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  • BBC dropped a piece about UK and Palestinian kids sharing poetry for ‘impartiality’ reasons

    The BBC‘s anti-Palestinian propaganda during Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been appalling — one telling example came when it dropped a piece about British and Palestinian children sharing poetry ‘for impartiality’ reasons. The BBC Gaza coverage sinks to a new low.

    We spoke to the project coordinator behind the collaboration to find out more.

    Showcasing the humanity of Gaza’s children

    The latest pro-Israel coup at the BBC is the culmination of longstanding efforts to further compromise its already dismal reporting on the illegal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. But its decision to drop a piece showing the humanity of Gaza’s children exemplifies how the BBC has consistently prioritised Israeli lives over Palestinian lives.

    In early 2025, the Hands Up Project brought British children together with children from Gaza via a poetry event. The educational charity seeks to connect children around the world through

    online interaction, drama, and storytelling — and recently organised an event at a primary school in Dartington, Devon.

    Hands Up had previously arranged an international poetry competition, which later became a book – Moon tell me truth – including the poems and illustrations of 9-to-15-year-old children from Palestine, India, Argentina, and Spain. An exhibition of the collection then toured the UK.

    Dartington primary offered to host the exhibition. But as Hands Up coordinator Nick Bilbrough told us, the school had insisted on the event being purely cultural rather than political. Considering the fact that “it’s been really difficult to get any of our work into UK schools”, he said, the tough decision was made to remove a couple of poems that explicitly mentioned Palestine. This made it possible for the work of other Palestinian children to enter the school.

    Soon after, local BBC journalists expressed interest. Bilbrough asked if they wanted to come to the school and “do an interview with me there, and with the teacher, and some of the kids”. He said “they loved that idea”. So they got all of the necessary permissions and then sent someone along to film.

    Weeks of silence followed, until a BBC editor finally confirmed the broadcaster had dropped the story.

    So why might BBC bosses have stepped in?

    Bilbrough explained:

    We did a live link-up with one of the young poets, Nada, who at that time was still in Gaza. She’s got three poems in the book. The kids at Dartington primary interviewed her. And I had a really lovely chat with her about why she writes poetry, and what it’s like to be a poet in Gaza.

    He added that:

    The kids were blown away by her – very inspired by her.

    The children in Britain also “read out some of the poems that they’d written, inspired by the poetry of the children of Gaza”.

    The BBC reporter got lots of content, and “obviously didn’t want to make it political in any way”. But as Bilbrough said:

    All the kids know, even though the BBC‘s trying to keep it all quiet or doing their best to, what’s going on in Gaza. And responding to the question ‘What was it like to meet a poet from Gaza?’ they were saying things like ‘Wow, it’s amazing that, even though Israel is bombing them really badly, she’s able to write such beautiful poetry’.

    So considering the longstanding pro-Israel bias at the BBC, it’s understandable that it wouldn’t want to green-light that kind of clear, factual statement specifically. But as Bilbrough stressed:

    There was enough footage for them to show. I wasn’t talking about anything political, nor was the teacher. We were all just talking about the value of writing poetry in a difficult situation, and how inspirational the poems are.

    He also argued that Nada’s efforts alone should have been reason enough to show at least a short report on the event:

    Nada had gone out of her way. At that time, she was still in Gaza. She subsequently managed to get out. At considerable risk to herself, she had to go somewhere where she could do the Zoom link and it was quite risky for her to do that.

    Indeed, the reporter suggested the piece may be “out by the end of the week” on local news programme BBC Spotlight. But the higher-ups clearly had a problem with that.

    Below is a short clip that Bilbrough had recorded himself:

    BBC Gaza coverage — when impartiality during a genocide becomes complicity

    Many days came and went with no news. And then, weeks later, a BBC editor sent Bilbrough an email (which the Canary has seen), saying “some key people [have] been away” and “it’s taken time to fully understand what happened”. But the crux of the message was to inform him that:

    After reviewing everything, we’ve decided not to proceed with the piece.

    The explanation was that:

    Every story we run is carefully considered, balancing editorial considerations, news value, and audience interest, while also being assessed in the context of what else is in the news at the time. In this case, it became clear that to meet our editorial standards, we would need to provide significantly more context to ensure due impartiality, which would be challenging within the scope of the piece.

    Did they think poetry from Israeli bomber pilots was necessary to balance the story out? We’ll never know.

    But as Bilbrough said, there was clearly more than enough material for the BBC to, at the very least, put out a dry 30-second report with a couple of quotes about the importance of children from around the world sharing poetry and sharing their humanity. That was apparently not something BBC editors wanted, though. Bilbrough added:

    I just think they don’t want to show this human side of the children of Gaza.

    That wouldn’t be surprising. Because this is just one instance of many where the BBC selectively humanises people according to whether the British state sees them as worthy or unworthy victims (depending on whether Britain’s adversaries or allies are to blame). One report earlier in the year, for example, showed that Israelis who died had got 33 times more BBC coverage, despite Israeli occupation forces killing at least 34 times more Palestinians. In short, it’s hard to argue that the BBC has even sought to be ‘impartial’ during the genocide. Instead, it has unapologetically taken Israel’s side.

    Never forget

    Nine-year-old Fatema Saidam wrote the following poem for the Moon tell me truth collection:

    Eyes are for looking

    And seeing sun

    Tongues are for greeting

    And saying fun

    Legs are for walking slowly

    And also run

    Hands are for shaking with friends

    Not for shooting gun

    This is the humanity of Gaza’s children that BBC bosses have actively sought to silence or minimise in the last two years, with the excuse of ‘impartiality’.

    Israel murdered Fatema and her entire family in October 2023. And it took the lives of over 20,000 more children in the following two years.

    The BBC‘s behaviour since 2023 is a stain it will never be able to wash off. And we should never forget what it has done.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Amnesty blasts Israeli death penalty bill as ‘institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians’

    Palestinian lawyers protest against the proposed Israeli death penalty law in front of the Judicial Court, in the Israeli occupied West Bank city of Hebron on November 9, 2025. AFP via Getty Images
    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Nov. 11, 2025. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    As Israel continues its “silent genocide” in the Gaza Strip one month into a supposed ceasefire with Hamas and Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank hit a record high, Amnesty International on Tuesday ripped the advancement of a death penalty bill championed by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

    Israel’s 120-member Knesset “on Monday evening voted 39-16 in favor of the first reading of a controversial government-backed bill sponsored by Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech,” the Times of Israel reported. “Two other death penalty bills, sponsored by Likud MK Nissim Vaturi and Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer, also passed their first readings 36-15 and 37-14.”

    Son Har-Melech’s bill—which must pass two more readings to become law—would require courts to impose the death penalty on “a person who caused the death of an Israeli citizen deliberately or through indifference, from a motive of racism or hostility against a population, and with the aim of harming the state of Israel and the national revival of the Jewish people in its land.”

    Both Hamas—which Israel considers a terrorist organization—and the Palestine Liberation Organization slammed the bill, with Palestinian National Council Speaker Rawhi Fattouh calling it “a political, legal, and humanitarian crime,” according to Reuters.

    Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, Erika Guevara Rosas, said in a statement that “there is no sugarcoating this; a majority of 39 Israeli Knesset members approved in a first reading a bill that effectively mandates courts to impose the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians.”

    Amnesty opposes the death penalty under all circumstances and tracks such killings annually. The international human rights group has also forcefully spoken out against Israeli abuse of Palestinians, including the genocide in Gaza that has killed over 69,182 people as of Tuesday—the official tally from local health officials that experts warn is likely a significant undercount.

    “The international community must exert maximum pressure on the Israeli government to immediately scrap this bill and dismantle all laws and practices that contribute to the system of apartheid against Palestinians.”

    “Knesset members should be working to abolish the death penalty, not broadening its application,” Guevara Rosas argued. “The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, and an irreversible denial of the right to life. It should not be imposed in any circumstances, let alone weaponized as a blatantly discriminatory tool of state-sanctioned killing, domination, and oppression. Its mandatory imposition and retroactive application would violate clear prohibitions set out under international human rights law and standards on the use of this punishment.”

    “The shift towards requiring courts to impose the death penalty against Palestinians is a dangerous and dramatic step backwards and a product of ongoing impunity for Israel’s system of apartheid and its genocide in Gaza,” she continued. “It did not occur in a vacuum. It comes in the context of a drastic increase in the number of unlawful killings of Palestinians, including acts that amount to extrajudicial executions, over the last decade, and a horrific rise of deaths in custody of Palestinians since October 2023.”

    Guevara Rosas noted that “not only have such acts been greeted with near-total impunity but with legitimacy and support and, at times, glorification. It also comes amidst a climate of incitement to violence against Palestinians as evidenced by the surge in state-backed settler attacks in the occupied West Bank.”

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the devastating assault on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then, Israeli soldiers and settlers have also killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

    Netanyahu is now wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Israel faces an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice. The ICJ separately said last year that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful and must end; the Israeli government has shown no sign of accepting that.

    The Amnesty campaigner said Tuesday that “it is additionally concerning that the law authorizes military courts to impose death sentences on civilians, that cannot be commuted, particularly given the unfair nature of the trials held by these courts, which have a conviction rate of over 99% for Palestinian defendants.”

    As CNN reported Monday:

    The UN has previously condemned Israel’s military courts in the occupied West Bank, saying that “Palestinians’ right to due process guarantees have been violated” for decades, and denounced “the lack of fair trial in the occupied West Bank.”

    UN experts said last year that, “in the occupied West Bank, the functions of police, investigator, prosecutor, and judge are vested in the same hierarchical institution—the Israeli military.”

    Pointing to the hanging of Nazi official and Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, Guevara Rosas highlighted that “on paper, Israeli law has traditionally restricted the use of the death penalty for exceptional crimes, like genocide and crimes against humanity, and the last court-ordered execution was carried out in 1962.”

    “The bill’s stipulation that courts should impose the death penalty on individuals convicted of nationally motivated murder with the intent of ‘harming the state of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people’ is yet another blatant manifestation of Israel’s institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians, a key pillar of Israel’s apartheid system, in law and in practice,” she asserted.

    “The international community must exert maximum pressure on the Israeli government to immediately scrap this bill and dismantle all laws and practices that contribute to the system of apartheid against Palestinians,” she added. “Israeli authorities must ensure Palestinian prisoners and detainees are treated in line with international law, including the prohibition against torture and other ill-treatment, and are provided with fair trial guarantees. They must also take concrete steps towards abolishing the death penalty for all crimes and all people.”


    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gal Gadot ‘wins’ ‘Israeli Nobel Prize’ for supporting Israel and for ’empathy with war victims’

    Israeli ‘actor‘ – for want of a better word – Gal Gadot has been announced as the 2026 winner of the ‘Genesis Prize’, called by some ‘Israel’s Nobel Prize’, for her ‘wartime support of Israel’, to the shock of none but the horror of many.

    Gadot’s “I stand with Israel” post is still online at the time of writing, after more than two years of genocide.

    Gadot’s comments on Israel and its crimes in Gaza have included:

    • denouncing calls for a ceasefire
    • declaring that everyone should side with Israel, because terrorism
    • whining that her Snow White film flopped because there is too much pressure on actors to condemn Israel (and her co-star – no speech marks – did, tweeting Free Palestine – and not because of her own support for genocidal Israel (and awful acting).

    Gadot is also using Thatcher-era anti-union laws to prosecute seven UK anti-genocide activists for protesting outside a location where she was filming

    Gal Gadot and ’empathy’

    But astonishingly, in spite of this record Gadot’s award was also – according to its Zionist organisers – for her “empathy for all innocent people affected by the war”. To be fair, Gadot did once post – in 2018, long before the current phase of the genocide, that “It is not a matter of right or left, Arabs or Jews, secular or religious,” she said. “It is a matter of dialogue, of dialogue for peace, and of our tolerance for each other”.

    However, in a stunning show of tolerance, she then deleted it. In 2021 she also posted that her “heart breaks” about the “vicious cycle that has been going on far too long”, ‘both-sidesing’ Israel’s occupation and slaughter of Palestinians. Of course, she did all this without even mentioning Palestine.

    And in October 2023, she posted that “Killing innocent Palestinians is horrific. Killing of innocent Israelis is horrific. If you don’t feel the same, I think you should ask yourself why that is” – but deleted it soon after a “backlash from Israelis who viewed it as slanderous against Israel” and apologised for posting it.

    Enter butcher Netanyahu

    Not exactly a tower of empathy, then – but given the record of the foundation that administers the prize it’s hardly surprising that it would go ahead anyway.

    The Genesis Prize Foundation operates in collaboration with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and the World Zionist Organization’s ‘Jewish Agency for Israel‘. Unsurprisingly, then, winners of the prize since it was established in 2012 have included:

    • Natan Sharansky – chair of the ‘Jewish Agency for Israel’
    • late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, an “establishment bigot” and “racist Islamophobe” who led racist “Flag Day” marches in Israel where far-right settlers shout “Death to Arabs”
    • billionaire Robert Kraft for his efforts to “combat the de-legitimization of Israel” and
    fascist Argentinian president Javier Millei for “his unequivocal support of Israel during one of the most difficult times since the founding of the Jewish State,

    US Israel lobbyist Jonathan Greenblatt posted on X to congratulate Gadot on her ‘win’. However, he apparently felt he had to lock replies to prevent a flood of righteous outrage in the responses from anti-genocide human beings:

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • If UK can limit intelligence with US over ‘illegal’ Caribbean strikes, why not Israel?

    The UK has suspended some intelligence sharing with the US as the British government raises concerns over the legality of US strikes in the Caribbean, according to CNN.

    The move comes as America’s biggest warship arrives in the Caribbean Sea.

    Venezuela has announced it is shifting to full guerrilla insurgency mode, shoring up defences in the event of any future US ground invasion. Venezuelan defence minister Vladimir Padrino López explained that his country:

    will continue in our determination to prepare ourselves to defend our homeland in all areas, whatever the threat, its intensity, its proportion.

    The intelligence suspension is limited to suspected drug trafficking vessels operating in the Caribbean. Anonymous sources cited by CNN note the UK is keen to distance itself from US strikes ordered by the Trump administration which they deem illegal as involvement could risk complicity. Neither the US nor UK have commented on the issue. CNN called the move:

    a significant break from its closest ally and intelligence sharing partner.

