Israel killed visual artist Frans al-Salmi in Monday’s mass murder of 95 people in Gaza. She joins over a hundred cultural workers whom occupation forces have killed during the ongoing genocide as part of what some call “a deliberate campaign to erase Palestinian culture”.
Targeting cultural heritage is not an empty gesture. Culture constitutes a visible expression of human identity. Depriving a people of their culture is tantamount to emptying them of the very substance that forms the backbone of their right to self-determination, especially in a context of cumulative, interconnected and systemic human rights violations.
Ignoring Gaza’s cultural genocide, as it assassinates Frans al-Salmi
Back in 2021, Keir Starmer spoke about China’s treatment of its Uyghur community, promising “to ensure Britain never turns a blind eye to genocide” and urging action. Though there were no apparent reports of murder, except the roughly 200 deaths during the July 2009 riots, Western media outlets regularly condemned “cultural genocide”.
Though they once threw the word genocide around quite lightly, Starmer and others suddenly went quiet when Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023. Could that possibly be because Israel is an ally and China isn’t? They wouldn’t allow that to determine their responses, would they?
This is textbook cultural genocide, and it’s a core component of Israeli settler colonialism. Erasing Palestinian culture and history makes it that much easier for the Israeli government to lay claim to Palestinians’ homes and land and deny Palestinians’ historical connection and rights to that land.
Israeli occupation forces added to this by destroying “at least 206 archaeological and heritage sites”, 611 mosques, and a “747-year-old library”, while damaging many other sites (including “all three of Gaza’s churches”, one of them dating back to the fifth century). They also demolished “at least 34 sports facilities, stadiums and gyms” and killed “at least 410 athletes, sports officials or coaches”.
Cultural rights organisation Mimetaexplains that the genocide has been:
devastating the region’s cultural fabric. Among the casualties are artists from diverse fields—painters, writers, poets, photographers, musicians, and designers—whose work represented the vibrant soul of Palestinian identity. This tragic loss extends beyond individuals, targeting cultural institutions and erasing centuries of heritage.
Now, Frans al-Salmi is the latest victim of this.
British cultural workers stand in solidarity with Palestine
Outspoken groups in the West like Kneecap and Bob Vylan have attracted the wrath of genocide apologists this year because of their opposition to Israeli war crimes. And their courage to speak out is nothing less than a moral imperative amid Israel’s cultural genocide in Gaza, especially as the British government seeks to crack down on the right to resist the state’s complicity in Israeli war crimes.
With popular and effective activists from Palestine Action facing proscription efforts from Keir Starmer’s regime, numerous cultural workers have made their opposition clear, insisting:
Palestine Action is intervening to stop a genocide. It is acting to save life. We deplore the government’s decision to proscribe it. Labeling non-violent direct action as ‘terrorism’ is an abuse of language and an attack on democracy. The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw its proscription of Palestine Action and to stop arming Israel.
Those signing this statement include Paul Weller, Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan, Francesca Martinez, and Frankie Boyle, along with many other visual artists, writers, actors, comedians, and musicians.
Mike Ferner, of Veterans For Peace, threw blood at the US mission to the UN today: “Here, United States, have some blood! You like shedding it all over the world so much? There you go! How about some blood? A small amount of the blood — the blood money — that corporations make taking us to war all the time. No. More. Killing. Please. Stop it.”
He and 28 others were reportedly arrested today. He had been participated in #FastForGaza
Most arrests took place at the Israeli mission to the UN where a mass action was. Joy Metzler, co-founder of Servicemembers For Ceasefire, was among those arrested there.
It’s June, which means a similar scene is playing out at tens of thousands of Jewish houses across the continent. Duffel bags dug up from basements. Toiletries laid out on carpeted floors, emergency trips to the drug store for one final item. Last-minute clothing decisions. Bags of carefully curated candy. Tearful midnight goodbyes to school friends. For so many of us Jewish North Americans, the summers of our younger years mean one thing: sleepover camp. Unfortunately, it’s not just Jewish kids, teenagers, and twenty-somethings getting ready to go to one of the hundreds of Jewish camps in North America.
The Trump administration has approved a new arms deal for Israel that will provide the country with $510 million worth of Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS), kits that turn bombs into precision-guided weapons, as the US continues to provide military aid to support the genocidal war in Gaza.
According to the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), the State Department notified Congress of the sale of 3,845 JDAMS for 2,000-pound BLU-109 bombs and 3,280 JDAMS for 500-pound MK 82 bombs. The deal also includes US “government and contractor engineering, logistics, and technical support services; and other related elements of logistics and program support.”
More than 170 international NGOs, including Oxfam, Save the Children, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and the Norwegian Refugee Council, issued a joint declaration on 1 July in Geneva calling for an immediate end to the US-Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
According to medical authorities in Gaza, over 550 Palestinians have been killed and thousands injured near GHF aid distribution sites and transport routes since the foundation began operating in late May.
The statement warned that “Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families.”
Although there is a temporary “ceasefire” in the U.S./Israeli effort to destroy Iran, many groups internationally are determined to stay mobilized. The horrific genocide in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank, continues, as do plots against Iran.
There were more than 65 actions around the world listed on the website of the United National Antiwar Coalition, based on a call from Global Resistance for a week of actions June 21 to 28. Internationally actions were held in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Germany, India, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Sweden. Across Canada there were multiple actions, from Vancouver to Hamilton, Ontario.
In the U.S. the week of actions stretched coast to coast.
In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.
They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.
As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”
Gaza crisis and Iran tensions. Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea
Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.
Martyn Bradbury talks to Dr Paul Buchanan (left) and Selwyn Manning on the Iran crisis and the future. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Political Panel:
Māori Party president John Tamihere,
NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson
NZCTU economist Craig Renney
Topics:
– The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp
– New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy?
– Cost of living crisis and the failing economy
The newspaper added that these figures mean that about 4% of the population of the Strip have lost their lives, making this war one of the bloodiest of the current century.
Ministry of Health figures for Gaza are lower than reality
Haaretz referred to a new study prepared by an international research team led by Professor Michael Spagat of the University of London, with the participation of Dr. Khalil Shqaqi. The study included a survey of 2,000 Palestinian families in Gaza, representing about 10,000 people.
It concluded that about 75,200 people were killed as a result of the violence until January 2025, while the Ministry of Health in Gaza had announced 45,660 deaths at that time. This means that the actual number may be 40% higher.
Indirect deaths and a high percentage of women and children dead in Gaza
In addition to direct deaths, the study addressed deaths resulting from hunger, lack of medicine, the spread of disease, and the collapse of the health system, showing that the total number of deaths as of last January was about 83,740 people.
According to the report, the death toll has increased since then, with the Ministry of Health in Gaza announcing that more than 10,000 people were killed after January, bringing the total to around 100,000 deaths.
