Palestine

[blindpig]

Israel to Build Settlers-Only Road on West Bank Territory


(FILE). Damage caused in the West Bank refugee camp of Nur Shams, April 21, 2024. Photo: EFE.

July 13, 2025 Hour: 4:29 am

The Israeli regime issued a military order to seize more than 5,000 square meters of Palestinian land in the al-Khalil governorate, in the West Bank, according to the WAFA news agency. This area, located on the outskirts of the towns of Sa’ir and al-Shuyoukh, is designated for the construction of a settlers-only road linking the illegal outposts of Asfar and Pnei Kedem.

Such a territory takeover was approved under the excuse of “military and security purposes,” allowing for the creation of new infrastructure aimed at facilitating settler movement while severely restricting Palestinian access.


Data compiled by Israeli news outlets shows there has been a 40% rise in the number of settlements under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

In this context, Keshet 12 reported that several ministers from Netanyahu’s Likud Party and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana are urging the Zionist administration to immediately annex the occupied territory, as the political right in Israel intensifies pressure for full annexation. This includes efforts to legalize existing outposts and accelerate settlement construction in strategic areas.

The channel noted that the scope and pace of settlement expansion are higher than ever before. Meir Deutsch, CEO of the far-right Regavim movement, remarked, “No government has ever encouraged settlement as much as this one (…) Israel is managing Judea and Samaria as the homeowner for the first time since the state’s establishment (1948/Palestinian Nakba).”

Earlier this year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese stressed that what Israel is doing in the West Bank is shameful and illegal, but not surprising. She also pointed out that genocidal violence has been occurring since before October 7, 2023.



https://www.telesurenglish.net/israel-t ... territory/

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‘No Nation Is Above the Law’: Colombia To Host International Summit Against Israeli Impunity
July 12, 2025


Concert and demonstration in support of Palestine in Plaza Bolívar, Bogotá, Colombia, in 2024. Photo: Presidencia de Colombia.

Bogota will include over 20 nations as part of The Hague Group’s campaign to confront Israeli war crimes in Gaza through coordinated legal, diplomatic, and economic action

More than 20 states will gather in Bogota on 15–16 July to declare “concrete measures” against Israel’s violations of international law, according to diplomats speaking to Middle East Eye.

The summit, co-chaired by Colombia and South Africa, will bring together members and supporters of The Hague Group, a bloc launched in January to confront what it calls “a climate of impunity” surrounding Israel’s actions in Gaza.


The group includes Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa, with additional countries such as Spain, Ireland, Turkiye, Portugal, China, Qatar, Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay, and Palestine set to attend.

Colombian Vice-Minister of Multilateral Affairs Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir said the summit would not only reaffirm the group’s resistance to the ongoing “Palestinian genocide,” but also outline specific steps to move from words to collective action.

“Colombia cannot be indifferent in the face of apartheid and ethnic cleansing,” he said.

The conference will be hosted at the Museo Nacional de Colombia under the banner Collective Action in Defense of Palestine, with keynote remarks to be delivered by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese – who was recently sanctioned by the US for what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel.”

Other speakers include UK parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, EU lawmaker Rima Hassan, and Andres Macias Tolosa of the UN Working Group on Mercenaries. Colombia’s Minister of Culture, Yannai Kadamani Fonrodona, will also participate.

South Africa’s Minister of International Relations, Roland Lamola, stated the summit will send a clear message that “no nation is above the law, and no crime will go unanswered.”

Since its formation, The Hague Group has coordinated legal challenges against Israel, including South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Namibia and Malaysia blocked arms shipments to Israel, while Colombia severed diplomatic ties and suspended coal exports.

The summit is expected to deepen and unify these efforts.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, writing in The Guardian, announced the conference and warned that “without decisive action, we risk stripping the global legal order of its remaining protections for less-privileged nations.”

He urged states to act collectively to halt Israel’s destruction of Gaza and restore the foundations of international law.

https://orinocotribune.com/no-nation-is ... -impunity/

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At the White House, Trump and Netanyahu Plot the Final Chapter of Israel’s Defeat
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 12, 2025



During the week of July 7, Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House for the third time in less than six months.

According to the corporate media, the primary purpose of Netanyahu’s visit was to hash out the terms of a ceasefire in Gaza.

According to Israeli media, however, Netanyahu’s true objectives were to secure Trump’s consent to further attacks on Iran and to a resumption of the genocide in Gaza after Israel recovers its prisoners of war from the resistance.

In Reason2Resist’s latest livestream, Dimitri Lascaris argues that a resumption of Israel’s war of aggression on Iran and the prolongation of its genocide in Gaza will simply hasten Israel’s ultimate demise.

Lascaris also discussed the Trump regime’s decision to lock up the Jeffrey Epstein files and to terminate the investigation into Epstein’s criminal clients.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... ls-defeat/

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Satellite images show Gaza's Rafah flattened for new Israeli concentration camp

Tel Aviv is moving forward with plans to force hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into the ruins of Rafah, with those left outside reportedly set to be identified as 'Hamas terrorists' and eliminated

News Desk

JUL 11, 2025


(Photo credit: Ali Hassan/Flash90)

New satellite imagery published by Al-Jazeera reveals that Israeli forces have flattened most of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, as part of a large-scale plan to forcibly transfer Gaza’s population into a confined area.

The footage shows widespread demolition and land clearing, with rubble from destroyed neighborhoods leveled to create a vast, empty zone.



The site, located on the border with Egypt, is where Israel reportedly intends to relocate Gaza’s entire population—over two million people.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has publicly stated that the goal is to eventually move all Gaza residents into this zone, which the military describes as a “Hamas-free area" or “humanitarian city.”

According to reports in Hebrew media, the plan also calls for Palestinians caught outside these zones to be “identified as Hamas terrorists, providing legal justification for their elimination.”

The Israeli military began preparing for this mass displacement after unilaterally breaking the last ceasefire in March.

Before the war, Rafah was home to nearly 200,000 people.

The city suffered extensive damage during earlier bombing campaigns, but the destruction captured in recent satellite imagery is significantly more complete. Entire districts have been bulldozed and then smoothed out, with only a few structures left standing.

Among those spared are thirty-nine schools, seven medical centers, and one university.

The US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has already begun limited food distribution within the cleared areas. However, entering the site is fraught with danger.

The zone is under strict Israeli military control, and since the GHF began operations in late May, Israeli forces have reportedly shot and killed hundreds of Palestinians attempting to reach the aid centers.

The military’s intent appears to go beyond tactical destruction.

British-Israeli analyst and commentator Daniel Levy says that the Israeli government’s refusal to agree to a ceasefire is part of a wider effort to erase Gaza as a place for Palestinians to live. Israel is waging a “permanent war” designed to lead to ethnic cleansing, with the “humanitarian city” serving as the vehicle to do so.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a scathing editorial on the situation, calling the effort to concentrate the population of Gaza in Rafah a “criminal plan.”

The editorial warned that it represents a “moral and historic nadir” for the Israeli state and the Jewish people. “No matter how they try in Israel to wrap this move with laundered epithets,” the newspaper stated, “they are talking about a concentration camp.”

https://thecradle.co/articles/satellite ... ation-camp

Israeli plan for Gaza ‘concentration camp’ to cost billions: Report

The Israeli military and defense establishment have expressed opposition to the plan over fears it would drain the army’s resources

News Desk

JUL 13, 2025


(Photo credit: APA)

The proposed plan for a “humanitarian city” over the ruins of the destroyed city of Rafah in south Gaza, recently described as a blueprint for a concentration camp, is expected to cost billions of dollars, according to reports in Israeli media.

The “humanitarian city” would “cost between $2.7 billion and $4 billion,” senior officials told Ynet on 13 July, adding that “if the plan proceeds, Israel would initially bear nearly the entire cost.”

The Hebrew media report notes that the plan has been criticized for its “financial overreach.”

The Israeli military and defense establishment have strongly opposed the plan, put forward recently by Defense Minister Israel Katz.

The Israeli army’s Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich over his opposition to the plan, and is reportedly arguing that the cost of preparations will negatively impact the military’s operational capabilities in ongoing battles with the Palestinian resistance.