    The UK has carried out drug interdiction in the Caribbean for decades. It currently has two Royal Navy patrol vessels deployed in the region. The HMS Medway replaced HMS Trent in early October. Medway is in Miami. HMS Trent was visible until recently off Puerto Rico, through it’s AIS satellite tracker now appears to be turned off now.

    One open-source X account reported that the Trent’s crew in Jamaica on 10 November, dealing with the fallout of Hurricane Melissa:

    The UK also has a permanent presence in Belize, used for jungle training and engagement with regional partners, as well as local forces, to advance develop peace and security.

    Cracks in the alliance

    The UK is not alone in its reluctance to share intelligence with its American counterparts. As noted by CNN:

    Colombia has also suspended intelligence sharing with the US. President Gustavo Petro said:

    The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people.

    Canada, whose coast guard also supports Caribbean counter-drug operations, has insisted its own intelligence should not be used for strikes.

    The intelligence was typically sent to Joint Interagency Task Force South, a task force stationed in Florida that includes representatives from a number of partner nations and works to reduce the illicit drug trade.

    Closer to home, the Conservative Party wheeled out their tired ‘lefty lawyers’ schtick:

    This is a trope the party has used to rail against everything from accountability for war crimes to migration.

    And US far-right commentator Laura Loomer said something bizarre about Shabana Mahmood being an Islamist:

    Moving on…

    Gunship diplomacy

    Since September, the US has killed 75 people in 19 airstrikes in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean. The Trump administration insists that is is fighting a legitimate war on drug and asserts that its airstrikes are lawful. An increasingly vast array of opponents, including legal experts, say they are extrajudicial killings.

    The US narrative centres on fighting the ‘narco-terrorism’ of Latin American cartels. Both local and international critics say this is a return to bullying Latin America and gunboat diplomacy — with regime change in oil-rich Venezuela being the real American aim.

    The US build-up is already substantial and highly aggressive. Everything from submarines to special forces motherships, shadowy spy planes to flying artillery platforms have been deployed into the region. Killer drones are also present. And long disused military bases are being rebuilt. El Salvador, whose authoritarian president Nayib Bukele is a close Trump ally, is also hosting shadowy military aircraft.

    The US flagship Gerald R. Ford has also arrived, according to reports. The giant aircraft carrier and her support ships were re-assigned from the Mediterranean to add even more weight to Trump’s Caribbean task force.

    The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has a breakdown of US forces here. And here’s their donor list for transparency.

    It’s reported that at least two senior special forces officers told a closed-door session in Washington they were at a loss to explain why the build-up was so vast:

    Good enough for Gaza?

    Precise details of the UK’s withdrawal of intelligence are unclear. As so often with intelligence and special operations matters, the government refuses to confirm or deny anything to the press or parliament.

    Yet, as intelligence scholar Dan Lomas pointed out, the UK is bound by various laws and treaties on intelligence liaison:

     

    The main contention for the British government seems to be complicity in strikes that flout International laws. If that is the case, surely it has wider implications for foreign policy and intelligence partnerships with allies.

    MI6 and GCHQ are overseen by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) scrutinises the “policies, expenditure, administration and operations” of all UK intelligence agencies.

    Given the above, there are some serious questions to ask of Starmer’s government. The UK not only shares intelligence with Israel, but gathers intelligence on Israel’s behalf. If it is the case that concerns over legality can change alter or limit that relationship — as they should — why hasn’t intelligence sharing been radically adjusted or been suspended with an ally currently on trial for genocide and war crimes?

    Neither MI5 nor GCHQ had responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. 

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A Torturous Truce

    The morning carried a different scent…
    One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
    The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
    as a ceasefire draped the land.

    — from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee

    On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.

    Roy, my American Sufi friend, was not impressed when I told him about the celebrations in Gaza. The people are so desperate to have something to celebrate. I’m highly skeptical that anything good long term will result from this. Trump is an imbecile and Netanyahu has zero desire for peace. The anger at politicians in the West touches the most loving of people.

    Omar Skaik, my Gaza refugee friend from The Greatest Man in Gaza, was more direct: I can hear bombs falling in the distance. I wonder how many Palestinians will die today? To him, it was just another day he hoped to survive as a father of three with a fourth on the way. He was walking to the market to buy ingredients for making hummus, when I called. In the background I could hear his fellow Palestinians’ exultations. At least someone in Gaza was happy. But Omar was the happiest Palestinian I knew, and his emaciated face revealed the truth. The suffering was not over. A trail of broken ceasefires was his proof.

    I was marginally happier, glad the genocide might be over. Sentiments ranged from marginally good to horrifically bad in my cohort of Western Sufi friends and Gaza refugees—people I had been building friendships with since February, 2024, when I first decided to write about Palestinians and connect them with Western fundraisers. Social media had finally made a positive impact on my life. I was using Facebook’s friend and messeging features, as well as Zoom’s meeting rooms, to foster relationships between people seeking an end to the genocide. In addition I helped kickstart fundraising campaigns that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Palestinian families.

    Farah Kamal, a twenty-year-old refugee well known to my Sufi friends and whose sister I wrote about in Marah’s Story, Or the Disintegration of a Country Family was suspicious: The bombing hasn’t stopped yet. The ceasefire was only for the media and hasn’t been implemented on the ground…I hope that Israel will not betray us. And just like she imagined, Israel continued bombing for the first 24hrs of the peace plan. From noon October 9th, when both sides formally approved the plan, until noon on October 10th, many innocent civilians died throughout Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) wouldn’t stop killing until they were ordered to. Thereafter, those Palestinians not mourning the newly martyred, flooded back to their beloved Gaza City, much of which had been reduced to rubble.

    Farah was hoping to return to the life she led before October 7th, 2023, but she knew that would be hard, and she was tired of having to start over each time (eight in total) she had been displaced. I ask God to help us and give us patience, strength and perseverance. I hope that all the suffering we have endured will be rewarded on the Day of Judgment.

    Palestinians supplicate God to right the wrongs, to make up for the suffering they went through. They survived two years of genocide, and are having trouble adjusting to a world without gunfire, bombs and terror. Later they would realize that the genocide hadn’t stopped, it was just reduced in intensity. All the things they were promised came slower than expected. The immediate lowering of food prices was helpful, but short lived. Israel still limited humanitarian aid, so many food items were out of reach for the average Palestinian. Hunger was only a missed meal away.

    Those who had fundraisers kept pleading for money, stuck in a PTSD trance. They had spent the better part of two years trying to gather enough to pay for the basics of life, and they didn’t know what else to do. Many felt pressured to help those extended family members still dependent on their efforts. There were no jobs they could go back to. Their work places had been destroyed. Those who were physically able, returned to their former homes and tried to rebuild. Sweat-equity has always been one of Gaza’s biggest resources. But for some, there was nothing left of the neighborhoods they once loved, just dreams buried in rubble. In Farah’s case, her family could not access two houses they had built themselves because they fell behind the new Israeli occupation line. Even homeowners in Gaza could be homeless.

    Of course, Farah will not give up. She’s an artist and a writer and spent the summer making a cookbook, A Palestinian Feast, that she sells as a fundraiser. From the introduction: This book is more than recipes. It is the story of Gaza, a land of resilience, love, and memory. Every dish here carries the laughter of grandmothers, the whispers of fathers, and the small, sacred moments around the table that keep hope alive. As you turn these pages, don’t just follow instructions. Sit at the table of the Palestinian heart, feel its dignity, and taste a love that survives despite everything. These dishes are our way of saying: We are here. We are unbroken. We deserve life. Our table is yours, and our hearts are open.

    Other Palestinians were also hopeful. I am still waiting to leave Gaza for kidney treatment, Salah El-Din Youssef from my story The Cats of Gaza told me. I expect to receive a call from the World Health Organization (WHO) by the end of this week. We are still in a tent in Deir al-Balah with relatives, but my daughter Donna graduated from high school this week. It’s amazing how so many contrasting feelings and situations can be all spelled out in a handful of sentences. By the end of October, Salah’s approval from the WHO came through. Now he’s trying to find a way to travel to a hospital outside of Gaza while his daughter contemplates college.

    Mohammed Kassab, from the story Medicine and Martyrs, started studying engineering online at Al-Aqsa University in August, two months before the ceasefire began. He was one of thousands of young people who, like Farah Kamal, had college delayed by October 7th. But otherwise his life remains unchanged. His family still clings to a tattered tent in a sea of refugees in Al-Mawasi.

    Mays Astal, whose story I covered in The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea, was looking for help relocating from the West Bank. She, her husband and their two children buried themselves in the sand inside a refugee camp in March 2024. They were trying to hide from Israeli tanks which were running over anyone they saw after burning down the tents. Mays was eight months pregnant at the time. They survived and made it across the border to Egypt in April 2024. Now her husband has been forced to go to Libya to work because he cannot enter the West Bank with his Gaza ID. Mays currently works as a Resilience Field Officer with Catholic Relief Services in the West Bank but is desperate to reunite with her husband. Such is the pain Palestinians endure. Relatives with Gaza or West Bank IDs cannot visit each other’s territories. Israel makes sure loved ones remain separated forever. Even in peace Palestinians like Mays face heartbreak.

    Ali Lubbad, featured in the story The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza City as Seen Through the Eyes of a Pediatric Nurse, returned to his family’s apartment in Gaza City to find the doors blown off, the inside filled with dust and debris, and the water and sewage systems destroyed. His employer, Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, was also in ruins. Stark photographs revealed the damage: holes in patient’s rooms, cracks in the walls of the surgery center, hundreds of wires protruding from a ceiling charred from rooftop explosions. Any areas still intact are shrouded in darkness. There is no power. It will take millions of dollars to repair everything. Some of the children will die during their wait to be healed.

    Gaza author Maryam Hasanat (see her autobiographical story Mary of Palestine) was initially ecstatic: I am crying, but this time because of joy. Maryam celebrated her 27th birthday on Friday, October 10th, the day the ceasefire took effect, and sent me a photograph of her three-and-a-half-year-old son Kamal celebrating with her at a restaurant. Maryam has a lightness of being that is seldom seen among people who have survived a genocide. Being an author helped. She is working on her poetry:

    The daylight spoke of stillness.
    I breathed it in, filling my lungs with ease.
    Jasmine drifted by and whispered:
    there is something in this world worth living for.

    — from A Scent of Life

    After her brush with death in the spring of 2024, when no one knew if she would survive a complicated childbirth, it was a relief to see her happy and watch her transmit it to the page. She looked to me for writing advice: “I am compiling a collection of poems about Gaza. I’m thinking of calling it Writing Through the Ruins. What do you think?”

    I suggested she share her work with her fellow Palestinians, both writers and the general population, for their opinions.

    “I feel more comfortable sharing my writings with a foreign writer like you,” she replied.

    I was warmed by Maryam’s trust in me. I felt like I was being invited into one of the most sacred parts of a Palestinian’s life, their home. Then I realized Maryam had no home. By Sunday she realized it as well: My heart is torn apart. I don’t know how I will raise my children, or how I will ever escape this nightmare that consumes and controls me. I still can’t believe that everything is gone. It feels like I’m still living inside a hell that never ends.

    Neither she, nor I can write half a page without this seesawing of emotions. The trauma of war related PTSD grips Palestinians deeply, and Maryam, like everyone in Palestine, will need many years to heal from the suffering and sorrow.

    On Sunday, October 12th we held our weekly Sufi-Gaza refugee meeting. The first since the ceasefire, it echoed with joy. Farah sang We Will Stay Here, an anthem of Palestinian love for their homeland. Her family members milled about in the background of her video, excited for their new freedom, their smiles communicating what they couldn’t say in English.

    Omar updated us about his attempts to fix up his sister’s bombed out apartment in Gaza City: I’m hooking up a waterline so my extended family can move in. None of our other apartments survived the bombardment. It’s night time in Gaza and Omar showed us around using the light from his phone. There is no power in the building, so the flashlight on the phone doubles as our only source of light at night. The beam landed on his sleeping preschool children before cutting back to his face. I charge it at a nearby home that has solar panels, he tells us. Unfortunately, few panels are available for sale in Gaza, so Omar is unable to buy any for the apartment.

    Omar’s friend Yahya, both a farmer and an iman (Muslim religious leader), was making plans to teach the recitation of the Quran to our group of Western Shadhiliyya Sufis online. He filled us in on the turmoil in the markets: Even with the entry of aid, there is a specter that haunts the citizens of Gaza, which is word of the crossing being closed. Upon hearing this news, the markets suddenly turn into ghost towns. Vendors bare their fangs, hide their goods, and raise prices exponentially… Palestinians in Gaza call them the Israeli army’s merchant brigade… Israel’s hands reach anyone who seeks to impose security and control… Israel wants chaos in Gaza.

    Rawan Aljuaidi is worried about her baby boy Aboud. I’ve known her since she became pregnant with him in 2024. Aboud is her first child, and his body didn’t grow like it should have this summer due to malnourishment. He’s been sick for a month now: fever, cough and a runny nose. Rawan tells me. He hasn’t smiled in weeks, his body is exhausted and his breathing is weak. Those are the damages done by starvation. I wrote the story A Palestinian Mother and Son Starve With Dignity for Rawan, but babies can’t eat words, so Aboud’s suffering continues.

    Omar’s two-year-old daughter Mariam also suffers. She has weak bones due to malnutrition and fractured her left leg while playing recently. Omar posted a photo of her leg in a cast on social media. One of his neighbors, named Jawdat, is the grandfather of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers January 29th, 2024 after they killed six members of her family and two Palestinian paramedics trying to rescue her. He wants to get the word out that Hind’s brother just turned five and is doing well. Children pay the highest price during genocide.

    Some refugees are missing from the meeting. Israel has been known for shutting down the internet intermittently, and we wonder if that’s the case today. But eventually, most of the regulars show up, and they remind us that, though the war has stopped, their suffering has not. In truth, the bombing never stopped for more than a few days. It’s similar to other ceasefires Israel has brokered with Hezbollah, Syria and Lebanon: peace agreements that give Israel the opportunity to wage a low level war against the very people it claims to want peace with. Airstrikes using munitions donated by the USA cost them little and offer virtually no risk to military personnel. By Monday, October 20th, ten days since the implementation of the ceasefire, nearly a hundred more Palestinians were dead. Over one hundred more died in attacks on October 29th. In the first month of peace, two hundred and forty-one Gazans were murdered by the IDF, pushing the official death toll since October 7th, 2023 to over 69,000.

    Still, the weekly meetings go on. They are places where Palestinians can gather with Westerners who will listen to their suffering. These meetings have brightened, and even saved, the lives of many Palestinians who had nowhere else to turn.

