THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The top United Nations court said Friday that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories is unlawful and called on it to end, and for settlement construction to stop immediately, issuing an unprecedented, sweeping condemnation of Israel’s rule over the lands it captured 57 years ago.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly denounced the nonbinding opinion issued by the 15-judge panel of the International Court of Justice, saying the territories are part of the Jewish people’s historic homeland. But the resounding breadth of the decision could impact international opinion and fuel moves for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.
The judges pointed to a wide list of policies, including the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, use of the area’s natural resources, the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, all of which it said violated international law.
The court said Israel had no right to sovereignty in the territories, was violating international laws against acquiring territory by force and was impeding Palestinians’ right to self-determination. It said other nations were obliged not to “render aid or assistance in maintaining” Israel’s presence in the territories. It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and that existing settlements must be removed, according to a summary of the more than 80-page opinion read out by court President Nawaf Salam.
Israel’s “abuse of its status as the occupying power” renders its “presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful,” the court said, saying its presence must be ended as “rapidly as possible.”
The court’s opinion, sought by the U.N. General Assembly after a Palestinian request, came against the backdrop of Israel’s devastating military assault on Gaza, which was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7. In a separate case, the International Court of Justice is considering a South African claim that Israel’s campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide, a claim that Israel vehemently denies.
The court said the General Assembly and Security Council — where staunch Israeli ally the United States holds a veto — should consider “the precise modalities” to end Israel’s presence in the territories.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will promptly transmit the advisory opinion to the 193-member world body and “it is for the General Assembly to decide how to proceed in the matter,” U.N. deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said.
The secretary-general reiterates his call for Israel and the Palestinians to engage “on the long-delayed political path towards ending the occupation and resolving the conflict in line with international law, relevant U.N. resolutions and bilateral agreements,” the spokesperson said.
Guterres also stressed that a two-state solution is “the only viable path” to seeing Israel and “a fully independent, democratic, contiguous, viable and sovereign Palestinian state” living side by side in peace and security, Haq said.
Israel, which normally considers the United Nations and international tribunals as unfair and biased, didn’t send a legal team to the hearings. Instead, it submitted written comments, saying that the questions put to the court are prejudiced and fail to address Israeli security concerns. Israeli officials have said the court’s intervention could undermine the peace process, which has been stagnant for more than a decade.
“The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land — not in our eternal capital Jerusalem and not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office, using the biblical terms for the West Bank. “No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”
Speaking outside the court, Riad Malki, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called the opinion “a watershed moment for Palestine, for justice and for international law.”
He said other nations must now “uphold the clear obligations” outlined by the court. “No actions of any kind … to support Israel’s illegal occupation.”
Hamas welcomed the court’s decision and said in a statement that “serious steps on the ground” need to be taken in response.
Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek all three areas for an independent state.
Israel considers the West Bank to be disputed territory, the future of which should be decided in negotiations, while it has moved populations there in settlements to solidify its hold. It has annexed east Jerusalem in a move that isn’t internationally recognized, while it withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but maintained a blockade of the territory after Hamas took power in 2007. The international community generally considers all three areas to be occupied territory.
The court’s decision strikes at the heart of the ambiguity of Israel’s administration of the territories. Israel hasn’t annexed the West Bank — though settler groups have pressed it to do so — but it calls it part of its homeland and has effectively treated it as an extension of the nation. Along with the settlements, it has appropriated large swaths of the territory as “state lands.” At the same time, Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly rejected the creation of any Palestinian state. Abbas’ Palestinian Authority has been restricted to control over divided enclaves scattered around the West Bank.
The Palestinians presented arguments at hearings in February, along with 49 other nations and three international organizations. In the hearings, Malki accused Israel of apartheid and urged the United Nations’ top court to declare that Israel’s occupation of lands sought by the Palestinians is illegal and must end immediately and unconditionally for any hope for a two-state future to survive.
Erwin van Veen, a senior research fellow at the Clingendael think tank in The Hague, said before the decision that a ruling that Israel’s policies breach international law would “isolate Israel further internationally, at least from a legal point of view.”
He said such a ruling would remove “any kind of legal, political, philosophical underpinning of the Israeli expansion project.” It could also increase the number of countries that recognize a Palestinian state, in particular in the Western world, following the recent example of Spain, Norway and Ireland, he said.
