radiofree.asia

Category: israel

  • The UN says entire families are buried beneath the rubble in Gaza

    The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Tom Fletcher, warned of the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip, stressing that the scale of the task of recovering bodies from under the rubble of destruction is ‘enormous and beyond the capacity of any single entity to bear alone.’

    In a television interview with Al Jazeera from inside the Gaza Strip, Fletcher said that thousands of destroyed buildings and homes ‘hide beneath them the bodies of entire families waiting to be recovered,’ He pointed out that the rubble scattered everywhere makes search and recovery operations ‘complex and extremely dangerous,’ given Israel’s continued restrictions on the entry of heavy equipment and specialised equipment.

    The UN official added that many families are still waiting for the recovery of their loved ones’ bodies, stressing that this issue is a ‘purely humanitarian matter’ that must be included in the field commitments of the ceasefire agreement, calling on all parties to cooperate to facilitate the tasks of rescue and relief teams.

    An urgent humanitarian priority, says the UN

    Fletcher explained that providing the necessary search and rescue equipment is a top priority in the UN plan, stressing that the enormous amount of rubble scattered throughout the destroyed cities makes it impossible to reach victims without significant engineering and technical intervention.

    He stressed that the humanitarian response in Gaza is not limited to food and medicine, but also includes ‘restoring dignity to victims by recovering and burying them in a dignified manner.’

    Fletcher described the humanitarian situation in the Strip as ‘indescribably difficult,’ saying that the cities he visited had been ‘razed to the ground’ and that the scale of the destruction was ‘beyond imagination.’

    He noted that what he saw during his field visits ‘reflects an enormous humanitarian tragedy that calls for broad international solidarity,’ stressing that the United Nations is intensifying its efforts to remove rubble, reopen roads and facilitate the delivery of aid to the besieged population.

    He added that the United Nations needs thousands of trucks per week to distribute food, health and educational aid, explaining that about one million meals are currently being distributed to the population despite the severe shortage of resources.

    Gaza is on the brink of collapse

    Fletcher noted that hospitals in Gaza are operating under enormous pressure and lack fuel, medicines and vital equipment, while hundreds of thousands of children are waiting to return to school as part of a UN plan to gradually restart the education process.

    The Deputy Secretary-General spoke about the UN’s 60-day plan following the ceasefire agreement, explaining that it is a ‘comprehensive plan’ aimed at bringing in thousands of trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies and supporting the operation of local bakeries, which have begun producing hundreds of thousands of loaves of bread daily after the arrival of flour, yeast and fuel.

    He added that the plan also includes bringing in thousands of tents in preparation for winter, securing fuel for cooking, heating and operating sewage treatment plants, as well as rehabilitating hospitals and schools and providing them with basic educational supplies.

    Fletcher stressed that ‘the challenge ahead of us is enormous, and rebuilding Gaza requires a long-term vision,’ calling on the international community to shoulder its responsibility, saying, ‘It is time for the world to take serious action to end the suffering in Gaza after years of neglect and isolation.’

    With regard to coordinating the entry of aid, Fletcher said that the Israeli side had committed to allowing trucks to cross, and that the United Nations was beginning to see tangible results after the reopening of the Rafah crossing and the start of the actual flow of supplies. However, he stressed the need to open all crossings permanently to ensure the unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid.

    He also called for international and Palestinian organisations to be able to work side by side in distributing aid, stressing that local markets are in dire need of basic items such as eggs and daily food products.

    The world must act

    Speaking about the killing of more than 100 UN employees during the war, Fletcher expressed ‘deep sadness at the loss of colleagues,’ affirming the UN’s commitment to continue its work ‘in honour of their memory’ and stressing that the organisation would maintain its humanitarian presence in the Strip despite the challenges and risks.

    Fletcher concluded his statement by emphasising that Gaza must not be left alone to face this destruction, saying that ‘bringing life back to this devastated place is not the responsibility of the Palestinians alone, but a global humanitarian duty,’ calling for genuine and sustained solidarity that will restore hope to millions of civilians who have lost everything.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ICC rejects Israel’s appeal, upholds arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galant

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) has, for the second time, rejected Israel’s appeal against the arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Galant.

    The ICC: not backing down over war criminals

    In a ten-page ruling issued on Friday 17 October, the ICC stated that Israel was ‘repeating its previous arguments,’ referring to its first appeal, which was rejected in July 2025 and was also based on the argument that the court lacked jurisdiction to consider the crimes in question.

    The Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted informed sources as saying that Israel reiterated in its latest appeal its position that the court ‘lacks jurisdiction to consider crimes committed on Palestinian territory.’

    In its decision, the ICC confirmed that it was not obliged to discuss the issue of jurisdiction raised by Israel before executing the arrest warrants, noting that the warrants were issued in an ‘independent legal process’ not directly related to the issue of jurisdiction.

    In Israeli legal circles, it is believed that the ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement in Gaza may have an impact on the court’s proceedings against Netanyahu and Galant, although Israeli sources told the same newspaper that the agreement ‘will not officially affect the course of the case.’ as the indictments relate to crimes allegedly committed between 8 October 2023 and 20 May 2024.

    It is noteworthy that in July 2025, the ICC rejected an official request from Israel to cancel the arrest warrants and suspend the investigation against Netanyahu and Galant, explaining at the time that the suspension of the investigation under Article 19(7) of the Rome Statute only applies in the event of a challenge to the ‘admissibility of the case’ , which Israel did not do, as its objection was limited to the issue of jurisdiction only.

    Palestine is recognised

    The ICC recognised Palestine as a State Party to the Rome Statute on 5 February 2021, granting it jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

    On 3 March 2021, the Court’s Office of the Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into ‘the situation in Palestine,’ before Israel lodged a formal objection to the Court’s jurisdiction on 23 September 2024.

    Two months later, on 21 November 2024, the First Pre-Trial Chamber issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galant on charges related to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Dirt emerges on the Labour-Israel relationship – despite Starmer trying to suppress it

    The National has reported that Keir Starmer’s Labour government has blocked a Freedom of Information (FOI) request regarding a meeting with Israel. While there are legitimate reasons for the government to block FOIs, the excuse given here has been described as “extraordinary”.

    Scottish Green MSP Patrick Harvie responded by saying the “idea that the public cannot see these documents because we might misinterpret them seems extraordinary, and if that excuse is allowed to stand, it would set a dangerous precedent”.

    Try as Labour might, however, they can’t stop the dirt about them and Israel from getting out:

    What are they hiding

    As we reported previously, Labour’s David Lammy (then-foreign secretary) hosted a secret meeting with his Israel counterpart Gideon Sa’ar in April. Wanting to know more about this “clandestine event”, the National sent an FOI requesting any documents relating to the visit. As they report, the government should have responded within 20 days. In the end, they kept pushing this date back, with a final refusal sent 5 months later.

    The refusal stated (emphasis added):

    Some of the information in scope shows our internal position and strategy on this bilateral relationship [with Israel].

    This relationship of trust allows for the free and frank exchange of information on the understanding that it will be treated in confidence. If the United Kingdom does not respect such confidences, its ability to promote and protect UK interests through international relations will be hampered, which will not be in the public interest.

    We believe, if viewed, it could be open to misinterpretation, which would damage our relationship with Israel.

    For these reasons, we consider that the public interest in maintaining this exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosure of the information.

    Freedom of Information was introduced to ensure confidence in government behaviour. Now we’re being told a British government can’t provide transparency to the British public because it might upset a foreign power.

    Where does it end?

    Not here, it seems, as there’s also this:

    “Nothing has changed” when it comes to Labour and Israel

    MintPress described lord Ian Austin as an “Arch Israel lobbyist” back in February 2024:

    As reported by the Guardian on 18 October:

    The Foreign Office recommended that David Lammy endorse a trade mission to Israel, days after he suspended trade talks and rebuked the country’s government, internal documents reveal.

    In an unusual move, officials asked for ministerial advice over Ian Austin’s visit to Israel in late May. Bureaucratic dysfunction meant the trip by the trade envoy went ahead without the support of ministers or advisers.

    The Foreign Office had said the peer would not meet any representatives of the Israeli government. But photographs show him with senior Israeli trade officials on two occasions.

    Activist and rapper Lowkey noted what Austin was up to back in May:


    The Guardian piece also carried this particularly telling section (emphasis added):

    The official said the visit would give Austin the opportunity “to explain to Israeli civil society and business … that nothing has changed in our existing trading relationship” and concluded: “We recommend the visit goes ahead. Do you agree?”

    In Israel, Austin met Rafael systems who produced the Spike missiles which almost certainly “killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, including three British citizens”. And if things went to plan, Austin told them that nothing had changed.

    Here he is telling Sky News that people are ‘obsessed’ with Gaza:


    Funny he has a problem with this given he wants to ensure ‘nothing changes’.

    Either Ian Austin has gone completely rogue and is undermining the UK’s position on the Israeli government (which was actively committing a genocide at the time), or nothing was officially signed so Lammy would have plausible deniability.

    Whichever way you look at it, it’s a grubby affair.

    Dirt

    To be fair, we have a pretty good idea why this current Labour government would want to avoid transparency:

    At this point, Starmer and his cronies are up to their eyeballs in it.

    They might be able to block some of this stuff now, but it will all come out eventually.

    Featured image via House of Commons

    By Willem Moore

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • BREAKING: video emerges from Israel’s ceasefire-breaking onslaught in Gaza

    Israel – which has committed more than 47 violations of the supposed ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza in just a few days – has now resumed its wholesale heavy bombing of Gaza, killing dozens of Palestinian civilians including many children.

    The resumed bombing shreds the ceasefire-that-never-was after the daily breaches took more than a hundred lives almost entirely ignored by the UK ‘mainstream’ media.

    Israel is a terror state.

    Featured image and video supplied

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • “Jewish Villans” Aston Villa supporters club didn’t exist online before Maccabi furore

    The decision of West Midlands Police and Aston Villa football club to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from the Villa match against the Israeli team early next month because of Maccabi’s notorious reputation for racist riots has seen a massive media and political operation swing into action to project ‘outrage’ at the supposed decision to ‘deny football fans the right to attend a game because they’re Jewish’. Supposedly.