    I will leave you with words of wisdom from the end of Farah’s cookbook: From Gaza where ovens still glow even when the lights go out, I send you flavors wrapped in stories, and stories wrapped in love. We don’t measure ingredients with cups or spoons, we measure them with the heart. In Gaza, we may not have everything, but we’ll always have a table big enough for hope.

    The post A Torturous Truce first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eros Salvatore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Torturous Truce

    The morning carried a different scent…
    One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
    The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
    as a ceasefire draped the land.

    — from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee

    On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.

    Roy, my American Sufi friend, was not impressed when I told him about the celebrations in Gaza. The people are so desperate to have something to celebrate. I’m highly skeptical that anything good long term will result from this. Trump is an imbecile and Netanyahu has zero desire for peace. The anger at politicians in the West touches the most loving of people.

    Omar Skaik, my Gaza refugee friend from The Greatest Man in Gaza, was more direct: I can hear bombs falling in the distance. I wonder how many Palestinians will die today? To him, it was just another day he hoped to survive as a father of three with a fourth on the way. He was walking to the market to buy ingredients for making hummus, when I called. In the background I could hear his fellow Palestinians’ exultations. At least someone in Gaza was happy. But Omar was the happiest Palestinian I knew, and his emaciated face revealed the truth. The suffering was not over. A trail of broken ceasefires was his proof.

    I was marginally happier, glad the genocide might be over. Sentiments ranged from marginally good to horrifically bad in my cohort of Western Sufi friends and Gaza refugees—people I had been building friendships with since February, 2024, when I first decided to write about Palestinians and connect them with Western fundraisers. Social media had finally made a positive impact on my life. I was using Facebook’s friend and messeging features, as well as Zoom’s meeting rooms, to foster relationships between people seeking an end to the genocide. In addition I helped kickstart fundraising campaigns that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Palestinian families.

    Farah Kamal, a twenty-year-old refugee well known to my Sufi friends and whose sister I wrote about in Marah’s Story, Or the Disintegration of a Country Family was suspicious: The bombing hasn’t stopped yet. The ceasefire was only for the media and hasn’t been implemented on the ground…I hope that Israel will not betray us. And just like she imagined, Israel continued bombing for the first 24hrs of the peace plan. From noon October 9th, when both sides formally approved the plan, until noon on October 10th, many innocent civilians died throughout Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) wouldn’t stop killing until they were ordered to. Thereafter, those Palestinians not mourning the newly martyred, flooded back to their beloved Gaza City, much of which had been reduced to rubble.

    Farah was hoping to return to the life she led before October 7th, 2023, but she knew that would be hard, and she was tired of having to start over each time (eight in total) she had been displaced. I ask God to help us and give us patience, strength and perseverance. I hope that all the suffering we have endured will be rewarded on the Day of Judgment.

    Palestinians supplicate God to right the wrongs, to make up for the suffering they went through. They survived two years of genocide, and are having trouble adjusting to a world without gunfire, bombs and terror. Later they would realize that the genocide hadn’t stopped, it was just reduced in intensity. All the things they were promised came slower than expected. The immediate lowering of food prices was helpful, but short lived. Israel still limited humanitarian aid, so many food items were out of reach for the average Palestinian. Hunger was only a missed meal away.

    Those who had fundraisers kept pleading for money, stuck in a PTSD trance. They had spent the better part of two years trying to gather enough to pay for the basics of life, and they didn’t know what else to do. Many felt pressured to help those extended family members still dependent on their efforts. There were no jobs they could go back to. Their work places had been destroyed. Those who were physically able, returned to their former homes and tried to rebuild. Sweat-equity has always been one of Gaza’s biggest resources. But for some, there was nothing left of the neighborhoods they once loved, just dreams buried in rubble. In Farah’s case, her family could not access two houses they had built themselves because they fell behind the new Israeli occupation line. Even homeowners in Gaza could be homeless.

    Of course, Farah will not give up. She’s an artist and a writer and spent the summer making a cookbook, A Palestinian Feast, that she sells as a fundraiser. From the introduction: This book is more than recipes. It is the story of Gaza, a land of resilience, love, and memory. Every dish here carries the laughter of grandmothers, the whispers of fathers, and the small, sacred moments around the table that keep hope alive. As you turn these pages, don’t just follow instructions. Sit at the table of the Palestinian heart, feel its dignity, and taste a love that survives despite everything. These dishes are our way of saying: We are here. We are unbroken. We deserve life. Our table is yours, and our hearts are open.

    Other Palestinians were also hopeful. I am still waiting to leave Gaza for kidney treatment, Salah El-Din Youssef from my story The Cats of Gaza told me. I expect to receive a call from the World Health Organization (WHO) by the end of this week. We are still in a tent in Deir al-Balah with relatives, but my daughter Donna graduated from high school this week. It’s amazing how so many contrasting feelings and situations can be all spelled out in a handful of sentences. By the end of October, Salah’s approval from the WHO came through. Now he’s trying to find a way to travel to a hospital outside of Gaza while his daughter contemplates college.

    Mohammed Kassab, from the story Medicine and Martyrs, started studying engineering online at Al-Aqsa University in August, two months before the ceasefire began. He was one of thousands of young people who, like Farah Kamal, had college delayed by October 7th. But otherwise his life remains unchanged. His family still clings to a tattered tent in a sea of refugees in Al-Mawasi.

    Mays Astal, whose story I covered in The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea, was looking for help relocating from the West Bank. She, her husband and their two children buried themselves in the sand inside a refugee camp in March 2024. They were trying to hide from Israeli tanks which were running over anyone they saw after burning down the tents. Mays was eight months pregnant at the time. They survived and made it across the border to Egypt in April 2024. Now her husband has been forced to go to Libya to work because he cannot enter the West Bank with his Gaza ID. Mays currently works as a Resilience Field Officer with Catholic Relief Services in the West Bank but is desperate to reunite with her husband. Such is the pain Palestinians endure. Relatives with Gaza or West Bank IDs cannot visit each other’s territories. Israel makes sure loved ones remain separated forever. Even in peace Palestinians like Mays face heartbreak.

    Ali Lubbad, featured in the story The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza City as Seen Through the Eyes of a Pediatric Nurse, returned to his family’s apartment in Gaza City to find the doors blown off, the inside filled with dust and debris, and the water and sewage systems destroyed. His employer, Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, was also in ruins. Stark photographs revealed the damage: holes in patient’s rooms, cracks in the walls of the surgery center, hundreds of wires protruding from a ceiling charred from rooftop explosions. Any areas still intact are shrouded in darkness. There is no power. It will take millions of dollars to repair everything. Some of the children will die during their wait to be healed.

    Gaza author Maryam Hasanat (see her autobiographical story Mary of Palestine) was initially ecstatic: I am crying, but this time because of joy. Maryam celebrated her 27th birthday on Friday, October 10th, the day the ceasefire took effect, and sent me a photograph of her three-and-a-half-year-old son Kamal celebrating with her at a restaurant. Maryam has a lightness of being that is seldom seen among people who have survived a genocide. Being an author helped. She is working on her poetry:

    The daylight spoke of stillness.
    I breathed it in, filling my lungs with ease.
    Jasmine drifted by and whispered:
    there is something in this world worth living for.

    — from A Scent of Life

    After her brush with death in the spring of 2024, when no one knew if she would survive a complicated childbirth, it was a relief to see her happy and watch her transmit it to the page. She looked to me for writing advice: “I am compiling a collection of poems about Gaza. I’m thinking of calling it Writing Through the Ruins. What do you think?”

    I suggested she share her work with her fellow Palestinians, both writers and the general population, for their opinions.

    “I feel more comfortable sharing my writings with a foreign writer like you,” she replied.

    I was warmed by Maryam’s trust in me. I felt like I was being invited into one of the most sacred parts of a Palestinian’s life, their home. Then I realized Maryam had no home. By Sunday she realized it as well: My heart is torn apart. I don’t know how I will raise my children, or how I will ever escape this nightmare that consumes and controls me. I still can’t believe that everything is gone. It feels like I’m still living inside a hell that never ends.

    Neither she, nor I can write half a page without this seesawing of emotions. The trauma of war related PTSD grips Palestinians deeply, and Maryam, like everyone in Palestine, will need many years to heal from the suffering and sorrow.

    On Sunday, October 12th we held our weekly Sufi-Gaza refugee meeting. The first since the ceasefire, it echoed with joy. Farah sang We Will Stay Here, an anthem of Palestinian love for their homeland. Her family members milled about in the background of her video, excited for their new freedom, their smiles communicating what they couldn’t say in English.

    Omar updated us about his attempts to fix up his sister’s bombed out apartment in Gaza City: I’m hooking up a waterline so my extended family can move in. None of our other apartments survived the bombardment. It’s night time in Gaza and Omar showed us around using the light from his phone. There is no power in the building, so the flashlight on the phone doubles as our only source of light at night. The beam landed on his sleeping preschool children before cutting back to his face. I charge it at a nearby home that has solar panels, he tells us. Unfortunately, few panels are available for sale in Gaza, so Omar is unable to buy any for the apartment.

    Omar’s friend Yahya, both a farmer and an iman (Muslim religious leader), was making plans to teach the recitation of the Quran to our group of Western Shadhiliyya Sufis online. He filled us in on the turmoil in the markets: Even with the entry of aid, there is a specter that haunts the citizens of Gaza, which is word of the crossing being closed. Upon hearing this news, the markets suddenly turn into ghost towns. Vendors bare their fangs, hide their goods, and raise prices exponentially… Palestinians in Gaza call them the Israeli army’s merchant brigade… Israel’s hands reach anyone who seeks to impose security and control… Israel wants chaos in Gaza.

    Rawan Aljuaidi is worried about her baby boy Aboud. I’ve known her since she became pregnant with him in 2024. Aboud is her first child, and his body didn’t grow like it should have this summer due to malnourishment. He’s been sick for a month now: fever, cough and a runny nose. Rawan tells me. He hasn’t smiled in weeks, his body is exhausted and his breathing is weak. Those are the damages done by starvation. I wrote the story A Palestinian Mother and Son Starve With Dignity for Rawan, but babies can’t eat words, so Aboud’s suffering continues.

    Omar’s two-year-old daughter Mariam also suffers. She has weak bones due to malnutrition and fractured her left leg while playing recently. Omar posted a photo of her leg in a cast on social media. One of his neighbors, named Jawdat, is the grandfather of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers January 29th, 2024 after they killed six members of her family and two Palestinian paramedics trying to rescue her. He wants to get the word out that Hind’s brother just turned five and is doing well. Children pay the highest price during genocide.

    Some refugees are missing from the meeting. Israel has been known for shutting down the internet intermittently, and we wonder if that’s the case today. But eventually, most of the regulars show up, and they remind us that, though the war has stopped, their suffering has not. In truth, the bombing never stopped for more than a few days. It’s similar to other ceasefires Israel has brokered with Hezbollah, Syria and Lebanon: peace agreements that give Israel the opportunity to wage a low level war against the very people it claims to want peace with. Airstrikes using munitions donated by the USA cost them little and offer virtually no risk to military personnel. By Monday, October 20th, ten days since the implementation of the ceasefire, nearly a hundred more Palestinians were dead. Over one hundred more died in attacks on October 29th. In the first month of peace, two hundred and forty-one Gazans were murdered by the IDF, pushing the official death toll since October 7th, 2023 to over 69,000.

    Still, the weekly meetings go on. They are places where Palestinians can gather with Westerners who will listen to their suffering. These meetings have brightened, and even saved, the lives of many Palestinians who had nowhere else to turn.

    I will leave you with words of wisdom from the end of Farah’s cookbook: From Gaza where ovens still glow even when the lights go out, I send you flavors wrapped in stories, and stories wrapped in love. We don’t measure ingredients with cups or spoons, we measure them with the heart. In Gaza, we may not have everything, but we’ll always have a table big enough for hope.

    The post A Torturous Truce first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eros Salvatore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Torturous Truce

    The morning carried a different scent…
    One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
    The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
    as a ceasefire draped the land.

    — from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee

    On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.

    Roy, my American Sufi friend, was not impressed when I told him about the celebrations in Gaza. The people are so desperate to have something to celebrate. I’m highly skeptical that anything good long term will result from this. Trump is an imbecile and Netanyahu has zero desire for peace. The anger at politicians in the West touches the most loving of people.

    Omar Skaik, my Gaza refugee friend from The Greatest Man in Gaza, was more direct: I can hear bombs falling in the distance. I wonder how many Palestinians will die today? To him, it was just another day he hoped to survive as a father of three with a fourth on the way. He was walking to the market to buy ingredients for making hummus, when I called. In the background I could hear his fellow Palestinians’ exultations. At least someone in Gaza was happy. But Omar was the happiest Palestinian I knew, and his emaciated face revealed the truth. The suffering was not over. A trail of broken ceasefires was his proof.

    I was marginally happier, glad the genocide might be over. Sentiments ranged from marginally good to horrifically bad in my cohort of Western Sufi friends and Gaza refugees—people I had been building friendships with since February, 2024, when I first decided to write about Palestinians and connect them with Western fundraisers. Social media had finally made a positive impact on my life. I was using Facebook’s friend and messeging features, as well as Zoom’s meeting rooms, to foster relationships between people seeking an end to the genocide. In addition I helped kickstart fundraising campaigns that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Palestinian families.

    Farah Kamal, a twenty-year-old refugee well known to my Sufi friends and whose sister I wrote about in Marah’s Story, Or the Disintegration of a Country Family was suspicious: The bombing hasn’t stopped yet. The ceasefire was only for the media and hasn’t been implemented on the ground…I hope that Israel will not betray us. And just like she imagined, Israel continued bombing for the first 24hrs of the peace plan. From noon October 9th, when both sides formally approved the plan, until noon on October 10th, many innocent civilians died throughout Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) wouldn’t stop killing until they were ordered to. Thereafter, those Palestinians not mourning the newly martyred, flooded back to their beloved Gaza City, much of which had been reduced to rubble.

    Farah was hoping to return to the life she led before October 7th, 2023, but she knew that would be hard, and she was tired of having to start over each time (eight in total) she had been displaced. I ask God to help us and give us patience, strength and perseverance. I hope that all the suffering we have endured will be rewarded on the Day of Judgment.

