Suaad was born under a nylon tent in Gaza, surrounded by the smell of smoke still rising from destroyed houses, in the arms of a mother exhausted by displacement, hunger, and fear – all manifested by Israel.
The streets of Khan Yunis were crowded with poor people fleeing death, and death was not far away.
Suaad came into life at a moment when there was no life. There was no hospital, no nurse, no nursery. Only a trembling hand bringing her into the light, and a faint cry barely audible amid the sounds of aircraft.
She was born from the womb of a mother exhausted by the bombing, who laid her newborn on a worn blanket and then gave up her soul.
Her mother was in her last month of pregnancy, exhausted from hunger and fatigue, when the bombing struck the family’s tents. The mother died instantly, but the field medical team, with its limited resources, managed to deliver the baby alive.
Suaad did not live to see her tenth hour.
She was never breastfed, never held, never heard her mother’s voice calling her, and never saw anything but the grey, dusty sky.
In the evening, death came again.
The same place, the same tent, was bombed again.
Like her mother, Suaad passed away without knowing why she was born or why she died so quickly.
Suaad never opened her eyes to the world, perhaps because God spared her from seeing it.
Not a number, but a complete story
Suaad’s date of birth is not officially known. She was not registered at any hospital or government office.
She left as she came: without documents, without identity, without clothes.
But despite her short life, she became a symbol of the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip.
Elsewhere in the world, the birth of a child is celebrated with balloons, songs, and cake, but in Gaza, birth may come amid airstrikes, death is faster than milk, and the shroud is closer than the cradle.
Suaad was not just a name on a piece of paper, but a soul that tried to live despite everything.
Gaza tried to give her a moment of life… but the bombing was faster than all attempts.
What remains is her name, a picture of her torn tent, and a very short story of a life that was not meant to be told.
A greater tragedy in Gaza
Since the start of the latest war on Gaza, thousands of civilians have been killed, including a huge number of children and infants.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, hundreds of children have been killed before reaching their first birthday.
But Suaad’s case is different… because she was simply born in the midst of tragedy, took her first breath amid her mother’s blood, and then left in silence, just hours later.
As we’ve watched from afar the tragedy unfolding in Gaza over the past 22 months, it’s worth remembering the part New Zealand troops played in setting in motion the cycle of violence that continues today in Palestine and Israel.
HISTORY:By Scott Hamilton
The man in the photo walks down the deserted street, over rubble. On both sides of the street buildings have lost their roofs and walls. A pockmarked minaret totters over the wrecked townscape. The photo is captioned “Ruins of Gaza at the Time of the Great Attack”.
The photo I’m describing wasn’t taken in 2025, but in 1917. Today Gaza is being destroyed by the armies of Israel and Hamas. In 1917 the British and Ottoman empires wrecked the city. New Zealanders played an important role in the destruction.
In 1917 most Gazans lived in village-suburbs interspersed with gardens and orchards. Their houses were made with mud bricks. The highest building in their town was the Great Mosque, whose foundations dated from the 7th century.
The Ottomans had made Gaza into a fortress, and had connected it by rail and road to a series of redoubts further east. These guarded the southern border of the province of Palestine, and were manned by German and Austrian as well as Ottoman troops.
Britain’s new prime minister David Lloyd George was desperate to capture Palestine, in the hope a victory there would shift public attention from the disaster on the western front, where tens of thousands of Britons had died fighting over mud.
The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, which crossed the Sinai desert to attack Gaza and Palestine, was made up of British, Anzacs, South Africans, West Indians, a volunteer Jewish Legion and Indians.
The Anzac Mounted Division was an essential part of the EEF. Its men rode to battles but fought on foot. Many of them had learned to ride on the farms of their homelands. Some were survivors of Gallipoli, where they had battled without their horses; others had arrived in Egypt after that catastrophe.
Farmland confiscated
Gaza’s suffering began before the British attack. Its defenders confiscated farmland for trenches, and demolished houses to give artillerymen better sight lines. The Great Mosque was seized and turned into an ammunition dump.
Captioned “Gaza Beauty Show”, this photo was likely taken by New Zealander Private Robert Kerr of the Anzac Mounted Rifle Division. Image: NZ Army Museum
It took the British empire three battles to capture Gaza. A photo taken before the second assault shows New Zealanders trying on gas masks. It is captioned “Gaza Beauty Show”. The attackers fired 4000 canisters of asphyxiating gas towards the city. No Gazan had a gas mask.
Before the final assault the city was bombarded for four days by naval guns, artillery and planes. When they finally captured Gaza, the New Zealanders found it empty. Almost the entire population had fled the bombardment; the Ottomans had followed them.
On the day its troops entered Gaza the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which committed it to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1917, though, Jews made up less than a tenth of Palestine’s population.
And Britain had made contradictory promises to Arabs, promising them independence if they rose up against Ottoman rule, and funding an Arab army that had advanced to the edge of Palestine.
There was still another group that wanted Palestine. When the Auckland Mounted Rifles had passed the stone pillar that marked the border between Sinai and Palestine, Henry Mackesy had stopped his men, and prayed to thank god for delivering the “Holy Land” to Britain.
Like New Zealand’s wartime prime minister William Massey, Mackesy was a British Israelite, who believed that Anglo-Saxons were a lost tribe of Israel, and that the British empire was god’s kingdom on earth. For Mackesy and many other Anzacs, Palestine belonged rightfully to Britons, not Jews or Arabs.
Conquerors warned
So many Anzacs wanted to settle in Palestine that Kia ora Coo-ee, their official magazine, had to run an article warning them that conquerors could not legally take locals’ land.
For most Anzacs, the inhabitants of Palestine — the Arabs of the villages and towns, the nomadic Bedouin of the deserts, the small and ancient Jewish communities in towns like Jerusalem — were at best an inconvenience, and at worst a reminder of the decadence and evil condemned in the Old Testament.
New Zealander Alexander McNeur summed up a widespread feeling when he wrote “no wonder the old inhabitants of Palestine had to be destroyed . . . many a chap is disgusted by the people”. (The only Palestinians the Anzacs really liked were the settlers in Zionist colonies, who looked, spoke and acted like Europeans.)
The Anzacs complained about the dirtiness and dishonesty of Palestinians. Many complained they had been cheated by Arab or Jewish traders; others said that Bedouins dug up soldiers’ graves and plundered them.
But the Anzacs themselves had a reputation for taking whatever they could from Palestinians, as well as from Ottoman soldiers. In 1988, Australian veteran Ted O’Brien gave an interview in which he confessed to killing a wounded Ottoman so that he could steal the man’s possessions. Robbing the dead was routine, O’Brien said.
O’Brien added that he and his comrades would immediately kill any Bedouins they found in the desert. Edwin McKay, a member of the Otago section of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, said that theft was a “two-way thing”, with Anzacs and Palestinians preying on each other.
After its defeat of Gaza the Ottoman army began to disintegrate, but as the EEF advanced through Palestine and into Jordan and Syria, it did not always bring peace. Arabs who fought alongside the British imperial forces, hoping for independence, became possessive about the areas they had captured.
Pushed off land
Ottoman deserters became bandits. Bedouins who had been pushed off their land by war raided EEF camps in search of loot. The Jewish Legion clashed with Arabs so often that the EEF commander General Allenby asked the War Office not to send him any more Jews.
The Anzacs’ contempt towards Arabs grew even greater after a calamitous attempt to capture Amman near the end of the war. Rain, cold and tougher-than-expected Ottoman resistance sent the mounted riflemen away with heavy losses.
As they rode towards safety, the Wellington Mounted Rifles entered Ain es Sir, a small village set amid hills and ravines. Villagers opened fire from houses and from nearby ledges, and seven Wellingtonians died. The Anzacs counterattacked Ain es Sir ferociously, shelling the village and killing 38 of its inhabitants. They took no prisoners.
Two members of the Canterbury Mounted Rifles – their exact identities haven’t been established – are flogging Egyptians charged with rioting. Egyptian police are holding the victim down, and other Egyptians are waiting, often in states of undress. 1919. Image: NZ Army Museum
The attack on Amman had made been made in partnership with an Arab force, and the Anzacs seem to have believed that the ambush at Ain es Sir was an act of treachery by their supposed allies.
They do not seem to have known, or cared, that Ain es Sir was not an Arab village. Its inhabitants were Circassians, a Caucasian group that migrated to the Middle East centuries ago.
