Tag: War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

So Many Child Deaths in Gaza, and for What?

Consider this: The most dangerous place to be a child in the world today is Gaza. That’s the assessment of Catherine Russell, the executive director of UNICEF, who is not a bleeding-heart radical but a former ambassador and veteran lawyer who worked for Presidents Biden and Barack Obama. Already it appears that more than twice […]

Read More

U.S. Charges 4 Russian Soldiers With War Crimes Against an American

The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it had charged four Russian soldiers with torturing an American living in the war-ravaged region of Kherson in Ukraine, using a war crimes statute for the first time since it was enacted nearly three decades ago. The indictment, unsealed in Virginia, could be followed by other charges against […]

Read More

Alberto Fujimori Is Ordered Released From Prison in Peru

Peru’s top court on Tuesday ordered former President Alberto Fujimori released from prison, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations, defying an order by an international court that the South American country keep him behind bars. The court, Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal, voted 3 to 1 to reaffirm its decision to instate […]

Read More

Ukraine Opens War Crimes Inquiry Into Soldiers’ Deaths

Prosecutors in Ukraine have started a war crimes investigation into whether Russian troops shot dead two Ukrainian soldiers who were in the act of surrendering, the latest episode in which the government in Kyiv has accused Moscow of violating the Geneva Conventions. The prosecutor general’s office said that the incident took place at an observation […]

Read More

Accounts of Sexual Violence by Hamas Are Aired Amid Criticism of U.N.

The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” In another house, a person’s genitals were so mutilated that “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Simcha Greinman, a volunteer who helped collect the remains of victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault on Israel, took […]

Read More

Kissinger Met With Xi and Other Powerful Figures Into His 100th Year

When Henry Kissinger popped up in an ornate meeting room in Beijing in July with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, the episode became the most vivid symbol of the former diplomat and business consultant’s ability through the decades to put himself next to centers of power. He crisscrossed the globe to do so, even after turning […]

Read More

Kissinger’s Legacy Still Ripples Through Vietnam and Cambodia

Henry A. Kissinger’s decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, his efforts to negotiate the American exit from the Vietnam War and his role in the U.S. rapprochement with China have rippled through Southeast Asia in the decades since. Mr. Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating […]

Read More

Hostages Freed From Gaza Recount Violence, Hunger and Fear

Some of the hostages were held in sweltering tunnels deep beneath Gaza, while others were squeezed into tight quarters with strangers or confined in isolation. There were children forced to appear in hostage videos, and others forced to watch gruesome footage of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack. They bore physical and psychological wounds. As some […]

Read More

A.I. Killer Drones Are Becoming Reality. Nations Disagree on Limits.

It seems like something out of science fiction: swarms of killer robots that hunt down targets on their own and are capable of flying in for the kill without any human signing off. But it is approaching reality as the United States, China and a handful of other nations make rapid progress in developing and […]

Read More

Israel Says Gaza Hospital Held Hamas Command Center: What We Know So Far

Israel is trying to produce solid evidence for its assertion that Hamas has been using tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command center. But an Israeli military-led tour of the hospital grounds with journalists Thursday night showed directly only a shaft in the ground with a staircase, which did not settle the issue. […]

Read More

Israeli Army Escorts Journalists to Gaza Hospital, and More

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — it’s available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times […]

Read More

U.S. Military Aid Is Killing Civilians in Gaza

On Oct. 18, I resigned from the State Department because I could not support the provision of U.S. weapons into the conflict in Gaza, where I knew that they would be used to kill thousands of civilians. I saw no willingness to re-evaluate a long-term policy that has not led to peace and has actually […]

Read More

There Should Be More Public Pressure on Hamas

In the summer of 2008, I helped raid a hospital. As I’ve written before, I was deployed as a JAG officer (an Army lawyer) with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Diyala Province, Iraq. Diyala was in the midst of a wave of suicide bombings, many of them carried out by women, that was brutal […]

Read More

With Darfur in Its Sights, Paramilitary Group Is Accused of Atrocities

Bodies littered the road out of El Geneina, a town in western Sudan, as Dr. Rodwan Mustafa and his family sped down a bumpy road that led to the border with Chad and, they hoped, safety. A day earlier, rampaging Arab militiamen had grabbed Dr. Mustafa by the neck, accusing him of giving medical care […]

Read More

Israel Seizes Gaza Hospital That Became Symbol of the War Itself

What Israel finds — or doesn’t — in the hospital could affect international sentiment about the invasion and influence the negotiations taking place on freeing more than 200 hostages being held by Hamas. Eighteen hours after the raid on the hospital began, the Israeli military released photos and video that it said backed its assertions. […]

Read More

Israeli Shells Hit Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as Battle With Hamas Intensified

Minutes after 1 a.m. Friday, as active fighting raged between Israeli forces and Hamas militants, a projectile streaked over Gaza’s largest medical complex and crashed into the center of the courtyard of Al-Shifa Hospital, a place where thousands of displaced Gazans had sought shelter. It landed just a few feet from Ahmed Hijazi, a social […]

Read More

The Israel-Palestine Conflict Has Been Raging for 75 Years

For the past month, normal life in Ramallah — a city in the West Bank usually known for its young population and its vibrant nightlife — has been brought to a standstill. Since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli forces have launched numerous raids on the West Bank, arresting people from all walks of life: […]

Read More

Israelis Were Shattered on Oct. 7. Can They Recover?

