As conflicts rage worldwide and international institutions continue to neglect to put an end to abuses and war crimes, Pope Leo XIV has lamented what he has described as the rise of blunt power over the rules of international law.
The pontiff stated in a Thursday social media post that it is depressing to see that the strength of international law and humanitarian law have vanished.
For humanity and the leaders of other countries, this is unworthy and shameful.
Leo’s statement comes as more people are calling for the end to the Israeli assault on Gaza, which prominent rights activists and UN experts have characterized as a genocide, but he did not go into more detail.
During its conflict with Palestinians, Israel has been the target of growing accusations that it broke international humanitarian law, a set of guidelines meant to protect civilians in conflict.
According to health officials, the Israeli military, supported by the United States, has nearly displaced almost all of Gaza’s population and killed at least 56,156 people.
Former US Department of State spokesperson Matthew Miller, who spearheaded Washington’s defense of Israel’s conduct under the Joe Biden administration, acknowledged earlier this month that the Israeli military has “without a doubt” committed war crimes in Gaza.
Israel defies several international resolutions, including those that the top UN tribunal, the International Criminal Court, has issued in regards to the Israeli blockade and the killings in Gaza.
The ICJ also called for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, to end “as soon as possible” last year.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant have been subject to an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Gaza, including using starvation as a means of combat.
Despite the allegations, the majority of the ICC members, especially those in Europe, continue to have close military and trade ties to Israel.
Leo pleaded for the end of Gaza’s war after succeeding the late Pope Francis in May as the first US pontiff.
Leo, the most revered spiritual authority among the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, declared in May, “Ceasefire now.”
We are constantly forced to move around in search of a little food and water and safer shelter from bombardments because of the cries of mothers and fathers who clutch the lifeless bodies of their children.
A small patio in the hospital’s center, where patients sat on benches beneath a wooden pagoda, provided the most tranquility. After surgery and other lengthy procedures, a small, colorful obstacle course nearby assisted in recovering mobility.
We first met Four-year-old Alexandro and his mother, Youseline Philisma.
When an armed group started igniting Alexandro’s camp where they were living, she was only one month old. He was saved from the flames, still alive but severely burned.
Youseline had taken him to Tabarre’s burn unit, the only one left in the nation, since then.
It’s “a whole new world” when I enter the hospital. My little one is understood by everyone. Everyone “gives us a lot of love,” she said.
The rest of Alexandro’s life will depend on his care in the burn unit. Among the medical professionals who treat him is surgeon Donald Jacques Severe.
Severe has the option to resign. His wife and children already made the trip to the US four years ago. Their home had been overrun by armed fighters. Severe is granted a visa to reside in Canada. He has not left, though, so far.
His co-operation, Xavier Kernizan, attempted to explain the responsibilities he and Severe share.
Someone will struggle if we’re not here, Kernizan said.
We are about to burnout, in my opinion. We can even get into depression at times. However, there is also the satisfying feeling of helping to make someone’s day better, of giving them a little hope in their most difficult times.
However, it’s impossible to predict the viability of Tabarre Hospital if the security situation continues to deteriorate.
My documentary team and I left the hospital gates for the first time in a week on April 11. One of the few places in Port-au-Prince that is still under government control was Petion-Ville, which we were heading for.
A World Food Programme helicopter brings passengers to the Karibe Hotel, where we crossed a football field. Right now, it’s the only way to get out of the capital.
As we flew into the air above the bubble of violence below, the Haitian capital began to shrink as the rotors began to rot, and we clambered into the helicopter. I recall being relieved.
A fast-moving wildfire has engulfed holiday homes and forest land on a section of the Greek coastline just 40km (25 miles) south of the capital, Athens.
More than 100 firefighters, supported by two dozen firefighting aircraft, battled the wildfire that tore across the coastal area of Palaia Fokaia on Thursday, officials said. The flames were whipped up by high winds as temperatures approached 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the country’s first heatwave of the summer.
Fire department spokesman Vassilis Vathrakogiannis told reporters that 40 people had been evacuated by police, with evacuation orders issued for a total of five areas. A seaside roadway running across the affected areas was protectively cordoned off, he added.
The coastguard said two patrol boats and nine private vessels were on standby in the Palaia Fokaia area in case an evacuation by sea became necessary.
“We’re telling people to leave their homes”, local town councillor Apostolos Papadakis said on Greece’s state-run ERT television.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known, but the fire department spokesman said that an arson investigation unit had been sent to the area.
Local mayor Dimitris Loukas said on ERT television that several houses were believed to have been damaged by the blaze.
The wider Athens area, as well as several Aegean islands, were on Level 4 of a 5-level scale measuring the risk of wildfires owing to the weather conditions, with the heatwave expected to last until the weekend.
Early in the week, hundreds of firefighters took four days to bring a major wildfire under control on the eastern Aegean island of Chios, where a state of emergency was declared and more than a dozen evacuation orders issued.