On the night of December 10, more than a month after the end of the war, the Anzacs’ hatred of Arabs erupted. Hundreds of them were camped outside a village named Surafend, waiting impatiently for a ship to take them home. On the night of December 9 a man entered the tent of a New Zealand soldier named Leslie Lowry. Lowry had been using his kitbag as a pillow. The intruder grabbed it and fled.
Lowry chased the thief across the dunes that separated the Anzac camp from Surafend. The thief turned and fired a pistol. Lowry died three hours later. The next morning Anzacs found Lowry’s blood in the sand. Footprints led from the stain towards Surafend.
Surafend attacked
On December 10, up to 200 Anzacs and a few Scots smashed through the fence that surrounded Surafend. They beat and stabbed scores of male inhabitants of the village, leaving between 40 and 120 dead and many more wounded, then set fire to the Arabs’ homes.
A nearby Bedouin encampment was also set ablaze. Ted O’Brien was one of the raiders. He and his comrades had “done their blocks”. They “all went for” the Arabs with “the bayonet”. “It was a godawful thing,” O’Brien remembered.
New Zealander Ted Andrews explained that the massacre was not just about Lowry’s murder. “The treacherous ambush at Ain es Sir was still fresh in the minds of New Zealand troops,” he wrote, ignoring the fact that the men of Surafend had nothing to do with that village.
Andrews said that victims at Surafend were castrated. Some historians have dismissed this claim, but American scholar Edward Woodfin has shown that castration and humiliation of the dead were being practised in 1918 by the Indian members of the Egypt Expeditionary Force, with whom the Anzacs were friendly.
Most historians say that children, women and old men were removed from Surafend before the slaughter, but they ignore the testimony of Australian John Doran, who was at the Anzacs’ medical station the night of the massacre. Doran said that women and children appeared there with burns and bullet wounds.
The Jewish soldier Roman Freulich said that Australians had fired a machine gun at the Bedouin encampment on the night of December 10. Freulich also reported that the members of the Jewish Legion were excited by the massacre — they hated Arabs even more than the Anzacs — and that they used what he called “the Australian method” on a group of Bedouin civilians shortly after. Freulich said that he and his comrades sealed off a Bedouin camp and stabbed the men with bayonets.
Caption reads “ruins of Gaza at the time of the Great Attack”. Image: Library of Congress
No one prosecuted
Although the Anzacs’ commander General Allenby condemned the attackers, calling them “cowards and murderers”, no one was ever prosecuted for the massacre at Surafend. In 2009, the New Zealand television programme Sunday ran a story on the massacre.
Sunday’s team visited the site of Surafend, which has now been covered by an Israeli town, interviewed an old man who remembered the massacre, and asked why New Zealand had never apologised for the crime. The question is just as pertinent now.
When we look back from 2025 to the destruction of Gaza and the rest of the Palestine campaign, we can see that New Zealand troops played a part in setting in motion the cycle of violence that continues today in Palestine and Israel.
Scott Hamilton is the author of two great modern works of sociology and place, Ghost South Road (Titus Books, 2018), and Searching for Ata’a (Bridget Williams, 2017). He writes the blog Reading the Maps and is currently working on a book about sorcery and sorcery-related violence in Melanesia as part of his ongoing exploration of Pasifika arts and colonial Pākehā histories. This article was first published by The Spinoff and is republished with the author’s permission.
New York City – The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a manufacturing complex that is heavily involved in military research and technological development. Originally a shipbuilding facility for the U.S. Navy, BNY now aids and abets the genocide of people living on Turtle Island and West Asia.
Hidden among art studios and food vendors, the Navy Yard leases space to two companies that directly supply military equipment and tactical gear to the Israel Occupation Forces: Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. Founded by Ivan Stamavski and former IOF soldier Ido Gur in 2015, Easy Aerial is an Israeli-U.S. drone manufacturer that supplies autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles to the IOF for use across West Asia.
Israeli soldiers raided a tent set up for mourning Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen on Tuesday as his killer, an Israeli settler infamous for terrorizing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, was released by an Israeli court. Haaretz reports that Hathaleen’s killer, Yinon Levi, was released to house arrest while he’s investigated for manslaughter, with a judge deciding that he isn’t…
Zohran Mamdani’s staunch support for Palestinian rights was a major boon to his campaign and served as one of the top motivations for voters to cast their ballot for him, new polling finds, providing evidence that opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a winning position as establishment Democrats scratch their heads over Mamdani’s historic campaign and popularity. Polling out Tuesday by the…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly prepared to propose a plan to annex the entire Gaza Strip that has the backing of the Trump administration, signalling the next horrific phase in Israel’s genocide as it also moves forward with annexing the occupied West Bank. On Tuesday, Israeli outlet Haaretz reported that Netanyahu is expected to propose the plan to his cabinet soon.
Israel’s incorrigible apologists continue to plumb ever greater depths of depravity to deny the indisputable facts of its genocide in Gaza. When an image of an excruciatingly emaciated child hit the front pages of multiple UK mainstream press outlets, Zionist organisations and prominent right-wing media piled on.
Despicably claiming to debunk the images, they honed in on the fact that a toddler depicted in them lives with underlying medical conditions. They shamefully wheeled out the fact he’s disabled to ‘disprove’ the widespread famine Israel has manufactured in Gaza.
However, the torrid reaction has only cemented Israel and its supporters’ barefaced ableist eugenics. And it has put it front and centre for all the world to see.
Palestinian children hit the pages of the mainstream press after it ignored them for months
After months of Israel’s engineered starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the Western mouthpiece media seem to have decided to no longer conceal the reprehensible reality.
UK mainstream outlets have plastered their pages with pictures of emaciated Palestinian children.
Of course, they chose to publish the images at this particular moment. That is, the very time when Western genocide-facilitating craven apologists across the political and media spectrum have begun a self-serving display of face-saving faux outrage.
However, the stain of their immoral participation will never wash off. Israel has been starving the population of Gaza for months, but these merchants of death spluttered into half-assed action only when starvation went past the point of return for many:
they waited for gaza to reach stage 5 of malnutrition (which is irreversible) to finally speak up.
it’s just so they could claim to be on “the right side of history” while choosing to be silent for months and months before that. fuck all of you.
— jana the evil witch (resurrected) (@nobodysdaught3r) July 27, 2025
These harrowing pictures are the culmination of months of Israel’s deliberate forced famine tactics. Since March, the pariah occupying state has cut off aid distribution from established operators like the UNRWA. It has done this all while spreading baseless smears to delegitimise these agencies. It has systematically destroyed Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure, and orchestrated death trap aid sites where Palestinians seem to have just as much chance of finding a bullet as they do finding flour to feed their families.
The US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has pared down the number of aid sites, made them inaccessible for many, and provided nowhere near enough food and supplies. The IOF has murdered more than 1,000 aid-seekers in cold blood since GHF began its “death-trap” operations.
Aid political theatre
Now, Israel’s temporary aid stunt – cheered on and championed by these same Western conspirators – is proving itself the sham political theatre it always was:
Only in Gaza you will see airdrops and airstrikes in one picture.
No one should look to the sky and wonder if what's falling is death or dinner. pic.twitter.com/EhkhyaT0P0
Press Release No. (908) Issued by the Government Media Office:
The famine is getting more ferocious and the occupation continues its crimes of genocide: Only 73 trucks entered today, and the air drop operations fell in dangerous combat zones
Breaking | Following the end of Israel's alleged "humanitarian pause," airstrikes and artillery are bombarding residential areas in the Shejaiya and Tuffah neighborhoods of eastern Gaza City. pic.twitter.com/kihAMfHDjr
Long before the mainstream media deigned to acknowledge the atrocious situation, these famine conditions have been well-documented. Online, Palestinians have been posting heart-wrenching accounts of the lived reality of their endless hunger. Social media has been a livestreamed horror-reel of scarce, moldy, outrageously unaffordable food, and of Palestinians going without for days on end.
The world has been bearing witness to this disgraceful deterioration into irreversible starvation in real-time.
To say this is the predictable outcome of more than a year of purposeful political prevaricating, and outright participation would be an understatement.