“The final cost will be between $2.7 billion and $4 billion – most likely closer to the upper end. The high price reflects the intention to create a location that Palestinians would willingly move to, with plentiful food, decent living conditions, long-term shelter, medical support including hospitals and, potentially, even educational services,” an Israeli source told the outlet.

Smotrich last week approved initial budget allocations for the plan, which aims to confine the entire population of Gaza to a small area of the south and bar them from returning to their homes, particularly in the north.

Israeli officials have claimed that Israel hopes to be “reimbursed” by Gulf states for the plan, according to Ynet. Other officials are skeptical of the plan’s feasibility.

“There’s almost no chance this actually materializes. Very few believe the city will ever be built,” another source told the Israeli outlet.

The defense establishment has warned that the plan serves as a prelude for a permanent Israeli military administration in Gaza.

The plan has also sounded alarm bells for openly calling for further forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza.

Katz said while unveiling the plan earlier this month that Palestinians would be forced to go through “security screening” before entering, and would not be allowed to leave once inside. Israeli forces would control the perimeter of the site and initially “move” 600,000 Palestinians into the area – mostly people currently displaced in the coastal Al-Mawasi area in the south.

Leading Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said Katz’s initiative is “an operational plan for a crime against humanity.” Amos Goldberg, Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, called it “a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them,” saying it was “neither humanitarian nor a city.”

As Israel moves forward with its forced displacement plan, ceasefire talks have collapsed over Tel Aviv’s insistence on maintaining an occupation that would leave 40 to 45 percent of the territory under occupation, including all of southern Rafah as well as parts of northern and eastern Gaza.

Meanwhile, the massacres against Palestinians continue unabated.

Israel has killed at least 50 Palestinians in attacks across the Gaza Strip since dawn on 13 July. On Saturday, at least 150 Palestinians were killed.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-p ... ons-report

US citizen beaten to death by Jewish settlers in occupied West Bank

Jewish pogroms targeting Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank have increased significantly since Israel's genocidal war in Gaza began

News Desk

JUL 12, 2025


(Photo credit: OREN ZIV/AFP)

Jewish settlers beat to death a US citizen of Palestinian descent on 11 July in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, according to the victim’s family and Palestinian health officials.

The victim, Seif al-Din Kamel Abdul Karim Muslat, was a 21-year-old man from Tampa, Florida. He had traveled to Palestine to visit family in the nearby town of al-Mazraa al-Sharqiya.


According to local sources, Muslat was part of a group of Palestinians and international activists attempting to dismantle an illegal settler outpost on Palestinian land in Khirbet al-Tell, located in the Jabal al-Batin area.

The group was ambushed by a gang of Jewish settlers, who beat Muslat to death.

Another Palestinian, Mohammed Shalabi, was fatally shot during the same attack. The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed both deaths and reported that at least ten others were injured, including one activist who was reportedly run over by a settler vehicle.

Two ambulances attempting to reach the scene were attacked, with their windows smashed by settlers.

Muslat’s cousin, Fatmah Muhammad, confirmed the killing in a post on social media. The US State Department said it was aware of reports of a US citizen killed in the West Bank but declined to comment further, claiming respect for the family’s privacy.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the killing and called on Washington to ensure accountability.

“Every other murder of an American citizen has gone unpunished by the American government, which is why the Israeli government keeps wantonly killing American Palestinians and, of course, other Palestinians,” said CAIR deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell.

The attack occurred amid a broader surge in settler violence across the West Bank.

In Hebron, Jewish settlers raided the Palestinian village of Susiya, injuring two people. In Bethlehem, homes near al-Maniya were targeted by settlers backed by Israeli soldiers, while in Wadi Sa’ir, ten homes were damaged, and a three-year-old girl was among the injured.


Human rights advocates have long warned that Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank operate with impunity, often under the protection of the Israeli military. Settler attacks frequently involve the burning of homes and vehicles, the destruction of crops, and assaults on civilians.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law and part of a broader Israeli strategy to gradually colonize the West Bank and forcibly displace Palestinians from their lands and homes.

Despite receiving billions of dollars in US military aid each year, Israeli forces often kill US citizens with impunity in the West Bank.

Omar Mohammad Rabea, a 14-year-old Palestinian-US teen, was killed by Israeli forces in Turmus Ayya in the West Bank in April 2025.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-US activist, was shot in the head by Israeli forces during a protest in Beita in the West Bank in September 2024.

Mohammad Khdour, a 17-year-old Palestinian-US teen, was shot dead by Israeli forces in Biddu in the West Bank in February 2024.

Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, a 17-year-old Palestinian-US teen, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler and also by a soldier on Highway 60 in the West Bank in January 2024

Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-US journalist working for Al-Jazeera, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in Jenin in the West Bank in May 2022.

In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a peace activist from Washington State, was crushed to death in Gaza by the driver of an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to protect the home of a doctor.

The same year, Brian Avery, a peace activist from New Mexico, was shot in the face and permanently maimed by Israeli forces in the town of Jenin in the West Bank.

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-citize ... -west-bank

[blindpig]

Palestinians in Gaza Have Less Space Than Detainees in Guantanamo Bay
July 15, 2025


Displaced Palestinians return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip. Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. Photo: AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana.


After 21 months of continuous “Israeli” assault, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are confined to less than 15% of the enclave, i.e. no more than 55 km². Approximately 2.3 million people are crammed into suffocating conditions, each with less space than that allocated to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

The population is trapped in this narrow space under constant bombardment and blockade, deprived of water, food, shelter, and healthcare, and effectively barred from returning to their destroyed or restricted areas of origin. This is part of a deliberate policy that reflects a genocidal process by “Israel” to uproot the people and erase their physical and demographic presence through mass killing, forced displacement, starvation, and systematic destruction of life.

As the “Israeli” genocide enters its twenty-second month, the reality on the ground is no longer one of mere bombing and killing, but of a comprehensive process of erasure of the Gaza Strip. Residents are now treated as detainees in a mass detention facility, confined to a stifling area of no more than 55 km², under strict military surveillance and direct targeting. This follows “Israel”’s conversion of approximately 85% of the enclave into restricted zones through evacuation orders or unlawful military control.

Such measures form a deliberate policy to erase the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip by uprooting residents, undermining human life, and dismantling the Strip’s social and geographical structure in a systematic pattern of crimes that, taken together, constitute an act of genocide under international law.

Residents live in a confined and devastated area, targeted around the clock and deprived of even the most basic services, under conditions of extreme overcrowding. The average population density is around 40,000 people per km², while the al-Mawasi area exceeds 47,000 people per km², a density unmatched in any other populated area on Earth.

These are not abstract figures, but the contours of an ongoing “Israeli” crime committed in broad daylight and full view of the world. Residents are forcibly isolated and repeatedly expelled from their original areas, and then from their displacement areas to what the occupying power calls “humanitarian and safe zones,” only to find that each time these zones are nothing but new death traps.

All families in the Gaza Strip have been forced to relocate, with many displaced five, six, or even ten times or more, in a scene that reflects a systematic and ongoing policy of collective pursuit in search of safety that does not exist.

No area in the Gaza Strip is safe. There is no place today that can serve as a haven or even a temporary shelter. Electricity, drinking water, healthcare, and food are all unavailable. Sewage floods the alleys, while disease, epidemics, rodents, insects, and hunger spread, and every aspect of life collapses. In reality, people are left with nothing but the terrifying and coercive option of endless displacement, amid relentless psychological and physical suffering and deep daily despair.

Confining the population between bombing, hunger, and disease on one hand, and preventing them from returning to or even remaining near their destroyed homes on the other, makes it clear that the measures imposed in the Gaza Strip are not a temporary emergency displacement, but part of a permanent and premeditated policy of forced displacement.

This policy aims to bring about a comprehensive demographic transformation in the enclave by depopulating it, placing it under full military control, and encircling it with an unprecedented blockade. In this context, displacement is not a byproduct of war, but a strategic objective.

Data documented by Euro-Med Monitor up to early July indicates that “Israel” has destroyed over 92% of homes, fully or partially demolished more than 80% of schools and 90% of hospitals, and completely destroyed all universities in the Gaza Strip.

