This has come to light after Rachel Maskell, Labour MP for York Central, tabled a written question to parliament. She asked:
when the last time was that a member of the Israel Defense Forces was trained by the UK armed forces.
In response, Luke Pollard, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Ministry of Defence (MOD), said:
As part of routine Defence engagement with Israel, the UK is currently training a limited number of Israel Defense Forces personnel on UK-based training courses.
The UK is literally training IDF soldiers to go back to Gaza and commit genocide.
we are an active participant in the genocide of palestinians, we are literally training death squads to murder and maim children and babies https://t.co/YrJGuZA2tQ
In October 2024, Declassifiedrevealed that the UK government was “covering up” the training of Israeli military personnel. In response to a Freedom of Information request, the MOD said that they “held” information related to Israeli armed forces training in Britain. However, they refused to disclose it in order to “protect personal information” and “because some of the information has the potential to adversely affect relations with our allies”. Obviously, Israel.
The UK should be jailing these criminals. Yet instead, our government is training them.
Back in 2020, the UK signed a military cooperation agreement with Israel, which they have said will remain ‘completely secret’. So much for a democracy.
This actually makes my stomach turn. Britain’s complicity in genocide is utterly shameful. Hundreds of thousands of people have protested this on British streets and the Labour Party wilfully ignore the public. And we call ourselves a democracy? Laughable. https://t.co/WeNZHvNf7N
The UK has also been regularly conducting ‘surveillance’ flights for Israel. Smells like co-conspiracy to me.
The UK is arming Israel.
The UK is conducting surveillance flights for Israel.
The UK is training military personnel for Israel. https://t.co/7HpNmX7jkj
Only this week, the UK has sanctioned two Israeli ministers – Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The two will face travel bans and asset freezes. Yet, the UK government is training these extremists.
Days after the UK sanctioned two Israeli ministers for “extremist” comments, it turns out we’re training their military to carry out extremist acts
This latest admission is damning. It is clearer than ever that the UK is not just complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza: it is an active participant. Let’s face it – the government will never really take a stand against a state it is aiding and abetting.
Activists from around the world are arriving in Egypt ahead of the Global March to Gaza, set to launch June 15, when thousands plan to march to the Rafah border to call for an end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and its blockade of the territory. Dozens who flew to Cairo for the march have reportedly been detained, interrogated and deported by Egyptian security forces…
Military dogs involved in attacks on Palestinian civilians – including children – are likely to have been exported from European countries, investigation finds
Warning: readers may find some of the details in this piece distressing
It was only seconds after soldiers entered the Hashash family’s home in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank that the dog attack began. As military raids rolled out across her neighbourhood one morning in February 2023, Amani Hashash says she took her four children into a bedroom. When she heard Israeli military coming into their home she called out that they were inside and posed no threat.
Moments later the bedroom door was opened and a large, unmuzzled dog launched itself into the room, plunging its teeth into her three-year-old son, Ibrahim, who was asleep in her lap.
More than 700 activists and concerned citizens from across India have written to the British High Commission. They have demanded that the UK take decisive diplomatic action against Israel, to demand the release of the detained Madleen Freedom Flotilla activists.
On Wednesday 11 June, they sent a powerful message through the commission’s offices in New Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Chandigarh and Goa. It conveyed a catalogue of concerns regarding Madleen activists and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Grassroots groups in India call on the UK condemn Israel
A coalition of grassroots movements in India, the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), initiated the letter. Numerous other people’s collectives and concerned citizens committed to justice and human rights have signed in support.
The signatories vehemently condemned Israel’s illegal capture of the Freedom Flotilla vessel Madleen. The genocidal state seized the UK-flagged civilian ship in international waters on 9 June. They also called out Israel’s illegal blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Together, they are demanding the immediate and dignified release of the eight detained Madleen activists, and the return of the four ‘deported’ activists to resume their peaceful mission. In tandem with this, they demand and end to Israel’s illegal blockade, accountability for its genocidal war crimes, and immediate, unhindered access to humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Organised by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, the Madleen carried vital aid – baby formula, food, medical supplies – to the Strip. Gaza’s population is facing forced starvation due to Israel’s blockade and ongoing genocide. The letter states that the British Deputy High Commission in Israel has clear legal and diplomatic responsibilities to intervene in the defence of the UK-flagged Madleen and its detained crew. Notably, this is in line with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Article 5). It demands accountability for their treatment, pressing the UK foreign office to act for the Madleen’s release, and supporting ICC/UN international war crimes investigations.
The UK has a legal and moral responsibility
The signatories call upon UK to fulfil its legal and moral responsibility. It urges the UK government to act without delay in defence of the 12 activists. Israel have unlawfully abducted and silenced them for their solidarity. The letter lays out how they cannot be penalised for upholding human rights. Notably, these are rights that the international community has painstakingly defined and defended since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
NAPM and all the 700 plus signatories demand the British High Commission, through its offices across India and its counterpart in Tel Aviv to:
Secure the immediate and dignified release of the 8 Madleen activists, including MEP Rima Hassan. Notably, this includes ensuring their protection from torture and clarifying diplomatic immunities.
Recover the Madleen and its cargo for Gaza’s urgent aid delivery.
Support the Hind Rajab Foundation’s complaint, pushing for a UK criminal investigation into Shayetet 13, Vice Admiral David Saar Salama, and other senior military commanders implicated in war crimes in the Madleen, Conscience, and Mavi Marmara incidents, holding Israel accountable.
Demand Israel lift its illegal blockade. This means ensuring immediate, unimpeded access to all land and sea routes for humanitarian aid, dismantling the US-Israeli militarised aid model.
Compel the UK to lead decisive diplomatic action to end Israel’s impunity. It asks the UK to hold Israel accountable for genocide, aligning with its justice commitments.
Urge the UK to champion EU naval escorts to protect humanitarian missions to Gaza. This is to ensure safe aid delivery against Israel’s aggression.
Demanding the UK initiate immediate action over the Freedom Flotilla
The letter states that UK’s obligation to uphold international law is absolute. Israel’s abduction of the Madleen activists, unlawful detention, and prevention of aid delivery demand unequivocal condemnation and strict sanctions on Israel. Both the UK and the international community should implement these. It condemns in no uncertain terms Israel’s horrific use of starvation as a weapon of ‘war’.
The signatories call upon the UK government to initiate immediate action towards release of all those detained. Moreover, it calls for uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Alongside this, it lays out the need for an urgent investigation and accountability into the genocidal war crimes of Israel. They also demand an end Israel’s impunity. It especially draws attention to UK and other powerful governments inaction, complicity, and direct participation in enabling its genocide.
A group of civilians recently sought to take aid to Gaza by sea with the Freedom Flotilla. Israeli occupation pirates, however, illegaly abducted them in international waters on 9 June. The kidnappers have proceeded to torture some hostages – including European Parliament member Rima Hassan – with solitary confinement. Hassan and Brazilian hostage Thiago Ávila also launched a hunger strike in response to their unlawful treatment.
Governments and mainstream media outlets, meanwhile, have essentiallygiven Israel the green light to mistreat the hostages. French opposition leader Jean-Luc Mélenchoncondemned Israel’s piracy and slammed the inaction of France’s government. And Europe’s hypocrisy was plain for all to see:
The silence of EU institutions over the unlawful detention and punitive conditions imposed on EU citizens including MEP @RimaHas speaks volumes to the deep roots of Israelism in European institutional culture. https://t.co/CtRlot3B55
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) June 11, 2025
Ávila reportedly began his hunger and water strike on 9 June. Others, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) said, reported “unsanitary conditions, including bed bug infestations and no access to safe drinking water”.
In an update on 11 June, the FFC stated that Israeli captors had taken Hassan out of solitary confinement. She had received punishment for writing “Free Palestine” on a prison wall. Ávila, meanwhile, remained “in isolation in Ayalon Prison due to his ongoing hunger and thirst strike”. His wife spoke about how Israeli forces had subjected him to “the psychological torment of isolation without light or ventilation”.
“Daddy has been trying to bring food to other children as beautiful as you”
Ávila wrote a letter for his 1-year-old daughter saying:
I’m sorry I’m not around with you these days, but Daddy has been trying to bring food to other children as beautiful as you who unfortunately are being starved by people who don’t understand that every single human being has the right to live free, to be happy in their communities, to access food, water, and everything else that is needed to survive.
Lara, speaking from Brazil, has had no contact with her husband, Thiago Ávila, since he was abducted and detained illegally by Israeli forces from the 'Madleen'.
— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) June 11, 2025
Ávila also highlighted the importance of the “millions of people who are now doing something to stop the biggest violation of our generation”.
The expectation is that Israel will soon expel the Freedom Flotilla hostages from the apartheid state. But the settler-colonial power, however, is now threatening to escalate regional conflict yet again with a new attack on Iran. And its brutal stranglehold on Gaza seems to be intensifying as people around the world become more and more aware of its war crimes and stand up in solidarity with the Palestinian people with bolder actions.
International activists, for example, are meeting in Egypt ahead of a massive march to Gaza. They plan to reach Gaza by 15 June via the Sinai desert, though it’s unclear if the Egyptian regime will allow this to happen.
Yvette Cooper is facing a vital new campaign from an advocacy organisation to de-proscribe Palestinian resistance. CAGE have made a formal application to the home secretary for the de-proscription of Hamas.
A proscribed organisation is one which the government believes:
commits or participates in acts of terrorism
prepares for terrorism
promotes or encourages terrorism (including the unlawful glorification of terrorism)
is otherwise concerned in terrorism
In an application seen by the Canary, CAGE set out an argument to de-proscribe Hamas based on:
the systemic suppression of political speech, particularly within Britain’s Muslim communities.
Proscription means that it is a criminal offence to belong to, invite support for, or wear clothing depicting a proscribed organisation. Hamas’ military wing were proscribed in the UK in 2001, and the organisation as a whole was proscribed in 2021.
Awaiting review from Yvette Cooper
Yvette Cooper now has 90 days to respond to the application. CAGE have made it clear that their application is rooted in principles of freedom of speech, rather than any particular politics.
