You wouldn’t know it going by the BBC coverage, but a growing hunger strike of political prisoners is amassing support. Over the weekend, another prisoner joined the hunger strike, bringing the current total up to seven. Now, supporters of the hunger strike are being asked to take a moment today to call out the BBC for their silence on both Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and the hunger strikers themselves.

And, campaigners are also calling out the  Starmer regime’s misuse of anti-terror legislation to hold twenty-four anti-genocide protesters without trial. The move comes after ‘Justice Secretary’ David Lammy claimed to be unaware of their hunger strike against the injustice:

BBC complicit

The government has used the Terrorism Act to deny the ‘Filton 24’ group bail, even though they are not charged with any terror offences and were imprisoned long before Starmer’s ‘proscription’ terror ban of their non-violent protest group Palestine Action to protect Israel’s interests. The government was exposed consulting the Israeli embassy about their prosecution. Eight of the group are on hunger strike, with most now in their second month and at least two hospitalised and in severe danger.

The BBC has stubbornly ignored Starmer’s ‘lawfare‘, just as it has ignored his regime’s use of similar tactics against journalists and activists exposing and opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Today, their supporters are asking others to ‘bombard’ the BBC’s systems with demands for an end to the silence and collusion:

Monday Dec. 8th

Bombard the BBC for our hunger strikers

1⃣Step one: save the BBC WhatsApp number +447756165803

2⃣Step two: copy and paste the below message and send to them.

3⃣Step three: share and repeat

—————————————

** EMERGENCY **
BBC — your silence is deadly.

Six UK political prisoners are now in the critical stage of a hunger strike.

They — along with 18 others — have been held for over a year with no trial, no bail.
This is not justice — this is punishment for refusing to bow to genocide.

Eight hunger strikers: Amu & Qesser (start date Nov 2) Heba (Nov 3) Jon (Nov 6), T Hoxha (Nov 9), Kamran (Nov 10), Lewie (Nov 25), Umer (Dec 4) are surviving on nothing but their will.

Their bodies are shutting down, permanent organ damage — even death — is no longer hypothetical, but imminent.

As a state-funded broadcaster, it is your responsibility to report on this urgent, life-threatening crisis. We demand you fulfil that duty.

We will keep calling, writing & standing at your doors until you break your silence.

They are not numbers.
They are people with names, families, futures.
They have stories — and they are fighting to keep them alive.
Report this.
NOW.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is also asking supporters to write to their MP about the hunger strikers:

Write to your MP about prisoners on hunger strike https://share.google/LI3P87lMUPiB7qiCs

You can check to see if your MP has signed here: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/64800/palestine-action-hunger-strike

Solidarity with the Filton 24 and the hunger strikers against the Starmer police state and its war on the rights of UK people to protect war criminals.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.

An Israeli drone pursued an older woman and her son through the rubble of Gaza yesterday, and then killed them both, along with at least five others. As Al Jazeera reported:

The Israeli military said it killed three people in separate incidents, claiming they had crossed the “yellow line” – an unmarked boundary where the Israeli military repositioned itself when the ceasefire with Hamas came into effect on October 10.

However, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said the woman and her son were chased by a quadcopter drone about one kilometre [half a mile] from the yellow line and “left there to bleed to death” as the aircraft continued hovering overhead, preventing anyone from reaching them.

Israeli drone kills; Western media silent

Some Israeli media reported the attack, but Western media have ignored it entirely:

The pair were among at least seven Palestinians murdered by Israel on the same day, in Beit Lahiya, Jabalia, and Zeitoun.

The occupation continues to starve Gaza, while also blocking essential food, medicines, medical equipment, shelters, and building materials as the Palestinian winter bites. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said the blockade, which has left more than a million people in flooded tents, makeshift shelters and wrecked buildings with no winter clothing or even shoes, is:

a direct result of Israeli policy and international silence.

One in four households is eating only at best a single meal a day, while one in ten are frequently going without food entirely. Almost the whole surviving population of Gaza – around 1.7 million according to Israeli military data – has been displaced, while approaching 700,000 have been murdered, either by bombs and bullets or by the starvation blockade.

Such atrocities have been met with silence from the UK and other Western media. Failing that, at best, these mainstream outlets have provided a regurgitation of Israeli narratives and an attempt at sanitisation to remove Israel’s guilt.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Middle East Eye

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.

What Skwawkbox-Canary and other independent news outlets, together with local journalists and international activists have been reporting for months, has finally made it into the ‘mainstream’ media. A CNN ‘investigation‘ ‘revealed’ that the Israeli military bulldozed some of the bodies of aid-seekers slaughtered at so-called ‘aid’ stations into unmarked Gaza mass graves. Others were simply left out in the open air to rot and add to the stench of death pervading the Strip.

