Latest news with #BosnianWar
Malaysiakini
5 days ago
- Malaysiakini
Remembering Bosnian genocide through M'sian lens, 30 years on
July 11 marked 30 years since the Srebrenica massacre, which claimed the lives of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in only two weeks. It was one of the bloodiest episodes of the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 until 1995 and left more than 100,000 dead, with over two million people displaced. Behzo and his family were among those displaced. Now aged 60, he arrived in Malaysia in 1993 as a refugee with his family of six. He has been here for more than three decades, and his family have all become permanent residents. Behzo, who declined to publicise his full identity, recalled that...
Roya News
20-07-2025
- Health
- Roya News
UK faces legal action for refusing medical evacuation of critically ill children from Gaza
The United Kingdom government is facing intensified scrutiny and a significant legal challenge for its decision not to facilitate the medical evacuation of critically ill children from Gaza. Lawyers and human rights advocates contend that this stance sharply contrasts with Britain's historical humanitarian efforts in other global conflicts, prompting widespread calls for a dedicated pathway for child patients. The legal action, spearheaded by law firm Leigh Day on behalf of three severely unwell children in Gaza, has been formally brought against both the Foreign Office and the Home Office. The challenge asserts that government ministers have failed to adequately assess the dire lack of medical resources and treatment options within the besieged territory when denying requests for vital medical transfers. Carolin Ott, a lawyer with Leigh Day, underscored the inadequacy of the government's current position. "The UK government has explained its failure to facilitate medical evacuations from Gaza on the basis that it supports treatment options in Gaza and the surrounding region and that there are visas available for privately funded medical treatment in the UK," Ott stated. "However, these mechanisms are profoundly inadequate to meet the urgent needs of children in Gaza." The three children at the heart of the legal case include a two-year-old, identified as Child Y, who suffers from an arteriovenous malformation in his cheek, causing daily bleeding and leaving him in critical condition. The other two, siblings aged five and known as Child S, are battling cystinosis nephropathy, a chronic kidney condition that has already led to kidney failure, with one sibling reportedly no longer able to walk. All three require urgent, specialized medical attention unavailable in Gaza. The legal challenge draws pointed comparisons to the UK's past actions, noting the active role Britain played in evacuating children from conflict zones such as the Bosnian War in the 1990s and, more recently, from Ukraine. Critics argue that the government's current approach to Gaza represents a troubling departure from these precedents. Despite ongoing appeals from humanitarian organizations, including Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Project Pure Hope, for the establishment of a government-funded medical evacuation route, the UK has not yet offered itself as a receiving state for such patients. While Project Pure Hope successfully brought two Gazan children to the UK for urgent, privately funded care in May, this remains a solitary instance. The charity's subsequent request for a government-funded pathway was reportedly declined. Recent developments have seen the Scottish First Minister, John Swinney, publicly urge Prime Minister Keir Starmer to engage with Scotland on the issue. Swinney stated that Scotland "stands ready" to receive some of the estimated 2,000 injured children from Gaza who require urgent medical attention and treatment within the NHS. However, Swinney claims to have received no response from the Prime Minister on this offer, highlighting a growing disconnect within the UK's political landscape regarding the crisis. According to health officials in Gaza, more than 17,000 children have been killed since October 7, 2023, out of a total of 58,000 Palestinian fatalities. The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 12,500 patients in Gaza require evacuation for medical treatment, with only around 7,200, including nearly 5,000 children, having been moved to other countries as of April 10. The legal pre-action letter requires a formal response from the UK government by July 28. As of Saturday, July 20, 2025, neither the Foreign Office nor the Home Office has publicly commented on the legal proceedings, but a government spokesperson reiterated their ongoing humanitarian contributions, including a £7.5 million medical support package announced in May, and their support for privately funded initiatives like Project Pure Hope.