But to the corporate press, the lives of Palestinians starving at the hands of Israel’s manufactured famine only became newsworthy on the brink of death. Or more to the point, when they were irrefutable. Now, these long-time abettors of genocide are transforming a tragedy they’ve played a core role in fomenting, into politically convenient pressure point to play up their diplomatic saviour personas.
Spouting starvation skepticism
Meanwhile, like clockwork, open Zionists and right-wingers were quick to find a way to spin even these most damning images for their own twisted genocide-denial narrative.
Repugnant as ever, hate-mongering hack Hartley-Brewer was out on her vile soapbox spouting calculated starvation-skepticism:
One of the IPC benchmarks for famine is over 30% of children suffer from wasting. Children are more vulnerable to rapid weight loss during food crises; that’s why every feeding centre anywhere in the world during famine, is full of kids.@JuliaHB1 – the blood will never wash off https://t.co/NxGk0NxjNv
But it was the story of one and half-year-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq that drew the most chilling response. Multiple outlets, including the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Express, and even the Daily Mail put out articles displaying Muhammad’s skeletal frame.
Freelance journalist Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini took the photos of Muhammed and his mother. He described the tent the displaced family currently reside in as resembling a “tomb” to BBC Newshour. Andalou Agencyfirst published the images under the caption:
Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1.5-year-old child in Gaza City, Gaza, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, on July 21, 2025. Having dropped from 9 to 6 kilograms, he struggles to survive in a tent in Gaza City, where milk, food, and other basic necessities are lacking.
However, it wasn’t long before Zionists went on a crusade to delegitimise the photos.
Pro-Zionist groups ‘investigate’ Muhammed’s story
Zionist media ‘watchdog’ organisation HonestReporting was among the first on the scene. The organisation claims to expose “anti-Israel media bias” and “combat ideological prejudice in journalism”. Needless to say, this is nothing but doublespeak for slandering coverage even the slightest bit critical of Israel:
Next to the staunchly Zionist propaganda organisation was self-appointed antisemitism “undercover researcher” David Collier. In a rancid blog post, Collier wrote that:
Time and again, the most widely circulated images of ‘starving children’ in Gaza have turned out to involve children with serious underlying medical conditions. The images are heartbreaking, yes – but we must stay grounded. This is a war zone, and Hamas is actively using the civilian population as pawns in a global propaganda campaign.
Cosplaying investigative journalist, Collier delves into Muhammed’s medical records and family history, concluding unironically that the outlets turned Muhammed:
into a propaganda weapon
The disgusting piece calls into question the credibility of Palestinian journalist and civilian accounts of Israel’s mass starvation campaign and genocide. It launders the well-worn smears against the UN and other aid agencies. All told, the article is a love letter to Israel’s propaganda, hiding beneath a thin veneer of faux investigative journalistic integrity.
Naturally, Israel’s dutiful propaganda collaborators in the West spread the disgraceful non-story. Zionist shitrag the Jewish Chronicle amplified it, writing that:
Child ‘misleadingly’ presented as symbol of Gaza starvation ‘suffers from muscular disorder’
Viral images of starving Gaza boy don’t tell the whole story because he suffers from genetic disorders, critics say
The Timesperpetuated the propaganda downplaying it as Mohammad merely getting “caught up in Gaza’s information war”.
Meanwhile, the Sunwent with the odious sensationalist headline:
TRAGIC PIC ‘FRAUD’ Harrowing viral pic of starving Gaza boy ‘was HIJACKED’ by Hamas to create ‘fake news’, campaigners say
Predictably, the genocidal government of Israel itself also seized on the slander campaign:
Vile eugenics on full display from the Zionists
The disgusting implication these pieces were making was evidently that Muhammad is disabled, so would have died anyway.
That we even have to point out that this is patently false is utterly appalling. This is not the typical portrait of a child with cerebral palsy. It is what you might expect from a child suffering severe malnutrition from months of Israel refusing even the entry of baby formula into the Strip. But what if Hamas gets its hands on it?!
Western media really went along with the idea that baby formula can fall in to the wrong hands. https://t.co/N0yVxnZJ1z
Since May, 93% of the population in Gaza have been experiencing food insecurity. This is the stark result of Israel’s induced famine.
What they’re saying in a nutshell is – Muhammad is expendable because he lives with underlying medical conditions. In other words, since he’s chronically ill and disabled, he’s unavoidable ‘collateral damage’.
Let’s get this abundantly clear: Muhammad’s life is no less valuable than any other child’s:
Children with genetic disorders don't deserve to starve, either.
Continue logging posts, articles, and news segments denying the famine in Gaza. https://t.co/CqfWQZZwWT
— Accountability Archive (@archivegenocide) July 28, 2025
This idea that his starvation-etched body “can’t be helped” is nothing less than glaring eugenics writ large. When societies and systems devalue disabled lives to the extent they write off their deaths as an inevitable, acceptable sacrifice, we call that fascism:
It’s so disturbing to see Zionists engage in conduct worthy of a Holocaust denier. Folks if you’re starvestigating pictures of malnourished kids check yourselves and the depths to which you are losing your humanity https://t.co/zKkYtDpfea
Of course, this grotesque ‘gotcha’ is entirely on-brand for these brutal colonial ideologues. They’ve dehumanised Palestinian lives at every turn to lay the groundwork for their total annihilation and expulsion from Palestine.
If there’s scandal anywhere, it’s not in Muhammed’s medical history
If there’s something scandalous about the images of starving Palestinian children, it isn’t that the mainstream press failed to disclose a full and invasive medical history. The peddlers of propaganda themselves set up this obscene and nauseating malnutrition purity test. It’s an ableist abomination masquerading as fact-checking due diligence – and nobody should fall for it.
At the end of the day, that any Palestinian child is starving at all is unconscionable. If anything, the fact it’s starving medically vulnerable kids only shows how irredeemably heinous Israel is:
Imagine waking up to obsessively “investigate” the authenticity of images of starved babies in Gaza.
Imagine going through hundreds, if not thousands, of images to find what you're looking for: “Aha, this one has Cerebral Palsy!”
At least 14 Palestinians, including two children, have died from hunger and malnutrition in Gaza, according to health authorities, as United States President Donald Trump says there are signs of “real starvation” in the besieged territory.
The deaths pushed the number of those who have died from malnutrition since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, to 147, including 88 children, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Monday.
Israel is getting away with this with total, remorseless impunity. As Western leaders and their media lapdogs feign horror, they hand it the bombs and political cover to continue this incomprehensibly evil war crime in full view of the world. That’s where the scandal is.
This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 28, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
Palestinian activist who helped film the No Other Land documentary highlighting Israel’s violent occupation of the West Bank, Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday, according to one of the film’s directors.
Israeli co-filmmaker Yuval Abraham posted about Hadalin’s death on social media on Monday. “An Israeli settler just shot [Hathaleen] in the lungs, a remarkable activist who helped us film No Other Land in Masafer Yatta,” Abraham wrote. About an hour later, Abraham wrote that Hathaleen had succumbed to the shooting. “[Awdah] just died. Murdered,” said Abraham.
“I can hardly believe it. My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time,” said Basel Adra, activist and Palestinian co-director of No Other Land.
Accompanying Abraham’s post was a video of the settler angrily facing a group, wielding a handgun. He waves the gun around, firing it, and keeping his hand on the trigger as he paces and angrily pushes those trying to confront him.
Hathaleen was previously targeted by the U.S. government. Last month, he flew to the U.S. to do a speaking tour with his cousin, Eid Hathaleen, to speak in synagogues and churches. However, U.S. authorities detained and deported them upon arrival at the San Francisco airport.
He had previously reported about Israeli settler violence, and was a leader in his community advocating against Israel’s occupation of his village, Umm al-Khair in Masafer Yatta.
Wafa reported that two Palestinians had been injured in Umm al-Khair by Israeli settlers, who invaded the village with a bulldozer in an attack on Monday evening.
Palestinian activist Issa Amro, from Hebron, mourned the loss of Hathaleen.
“Israeli settlers have murdered our beloved hero, Awdah Hathaleen, from the Um Al-Khair community in Masafer Yatta,” Amro wrote on social media. “Awdah stood with dignity and courage against oppression. His loss is a deep wound to our hearts and our struggle for justice. May he rest in peace. We will never forget him.”
To know Awda Hathaleen is to love him.
