Banner: Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention on Palestinian Community Centre wall. The Old Hebron City. Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
Yesterday US President Donald Trump declared in effect what amounts to his intention to commit a war crime in Gaz, a scheme of US-sponsored deportation and depopulation of 2.3 million survivors of genocide along the Mediterranean Sea.
Trump is officially an American felon under US domestic law, and it feels as though he is trying to upgrade himself into a Nuremberg-worthy Class A criminal under international law.
In the presence of his visitor, Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, an ICC-wanted war criminal, who nodded approvingly, as Trump unveiled his scheme of real estate development – as “the Riviera of the Middle East” in a vast graveyard of 17,000 children and infants and 30,000+ adults slaughtered by Israel since 8 October 2022.
If Trump’s scheme is implemented it will categorically constitute a war crime under the 49th Article of the 4th Geneva Convention.
Additionally, Trump disingenuously spanned his plan to, in effect, deport – forcibly, how else? – 2.3 million survivors of Israel’s 15-months-long genocidal slaughter and destruction in the language of humanitarian concerns – that the place is no longer liveable, with millions of tons of rubble and unexploded ordnances, as if Palestinian lives matter to him.
The gigantic key symbolizes the Palestinians’ inalienable right of return, the biblical right Israel grants all Jewish people from around the world; but it refuses to recognize the same right for millions of Palestinian people, including those under its occupation and in diaspora. Aida Refugee Camp Entrance, Bethlehem, Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
As a matter of fact, this narrative of turning 25-miles long strip along the Mediterranean Sea into a “Riviera of the Middle East” ought to be seen as a honey-tongued proposal which conceals its profoundly criminal nature: it amounts to an act of ethnic cleansing, not dissimilar to the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s program of forcible displacement and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians as refuges into the neighbouring countries in 1994.
As pointed out, it is in categorical breach of the 49th Article of the 4th Geneva Convention adopted after the Second World War. The article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 spells out that “(i)ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
Israel’s presence and control over Gaza has long been deemed that of an occupying power, and as such illegal under international law. With Trump declaring the United States will “take over Gaza” from the current occupier the US Government is equally obliged not to breach this international humanitarian law.
Aside from the serious breach of both the international humanitarian and international criminal law, it is in keeping with the Western imperialist tradition whereby human populations are an afterthought to this centuries-old lust for and policies of primitive accumulation of the lucrative movable and immovable assets – land, resources, strategic geographic spaces, etc.
2006 Ashoka Fellow Dr Abdelfattah Abusrour, told our delegation, “we refuse to be victims” (photo by Zarni)
A few months ago, in November in my interview with Anadolu News Agency I made a specific mention of the Trump family’s lust for commercial deals. Here is what I said: “… I think Trump is also going to benefit from bringing a brutal end to the Israeli genocide and letting real estate developers from New York and other places to go in and invest billions of dollars in the land where Palestinians have been killed by the thousands.”
I have never really lived under Israel’s 57-years-long brutal military occupation and the latter-day apartheid – backed by the now openly imperialist UN member state, namely the United States. If I could see through the US-Israel joint venture of settler colonial land grab via variously genocidal methods of depopulating Palestine of its native Palestinians of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds then surely the Palestinians who have spent their entire life, resisting this latest and ongoing case of the European implant called Israel has incomparably more perceptive observations. After all, they live Israel’s breaches of international law every second of their days.
As the 3rd instalment in our FORSEA Palestine Solidarity Series, FORSEA is presenting the following 3 video-recorded dialogues and conversations from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, Mairead Maguire’s nominee for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, inside the garden of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, Bethlehem, Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University, offers his historical analysis Israel’s settler colonialism while linking the ecological destruction of our natural world with violent colonial projects of which Israel is the latest European criminal offshoot in the long line of such entities.
He rightly sees the resistance against the latter-day settler colonialism as an integral part of the global environmental movement and the broader de-colonization struggles.
Mazin Qumsiyeh has been nominated for 2025 Nobel Peace Prize by the N. Irish Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire. [Watch Maguire’s Interview “Israel Cannot Build Peace on Genocide”, Dec. 2023.]
Mazin Qumsiyeh in the Q and A with our delegation and a few visiting Palestinian scientists, Bethlehem, Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
The second dialogue contains a big picture analysis of the Palestinian conditions by Dr Mustafa Barghouti, who heads the Palestine Medical Relief Society out of his Ramallah office. Dr Barghouti is a Palestinian physician, activist, and politician who serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, also known as al-Mubadara. He previously served as minister of information of the Palestinian unity government.
Dr Mustafa Barghouti (right) with s Bahia Amra-Abu Ta’a, Director of External Relations and Projects Department, Medical Relief Society – PMRS, Ramallah, Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
Dr Barghouti has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006 and is also a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council. He said to our visiting delegation of conscience, “I ran in the leadership contest against the President (Mahmoud Abbas) of the Palestinian Authority.”
I met and heard him speak on the post-Oct 7 Palestinian situation at the London Emergency Meeting on Palestine in London a year ago, which was co-organised by Professor Richard Falk and former Prime Minister of Türkiye and Professor Ahmet Davutoglu. One cannot fail to pick up on the fact that this Palestinian physician and activist commands respect and radiates integrity.
From left to right: Phyllis Bennis, Izzeldin Abuelaish, Avi Shlaim, and Dr Mustafa Barghouti, London Emergency Conference on Palestine, Jan. 2024 (photo by Zarni)
Although Jerusalem is a short drive from Ramallah where he lives and works, Dr Barghouti wryly said, “Israel doesn’t permit me to go to Jerusalem”. We told him that we were staying in East Jerusalem, the officially UN-recognized Palestinian territory.
Mustafa Barghouti, co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, has criticised US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over Gaza, calling it “criminal” and describing Trump as “the voice of Netanyahu” during an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/Gliyo11ePc
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) February 6, 2025
Our third dialogue is by 2006 Ashoka Fellow Dr Abdelfattah Abusrour, who told our delegation, “we refuse to be victims”, and who has kept his resilience and hope by finding beauty every day, despite the incredible level of colonial repression which Palestinians have been subjected to by Israel.
Dr Abdelfattah Abusrour welcoming our delegation at the entrance of his art and culture centre, Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
Just a few weeks before our group arrived the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) – as the Palestinians correctly name them – had raided the centre, detained a group of his students, and turned his office into a temporary interrogation room, our host told us.
Dr Abusrour in conversation with our international delegation of artists, writers and academics from six countries, Director’s Office, Alrowwad Culture and Art Society, Aida Camp, Bethlehem, Jan. 2025 (photo by Zarni)
He is also founder and director of Alrowwad Culture and Art Society, based in Aida Refugee Camp adjacent to the holy city of Bethlehem. A son of the 1948 Nakba survivors from a Palestinian village 18K away from Bethlehem, Dr Abusrour himself grew up in the camp, which was established subsequent to the destruction of 600 Palestinian villages and 11 cities by armed gangs of Jewish settlers who formed their independent state of Israel on 14 May 1948, not simply on the UN-recognized part for the Jewish National Homeland but grabbing parts of the UN-partitioned Palestine.
Dr Abusrour earned his PhD in biochemistry from France, is also an accomplished performing artist who is mobilizing creative, resistance and therapeutic potential of various types of art, including filmmaking, graphic design, dance, music, singing, painting, writing and so on.
He read his very powerful poem “I condemn myself” at a FORSEA solidarity event a few weeks after Israel launched its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, using 7 October attacks by Hamas as a welcome pretext to start another “war of choice”.
Maung Zarni