NZ Herald
18-07-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
Diary of a Smith & Caughey's sales girl: What it was like working for the iconic Auckland retailer
It wasn't jealousy, exactly. More a kind of intrigue, laced with the knowledge that accent alone could open and close doors. Good afternoon, ma'am. Of course, sir. That's a beautiful choice, ma'am. I listened, I mimicked, and I understood no one else knew about the game. But they were still playing. Let me explain. This was my first exposure to the upper class of Aotearoa. I was 18. It was a far cry from the thundering laughter and humility of Onehunga, where I was raised, shaped and gifted a tongue. I'm also an Indo-Fijian immigrant. It was 2010. I remember serving Christopher Luxon. He told me he ran an airline. It would have been 2013 or 2014. He came in alone to the Newmarket branch of Smith & Caughey's and got two shirts. As I was bagging up, he asked me if I was a student. I was used to men coming in and making useless conversation, often bizarre tales, that non-casually wove in ludicrous wealth. I'm a manager of this and that, they would say. I've travelled here and there. Once, a middle-aged man detailed coherently in 10 long minutes how he helped forge passports to get people out of the Bosnian War. All I asked was if he needed help finding something. These chats almost always led to an invitation to 'talk more' and a gifting of the holy business card at the till. I'm very aware of how conceited I sound, but this happened. Every single shift. The shop's window display showing some of the history of the store after it announced its closure. Photo / Dean Purcell I remember thinking they were all boring, and I didn't understand at that age why they thought talking about jobs and wealth was a good way to flirt. Perhaps it was because, as a student on basically minimum wage, I knew I couldn't reciprocate. Perhaps it was because the main shop we got our clothes from growing up was The Warehouse. Perhaps it was because it isn't a good way to flirt. I would smile. I would feign interest; being polite was my job. Luxon wasn't at all like that, though. Not with me anyway. I told him I was studying a BA in Politics and Spanish. The degree that gets criticised for poor job prospects. I expressed my uncertainty about my future. He said: 'I studied the same thing [referring to the politics part, though I'm not sure in what capacity], and now look, I'm the CEO of Air New Zealand.' I never forgot that moment for two reasons. One, Luxon did indeed succeed in inspiring a young student suffering from disenchantment. Two, it didn't feel like I was his tool to score validation. Luxon's politics as the leader of one of the country's most conservative coalition governments to date aside, that energy was rare in the menswear department. The Queen St branch. Photo / Michael Craig Although the talk was often dull, I admit I was always curious about how they came to be how they were. I'd serve men with their breast-implanted trophy wives, fashion designers, models, gangsters, politicians, sugar babies, drug dealers, chief executives, escorts, the I-grew-up-poor-and-now-I'm-here people, the generational wealth people and the I-wear-real-fur kind of people. Not all of them were pillocks, of course. I've had plenty of nice and kind conversations with customers at Smith & Caughey's. But being nice and kind is the baseline. What I remember more is the absurdity of exchanges with some of them, fascinated by their delusion of power. And that's what this story is about. I remember when a man literally threw his cash at me after I asked for payment. 'There you go, I just paid your wages,' he said, looking at me dead straight in the eye. I looked at the woman, presumably his wife, standing beside him physically and, apparently, metaphorically. Are you okay with your husband speaking to me like that? I said to her with my eyes. She held the same expression as him and said nothing. Once, an older man of large stature, maybe in his 60s, perhaps even early 70s, walked in and stopped dead when he saw me. I greeted him as I was trained to do. He looked me up and down without any coyness. Instead of greeting me back, he said loudly: 'Mmm, I want you. I want a piece of you'. While I was no stranger to flattery, this felt different. His eyes were wide and locked in. The arrogance of his display told me he didn't play by normal social rules. He didn't touch me. He didn't come closer. He didn't say anything more. And yet my frozen body wanted to get as far away from him as possible. The announcement of the store's closure attracted nostalgic crowds. Photo / Dean Purcell What followed is a blur; I found an excuse to walk away and hide, forcing my colleague to attend to him. After a while, I returned, and the man had left. I told the security guard what happened, more out of making conversation than to prompt action. His anger surprised me. The security guard went out onto the street to see if he could spot him. He reviewed the security footage. He told the assistant store manager, who then came down to personally check if I was okay. I will note that I always felt physically safe while at work. It was