Awda Hathaleen was an activist and a resident in Umm al-Khair, an indigenous Bedouin Palestinian community in the South Hebron Hills within the occupied West Bank. He was an English teacher and activist. Awda has always been a pillar… pic.twitter.com/3Pf5Q8CxFA
Abraham said that local residents identified Hathaleen’s killer as Yinon Levi, who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Levi was sanctioned by the Treasury Department under the Biden administration in April 2024, with officials saying that he “regularly led groups of violent extremists” in assaults on Palestinian and Bedouin communities in the West Bank. He was also sanctioned by the European Union around the same time.
President Donald Trump lifted the U.S. sanction on Levi and other Israeli settlers and settler groups on his first day in office this January. Even before that, however, the Biden administration’s and other international authorities’ sanctions on Israeli settlers were criticized as weak and ineffective, with Israeli leaders who are backing and often funding settler groups going unpunished.
In fact, Levi toldThe Associated Press last June that he only felt the financial impact of sanctions for a few weeks after banks froze his accounts. His community raised thousands of dollars for him, and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a key architect of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank, pledged to intervene to personally help take care of sanctioned settlers. The bank, which was supposed to freeze his assets, slowly lifted restrictions until he was able to access his money for whatever he wanted again.
“America thought it would weaken us, and in the end, they made us stronger,” Levi said at the time. Indeed, The Associated Press reported that local rights groups and settlers said that the sanctions only emboldened them.
This is just the latest settler attack on someone involved in making No Other Land. In March, just weeks after the documentary won an Oscar, an Israeli settler mob attacked and beat Palestinian filmmaker and activist Hamdan Ballal, in his home village of Susiya in Masafer Yatta. While he was in an ambulance to be treated for his injuries, Israeli soldiers invaded the vehicle and took him into custody. He emerged, bloody and bruised, saying that he has faced increased violence from settlers due to his role in making the film.
Israeli settlers and soldiers have intensified their violence in Masafer Yatta since the film won an Oscar, and Israeli authorities have now ordered a large swath of the region to be turned into a live-fire zone — effectively ordering the forcible transfer of over 1,200 Palestinians living in the region. Palestinians in the region report that Israel’s demolition of their homes is being fast-tracked by authorities.
Rights advocates in Canada are accusing the government of misleading the public by allowing huge amounts of weapons to be sent to Israel despite a pledge to curtail such transfers. In a new report issued on July 29, a coalition of advocacy groups released new details about the scope of Canadian-made arms exports to Israel amid the country’s war on the Gaza Strip.
As more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid at militarized aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a former GHF security contractor tells Democracy Now! he saw U.S. mercenaries and Israeli forces commit war crimes by indiscriminately shooting at starving Palestinians waiting for aid. “What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as…
Abdelsalam Odeh and his wife have been living in a bus for the past three months. The couple had nowhere to go and no means to pay rent after being expelled at gunpoint from their lifelong home in the Tulkarem refugee camp by the Israeli army earlier this year. But desperation has a way of unlocking ingenuity — and for 71-year-old Odeh, that meant repurposing an old vehicle, piece by piece…
Among those on the ship was Chris Smalls, who gained fame when he led a successful union drive at Amazon in Staten Island in 2022. Not only was Smalls detained, but he was physically beaten by the IDF. He was the only Black member on the Handala.
“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that upon arrival in Israeli custody, U.S. human rights defender, Christian Smalls, was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals,” wrote the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on Instagram. “They choked him and kicked him, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back”.
“This totally makes sense,” wrote University of New Brunswick Professor Nathan Kalman-Lamb on Bluesky. “A notable public figure in the US (Amazon labor organizer Christian Smalls) is illegally arrested by Israel and subjected to severe physical violence while on a hunger strike… and not one US media outlet of any type has decided that is news.”
This article is a cross-post from Payday Report and is a developing story. Payday Report will update it as more information becomes available.
It’s been almost an article of faith among Israeli officials: the state they represent is incapable of genocide, their actions always spurred by the noblest, necessary motivations of self-defence against satanic enemies who wish genocide upon Jews. Over time, as Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov writes, “Ethical concerns and moral qualms were brushed aside as either marginal or distracting in the face of the ultimate cataclysm that is the genocide of the Jews.”
This form of reasoning, known otherwise as “Holocaust-ism” or “Shoah-tiyut”, is a moral conceit left bare in the war of annihilation being waged in Gaza against the Palestinian populace. Israeli human rights groups have taken note of this, despite the drained reserves of empathy evident in Israel proper. (A Pew Research Center poll conducted last month found that a mere 16% of Jewish Israelis thought peaceful coexistence with Palestinians was possible.)
In its latest report pointedly titled Our Genocide, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem offers a blunt assessment: “Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
The infliction of genocide, the organisation acknowledges, is a matter of “multiple and parallel practices” applied over a period of time, with killing being merely one component. Living conditions can be destroyed, concentration camps and zones created, populations expelled, and policies to systematically prevent reproduction enacted. “Accordingly, genocidal acts are various actions intended to bring about the destruction of a distinct group, as part of a deliberate, coordinated effort by a ruling authority.”
Our Genocide suggests that certain conditions often precede the sparking of a genocide. Israel’s relations with Palestinians had been characterised by “broader patterns of settler-colonialism”, with the intention of ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians – economically, politically, socially, and culturally.”
B’Tselem draws upon three crucial elements centred on ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians”: “life under an apartheid regime that imposes separation, demographic engineering, and ethnic cleansing; systemic and institutionalized use of violence against Palestinians, while the perpetrators enjoy impunity; and institutionalized mechanisms of dehumanization and framing Palestinians as an existential threat.” The attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militant groups on October 7, 2023 was a violent event that created a “sense of existential threat among the perpetrating group” enabling the “ruling system to carry out genocide.” As B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak notes, this sense of threat was promoted by an “extremist, far-right messianic government” to pursue “an agenda of destruction and expulsion.”
Israeli policy in the Strip since October 2023 could not be rationalised as a focused, targeted attempt to destroy the rule of Hamas or its military efficacy. “Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers about the nature and assault in Gaza have expressed genocidal intent throughout.” Ditto Israeli military officers of all ranks. Gaza’s residents had been dehumanized, with many Jewish-Israelis believing “that their lives are of negligible value compared to Israel’s national goals, if not worthless altogether.”
The report also notes the use of certain terminology that haunts the literature of genocidal euphemism: the creation of “humanitarian zones” that would still be bombed despite supposedly providing protection for displaced civilians; the use of “kill zones” by the Israeli military and the absence of any standardized rules of engagement through the Strip, often “determined at the discretion of commanders on the ground or based on arbitrary criteria.”
Wishing to be comprehensive, the authors of the report do not ignore Israel’s actions in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Airstrikes have regularly taken place against refugee camps in the northern part of the territory since October 2023. Even more lethal open-fire policies have been used in the West Bank, with the use of kill zones suggesting “the broader ‘Gazafication’ of Israel’s methods of warfare.”
Another group, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), has also published a legal-medical appraisal on the intentional destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, finding that the Israeli campaign in Gaza “constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.” The evidence examined by the group “shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival.” The evolving nature of the campaign suggested a “deliberate progression” from the initial bombing and the forced evacuation of hospitals in the northern part of the Strip to the calculated collapse of the healthcare system across the entire enclave. The dismantling of the health system involved rendering hospitals “non-functional”, the blocking of medical evaluations, and the elimination of such vital services as trauma care, surgery, dialysis, and maternal health.
Added to this has been the direct targeting of health care workers, involving the death and detention of over 1,800 members, “including many senior specialists”, and the deliberate restriction of humanitarian relief through militarized distribution points that pose lethal risks to aid recipients. “This coordinated assault has produced a cascading failure of health and humanitarian infrastructure, compounded by policies leading to starvation, disease, and the breakdown of sanitation, housing, and education systems.”
PHRI contends that, at the very least, three core elements of Article II of the Genocide Convention are met: the killing of members of a group (identified by nationality, ethnicity, race or religion); causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group and deliberately inflicting on the group those conditions of life to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.
In accepting that genocide is being perpetrated against the Palestinians, Our Genocide makes that most pertinent of points: the dry legal analysis of genocide tends to be distanced from a historical perspective. “The legal definition is narrow, having been shaped in large part by the political interests of the states whose representatives drafted it.” The high threshold of identifying genocide, and the international jurisprudence on the subject, had produced a disturbing paradox: genocide tends to be recognised “only after a significant portion of the targeted group has already been destroyed and the group as such has suffered irreparable harm.” The thrust of these clarion calls from B’Tselem and PHRI is urgently clear: end this state of affairs before the Palestinians become yet another historical victim of such harm.