The study showed that 56% of the victims were women and children, an unprecedented percentage in contemporary conflicts. This percentage exceeds that recorded in conflicts such as Syria, Iraq, Kosovo, and Sudan.
Spagat said that the death rate compared to the population was about 4%, one of the highest rates recorded in the 21st century.
Absence of Israeli data
The Haaretz report noted that the Israeli army did not announce any official figures on the number of civilian deaths in Gaza, which is unusual. Instead, Israel has repeatedly claimed that 20,000 members of Hamas and other factions were killed, but without providing any evidence or lists.
The researchers confirmed that the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s data, despite Israeli skepticism, is accurate and may even be lower than the actual figures, pointing to its consistency with the results of other international studies.
As of the end of June, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that the war had resulted in more than 189,000 deaths and injuries, in addition to more than 11,000 missing persons, most of them women and children, amid continuing siege, famine, and mass displacement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting the United States next week to meet with President Donald Trump and other top officials in the U.S. administration, supposedly to “capitalize on the success” of the 12-day war against Iran. This comes after nearly 21 months of Israel’s war on Gaza that has killed at least 56,000 Palestinians, with daily violence only increasing.
UN human rights expert Francesca Albanese has released a report naming dozens of companies that bear complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid in Palestine, aiming to show how companies have built Israel’s occupation into a sprawling, profitable industry. In her report released Monday, Albanese names over 60 companies, including numerous U.S.-based companies, for their role in advancing…
Israel’s parliament thinks it’s ok for politicians to call Palestinians “subhumans” and encourage Israeli occupation forces to “burn Gaza” and “kill the adults in Gaza”. And it allows this during a livestreamed genocide. Free speech matters, it says… until musicians in Britain like Bob Vylan dare to call out the war criminals committing that genocide.
Every day a new mass murder. But it’s the perpetrators’ feelings we need to worry about, apparently.
On Monday 30 June, the Israeli occupation forces (IDF) murdered 95 people at a cafe, school, and aid sites in Gaza. These included a journalist and children celebrating a birthday. But it’s not those war criminals facing the wrath of the British political and media establishment. Instead, police are investigating music group Bob Vylan after its frontman said “death to the IDF”. Its agents have reportedly dropped it. The US, without which Israel’s genocide couldn’t have happened, has revoked the group’s visas. And they’ve been facing offensively cynicalsmears from genocide-apologists.
Without a hint of irony, the Israeli embassy in Britain feigned concern over “the normalisation of extremist language and the glorification of violence”, saying:
when speech crosses into incitement, hatred, and advocacy of ethnic cleansing, it must be called out—especially when amplified by public figures on prominent platforms.
However, genocide-apologists don’t justwish “death to Hamas” or its military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades (which would be the actual equivalent to saying “death to the IDF”). They go much further. They often say “Death to Arabs”, normalising genocidal rhetoric against a whole ethnic group. It’s now a “popular Israeli slogan”. And a chart-topping Israeli song goes further, calling for the deaths of anti-genocide celebrities Dua Lipa, Mia Khalifa, and Bella Hadid. The very “incitement, hatred, and advocacy of ethnic cleansing” the Israeli embassy claims to worry about in Britain is exactly what the colonial power has been fostering and allowing at home.
No more morality lessons from those who incite and commit genocide
Israeli politician Nissim Vaturi called for the IDF to “burn Gaza“. But a parliamentary ethics committee recently rejected a complaint about him on ‘free speech’ grounds. The fact that he was a deputy Knesset speaker made no difference. Earlier this year, meanwhile, Vaturi also gave an interview in which he called Palestinians “subhumans” (the same term the Nazis used during the Holocaust), adding that they were a group of people that cannot be accepted by anyone. He also suggested no Gazans were innocent and encouraged the IDF to “kill the adults in Gaza”, insisting that the war criminals were “being too considerate”. At that point, the IDF had already killed at least one child every hour since October 2023.
Even LBC, usually not a place for left-wing commentary, had to admit how absurd it was that there was so much establishment rage about Bob Vylan and so little about Israel’s words and crimes:
.@rachshabi having to explain that 'death to the IDF' is not antisemitic is a sign of how far the smears have gone. And Rachel is right, there are dangerous consequences to that. pic.twitter.com/6I942jx1Yk
OMG this is the best ever speaking James O'Brien ever made. He says what happens in Gaza is 17,000,000 times worse than what happened in Glastonbury pic.twitter.com/5rQc9HmlCy
Vaturi isn’t unique either. There is a long, exhaustive list of Israeli politicians who have made genocidal statements. As Al Jazeerareported previously, “people with command authority have been making genocidal statements repeatedly”:
They have dehumanised Palestinians in their rhetoric, and painted the population in Gaza, as a whole, as Israel’s enemy.
Wanted war criminals Yoav Gallant and Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, described Palestinians as “human animals”, “monsters”, and “barbarians”.
Bob Vylan is not the problem
Genocide requires dehumanisation of the target population. Nazis famously did that by portraying Jewish people as rats before the Holocaust, and Zionists have done the same with Palestinians both before and during the current genocide in Gaza. Perpetrators and supporters of Israel’s actions have called Palestinians “roaches” and “rats”, for example. And Western mainstream media outlets have even joined in with dehumanising propaganda to support Israel’s efforts.
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.
I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.
It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.
“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.
Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.
The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.
Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.
Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.
Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”
On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”
Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.
Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.
“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.
“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”
He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.
“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.
Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”
The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.
“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.
“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”
The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.
As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”
Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.
“It’s a killing field” says a headline in the Ha’aretz newspaper. Image: Ha’aretz screenshot APR
“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.
Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.
There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.
The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.
As parliament is set to vote on Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cuts to chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits, people were out protesting again on Monday 30 June. However, in a shocking display of far-right abuse, a group of pro-Israel supporters was also there. And they hurled abuse at disabled people – telling them to “fuck off and die”, calling them “lazy scum”, and screaming “fuck disabled people”.
DWP cuts: no concessions, here
The Canary has been documenting the Labour Party’s planned cuts to DWP benefits like Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Universal Credit. Most recently, as we reported Keir Starmer has offered concessions to Labour rebels over the DWP cuts. More than 120 Labour MPs have mounted a major rebellion against the proposed cuts. And, countless disability organisations and activists have repeatedly warned that the cuts will decimate the lives of disabled people.
Ahead of the vote on Tuesday 1 July, Starmer reached out to rebels with a desperate attempt to win their support. The government has proposed a major reform to PIP. As ever, it’s worth nothing that PIP has a 0% fraud rate and is not an out of work benefit. That’s in spite of the fact that this raft of disability cuts are being presented as getting disabled people into work. Now, Starmer has proposed the following ‘concessions’:
everyone currently on PIP will use the old points system, whilst new claimants will be subject to the overhauled points system
universal credit (UC) health element – the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity (LCWRA) component – will now rise alongside inflation, but again this appears to apply only to existing claimants, and those that meet the DWP’s new ‘severe conditions criteria’ as new claimants
increasing spending on employment schemes
Of course, these are not concessions at all. This is because new claimants and those transitioning from other benefits like Child Disability Living Allowance (DLA) will still be hit by the cuts.
