#cross-border incursion

[youthchronical]

Russian forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian troops from the rear in Kursk - The Times of India

Representative image (Picture credit: AP) KYIV: Russian special forces walked kilometers (miles) inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian units from the rear in the Kursk region, Ukraine’s military and Russian war bloggers reported, as Moscow moves to recapture parts of its border province that Kyiv seized in a shock offensive. Ukraine launched a daring cross-border incursion into Kursk in…

[sayruq]

Doctors in Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza where over 1 million displaced Palestinians have fled, are raising alarm over the impact Israel’s expected military escalation will have on 25 preterm babies in incubators at Emirate Maternity Hospital. Glia, a medical aid group that currently has eight personnel at Emirate, said in a dispatch shared with Jezebel on Monday that no fuel has entered Gaza since May 6; the hospial has enough fuel for about 48 hours until its reserves run out. (On May 9, the United Nations said that no aid or fuel had been able to enter Gaza from Rafah since Israeli forces took control of the border crossing last week.) “If fuel does not enter immediately, the lights will turn off. Generators will stop running. Incubators will fail. Babies will die,” said Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo, a doctor with Glia currently stationed at Emirate. The 25 babies “are at immediate risk if these incubators are shut off.” Al Jazeera reported that, as of early Monday, Israeli forces ordered the medical staff at Kuwaiti Hospital, also in Rafah, to evacuate, as they continue to increase their attacks on the area. Last week, a UNICEF spokesperson said there is “nowhere safe on the Gaza strip to go to,” and that “Rafah is a city of children,” with 600,000 kids “caught in the crosshairs” of war. Since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October, the United Nations estimates that over 14,500 children have been killed; more than 35,000 Palestinians of all ages have died due to Israeli bombs and gunfire. The full scale of casualties, including death from malnutrition and illness, is not yet known. Dr. Tarek Loubani, the head of Glia’s medical programs, and Gucciardo pleaded with the international community to care about the fate of the preterm babies being kept alive by incubators (and thus, fuel.) In a statement to Jezebel, Loubani referenced four incubated babies at al-Nasr Children’s Hospital who were found dead and decomposing (“eaten by worms [and] blackened by mold,” according to the Washington Post) in December, after Israel forced hospital staff to flee, assuring them the babies would be cared for. “The global community cannot allow this to happen again,” Gucciardo said.

[palms-upturned]

Israeli tanks enter Rafah, push close to border crossing with Egypt: Report

May 7th 2024, 03:00 GMT

A Palestinian security official and an Egyptian official have told the Associated Press (AP) news agency that Israeli tanks have entered Rafah, reaching to within 200 meters (almost 220 yards) from Rafah’s border crossing with neighbouring Egypt.

The Egyptian official told AP that the operation appeared to be limited in scope. The official, as well as Al-Aqsa TV, said Israeli officials had informed the Egyptians that its forces would withdraw after completing the operation.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the reported tank incursion.

AP said the Egyptian official, located on the Egyptian side of Rafah, and the Palestinian security official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the press.

[workersolidarity]

[ 📸 A child named Jana Ayyad, who was displaced into Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, suffers from extremely poor health caused by malnutrition resulting from the continued closure of the southern border crossings. In a report published by the UN-affiliated agency that classifies famines, northern Gaza has been determined to not yet to be in famine, a result of an unexpected increase in aid, while Gaza on the whole remains on the brink of famine and catastrophe. ]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚀🏘️💥🚑 🚨

WAR IN GAZA, DAY 263: DESTRUCTION OF INFRASTRUCTURE PRESENTS DANGERS TO CIVILIANS IN GAZA, ISRAELI OCCUPATION TO DRAFT ULTRA-ORTHODOX JEWS FOR MILITARY SERVICE, "INTENSE" PHASE OF GAZA WAR TO END, BOMBING RAIDS CONTINUE AS MASS MURDER OF PALESTINIANS GOES ON ANOTHER DAY

On 263rd day of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a total of 3 new massacres of Palestinian families, resulting in the deaths of no less than 32 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, while another 139 others were wounded over the previous 24-hours.

It should be noted that as a result of the constant Israeli bombardment of Gaza's healthcare system, infrastructure, residential and commercial buildings, local paramedic and civil defense crews are unable to recover countless hundreds, even thousands, of victims who remain trapped under the rubble, or who's bodies remain strewn across the streets of Gaza.

This leaves the official death toll vastly undercounted as Gaza's healthcare officials are unable to accurately tally those killed and maimed in this genocide, which must be kept in mind when considering the scale of the mass murder.

Following weeks of Israeli ground incursions into the northern Gaza Strip, as well as Rafah to the south, large portions of Gaza's Palestinian population have been displaced into central Gaza, into cities such as Deir al-Balah, the Al-Mawasi area, and the Bureij Camp.

Following their displacement, the Israeli occupation army began heavily bombing the local public infrastructure, leaving central Gaza, in particular targeting public infrastructure, including wells and sewage lines, spilling sewage while trash collection has ceased. All of this directly nearby areas where tens of thousands of Palestinian families are forced to reside in tent cities.

Speaking with the local media, resident Umm al-Abd Baalousha and her family live in a small tent erected near the sea water desalinization plant in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, an area where previous Israeli bombing has led sewage to overflow into the streets where piles of garbage grow ever larger as basic services are now impossible due to the ongoing genocidal war.

Baalousha told the local media she is a refugee from the Jabalia Camp, in Gaza's north, where the Israeli occupation forces recently launched a deadly invasion, destroying or damaging nearly every building and forcing her family to seek shelter in Rafah.

