“This is a famine we could have prevented, had we been allowed to.” — Tom Fletcher, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, 22 August 2025

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On 19 May 2026, at the port of Ashdod, a man filmed himself. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, moved through rows of humanitarian activists on their knees, hands bound behind their backs, foreheads to the pavement. They had come from 44 countries, sailing toward Gaza with food. They were intercepted in international waters. Ben-Gvir waved a flag. When an Irish woman, Catrióna Graham, managed to shout “Free Palestine,” two guards forced her head to the ground. The minister smiled at the camera.

“Welcome to Israel,” he said. “We are the landlords here. That is how it should be.”

Then he posted the video himself.[1]

That gesture — not the abuse itself, but its deliberate publication — is where this indictment begins. A man who films his own cruelty and broadcasts it to the world fears no consequences. He knows none will come. That certainty has a name: impunity. And impunity has suppliers. This text charges both.

Let this be stated plainly at the outset: this is not a charge against a people, a faith, or a civilisation. Peoples are not regimes. The critique of a state is not hatred of its citizens. This indictment charges acts, decisions, names, dates, and figures. It requires no invective. The evidence is sufficient.

The Testimony

Begin with the bodies. Lawyers from Adalah — the Israeli-based Arab minority rights organisation — interviewed hundreds of detainees at Ashdod Port on the night of 20 May. Their reports document widespread violence, sexual abuse, and psychological torment prior to transfer to Ketziot Prison in the Negev desert.[2] Miriam Azem of Adalah cited rubber bullets, organised humiliation, sexual harassment, and one activist forced to strip naked and run while guards laughed. At least three people were hospitalised.

These accounts are not exceptional in time. During a previous flotilla interception in October 2025, Italian journalist Saverio Tommasi reported that soldiers had withheld medicines and treated detainees “like monkeys.”[3] His colleague Lorenzo D’Agostino described dogs used for intimidation, laser sights trained on prisoners “to scare us,” and his personal belongings “stolen by the Israelis.” A protected-identity detainee reported having drunk only from a toilet tap for three days. Former Barcelona mayor Ada Colau described “a maximum-security prison where no rule of law existed.”

Go back further. In 2010, ten members of the first Freedom Flotilla were killed by Israeli commandos aboard the Mavi Marmara. They were not combatants.[4] The UN Human Rights Council found evidence of summary executions. The UN Secretary-General’s own inquiry called the blockade unlawful and the force excessive. No one was ever tried. The pattern recurs in 2025, in May 2026: interception, abuse, deportation, impunity. This is not accidental repetition. It is method.

Famine as Policy

Image: United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, OCHA, Tom Fletcher (Source)

The Ashdod video would be almost a footnote if measured against what has been happening in Gaza since March 2025. On 22 August 2025, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, officially declared famine in the Gaza governorate. His words were precise and, for that reason, devastating:

“This is a famine we could have prevented, had we been allowed to. Food is piling up at the borders because of Israel’s systematic obstruction.”[5]

Systematic obstruction. The word is the UN’s, not the accusers’.

The figures delivered by UN agencies are exact and uncontested. According to UNICEF, one in five children in Gaza suffers from severe acute malnutrition.[6] By 30 August, Gaza’s Ministry of Health counted 332 deaths from starvation and malnutrition, including 124 children.[7] At that same moment, the World Food Programme and partner agencies held sufficient stocks in the region to feed all 2.1 million inhabitants for at least three months. The food existed. It was not let in.

Deliberately starving a civilian population by blocking available aid has a legal designation. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies as a war crime “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”[8] The ICC has charged Israeli leaders. The ICJ has been seized. Those proceedings are ongoing. The judicial verdict will come.

The Money, the Veto, and the Architecture of Impunity

Why does this continue without sanction? Because it is funded and shielded. The figures come from American institutions themselves. According to the Council on Foreign Relations,[9] the United States has provided at least $16 to $18 billion in direct military assistance since 7 October 2023: tank and artillery shells, bombs, rockets, missile defence. Israel’s own Defence Ministry, in May 2025, put American deliveries at 90,000 metric tons of weaponry on 800 cargo planes and 140 ships. The Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank, was unsparing:[10]

“Israel repeatedly used those US-subsidized arms to commit grave atrocities in violation of American and international law.”