Palestine Action co-founder, Richard Barnard, said:
Many may be under the illusion that free speech is protected in Britain, but unfortunately they are wrong. I was targeted and silenced by the state for giving a speech in support of the Palestinian people.
There’s no doubt that the prosecution against myself, and many others, is entirely political. Evidence suggests that foreign interference has led to many of us being targeted to protect the Zionist regime by silencing critics of genocide.
In their application, CAGE demonstrate the impact of Hamas being proscribed:
The human cost is clear. The proscription is enabling unjust consequences: teachers suspended, doctors struck off, students expelled, and charities paralysed, all without due process, and often without any formal conviction.
For CAGE, their application is about protecting freedom of speech:
The systematic suppression of pro-Palestinian speech does not merely harm the individuals and communities targeted; it threatens the broader principles of open debate and political freedom upon which a free society must be based.
CAGE cite Dr. Sophie Haspeslagh’s book, Proscribing Peace: How listing armed groups as terrorists hurts negotiation. Haspeslagh explains that systems of proscription often hurt the path to peace. CAGE write that:
Ultimately, her work shows that like with Sinn Fein and the African National Congress, ultimately governments must negotiate those they once considered ‘terrorist’.
Organisation after organisation, from the United Nations to Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International have released reports evidencing Israel’s genocide against Palestine. These findings have painted a picture of Israel’s war crimes against civilians in its pursuit of Hamas. And, importantly, Hamas’ very existence cannot be understood without reckoning with the siege and occupation that settler colonial Israel have imposed on Palestine for decades now. That, surely, cannot be ignored by Yvette Cooper when considering the context of the application.
As CAGE argue above, designations of terrorism obstruct the peace process. In addition to this, such labels are often motivated by political choice rather than absolute fact. As administrators of parts of Palestine, Hamas must be part of any movements towards peace, as CAGE argue:
While the organisation Hamas remains a proscribed organisation, there can be no effective debate or discussion about the long-term future of Palestine, as one of the main political parties in the region is vilified by the legal structures of the British state.
Testimony for Yvette Cooper
In their application, CAGE also collect the testimony of those whose expressions of political opinion have been curtailed by the proscription of Hamas. In one such case:
Six students from a University reposted a Middle East Eye article on the University’s Palestinian Society Instagram story, that discussed the death of Ismail Haniyeh and referred to him as a martyr. The students simply reposted the articles without any additional commentary. The University reported them to the police for support of a terrorist organisation, namely Hamas.
The Police, after two weeks, informed the university that no further action would be taken.
The government should have no right to uphold such restrictions on speech and opinion. Sharing articles that discuss the death of someone in Palestine is not an example of proportionate restrictions under proscription laws.
In another case:
K, the President of a Palestine Society at a prominent University, circulated the headline “resistance fighters launch surprise attack against Israel” as a part of a weekly digest to update their audience of Palestine related news. Another student, on seeing this, made a complaint to the University, citing his fear and distress, while simultaneously threatening K on social media with prosecution.
Again, there is an apparent danger that any characterisations of Palestinian resistance are deemed to fall under a flawed definition of terrorism. By November 2024, Israel had dropped 85,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza – far outstripping World War II munitions. Opposition to such destruction, of one’s home, one’s people, one’s loved ones is not innately terrorism.
Ms L, saw her husband arrested for posting social media commentary on Palestine. Ms L herself was then sanctioned by the secondary school who employ her. As CAGE write:
The criminalisation of Mrs L by the school and maligning of her characterimpacted Ms L’s mental health and family life. She felt targeted and unduly criminalised by her employer and was reluctant and fearful about returning to work as a result.
A healthcare professional for the NHS, M2, was reported to her Trust by co-workers after posting content about Palestine on her personal Instagram story. CAGE reported that:
Following a decision being made on her case, and continuing after her appeal was successful, M2 was subject to intense scrutiny and micromanagement on her managed return. The impact on her personal and professional life has been immense.
CAGE includes many more examples, from teachers, doctors, students, academics, and many others facing formal disciplinary action and sometimes even involvement from the police for how they discussed Palestine privately. The question, then, facing Yvette Cooper in this application is one not of political allegiance, but of freedom of speech. Is this really the environment the government should be cultivating?
Erosion of rights
The weight of these testimonies cannot be understated. They paint a damning picture of an erosion of rights, particularly for British Muslims.
Yvette Cooper’s decision will be eagerly awaited, but in the meantime we cannot lose sight of the fact that Israel have committed war crime after war crime in their relentless pursuit to obliterate all Palestinian life and culture. Hamas’ existence, and Palestinian resistance more broadly, should not be proscribed by the UK as terrorism.
Just as history has proven the likes of the African National Congress to have been combating apartheid, so too must our government recognise that proscription is a restriction of freedom of speech.
Tens of thousands of people joined protests across Europe demanding the release of the Freedom Flotilla crew aboard the vessel Madleen and calling on their governments to take immediate action to ensure the delivery of essential supplies to the Gaza Strip. Demonstrations took place in dozens of cities across Britain, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and beyond, just hours after Israeli occupation forces abducted Madleen and confiscated its humanitarian cargo.
Protesters condemned the silence of European governments and institutions regarding the flotilla’s mission and the crew’s ordeal, warning that they once again failed to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law.
Last week, six Dartmouth College students began a hunger strike in support of Gaza.
The activists are demanding that Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees approve the Dartmouth Divest for Palestine divestment proposal, which was recently rejected by the college. They’re also calling for the school to lift its suspension of student Roan Wade, who was targeted over their involvement in campus protests.
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Wade, and fellow hunger striker Greyson Xiao about the hunger strike. Both students are members of the Palestine Solidarity Coalition.
Amidst an escalation of threatening rhetoric between Tehran and Tel Aviv, Iran has revealed an intelligence operation of historic proportions. The Iranians not only claim to have retrieved thousands of classified Israeli documents, but now warn Israel that it can hit its secret nuclear weapons sites in the event its own are targeted.
On June 7, Al Mayadeen News and Iranian state broadcasters began releasing exclusive stories about a massive intelligence operation carried out by Tehran’s intelligence services “inside the Zionist Entity”.
According to Al Mayadeen’s original scoop, “thousands of documents related to the Israeli occupation’s projects and its nuclear facilities” were seized, and the operation had taken place some time ago and could only be revealed now due to security concerns.
Did you know that there are currently over 300 properties listed for rent on Airbnb that are situated in Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as Palestinian refugee properties that were taken during the Nakba?
In November 2018, Airbnb promised to “act responsibly” and remove all listings in the illegal settlements, but just a few months later, in April 2019, it shamefully reversed the decision.
Even following the ruling by the International Court of Justice in July 2024, that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and that all States must prevent trade or investment that support the occupation – Airbnb’s listings in the settlements continue.
With chaos and violence persisting “by design” at aid sites set up by a U.S.- and Israeli-backed organization in Gaza, the death toll at the distribution points rose Wednesday, as did the overall number of deaths in the enclave since Israel began bombarding the civilian population 20 months ago. At least 120 Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours across the enclave…
Roughly 200 protesters occupied the lobby of Maersk’s Manhattan headquarters on June 11 to demand that the multibillion-dollar shipping conglomerate stop sending military cargo to Israel amid the genocide in Gaza. The intergenerational, multifaith coalition — organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace — poured through the revolving doors of a Midtown East skyscraper…
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has directed his ministry to cancel a waiver allowing Palestinian banks to operate, threatening the livelihoods of millions of Palestinians, just hours after he was sanctioned by several Western governments for his incitements of violence in the occupied West Bank. Smotrich has ordered the cancellation of a waiver allowing Israeli banks to cooperate…
A blistering report from UN experts has determined that Israel is committing:
the crime against humanity of extermination.
The report is a summary of “factual and legal findings” by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. It wouldn’t be outlandish to consider that this statement may well reverberate around the inevitable denials, detractions, and outright lies from Israelis defending their genocide.
Journalist Assal Rad called out the lack of coverage from mainstream media of what should be a landmark moment in global legal understanding of Israel’s genocide:
A UN report today said Israel has committed the crime against humanity of EXTERMINATION, but there’s almost no media coverage.
The report outlines in meticulous detail how Israel have destroyed numerous education facilities. And, importantly:
The Commission could not identify any military objective for the demolitions of educational facilities.
Between 7 October 2023 and 25 February 2025:
403 of a total 564 schools were directly hit by Israeli bombs
approximately 1 million displaced people have been sheltering in clearly marked UNWRA shelters in Gaza since October 2023, and at least 742 people have been killed and at least 2406 injured by Israeli attacks
more than 57 university buildings completely destroyed
612 staff reported killed, and 2769 injured, along with 190 academic staff reported killed
Not only have Israel systematically destroyed schools and universities, they have made efforts to raze them to the ground. And, whilst sending terrified Palestinians running for shelter from their attacks, have even bombed schools and hospitals being used as places of shelter from bombs.
Religious attacks
The report also examined Israel’s attacks on religious and cultural sites in Palestine. As of November 2024, UNESCO has confirmed damage to 75 religious and cultural sites in Gaza. The World Bank assesses this damage of up to $120 million. In comparison to the damage caused to such sites in 2014, the report found that:
This represents a 100-fold increase in the estimated cost of damage, mirroring the unparalleled rise in attacks on cultural and religious sites in Gaza since October 2023.
The report also notes allegations against Israeli security forces who are accused of looting Palestinian heritage and culture sites. As with their attacks on schools being used to shelter people, the commission outlines how Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked people sheltering in mosques from bombing. Israeli settlers are also known to have attacked religious sites, including graffitiing slurs on religious sites and burning mosques. The report finds a pattern of Israeli impunity:
The Commission has documented many incidents in which Israeli officials have: seized or allowed settlers to seize cultural heritage sites; excavated, developed and expanded such sites for tourism purposes, including those containing artefacts representing various cultures and periods in history, while excluding non-Jewish history.
Israeli authorities have also allowed – and some would argue enabled – Israeli settlers to take over historically Palestinian areas:
Israel has also increasingly taken steps to seize, expand and develop for tourism purposes sites that have Jewish and non-Jewish historical significance in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, including in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
The report found that:
The purported need to protect heritage sites has been used for decades as justification for the displacement of Palestinians.