    The campaign has made no mention of non-Israeli teams being banned plenty of times because of fears about the behaviour of their fans — including all English teams at one point. Nor do they mention — at least with any honest portrayal — the abundant video record of racist chants, rape threats and death threats of Maccabi fans, their songs about drinking the blood of opposing fans, their cries of “Death to Arabs” and their mockery of dead Palestinian children killed in Israel’s Gaza genocide. A behaviour so bad that Dutch intelligence services now classify Israel as a national security threat.

    One figure has appeared in the media more than any other as the face of supposed ‘Jewish’ hurt at the idea that Israeli thugs, terrorists and racists might be banned ‘just for being Jewish’ — Andrew Fox. Fox was at first presented as the ‘Jewish honorary president’ of the “Jewish Villans” (or “Villains”) supporters club, though some outlets have removed the word “Jewish” after people pointed out Fox, in bygone days, had admitted that he isn’t.

    Aston Villa Jewish supporter’s club

    But the ‘mystery’ goes further: there’s no such thing as “Aston Villa Jewish Villans/Villains” supporters club.

    The club did once tweet Passover greetings to Jewish fans including a message from Rabbi Michael Pollak, whom it described as “Chief Rabbi and member of” the group “Fans of Diversity Aston Villa Jewish Supporters Club.” However, the message quoted by Pollak doesn’t mention Aston Villa.

    There is a Rabbi Michael Pollak, but his bio says he’s from London and makes no mention of Villa or any links with the club. The only existing Google hit for his name and “Villa” at the same time is a link to a B’nai B’rith post where the page contains a link to a comment in the last couple of days about the Maccabi ban:

    Even “Fans of Diversity Aston Villa Jewish Supporters Club” and its variants have next to no online presence, but “Aston Villa Jewish Villans/Villains” appears to have none at all before it sprang into being for the Maccabi faux-outrage. Search engines reveal no relevant hits before the last few days, except for a few new comments on older pages — which appears to be a regular tactic used by Israel lobby ‘astroturfers’ to try to create some older-looking search results:

    These results are corroborated by Villa fans’ forums, who’ve never heard of either variant:

    And Mr Fox himself? Well, he exists and appears to be a retired army major as the media have described him — however, he is also an ardent advocate for Israel who has visited Israel with the Israeli military and appeared on far-right TV station GB News to defend Israel’s war crime of bombing a civilian building in (US ally) Qatar in September — an appearance that the Islamophobic ‘Henry Jackson Society’ (HJS) also featured. Fox also appeared on screen to describe Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a ‘just war’ and regurgitating Israel’s long-disproven atrocity propaganda of mass rapes and beheaded babies.

    And in an article for HJS, as human rights groups, the UN and journalist groups condemned Israel’s targeted, UK-assisted slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, he said Israel should be killing more journalists, a comment that Action on Armed Violence condemned as:

    a politicised argument that undermines the foundational principle of civilian protection in war. To accept it would be to take a step toward normalising the targeting of journalists for the content of their reporting: an erosion of humanitarian law that would outlast the current conflict and endanger reporters worldwide. And if Fox’s own repeated, IDF-facilitated trips to Gaza were judged by the elastic criteria he applies to others, he himself might be classified as a combatant.

    None of this has prevented Mr Fox from being presented by virtually every ‘mainstream’ UK media outlet as the face and voice of supposed anger among Aston Villa fans at the decision not to allow Maccabi thugs to rampage through Birmingham as they did in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

    And not only did it not prevent it, none of these facts has as much as been hinted at in the ‘MSM’ coverage.

    You’d almost think it was a joint operation between the genocidal coloniser Israel and the genocide-denying and collaborating Starmer regime to whitewash Israeli racism and violence and demonise any opposition to it. Outlandish, eh?

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tunisians are rising up to outlaw normalisation with Israel’s genocidal regime

    Activists in Tunisia are renewing pressure on their government to introduce the anti-normalisation bill in parliament for voting. The bill would criminalise relations with Israel, and is something they have been campaigning for, for many years.

    Their movement, called ‘One Million Signatures to Criminalise Normalisation’, is led by prominent pro-Palestinian groups, including the Coordination Committee for Joint Action for Palestine, the Tunisian Boycott Campaign, and the Anti-Normalisation Campaign.​

    Tunisia: Activists are campaigning to outlaw normalisation with the Israeli occupation

    The concept of ‘normalisation’ presents Israel’s oppressive policies — such as occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism — as being normal or acceptable. According to the Palestinian BDS National Committee, normalisation involves participating in any project or activity that brings Palestinians and Israelis together without meeting the following two key conditions: the Israeli side must publicly recognise Palestinian inalienable rights, and joint efforts must actively oppose Israeli oppression through co-resistance. If these conditions are not met, the activities are considered normalisation and should be boycotted because they serve to whitewash Israel’s regime of injustice and undermine Palestinian resistance.​

    Organisers in Tunisia are gathering signatures to push for legislation that makes these normalisation activities criminal offences, arguing that they attempt to make the ongoing starvation, displacement, settler colonialism, and genocide appear normal, instead of the crimes that they are. They say that engaging in joint projects with Israelis, without addressing the root causes of injustice, and without Palestinian-led resistance, continues the ongoing cycle of oppression and apartheid. The campaign specifically targets activities like cultural festivals, conferences, or artistic collaborations that bring together Palestinians and Israelis without fulfilling the two essential conditions of recognition and resistance.​

    Several countries already maintain strong positions against normalisation with the Israeli occupation. Algeria’s Constitution explicitly supports a full Palestinian state and forbids normalisation efforts with the Zionist regime, while Iran continues to support armed Palestinian resistance and has also refused diplomatic ties, instead maintaining its position of anti-normalisation. Yemen and Iraq have also passed anti-normalisation laws.

    Normalisation means complicity in the Israeli occupation’s oppression and many crimes

    But the vast majority of countries, the UK included, while claiming to uphold international law, have maintained complicity in systemic violence and genocide against Palestinians by continuing their normalisation of relations with the Israeli regime. Despite the occupation’s policies of displacement, settlement expansion, military aggression, and genocide, they have signed trade agreements and increased diplomatic ties, legitimising the actions of this rogue state. Their support provides cover for war crimes and crimes against humanity, allowing the occupation to persist without international accountability.​

    The public in Tunisia are deeply opposed to normalisation with the Israeli occupation. Earlier this month, protesters gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Tunis, demanding the expulsion of the American ambassador and the passage of laws criminalising normalisation with the Israeli occupation. Demonstrators accused the U.S. of supporting genocide, while organisers announced they would continue protesting until the authorities enact anti-normalisation laws and cut all military and political ties with the Israeli regime and the US. Several weeks earlier, crowds again gathered outside the US embassy, while hundreds of activists marched through Tunis, calling for laws that stop all forms of cooperation with the Israeli terrorist state.

    BDS criteria

    According to the Palestinian BDS movement, normalisation — meaning participating in joint activities without addressing underlying injustices — is a tool of colonial and oppressive regimes and serves to cover up Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial policies, weakening the global solidarity needed to end these systems.​

    The campaign to criminalise normalisation represents a broader resistance movement for justice and human rights and the struggle against colonialism, and while most countries — both Western and Arab — continue to normalise relations with this pariah state, Tunisian citizens see this as perpetuating injustice and delaying liberation for Palestinians, and they are demanding action from their government.

    Tunisia’s Parliament debated similar legislation in November 2023, which prohibited the ‘recognition of the Zionist entity or the establishment of direct or indirect ties’ with it’, and would have banned any interaction between people from Tunisia and Israel, irrespective of the context. ‘Normalisation’ would have resulted in six to 10 years in prison and a fine equivalent of up to £23,000. But Tunisian President Kais Saied used his veto power, indefinitely postponing the voting on the bill, so the law was not passed.

    Moral and legal duty to act against the Israeli regime

    Bringing an end to the illegal occupation, and stopping, preventing and punishing genocide remain a moral and legal duty for all countries. In 2024 the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion stated that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was illegal and, in September 2025, a UN International Commission of Inquiry said the Israeli occupation was committing genocide. Why are our governments not taking action to stop a regime that is responsible for an illegal occupation, a system of apartheid, an illegal siege and a genocide?

    Tunisia’s anti-normalisation campaign comes at a time when the international community has failed to uphold international law and protect Palestinian rights. As Tunisian activists intensify their push to criminalise normalisation with Israel,Yemen has stood alone as the only country fulfilling its legal obligations to resist the genocide against Palestinians, but it has been pounded by bombs, as a result. By enforcing a blockade on Israeli occupation linked vessels in the Red Sea, making their way to Eilat, Yemen was legally asserting its right to prevent genocide. This blockade has been a concrete action upholding international law in the face of Israeli war crimes and a humanitarian catastrophe.

    Yemen’s courageous enforcement of the blockade, despite facing devastating bombing and sanctions, underscores the urgent need for all countries to honour their legal and moral duties, not just to perform symbolic solidarity with only words and no actions.

    As Tunisia demands that its government passes essential anti-normalisation laws, the world must wake up, to ensure that normalisation is never accepted as normal and that Palestinian rights to freedom and dignity are fully defended. For peace and justice to occur, the illegal Israeli occupation must be dismantled, not normalised.

    Featured image by Mohamed Jamil Latrach on Unsplash

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • BREAKING: Israel escalates with airstrikes, killing dozens in Gaza

    The Gaza Strip witnessed a new escalation on Sunday 19 October, days after the ceasefire was announced, with continuous Israeli air strikes resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries in various areas, while senior Israeli ministers called for the resumption of the genocide.

    51 martyrs since the ceasefire

    Medical sources in Gaza Strip hospitals reported that Israel has killed 51 Palestinians and injured more than 150 others since the ceasefire was declared, indicating the fragility of the truce and the continuation of Israeli violations.

    Israel carries out new raids in Al-Zawayda and Jabalia

    A source at Al-Aqsa Hospital revealed that five Palestinians were killed and others wounded in an Israeli bombardment of the town of Al-Zawayda in the centre of the Strip. In northern Gaza, two Palestinians were killed and others wounded in an Israeli air strike east of Jabalia.

    20 Israeli raids after the ‘Rafah incident’

    Israel’s broadcaster Channel 14 reported that the Israeli army launched about 20 air strikes on targets in various areas of the Strip following what it described as a ‘security incident in Rafah’ in southern Gaza, without providing details of the incident.

    Channel 14 reported an explosion in an Israeli army engineering vehicle in the Rafah area, noting that the causes remain unknown.