    Palestinians supplicate God to right the wrongs, to make up for the suffering they went through. They survived two years of genocide, and are having trouble adjusting to a world without gunfire, bombs and terror. Later they would realize that the genocide hadn’t stopped, it was just reduced in intensity. All the things they were promised came slower than expected. The immediate lowering of food prices was helpful, but short lived. Israel still limited humanitarian aid, so many food items were out of reach for the average Palestinian. Hunger was only a missed meal away.

    Those who had fundraisers kept pleading for money, stuck in a PTSD trance. They had spent the better part of two years trying to gather enough to pay for the basics of life, and they didn’t know what else to do. Many felt pressured to help those extended family members still dependent on their efforts. There were no jobs they could go back to. Their work places had been destroyed. Those who were physically able, returned to their former homes and tried to rebuild. Sweat-equity has always been one of Gaza’s biggest resources. But for some, there was nothing left of the neighborhoods they once loved, just dreams buried in rubble. In Farah’s case, her family could not access two houses they had built themselves because they fell behind the new Israeli occupation line. Even homeowners in Gaza could be homeless.

    Of course, Farah will not give up. She’s an artist and a writer and spent the summer making a cookbook, A Palestinian Feast, that she sells as a fundraiser. From the introduction: This book is more than recipes. It is the story of Gaza, a land of resilience, love, and memory. Every dish here carries the laughter of grandmothers, the whispers of fathers, and the small, sacred moments around the table that keep hope alive. As you turn these pages, don’t just follow instructions. Sit at the table of the Palestinian heart, feel its dignity, and taste a love that survives despite everything. These dishes are our way of saying: We are here. We are unbroken. We deserve life. Our table is yours, and our hearts are open.

    Other Palestinians were also hopeful. I am still waiting to leave Gaza for kidney treatment, Salah El-Din Youssef from my story The Cats of Gaza told me. I expect to receive a call from the World Health Organization (WHO) by the end of this week. We are still in a tent in Deir al-Balah with relatives, but my daughter Donna graduated from high school this week. It’s amazing how so many contrasting feelings and situations can be all spelled out in a handful of sentences. By the end of October, Salah’s approval from the WHO came through. Now he’s trying to find a way to travel to a hospital outside of Gaza while his daughter contemplates college.

    Mohammed Kassab, from the story Medicine and Martyrs, started studying engineering online at Al-Aqsa University in August, two months before the ceasefire began. He was one of thousands of young people who, like Farah Kamal, had college delayed by October 7th. But otherwise his life remains unchanged. His family still clings to a tattered tent in a sea of refugees in Al-Mawasi.

    Mays Astal, whose story I covered in The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea, was looking for help relocating from the West Bank. She, her husband and their two children buried themselves in the sand inside a refugee camp in March 2024. They were trying to hide from Israeli tanks which were running over anyone they saw after burning down the tents. Mays was eight months pregnant at the time. They survived and made it across the border to Egypt in April 2024. Now her husband has been forced to go to Libya to work because he cannot enter the West Bank with his Gaza ID. Mays currently works as a Resilience Field Officer with Catholic Relief Services in the West Bank but is desperate to reunite with her husband. Such is the pain Palestinians endure. Relatives with Gaza or West Bank IDs cannot visit each other’s territories. Israel makes sure loved ones remain separated forever. Even in peace Palestinians like Mays face heartbreak.

    Ali Lubbad, featured in the story The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza City as Seen Through the Eyes of a Pediatric Nurse, returned to his family’s apartment in Gaza City to find the doors blown off, the inside filled with dust and debris, and the water and sewage systems destroyed. His employer, Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, was also in ruins. Stark photographs revealed the damage: holes in patient’s rooms, cracks in the walls of the surgery center, hundreds of wires protruding from a ceiling charred from rooftop explosions. Any areas still intact are shrouded in darkness. There is no power. It will take millions of dollars to repair everything. Some of the children will die during their wait to be healed.

    Gaza author Maryam Hasanat (see her autobiographical story Mary of Palestine) was initially ecstatic: I am crying, but this time because of joy. Maryam celebrated her 27th birthday on Friday, October 10th, the day the ceasefire took effect, and sent me a photograph of her three-and-a-half-year-old son Kamal celebrating with her at a restaurant. Maryam has a lightness of being that is seldom seen among people who have survived a genocide. Being an author helped. She is working on her poetry:

    The daylight spoke of stillness.
    I breathed it in, filling my lungs with ease.
    Jasmine drifted by and whispered:
    there is something in this world worth living for.

    — from A Scent of Life

    After her brush with death in the spring of 2024, when no one knew if she would survive a complicated childbirth, it was a relief to see her happy and watch her transmit it to the page. She looked to me for writing advice: “I am compiling a collection of poems about Gaza. I’m thinking of calling it Writing Through the Ruins. What do you think?”

    I suggested she share her work with her fellow Palestinians, both writers and the general population, for their opinions.

    “I feel more comfortable sharing my writings with a foreign writer like you,” she replied.

    I was warmed by Maryam’s trust in me. I felt like I was being invited into one of the most sacred parts of a Palestinian’s life, their home. Then I realized Maryam had no home. By Sunday she realized it as well: My heart is torn apart. I don’t know how I will raise my children, or how I will ever escape this nightmare that consumes and controls me. I still can’t believe that everything is gone. It feels like I’m still living inside a hell that never ends.

    Neither she, nor I can write half a page without this seesawing of emotions. The trauma of war related PTSD grips Palestinians deeply, and Maryam, like everyone in Palestine, will need many years to heal from the suffering and sorrow.

    On Sunday, October 12th we held our weekly Sufi-Gaza refugee meeting. The first since the ceasefire, it echoed with joy. Farah sang We Will Stay Here, an anthem of Palestinian love for their homeland. Her family members milled about in the background of her video, excited for their new freedom, their smiles communicating what they couldn’t say in English.

    Omar updated us about his attempts to fix up his sister’s bombed out apartment in Gaza City: I’m hooking up a waterline so my extended family can move in. None of our other apartments survived the bombardment. It’s night time in Gaza and Omar showed us around using the light from his phone. There is no power in the building, so the flashlight on the phone doubles as our only source of light at night. The beam landed on his sleeping preschool children before cutting back to his face. I charge it at a nearby home that has solar panels, he tells us. Unfortunately, few panels are available for sale in Gaza, so Omar is unable to buy any for the apartment.

    Omar’s friend Yahya, both a farmer and an iman (Muslim religious leader), was making plans to teach the recitation of the Quran to our group of Western Shadhiliyya Sufis online. He filled us in on the turmoil in the markets: Even with the entry of aid, there is a specter that haunts the citizens of Gaza, which is word of the crossing being closed. Upon hearing this news, the markets suddenly turn into ghost towns. Vendors bare their fangs, hide their goods, and raise prices exponentially… Palestinians in Gaza call them the Israeli army’s merchant brigade… Israel’s hands reach anyone who seeks to impose security and control… Israel wants chaos in Gaza.

    Rawan Aljuaidi is worried about her baby boy Aboud. I’ve known her since she became pregnant with him in 2024. Aboud is her first child, and his body didn’t grow like it should have this summer due to malnourishment. He’s been sick for a month now: fever, cough and a runny nose. Rawan tells me. He hasn’t smiled in weeks, his body is exhausted and his breathing is weak. Those are the damages done by starvation. I wrote the story A Palestinian Mother and Son Starve With Dignity for Rawan, but babies can’t eat words, so Aboud’s suffering continues.

    Omar’s two-year-old daughter Mariam also suffers. She has weak bones due to malnutrition and fractured her left leg while playing recently. Omar posted a photo of her leg in a cast on social media. One of his neighbors, named Jawdat, is the grandfather of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers January 29th, 2024 after they killed six members of her family and two Palestinian paramedics trying to rescue her. He wants to get the word out that Hind’s brother just turned five and is doing well. Children pay the highest price during genocide.

    Some refugees are missing from the meeting. Israel has been known for shutting down the internet intermittently, and we wonder if that’s the case today. But eventually, most of the regulars show up, and they remind us that, though the war has stopped, their suffering has not. In truth, the bombing never stopped for more than a few days. It’s similar to other ceasefires Israel has brokered with Hezbollah, Syria and Lebanon: peace agreements that give Israel the opportunity to wage a low level war against the very people it claims to want peace with. Airstrikes using munitions donated by the USA cost them little and offer virtually no risk to military personnel. By Monday, October 20th, ten days since the implementation of the ceasefire, nearly a hundred more Palestinians were dead. Over one hundred more died in attacks on October 29th. In the first month of peace, two hundred and forty-one Gazans were murdered by the IDF, pushing the official death toll since October 7th, 2023 to over 69,000.

    Still, the weekly meetings go on. They are places where Palestinians can gather with Westerners who will listen to their suffering. These meetings have brightened, and even saved, the lives of many Palestinians who had nowhere else to turn.

    I will leave you with words of wisdom from the end of Farah’s cookbook: From Gaza where ovens still glow even when the lights go out, I send you flavors wrapped in stories, and stories wrapped in love. We don’t measure ingredients with cups or spoons, we measure them with the heart. In Gaza, we may not have everything, but we’ll always have a table big enough for hope.

    The post A Torturous Truce first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eros Salvatore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Torturous Truce

    The morning carried a different scent…
    One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
    The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
    as a ceasefire draped the land.

    — from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee

    On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.

    Roy, my American Sufi friend, was not impressed when I told him about the celebrations in Gaza. The people are so desperate to have something to celebrate. I’m highly skeptical that anything good long term will result from this. Trump is an imbecile and Netanyahu has zero desire for peace. The anger at politicians in the West touches the most loving of people.

    Omar Skaik, my Gaza refugee friend from The Greatest Man in Gaza, was more direct: I can hear bombs falling in the distance. I wonder how many Palestinians will die today? To him, it was just another day he hoped to survive as a father of three with a fourth on the way. He was walking to the market to buy ingredients for making hummus, when I called. In the background I could hear his fellow Palestinians’ exultations. At least someone in Gaza was happy. But Omar was the happiest Palestinian I knew, and his emaciated face revealed the truth. The suffering was not over. A trail of broken ceasefires was his proof.

    I was marginally happier, glad the genocide might be over. Sentiments ranged from marginally good to horrifically bad in my cohort of Western Sufi friends and Gaza refugees—people I had been building friendships with since February, 2024, when I first decided to write about Palestinians and connect them with Western fundraisers. Social media had finally made a positive impact on my life. I was using Facebook’s friend and messeging features, as well as Zoom’s meeting rooms, to foster relationships between people seeking an end to the genocide. In addition I helped kickstart fundraising campaigns that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Palestinian families.

    Farah Kamal, a twenty-year-old refugee well known to my Sufi friends and whose sister I wrote about in Marah’s Story, Or the Disintegration of a Country Family was suspicious: The bombing hasn’t stopped yet. The ceasefire was only for the media and hasn’t been implemented on the ground…I hope that Israel will not betray us. And just like she imagined, Israel continued bombing for the first 24hrs of the peace plan. From noon October 9th, when both sides formally approved the plan, until noon on October 10th, many innocent civilians died throughout Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) wouldn’t stop killing until they were ordered to. Thereafter, those Palestinians not mourning the newly martyred, flooded back to their beloved Gaza City, much of which had been reduced to rubble.

    Farah was hoping to return to the life she led before October 7th, 2023, but she knew that would be hard, and she was tired of having to start over each time (eight in total) she had been displaced. I ask God to help us and give us patience, strength and perseverance. I hope that all the suffering we have endured will be rewarded on the Day of Judgment.

    Palestinians supplicate God to right the wrongs, to make up for the suffering they went through. They survived two years of genocide, and are having trouble adjusting to a world without gunfire, bombs and terror. Later they would realize that the genocide hadn’t stopped, it was just reduced in intensity. All the things they were promised came slower than expected. The immediate lowering of food prices was helpful, but short lived. Israel still limited humanitarian aid, so many food items were out of reach for the average Palestinian. Hunger was only a missed meal away.

    Those who had fundraisers kept pleading for money, stuck in a PTSD trance. They had spent the better part of two years trying to gather enough to pay for the basics of life, and they didn’t know what else to do. Many felt pressured to help those extended family members still dependent on their efforts. There were no jobs they could go back to. Their work places had been destroyed. Those who were physically able, returned to their former homes and tried to rebuild. Sweat-equity has always been one of Gaza’s biggest resources. But for some, there was nothing left of the neighborhoods they once loved, just dreams buried in rubble. In Farah’s case, her family could not access two houses they had built themselves because they fell behind the new Israeli occupation line. Even homeowners in Gaza could be homeless.

    Of course, Farah will not give up. She’s an artist and a writer and spent the summer making a cookbook, A Palestinian Feast, that she sells as a fundraiser. From the introduction: This book is more than recipes. It is the story of Gaza, a land of resilience, love, and memory. Every dish here carries the laughter of grandmothers, the whispers of fathers, and the small, sacred moments around the table that keep hope alive. As you turn these pages, don’t just follow instructions. Sit at the table of the Palestinian heart, feel its dignity, and taste a love that survives despite everything. These dishes are our way of saying: We are here. We are unbroken. We deserve life. Our table is yours, and our hearts are open.

    Other Palestinians were also hopeful. I am still waiting to leave Gaza for kidney treatment, Salah El-Din Youssef from my story The Cats of Gaza told me. I expect to receive a call from the World Health Organization (WHO) by the end of this week. We are still in a tent in Deir al-Balah with relatives, but my daughter Donna graduated from high school this week. It’s amazing how so many contrasting feelings and situations can be all spelled out in a handful of sentences. By the end of October, Salah’s approval from the WHO came through. Now he’s trying to find a way to travel to a hospital outside of Gaza while his daughter contemplates college.

    Mohammed Kassab, from the story Medicine and Martyrs, started studying engineering online at Al-Aqsa University in August, two months before the ceasefire began. He was one of thousands of young people who, like Farah Kamal, had college delayed by October 7th. But otherwise his life remains unchanged. His family still clings to a tattered tent in a sea of refugees in Al-Mawasi.

    Mays Astal, whose story I covered in The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea, was looking for help relocating from the West Bank. She, her husband and their two children buried themselves in the sand inside a refugee camp in March 2024. They were trying to hide from Israeli tanks which were running over anyone they saw after burning down the tents. Mays was eight months pregnant at the time. They survived and made it across the border to Egypt in April 2024. Now her husband has been forced to go to Libya to work because he cannot enter the West Bank with his Gaza ID. Mays currently works as a Resilience Field Officer with Catholic Relief Services in the West Bank but is desperate to reunite with her husband. Such is the pain Palestinians endure. Relatives with Gaza or West Bank IDs cannot visit each other’s territories. Israel makes sure loved ones remain separated forever. Even in peace Palestinians like Mays face heartbreak.