Soon after, they were displaced again by the Israeli invasion into Rafah beginning several weeks ago. The family was forced to seek shelter once again, now a refugee living in a tent in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza.

“We did not find another place to flee to from the city of Rafah in the far south, with the occupation beginning its ground military operation, other than this area (in Deir al-Balah), which is characterized by its proximity to the water desalination plant, but the disaster began to unfold with the overflow of sewage," Baalousha told the local media.

"Children in the area cannot move easily, unless accompanied by an adult, due to the high level of wastewater in the place and the matter not being addressed by the responsible authorities," she added.

The same can be said for countless other residents of Gaza, many of whom have been forced into unsafe, or sometimes outright dangerous living conditions, surrounded by garbage, sewage, sickness and death, often being starved.

According to a report published today, June 25th, by the UN-affiliated IPC Global Famine Review Committee, although the amount of food going into the northern Gaza Strip has increased, the food situation in the Palestinian enclave is "catastrophic", while there remains a "high and sustained risk of Famine across the whole Gaza Strip."

"The prolonged nature of the crises means that this risk remains at least as high as at any time during the past few months," the report says.

"The FRC encourages all stakeholders who use the IPC for high-level decision-making to understand that whether a Famine classification is confirmed or not does not in any manner change the fact that extreme human suffering is without a doubt currently ongoing in the Gaza Strip, and does not change the immediate humanitarian imperative to address this civilian suffering by enabling complete, safe, unhindered, and sustained humanitarian access into and throughout the Gaza Strip, including through ceasing hostilities. All actors should not wait until a Famine classification is made to act accordingly," the report concluded.

In more news, the Israeli entity's High Court of Justice has ruled today the occupation army must draft Ultra-Orthodox men into the Israeli military.

According to the Occupation media, due to there no longer being a legal framework for the exclusion of Haredi men from the Israeli draft, the Israeli High Court has ordered the military to begin drafting the Ultra-Orthodox immediately.

Though the High Court did not determine a rate at which they must be drafted, it instead told the government it could draft Yeshiva students gradually or quickly, but that it must begin actively working to conscript the Ultra-Orthodox.

The Court ruling concluded that a June, 2023 government order instructing the army not to begin drafting Ultra-Orthodox men was illegal because the law exempting them from conscription had expired and was not renewed by the Israeli Knesset.

The Israeli media states that some 63'000 exemptions for Ultra-Orthodox men were reported by the Court's documentation.

The Israeli High Court writes that, “In these days, in the midst of a severe war, the burden of inequality is more acute than ever — and requires the promotion of a sustainable solution to this issue.”

“Non-enforcement of the provisions of the Security Service Law creates severe discrimination between those who are required to serve," the Court is quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Israeli occupation Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave interview with the Hebrew media in which he said that the "period of intense fighting in Gaza is about to end," adding that "This does not mean that the war is about to end, but rather its intense phase is about to end."

Trending news analysis of Netanyahu's recent comments suggest that, with the risk of Netanyahu's position crumbling if the war comes to an end.

Analysis suggests that at the conclusion of the Rafah operation, the bulk of the Israeli occupation's military violence is likely to shift north towards Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, just rinse the Gaza operation and repeat south of Lebanon.

In the meantime, in the Gaza Strip, the slaughter continued, albeit at a slower pace in recent days as the Zionist entity begins refocusing its attention north. Still, dozens of civilians were killed and more than one hundred wounded over the last 24-hours.

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, an Israeli warplane bombed a gathering of civilians on Al-Wahda Street near Al-Shifa Hospital, west of Gaza City, killing five Palestinian civilians, including two children, and resulting in a number of others wounded to varying degrees. The wounded were taken to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the city.

Soon after, the Israeli occupation forces bombed two UNRWA shelter schools in a series of raids that killed 16 civilians, with most of the victims being women and children.

The Israeli bombardment targeted several areas of Khan Yunis, in Gaza's south, along with the Al-Maghazi and Al-Shati Refugee Camps in the central and northern Gaza Strip, respectively.

According to Palestinian sources, the Zionist army bombed two UNRWA shelter schools housing displaced families in the Al-Shati Camp and in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza city.

The Civil Defense reported the recovery of five Palestinians who were killed, including children, and several others wounded as a result of the bombing of the "Asmaa" School housing displaced civilians in the Al-Shati Camp, west of Gaza City.

Similarly, local Civil Defense crews said they'd recovered the bodies 6 Palestinians as a result of the occupation army's bombing of the Abdel Fattah Hamoud School,in the Jaffa area of central Gaza City.

In further raids, occupation fighter jets bombarded a home belonging to the Al-Zamili family in the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood, east of Gaza City.

Meanwhile, the systematic destruction of neighborhoods such as the Saudi and Tal al-Sultan neighborhoods, west of the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, continued as well. With near constant bombings, artillery shelling and tank fire being reported, as well as the death of a man who was killed as a result of Israeli bombing in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood.

As Tuesday went on, the Zionist entity renewed its attacks, and further bombed into the night.

At midnight, Israeli warplanes bombed a house in the city of Beit Lahiya, north of Gaza, killing at least 3 Palestinians, and wounding a dozen others, while the Zionist army also bombed several homes in Gaza City and Rafah.

The Israeli occupation forces bombed several homes in southwestern Gaza City, including the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, in northern Gaza, while in Gaza's south, the Israeli occupation bombed the Saudi neighborhood, west of Rafah.

Further Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling hammered neighborhoods northeast of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, while airstrikes also hit the Nuseirat Camp in central Gaza.

As a result of the Zionist entity's ongoing war of extermination against the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, the current death toll now exceeds 37'658 killed, including over 15'000 children and at least 10'000 women, while another 86'237 others have been wounded since October 7th, 2023.

