after staff were unable to find a vein to administer a lethal drug.
Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was set to be executed on Thursday.
But the state’s Department of Corrections said that while its medical team did find a primary IV line to carry out the lethal injection, they could not find a suitable second vein to establish a backup line, which is required under lethal injection execution protocol.
In response, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said he would grant Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year.
After finding the primary injection line, “the team continued to follow the protocol, but could not find another suitable vein”, the corrections department said in a statement.
“The team attempted to insert a central line pursuant to the protocol, but the procedure was unsuccessful,” the statement continued. “The execution was then called off.”
Carruthers was convicted in 1996 for the kidnapping and murders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker.
The men were beaten and shot and the three were buried alive in a Memphis cemetery.
Carruthers’ case has drawn national attention as advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have argued there were significant problems with his trial, including that he was forced to represent himself.
Carruthers himself has consistently maintained his innocence.
“His trial was riddled with errors. He was denied legal counsel. There was no physical evidence linked to him,” the ACLU said in a press release demanding the “wrongful execution” of Carruthers be called off.
“The evidence against him that was presented at trial came from informants who have since recanted their statements or been discredited,” the ACLU continued.
The nonprofit group also collected more than 130,000 signatures calling for the execution to be halted to allow for “necessary fingerprint and DNA testing”.
Advocates and community groups delivered that petition to the governor’s office at the Tennessee capitol on Monday, but Gov Lee announced the following day that Carruthers’ execution would go forward as planned.
Last week, Kim Kardashian took up Carruthers’ cause, urging her fans in a social media post to call the governor’s office and demand the DNA evidence be tested “before it’s too late”, according to US media.
In a petition for clemency filed on Wednesday, attorneys for Carruthers argued that his current mental state – resulting from Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type, and brain damage – is too impaired for him to be executed.
“These disorders manifest in current symptoms of unending, synergistic, and complex delusions that thwart a rational understanding of his imminent execution,” his lawyers argued.
In response to the news of the temporary reprieve, Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the ACLU will continue fighting on Carruthers’ behalf.
“Tennessee cannot continue torturing a man while refusing to answer serious questions about his innocence,” DeLiberato said.
[BBC]
A French appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of manslaughter in 2009 Rio de Janeiro – Paris crash that killed 228 people – the worst aviation disaster in the country’s history.
The Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that both companies were “solely and entirely responsible for the crash of flight AF447”, and ordered a payment of 225,000 euros ($261,720) for each passenger, the maximum fine possible for corporate manslaughter.
Although the penalties are largely symbolic, they capped an eight-week trial that victims’ families saw as a last chance to find justice two years after a lower court acquited Airbus and Air France.
Both companies have repeatedly denied all charges.
Following the ruling, Airbus said it would appeal to France’s highest court, saying the latest finding contradicted submissions from prosecutors and the 2023 acquittal.
Prosecutors previously warned that an appeal was likely and denounced the companies’ behaviour throughout the decade-plus legal process.
“Nothing has come of it – not a single word of sincere comfort,” said prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann as the trial was under way last November. “One word sums up this whole circus: indecency.”
The crash unfolded on June 1, 2009, when flight AF447 disappeared from radar screens as it headed from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to the French capital Paris with 216 passengers and 12 crew.
Two years passed before a deep-sea search uncovered the plane’s black boxes, which record flight data.
Investigators found the pilots had pushed the jet into a climb as it struggled with sensors blocked with ice during a mid-Atlantic storm. The plane stalled and crashed into the ocean.
While Airbus and Air France have blamed pilot error, the lawyers for passengers’ families argued that both companies knew that there was a problem with the plane’s pitot tubes, which measure flight speed.
Pilots were not trained to deal with such an emergency as the tubes malfunctioned, prosecutors said, triggering alarms in the cockpit and turning off the plane’s autopilot function.
Air France lawyer Pascal Weil said in October that the company “had the means to conduct high-altitude training, but we did not do so because we sincerely believed it was unnecessary”.
[Aljazeera]
The US has charged former Cuban leader Raúl Castro with conspiracy to kill US nationals and other crimes over the 1996 downing of two planes between Cuba and Florida.
The case unveiled on Wednesday accuses Castro and five others in the shooting down of the aircraft belonging to Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue and killing four people, including three Americans.
Castro, now 94, was then head of the country’s armed forces and faced international condemnation over the crash.