That assessment belongs to a Washington think tank, not a pamphlet.

The financial lifeline is matched by a diplomatic shield. The United States has cast six vetoes since October 2023 against Security Council ceasefire resolutions.[11] In September 2025, 14 Council members demanded an end to hostilities, the lifting of humanitarian restrictions, and the return of hostages. Washington, alone, blocked. A state whose war survives the unanimous demand of the international community does not act alone. It acts on behalf of what protects it.

As for Europe: governments summoned ambassadors after the Ashdod video. Italy. France. The Netherlands. Canada. Solemn indignation, carefully worded statements. Not a single arms contract was suspended. Summoning an ambassador after delivering the bombs is deploring the smoke while selling the match. Indignation, in this context, is the last refuge of complicity.

The Confession of the Accused

The most damning piece of evidence is not produced by the prosecution. It is spoken by the defendant. In January 2026, in an interview with The Economist, Netanyahu declared that Israel was fighting to defend “all of Western civilisation” against “fanatical forces” seeking to drag the world back “to the early Middle Ages.”[12] Take this seriously and at face value. When a head of government claims the role of advanced bastion of Western civilisation, he names his own function. A forward outpost never acts for itself alone. The cruelty at Ashdod and the famine in Gaza are not aberrant local policies. On the admitted account of their political architect, they are carried out in the name of a larger order.

The West’s own representatives confirmed this, inadvertently. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, responding to the Ashdod video, wrote:

“The flotilla was a stupid stunt, but Ben-Gvir betrayed the dignity of his nation.”

Read that again. The scandal is the damaged image — never the suffering of the activists. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saʳar reproached Ben-Gvir only for having “deliberately caused harm to the state.” Netanyahu ordered deportations “as quickly as possible” — not out of remorse, but to contain a media fire. The crisis was one of optics, not of conscience.

The Long Record and the Law

The objection will come: one minister, one video. The file answers with duration and with texts. In October 1953, Major Ariel Sharon’s Unit 101 attacked the Palestinian village of Qibya in the West Bank: 69 civilians killed, most of them women and children, crushed beneath the rubble of dynamited homes.[13] The Security Council condemned it. Sharon became Prime Minister half a century later.

On 29 October 1956, the eve of the Suez War, Israeli border police established an emergency curfew at Kafr Qassem. The Arab villagers returning from the fields did not know. Forty-eight of them — 23 children aged eight to 17, women, men, and a pregnant woman whose unborn child is counted as the 49th victim — were shot at close range.[14] An Israeli military court convicted eight officers. The sentences were commuted and dissolved before 1960. The doctrine of the “manifestly illegal order” — that a soldier must refuse a clearly criminal command — was born from this trial. It has never been systematically applied.

In September 1982, in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, Phalangist militiamen allied with Israel killed between 1,300 and 3,500 civilians over 40 hours while the Israeli army controlled the perimeter and illuminated the camp at night.[15] The Kahan Commission — established by Israel’s own government, chaired by the President of the Supreme Court — found Israel bore “indirect responsibility” and recommended Sharon’s dismissal as Defence Minister. He was never tried. He became Prime Minister. Impunity does not humble the men who receive it. It promotes them.

Today, a 2026 law championed by Ben-Gvir allows military courts to impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis — a penalty not applicable to Israeli Jews convicted of killing Palestinians.[16] A capital sentence that depends on the identity of the accused. There is a word for a legal system that places two categories of humanity on different sides of the threshold of death.

What Intellectual Honesty Requires

An indictment that intends to last does not select its evidence: it confronts all of it. Israel has independent courts that have occasionally convicted soldiers. It has a free press — Haaretz, +972 Magazine — that investigates its own government. Adalah, whose testimony grounds this text, is an Israeli organisation. In 1982, four hundred thousand Israelis marched in Tel Aviv demanding an inquiry into Sabra and Shatila. These countervailing forces have existed.

The thesis is therefore not that Israel has been identical to itself since 1948: that would be false, and easily refuted. The thesis is more severe: the internal safeguards are failing, and failing rapidly. The Kahan Commission would not have allowed the Ashdod video to pass without consequence. The 2026 government issued a press statement and moved on. That a man once convicted by Israeli courts for supporting a proscribed Jewish terrorist organisation now serves as Minister of National Security, passes laws on life and death, and films his abuses without fear: this is the measure of the retreat.