Protest
So, on 30 June disabled people went to parliament to protest the DWP cuts:
However, at the same time there was a group of pro-Israel supporters there.
Reportedly, because former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn came to speak at the disabled people’s demo, the Israel supporters thought it appropriate to throw abuse at them:
Protestors waving Israeli flags have tried to stop the #WelfareNotWarfare demo after seeing Jeremy Corbyn. Disabled people have been forced to form a line to stop them. pic.twitter.com/1ROKwvYywL
— Ben Claimant Join a Union (@BenClaimant) June 30, 2025
At the disabled people’s protest they were targeted by zionists, abuse included “Fuck disabled people” & “You should just fuck off & die”. Activists courageously held hands & turned their backs on the abusers.
The abuse from those with Israeli flags was on the lines of ‘get a job’, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’ ‘lazy scum’ etc but it also involved ‘f*ck the disabled, f*ck off & die’. These people should remember that the Nazis began with the disabled. @Dis_PPL_Protest#TakingThePIPpic.twitter.com/69dWYEI0Tl
It’s well documented that far-right Western settlers in Israel have a penchant for chanting ‘death to Arabs‘. It is also well documented that nearly half of all Israelis support ethnic cleansing in all but name. However, far-right, UK-based Israeli supporters calling for death to disabled people at a DWP protest is a new one.
The Canary has witnessed first hand at protests the blurred lines between racist Israeli supporters and the far-right. They are often the same thing. So, it’s not surprising that they would have extremist eugenicists in their ranks, either.
Disabled people are fighting for their basic rights – and in some cases, their lives. Genocidal Israeli supporters, who would happily see countless dead Palestinian children, now turning on disabled people in the UK is hardly a surprise.
Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.
Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.
Judgment in Al-Haq’s historic long-running claim against the U.K. government for its continued licensing of F-35 parts into the global supply reaching Israel. The Court has not upheld Al-Haq’s claim.
Today, the UK High Court delivered judgment in Al-Haq’s claim against the U.K. government for its continued licensing of F-35 parts into the global supply chain. The court stated that it could not find any legal flaws in the government’s decision-making and that certain parts of the challenge were non-justiciable, meaning that they are not matters for the Courts. Leaving the question, who is the UK government accountable to in matters of international law?
As Europe’s summer music festival season rolls out, mainstream media and governments are struggling to keep Palestine solidarity off the stage. In its coverage of Glastonbury Festival, the BBC focused on censoring the Irish rap group Kneecap over their staunch pro-Palestinian stance – only to be met by a wave of artists who used their platform to call for a free Palestine and to demand broadcasters share real news about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Among them was the British duo Bob Vylan, who led the crowd in chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF,” denouncing war crimes committed by the Israeli army, including the starvation of children and the killing of civilians in humanitarian aid lines.
Israeli soldiers are ordered to treat crowds of Palestinians gathered to receive humanitarian aid in Gaza as a “hostile force” and communicate with the desperate aid seekers by opening fire, according to a new report citing soldiers who were deployed in Gaza. Haaretz, echoing reporting by Palestinians and humanitarian groups on the ground, reports that Israeli soldiers are told to shoot at…
Israel is a paper tiger. What was it? Three days of Iran going through first gear before Tel Aviv was pleading for a ‘coalition of the willing’ to step in and join in with their targeting of Tehran?
How revolting.
But let’s go back to the playground for a moment.
Benjamin Netanyahu: the playground bully
The feared school bully, a thuggish kid named Benjamin, — known for targeting small and often weak pupils — picked a very public, middle-of-the-playground fight with a kid that was actually capable of defending themselves.
This is where the phrase a “schoolboy error” must come from.
Benjamin, somewhat shocked by the other kids’ resistance, took no more than a few swift-but-decisive uppercuts before screaming for back up from his gang. Donny came rushing to Benjamin’s aid, Keith scratched his head and called for calm, and Manny is still looking under the stairs for his white flag.
Benjamin’s friends were shocked by just how easy it was to land a hefty blow on their leader’s chin, particularly with his reputation for an impenetrable defence.
Benjamin the bully’s reputation as the toughest kid in the school was shattered, made worse by the undeniable fact that he actually started this fight in the first place.
A well-deserved kicking
But what lots of onlookers never realised was while everyone was watching Benjamin get a bit of a well deserved kicking, the rest of his thugs were still picking on the poor, starving and defenceless kids gathered elsewhere.
You see, while global mainstream media had all of us looking towards Tehran and Tel Aviv, genocidal Israel has stepped up its killing spree of the Palestinian people, in Gaza.
Hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians — suffering from starvation and patiently waiting for food rations for their families — have been callously slaughtered by Israel, in just the last few days.
While the tit-for-tat exchange between Israel and Iran, and the bizarre intervention from the (barely) human cheesy Cheeto in Washington may well have provided something for the world’s media to fixate upon, it also provided a perfect distraction for Benjamin, butcher of Gaza.
Israel will fight tooth and nail to ensure the Middle East is riddled with instability because without it, Israel cannot claim victimhood, and without victimhood, Israel is nothing.
Starmer: callous at home and abroad
Keir the capitulator, a gormlessly loyal servant of Zionist Israel, has had a shocker of a week.
Labour has made no secret of their utter contempt for disabled people. If you think that is a controversial statement, why the hell are you even reading this?
When they’re not snooping through your bank account, stripping away your support, slashing your pitiful benefits, they’re looking for new and imaginative methods to kill off the disabled people of Britain in ways that not even Iain Duncan Smith dared to dream.
I am absolutely sick to death of hearing about “concessions”, “rebels”, and “significant revisions”, because it’s entirely fucking meaningless media speak designed to convince you into believing that we have a functioning democracy where the powerful are held to account by elected representatives.
They’re not. Not under this government, the one before, the one before that, or any government stretching back throughout my lifetime.
There are no “concessions” to be made. A two-tier benefits system for disabled people to match the two-tier policing and the two-tier healthcare provision just doesn’t sit well with me an nor should it with any person with a single shred of moral fibre.
There are very few “rebels” because the “concessions” they have made for weak Keir Starmer will still see millions of disabled people being unfairly punished by a callous and inhumane government, hellbent on satisfying its shadowy string-pullers and appealing to enough knuckle draggers to see them over the line at the next general election.
The Welfare Bill
Labour’s Welfare Bill is set to sully the party’s already-battered public image even further. There are no positive optics when you’re shafting poor, disabled, and vulnerable people in broad daylight.
