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Category: israel

  • 230 Congressional Staffers Urge Lawmakers to Boycott Netanyahu Speech

    An anonymous letter supported by 230 staffers in the House of Representatives and the Senate is urging lawmakers to boycott a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is scheduled to address Congress later this month as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza rages on. The letter, organized by members of the Congressional Progressive Staff Association and endorsed by…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israeli Lawmakers Vote Against Palestinian Statehood Before Netanyahu’s US Trip

    While Israel’s troops wage what has been widely decried as genocide on the Gaza Strip, Israeli lawmakers on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution opposing “the establishment of a Palestinian state” west of the Jordan River. The measure passed Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, 68-9. It was spearheaded by Knesset Member Zeev Elkin of New Hope – The United Right, who shared the key…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The BBC knew EXACTLY what it was doing with THAT pro-Israel headline

    Of all the disgusting genocide-apologist headlines pumped out by the establishment media on Gaza, a recent BBC article might now top them all. In a utterly disgraceful move, the news broadcaster entitled a piece about a disabled man the IDF had horrifically murdered in words so blatantly bristling with pro-Israel bias, it beggared belief.

    Outrage on social media forced the BBC to change it. However, research shows that far from being a mistake, it’s likely the BBC had a reason to run its propaganda-laced headline.

    BBC pro-Israel headline the latest in establishment media bias

    It’s ten months now that Israel has been carrying out its brutal genocide in Gaza. People on social media have born witness to ten indescribably atrocious months of Israeli war crimes. At the same time, the corporate and Western press has pushed ten months of whitewashing media to obfuscate and absolve Israel of precisely these unconscionable acts.

    There have been too many of these propaganda pieces to note here. That’s because Western outlets have published near wall-to-wall coverage dripping in this bias – and by extension, complicity in Israel’s bloody crusade of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

    People on social media have consistently called this out. Meanwhile, journalists and civilians in Gaza, alongside independent sites (including the Canary) have been left to tell the truth about Israel’s unrelenting fascistic massacres.

    When Israeli soldiers killed six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family, the appalling Western establishment media spin was plain for all to see:

    Then, in June, the Canary’s Rachel Swindon reported on a BBC headline that flagrantly ignored Israel slaughtering nearly three hundred Palestinians. It relegated them to the subtext, while celebrating how the IDF had “freed” four Israeli hostages

    More recently, folks on X underscored the shocking double standards Western media displayed when Russia attacked a hospital in Ukraine. Particularly, they compared its emotive coverage condemning Russia, with the passive language it applied to Israel bombing Gaza health facilities:

    Now, the BBC has added a new sickeningly sanitising headline to the whitewashing hall of infamy and complicity.

    BBC whitewashes IDF murder of disabled Palestinian

    The article detailed how IDF soldiers had brutally set a combat dog on a autistic disabled man with Down Syndrome. It described how the IDF dog mauled 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar in his family home. His family later found his decomposing body where the IDF had left him to die. But in its editorial wisdom – or deliberate lack thereof – the BBC headline meekly read:

    The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome

    So once again, people on X had to speak out about another horrendous headline:

    UK ambassador to Palestine Husam Zomlot expressed how despicable the BBC’s framing was:

    Some noted the shocking double standards at work again with the BBC baring its racist arse:

    Others couldn’t quite believe the language the BBC had used that implied something altogether different from the true order of events:

    Because quite apart from a “lonely” death, the IDF viciously murdered Bhar with a military dog. But passive voice – the feat of shameless linguistic gymnastics that avoids placing blame – reigned supreme again:

    After enormous backlash, the BBC removed the social media post, and amended the headline:

    Beyond the biased headlines…

    Of course, the BBC knew exactly what it was doing. Editors would have been aware that in a digital, social media-fueled churnalism landscape, people don’t actually read the news. That is, many will in fact only read the headline, and do not engage with the article content itself. As the previously Independent reported, a 2016 study illuminated this reality, showing how across X (then Twitter):

    59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.

    Given this, BBC’s latest offence shows how the establishment press can weaponise this media illiteracy to shape a pro-Israel narrative.

    US-based linguist and journalist Abdulkader Assad previously told the Middle East Eye how headlines in particular propagate this pro-Israel bias:

    The way the western media is “framing” headlines and opening paragraphs of their news coverage of the Israeli occupation’s war on Gaza is intentionally meant to sway opinions and help consolidate a perception of Gaza with its entire population as ‘militants’, and thus the bombardment and killing then becomes justified

    Ultimately, the mismatch between the headline and the story itself was almost inconceivably depraved. Almost. Only, this has been the Western establishment press writ large.

    Evidencing this, in March, the New Arab conducted an analysis on UK mainstream media coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This did specifically focus on the rightwing press, but is still instructive. In particular, it looked at articles by the Times, the Telegraph, the Sun, and the Daily Mail. Notably, it identified that:

    in their headlines, all four sources exhibit bias against Palestinians in the following three ways: uniquely deploying a vast amount of emotive language when describing Israeli suffering, amplifying Israeli justifications for violence, and qualifying Palestinian deaths.

    Echoing these findings, researchers at the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), an arm of the Muslim Council of Britain, produced a report on UK media coverage of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. This research looked more comprehensively at the UK press, assessing 28 outlets, including the BBC.

    Again, it stated how:

    One noticeable feature of this coverage has been the use of imagery which has shown Israeli aggression or Palestinian suffering and headlines which have favoured an Israeli position or narrative. The dehumanisation of Palestinians in this respect starts with the minimisation of their suffering, effectively rendering them invisible despite the huge numbers of those killed whilst focusing solely on the deaths of Israelis.

    With the recent article, it’s clear that he BBC is firmly among this Zionist propaganda ecosystem. This liberally employs techniques like bias by omission, and passive language describing Israel in order to deprioritise Palestinians voices and experiences.

    Overall, the incident showed the BBC indisputably as the servile media handmaiden to a violent colonial state. This latest headline is testament to the fact the BBC – like Western establishment media en masse – promotes a hierarchy of human life. And a disabled Palestinian man’s life wasn’t worth enough to condemn the Israeli war criminals it has spent months unrepentantly whitewashing.

    Feature image via the Canary/BBC

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel Has Attacked Gaza “Safe Zone” at Least 10 Times Since Rafah Invasion

    Just over two months ago, Israel forced more than a million Palestinians who were taking shelter in southern Gaza to flee, once again, to an area it designated as a “humanitarian safe zone” — an area that the Israeli military has since attacked at least 10 times, new research finds. According to London research group Forensic Architecture, the area in Al-Mawasi now sheltering thousands of…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Report: US Allows Tax Incentives for Donations to Israeli Groups Blocking Aid

    Americans who wish to financially support far right Israeli groups working to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza are given tax incentives to do so, a new investigation finds. Reporting from The Associated Press and Israeli news site Shomrim finds that three groups that have worked to obstruct aid efforts in Gaza have gotten tax deductible donations from the U.S. and Israel.

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel brutally kills disabled Palestinian man. BBC headline: it was a natural death

    The BBC has changed a headline about Israel after viral condemnation.

    Israeli soldiers set a combat dog on a Palestinian man living with Down’s syndrome in Gaza during a raid of his family home. After the dog attacked 24 year old Muhammed, a solider told his mother they would “treat him”.

    The Israeli soldiers later expelled his mother and the rest of his family at gunpoint. Once they let Muhammed’s relatives back in a week later, his brother found him, who said: “he was lying on his stomach, his body had decayed and worms had begun to eat his face”.

    But this is how the BBC initially reported it:

    And in the BBC article itself, the reader has to scroll through several paragraphs before the outlet mentions the dog attacking Muhammed.

    After people’s condemnation of the framing went viral, the BBC then backtracked on the headline:

    A BBC pattern of pro-Israel coverage

    The article is the latest instance of the BBC propagandising for Israel. In another piece, the BBC painted Israel’s plans to colonise Gaza as “Who wouldn’t want a beach house?”

    This is consistent framing from the BBC on Israel’s colonial expansion. In a further piece, a BBC headline reads “Israel approves plans for 3,400 new homes in West Bank settlements”. In other words, Israel’s theft of more Palestinian land is something requiring simple planning approval from the coloniser, rather than something illegal.

    The BBC also often removes Israel as the perpetrator. One headline reads “Deadly air strike shows system to protect aid workers in crisis, agencies say”. Of course, the air strike merely fell out of the sky, Israel didn’t launch it, according to this headline.