clear that our store manager was protective of her staff. Before this job, I was a part-time sales assistant at a Hallensteins outlet store in Dressmart. There, discounts were king. Here, in the land of $200 keychains, discounts were offensive. I remember the first time I voluntarily told a Smith & Caughey's customer about a sale. It was also the last. The woman was looking for a nice handbag, which was the department I started in before moving to menswear. I showed her the ones on special first, thinking she would be grateful to know – everything is rudely expensive, after all – and it's a normal practice for retail staff. But this wasn't a normal place. I might as well have told her I had a lovechild with her son and stole her cat. She didn't need to buy things on sale. The price didn't matter. She could buy anything in the store if she wanted to, and I darn well should know that. I remember the first time a customer shouted at me. It had to have been in my first year. His signature did not match his credit card. I politely let him know, even asked if he wanted to try again. He started pointing his finger. He started protruding his veins. It was like he morphed into an evil character from a Hayao Miyazaki film. 'YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DO THIS TO ME. NOT TODAY. I AM A LOYAL CUSTOMER,' he screamed as he walked off with the goods. I was shaken and in tears. I didn't know how to handle angry men then. I'm not sure I know how to handle them now. Concerned about a potential theft that I let happen, I informed my superiors. The counter manager told me they called him, secured payment and that he was sorry for how he treated me. A colleague told me the company called and apologised to him before rewarding him with store credit for his loyalty. I remember a man walked in with – I kid you not – his nose in the air. Our conversation was the following: 'Good afternoon,' I said. 'I need a pair of jeans, but I am far too rich for you. Smith & Caughey's won't have the jeans that I need. I am too rich,' he said. It was like a scene from a cartoon. There is nothing wrong with grandeur inherently, nor the desire to show appreciation for someone's artistry and the beauty of their creations. Feeding a fantasy is something else. Some Smith & Caughey's customers, I know, felt special when they were inside. They felt like they 'made it' – they were 'a somebody'. To simply be seen there, for many, I believe, was always the point. A masterclass in marketing. Until it wasn't.
7NEWS
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- 7NEWS
From ‘as if!' to cultural icon: Clueless turns 30 and proves it's more than just a pretty plaid skirt
How can it be that Clueless, a thoroughly modern social comedy, is now a period piece? When Clueless came out in July 1995, it was fresh and exciting, an update of, at the time, a 180-year-old novel by Jane Austen. Rather than Regency England, it was 1990s Beverly Hills, and the references were Ren & Stimpy, the Bosnian War, Coolio and Cindy Crawford's Buns of Steel. Friends, it's been 30 years. Clueless and Emma may have been almost two centuries apart, but themes were timeless with their story about personal growth, social structures, and, of course, love. But what made Clueless so beloved is that it centred a character who was, above all, an optimist. For its lovable hero, Cher Horowitz, things will work out. Why wouldn't they? Just as she tells her ex-stepbrother Josh, who expresses scepticism that she could get her teachers to change the grades on her report card, that she had 'done it every other semester'. Perhaps that's the secret to Clueless' enduring power. Earlier this year, its writer and director Amy Heckerling told the British podcast, Script Apart: 'When you're not so happy about the way things are going in the world, you could escape to this place of sunshine and fantasy and somewhat lovable characters, for the most part.' Clueless changed the game, it supercharged teen movies which had been quiet after their 1980s peak, heralding the next decade of youth stories, and embedding the film's snappy, specific lexicon into the wider culture – 'As if!', 'Whatever!', 'Way harsh', 'buggin'' and 'I was surfing the crimson wave'. It even created its own sub-genre of teen literary adaptations, which included 10 Things I Hate About You/Taming of the Shrew, Easy A/The Scarlet Letter, Cruel Intentions/Les Liaisons Dangereuses, She's All That/Pygmalion, She's the Man/Twelfth Night and O/Othello. Mona May's costumes – Cher had 63 outfit changes – had every girl and woman aged between 10 and 49 rushing out to buy plaid skirts and argyle prints. If you couldn't procure a fluff-topped pen, you made your own with supplies from Lincraft. It didn't matter if you couldn't afford 'totally important designer' Azzedine Alaia, you could still be part of the Clueless phenomenon. But it almost didn't happen at all. Heckerling's second film was the 1982 teen riot Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which featured among its all-star cast of young up-and-comers Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It was the early Reagan era, and Fast Times was loose – it had sex, drinking, an