As the US seeks to exert increasing pressure on Cuba’s communist rule, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the charges “a political manoeuvre, devoid of any legal foundation”.
Speaking at Freedom Tower in Miami, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the US would also charge Castro with destruction of aircraft, and four individual counts of murder over the deaths of Armando Alejandre Jr, Carlos Alberto Costa, Mario Manuel de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.
“The United States, and President Trump, does not, and will not, forget its citizens,” Blanche said.
The charges must be argued in a US court, with some carrying the possibility life terms. The murder charges each carry a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment.
The justice department’s new charges take aim at a key figurehead of Cuba’s communist leadership when it is facing intense US pressure to make significant political and economic reforms to its one-party rule there.
“I think the strategy is to increase the pressure gradually to the point where the Cuban government will give in and surrender at the bargaining table,” said Wiliam LeoGrand, a expert on Latin American politics at American University.
The US has issued sanctions on the country and imposed a blockade on oil to Cuba that has resulted in blackouts and food shortages.
Earlier on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a message to the Cuban people timed to the country’s independence day.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba,” Rubio said.
Rubio told citizens of the island that a Cuban military run conglomerate known as GAESA is primarily responsible for the blackouts and food shortages that the country continues to endure.
GAESA owns or operates most of the lucrative parts of the Cuban economy from the ports to the petrol pumps to five-star hotels.
In response to Rubio’s message, Díaz-Canel accused the US of lying and imposing a collective punishment on the Cuban people.
Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges in Miami. (BBC)Díaz-Canel also said that the indictment of Castro was being used to “justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba” and accused the US of distorting the facts around the downing of the plane.
Asked by reporters about the prospects of bringing Castro to the US to face charges, Blanche responded that there was a warrant for his arrest.
He did not confirm whether the US would try to capture Castro, but said, “we expect he will show up here, by his own will or another way”.
American University’s LeoGrande said he believes the US is ready to capture the former Cuban leader “if the Cubans don’t surrender at the bargaining table”.
In January, the US staged a military operation to seize former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the US, after the justice department indicted him.
It transformed Venezuela’s relationship with Washington, something LeoGrande cautioned would be unlikely to have the same effect in Cuba, noting Castro retired almost a decade ago.
Nearly 95 years old, Castro, the brother of late Cuban leader Fidel Castro, remains an influential figure, acknowledged on the island as the surviving “leader of the Cuban Revolution”.
Blanche said he would “not compare cases” between Castro’s and that of Maduro.
President Donald Trump was asked about the political aspect of Wednesday’s indictment.
“A lot of those people are related to me in the sense that I’ve had such a great relationship with Cuban-Americans,” Trump said. “On a humanitarian basis, we’re here to help.”
While Castro is not expected to be extradited or to appear in the case, all options appear to be on the table, says attorney Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, who served as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Miami.
“If he did appear in the case, he would be afforded the same legal rights as any other defendant,” Friedman said, adding that would ultimately include a trial by jury.
“No one expects that the case will follow this typical path… but the indictment is compelling and is supported by significant evidence,” she told the BBC.
Cuba unlikely to bow without a fight
The Miami centre where US officials announced the indictment of Raúl Castro was full of Cuban Americans, mostly representing Cuban exile organisations that have for decades led opposition of the Cuban government from within the United States.
Surrounded by pictures of the four people who died in the 1996 crashes, many at the Miami event described being thrilled by the news.
“It was time, 67 years of that murderous regime,” said Isela Fiterre. “Raúl Castro did not merely kill four individuals. Over the course of many years, he has killed countless people,” Fiterre said.
She said it is never too late for justice and that she is grateful to the Trump administration for taking this step.
Another attendee, Mercedes Puid-Soto, echoed those sentiments.
“I feel very happy. Justice has been served,” she said. “It’s very important that the families can close that chapter, and we Cubans too.”
“It’s unlikely that the Cuban regime will surrender to the United States without a fight,” Vigil noted. “And any move that includes working with the Cuban regime would be very difficult for the Cuban diaspora in the United States to accept.”
US and Cuban representatives, including Raúl Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, have held “conversations” in recent months, but US charges against the former president are unlikely to smooth these contacts.
On the contrary, the Cuban side showed signs of further entrenching into its “no surrender, no concessions” position against US pressure, with Cuban state media outlets blasting what they called the “false accusations”.
(BBC)
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