INDIVIDUAL US military personnel assisting the war crimes of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank territory could be prosecuted for their actions, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported this week.
Previously pro-Palestine human rights groups have focused on protesting against the complicity of the US, UK and other governments for arming Israel’s murderous campaign of annihilation in the Gaza Strip with over $US43.4 billion of arms and military supplies.
But as Israel is moving to murder or drive out the one million Palestinian population of Gaza city, pro-Palestinian protesters have now escalated their opposition to also include military co-operation and intelligence sharing, according to Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director of HRW.
He said that the US government has made no secret of its operational support for the Israeli war on Gaza for 22 months, providing intelligence data from satellites and AWAC aircraft and even building a pier off the Gaza coastline to facilitate the Israeli army logistics to supply military equipment directly from the sea.
More incriminating though, Shakir continued, is the embedding of US military forces with Israeli operational planning.
In October 2024, Joe Biden, then US president, admitted that US special operations personnel and members of the intelligence community had helped Israel target Hamas leaders, including its former head, Yahya Sinwar.
The direct participation of US forces in Israel’s illegal genocide and mass murder of the Palestinian population makes it a party to the conflict, which means that those individual US soldiers are liable for any war crimes committed with their assistance.
‘It goes beyond complicity. The US has directly participated in hostilities. If you played a role in it and the Israeli forces carried out war crimes, you could still be liable for a war crime,’ Shakir concluded.
However, the role of the UK in supporting Israel’s war is no less culpable. It supplies military equipment and arms, provides logistical support for US military aircraft bound for Israel, and allows them to land and refuel at the UK airbase in Cyprus.
UK fighter jets also defend Israel, along with the US, in its illegal war with Iran by targeting Tehran’s missiles and drones.
But it is not just the complicity of the US and UK foot soldiers that is the issue. Political leaders like Trump and the UK PM’s Keir Starmer, and their military generals will also have to face justice for their complicity in the horrific attempts to annihilate the Palestinian people.
Now, the Palestinian struggle is confronted with the obscene spectacle of arch war criminal and warmonger Tony Blair advising US president Trump on how to annihilate the Gazans or displace them to South Sudan!
Blair is reviled globally for invading and destroying Iraq together with the US using a fabricated intelligence dossier alleging that Iraqi missiles were capable of hitting UK bases in Cyprus in 45 minutes.
Blair’s involvement is to seek Arab acquiescence and finance for Trump’s plan for a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’, to be built on the bones of millions of Palestinians in Gaza, and for some sort of quasi-military regime to rule over it, with the assistance of Egypt, after the demise of Hamas.
In an act of supreme imperial arrogance and cynicism Blair has been installed as a ‘peace envoy’ in the Middle East.
It is obvious that the pro-Israel US or UK governments will never prosecute their military who are carrying out their orders and doing the dirty work of the imperialists.
In fact, the only justice these war criminals will ever face is the revolutionary justice of working class socialist governments set up after the imperialist regimes are overthrown by socialist revolutions.
Spearheaded by the undefeated Palestinian revolution in Gaza, which has now split Israeli society, the working class of the world must rise up to overthrow their ruling classes with mass trade union actions and general strikes to bring down the imperialist regimes and prepare the seizure of power by the working class to give full support to the Palestinian victory to achieve their independent nation.
The British TUC annual congress is meeting in Brighton on 7th September and will be lobbied by the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists, plus trade union members and other workers to demand it calls a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a Workers Government and socialism.
Join the lobby on September 7th. Demand a general strike to bring down the Starmer government. This capitalist system is in its death agony. Demand that the TUC makes 7th September the first day of an indefinite general strike to bring in a Workers Government!
