OF THE
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There was a very good feel at the end of the South African presentation on day one. Everyone felt it had gone extremely well, and left very little room for the court to wriggle away from provisional measures. We left the public gallery, and I went with [Jeremy] Corbyn and [Jean Luc] Mèlenchon to meet the South African delegation. This caused some concern to the security officials, who told us that members of the public had to leave immediately and not meet delegates or speak to the media, who were grouped outside the court but still within the precincts.
This was fairly impractical as the media very much wanted to speak with Corbyn and Melenchon. There was a lot of flapping of arms and waving. All my friends of the queue had left, while I stayed sticking close to Jeremy, partly because I didn't like to leave him unsupported, but mostly because his wife Laura was somewhere looking after my phone. The ICJ staff seemed scared to tell off Corbyn and Melenchon, so kept getting pretty shirty with me as a proxy, saying we must leave.
It was quite strange. The situation was very friendly; there was no tension. There were about sixty delegates and about the same number of journalists, who were all supposed to be there. Then there were Corbyn, Melenchon and me, who were apparently supposed to have left, but whose presence made no actual difference to events. People being in slightly the wrong place entirely peacefully after proceedings had finished, seemed to me an unnecessary source of anger. But a succession of female officials arrived, getting increasingly cross.
At this stage the South African delegation returned to their allocated office inside the building to finalise the formal press statement. We went with them. I was chatting to Amaar Hijazi, Palestine's Deputy Foreign Minister, who I know a bit. One of the ICJ ladies came in with a clipboard, asked for silence, and then asked the assembled group in the manner of a public proclamation:
"is this a legal meeting or a political meeting?"
Nobody seemed inclined to answer. So I replied "That's rather a philosophical question. I am not sure if you can make that simple binary distinction". Rather more usefully, Varsha assured her it was a legal meeting, and the official said "good, political meetings off the premises", waving her clipboard for no apparent reason. After a bit of a conflab we went out again.
I was enjoying Melenchon enormously; he seemed to have unlimited stores of bonhomie and was unstoppably voluble with everyone. Whether the security guards wanted a lecture on workers' cooperatives I am not sure, but they certainly got one.
We wandered back out the front door again and back into interviews. Two ladies came up to me looking very stern and said I must leave. Jeremy was giving an interview to Israeli TV and Melenchon had bustled back into the building.
One of the ladies said to me, "I am asking you to leave and you are refusing to do what I say".
I replied, "Oh no, certainly not. Of course I am doing what you say. Just very slowly".
By now I had three enormous security officers with me, as I tried to keep an eye on Jeremy as he drifted through the milling journalists, while I kept running in to people I knew. I have to say the security people were very friendly, and seemed unsure why they were shadowing me too. Shortly a fourth turned up, a mountain of a man with a bald head and beard, who said "here you are, we've been looking for you everywhere", which seemed strange. Possibly they couldn't see me surrounded by their massive bouncers.
Laura had somehow got in, and gave me back my phone. Jeremy was slowly heading for the gates, but he is incapable of being impolite and not having a friendly word with anybody who addresses him, whoever they are. Once we were outside the gates he showed no sign of stopping with the much larger crowd outside, so I said my farewells and headed back to the hotel. My toes had gone very painful again and I was keen for another warm bath.
After the bath I went down to look for some food. I felt exhausted and drained. It was not just the cold night standing in the queue with no sleep, it was the immediately preceding 40 hour, four economy-flight journey from Bali, with virtually no sleep either, to get here. I hadn't been in a bed, I calculated, for 85 hours.
I was also feeling a bit unappreciated. I had in fact played a role in this happening at all. Copies of my initial articles on invoking the Genocide Convention had been physically in front of South African cabinet ministers when they took the initial decision on 8 December to ask their excellent legal services to prepare a case. It was not me that arranged that and I cannot break confidence by telling you how it came about. I didn't expect any acknowledgement, but it seemed an unfair twist of fate that had me standing all night in the cold trying to get in.
I was, dear reader, simply wallowing in exhaustion and self-pity, and in a kind of ridiculous teenage sulk. My tired brain was fogged and I was seriously worried about finding the energy to write up day one, which I had to do immediately. I wasn't sure that my body was physically capable of another night of no sleep and standing in the freezing cold. I was fed up with being in exile over this laughable terrorism investigation, and I was missing my children.
I made up my mind - I could not do another night. I would have to explain to readers that I had done what I could. A great feeling of relief came over me, and I decided to go to bed.
That very second, out of the lift walked the eminent British lawyer Tayab Ali, with a short, unassuming bearded Arab gentleman.