    What’s more the attack in question was a triple strike, targeted on a World Central Kitchen aid worker convoy. It killed three British people, as well as others from Poland, Australia and Palestine. Within the BBC piece, it further seeks to obscure that Israel targeted the aid workers deliberately. In fact, Human Rights Watch has documented another seven instances where aid workers shared their location with Israel, only for the the state to kill or injure them.

    ‘The BBC seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy’, says its correspondent

    The BBC‘s own staff are concerned with its coverage. Beirut-based BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem wrote an email to BBC director general Tim Davie on 1 May. And its full contents were just released.

    In the email, also forwarded to BBC News staff, Ruhayem said:

    I’ve seen evidence of bias in favour of Israel as well as evidence of a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy. Such evidence has been pouring in for months at a dizzying pace

    Ruhayem also explained in the email that BBC senior figures and management are not taking staff concerns properly:

    Silence has been a common response to a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage.

    Other BBC journalists have also criticised the media outlet’s coverage. In a letter to Al Jazeera in November, eight UK-based BBC journalists wrote:

    The BBC has failed to accurately tell this story – through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims – and it has therefore failed to help the public engage with and understand the human rights abuses unfolding in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 7. When will the number be high enough for our editorial stance to change?

    The BBC‘s reporting on Israel and Palestine has long been a disgrace. But it has only gotten worse since the violence escalated further.

    Featured image via The Telegraph – YouTube

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Deadly strikes pound Gaza as Netanyahu promises even more death

    Israel slammed Gaza with air strikes after their ghoulish prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to ramp up the pressure. The Israeli military said it had carried out 25 strikes in 24 hours.

    The health ministry in Gaza said 52 people, most of them women and children, had been killed in Israeli strikes over the previous 24 hours. The UN humanitarian office OCHA said multiple strikes across Gaza on Tuesday killed and wounded dozens. The territory’s civil defence agency said 30 people had been killed in three strikes in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, one on a UN-run school, another on a house and a third on a mosque.

    Ghoulish promises

    Netanyahu, who has repeatedly vowed to eradicate Hamas, insisted Tuesday that despite mounting pressure, there would be no let-up in Israel’s campaign against the militants. He said:

    This is exactly the time to increase the pressure even more, to bring home all the hostages – the living and the dead – and to achieve all the war objectives.

    He rammed home the point in a speech to parliament, saying:

    We have got them by the throat; we are on the road to absolute victory.

    What does absolute victory look like for the ghoul of Gaza? As many of us have seen on our social media feeds, apparently it looks like children being killed while they play football, body parts scattered around bomb sites, and entrails from children lying on the ground. It looks like bombing zones the Israeli military have designated safe. As Al Jazeera reported:

    The Israeli attacks on Tuesday hit the UN’s al-Razi school in the central Nuseirat refugee camp and a main street lined with market stalls in the southern al-Mawasi area, where thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought shelter.

    And:

    Among those killed was local journalist Mohammad Meshmesh. His death takes the number of journalists killed in the conflict to 160, the Gaza Government Media Office said.

    Netanyahu has never hidden his ambitions. Clearly, his definition of “absolute victory” is the ethic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.

    Shelters bombed

    In southern Gaza, two people were killed in Israeli bombardment of the Shakush area, northwest of Rafah, a medical source at Nasser Hospital said.

    At least 90% of Gazans have been forced from their homes, many of them seeking refuge in UN-run schools. Seven of them have been hit by Israeli strikes since 6 July.

    Nearly 70% of UN-run schools across Gaza have been hit during more than nine months of fighting, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Tuesday. Umm Mohammed al-Hasanat, sheltering with her family at a UN-run school in Nuseirat, said:

    Why do they target us when we are innocent people?

    We do not carry weapons but are just sitting and trying to find safety for ourselves and our children.

    The UNRWA said:

    Over 95% of these schools were used as shelters when hit. 539 people sheltering in UNRWA facilities have been killed. Nowhere is safe. The blatant disregard for UN premises and humanitarian law must stop.

    ‘Nowhere is safe’ in Gaza

    A professor of international law at Queen Mary University, London, Neve Gordon, explained:

    If Netanyahu and his government succeed in rendering Israel’s version of proportionality acceptable among other state actors, then the laws of armed conflict will end up justifying rather than preventing genocidal violence. Indeed, the very architecture of the entire international legal order is now in the balance.

    As the West’s continued inaction has shown, the entire international legal order will indeed be upset.

    Netanyahu and his cabinet have never hidden their view of Palestinians as less than human. “Absolute victory” is a chilling phrase that, after nine months of relentless and brutal bombing, promises nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Channel 4 News

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Starmer faces major test as pro-Palestine protest set to take place outside parliament

    As ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel stall – once again thanks to the latter – and the new Labour Party UK government refuses to change position on the International Criminal Court (ICC), people will be protesting for Palestine outside parliament – in a direct provocation against Keir Starmer.

    Israel: the genocide continues as Labour watches

    Israel killed dozens of Palestinians on Tuesday 16 July in three separate strikes, as it pounded the territory. Gaza civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the three air strikes killed at least 44 people and wounded dozens within an hour across the Palestinian territory. Israel confirmed it carried out two of the strikes.

    The health ministry said a strike on a fuel station in Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza killed 17 people, and the Palestinian Red Crescent said a separate strike at almost simultaneously hit the UN-run Al-Razi School in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing five people.

    Israel has now killed nearly 39,000 people in Gaza and displaced 90% of the population. However, the UK under the Labour Party is still toeing its line. As the Canary’s James Wright has been documenting, foreign secretary David Lammy recently met with Benjamin Netanyahu in what was a snivelling display of sycophancy.

    Then, independent MPs piled the pressure on Starmer. As Wright noted, they wrote to the PM calling on him to:

    • Suspend arms sales and licences.
    • Restore funding to UNRWA.
    • Stop the legal challenge to the ICC over its potential arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant.

    Of course, the Labour government is unlikely to listen to any of this.

    Hands around parliament

    So, a protest is taking place on Thursday 18 July to further pressure Starmer’s administration.

    Stop the War Coalition said in a statement:

    Israel is committing war crime after war crime. Meanwhile Keir Starmer and our new government continue to arm Israel and may be taking forward the blocking of the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s PM Netanyahu.

    On parliament’s first full day back, the Palestine coalition is calling for a hands round parliament protest this Thursday 18 July at 6pm. We are asking all our supporters in London and the South East to help us link hands around Parliament to show the new government the strength of feeling there is for a ceasefire and an end to arms sales to Israel.

    Join us on Thursday as we come together and form a ring of linked hands around Parliament to call on our political leaders to stop arming Israel and push for an immediate #CeasefireNOW in Gaza. Please assemble for a briefing in Parliament Sq. at 6pm before the protest begins.

    Given Labour’s near-identical stance on Israel as the Tories’, it is likely protests like this will continue unabated. How Starmer and his team respond is another matter entirely.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

  • Israel: Palestinian Armed Groups’ October 7 Assault


    This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden Says He’s Done “More” for Palestinians “Than Anybody” as He Backs Genocide

    President Joe Biden bragged about his supposed charity to Palestinians in an interview on Monday, claiming that he’s done “more” for Palestinians “than anybody” — despite the fact that he has done more to perpetuate the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza than any world leader outside of Israel. In an interview on Complex’s “360 With Speedy” released Monday, Biden implied that he deserves praise…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israeli Forces Dropped 8 2,000-Pound Bombs on Gaza “Safe Zone,” Killing 90

    Israeli forces dropped eight tons of bombs on an area Israel labeled as a “humanitarian safe zone” in Gaza on Saturday, wielding explosives built to maximize destruction on an area sheltering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been forced to flee Israel’s genocidal campaign again and again. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Israeli military dropped eight 2,000…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No Social Movement Deserves Uncritical Support

    A reply to Gemma Sack.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Israel Ramps Up Massacres in Gaza as Media Focuses on Presidential Horse Race

    Israeli forces have massacred nearly 60 people in the Gaza Strip over just the past 24 hours, and the past week has been one of the deadliest since the war began more than nine months ago. But you’d hardly know it by looking at the front pages of major newspapers in the United States, despite U.S. President Joe Biden fueling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault with diplomatic…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Newly elected independent MPs all demand David Lammy act on Israel’s genocide

    The newly elected anti-genocide independent MPs, including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have written to the foreign secretary with a number of demands over Israel’s assault on Palestine.

    Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed are the other independent MPs calling for action on the “catastrophic situation in Gaza”.

    The MPs united to write the letter after their election on 4 July caused an upset. In Leicester South, Adam defeated Labour shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth.

    Labour must stop impeding the ICC

    They call on the Labour government to stop its legal challenge to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In May, the ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant.

    The UK government is challenging this. According to the Israeli outlet Maariv, David Lammy has now assured Israel that Labour will continue the Conservatives’ legal challenge that claims the ICC has no jurisdiction over Palestine.

    But, in 2021, the ICC ruled that it does have jurisdiction over Israeli war crimes in Palestine. Indeed, human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson has called the UK move both “a legal nonsense” and “preposterous”.

    As well as calling on Lammy to “drop any legal challenge” to the ICC, the MPs also assert he should “issue a public statement” on the case.

    The UK must restore funding to UN aid agency

    The letter further states that Lammy and the Labour government must “immediately restore and increase UK funding to UNRWA”. A number of countries stopped funding the the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) when Israel claimed some of its members were terrorists.

    But an independent review from a former French foreign minister found Israel gave no credible evidence to support its claim. Following this, most countries resumed funding. But the UK still has not. The UN agency delivers education, social services, healthcare, and refugee camps in Palestine. 1.7 million Gazans rely on it.

    Independent MPs: end weapons sales to Israel

    The independent MPs also called on Lammy to “immediately suspend all provision of weapons and weapons systems to the government of Israel”.  The UK government, under Rishi Sunak, approved 42 military export licenses to Israel from 7 October to 31 May. Five of these are open licenses, meaning they allocate unlimited exports of specified items under just one license.

    Their letter also points to a recent study in the Lancet that estimates the true extent of the Palestinian death toll to be much higher than Gaza health ministry statistics. The medical journal writes:

    Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

    The indirect deaths are a result of Israel’s destruction of public infrastructure. Israel has damaged or destroyed 31 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza, with many in complete ruin.

    Let’s hope these independent MPs continue to oppose the genocide in parliament.

    Featured image via Guardian News – YouTube and Middle East Eye – YouTube

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Shameless Labour politicians play the victim card over pro-Palestine voters

    Not even two weeks into the Labour Party’s landslide that wasn’t actually a landslide, and the UK’s brand-spanking new government and its corporate media mouthpieces have gifted the public a whistle-stop tour of the worst, the dullest, the whiniest little shits the party has to offer.

    Labour’s rightwing gammon-grifters couldn’t possibly contemplate that its spineless, Tory-esque policies would bite them on the arse at the election. So when some morally principled independents, Greens, and other parties pluckily nabbed some parliamentary seats, its “pity me” machine predictably went whirring into overdrive.

    Labour playing the victim

    So far, Labour politicians have shown if there’s one thing the new government is good at, it’s playing the victim.

    First, sore losers Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire took to the television media to whine about their election losses. Their interviews signalled the start of probably quite literally a collective public groan of sheer, unbridled exasperation.

    Unsurprisingly, the pair didn’t waste a moment for some deep and conscientious reflection. But why would they spare a precious second on that, when the think tank corporate lobbyist revolving door already beckons?

    Instead, it was straight to the voter-blaming. Both bristled at the ‘bullies’ bashing them for their pathetic stances on Gaza. So that would be voters trying to get answers out their prospective MPs then. In Accidental Partridge Ashworth’s most brilliant recent example, as the Canary’s Steve Topple pointed out, this meant:

    pretending to do some ninja shit in an attempt to intimidate said Muslim uncles.

    Therefore, one person on X rightly noted:

    Because, does it get any more sickeningly hypocritical than this? In the midst of a literal genocide where Israel has brutally bombed to death over 186,000 people, the Labour rightwing are the real victims, clearly. Plenty on X had words to say on this disgraceful response:

    Faux outrage

    But if you thought that some spurned former MPs would be the end of it, you’d be dead wrong.

    Cue new Home secretary Yvette Cooper crying wolf on “political intimidation”. Unsurprisingly, liberal Labour’s biggest media bootlicker the Guardian ate this up. It reported that:

    An alarming rise in candidate intimidation during the UK’s general election campaign will be addressed next week at a meeting of ministers and civil servants, the home secretary has said.

    Yvette Cooper said there had been “disgraceful scenes” in some areas in the run-up to the 4 July vote, as she announced she would chair a meeting of the defending democracy taskforce.

    Then, it was Angela Rayner’s turn to spinelessly spin the same narrative for the latest nauseating episode of the suck-up to Starmer show:

    Of course, the reality is that it’s arguably the Labour right that has ample experience in this political abuse. Cough *Labour Files* cough *Forde Report* cough:

    Aptly, journalist Jonathan Cook highlighted that Starmer’s Labour has form on smearing anyone trying to hold his party to account:

    But corporate media hacks will still likely fall all over themselves over neoliberal Labour’s fake persecution parade. That is, just as it did when Labour’s treacherous right and its press enablers ran a shocking stitch-up and sabotage of Jeremy Corbyn… oh wait:

    Meanwhile, Ashworth’s drunk on power met a titillating new game of “never have I ever”, but a poster on X called his bluff:

    Ultimately, these Labour politicians prove it: once a narcissistic political opportunist, always a narcissistic political opportunist. Independent MP candidate Faiza Shaheen laid out Labour’s rank hypocrisy in just one post:

    It’s clear that the new government’s faux outrage is designed to manufacture consent for continuing its assault on the left. One poster summed up Labour’s fragile white ego in a nutshell:

    Some suggested it also hinted that Labour might continue the Tories’ authoritarian crackdown on protesters:

    Because ultimately, that’s the thing – it’s increasingly blatant that Labour exists to serve whiteness, and the corporate capitalist and colonial forces that underpin its status quo.

    On with the show

    Maybe, just maybe, people didn’t vote for the Labour right’s best and brightest (heavy dose of sarcasm) because they’re servile Tory-lite turncunts:

    Because naturally, Labour’s defeat by pro-Palestine candidates had nothing to do with its mealy-mouthed prevarications on Gaza. Vile Islamophobia and anti-Black racism from the arrogant Starmerrhoids also had absolutely no part in it either:

    One thing’s for sure, this is all extremely predictable behaviour from Starmer’s petulant brand of Labour loyalists.

    I for one have been sharpening my tiny violin bow good and ready for Labour’s inevitable post-election melodrama meltdown for the next five years.

    Graciously, the media has started beaming it incessantly onto our screens. If the cacophony of careerists already clamouring their best victim theatrics is anything to go by, we’re in for quite the show.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Palestine Action shut down Elbit for TWO DAYS and break into another arms manufacturer’s factory

    Palestine Action have shut down arms manufacturer Elbit System’s Bristol HQ for two days running – along with damaging the factory of one of its suppliers in the process. Once again, the group has shown direct action can actually make an impact; here, disrupting the supply of arms to Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

    Palestine Action: shutting Elbit for two days

    From 6.30am on Tuesday 16 July, three activists from Palestine Action locked themselves to a vehicle blocking the only access point to the UK headquarters of Israel’s biggest weapons producer, Elbit Systems. Police have arrived at the scene and cordoned off the area:

    As of 12pm on 16 July, the cops were still scrabbling around trying to stop Palestine Action:

    Yesterday, another three activists similarly blocked the entrance, forcing the site to close:

    So, for the second day in a row, Palestine Action have shut down Elbit’s Bristol HQ at Aztec West 600, Bristol:

    They also broke inside Hydrafeed’s central premises in Milton Keynes, damaging the company who provide machinery for Elbit’s Instro Precision factory in Sandwich, Kent:

    Supplying Israel’s war machine

    Hydrafeed’s machinery is used to produce arms by Elbit’s Instro Precision factory which have had over 80 separate licenses to export weapons to Israel since 2016.

    Hydrafeed’s involvement in the production of Israeli arms was confirmed during a break in of the Instro factory by Palestine Action last month. By dismantling the inside of the machinery maker’s central premises, activists have prevented the company’s ability to provide Elbit Systems with “a rapid response for breakdowns, repairs, spares and replacement parts”.

    They have also disrupt the supply of machines to be used for arming the Gaza genocide.

    Meanwhile, according to Elbit’s CEO Bezhalel Machlis, Elbit Systems weaponry is “currently being used extensively by the Israeli military”. The Israeli weapons maker produces 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, ammunition, missiles, digital warfare and training simulators.