June 25th, 2024.

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@WorkerSolidarityNews

[lonely-house]

i love the vibe of Rental, it looks like scary animal crossing! can you tell us more about the game?

thank you! :)

rental is our first incursion into horror as a team, since our other, main label is about cozy games. it had an unexpectedly great reception on itchio, so we wanted to update it to be lonely house's first official release. we're very happy with the reception it's got now, too

as you can see, our style of horror ends up being pretty silly and comedic too, and we wanna continue exploring this duality.

some little fun facts i can say are -many of the assets, including all the religious objects and the house itself are taken directly from pictures of the beach house where we gathered to make the game. the owners were very religious and some of the decorations bordered on bizarre. -while there's no plan to expand rental any further, the protagonist, umi, may be making an apparition in a future game (kudos if you find a certain artwork that contains her)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the population of Soviet Karelia, especially of its border areas, which were directly affected by Soviet-Finnish conflicts, could easily be influenced by reports of “Finnish danger” and felt animosity toward “white Finnish bandits.” At the same time, the closer people lived to the border, which in the 1920s remained easy to cross illegally, the easier it was for them to compare lifestyles and policies on both Finnish and Soviet sides. This comparison often was not in favor of the latter, which, to a certain degree, negated the efforts of Soviet propaganda to convince people that Finnish neighbors were their main enemy. Quite the contrary, the Karelian population increasingly tended to blame their misfortunes on the new power that, as they believed, had brought only hunger and unemployment. In this context, anti-Soviet propaganda from Finland in the early 1920s had a much stronger effect than Bolshevik agitation. This was evidenced by thousands of Karelian refugees who saw the main danger for their families not in white Finnish incursions but in the Bolsheviks in power and who sought refuge in white Finland so much hated by Soviet leaders.

When the Civil War was over, the Soviet government set a goal to “distract attention of Karelians from Finland,” which had to be implemented, in particular, by émigré Finnish Communists. The government of Edvard Gylling sent Red Finns to establish Soviet power in ethnic Karelian regions, for it believed that they would find a common language with people who barely spoke Russian easier than Bolshevik activists. Most Red Finns, however, were former industrial workers full of revolutionary enthusiasm, but hardly aware of the peculiarities of rural life, which caused additional problems when they communicated with Karelian peasants. Finnish Communist émigrés readily condemned the “white bourgeois regime” of Finland but had no means to effectively fight hunger and unemployment, so their arguments deflated; moreover, because of very poor infrastructure on the Russian side, provisions to certain remote Karelian areas could be delivered in winter and spring months only from Finland, which strengthened the sympathies of Karelians for their neighbors.

Since Red Finns were the immediate authority that represented the Bolshevik power in Karelian areas, local inhabitants started to blame them as the people responsible for their misfortunes. Economic hardships among the Karelian population resulted in images of white Finnish aggressors, which they adopted from Soviet narratives, superimposed onto Soviet Finnish leaders. Soviet security organs kept a close eye on this tendency. In its report for May 1928, the GPU of Soviet Karelia informed the Soviet government that

there is widespread antagonistic sentiment among the Karelian population toward Finns, which is caused, on the one hand, by the introduction of school teaching in Finnish and, on the other hand, by a large number of Finns in the central administrative bodies of Karelia. This also leads to talks of a possible incorporation of Karelia into Finland: “Finns are at the head of our government, Finnish is taught in schools, and what if we will be annexed by Finland?” Kulaks and the well-to-do element of the Karelian population try to intensify this sentiment using agitation: “While we have Finns at power, we will live poor, because they issue wrong laws,” and in a number of cases they claimed: “We should create our own organization and expel all Finns from the government.”

However, anti-Finnish feelings among the local population were seldom addressed to the Karelian government. Instead, their grievances were aimed first at local officials and managers, who were always in the public eye. People were dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in management: “Why [do] Finns keep on occupying leading positions in the [state timber trust] Karelles, while Karelians are not allowed to them?” Such sentiments were sometimes generalized to the entire Finnish leadership of Soviet Karelia, and this was perceived by Soviet authorities as a real threat.

Some Karelian returnees who fled to Finland during the Civil War, for example, argued that in Finland they were treated much better than back home, where “[Red] Finns control everything and life is miserable,” and they called for the “expulsion of red scoundrels from Karelia.” Similar complaints were made by workers of factories in which the top management consisted of Finns: complaints included wage discrimination of Russians compared with Finns and Karelians as well as the reserve and self-restraint of Finns and their tendency to keep their distance from others, to “stick to their nationality.” Workers of the Kondopoga pulp and paper plant complained that “there are two classes in Karelia: exploiting Finns and exploited Russians and Karelians, [and] this should be eliminated before it is too late.”

This confrontation between Red Finns and the local population embodied, in fact, a much larger conflict between Soviet authorities and this population. Similar antagonism could be observed in places and organizations where Karelians, Russians, or Jews occupied authoritative positions. Inhabitants of northern Karelia were reported to say that “there was one revolution in Karelia, but we will have to make a second one, for too many Russian administrators came to us,” while workers of a lumber mill in Medvezhyegorsk complained of a “Jewish stranglehold” because “managerial positions were all occupied by Jews.”

Thus, by the late 1920s, the image of Finland and Finns formed in Karelian society was quite discrepant. Bourgeois Finland and its revolutionary proletariat, which “suffered under the yoke of white terror,” as newspapers wrote, were somewhere far away, while Red Finns were nearby, and among the local population they were perceived as “masters” (khoziaeva) dreaming of taking over their native land or sometimes even as a “fifth column”: “Now, under Soviet power, there are many Finns working as Soviet bureaucrats, but if a war breaks out they would betray, as [Russian] Germans betrayed in old times under Nicolas [II].” During the 1920s, this image of an internal alien clearly dominated images of hostile Finnish bourgeoisie and friendly Finnish proletariat imposed by Soviet propaganda.

