Category World News

The raw statistics speak to the scale of the suffering in two places, separated by decades.

Israel has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, many of them women and children, and injured more than 138,000.

With constant bombardment, man-made famine, and tactics like declaring a safe zone and then bombing it, experts say what Israel is doing amounts to genocide.

In the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 68,000 Bosniaks, rounding people up based on ethnicity.

On July 11, 1995, Serb fighters rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a United Nations-declared “safe zone” in the town of Srebrenica.

That was the only legally recognised genocide of the Bosnian War.

On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, Al Jazeera spoke to Iva Vukusic, assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, and Nimer Sultany, Palestinian legal scholar at the University of London, about the parallels between the two.

Safe zones that aren’t

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said his country intends to round up some 600,000 people who are in what Israel once designated as a “safe zone” – and subsequently violated several times – and push them into a “concentration zone” in Rafah.

People would only be allowed to leave this “concentration zone” if they were “voluntarily emigrating” from Gaza.

“We have seen … Israeli academics, legal scholars, really objecting to this plan and calling it a manifest example of a war crime,” Vukusic explained.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” former Israeli Prime Minister said bluntly about the Katz announcement in an interview with the Guardian on Sunday.

Implied in Israel’s claim that it would secure this concentration zone from the outside, and that aid would be distributed within, is the idea that this zone will be yet another Israeli “safe zone” in its war on Gaza.

A unilaterally declared safe zone, however, does not include the external controls and mechanisms that were part of the Srebrenica safe zone 30 years ago, Vukusic pointed out. These controls included international peacekeepers as well as UN Security Council Resolution 819, declaring Srebrenica a safe area.

The UN declaration of the safe zone came after thousands of Bosnians streamed into Srebrenica, seeking safety from relentless attacks by Bosnian Serb fighters acting under “Directive 7” to cut Srebrenica off from any other areas.

Hemmed in and starving, people were trapped.

The external mechanisms monitoring it did not prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosniak boys and men, a failure of the international community’s pledge to “never again” allow mass atrocities. And, in Gaza, even the appearance of UN protection mechanisms is lacking.

“We see that failure of ‘never again’ when it comes to Gaza, because Israel has systematically expelled and dismantled any kind of UN presence and prevented international organisations from performing their minimal humanitarian objectives,” Sultany said.

In Bosnia, as in Gaza, people were forced to flee for their lives in the face of relentless violence by the attacking forces.

Israel has issued expulsion order after expulsion order, pushing people out of one part of Gaza into another, then back again. It declared certain areas as “safe zones”, then proceeded to bomb them as refugees slept in flimsy tents that Israeli bombs turned into infernos in seconds.

Displacement and its physical and psychological toll on refugees have been studied in various contexts, with scientists finding that displaced people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders at much higher rates due to the uncertainty of displacement, the destruction of social support systems, and the inability to maintain a semblance of “normal life”.

Add to that the forced starvation Israel is imposing on Gaza, which takes a physical and mental toll, as people watch their loved ones die of malnutrition or from curable diseases that their bodies are too weak to fight.

Sultany pointed out that “forcible transfers, in which Palestinians are being forced into increasingly shrinking spaces with limited ability to survive and dire humanitarian conditions”, have been a hallmark of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Therefore, while Katz’s comments were a continuation/extension of what was already being seen on the ground, this now resembles an official plan.

“The question of forcible transfer is part of the declared objectives of the so-called Gideon’s Chariots military campaign in early May 2025 [and] it was also part of the so-called General’s Plan in northern Gaza in October till December 2024,” he clarified.

How to make a society accept genocide

Israel’s actions in Gaza are widely documented, with daily accounts of unarmed Palestinians being shot by snipers or bombed from above.

Israel has been denounced for its indiscriminate killing of civilians, especially after investigations showed that its army had allowed itself a higher “margin of error” when it came to killing civilians in this conflict, compared to its past wars on Gaza.

Both experts argued that this is widely accepted within Israel because Palestinians have been dehumanised, much as Bosniaks were during the 1990s.

Sultany said, in both Bosnia and Gaza today, civilians have been stripped of their civilian status, or innocence, through repeated messaging to society at large.

Early examples include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framing the assault on Gaza and its civilians as a “holy war” and using Biblical references to equate Palestinians to ancient foes to justify these actions by saying: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”

Most recently,  far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May that Gaza’s population would soon be choked into a small strip of land to make them “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

Documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia pointed to several instances of propaganda by Bosnian Serb leaders to dehumanise Bosniaks and brand them as “foreigners”, including claiming that Bosniaks were all assassins with “kill lists” of Bosnian Serbs.

Such descriptors, Sultany said, give aggressors a “justification for the killing of civilians” and make the killing more palatable to society.

“We see all of that now in Gaza in the last 21 months,” Sultany added.

Vukusic agreed, telling Al Jazeera that in both Bosnia and Gaza, there has been a “deep process of dehumanisation to allow for the societal acceptance of such acts where you see a people [who are] civilians as enemies”.