    Ali Lubbad, featured in the story The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza City as Seen Through the Eyes of a Pediatric Nurse, returned to his family’s apartment in Gaza City to find the doors blown off, the inside filled with dust and debris, and the water and sewage systems destroyed. His employer, Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, was also in ruins. Stark photographs revealed the damage: holes in patient’s rooms, cracks in the walls of the surgery center, hundreds of wires protruding from a ceiling charred from rooftop explosions. Any areas still intact are shrouded in darkness. There is no power. It will take millions of dollars to repair everything. Some of the children will die during their wait to be healed.

    Gaza author Maryam Hasanat (see her autobiographical story Mary of Palestine) was initially ecstatic: I am crying, but this time because of joy. Maryam celebrated her 27th birthday on Friday, October 10th, the day the ceasefire took effect, and sent me a photograph of her three-and-a-half-year-old son Kamal celebrating with her at a restaurant. Maryam has a lightness of being that is seldom seen among people who have survived a genocide. Being an author helped. She is working on her poetry:

    The daylight spoke of stillness.
    I breathed it in, filling my lungs with ease.
    Jasmine drifted by and whispered:
    there is something in this world worth living for.

    — from A Scent of Life

    After her brush with death in the spring of 2024, when no one knew if she would survive a complicated childbirth, it was a relief to see her happy and watch her transmit it to the page. She looked to me for writing advice: “I am compiling a collection of poems about Gaza. I’m thinking of calling it Writing Through the Ruins. What do you think?”

    I suggested she share her work with her fellow Palestinians, both writers and the general population, for their opinions.

    “I feel more comfortable sharing my writings with a foreign writer like you,” she replied.

    I was warmed by Maryam’s trust in me. I felt like I was being invited into one of the most sacred parts of a Palestinian’s life, their home. Then I realized Maryam had no home. By Sunday she realized it as well: My heart is torn apart. I don’t know how I will raise my children, or how I will ever escape this nightmare that consumes and controls me. I still can’t believe that everything is gone. It feels like I’m still living inside a hell that never ends.

    Neither she, nor I can write half a page without this seesawing of emotions. The trauma of war related PTSD grips Palestinians deeply, and Maryam, like everyone in Palestine, will need many years to heal from the suffering and sorrow.

    On Sunday, October 12th we held our weekly Sufi-Gaza refugee meeting. The first since the ceasefire, it echoed with joy. Farah sang We Will Stay Here, an anthem of Palestinian love for their homeland. Her family members milled about in the background of her video, excited for their new freedom, their smiles communicating what they couldn’t say in English.

    Omar updated us about his attempts to fix up his sister’s bombed out apartment in Gaza City: I’m hooking up a waterline so my extended family can move in. None of our other apartments survived the bombardment. It’s night time in Gaza and Omar showed us around using the light from his phone. There is no power in the building, so the flashlight on the phone doubles as our only source of light at night. The beam landed on his sleeping preschool children before cutting back to his face. I charge it at a nearby home that has solar panels, he tells us. Unfortunately, few panels are available for sale in Gaza, so Omar is unable to buy any for the apartment.

    Omar’s friend Yahya, both a farmer and an iman (Muslim religious leader), was making plans to teach the recitation of the Quran to our group of Western Shadhiliyya Sufis online. He filled us in on the turmoil in the markets: Even with the entry of aid, there is a specter that haunts the citizens of Gaza, which is word of the crossing being closed. Upon hearing this news, the markets suddenly turn into ghost towns. Vendors bare their fangs, hide their goods, and raise prices exponentially… Palestinians in Gaza call them the Israeli army’s merchant brigade… Israel’s hands reach anyone who seeks to impose security and control… Israel wants chaos in Gaza.

    Rawan Aljuaidi is worried about her baby boy Aboud. I’ve known her since she became pregnant with him in 2024. Aboud is her first child, and his body didn’t grow like it should have this summer due to malnourishment. He’s been sick for a month now: fever, cough and a runny nose. Rawan tells me. He hasn’t smiled in weeks, his body is exhausted and his breathing is weak. Those are the damages done by starvation. I wrote the story A Palestinian Mother and Son Starve With Dignity for Rawan, but babies can’t eat words, so Aboud’s suffering continues.

    Omar’s two-year-old daughter Mariam also suffers. She has weak bones due to malnutrition and fractured her left leg while playing recently. Omar posted a photo of her leg in a cast on social media. One of his neighbors, named Jawdat, is the grandfather of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers January 29th, 2024 after they killed six members of her family and two Palestinian paramedics trying to rescue her. He wants to get the word out that Hind’s brother just turned five and is doing well. Children pay the highest price during genocide.

    Some refugees are missing from the meeting. Israel has been known for shutting down the internet intermittently, and we wonder if that’s the case today. But eventually, most of the regulars show up, and they remind us that, though the war has stopped, their suffering has not. In truth, the bombing never stopped for more than a few days. It’s similar to other ceasefires Israel has brokered with Hezbollah, Syria and Lebanon: peace agreements that give Israel the opportunity to wage a low level war against the very people it claims to want peace with. Airstrikes using munitions donated by the USA cost them little and offer virtually no risk to military personnel. By Monday, October 20th, ten days since the implementation of the ceasefire, nearly a hundred more Palestinians were dead. Over one hundred more died in attacks on October 29th. In the first month of peace, two hundred and forty-one Gazans were murdered by the IDF, pushing the official death toll since October 7th, 2023 to over 69,000.

    Still, the weekly meetings go on. They are places where Palestinians can gather with Westerners who will listen to their suffering. These meetings have brightened, and even saved, the lives of many Palestinians who had nowhere else to turn.

    I will leave you with words of wisdom from the end of Farah’s cookbook: From Gaza where ovens still glow even when the lights go out, I send you flavors wrapped in stories, and stories wrapped in love. We don’t measure ingredients with cups or spoons, we measure them with the heart. In Gaza, we may not have everything, but we’ll always have a table big enough for hope.

    The post A Torturous Truce first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eros Salvatore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Torturous Truce

    The morning carried a different scent…
    One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
    The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
    as a ceasefire draped the land.

    — from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee

    On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.

    Roy, my American Sufi friend, was not impressed when I told him about the celebrations in Gaza. The people are so desperate to have something to celebrate. I’m highly skeptical that anything good long term will result from this. Trump is an imbecile and Netanyahu has zero desire for peace. The anger at politicians in the West touches the most loving of people.

    Omar Skaik, my Gaza refugee friend from The Greatest Man in Gaza, was more direct: I can hear bombs falling in the distance. I wonder how many Palestinians will die today? To him, it was just another day he hoped to survive as a father of three with a fourth on the way. He was walking to the market to buy ingredients for making hummus, when I called. In the background I could hear his fellow Palestinians’ exultations. At least someone in Gaza was happy. But Omar was the happiest Palestinian I knew, and his emaciated face revealed the truth. The suffering was not over. A trail of broken ceasefires was his proof.

    I was marginally happier, glad the genocide might be over. Sentiments ranged from marginally good to horrifically bad in my cohort of Western Sufi friends and Gaza refugees—people I had been building friendships with since February, 2024, when I first decided to write about Palestinians and connect them with Western fundraisers. Social media had finally made a positive impact on my life. I was using Facebook’s friend and messeging features, as well as Zoom’s meeting rooms, to foster relationships between people seeking an end to the genocide. In addition I helped kickstart fundraising campaigns that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Palestinian families.

    Farah Kamal, a twenty-year-old refugee well known to my Sufi friends and whose sister I wrote about in Marah’s Story, Or the Disintegration of a Country Family was suspicious: The bombing hasn’t stopped yet. The ceasefire was only for the media and hasn’t been implemented on the ground…I hope that Israel will not betray us. And just like she imagined, Israel continued bombing for the first 24hrs of the peace plan. From noon October 9th, when both sides formally approved the plan, until noon on October 10th, many innocent civilians died throughout Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) wouldn’t stop killing until they were ordered to. Thereafter, those Palestinians not mourning the newly martyred, flooded back to their beloved Gaza City, much of which had been reduced to rubble.

    Farah was hoping to return to the life she led before October 7th, 2023, but she knew that would be hard, and she was tired of having to start over each time (eight in total) she had been displaced. I ask God to help us and give us patience, strength and perseverance. I hope that all the suffering we have endured will be rewarded on the Day of Judgment.

    Palestinians supplicate God to right the wrongs, to make up for the suffering they went through. They survived two years of genocide, and are having trouble adjusting to a world without gunfire, bombs and terror. Later they would realize that the genocide hadn’t stopped, it was just reduced in intensity. All the things they were promised came slower than expected. The immediate lowering of food prices was helpful, but short lived. Israel still limited humanitarian aid, so many food items were out of reach for the average Palestinian. Hunger was only a missed meal away.

    Those who had fundraisers kept pleading for money, stuck in a PTSD trance. They had spent the better part of two years trying to gather enough to pay for the basics of life, and they didn’t know what else to do. Many felt pressured to help those extended family members still dependent on their efforts. There were no jobs they could go back to. Their work places had been destroyed. Those who were physically able, returned to their former homes and tried to rebuild. Sweat-equity has always been one of Gaza’s biggest resources. But for some, there was nothing left of the neighborhoods they once loved, just dreams buried in rubble. In Farah’s case, her family could not access two houses they had built themselves because they fell behind the new Israeli occupation line. Even homeowners in Gaza could be homeless.

    Of course, Farah will not give up. She’s an artist and a writer and spent the summer making a cookbook, A Palestinian Feast, that she sells as a fundraiser. From the introduction: This book is more than recipes. It is the story of Gaza, a land of resilience, love, and memory. Every dish here carries the laughter of grandmothers, the whispers of fathers, and the small, sacred moments around the table that keep hope alive. As you turn these pages, don’t just follow instructions. Sit at the table of the Palestinian heart, feel its dignity, and taste a love that survives despite everything. These dishes are our way of saying: We are here. We are unbroken. We deserve life. Our table is yours, and our hearts are open.

    Other Palestinians were also hopeful. I am still waiting to leave Gaza for kidney treatment, Salah El-Din Youssef from my story The Cats of Gaza told me. I expect to receive a call from the World Health Organization (WHO) by the end of this week. We are still in a tent in Deir al-Balah with relatives, but my daughter Donna graduated from high school this week. It’s amazing how so many contrasting feelings and situations can be all spelled out in a handful of sentences. By the end of October, Salah’s approval from the WHO came through. Now he’s trying to find a way to travel to a hospital outside of Gaza while his daughter contemplates college.

    Mohammed Kassab, from the story Medicine and Martyrs, started studying engineering online at Al-Aqsa University in August, two months before the ceasefire began. He was one of thousands of young people who, like Farah Kamal, had college delayed by October 7th. But otherwise his life remains unchanged. His family still clings to a tattered tent in a sea of refugees in Al-Mawasi.

    Mays Astal, whose story I covered in The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea, was looking for help relocating from the West Bank. She, her husband and their two children buried themselves in the sand inside a refugee camp in March 2024. They were trying to hide from Israeli tanks which were running over anyone they saw after burning down the tents. Mays was eight months pregnant at the time. They survived and made it across the border to Egypt in April 2024. Now her husband has been forced to go to Libya to work because he cannot enter the West Bank with his Gaza ID. Mays currently works as a Resilience Field Officer with Catholic Relief Services in the West Bank but is desperate to reunite with her husband. Such is the pain Palestinians endure. Relatives with Gaza or West Bank IDs cannot visit each other’s territories. Israel makes sure loved ones remain separated forever. Even in peace Palestinians like Mays face heartbreak.

    Ali Lubbad, featured in the story The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza City as Seen Through the Eyes of a Pediatric Nurse, returned to his family’s apartment in Gaza City to find the doors blown off, the inside filled with dust and debris, and the water and sewage systems destroyed. His employer, Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, was also in ruins. Stark photographs revealed the damage: holes in patient’s rooms, cracks in the walls of the surgery center, hundreds of wires protruding from a ceiling charred from rooftop explosions. Any areas still intact are shrouded in darkness. There is no power. It will take millions of dollars to repair everything. Some of the children will die during their wait to be healed.

    Gaza author Maryam Hasanat (see her autobiographical story Mary of Palestine) was initially ecstatic: I am crying, but this time because of joy. Maryam celebrated her 27th birthday on Friday, October 10th, the day the ceasefire took effect, and sent me a photograph of her three-and-a-half-year-old son Kamal celebrating with her at a restaurant. Maryam has a lightness of being that is seldom seen among people who have survived a genocide. Being an author helped. She is working on her poetry:

    The daylight spoke of stillness.
    I breathed it in, filling my lungs with ease.
    Jasmine drifted by and whispered:
    there is something in this world worth living for.

    — from A Scent of Life

    After her brush with death in the spring of 2024, when no one knew if she would survive a complicated childbirth, it was a relief to see her happy and watch her transmit it to the page. She looked to me for writing advice: “I am compiling a collection of poems about Gaza. I’m thinking of calling it Writing Through the Ruins. What do you think?”

    I suggested she share her work with her fellow Palestinians, both writers and the general population, for their opinions.

    “I feel more comfortable sharing my writings with a foreign writer like you,” she replied.

    I was warmed by Maryam’s trust in me. I felt like I was being invited into one of the most sacred parts of a Palestinian’s life, their home. Then I realized Maryam had no home. By Sunday she realized it as well: My heart is torn apart. I don’t know how I will raise my children, or how I will ever escape this nightmare that consumes and controls me. I still can’t believe that everything is gone. It feels like I’m still living inside a hell that never ends.

    Neither she, nor I can write half a page without this seesawing of emotions. The trauma of war related PTSD grips Palestinians deeply, and Maryam, like everyone in Palestine, will need many years to heal from the suffering and sorrow.

    On Sunday, October 12th we held our weekly Sufi-Gaza refugee meeting. The first since the ceasefire, it echoed with joy. Farah sang We Will Stay Here, an anthem of Palestinian love for their homeland. Her family members milled about in the background of her video, excited for their new freedom, their smiles communicating what they couldn’t say in English.