To make things even more complicated, the Finnish influence on Karelian territories was still strong in the 1920s, and idealized memories of prerevolutionary life accentuated current economic hardships and provoked accusations: “If we had been annexed to Finland, we would have lived much better. If Finns hadn’t given away Karelia in 1920, we would have lived like barons.” At the end of the 1920s, the population of border regions listened almost exclusively to Finnish radio stations, which, as Soviet party documents worrisomely noted, would have a negative impact on “politically undeveloped listeners.”"

- Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala, The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Lansing: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 111-112.

[mariacallous]

This past July, Geoffrey Corn, a law professor at Texas Tech and a former judge advocate general in the U.S. Army, joined the Israel Defense Forces on a tour of the Rafah border. Within hours of Hamas’s attack, on October 7th, 2023, Israel began bombing Gaza. But until May, 2024, just a couple of months before Corn’s latest visit, the city of Rafah remained relatively intact. The site of the only border crossing with Egypt, Rafah was already one of the most densely populated cities in Gaza, packed further by the flight of Palestinians from the north. In February, when it became clear that the I.D.F. was planning to invade Rafah, it was estimated that 1.5 million people were living in the city.

World leaders and various organizations lobbied Israel not to go through with the incursion, including President Biden, who, on the eve of the I.D.F.’s attack, called Rafah a “red line.” The I.D.F. moved forward anyway, even as the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.) ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive.” By July, when Corn surveyed the area, Rafah was largely rubble. “It looked like Berlin after World War Two,” he told me. “And, if all you do is look at that, you say, This can’t be right.”

Corn, at the height of his military career, was the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the laws of war, also known as international humanitarian law (I.H.L.), or the law of armed conflict (LOAC). Corn brought up Berlin as a metric for the level of urban destruction he saw, but he was also, perhaps inadvertently, recalling a watershed moment in international law. The Second World War was the first armed conflict in which air power made the bombing of civilians possible at a massive scale. Military leaders pushed those possibilities to hellish extremes, following the logic that killing civilians might induce surrender. It wasn’t until the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions were adopted, in 1977, that an international agreement explicitly prohibited the intentional targeting of civilians. (The United States has not ratified these protocols, but it has incorporated the basic rules of civilian protection into the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual and treats them as customary international law.) And it wasn’t until the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which began in 1993 and in which Corn served as a defense witness, that an international court had ever tried someone for violating this prohibition.

The war in Gaza has played out under this relatively young international legal regime.

At the Rafah border, I.D.F. intelligence officers showed Corn surveillance videos that he says demonstrated Hamas activity in the area before the I.D.F. offensive commenced. The suggestion was that the destruction he saw was not the product of an indiscriminate assault and that the laws of war had been upheld. Hamas’s use of civilian buildings transformed those sites into “military objectives,” Corn said. The civilians killed were not targets but “incidental deaths.”

The claim that Israel has adhered to the laws of war is extremely contentious. There is the genocide case at the International Court of Justice, as well as the arrest warrants the International Criminal Court issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Numerous experts have accused Israel of flouting the laws of war, including Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories, who argued that Israel had weaponized international humanitarian law as “ ‘humanitarian camouflage’ to legitimize genocidal violence.” This was done “by deploying IHL concepts such as human shields, collateral damage, safe zones, evacuations and medical protection” to erode “the distinction between civilians and combatants.”

Israel has contested these claims in hearings at the I.C.J., and an array of institutions have echoed the defense. Corn’s trips to the region arose from these efforts. Besides the July visit, he also travelled there in March, 2024, with a group of retired three- and four-star generals, on a trip sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or JINSA. The report he subsequently co-authored with the other members of that delegation found that the I.D.F.’s implementation of civilian-risk mitigation “reflects a good-faith commitment” to comply with the laws of war, whereas Hamas acted as a pervasive and intentional violator of the law. Corn, when we spoke on the phone in late February, argued that despite the visceral nature of the destruction, which even he was struck by, the charges levelled against Israel were hasty. He was adamant that the legality of an attack cannot be judged based just on its outcomes: “That’s like me saying one plus I-don’t-know is obviously ten.” A destroyed school does not tell you whether war crimes took place. For that, he said, you need to examine the decision-making that led to the strike. “I’m not going to say that all of the damage was necessary or justified, because I don’t have enough information to say that,” Corn continued. “What I can say is that the systems and processes that the I.D.F. implemented are very similar to what we would implement in a similar battle space.”

This idea, that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is in line with the U.S. military’s understanding of its own legal obligations, has become the general consensus among American military lawyers and their allies in the academy in recent years. That is the argument at the heart of a new paper by Naz Modirzadeh, a professor at Harvard Law School and the founder of its Program on International Law and Armed Conflict. As Modirzadeh writes, in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard National Security Journal, the U.S. government has been evasive about whether Israel has violated the laws of war. Where some have seen hypocrisy and geopolitical calculation, credit for this should also be given to “a deeper transformation within the U.S. military and its legal apparatus.”