Palestinians are restricted from entering their own religious and cultural sites:
Palestinians worshippers wishing to enter the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount site have been subjected to increased security checks, checkpoints, harassment and assault, and criteria, linked to age, gender and place of residence, have been applied by Israeli authorities to restrict which Palestinians are allowed to enter.
Genocide
The report concludes that:
The destruction of the education system in Gaza is one element on a continuum of harm to educational facilities and personnel across the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The education system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has suffered from increasing military operations by Israeli security forces, harassment of students, checkpoints, demolitions and settler attacks, affecting more than 806,000 students.
As many UN reports before this one has found, Israel is violating – with total impunity – established international legal norms.
The Commission finds that the increased military operations by Israel in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the acquiescence of Israel in settler violence there, are a violation of the obligation of Israel to ensure the safety of the occupied population.
And, crucially, this latest report establishes Israel’s purposeful destruction of Palestinian religious and cultural sites:
Since October 2023, Israeli security forces have caused damage to more than half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip as part of their wider campaign of devastation of civilian targets and infrastructure.
After detailing Israeli attacks at the Ihya al-Sunna Mosque and the Saad al-Ghafari Mosque, the commission finds that:
the conduct of the Israeli security forces that caused the death of civilians at the two aforementioned mosques was part of a widespread and systematic attack directed against the civilian population in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and that Israeli security forces committed the crime against humanity of extermination.
Israel is committing extermination
One particular recommendation that should ring loudly in the ears of Starmer and his ilk is that:
The Commission recommends that all Member States…cease aiding or assisting in the commission of violations; and explore measures to ensure the accountability of perpetrators of international crimes, grave human rights violations and abuses in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Of course, this determination of extermination comes as individual activists have had to take it upon themselves to do what governments and mainstream media won’t: hold Israel to account. The kidnapped crew of the Madleen have continued their protest. One crew member, Thiago Ávila, has begun a hunger strike; his counterpart Greta Thunberg has received international media with accounts of their detention and deportation by Israeli authorities; Rima Hassan is still detained by Israeli authorities.
And, the Maghreb land convoy has departed for Rafah just days ago. Diplomats, activists, and volunteers are travelling from Algeria, through Tunisia, and eventually planning to arrive in Rafah. Middle East Monitorreported that:
The land convoy will include union and political figures, as well as human rights activists, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and members of youth organisations.
Already on its departure from Algeria, the convoy has attracted thousands of supporters to see them off, and even join them. Mainstream media and governments may well ignore both this report and the actual impact of both the Madleen and the Maghreb land convoy but the message is clear: people around the world stand with Palestine and are willing to risk everything while governments remain not only complicit, but guilty.
Football legend Pep Guardiola has used a speech to warn against silence on the ongoing US-Israeli genocide in occupied Gaza, which has killed over 17,000 children so far. In particular, he said, we should be aware that “the next four/five-year-old kids will be ours”. That’s why we must do our part, speaking out and taking action against the atrocities and our governments’ complicity.
Pep Guardiola: speaking out
Pep Guardiola is arguably one of the best football managers of all time. Currently at Manchester City, he has just received an honorary degree at the University of Manchester, which has previously faced pressure from students over its ongoing complicity with Israeli crimes. And he used his platform to express the pain he feels as a result of what’s happening in Gaza, urging the world to stand up in solidarity with the people Israel is currently starving to death.
It’s so painful what we see in Gaza. It hurts me [in] all my body… It’s not about ideology… It’s just about the love of life, about the care of your neighbour. Maybe we think that we see the boys and girls of four years old being killed [by] the bomb or being killed at the hospital… is not our business… But be careful, the next one will be ours. The next four/five-year-old kids will be ours… I see my kids… when I see every morning – since the nightmare started – the infants in Gaza, and I’m so f*cking scared.
He then told a story about a forest fire, with a bird bringing back a drop of water from the sea to play its part in putting the fire out. “It refused to do nothing”, he said, before adding:
In a world that often tells us that we’re too small to make a difference, that story reminds me the power of one is… about showing up, about refusing to be silent or still when it matters the most.
JUST IN:
Pep Guardiola, while receiving an honorary degree from the University of Manchester, gave a powerful speech about Gaza:
"It is so painful what we see in Gaza, it hurts all my body…it is not about ideology but the love of life…It is about refusing to be silent or… pic.twitter.com/s4w9ht8yhK
For all our children, we must not let this become the global norm
Last week, one British surgeon said he’d witnessed Israel’s campaign of “mass murder and mutilation” in Gaza, calling it “the most appalling humanitarian catastrophe of our young century”. Another said children were entering hospital as if on a “conveyor belt“. She added that:
I was running an operating list and everyday at least half of the people on it were under the age of 11
Israel’s genocide has taken a massive toll on Gaza’s children, killing around one per hour since October 2023. And in this context, it’s hardly surprising to hear Save the Children’s humanitarian director Rachael Cummings saying:
Children are sharing with us now that they wish to be dead… [they] see no hope, they see no future.
This is, indeed, the mission for many politicians leading Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, for example, wants to “kill the de facto Palestinian state”. And he promised last month that people in Gaza:
will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.
Pep Guardiola also mentioned the wars that continue to rage in Sudan (reportedlywith thebacking of Western allies Turkey and the United Arab Emirates) and Ukraine. And he criticised politicians who have miserably failed to take meaningful action to end the:
horror of thousands and thousands of innocent children, innocent mothers and fathers, innocent entire families, suffering, starving, being killed
Pep Guardiola delivered a powerful speech while receiving an honorary degree from the University of Manchester, where he spoke about the suffering in Sudan, Ukraine, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.@PepTeampic.twitter.com/IdLXFsNaa5
As Pep Guardiola said, it may be scary to speak up and take action. But we must play our part anyway. Because we must not allow the horrors we have seen so vividly since 2023 to become the global norm.
This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.
In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation.
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has sent an urgent legal letter to Israeli authorities demanding information on the whereabouts of the 12 activists forcibly detained after Israeli naval forces unlawfully seized the Madleen, a vessel sailing as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
Israeli forces intercepted the Madleen in international waters at around 3:00 a.m. Israel time on 9 June 2025, and contact with the activists was lost. This peaceful civilian mission sought to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, enforced as part of a broader policy of engineered starvation and an ongoing 20-month-long genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
The overland “Steadfastness” Convoy to break the siege on Gaza will depart from Tunisia on the morning of Monday, June 9, 2025, under the slogan: “The chains must be broken.” The convoy will travel through Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, with the goal of reaching the Rafah crossing.
As a member of La Via Campesina’s Arab and North Africa Region, the Association of the Million Rural Women and Landless (MRWL) is a key partner in the organization, support, and mobilization for this popular overland convoy. The convoy coincides with the Global March to Gaza and the Freedom Flotilla, where freedom-loving people from around the world will gather at Rafah on June 14, 2025, in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Doctors Sarah Lalonde, Rizwan Minhas, and Yipeng Ge have all recently returned to Canada from volunteer medical delegations in Gaza with a harrowing message for the rest of the world. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with all three doctors about what they saw and experienced attempting to provide medical care for patients in the midst of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.
Content Warning: This episode contains vivid descriptions of wartime conditions, genocide, violent physical injuries, and death.
Guest(s):
Dr. Sarah LaLonde is an emergency and family physician specializing in community, rural, and remote emergency medicine, with a particular focus on Indigenous communities
Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician specializing in sports and regenerative pain medicine, with extensive experience in emergency medicine.
Dr. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg in Ottawa, Canada.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Today we’re going to talk with three physicians who’ve just returned from Gaza as we speak. The Israel’s war in Gaza is killed. At least 55,000. Palestinians wounded over 125,000 more. This war began when 1,130 Israelis were killed, who were held hostage. But now this war is out of control. Every day, hundreds and hundreds of people are being decimated, and as we begin this conversation, 36 more people, non-combatants were killed in Gaza. Our guests today have vast experience in war zones and in disasters. Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician. He specializes in sports and regenerative pain medicine, but his extensive experience across the globe and is deeply committed to global humanitarian medical efforts. Dr. Sarah LaLonde as an emergency and family physician who specializes in community, rural and remote emergency medicine, especially in indigenous communities. She’s worked in Albania, Togo, Chad, and fights against human trafficking in Quebec in Canada, and of course most recently came back from Gaza. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based in Ottawa, Canada. He currently works and lives on the traditional Unseeded and Unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin on shop bag. He practices family medicine and refugee health and community health centers there and across the country.
So just once again, it’s a pleasure to have you all with us here. It’s also an honor for me to talk to the three of you who sacrificed so much to be on the front lines in Gaza to save lives. I mean, as we begin to record today, I was just getting texts from another friend in Gaza who just said another 50 people, mostly women and children have been killed as we were beginning this conversation right now. That’s just so important people to realize that. I’d like to just kind of step back for a minute, all three of you, and just, I’m really personally curious how and why you all ended up doing what you do, because it’s not as if you’re going into Gaza to come home and make thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars as a physician and you’re going into a war zone, you’re going into a place where you may not come back from. So I’m very curious about all of you, what motivated you, what happened to put you into gaze, into those front lines? And we can start with you, Sarah, please.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde:
Yeah, so my journey started in medical school. I had a lot of friends who were Jewish and I became quite interested in the country of Israel because they were talking about their experiences living there, and many had been or were going, and that got me thinking about Israel. At the end of my medical training, I decided to go to Israel. So I was there for about two weeks, and as the two weeks was finishing up, I had a really strong gut feeling that I should go on this tour that takes place in Hebron. So for those of us who are religious, that’s a place where Abraham, who’s the father of Islam, Christianity and Judaism buried his wife Sarah. And that town is in the West Bank and has a very specific history. And basically in Hebron at that time when I visited, there was I think a few hundred or a few thousand settlers.
