While I didn’t plan on posting about Gaza today, I want to share something I just learned. Per journalist Jose Olivares writing for Drop Site News:

In Columbia, The Hague Group Charges
Israel With Genocide

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA—On Tuesday, ministers and officials from over 30 countries gathered in Bogotá, Colombia to convene The Hague Group, an international organization co-chaired by the governments of Colombia and South Africa. The two-day conference will discuss steps forward for the international community to stop Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

image from TheHagueGroup.org home page

I didn’t even know about The Hague Group, much less that they’d convened an emergency conference on behalf of the Palestinians being genocided by Israel (and the United States). I could’ve predicted, however, that the U.S. State Department would be unhappy about such a gathering.

In an official statement to Drop Site, the U.S. State Department said it strongly opposed the Hague Group’s meeting in Colombia.

“The United States strongly opposes efforts by so-called ‘multilateral blocs’ to weaponize international law as a tool to advance radical anti-Western agendas,” a State Department official said. “The so-called Hague Group—whose leading voices are South Africa and Cuba, authoritarian and communist regimes, respectively, with deeply troubling human rights records—seeks to undermine the sovereignty of democratic nations by isolating and attempting to delegitimate Israel, transparently laying the groundwork for targeting the United States, our military, and our allies.”

The U.S. will “aggressively defend our interests, our military, and our allies, including Israel, from such coordinated legal and diplomatic warfare. We urge our friends to stand with us in this critical endeavor.” The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year.

But as Annelle Shenile, a former State Department officer who resigned in March of 2024 over the genocide stated, “This is not the weaponization of international law. This is the application of international law.”

Shenile is attending the gathering, as is Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador and permanent observer of Palestine to the UN. Mansour was an opening speaker at the conference:

“The core values we believed humanity agreed were universal are shattered—blown to pieces, like the tens of thousands of starved, murdered, and injured civilians in Palestine. Accountability alone is not enough for justice to prevail in Palestine. We must deconstruct the regime of illegal colonial occupation and apartheid to ensure that the current horrifying crimes do not repeat. The best and most assured way to protect the Palestinian people from more crimes is their freedom.”

This news gives me hope. You can read Olivares’s entire article here.

Free Palestine!