In the past several years, the Department of Defense has become fixated on how the United States might fight a major war against an enemy that rivals the American military in force and technology. In such a scenario—known as a large-scale combat operation, or L.S.C.O.—combat would take place across land, sea, air, and into the thermosphere. Command of the air could not be taken for granted. Intelligence may be spotty. Casualties could soar into the hundreds of thousands, and whole cities could be flattened. “In short,” Modirzadeh writes, the U.S. military has begun “preparing for an all-out war with China.” And, with such conflagrations burning in the mind, “LSCO lawyers,” as Modirzadeh calls them, have been arguing that the laws of war are far more permissive than many of their peers and the public seem to appreciate. From that vantage, Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat U.S. soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.

In 2018, as Trump imposed his first tariffs on Chinese goods, the new National Defense Strategy declared that competition with China and Russia—“not terrorism”—was the principal concern for national security. With that signal, the hulking bureaucracy of the U.S. military began to reorient itself, shifting the defense budget, training manuals, weapons contracts, and military strategy to focus on the Pacific theatre. The concept of L.S.C.O. took off in these years. By one account, the term was first mentioned in official Army doctrine in 2017. By 2022, the updated Army Field Manual 3-0, Operations used the term L.S.C.O. more than a hundred times.

Modirzadeh locates the origins of L.S.C.O. lawyering within this trend. She credits a 2021 article titled “The Eighteenth Gap” that was published in The Military Review. Its authors were Lieutenant General Charles Pede, who was the Army’s highest-ranking legal expert at that time, and Colonel Peter Hayden, another military lawyer. (Both are now retired.) The title is a reference to a 2017 study from the Army’s Combined Arms Center, which laid out seventeen gaps in the force’s preparedness as it shifted its focus from counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism to a possible conflict with a technologically advanced military. To that list of seventeen, Pede and Hayden suggested adding one more, a gap in “legal maneuver space.”

The U.S. military, as the authors framed it, had practiced an exceptionally restrained form of warfare for the past twenty years. This was possible because of a specific set of circumstances—secure bases, technological superiority, command of the air and the seas—which allowed for a style of unhurried killing that reached its apex with drone strikes. From a terminal far out of harm’s way, drone pilots could hover in the sky for hours, soaking up surveillance information, building a case for precisely whom to bomb and when to do it. But, as Pede and Hayden saw it, all this restraint had conditioned both American troops and the public to believe this level of restraint was the norm. We were suffering, they wrote, from a counter-insurgency “hangover,” one that threatened the U.S. military’s preparedness for a full-scale war. In training exercises that simulated large-scale combat, soldiers were hesitant to fire certain ordnances, unsure whether they had the clearance to make that call themselves. Observing officers also noted a “general aversion to collateral damage risk.”

More confounding for Pede and Hayden was the “threat” coming from outside the armed services. Into the last decades of the twentieth century, the laws of war were almost exclusively the domain of military lawyers and humanitarians at the Red Cross. But, in the nineteen-eighties, Human Rights Watch began monitoring armed conflicts for compliance. Other N.G.O.s soon joined in, and, once the war on terror got under way, a whole knowledge industry sprang up around the laws of war. Civilian academics began studying I.H.L. alongside other bodies of international law, and journalists used the laws of war to scrutinize U.S. military actions, particularly those which led to civilian deaths. Describing this shift, Kenneth Roth, a former director of Human Rights Watch, said that militaries had “lost their monopoly over the interpretation” of the laws of war. Pede and Hayden called it “humanitarian legal creep.” For them, the U.S. military’s critics were “well-intentioned” but callow, with no authority to determine what counted as a military target and the means by which soldiers could destroy such targets.

Pede and Hayden, throughout their article, insisted that they were not disputing the importance of the laws of war. The problem, they argued, was that the laws’ comparatively minimal obligations had been conflated with the far more restrictive set of precautionary measures the U.S. military has followed as a matter of policy. That policy was discretionary, and it would be impossible to sustain in an L.S.C.O. situation; it could even be fatal. For the military lawyers, the crucial point was for American soldiers to understand that the law didn’t require them to try. “If we are to win on Battlefield Next, we must be ready to fight with the law that is, not the law as some would wish it to be,” they wrote.

After the publication of “The Eighteenth Gap,” a flurry of other articles, speeches, blog posts, and conferences followed, rehashing its argument—that the U.S. military would need to operate under a less restrictive set of rules in an L.S.C.O., and that the laws of war were sufficiently permissive to allow for that.

As military leaders and legal experts zeroed in on the details, a loose program took shape. Generally, L.S.C.O. lawyers called for delegating more authority to commanders in the field to kill independently. In the fast-moving combat expected in an L.S.C.O., soldiers would have to decide for themselves, without legal counsel and without clearance from up the chain of command, what they could target, what weapons they could use, and whether expected civilian casualties were acceptable. This would mark a departure from recent U.S. military practice, where members of the JAG corps have often worked side by side with commanders to make targeting decisions, and where strikes expected to harm civilians have typically undergone a review. L.S.C.O. lawyers also argued that targeting decisions made by commanders should be evaluated only by the subjective test of “good faith.” Imposing a higher standard could put soldiers in jeopardy, because they would be afraid that they might need to produce evidence to justify firing their weapons.

In all of these arguments, the prospect of a full-scale war functions as a pressure test. The laws of war are premised on the possibility of a compromise. They are supposed to strike a balance between humanitarian concern and military necessity. That is an immensely fraught proposition, but its contradictions fade away when you envision yourself surrounded by a blur of steel, ocean spray, and explosions. If a war between the United States and China were to erupt in the Taiwan Strait, the necessity of winning would be almost absolute. From that vantage, L.S.C.O. lawyering can be seen as an effort to preserve legal compliance and humanitarian considerations even under the most extreme conditions.