Entire neighbourhoods, cities, villages, and camps have been erased from the map—along with their homes, streets, institutions, markets, mosques, and even memories. They were physically removed from existence in a manner that aims to eliminate any prospect of return, with “Israeli” forces even clearing the rubble and transferring it into “Israel” to ensure Palestinians cannot return by any means.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the individual or mass forcible transfers of civilians from occupied territories unless “the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand.” The article also states that the population transferred in this way must be “transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.”

Furthermore, the article states that “the occupying power undertaking such transfers or evacuations shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to receive the protected persons, that the removals are effected in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that members of the same family are not separated.”

In the case of the Gaza Strip, however, the large-scale displacement operations are carried out systematically, without any urgent military necessity and without providing protection, shelter, or the possibility of return. This constitutes a grave violation of the Convention and amounts to a war crime under international humanitarian and criminal law.

When carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, such displacement meets the threshold of a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

More gravely, when mass displacement is paired with mass killing, the deliberate denial of food, water, shelter, medical care, and return, and public calls to erase Gaza and uproot its people, there is no doubt that “Israel” is deliberately imposing life-destroying conditions with the intent to destroy a protected group as such. This meets the definition of genocide under international law.

The pattern of forced evacuation orders, widespread killings, destruction, and the deliberate use of starvation are all integral parts of an “Israeli” plan clearly advancing toward its final objective: the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land, particularly beyond the Gaza Strip.

This follows more than 20 months of genocidal crimes, including the killing and wounding of over 200,000 civilians, the destruction of entire towns, the near-total collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure, the eradication of basic living conditions, and systematic internal displacement. All of this has taken place within a broader effort to eliminate the Palestinian community as an entity and existence.

The forced displacement of Palestinians is a direct extension of “Israel”’s decades-long settler-colonial project, rooted in the erasure of Palestinian existence and the seizure of their land. What sets this phase apart is its unprecedented scale and severity, demonstrated by the comprehensive targeting of all 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023 through genocide and the denial of people’s most basic human rights. The conditions of extreme coercion and deprivation forced upon the Palestinian people represent a deliberate effort to push them out of their homeland, not by choice but as a condition for their very survival. This stands as one of the most blatant cases of planned mass displacement in modern history.



Euro-Med Monitor urges all states to recognise that what the people of the Gaza Strip are facing is not evacuation, but the systematic erasure of an entire people. It is not enough to merely acknowledge or condemn these crimes; states must stand firmly between the people of Gaza and the completion of the genocide, to protect them from annihilation and to ensure their right to remain on their land with dignity.

All states, both individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal responsibilities by taking urgent action to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip, through implementing effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians; ensuring “Israel”’s compliance with international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice; holding “Israel” accountable for all crimes against the Palestinians in the Strip; and providing redress to victims as per international law.

The international community must also impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on “Israel” for its systematic and grave violations of international law. These sanctions should include an arms embargo; an end to all political, financial, and military support; freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians; imposing travel ban on these officials; suspending the operations of “Israeli” military and security industries companies in international markets; banning involved companies’ access to banking services; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide “Israel” with economic benefits that enable its continued crimes.

Euro-Med Monitor calls for an immediate and comprehensive reconstruction process in the Gaza Strip, with priority given to rebuilding homes, infrastructure, and health and education facilities, as well as restoring the foundations of community and economic life. This is essential to re-establish a dignified standard of living for the population, provide compensation for the immense losses endured, and address the consequences of the systematic destruction inflicted by ongoing Israeli attacks.

States must urgently push for the restoration of humanitarian access and the lifting of the illegal blockade, as this is the only way to stop the accelerating humanitarian deterioration and ensure the entry of aid, given the imminent threat of famine.

The establishment of safe humanitarian corridors under UN supervision is vital to ensure the delivery of food, medicine, and fuel to all areas of the Strip, with independent international monitors deployed to verify compliance.

Countries with universal jurisdiction courts must issue arrest warrants for “Israeli” political and military leaders involved in the ongoing genocide and initiate legal proceedings to fulfil their international legal obligation to prosecute serious crimes and combat impunity. They must also hold accountable their citizens found to have committed violations against Palestinians, in line with their national and international legal obligations and within their territorial or personal jurisdiction.

Furthermore, the International Criminal Court (ICC) must expedite its investigations and issue arrest warrants for every “Israeli” official involved in international crimes committed in the Gaza Strip. These crimes must be formally recognised and treated as acts of genocide. State parties to the Rome Statute are reminded of their legal obligation to fully cooperate with the Court, ensure the implementation of the arrest warrants, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

https://orinocotribune.com/palestinians ... anamo-bay/

Compare and contrast:





You know where..... humans shouldn't be capable of the shamelessness of the Zionists.

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Hezbollah's strategic ascension after Iran's open war with Israel

By striking deep into Israel, Tehran has obliterated decades of deterrence dogma – bringing Hezbollah into open alignment as a frontline ally in the Axis of Resistance.

Abbas Al-Zein

JUL 15, 2025


Photo Credit: The Cradle

Iran's unprecedented retaliatory launch of missiles and drones at Israel from its own territory during “Truthful Promise 3” was a strategic rupture – rather than a mere battlefield tactic – redefining the operational dynamics of the Axis of Resistance and elevating Lebanon’s Hezbollah into a central military partner in a regional security framework now openly led by Tehran.

This recalibrated Hezbollah’s role, transforming it from a Lebanese branch within a broader network into a central ally in a Tehran-led military coalition confronting Tel Aviv directly. Iran’s strike on the occupation state marked a doctrinal shift, signaling a move from simply defending its borders to actively imposing red lines around its regional presence.

Hezbollah's new strategic footing

Iranian diplomats with close ties to Hezbollah confirm to The Cradle that this transformation has reshaped internal Iranian consensus. Confronting Israel has come to embody both the state’s core ideology and its sense of national imperative. The result? An anticipated surge in Iranian support for its allies, driven by strategic interest and underpinned by popular consensus.

More critically, Iran's oft-cited regional defense infrastructure is no longer hypothetical as it has been activated, field-tested, and proven capable of imposing new deterrence equations and curbing Tel Aviv's impunity.

Hezbollah, once exposed to targeted attacks as a standalone entity, now operates within a hardened regional defense matrix, where any escalation risks confrontation with a state, not just a movement.

This shift is not merely symbolic but a fundamental redefinition of Hezbollah’s regional role and a stark warning to its adversaries that attacking the Lebanese resistance could now invite the wrath of Tehran itself.

Recasting battlefield losses as regional leverage

Hezbollah paid heavily in blood and infrastructure in the latest Israeli war on Lebanon, with its leaders and commanders martyred, facilities in southern Lebanon and Dahiye targeted, and logistical networks disrupted with the loss of support from Syria. But what once would be read as isolated attrition now forms part of a wider war calculus.

The resistance's losses are no longer viewed through a Lebanese lens. They are contextualized within a regional confrontation orchestrated by Tehran and executed across multiple fronts. In this new equation, Iran is the primary actor, Hezbollah its seasoned partner, and Israel an adversary facing a recalibrated axis of force.

Increasingly, however, it is the Ansarallah-aligned armed forces in Yemen that have emerged as the most assertive military component of this axis. With their sustained strikes on US, UK, and Israeli-linked targets and vessels across the Red Sea and beyond, Yemen’s army now plays a frontline role in stretching western capabilities and reshaping maritime and aerial deterrence.

This new reality is not lost on Washington. Shifts in US discourse on Lebanon reflect a new strategic understanding: Hezbollah is no longer a rogue militia, but a combat-tested component of a state-backed alliance. Thus, its battlefield losses do not weaken it politically; they entrench its position within a more transparent and coordinated axis of confrontation.

Even among Hezbollah's popular base, the costs of war are now viewed through a new lens, as the battle between Beirut and Tel Aviv has evolved into a wider one between Tehran and Tel Aviv – a battle that Hezbollah no longer fights alone. That broader context lends Hezbollah's sacrifices greater strategic meaning: not isolated pain, but a contribution to a reshaped regional balance.