    Omar updated us about his attempts to fix up his sister’s bombed out apartment in Gaza City: I’m hooking up a waterline so my extended family can move in. None of our other apartments survived the bombardment. It’s night time in Gaza and Omar showed us around using the light from his phone. There is no power in the building, so the flashlight on the phone doubles as our only source of light at night. The beam landed on his sleeping preschool children before cutting back to his face. I charge it at a nearby home that has solar panels, he tells us. Unfortunately, few panels are available for sale in Gaza, so Omar is unable to buy any for the apartment.

    Omar’s friend Yahya, both a farmer and an iman (Muslim religious leader), was making plans to teach the recitation of the Quran to our group of Western Shadhiliyya Sufis online. He filled us in on the turmoil in the markets: Even with the entry of aid, there is a specter that haunts the citizens of Gaza, which is word of the crossing being closed. Upon hearing this news, the markets suddenly turn into ghost towns. Vendors bare their fangs, hide their goods, and raise prices exponentially… Palestinians in Gaza call them the Israeli army’s merchant brigade… Israel’s hands reach anyone who seeks to impose security and control… Israel wants chaos in Gaza.

    Rawan Aljuaidi is worried about her baby boy Aboud. I’ve known her since she became pregnant with him in 2024. Aboud is her first child, and his body didn’t grow like it should have this summer due to malnourishment. He’s been sick for a month now: fever, cough and a runny nose. Rawan tells me. He hasn’t smiled in weeks, his body is exhausted and his breathing is weak. Those are the damages done by starvation. I wrote the story A Palestinian Mother and Son Starve With Dignity for Rawan, but babies can’t eat words, so Aboud’s suffering continues.

    Omar’s two-year-old daughter Mariam also suffers. She has weak bones due to malnutrition and fractured her left leg while playing recently. Omar posted a photo of her leg in a cast on social media. One of his neighbors, named Jawdat, is the grandfather of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers January 29th, 2024 after they killed six members of her family and two Palestinian paramedics trying to rescue her. He wants to get the word out that Hind’s brother just turned five and is doing well. Children pay the highest price during genocide.

    Some refugees are missing from the meeting. Israel has been known for shutting down the internet intermittently, and we wonder if that’s the case today. But eventually, most of the regulars show up, and they remind us that, though the war has stopped, their suffering has not. In truth, the bombing never stopped for more than a few days. It’s similar to other ceasefires Israel has brokered with Hezbollah, Syria and Lebanon: peace agreements that give Israel the opportunity to wage a low level war against the very people it claims to want peace with. Airstrikes using munitions donated by the USA cost them little and offer virtually no risk to military personnel. By Monday, October 20th, ten days since the implementation of the ceasefire, nearly a hundred more Palestinians were dead. Over one hundred more died in attacks on October 29th. In the first month of peace, two hundred and forty-one Gazans were murdered by the IDF, pushing the official death toll since October 7th, 2023 to over 69,000.

    Still, the weekly meetings go on. They are places where Palestinians can gather with Westerners who will listen to their suffering. These meetings have brightened, and even saved, the lives of many Palestinians who had nowhere else to turn.

    I will leave you with words of wisdom from the end of Farah’s cookbook: From Gaza where ovens still glow even when the lights go out, I send you flavors wrapped in stories, and stories wrapped in love. We don’t measure ingredients with cups or spoons, we measure them with the heart. In Gaza, we may not have everything, but we’ll always have a table big enough for hope.

    The post A Torturous Truce first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eros Salvatore.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Epstein & Israel: Drop Site News Investigates Jeffrey Epstein’s Ties to Israeli Intelligence

    Seg3 epstein2

    A new series by Drop Site News looks at Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence and how he secretly brokered numerous deals for Israeli intelligence. Drop Site revealed that Epstein had played a role in brokering a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia and setting up a backchannel between Israel and Russia during the Syrian civil war.

    Epstein had an “extensive relationship with Israeli intelligence, U.S. intelligence and the intelligence agencies of other countries as well,” says Murtaza Hussain, reporter for Drop Site News. “He was a dealmaker and a fixer at a very, very elite level.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Not guilty’ verdict for Glasgow uni Palestine protesters should ignite momentum for action

    The University of Glasgow (UoG) has been thoroughly complicit in Israel’s genocide in Palestine. But amid its stubborn refusal to change, student resistance has been unbreakable. And recent ‘not guilty’ verdict for protesters who took action earlier in the year may now embolden others to dial up pressure for a full trade embargo on Israel and divestment from companies complicit in its war crimes.

    Hannah Taylor, whom UoG treated particularly harshly in an apparent attempt to deter other students from taking action, spoke to the Canary about the verdict.

    Student resistance gains momentum

    Following weeks of uncertainty after her protest in February, the university said it would only allow Taylor to continue studying if she paid £2,800 to help clean up the red paint she had sprayed on a UoG building. And after many more months, a judge has finally ended her ordeal.

    She was “very relieved the judge decided to find us not guilty”, but added that:

    As usual the court process was incredibly unpleasant and stressful. I had to take several days off university and work often to stand and wait from 10-4 before being told the court was too busy to see my case. Everything about the process is designed to inconvenience you from hostile architecture of the actual building to the treacle-slow and archaic bureaucracy. The prosecution are allowed to be disorganised and delay the case but your attendance and compliance is ensured under threat of arrest. The courts are open to the public and I would recommend people go and sit for a day to see behind the curtain of how our system treats the people it’s meant to protect.

    Despite the establishment intimidation she faced, however, she insisted:

    I hope that this result will give others the courage to take whatever action they can. As British citizens we all have to reckon with our complicity in this genocide due to our government’s and institutions’ insistence on aiding the Israeli state’s crimes both financially and materially. I hope people will feel emboldened to take whatever action is needed to ensure a full UK trade embargo with Israel is implemented as well as full divestment from Israeli linked companies by our institutions.

    Palestinians can’t go about  their business in peace. Why should complicit institutions?

    A UoG spokesperson told the Canary:

    The University of Glasgow upholds the right to freedom of expression, including the right of staff and students to engage in peaceful demonstrations. However, we do not tolerate acts of vandalism to University property or activities which interfere with the rights of others to go about their business in peace.

    The fact remains, however, that the Palestinian people in Gaza have not been able to “go about their business in peace” during two years of genocide, nearly two decades of an illegal blockade, or nearly 60 years of settler-colonial occupation. So some may argue that non-violent “vandalism” against complicit institutions pales in comparison.

    Indeed, resistance to UoG complicity in Israel’s war crimes has absolutely continued, with a recent protest seemingly forcing the postponement of an under-the-radar arms career fair. This new ‘not guilty’ verdict, meanwhile, is very much a victory against immoral institutions. It may just embolden ordinary people of conscience further.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel legalises death penalty as far-right lawmakers applaud

    With a grin of smug entitlement, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right fascist minister, roams through the Israeli Knesset, handing out a tray of Arabic baklava to his Israeli counterparts. They toast to the passing of a law that grants legal cover for the execution of Palestinian detainees. The moment is nothing short of a public taunt — a brazen display of the dehumanisation of Palestinian lives.

    On Monday, legislative branch of Israel’s government passed a bill in its first reading which legalises the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners.

    The controversial legislation raises serious questions about the motives of its proponents, which Palestinian and Arab critics contend are primarily retributive.

    The bill passed with 39 votes out of 120, while 16 voted against it, Israeli media sources, including the state broadcaster, reported.

    During the session, a heated argument erupted between Arab MK Ayman Odeh and the fascist Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, nearly escalating into a physical altercation.

    Israel’s far-right lobby makes gains

    The bill originated from the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, headed by Ben-Gvir. Days before its passage, the bill was sent to the relevant Knesset committee for review, bypassing the required second and third readings before being put to a vote.

    The bill stipulates that the death penalty will apply to:

    any person who intentionally or negligently causes the death of an Israeli citizen, and when the act is motivated by racism or hatred and intended to harm Israel.

    Under the new law, death sentence cannot be reduced or repealed, and once imposed, are final.

    Given Israel’s record of sweeping arrests of Palestinian activists and the endemic use of administrative detention, the risk is that the death penalty will be used to justify the murder of victims of injustice.

    Two weeks ago, with the opening of the Knesset’s winter session, Ben-Gvir threatened that if the bill was not brought to a vote in the plenary session within three weeks, his party would not vote with the governing coalition.

    Following the vote, Ben-Gvir wrote on his X (formerly twitter):

    Otzma Yehudit is on its way to making history. We promised and we delivered. The death penalty law for terrorists has passed its first reading.

    Legalising collective punishment

    The extremist minister — himself the  subject of countless controversies for espousing racist and homophobic views — has repeatedly urged the government to approve a law that provides legal cover for the execution of Palestinian prisoners.

    In recent months, detention conditions have worsened  across Israel jails. This pattern forms a broader policy of repression and collective punishment.

    Reports by international human rights organisations and observers, demonstrate that measures include the revocation of visitation rights, a reduction in food rations, and limitations on showering opportunities.

    The passing of this legislation comes as Palestinians continue to endure the brutal consequences of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, since October 2023, and the senseless violence in the occupied West Bank, especially that perpetrated by settlers which has surged to record levels.

    Featured image via Eye on Palestine

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Netherlands Advances Plan To Ban Imports From Illegal Israeli Settlements

    The Netherlands is moving ahead with a partial trade ban targeting imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, Dutch Foreign Minister David van Weel said on 10 November during a visit to the region.

    Van Weel confirmed that while a wider package of sanctions on Israel has been paused following last month’s ceasefire in Gaza, work continues on legislation specifically addressing settlement products.

    “The Netherlands is still working on legislation to bar imports from illegal settlements in occupied Palestine,” he said, adding that the measure responds to expanding settlements and what he called “spiralling Israeli violence” that threatens the viability of a two-state solution.

    The post Netherlands Advances Plan To Ban Imports From Illegal Israeli Settlements appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Know Your Enemy: Zohran, the Jews, and Reckoning with Gaza

    Matt and Sam talk to Peter Beinart about Zohran and Islamophobia, Jews and antisemitism, the genocide in Gaza, and more.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.

  • Winter Is Coming to Gaza

    The most urgent task, to end genocide, requires truthful coverage about Israel’s war crimes.

    On Saturday, 8 November, 2025, Dan Perry wrote in the Jerusalem Post about Israel’s projected lifting of the media blockade on Gaza. Perry laments that Israeli censorship has left all reporting of the atrocity in the hands of Palestinians, who refuse to be silent. To date, Israel has assassinated over 240 Palestinian journalists.

    Perry writes: “The High Court ruled last week that the government must consider allowing foreign journalists into Gaza but also granted a one-month extension due to the still-unclear situation in the Strip.” He asserts that Israel had and has no motive for excluding foreign journalists save concern for their own protection.

    He makes two appeals: first, the duplicitous demand that Israel should use the one-month reprieve to cover up the evidence of atrocities: “Soon, journalists and photographers will enter Gaza… They will find terrible sights. Hence, Israel’s urgent task: to document retrospectively, to finally prepare explanations, to show … that Hamas operated from hospitals, schools, and refugee camps.” In other words, bury the truth with the bodies.

    Secondly, that since in this conflict Israel did absolutely nothing that it could have wished to hide, it should learn not to impose absolute media blackouts so likely to arouse suspicion.

    I sense a cold, hard winter within the souls of people in league with Dan Perry’s perspective.

    Now, a cold, hard winter approaches Gaza. What do Palestinians in Gaza face, as temperatures drop and winter storms arrive?

    Turkish news agency “Anadolu Ajansi” reports, “Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to endure hunger under a new starvation policy engineered by Israel, which allows only non-essential goods to enter the enclave while blocking essential food and medical supplies. …shelves stacked with non-essential consumer goods disguise a suffocating humanitarian crisis deliberately engineered by Israel to starve Palestinians.”

    “I haven’t found eggs, chicken, or cheese since food supplies started entering the Gaza Strip,” Aya Abu Qamar, a mother of three from Gaza City, told Anadolu. “All I see are chocolate, snacks, and instant coffee. These aren’t our daily needs,” she added. “We’re looking for something to keep our children alive.”

    On November 5,  2025 the Norwegian Refugee Council sounded this alarm about Israeli restrictions cruelly holding back winter supplies. NRC’s director for the region, Angelita Caredda, insists: “More than three weeks into the ceasefire, Gaza should be receiving a surge of shelter materials, but only a fraction of what is needed has entered.”

    The report states:” Millions of shelter and non-food items are stuck in Jordan, Egypt, and Israel awaiting approvals, leaving around 260,000 Palestinian families, equal to nearly 1.5 million people, exposed to worsening conditions. Since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October, Israeli authorities have rejected twenty-three requests from nine aid agencies to bring in urgently needed shelter supplies such as tents, sealing and framing kits, bedding, kitchen sets, and blankets, amounting to nearly 4,000 pallets. Humanitarian organisations warn that the window to scale up winterisation assistance is closing rapidly.”

    The report notes how, despite the ceasefire, Israel has continued its mechanized slaughter and its chokehold on aid.

    In Israel’s +972 Magazine, Muhammad Shehada reports: “With the so-called ‘Yellow Line,’ Israel has divided the Strip in two: West Gaza, encompassing 42 percent of the enclave, where Hamas remains in control and over 2 million people are crammed in; and East Gaza, encompassing 58 percent of the territory, which has been fully depopulated of civilians and is controlled by the Israeli army and four proxy gangs.” This last, a reference to four IDF-backed militias put forward by Israel as Hamas’ legitimate replacement.

    If ever tallied, the number of corpses buried under Gaza’s flattened buildings may raise the death toll of this genocide into six figures.

    The UN estimates that the amount of rubble in Gaza could build 13 Giza pyramids.

    “The sheer scale of the challenge is staggering,” writes Paul Adams for the BBC: “The UN estimates the cost of damage at £53bn ($70bn). Almost 300,000 houses and apartments have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN’s satellite centre Unosat…The Gaza Strip is littered with 60 million tonnes of rubble, mixed in with dangerous unexploded bombs and dead bodies.”

    No one knows how many corpses are rotting beneath the rubble. These mountains of rubble loom over Israelis working, in advance of global journalism’s return, to create their counternarratives, but also over surviving Gazans who, amidst unrelenting misery, struggle to provide for their surviving loved ones.

    Living in close, unhygienic quarters, sleeping without bedding under torn plastic sheeting, and having scarce access to water, thousands of people are in dire need of supplies to help winterize their living space and spare themselves the dread that their children or they themselves could die of hypothermia. The easiest and most obvious solution to their predicament stands enticingly near: the homes held by their genocidal oppressors.