There was I think about 3000 soldiers to guard the settlers. And there was about 200,000 Palestinians. And the settlers and the Palestinians are living quite closely, some even literally on top of each other in apartment buildings, et cetera. And while I was there, I was leaving the mosque, which is called the Ibrahim Mosque, and I saw that the border police was angry, so I decided to hide. And while I was hiding the Israeli border police killed a girl, a girl who was 17. She’s actually the same age as my brother, and that in Canada we’re not very accustomed to gun violence. So that really shook me up to be so close to a shooting. And then afterwards, because they closed the checkpoint, we were kind of stuck on the Palestinian side of Hebron and we went into a woman’s house and she was supposed to be feeding us lunch, but she was very shook up because there had just been a person killed outside her house.
And she was trying to manage her children who were behaving like normal children, playing with their bikes inside the house. And she was trying to feed us lunch, our guide saw the girl get shot, and he was also very shaken up. So when I had that experience, it helped me understand the type of fear that someone might have when they live under occupation. And that got me interested in thinking about what it might be like to live or to experience occupation living in the West Bank. And then that got me thinking about how I could contribute in the future as a physician. And one of those ways was by going to Gaza. So I was thinking of going to Gaza from 2016 until this year when I was honored to be able to go
Marc Steiner:
Yipeng?
Dr. Yipeng Ge:
Similar to Sarah, actually, I visited that mosque in Hebron, Abraham Mosque. I visited it back in March, 2023. I was with many other Harvard graduate and undergraduate students who were visiting Palestine to understand the context of historical and political context of Palestine. It was during that master’s that I was studying colonialism as a structural determinant of health. That’s actually been my own entry point into medicine and public health, learning about settler colonialism as it affects indigenous first nations, Inuit, Metis peoples in Canada or so-called Canada as a settler colonial state that has committed genocide of indigenous peoples on this land. And I didn’t choose to grow up in Canada. I came to Canada when I was four years old and learning about the history of indigenous peoples and the genocide of indigenous peoples on this land, I felt very compelled to do what I can to understand that more and to think about what does it look like to decolonize and to dismantle these systems of oppression here.
And that really led me to the field of study and learning about colonialism in other contexts and how it is so interconnected in how people experience health or poor health. And to understand that was actually just part of my public health studies. And during my own public health and preventive medicine training, I finished my family medicine training just two years ago, and it was during my public health and preventative medicine training that this increased violence in Gaza took place about 20 months ago. And my university that I was training at actually suspended me for social media posts related to Palestine. And it was actually just also photos from my own travels in Palestine just a few months before in that very year. And they later rescinded that suspension and then didn’t offer an apology. And I’ve been continuously thinking about ways to put my energy and put my time to places and spaces that deserve it, including going to Gaza and offering what I could to be a witness to genocide as a family doctor.
Marc Steiner:
That was ama.
Dr. Rizwan Minhas:
So you know what? I wish I studied this beforehand, but I’m talking about the conflict beforehand. Before I knew there was a conflict, I wasn’t aware how the conflict was, what phase it was taking, but the reason I went there was because from the fellow physicians that went there before me, they came back and they informed me of the stories that they were seeing, what they were seeing on the ground, that they were handing children with bullet wounds, they were handing children who needed amputations. There was no medical supply. But when I’m hearing these stories and when I was looking at the news, I was hearing something completely different. So then as a fellow colleague to these physicians who did go there prior to my travel in April of 2024, I said, this is true. I want to go see for myself and I want to be able to provide at least some aid because there’s no independent journalism there.
So I was trusting my fellow physicians. And when I got there, and I was shocked to see they were absolutely correct. So I went there just specifically to bring in some aid because at that time no aid was being allowed. And while traveling, I took a flight from here to Egypt, Cairo, and then I took a bus from Egypt, Rafa, and we crossed to the Palestinian side, to the Rafa Palestinian side. And when I was crossing, I saw exactly what they said was true. There were thousands of trucks lined up and not one was being allowed through. So then we and my fellow colleagues, we had about close to I think about a hundred thousand dollars of medications that we took along. So I went there just to provide some relief in regards to medical supplies and to provide relief to the doctors who are working tirelessly 24 7 and to give them a break. That was my main motivation for going there.
Marc Steiner:
I really want to give people a sense of what you all experienced, the things that I’ve watched you talk about and read about that you did. I mean, it has to be one of the most profoundly difficult things to do to be a physician, do the work you’re doing and working in a place that is just being slaughtered and destroyed. And you’re in the middle of all this trying to heal it and save as many lives as you can. And as I was reading about what you all did, it was almost difficult for me to comprehend in terms of what you experienced. I just would like you to all give a message to this world to make them really understand and hear and see how horrendous it is, what Godin’s lived through and what people are experiencing every day and the slaughter that is taking place. It’s almost unfathomable for me. I mean, it’s like a war beyond most wars that I’ve ever read about or experienced. And I know that it was all very emotional for all of you as well, despite the work you do. And I just like, let’s just rattle forth wan, you want to just begin?
Dr. Rizwan Minhas:
Absolutely. It is tough talking about it, especially when you see it. You can’t unsee it. I want the world to know that. Trust me when I say this, we want independent journalism to be there because now it’s our word against what the Israeli media or the army is trying to tell you. And trust me, the two opposite statements can’t be correct. I want them to know that all the doctors who’ve been there are seeing and are on the same page. This is a genocide happening, live streamed. And yes, you can see it online, you can see dead babies online, but we actually are holding those dead babies with our hands. We’re actually treating those babies with bullet wounds. We’re actually treating older folks who are dying because of a lack of medication that could easily be treated. I want them to know that this is not a battle of two religious sides or anything.
This is just a battle of humanity. I had a fellow physician, Dr. Mark Palmiter, who is, I believe he’s of Jewish faith, and he was working alongside with me over there, and our main focus was to save as many lives as you can. The thing is with doctors, we can’t stop a genocide. The political leaders around the world can. And I want the world to understand that yes, we may be able to provide aid, but you have to step up yourself and put pressure on your government and stand together with humanity and help stop this genocide. This is happening during our lifetime,
Marc Steiner:
What you just said, you can jump in here. It is our job at this moment, your job to tell your stories. Our job is to get your stories told so that we shine light into this darkness so we can do something to stop it. I mean, that’s part of what has to happen here.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde:
Yeah, there’s so much that we can say that people should know about it. I think that it’s important to know for people to understand the kind of visceral feeling that you have when you go into Gaza. Gaza is a post apocalyptic world. When you go into Gaza, you feel like you’re in some type of a post apocalyptic film. And I think that when we think about Gaza, we need to think about would we accept any of the things that we’re asking people in Gaza to accept. Like last week for example, we went to the Canadian parliament and there was a journalist there who asked us about tunnels being under the hospital.
Now, this is a question that’s been repeated to many physicians. You can watch many, many, many interviews on YouTube where they asked physicians if they saw tunnels underneath the hospital and we did not see tunnels. However, even if there were tunnels, does that justify the bombing of hospitals? Would we accept, let’s say my nephew was in the hospital and I find out my nephew was killed while he was in the hospital by a bomb, and someone said, oh, there was a tunnel underneath the hospital, so that’s why we bombed the hospital. Would we accept that? Would we accept that for our own children? Would we accept that for our indigenous people that we would bomb? I work up north in Cree nation and with the Inuit that we would accept that we would bomb the Cree Regional Hospital. And ironically, after we had that conversation, we discovered that there were tunnels underneath the building where we did the press conference.
We walked through them as we were going to another building. But do you think that as Canadians, we would accept that someone would bomb our parliament because there were tunnels underneath it? So I think that a lot of what we’re asking, what the world is asking Gaza to accept is not something we would accept for ourselves or our children. We have access to direct news because we’ve been to Gaza, we know people there, and a few times a week I receive videos of people being burnt alive more than once a week. Would we accept that our children in Canada would be burnt alive on a regular basis? I don’t think we would accept that. And I think when it comes to the land piece of it, after the world decided to create Israel, it was created after the Arab Israeli war, there was 22% of the land that was given to the Palestinian people.
And that’s the land where these crimes are being committed. And when we talk about forcible displacement, they’re asking those people to move off of their land. That would be like if Canada said to the Inuit people, oh, we don’t like having you here in Northern Quebec, so we’re going to put you on a train and we’re going to send you to America. Well, I don’t think there’s very many Canadians that would find that to be acceptable. So we have to think about, I mean, first of all, there’s international law and we can talk about what is okay and what is not okay according to law. But on a more visceral and gut and human feeling, we have to think about whether we would accept any of that for someone that we love.
Marc Steiner:
Yipeng?
Dr. Yipeng Ge:
I mean, reflecting on Sarah’s words, I think it’s really important that I think about the context and framework of settler colonialism because I agree with Sarah in all of these really important questions. And how has this happened to this extent? And to be able to see settler colonialism in its brutal, vicious, overt form of genocide is only possible because of this really pervasive dehumanization, not only through politic and rhetoric, but through very real actions on the Palestinian indigenous land and body. And we’ve seen that too in the context of Canada, right? That indigenous children have been starved in Canada by policies set by the first prime minister of this country, sir John A. McDonald, to be able to displace indigenous peoples off of their land into reservations. But I think it’s, at least for me, it’s different because I’ve learned about settler colonialism in almost this sterile academic environment.
And the ways in which it feels and acts in Canada and the US is still very pervasive, but is not this overt violence and brutality on a body. And we see it in resource grabs in decimating the land here, but to see it also for firsthand in Palestine, I’ve also seen it in the West Bank, the demolitions of homes and the displacement of people from their villages that they’ve lived for generations. But to see it in Gaza, it helps a sliver to understand that this is settler colonialism. But it does something I think to my soul, to our souls of seeing this, that this is what humans are capable of. And unfortunately, it’s a reminder of what humans have been capable of since time existed, perhaps because these atrocities in the form of holocaust and genocides have happened in the past and are actually happening in other parts of the world.