Strategically, this new dynamic grants Hezbollah room to maneuver. The Iranian umbrella that emerged in this round offers indirect protection, operational flexibility, and a measure of deterrence that constrains Israel's options. Any assault on Hezbollah now carries the risk of igniting a broader war with Tehran – a deterrent previously absent.

Intelligence dividends from Tehran's war

One of Hezbollah's quiet victories in this war has been its access to Iran's real-time combat data. Hezbollah’s deep operational coordination with Iran likely gave it indirect insight into Iranian strike tactics and battlefield performance, which is knowledge that could help refine its own capabilities.

The value of this intelligence cannot be overstated. Hezbollah monitored Israeli air defense systems – Iron Dome, David's Sling, Arrow – under real combat stress. This trove of operational data enables the movement to refine its own strategies, select more sensitive targets, and preempt Israeli countermeasures in future engagements.

Iran’s missile campaign gave Hezbollah battlefield exposure to real-time strike operations against the occupation state, providing combat-tested intelligence that sharpened the resistance movement’s own missile doctrine, electronic warfare tools, and surveillance playbook. Intelligence cooperation between the two allies has moved from episodic to embedded, forming the backbone of a joint war doctrine.

The party's recent losses have also exposed vulnerabilities – specifically in command-and-control, logistics, and concealment. But Iranian input has fast-tracked Hezbollah's capacity to reconfigure and modernize, replacing static infrastructure with mobile, decentralized units better suited to prolonged conflict.

Notably, several targets hit by Iran were also on Hezbollah's pre-established strike list, gathered through reconnaissance operations like Hudhud. The overlap in target selection suggests a high level of strategic coordination, even absent overt operational collaboration.

Post-war strategy: Deterrence through partnership

Hezbollah's near-deployment during Iran's confrontation with Israel was not rhetorical. Multiple sources confirm to The Cradle that the Lebanese resistance was on standby, prepared to enter the war if the Islamic Republic's sovereignty or government were seriously threatened – a contingency repeatedly articulated by the late martyred Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah.

The war's outcome – Iran withstanding Israeli and US war plans – eased pressure on Hezbollah, but also solidified a doctrine of mutual intervention. If one is threatened existentially, the other moves.

This has birthed a new set of post-war strategies. First, an interlocked defense doctrine now binds the security of Iran and Hezbollah, where any existential threat to one triggers readiness from the other.

Second, Hezbollah is transitioning from fixed command structures to mobile, decentralized units across leadership, communications, and logistics, taking cues from Iran's early war successes.

Third, Hezbollah has imposed strict secrecy over its strategic missile arsenal, abandoning media signaling in favor of operational surprise.

Fourth, Hezbollah has adopted a doctrine of cumulative deterrence, where immediate retaliation gives way to long-game damage calibrated to strategic timing.

And finally, Hezbollah is anchoring itself more deeply in regional military coordination while de-escalating domestically, avoiding internal friction to maintain its position as Lebanon's security guarantor within an emerging deterrence framework.

Hezbollah emerges from this war not weakened, but redefined: a frontline actor in a regional alliance no longer hiding in the shadows. With Iran now openly in the fray, the resistance is no longer an isolated node, but a fuse, a partner, and a co-author of a new balance of terror that Tel Aviv can neither predict nor contain.

https://thecradle.co/articles/hezbollah ... ith-israel

West Bank witnessing largest forced displacement of Palestinians since 1967: UN

UN says 30,000 Palestinians have been forcibly uprooted since January as Israeli forces clear refugee camps and demolish homes under ‘Iron Wall’ campaign

News Desk

JUL 15, 2025


(AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

UN officials warned on 15 July that Israel’s months-long ‘Iron Wall’ operation in the occupied West Bank has caused the largest displacement of Palestinians since 1967, with 30,000 people forcibly uprooted since January and entire refugee camps emptied under military orders.

UN rights office spokesman Thameen al-Kheetan said the forced uprooting underway may constitute a crime under international law, stressing that “permanently displacing the civilian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer,” and depending on the circumstances, “could be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.” He said the campaign is “emptying large parts of the West Bank of Palestinians.”

The UN said the offensive, launched in January, is impacting several northern refugee camps. Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for UNRWA, described it as “the longest since … the Second Intifada,” and warned it was causing “the largest population displacement of the Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.”

According to Kheetan, most of those displaced were residents of the Jenin Refugee Camp.

During the same period, Israeli occupation forces issued demolition orders for approximately 1,400 homes in the area. Kheetan called the figures “alarming.”

Since 7 October 2023, 2,907 Palestinians have been displaced by demolitions, while 2,400 more – nearly half of them children – were forcibly uprooted by Israeli settlers.

The UN recorded 757 settler attacks in the first half of 2025, a 13 percent increase from the same period in 2024. Ninety-six Palestinians were injured in settler assaults in June, marking the highest monthly toll in over two decades.

Israeli forces have fired live ammunition at unarmed civilians, including those attempting to return to their homes in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nour Shams camps.

Victims include two-year-old Laila al-Khatib, shot in the head inside her home in Ash-Shuhada village in January, and 61-year-old Walid Bdeir, reportedly killed while cycling home from prayers on 3 July.

Since 7 October, at least 964 Palestinians have been killed across the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers.

https://thecradle.co/articles/west-bank ... ce-1967-un

******

Knesset Member Facing Impeachment Said Israel is Waging a “War of Annihilation” in Gaza

Israeli-Palestinian Knesset member Ayman Odeh faces impeachment amid tensions over his criticism of the Zionist regime and recent genocide in Gaza.


Israeli-Palestinian Knesset member Ayman Odeh. Photo: X/ @@AyOdeh,

July 14, 2025 Hour: 4:30 am

Israeli-Palestinian Knesset member Ayman Odeh accused Netanyahu’s regime on Monday of waging a war of annihilation against the Palestinian people and of carrying out a dangerous and undemocratic process to remove him from office, which is set to culminate on July 14 with a vote in Parliament.

In an article for Haaretz newspaper, he further denounced that the government has abandoned even the bare minimum of morality, naming Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich as the main instigators of the genocide in Gaza. Odeh pointed out that the goal of the Zionist entity is not Israel’s security, but vengeance, destruction, domination, and occupation of Palestine.

The Knesset plenum must vote with a majority of 90 out of 120 members for the expulsion to proceed. The impeachment proceedings against Odeh were initiated following a message he posted on January 19, the day a ceasefire in Gaza took effect, in which he celebrated the prisoner exchange on both sides.

“From here, we must free both peoples from the yoke of occupation. We were all born free,” the politician wrote on X during the truce, which Israel broke with renewed bombings, killing over 400 Gazans in a single night less than two months later.

Like Émile Zola, who cried out in defense of human conscience during the Dreyfus Affair, I too feel a moral duty to cry out.

I accuse. pic.twitter.com/HNTXvUYesF

— איימן עודה أيمن عودة Ayman Odeh (@AyOdeh) July 13, 2025

Settler activist from the far-right Likud party, Avichay Boaron, who initiated the process against Odeh, argued in January that equating Israeli “hostages” with “Palestinian terrorists,” as well as calling to “lift the weight of occupation,” was legitimizing and inciting violence.

In his article, Odeh, who is also the leader of the predominantly Arab Hadash-Ta’al party, accused Israeli media of failing to cover the impeachment process with due professionalism, as well as ignoring the horrors of the war in Gaza, which he listed as including the suffering of children, famine, and destruction.

Just before what could be his last day as a member of the Israeli parliament, he also criticized the passivity of the international community, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump and his predecessors, whom he said legitimized the war of annihilation in the Gaza Strip and the rise of fascism in Israel.



https://www.telesurenglish.net/knesset- ... n-in-gaza/

[blindpig]

Israel's Bombing Of Damascus Is Aimed At Turkey

Today the Israeli air force bombed the capital of Syria, Damascus.

In late November 2024 al-Qaeda in Syria under former ISIS leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani (aka Ahmed al-Sharaa) set off to oust the Syrian government. He was backed by Qatar (financially), Turkey (militarily), the U.S. (intelligence wise) and Israel (propaganda).