abortion storyline and nudity. It was also a commercial success, but 40 years ago, there were even fewer opportunities for women directors than there are now, and Heckerling didn't get the leg-up in her career that should've been forthcoming. She had to write the Look Who's Talking movies so she could direct something, and by the early 1990s, was scouring for her next project. At the time, Fox was looking for a teen TV series, and Clueless started life as a show called No Worries. Heckerling wrote the pilot, which had all the main characters that would eventually end up in Clueless, and Fox passed. Heckerling changed agents, and her new rep, Ken Stovitz, took one look and said, 'This is a movie'. But still no one was biting. The feedback was that there weren't enough boys in the script, and you're not going to get male audiences to come and see a movie about girls. Every studio passed. That is, until Scott Rudin, a powerful producer who has since been put in the doghouse over many, many allegations over decades of abusive and bullying behaviour, read the script and liked it. Once Rudin was attached, it became hot property. Alicia Silverstone was 17 years old during the casting process and had only one notable film to her name, The Crush, but she was known as the girl in the Aerosmith videos. Heckerling loved her, but the studio insisted she see more actors, which included Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Keri Russell, Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and even Angelina Jolie – the latter was deemed 'too knowing' to play the innocent Cher, according to an oral history published by Vanity Fair. Heckerling recalled that casting the role of Josh was the hardest. Ben Affleck read for it at one point, and so did Zach Braff. When Paul Rudd came in, he had also read for Christian and Elton, and he eventually booked Josh, after he screen-tested well with Silverstone. Brittany Murphy was a shoo-in for Tai from the start. Heckerling remembered her as 'so bouncy and giggly and just so young, when you saw her, you just smiled'. In fact, even the actors who didn't get Clueless reads like a who's-who – Seth Green and Jeremy Renner for Travis, Terence Howard and Dave Chappelle for Murray, and Lauryn Hill for Dionne. Sarah Michelle Gellar was offered the role of Amber, but the soap she was on at the time, All My Children, wouldn't release her for the two weeks of filming. Similarly, Jerry Orbach couldn't get off Law & Order to play Cher's dad, Mel. In a moment of life imitating art, during filming in Los Angeles, Rudd was mugged at gunpoint in a car park, just like Cher, and the Clueless script was in the backpack he surrendered to the assailant. He told GQ in 2009: 'I just remember the sounds of it, I remember people in the parking lot being really freaked out. But I just got very calm. Then I had to go to work the next day. It was a scene at a club. I was dancing, and I had just been shot at the night before.' One of the film's most iconic line readings – when Cher mispronounces Haitians as Hai-ti-ians – was an accident. Silverstone genuinely didn't know how to say it, and Heckerling loved it so much, she kept it. That scene was recreated last year for a Rakuten Super Bowl ad with Silverstone and a version of that famous yellow plaid skirt suit. Clueless came to define mid-1990s teen culture, and given its enormous success — a $US56 million ($AUD85m) box office from a $US12m budget — everyone wanted a piece of it. Every studio cried out for teen film scripts, and the next five years saw a saturation, culminating in the avalanche of 1999 during which at least a dozen major films in the genre were released, including Never Been Kissed, 10 Things I Hate About You and Jawbreaker. In a full circle moment, the year after Clueless's release, ABC commissioned a TV spin-off, but without Silverstone, Rudd, Murphy or Meyer, who didn't return. The roles of Cher and Josh were recast with Rachel Blanchard and David Lascher, but Stacey Dash, Donald Faison, Elisa Donovan, Twink Caplan and Wallace Shawn reprised their characters. It lasted three seasons, but that still wasn't the end for Clueless. Heckerling adapted her film for a stage musical in 2018, initially as a jukebox musical, but reopened earlier this year with original songs. And there's a TV sequel in the works with Silverstone on board. Even though Clueless was a tectonic film that recharted the course of teen movies and culture, the one person who didn't do as well out of it as she should have was Heckerling. 'If you're George Lucas and you create Star Wars, and then suddenly science fiction is acceptable after not being for so long, you're golden,' Heckerling told Script Apart. 'But I was just like, 'What am I going to do next?'.' Not that much, it turned out. Heckerling wrote and directed teen movie Loser, starring American Pie's Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari in 2000, reunited with Rudd for largely forgotten 2007 rom-com I Could Never Be Your Woman and with Silverstone for little-seen 2012 horror comedy Vamps. But she'll always have Clueless. We'll always have Clueless. Thirty years on and still as sharp, bright and winning as ever.