    Al-Qassam denies involvement and affirms commitment to agreement

    For its part, the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, denied any connection to the events in Rafah, affirming in a statement that it is fully committed to the ceasefire agreement.
    It stressed that the Rafah area is a ‘red zone’ under occupation control, adding that communication with its affiliated groups there has been cut off since the war resumed last March.

    Israel ministers calls to resume fighting

    On the Israeli side, Channel 12 reported that far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the resumption of fighting in Gaza, citing ‘violations of the agreement in Rafah,’ while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had previously called for a similar move.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel just massacred 11 members of the same Palestinian family in Al-Zaytoun, Gaza

    Content warning: this article contains video and images some readers may find distressing

    The ceasefire in Gaza was breached yet again by Israel. 11 members of the Abu Shaaban family were deliberately massacred by the Israeli occupation on Friday evening, October 17, in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City.

    Ceasefire in shatters: a deliberate, unprovoked attack on civilians by Israeli occupation

    A tank fired directly at their vehicle, while they were attempting to check on their home. The dead include seven children and three women.

    Ceasefire

    Those killed were Ihab Shaaban, his wife Randa, their seven children — all aged 13 years and under — and Ihab’s sister and brother- in- law. Palestinian rescue workers, coordinating with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), were unable to retrieve the bodies until the following day due to the ongoing Israeli attacks. But, according to Civil Defense Spokesperson Mahmoud Basal, the remains of two of the children are still missing, as their bodies were torn apart by the ‘intensity of the bombardment’.

     

    Basal said in a statement that no warning had been given before the attack, and ‘what happened confirms that the occupation remains thirsty for blood and determined to commit crimes against innocent civilians’.

    Many Palestinians unaware of the position of the ‘yellow line’

    Israeli media reports that Israeli occupation forces (IOF) fired at a ‘suspicious vehicle’ which had crossed the so-called ‘yellow line’, behind which the IOF were required to withdraw as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire terms. There are currently no physical markers to show where this line is. In a report on Al Jazeera, Hind Khoudary said many people in Gaza do not have internet, so are unaware of the position of the yellow line or the occupation forces, and their lives are put at risk. Defence Minister Israel Katz is also calling for markers to show its position, saying they will serve as a warning to ‘Hamas terrorists and Gaza residents that any violation or attempt to cross the line will be met with fire’.

    Zionist regime breaks another ceasefire and continues with its crimes against Palestinians

    The Israeli regime has not only systematically violated international law throughout the past two years, but has also broken the ceasefire agreement and continued with its wholesale slaughter of Palestinians across all governorates of the Gaza Strip since the ceasefire was implemented on October 10, confirming it has no intention of stopping the genocide.

    Hamas is calling on Trump and the ‘ceasefire’ mediators to pressure the Israeli occupation to abide by the terms of the ceasefire, and asks the international community to fulfil its legal and moral obligations to prevent and also to stop the genocide, and hold the Israeli regime accountable for its many crimes.

    Although the first phase of the ceasefire plan states that the IOF must withdraw its troops to the yellow line,  Israeli forces are permitted to remain in several Palestinian neighbourhoods, and are still in control of 58 percent of the Gaza Strip.

    Featured image and additional images suppled

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Trevor Phillips seemingly suggests football hooligans deserve equal rights

    On his Sky News Sunday show, a smirking Trevor Phillips has suggested that barring football hooligans may violate equality laws:


    This is yet another example of how the wilfully idiotic British media purposefully muddies the water.

    Protected characteristics, according to Trevor Phillips

    In the video above, Trevor Phillips says:

    Has anybody in government actually considered whether this is legal? Because looking back to a previous existence of mine, I suspect that banning Israeli fans or the fans of an Israeli club might be unlawful under the Equality Act because it applies a condition to a particular group of people.

    Phillips is talking about when he worked at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). He’s probably avoiding referencing the EHRC directly because it’s one of the most widely discredited organisations in the UK.

    Getting into what he’s saying, Phillips is suggesting that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans would be protected under the Equality Act because they’re a “particular group of people”. The Equality Act protects ‘groups’ when members share ‘protected characteristics’, which include:

    • Age.
    • Gender reassignment.
    • Being married or in a civil partnership.
    • Being pregnant or on maternity leave.
    • Disability.
    • Race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin.
    • Religion or belief.
    • Sex.
    • Sexual orientation.

    You’ll notice that ‘football team support’ isn’t on this list.

    You’re also probably aware that the authorities didn’t bar Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters for being fans; they barred them because they have a strong contingent of hooligans with a record of tearing up European cities.

    By now, if you didn’t already know, you’ve probably learned that it’s far from abnormal to bar fans with a history of hooliganism (it’s not even the only time it happened this week).


    What Phillips is insinuating is that it could have violated the Equality Act because Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are Jewish. He’s not saying that clearly, because he knows that’s not why we barred them. He also knows that not every Maccabi Tel Aviv fan is Jewish:

    The propaganda machine

    Trevor Phillips was smirking when he asked this too:


    He may have good reason to smirk. The antisemitism smear is of course being used as a vector to attack Muslims and Muslim communities, and Phillips has some noteworthy opinions on that topic:

    It’s obviously all a game to these people, and you can tell that by how seriously they take it.

    Weaponised stupidity from Trevor Phillips

    If Trevor Phillips was correct that you couldn’t block individuals from doing things because they’re part of a ‘group’, we wouldn’t be able to stop sex offenders from working in schools. Obviously what he’s saying doesn’t hold up if you think about if for two seconds, but then again, two seconds is about as long as most people can manage when watching these shows.

    Featured image via Sky News 

    By Willem Moore

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Video: Israeli troops abduct small children in West Bank

    Israeli troops have abducted two small children in Hebron, West Bank. The children clearly posed no threat, yet were dragged away, clearly terrified:

    As it has done during previous Gaza ‘ceasefires’ — which continue to be violated daily by the murderous occupation — Israel has escalated its murders and kidnappings in the West Bank since the latest ‘deal’, gleefully applauded by its fascist ministers.

    And a new United Nations report has confirmed that Israel has murdered more than a thousand Palestinians in the West Bank since October 2023 – well over two hundred of them children – with thousands more abducted. These events have rarely featured in the UK ‘mainstream’ media or the mouths of UK politicians as more than a side note, if even that.

    Israel is a terror state and the UK establishment its eager collaborators.

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Bristol Palestine Film Festival returns this November with early preview of The Voice of Hind Rajab

    This year’s Bristol Palestine Film Festival returns from Friday 28 November to Sunday 7 December. The vibrant programme celebrates the creativity and courage of filmmakers from Palestine and beyond.

    In 2025, the suppression of Palestinian voices has escalated to new levels. But in a time of deepening erasure and cultural suppression, filmmakers resist through art, expression, and imagination.

    The Festival is bringing together powerful new fiction, crucial investigative documentaries, rare archival works, and communal events that reflect, connect, and rejoice.

    Image via Bristol Palestine Film Festival. From ‘A State of Passion’.

    Groundbreaking fiction from Palestinian Filmmakers

    The festival opens with an exclusive early preview of The Voice of Hind Rajab. It’s a haunting story of a child’s last phone call now heard across the world. It won the 2025 Venice Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and broke records with a 23-minute ovation, the longest in the festival’s history.

    Audiences in Bristol will get to see it one month before its official release, followed by a cast and director Q&A.

    Censorship and control

    At the centre of the wider programme are documentaries Censoring Palestine and The Palestine Laboratory. These are two vital and urgent investigations confronting the machinery of silence and surveillance. Censoring Palestine uncovers how counter-terror laws, cultural institutions, and broadcasters suppress Palestinian perspectives in Britain.

    The Palestine Laboratory, based on Antony Loewenstein’s acclaimed book, reveals how Israel turns occupied Palestine into a testing ground for weapons and surveillance, which is subsequently exported across the globe. Together, these films expose the intertwining of censorship and militarisation, from Palestine to Britain and beyond.

    Other highlights include A State of Passion, following surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah under bombardment, and the Voices from Gaza shorts (Gaza Sound Man; Vibrations from Gaza; It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive).

    Resistance as culture, joy as survival at the Bristol Palestine Film Festival

    The Bristol Palestine Film Festival closes with the Palestine Comedy Club, followed by a live stand-up set from one of the film’s stars – ending the programme with sharp wit, shared laughter, and unfiltered insight.

    And after the screening of Aisha’s Story, audiences can join in with a communal meal, explore the poster exhibition at The Island, take part in creative poster-making workshops, and attend a special evening of Palestinian poetry. Dabke dance workshops and post-screening discussions with directors and invited guests will further open space for collective expression.

    Bristol Palestine Film Festival trustee Karena Batstone commented:

    This year’s films and documentaries, from The Voice of Hind Rajab to Censoring Palestine and The Palestine Laboratory, reveal the uncomfortable truth: what is happening in Palestine is deeply intertwined with us in the UK. In Bristol alone, so many are protesting the city’s role in the global arms trade. These films make that connection real, such as showing how technologies and surveillance tested on Palestinians come back to affect us all.

    Bristol Palestine Film Festival gives audiences an opportunity to join the dots, to realise our complicity, and to think about the shared responsibility we carry. And the festival gives our audiences a chance to connect, understand, and seek solidarity together.

    This year’s festival is a celebration of cinema and community, at a time when we need it more than ever. Find the full programme here.

    Image via Bristol Palestine Film Festival

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Keir Starmer: an embarrassment at home and abroad this week

    The irrelevance of Keir Starmer was highlighted in the most brutally awkward fashion, this past week in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where world leaders gathered for a hastily organised signing ceremony endorsing Donald Trump’s Gaza ‘peace plan’.

    After a couple of weeks of painfully dragging myself through party conference speeches, a running nose and aching bones, this ultimate cringe of 2025 was exactly what the doctor ordered.

    The ‘historic’ signing event was supposed to project global unity, but it quickly devolved into a viral moment of delicious diplomatic discomfort that humiliated a beleaguered flop of a British prime minister.

    Even more glorious was the fact Keir Starmer had hyped himself up into the big leagues, and in the blink of an eye he realised he was no more than the intern fetching a coffee for his boss.

    Starmer shuffled up to the lectern like he was about to unveil the cure for the common cold and left moments later looking like a lightweight boxer in a heavyweight bout.

    After watching the slow motion car crash of egos clip for a fourth, possibly fifth time, was I the only person thinking to myself, “Please god, don’t let me be British any longer”?

