INTERNATIONAL complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine is “asserted rather than hidden”, a leading legal expert has told a public tribunal on Gaza.
Richard Falk, an American Jewish professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University who previously served as the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, is leading the public scrutiny of Israel’s actions in Gaza in the form of a tribunal.
Though it has no legal force, the tribunal – which has its first public hearing taking place in Sarajevo this week – aims to document alleged war crimes, advocate for justice for Palestinians, and address shortcomings of the international legal system, its organisers said.
The Gaza Tribunal was officially launched in London last November and is set to conclude with a final hearing in Istanbul in October 2025, at which the tribunal’s conclusions and decisions will be published.
Over four days, the tribunal’s Sarajevo hearing is aiming to “close the gap in the enforcement of law” with examinations of the Nakba and colonialism, apartheid, forced population displacements, the political economy of genocide, the criminalisation of protest, and a look at the media’s role in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.
The Gaza Tribunal is looking to follow on from Nobel prize winner Bertrand Russell’s 1966 people’s tribunal, which ultimately concluded that the US had perpetrated genocidal acts in Vietnam.
“Governments enable Gaza genocide through weapons, financial support, diplomatic cover, disseminating Israeli propaganda. This complicity is asserted rather than hidden."
Falk’s words echo those of Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, who said: “If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them.”
Jackson’s words were cited by Russell in the establishment of the 1966 tribunal on the US and Vietnam.
At the Gaza Tribunal, the Byline Times reported on evidence given by Dr Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American doctor who worked in Nasser in Gaza City in 2024.
“It appeared that the city, block by block, was being levelled from east to west and we would watch from the hospital as giant balls of smoke would fill the sky and then 10 or 15 minutes later, we would get an influx of the mass casualty event,” Dr Ahmad said.
He added: “This was happening multiple times a day … There is no hospital in the United States, no hospital in Chicago, that would have been able to function had they seen the same volume that was being seen at Nasser hospital.”
Craig Mokhiber, the former director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights who stepped down in October 2023 accusing the UN of failing to act on a “textbook genocide”, also spoke at the tribunal.
"What can we say of an international system that speaks of human rights but allows a live-stream genocide to rage day after day, year after year?” he said. “A system that refuses to even name the crime out loud: genocide.
“The word genocide is only permitted in reference to history – not for genocides happening today, certainly not for Palestine. UN offices have non-critically endorsed Israeli propaganda under Western pressure.”
The Worldwide Lawyers Association (Wolas), a Turkish-based rights group, said: "This tribunal is not merely a response to enforcement vacuum left by states and international institutions. It is a peoples’ legal, ethical and political initiative exposing the deeper structures behind the failure: an international system where power dynamics consistently override law, and where geopolitics shields atrocity.
"Over four days in Sarajevo, lawyers, scholars, survivors, and organisers come together to present evidence, offer expert testimony, and challenge both the violence in Gaza and the global order that sustains it."
In the UK, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has spear-headed calls for a public inquiry to examine the Government's role in Gaza.
You can find more details of the Gaza Tribunal on Richard Falk's website.