The National Union of Students (NUS) Lead and Change conference, which was meant to start on Tuesday 29 July, has been cancelled. The NUS was forced to do this due to its venue being occupied by students who have become increasingly frustrated over the union’s inaction over Gaza. They have also threatened disruption if there are attempts to move the conference elsewhere.
NUS: under pressure
The University of Birmingham Guild of Students building has been occupied since yesterday evening by ‘disenfranchised students’, who intend to remain there for what would have been the conference’s three-day duration. Running for almost 40 years, this conference is usually a key part of the NUS calendar.
Earlier this month, the Canary reported that more than 180 elected sabbatical officers and student groups, representing more than 50 campuses across the country, issued the NUS not only with an open letter condemning its silence on Gaza, accusing it of complicity in Israel’s genocide, and demanding it take a decisive stand, but also an ultimatum-take meaningful action on Gaza or face mass disaffiliation.
The failure of the NUS to address these valid concerns has caused anger and discontent among those at university and has now resulted in the occupation of the venue which should have been hosting its flagship summer conference.
A damning statement
Here is the statement issued yesterday evening by a group calling themselves the Birmingham Student’s Assembly:
We, an autonomous grouping of disenfranchised students, have today entered into occupation inside the building of Guild of Students, University of Birmingham, for the duration of the NUS Lead and Change conference.
This comes after NUS have refused to answer our open letter calling out their complicity in genocide, instead responding indirectly to pressure, without acknowledging it, by publishing a statement which pretends to call for justice but which, unlike their older statement on the ‘Middle East crisis’, does not commit to any planned or real action from NUS.
The NUS has long failed to represent student interests, and has not been a genuinely progressive force for decades, as evidenced by the revolving door from the Presidency of NUS into the Labour Party- with many former presidents now responsible not just for the continuation of austerity but also for the Government inaction to properly respond to the genocide in Gaza.
We invite in all sabbatical officers, encampment groups, students, graduates and educators who stand fundamentally opposed to genocide, who have been marginalised by NUS political abdication in the face of genocide. Join us in trying to fundamentally change the role of Student’s Unions and realise our collective political will.
Our occupation will last for the duration of the Lead and Change conference. We are prepared to disrupt any locations, should the organisers attempt to transfer to another venue. Instead, the Birmingham Student Assembly will run an alternative programme of events, inside the occupied Guild of Students building, for students and activists to engage in politics- free from the confines of NUS suppression.
Activists will be deciding on the fundamental principles and constitution of a new Union- one that inherently takes a broad and expansive view of the student- whereby participation is not limited to delegates of Sabbatical Officers, but rather is open to the grassroots and movements that constitute political life on campus and beyond. Using our collective power, and noting the discontent with NUS in the current moment, we shall be setting ourselves up, not to lobby Parliamentarians with petitions and participation inAPPGsbut as a genuinely radical social movement that stands up for students and young people.
We have already seen commitments to membership from the majority of university encampment groups, as well as Student Unions.
Gaza has been burning at both ends for twenty months. But the fires are not only burning houses, but also consuming what remains of people’s dreams and dignity, in a continuous war of extermination in which Israel’s occupation has engineered starvation to the point where people wish for a loaf of bread.
In Gaza, cameras are for sale, balls are kicked for the last time in abandoned playgrounds, and a loaf of bread has become a greater goal than glory.
The journalist who became the image in Gaza
Palestinian journalist Bashir Abu Al-Shair, who spent years documenting the suffering of others, suddenly found himself becoming the image. He no longer holds the camera to convey the pain of the Gazans, but wrote a brief and poignant post on his Facebook account in which he offered to sell or exchange his camera for a bag of flour to feed his children.
The journalist also said in his post:
We no longer have the energy to endure the hardship of life and the oppression of famine, and I will not wait for my children to die before my eyes because of hunger.
His camera, which had witnessed war, pain, and siege, the crying of children under the rubble, and the faces of mothers drenched in patience, did not help him when his children’s strength failed them from hunger:
The decision to sell was not an easy one. He sold his livelihood, his dream, his means of survival from poverty, just to save his family from another night without food.
When former glory is sold for a bag of flour
In another neighborhood of besieged Gaza, soccer player Mohamed Salah was closing the last chapter of his dream when he wrote a post on Facebook whispering: “The last of my soccer memories” for sale, attaching the soccer shoes that had taken him to every stadium and accompanied him from the beginning of his unfulfilled dream:
“I’m selling the last thing I own… for a bag of flour.” Mohammed, who used to be cheered on by the whole of Gaza at every match, is now forced to knock on his friends’ doors, not to ask for encouragement, but to offer them his possessions.
The ball he loved since childhood did not satisfy his family, the stadiums where he dreamed of shining have become rubble, and the crowd is busy and hungry and does not cheer for anyone.
No one in Gaza has the luxury of choice. Sell your dream to stay alive.
Gaza today offers its people no choice. People are selling what remains of the symbols of their lives, not because they want to, but because they have no alternative. Journalists are selling their cameras, athletes their memorabilia. Everything is for sale in the markets of hunger, even dignity.
Many stories are now being told, not on television screens, but in timid posts on social media, in pictures of men ashamed to sell the tools of their dreams, women hiding their faces at the doors of soup kitchens, and children asking for bread more than they ask for toys.
Elsewhere in the world, success is measured by the number of achievements, the number of photos, the number of goals scored. In Gaza, however, success today means waking up alive, returning to your children with a bag of bread or a box of food.
Featured image and additional images via the Canary
Hundreds of activists are set to protest outside an emergency cabinet meeting in Downing Street on Tuesday 29 July to demand the government takes immediate, meaningful action to halt Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Cabinet meeting to face protest over Gaza
As the Cabinet meets for a rare emergency meeting during the summer recess to discuss the Gaza genocide, hundreds of protestors will be noisily demonstrating outside Downing Street to demand immediate, meaningful sanctions against Israel. They will be banging pots and pans to symbolise the famine that Israel is using to kill Palestinians.
The recent scenes of starving babies and children from Gaza, as well the shooting of those seeking food aid at Israeli controlled distribution points, have sparked global outrage. The government has found itself politically isolated in its support for the genocidal regime in Israel and has been forced to change track by the constant stream of protest and condemnation around the UK.
So far it has made only cosmetic attempts to present itself as a humanitarian actor, such as the pitifully meagre and ineffective proposed use of air drops. Now the pressure is on the government to take concrete steps such as
Immediately introduce a comprehensive military embargo to end all arms trade and military collaboration with Israel.
End all trade negotiations with Israel and introduce a total ban on all trade which aids or assists Israel’s violations of international law including but not limited to trade with Israel’s illegal settlements.
Introduce immediate and wide-ranging sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against all Israeli government ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has sharply criticised the Fiji government’s stance over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, saying it “starkly contrasts” with the United Nations and international community’s condemnation as a violation of international law and an impediment to peace.
In a statement today, the NGO Coalition said that the way the government was responding to the genocide and war crimes in Gaza would set a precedent for how it would deal with crises and conflict in future.
It would be a marker for human rights responses both at home and the rest of the world.
“We are now seeing whether our country will be a force that works to uphold human rights and international law, or one that tramples on them whenever convenient,” the statement said.
“Fiji’s position on the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestinians starkly contrasts with the values of justice, freedom, and international law that the Fijian people hold dear.
“The genocide and colonial occupation have been widely recognised by the international community, including the United Nations, as a violation of international law and an impediment to peace and the self-determination of the Palestinian people.”
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognise the state of Palestine — the first of G7 countries to do so — at the UN general Assembly in September.
142 countries recognise Palestine
At least 142 countries out of the 193 members of the UN currently recognise or plan to recognise a Palestinian state, including European Union members Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia.
However, several powerful Western countries have refused to do so, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.
At the UN this week, Saudi Arabia and France opened a three-day conference with the goal of recognising Palestinian statehood as part of a peaceful settlement to end the war in Gaza.
Last year, Fiji’s coalition government submitted a written statement in support of the Israeli genocidal occupation of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, noted the NGO coalition.