    During the onslaught of Gaza which the ICJ has ruled is a plausible genocide, Elbit have “ramped up production” to meet the increased demand of the Israeli military for munitions.

    Elbit Systems are the majority provider of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, as well as bullets, bombs, missiles and digital warfare.

    Palestine Action ‘will not stop’

    Over the weekend more than a hundred Palestinians were massacred by the Israeli military. On Saturday, Al-Mawasi refugee camp which was an Israeli designated safe zone was targeted by Israeli air strikes killing over 90 Palestinians. The next day Israeli missiles struck a UN school sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinians, killing 16 of them and injuring many more.

    The Bristol HQ which activists have once again shut down is owned by Somerset Council.

    In April 2024, a motion was passed by councillors calling for Somerset Council to explore all legal routes to evict Elbit before disposing of the Bristol premises. The council also received legal advice from Palestine Action’s lawyers, Public Interest Law Centre, setting out a clear route to remove Elbit as a tenant[6]. Despite this, the council continue to fail their legal and moral obligations to evict Elbit.

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said:

    Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, parties are obliged to prevent the commission of genocide and punish those responsible. When our government remains complicit in genocide and allows Israel’s Elbit Systems to operate in this country, it’s the responsibility of ordinary people to take direct action.

    Anyone who remains a partner of the Israeli weapons maker has done a serious moral and financial miscalculation as Palestine Action will break every link of Elbit’s supply chain, which involves targeting Elbit’s suppliers and of course, shutting Elbit down. We will not allow any institution to continue facilitating the bloody massacres of the Palestinian people.

    We will not stop until Elbit is shut down.

    Featured image and additional images and video via Martin Pope Photography

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel kills at least 90 Palestinians in Gaza “safe zone”

    Bodies of Palestinians who were killed in Israel’s attack on al-Mawasi are brought to a hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 13 July (Omar Ashtawy APA images)

    Israel massacred dozens of Palestinians in airstrikes in al-Mawasi, the supposed “safe zone” along the coast in southern Gaza, and in Beach refugee camp near Gaza City on Saturday.

    At least 90 Palestinians were killed and 300 injured in the attack on al-Mawasi, according to the health ministry in Gaza, and at least 20 Palestinians were killed after Israel bombed worshippers gathered for noon prayers outside the ruins of a mosque in Beach refugee camp.

    On Friday, the Israeli military killed four workers at an aid warehouse in Gaza, claiming that it had targeted Husam Mansour. Israel alleged that Mansour was a militant who worked at an aid organization to raise money for Hamas – an unsubstantiated claim similar to those made by Israel against other humanitarians in Gaza working for international charities who were killed and jailed with impunity.

    The Al-Khair Foundation, a UK-based charity, stated that Mansour was a “cornerstone” of its team in Gaza and that his death “is not just a loss to our organization but a devastating blow to the humanitarian efforts in the region.”

    The deaths of the aid workers came one day after Samantha Power, the head of the State Department agency USAID, said that Israel promised to improve safety for humanitarian workers in Gaza, where famine has taken hold as a result of Israel’s blockade.

    At least 38,345 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, though the actual tally is likely substantially higher. Thousands remain missing in the rubble or their deaths as a result of secondary mortality such as hunger, thirst and disease resulting from Israel’s military campaign are not reflected in the fatality count.

    Saturday’s deadly attacks came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to be sabotaging what may be a final push to reach a deal with Hamas that would see an exchange of captives and lead the way for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

    Hamas condemned the “horrific massacre” in densely populated al-Mawasi, the open area where Israel ordered Palestinians to move after declaring one-third of Gaza a combat zone last week.

    Israel reportedly dropped five 2,000-pound bombs in al-Mawasi, resulting in one of the deadliest attacks – if not the deadliest – since nearly 300 people were killed in a raid in Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June.

    Four Israeli captives were freed by the military in the Nuseirat raid, during which Israeli forces posed as civilians and gunned down Palestinians in the camp’s crowded market and streets. The office of the UN human rights chief said it was “profoundly shocked” by that operation in which the basic principles of the laws of war were blatantly disregarded.

    “False victory”

    Israel attempted to justify the massacre in al-Mawasi on Saturday by claiming that it targeted Muhammad Deif, the elusive head of the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, and the commander of Qassam’s Khan Younis Brigade.

    One of Israel’s most wanted figures, Deif survived several previous attempts on his life, including a 2014 attack that killed the military leader’s wife and their two young children.

    Netanyahu acknowledged during a press conference on Saturday evening that it was unclear whether Deif and the Qassam Brigades commander were killed, which Hamas denied.

    Khalil al-Hayya, deputy chair of Hamas, said in response that Netanyahu had hoped to “announce a false victory” and said that the blood of Deif is no more precious than that of the youngest Palestinian child.

    Al-Hayya suggested that Israel was killing more people in Gaza to undermine negotiations with Hamas and that Netanyahu was grasping for an illusion of victory before his address to US Congress later this month.

    Earlier in the day, following the al-Mawasi attack, Hamas said that this was “not the first time the occupation has claimed to target Palestinian leaders, and later it is proven to be a lie.”

    “These false claims are merely a cover-up for the scale of the horrific massacre,” the resistance group added in a statement published on Telegram.

    “Justification always the same”

    Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observed that “the justification is always the same: ‘targeting Palestinian militants.’”

    Hamdah Salhut, an Al Jazeera correspondent, said that the Israeli military repeatedly employs such claims, “saying civilians are being used as ‘human shields’ for Hamas figures, using that as justification for killing dozens of civilians.”

    Assal Rad, an academic who closely observes the Western media’s framing of the genocide in Gaza, said that the Israeli justification is used by media outlets to treat the massacre of civilians in a “safe zone” as “an afterthought in their headlines,” if they are even mentioned at all:

    Amjad al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, told Al Jazeera that the al-Mawasi massacre was “the message from Israel to the world that again and again and again they are targeting Palestinian civilians wherever they are.”

    “Massive attack on the north”

    Following the massacre in al-Mawasi, the UN human rights office condemned Israel’s continued use of “weapons with area effects in populated areas of Gaza.”

    A statement from the office noted that the deadly strikes on Saturday came “right after another massive attack on the north, which lasted for a week, resulting in further destruction and casualties.”

    Israel laid waste to Shujaiya, on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City, in a two-week raid during which it claimed to have killed a Hamas battalion deputy chief and commander in the area and uncovered a command center in a facility belonging to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.

    Following the military’s withdrawal, residents returned to find that troops had destroyed the majority of buildings in the area, including residences, schools and medical clinics.

    A spokesperson for the civil defense in Gaza said that the bodies of more than 60 people had been recovered in Shujaiya, and that many more were missing under the rubble of destroyed homes.

    Dozens of people were also killed in Tal al-Hawa in southern Gaza City, the civil defense spokesperson said on Thursday.

    On Wednesday, Israel once again ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate. Many Palestinians vowed to stay in Gaza City, no matter the cost.

    Itay Epshtain, an international law expert, said that “this is not a permissible evacuation but an act of forcible transfer” that “shows the open-ended nature of hostilities in Gaza.” Epshtain noted that “Israel appears interested as ever in a protracted conflict.”

    The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that its field workers “are investigating reports that the Israeli army forces committed extrajudicial killings and unlawful executions of numerous residents, the majority of whom were women” during its incursion into areas of western Gaza City between Monday and Friday.

    Quadcopters fired on rescue workers

    The UN office said that the strikes on al-Mawasi on Saturday allegedly hit tents housing displaced people, a food kitchen and a desalination plant where people had gathered to collect water, “leading to tens of fatalities.”

    Israeli military “quadcopters reportedly targeted emergency rescue workers, killing at least one civil defense worker and injuring several others,” the human rights office added.

    The UN office once again pointed to “a pattern of willful violation of the disregard of [international humanitarian law] principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution” and “a rampant disregard for the safety of civilians.”

    Even if Palestinians belonging to armed groups were present among civilians, “this would not remove [the Israeli military’s] obligations” to comply with the fundamental principles of the laws of war, the UN office said.

    Video of the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack in al-Mawasi shows injured and dead people who appear to be civilians, including someone wearing a civil defense vest, lying in the streets as a black plume of smoke rises from an area adjacent to a tent encampment:

    Another video shows people attempting to dig victims out of a massive crater with their bare hands. A man’s left arm and shoulder is seen protruding from the sandy soil as a child says, “that’s my father, has he been martyred?”