"Hello Craig, how's it going", he asked, but they were evidently in a hurry, going somewhere: "This is Ghassan".
We shook hands briefly and then the realisation struck me.
"Are you the surgeon?"
Ghassan looked diffident, slightly abashed.
"The surgeon from Gaza?".
"Yes, I am Ghassan Abu Sitta."
"I am honoured, sir. Greatly honoured".
He looked slightly embarrassed, and they dashed off to their meeting.
I felt even more embarrassed. I had just met the man who had stayed operating in Shifa hospital while Israel bombs and missiles struck it and Israeli snipers fired through the windows. He had continued to operate with no electricity, with no bandages, with no antiseptic, with no anaesthetic. He had worked 20 hours a day, amputating the limbs of children or trying to piece them back together. He stayed and stayed and stayed through weeks under fire. He did this for love: he is a top British plastic surgeon and could have been in the UK making millions.
I felt deeply ashamed. This man had endured so much, and done so much, and seen so much suffering. Here was I giving up over sore toes and lack of sleep, and over wanting to be important. I had an epiphany; I realised I can be a dreadful egoist, and I hated myself for it. Nothing stopped hurting, but I had a new surge of adrenaline and decided to get on with it. Perhaps nothing I did would help prevent genocide, but we all have to do that which is within our power to try.
I accept you may wish to scoff, but for me that encounter with Mr Abu Sitta revealed an important element of greatness - the ability to inspire others to do more that they believed they could, to transmit will. Even without actually saying anything.
I did, however, retain the sense to know that I had to prepare, so I got a taxi to a camping shop. There I bought the warmest sleeping bag I could afford, a reflective groundsheet, thermal socks and a flask.
I then took a taxi back, went straight to my room and started to write. The first three paragraphs flowed very easily. Then suddenly I was opening my very groggy eyes with my head on the keyboard, not sideways but leaning on my forehead. I had been asleep like that for three hours.
After that it was like wading through treacle. The phrases still rushed into my head as always, but there was a strange disconnect to my fingers and what they typed, which often was a phrase that sounded a bit like the one I was trying to get down. I recall typing "to assist them" as "his big cyst hen". It was slow going.
At 11pm I went to see if there was a queue yet for the public gallery the next day. Nobody was there. I was worried that after the arguments at the gate the previous morning, with many people disappointed, the queue would start to form much earlier for Day 2. I decided to just publish what I had written so far, with an explanatory first paragraph, and check the queue regularly. The cold walk woke me up. It was notably warmer than the previous night - plus 2 rather than minus 5 - but the ground was all wet with a heavy dew and there was a lot more wind chill.
I checked again at 1.30am, still nobody had come. But at 3am there were eight people in the queue. I rushed back to the hotel, picked up my sleeping bag and groundsheet and published the now almost finished Day 1 article. I joined the queue as number 9 of the 14 who would be let in. I met a wonderful Dutch lady who had joined the queue with the intention of giving me her place if I arrived too late. I am ashamed to say I forget her name.
I was disappointed that not one of my new friends from the previous night's queue was there again. I felt we had bonded through a pretty tough experience and a mutual cause. Almost all had said they intended to do both nights, and I presume the cold and exhaustion just got to people. This second night was much more jolly, I think because it was not quite so cold.
The reflective groundsheet was a big success, dry and surprisingly effective at stopping the cold seeping up. The mummy sleeping bag proved more of a problem. I am not as slender as I used to be, and with several layers of clothing and my ski jacket all on, it was a very tight fit. I got the zip up pretty well, but I couldn't do the last bit that would bring the cowl over my head, not least because by that stage the bag had immobilised my arms.
Thankfully several wonderful young ladies came to help and zipped me up tight. This involved a lot of laughing. We could have invented a whole new genre of internet porn, in which fully clothed old men get zipped into bags. Although it probably already exists. I am not going to google for it, given the frequency with which the security services seize or steal my electronic devices. It might be misunderstood.
So at 3.30am I lay down my head, and did in fact sleep until about 5.30am. It was not comfortable, but it was not cold. I then wandered off to find a bush for a pee. When I returned, three women had taken over my groundsheet and were using my sleeping bag as a blanket. They joked that they had occupied my sleeping bag. I said I perfectly understood - surely their ancestors had a sleeping bag there 3,000 years ago. It was not brilliant repartee, but this kind of thing kept us going. The 14 of us who made the public gallery took group pictures.