But the US news outlet still whitewashes occupation’s mass murder, claiming that the victims were killed by “indiscriminate Israeli fire near the [Zikim] crossing.” It was in fact an entirely deliberate killing of huge numbers of desperate civilians that has long been known to be Israel’s ‘standard operating procedure.’ It also has been exposed by a US mercenary-turned-whistleblower:

CNN’s review, which also found that aid seekers were killed by indiscriminate Israeli fire near the crossing, drew upon hundreds of videos and photos from around Zikim, along with interviews of eyewitnesses and local aid truck drivers.

Israeli military whistleblowers also told the broadcaster that the use of mass, unmarked graves was widespread throughout Gaza. We have already seen this in the attempts of occupation troops to hide both paramedics and their vehicles after the night-time Rafah massacre.

In a chilling reminder of that massacre, CNN also reported a message left by one aid-seeker victim to his family as he risked his life to find food. Ammar Wadi wrote on his phone screen, found months later with his body:

Forgive me mom if anything happens to me. Whoever finds my phone, please tell my family that I love them so much.

In the Rafah massacre, the paramedic — whose footage of the ambush and slaughter exposed Israeli lies denying the slaughter — can be heard reciting the Shahada, then asking his mother to forgive him:

Forgive me, Mom, forgive me. I swear I only chose this path to help others.

The occupation denied using bulldozers on the bodies of its victims, just as it denied bombing hospitals, denied starving the people of Gaza, denied, denied, denied — every denial a lie.

Given Israel’s record of atrocities, the confirmation of the mass burials raises the horrific possibility that some of the victims were not dead when they were buried. US-Jewish volunteer Surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter recounted his experience of hearing multiple eyewitnesses. They described Israeli troops burying two bound children alive during the occupation’s attack on the hospital. Perlmutter later saw their bodies after the mass grave was uncovered:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by OnePath Network (@onepathnetwork)

Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, Janina Dill, told CNN that:

The purpose is to prevent the dead from becoming the missing and to allow for memorialization, chiefly by their families. Moreover, if bodies are deliberately mutilated or mishandled in a way that violates their dignity, this can amount to ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Wadi’s mother is still haunted by her son’s disappearance and final message. She told CNN:

When he comes to my mind, my eyes just cannot stop crying. We accept whatever God has written for us, but we just want to know what happened to our son.

The BBC and others have been forced to verify and acknowledge footage showing other massacres in which starving Palestinians were gunned down from the air while trying to retrieve food from aid trucks. In its article, CNN published a short clip, one of many circulating, showing aid-seekers fleeing under fire from ground forces:

US mercenary whistleblower Anthony Aguilar has described the way in which aid-seekers were allowed only minutes, at set times, to collect food. Any arriving outside those times or not escaping fast enough were gunned down by laughing soldiers and ‘military contractors’.

Israel has murdered at least three thousand aid-seekers this year and wounded almost twice as many, just a part of its slaughter and starvation of people in Gaza, more than two thirds of them children.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.

A released Palestinian detainee has revealed that Marwan Barghouti has been horrifically tortured by his Israeli captors. Barghouti, the political prisoner held for twenty-four years by the Israeli occupation, was recently honoured with a new mural in London.

Barghouti’s son Omar posted this morning to his social media this morning, in Arabic, that:

I woke up to a phone call from a released prisoner this morning. He told me, “Your father was physically abused. They broke his teeth and ribs, cut off part of his ear, and broke his fingers in stages for fun…

What do I do? Who do I talk to? Who can we turn to? We’re living with this nightmare every day… Oh God, have mercy on me. My father is 66 years old now. Oh God, where will he find the strength?”

In August, footage emerged showing an emaciated Barghouti, a shadow of his old self, being threatened by Israel’s fascist ‘security’ minister Itamar Ben-Gvir:

As with most of the myriad examples of the terror state torturing, starving, beating and raping innocent Palestinians it has abducted, the ‘mainstream’ media here in the UK has decided to stay silent.

The UK’s ‘mainstream’ media has so far ignored the torture of Marwan Barghouti. It has also ignored seven British nationals on hunger strike in British prisons — some for more than 4 weeks. But somehow, it hasn’t ignored the rise of the Labubu.

So what is it? Are you simply out of touch with the world around you, or are you consciously enabling Israeli terrorism and the Starmer government’s authoritarianism through your silence?
#FreeMarwan

Featured image via the New Arab

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.