    A witness says in the same video that “all of Gaza is wanted” by the occupation.

    The man adds that there was a fire belt – a series of heavy bombs dropped in the same place – without warning on the tent encampment. When rescuers arrived, F-16 jets “bombed the paramedics and civil defense team,” he says.

    Amjad al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, told Al Jazeera that the al-Mawasi massacre was “the message from Israel to the world that again and again and again they are targeting Palestinian civilians wherever they are.”

    “Massive attack on the north”

    Following the massacre in al-Mawasi, the UN human rights office condemned Israel’s continued use of “weapons with area effects in populated areas of Gaza.”

    A statement from the office noted that the deadly strikes on Saturday came “right after another massive attack on the north, which lasted for a week, resulting in further destruction and casualties.”

    Israel laid waste to Shujaiya, on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City, in a two-week raid during which it claimed to have killed a Hamas battalion deputy chief and commander in the area and uncovered a command center in a facility belonging to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.

    Following the military’s withdrawal, residents returned to find that troops had destroyed the majority of buildings in the area, including residences, schools and medical clinics.

    A spokesperson for the civil defense in Gaza said that the bodies of more than 60 people had been recovered in Shujaiya, and that many more were missing under the rubble of destroyed homes.

    Dozens of people were also killed in Tal al-Hawa in southern Gaza City, the civil defense spokesperson said on Thursday.

    On Wednesday, Israel once again ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate. Many Palestinians vowed to stay in Gaza City, no matter the cost.

    Itay Epshtain, an international law expert, said that “this is not a permissible evacuation but an act of forcible transfer” that “shows the open-ended nature of hostilities in Gaza.” Epshtain noted that “Israel appears interested as ever in a protracted conflict.”

    The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that its field workers “are investigating reports that the Israeli army forces committed extrajudicial killings and unlawful executions of numerous residents, the majority of whom were women” during its incursion into areas of western Gaza City between Monday and Friday.

    Quadcopters fired on rescue workers

    The UN office said that the strikes on al-Mawasi on Saturday allegedly hit tents housing displaced people, a food kitchen and a desalination plant where people had gathered to collect water, “leading to tens of fatalities.”

    Israeli military “quadcopters reportedly targeted emergency rescue workers, killing at least one civil defense worker and injuring several others,” the human rights office added.

    The UN office once again pointed to “a pattern of willful violation of the disregard of [international humanitarian law] principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution” and “a rampant disregard for the safety of civilians.”

    Even if Palestinians belonging to armed groups were present among civilians, “this would not remove [the Israeli military’s] obligations” to comply with the fundamental principles of the laws of war, the UN office said.

    Video of the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack in al-Mawasi shows injured and dead people who appear to be civilians, including someone wearing a civil defense vest, lying in the streets as a black plume of smoke rises from an area adjacent to a tent encampment:

    Another video shows people attempting to dig victims out of a massive crater with their bare hands. A man’s left arm and shoulder is seen protruding from the sandy soil as a child says, “that’s my father, has he been martyred?”

    A witness says in the same video that “all of Gaza is wanted” by the occupation.

    The man adds that there was a fire belt – a series of heavy bombs dropped in the same place – without warning on the tent encampment. When rescuers arrived, F-16 jets “bombed the paramedics and civil defense team,” he says.

    The head of the World Health Organization said that Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, which received 134 people severely injured in the al-Mawasi attack, “is extremely overwhelmed by the influx of patients.”

    Netanyahu stalls negotiations

    After the deadly attack in al-Mawasi, Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British Palestinian surgeon who was working in Gaza during the first weeks of the genocide, said that “Israel committed this massacre to foil the ceasefire negotiations.”

    Egypt officials told Reuters on Saturday that the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel “have been halted after three days of intense negotiations failed to produce a viable outcome … blaming Israel for lacking a genuine intent to reach an agreement.”

    Earlier in the week, an unnamed “former senior Egyptian official with knowledge of the negotiations” told The Washington Post that “Netanyahu does not want peace. That is all.”

    The official added that Netanyahu “will find excuses … to prolong this war” until the US elections, in which Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump, who was lightly injured after gunshots rang out during a campaign event on Saturday, may be voted into a second term.

    Whatever Netanyahu’s motivation, Israeli defense officials have told the Haaretz newspaper that the prime minister has “repeatedly torpedoed” progress towards a deal with Hamas to free the remaining captives held in Gaza since 7 October.

    The officials said that “in his attempt to derail negotiations, Netanyahu relied on classified intelligence and manipulated the sensitive information.”

    In recent days, an unnamed senior official told Hebrew-language media that Netanyahu’s new demand to build “a mechanism to prevent the movement of armed operatives” within Gaza threatened to derail a deal.

    “This is the moment of truth for the hostages,” the official told Channel 12 news. “We can reach an agreement within two weeks and bring the hostages home.”

    But Netanyahu’s new demand “will stall the talks for weeks and then there may not be anyone to bring home,” the official said.

    US resumes weapons shipments

    While US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he was “determined to get this deal done and bring an end to this war, which should end now,” his national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that “there’s still miles to go before we close, if we are able to close” on an agreement.

    With the US putting no real pressure on Israel, and continuing to supply weapons, more massacres of Palestinians in Gaza are all but guaranteed.

    The US said in recent days that it will resume the shipments of 500-pound bombs to Israel after pausing a transfer of those weapons and 2,000-pound munitions in May to deter a major Israeli offensive in Rafah, southern Gaza, which went ahead anyway.

    The Washington-based human rights watchdog DAWN said that the “partial lifting of the one solitary pause on munitions to the [Israeli military] in the face of overwhelming evidence of war crimes is a criminal offense under international law.”

    The group’s advocacy director called on the International Criminal Court to investigate US officials for their complicity in “genocidal atrocities in Gaza.”

    Karim Khan, International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, announced in May that he was pursuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leaders Muhammad Deif, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh.

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Israel kills at least 90 Palestinians in Gaza “safe zone” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Has “Flattened” UNRWA HQ in Gaza in “Blatant” War Crime, Agency Says

    After months of successive attacks on humanitarian aid facilities, Israeli forces have now “completely destroyed” the headquarters of the primary aid group for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the agency reports. Israeli forces attacked the facility as they carried out their horrific raid of Gaza City last week, leaving nothing but rubble in its place. The building was one of many operated by…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel Continues to Evade Accountability After Mawasi Massacre, Says Analyst

    The Israeli military carried out one of its deadliest attacks in weeks when it bombed al-Mawasi in Khan Younis — designated as a “safe zone” — killing at least 90 Palestinians and injuring hundreds more on Saturday. Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, but the group denied that Deif had been hit. Israel also struck a makeshift mosque during noon prayer in the Shati…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The MSM just buried news of a protest over Gaza at the Wimbledon men’s final

    Fossil Free London activists staged a demonstration outside the Wimbledon men’s finals, in protest of its sponsorship by climate crisis-catalyst and Israel genocide-enabling Barclays. You’d be forgiven for not knowing this, as the corporate media appears to have ignored the actions altogether.

    Wimbledon: ‘block for Palestine’

    Activists, dressed in tennis whites, poured “oil” (molasses) on themselves and chanted as they called on Wimbledon to drop Barclays as a sponsor due to its fossil fuel and Israeli defence company ties.

    They also ‘photobombed’ major celebrities entering the Wimbledon match with a ‘block for Palestine’ sign:

    Wimbledon Barclays

    Despite Barclays publishing a new energy policy at the start of this year that it hailed as a step towards a “science-based” approach towards “financing the transition”, Barclays continues to finance fossil fuel companies such as Shell. In 2023 alone, the hottest year ever recorded, Barclays provided $24.221 billion of financing to fossil fuel companies.

    Barclays: a stain on sport

    A report released in April also found that Barclays provides over £6.1 billion in loans and underwriting to arms and military technology companies that are involved in Israeli operations in Palestine. This includes holding £2.7m in Elbit Systems, which supplies the Israeli military with armoured drones, munitions, and artillery weapons used in its attacks in Gaza.

    Pressure is building on Barclays and those institutions like Wimbledon with links to the bank, after its multi-year sponsorship deal with Latitude, Download, and Isle of Wight festivals was suspended following protests from bands and fans.

    Joanna Warrington, spokesperson for Fossil Free London, said of Wimbledon:

    Barclays is a shameful stain on Wimbledon’s reputation. Treasured sporting events should not be sponsored by the billions this oily bank makes funding bombs and big oil. Clean up your image and drop Barclays, Wimbledon, or you’ll be hung out to dry alongside them.