But I think the tagline for me is to know that Canada is so heavily complicit in what’s happening, and that’s what we tried to highlight last week. And it’s also something that a lot of parliamentarians and policymakers they don’t even think is true because they are being fed inaccurate information from the Minister of Foreign Affairs or minister of Industry now about how Canada is still heavily complicit. They canceled 30 permits for military technology that goes to Israel last year, but there’s still around 88% of existing permits of these technologies that go to Israel, including technology that goes from Canada to the us, such as engine sensors built in Ottawa, built in Ottawa, the only engine sensors that fit the F 35 fighter jets that are built in the US by Lockheed Martin. Those engine sensors are made by a company called Gas Stops in Ottawa. And those F 30 fives are the same fighter jets drop 2000 pound bombs on Palestinian children, women, men, and families, and they’re the ones that come into the hospitals sometimes dead on arrival. So to understand that complicity, I think it’s really compelling for us to know what is our responsibility, for example, as a Canadian, to push for ending this kind of complicity.
Marc Steiner:
I think that the work you’ve done, what you’ve written, what you have been interviewed about, what you’ve told people you’ve seen should be opening doors to just that idea at this moment. And all of you having grown up in a medical world, I know what you see every day is seeing people in deep pain lives in trouble, and you do your best to put your knowledge to work, to save lives. But I don’t think people really understand or get what the three of you saw, what the three of you experienced in Gaza, no matter what you’ve done before. I mean, when I interview people in Gaza, there’s one interviewee I’ve been desperately trying to get back to. I don’t know what happened to him, but we tried to follow his life. And to people that don’t really understand the depth of destruction and depravity that’s taking in places that you all just came back from, how do we begin to relate that to people in terms of your experiences?
Dr. Yipeng Ge:
I mean, I think it’s just so indescribable. I think we can sit here all day to kind of go through all the ways in which life has been completely and utterly decimated. If we think about all the conditions of life that are needed to sustain life in Gaza being targeted and destroyed, it becomes really, really hard for someone living on this side of the world to fully grasp that and understand that. I don’t think I can even grasp it in this moment because I go to work here and then I go home and I have food on the table. I can go buy stuff from the grocery store. All of those things have been fully broken and the ways in which people live their lives have been fully broken. I just want to share the things that I learned in medical school. I was hoping to use even a little bit in the clinics that I worked at in Rafah, but it was really incomparable to what was absolutely needed. What was needed was food. What was needed was water. What was needed was medicines. These were things that were not even available. And to be faced with starving children on the brink of death, severe malnutrition, we didn’t even learn about things in a comprehensive way in medical school about severe malnutrition or something like rickets disease where your bones don’t even develop properly because you have vitamin D deficiency. But these were the things that we were already seeing. And that was like a year ago in Gaza.
Marc Steiner:
Rizwan, you’re about to jump in. Please do.
Dr. Rizwan Minhas:
Yeah. You know what Dr. Yipeng said, it’s hard to put into words what you see that you can’t unsee, and it’s hard to even to put into words, but just for example, so I went to the European Gaza Hospital, and this is only one side of the story because then you have the rest of the population. There is some population that’s even more north. There’s some population that was in Rafah, and there’s some population that was around the European Gaza Hospital. Once you enter the hospital, people are trying to crowd themselves around the hospital just for safety because they think that they’ll be safe around the hospital setting, which has now found to be not true because they can target hospitals anytime they want to. When I was entering, actually what happened was there was the World Central Aid Kitchen trucks that were with us at the border, and they were a few minutes ahead of us while we were entering, and they were the first to be targeted.
And one of our fellow Canadian, Jacob Flickinger was in that van working with World Central Aid Kitchen. And when we found out about it, then we’re like, okay, so we’re entering now. Could be this could be us as well. So right from the start, you realize that your life is in their hands with the press of a button. When you enter the hospital setting, you realize this is a population with a 90% literacy rate, and now they’re out looking for food for their children. Every person that I saw, every third person I saw had yellow eyes that showed that they had jaundice, likely from a in contaminated hepatitis water. There’s no water, there’s no food, and there’s no aid. There’s nothing getting through to the borders. In regards to the medical side of things, there is a lack of supplies. We had to choose who we would give oxygen to, who we would give the last few IV antibiotics to.
We had two people, I wasn’t working in the ICU, but I would go to the ICU transfer patients to the ICU. There was a girl, there was a girl, which we did a newspaper on over there, and she was in the ICU and she was intubated, but because of the lack of pain medication, she was always in pain. She was just hurling around in bed all day for 24 hours and we had no IV set of antibodies, but we just didn’t want to lose hope. And then every day we used to go and check up on her, and she was always in pain, and you could tell she was in pain because she would try to extubate herself at the same time. She would be screaming in pain all night, and we had to make a decision, should we give her a chance? Should we wait?
Maybe some supplies might enter, maybe there’s the news that Israel is allowing aid to get through medical supplies, at least to get through. But that news never came. And the day I was leaving, it was also the last day that she actually, they could not survive without the pain medication or medical lack of medical supplies. And it hurts because in a situation like in Canada, that 4-year-old girl’s life could have been easily saved. And listen, there’s so many kids over there with no surviving family. So the only people that have is the nurses and the medical people around, and maybe they might be lucky to find a family friend that’s around them as well. So it’s a tough situation, hard to describe, and it’s not like it’s not known, and now it’s everywhere on the internet. But the problem, the thing with us is we’ve seen it firsthand.
Marc Steiner:
So I want you to jump in here, please. I just might just give a thought. It was hard to listen to that. People have to hear it. I think that the three of you are physicians who have seen some horrendous things in your lives working with patients, but they experienced the horror of that little girl you were just talking about, and that’s expanded 10, 20,000 times inside Gaza. I think people need to hear and understand the depth of that pain and what we’re allowing to happen. I didn’t mean to sit there and preach, just it grabbed me very deeply what you said, Sarah. I’ve seen doctors work on people who come out of accidents that happened in communities like ours where we all live, but what you all experienced and have seen is something way beyond that. And so it’s just your own kind of personal journey through that and what you came away with and how you survived it, how you survived it.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde:
Yeah. Well, of course, I could talk about many things. I was working at European Gaza Hospital when we received the Palestinian prisoners that were given in exchange during the month of February during the so-called ceasefire. And I could talk about the state of the prisoners. I could talk about all the patients that we saw who were affected by quadcopters or snipers or unexploded ordinances or missiles. I could also talk about the colleagues. But part of the conversation that I think is often missing is our experiences as international doctors in the hospital. And I think what really changed me when I went to Gaza was my experience of the kindness and the welcoming by the national staff. I remember that I was sad one day I went outside and I was standing, it was raining and I had eaten with most of the people in the department.
They all knew me. So the security guards or the people who do the welcoming of the patients and triaged, they saw me. They looked out the window and they saw me and they said, Dr. Sarah, are you okay? Are you okay? Let us pass you a chair. So they passed me a chair through the window. So then I sat on the chair. So then they said, are you okay? Are you okay? Can we give you some tea? So I said, okay, thanks for the tea. So they gave me tea. So then after that they said, well, if you’re having tea, you need to have some kind of chocolate with your tea. Can we give you a chocolate? So then they gave me a chocolate through the window. And I think that the profound kindness and welcoming and the treatment of guests was something that I was so touched by.
And as I think about what we’re often taught as children, I guess teaching in every family is different, but in my family, it was like that love is about putting the other person before yourself or that thinking about the good of the other or being attentive to what they might want or need in that moment. And that’s something that I experienced all the time there I was so touched at the end of my time there, I offered to extend, and I spoke with my boss about that. And you have to keep in mind that my boss was the only physician there during the mass casualty events last year. He was there with a bunch of medical students. He lived in the hospital and he sought every mass casualty event. So I asked him, do you need some help? Do you want me to stay longer? And he answered my question in a very polite but roundabout way. He said that he had experienced romantic love in his life, but that the romantic love that he experienced will never ever compare to the love that he has for his daughter. And then he said to me, your dad’s worried about you. You should go home.
So to think that my boss was caring about the feelings of another man that he’s never met while undergoing a genocide and being afraid for his children’s lives, having lost everything, displaced multiple times, huge financial loss, huge personal loss. The healthcare workers in Gaza, they’re experiencing the genocide on two levels. They go to work, they try to manage the mass casualty events. They try to save as many people. Some of my male colleagues admitted to me that they felt so hopeless after the mass casualty events that they were crying. And after all that, they go home and they experience the genocide in their own lives. They’re living, most of them are living in tents. They don’t have electricity, they don’t have access to water. They’ve experienced, they’ve lost friends, they’ve lost family members. And despite all of that, they’re coming to work and they’re taking great care of patients, and they’re treating us like guests, even though our country is directly involved in killing their friends. And I think that that’s something that really changed me.
Marc Steiner:
Before we become around this up a bit, I want closing thought from each one of you, but Yipeng, let me just ask, I understand you’re going back to Gaza soon, is that right?
Dr. Yipeng Ge:
The intention is not to go into Gaza. I’ll be with a global march to Gaza. So we have, I believe, over 50 country delegations now, and we are expecting thousands of people arriving in Egypt to go from Cairo to Alish, which is a few kilometers away from the Rafa border between Egypt and Gaza Palestine. And the goal will be to march and to protest at the Rafa border crossing to demand that the thousands of trucks that are still waiting at that border to be let in with food, water, fuel, medical aid, and supplies, that that needs to enter to end the genocide, to end the famine and the starvation. And I think we are at this pivotal moment where hundreds of thousands, if not the majority of the population facing extermination because of this months long blockade on top of an existing 18 year blockade of essential foods and supplies and medicines.
So people are on a razor thin thread of survival at this moment. And I think citizens and people of conscience around the world are really unsure what else there is to do, right? We have organized as best as we could in different parts of the world, especially the countries that are most complicit, like the uk, France, Canada, Australia, the us, and we’ve done our press conferences, we’ve done our letters, we’ve done our petitions, we’ve done it, and we’ve done direct actions, we’ve done it all. And I think this feels like a very pivotal moment where people are descending on the rough of border to say, enough is enough. We haven’t seen meaningful action from these most complicit parties to prevent and end this genocide and end this famine. And as people, we are going to try to do this on our own in the same way that the freedom Flotilla has tried multiple times, and now they are, I think, very close to reaching the beaches of Gaza. So I think it’s a reflection of nothing in this world, whether it be civil rights or equal human rights, if we can even call it that on this side of the world, nothing has been just granted to people. It has always been fought for by the people. And this is another example of that,
Marc Steiner:
Just when is that taking place?