    As if the dentally-challenged far-rights painted roundabouts and upside down Temu flags didn’t already leave you wanting to denounce your Britishness every time you popped to Asda, then along comes wooden Keir, with a grin like cracked porcelain to finish the job off.

    So what happened to the ironclad “special relationship”?

    Starmer: where’s the special relationship?

    There was Trump, name-dropping and praising his allies like Italy’s Meloni, while Starmer got the equivalent of a LinkedIn “thanks for your interest” email. There was no “Keir, my man” bromance, no shared spotlight, just a pat on the head and a dismissal that screamed of utter irrelevance.

    Of course, the snub wasn’t random. Starmer was named last because of the simmering tensions over Britain’s role in the peace process. Trump, seeking revenge for Starmer’s half-hearted recognition of a Palestinian state, gave a brutal demonstration of our diminished clout on the global stage.

    Starmer, desperately trying to play the serious statesman with his lawyerly gravitas and zero stage presence, made an absolute fool of himself on the greatest stage of them all, and I, for one, absolutely loved it.

    Starmer’s post-snub spin? “It helped get the ceasefire”. This is delusional nonsense from a man who peaked as a human upright Dyson.

    In reality, it wasn’t just a snub. It was a vivisection of Starmer’s fragile ego, exposing the hollow core of a damaged prime minister who thought groveling at Donald Trump’s flakey feet would earn him a seat at the grown-ups’ table.

    I absolutely detest Keir Starmer at the best of times, be in absolutely no doubt of that, but I am absolutely convinced that the tangerine tantrum hates the toolmaker’s son, even more than me.

    Trump views Starmer as a woke liability with Obama-esque policies. It’s easy for us to laugh at the “woke” accusation, but when you’re Donald Trump even Genghis Khan comes across as a tofu-eating tree hugger.

    Meanwhile…

    I dared to delve into the world of football thuggery this past week, inspired by the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from travelling to Birmingham to watch their football team face Aston Villa.

    Keir Starmer, desperate to please his disappointed Zionist backers, immediately denounced the safety advisory group’s decision (because he obviously knows better), and went straight in with the antisemitism smear.

    I can’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters’ well-documented football-related violence, and I thought the Football Lads Alliance was some sort of boyband that was thrown together on the X Factor. But to pretend a group of football hooligans are being singled out for being Jewish is entirely disingenuous and utterly deplorable.

    The last I heard, the Labour government were working “at pace” to get the sensible decision overturned. Perhaps they should keep their fucking noses out, unless Starmer, Streeting, Reeves, and the rest of the Israel fanatics want to put on a hi-viz jacket and steward the match themselves.

    Who knows? By the time you read this it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for Benjamin Netanyahu to be given a VIP seat at Aston Villa for the big match, with free tea and biscuits at half time.

    Bald bait

    I must admit, I did put a little bit of bald bait on my X timeline to see what fishy fash I could reel in, and my goodness they did not disappoint:

    Stick to cooking. U obviously know nothing about football

    You’ve not seen my cooking, Simon Bunchanumbers.

    You know fuck all about football you nazi cunt

    @lads_alliance we have another one here to visit

    Ive got her address

    Thank you Jason the patriot. Could you ask them to cut my front bush, please?

    Shut up you lefty cunt

    Cheers Arnie, my love. I hope your next shit is a hedgehog.

    I say to you lovers of ‘the beautiful game’, there is nothing beautiful about repeatedly turning European football into a battleground for violent extremism. Not that Starmer seems to have noticed that.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ali Khaled’s journey home: the Canary documents one Palestinian’s return to Gaza City

    20-year-old Ali Khaled was born and brought up in the Al-Daraj neighbourhood of northwest Gaza City. Earlier this week, he and his family took down their tent, packed their clothes, and left the Nuseirat area of southern Gaza, where they had been displaced to several weeks previously, to return home:

     Khaled says:

    Home means everything, and the neighbourhood I live in means a lot to me, and I love it. On my way home, I was thinking and hoping that it would be peaceful, and that this occupation of my country will end forever and we will live as other people live. I found my home and, although it only had minor damage, there was great destruction nearby. There were many bombed houses and also schools in the same neighbourhood, and my university is gone.

    Gaza has endured one war after another

     Khaled, like other Palestinians his age, has lived through six wars already, but they have been nothing like this one:

    This war is the most violent and powerful I have seen, and it has affected my life completely, in all aspects.

     The genocide began just two weeks after he began studying a website design and development course at university. He remembers October 7, 2023 well:

    On the Saturday morning, my twin sister and I woke up early to go to the university, but we heard explosions and rockets, so we didn’t leave the house. We turned on the news and learned what had happened. The university closed on the first day of the war — my course later continued online, and I went to work in the mall, where I had been doing some work before, this time under emergency conditions. They needed me because of the crowds of people rushing to buy food. I worked there for the first couple of months of the war, then had to stop because of the worsening situation in Gaza, including displacement.

    Khaled has been forcibly displaced several times during the past two years. The first time, he says, was in December 2023 when the Israeli occupation’s tanks rolled into the Al- Daraj neighbourhood where he lived, storming the Yarmouk Stadium– Palestine’s oldest stadium, which was later turned into a detention camp. Khaled lived less than five minutes’ walk from here. According to Khaled:

    The army arrested many men, and let the women and children leave to the Southern Gaza Strip. I remember, moments before we fled, the army threw smoke bombs in the street, and a young man who I knew, he was our neighbour, was martyred because of the bomb. Another bomb fell on Bandar Al-Daraj Hospital, near to where we lived. I will never forget that, as at the time Al Shifa Hospital was out of service, so they had been bringing the injured and martyrs to Bandar Al-Daraj instead. There was a terrible smell of blood, and the sight of martyrs lying on the ground.

    After this bombing Khaled and his family were displaced to the Al-Sabra  neighbourhood in the South of Gaza City, but he says they did not find safety there either:

    It was a very difficult first night there, in my uncle’s house, where we stayed for about 25 days. The tanks were also close to the neighbourhood and shrapnel was falling. There were many martyrs. Now, the house is completely destroyed by robots.

    When the army withdrew from the Al- Daraj area, Khaled and his family returned to the house they shared with his grandfather, which they had previously fled from. He says they stayed inside most of the time for fear of being shot. He said:

    During the war, more than 30 displaced people were sleeping in the two rooms of my grandfather’s house. Our rooms upstairs were also full of people, including my married older sister and her children, as her home was bombed and destroyed at the beginning of the war. My uncles slept on the roof of the house, as there was no room. The house is still crowded today, but not like it was during the war.

    Gaza

    Although Gaza City has been relentlessly pounded for the past two years by the Israeli war machine and now looks unrecognisable from how it was, Khaled feels relieved he has managed to return to Gaza City before the arrival of winter, and is happy to be back in Gaza City, back in his home, seeing his sister and her children, who remained in the Al-Daraj area, while Khaled was forcibly displaced to the south of the Strip. But he worries for the people who have been left with absolutely nothing:

    We are lucky that our house had only minor damage, but many people do not even have a shelter, or extra clothes, even though winter is approaching.

    Musab bin Omair Mosque in the west of Gaza City 2023:

    Musab bin Omair Mosque in the west of Gaza City 2025:

    Here’s to those not with us anymore

    Khaled is now thinking of the relatives and friends who have been killed by the Israeli occupation during this genocide. His uncle died because the army prevented him from receiving his cancer treatment, and his beloved grandfather was blown apart when a bomb went off not long after he had returned from his brothers funeral:

     When he left the funeral, he went to a house in the Al- Sabra neighbourhood, where things were unstable. He called my mother, then the call ended unexpectedly. An hour later, news came that he was matryred. Three artillery shells bombed the street.

    Life is extremely difficult in Gaza right now. People are now in a state of shock, everyone is tired and sad, and some people have been left with absolutely nothing, not even any family members. Although prices have started to come down in Gaza, no one has any money. Khaled is trying to find work, to provide for his family but not found anything. He says:

    My work no longer exists. The shop was destroyed, and many of the other workers and shop owners for whom I used have been martyred.

    Israeli occupation forces are never far away, and under phase one of the ‘ceasefire’ deal, 58 percent of the Gaza Strip is still under the control of the Israeli regime, including parts of Gaza City. As he once again hears the familiar noise of reconnaissance and war planes, Khaled says he has not yet been able to dream about his future, and only thinks about how he and his family will survive.

    “At the moment, my hopes for the future are just to live in peace,” he says.

    Featured image and additional images and video via Ali Khaled

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Trump Admits Complicity In Genocide

    As Donald Trump congratulates Israel for its conduct of the genocide in Gaza, he should be charged with aiding and abetting genocide, not given the Nobel Peace Prize.

    In his speech on Monday to the Israeli Knesset, Trump spent an hour bragging about how he ended the “war” in Gaza and “an age of terror and death,” declaring, “This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”

    He decried the “thousands of innocent Israeli civilians” who “were attacked by terrorists in one of the most evil and heinous desecrations of innocent life the world has ever seen; the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust,” adding, “The cruelty of October 7th struck to the core of humanity itself. Nobody could believe what they were witnessing.”

    The post Trump Admits Complicity In Genocide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Whitewashing Gas Exploration In Post-Genocide Gaza

    In December 2022, Israeli Ministry of Energy launched the Fourth Offshore Bid Round offering new exploration licenses. A year later, it awarded licenses to several Israeli and international companies: Eni (Italy), Dana Petroleum (UK, a subsidiary of a South Korean company, and Ratio Petroleum (Israel). The problem is that these tenders violated international law. A few months later in June 2023, following years of stalled talks, Israel approved the development of the Gaza Marine field, while Egypt’s state-owned EGAS (Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company) was to lead extraction efforts in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority.

    The post Whitewashing Gas Exploration In Post-Genocide Gaza appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Iran Announces Legal Campaign To Hold Israeli Officials Accountable

    Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei announced on 18 October that Tehran is launching a comprehensive legal campaign to hold Israeli officials accountable for crimes against humanity.

    Speaking at a specialized meeting titled Legal Response to the 12-Day Aggression: From Criminal Justice to Restorative Justice, Baghaei said the legal challenge aims to end what he described as Israel’s “entrenched impunity.”

    “Iran will pursue justice through international legal channels,” he said, warning that the absence of accountability has emboldened Israel’s continued violations across West Asia.

    The post Iran Announces Legal Campaign To Hold Israeli Officials Accountable appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Trump’s Diplomatic Initiative: A New Dawn or Just Another Dusk?