    Featured image and additional images via Fossil Free London

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Palestinian children cheer on Spain as Israel kills footballers while UEFA and FIFA stand idly by

    As football fans awaited the Euros final this weekend, Israel continued massacring Palestinians. Among them, a Gazan football legend – just as the UK’s new foreign secretary visited the genocidal state.

    Whilst England may have lost 2-1 in the final, children in Gaza were cheering for Spain:

    In May, Spain announced it would formally recognise the Palestinian state – alongside Ireland and Norway. So of course, the children in Gaza were cheering for Spain as a thank you for their ‘unrivalled support’:

    Israel’s targeting of innocent people

    According to the Guardian, only last week an Israeli airstrike killed at least 30 people, including children who were playing football in the courtyard of al-Awda school. This was not the first time the Israeli regime have murdered Palestinian children whilst playing the sport they love. Similar reports emerged in April and as far back as 2014 – when four boys were killed playing football on the beach.

    Only today, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli forces had struck a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp – killing at least 17 people.

    All of this shows a pattern which speaks to Israel’s targeting and slaughter of innocent people – especially children:

    Israel has murdered more than 300 athletes in Gaza since 7 October – many of whom were children and young people. ‘

    These included Nazir al-Nashnash, a 20-year-old university student who played for Bureij Services Football Club, Hani Al-Masdar, former footballer and manager of the Palestinian Olympic team, and Hanan Wael Al-Hawajri, a ‘promising young football player’ who looked to be no older than ten from the photos on Palestine Chronicle. 

    Other deaths include athletes from Palestinian national teams of many different sports, including athletics, basketball, bodybuilding, football, Judo, karate, table tennis, volleyball, and wrestling.

    Yesterday’s attack on the refugee camp killed Shadi Abu Al-Arraj. He was a goalkeeper for Khan Younis Youth Club and reportedly, one of the best goalkeepers in Gaza:

    Football pitches or mass graves?

    Meanwhile, Israel has destroyed all of Palestine’s professional football stadiums and locals have been forced to turn smaller facilities into refugee camps, field hospitals, and even mass graves.

    Back in May, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) – footballs international governing body – ordered an urgent legal evaluation of a proposal by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) to suspend Israel over their invasion of Gaza.

    UEFA however, have still allowed Israel to compete in the qualifiers for this years Euro’s, as recently as March:

    Interestingly, this request for sanctions against the Israel Football Association comes two years after FIFA made the decision to suspect Russia from all international competitions over their invasion of Ukraine.

    FIFA banned Russia from all international competitions on 28 February 2022. This was just four days after the invasion of Ukraine. So why, over nine months after Israel started their offensive on Gaza are its players and their team still allowed to compete in international football competitions? Why have FIFA or UEFA not taken a stand like they did with Russia?

    Jibril Rajoub, PFA President said:

    How much more must the Palestinian football family suffer for FIFA to act with the same urgency and severity as it did in other cases? Does FIFA consider some wars to be more important than others and some victims to be more significant?

    Double standards

    Similarly, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) – of which Israel is a member despite not being in Europe – has refused to condemn Israel. It has been accused of applying double standards because of its reaction to Russia invading Ukraine.

    UEFA has suspended most Russian teams from its competitions since February 2022. However, UEFA general secretary Theodore Theodoridis refused to give Israeli teams the same treatment. He stated that they were “two completely different situations”. He also stated that the Hamas attacks of 7 October absolved Israel of responsibility for its actions in Gaza.

    Double standards in football go way back. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, FIFA and UEFA both prohibited Crimean football clubs from playing in the Russian league. It is worth noting that Russia has violated both FIFA and UEFA standards. Reports now suggest that the Russian Football pyramid now includes Crimean Clubs.

    According to Al Jazeera:

    The fact that FIFA has recognised the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) league since 1998, and allows Palestinian clubs in Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) to play as part of FIFA implies that it recognises these areas as Palestinian territory.

    The PFA has, however, not consented to Israeli teams playing on its territory. It must therefore be assumed that FIFA is either in clear breach of its statutes, or that it recognises Israeli settlements as part of Israel’s territory against international consensus – a point that Tokyo Sexwale must clarify.

    The power of football

    Throughout history, football has been a powerful way of uniting people. From the Christmas Truce in WWI to helping Yemeni’s cope with the ongoing civil war:

    In a tent and with warplanes flying overhead, Palestinians were able to find a moment of joy in Spain’s triumph:

    I am a huge football fan. But personally, I’m glad the children of Palestine may have had even a few moments of joy from England’s loss. They need it far more than we do.

    Feature image via Abubaker Abed and Leyla Hamed/ X

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israel delays negotiations with new Gaza massacres


    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Survivors Describe Horror as Israel Massacres 90 Palestinians in “Safe Zone”

    In a crater in the ground almost larger than a schoolyard, a group of young men dig through the sand and pull out the bodies. “His head is there! His head is there!” someone yells. A man emerges from the hole, carrying a child. “Who knows who this child is? Who knows his family? Where are his parents?” he calls out. Behind him are dead bodies and severed limbs scattered across the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liberals Create Yet another “Support Israel’s Crimes” Position


    A genocidal Jewish supremacist political culture rewards, well, a genocidal Jewish supremacist. That explains Anthony Housefather’s recent appointment as Special Adviser on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism.

    On Friday Justin Trudeau rewarded his most openly hostile caucus member with the newly created position. This gives Housefather a bigger platform to promote Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

    A longstanding advocate of apartheid, Housefather has spent the past nine months working assiduously to expand Canadian assistance to Israel’s bloodletting, which has led to 50,000 killed, 100,000 injured and the destruction of most buildings, water sources and agricultural land in Gaza.

    Housefather has repeatedly smeared protesters as antisemitic and clamoured for the violent suppression of students protesting Israel’s genocide. In late November, Housefather made a solidarity trip to Israel where he met former Israeli military leaders and other officials. Previously Housefather met a Knesset member from Itamar Ben Gvir’s far right party Simcha Rothman and boasted about the Trudeau government’s voting record at the United Nations being more anti-Palestinian than Stephen Harper’s.

    After Canada voted with most of the world for a ceasefire at the United Nations in December, Housefather repeatedly condemned his own government to the media. A month earlier, the Montréal MP also criticized Trudeau for his statement opposing the killing of babies. At the time CBC’s At Issue panel reported that Liberal MPs (presumably Housefather) had privately threatened to quit the party if Trudeau called for a ceasefire.

    After a March 18 parliamentary vote that represented a small step towards lessening Canada’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, Housefather’s threat was formalized. In a rare form of public dissent, Housefather said he was considering quitting the Liberal caucus because of the vote and his party’s MPs applauding NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson who introduced the motion. He created a media spectacle for a week, concluding it with a column in the National Post about being a proud “Zionist”.

    If another MP attempted a similar move on most any other issue they would have been expelled from the Liberal caucus. Instead, the rogue genocidal Jewish supremacist is rewarded.

    At the end of January, Housefather was made Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board and then parlayed his threat to leave the party over his “hurt” feelings into the appointment as Special Envoy to Promote Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

    Housefather’s appointment further confirms what I argued in a 2016 article that led to efforts to cancel my ability to speak publicly. I wrote, “‘Anti-Semitism’ may be the most abused term in Canada today. Almost entirely divorced from its dictionary definition — “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews” — it is now primarily invoked to uphold Jewish and white privilege… Without an intervention of some sort, the Jewish community risks having future dictionaries defining “antisemitism” as “a movement for justice and equality.”

    Since that time the antisemitism apparatus has grown significantly.

    As Special Adviser on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, Housefather will work with Trudeau’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism Deborah Lyons (who hosted a pizza party for Canadians fighting in Israeli military while ambassador). They’ll seek to enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s anti Palestinian definition of antisemitism, which the Liberals adopted and have made all Canadian Heritage grantees adhere to. They’ll work with the publicly funded Holocaust museums and monuments, which use Nazi crimes to enable Israel’s holocaust in Gaza today.

    They’ll probably also coordinate with the University of Ottawa’s Special Advisor on Antisemitism and a host of other similar new ventures, such as Canadian Women Against Antisemitism, campaigning in support of Israel’s horrors in Gaza.

    History will not judge the antisemitism industry kindly. Claiming oppression to justify apartheid and genocide is odious and honest people know it.