Achille Mbembe named the logic that runs through this history: necropolitics — the sovereign power to decide who may be killed and under what conditions a death leaves or does not leave a trace. Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as a world cut in two, where the dividing line runs between humanities held to be unequal. Malek Bennabi spoke of “colonisability” — that interior disposition a declining civilisation allows to form within itself, which renders it open to subjection by others. Turned outward, the concept names not only the colonised but also the incapacity of the Arab world and the Global South to build the coalitions that would impose real consequences. The challenge is addressed to the bystanders no less than to the actors.

The Verdict

Three precise demands, because precision is what commits.

First: arms suppliers must answer. A state that delivers ninety thousand tons of weaponry, casts six vetoes against a ceasefire, and sanctions the organisers of humanitarian flotillas while deploring their treatment for the cameras is not a bystander. It is a co-defendant. Weapons deliveries during a famine officially declared by that same state’s own agencies do not constitute foreign policy. They constitute material complicity.

Second: international justice must run its course, without veto or extortion. An international order applied selectively is not an order. It is a power relation dressed as a principle. The ICJ and the ICC exist precisely for moments such as this. Every government that paralyses them when its interests are at stake is not defending the rules-based order. It is dismantling it.

Third: the Global South must stop subcontracting its voice to forums designed not to hear it. South Africa showed the way by seizing the ICJ. Others have joined. This is the only structural response: not indignation, but patient, coordinated, irreversible legal and diplomatic action.

Coda: What History Will Ask

There is, in what is happening in Gaza, something that exceeds regional conflict and speaks to humanity entire. Every era produces its great impunities — those moments when a crime is committed in full view of all, and each witness chooses whether to see or look away. It is that line, more than any territorial border, that separates advancing civilisations from declining ones.

The universal moral law — what Ibn Khaldun understood as the ʻasabiyya of all humanity, what Kant formulated as the imperative to treat every human being as an end and never merely as a means, what the United Nations Charter translates into positive law — does not admit geographical exceptions. A child who dies of starvation in Gaza because food was blocked at the border is not a casualty of abstract History. He is the result of a human decision, taken by identifiable individuals, funded by traceable budgets, covered by recorded votes. This is why this indictment is written with names and numbers: because abstraction is the primary refuge of impunity.

History will judge, as it always has, not those who were right too early, but those who knew — and stayed silent. The Ashdod video will have served one involuntary purpose: for a few seconds, the face of the bastion smiled at the camera, and behind that smile one glimpsed the order sustaining it — its budgets, its vetoes, its organised silences.

I charge, therefore, not an essence but acts: detained civilians systematically humiliated; children dying of starvation in front of food blocked at the border; a law that places two categories of humanity on either side of the threshold of death; a war sustained against the expressed will of the world. I charge the hands that arm and the vetoes that cover. And I do so with names, dates, and figures — because that is the only way, and the only way, an indictment survives time.

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Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist, and geopolitical analyst. He has been writing on Trump, American hegemony, and the collapse of the international order since 2025. His work appears in Countercurrents, Global Research, Réseau International, Le Quotidien d’Oran, Sri Lanka Guardian, and other international platforms. This article integrates and crowns a corpus of analytical work produced between November 2025 and April 13, 2026.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

[1] Video posted to Ben-Gvir’s official X account, 20 May 2026. Sources: Al Jazeera, ‘Outrage over Israel’s Ben-Gvir flotilla abuse video,’ 21 May 2026; Times of Israel, same date; CNN, ‘Video showing far-right Israeli minister taunting Gaza flotilla activists sparks global outcry,’ 20 May 2026.

[2] Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, statement 21 May 2026, reported in Jerusalem Post, ‘Adalah claims flotilla activists abused by Israeli authorities,’ 21 May 2026; Peoples Dispatch, ‘Flotilla activists deported after days of abuse,’ 21 May 2026. Adalah is an Israeli-registered legal organisation accredited before Israeli courts.

[3] Saverio Tommasi, statement at Fiumicino Airport, reported by the Associated Press, 5 October 2025; Al Jazeera, ‘More Gaza flotilla activists allege mistreatment in Israeli detention,’ 5 October 2025; Euronews, same date.