    Prefatory Note: The post below is based on modified responses to questions addressed to me by Rodrigo Craveiro, a Brazilian journalist. The focus is on what to expect in the weeks ahead to follow from the Trump diplomatic offensive to bring an Israeli-crafted peace to fruition in Gaza, and broader stability to the entire Middle East.

    1. There is a sense of joy but also of fury due to the fact that not all the bodies returned to Israel. How do you see this?

    Given the overall experience of the past two years, the attention accorded to the hostages by the Western media is misleadingly disproportionate, and as usual, Israel-biased. And now the pain of those Israelis who seek the agreed return of the bodies of non-surviving hostages is an extension of this distortion that shifts global concerns away from the terrible carnage and ccontinuing suffering in Gaza, and the totally ravaged homeland of the Palestinians that is being subject to day after arrangements made by its tormentors without Palestinian participation, much less authentic representation selected by the Palestinian people. Legitimate Palestinian leadership does not presently exist, even if there existed a commitment to identify and endow such individuals with appropriate roles. For sustainable progress toward a just future peace, the Palestinians must participate and be represented by their own choosing. Such a reality can only be decided by the Palestinians themselves, most obviously, in an internationally monitored competitive election among rival claimants to Palestinian leadership throughout Occupied Palestine.

    Hamas evidently agreed to return the bodies of dead hostages in their possession. Still, given the difficulty of locating the bodies and collecting the remains, unless there is a genuine repudiation by Hamas of this underlying duty associated with the ceasefire, their goodwill deserves the benefit of the doubt. The disappointment of the families in Israel that suffered from this human loss is understandable, but it should be interpreted in ways that are subordinate to more relevant issues, such as ceasefire violations. It was reported two days after the ceasefire went into effect that Israel killed by gunfire and missiles 7 Palestinians seeking to visit their destroyed home in Gaza City, a disturbing incident which seemed to receive scant, if any, coverage in international media or mainstream international commentary, and yet could be seen as evidence of the fragility of the ceasefire arrangements or an indication that Israel is ready to risk or is even seeking the collapse of the ceasefire by testing its limits. A carefree attitude toward the renewal of the violent encounter that rests on implied, or even secret, assurances of unwavering US support.

    • Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset, where he said his peace plan marks the “historic dawn of a new Middle East.” Do you believe this is something real, or is he exaggerating?

    My best guess is that historians looking back at those words will conclude that Trump had confused dawn with dusk. There is no prospect of a brightening of the dark skies casting a shadow on the countries of the Middle East until Palestinian rights are respected, and that includes honoring the international right of return of the seven million Palestinian refugees. There must be a campaign to obtain proper accountability for the Gaza Genocide. Until the costs of Gaza reconstruction are borne by the perpetrators of the devastation, accompanied by some process of reconciliation that does not whitewash the crimes of Israel and its enablers, it will be impossible to create a peaceful future for the region. At the very least, the vast devastation caused by the genocide must be physically overcome by a process of reconstruction funded by adequate reparations. The scope of reconstruction must include health, heritage, and religious sites; educational and cultural institutions; residential neighborhoods; UNRWA facilities; and much more. The most painful losses of loved ones and body parts can never be compensated for by material means and are an enduring negative legacy of the Gaza Genocide. Even recognizing pragmatic constraints on peacemaking given political conditions a ‘peace’ crafted to please the perpetrator of genocide and its most complicit supporter, is highly unlikely to proceed very far. The Trump 20 Point Plan is not a break with the past, but an effort to induce forgetfulness necessary to attain credibility in proposing post-conflict arrangements. To grasp the ironies of this Trump Plan, we should imagine our reactions if the Nazi survivors of World War II had been put in charge of designing the future of the international order, or even of just post-war Germany. It would not have seemed like a step toward a peaceful future, regardless of the language used to obscure the perverse underlying reality.

    3- Trump and the three mediating governments signed the peace plan for Gaza at the Sharm el-Sheik Summit. Given this development, what can we expect to happen in the future?

    It is almost universally believed that the ceasefire should remain operative even if violations of the underlying plan occur or its further implementation stalls. Beyond this, it is a matter of how much leverage the US exerts to advance the governance proposals in Part II of Trump’s Plan. Whether Hamas and Palestinian resistance forces are subject to being coerced by further threats of Israeli renewal of its genocidal assault is unclear. It is also uncertain if the US would go along with an Israeli unilateral departure from the Trump Plan. Israel is quite capable of fabricating claims that Hamas is violating the ceasefire and related obligations, leaving it no choice but to resume its military operations. It would appear at this time that Trump would allow Israel to exercise such an option. At the same time, Trump is so mercurial and narcissistic that it is possible he would regard Israel’s action as undermining his claims as peacemaker and repudiate the Israeli resumption of large-scale violence in Gaza. In an odd way, Israel and Trump may turn out to have different goals. Israel has not given up its quest for ‘Greater Israel,’ which means absorbing not only East Jerusalem, but Gaza and the West Bank within its sovereign territory. Trump may still strangely believe he can obtain the Nobel Peace Prize if his Plan is operationalized in Gaza and the two conflicting parties accept the arrangements.

    Overall, it is clear that peace and stability will not be the future of the Middle East until Israel respects Palestinian rights, drastically redefines or repudiates Zionism and apartheid in a manner consistent with international law, and agrees to the establishment of a Peace & Reconciliation Commission to acknowledge Israel’s past criminal violations of Palestinian rights and to announce a new dedication to the creation of an independent commission that assists the Palestinian/Israeli leadership to build future relations between Jews and Arabs on the basis of equality, dignity, and rights as the foundation for sustainable patterns of peaceful coexistence. For a truly new and stable Middle East, Israel must agree to the establishment of a nuclear-free zone, including itself and Iran.

    4- What are the Risks of Clashes between Hamas and Gaza Clans and Factions?

    These issues are murky, with contending interpretations and explanations of their recent prominence amid this most ambitious effort to develop the current ceasefire pause into a framework for long-term conflict resolution by implementing, perhaps with modifications, the advanced phases of the Trump 20 Point Plan. In this context, Israel seems to welcome these tensions within Gaza, by various means, including subsidies, to allow them an option to exit from this series of developments that might challenge their annexation plans in the West Bank as well as Gaza. It is possible that the Netanyahu government agreed to the ceasefire only to secure the return of the hostages, and never assented to any wider interference with its militarist approach, and may have had assurances of Trump’s support, no matter what.  If this plays out, Israel would actually welcome the collapse of the conflict-resolution part of the framework in a manner that would find tacit acceptance, if not outright approval, in Washington. Such a manipulation of reality requires pinning the blame on Hamas, which is currently taking the form of criticizing Hamas for seeking to destroy those armed groups in Gaza that collaborated with the Israeli military operations.

    Such a line of interpretation is reinforced by Israeli unreasonably shrill complaints about Hamas’ failure to return all of the bodies of the dead hostages. On its part, Hamas claims it has returned all the remains it could discover with its existing equipment, given that some dead hostages remain trapped far beneath the rubble. This seems a reasonable explanation, as Hamas has little incentive to retain the remains of dead Israeli hostages or to take steps that provide an excuse for Israel to resume bombardment and other forms of violence in Gaza.

    Such a line of interpretation is also consistent with Israel’s pattern of lethal violence killing Palestinians in several instances that have the clear appearance of being deliberate violations of the ceasefire agreement. Additionally, Israeli interference with the delivery of humanitarian aid by reducing the entry of relief goods by 50% is another expression of Israel’s unwillingness to allow even a conflict-resolving process weighted in its favor to go forward. These are serious provocations by Israel, causing sharp criticism from some governments that had previously endorsed the Trump approach, but not yet even a whimper of disapproval from the US.

    The gathering evidence suggests that Israel is accumulating grounds for repudiating the ‘peace’ process and resuming its military operations, accompanied by a renewed clampdown on the further delivery of humanitarian aid, despite widespread hunger, disease, and trauma among the civilian population of Gaza. The next week or so shall determine whether this pessimistic assessment dooms the ceasefire and the prospects for conflict-resolution through diplomacy rather than further recourse to genocide. Israel, since the return of the living hostages in Gaza, holds all the cards, and Hamas has none except for its incredible capacity for resilience.

    As yet, there are no signs pointing to a new dawn.

    The post Trump’s Diplomatic Initiative: A New Dawn or Just Another Dusk? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • BREAKING: Netanyahu refuses to open Rafah crossing – violating the ceasefire agreement

    The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday 18 October that he had decided to keep the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt closed until further notice, despite the Palestinian embassy in Cairo’s earlier announcement that the crossing would open on Monday.

    Rafah Crossing remains closed by Israel

    Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the opening of the crossing would be linked to ‘Hamas’s commitment to its role’ in handing over the bodies of Israeli detainees in Gaza, as well as ‘the implementation of the agreed framework,’ without providing further details. As the Canary previously reported, Hamas handing over Israeli bodies was not part of the ceasefire agreement. Meanwhile, Israel has so-far violated this 47 times itself.

    For its part, the government media office in Gaza accused Israel of obstructing the implementation of the terms of the ceasefire agreement, continuing to close the crossings and preventing the entry of food and humanitarian aid, calling on the international guarantors of the agreement to intervene immediately to ensure that the commitments are implemented.

    Adnan Abu Hasna, spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), pointed out that thousands of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid are still waiting for permission to enter the Gaza Strip, saying:

    There are about 6,000 trucks carrying food and basic supplies stuck at the crossings, in addition to large quantities of medicines and medical supplies waiting to be brought in to meet the emergency needs of the population.

    Abu Hasna added that the delay in opening the crossings is exacerbating the humanitarian situation in the Strip and threatening the lives of thousands of civilians, especially the sick and injured who need urgent care.

    The Palestinian Embassy in Cairo announced that the Rafah crossing would be opened on Monday to allow Palestinians residing in Egypt who wish to return to Gaza to register via a dedicated electronic application, and that they would be notified later of the times and places to gather to move towards the crossing.

    Breaching the ceasefire

    It is noteworthy that on 9 October, Israel and Hamas reached an agreement on a ceasefire and prisoner exchange in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s plan, and the first phase of the agreement was activated the following day. The agreement stipulates that all Gaza Strip crossings, especially Rafah, will be opened to the movement of individuals and humanitarian aid, with the participation of Qatar, Turkey and Egypt, and under US supervision.

