By Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko

“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” – Anatole France

“The Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” – John Marshall Harlan

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal”. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Today, the international news networks are reporting the bombing to death of four journalists from a hospital environment in Gaza City, which is under an intensive military blockades by Israeli military. Five journalists were earliest killed by Israel in Gaza.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have been on special assignments inside the Palestinian Homeland of Gaza- a place with a population of over 2 million Palestinians.

The military activities by the state of Israel were precipitated by the vexatious invasion of Israel by Hamas militants who killed over 200 Israeli civilians and children around October 7, 2023.

Since after that despicable terror attack by the Palestinian Sunni Islamists known as Hamas (a US designated Foreign terrorist organisation also known as FTO), Israel began the military actions in Palestinian Homeland of Gaza, even as West Bank occupied partly by Israel has seen some flashes of military strikes.

A classified Israeli military database sighted reportedly by Aljazeera tv network, shows the vast majority of Palestinians killed in Gaza are civilians, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call.

Figures reviewed by the outlets revealed on Thursday indicate that, as of May 2025 – 19 months into Israel’s war on Gaza – Israeli military intelligence had listed 8,900 fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) as confirmed or “probably” dead.

Over the same period, Gaza’s health authorities recorded at least 53,000 deaths from Israeli attacks, meaning that named fighters accounted for just 17 percent of those killed, with civilians at about 83 percent of the total death toll.

Conflict researchers say that ratio is almost unparalleled in modern warfare. Only the Rwandan genocide, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, and Russia’s 2022 siege of Mariupol recorded a higher civilian death rate, the authors noted. source: Aljazeera, date: 21 Aug 2025.

Conversely, Russia invaded Ukraine around February 2014 and since then, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in several bombardments. The sheer barbarism of what Russia is doing inside of Ukraine is unprecedented.

So, looking at how Russia and Israel are attacking the weaker countries of Ukraine and Gaza of Palestinians, and then the United Nations (UN) would hold meetings including security council meetings and issue declarations and Resolutions that are non-binding, and also since Russia as a veto power holding member of the UN Security Council, then Israel backed by USA another veto power wielding member of the unequal Security Council of the UN, neither Russia nor Israel may ever have to worry about any threats of military actions by the UN against each of their territories for violating the international law.

Besides, the application of international law is unequal and opaque, just as the relevant international treaties did not make it explicit that stronger Nuclear powerful nations are prohibited from attacking weaker nations or seek to annex those territories, just as Russia and Israel are currently doing in Ukraine and Palestinian Homeland.

A reliable source: theforge.defence.gov.au 30/08/2023, informed us much profoundly on why I said the two Nuclear powers of Russia and Israel are way bigger than the United Nations, made up of over 100 other nations.

The source said the Kellogg-Briand Pact was the first attempt to outlaw war (although the League of Nations required states to submit disputes to arbitration, it did not attempt to outlaw war as such). The parties to the 1928 General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy ‘condemn[ed] recourse to war’ and agreed to ‘renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another’. The goal during that period was to reverse the legal presumption in favour of belligerence.

In the aftermath of the Second World War (1945), the United Nations Charter came into being, spurred by that war’s many atrocities and the epic number of civilian and military deaths. The principles from the Kellogg-Briand Pact were incorporated into the more robust UN system. The rules regarding the use of force by states contained in the Charter may be challenged from time to time, but are clear: ‘[N]o one really contests that the use of force is strictly forbidden in contemporary international law.

This prohibition is recognized as a core rule of the law of nations.’ There are, of course, some ambiguities at the margins and this keeps legal scholars and foreign ministry legal advisors occupied. As a general matter, the International Court of Justice has rejected any ‘innovative’ interpretations of the law. Cyber is an evolving area, but that is more a question of determining how the law applies to novel situations, and not real confusion as to the content of the law itself.

Contemporary international law prohibits resort to force to threaten or attack other countries (UN Charter, Article 2, para. 4: ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.’).

The prohibition on the use of force is itself a reflection of the primacy of the two primary incidents of statehood: state sovereignty and the territorial integrity. So long as a national government has effective control over its land and sea territory, it has the legal protection of the Charter against other states trying to dislodge it by force. This goes into the related question of international recognition of states and governments and the definition of a state’s maritime borders, perhaps topics for another time.

The prohibition on the use of force includes a prohibition on one state assisting another state in a breach of the prohibition on the use of force, to include a prohibition on letting the aggressor use the assisting state’s territory to attack a third country (looking at you, Belarus).

Well, Russia and Israel do not believe that they are subjected to the dictates of the aforementioned aspects of international treaties.

The following are just very few records of casualties of Ukrainian and Palestinian civilians killed in the two unjust wars waged by Russian soldiers and Israel Defense Forces.

October 13, 2023, Source: Reuters

(Reuters) – A Reuters video journalist was killed and six other journalists injured in southern Lebanon on Friday when missiles fired from the direction of Israel struck them, according to a Reuters videographer who was at the scene.

The group of journalists, including from Aljazeera and Agence France-Presse, were working near Alma al-Shaab, close to the Israel border, where the Israeli military and Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been trading fire in border clashes.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and a Hezbollah lawmaker blamed the incident on Israel.

Reuters said in a statement that Issam Abdallah had been killed while providing a live video signal for broadcasters. The camera was pointed at a hillside when a loud explosion shook the camera, filling the air with smoke, and screams were heard.