Labour’s Welfare Bill is a stunning masterclass in miscalculation, self-sabotage and moral failure. The bastards are robbing billions of pounds from disabled people and dressing it up as ‘pragmatic reform’, while claiming that they are magically fixing a broken system.
Can you believe the brass neck of this remorseless, red Tory scum?
Labour’s Welfare Bill is a deliberate choice to target the most vulnerable to plug an apparent budget hole. Nobody really believes it is fiscally responsible to push 400,000 disabled households in the direction of Food Banks, do they?
Before I go and hide somewhere cold for the next few days, can I make a radical suggestion?
And a heatwave, just to finish us off. Thanks, Starmer.
The weather forecast for the next few days will undoubtedly be enjoyable for some people. Personally, I cannot stand it, and I know lots of Fibromyalgia sufferers struggle to keep cool, particularly when they’re stuffed to the eyeballs with anti-depressants like Pregablin.
These extremely rare weather events are no longer rare, but undoubtedly extreme.
If we think it is a good idea to help people to heat their homes during cold weather spells in the winter, why aren’t we talking about warm weather payments for people, young and old, that need additional financial support to help them keep their homes cool during the summer months?
Perhaps a Freedom of Information Act request would tell us how many MPs have public-subsidised air conditioning in their offices, both in Westminster and their constituencies?
I’m sure they, the pampered elite, wouldn’t expect you to work in extreme heat on a building site, or in a kitchen, or a hospital, or a call centre, while they’re sat in their offices with their private bits slowly turning to ice, would they?
On 30 June, the UK High Court ruled that the government’s decision to continue exporting F-35 fighter jet components to Israel is lawful, despite Labour acknowledging that these parts could potentially be used in violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) in Gaza. This decision has sparked significant criticism from human rights organisations and legal experts who argue that it undermines the UK’s commitment to upholding international law and human rights.
F-35 exports are legal, says High Court
The case was brought forward by the Global Legal Action Network and the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, with support from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam.
They contended that the UK’s continued supply of F-35 components, which are part of a global spares pool accessible by Israel, makes the UK complicit in potential IHL violations committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
UK industry makes 15% of every F-35, with the value of UK components in Israel’s F-35s estimated by CAAT to be well over £500m. This is by far the most significant part of the UK arms trade with Israel. At least 75 UK companies are involved in manufacturing components. For example, BAE Systems makes every rear fuselage for the F-35 and also makes its active interceptor system. Leonardo makes its targeting lasers and L3 Harris makes the weapons release cables.
Israel is using its 45 F-35s intensively to bomb the Palestinian people in Gaza, including using horrifically destructive 2,000lb bombs. By March this year, Israel had carried out 15,000 flight hours with the F-35 since the start of the war, using the planes in “beast mode”, with extra munitions attached to the wings.
A “cowardly ruling”
In their 72-page ruling, Lord Justice Males and Mrs. Justice Steyn stated that such matters are political and best left to the executive branch and Parliament, not the courts. They emphasised that the issue at hand was whether it is appropriate for the court to mandate the UK’s withdrawal from a multilateral defense collaboration, which ministers consider vital to national and international security, due to the possibility that UK-manufactured components might be used in serious IHL violations.
Critics argue that this ruling effectively allows the UK government to prioritise political and economic interests over its legal and moral obligations to prevent complicity in potential war crimes.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT’s) Media Coordinator Emily Apple said:
This is a cowardly ruling that absolves any responsibility from the court to rule on the UK government’s compliance with international law. International law exists to keep all of us safe. It should be the founding principle of our arms export criteria, not one the government can pick and choose when to implement.
Successive governments have claimed that our arms export licensing criteria are the most robust in the world. This claim is now in tatters.
This court ruling vindicates Palestine Action. Palestine Action are not terrorists – they have the courage our courts clearly lack. It shows the only option open to us is to take direct action against the arms trade, to stop the genocide profiteers in their tracks. We cannot rely on our institutions to uphold international law, we can only rely on ourselves and the power we have to create change.
When our government and our courts fail us, it is down to us, ordinary citizens, to take action. We cannot wait for the history books to vindicate us. We cannot wait for Israel to obliterate Gaza and the West Bank. We cannot wait and watch while Israel kills more Palestinian children with 2000lb bombs dropped by F-35s. We will not stand by and we will not stay silent while the government prioritises its relationship with a genocidal state and arms dealers’ profits over Palestinian lives.
A biased assessment
Furthermore, the government’s limited investigation into potential IHL breaches by Israeli forces raises concerns about the thoroughness and impartiality of its assessments.
Despite reports of at least 56,000 Palestinian deaths, the government identified only one case—the April 2024 World Central Kitchen strike—as a possible IHL violation. This narrow focus fails to account for the broader pattern of civilian casualties and destruction in Gaza.
theguardian.com
The ruling also highlights the UK’s significant role in the F-35 program, with British manufacturers supplying approximately 15% of the aircraft’s components. This involvement not only ties the UK economically to the program but also raises questions about the influence of defense industry interests on government policy decisions.
The government is committing war crimes with its F-35 exports
Human rights organisations and legal experts have expressed deep concern over the implications of this ruling. The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said:
We are disappointed by the High Court’s refusal to grant permission for judicial review, but recognise the significant steps made in the course of this case so far. The Court accepted the government’s own finding that Israel is not committed to compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL). The Court accepted that there is a clear risk that UK-manufactured F-35 components may be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of IHL in Gaza. These findings are profoundly serious, and without Al-Haq’s claim the government may well have continued to deny these facts.
Yet despite those acknowledgements, the Court held that the legality of the UK’s decision to continue F-35 exports is not a matter that the courts can properly decide. We believe that the Court was wrong in law to conclude that the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Arms Trade Treaty, or customary international law are non-justiciable. The government must be held to account – in the Courts and in the court of public opinion – on these well-evidenced risks of atrocity crimes.
ICJP commends the efforts of Al-Haq, the Global Legal Action Network, interveners in this case, and those who provided their eyewitness testimony. Without them, the troubling reality may not have been exposed: that the UK government can acknowledge the risk of war crimes, admit the likely involvement of British-supplied weapons, and still continue exports to the perpetrators – shielded from judicial scrutiny.
ICJP remains committed to pursuing all available legal avenues to end the UK’s complicity in serious violations of international law. We have worked to support this case for over 18 months and will continue to do so should an appeal be launched.
In light of this decision, there is a growing call for greater transparency and accountability in the UK’s arms export policies. Critics urge the government to reassess its commitments and ensure that its actions align with its legal and moral obligations to prevent complicity in serious violations of international humanitarian law.
We know the Western mainstream media are on Israel’s side in its settler-colonial genocide of Palestinians. But following Bob Vylan’s anti-genocide chants at Glastonbury, they barely even pretended to be professionals. And they definitely didn’t include, for balance, the “popular Israeli slogan” calling for the murder of a whole ethnic group: “Death to Arabs”. And they certainly didn’t highlight that Israeli soldiers have long carried out this promise, killing as many people in Palestine and beyond as they can get away with.