After more than 11 years of war the Syria army was in a bad state. Pay was low while prices had risen sky high under sanctions. Many officers had been bribed by Qatar to stay put or change sides.

The Russian air force intervened against the Jihadi onslaught but, with no forces on the ground, could not stop their advances. Shia militia send by Iran from Iraq were bombed by U.S. jets while crossing the border. Eventually President Assad found that there was no army left to command and fled. The Syrian government broke down. The Jihadis conquered Damascus and have since ruled the country.

Syrian resistance against Israel ceased. Israel has since bombed what was left of the Syrian armies heavy equipment and missile forces. The country is no longer able to defend itself.

There are about 700,000 Druze living in Syria, southeast of Damascus, and in the Israel occupied Golan Heights. The Druze religion is an offshoot of Shia Islam but generally not accepted as Muslim.



After al-Qaeda took power in Syria the Israel army took additional Syrian territory near the Golan heights. It has tried to pull the Druze to its side:

Following the fall of the Assad regime, news were shared on social media to claim that the Druze population living in Hader, Quneitra Governorate of wishing to be under Israeli rule. This information, based on a non-verified video showing one individual expressing his opinion in a public gathering, has been repeated by mainstream media. The local leaders recorded a collective announcement on December 13, 2024, to deny these allegations and to denounce the Israeli occupation of their village. Syrian Druze leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri denounced the Israeli invasion of Syria, stressing the need to maintain support for Syria's "social and territorial unity".

Throughout the last week there was increased strife between Jihadi Syrian government forces and Druze militia. Both sides had losses. The Israeli army intervened by bombing heavier equipment the Syrian government tried to bring near to the contact line.

There is no doubt that the strife between the Druze and Jihadis was provoked by Israel to proceed with its strategic plans of taking more land in Syria and Lebanon.

Michael A. Horowitz @michaelh992 - 12:22 UTC · Jul 16, 2025
Israel's Defense Minister:
"The signaling in Damascus is over, now come the painful blows,”

"The IDF will continue to operate forcefully in Suweida to destroy the forces that attacked the Druze until their full withdrawal.”

"Our Druze brothers in Israel: You can count on the Israel Defense Forces to protect your brothers in Syria. Prime Minister Netanyahu and I, as defense minister, have made a commitment, and we will uphold it,"

Today the Israeli air forces dropped bombs on the Syrian Ministry of Defense, near the presidential palace and in the Umayyad Square in the center of Damascus.

Yossi Melman @yossi_melman - 14:05 UTC · Jul 16, 2025
Translated from Hebrew by Grok
To the best of my recollection, the last time the air force attacked the Syrian army’s general staff compound was during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Today’s double strike was particularly powerful.

It’s hard to understand why Israel is intervening so deeply in Syria. With all due respect to the Druze community in Israel, which is outraged about the clashes between regime forces and the Druze—who, by the way, are themselves divided on whether Israel should intervene in the matter at all.

The answer may lie in the fact that Israel can, and is acting like the neighborhood bully. This, of course, reinforces the idea of Netanyahu, Katz, Likud, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich’s eternal war.

The real aim of the Israeli government is not to protect the Druze or even to subjugate the Jihadi government of Syria.

These are the opening shots of a war between the rivaling powers of the Zionist entity and Turkey:

As the distribution of power shifts in the region, with Iran losing relative power and Israel and Turkey emerging on top, an intensified rivalry between Tel Aviv and Ankara is not a question of if, but how. It is not a question of whether they choose the rivalry, but how they choose to react to it: through confrontation or peaceful management.
...
[A]s long as Israel believes its security can only come through militarily dominating all its neighbors that can pose a challenge to it — that is, those who have the capacity to do so regardless of whether they have the intent or not — then Turkey's emergence as a major power in the region will put it into Israel's crosshairs, whether it likes it or not.

The forces of geopolitics cannot be eliminated. They can at best only be tamed.

Today Israel provided that the favored way of managing the rivalry with Turkey is by bombing its clients.

Ankara ain't happy with that:

Ragıp Soylu @ragipsoylu - 12:49 UTC · Jul 16, 2025
Turkish Foreign Ministry:
“Israeli attacks on central Damascus are an attempt to sabotage Syria's efforts to establish peace, stability, and security.
All stakeholders who support this opportunity should contribute to the Syrian Government's efforts to establish peace.”

Today's Syria is a client state of Turkey with al-Julani being the Turkish controlled regent.

While Turkey's wannabe Sultan Erdogan has publicly spoken out against Israel's genocide in Gaza he has silently cooperated with it by providing oil and other goods.

He probably thought that he could profit from the relation while ignoring the rivalry which is caused by the strategic expansion into the Levant both, Turkey and Israel, are seeking.

Today's strikes on Damascus might change his calculation.

Posted by b on July 16, 2025 at 14:45 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/07/i ... .html#more

*****

Palestinians Have Lived as Refugees For 80 Years: It is Time for a Durable Solution to End Their Suffering
By Khalil Al-Wazir - July 16, 2025 0


Palestinian refugees in Gaza following the 1948 Nakba. [Source: timesofisrael.com]

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has brought greater global attention to the plight of Palestinians, a huge number of whom have been refugees since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 when they were expelled from their land in what is known as the Nakba.

The brutal Israeli onslaught over the last year and a half has contributed to a further deterioration of living conditions inside the envisioned state of Palestine—the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip—and outside it, where refugees are hosted under the UNRWA operations and elsewhere.

Recent events have underscored the necessity of empowering Palestinian refugees and ending their dependence on foreign aid organizations and NGOs.

Adding to their self-reliance would help decrease the huge despair and anger caused with a prolonged status of refugeehood and statelessness.[1]

Palestinian stateless refugees are considered a significant bulk out of the stateless persons around the globe.[2]

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced an international campaign in 2014, titled “I Belong,” and calling for resolution of existing major situations of statelessness by November 2024, applicable in principle to Palestinian stateless persons but with little effort paid on that front due to unattainable mutual negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian representations.

The plight of refugees, as noted, is closely related to the events of 1946-1948 and can be said to be of a protracted and continuous nature.

The events of voluntary and forced displacement and dispossession accompanying the succession of Mandate Palestine initiated the 1948 Israel-Arab armed conflict which has changed and turned over time along with the establishment of the International-law de jure state of Palestine into an Israel-Palestine international armed conflict associated with the 1967 armed conflict.


Scene from the 1948 Nakba. [Source : theconversation.com]

The challenges faced by Palestinian refugees differ from one context to another. The main problems include: limited access to social, cultural and economic rights; narrative fight over the Nakba displacement and related school education; work generation; higher education; inadequate housing; and poor infrastructure inside the camps.

In addition, they face a lack of public spaces, overcrowding, restrictions on camp expansion and land titleship outside the camp, and limited secondary health-care services, social marginalization, de-development, and heightened poverty inside the camps.


Palestinian refugee camp inside Gaza. [Source : aljazeera.com]

These multifaceted issues have resulted in increased violence and instability within the limited-space camps. The vulnerabilities of refugees have been compounded by internal events in host communities and events of violence, like in Syria, resulting in double refuge status. The challenges extend to political and civil rights, with Israel denying Palestinians their right to self-determination and for refugees to move on from their plight of statelessness and refugeehood.

On November 15, 2022, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Palestine (UNRWA)-Jerusalem stated that 90% of Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon suffer from “unprecedented levels of poverty.” Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini added that most Palestinian refugees (93%) in Lebanon live below the poverty line. He talked about the increasing needs in the refugee community, noting that 40% of UNRWA students “could not eat breakfast every morning.”


UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini meets with displaced people sheltering in UNRWA facilities during a visit to Gaza on November 22, 2023. [Source: unrwa.org]

In 2012, then-President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Peter Maurer authored a law journal article, “Challenges to international humanitarian law: Israel’s occupation policy (icrc.org), in which he stated “Perhaps the most protracted and entrenched humanitarian situation in the region is the continued alienation of the Palestinian population living under occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or displaced in refugee camps across the region.”

Durable solutions
According to the UNRWA,[3] Palestinian refugees are defined to be “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

This link with property and livelihood is directly concurrent with Resolution 194 (III) on compensation for titles lost between 1946 and 1948.