Al Jazeera
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
From Srebrenica to Gaza, why ‘never again' keeps failing
The raw statistics speak to the scale of the suffering in two places, separated by decades. Israel has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, many of them women and children, and injured more than 138,000. With constant bombardment, man-made famine, and tactics like declaring a safe zone and then bombing it, experts say what Israel is doing amounts to genocide. In the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 68,000 Bosniaks, rounding people up based on ethnicity. On July 11, 1995, Serb fighters rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a United Nations-declared 'safe zone' in the town of Srebrenica. That was the only legally recognised genocide of the Bosnian War. On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and as Israel's genocidal war on Gaza continues, Al Jazeera spoke to Iva Vukusic, assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, and Nimer Sultany, Palestinian legal scholar at the University of London, about the parallels between the two. Safe zones that aren't Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said his country intends to round up some 600,000 people who are in what Israel once designated as a 'safe zone' – and subsequently violated several times – and push them into a 'concentration zone' in Rafah. People would only be allowed to leave this 'concentration zone' if they were 'voluntarily emigrating' from Gaza. 'We have seen … Israeli academics, legal scholars, really objecting to this plan and calling it a manifest example of a war crime,' Vukusic explained. 'It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,' former Israeli Prime Minister said bluntly about the Katz announcement in an interview with the Guardian on Sunday. Implied in Israel's claim that it would secure this concentration zone from the outside, and that aid would be distributed within, is the idea that this zone will be yet another Israeli 'safe zone' in its war on Gaza. A unilaterally declared safe zone, however, does not include the external controls and mechanisms that were part of the Srebrenica safe zone 30 years ago, Vukusic pointed out. These controls included international peacekeepers as well as UN Security Council Resolution 819, declaring Srebrenica a safe area. The UN declaration of the safe zone came after thousands of Bosnians streamed into Srebrenica, seeking safety from relentless attacks by Bosnian Serb fighters acting under 'Directive 7' to cut Srebrenica off from any other areas. Hemmed in and starving, people were trapped. The external mechanisms monitoring it did not prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosniak boys and men, a failure of the international community's pledge to 'never again' allow mass atrocities. And, in Gaza, even the appearance of UN protection mechanisms is lacking. 'We see that failure of 'never again' when it comes to Gaza, because Israel has systematically expelled and dismantled any kind of UN presence and prevented international organisations from performing their minimal humanitarian objectives,' Sultany said. In Bosnia, as in Gaza, people were forced to flee for their lives in the face of relentless violence by the attacking forces. Israel has issued expulsion order after expulsion order, pushing people out of one part of Gaza into another, then back again. It declared certain areas as 'safe zones', then proceeded to bomb them as refugees slept in flimsy tents that Israeli bombs turned into infernos in seconds. Displacement and its physical and psychological toll on refugees have been studied in various contexts, with scientists finding that displaced people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders at much higher rates due to the uncertainty of displacement, the destruction of social support systems, and the inability to maintain a semblance of 'normal life'. Add to that the forced starvation Israel is imposing on Gaza, which takes a physical and mental toll, as people watch their loved ones die of malnutrition or from curable diseases that their bodies are too weak to fight. Sultany pointed out that 'forcible transfers, in which Palestinians are being forced into increasingly shrinking spaces with limited ability to survive and dire humanitarian conditions', have been a hallmark of Israel's war on Gaza. Therefore, while Katz's comments were a continuation/extension of what was already being seen on the ground, this now resembles an official plan. 'The question of forcible transfer is part of the declared objectives of the so-called Gideon's Chariots military campaign in early May 2025 [and] it was also part of the so-called General's Plan in northern Gaza in October till December 2024,' he clarified. How to make a society accept genocide Israel's actions in Gaza are widely documented, with daily accounts of unarmed Palestinians being shot by snipers or bombed from above. Israel has been denounced for its indiscriminate killing of civilians, especially after investigations showed that its army had allowed itself a higher 'margin of error' when it came to killing civilians in this conflict, compared to its past wars on Gaza. Both experts argued that this is widely accepted within Israel because Palestinians have been dehumanised, much as Bosniaks were during the 1990s. Sultany said, in both Bosnia and Gaza today, civilians have been stripped of their civilian status, or innocence, through repeated messaging to society at large. Early examples include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framing the assault on Gaza and its civilians as a 'holy war' and using Biblical references to equate Palestinians to ancient foes to justify these actions by saying: 'You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.' Most recently, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May that Gaza's population would soon be choked into a small strip of land to make them 'totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places'. Documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia pointed to several instances of propaganda by Bosnian Serb leaders to dehumanise Bosniaks and brand them as 'foreigners', including claiming that Bosniaks were all assassins with 'kill lists' of Bosnian Serbs. Such descriptors, Sultany said, give aggressors a 'justification for the killing of civilians' and make the killing more palatable to society. 