Last month, Fiji’s coalition government again voted against a UN General Assembly resolution that demanded an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Also recently, the Fiji government approved the allocation of $1.12 million to establish an embassy “in the genocidal terror state of Israel as Fijians grapple with urgent issues, including poverty, violence against women and girls, deteriorating water and health infrastructure, drug use, high rates of HIV, poor educational outcomes, climate change, and unfair wages for workers”.
Met with ‘indifference’
The NGO coalition said that it had made repeated requests to the Fiji government to “do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel”.
“We have been calling upon the Fiji government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes,” the statement said.
“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained. We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing.
“We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.”
Instead, said the NGO statement, Fiji leaders had met with Israeli government representatives and declared support for a country “committing the most heinous crimes” recognised in international law.
“Fijian leaders and the Fiji government should not be supporting Israel or setting up an embassy in Israel while Israel continues to bomb refugee tents, kill journalists and medics, and block the delivery of humanitarian aid to a population under relentless siege.
“No politician in Fiji can claim ignorance of what is happening.”
“Many more have been maimed, traumatised, and displaced. Starvation is being used by Israel as weapon to kill babies and children.
“Hospitals, churches, mosques,, refugee camps, schools, universities, residential neighbourhoods, water and food facilities have been destroyed.
“History will judge how we respond as Fijians to this moment.
“Our rich cultural heritage and shared values teach us the importance of always standing up for what is right, even when it is not popular or convenient.”
Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Programme, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.
Also, Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.
The NGO coalition said it stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people out of a shared belief in humanity, justice, and the inalienable human rights of every individual.
“Silence is not an option,” it added.
Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network said it supported this NGO coalition statement.
Israel is meticulously following a textbook model of instigating unrest in the occupied West Bank.
The latest such provocations consisted of stripping the Palestinian-run Hebron (Al-Khalil) municipality of its administrative powers over the venerable Ibrahimi Mosque.
Worse, according to Israel Hayom, it granted these powers to the religious council of the Kiryat Arba Jewish settlement, an extremist settler body.
Though all Jewish settlers in occupied Palestine can be qualified as extremists, the approximately 7,500 inhabitants of Kiryat Arba represent a more virulent category.
Two leading Israeli human rights organizations issued reports on 28 July accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, marking the first time any major Israeli group has made such a declaration.
“An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,” B’Tselem wrote.
Activists are urging people worldwide to participate in a “pot-banging” demonstration daily at 6 PM local time, wherever they are, aiming to raise urgent awareness about the escalating famine in Gaza caused by the “Israeli” blockade.
The initiative, dubbed “Pot-Banging for Gaza,” calls on participants to bang pots and pans from their windows or balconies for 2-5 minutes to highlight the dire humanitarian crisis caused by what organizers describe as “Israel’s” illegal blockade.
It was inspired by a viral video shot on Monday in Nuseirat, central Gaza, where hungry children, men, and women banged on their empty pots demanding the opening of crossings.
A Palestinian activist who helped film the No Other Land documentary highlighting Israel’s violent occupation of the West Bank, Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday, according to one of the film’s directors. Israeli co-filmmaker Yuval Abraham posted about Hadalin’s death on social media on Monday. “An Israeli settler just shot [Hathaleen] in the lungs…
Support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians has become a critical political dividing line, not just in the United States, but in countries around the globe. At a recent pro-Donald Trump rally in São Paulo, Brazil, for instance, a protester waving an Israeli flag fought with a man in a Palestinian shirt. In this on-the-ground report, Brazil-based journalist Michael Fox shows how Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is playing out in South America’s largest country.
Michael Fox [Narration]: This is a pro-Donald Trump rally on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil. It’s an example of how Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza is playing out in South America’s largest country: the left staunchly in defense of Palestine, the far-right defending Israel and the United States. Both sides have become symbols for their separate causes inside Brazil…
Mauricio Santoro, Political Scientist: In Brazilian domestic politics, people are becoming more identified with Israel or with Palestinian, with the Arab political movements. And it’s more or less a right-left wing fight.
So conservative politicians in Brazil nowadays, they appear in public with Israeli flags of Israeli T-shirts, because Israel is very important to the Brazilian evangelicals, and we’re talking about 30% of the Brazilian population. It’s a very important political group for the presidential election next year. And on the left, the more traditional view is that Brazil should support Palestine.
Michael Fox [Narration]: In mid June thousands of people hit the streets of Sao Paulo in defense of Palestine and in opposition to Israel’s inhumane war on Gaza.
Just days later, evangelicals held the massive March for Jesus, on the same Paulista Avenue. Countless people wore Israeli flags. Among them was Sao Paulo state governor Tarcisio Genro. He is also the most likely conservative candidate to run for the Brazilian presidency next year.
It did not go over well in the country’s Arab community. Brazil has the largest population of people descended from the Middle East in all of Latin America.
Márcio França, Brazilian Minister of Entrepreneurship: The governor of São Paulo humiliated the entire Arab community yesterday. Syrians. Lebanese. We’re talking about millions of people. This is a grave mistake, which has nothing to do with the war. São Paulo is a Brazilian state.
Michael Fox [Narration]: The numbers of evangelicals in Brazil have been rising almost exponentially in recent years. They were a huge force in the election of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. And they’re playing an increasingly prominent role in far-right politics in Brazil. For them, the Israeli flag is a symbol. It was front and center at last year’s CPAC Brasil conference.
Jose Fabio Faustino, Devout Evangelical: This Israeli flag… We are from a country, Brazil, that is more than 80%, more than 90% Christian. And the word of God, which is the Bible, says that I will bless those who bless you. So we use the Israeli flag because we bless Israel. We believe that is the Holy Land. That they are the Lord’s chosen people. And we are descended from the olive tree. And we love Israel.
Michael Fox [Narration]: Brazilian Middle East analyst Monique Goldfeld says that in Brazil, the Israel-Palestine conflict has really become a question of internal politics over the last 10 years.
Monique Sochaczweski Goldfeld, Senior Fellow, Brazilian International Relations Center: We have a political right that is closely linked to evangelical groups that have appropriated an image of Israel that doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality of Israel. I lived in Israel long enough to believe it’s quite different. But they’re using its symbols… The Star of David, the Israeli flag, and political demonstrations. And this has become associated with Jair Bolsonaro.
Michael Fox [Narration]: Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is the face of the far-right movement in Brazil. He’s Catholic, but he has deep ties to evangelicals. His wife is devout. While in office, Bolsonaro boasted of opening up a new era of relations with Israel. He traveled there, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and opened up an office for Brazilian trade in Jerusalem.
Bolsonaro, however, is now wearing an ankle bracelet. He’s accused of attempting to orchestrate a coup to remain in power, and is currently standing trial in Brazil. U.S. president Donald Trump responded in defense of his ally, slapping Brazil with 50% tariffs for its lawsuit against Bolsonaro.
In a shocking partisan attack on Brazil’s independent judicial system, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stripped U.S. visas from the eight Supreme Court justices the United States believes are antagonistic to Bolsonaro. Rubio left Bolsonaro’s allies on the court untouched.
Meanwhile, many Brazilians have been marching in the streets against the United States, Donald Trump and in defense of Palestine.
Monique Sochaczweski Goldfeld, Middle-East Analyst: Above all, since the war in Gaza, but even before that. It was very common to see keffiyeh or the Palestinian flag at left-wing demonstrations.”
Barbara Sinedino, Rio de Janeiro State Union of Professional Educators: They are annihilating a people through the use of force. Today the Gaza Strip is a humanitarian calamity, because of the Israeli state, which was always supported by U.S. imperialism. But now, it’s even worse. The Trump administration has just opened it all up. Trump wants to make a luxury resort out of the Gaza Strip and he wants to kill the people. He wants to destroy the Palestinian people. So we are here, standing up in the streets.
We need to break political, economic, military relations with Israel. We have to break diplomatic, cultural and sporting relations with Israel. We did this in the era of Apartheid in South Africa and the international blockade was really important in ending apartheid.
Michael Fox [Narration]: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hasn’t broken relations with Israel. But ties between the two countries are at a low. Lula has repeatedly condemned the violence in Palestine.