The fire department said one woman had been arrested on suspicion of having contributed to the sparking of that fire.
Greece has spent hundreds of millions of euros to compensate households and farmers for damage related to extreme weather and to acquire new equipment to deal with wildfires.
It has increased its number of firefighters to a record 18, 000 this year.
Iran’s Guardian Council has ratified a parliament-approved legislation to suspend Tehran’s cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, after the war with Israel and the United States.
Iranian news outlets reported on Thursday that the appointed council, which has veto power over bills approved by lawmakers, found the parliament’s measure to “not to be in contradiction to the Islamic principles and the Constitution”.
Guardian Council spokesperson Hadi Tahan Nazif told the official state news agency, IRNA, that the government is now required to suspend cooperation with the IAEA for the “full respect for the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Nazif added that the decision was prompted by the “attacks … by the Zionist regime and the United States against peaceful nuclear facilities”.
The bill will be submitted to President Masoud Pezeshkian for final approval and would allow Iran “to benefit from all the entitlements specified under … the Non-Proliferation Treaty, especially with regard to uranium enrichment”, Nazif said.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf suggested that the legislation is now binding after the Guardian Council’s approval.
“Continued cooperation with the agency, which plays a role as a protector of anti-human interests and an agent of the illegitimate Zionist regime through the pretext of war and aggression, is not possible until the security of our nuclear facilities is ensured,” Ghalibaf said in a social media post.
However, the IAEA said on Thursday that it had not received an official communication from Iran regarding the suspension.
Iranian officials have been decrying the IAEA’s failure to condemn Israeli attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities.
Before the war started, Tehran claimed to have obtained Israeli documents that show that the IAEA was passing off information to Israel about Iran’s nuclear programme – allegations that were denied by the agency.
Israel is widely believed to have its own nuclear arsenal, but its nuclear programme has not been monitored by the UN watchdog.
For years, Iranian nuclear sites have been under strict IAEA inspection, including by constant video feed. But it appears that Iran moved its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium from the facilities before they were bombed by Israel and the US during the recent war, putting them out of the view of UN observers for the first time.
US and Israeli officials have argued that the military strikes have set back Iran’s nuclear programme for years. But suspending cooperation with the IAEA could escalate the programme, although Tehran insists that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday that Moscow was “interested in Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA continuing”.
“We are interested in everyone respecting the supreme leader of Iran, who has repeatedly stated that Iran does not and will not have plans to create nuclear weapons,” Lavrov said.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul also told journalists that Berlin “urges the Iranian government not to go down this path” and cease cooperation with the board.
On June 13, Israel launched a surprise bombing campaign against Iran, striking residential buildings and nuclear sites and military facilities, killing top commanders and scientists as well as hundreds of civilians.
Iran responded with barrages of missiles that left widespread destruction in Israel and killed at least 29 people.
On Sunday, the US joined Israel and launched unprecedented strikes on Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites.
Following Iran’s retaliatory attack on a US military base in Qatar, a ceasefire was reached between the countries.
Barely 72 hours after United States President Donald Trump’s air strikes against Iran, a controversy erupted over the extent of the damage they had done to the country’s uranium enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz.
The New York Times and CNN leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that the damage may have been “from moderate to severe”, noting it had “low confidence” in the findings because they were an early assessment.
Trump had claimed the sites were “obliterated”.
The difference in opinion mattered because it goes to the heart of whether the US and Israel had eliminated Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to levels that would allow it to make nuclear weapons, at least for years.
Israel has long claimed – without evidence – that Iran plans to build nuclear bombs. Iran has consistently insisted that its nuclear programme is purely of a civilian nature. And the US has been divided on the question – its intelligence community concluding as recently as March that Tehran was not building a nuclear bomb, but Trump claiming earlier in June that Iran was close to building such a weapon.
Yet amid the conflicting claims and assessments on the damage from the US strikes to Iranian nuclear facilities and whether the country wants atomic weapons, one thing is clear: Tehran says it has no intentions of giving up on its nuclear programme.
So what is the future of that programme? How much damage has it suffered? Will the US and Israel allow Iran to revive its nuclear programme? And can a 2015 diplomatic deal with Iran – that was working well until Trump walked out of it – be brought back to life?
What Iran wants
In his first public comments since the US bombing, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the attack “did nothing significant” to Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said Khamenei spoke of how “most of the [nuclear] sites are still in place and that Iran is going to continue its nuclear programme”.
Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Tuesday said that “preparations for recovery had already been anticipated, and our plan is to prevent any interruption in production or services”.
To be sure, even if they haven’t been destroyed, Natanz and Fordow – Iran’s only known enrichment sites – have suffered significant damage, according to satellite images. Israel has also assassinated several of Iran’s top nuclear scientists in its wave of strikes that began on June 13.