    In affluent countries, observers like Dan Perry may tremble for Israel’s reputation, eager to rush in and conceal Israel’s crimes, clothing them in self-righteous justifications. These are of course our crimes as well.

    Our own hearts cannot escape the howling winter unless we take, far more seriously, the hell of winter and despair to which we continue to subject Palestinians living in Gaza.

    There is no peace in Gaza. May there be no peace for us until we fix that.

    The post Winter Is Coming to Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • After More Than 2 Weeks in ICE Detention, UK Commentator Sami Hamdi Released

    A leading Muslim civil rights group in the US applauded Monday as the Trump administration’s agreement to release British pro-Palestinian commentator Sami Hamdi acknowledged that he is not “a danger to the community or to national security,” after he was held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for more than two weeks. Hamdi’s family and the California chapter of the Council on…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Farage announces donation from notorious Israel accomplices JCB

    Supporting the accusations that he’s in the pocket of big business, Nigel Farage has posted a video to social media announcing a donation from a wealthy backer:


    This isn’t just any backer, either – it’s JCB – the company which provides equipment to the Israeli forces demolishing Palestinian homes.

    Demolished

    In the video above, Farage says:

    The first thing I want to do is say a big thank you, a very big public thank you to Lord Bamford and JCB Excavators for their recent donation to us of £200,000 and I’m really, I’m very thankful indeed for that.

    And they’ve given a lot of money, over £10m to the Conservatives over the years, but they’re giving us some money because they know that we are pro-entrepreneurship. They know that we are pro-start-up. They know that we are pro-small business.

    “Pro-small business”, he says, with a giant banner behind him which reads ‘SMALL BUSINESS FOR REFORM’.

    Activist Harry Eccles pointed out the irony of this:


    Clearly, this is not a ‘small business’ – it’s a ‘whopping great big business’.

    It gets worse, too, as we reported in September:

    In January 2025, the Stop JCB campaign published a report. It detailed JCB’s role in ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, India, and Kashmir.

    In Palestine, JCB operates through its sole dealer, the Israeli company Comasco. The corporation holds contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defence for the same model of JCB machines the Zionist settler state uses in the demolitions and construction of settlements.

    From as early as 2006, the Israeli military has been photographed demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank with JCB bulldozers.

    Currently, JCB is also complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese listed JCB in her July report. This was among numerous companies directly aiding and profiting from the genocide. Israel has long used armoured, unbranded JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE) machines, known as ‘Ami’ in Hebrew, and is now using them in Gaza.

    And it gets worse again:

    And again:

    For sale?

    So what’s the deal with Farage posting this grovelling ‘thank you’ to social media?

    We can understand him thanking JCB, and we can understand him posting about the Small Business presentation, but publicising the donation like this comes across like he’s been told to make it crystal clear he’s in lord Bamford’s pocket.

    It’s especially weird given that Farage said the following this very same week:

    Still, the announcement has pleased some people – namely Farage’s other wealthy backers:

    Some people see Reform as an alternative to the Tories, but the billionaires of Great Britain seemingly have reassurances that it will be business as usual under Farage.

    Featured image via B’Tselem (YouTube) / Owain.Davies (Wikimedia)

    By Willem Moore

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A leaked IDF video showing alleged detainee abuse has Israel reeling, but not in the way you might think | Roy Schwartz

    The outrage has been all about who leaked the footage and who is hurting Israel’s image, not what actually happened at the Sde Teiman detention camp

    “I would never, ever publish a video that makes IDF soldiers look bad, even when they did something wrong, out of the understanding that it could tarnish our image in the eyes of the entire world.”

    These are not the words of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) chief. They were not even written by a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Shockingly, they came from a journalist, Amichai Attali, a political correspondent for one of Israel’s most popular newspapers.

    Roy Schwartz is a senior editor and op-ed contributor at Haaretz

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Video: “Still gives me goosebumps” – BBC Middle East editor on his love for Mossad

    BBC editor Raffi Berg is suing journalist Owen Jones for suggesting that he is not properly impartial on the subject of Israel, a suggestion Berg claims led to him receiving death threats.

    Here is Mr Berg talking about his love for Israel’s foreign intelligence organisation Mossad and the ‘goosebumps’ it gives him to think about it:

    The date of the video is uncertain, but judging by a Jewish Telegraph (JT) article about an interview with similar content it appears to have been around January this year, well after the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – and after Israeli spies killed and maimed thousands using exploding pagers in a terrorist attack on Lebanon.

    The JT has since deleted its interview with Berg from its website, but an archive of it survives.

    The BBC has said that it stands by Mr Berg’s impartiality.

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • 88 organisations sign open letter to condemn KCL revoking visa of Palestine activist

    Over 88 student groups have signed an open letter from the Association of Student Activism for Palestine (ASAP) calling on King’s College London (KCL) to reverse its decision to revoke pro-Palestine activist Usama Ghanem’s student visa.

    The letter begins by detailing the ways in which KCL has singled out and made an example of Usama’s case:

    We, the undersigned, condemn the draconian disciplinary action undertaken by King’s College London against student activist Usama Ghanem. The university’s crackdown on student activists has reached new heights, as they are now attempting to revoke Usama’s student visa. KCL is at the forefront of unprecedented university repression in the UK.

    Usama has been singled out and targeted by KCL since his participation in the 2024 KCL encampment. During which he was put under disciplinary and banned from campus for protesting against KCL’s participation in the Gaza genocide. His disciplinary was only reversed on the condition of a cease and decist order, an unprecedented measure taken against a student, which restricted him from joining any protests on campus.

    The organisations which have signed up in support include CAGE International, Muslim Students for Palestine, and numerous Palestine societies from universities around the country.

    Greta Thunberg and Jeremy Corbyn have also voiced their support of Usama in the face of KCL’s decision. The local branch of the University and College Union (UCU) even carried out a first-of-a-kind strike ballot in support of the students.

    ‘Punishment for supporting Palestine’

    The open letter goes on:

    In February, Kings shamefully invited pro-Israel speaker Faezah Alavi to speak on campus, a woman who publically mocked the infanticide of Gazan children on her social media. This decision outraged students, and led to a protest. After a letter from Campaign Against Antisemitism lobbying KCL’s Vice Chancellor, Shitlji Kapur, to take action against protesters, Usama was then put under indefinite suspension, resulting in the removal of his student visa.

    Despite the university clearing him of causing any health and safety issues by protesting, KCL still moved to suspend Usama – showing that this is the punishment for supporting Palestine. This unjust decision means that Usama is at risk of being sent back to the authoritarian regime in Egypt where he and his family have faced political persecution and imprisonment. The university was well aware of this, but chose to harm their student over divesting from genocide.

    Before he came to KCL, Ghanem – along with his brother and father – was imprisoned for his opposition to the Egyptian government in 2020.

    After King’s decided to suspend Ghanem, the university sent a letter informing the Home Office. The Home Office then immediately moved to revoke his visa, and sent him notice of his removal from the country. Now, Ghanem’s lawyers in his case against KCL hold that the university is discriminating against his anti-Zionist beliefs.

    Three demands

    The open letter pulls no punches in naming why King’s is so invested in silencing Ghanem. It also makes three demands of the university:

    Usama is 1 of 28 KCL students who have been put under investigation for protesting for Palestine. King’s [sic] takes issue with these students because they expose the university for their investments in weapons manufacturers and Israeli companies that enable genocide in Gaza. Students paying fees to attend an academic institution, should be able to critique and hold accountable their university when the money is used to fund genocide.

    Thus, we make the following demands:

    • KCL must swiftly drop Usama’s case and safeguard his student status

    • KCL must end all other disciplinaries against student activists

    • Most crucially, it must relinquish support for companies carrying out the genocide on behalf of the zionist entity

    The letter then ends with a message addressed to King’s College bosses:

    Students should have the right to free expression on campus, the right to protest and the right to oppose their university’s role in occupation without running the risk of suspension or expulsion.

    Lastly, we convey a message to the KCL administration: to Shitlij Kapur, Glen Childs and Jeremy Cook – you care more about your profits than the lives of your students you claim to serve and the Palestinians your investments kill. We stand in unwavering solidarity with Usama, and the legal action he is pursuing against the university for their repression.

    We implore fellow students, the UCU, SU and people of conscience, to write to KCL and demand they reverse these measures. We also call on all staff members to support the recent UCU action in support of Usama.

    Universities across the UK have made themselves complicit in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This takes the form of both direct and indirect investments in companies profiteering from the war.

    However, Kings’ is far beyond this mere complicity. It’s actively trying to silence a student for speaking out against genocide, even to the extent of having him deported. As the weight of solidarity behind the ASA Palestine’s letter has shown, the activist community is more than willing to fight back against KCL’s blatant repression.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • How Somerville Became the First US City to Vote to Divest From Israeli Apartheid

    When voters across the country filed into polling stations on November 4, making choices that could shape their communities over coming years, residents of Somerville, Massachusetts, also had the opportunity to vote on a question of international significance: whether their city should boycott and divest from companies complicit in Israeli apartheid and genocide in Gaza.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Replaces Israel As ‘Overseer’ Of Gaza Aid Deliveries

    The US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC), established by Washington last month, is replacing Israel as the “overseer” of humanitarian aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip, the Washington Post reported.

    According to informed sources, the first weeks of operations have been “chaotic and indecisive.”

    A US official said Israel remains “part of the conversation” but overall decisions will be made by the new center, established weeks ago in Kiryat Gat – a city just north of the besieged strip.

    “The move relegates Israel to a secondary role in determining how and what humanitarian relief can enter Gaza as CMCC takes the lead,” other familiar sources told the outlet.

    More than 40 countries are participating in the US-led center.

    The post US Replaces Israel As ‘Overseer’ Of Gaza Aid Deliveries appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Anti-Palestine bias wasn’t enough, pro-Israel BBC coup plotters want more

    Pro-Israel right-wingers were reportedly at the heart of this weekend’s coup at the BBC. And they may well have put the final nail in its coffin.

    The BBC had tried to please or appease its far-right critics by consistently underplaying Israeli crimes, echoing Israeli propaganda, omitting key information, and displaying strong anti-Palestinian bias. But genocide-apologists will not settle for crumbs. They want total submission to their dystopian billionaire agenda.

    This attack on the BBC is highly concerning as Britain’s dominant source of news. But let’s not pretend that the situation before the coup was anything other than state propaganda with a smiling face.

    The BBC‘s extreme bias amid Gaza atrocities

    During Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the BBC has really shown its true colours more clearly than ever before. It has systematically chosen not to call crimes by their names. Earlier this year hundreds of media workers accused it of disseminating racist “PR for the Israeli government and military”. The “opaque editorial decisions and censorship” relating to Israel’s atrocities, they said, had been a huge problem.

    Through an ostensible commitment to impartiality, the broadcaster has not only treated a genocidal colonial occupier and the people whose territory it occupies as equal combatants. It has also gone out of its way to foreground Israel’s side of the story, treating Israeli lives as more important than Palestinian lives. One report, for instance, showed that Israelis who died got 33 times more coverage, despite Israeli occupation forces killing at least 34 times more Palestinians. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

    Not extreme enough for the far right

    Now, the coup that has toppled two key players at the BBC — director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness — has had the nerve to suggest there was too much ‘anti-Israel’ bias at the organisation. And Turness dared to insist upon leaving that “BBC News is not institutionally biased”. She’s wrong. It absolutely is. It’s just not the kind of bias her enemies were talking about.

    One such enemy is board member Robbie Gibb, who the Observer called “the central character in this” steering this development. Gibb is a pro-Israel right-winger with links to both the Conservative Party and propaganda outlet the Jewish Chronicle. He has long sought to push the BBC to the far right or, alternatively, “blow the place up”.

    Government-appointed directors supported Gibb’s interference. And his friend Michael Prescott, a far-from-neutral ‘adviser’, backed up the assault with an extreme memo saying the BBC had:

    • Focused too much on the suffering of Palestinian women and children during the Gaza genocide
    • Been too critical of Israel on BBC Arabic
    • Been too critical of fascist billionaire sex pest Donald Trump
    • Reported too much about racism
    • Been too sympathetic on trans rights
    • Not pushed immigration stories enough

    In short, the BBC wasn’t supportive enough of a divisive, genocidal, far-right agenda.

    BBC Arabic had failed to water down Israel’s crimes or prioritise Israeli suffering over Palestinian suffering in the way that its English counterpart had. As Prescott lamented, it almost seemed like BBC Arabic wanted to “paint Israel as the aggressor”, in other words, give an accurate impression of the colonial occupier’s genocide in Gaza.

    Give fascists an inch, they’ll take a mile

    The BBC has always been subservient to the interests of the British establishment, and has moved further and further rightwards over time (consider its copious platforming of Nigel Farage and attempts to court Reform voters). But it has usually sought to maintain at least a veneer of professionalism, impartiality and objectivity. And it genuinely has done some good work in its time.

    Impartiality, however, doesn’t mean treating everyone equally. Murderers aren’t the same as their victims. Fascists aren’t the same as anti-fascists. And colonisers aren’t the same as the people they colonise. Impartiality means looking at the evidence honestly, and sharing what you find. You can mention that fascists, colonisers, and murderers deny their crimes, but that denial shouldn’t be the main focus of the story, especially if there’s clear evidence of their crimes.

    Too often, the BBC has sought to please powerful critics rather than doing real journalism. By giving in now, it has only emboldened the far right further. And it may just have sealed its own descent into oblivion too.

    Image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Shocking investigation reveals secret Israel’s underground torture prison

    A shocking new investigation has uncovered the existence of a secret Israeli underground prison known as ‘Rakefet’ (Zahrat al-Siklamin). Here, almost a hundred Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are being held in conditions described as harsh and inhumane. They live in complete isolation from daylight, deprived of adequate food, and any contact with their families or the outside world.

    Israel secret underground prison

    The Guardian reported that among those detained are a Palestinian nurse who was arrested at his workplace while wearing his medical uniform, and an 18-year-old man who worked selling food, both of whom have been detained for months without charge or trial.

    Lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), who represent the two men, said they were transferred to the lower complex of Rakefet Prison in January and spoke of repeated beatings and violence consistent with patterns of torture documented in other Israeli detention centres. The Guardian reported that:

    Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house a handful of the most dangerous organised crime figures in Israel but closed a few years later on the grounds that it was inhumane. The far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it back into service after the 7 October attacks in 2023.

    Underground detention conditions: constant darkness, torture, and stifling air

    Official data obtained by PCATI shows that the prison, which was designed to hold only 15 people in solitary confinement, currently holds around 100 detainees.