Dr. Yipeng Ge:
The goal is to march the Rafah border crossing June 15th.
Marc Steiner:
So as we conclude this and let you all go back to your day, I know you’re busy. One of the things you said, Sarah, I was curious about, we hear about the resilience of the Palestinian people, and I wonder when you are there and reflect on it now, where you see the hope, where you see the possibility of this ending and how we end it and how we build something new and how not to give up hope.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde:
Well, first I’ll talk about resilience, then I’ll talk about hope. So I don’t think that we should be talking about resilience. While there are ongoing atrocities, I don’t think that resilience, I have a lot of resistance to the use of the word resilience when we’re talking about something that’s manmade
Because it takes the responsibility off of the perpetrator and puts it onto the victim. And this is not what the insurance companies call an act of God, right? This is a choice. We saw all the trucks outside of Gaza as we went in. It’s very easy to get water and food into Gaza. It’s easy. Like many of these problems could be solved within a few hours if there was the political will to do that. So I don’t want to focus on the Palestinian resilience. I want to focus on what we can do to come alongside people in need and to do that in a way that respects their sovereignty to say, how can we come along you? What do you want us to do for you or with you? And how can we help? And I think that that’s how we need to be responding.
When it comes to hope, I think that hope is a choice. So love is a choice, and hope is a choice. So as I come alongside my Palestinian colleagues, my patients, the nurses, and all the people of Palestine and of Gaza, I’ve taken a decision to clinging to hope, even at the darkest moments when I am receiving those videos of people being burnt alive. This week, I found out that one of my colleagues had his leg blown off at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution that happened. I found out that another friend of a friend was killed by missile when he went to go pick up his food at the Gaza, at the GHF distribution. And that type of grieving is hard for me, and I’m only experiencing 1000000th of what my Palestinian friends, colleagues, patients are experiencing. So to summarize, I am willing to choose hope. Even at times when hope is not saying that there is a probability that everything is going to go amazing, but for me, hope is a choice.
Marc Steiner:
There’s one you want to,
Dr. Rizwan Minhas:
Yeah, you know what? Yes. I would like to comment on two things Sarah mentioned about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation known as the GHF, and understand that this was backed by US and Israel only to distribute aid in to Gaza. It was a failed operation, which was marred by violence and mismanagement. And not many other humanitarian organizations even want to deal with them or collaborate with them because they knew it would fail. And it did fail. Not only did it fail, it actually led into violence and killing of more Palestinians who were just there to grab aid for their families. So it’s just tough to talk about this. Anyways, it was a failed operation. In regards to blockade. I know we kept talking about blockade of supplies, but there’s a blockade of medical personnel getting in. There’s a blockade of journalism getting in and the medical, we had three rejections by the head of Galia just informed us, who was Dr.
Dort. She had three rejections. And before that, there was another organization that had nine out of 10 people rejected from doctors coming into Gaza to provide medical relief in regards to hope. I don’t want to talk about the Palestine home like Sarah said, because they are a resilient group. That’s their faith. Their faith tells them that despair is a sign of disbelief and that hope is a hallmark of faith. So they’re never going to give up hope. And so for such people, you can never defeat them. In regards to from our standpoint, there’s always hope. Because if you don’t have hope, then you let injustice win. And what you see, what we’ve seen, you can never let that happen. There’s hope whenever they pull a child out of the rubble and he smiles back at you. Those images are tough to look at, but they’re there. And without hope, we let injustice one. So there will be hope until we succeed in having a free Palestinian state.
Marc Steiner:
I want to thank the three of you deeply for what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and for joining us today, and the stories and wisdom that you all have shared in this conversation. I hope we can all just stay in touch. I’m serious about that because this is something that we have to be unified together to stop. And I just really do want to thank you for the sacrifices you’ve made, putting your lives a line in danger and bringing back the stories that we need to hear and healing the people in the process. So thank you all very much for being here.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde:
It was an honor. Thank you for having us.
Marc Steiner:
Thank you once again. Let me thank our guests, doctors Sarah LaLonde, Yipeng Ge, and Rizwan Minhas for joining us and for all the work they do, putting their lives on the line, literally putting their lives on the line in Gaza to save people’s lives. And here in Baltimore, let’s say thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, our audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing the Marc Steiner show, and putting up with me and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to the three physicians that work for joining us here today on the Marc Steiner Show. So the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.
Six months have passed since rebels led by Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS) toppled the Assad family’s 53-year dictatorship in Syria in December 2024. After an initial period of widespread celebration, a new period has set in — one of realization that the end of Assad’s rule has not meant solving the deep problems compounded in Syria from 14 years of counterrevolution and war. In the initial weeks…
In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot. Some of history’s worst atrocities can be…
The latest incident with the Madleen vessel, pictured as a relief measure by celebrity activists and sundry accompaniments to supply civilians with a modest assortment of humanitarian aid, is merely one of multiple previous efforts to break the Gaza blockade. It is easy to forget that, prior to Israel’s current program to kill, starve, and empty the enclave of its Palestinian citizens after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Gaza had already become, arguably, the world’s largest open-air prison. It was a prison which converted all citizens into inmates trapped in a state of continual privation, placed under constant surveillance, at the mercy of the dispensations and graces of a power occupying in all but name. At any moment, officials could be extrajudicially assassinated, or families obliterated by executive fiat.
In 2008, the Free Gaza Movement successfully managed to reach Gaza with two vessels. For the next eight years, five out of 31 boats successfully journeyed to the Strip. Others met no such luck. In 2010, Israeli commandos revealed their petticoats of violence in killing 10 activists and injuring dozens of others on the Mavi Marmara, a vessel carrying 10,000 tonnes of supplies, including school supplies, building materials, and two large electricity generators. It was also operated by the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish NGO, being one of six ships that formed a flotilla. Scandal followed, and the wounds on that issue have yet to heal.
With the Israeli Defense Forces and its evangelical warriors preaching the destruction of Palestinians along with any hope of a viable, functioning state, an impotent collective of nations, either allied to Israel or adversarial in nature, have been unable to minimize or restrain the viciousness of the Gaza campaign. Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen have made largely fruitless military efforts to ease the program of gradual liquidation taking place in the Strip. Given such an absence of resolve and effectualness, tragedy can lend itself to symbolic theatre and farce.
The Madleen enterprise, operated by the Freedom Flotilla, departed from Sicily on June 1 with baby formula, food, medical items, and water desalination kits. It ended with its interception by the Israeli forces in international waters roughly 185 km (100 nautical miles) from Gaza. With a top-billing activist such as Greta Thunberg, a French-Palestinian Member of the European Parliament, Rima Hassan, and journalists in the crew, including Al Jazeera’s Omar Faiad, this was not your standard run-of-the-mill effort.
Celebrities, when they throw themselves at ethical and moral problems, often risk trivializing the cause before the bright lights, gilding, if not obscuring the lily in the process. Thunberg, for all her principles, has become a professional activist, a superstar of the protest circuit. Largely associated with shaming climate change deniers and the officials’ laziness in addressing dense carbon footprints, her presence on the Madleen crew is a reminder that calculated activism has become a media spectacle. It is a model, an IKEA flatpack version, to be assembled on sight, an exportable product, ready for the journey.
This is not to be flippant about Thunberg or the broader purpose involved here. Her presence and those engaged in the enterprise are dangerous reminders to the Israeli project in Gaza. Had they been wise, the bureaucrats would have let the affair play out in stoic silence, rendering it a media event, one filed in the library of forget-me articles that have become the stock and trade of an overly crowded infosphere. But the criminal instinct, or at least one guiltily prone towards one, is garrulous. The chatter can never stop, because the justifications for such behaviour never end.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry, for instance, thought it wise to dismiss the entire effort of what it called the “celebrities yacht” as a “media gimmick for publicity (which includes less than a single truckload of aid) – a ‘selfie yacht’.” Perfectly capturing Israel’s own abominable record in supplying humanitarian aid in dribs and drabs to the residents of Gaza, when it bothered to, the ministry goes on to fabulize about 1,200 aid trucks and 11 million meals supposedly sent to those in the Strip, never mentioning the killing of those seeking the aid by IDF personnel, the enlistment of rogue Palestinian clans, and the sketchy background of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Defence Minister Israel Katz also issued a statement declaring that Israel would “not allow anyone to violate the naval blockade on Gaza, the primary purpose of which is to prevent the transfer of weapons to Hamas, a murderous terror organisation that holds our hostages and commits war crimes.”
In responding to the vessel, the Israelis did not disappoint. They added to the scene with accustomed violence, but the publicity wonks were aware that killing Thunberg and treating the rest of the crew like any other member of displaced persons at Khan Younis did not seem kosher. The infliction of suffering had to be magisterially restrained, a gold-class privilege delved out by the superior ones. No missiles or armed drones were used on this occasion.
Instead, the twelve-member crew was taken to the port city of Ashdod, 30km north of Gaza, where prison authorities had been instructed by Israel’s dogmatic National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to hold them in solitary confinement. A number, including Thunberg, have been deported. Others are still being held, purportedly for refusing to sign paperwork authorising their deportation.
As the formalities are being chewed over, the broader designation of the effort by the Madleen and her crew as those of a “selfie yacht” offer the pool’s reflection to Israeli authorities: how the IDF took selfies of their atrocities, filming with haughty and avenging pride the destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure and the moonscape of their creation; how Israeli officials, such as the former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant felt comfortable claiming the Jewish state was “fighting against human animals”. This was one occasion where a celebrity venture, as small as it was, proved worthy.
We’re seeing an escalation of open state violence and illegality right now. But it’s not Iran or another Western establishment bogeyman responsible. It’s in the heart of the Western political order – in the US, Israel and, yes, the UK too.