[Source: mei.edu]

Durable solutions are pending final negotiations occurring between the parties to the armed conflict—Israel and Palestine. The durable solution highlighted by the Palestinian position is a just solution that relies on UN General Assembly resolutions with three-element reparations:

1.recognition by Israel of the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to start the negotiations;

2.restitution and, where impossible, adjustment to a form of assigning another vacant land in Israel; or
3.in case of the preference of a refugee to receive compensation rather than “return,” to receive full and complete compensation on lost land and livelihood.

A companion for all options is to receive compensation for non-material damage in terms of mental suffering resulting from long displacement.[4]

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “the options for our refugees should be: return to Israel, return/resettlement to a future Palestinian state, integration in host states, or resettlement in third-party states,” all linked with compensation that its value would be assessed against the option of the single refugee.

(1) Return: The international fora have some examples on voluntary return of refugees to their original land. Chances for voluntary repatriation are reliable based on agreement made by the parties to the armed conflict during the conflict or post the settlement. An example of the latter is the case of non-international armed conflict in Burundi, which occurred between 1994 until 2005 and resulted in refugeehood in neighboring countries. The returnees into Burundi, after settlement of the conflict, are included within policies drawn for integration and empowerment set by the Directorate General for Repatriation, Resettlement, Reintegration of Returnees and War-Displaced Persons in cooperation with the UNHCR and UNDP.[5] The UNHCR role toward the Palestinian refugees is discussed below in the case of UNRWA.


Burundian refugees who were assisted by UNHCR. [Source: unhcr.org]

(2) On the local integration and/or resettlement of refugees and fostering their inclusion into third countries conferring a citizenship,[6] local integration has been employed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in relation to all Palestinian refugees, excluding Palestinian displaced persons in 1967 who are located inside the so-known Gaza Camp of which 88% of its residents are medically uninsured.[7] Nationality laws of different hosting countries to Palestinian refugees can contribute indirectly to the local integration. For example, on the small percentage of refugees in Egypt, those who were married to Egyptian females, the mothers can pass on their nationality to their sons and daughters, unlike the nationality laws of Lebanon and Syria.[8] About the re-resettlement of refugees into other countries other than the original hosting state, some Palestinian refugees have made their way to Europe, Canada, and elsewhere and received or are in the process of receiving a nationality that would end their stateless status, but were not compensated on losses sustained. The available countries’ mechanisms and the UNHCR can play a significant role in resettlement of Palestinian refugees into third-country options.

(3) There is some evolution of Palestinian pragmatism on the right of return with PLO showing options for return of refugees into the West Bank and Gaza Strip considering the fact that refugees are unwilling to submit themselves to live in an Israeli state.[9] In fact, the main problem of repatriation/return is that the refugees may not want to receive Israeli nationality. From that it can be inferred that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank representing big urban centers can have the potential to receive thousands of Palestinian refugees into the future Palestinian Sovereign State, allowing for Palestinian citizenship.


[Source: progressispossible.org]

Having the right of return at the end of the day considered as an individual-based right under the inalienable collective right of return, any of the afore-mentioned options shall not jeopardize the right of compensation on titles and livelihoods lost and mental suffering. On that, the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine concluded an identification and evaluation of Arab property in 1964 and it still retains land records of Arab owners defining the location and area of the property.

There is an international recognition that Palestinian refugees are entitled to their property and to revenue—income derived therefrom since then—in conformity with the principles of equity and justice under Resolution 194 (III).

It is important to mention that hundreds of Palestinians were displaced due to the 1967 armed conflict, many of whom were residing in UNRWA Areas of Operations. Like the Palestinian refugees of 1948, displaced persons of 1967 were guaranteed the right to return to their property based on UNGA resolutions and Article XII of the Oslo Declaration of Principles of 1993.

Status of Palestinian refugees, and roles of UNRWA, UNHCR and ICRC
The Palestinian refugees have a distinctive legal status under international law. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its protocol of 1967 excludes the application of the convention over Palestinian refugees registered under the UNRWA support by virtue of Article 1 (D): “This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.”

The same holds true for the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons which literally repeats in Article 1 para. (2) (I), the quoted Article 1D above of the 1951 convention.

Therefore, the 1951 and 1954 conventions excluded Palestinian refugees supported by UNRWA from the scope of the two conventions and, as such, from the support that can be provided by the UNHCR, regardless of whether the hosting countries have ratified those conventions or not.

Knowing that the UNRWA areas of operations are the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan are considered as de-facto stateless persons on the basis that they are not protected by the operation of any country and the fact that UNRWA does not, at the end of the day, provide a citizenship per se as it solely provides relief and assistance operations.[10]

A group of people holding signs

AI-generated content may be incorrect.
[Source: ritimo.org]
The case is different for refugees acquiring a Palestinian ID number that allows them to reside, regularly, in their respective domiciles in areas of Gaza and the West Bank, or those given nationality in their respective hosting countries.

Doctrine 13 of the UNHCR speaks about the Palestinian refugees in areas of UNRWA operations.[11] The guidelines illustrate the interpretation of Article 1D of the 1951 Convention, the guidelines were made in cooperation with the UNRWA for the attention of governments, legal practitioners, decision makers, the judiciary, and UNHCR staff.

Article 1D, para. 1, is considered an “exclusion clause,” while para. 2 is an “inclusive clause,” and the two should be read sequentially. [12]
It was the purpose of Article 1D to show that Palestinian refugees are considered a sui generis class of refugees under the 1951 Convention until their position has been definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the UNGA, and meanwhile to avoid duplications or overlapping between the UNRWA and UNHCR.[13]
According to the doctrine, Palestinian refugees are defined as follows:

1.Palestinian refugees within the sense of UNGA Resolution 194, para. III, and subsequent resolutions, encompassing all of those who were displaced from the part of Mandate Palestine which became Israel, and who have been unable to return there. Under UNRWA system, those are registered persons—persons who meet UNRWA’s Palestine Refugee criteria: 1948.[14]

2.Displaced persons within the sense of UNGA Resolution 2252 (ES-V) of 1967 and subsequent UNGA resolutions and who, because of the 1967 conflict, have been displaced from occupied Palestinian territory and unable to return there, including those displaced due to hostilities up until 1982. Under UNRWA system, those are non-registered persons—persons eligible to receive UNRWA emergency services without being registered in UNRWA’s Registration System; 1967.[15] Having this category originally displaced from the envisaged Palestinian state located within the border of June 4, 1967, the main problem of this category is that in the two months following the armed conflict of 1967, the State of Israel (IL) conducted a census of the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, combining the Palestinian population registry. Any addition to the Palestinian population by the Palestinian Authority would need the IL consent to materialize the addition as per Article XII of the Oslo Accords and Article 28 of the Annex III.

3.Descendants from original male and female Palestinian refugees and displaced persons of the 1948 and 1967 events.


[Source: newarab.com]

All the above categories are excluded from the support of UNHCR with noting that the standard is the “eligibility,” not on whether they receive assistance from UNRWA at current or not for 1946-48.[16] This lock of UNHCR support adds on the legal impediments toward reaching durable solutions for refugees. In 2021, approximately 5.7 million women, children and men are registered with the Agency as Palestine refugees.

A further 700,000 persons are also registered with the UNRWA as eligible to receive services within the scope of 1967 displacement. It is important to flag that the non-registered persons of 1967 are eligible to access UNRWA services on the basis of need—as such in case of improved economic conditions, then they are no longer supported by UNRWA, and as such remain outside protection of UNRWA which would justify UNHCR involvement solely in the case of statelessness of the refugees.

UNHCR is to re-establish its mandate over the Palestinian refugees in the UNRWA areas of operations in the following scenarios:[17]

1.Termination of the mandate of UNRWA by UNGA resolution—automatic alternative protection.
2.Inability of UNRWA to fulfill its protection or assistance mandate.
3.Threat to the applicant’s life, physical integrity, security or liberty or other serious protection-related reasons: individuals may be forced to leave area of UNRWA operation due to persecution, torture and CIHD treatment, human trafficking, and exploitation, forced recruitment, severe discrimination or arbitrary arrest and detention. Group threats involve armed conflict, civil unrest, OSV, the non-ability of the state to protect refugees.
4.Practical, legal, and/or safety barriers preventing an applicant from (re)availing him/herself of the protection or assistance of UNRWA—case-by-case scenario.