Bob Vylan is not the story. The heinous war crimes of the IDF are.
Bob Vylan’s frontman chanted “death, death to the IDF”, referring to the Israeli occupation army currently committing genocide in Gaza. He has clarified that he doesn’t regret his words.
The Mail, however, twisted this on its front page to make it look like the chant referred to all Israelis – not just the ones engaging in heinous war crimes:
The headline is a total fabrication. “Death to the IDF” is not “Death to Israelis”.
The Spectator sought to paint it as antisemitic, an assertion that was antisemitic itself for ridiculously suggesting Jewish people and the actions of the Israeli state are somehow the same.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, took this even further, suggesting he had been “glorifying violence against Jews”. But as one community note put it, the “religious makeup” of the IDF is irrelevant. It is an organisation which has been openly terrorising civilians, so there is genuine, justifiable anger against it:
The IDF is an institution, not a person. Calling for its 'death' is calling for its activities to be curtailed. Pretending it calls for 'violence against Jews' is plainly fraudulent. pic.twitter.com/tKP4z0szpp
There are many Israelis, meanwhile, who haverefusedto serve in the IDF or to help it continue its genocide in Gaza:
A number of Israelis refuse to serve. The only morally acceptable thing to do if you are Israeli is refuse and go to prison for it. https://t.co/mri5Y54m6V
There are also IDF members who have openly spoken about its genocidal crimes:
The Israeli soldier who said he felt like a "Nazi" while stationed in Gaza during the First Intifada (https://t.co/hiO7DMph2P) could be expelled from @harvard. Not for violently suppressing an unarmed uprising, but for describing his behavior as Nazi-like, a clear violation of… pic.twitter.com/pZTKb4luYB
— Alternate Media Watchers (@AltMediaWatch) June 29, 2025
“Death to Arabs”, and Dua Lipa, Mia Khalifa, Bella Hadid etc.
Where Bob Vylan called out a genocidal army, the fascists supporting that army love calling for the death of a whole ethnic group which spans 22 countries. An annual hate march takes place on Jerusalem Day in Israel, and large groups of people chant “death to the Arabs”, “may their villages burn”, and other criminal slogans.
Israeli judges have let off Israeli terrorists who’ve attacked Palestinians while saying “Death to Arabs”. In the US, senator has said “I think we should kill ’em all” when talking about Palestinians. Western counter-protests have seen pro-Israel forces chanting “death to Arabs”. Israeli football hooligans in Europe have also chanted “death to Arabs”. And when a Jewish terrorist in the US tried to murder Israeli Jews because he thought they were Palestinians, one of the victims responded (thinking the gunman was a Palestinian) by saying “Death to Arabs”.
An Israeli song calling for the deaths of anti-genocide celebrities Dua Lipa, Mia Khalifa, and Bella Hadid, meanwhile, became a chart topper.
The big problem with the “death to Arabs” slogan is that it’s more than just words. Because the settler-colonial fascists who have been genociding Gaza (while attacking any country in the Middle East willing to stand up for it) have been acting on the slogan. And that is the story we should be emphasising amid all the manufactured outrage about Bob Vylan’s words at Glastonbury.
A leaked email has reportedly shown the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) calling on its branches not to show public support for Palestine Action. It is despite the group’s public support for Palestine Action, and it’s organising of a demo for them. This comes as the British state – in cahoots with the pro-Israel lobby – seeks to proscribe the group, smearing their non-violent ethical stand as terrorism.
Journalist Asa Winstanley has revealed an apparent request from PSC director Ben Jamal for branches ‘not to share or sign statements’ about Palestine Action. The reason, Jamal said, was to avoid ‘jeopardising the organisation’ or ‘putting members and followers at risk’.
Winstanley is one of many who have faced the misuse of British state power during the ongoing genocide, as authorities have increasingly sought to suppress criticism of Israel’s settler-colonial occupation and war crimes in Palestine. Counter-terrorism police unlawfully raided Winstanley’s home in 2024, with the Central Criminal Court ruling only last month that authorities had to return “all computers, phones and devices” that they’d seized many months before.
While @Pal_action is fighting for its life against proscription, @PSCupdates threatens its branches with consequences if they support them.
I’ve obtained an internal PSC email which shows @BenJamalpsc has ordered his branches:
While PSC usually says the right things on Palestine, it does not share Palestine Action’s philosophy of direct action. The letter gave PSC branch officers “comprehensive guidance on how [branches] should handle the possible proscription”. It began by saying:
the Home Secretary’s plans are an outrageous attack on the movement and… we are doing everything in our power to campaign against this proscription taking place.
However, in preparation for the possibility that proscription does happen, it warned against:
Publicly inviting support, for example through a social media post, wearing clothing which indicates support, or arranging a meeting where a member of a proscribed organisation speaks or a speech indicating support for the organisation
These could soon be “criminal offences which can carry prison sentences of up to 14 years”.
The letter continued by saying:
PSC’s position is clear – we will not allow any branch to jeopardise the organisation and the movement by taking such actions in the name of PSC. It is vitally important for all branches to understand this and to act accordingly – ensure that no branch communications profess support for a proscribed organisation, that no events are planned in support of a proscribed organisation, and that no clothing or signs are used which profess support for a proscribed organisation.
All of us must follow this guidance, not because we agree with the proscription of Palestine Action, but because not to do so would have catastrophic consequences for individual members, branches, PSC as an organisation and the movement as a whole.
‘No unnecessary risks’
Although the PSC doubts “the offence of support for a proscribed organisation can be applied retrospectively”, it clarified:
Please DO NOT share your own statements or comment on this issue… Branches SHOULD NOT be signing public statements or open letters on this or any other issue… Putting out content framed such as ‘we are all Palestine Action’ which may be legal to say now but could be illegal by next week, puts your members and followers at risk if they repeat or repost your content after proscription takes effect.
It argued that:
There are numerous very strong ways to oppose the government’s plan to proscribe Palestine Action as detailed above, so there is simply no reason to take unnecessary risks that do not achieve any actual results.
And it added:
Any individual who feels they cannot adhere to these guidelines and intend to continue to openly support Palestine Action after proscription, cannot do so in the name of your branch or PSC.
The question now is, will PSC supporters prefer to stick their necks out for Palestine Action? Because some certainly believe members and leaders have different feelings about Palestine Action:
When I was active in PSC, the biggest gap between the leadership and the membership was in their attitudes to Palestine Action. I imagine that's why somebody leaked this. https://t.co/kywx45DYrJ
Since the leak, PSC has come out and organised a demo:
EMERGENCY DEMO: Defend The Right To Protest, Don't Ban Palestine Action Wednesday, 2 July, 6PM Outside Parliament, London
Join us to protest this government's attacks on the right to protest and to demand that MPs vote against the plans to proscribe Palestine Action. pic.twitter.com/PNqIFstKRT
— Palestine Solidarity Campaign (@PSCupdates) June 30, 2025
Palestine Action’s legal challenge
Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action will have made her pro-Israel donors happy, while generating panic in some more fearful groups. But Palestine Action has received solidarity from countless human rights and other high-profilegroups. It has also raised over £200,000 for its legal resistance to Cooper’s efforts.