SOT9: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazilian President [CLIP]: Absolutely nothing justifies the terrorist actions perpetrated by Hamas. But we cannot remain indifferent to the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. The solution to this conflict will only be possible with the end of the Israeli occupation and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
Michael Fox [Narration]: Analyst Monique Goldfeld explains how Israel’s war on Gaza is shaping domestic Brazilian politics, similar to the United States… Support for Israel or Palestine lines up along political lines. There’s a powerful evangelical lobby pushing a pro-Israel agenda.
But there are many differences. The number of Brazilians descended from the Middle East is three times larger than in the U.S. And the Jewish population is tiny.
Monique Sochaczweski Goldfeld: The United States has 300 million people, and 6 million Jews. Brazil has 200 million inhabitants, and 120,000 Jews. It’s a very small community and it’s a community that doesn’t have a lot of political weight, although there are some Brazilian politicians, who are Jewish who are very prominent.
Michael Fox [Narration]: But far beyond the Jewish community… for evangelicals and the country’s far-right, Israel has become a symbol for Jesus, God, religious devotion, and the evangelical movement.
[CLIP] Reporter: Why are you wearing the Israeli flag? Protester: Because we are Christians, just like Israel.
Michael Fox [Narration]: While the Left is waving the flag for the Palestinian cause. In a June poll, over half of Brazilians had a disfavorable opinion of Israel. The same month, activists held the largest marches in defense of Palestine that Brazil had ever seen. Tens of thousands in the streets. They say they will not be silent. The situation in Gaza is too dire. The suffering is too great. The thousands of innocent deaths… too many.
While Brazil has long defended the right of both Israel and Palestine to exist… that does not mean the country will be silent over Israel’s violence in Gaza. Brazil recently announced plans to join the genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. It’s a sign of Brazil’s support for Palestine, both in and outside the government.
Despite the far-right’s embrace of Israel and the United States, the majority of Brazilians are standing against Israel’s attack on Gaza and the on-going occupation. They are standing in defense of Palestine.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) has denounced a bill advancing through the House that threatens sanctions on South Africa over its genocide case against Israel in the Hague and other actions against Israel, calling it an “extremist disgrace.” Last Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee overwhelmingly voted to advance a bill that requires the U.S. to reexamine its relationship with South…
As Israel’s military campaign in Gaza inflicts unprecedented levels of human destruction, two leading Israeli human rights organizations have at last called their nation’s actions in the enclave a “genocide.” Many international human rights groups — such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have long described Israel’s 22-month assault on Gaza in such grave terms…
The Department of Justice Civil Division issued an internal memorandum in June that got coverage in Fox News and very little attention elsewhere. The memo empowers the Civil Division – which had come under new leadership as of the week of the memo – to proactively advance several of Donald Trump’s right-wing priorities. The memo encourages the division to investigate “illegal private-sector DEI,”…
The “aid” airdrops that Israel authorized in Gaza did little to nothing to alleviate Israel’s starvation catastrophe while also injuring roughly a dozen Palestinians, with reports that they even collapsed homes and landed on tents in the region. The UN-backed Global Protection Cluster reported on Sunday, a day after the drops began, that Palestinians across the Strip were reporting “injuries…
Columbia University announced on July 23 that it had accepted an unprecedented “deal” with the federal government to settle claims brought by the Trump administration that it had discriminated against Jewish students. While the settlement did not include an admission of wrongdoing by the university, Columbia has agreed to meet a wide range of demands, which include paying more than $200 million to…
Baldwin’s assessment is shared by many others, such as Noam Chomsky, who discussed in his book (The Fateful Triangle, 1999 edition) Israel’s role as a “strategic asset.” (p. 69, 70, 103, 137) However, others, such as Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone countered that assessment in a 2024 article, “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East.” They write:
But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.
If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S. control.
We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by all the populations of the oil producing countries?
Bricmont and Johnstone attribute the unstinting US support of Israel as being influenced by money injected into the US political arena by the Jewish lobby, in particular AIPAC.
The question of which side leads in determining US support for Israel is debatable. What is indisputable is that the US and Israel are in lockstep despite all the violations of international law by Israel (US is a serial violator of international law, as well), despite several massacres carried out by Israel, and despite the mightily ramped up genocide being perpetrated by Israeli Jews against Palestinians currently.
Genocide and the understanding of what unleashes the bloodshirtiest of human actions is the subject of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery, scheduled for release by Haymarket Books on 30 September — while the savagery is ongoing. The urgency for a worldwide response calls for informing those unaware or those insouciant to the Jewish Israeli genocide that is being perpetrated on Palestine (It is not just a genocide in Gaza, as a 1 July 2025 Al Jazeera headline makes clear: “Israel has killed 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023.”). After Savagery, however, is not just about the genocide in Gaza, it is about why some humans commit genocide. So After Savagery is also about “before savagery.” What are the conditions that lead to savagery today. And most importantly, how genocide can be prevented from happening.
Dabashi quotes many sources to attest to the genocide that is happening now in Palestine.
“What we are seeing in Gaza is a repeat of Auschwitz,” says the Burmese genocide expert and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Maung Zarni. “This is a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” he further explains. (154-155)
Asked to describe what he witnessed in Gaza, Dr. Perlmutter replied, “All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—forty mission trips, thirty years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.” And the civilian casualties, he said, are almost exclusively children. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.” (103-104)
“Yes, it is genocide,” has affirmed Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust history at the department of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.” (142)
Dabashi traces the roots of Zionism to a longstanding settler-European colonialism. And the author lays bare the insidiousness of Zionism and how this racism impacted Palestinians:
Today, the birth of Palestine as a “question” rather than a nation-state marks precisely the birth of Palestine as a constellation of refugee camps. The land was stolen from Palestinians, the state stealing the land was a European settler colony garrison state that rules over Palestinians with cruelty, the rules for the inscription of life were dictated to Palestinians in draconian terms, and the camps as the fourth inseparable element are precisely where generations of Palestinians are born and raised, before being killed by the Israeli military. (127-128)
Part of this racism towards Muslims, of which the majority of Palestinians are, is the use of the term “Muselmann.” Writes Dabashi, “This is perhaps a mini encyclopedia of European ignorance, Islamophobia and antisemitism all wrapped up in an attempt to unpack the word ‘Muselmann,’ but in fact loading it with more racist dimensions.” (120) And the new Muselmann, is the Palestinian, “the Untestifiable, the human animal, as Israeli warlords have said.” (xxvi)
Zionist Israel and its racism and discrimination is compellingly described. My colleague B.J. Sabri and I needed no convincing of Israeli racism.1
And this racism, not exclusive to Israeli Jews, points to “what ultimately matters for the world at large is the categorical inability to fathom a Palestinian as a human being.” (96) Thus, “Witnessing this savagery in Gaza, we can clearly link the Jewish Holocaust to the Palestinian genocide, and see genocidal Zionism as the logical colonial extension of European fascism.” (xv)
Before Savagery
Many personages appear in After Savagery, such as, to name a few, Sven Lindqvist, Frantz Fanon, Joseph Conrad, and James Baldwin who opposed racism; Edward Said, Giorgio Agamben, Ghassan Kanafani and his Danish wife Anni Kanafani (née Høver), Mario Rizzi, Mahmoud Darwish who spoke to the beauty of Orientalism and Arab culture; others such as Ilan Pappe and UN special rappateur Francesca Albanese who denounce unflinchingly the depredations of Israeli Jews against Palestinians. Dabashi delves deeply into the Eurocentric perspective on colonialism, borne of Western philosophy and figures like Immanuel Kant, Hegel Heidegger, and others whose thinking was impoverished by being shackled by their own racism.
Dabashi writes:
“According to Hegel, Africans, or any other people, can only become civilized to the degree and so far as they abandoned their own cultures and convert to Christianity, founding a state according to Christian principles.” (91)
How are “we” to escape the indoctrination of feted philosophers and the inculcation of Western thought? How do “we” humanize Palestinians? The mere fact that the humanity of Palestinians requires affirmation for so many people points to the pervasiveness of racist Eurocentric narratives.
After the unbridled savagery in Gaza, it is not only European philosophy that reaches its ignoble ends. We need equally to think of the modes of knowledge production about Gaza itself, about Palestine, as the simulacrum of the world outside the purview of the discredited Eurocentric imagination. We no longer need to worry about the critique of Orientalism. We need to think of how to produce knowledge about Gaza and Palestine and the rest of the world. We need to reverse the anthropological gaze, to produce an anthropology of Zionism and Western Philosophy. (105)
The book covers a lot of ground. It delves deeply into ontology, epistemology, semantics, literature, art, filmmaking, poetry, politics, religion, exilism, and — especially — philosophy. After Savagery is not focused solely on the here and now of what is transpiring in historical Palestine. The book goes into the history, background, and philosophy that enables genocide. The book is scholarly and is well footnoted. If that is what the reader is looking for, then Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery is well worth the read.