    This comes after two years of genocide waged by Israel on the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, with US support, resulting in the martyrdom of 68,116 Palestinians, the injury of 170,200 others, and the destruction of more than 90% of the infrastructure in the Strip.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Rosen exposes Israel-supporting ‘patriot’ ‘Tommy Robinson’

    A poem by Jewish author Michael Rosen has been used to expose far-right criminal hypocrite ‘Tommy Robinson’.

    Robinson, who claims to be an English ‘patriot’ but has previously posted photos of himself on an Israeli tank in ‘IDF’ uniform, flew to Israel this week at the invitation of the Zionist regime — with a judge delaying the verdict in his latest trial to allow him to make the trip funded by billionaire Elon Musk. He then posted a ‘selfie’ of himself wearing a Maccabi Tel Aviv football shirt, whose violent, racist fans have been banned from attending the club’s impending ‘European’ match in Birmingham, to the horror of Israeli tool Keir Starmer.

    ‘Robinson’ on Israeli tank.

    In the caption accompanying the selfie, Robinson said he would be supporting the Israeli club against English Premier League Club Aston Villa:

    Who’s coming to support Maccabi Tel Aviv at Villa Park on November 6th???

    Merseyside left-winger Jan Brooker found that the fascist’s use of “Football shirts, not Blackshirts” brought to mind a poem about fascism by left-wing Jewish author, Holocaust historian and national treasure Michael Rosen, whose parents fought Mosley’s fascists in the battle of Cable Street and posted the poem on his social media. Titled “Fascism, I sometimes fear”, it reads:

    Fascism: I sometimes fear…

    I sometimes fear that
    people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
    worn by grotesques and monsters
    as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

    Fascism arrives as your friend.
    It will restore your honour,
    make you feel proud,
    protect your house,
    give you a job,
    clean up the neighbourhood,
    remind you of how great you once were,
    clear out the venal and the corrupt,
    remove anything you feel is unlike you…

    It doesn’t walk in saying,
    “Our programme means militias, mass
    imprisonments, transportations, war and
    persecution.”

    ‘Patriots’ like Robinson are poison to this country and its people, whether they posture in a black shirt or a football shirt — and evidently more loyal to ‘Israel’ than to Britain.

    Featured image via The Canary

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tommy Robinson rallies nationalists to support Israelis playing English team

    As reported by the Canary, politicians and media figures have rallied to defend Israeli football hooligans at the expense of the British public. Highlighting just how batshit this is, noted far-right agitator Tommy Robinson has joined this axis of political hooligans on the side of the Israeli hooligans:


    Tommy Robinson the Zionist

    Robinson has a long history of supporting Zionists (a.k.a. those who endorse Israel’s settler-colonial / ethno-nationalist ideology, both in Israel and abroad.) As activist and rapper Lowkey laid out:


    In his thread, Lowkey details Robinson’s many connections to Israeli and British Zionists, including the following:

    Opinion on Robinson among Zionists is certainly divided. Some of them seemingly welcoming his support while others suggest it’s a bad idea to associate with a guy whom many see as a criminal “cokehead“. Regardless of what the Zionist pundits think, however, Robinson is currently in Israel at the invitation of Israeli minister Amichai Chikli:


    Tommy vs England

    In response to Robinson’s Maccabi Tel Aviv tweet, 5 Pillars editor Roshan M Salih accused Robinson of organising a “rally”:


    While Robinson didn’t use the phrase “rally” in his tweet, it’s hard to see how it won’t end up as one if his fans heed the call. At the same time, people have highlighted that Robinson’s pivot to supporting hostile, military-age foreigners might have a limited shelf life with his broader audience:

    Comedian Tadhg Hickey highlighted that Israel and Robinson are both embarrassing themselves by associating with one another:

    To be fair, not every Israeli or Zionist supports Robinson, but of those who do, their opposition is becoming a little muddled:


    The most alarming thing is that Robinson isn’t just standing with the genocidal Israeli government; he’s also standing alongside the majority of the UK’s political leaders:

    Several people made comments like this in reference to the fact that Israel has been caught paying influencers $7k per post to promote the genocidal regime :

    Grotesques

    As we’ve reported, it’s grim to see our politicians and pundits supporting Israeli football hooligans at the expense of the British public. The fact that Tommy Robinson is now making the exact same argument as Keir Starmer highlights just how bad things have gotten in the UK.

    Just imagine if all our political leaders and commentators were standing shoulder to shoulder with Russian football hooligans in defiance of the police and the public. You probably can’t imagine it, because it obviously wouldn’t happen. And sooner or later, we need to get to the bottom of why our political class is prioritising the feelings of Zionists over the safety of British citizens.

    Featured image via X/Twitter

    By Willem Moore

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ceasefire only on paper: Israel violates agreement 47 times and continues killing in Gaza

    The Government Media Office in Gaza confirmed that Israel has committed 47 documented violations since the announcement of the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, resulting in the killing of 38 Palestinian civilians and the injury of 143 others, in a clear and explicit violation of the ceasefire resolution and the rules of international humanitarian law.

    Israel continues to violate the ceasefire

    In an official statement issued to the Canary on Saturday 18 October, the office explained that Israel’s violations included direct fire on civilians, deliberate shelling of residential neighbourhoods, and field arrests  of civilians, reflecting the occupation’s continued aggressive behaviour despite the cessation of military operations.

    The statement added that the Israeli occupation forces used their tanks and armoured vehicles stationed on the outskirts of cities, as well as mechanised cranes equipped with remote sensing and targeting systems, in addition to drones (quadcopters) that continue to fly over the Strip and fire bullets on residents in border areas.

    The media office stated that Israel’s violations covered all governorates of the Gaza Strip from north to south. It confirmed that the occupation did not actually comply with the ceasefire, but continued to commit its usual crimes of murder and intimidation against civilians.

    The Government Media Office held the Israeli occupation fully responsible for the continuing violations after the ceasefire agreement. It called on the United Nations, international organisations, and guarantors of the ceasefire to intervene urgently to compel the occupation to stop its attacks and ensure immediate and effective protection for unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip.

    The statement concluded by emphasising that the continuation of these violations ‘puts the credibility of the international community at stake.’ It warned that any silence on the violations would be considered encouragement for the occupation to continue its crimes against the Palestinian people.

    Featured image via The Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ‘Concerned’ footie fan actually ex-army disinfo expert honoured by World Zionist Organisation

    ‘Concerned’ football fan Andrew Fox, honorary head of a Jewish Aston Villa fan group, was recognised by the World Zionist Organisation in 2024. He’s also an ex-army disinformation expert with links to shadowy thinktanks. His past claims the Gaza death toll is wrong have been slammed as ‘flawed’. And it’s not even clear if the group he claims to be head of exists…

    Fox popped up on the Murdoch-owned Sky News amid the current furore over Maccabi Tel Aviv , a notorious far-right football club, who have banned by police from attending a match against Aston Villa.  The Israeli team’s fans bring violence wherever they go, attack locals and sing about raping Arab women.

    You can read about how the British establishment has almost universally endorsed these fascists thugs here.

    Andrew Fox – Bizarre framing by Sky

    Fox was originally framed by Sky News as a concerned Jewish football fan raising concerns about the police ban:

    Sky, who are a fucking disgrace at the best of times, have since clarified that Fox isn’t Jewish:

    But there’s more. It’s not even clear that the Jewish Villa fans group Fox claimed to be an honorary president of even exists. We’ll let you know if we can confirm that.

    Questions like that didn’t stop Fox turning up on slapstick TV channel GB News as well:

    And as another X user pointed out, for a man framed as an average footie fan, Fox spends quite a lot of time egging on the genocidal Israeli military:

    But that’s not the half of it. So who actually is Andrew Fox?

    Perennial ‘genocide denier’ and hard-right think tanker

    Luckily the Canary’s ex-military grifter understander – me – is on hand. Fox is one of a network of hard-right ex-military figures who’ve made a career out of gobbing off for cranky neocon thinktanks and making the case for US imperialism.

    Fox served in the Parachute Regiment for 16 years. He is now an associate fellow at the conspiratorial Atlanticist thinktank The Henry Jackson Society (HJS). His HJS describes him as follows:

    …he spent three years as a senior lecturer in the War Studies and Behavioural Science departments at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Andrew specialises in Defence, the Middle East, and disinformation. He holds degrees in Law & Politics, Modern War Studies, and Psychology.

    His extensive experience has established him as a recognised authority in his field and he provides regular commentary on defence and foreign policy across the media including articles in the New York Post, the Telegraph and Spiked. He has amassed a large following across his digital platforms, including X (formerly Twitter) and Substack, where he writes on disinformation, defence and security as stories develop.

    Okay, not exactly a neutral actor. But that’s just the start of it.

    World Zionist Organisation

    His own bio – on his own website, under his own name – which Sky News either couldn’t be bothered to check or deliberately omitted, says:

    His work on the Middle East conflict was recognised by the World Zionist Organisation in 2024. In 2025, he was featured on Algemeiner’s J100 list of People Positively Influencing Jewish Life, alongside Donald Trump, Douglas Murray and Javier Milei amongst others.

    Keeps great company then. But all this suggests Sky have skipped over even the most basic journalistic standards. Not for the first time, but hey: you do you, lads.

    There’s STILL more. Fox’s website claims he visited Lebanon and Gaza during the Israeli Genocide:

    In 2024, he visited Gaza twice as well as captured Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon. In 2025 he was the first neutral researcher invited to observe the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites, and also visited the frontlines in Ukraine.

    Let’s just clarify here.

    To visit a GHF site – these were the armed aid in Gaza points run BY Israel – one cannot simply meander into Gaza like you’re off for Sunday.

    To claim you are a ‘neutral observer’ at a site you can ONLY reach under the protection and sanction of the Israeli military is shaky enough. But claims he’s done so with the kind of credentials (and political allegiances) Fox has is frankly bizarre.

    Interestingly, Fox’s specialisms also include “the psychology of disinformation”. Hmmm.

    Debunked death toll claims

    Fox has also made a habit of contesting claims about the Gaza death toll during the genocide. But his critique was described as “flawed” by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) in late 2024.

