On 24 May the Paris Criminal Court convicted three high-ranking Syrian senior officials for their role in the imprisonment, enforced disappearance, and torture of two dual Syrian-French Citizens, Patrick Dabbagh and his Father Mazzen. 

In 2013, Mazzen and Patrick Dabbagh were arbitrarily arrested by the Syrian authorities and taken to the Mezzeh military airport detention center. After five years, their family received two death certificates stating their deaths in 2014 and 2017.

The leaders of Norway, Ireland, and Spain have announced that they will formally recognize a Palestinian state on 28 May.

On Wednesday, Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said a two-state solution was in Israel’s best interest. He adds “There cannot be peace in the Middle East if there is no recognition.”

Gahr Store added, “Recognition of Palestine is a means of supporting the moderate forces which have been losing ground in this protracted and brutal conflict.”

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court has said he is seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

Karim Khan said his office had applied to the World Court’s pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants for the military and political leaders on both sides for crimes committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Israeli attack on World Central Kitchen convoy, April 1, 2024

In a press release from 14 May Human Rights Watch said that Israeli forces have carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 2023, despite aid groups having provided their coordinates to Israeli authorities to ensure their protection. 

President Joe Biden has warned Israel that the US will stop supplying some weapons if it launches a major ground operation in the Gaza city of Rafah.

The comments amount to the president's strongest warning yet over a potential ground invasion of Rafah, and mark the first time he has said the US could stop shipments of American weapons to Israel.

The weapons being held back by the US are related to a future delivery, so the move is unlikely to have an immediate impact. But given the rate at which Israel is bombing it will probably affect future strikes fairly soon.

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias killed “at least thousands of people” in West Darfur state, Human Rights Watch has said, in what it called apparent “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”.

Canadian police on Friday arrested and charged three Indian men with the murder of Sikh activist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar last year and said they were probing whether the men had ties to the Indian government.

The International Criminal Court's prosecutor's office last Friday called for an end to what it called intimidation of its staff, saying such threats could constitute an offence against the world's permanent war crimes court.

In the statement posted on social media platform X, the ICC prosecutor's office said all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence its officials must cease immediately. It added that the Rome Statute, which outlines the ICC's structure and areas of jurisdiction, prohibits these actions.

Last week a US judge ruled that French bank, BNP Paribas, must face a lawsuit accusing the bank of helping the Sudanese government commit genocide between 1997 and 2011 by providing banking services that violated American sanctions.

U.S. District Judge in Manhattan, Alvin Hellerstein, found substantial evidence that showed a relationship between BNP Paribas' financing and human rights abuses perpetrated by the government.

Hundreds of bodies have been uncovered so far at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, central Gaza, and at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in the north, responding to the harrowing discovery the international community is calling for independent investigations to guarantee accountability for any violations of international law.