Will they win? If the question is whether Israel will be able to defeat Hamas, the answer is almost certainly yes: Israeli military planners have been war-gaming an invasion of Gaza for decades and, despite the intelligence blunders of Oct. 7, have tools and tactics that can flush Hamas’s fighters out of their maze of […]

Read More

For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8

Our friends are not those who, until recently, never mentioned that Gazan casualty figures come from a health ministry run by Hamas — a mistake they would never make if, say, they were relaying figures produced by the Russian government. Or who describe the people murdered on Oct. 7 as “Jewish settlers,” never mind that […]

Read More

Under Scrutiny Over Gaza, Israel Points to Civilian Toll of U.S. Wars

Israeli officials say they have no choice: Hamas fighters, numbering perhaps 30,000 by Israeli estimates, embed within Gaza’s population of 2.2 million and store weapons in or under civilian sites, daring Israel to launch strikes that fuel outrage. The officials also say Hamas is clearly guilty of intentionally murdering Israeli civilians. President Biden and his […]

Read More

U.S. Outlines Steps to Israel to Reduce Civilian Deaths

The Americans say Israel’s forceful response to the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, in which more than 1,400 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage, reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region. The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the […]

Read More

An Unarmed Teen Was Shot During a Cease-Fire. Israel Was Never Held to Account.

On the afternoon of his 15th birthday, Attiya Nabaheen was walking home from his school in Gaza when an Israeli soldier shot him in the neck. It was November 2014, and Mr. Nabaheen was on his family’s land, situated about 500 meters from the militarized Green Line demarcating the Gaza Strip. In court proceedings, a […]

Read More

A World of Fear for Europe’s Jews

Angst is, indeed, palpable across the continent. From Britain to Italy, tensions have risen sharply. In the period between the Hamas attack and Oct. 27, Britain’s Community Security Trust, a charity, said that it had recorded 805 antisemitic acts, the highest number in a three-week period since it began reporting episodes of this kind in […]

Read More

Nazis in Canada? A Secret List With Answers May Soon Be Released.

For 37 years, Canada has kept close guard on an explosive roster of names. The classified report lists 883 possible Nazi war criminals who found harbor in the country after World War II, and many believe it offers insights into exactly what the government knew about how they got there, the extent to which they […]

Read More

What I Read and Watch to Decompress

It has been an intense couple of weeks here at Interpreter HQ. “India’s Daughters,” the special newsletter series that I created with my colleagues Emily Schmall and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, premiered last week. There will be a new chapter on Friday, and you can catch up with the first installment here if you missed it. […]

Read More

Developing World Sees Double Standard in West’s Actions in Gaza and Ukraine

In Europe, the discussion has played out largely on social media, where some commentators have lambasted Europe for hypocrisy for its different approaches to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, while few politicians have commented directly. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that most of the world perceives a […]

Read More

Why Jews Cannot Stop Shaking Right Now

There is a reason so many Jews cannot stop shaking right now. The concept of intergenerational trauma doesn’t begin to describe the dark place into which this month’s attack plunged Jewish communities around the world. On Oct. 7, a Jewish holiday, Hamas terrorists went house to house in southern Israel murdering and abducting children and […]

Read More

New Evidence Found of Rape and Torture by Russian Forces in Ukraine

A United Nations commission has found new evidence that Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine, including deliberate killings, rape and the removal of Ukrainian children, according to a report released on Friday. Victim testimonies also asserted the systematic and widespread use of torture in several Russian detention facilities, the report said. Drawing on more […]

Read More

In the Israel-Gaza War, We Must Not Kill Some Children to Protect Others

The crisis in the Middle East is a knotty test of our humanity, asking how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy. And in this test, we in the West are not doing well. The acceptance of large-scale bombing of Gaza and of a ground invasion likely to begin […]

Read More

Piling Horror Upon Horror

In Gaza, mass death has already begun. Last week the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced that Israel was cutting off Gaza’s water, electricity, food and fuel. There was hopeful reporting over the weekend that at the urging of President Biden’s administration, water to a town in Gaza’s south had been turned back on, but for […]

Read More