An urgent hearing took place at the High Court today, with the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori applying for a judicial review. On Friday 4 July, meanwhile, there will be another hearing to determine if a temporary blockage of the ban can occur while Palestine Action waits to see (around the week of 21 July) if its legal challenge can go forwards.
The High Court has granted an urgent hearing for Palestine Action’s legal challenge to threatened proscription.
In a hearing which concluded on the morning of Monday 30 June at the Royal Courts of Justice, Mr Justice Chamberlain granted the application for an urgent hearing and set the date for Friday 4 July at 10:30am to consider permission for a judicial review of the Home Secretary’s decision to make an order to add direct action group Palestine Action to the list of proscribed organisations under Schedule 2 of the Terrorism Act 2000, alongside ISIS and Al Qaeda.
A judicial review has been granted
Birnberg Peirce submitted the judicial review claim on behalf of Ms Huda Ammori, a 31-year-old woman of Palestinian and Iraqi heritage and one of the founders of Palestine Action. Supporting witness statements have been submitted by human rights experts Amnesty International, Liberty, and the European Legal Support Centre about concerns about the unlawful misuse of anti-terror measures to criminalise dissent and the impact of any proscription on fundamental rights to freedom of speech and expression and rights to protest.
This comes as a senior civil servant speaks out about concerns about the proposal within the Home Office and the Labour peer Baroness Helena Kennedy KC – founding head of Keir Starmer’s own chambers, Doughty Street Chambers – describes it as “extraordinary” and “going down the old Trump road”, with the Labour peer, former Justice Minister Lord Falconer and member of Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet also stating that the action at RAF Brize Norton would not justify proscription.
The claim seeks to quash any decision to proscribe Palestine Action and any resulting order putting this into effect on the following grounds: ultra vires/improper purpose; error of law; irrationality; consideration of irrelevant factors/failure to consider relevant factors; breach of policy; breach of the Human Rights Act 1998; discrimination and Public Sector Equality Duty; and breach of natural justice.
The Home Secretary’s decision to rush the order through Parliament, by laying the draft order today, Monday 30 June and holding the votes on Wednesday 2 July, could see the order come into effect as soon as Friday 4 July. The application requests interim relief to prevent the Home Secretary from bringing any order into force until Mr Justice Chamberlain has made his ruling, which could be handed down on Friday or in the following weeks, with the submission urging that the “order must not be made and/or not come into effect until her [the claimant’s] challenge is heard and determined”.
Interim relief may involve an injunction prohibiting the Home Secretary from making the order, after any Parliamentary approval, pending determination of the Claimant’s legal challenge.
Palestine Action push back
The Claimant’s lawyers had written last week to the Home Secretary to request that she refrain from laying her order seeking to proscribe Palestine Action until the substantive issues raised in the pre-action correspondence had been addressed, but the Secretary of State has not, to date, agreed to that course of action. The court has promptly directed an urgent hearing to consider the requested interim relief pending the determination of the judicial review.
Palestine Action’s lawyers argue that “irreparable harm would flow from a proscription order coming into effect”, not just to the Claimant or to Palestine Action but to its many thousands of supporters in the general public, who would be “left with no means of seeking relief against unlawful executive decision-making”. This risks a breach of natural justice and procedural fairness and the right of access to court under Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights by allowing “the Home Secretary to formulate an order in such a way as to effectively oust judicial review through the timing of the order”.
They contend that “there has been a failure of the duty to inform the Claimant of the basis on which it is proposed to restrict her rights through proscription” and to “afford her the opportunity to make representations before any decision to restrict her rights”. The submission also states that while “extensive consultation has taken place with the Israeli Government and arms companies…. no opportunity has been provided for other groups affected or concerned by the proposal to proscribe Palestine Action, including Liberty, Amnesty International and other civil society organisations”.
‘Spraying red paint is not terrorism’
Commenting on the court’s decision to grant the urgent hearing, the claimant and co-founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori, said:
The court’s decision to grant an urgent hearing this week is indicative of the vital importance of what is at stake in this case, including the far-reaching implications any proscription of Palestine Action would have on fundamental freedoms of speech, expression and assembly in Britain. This is the first attempt in British history to criminalise direct action, political protest, as terrorism, mimicking many authoritarian regimes around the world who have used counter-terrorism to crush dissent. This would set an extremely dangerous precedent, with repressive impacts right across the Palestine movement.
I have been left with no choice but to request this urgent hearing and to seek either an injunction or other form of interim relief because of the Home Secretary’s decision to try to steamroll this through Parliament immediately, without proper opportunity for MPs and Peers to debate and scrutinise the proposal, or for legal and human rights experts and civil society organisations to make representations, or for those of us who would be denied fundamental rights as a result and criminalised as ‘terrorists’ overnight, including the many thousands of people who support Palestine Action. The only groups we know the Home Secretary has consulted is the Israeli Embassy, the arms companies we’ve disrupted, and pro-Israel lobby groups such as We Believe in Israel claiming this proposal is a “direct result” of their representations to Government to have us banned.
Spraying red paint on war planes is not terrorism. Causing disruption to the UK-based arms factories used by Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems, is not terrorism. The terrorism and war crimes are being committed in Palestine by Israel, which is being armed by Britain, and benefitting from British military support. Direct action has a long history in Britain – Suffragettes, Anti-Apartheid activists, Greenham Common and anti-Iraq War campaigners, including those who defended by the Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself for using the same direct action methods he is now seeking to proscribe as ‘terrorism’.
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.
Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.
Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.
The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.
Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.
“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”
‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”
She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.
“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.
“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.
“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . publication July 2025. Image: Little Island Press
In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.
Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.
“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”
Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.
The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.
His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.
Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.
Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary day, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
Advocacy groups in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) disrupted the US Department of Defense’s public meeting this week, which tackled proposed military training plans on Tinian, voicing strong opposition to further militarisation in the Marianas.
Members of the Marianas for Palestine, Prutehi Guahan and Commonwealth670 burst into the public hearing at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Garapan, chanting, “No build-up! No war!” and “Free, free, Palestine!”
As the chanting echoed throughout the venue on Wednesday, the DOD continued the proceedings to gather public input on its CNMI Joint Military Training proposal.
The US plan includes live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure, and a biosecurity facility. Officials said feedback from Tinian, Saipan and Rota communities would help shape the final environmental impact statement.
