A war crime is when . . .
When children are killed in vicious night raids by a government bent on punishing a people whose land it has occupied, it is a war crime.
When homes are razed and offices are reduced to rubble by a state that is not fighting an opposing army, it is a war crime.
When water supplies are closed off, when fuel is made unavailable, when hapless people are deprived of food by an occupying power, it is a war crime.
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When men, women and children are ordered to leave their homes and flee to another region because the occupying power means to flatten the rest of the territory it has already bombed to ruin, it is a war crime.
When a minister of the occupying power refers to a colonised people as animals, it is a war crime.
When a mighty state decides to launch air, land and naval attacks against unarmed people trapped in an enclave, it is a shameful instance of a war crime.
When an occupying power masses an army on the border of a region it has never permitted to be free, it is a war crime and nothing less.
When a militant group fires missiles into civilian populations across the frontier, it is a war crime.
When an occupying power pummels, in retaliation, a population to death and destruction, it commits war crimes of a greater magnitude.
When the International Criminal Court, so swift to act on Ukraine against Russia, remains silent on the acts of men cheerfully killing off a people who have wandered as refugees for seventy five years, it is condoning war crimes.
When a resolution for peace, for hostilities to be suspended in Gaza, is vetoed by some members of the UN Security Council because it does not specifically blame one of the parties to the conflict, it is a carte blanche to the occupying power; it is support for war crimes.
When governments friendly with the occupying power choose to clamp down on demonstrations in support of people who are being bombed in nocturnal raids by an occupying power, it is a show of callous support for a commission of war crimes.
A war crime is when soldiers kick down the doors of homes in the middle of the night in the occupied West Bank, rudely rouse sleeping young men and seize them and tell their parents that their children do not deserve to live.
When fathers weep over the bodies of their babies, bombed to death by cheerful fighter pilots in the night, it is the tragic bells of war crimes ringing in our ears.
When Palestinians are trapped in Gaza, when they have nowhere to go, when the Rafah border opening into Egypt remains closed to them, it is a war crime.
When the media choose to be selective in their reporting, when they focus on the travails felt by the occupying power but ignore the calamity the occupying power is causing to descend on a people who have been without a state for seventy five years, they are complicit in war crimes.
When cemeteries expand and lengthen, with the remains of men, women and children laid into freshly dug graves, it is a horrific image of war crimes the world cannot look away from.
When settlers from the occupying power, armed and driven by political fanaticism, seize Arab land, grab their orchards and homes and on that commandeered property build residential structures for themselves, when their mother country acquiesces in the immorality of it, it is a war crime.
Every war crime calls for the trial of the men and women who, in a brutal exercise of power, push people to death --- by bombarding them at night, by depriving them of water and food and fuel, by flattening their homes, by turning their land into a prison under the open sky.
Around the world, men of goodwill and women of noble intent do not sleep well at night --- because other men and women, determined to cause misery for the helpless, are busy at work in a land they have no moral and legal right to hold on to.
Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, history and literature.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.