In addition, it can be concluded that it is the primary UNHCR responsibility to address Palestinian de facto refugees and stateless persons under the 1951 and 1954 conventions who exist outside the countries in which UNRWA performs its operations, like in Egypt and Iraq.

It also holds true that the ICRC has within its mandate all refugees residing in the Occupied Palestinian territory, themselves being protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.

(Notes at link.)

The Zionists have made it clear that there can be no 'two-state solution'.

******

Israel’s War Mutates Without End
July 16, 2025


Israeli occupation soldiers mourn over the coffin of a companion killed in the Gaza battlefield. Photo: AFP.

By Yahya Dbouk – Jul 14, 2025

With Gaza ceasefire negotiations having faltered, reports have surfaced of a detailed Israeli military plan prepared for immediate execution. While not officially confirmed by the Israeli army, the plan outlines objectives, operational zones, and constraints, signaling both a credible threat and a possible psychological pressure tactic. Some commentators view the leaks as a pressure tactic meant to force Hamas into concessions and impose Israeli terms at the negotiating table. Others take the threat seriously, noting its alignment with powerful Israeli factions that view the war as an opportunity to “cleanse” Gaza of Palestinians once and for all. Between these readings, the official Israeli policy continues its push without setting any clear limits on its goals.

Recent Israeli media reports confirm that the Zionist occupation army has finalized a new plan to be launched within hours or days if negotiations fail. It includes a large-scale ground offensive toward central Gaza City, a siege on Hamas strongholds in areas such as Jabalia Camp and Deir al-Balah, and the forced displacement of civilians from northern and central Gaza to the southernmost area of Rafah. There, they would be placed in what Israel is calling the “tent city,” a revised version of the previously proposed “humanitarian city.” According to a senior Israeli security official, breaching central Gaza City would deliver a major blow to Hamas, as the area has maintained near-normal daily life despite nearly two years of war.

The “tent city” project is intended to contain civilians away from combat zones, but the Israeli army opposes it, arguing that managing such a site would entangle it in the direct administration of Palestinian civilian life, something that would require a permanent military presence on the ground. Despite these concerns, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Security Minister Yisrael Katz remain committed to the plan. They view it as a means to ensure long-term Israeli influence over Gaza, with or without a ceasefire agreement.

These plans are advancing amid serious internal challenges for the Israeli military, most notably a severe troop shortage. In response, the government proposed extending mandatory service for combat and special forces soldiers from 32 to 44 months. Although the plan was announced and approved, it was delayed following widespread backlash from soldiers, opposition parties, and the public. This underscores structural dysfunction within the military, which now affects its professional advice to political leaders and deepens tensions between those favoring negotiation and those pushing for further escalation.



Based on statements from top military officials and orchestrated leaks to Israeli media, the army appears to favor continued, limited operations while keeping the door open to potential agreements. In contrast, the government advocates for a so-called “strategic resolution,” even if it entails controversial, risky, or high-cost moves. Final decision-making, however, rests with Netanyahu, who continues to juggle internal fractures, external constraints, and international pressure, often resorting to short-term, vague, or inconclusive policies.

Meanwhile in Doha, where indirect negotiations are ongoing, any anticipated deal is unlikely to end the war. Instead, from the Zionist perspective, it may simply reframe it, weakening Hamas’ leverage while continuing military operations aimed at Palestinian surrender or mass displacement. Hamas, on the other hand, sees any concessions as dangerous, both politically and existentially. The group therefore insists on a complete end to the war, or at minimum, a permanent ceasefire guarantee; an outcome the Israeli leadership firmly rejects.

This stark divide defines the conflict: for the Zionist occupation, “victory” means Hamas’ defeat, a radically reshaped Gaza, or even its removal from the political map, with direct Israeli control. For Palestinians, victory lies in survival, preserving identity, and lifting the blockade, no matter the cost. What further complicates the situation is Israel’s refusal to define concrete strategic goals. Instead, it continues the war with no clear endgame, guided by the logic of “crossing the bridge when we get to it,” waiting to see what the battlefield might yield.

(Al-Akhbar)

https://orinocotribune.com/israels-war- ... thout-end/

******

Netanyahu’s new message to al-Sharaa: ‘Daddy’s home!’

Martin Jay

July 17, 2025

The West is learning that it can’t trust al-Sharaa as most of his CNN makeover and its gestures have proved to be worthless in the shifting sands of the region and its geopolitics.

“No one has the right to erase another group. These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them”. These are the words of Syria’s new dictator who was installed by Turkey, is now run by Israel and America and feared by regional Arab leaders. Ahmed al-Sharaa was speaking about the protection of dozens of Syria’s minority groups.

Since December of last year, many have feared that his words were empty. They have feared that ethnic groups like the Alawites who fought hard with Assad against all Sunni extremist groups in Syria leading up to his fall, would be the first target for reprisals. And of course they were right.

But now the Druze are also under attack, as they too were broadly aligned with Assad and have old scores to settle with al-Sharaa’s men. Yet this time it’s different as Israel comes to their support and in recent days has actually done the unthinkable to send a message to Syria’s new leader: bombed government and military installations in Damascus. The message is clear: we are running Syria now and call the shots.

Netanyahu has good reason to fear the clashes between Bedouin groups and the Druze. Firstly, there is an important Druze minority in Israel which is drafted into the army and is largely supportive of the Zionist cause. For Israel to allow Druze to be slaughtered so close to the Israel border would give Netanyahu a number of problems. There is also the broader point that Netanyahu sees the Druze in the region – Syria, Lebanon and Israel – as a potentially useful ally.

The real worry for Israel is that a new civil war erupts with minorities all ganging up against al-Sharaa’s bloodthirsty henchmen who were of course originally HTS extremists. Contrary to popular belief held among some analysts, it is unlikely that Israel wants to put resources into a new war when it is preparing for a longer one with Iran and is already stretched to its limits elsewhere like Gaza or Lebanon. The honeymoon between Netanyahu and al-Sharaa is certainly over and now the former needs to show the latter who’s wearing the pants.

However, some analysts underplay the support Netanyahu may have for the Druze and see a different strategy at play with the Damascus bombing.

“The thuggish Israeli attacks on Damascus are wildly misunderstood by everyone” argues Syrian journalist Hassan I. Hassan, owner of Newlines mag. “It’s not a continuation of the old Israeli policy or connected to a policy to defend Druze rebels against a Damascus takeover of the province. It’s more likely a way to dictate terms amid negotiations” he explains.

Charles Lister is also cynical of how the bombing is presented and worries that the Druze may well be slaughtered when they are in the middle of all the crossfire. “Israel claims to be striking Syria in order to defend a minority, but in so doing, they are putting that minority in a far tighter and dangerous corner than they were in beforehand” he says. “There’s no strategy at play here – desperately short-sighted”.

Is there any strategy? While Israel’s and America’s vision of Syria is slightly different there can be little doubt that Netanyahu regards the annexing of Syria as an essential step towards weakening and finally defeating Iran. The fall of Assad was a crucial step and the spoils of war must be kept for the victor. A recent warning by America’s ambassador in Lebanon to the Lebanese that if they don’t disarm Hezbollah, then Syria will simply swallow up that tiny country was a poignant warning which needs to be heeded. ‘Greater Israel’ is the real plan and al-Sharaa needs to be tamed and shown that he can just as easily be replaced as he was installed. It was a mistake of his to allow his troops with heavy equipment to move south to Sweida and attack the Druze.

Although reports indicate that it was Druze armed militias who were responsible for the escalation, such skirmishes cannot be allowed to get out of control and become a free for all bloodbath with al-Sharaa’s forces settling old scores. Israel seems to be ready to begin hitting Syria’s army as way of taming it and its leader.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said after the airstrike in a post on X that the “painful blows have begun.”