US soldiers in the streets, Israeli occupiers abduct international civilians as genocide continues
In recent days, the US government has ramped up its violent and highly controversial attacks on immigrant communities. And its actions have sparked mass protests in Los Angeles. The Donald Trump administration has responded by unnecessarily and provocatively sending in thousands of National Guard soldiers and hundreds of Marines. So far, authorities have engaged in open shows of brutality, shooting at both Australian and British journalists. Protests are now spreading around the country against Trump’s repression.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in occupied Gaza, meanwhile, continues to face resistance. And its most recent challenge to international law has come with its illegal abduction of civilians from an aid boat in international waters which was heading to Gaza. After the kidnapping, Israeli occupation forces unlawfully held the international volunteers offshore with no outside contact foralmosta day before taking them to the mainland. The Adalah legal centre says four crew members of the Madleen Freedom Flotilla accepted deportation and “left or are on their way to their home countries”. It added:
The remaining eight are still detained and will contest their deportation before an Israeli tribunal
Since 2023, Israel’s genocide and Western support for it have seen the masks of ‘democracy, international law, and freedom’ slip. The world has seen the establishment’s true face of elite control, repression of dissent, and flouting of international norms. Even academics from Israel have joined the globalscholarly consensus that the apartheid state has been committing genocide. And as the United States once again vote against a ceasefire amid a brutal starvation campaign in Gaza, it was clearer than ever for most that it is also a US genocide.
US, Israeli, and UK masks are off
Israeli occupiers, meanwhile, have long documented their war crimes, fully expecting to benefit from ongoing impunity. And the Israeli state is so confident about this that it has even admitted to backing criminals with links to Daesh (Isis) in Gaza. Now, even though Israel illegally abducted Western civilians – including prize-winning climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and European Parliament member Rima Hassan – from international waters, their governments have overwhelmingly failed to hold the settler-colonial power to account. Chief among those was the UK, whose shipping flag the aid vessel carried.
British inaction, however, is unsurprising. Because around the time Israeli thugs attacked the civilian ship, a UK plane was actually heading towards Gaza from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus – as has become routine during the genocide. The base has indeed been “a foundational asset” for Israel’s criminal assault on the occupied Palestinian territory. Meanwhile, as the British government tries to defend its complicity in court, more and more reports have shown how arms have continued to flow from Britain to Israel. Evidence of the influence the Israel lobby has over Keir Starmer’s cabinet also keeps coming in. And the Foreign Office hastold hundreds of staff members that, if they’re unhappy about all this, they should just resign.
The disdain for humanity and international law in the halls of British power are clear also in the raiding of journalists’ homes, the repression of anti-genocide activism, and former prime minister David Cameron’s attempts to bully the International Criminal Court into not issuing arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals.
The mainstream media – like British state propaganda outlet the BBC – have tried to cover for Western crimes while keeping a veneer of respectability. But the livestreaming of the US-Israeli genocide has made that near-impossible. As actor Liam Cunningham put it recently, ongoing media platforming of Israeli war criminals is like “contacting Heinrich Himmler for his take on the genocide” after discovering “the horrors of Auschwitz” back in the mid-1940s.
More and more people can now see through the hypocrisy.
Imagine, just imagine, the response from the West if the Iranian government, in international waters, had rammed and then boarded a European ship, filled with European citizens, and taken them captive.
But it's Israel, so it's all good. Our citizens don't matter.
The UK has repeatedly bombed Yemen supposedly to protect international shipping/freedom of navigation so the RAF is gearing up for air strikes on Tel Aviv, right? pic.twitter.com/YULSuJniVW
As Israeli occupation thugs stopped civilians getting aid to Gaza, politicians may have stayed quiet, but ordinary people didn’t. Throughout Europe, people took to the streets in solidarity:
France is finally starting to wake up after Israel kidnapped French MEP Rima Hassan.
They're shouting: "Gaza, Gaza, Paris est avec toi" ("Gaza, Paris is with you") pic.twitter.com/yjZqsb70b7
NOW! The emergency #FreedomFlotilla demo has spontaneously decided to divert through Brighton's biggest shopping centre. It is BIG! And LOUD! Amazing support from shoppers & shop workers pic.twitter.com/hKd12Qe9X4
Outside the UK Foreign Office now demanding action after the israelis illegally raided the UK-flagged Madleen in int’l waters | @fossilfreeLDNpic.twitter.com/w93U1jBVTA
Dutch protestors rallied outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to demand that the Ministry ensure the safety of activist Mark van Rennes and his crewmates on the Freedom Flotilla. pic.twitter.com/F5h577Z8wb
Palestine supporters rallied in Geneva, Switzerland to show solidarity with the Flotilla activists and to demand an end to genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/7WQaxHYN1E
And as Donald Trump tries to scapegoat immigrant communities in order to militarise the streets and crush dissent, one message bears repeating over and over again:
More than 300 Foreign Office staff have been told to consider resigning after they wrote a letter over fears the government had become complicit in Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza.
It is the fourth internal letter from staff about the offensive in Gaza, which started in October 2023 in response to Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel.
Israel has raised a record $5 billion through Israel Bonds, a US-based broker-dealer, to help finance its ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza, marking a surge in foreign support for the country’s economy despite mounting concerns over domestic fiscal sustainability.
Bloomberg reported on 7 June that the figure, more than double what Israel Bonds typically raises in similar timeframes, reflects a wave of investment from US state and local governments as well as individual and institutional buyers.
“Oct. 7 changed everything,” said Dani Naveh, CEO of Israel Bonds, referring to the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israeli settlements and military bases to break the 17-year siege on Gaza.
On March 2, Israel announced the closure of Gaza’s main crossings, cutting off food, medical and humanitarian supplies, worsening a humanitarian crisis for 2.3 million Palestinians, according to reports by human rights organisations who have accused it of using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinains.
On May 27, the controversial US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began its operations in the Gaza Strip, opening its first of four distribution points in Rafah in southern Gaza.
After more than 80 days of total blockade, starvation, and growing international outrage, limited aid has allegedly been distributed by the GHF, a scandal-plagued organization backed by the US and Israel, created to bypass the UN’s established aid delivery infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.
After a week in Mediterranean waters, Israeli forces put an end to the journey of the Madleen to Gaza, intercepting the aid boat in international waters and arresting its 12 passengers, including the crew and Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg. The boat, named after Madleen Kullab, a Palestinian fisherwoman from Gaza, had left the port of Catania in eastern Sicily in early June and…
A stark new article from the BBC is surprisingly frank in its portrayal of Israel of a nation which is openly violating the Geneva Convention. Clearly, this is another sign that the the tide is turning on Israel and its supporters in the West. Beyond that, it’s an inadvertent admission of what many of us already knew; that the BBC has known what’s going on all along.
I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland
He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.
The piece from international editor Jeremy Bowen is titled as follows:
Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how governments respond could haunt them for years to come
It begins with a statement which is obvious to most of us:
Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.
If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.
The BBC would have to present this as uncommon knowledge, because they’ve spent so much of the past 20 months giving air time to people who argue that Israel can do what it likes in response to the October 2023 attack.
Author Jeremy Bowen ends his intro with the following (emphasis added):
At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.
The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.
You could call this article from the BBC a lot of things, but timely is not one of them.
Israel’s war on journalism
Bowen goes on to talk about how hostile to journalism Israel is:
Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza.
Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.
It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.
Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.
This is the sort of reporting we should have seen from the BBC all along, but it does leave some things out. One thing of note is that this hasn’t simply been “difficult” for journalists, as Al Jazeera reports:
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 232 journalists – an average of 13 per month – making it the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded, according to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Costs of War project.
More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia and the United States war in Afghanistan combined, the report published on Tuesday found.
“It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters,” the analysis said.
It’s worse than just deadly, too, with Al Jazeera publishing allegations that Israel has deliberately targetted journalists:
The report explained it was unclear how many Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been specifically targeted by Israeli attacks and “how many were simply the victims, like tens of thousands of fellow civilians, of Israel’s bombardment”.
However, it cites the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) as documenting 35 cases where Israel’s military likely targeted and killed journalists because of their work by the end of 2024.
Among them was Al Jazeera reporter Hamza Dahdouh, who was killed on January 7, 2024 when a missile struck the vehicle he was travelling in in southern Gaza. He was the fifth immediate family member of Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, to be killed by Israeli attacks.
Why were so many journalists in the West comfortable to ignore the targetted elimination of their Palestinian peers?
That’s a question we hope they’ll one day have to answer.
Why this admission from the BBC now?
The article quickly tells on itself as to why the Western establishment is suddenly asking questions of Israel (emphasis added):
To find an alternative route through that [fog of war], we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.
I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.
The first paragraph suggests it’s been impossible to report on the conflict, which is funny because outlets like The Canary, Declassified UK, Al Jazeera, and others have managed just fine.
Bowen is suggesting he’s had to be clever to get to the bottom of things, but it’s the second paragraph which highlights what’s actually going on. Politicians and media figures are waking up to the reality that unlike in previous assaults, Israel may not stop this time.
We may be watching its final solution on the Palestinian people unfold in realtime, and when it’s over, all those who supported Israeli propaganda will be judged. Whether they’re judged in the court of public opinion or the Hague remains to be seen, but one things is clear; the BBC has been a key purveyor of Israel’s narratives.
In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.
As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.
This next passage demonstrates Netanyahu’s victim complex:
Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.
He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.
If there’s a problem with this section – and there is – it’s that it puts too much emphasis on Netanyahu as an individual; it also suggests a level of opposition to him which simply isn’t there. Israel was oppressing Palestine long before Netanyahu took power, and polling within the country shows broad support for ethnically cleansing Gaza. The horrors didn’t start with Netanyahu and they won’t stop with him either.
It’s important to point out what’s being said here, because there are many Western supporters of Israel who have moved from ‘what Israel is doing is fine’ to ‘what Netanyahu is doing is wrong’; a shift which allows them to continue supporting the broader Zionist project of maintaining a colonialist ethnostate in the Middle East without feeling uncomfortable about the overt barbarism that’s currently on display.
The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.
According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.
Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services.
Bowen also touches on the fact that much higher estimates exist:
A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.
What he doesn’t do is highlight just how high some of these alternatives are. The Lancet study in question is presumably the one which was published in January of this year, with France 24 reporting:
A study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that 64,260 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, which would mean the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip had under-reported the number of deaths to that point by 41 percent.