    The Guardian found that detainees live in cells with no windows or ventilation, with three to four people in each cell, and often feel suffocated and short of breath. Mattresses are removed at 4 a.m. and returned late at night, forcing detainees to sit all day on cold metal frames. Prisoners are only allowed into a cramped underground exercise yard with no natural light for five minutes every two days.

    Detainees reported being beaten, trampled on, and attacked by dogs with iron muzzles. Many reported the denial of medical care, and a severe lack of food – barely enough to survive.

    Lawyer Janan Abdu of PCATI explained that:

    After arrest, the court “approves” the detention in a perfunctory manner: the detainee appears only as a face on a soldier’s phone screen, and the judge tells him, “You are detained until the end of the war,” without inquiring about his circumstances or conditions of detention. Such a process reflects a blatant abdication of the judiciary’s basic responsibility to oversee prisons and the conditions of those held in them—oversight that is essential, especially when all other monitoring is absent, as is the case in these prisons.

    ‘they are talking about civilians, not fighters,’ noting that one of them was a young man who worked as a food vendor and was arrested at a roadblock.

    Lawyer Saja Mashirqi Bransi, who visited the prison with Abdu, said that the detained nurse had not seen sunlight since 21 January and that he asked her at the beginning of the meeting, “Where am I? Why am I here?| because he had not been told the name of the prison.

    ‘Deliberate humiliation’ under the eyes of the guards

    The two lawyers described their trip to the prison as ‘a descent into hell.’

    Masked and heavily armed guards led them down a dirty staircase littered with dead insects to the visiting rooms, where even the privacy of the lawyers was violated by surveillance cameras inside the meeting rooms.

    ‘If these are the conditions in the lawyers’ room, what must the conditions in the cells be like?’ said Abdo. ‘We found the answer when we saw the detainees, handcuffed, heads bowed, forced to bend over.’

    Tal Steiner, executive director of PCATI, confirmed that the conditions of detention in Rakefet are oppressive and harsh to the point of being life-threatening, adding that the absence of daylight makes existence extremely difficult:

    It’s very hard to remain intact when you are held in such oppressive and difficult conditions.

    Steiner said these practices constitute “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law,” noting that “detention in darkness underground is one of the most severe forms of psychological and physical torture that can be inflicted on a human being.”

    Official silence and mutual accusations

    The Israel Prison Service (IPS) refused to respond to the Guardian’s findings, issuing only a statement saying that it:

    operates in accordance with the law and under official supervision.

    According to official data, around 1,000 Palestinian detainees remain in Israeli custody in similar conditions, despite the release of 250 convicted prisoners and 1,700 detainees from Gaza during the truce agreement in mid-October.

    Confidential Israeli documents confirm that the majority of detainees are civilians, raising serious legal and humanitarian questions about the legality of these arbitrary arrests.

    The investigation concluded with a striking testimony from lawyer Saja Misherqi Baransi, who said that when she spoke to one of the detainees, they pleaded with her:

    Please come and see me again.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Emiliano Bar

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel killed 44 Palestinian journalists sheltering in displacement camps

    The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has revealed in a report that Israeli occupation forces have killed 44 Palestinian journalists inside displacement camps in the Gaza Strip between the start of the war in October 2023 and the end of October 2025. These latest statistics bring the total number of journalists killed during the offensive to 254.

    The report explained that most of the victims were killed while covering the humanitarian situation in displacement camps. Occupation aircraft targeted tents located near hospitals and UNRWA shelters, in addition to direct sniper fire by occupation soldiers against journalists inside the shelters.

    The committee added that the journalists who were killed worked for local and international media outlets and were killed while performing their professional duty of conveying the truth to the world. It noted that this systematic targeting reflects a deliberate policy to silence Palestinian voices and eliminate witnesses to war crimes.

    ‘Clear-cut war crime’ in killings of Palestinian journalists

    The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate affirmed that the attacks against journalists in Gaza constitute a “clear-cut war crime,” as the assaults have not been limited to targeting reporters during their field coverage. Instead, they have also extended to their places of refuge after they lost their homes and workplaces.

    The Syndicate called on the international community, human rights organisations, and the International Federation of Journalists to take immediate action to ensure the protection of media personnel and to hold the Israeli occupation accountable for its ongoing crimes against Palestinian journalists, who have paid a heavy price for conveying the truth from the heart of the tragedy.

    According to international organisations concerned with media freedom, this escalation is the most dangerous in the history of modern journalism, as the number of journalists killed in Gaza in two years has exceeded the total number of journalists killed in all armed conflicts worldwide during the last decade.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Alaa Shamali

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • 88yo Holocaust survivor speaks out on what ‘never again’ really means

    88-year-old Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos – one of many Jewish people at the forefront of protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza who have been persecuted by the Starmer police state for doing so – has spoken to Indian news site The Wire about what the phrase ‘never again’ really means.

    The phrase is applied prominently to the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered millions of Jews. However, when Israel’s genocide in Palestine is described as a holocaust, some take great offence. Undoubtedly, such offence is sparked when the hell Palestinians have been through is accurately described.

    Holocaust survivor speaks out

    But Kapos says unequivocally that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians just as the nazis committed against Europe’s Jews:

    This is not the first time Mr Kapos, who survived the Nazi genocide as a child in Hungary, has made the same point – and he has been joined by many outspoken fellow Jewish people who are horrified at the claim that Israel speaks or acts in their name and are being hounded by the UK state for doing so.

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot/The Wire

    By Skwawkbox

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Paramount ‘Blacklisting’ Hollywood Figures Critical Of Gaza Genocide

    Paramount Studios, led by new CEO David Ellison, has created an internal blacklist targeting Hollywood figures it considers “anti-Semitic,” Variety reported on 4 November.

    The move follows a broader campaign by the studio to distance itself from growing industry criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, assumed control of the Hollywood studio in October following an $8bn merger with Skydance. Larry Ellison, a close ally of wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and the largest individual donor to the Israeli army, has long aligned his company’s operations with US and Israeli security priorities, pledging Oracle’s cloud and cybersecurity infrastructure to support Israel after the start of its genocide in Gaza.

    The post Paramount ‘Blacklisting’ Hollywood Figures Critical Of Gaza Genocide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Maccabi’s Birmingham Match Met With Protests

    Protests took place in Birmingham on Thursday, November 6 as local football club Aston Villa faced Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv. The match took place after authorities banned visiting supporters over security concerns. Palestine solidarity groups and anti-racist organizations called for the match to be fully canceled, citing the violent record of Maccabi supporters and the club’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    “Allowing football clubs from a state committing genocide and implementing apartheid to compete in international competitions normalizes its atrocities, and sends the signal that there are no consequences for them,” the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) stated ahead of the match.

    The post Maccabi’s Birmingham Match Met With Protests appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Israel arrest warrants: Turkiye charges Netanyahu and top officials with war crimes

    Turkiye has issued Israel arrest warrants for 37 senior officials. They are all accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. This comes in response to the Israeli occupation’s military operation in Gaza.

    Senior Israeli occupation officials have no place to hide

    Only five of the officials have been named. They are war criminal Netanyahu, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Defence Minister Israel Katz, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) Border and Security Minister Eyal Zamir, and Naval Forces Commander David Salama.

    The charges stem from allegations that the IOF has waged “systematic violence against civilians in Gaza”. Infrastructure has been intentionally destroyed, and humanitarian aid has been blocked, while medical assistance has been denied.

    Turkish prosecutors cited specific targeted attacks in Gaza, between October 2023 and March 2025. These included the devastating attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital on October 17, 2023, in which more than 470 people were massacred and 340 injured, from an explosion in the hospital car park. The Israeli regime blamed the incident on a failed rocket launch by Hamas, and continues to do so today. But according to analysis by Forensic Architecture there was a campaign of disinformation from the Israeli occupation forces about the incident.

    The prosecutors also refer to the “Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital”. This was built by Turkiye, and was the only cancer hospital in Gaza. It was bombed in March of this year, after ‘Israel’ claimed again, without any evidence, that the hospital was being used by Hamas.

    They also referenced the killing of seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen on April 1, 2024. All three vehicles were clearly marked with their logo, even on the roof, and their route had been agreed upon with the IOF beforehand. But they were targeted by Israeli precision drone strikes, and were killed.

    Israel arrest warrants — regime calls it a ‘PR stunt’

    The Foreign Minister for the Israeli regime, Gideon Saar has dismissed the announcement of the charges by calling them “the latest PR stunt by the tyrant Erdogan.” Even though Saar is deeply complicit in Gaza’s genocide, the UK government actively shielded him from arrest during a visit to Britain earlier this year.

    Hamas has welcomed the decision by Turkiye to issue the arrest warrants. In a statement, the resistance group said:

    We call on all countries worldwide, and their judicial bodies, to issue legal warrants to pursue the terrorist Zionist occupation leaders everywhere, and work to bring them to court, and hold them accountable for their crimes against humanity.

    Turkiye has been a vocal critic of the genocide in Gaza, and suspended diplomatic and trade relations with Israel over the conflict. But the country has a long history of diplomatic relations with the Israeli regime. It was the first Muslim majority country to officially recognize the Israeli regime in 1949. For decades, the two countries cooperated in areas such as trade, military, and intelligence. In the 1990s and early 2000s, security and economic ties deepened between the two and, in 2006, the Israeli occupation’s Foreign Ministry described its country’s relationship with Turkiye as “perfect”.

    In 2010 ‘Israel’ killed 10 Turkish activists

    Relations started to strain following Turkiye’s condemnation of Operation Cast Lead. Israeli occupation’s devastating 22 day military assault on Gaza in 2008, killed almost 1390 Palestinians, wounded 5000, and obliterated much of Gaza’s infrastructure. Relations deteriorated further after the 2010 Gaza Flotilla incident, where Israeli occupation forces raided the Turkish-owned aid ship Mavi Marmara in international waters, killing 10 Turkish activists. The boat was attempting to break the occupation’s blockade on Gaza. This led to a sharp diplomatic break and the suspension of military ties.

    Trump’s 20 Point Plan for Gaza states that an International Stabilisation Force (ISF) will soon be deployed to Gaza. Its task would be to oversee the ‘ceasefire’, and provide security in Gaza. It would oversee aid distribution, train a Palestinian police force and also ensure that Hamas hands over its weapons. The US wants Islamic and Arab states to contribute with funding and troops. Turkey says it will commit to the ISF, and Gaza’s reconstruction. But the Israeli regime insists that any foreign troops deployed in Gaza must have its approval, and says any Turkish military presence in Gaza is unacceptable.

    Israel arrest warrants — Countries have a legal obligation

    History shows us a pattern of cooperation and confrontation between Turkiye and ‘Israel’, but Turkiye is now  pursuing legal measures. The country wants to challenge Israeli’s impunity for war crimes. The decision also places renewed pressure on other governments. Those who have remained silent or complicit — failing their obligations under international law.

    As the warrants set a new precedent, Turkiye’s move challenges the longstanding impunity that Israeli occupation officials have enjoyed on the world stage. More countries must act. Rather than countries such as the UK shielding criminal Israeli occupation officials, arrest warrants must continue to be issued. All ties must also be cut with the regime. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, has told us that ‘Israel’ will be destroyed if it suffers from an arms embargo. But we need to ensure diplomatic, economic, academic and cultural boycotts take place as well.

    Under international law, every country has a moral and legal obligation to prevent genocide, and stop it happening. It is time we fulfilled our obligations and held the Israeli occupation to account for its many crimes.

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ms Rachel joins New York Times boycott in support of Palestine

    Ms Rachel is a children’s entertainer who has drawn significant criticism for speaking out on behalf of Palestinian children. While the pressure she’s faced has been immense, she’s remained steadfast, and now she’s joined the boycott of the New York Times (NYT):

     

    View this post on Instagram

     

    A post shared by Ms Rachel (@msrachelforlittles)


    Ms Rachel — Integrity

    Writing for the Canary, Maryam Jameela reported the following on Ms Rachel earlier this year:

    Ms Rachel, an American children’s entertainer, is facing attacks from pro-Israel groups. Otherwise known as Rachel Accurso, the performer has used her massive following to call for the famine and murder of Palestinian children to be stopped. Incredibly, this has led a number of Zionist lobbyists and mainstream media outlets to question if Ms Rachel is funded by Hamas.

    At the time, Ms Rachel said:

    When it’s controversial to advocate for children that have been killed in the thousands, are blocked from food and medical care, and have become the largest cohort of amputees in modern history, we have lost our way.

    It’s my unwavering belief that children aren’t less valuable or less equal because of where they were born, the color of their skin, or the religion they practice.

    In a follow-up message to her NYT boycott post, Ms Rachel highlighted why people are taking action:

     

    View this post on Instagram

     

    A post shared by Ms Rachel (@msrachelforlittles)

    In October, Middle East Eye reported that 150 NYT contributors had pledged not to write for the outlet until it ends its bias against Palestinians. Their letter stated:

    Until The New York Times takes accountability for its biased coverage and commits to truthfully and ethically reporting on the US-Israeli war on Gaza, any putative ‘challenge’ to the newsroom or the editorial board in the form of a first-person essay is, in effect, permission to continue this malpractice

    Only by withholding our labor can we mount an effective challenge to the hegemonic authority that the Times has long used to launder the US and Israel’s lies

    As of this week, Mondoweiss say the number of signatories is more like 500.

    The letter detailed the many examples of shoddy journalism perpetrated by the NYT, including:

    The writers also called on The New York Times to retract a December 2023 article titled “Screams Without Words,” which alleged that Palestinians who took part in the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack committed sexual assault against Israeli women.

    That article relied largely on the testimony of an unnamed Israeli special forces paramedic. A spokesperson for the kibbutz where the article claimed the assaults took place later denied the allegations made by The New York Times.

    Anat Schwartz, one of the report’s authors, was later investigated by the paper after it emerged that she had liked a social media post calling for Gaza to be turned into a “slaughterhouse”.

    Prior to the article, family members of the girls killed during the attack, who were the alleged victims of the sexual assault, gave several interviews that appeared to contradict the claims made in the story. However, none of these interviews were used in the New York Times piece.

    History repeats itself

    Like much of the British media, the NYT helped sell the lies which led to the Iraq War. They apologised for that, but clearly they haven’t learned.

    Solidarity with the Palestinians and with all those who are boycotting the NYT.

    Featured image via USA Today

     

    By Willem Moore

    This post was originally published on Canary.