Amnesty International on Nov. 3 welcomed the French War Crimes Unit's opening of a judicial investigation into a deadly Israeli strike on a civilian building in central Beirut in November 2024 as a critical step toward justice and reparation. France launched the investigation after the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and Ali Cherri, a French-Lebanese artist and filmmaker, jointly filed a legal complaint.

A new report from the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories finds that Israel has continued to commit "genocidal acts" in the Gaza Strip since the signing of a ceasefire with Hamas last October, and continues to carry out war crimes and crimes against humanity throughout the occupied territories.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio placed full sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Oct. 9 in response to investigations into potential war crimes committed by US and Israel.

The three-year commemoration of the October 7 attacks saw ugly manifestations around the world of the growing atmosphere of polarization and dogmatism on the Israel-Palestine dilemma. There is, alas, the grave potential for everything to get much worse. Benjamin Netanyahu, under siege politically within Israel, is seeking not only a re-occupation of Gaza, but to extend the eliminationist project to the West Bank. In Episode 349 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes stock. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem issued a comprehensive report last month charging that Israel is carrying out an "elimination project" on the occupied West Bank, seeking to dismantle Palestinian "collective existence" there to establish a permanent, contiguous Jewish presence and Israeli sovereignty. A campaign of "ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover" is effected through violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, and criminalization of Palestinian political organizing.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Oct. 5 unsealed four arrest warrants against senior Taliban figures, accusing them of persecuting women and girls in Afghanistan, acts that the Court's prosecutors say constitute crimes against humanity.

Amnesty International on Sept. 29 condemned the Malian armed forces and its partners from the Russian private military company Wagner Group for perpetration of war crimes, including the murder and torture of civilians.

Guatemala received a shipment of weapons and military equipment from the United States on Sept. 21, the first in a series of commercial exchanges set to total $5 million. Weapons transfers to the country had been formally frozen since the administration of President Jimmy Carter restricted arms sales in 1977 due to the Guatemalan military's record of human rights abuses during the country's civil war. The ban was lifted in March, after months of deepening security ties between the two countries.