The accumulative effects of Israel’s war on Gaza could mean the true death toll could reach more than 186,000 people, according to a study published in the journal Lancet.
The outlet further expanded on the study’s reasoning:
“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths,” it said.
After applying a “conservative estimate” of four indirect deaths per one direct death, “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable” to the Gaza war, the study found.
Such a number would represent almost 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.
The Lancet study noted that Israeli intelligence services, the UN and the World Health Organization all agree that claims of data fabrication levelled against the Palestinian authorities in Gaza over its death toll are “implausible”.
It pointed out that the toll is likely much higher because the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza has made it extremely difficult to maintain a count that is not lower than the actual death toll.
Starvation as a weapon
The recent shift against Israel seems to have happened because Israel has more openly deployed starvation as a means of warfare. While this is far from a new phenomenon, the fact that it’s become more pronounced has caused widespread revulsion among the public. While many of us rightfully view Israel’s bombing campaigns as equally genocidal, it’s sadly the case that more people can kid themselves into thinking this sort of violence is acceptable to get at the ‘bad guys’ (in this instance the Hamas fighters which Israel alleges are hidden beneath the hospitals and schools it blows up).
Speaking on the weaponisation of famine, Bowen reports:
Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.
A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.
“For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza’s population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “World leaders should be speaking out against this abhorrent war crime, which has devastating effects on Gaza’s population.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 11 displaced Palestinians in Gaza between November 24 and December 4. They described their profound hardships in securing basic necessities. “We had no food, no electricity, no internet, nothing at all,” said one man who had left northern Gaza. “We don’t know how we survived.”
There’s one more thing to note, however, and that’s that Israel was weaponising hunger and poverty far before 2023, as reported in the Conversation:
But as much as things have worsened in the past 18 months, food insecurity in Gaza and the mechanisms that enable it did not start with Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
A U.N. report from 2022 found that 65% of people in Gaza were food insecure, defined as lacking regular access to enough safe and nutritious food.
Multiple factors contributed to this preexisting food insecurity, not least the blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel and enabled by Egypt since 2007. All items entering the Gaza Strip, including food, became subject to Israeli inspection, delay or denial.
Basic foodstuff was allowed, but because of delays at the border, it could spoil before it entered Gaza.
A 2009 investigation by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz found that foods as varied as cherries, kiwi, almonds, pomegranates and chocolate were prohibited entirely.
At certain points, the blockade, which Israel claimed was an unavoidable security measure, has been loosened to allow import of more foods. In 2010, for example, Israel started to permit potato chips, fruit juices, Coca-Cola and cookies.
By placing restrictions on food imports, Israel has claimed to be trying to put pressure on Hamas by making life difficult for the people in Gaza. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” said one Israeli government adviser in 2006.
To enable this, the Israeli government commissioned a 2008 study to work out exactly how many calories Palestinians would need to avoid malnutrition. The report was released to the public only following a 2012 legal battle. Echoes of this sentiment can be seen in the Israeli decision in May 2025 to allow only “the basic amount of food” to reach Gaza to purportedly ensure “no starvation crisis develops.”
The long-running blockade also increased food insecurity by preventing meaningful development of an economy in Gaza.
This is what Amnesty said of that protest back in 2018:
More than six months have passed since the “Great March of Return” protests started in the Gaza Strip on 30 March.
Their calls for Israeli authorities to lift their 11-year illegal blockade on Gaza and to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their villages and towns have not been met.
According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, since the start of the protests, over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition.
They added:
Over the last 11 years, civilians in the Gaza Strip, 70% of whom are registered refugees from areas that now constitute Israel, have suffered the devastating consequences of Israel’s illegal blockade in addition to three wars that have also taken a heavy toll on essential infrastructure and further debilitated Gaza’s health system and economy. As a result, Gaza’s economy has sharply declined, leaving its population almost entirely dependent on international aid. Gaza now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world at 44%. Four years after the 2014 conflict, some 22,000 people remain internally displaced, and thousands suffer from significant health problems that require urgent medical treatment outside of the Gaza Strip. However, Israel often denies or delays issuing permits to those seeking vital medical care outside Gaza, while hospitals inside the Strip lack adequate resources and face chronic shortages of fuel, electricity and medical supplies caused mainly by Israel’s illegal blockade.
The protests were launched to demand the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees to their villages and towns in what is now Israel, and to call for an end to Israel’s blockade. They culminated on 14 May, on the day of the US embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when Palestinians commemorate the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands in 1948-9 during the conflict following the creation of the state of Israel. On that day alone, Israeli forces killed 59 Palestinians, in a horrifying example of use of excessive force and live ammunition against protesters who did not pose an imminent threat to life.
War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.
After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”.
The Geneva Conventions are all well and good, but this focus on the rules of war is another way of allowing Israel to maintain some sense of legitimacy. Inherent to this line of thinking is that the issue isn’t the invasion; it’s the improper way in which Israel is waging it.
Why can’t we just say war is bad, and demand that Israel stop?
Israel is entirely reliant on Western weapons and funding after all; without that, the genocide would end tomorrow.
Never again, says the BBC
Grimly, Israel has abused the memory of the Holocaust to pursue its own genocide against the Palestinian people. And thankfully, Bowen’s article touches on that:
British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism.
“We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.”
But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.
“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.
“You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.”
Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”.
The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.
Those who have stood against Israel for decades know all this. As such, it’s somewhat shocking to see the BBC reporting it; it was, after all, one of the key vessels Israel used to attack and smear us.
On 10 July, the BBC‘s Panorama broadcast an hour-long show called Is Labour Antisemitic? The BBC claimed it used “exclusive interviews from key insiders and access to confidential communications” in order to reveal “evasions and contradictions at the heart” of the Labour Party. Yet, a new report documents a “catalogue of reporting failures” against the BBC‘s own editorial guidelines.
Journalist Fréa Lockley further reported:
BBC guidelines note that looking at “a series of programmes” on a topic can establish impartiality. As MRC said, “Panorama has broadcast three editions focused on the Labour Party, all of which have taken an overwhelmingly critical view of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership”. Presenter John Ware’s first show ‘Labour’s Earthquake’, prompted Corbyn’s office to issue a formal complaint calling it a “hatchet job”. Ware is openly critical and has “long declared his opposition” to Corbyn. Neil Grant – who’s also been behind a series of anti-Corbyn programmes – was the executive producer on two Panorama shows. MRC noted:
“Handing two editions to the same presenter with known (and hostile) political views on Corbyn without seeking to offer a counterposing perspective is hardly a ringing endorsement of the BBC’s commitment to due impartiality.”
Panorama failed to document “the overwhelming support” for Corbyn from members. Nor did it show that in 2017, he “led the party in a general election that saw the biggest increase in Labour’s share of the popular vote since 1945”.
As MRC’s chair Natalie Fenton told The Canary:
“How can it be right that two recent editions of Panorama on the Labour Party have been presented by a journalist who has publicly declared his hostility to Jeremy Corbyn?”
We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion.
“Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part.
“Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”
In articles like this one from Bowen, you can feel the ground shifting beneath us.
It’s obvious to everyone that Israel has created an impossible rift between the image it wants to maintain and the actions it cannot stop itself committing. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of that rift when it’s finished forming. There may be no coming back.
We’re glad to see the BBC has to report some semblance of the truth now, but we’re not going to pretend this is about anything other than self-preservation. We’re also not going to let them get away with rewriting their role in all of this; especially with them admitting that they knew all along:
Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 9, 2025. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Israeli forces early Monday boarded the Madleen, a United Kingdom-flagged vessel carrying humanitarian aid, and detained its crew members as they sought to deliver food, children’s prosthetics, and other supplies to Gaza’s besieged and starving population.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said in a statement that the Madleen was “unlawfully boarded, its unarmed civilian crew abducted, and its life-saving cargo—including baby formula, food, and medical supplies—confiscated.”
Huwaida Arraf, a human rights attorney and Freedom Flotilla organizer, said that “Israel has no legal authority to detain international volunteers aboard the Madleen” and argued that Israel’s naval blockade violates the International Court of Justice’s “binding orders requiring unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza.”
“These volunteers are not subject to Israeli jurisdiction and cannot be criminalized for delivering aid or challenging an illegal blockade—their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end immediately,” said Arraf.
Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada, echoed Arraf, writing on social media that “the world is watching Israel attack a civilian boat carrying no weapons—only humanitarian aid—flying a U.K. flag in international waters and carrying humanitarians of many nationalities.”
“Israel has precisely zero authority to do so under any law,” Matthews added.
“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry on Monday derided the Madleen as a “selfie yacht” and said the vessel is “safely making its way to the shores of Israel” after the country’s forces boarded the boat, which set sail from Sicily on June 1. The foreign ministry added that there are other “ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip”—but Israel’s military has been tightly restricting the flow of food and other assistance, pushing the enclave toward famine.
Among the vessel’s dozen passengers are Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.
“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel,” Thunberg said in a video posted online by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. “I urge all my friends, family, and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”
SOS! the volunteers on 'Madleen' have been kidnapped by Israeli forces. Greta Thunberg is a Swedish citizen. Pressure their foreign ministries and help us keep them safe!
— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) June 9, 2025
Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker reported that “before connection was lost, video from the vessel showed some form of white substance sprayed upon the vessel.”
“Passengers reported the unknown liquid came from drones flying overhead, while the ship’s radios began being jammed,” Thakker wrote.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called Israel’s seizure of the Madleen “a blatant act of international piracy and state terrorism.”
“We call on governments—especially western governments funding Israel’s genocide and Arab Muslim governments watching it happen—to show an iota of the courage demonstrated by those on the Madleen by using every tool at their disposal to force an end to the genocide,” said Awad.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote that “while Madleen must be released immediately, every Mediterranean port should send boats with aid, solidarity, and humanity to Gaza.”
“Breaking the siege is a legal duty for states, and a moral imperative for all of us,” Albanese added.
BREAKING — The UK Ministry of Defence admits it is “currently training” Israeli military personnel in Britain.
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Messages from Rima and other members of the Freedom Flotilla crew.
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