There becomes a “broad acceptance of acts committed by the government where only the suffering of yourself and your people [is seen] and it absolutely does not matter what the costs are for somebody else”, she added.

This shift is apparent in how freely and often Israeli officials have made openly genocidal statements.

Serbian leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic (president of the Republic of Serbia from 1990 to 1997 and Serbia and Montenegro until 2000), were tried by the International Court of Justice for genocide and war crimes. Milosevic died before he was convicted.

“If you compare what Slobodan Milosevic was saying to some of the things that Israeli ministers are saying, Slobodan Milosevic was never, ever that open and was never, ever that explicit,” she said.

Because statements by Israeli officials are so explicit, “the determination of the genocidal intent would probably be much easier to make”, she added.

Inaction, politics and the international community

Western nations were initially reluctant to involve themselves in the Bosnian War, but the horror of Srebrenica eventually moved them to action, with NATO conducting an air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces in August and September 1995, eventually leading to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war.

Yet many of the countries that led the defence of the Bosniaks after Srebrenica are some of Israel’s biggest backers.

“In many ways, this is a Western genocide,” Sultany said. “There is a US-Israel genocide, a genocide that was backed from the beginning by major European and North American powers.

“This is fundamental to understanding the Western support for and justification for the genocide in Palestine,” Sultany said.

“It’s not only that the West was a reluctant observer, and they failed to prevent the genocide. They were actively from the beginning supporting it, shielding it diplomatically and politically and financing and arming it.”

Elusive justice

What did justice look like for the victims in Bosnia, and is that a model that could be followed in Gaza?

In the case of Bosnia, there is no universal position on the question of justice among the victims.

Vukusic said some were satisfied with the prison sentences given to high-level officials convicted of genocide, while others are disappointed because not all the hundreds of people who participated in war crimes or genocidal acts were held to account.

Sultany, after a recent visit to Bosnia, is convinced that Bosnians have been failed by international justice.

“The initial case was brought in 1993, [but] was delivered in 2007, almost 14 years later,” he said. “So the wheels of justice grind very slowly.”

He added that Srebrenica, a single massacre, was singled out among years of massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Bosnian Serb forces.

“Anyone who was killed before or after or [in] different areas is not considered a victim of genocide because of the detrimental effects of the legal delimitation of what is a genocide in the case of Bosnia,” he said.

In Gaza, where attacks against Palestinians are ongoing, justice may be difficult to envision. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024, the international community has failed to follow through on them.

Vukusic said expectations should be tempered when considering international justice, but that prosecutions are still important, allowing facts to be established in court, and messages sent about what the law does not allow.

For example, Vukusic said: “You cannot cut off a civilian population [from food and water], you cannot make them thirsty and hungry and without medicine, you cannot bomb universities, you cannot raze to the ground a whole area where two million people live.

“Those [messages] may be helpful, but nothing is going to restore what people have lost,” she said. “Nothing is going to bring back dead family members.”

“In both cases [Bosnia and Palestine], there is a failure of prevention mechanisms,” Sultany said. “And the fact that it fails again … is a miscarriage of justice in itself that requires us to rethink the international legal order.”

Sultany added that the ongoing injustices against Palestinians are down to “long-term impunity” and “the fact that the Israelis have not been held to account by any meaningful legal mechanisms”.

“Never again” has not been put into practice when it comes to Palestinians, according to Sultany.

It might seem bizarre to speak of hope in these dark times. In Palestine, the horror of genocidal violence is coupled with the sickening acquiescence of Western powers to it. In Sudan, war rages, with the people of Darfur once again facing war crimes on a mass scale. While in the United States, the blitzkrieg advance of broligarchic authoritarianism has caught many by surprise and left devastation in its wake.

Yet, hope there is. For, across the icy ground of political repression and reaction, the green shoots of possibility are poking through, with movements of various sorts pointing towards a paradigm shift that places people before profit and, in so doing, charts a pathway for progressives.

The latest example is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Party’s primary election for New York’s mayoral race. Mamdani was successful because he focused on the economic difficulties faced by the poor and middle class and promised free, foundational basics, like public transport and childcare. Importantly, he proposed paying for all this by raising taxes on corporations and the rich.

In the United Kingdom, after years in the wilderness, progressives of various sorts are rallying behind Zack Polanski’s bid to lead the Green Party. After he announced his intention to contest the leadership seat, party membership jumped by 8 percent in the first month alone, as people embraced his call to rein in corporate power, tax the rich, and make sure that the state serves the 99 percent instead of the 1, now and in our climate-threatened future.

In the Global South, similar trends are in evidence. In India, in the last election, the Congress party finally managed to stem the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s saffron tide by promising unconditional income support to each poor family alongside universal, cashless health insurance. This came after one of the world’s largest basic income trials, conducted in Hyderabad, produced hugely exciting results that fed into Congress’s thinking, with policies to be funded by more redistributive taxation.