Salam Castro Younis, of Chamorro-Palestinian descent, linked the military expansion to global conflicts in Gaza and Iran.
“More militarisation isn’t the answer,” Younis said. “We don’t need to lose more land. Diplomacy and peace are the way forward – not more bombs.”
Saipan-born Chamorro activist Anufat Pangelinan echoed Younis’s sentiment, citing research connecting climate change and environmental degradation to global militarisation.
‘No part of a war’
“We don’t want to be part of a war we don’t support,” he said. “The Marianas shouldn’t be a tip of the spear – we should be a bridge for peace.”
The groups argue that CJMT could make Tinian a target, increasing regional hostility.
“We want to sustain ourselves without the looming threat of war,” Pangelinan added.
In response to public concerns from the 2015 draft EIS, the DOD scaled back its plans, reducing live-fire ranges from 14 to 2 and eliminating artillery, rocket and mortar exercises.
Mark Hashimoto, executive director of the US Marine Corps Forces Pacific, emphasised the importance of community input.
“The proposal includes live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure and a biosecurity facility,” he said.
Hashimoto noted that military lease lands on Tinian could support quarterly exercises involving up to 1000 personnel.
Economic impact concerns
Tinian residents expressed concerns about economic impacts, job opportunities, noise, environmental effects and further strain on local infrastructure.
The DOD is expected to issue a Record of Decision by spring 2026, balancing public feedback with national security and environmental considerations.
In a joint statement earlier this week, the activist groups said the people of Guam and the CNMI were “burdened by processes not meant to serve their home’s interests”.
The groups were referring to public input requirements for military plans involving the use of Guam and CNMI lands and waters for war training and testing.
“As colonies of the United States, the Mariana Islands continue to be forced into conflicts not of our people’s making,” the statement read.
“ After decades of displacement and political disenfranchisement, our communities are now in subservient positions that force an obligation to extend our lands, airspace, and waters for use in America’s never-ending cycle of war.”
They also lamented the “intense environmental degradation” and “growing housing and food insecurity” resulting from military expansion.
“Like other Pacific Islanders, we are also overrepresented disproportionately in the military and in combat,” they said.
“Meanwhile, prices on imported food, fuel, and essential goods will continue to rise with inflation and war.”
That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.
There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.
But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?
In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.
Victimhood serving narrative
Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.
And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.
Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.
Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.
Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.
Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.
Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.
Bias over Palestinian deaths
A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.
Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.
The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.
Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.
Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.
It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.
And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.
Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’
But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.
This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.
Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.
But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.
After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment
The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.
They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.
Low social justice spending
At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.
And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.
Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.
They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.
The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.
The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.
‘Don’t drop bombs’
And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.
Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.
But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.
Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.
Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.
I’m always consumed by the same question: How will this endless, brutal spectacle of killing finally end? Will it be like a movie — justice prevailing, liberation won, goodness triumphing over evil? Will the ending even be worthy of the horrors we’ve endured? Or will it all fade away in an open-ended scene, full of unknowns, unanswered questions, and the absence of closure?
Setting aside any thoughts I may have about theocratic rulers (whether they be in Tel Aviv or Tehran), I am personally glad that Iran was able to hold out against the US-Israeli attacks this month.
The ceasefire, however, will only be a pause in the long-running campaign to destabilise, weaken and isolate Iran. Regime change or pariah status are both acceptable outcomes for the US-Israeli dyad.
The good news for my region is that Iran’s resilience pushes back what could be a looming calamity: the US pivot to Asia and a heightened risk of a war on China.
There are three major pillars to the Eurasian order that is going through a slow, painful and violent birth. Iran is the weakest. If Iran falls, war in our region — intended or unintended – becomes vastly more likely.
Mainstream New Zealanders and Australians suffer from an understandable complacency: war is what happens to other, mainly darker people or Slavs.
“Tomorrow”, people in this part of the world naively think, “will always be like yesterday”.
That could change, particularly for the Australians, in the kind of unfamiliar flash-boom Israelis experienced this month following their attack on Iran. And here’s why.
US chooses war to re-shape Middle East Back in 2001, as many will recall, retired General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe, was visiting buddies in the Pentagon. He learnt something he wasn’t supposed to: the Bush administration had made plans in the febrile post 9/11 environment to attack seven Muslim countries.
In the firing line were: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, Gaddafi’s Libya, Somalia, Sudan and the biggest prize of all — the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One would have to say that the project, pursued by successive presidents, both Democrat and Republican, has been a great success — if you discount the fact that a couple of million human beings, most of them civilians, many of them women and children, nearly all of them innocents, were slaughtered, starved to death or otherwise disposed of.
With the exception of Iran, those countries have endured chaos and civil strife for long painful years. A triumph of American bomb-based statecraft.
Now — with Muammar Gaddafi raped and murdered (“We came, we saw, he died”, Hillary Clinton chuckled on camera the same day), Saddam Hussein hanged, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad in Moscow, the genocide in full swing in Palestine — the US and Israel were finally able to turn their guns — or, rather, bombs — on the great prize: Iran.
Iran’s missiles have checked US-Israel for time being Things did not go to plan. Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman pointed out this week that for the first time Israel got a taste of the medicine it likes to dispense to its neighbours.
Iran’s missiles successfully turned the much-vaunted Iron Dome into an Iron Sieve and, perhaps momentarily, has achieved deterrence. If Iran falls, the US will be able to do what Barack Obama and Joe Biden only salivated over — a serious pivot to Asia.
Could great power rivalry turn Asia-Pacific into powderkeg? For us in Asia-Pacific a major US pivot to Asia will mean soaring defence budgets to support militarisation, aggressive containment of China, provocative naval deployments, more sanctions, muscling smaller states, increased numbers of bases, new missile systems, info wars, threats and the ratcheting up rhetoric — all of which will bring us ever-closer to the powderkeg.
Sounds utterly mad? Sounds devoid of rationality? Lacking commonsense? Welcome to our world — bellum Americanum — as we gormlessly march flame in hand towards the tinderbox. War is not written in the stars, we can change tack and rediscover diplomacy, restraint, and peaceful coexistence. Or is that too much to ask?
Back in the days of George W Bush, radical American thinkers like Robert Kagan, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld created the Project for a New American Century and developed the policy, adopted by succeeding presidents, that promotes “the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of US military forces”.
It reconfirmed the neoconservative American dogma that no power should be allowed to rise in any region to become a regional hegemon; anything and everything necessary should be done to ensure continued American primacy, including the resort to war.
What has changed since those days are two crucial, epoch-making events: the re-emergence of Russia as a great power, albeit the weakest of the three, and the emergence of China as a genuine peer competitor to the USA. Professor John Mearsheimer’s insights are well worth studying on this topic.