  • Image credit: Al Jazeera.
    • The post Liberals Create Yet another “Support Israel’s Crimes” Position first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel targets Palestinians from land and air in West Bank

    Mourners carry the bodies of four Palestinians killed by an Israeli airstrike late Tuesday during their funeral in the West Bank refugee camp of Nur Shams, near Tulkarm, Wednesday, 3 July (Mohammed Nasser APA images)

    At any other time in Palestinian history, the West Bank’s resistance to Israel’s lethal military raids and colonial encroachments would earn the title of a third intifada.

    Since 7 October, Israel’s military has intensified its raids into occupied West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps. These military operations, which often involve special units and an array of armored vehicles and bulldozers, have wrought widespread devastation, severely damaging electricity networks, water and sewage infrastructure, uprooting roads and destroying homes.

    In the West Bank, Israel has been killing Palestinians by various means.

    Israeli forces shoot Palestinians at protests, during military incursions or even by carrying out extrajudicial executions.

    Now, even aerial attacks in the occupied West Bank is not an unusual occurrence, after the practice was dormant since the second intifada until last summer. Since 7 October, Israel has conducted dozens of airstrikes in the occupied West Bank, killing at least 86 Palestinians, including 14 children, according to records kept by UN monitoring group OCHA.

    Armed Palestinian cells have expanded and refined their tactics to resist and confront Israel’s military raids, particularly in northern cities and refugee camps. One such tactic has been the wider use of explosive devices planted within roads where Israeli armored vehicles pass. Palestinians remotely detonate the explosive devices, killing and injuring a number of Israeli soldiers in recent months.

    Refined resistance

    In under one week, between the end of June and the beginning of July, roadside explosives killed two members of Israel’s army – a sniper team commander who was killed in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on 27 June, and a combat driver who was killed in another explosion in the Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm on 1 July.

    Under the guise of wanting to uproot explosive devices from roads, Israeli bulldozers ravage through the streets of cities and refugee camps “to shave the upper layer of asphalt on the roads,” as The Times of Israel put it.

    This has wreaked havoc on Palestinian communities, commercial stores and civic infrastructure in those areas.

    During a 15-hour Israeli military raid in Nur Shams refugee camp on 9 July, bulldozers destroyed roads in and around the camp, damaging water, electricity and internet infrastructure, OCHA reported, in addition to the walls of homes and commercial stores.

    The Israeli army claimed that the discovered explosive devices were “targeted toward civilians and Israeli security forces.”

    Armed resistance has seemingly adapted to the Israeli army’s methods to combat them and inflict punishment on the entire community in the process. The Times of Israel said the explosive that killed the sniper commander in the Jenin refugee camp was a “100-kilogram” device and may have been placed 1.5 meters underground.

    The device that killed the combat driver in the Nur Shams refugee camp also breached his vehicle’s IED protection, severely damaging it and flipping it upside down, suggesting the explosive device was particularly large and powerful.

    “All of the explosive devices detonated against Israeli targets in the West Bank over the past year were made of improvised homemade materials, and some were very high quality,” The Times of Israel reported.

    The increasingly sophisticated and organized resistance tactics are concerning the Israeli army in the West Bank as it invests in a larger effort to combat it, including an intelligence unit aimed at detecting them.

    Since the beginning of the year, the Israeli army dismantled production labs for these explosives, as well as discovered and neutralized planted devices, the Israeli newspaper reported, figures that likely originate with the Israeli military. Around 1,000 IEDs targeted Israeli troops.

    Since 7 October and through 8 July, 14 Israelis, including nine soldiers and five settlers, have been killed in the occupied West Bank, OCHA said.

    Deadly raids

    Children bear the brunt of Israel’s lethal military incursions into West Bank towns, cities and refugee camps.

    An atmosphere of constant impunity demonstrates Israeli soldiers’ “contempt for Palestinian children’s lives,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at Defense for Children International – Palestine.

    On Thursday, as Israeli forces withdrew from nearby Palestinian villages, they passed by the entrance of Meithalun, a town in the Jenin area. Palestinians threw stones at the invading Israeli military vehicles.

    One kid who allegedly threw stones at Israeli forces near the entrance of Meithalun was fatally shot by an occupation soldier.

    An Israeli soldier in a heavily armored vehicle shot 14-year-old Ali Hasan Ali Rabaya from a close distance of 20 to 40 meters, striking him under the armpit.

    Ali managed to run for about three meters before collapsing to the ground.

    “Israeli forces continued firing in Ali’s direction, striking at least five other Palestinian children,” DCIP reported.

    Israeli military fire continued for about five minutes, preventing any nearby Palestinians from approaching Ali to provide medical care or transport him. It was only when Israeli military vehicles withdrew from the area that Ali was transferred to a nearby hospital by private car, where he was pronounced dead.

    Meanwhile, Israeli forces killed 14-year-old Ghassan Gharib Zahran while he played with two friends at the entrance of the Palestinian village of Deir Abu Mashal, west of Ramallah.

    Three Israeli soldiers traveling in a vehicle nearby opened fire on the kids from a distance of 80 to 100 meters, striking Ghassan in his back, DCIP said.

    “A group of Israeli settlers gathered after Israeli soldiers shot Ghassan and began throwing stones at Palestinian village residents attempting to reach him,” DCIP said.

    “Israeli forces opened fire on the Palestinian residents to prevent them from reaching the child, who remained lying on the ground bleeding for 15 to 20 minutes.”

    “Unlawful killings of Palestinian children have become the norm as Israeli forces become increasingly empowered to use intentional lethal force in situations that are not justified,” said Abu Eqtaish.

    “In short, these are war crimes with no consequence.”

    Israeli forces and settlers have killed 57 Palestinian children since the beginning of the year, including two US citizens, according to documentation by DCIP.

    More than 550 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 536 by Israeli forces, according to OCHA.

    Israeli settlers have killed at least 11 Palestinians, and another six were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.

    Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 137 were children.

    At least 246 of those killings have happened since the beginning of 2024, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Over 700 Palestinians, including 150 children, were injured.

    Israeli forces and settlers have injured over 5,500 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, at least 800 of them children. One third of all injuries were by live ammunition.

    • Article first published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Israel targets Palestinians from land and air in West Bank first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sanders Makes Bid to Block Biden’s New $18 Billion Arms Sale to Israel

    As the Biden administration pushes Congress to approve an additional $18 billion arms sale to Israel even as it wages what much of the international community considers a genocidal war against the people of Gaza, Palestine defenders on Friday urged U.S. senators to support an effort by Sen. Bernie Sanders to block weapons transfers to the key Middle Eastern ally. The Biden administration is…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Popcorn, Pizza and the Theater of Debate

    As the evening of June 27, 2024 approached, I wondered if the debate was really going to happen. For months now, we’d been seeing videos of President Joe Biden spacing out, drifting off into a fog at official events. At the G7, he’d wandered off and Italian PM Meloni had to gently guide him back; that was only two weeks before this debate, and the video of it went viral. Donald Trump would demolish him, some predicted, a spectacle Democratic Party power brokers could not allow; they’d cancel the debate with some face-saving excuse, and gracefully usher Biden off into retirement. His replacement would be another apologist for Palestinian mass-slaughter, somebody just as vicious as Genocide Joe, but clear-headed.

    If the debate did actually take place, it would be an historical event. My friends and I wanted to watch it together with an audience and see the responses of people around us. The day came, and we headed off to the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.

    People were lining up at the snack bar for popcorn and drinks as we went in to take our seats. Within minutes two CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, appeared on the screen and explained the format. There was no studio audience, they told us. So in effect, we and the whole world in dozens of countries around the globe had virtual ringside seats to this event, now being broadcast live.

    Seconds later candidates President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appeared on the screen in front of us. Okay, so it was really happening.

    Biden took the first question, one about the economy. He started off well, far better than I had ever expected.. I was impressed at how he could rattle off (alleged) facts, figures, and policies at such amazing speed that I could barely follow.

    Wow! I thought to myself. He’s really cranking that stuff out!

    Another round of questions. A moderator had asked Trump about the national debt, and after his response, turned to Biden.

    “He (Trump) had the largest national debt of any president’s four-year period,” Biden said, and reminded us of Trump’s tax cut which “benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.”

    Great! I thought, but he’d already had nearly four years without doing much about it. Well, that’s Biden. Promises, promises. He went on, promising to correct the tax inequalities and do “all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, . . . strengthen our healthcare system. . .”

