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An independent ‘people’s tribunal’ established by scholars and experts on genocide and international law from around the world held its first public session on Monday in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the aim of investigating Israel’s’ alleged war crimes in Gaza.
Led by Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International law at Princeton University and former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, the four day Gaza Tribunal tribunal will hear from scholars, lawyers, journalists, UN special rapporteurs and eyewitnesses to the horrors of Gaza.
Opening the public session Richard Falk said: “The Gaza tribunal is devoted to bearing witness to Israel’s crimes against the peoples of Gaza. Beyond this the purpose of the tribunal is to add whatever it can to the torment and outrage of peoples around the world to bring the Gaza ordeal of death and destruction to a rapid end by urging action to be taken in the name of our common humanity.”
Although it has no formal legal status, the tribunal hopes to catalyse opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and to urge states to act where they previously have not, to meaningfully sanction Israel in an attempt to bring an end to the violence.
People’s tribunals first began during the Vietnam war when philosopher Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre hosted a similar project, in an attempt to hold the US to account over war crimes.
Prof Falk added that the Gaza Tribunal was also inspired by a similar civil-society led exercise during the Iraq War, prompted by the ‘regime-changing aggression that brought chaos and misery to the Iraqi people.’
“This legacy of earlier people’s tribunals has a common feature that defines the mission of the Gaza tribunal. It is the failure of organised international society to enforce international law and hold the perpetrators accountable. In short these tribunals arise only when governments and their institutions fail or refuse to address severe injustices, especially bearing upon war and peace.”
On Monday, the tribunal heard from Dr Nimer Sultany, a reader in Public Law at SOAS, who told attendees: “Palestine is a clear case in which the naming of the colonial condition has been delayed, or avoided, for so long. For too long.
“This lack of naming exposes an uneven application of principles and human rights. This lack of naming prolongs injustice and delays the application of human rights standards. We are here today to name the genocide.”
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He added: “We need to be careful of the recent revisionism which seeks to justify the prolonged silence of so many, in the face of the most barbaric crime of our lifetime, [and] definitely of this century.”
Commenting on Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s recent statement that “within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Sultany said: “These revisionists are pretending that there is something new in Smotrich’s recent statement.
“[They pretend] that Smotrich and Ben Ghivir [the far right Israeli National Security Minister] are not members of the security cabinet, which is constitutionally responsible for the war policy…and that Netanyhu’s political survival did not depend on them in October 2023 as much as now.”
Sultany’s remarks come as there is an increasing scrutiny of Israel in Europe. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz argued on Monday that “to cause such suffering to the civilian population, as has increasingly been the case in recent days, can no longer be justified by the fight against Hamas terrorism,” in a striking rhetorical reversal of Germany’s position as Israel’s most reliable Western European backer.
The tribunal also heard evidence from Dr Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American doctor practising in Chicago, who worked in Gaza in 2024.
He said: “My time at Nasser [a hospital in Gaza] was riddled with mass casualty events. What this means is there are multiple patients arriving at your facility at the same time, who are victims of trauma.
“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.”
The majority of his trauma patients were women and children and Khan Younis in early 2024 was being “levelled in a geographic fashion.”
“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.
“Many of these patients would demonstrate injuries from having a building collapse on them, some would be burned from the ensuing fires that would occur after a bombing. But we also had a significant number of gunshot wounds and shrapnel injuries.”
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The journalist Peter Oborne, a Byline Times writer who will speak at the tribunal on Wednesday, said of the event: “It is significant I think that this is taking place in Sarajevo, where a genocide took place across Bosnia – although the only recognised bit of it was in Srebrenica.
“The institutions set up to prevent this sort of thing [the devastation of Gaza] are incapable of stopping it, the Gaza Tribunal has been set up to analyse it, to tell the truth about it and to look at ways of holding those responsible to account whether in Israel, whether in Gaza itself – Hamas, or the leaders of the United states, Britain, Germany and so on.”
Oborne plans to talk about British media “complicity with Israel as it decimates and destroys Gaza.”
“The media is very merged with the political class on this issue. The media is a manifestation of power, not [of] telling the truth. Look at the hopeless way in which, with some glowing exceptions, the media has failed to hold the British government to account over arms sales.”
And Heidi Matthews a Co-director, International and Transnational Law Intensive Program at York University in Toronto, who spoke at the tribunal’s panel on international law also told Byline Times she had joined the Gaza Tribunal to provide expert testimony.
“It is an effort of civil society to explore the promises and pitfalls of international law in achieving concrete political outcomes: in this case, the end of genocide and Palestinian liberation.
“Participants in the Tribunal represent the global peoples’ demand for justice and accountability; the Tribunal will better equip each of us to do the work of justice by building knowledge and solidarity. It will also contribute to global consciousness raising and the growing wave of pressure on states – in the west and globally – to take concrete action against Israel’s crimes in Palestine.”
The tribunal will gather again in October in Istanbul where a “Jury of Conscience” will present the findings of the tribunal and deliver verdicts influenced by testimony from Palestinians who have lived through the genocide.