The three pillars of multipolarity A new world order really is being born. As geopolitical thinkers like Professor Glenn Diesen point out, it will, if it is not killed in the cradle, replace the US unipolar world order that has existed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Many countries are involved in its birthing, including major players like India and Brazil and all the countries that are part of BRICS. Three countries, however, are central to the project: Iran, Russia and, most importantly, China. All three are in the crosshairs of the Western empire.
If Iran, Russia and China survive as independent entities, they will partially fulfill Halford MacKinder’s early 20th century heartland theory that whoever dominates Eurasia will rule the world. I don’t think MacKinder, however, foresaw cooperative multipolarity on the Eurasian landmass — which is one of the goals of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) – as an option.
That, increasingly, appears to be the most likely trajectory with multiple powerful states that will not accept domination, be that from China or the US. That alone should give us cause for hope.
Drunk on power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has launched war after war and brought us to the current abandonment of economic sanity (the sanctions-and-tariff global pandemic) and diplomatic normalcy (kill any peace negotiators you see) — and an anything-goes foreign policy (including massive crimes against humanity).
We have also reached — thanks in large part to these same policies — what a former US national security advisor warned must be avoided at all costs. Back in the 1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “The most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran.”
Belligerent and devoid of sound strategy, the Biden and Trump administrations have achieved just that.
Can Asia-Pacific avoid being dragged into an American war on China? Turning to our region, New Zealand and Australia’s governments cleave to yesterday: a white-dominated world led by the USA. We have shown ourselves indifferent to massacres, ethnic cleansing and wars of aggression launched by our team.
To avoid war — or a permanent fear of looming war — in our own backyards, we need to encourage sanity and diplomacy; we need to stay close to the US but step away from the military alliances they are forming, such as AUKUS which is aimed squarely at China.
Above all, our defence and foreign affairs elites need to grow new neural pathways and start to think with vision and not place ourselves on the losing side of history. Independent foreign policy settings based around peace, defence not aggression, diplomacy not militarisation, would take us in the right direction.
Personally I look forward to the day the US and its increasingly belligerent vassals are pushed back into the ranks of ordinary humanity. I fear the US far more than I do China.
Despite the reflexive adherence to the US that our leaders are stuck on, we should not, if we value our lives and our cultures, allow ourselves to be part of this mad, doomed project.
The US empire is heading into a blood-drenched sunset; their project will fail and the 500-year empire of the White West will end — starting and finishing with genocide.
Every day I atheistically pray that leaders or a movement will emerge to guide our antipodean countries out of the clutches of a violent and increasingly incoherent USA.
America is not our friend. China is not our enemy. Tomorrow gives birth to a world that we should look forward to and do the little we can to help shape.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Israeli soldiers have said that they were ordered to open fire at unarmed Palestinian civilians desperately seeking aid at designated distribution sites in Gaza, a report in the Ha’aretz newspaper has revealed.
The report came as 70 Palestinians were killed across the Gaza Strip — mostly at aid sites belonging to the widely condemned Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — in the last 24 hours.
Soldiers said that instead of using crowd control measures, they shot at crowds of civilians to prevent them from approaching certain areas.
One soldier, who was not named in the report, described the distribution site as a “killing field,” adding that “where I was, between one and five people were killed every day”.
The soldier said that they targeted the crowds as if they were “an attacking force,” instead of using other non-lethal weapons to organise and disperse crowds.
“We communicate with them through fire,” he continued, noting that heavy machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars were used on people, including the elderly, women and children.
The increased attacks, particularly those targeting aid-seekers, come as Gaza’s government Media Office said at least 549 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces while trying to get their hands on emergency aid in the last four weeks.
‘Evil of moral army’
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara described what was happening in Gaza was more than the genocode.
“It is the evil of the most moral army in the world,” he said.
Israeli forces continued their attacks across the Gaza Strip on Friday, killing at least three Palestinians in an attack on Khan Younis, in the south, while also heavily bombing residential buildings east of Jabalia in the north.
Medical sources also said a Palestinian fisherman was killed, and others wounded, by Israeli naval gunfire off the al-Shati refugee camp, while he was working.
Gaza’s Ministry of Interior responded to the attacks with a statement, accusing Israel of “seeking to spread chaos and destabilise the Gaza Strip”.
Malnutrition soars Gazans have continued to desperately seek aid provided by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, despite the hundreds of people killed at its sites, as malnutrition soars in the territory.
Two infants have died this week due to malnutrition and the ongoing blockade on Gaza.
“It’s a killing field” claims a headline in Ha’aretz newspaper. Image: Ha’aretz screenshot APR
For weeks now, health officials in the enclave have raised the alarm over the critical shortage of baby formula, but aid continued to be obstructed.
The two infants were buried on Thursday evening, after they were pronounced dead at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Medical staff said the cause of death was a lack of basic nutrition and access to essential medical care.
One of the infants, identified as Nidal, was only five months old, while the other, Kinda, was only 10 days old.
Mohammed al-Hams, Kinda’s father, told local media that children are dying due to severe malnutrition, sarcastically labelling them “the achievements of Netanyahu and his war”.
“Not a second goes by without a funeral prayer being held in the Gaza Strip,” he continued.
Malnutrition ‘catastrophic’
On Wednesday, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said the humanitarian situation in Gaza had reached “catastrophic” levels, noting that there had been a sharp increase in malnutrition among children, particularly in infants.
According to Palestinian official figures, at least 242 people have died in Gaza due to food and medicine shortages, with the majority of them being elderly and children.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,700 Palestinians since October 2023. The war has levelled entire neighbourhoods, and has been called a genocide by leading rights groups, including Amnesty International.
In Auckland last night, visiting Palestinian journalist, author, academic and community advocate Dr Yousef Aljamal spoke about “The unheard voices of Palestinian child prisoners”.
Dr Aljamal, who edited If I Must Die, a compilation of poetry and prose by Refaat Alareer, the poet who was assassinated by the Israelis in 6 December 2023, also described the humanitarian crisis as a “catastrophe” and called for urgent sanctions and political pressure on Israel by governments, including New Zealand.
Soldiers admit Israeli army is targeting aid seekers Video: Al Jazeera
Counter-terrorism police have arrested four people in connection to the protest by Palestine Action at RAF Brize Norton, in which two activists on scooters spray painted two British military planes with red paint and evaded security and police.
Three have been arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. Another was arrested of assisting an offender.
The embarrassment caused to the government by the recent Palestine Action incursion at Brize Norton, has led rapidly to the announced proscription of Palestine Action. Keir Starmer explicitly referred to the spray-painting of the planes as “vandalism”, not ‘terrorism’ and many Parliamentarians including former Justice Secretary Lord Falconer, have stated that the protest may be criminal damage, but not terrorism.
(@mhmd_s09) June 30, 2025
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EMERGENCY DEMO: Defend The Right To Protest, Don't Ban Palestine Action
Wednesday, 2 July, 6PM
Outside Parliament, London