    For some actual analysis of the shadowy GHF aid points you can listen to me and Declassified UK’s Alex Morris here. We also look at another HJS-linked, Israel-apologist former army officer, Colonel Richard Kemp:

    We note the BBC also failed to mention Kemp’s role in an Israeli military charity currently under investigation by the Charity Commission in an interview in June.  It does kind of seem to me like Zionist apologists get mate’s rates on legacy media though…

    For another serious look at GHF than Fox could summon, you can hear the chilling testimony of ex-US green beret and GHF whistleblower Anthony Aguilar here:

    Genocide denial

    Fox has a long track record of taking the most immoral possible positions on the Israeli attack on Gaza. X user Hamza Yusuf claims to have found him backing the murder of journalists and calling the destruction of Gaza “necessary”.

    As of 1 October, the International Federation of Journalist (IFJ) says 223 journalists and media workers have been killed by the Israelis in Gaza alone.

    And for someone who claims to be an advocate for Jewish people, Fox hasn’t gone down very well with Prominent Jewish commentator Tom London. London was very blunt about Fox’s views on the genocide:

    Since the Maccabi Tel Aviv furore started tiny fascist parasite Tommy Robinson – currently on a break from his terrorism trial to visit the apartheid state – seems to be planning to go to Birmingham on the day of the match.

    And in the background it feels like establishment politicians and journalists are in lock step. It feels like they’re desperate for an inciting event to launch a crackdown on both Muslims and the Palestine solidarity movement.

    In times like these, riddled with misinformation and disinformation as they are, it’s an absolute travesty that the legacy media is letting pro-Israel figures get away with making claims like these unchallenged.

    Featured image via Sky News/X screenshot

     

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • British establishment has sided with Israeli hooligans over UK police and residents

    British politicians and pundits have seemingly decided they’re all pro-hooliganism. They’re not just supporting hooliganism in general, either; they’re supporting the introduction of foreign hooligans who pose a risk to British citizens. The hooligans in question are the ultras of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv, and this isn’t the first time the British establishment has attempted to gaslight us on this:


    What the hell is going on in this country that our politicians and political figures are more dedicated to violent foreign hooligans than the truth?

    Israeli Hooligans: A history of violence

    As we reported at the time, Sky News initially reported that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans ran riot in Amsterdam in 2024. 


    Many outlets immediately described the scenes of 70’s style hooliganism as a 30’s style pogrom against Jewish people. And they’re still trying to present that narrative today:


    As we reported yesterday, Keir Starmer himself has stepped in to defend the hooligans. This is despite the police and Birmingham City Council deciding it’s unsafe to invite a roving horde of genocide-supporting nationalists:

    Politics aside, these are football ‘fans’ in the true ‘fanatic’ sense. This isn’t normal behaviour for European games in the 21st century, and British people have no interest in bringing it back:


    So, Birmingham is against it and the broader public are against it.

    But is there someone we forgot to ask?

    The establishment steps in

    Increasingly, British politicians and pundits are on something of an auto-psychotic kamikaze mission to blow up their own reputations. Anyone looking at the facts of this situation can see that there’s an obvious risk to British safety. And yet – and fucking yet – these establishment ghouls are once again trying to say that it’s antisemitism.

    Here’s Sky News getting in on it:

    Here’s ex Liberal Democrat leader and current weirdo Tim Farron talking as if he was in Football Factory:

    Here he is suggesting we should permit Israeli hooliganism in 2025 because we had hooligans of our own half a century ago:


    Good argument, Tim – may be should all drink lead and use mustard gas too?

    Either Farron is incredibly foolish or he thinks his followers are.

    Here’s Frances Coppola highlighting that conflating Israeli hooligans with Jewish people in general is considered antisemitic under the IHRA definition that the establishment pretends to respect:


    Here’s just one of many right-wing pundits who are increasingly losing it because they know the public is no longer buying into their delusions:

    Threats

    These selfish British journalists and politicians are playing an incredibly dangerous game.  If you keep pointing at soldiers carrying out a genocide or hooligans doing hooliganism and saying ‘this is all Jewish people‘, eventually some portion of the public is going to  believe you.

    To be honest, we think they can see what they’re doing, and they just don’t care.

    The antisemitism smear worked well enough for a time, and they’re going to keep pushing it for as long as they can to provide cover for their genocidal Israeli allies.

    Featured image via Quds News Network/X screenshot

     

    By Willem Moore

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel’s Perpetual War Machine Demonstrates That Environmental Warfare Is A Tool

    The zionist ethnostate’s recent pause in hostilities against the people of Gaza due to so-called Phase 1 of President Trump’s 20 Point Gaza Peace Plan has resulted in a collective sigh of relief for many the world over, who have observed and/or have been victims of the ongoing genocidal onslaught that’s pillaged an estimated 70,000 lives, including approximately 20,000 women and children, included the use of starvation as a weapon, and has reduced the Gaza Strip to rubble as critical infrastructure including homes, schools/universities, hospitals and places of worship have all been decimated by the Israel Occupying Force’s (IOF) war machine that has been aided, abetted, and funded by the United States and other Western governments.

    The post Israel’s Perpetual War Machine Demonstrates That Environmental Warfare Is A Tool appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Thousands Of Film Workers Pledge To End Complicity With Genocide

    Despite repression and retaliation, the Gaza genocide has pushed an unprecedented wave of artists across the entertainment industry to back the cultural boycott of Israel.

    In recent months, a wave of artists throughout the entertainment industry has begun speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    The post Thousands Of Film Workers Pledge To End Complicity With Genocide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Gaza, Gas, And The Real Estate Empire Behind Trump’s Deal

    As the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas comes into effect, two million Gazans are returning to what is left of their homes. Part of the deal includes a vast prisoner swap, that sees the remaining 20 Israelis captured on October 7, 2023, going back to their homeland, and almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners being released from Israeli jails. A further 10,000 remain behind bars, including top political prisoners, such as Marwan Barghouti. Israel has also stated that it will not return the remains of hundreds of Palestinians it is holding, sparking intense speculation as to what those corpses would reveal.

    Joining the Behind the Headlines show & MintCast Podcast to discuss the ceasefire, and the increasingly pro-Israel tone of our corporate media, is Aaron Maté. Aaron is an award-winning journalist from Canada.

    The post Gaza, Gas, And The Real Estate Empire Behind Trump’s Deal appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Washington’s New War Front To Box In China And Turkiye

    The tripartite alliance between Greece, Cyprus, and Israel is deepening as a security and political nucleus for a broader project aimed at linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and encircling China’s growing influence in West Asia and southern Europe. Turkiye views this alliance as a direct strategic threat to its regional ambitions and national security.

    The post Washington’s New War Front To Box In China And Turkiye appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • “No Kings” — Another Chapter in the Quest for an Empire without an Emperor

     

    There are many hyped “No Kings” protests this weekend. They seem fairly clearly a creation of the DNC or some appendage of it.

    They reflect a wretched sentiment I criticized back in 2017 — how many were “In Search of an Empire without an Emperor”:

    When Trump uses military violence in Yemen or Syria, he is lauded by presumed liberals like Van Jones and Fareed Zakaria as presidential.… This leads to a political culture based on loving or hating various political figures.

    It is a case of interesting timing that these protests are taking place after the so-called “ceasefire” finally happened in Gaza.

    The establishment very much wants to stuff people back into their partisan boxes and to eviscerate any notion that decent people on the left and right might build on their revulsion of imperial Israel’s genocide.

    Moreover, I’d not be shocked if “liberals” at these “protests” had signs for more weapons to Ukraine and in defense of John Bolton.

    So, if you do go to these protests, I’d recommend you have a sign denouncing Empire, the duopoly, and/or wear a keffiyeh.

    Protest the protest.

    What is needed is a massive realignment of US politics. We need people breaking out of their partisan boxes, not calcifying in them. This is part of my VotePact.org project, which can upend and make right much of US politics.

    The post “No Kings” — Another Chapter in the Quest for an Empire without an Emperor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The West’s Dehumanization Of Arabs Is Completely Unforgivable

    In October 2024, a Lebanese writer named Lina Mounzer wrote, “ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.”

    I’ve thought about that line a lot over the last year.

    I thought about it as Israel hammered Lebanon with at least 20 airstrikes during a supposed “ceasefire”.

    I thought about it during the Gaza ceasefire negotiations when the Western political/media class kept calling the Israelis held by Hamas “hostages” while calling the innocent Palestinians held captive by Israel “prisoners”.

    I think about it as the IDF continues to murder Palestinian civilians every day during the Gaza “ceasefire” when they are deemed to be traveling into forbidden areas, because Palestinians are so dehumanized that Israel sees bullets as a perfectly legitimate means of directing civilian foot traffic.

    I think about it as these daily ceasefire violations and acts of military slaughter barely make a blip in the western news media, while any time anything happens that makes western Jews feel anxious or upset, it dominates headlines for days.

    I thought about it while the western political/media class solemnly commemorated the second anniversary of the October 7 attack, even as the daily death toll from the Gaza holocaust ticked along with its victims unnamed and unacknowledged by those same institutions.

    I thought about it when all of Western politics and media stopped dead in its tracks and stood transfixed for days on the assassination of Charlie Kirk while ignoring the genocide he had spent the last two years of his life actively manufacturing consent for.

    Day after day after day, we see glaring, inexcusable discrepancies between the amount of attention that is given to the violent death of an Arab and the attention that is given to the violent death of an Israeli, a Western Jew, or any Westerner.

    These last two years have been a time of unprecedented unmasking in all sorts of ways, but I think that’s the one that’s going to stick with me the most. The way Western civilization came right out into the cold, harsh light to admit, day after day after day, that they don’t truly view Arabs as human beings.

    Ours is a profoundly sick society.

    One of the main arguments you’ll hear from rightists about why the West needs to support Israel is that Israel is helping to defend the West from the savage Muslim hordes — a sentiment that Israeli pundits and politicians have been all too happy to feed into of late. It’s revealing because it’s just coming right out and saying that slaughtering Muslims is a virtue in and of itself, so anyone who kills Muslims is an ally of the West.

    But whenever I come across this argument, all I can think is, why would anyone want to defend the West if this is what it has become?

    Even if we pretend that these delusions that Arabs and Islam pose some kind of threat to Western civilization are valid, why would it even matter? This civilization does not deserve to be saved. Not if we’re going to be living like this.

    If we’ve become so detached from our own humanity that we can’t even see innocent children as fully human just because they live somewhere else and have a different religion, then we are the monsters. We are the villains. We are everything the craziest Zionist pretends the Arabs are.

    These last two years have shown us that Western civilization doesn’t need protection; it needs redemption. It needs to save its soul.

