The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on July 19 that Israel's occupation and settlement of Palestinian territory breach international law. The decision came after the UN General Assembly requested an advisory opinion from the body on Israel's practices in the occupied territories. The ruling held that Israel's practices violate a number of international agreements including the Hague Convention of 1907, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

United Nations experts affiliated with the Human Rights Council declared July 9 that famine has now undoubtedly spread throughout the Gaza Strip. The expert determination follows the deaths of three more Palestinian children in May and June. Six-month-old Fayez Ataya, 13-year-old Abdulqader al-Serhi, and nine-year-old Ahmad Abu Reida were all found by the experts to have died from malnutrition. The experts stressed that inaction by the international community amounts to complicity, adding: "Israel's intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza."

Anti-government protesters marched July 7 across Israel's major cities, aiming to pressure the authorities to instate a ceasefire in Gaza and reach a hostage deal with Hamas. Demonstrators blocked roads and gathered in front of the homes of government officials. The protesters marched to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem, calling for immediate elections to replace his government. Simultaneously, thousands assembled in Tel Aviv, where Einav Zangauker, whose son is being held in Gaza, staged a symbolic protest by isolating herself in a cage suspended from a bridge over Begin Road. Addressing the crowd below, Zangauker described the entire region as being held hostage by Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' leader in Gaza.

In Episode 232 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the politics of the ugly dust-up between pro-Palestinian protesters and local Jewish residents in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pico-Robertson—and notes the anniversary of June 1941 anti-Jewish pogroms in Bialystok, Poland, and Baghdad, Iraq. Propagandistic and distorted portrayals of the LA protest as mere arbitrary anti-Semitism ignore the fact that the targeted synagogue was hosting a real estate event promoting sale of lands to create "Anglo neighborhoods" in Israel, and probably in the occupied West Bank (which would be a clear violation of international law). On the other hand, insensitivity to (or ignorance of) the historical context (and contemporary context) that makes an angry protest outside a synagogue an inevitably problematic "optic" only abets the propaganda. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

Israel's Supreme Court issued an order June 23 demanding the Benjamin Netanyahu government provide an update on conditions in the Sde Teiman detention facility, where the government has been holding Palestinian detainees from the war in Gaza. The court gave the government until June 30 to provide its update. The order came in response to a challenge from a constellation of human rights organizations, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, seeking to shut down the prison over allegations of harsh abuses there.

The Zionist propaganda machine continues to weaponize the accusation of anti-Semitism to delegitimize any effort to resist Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza. This increases rather than decreases the responsibility of activists to distinguish—and oppose—actual anti-Semitism. Yet in recent weeks, sectors of the activist response to the Gaza genocide in the United States have utterly surrendered to the most abject, undisguised, unambiguous anti-Semitism—playing right into the hands of the Zionist calumnies. Bill Weinberg discusses this difficult reality in Episode 231 of the CounterVortex podcast.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported June 13 that a record number of 117.3 million people around the world were forcibly displaced as of the end of 2023. The agency expects this number to rise to over 120 million cases by the end of this year, especially noting the situations in Sudan, Burma and Palestine. The conflict in Sudan that began in April 2023 has led to 6 million becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs) with 1.2 million people forced into neighboring countries as refugees. In Burma, conflict since the military coup of 2021 has resulted in 1.2 million IDPs, while over 75% of the population in Gaza was displaced between October and December amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment of the enclave.

Israeli forces have committed war crimes and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, and there are "reasonable grounds" to conclude Hamas and loyalists have done the same, a UN inquiry concluded in a report released June 12. The report, which covers Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians and the initial phase of Israel's retaliatory invasion and bombardment of Gaza, was produced by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, & Israel (Commission). The UN Human Rights Council established the Commission in 2021 to monitor human rights and humanitarian concerns in the region.