[4] UN Human Rights Council, Report A/HRC/15/21, ‘Report of the international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international law resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla,’ September 2010: concluded that summary executions had taken place. UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry (the Palmer Report), September 2011: described the naval blockade as ‘not compatible with international law’ and the force used as ‘excessive and unreasonable.’

[5] Tom Fletcher, official statement, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 22 August 2025, reported by UN News and confirmed by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis published August 2025, which formally classified conditions in the Gaza governorate as Famine (IPC Phase 5) based on all three technical threshold criteria.

[6] UNICEF, report August 2025: 23% of children admitted for treatment presented severe acute malnutrition in August 2025, up from 12% six months earlier. The IPC August 2025 analysis placed over 500,000 people in IPC Phase 5 (Famine), projecting 640,000 by end-September 2025.

[7] Gaza Ministry of Health, statement 30 August 2025, relayed by the Palestinian official news agency WAFA. Cross-referenced with OCHA data: by 13 August, the Ministry had recorded 235 malnutrition-related deaths since October 2023, including 106 children.

[8] Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Art. 8(2)(b)(xxv). In May 2024, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant on charges including this count. South Africa had filed its application at the International Court of Justice in December 2023 (Application instituting proceedings and request for provisional measures in the case of Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

[9] Council on Foreign Relations, ‘U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts,’ updated October 2025. Total direct military aid since 7 October 2023: at least $16–18 billion, comprising $8.7 billion under the April 2024 supplemental appropriations act and $3.8 billion annually under the Memorandum of Understanding. In May 2025, Israel’s Defence Ministry itself placed American deliveries at 90,000 metric tons of arms on 800 cargo aircraft and 140 ships.

[10] Center for International Policy, statement by Executive Vice-President Matthew Duss, 17 November 2025: “The United States gave Israel nearly $18 billion in weapons aid over the two years of the Gaza war – and Israel repeatedly used those US-subsidized arms to commit grave atrocities in violation of American and international law.”

[11] Sixth US veto: UN Security Council, session of 19 September 2025, draft resolution demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire, full Israeli withdrawal, and lifting of humanitarian restrictions. Vote: 14 in favour, 1 against (United States). Source: UN News, ‘US vetoes Security Council resolution demanding permanent ceasefire in Gaza,’ 19 September 2025.

[12] Benjamin Netanyahu, interview with The Economist, January 2026, cited in War on the Rocks, ‘Does Guaranteeing Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge Still Serve U.S. Interests?’ February 2026.

[13] UN Security Council Resolution S/RES/101 (1953), condemning the Qibya attack. Figure of 69 civilians killed confirmed by Israeli military sources: see Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 257–261.

[14] Israeli military court, case of Ofer et al., 1957. Official toll: 48 victims (49 in Arab sources, counting the foetus). Eight officers convicted; all sentences commuted and served before 1960. The doctrine of the ‘manifestly illegal order’ (pkauda mifaheret levina) originates in this judgment: see David Kretzmer, The Occupation of Justice (SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 176–179.

[15] Kahan Commission of Inquiry, official report of the Government of Israel, 8 February 1983. Findings: Israel bore ‘indirect responsibility’ for the massacre; Defence Minister Ariel Sharon bore ‘personal responsibility’ through ‘non-prevention.’ Recommended Sharon’s dismissal. Death toll range: 700 (official Israeli figure) to 3,500 (journalist Amnon Kapeliouk’s inquiry); IRC on-site count: 328 bodies, excluding mass graves.

[16] Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, 27 April 2021: documents the dual legal regime — civil law with its protections for Jewish Israeli citizens, military law with near-100% conviction rates for Palestinians under occupation. The 2026 death-penalty law: noted in Al Jazeera, ‘Outrage over Israel’s Ben-Gvir flotilla abuse video,’ 21 May 2026; Times of Israel, same date.

Featured image: Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir reacts as flotilla activists are detained by Israeli forces, in Ashdod Port, Israel, in this screen grab taken from a video released on May 20, 2026. Office Of Itamar Ben Gvir/Handout via REUTERS. OFFICE OF ITAMAR BEN GVIR / VIA REUTERS

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