international court of justice advisory opinion in 2024<\/a>\u201d, which stated that Israel\u2019s presence in the occupied territories was \u201cunlawful in its entirety\u201d. The opinion, she added, said that \u201call states carry an obligation \u2013 not a preference of an obligation \u2013 not to recognise the situation as legal, and not render aid and assistance in maintaining it\u201d.<\/p>\nAlbanese also said the trade ban could not be narrowly confined to goods \u2013 such as agricultural products and cosmetics \u2013 since \u201cthey are a fraction of what sustains the occupation, and a fraction that Israel can absorb without difficulty\u201d.<\/p>\n
The package should also aim to include trade in services, she said, progressively suspending British intelligence cooperation, all arms licensing and the unexamined flights out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Albanese warned that if the steps were not taken or were \u201ccompletely off the table\u201d, the changes would \u201cover time come to be seen as not amounting to a reckoning, but a press release\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said that a state banning \u201cdates from Ma\u2019ale Adumim [a city in the West Bank]\u201d while \u201ccontinuing to licence the equipment used to enforce the checkpoints around it\u201d had not \u201cchanged its relationship with the occupation \u2026 It has rearranged its communication strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albanese added that, \u201cbecause the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion declares the entire Israeli presence in the occupied territories as unlawful, third states\u2019 obligations \u2018not to render aid or assistance\u2019 extends to everything that sustains that unlawful presence as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich standing near the settlement of Ma\u2019ale Adumim, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, holding a map showing the E1 settlement project. Photograph: Ohad Zwigenberg\/AP<\/p>\n
Albanese said the UK needed to end any ambiguity around the tender for the E1 settlement that will sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and cut the territory in two, adding: \u201cSince bids close a week before Israel\u2019s elections on 27 October, there is nothing that London can realistically do in September that can change that calendar.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she warned the government could not let the tenders simply pass, pointing out that Israel\u2019s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, had already said E1 was designed to \u201cbury the idea of a Palestinian state\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a difference between the tenders closing and the settlement getting built and financed,\u201d she added. \u201cConstruction on this scale needs finance, insurance and construction firms, and since E1 amounts to annexation and not just settlement expansion, sanctions or similar have to be threatened against those firms that seek to cooperate with the building of E1.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albanese also called on the UK government to join South Africa before the ICJ, and also support Nicaragua on Monday when the ICJ hears preliminary oral objections from Germany over claims filed by the Central American country that Berlin\u2019s continued arms sales to Israel makes it complicit in genocide.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cBritain is not a party to that case. It can still choose which side of the argument it stands on: whether it treats participation in international accountability mechanisms as a threat to an alliance, or recognises that an alliance built on anything other than principle and the rule of law is not an alliance at all. It is an arrangement of convenience, honoured only until convenience changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally she urged the UK to issue guidance to UK-based firms not to overcomply with sanctions imposed by the US on the international criminal court prosecutor, the deputy prosecutors, eight judges and an increasing number of others, including herself and Palestinian human rights groups that have cooperated with the court. \u201cThis has frozen bank accounts, everywhere, for people doing nothing other than their judicial function or providing evidence lawfully requested by an international court,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK\u2019s planned ban on trade with unlawful Israeli settlements is a welcome, if overdue, first step and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-608327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}