DaysofPal – Milena Ansari, a legal researcher at Human Rights Watch, has asserted that the prolonged Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip—now exceeding 600 days—represents a defining test for the credibility of international justice, especially amid the global failure to stop what she described as “acts amounting to genocide.”
In an interview with Palestine Online, Ansari criticized the refusal of certain states, particularly the United States and Hungary, to enforce the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She described this inaction as “a direct insult to the victims of these crimes” and a severe blow to the integrity of international accountability mechanisms.
Ansari noted that Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented Israel’s use of starvation and the denial of medical access as weapons of war. By blocking the entry of essential supplies such as food, water, and medicine, she explained, the occupation has caused thousands of preventable deaths—especially among children, the elderly, and the chronically ill.
She also condemned the surge in settler violence and the continued forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank, describing these actions as part of Israel’s ongoing apartheid system and a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing.
Despite the grim circumstances, Ansari expressed cautious optimism over emerging legal and diplomatic developments. She welcomed moves by several European governments to reevaluate their political and military relations with Israel and urged international legal bodies to expand arrest warrants to include all officials involved in documented war crimes and crimes against humanity.
She concluded by emphasizing that “justice begins in the streets,” crediting grassroots activism and public pressure for influencing recent shifts in the stance of Western governments toward Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories.
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