    The post The West’s Dehumanization Of Arabs Is Completely Unforgivable first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth

    [First published by Middle East Eye]

    Ceasefires stick because the two sides in a war have reached military stalemate – or because the incentives for each side in laying down their arms outweigh those of continuing the bloodshed.

    None of this applies in Gaza.

    The past two years in the enclave have been many things. But the one thing they have not been is a war, whatever Western politicians and media wish us to believe.

    Which means the current narrative of a “ceasefire” is as much a lie as the preceding narrative of a “Gaza war”.

    The ceasefire is not “fragile”, as we keep being told. It is non-existent, as evidenced by Israel’s continual violations – from its soldiers continuing to shoot dead Palestinian civilians to its blocking promised aid.

    So what is really going on?

    To understand the “ceasefire” and US President Donald Trump’s even more deluded 20-point “peace plan”, we first need to make sense of what the earlier “war” rhetoric was used to conceal.

    Over the past 24 months, we witnessed something deeply sinister.

    We watched the indiscriminate slaughter of a largely civilian population, already under a 17-year siege, by Israel, a regional military goliath supported and armed by the global military goliath of the United States.

    We watched the erasure of almost every home in Gaza – in what already amounted to a concentration camp for its people.

    Families were forced into makeshift tents, as they had been when they were expelled decades ago at gunpoint from their lands in what is now Israel—but this time they have been exposed to a toxic brew of the rubble-dust of their former homes and the spent materials from many Hiroshimas-worth of bombs dropped on the enclave.

    We watched a captive population being starved for months on end, in what amounted to, on the most generous view, an undisguised policy of collective punishment – a crime against humanity for which the International Criminal Court is pursuing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have been physically damaged, in addition to their psychological trauma, by a malnourishment that has altered their DNA – damage that will most likely be passed on to future generations.

    We watched Gaza’s hospitals being systematically dismantled, one by one, until the entire health sector was hollowed out, unable to deal with either the flood of wounded or the growing tide of malnourished children.

    We watched large-scale ethnic cleansing operations, in which families – or what was left of them – were driven out of “kill zones” into areas Israel termed “safe zones”, only for those safe zones to quickly turn, undeclared, into new kill zones.

    And as Trump stepped up the pressure for a “ceasefire”, we watched Israel unleash an orgy of violence, destroying as much of Gaza City as it could before the deadline arrived to stop.

    Rhetoric of ‘Gaza war’

    None of this can, or should, be described as a war.

    The United Nations, every major human rights organization in the world, including Israel’s B’Tselem, and the world’s leading body of genocide scholars agree that what has happened in Gaza meets the definition of genocide, as laid out in the UN’s Genocide Convention, ratified by Israel, the US, Britain, and the European Union.

    Nonetheless, Israel and the West’s rhetoric about “war” has been crucial in selling to Western publics an equally dishonest rhetoric of a “ceasefire” and hopes for “peace”.

    The lie of the current ceasefire is a counterpart of the lie about a “Gaza war” narrated to us over the past two years. The framing serves exactly the same purpose: to disguise Israel’s larger goals.

    On Tuesday, in the midst of the “ceasefire”, as the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians were being traded, Israel was killing more Palestinians. The Financial Times was among the media outlets reporting that Israeli soldiers had killed “several” Palestinians that day.

    Earlier, Israeli soldiers posted videos as they pulled out of Gaza City of their torching homes, food supplies, and a vital sewage treatment plant.

    In other words, Israel never had any intention of halting its fire.

    This is a familiar pattern.

    Israel killed at least 170 Palestinians during an earlier “ceasefire” negotiated by Trump, in January, which it then unilaterally ended weeks later so that it could revive the genocide.

    And in Lebanon, where a ceasefire is supposed to have been in force for the past year, overseen by the United States and France, Israel is recorded to have broken its terms more than 4,500 times.

    As former British ambassador Craig Murray observed of the ceasefire period, Israel “has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon”.

    Does anyone imagine Gaza, a tiny territory without an army or the trappings of statehood, will fare any better than Lebanon under an Israeli ceasefire?

    Ceasefire charade

    The ceasefire may be a temporary lull in Israel’s genocidal, two-year assault on Gaza but it does nothing to cease Israel’s decade-long occupation of the Palestinian territories – the inciting cause of the “war”.

    The occupation continues.

    It also does nothing to cease Israel’s system of apartheid rule over Palestinians, judged illegal by the world’s highest court last year.

    Then, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, and that other states pressure it into such a withdrawal.

    The UN General Assembly gave Israel till last month to honor the ICJ’s ruling. Israel has not just ignored that deadline. Even during the current “ceasefire”, Israeli soldiers continue to be directly stationed in more than half of Gaza.

    Additionally, of course, Israel still controls all of Gaza’s territory at arm’s length through its spy drones, attack drones and fighter jets, surveillance technology, and land and naval blockades.

    It should be a truism that a state bent on genocide has no reason to stop its genocide unless it is forced to do so – by a stronger party.

    Trump has been striding the world stage pretending to be doing just that, strong-arming Israel and Hamas. But only the credulous – and the Western political and media class – fall for this charade.

    The “ceasefire” is not “fragile”. It was set up to fail, not to provide a path to peace. Its real purpose is to provide Israel with a fresh mandate to renew the genocide.

    Dehumanized prisoners

    For decades, Palestinians have been forced to live with a catch-22: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

    Any resistance to their brutal occupation results in slaughter – or “mowing the lawn”, as Israel terms it – as well as their designation as “terrorists”.

    But a policy of no resistance, as pursued by Mahmoud Abbas’ compliant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, hangs Palestinians out to dry – living as permanent, dehumanized prisoners under Israeli rule, herded into ever-shrinking reservations while Jewish militias are licensed to build settlements on their land.

    The same kind of bogus “choice” is central to the current “ceasefire”.

    Hamas has got a hostage swap – after thousands of Palestinians were seized off the street (and thousands more will soon be seized to replace them) – while the people of Gaza win a brief respite from Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign. That was the formula for cornering Hamas into approving a ceasefire agreement it knows only too well is primed with tripwires.

    The most obvious is the requirement on Hamas to return the last remaining Israelis held captive in Gaza, including 28 bodies, in exchange for some 2,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel’s prisons. The agreement set a 72-hour timeframe for the exchange.

    Hamas has found it harder to locate the sites of the dead. So far, they have returned 10, though one appears to be non-Israeli.

    The wasteland that is now Gaza has few landmarks to identify the locations of original burial sites. And the mountains of rubble under which the Israelis’ bodies lie – created by the US-supplied bunker-busting bombs Israel dropped that most likely killed them – are almost impossible to move without heavy machinery, sorely lacking in Gaza.

    Even if the sites can be identified and the rubble removed, Hamas may discover that the bodies no longer exist, that they have been vaporized, alongside Palestinian victims, by Israel’s bombs. And of course, there is a further likely problem: some of the bodies may be located in more than half of Gaza, which Israel is still occupying, and Hamas cannot access.

    As the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ultimate neutral arbiter, has conceded, finding the bodies in these circumstances will be a “massive challenge”.

    Another catch-22.

    Notably, though the Western media has happily amplified Israeli claims of Hamas’s bad faith over returning the bodies, as well as the suffering of waiting Israeli families, it has provided little comparable coverage on the condition of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel.

    The refrigerated corpses arrived at Nasser hospital in Gaza without any form of identification, and with staff there unable to run DNA tests because of the destruction inflicted by Israel on its facilities. Families will have no idea who their loved ones are unless they try to identify them personally.

    That will be a gruesome and distressing task. Doctors noted that the returned bodies were still cuffed and blindfolded, executed with bullets to the head, and with clear signs that they had been tortured before and after their deaths.

    Meanwhile, even before the 72-hour timeframe for the exchange was reached, Israel exploited the delay to renew the starvation of Gaza, restricting aid desperately needed to address the famine it had engineered.

    More ominously, according to Israeli media reports, the US has agreed to a “secret clause” with Israel to allow it to resume its genocidal “war” if Hamas cannot produce all the bodies within the three-day window.

    Double bind

    Then, if Hamas can avoid this tripwire, there is a requirement on the group to lay down its weapons. This is being presented as a precondition for “peace”. But the one certainty is that, even were Hamas to disarm, peace would not be the outcome.

    This week, in his usual style, Trump made undefined threats.

    “If they [Hamas] don’t disarm,” he said, “we will disarm them”. He added that, if the US got involved, “it will happen quickly and perhaps violently. But they will disarm.”

    This intentionally puts Hamas and others pursuing armed resistance against Israel’s occupation – a right recognized in international law – in a double bind.

    First, a disarmed population in Gaza will be even more defenseless in the face of Israeli attacks.

    Whatever the rights or wrongs of Hamas’ military strategy, it is hard to ignore the fact that the prolonged toll of fighting on Israeli troops – in terms of psychological trauma and casualty figures – has served as some sort of countervailing pressure.

    Large numbers of Israelis have taken to the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza – but not, as polls show, because most care about the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians there.

    Rather, their protests have been driven by concerns about the plight of Israeli captives in Gaza and about the toll on Israeli soldiers.

    Hamas, and many of Gaza’s population, will worry that disarmament would swing the cost-benefit analysis among Israelis even further towards continued genocide. It risks more bloodletting by Israel, not peace.

    Lose-lose conundrum

    Second, Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm when there are criminal clans, armed and backed by Israel, and some of them linked to the Islamic State, roaming Gaza’s streets.

    Palestinians have long understood that Israel’s ambition is to undermine the Palestinians’ major national liberation movements – whether Hamas or Fatah – by promoting in their place feudal warlords.

    One Palestinian analyst warned me 14 years ago of the dangers of what he referred to as Israel’s plan for the “Afghanistanization” of Gaza and the West Bank.

    Israel’s ultimate divide-and-rule strategy would involve promoting rival clan leaders who focus on protecting their own small fiefdoms and fighting each other, rather than trying to resist the illegal occupation and seek a unified Palestinian state.

    At the height of the genocide, the clans proved how dangerous such a development could be for ordinary Palestinians. Aided by Israel, and with Hamas pinned down in their tunnels, these gangs looted aid trucks, stole aid from weaker families, then took that food for their own families and sold the rest at extortionate prices few could afford. Everyone else starved.

    The post It was never a Gaza ‘war’. The ‘ceasefire’ is a lie cut from the same cloth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.