Likewise, in South Africa, the inheritors of the country’s anti-apartheid struggle have built a nationwide movement to demand extension of what was initially an emergency relief grant during the COVID-19 pandemic into a permanent basic income designed to ensure economic security for all. Aside from increasing progressive taxation, one of the more exciting ideas to emerge from this struggle for economic justice has been to frame (and fund) the basic income as a “rightful share” due to all citizens as their portion of the country’s wealth.

What unites all these various developments?

To begin to make sense of them, we first need to remind ourselves that the two fundamental questions of all politics are simply who gets what and who decides. In our present global capitalist order, the (very) rich decide, and they allocate most of the wealth that exists to themselves. In turn, like rulers throughout the ages, they pit the have-nots against those who have even less, maintaining their dominance through divide-and-rule.

At the heart of this strategy sits a foundational lie, which is repeated ad infinitum by the corporate misinformation architecture. The lie is: there is not enough to go around, because we live in a world of scarcity. From this awful premise stems the violent division of the world into “us” and “them”, the line between one and the other determining who will and will not have access to what is needed to live a decent life. From there, it is a short step to the disciplinary notion of “deservingness”, which adds the veneer of moral justification to otherwise uncomfortable exclusions.

The contemporary rise of the far right is little more than an expression of these foundational tensions. When people struggle en masse to make ends meet, they demand more, and when they do, those who control the purse strings as well as the narrative double down on the story that in a world of scarcity, people can only have more if some other, “less deserving”, people have none.

In this historical tragedy, the far right plays a treacherous role, protecting the rich and powerful from discontent by sowing division among the dispossessed. While the centre-left – long the hapless accomplice – plays that of the useful idiot, unquestioning in its acceptance of the founding myth of scarcity and thus condemned to forever attempt the impossible: treating the symptoms of inequality without ever addressing its underlying cause.

The alternative to this doom-loop politics is obvious when you stop to think about it, and it is what distinguishes each of the exciting examples noted above. The first step is a clear, confident affirmation of what most of us intuitively know to be true – that abundant wealth exists in our world. Indeed, the numbers make clear that there is more than enough to go around. The issue, of course, is just that this wealth is poorly distributed, with the top 1 percent controlling more than 95 percent of the rest of humanity, with many corporations richer than countries, and with those trends only set to worsen as the hyper-elite write the rules and rig the political game.

The second, most vital, step is to put the question of distribution back at the centre of politics. If common people struggle to make ends meet in spite of abundant wealth, then it is only because some have too much while most do not have enough.

This is exactly what progressives in the US, the UK, India, and South Africa have been doing, evidently to great effect. And this should be no surprise – the data shows again and again that equality is popular, voters like fairness, and overwhelmingly people support limits to extreme wealth.

The third step is to frame progressive demands as policies that meet people’s basic needs. What unites free childcare, healthcare, and transport? Quite simply, each of these straightforward measures will disproportionately benefit the poor, working majority and will do so precisely because they represent unavoidable everyday expenses that constrain common people’s spending power. By the same token, basic income is attractive both because it is simple and because it offers the promise of foundational economic security for the majority who presently lack it.

Yet what also unites these policy proposals and the platforms they have come to represent is that they are all in important ways unconditional. It is difficult to overstate how radical this is: almost every aspect of global social policy is conditional in one sense or another. The guaranteed provision of foundational basics to all without exclusion goes against the very idea of scarcity and its craven companion, deservingness.

What it says is that we all deserve because we are all human, and because of that, we shall use the resources that exist to make sure that we all have at least the basics that make up for a decent life.

In this radical message, hope abounds. Our task now is to nurture it and help it to grow.

In the besieged Gaza Strip, Palestinians burn plastic to produce desperately needed fuel – despite the risks to their health and the environment.

Toxic Fumes: Gaza under Siege is part of a series called Climate & War, commissioned by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), which tells personal stories to reveal how war exacerbates climate change.

Exercise Talisman Sabre, the largest ever war drills in Australia, is under way and expected to attract the attention of Chinese spy ships. Talisman Sabre began in 2005 as a biennial joint exercise between the United States and Australia.

This year, more than 35,000 military personnel from 19 nations, including Canada, Fiji, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Tonga, and the United Kingdom, will take part over three weeks, Australia’s Department of Defence said on Sunday.

Malaysia and Vietnam are also attending as observers.

The exercise will also take place in Papua New Guinea, Australia’s nearest neighbour. It is the first time Talisman Sabre activities have been held outside Australia.

Chinese surveillance ships have monitored naval exercises off the Australian coast during the last four Talisman Sabre exercises and were expected to surveil the current exercise, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said.

“We will adjust accordingly. We will obviously observe their activities and monitor their presence around Australia, but we will also adjust how we conduct those exercises,” Conroy said.

The exercise, showcasing Australia’s defence alliance with the US, started a day after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese began a six-day visit to China, where he is expected to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Tuesday.

Albanese said Chinese surveillance of Talisman Sabre would not be raised with Xi. “That would be nothing unusual. That has happened in the past and I will continue to assert Australia’s national interest, as I do,” Albanese told reporters in Shanghai on Monday.