'We see all of that now in Gaza in the last 21 months,' Sultany added. Vukusic agreed, telling Al Jazeera that in both Bosnia and Gaza, there has been a 'deep process of dehumanisation to allow for the societal acceptance of such acts where you see a people [who are] civilians as enemies'. There becomes a 'broad acceptance of acts committed by the government where only the suffering of yourself and your people [is seen] and it absolutely does not matter what the costs are for somebody else', she added. This shift is apparent in how freely and often Israeli officials have made openly genocidal statements. Serbian leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic (president of the Republic of Serbia from 1990 to 1997 and Serbia and Montenegro until 2000), were tried by the International Court of Justice for genocide and war crimes. Milosevic died before he was convicted. 'If you compare what Slobodan Milosevic was saying to some of the things that Israeli ministers are saying, Slobodan Milosevic was never, ever that open and was never, ever that explicit,' she said. Because statements by Israeli officials are so explicit, 'the determination of the genocidal intent would probably be much easier to make', she added. Inaction, politics and the international community Western nations were initially reluctant to involve themselves in the Bosnian War, but the horror of Srebrenica eventually moved them to action, with NATO conducting an air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces in August and September 1995, eventually leading to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war. Yet many of the countries that led the defence of the Bosniaks after Srebrenica are some of Israel's biggest backers. 'In many ways, this is a Western genocide,' Sultany said. 'There is a US-Israel genocide, a genocide that was backed from the beginning by major European and North American powers. 'This is fundamental to understanding the Western support for and justification for the genocide in Palestine,' Sultany said. 'It's not only that the West was a reluctant observer, and they failed to prevent the genocide. They were actively from the beginning supporting it, shielding it diplomatically and politically and financing and arming it.' Elusive justice What did justice look like for the victims in Bosnia, and is that a model that could be followed in Gaza? In the case of Bosnia, there is no universal position on the question of justice among the victims. Vukusic said some were satisfied with the prison sentences given to high-level officials convicted of genocide, while others are disappointed because not all the hundreds of people who participated in war crimes or genocidal acts were held to account. Sultany, after a recent visit to Bosnia, is convinced that Bosnians have been failed by international justice. 'The initial case was brought in 1993, [but] was delivered in 2007, almost 14 years later,' he said. 'So the wheels of justice grind very slowly.' He added that Srebrenica, a single massacre, was singled out among years of massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Bosnian Serb forces. 'Anyone who was killed before or after or [in] different areas is not considered a victim of genocide because of the detrimental effects of the legal delimitation of what is a genocide in the case of Bosnia,' he said. In Gaza, where attacks against Palestinians are ongoing, justice may be difficult to envision. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024, the international community has failed to follow through on them. Vukusic said expectations should be tempered when considering international justice, but that prosecutions are still important, allowing facts to be established in court, and messages sent about what the law does not allow. For example, Vukusic said: 'You cannot cut off a civilian population [from food and water], you cannot make them thirsty and hungry and without medicine, you cannot bomb universities, you cannot raze to the ground a whole area where two million people live. 'Those [messages] may be helpful, but nothing is going to restore what people have lost,' she said. 'Nothing is going to bring back dead family members.' 'In both cases [Bosnia and Palestine], there is a failure of prevention mechanisms,' Sultany said. 'And the fact that it fails again … is a miscarriage of justice in itself that requires us to rethink the international legal order.' Sultany added that the ongoing injustices against Palestinians are down to 'long-term impunity' and 'the fact that the Israelis have not been held to account by any meaningful legal mechanisms'. 'Never again' has not been put into practice when it comes to Palestinians, according to Sultany. 'We need to go to the root cause of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide … to guarantee that 'never again' becomes an effective and practical possibility,' he said.