Anas Al-Sharif, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent and one of the few journalists still reporting from Northern Gaza, is being targeted by a long running smear campaign led by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
Al Jazeera: Speaking the truth is a threat to Israel in this time of genocide
Once again, the Israeli army spokesperson has launched a campaign of threats and incitement against me because of my work as a journalist with Al Jazeera. I reaffirm: I, Anas Al-Sharif, am a journalist with no political affiliations. My only mission is to report the truth from the ground — as it is, without bias. At a time when a deadly famine is ravaging Gaza, speaking the truth has become, in the eyes of the occupation, a threat.
The latest accusations directed at Al-Sharif from the IOF spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, have falsely accused him of being a member of Hamas’ military wing, Al-Qassam, since 2013. Adraee also accused him of moving during the war “to work for the most criminal and offensive channel” after he broke down live on air earlier this week, when a woman fainted in front of him from hunger whilst he was reporting on the occupation’s enforced starvation campaign against Palestinians.
Since then, the IOF Spokesperson has also called Al Jazeera’s reporting on Gaza’s starvation “a fabricated drama starring Anas Al-Sharif, who sheds crocodile tears”, and his sadness “propaganda”.
Al-Sharif’s life in acute danger
On Saturday 26 July, Adraee posted the following statement on X:
To the self-proclaimed journalist, the mouthpiece of Hamas’s intellectual terrorism, it is truly astonishing that you are speaking today about the suffering of the people of Gaza, while in reality you are part of the lying media machine that promotes propaganda and distorts the facts. Let’s be frank: you do not represent Gaza or its suffering, because you are part of the Hamas family and refuse to hold this Muslim Brotherhood movement responsible.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has issued a statement saying it is “gravely worried” about the safety of Al-Sharif, who believes this campaign against him is a precursor to his assassination. CPJ and human rights organisations have called urgently for international protection for him due to the acute danger to his life.
Israel has murdered more journalists than in any other conflict ever recorded
Since the start of this modern-day genocide, 232 journalists have been targeted and killed by Israel in Gaza, according to the Government Media Office last week. That is an average of 13 per month – making it the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded.
At least six of these worked for Al Jazeera. This killing is intentional: an attempt by Israel to silence the truth and hide its many war crimes. Along with the rest of Gaza’s population, if the bullets and bombs do not kill the journalists, intentional starvation and disease will – yet still they risk everything to bring us the truth.
Al-Sharif, who has not stopped reporting for the past 22 months, said last week:
Today I say it outright, and with indescribable pain- I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment…. Gaza is dying and we die with it.
Al-Sharif and other journalists: tired and starving, but won’t be silenced
Al-Sharif, who comes from Jabalia refugee camp in the North of the Gaza Strip, has become a target for repeated intimidation and threats from the occupation.
In November 2023, he was repeatedly harassed by the military, who phoned him up multiple times, and ordered him to stop reporting, and to leave Northern Gaza. In December 2023, his father, Jamal, was killed by an Israeli strike which also destroyed his home, while last year he was one of six Al Jazeera journalists accused of being affiliated with Hamas, by the IOF.
But although he faces constant threats, and fears for his family’s safety, Al-Sharif says he remains determined to continue reporting on the suffering of the people in Gaza. He told CPJ:
For the past few years, governments across the world have paid close attention to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There, it is said, we see the first glimpses of what warfare of the future will look like, not just in terms of weaponry, but also in terms of new technologies and tactics.
Most recently, the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran demonstrated not just new strategies of drone deployment and infiltration but also new vulnerabilities. During the 12-day conflict, Iran and vessels in the waters of the Gulf experienced repeated disruptions of GPS signal.
This clearly worried the Iranian authorities who, after the end of the war, began to look for alternatives.
“At times, disruptions are created on this [GPS] system by internal systems, and this very issue has pushed us toward alternative options like BeiDou,” Ehsan Chitsaz, deputy communications minister, told Iranian media in mid-July. He added that the government was developing a plan to switch transportation, agriculture and the internet from GPS to BeiDou.
Iran’s decision to explore adopting China’s navigation satellite system may appear at first glance to be merely a tactical manoeuvre. Yet, its implications are far more profound. This move is yet another indication of a major global realignment.
For decades, the West, and the US in particular, have dominated the world’s technological infrastructure from computer operating systems and the internet to telecommunications and satellite networks.
This has left much of the world dependent on an infrastructure it cannot match or challenge. This dependency can easily become vulnerability. Since 2013, whistleblowers and media investigations have revealed how various Western technologies and schemes have enabled illicit surveillance and data gathering on a global scale — something that has worried governments around the world.
Clear message
Iran’s possible shift to BeiDou sends a clear message to other nations grappling with the delicate balance between technological convenience and strategic self-defence: The era of blind, naive dependence on US-controlled infrastructure is rapidly coming to an end. Nations can no longer afford to have their military capabilities and vital digital sovereignty tied to the satellite grid of a superpower they cannot trust.
This sentiment is one of the driving forces behind the creation of national or regional satellite navigation systems, from Europe’s Galileo to Russia’s GLONASS, each vying for a share of the global positioning market and offering a perceived guarantee of sovereign control.
GPS was not the only vulnerability Iran encountered during the US-Israeli attacks. The Israeli army was able to assassinate a number of nuclear scientists and senior commanders in the Iranian security and military forces. The fact that Israel was able to obtain their exact locations raised fears that it was able to infiltrate telecommunications and trace people via their phones.
On June 17 as the conflict was still raging, the Iranian authorities urged the Iranian people to stop using the messaging app WhatsApp and delete it from their phones, saying it was gathering user information to send to Israel.
Whether this appeal was linked to the assassinations of the senior officials is unclear, but Iranian mistrust of the app run by US-based corporation Meta is not without merit.
Cybersecurity experts have long been sceptical about the security of the app. Recently, media reports have revealed that the artificial intelligence software Israel uses to target Palestinians in Gaza is reportedly fed data from social media.
Furthermore, shortly after the end of the attacks on Iran, the US House of Representatives moved to ban WhatsApp from official devices.
Western platforms not trusted
For Iran and other countries around the world, the implications are clear: Western platforms can no longer be trusted as mere conduits for communication; they are now seen as tools in a broader digital intelligence war.
Tehran has already been developing its own intranet system, the National Information Network, which gives more control over internet use to state authorities. Moving forward, Iran will likely expand this process and possibly try to emulate China’s Great Firewall.
By seeking to break with Western-dominated infrastructure, Tehran is definitively aligning itself with a growing sphere of influence that fundamentally challenges Western dominance. This partnership transcends simple transactional exchanges as China offers Iran tools essential for genuine digital and strategic independence.
The broader context for this is China’s colossal Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While often framed as an infrastructure and trade project, BRI has always been about much more than roads and ports. It is an ambitious blueprint for building an alternative global order.
Iran — strategically positioned and a key energy supplier — is becoming an increasingly important partner in this expansive vision.
What we are witnessing is the emergence of a new powerful tech bloc — one that inextricably unites digital infrastructure with a shared sense of political defiance. Countries weary of the West’s double standards, unilateral sanctions and overwhelming digital hegemony will increasingly find both comfort and significant leverage in Beijing’s expanding clout.
This accelerating shift heralds the dawn of a new “tech cold war”, a low-temperature confrontation in which nations will increasingly choose their critical infrastructure, from navigation and communications to data flows and financial payment systems, not primarily based on technological superiority or comprehensive global coverage but increasingly on political allegiance and perceived security.
As more and more countries follow suit, the Western technological advantage will begin to shrink in real time, resulting in redesigned international power dynamics.
Jasim Al-Azzawi is an analyst, news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor. He has presented a weekly show called Inside Iraq.
Press Release No. (908) Issued by the Government Media Office:
The famine is getting more ferocious and the occupation continues its crimes of genocide: Only 73 trucks entered today, and the air drop operations fell in dangerous combat zones
(@archivegenocide) 