However, the DIA said in the initial assessment that the Trump administration has tried to dismiss, that the attacks had only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by months. It also said that Iran had moved uranium enriched at these facilities away from these sites prior to the strikes. Iranian officials have also made the same claim.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had accused Iran of enriching up to 400kg of uranium to 60 percent – not far below the 90 percent enrichment that is needed to make weapons.
Asked on Wednesday whether he thought the enriched uranium had been smuggled out from the nuclear facilities before the strikes, Trump said, “We think everything nuclear is down there, they didn’t take it out.” Asked again later, he said, “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move.”
(Al Jazeera)
What was the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities?
Without on-site inspections, nobody can be sure.
Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday posted a statement saying, “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years”. That’s a very different timeline from what the DIA suggested in its early assessment.
But it’s important to remember that the DIA and CIA also disagreed on whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
The DIA sided with the UN’s view that inspections had proven Hussein didn’t have such weapons. The CIA, on the other hand, provided intelligence that backed the position of then-president George W Bush in favour of an invasion – intelligence that was later debunked. In that instance, the CIA proved politically more malleable than the DIA.
Amid the current debate over whether Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has also weighed in favour of the president’s view.
“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she posted on Twitter/X.
But Gabbard has already demonstrably changed her public statements to suit Trump.
In March, she testified before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003”.
On June 20, Trump was asked for his reaction to that assessment. “She’s wrong,” he said.
Gabbard later that day posted that her testimony had been misquoted by “the dishonest media” and that “America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalise the assembly”.
Gabbard’s clarification did not contradict her earlier view, that Iran was not actively trying to build a weapon.
Asked in an interview with a French radio network whether Iran’s nuclear programme had been destroyed, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi replied, “I think ‘destroyed’ is too much. But it suffered enormous damage.”
On Wednesday, Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission concurred with the CIA, saying Iran’s nuclear facilities had been rendered “totally inoperable” and had “set back Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come”.
Also on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the destruction of Iran’s surface facilities at Isfahan was proof enough of Iran’s inability to make a bomb.
“The conversion facility, which you can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he told reporters.
(Al Jazeera)
Can a 2015 diplomatic deal be resuscitated?
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated with Iran by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the US, China, Russia and the European Union in 2015, was the only agreement ever reached governing Iran’s nuclear programme.
The JCPOA allowed Iran to enrich its own uranium, but limited it to the 3.7 percent enrichment levels required for a nuclear reactor to generate electricity. At Israel’s behest, Trump abandoned the agreement in 2018 and Iran walked away from it a year later – but before that, it was working.
Even though Trump has said he will never return to the JCPOA, which was negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, he could return to an agreement of his own making that strongly resembles it. The crucial question is, whether Israel will this time back it, and whether Iran will be allowed to have even a peaceful nuclear programme, which it is legally entitled to.
On Wednesday, Trump didn’t sound as though he was moving in this direction. “We may sign an agreement. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that necessary,” he told reporters at The Hague.
Any JCPOA-like agreement would also require Iran to allow IAEA inspectors to get back to ensuring that Tehran meets its nuclear safeguard commitments.
“IAEA inspectors have remained in Iran throughout the conflict and are ready to start working as soon as possible, going back to the country’s nuclear sites and verifying the inventories of nuclear material,” the IAEA said on Tuesday.
But Iran’s powerful Guardian Council on Thursday approved a parliamentary bill to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, suggesting that Tehran is at the moment not in the mood to entertain any UN oversight of its nuclear facilities.
What happens if Iran returns to enriching uranium?
“If Iran wants a civil nuclear programme, they can have one, just like many other countries in the world have one, and [the way for] that is, they import enriched material,” Rubio told journalist Bari Weiss on the Podcast, Honestly, in April.
“But if they insist on enriching [themselves], then they will be the only country in the world that doesn’t have a weapons programme, quote unquote, but is enriching. And so I think that’s problematic,” he said.
Ali Ansari, an Iran historian at St. Andrews University in the UK, told Al Jazeera that “there have already been calls to cease uranium enrichment from activists within the country”.
But the defiant statements from Iranian officials since the US strikes – including from Khamenei on Thursday – suggest that Tehran is not ready to give up on enrichment.
Trump has, in recent days, suggested that he wants Iran to give up its nuclear programme altogether.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on TruthSocial, “IRAN WILL NEVER REBUILD THEIR NUCLEAR FACILITIES!”
He doubled down on that view on Wednesday.
“Iran has a huge advantage. They have great oil, and they can do things. I don’t see them getting back involved in the nuclear business any more, I think they’ve had it,” he told reporters at the end of the NATO summit in The Hague.
And then he suggested the US would again strike Iran’s facilities, even if it weren’t building a bomb. “If [Iran] does [get involved], we’re always there, we’ll have to do something about it.” If he didn’t, “someone else” would hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, he suggested.
That “someone” would be Israel – which has long tried to kill any diplomatic effort over Iran’s nuclear programme.
At the NATO summit, Trump was asked whether Israel and Iran might start a war again soon.