The practice of writing about the laws of war in L.S.C.O. might be seen as a form of escapism. More than two decades after its invasion of Afghanistan, the United States is still engaged in a number of armed conflicts, all of them asymmetrical. In these, the enemy is not a standing army but various terrorist organizations and looser categories of hostiles, enmeshed in large civilian populations. To focus one’s attention on the bare minimum that the laws of war require in extremis is a way to avoid the vexed moral and political problems of the past wars, which America is very much still fighting.

When the campaign in Gaza began, I.D.F. leadership issued a broad directive that vastly expanded its target list, loosened restraints on civilian casualties, and conferred greater authority on mid-rank commanders to strike targets independently—roughly the L.S.C.O. legal playbook.

A recent video, taken in April, demonstrates how permissive the I.D.F.’s rules of engagement became. In the clip, a battalion commander for the I.D.F. instructs a group of soldiers who are preparing for a hostage-rescue operation in Rafah. “Everyone you encounter is an enemy,” the commander tells his troops. “If you see anyone, open fire, neutralize the threat, and keep moving.” Less than two weeks earlier, soldiers from the same brigade, operating under a reserve commander, killed fifteen Palestinian aid workers and buried their bodies in a mass grave.

An I.D.F. spokesperson initially claimed the vehicles the workers drove were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights. I.D.F. sources told Haaretz that the soldiers had felt their lives were in danger. A video later discovered on one of the aid workers’ cellphones revealed the I.D.F.’s account to be a fabrication. In the video, a convoy of clearly marked ambulances and a fire truck move along a dirt road. They pulled over to inspect a vehicle that had veered off the road into a field. As an internal I.D.F. investigation revealed, this was another ambulance that a battalion of Israeli soldiers hiding about one hundred feet away had fired upon a few hours earlier. In the cellphone video, you can see several of the newly arrived aid workers get out of their vehicles, with the emergency lights flashing. Then gunfire erupts. The video goes black, but the camera continues to record. The gunfire lasts for several more minutes. Soldiers can be heard nearby shouting orders in Hebrew. At the same time, you can also hear the voices of aid workers who were still alive. A little over ten minutes after the cellphone video cut off, yet another vehicle arrived on scene, this one from the U.N. For a third time, the I.D.F. battalion opened fire, killing the driver.

The footage suggests these killings were a war crime. No L.S.C.O. lawyer would argue they are acceptable. But the deference that I.D.F. leaders have shown for the soldiers’ account of the killings is in line with the “good faith” standard L.S.C.O. lawyers advocate. The I.D.F. said in a statement that the incident was the result of “several professional failures” and dismissed the battalion deputy commander for giving inaccurate information. He was blamed for going off mission, and putting his unit and others in the field at risk. But, the I.D.F. has tacitly accepted his claim that he believed his soldiers were shooting at Hamas. They maintain that his battalion “did not fire indiscriminately.” In other words, they committed three mistakes in a row—not a war crime.

In reading through various accounts of the conflict written by American L.S.C.O. lawyers, it is striking how little is made of the incongruity between Israel’s tactics and military necessity—particularly given the asymmetrical nature of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, in which the former has a vast advantage in technology and firepower. Last year, former Lieutenant General David Deptula, after having been led on a tour of Rafah by the I.D.F., wrote that, from his observations, Israel was “using the right force, at the right place, at the right time.” The JINSA report that Corn co-authored provided a more nuanced, albeit legally idiosyncratic, analysis. While a large section of the report is spent emphasizing the I.D.F.’s efforts and ability to mitigate civilian harm, the authors concluded that Israel is under little legal obligation to do so. This is not because of the military threat that Hamas poses, but because of Hamas’s “motivation and intent.”

The most telling detail in reports like these, though, is the tendency to frame Israel’s main problem as a public-relations issue. “We believe the I.D.F. has fulfilled its legal obligations to provide humanitarian access and assistance to Gazan civilians,” the JINSA report reads. “At the same time, we acknowledge the strategic legitimacy of Israel’s campaign has been compromised by the perception of indifference to the humanitarian suffering in Gaza.” A current member of the JAG corps, Major Joseph Levin, put a finer point on it. “The lesson for America in the Israeli-Hamas conflict is that a democratic nation with power overmatch that is achieving consistent tactical victories still risks strategic defeat when its enemy effectively uses cognitive warfare to undermine public support,” he wrote in Military Review.

A couple of months ago, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy, and Air Force—ridding each branch of its highest-ranking legal officer. One of these was Lieutenant General Joseph Berger, who had recently published an article commending “The Eighteenth Gap” and endorsing many of the reforms L.S.C.O. lawyers have championed. On Fox News, Hegseth described Berger and the other judge advocate generals as willful “roadblocks.” For Hegseth, who has been a vocal proponent of a “warrior ethos” and has referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs,” it seems that Berger’s embrace of L.S.C.O. lawyering hadn’t gone far enough.

I spoke to Geoffrey Corn shortly after these firings. He worried that Hegseth was fashioning a military culture in which war crimes might go unpunished. “If leaders of the United States think that they can wage war with indifference toward the rules of I.H.L. or LOAC or whatever we want to call it, they’re going to learn very quickly how easy it is to win a battle and lose a war,” he said.

Corn mentioned he had never shot anyone while he served, but knew other soldiers who had. He’d asked them, Were they O.K.? “When you have to do something as part of your duty that is incredibly unpleasant, knowing that you followed a widely understood and respected rule set helps you live with the consequence of those actions.”

[nocompromise-noregrets]

Another round! 2, 6 (haha), 16 and 17.

And a bonus gif of Mr Efficient to honour our delightful conversation.