    There he seemed to skip a beat, then picked up again. “With dealing with everything we have to do with –.” Having gotten that far, he froze up went silent.

    He stood there, zombie-like, a vertical cadaver; he seemed to be struggling, agonizing to come back to the studio, back to the audience. Seconds ticked by, seeming like hours.

    “See there!” came a voice from the audience. It was a guy sitting in the row in front of me, off to the right. “He’s zoning out!” Some others were also saying, “Biden’s lost it!”

    Till then he’d been soaring through the sky as though on automatic pilot — but woops, a device made by Boeing, perhaps. Now he was stalling out. This lasted only about two or three seconds, but long enough for us in the theater — along with the rest of the worldwide audience — to see and know that the guy who nominally runs the U.S. empire might be non compos mentis. It was an eternal moment that few of us will ever forget.

    It got even worse as he partially reconnected and gasped out the words:

    “We finally beat Medicare!”

    “Thank you, President Biden,” said the moderator, and turned to Trump who gleefully pounced on Biden’s misspoken words, saying:

    “Well, he’s right! He did beat Medicaid. He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare.”

    Poor Biden had pulled himself out of a nosedive, only to crash into a mountainside.

    This was only about ten minutes into the event. There was almost another hour and a half yet to go. Biden did not attempt to correct his “beat Medicare” slip; whether he was even aware of having said it is not certain. He seemed to come out of it and went on for the rest of the debate as though nothing strange had happened, though he continued to have a slightly cadaver-like appearance. Nevertheless, at times he did quite well, and drew occasional loud applause from about a third of the New Parkway audience.

    I’m guessing that most of the people here were Democrats, though not necessarily Biden supporters. It isn’t only Biden’s senility which causes people to consider him unfit; there was also his role in the Iraq invasion, and now his policy of supplying arms to the Israelis, which has earned him the epithet “Genocide Joe.” (Trump promises to be even worse on that issue. “Let [Israel] finish the job,” he said.)

    Biden’s not the first president who became senile, Ronald Reagan did too, but that didn’t seem to disturb anyone. Perhaps Journalist Caitlin Johnstone was right when she said: “A dementia patient can be president because it doesn’t matter who the president is.” The government is run by unelected empire managers who are chosen undemocratically by the power elite. “Biden is just the official face on the operation,” she wrote. Well it sure does look that way, though I do think there have been some exceptional presidents who took the reins of power into their hands — JFK for one, and we saw what happened to him when he refused to carry out the wishes of the power elite.

    The debate went on. Both Biden and Trump both scored some points, though not many. Mostly they were regurgitating stuff we’ve been hearing for years. Biden boasted his achievements, and Trump told us what a great job he did and is going to do again after he’s elected. “I’m going to make America great again!”

    Among the New Parkway audience, nobody cheered for Donald Trump, or booed him either. To the contrary, Trump’s preposterous lies occasionally drew explosions of laughter.

    This non-support for Trump was to be expected since Oakland, and the San Francisco Bay Area in general, is generally progressive. We can assume that in other parts of the country, there would’ve been many screen-viewing gatherings where Donald Trump was being applauded as hero of the evening.

    Trump’s default talking point was to hammer on immigrants, and accuse Joe Biden of letting them in. “He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country,” Trump asserted. He repeated that several times in the course of this debate.

    I wonder how anybody can forget that except for Native Americans we’re all immigrants in this country. But when Trump says “immigrants,” it sounds like he’s really using that as a code word meaning non-white.

    Nevertheless, Biden has continued some of Trump’s policies that abuse immigrants. And this spring Biden supported a Border Act which he said would be “the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.” When Republicans come up with some odious thing that seems to gain them popularity, Biden seems all too ready to borrow it.

    For about an hour and a half, they each got their turns, blasting away at each other, trading insults. Biden called Trump a criminal, “The only person on this stage that is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now!” Biden said. Trump countered with reminding Biden of the criminal activities of his son Hunter Biden, and of Joe Biden’s role in supporting his son’s Burisma affair.

    “You have the morals of an alley cat!” Biden said, mentioning Trump’s affair with a porn star. Throughout the event the called each other liars and other names. “You are a child,” Biden declared. He also called Trump a “whiner,” and even hinted that Trump was too fat.

    People in the audience around me were munching popcorn and sipping soft drinks, beer and wine. My friends and I ordered a pizza.

    Some of this was funny. Some was not. On the topic of the Middle East, Trump used ‘Palestinian’ as a pejorative, and said, “He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”

    “I’ve never heard so much foolishness!” Biden shot back.

    And that was foolishness. After all, Joe Biden has been supporting the Israeli genocide with weapons and diplomatic cover. We need to give discredit where discredit is due.

    Regarding Gaza Biden said:

    “Hamas cannot be allowed to be continued. We continue to send our experts and our intelligence people to how they can get Hamas like we did Bin Laden.”

    Was Biden referring to our 20-year-long adventure in Afghanistan? The empire lost that war, and the Taliban is back in charge. Or maybe he meant that the U.S. and Israel working together can achieve anything they set out to do and all will turn out well? In reality Israel is now in the ninth month of its war on a rag-tag militia, and though it has massacred some 40,000 civilians, it doesn’t seem to be winning. Does Biden know that? Haaretz is available in English, but maybe he doesn’t read it.

    Biden didn’t really explain exactly what he meant, but further on he told us:

    “We are the most admired country in the world. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing beyond our capacity. We have the finest military in the history of the world.

    Nobody cheered. Nobody laughed either.

    “We’re the strongest country in the world,” he reiterated a few minutes later.

    Really? Looking at declining U.S. fortunes in the forever-wars and proxy-wars — eastern Europe, the Middle East, and above all in Palestine — we gotta wonder if those glory days aren’t about over.

    “We’re a country in the world who keeps our word and everybody trusts us.” Biden went on. “. . . Right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world.”

    Was Biden debating Trump? — or was he fending off some ghostly voices of doom?

    Our pizza arrived. But what were we watching? — an end-of-empire drama? We were sitting in a movie theater, but this was not a movie. It was history being played out, presented live, on the screen in front of us.

    For these 90 minutes, Biden continued on at full speed except for that one blackout. Some of what he said was a bit scrambled and out of sequence, but in general I felt he did much, much better than I had ever expected, though I do hope they’ll revoke his driver’s license.

    The debate ended, and the moderator announced, “Stay with us because we have full analysis of this debate.”

    A panel of pundits came up on the screen, and immediately they laid into Biden’s performance, mercilessly ripping the poor guy to shreds. Their evaluation was so instantaneous, so unanimous, I was totally caught by surprise. I could hardy believe what I was hearing. Was the pundits’ response pre-planned? My first thought was to suspect that Biden had stumbled into an ambush. Although Biden had called for this debate, it was strange that his Democratic Party handlers had let him go through with it. Maybe they’d decided this was the only way they could get rid of their candidate who was unlikely to win the upcoming election.

    I almost felt sorry for Joe Biden — even though he’s not some kindly old gentleman who deserves a lot of sympathy. “Don’t feel sorry for him,” a friend chided me. “He’ll be remembered as ‘the genocide president,’ and not only that, he makes elderly people look incompetent.”

    • Virginia Browning and Steve Gilmartin contributed to this article

    The post Popcorn, Pizza and the Theater of Debate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Planned to Re-Anchor Gaza Pier One Last Time — And Even That Failed

    As the U.S. prepares to permanently wind down use of its embarrassingly inept military pier effort in Gaza, the Pentagon has announced that it has once again failed to connect the pier this week as promised because of weather-related issues, potentially bringing a fitting end to the pier effort that was nothing short of disastrous for the two months since it was connected. U.S.

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Entire Families Were Killed During Israel’s Attack on Gaza City

    Gaza’s Civil Defense reported Friday that the Israel Defense Forces left the bodies of at least 60 Palestinians in their wake after withdrawing from Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, where victims of the IDF’s recent onslaught were found in rubble, on streets, and “burned inside their homes.” Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Civil Defense in Gaza, told the Associated Press that “entire…

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  • Biden Said He’s Not Sending Israel 2,000-Pound Bombs. He’s Sent 14,000 of Them.

    In his much-anticipated press conference on Thursday, President Joe Biden claimed that he isn’t providing Israel with the 2,000-pound bombs that Israeli forces are using to kill Palestinians in Gaza — a statement that is patently untrue. Just since October, Biden has sent over 10,000 of these highly destructive bombs to be used in Israel’s assault — raising questions about whether this was…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.