There were some changes from the day before. We are to be allowed pens. But in view of "people wandering around" the day before, they said huffily, we were to be escorted in via a back door and leave the same way, and strictly forbidden from talking or interacting with anybody not in our group. So we entered the tiny public gallery. It has only two rows, and I now discovered that if you sit in the second row you cannot see anything. From the hall you can't even tell there is a second row to the gallery. Once again, I marveled at the lack of attention to the dreadful design of the courtroom.
Luckily for me, a young man who apparently should not have been there was ejected from a front row seat, and finally I got to watch the Israeli presentation.
(continue above)
American and British aircraft and warships launched cruise missiles and airstrikes against multiple targets in Houthi-controlled Yemen on Jan. 11, in response to continuing attacks on commercial shipping, a U.S. official said.Footage of the strikes:
"Tonight, a multinational force, including the US military conducted strikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. We will have more details to share soon share soon," a defense official added.
The strikes were aimed at more than a dozen targets.
A few thoughts on the US and UK's plans to imminently bomb Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which the Houthis have struck to pressure Israel to cease its slaughter in Gaza.
First of all, the UN resolution that condemns the Houthis does not authorize the use of force, though it acknowledges the right of self-defense for the countries whose vessels have been attacked.
Secondly, if the objective is to stop Houthi attacks without escalating matters toward a full war, then bombing them has proven quite inefficient in the past. Just ask the the Saudis.
Moreover, bombing them very likely will escalate matters, which means that not only will the attacks not be stopped, but the broader war that Biden seeks to prevent will likely become a reality.
Indeed, if the objective is to stop them, a ceasefire in Gaza is far more likely to succeed. The Houthis have declared that they will stop if Israel stops, and during the 6 days there was a ceasefire (in November), there was only one attack in the Red Sea that can be attributed to the Houthis.
A ceasefire would also pacify tensions in Iraq/Syria vis-a-vis the US, not to mention win the release of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
The question then is why the US and the UK are so adamant about rejecting the policy that is most likely to succeed and instead pursuing the policy that is the most likely to escalate matters even further?
This shows, once more, that for every day that there is no ceasefire in Gaza, we will move closer and closer to the war spreading and the US once again fighting a war of choice in the Middle East.//
'The press room in The Hague watches a video shown to the judges by a South African team in the adjacent courtroom, in which Israeli soldiers dance and sing for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.'
The number of women dying during pregnancy or soon after childbirth has reached its highest level in almost 20 years, according to data from a major UK study.A few years prior to the contrived coronavirus crisis, life expectancy was stalling, and in some cases falling for the country's poor, due to the government's austerity cuts following the financial collapse of 2008, however, it was after the lockdowns and the roll out of the experimental covid injections that life expectancy for everyone began crashing, which is actually contrary to what we were told the two brutal policies would achieve.
Experts said the figures raise "further concern" about maternity services and called for matters such as pre-pregnancy health and personalised care to be "prioritised as a matter of urgency".
MBRRACE-UK, which conducts surveillance and investigates the causes of maternal deaths, stillbirths and infant deaths as part of the national Maternal, Newborn and Infant clinical Outcome Review Programme (MNI-CORP), said there were 13.41 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies reported from 2020 to 2022.
Excluding deaths from Covid-19 - which was the second most common cause - the maternal death rate for the period was 11.54 per 100,000.
It's highly unlikely that Covid-19 caused many, if any, of those deaths.
This is up from 8.79 per 100,000 in 2017 to 2019.
The main cause of death in women who died during pregnancy or within six weeks of their pregnancy ending was thrombosis and thromboembolism, or blood clots in the veins.
Heart disease and deaths related to poor mental health were also common.
Considering the findings described by doctors and coroners regarding the life threatening clotting issues caused by the injections, that finding is damning.
The figures were released ahead of the publication of the 2024 Saving Lives, Improving Mothers' Care report.
The 2023 report, which was published in October, "identified clear examples of maternity systems under pressure", according to Professor Marian Knight, director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and MBRRACE-UK maternal reporting lead.
She added that the latest "increase in maternal mortality raises further concern".
"Ensuring pre-pregnancy health, including tackling conditions such as overweight and obesity, as well as critical actions to work towards more inclusive and personalised care, need to be prioritised as a matter of urgency now more than ever," Professor Knight said.
The maternal death rate among black women decreased slightly compared to 2019 to 2021, although black women remained three times more likely to die compared to white women.
[...]
Maternity and neonatal services
"The NHS has also introduced maternal medical networks and specialist centres, which are a vital step in improving the identification and management of potentially fatal medical conditions in pregnancy, wherever a woman receives care, and to ensure England continues to improve in its position as one of the safest countries in the world to give birth. [...]
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