ROUND TWO DING DING DING! :D :D :D

2. What’s something new that you tried in a fic this year? OOH. I answered this already here, but that wasn't the only new thing, I don't think. Hmmmm. ahahaha I finally wrote some Glorfindel/Thranduil in response to a prompt and I really enjoyed putting together these two very strong characters and strident voices in the back of my head. :D :D :D

6. What character(s) captured your heart? Oh dammit, Mr Efficient is absolutely up there, although I haven't actually written him yet. I just love him so much, particularly in his Cartwright!incarnation. Also my inconveniently insistent and talkative Italian RPF muses (all four members of Måneskin, dammit) who I was not expecting, did not particularly intend to end up writing, thinking my RPF days were at least 15 years in the past, but who WILL NOT SHUT THE HELL UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE DAMMIT.

16. What’s your favorite title of the year? Oooh. *scrolls back through stats spreadsheet* I am very fond of in the meantime, you've got me, which was kind of a placeholder title during the madness of Writers' Month (a fic a day for the whole of August) but has kind of grown to fit the story (Théoden survives the Battle of the Pelennor Field and finds himself developing something of a rapport with Ioreth).

17. Share your favorite opening line Oh man. I am terrible at picking favourites, and I write so ridiculously much that I tend to forget what I've written, even though I reread my own stuff SO MUCH, but let's have a look...hmm! Not so much an opening line as an opening couple of paragraphs, but here's the beginning of the Glorfindel/Thranduil fic linked above:

Something crosses the border of the Woodland Realm, and Thranduil feels it, as he senses every incursion into his kingdom, so deeply is he attuned to the forest. As a spider feels a fly blundering even into the outermost threads of its web, so Thranduil knows when any intruder crosses his borders, however small. Queen Melian taught him well, and he needs no Ring of Power to maintain his borders, even against the Necromancer’s poison, although his Woodland Guard are kept ever-busy dealing with the spiders and other foul creatures that issue forth from Dol Guldur. This is no spider, though; this is a traveller, riding alone up the Enchanted River from the Old Forest Road, and Thranduil inwardly raises an eyebrow, though he shows no indication of his thoughts upon his face. Nobody travels alone in Middle-Earth these days. Nobody - except one who does not need to fear the forces of the Enemy. So his unexpected visitor is either Mithrandir - or Glorfindel. Thranduil is not sure which he would be less pleased to see. Mithrandir speaks in riddles and always brings bad news, and Glorfindel - well. Glorfindel brings bad memories.

I am ludicrously fond of Thranduil and his complexities, and of Glorfindel and his hidden depths, and I had so much fun putting them together at last in this one! :D :D :D

wheeeee, thank you so much for asking! And for the gif of Mr Efficient, who I love inordinately, especially in that incarnation. XDDDD Cartwright!Sauron and his innate ability to fuck up any opportunity that happens to come his way, I adore him. <3333333

[stele3]

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-campaign-leaves-lebanese-border-towns-ruins-satellite-images-show-2024-10-28/

[croc-odette]

"Videos circulating Wednesday on social media showed the Israeli army blowing up a neighborhood in the southern Lebanese town of Mhaibib, a historical site that houses a shrine that is more than 2,100 years old.

The town in the Marjaayoun district in Nabatiyeh is about 115 kilometers (71 miles) from Beirut.​​​​​​​ [...]

Israel has mounted a huge air campaign in Lebanon against what it claims are Hezbollah targets since Sept. 23, killing more than 1,500 people and displacing more than 1 million.

The aerial campaign is an escalation from a year of cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of Tel Aviv’s offensive on the Gaza Strip, which has killed nearly 42,400 people, most of them women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.

Israel expanded the conflict on Oct. 1 by launching an incursion into southern Lebanon."

[palms-upturned]

UN warns fuel running out in Gaza, hitting water, food, medical and aid operations

May 8th 2024, 1:30 GMT

Critical diesel fuel supplies needed to power drinking water pumps, maintain communications and deliver humanitarian aid within the war-torn Gaza Strip will run out today, a senior UN official said after Israel’s closure of the two key border crossing points into the Palestinian territory

Andrea De Domenico, the head of the UN’s humanitarian aid office in the Palestinian territory, said Israel’s military incursion and order for people to leave Rafah has resulted in “the forced displacement of tens of thousands of people”.

De Domenico said the UN normally uses 200,000 litres of diesel fuel a day in Gaza. As of Tuesday night, the UN had 30,000 litres remaining.

Without a fuel delivery, the main water production facility in northern Gaza will be shut, “depriving the entire population of access to drinking water.” The same shutdown will happen in another day for the middle and south of Gaza, affecting 1.9 million people, the Associated Press news agency reports.

De Domenico also said the area that Israeli officials have told Palestinians to move to is mainly sand dunes and has no toilets, water points, drainage, shelter or health facilities.

Israeli authorities are also not on the ground providing humanitarian services, he said, adding that without fuel and more flour, the 16 bakeries supported by the UN throughout Gaza will be forced to suspend operations.

[argumate]

Previous notable incursions into Russia did not change the Kremlin's perception of the international border area, but the Ukrainian operation in Kursk Oblast will force the Kremlin to make a decision. All Russian pro-Ukrainian forces have conducted several cross-border raids into Russia since Fall 2022, but the Kremlin and the Russian military command resisted calls for redeploying forces to protect the border at that time. Russian President Vladimir Putin assessed at that time that those limited raids posed no medium- to long-term threat to Russian territory and that redeployments to the international border would be a less effective allocation of resources that could otherwise support large-scale defensive and offensive operations in Ukraine. The current Ukrainian incursion, however, poses significant threats to Russian military operations in Ukraine and Putin's regime stability and demands a response. The Ukrainian operation in Kursk Oblast will likely expand the Kremlin's consideration for what type of Ukrainian operations are possible along the border. Russia's prolonged treatment of the international border area as a dormant frontline is a strategic failure of imagination.