January 7, 2024. Source: Aljazeera

The Israeli military has seemingly walked back its justification for targeting a vehicle in Gaza last week, killing two Al Jazeera journalists, United States broadcaster NBC reported.

Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was killed in an Israeli missile strike on Sunday in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Journalist Mustafa Thuraya was also killed in the attack, while a third passenger, journalist Hazem Rajab, was seriously injured.

At the time of the attack, the Israeli army said it was targeting a “terrorist” in the vehicle.

May 17, 2025, Source: palestinechronicle

Five Palestinian journalists were killed on Sunday in separate Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, raising the number of journalists killed since October 7 to more than 222, according to local sources.

Aljazeera reported that Israeli warplanes targeted and killed journalists Aziz al-Hajjar, Abdel Rahman al-Abdallah, Nour Qandil, and her husband, Khaled Abu Seif. Their family members were also killed in the strikes.

Photojournalist Aziz al-Hajjar was killed along with his wife and children when an Israeli airstrike hit their home in the Saftawi neighbourhood in northern Gaza.

20 MAY 2025, Source: theguardian

At least 91 Palestinians have been killed and many more injured in a third day of Israeli strikes across Gaza, according to medical officials in the strip, who said a high proportion of the dead were women and children.

The timing of the strikes in the new Israeli offensive appears to have increased the proportion of women and children among the victims, with many sleeping when the missiles struck overnight or very early in the morning. Among those pulled alive from rubble on Thursday was a month-old baby girl, but her parents and brother were killed.

A first wave of airstrikes on Tuesday shattered a two-month pause in hostilities and killed more than 400, according to the health ministry in Gaza, in what may have been the single bloodiest day of the 18-month conflict. The dead included 183 children and 94 women, Palestinian officials said.

4^th April, 2025, Source: hrw.org

(Jerusalem, April 4, 2024) – An Israeli airstrike on a six-story apartment building sheltering hundreds of people in central Gaza on October 31, 2023, is an apparent war crime, Human Rights Watch said today. The attack, which killed at least 106 civilians, including 54 children, is among the deadliest single incidents for civilians since the Israeli government’s bombardment and ground incursion into Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence of a military target in the vicinity of the building at the time of the Israeli attack, making the strike unlawfully indiscriminate under the laws of war. Israeli authorities have provided no justification for the attack. The Israeli military’s long track record of failing to credibly investigate alleged war crimes underscores the importance of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s inquiry into serious crimes committed by all parties to the conflict.

“Israel’s unlawful airstrike on an apartment building on October 31 killed at least 106 people, including children playing football, residents charging phones in the ground-floor grocery store, and displaced families seeking safety,” said Gerry Simpson, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch. “This strike inflicted massive civilian casualties without an apparent military target – one of scores of attacks causing overwhelming carnage, and highlighting the urgency of the ICC probe.”

Russian Killing, Source: Wikipedia

According to local authorities, 458 bodies have been recovered from the town, including nine children under the age of 18.

Among the victims, 419 people were killed with weapons and 39 appeared to have died of natural causes, possibly related to the occupation. A memorial wall was installed in Bucha with 501 names of killed residents.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented the unlawful killings, including summary executions, of at least 73 civilians in Bucha. Photos showed corpses of civilians, lined up with their hands bound behind their backs, shot at close range. An inquiry by Radio Free Europe reported the use of a basement beneath a campground as a torture chamber. Many bodies were found mutilated and burnt, and girls as young as fourteen reported being raped by Russian soldiers.

Source: Reuters, Date: February 8, 2024

Geneva, Feb 8 (Reuters) – At least 8,000 people were killed by fighting or war-related causes in Russia’s months-long conquest of Mariupol, one of the biggest battles of the nearly two-year war between Russia and Ukraine, according to Human Rights Watch.

Mariupol became a byword for horror during a nearly three-month-long Russian siege for control of the strategic port city between March and May 2022, with trapped civilians forced to bury their dead by the roadside.

The Human Rights Watch assessment, based on satellite and other images of grave sites, is one of the only independent estimates of the death toll so far.

Ukraine has said tens of thousands were killed but that it cannot give an exact number without access to the city, now under Russian control.

Source: hrw.org, Date: July 8, 2024

(Kyiv) – Russian forces’ strikes on multiple cities in Ukraine on July 8, 2024, killed at least 42 civilians, including five children, and injured at least 190, according to Ukrainian authorities. The attacks also caused significant damage to vital infrastructure, including the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv, the country’s largest children’s hospital.

The hospital’s director told the UN Security Council that the strike severely damaged several departments, including the intensive care units and oncology and surgical wings, and completely destroyed the toxicology and traumatology departments. The director also said that hundreds of children, including those undergoing dialysis treatment, were evacuated immediately after air raid sirens went off at 9:52 am.

When the first strike hit, less than an hour after the sirens went off, patients and staff were still in the hospital, including three patients undergoing heart surgery. Ten children were injured in the attack. On July 10, the Ukrainian health minister reported that a child who had been evacuated from Okhmatdyt’s intensive care unit in a critical condition had died in another hospital.

ALSO READ: Road Safety: Dangote Cement Screens 1,500 Drivers

So, what then is the essence of the members if humanity congregating under the auspices of the UN when just 5 members wielding Veto powers can constantly stop the UN from taking military steps to protect the weak and vulnerable members that have no Nuclear weapons? Your guess is as good as mine that the UN is a dysfunctional contraption set up to protect the Powerful nations.

Onwubiko, the founder of the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) wrote from Abuja Nigeria.