It’s not the first time the ICJ has been asked to give its legal opinion on Israeli policies. Two decades ago, the court ruled that Israel’s West Bank separation barrier was “contrary to international law.” Israel boycotted those proceedings, saying they were politically motivated.
Israel says the barrier is a security measure. Palestinians say the structure amounts to a massive land grab, because it frequently dips into the West Bank.
The court said that Israel’s construction of settlements in the West Bank violated international laws prohibiting countries from moving their population into territories they occupy.
Israel has built well over 100 settlements, according to the anti-settlement monitoring group Peace Now. The West Bank settler population has grown by more than 15% in the past five years to more than 500,000 Israelis, according to a pro-settler group. Their residents are Israeli citizens governed by domestic law and served by government ministries, services, banks and other businesses — effectively integrating them into Israel.
Israel also has annexed east Jerusalem and considers the entire city to be its capital. An additional 200,000 Israelis live in settlements built in east Jerusalem that Israel considers to be neighborhoods of its capital. Palestinian residents of the city face systematic discrimination, making it difficult for them to build new homes or expand existing ones.
The international community considers all settlements to be illegal or obstacles to peace since they are built on lands sought by the Palestinians for their state.
Netanyahu’s hard-line government is dominated by settlers and their political supporters. Netanyahu has given his Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a former settler leader, unprecedented authority over settlement policy. Smotrich has used this position to cement Israel’s control over the West Bank by pushing forward plans to build more settlement homes and to legalize outposts.
They want to claim the democrats are the violent ones, the democrats are the ones with gang thugs that threaten everyone. They claim the democrats are the ones using dangerous violence rhetoric. They ignore everything they say and do. Hugs. Scottie
“We are in a battle between GOOD and EVIL. The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars. They want to lock up their political opponents, and terrorize innocent Americans who would tell the truth about it. The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.” – Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, posting yesterday to X.
This morning, Speaker Mike Johnson called on politicians to “turn the rhetoric down."
“We’re all Americans, and we have to treat one another with dignity and respect.”
Don’t blame US for YOUR violence. Trump was shot at by one of your own, with a military assault rifle that was made readily available to him by your own party’s stance on the 2nd amendment. And stop calling us pedophiles you shrieking bag of pus.
i know this first hand when they tried removing my children, around 2006, because our lifestyle a danger to them. That is exactly what we the papers said. Not that they were harmed in and way, but two women in a relationship was a danger. We managed to fight those charges, but a few years earlier, a mother lost custody to her children, because her mother thought her lifestyle was a unhealthy.
It’s obvious a fucking projection of people like herself. THOSE HATER SPEECH 100% filled with harmful lies from MTG is enough to incite the country to turn into herself. She is the culprit of violence like assassination.
I want thank PERSONNELENTE whose post I got the link from. Link below. I hate the infighting from Democrats tearing Biden apart. He is old, but he has great ideas. The time to get someone else was back a year or more ago. Plus all these drop Biden people can not agree on who should replace him. If they try to pass over Harris then it is an automatic win tRump. We have to remember who we are facing, it is tRump we must defeat, not Biden. Hugs. Scottie
Donald Trump announced Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate on Monday. The following article is composed of direct quotes from Vance about Trump, given in interviews, op-eds, tweets, and text messages.
I don’t know who I’m gonna vote for. I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains.2 I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.3
Trump instead offers a political high, a promise to “Make America Great Again” without a single good idea regarding how.4 [His] promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. … Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.5 Whether he wins or not, people are going to wake up and realize these problems are still there.6
Without some recognition that some of these problems in our community are not the fault of other people, they’re not going to be solved by a Mexican border wall or better trade deals with China. Without some recognition along those lines, I don’t believe these problems are ever truly going to get better.7
And if you think, as I do, that Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily have a good message either, that’s maybe not the best approach to politics. It’s not how you win these folks over. And if you’re worried about them being racist now, when you push them away and push them to somebody like Trump, you’re only going to make the problem worse.8
But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire [Republican] Party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. … I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?9
The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation.10 [He] is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way.11 [T]here is definitely an element of [his] support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.12
A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse.13 There are people who are drawn to Trump because he says racially insensitive things.14 [He] still hasn’t apologized for suggesting that a disproportionate share of Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals.15
People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes. … [He] is exploiting something but he’s also leading the white working class to a very dark place.16His rallies may be cathartic, as he screams and yells at conjured enemies, but he offers no solutions. His entire candidacy is an exercise in pointing the finger at someone else. In pointing that finger so repeatedly and enthusiastically, Donald Trump has debased our entire political culture.17
I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.18 [He] makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.19
Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.20
“What’s more, the grievance and resentment at the heart of Trumpist nationalism in America is in some ways quite similar to the mentality of Putinist nationalism in Russia: One obsesses over losing the culture war and being disrespected by the “elites”; the other, over losing the Cold War and being disrespected by the West. Perhaps this explains other similarities in the two mindsets, from the penchant for provocation and in-your-face defiance of norms to the affinity for conspiracy theories. Too many American rightists look at the Putin regime and see kindred spirits.”
Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate, the former president announced on Monday.
Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, was widely expected to be Trump’s vice presidential pick as the pool of potential hopefuls narrowed earlier in the day. Just hours before the announcement, several outlets reported that Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.) and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) were informed by the Trump campaign that they would not be on the 2024 ticket. Others previously thought to be on Trump’s short list included Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), U.S. House Rep. Elise Stefanink (R-N.Y.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
In a post on his own tech platform, Truth Social, Trump lauded Vance as the “person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States.”
“J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association,” he said, adding that he “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”
The choice of Vance, who rose to fame as the author of the controversial memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was likely intended to help Trump shore up support among white, lower-income voters in the Midwest, where President Joe Biden is considered vulnerable in the 2024 race. According to poll averages from FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Biden by more than nine points in Vance’s home state of Ohio, and Biden also trails in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden would likely need to win all three of the latter states to stave off a second Trump term, with swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada also looking vulnerable in 2024.
A former critic of Trump who recast himself as a politician in the MAGA model, Vance’s LGBTQ+ record differs very little from the man at the top of his ticket. During his two years in the U.S. Senate, Vance opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal same-sex marriage rights in the event that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2004 ruling legalizing marriage equality, is repealed by the Supreme Court. He also authored the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would make it a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to provide gender-affirming surgery to trans minors. (This despite the fact that transition surgeries are rarely offered to patients under the age of 18 and only in cases of extreme medical need.)
Additionally, Vance is a supporter of the so-called “parent’s rights” movement, which advocates that LGBTQ+ students be outed to their parents and seeks to remove queer-affirming resources from classrooms. He has repeatedly referred to opponents of those actions as “groomers,” such as in an April 2022 post on X. “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children,” he wrote at the time.
The 39-year-old politician has also opposed diversity and inclusion in the U.S. armed forces, suggesting that he is likely to support re-banning trans servicemembers from the military should Trump be elected. “American political leaders should stop using America’s military as a social justice side project,” his 2022 campaign site reads. “Troops don’t need to focus on diversity or equity or any other progressive buzzword; they need to focus on fighting and winning America’s wars.” The removal of trans troops from the military is a major component of Project 2025, a set of far-right policy proposals shaped and promoted by the anti-LGBTQ+ Heritage Foundation, which Trump has sought to distance himself from in recent days.
Vance’s anti-LGBTQ+ background also includes claiming that Biden supports Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin is anti-trans and blaming the “childless left” for America’s decline, specifically citing U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Furthermore, he once accused U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) of making up the term “Two-Spirit,” which is broadly embraced by LGBTQ+ Native Americans to describe their identities. “Would love if progressives just stopped inventing words,” Vance posted on X in February 2021.
In repeatedly opposing LGBTQ+ equality, Vance has found a perfect match in Trump, whose administration was responsible for more than 200 attacks on queer rights in four years, according to GLAAD. These assaults included repealing protections for trans students, removing resources for LGBTQ+ Americans from federal websites, decimating funding for global HIV/AIDS prevention, and appointing a record-number of judges opposed to LGBTQ+ equality. His administration also made it harder for marginally housed people to find safe shelter and opposed workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees.
Trump, whose own supporters threatened to kill his last vice president for refusing to support Trump’s 2020 bid to remain in office, is likely to resume many of those policies if reelected in November.
Russia launched a barrage of missiles on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in a rare daytime attack, killing at least 20 people across the country and hitting a key children’s hospital
Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate
Scottie's Playtime 