[follow-up-news]

In a brazen attack that caught Russia off-guard, Ukraine’s military has sent a large ground force across its border and into western Russia. The Ukrainian soldiers crossed the country's northeastern border Tuesday and now appear to be several miles inside Russia’s Kursk region, where they are operating in several villages. Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia's general staff, said in a Kremlin briefing Wednesday that some 1,000 Ukrainian troops were taking part, backed by dozens of armored vehicles. Russia has sent reinforcements in an attempt to drive the Ukrainians back across the border. Russian leader Vladimir Putin listened to the assessment with a look that appeared to be a mixture of impatience and disgust. He called the Ukrainian incursion a "large-scale provocation." Ukraine has previously backed Russian exiles who carried out limited cross-border raids, but has never conducted its own operation on such a scale. Ukraine is not commenting on the current developments, and many details remain sketchy. In an interview with NPR, Mykhailo Podolak, one of the top advisers to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, declined to provide any specifics.

[allthegeopolitics]

The Israeli military campaign has resulted in the destruction of over 75 per cent of olive trees in Gaza, a new report revealed on Saturday, Anadolu Agency reports. The report, compiled by the National Office for the Defense of Land and Resistance to Settlement, affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization, said “the war has had a destructive impact on the olive sector, annihilating more than 75 per cent of olive trees in the region.” Israel has continued its air and ground attacks in the Palestinian enclave since the cross-border incursion by Hamas last October. It said that residents of Gaza could only access their fields during a temporary cease-fire, which lasted just a week last November, allowing them to harvest olives from areas that had not yet been subjected to Israeli uprooting and destruction.

Continue Reading

[mariacallous]

When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, he was operating on a fringe legal theory that a right-wing faction has been working to legitimize for more than a decade.

“The Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said earlier this month in response to a question about Trump’s threat to suspend habeas corpus, the legal right of a prisoner to challenge their detention. Days after Miller’s remarks, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued the same warning when a member of a House panel asked her if the number of illegal border crossings meets the threshold for suspending the right. “I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” Noem said. “But I believe it does.”

Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.

Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.

The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.

The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.

So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion, as defined by the Constitution or the Alien Enemies Act, on the handful of occasions the government has used the argument to justify supercharged immigration enforcement. Four federal judges, including one Trump appointee, have said the situation Trump describes fails to meet the definition of an invasion. Tren de Aragua “may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote. Indeed, Trump’s own intelligence agencies found that Maduro is not directing the gang. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question but froze any more deportations without due process on May 16.

The Trump legal push has been in the works for years.

[eretzyisrael]

David M. Litman

Unsurprisingly, the International Court of Justice played along with the cynical attempt by Hamas’s ally South Africa to halt the Israeli military operation launched to destroy the terrorist organization after its horrific Oct. 7 massacre. 

Equally unsurprising is that the ICJ justified its ruling by relying on a thin, distorted and inaccurate set of “facts.” In its May 24 ruling, the court relied on a handful of dubious, generalized and misleading claims made by various United Nations figures.

As justice ad hoc Aharon Barak points out:

“The Court relies primarily on statements made by United Nations officials on social media and on press releases issued by relevant organizations (see Order, paragraphs 44-46). It relies on these statements and press releases without even inquiring into what kind of evidence they draw upon. The Court’s approach is in stark contrast with its previous jurisprudence, in which it has stated that ‘United Nations reports [are] reliable evidence only ‘to the extent that they are of probative value and are corroborated, if necessary, by other credible sources.’”

Indeed, as has been pointed out many times before, the United Nations reports on Israel, on which the ICJ relies, are replete with dubious claims and outright lies.

Below are four claims on which the ICJ based its decision, followed by the facts disproving the narrative crafted by the court in an effort to deprive the Jewish state of its right to self-defense.

ICJ Claim 1: “For instance, on 8 May 2024, the Director-General of the World Health Organization stated that the Al Najjar Hospital, one of the last remaining medical facilities in the Rafah Governorate, was no longer functional due to the ongoing hostilities in its vicinity.”

The Facts: Omitted is that Al Najjar Hospital had limited capacity—only 63 beds—which has been more than made up for by the establishment of field hospitals in Rafah Governorate.

In a manner typical of the rest of the ICJ’s ruling, the responsibility of other parties for the situation is omitted. It is well-established that many of Gaza’s hospitals have been exploited by Palestinian terrorist organizations like Hamas, forcing Israel to attack these medical facilities.

Under the ICJ’s logic, the IDF must stand and take it as Hamas launches rockets from Rafah.

ICJ Claim 2: “On 17 May 2024, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned that it had been unable to access its warehouse in Rafah for over a week and observed that ‘[t]he incursion into Rafah is a significant setback to recent modest progress on access.’”

The Facts: Once again, the ICJ is deceiving the public by omitting the responsibility of parties other than Israel for the situation. Much, if not all, of the responsibility for the aid situation in Rafah lies with Palestinian terrorists, looters and Egypt.

One of the main reasons the WFP has been unable to access its warehouses has little to do with the Israel Defense Forces. In many cases, mobs of Palestinians are stopping aid convoys and looting the supplies destined for WFP warehouses.

Another party responsible for this situation is Egypt. The May 17 WFP report the ICJ cites does indeed claim, “We’ve not been able to access our warehouse in Rafah for more than a week,” but in the very next sentence it goes on to explain: “We have very little food and fuel coming through the border crossings in the south.”