Syria’s Defense Ministry had earlier blamed militias in the Druze-majority area of Sweida for violating a ceasefire agreement that had been reached, causing Syrian army soldiers to return fire. It said they were “adhering to rules of engagement to protect residents, prevent harm, and ensure the safe return of those who left the city back to their homes.”

Whether the Syrian army is telling the truth or not, Israel’s grand plan for Syria is not for it to return to civil war as this would weaken its main role, to provide a buffer between Iran and Lebanon and to cast a shadow over Iraq’s Hezbollah militias. If al-Sharaa doesn’t comply though, Netanyahu is ready to move in more troops and do a second run of ‘operation grapes of wrath’ which took place in Lebanon in 1996 under Shimon Peres and fill the south of Syria with Israeli soldiers and tanks. The most crackpot idea in Trump’s second term, to support the most brutal terrorist in Syria and Iraq, to become a western surf against Iran, was always a shaky idea. The West is learning that it can’t trust al-Sharaa as most of his CNN makeover and its gestures have proved to be worthless in the shifting sands of the region and its geopolitics.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... ddys-home/

[blindpig]

Global Solidarity Call: Hamas Declares Critical 3-Day Protest Campaign Against Gaza Famine And Blockade


Hamas’s official logo, calling on its followers to mobilize this Sunday against the offensive in Gaza. 19/7/2025


July 19, 2025 Hour: 11:05 am

Hamas issues a Solidarity Call for global protests against the Gaza humanitarian crisis and Israeli blockade. With over 53,000 dead and famine risks escalating, urgent international action is demanded.

Geopolitical Context Behind the Hamas Global Solidarity Call for Gaza
The Hamas global solidarity call for Gaza has intensified as the humanitarian and health crisis in the enclave reaches catastrophic levels. On Saturday, July 19, 2025, Hamas issued an urgent appeal for mass mobilization starting Sunday, July 20, calling for global protests against what it describes as a systematic policy of starvation and extermination by Israel.

The call targets Arab, Islamic, and international civil society groups, urging them to organize demonstrations, marches, and public actions in front of Israeli and U.S. embassies and international institutions. The movement has framed the situation as a “genocide in progress”, accusing the international community of complicity.

Telesur – Hamas Global Mobilization

Hamas Calls for 3-Day Global Protest Against Gaza Famine
In a statement released this Saturday, the Hamas global solidarity call for Gaza urged a worldwide wave of demonstrations to begin on July 20, 2025, denouncing what it calls an ongoing extermination campaign by Israel and the complicity of Western governments in allowing it to continue.

The movement described the Israeli military campaign as a blatant violation of international law and moral standards, calling for the next few days to become a global moment of marches, rallies, and public actions demanding an end to the blockade and the cessation of hostilities.


“We call on all free peoples of the world to break the silence,” said the statement, which emphasized the need for political, diplomatic, and social pressure on governments and international institutions.

Infobae – Hamas International Appeal

Humanitarian Disaster in Gaza Deepens
Since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry has reported over 53,000 civilian deaths, primarily women, children, and elderly individuals. The enclave faces a near-total collapse of essential services — including food, clean water, electricity, and medical care — with over 3,000 aid trucks stuck at Rafah and minimal access to life-saving supplies.

The United Nations and humanitarian agencies have confirmed a man-made famine and a complete breakdown of the health system, with children dying from malnutrition and hospitals unable to treat the sick due to lack of medicine and power.

“This is not just a war zone — it is a place where people are dying because they cannot eat or get treatment,” said a local health official. “The world must act before it’s too late.”

Gaza Famine and Health Collapse: A Preventable Tragedy
The Gaza humanitarian crisis has led to widespread disease outbreaks, including cholera and dehydration, due to the lack of clean water and nutrition. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have issued urgent alerts, noting that over 90% of Gaza’s healthcare facilities are non-operational.

The blockade has also prevented access to medical evacuations, maternal care, and basic medicines. Thousands of patients are now left without treatment, while hospitals operate without electricity, fuel, or water.

“We are witnessing the collapse of an entire health system under siege conditions,” said a WHO representative, reinforcing the urgency of the Hamas-led mobilization.

World Health Organization – Gaza Health Report

Hamas Demands Action Beyond Words
The movement urged religious scholars, political leaders, and intellectuals to take a firm stance and break the silence surrounding the Gaza humanitarian crisis. It also called for sustained mobilization beyond a single day, insisting that pressure must continue until the siege is lifted and aid flows freely.

The statement emphasized the need for a unified global voice demanding an immediate ceasefire, an end to the blockade, and strict adherence to international humanitarian law.

Hamas also criticized several Arab governments for their inaction, accusing them of abandoning humanitarian principles and failing to support the Palestinian cause.

International Response and Growing Awareness
The Hamas global solidarity call for Gaza arrives amid rising global awareness and protest activity. Across the world, civil society groups, student organizations, and political movements have staged demonstrations calling for an end to the Israeli military campaign and the lifting of the blockade.

However, the movement warns that rhetoric is not enough — it demands concrete diplomatic pressure on Israel and its allies, particularly the United States and European nations, to halt the ongoing aggression.

Organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International have documented the crisis, with the UN describing the situation as a man-made famine and humanitarian catastrophe.

UN News – Gaza Famine Risk Report

Conclusion: A Movement for Global Conscience
The Hamas global solidarity call for Gaza is not merely a political maneuver — it is a plea for global conscience, urging the world to act before the crisis becomes irreversible. As famine spreads and hospitals shut down, the call for mass protests and sustained pressure reflects the urgency of the moment.

While the international community remains divided, the movement insists that solidarity must move beyond words and translate into real diplomatic and humanitarian action. The question remains: will the world finally respond?

https://www.telesurenglish.net/solidari ... -for-gaza/

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The high corporate profitability of Palestinian extermination
July 17, 2025 , 1:59 pm .


The estimated 30,000 Palestinian deaths and 71,000 injuries in 2024 have risen to 57,000 deaths and 135,000 injuries in 2025 (Photo: Archive)


In its report " From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide ," presented to the Human Rights Council by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the UN documents how violence in the occupied Palestinian territories has become an engine of unprecedented profits for luxury war, technology, and financial corporations.

An unprecedented stock market rally
In just 21 months, from October 2023 to July 2025, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's main index climbed 213%, accumulating $225 billion in additional capitalization. More than a third of that growth—approximately $76.8 billion—was concentrated in the last month, coinciding with the most intense operations in Gaza.

Figures that do not admit nuances:

Death toll: 57,000 Palestinians killed, including 13,000 children, compared to 30,000 in the previous report from 2024.
Injured: The total number of injured people is 135,000, almost double the 71,000 recorded a year earlier.
Forced displacement: 80% of the population has been forced to leave their homes.
Infrastructure destroyed: 70% of homes and 81% of agricultural land have been destroyed.
Water and health: 97% of the water in Gaza is unsafe, and only three hospitals will be partially operational by July 2025.
At least 48 companies, spanning the arms, technology, construction, finance, tourism, and services sectors, have secured direct contracts or investments linked to the Israeli military operation. These include giants such as Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Elbit Systems, and BNP Paribas. Their presence describes an ecosystem where the demand for cutting-edge weapons, biometric surveillance systems, and occupation infrastructure has translated into growing balance sheets and a proliferation of technology startups dedicated to the defense sector.

Between 2020 and 2024, Israel climbed to eighth place in the world in arms exports. At the same time, domestic military spending grew 65% between 2023 and 2024 to reach $45.5 billion, one of the highest per capita on the planet. The report highlights how this phenomenon has turned the permanent occupation into a testing ground for manufacturers of drones, 2,000-pound bombs—equivalent to two nuclear bombs—and predictive intelligence software .

Sectors and protagonists of the genocide economy
The report by rapporteur Francesca Albanese details the participation of companies in six major sectors that have seen their revenues soar thanks to the military operation in Gaza.

Armaments and defense systems . In the United States , Lockheed Martin and Boeing account for a large portion of the business: the F-35 program, with a global value exceeding $100 billion, and the sale of Hellfire missiles and JDAM kits have fueled revenue growth of up to 18% in the last year. In Israel, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, both emerging from public-private partnerships and later privatized, are among the fifty largest arms manufacturers on the planet, with profits exceeding $5 billion each in 2024 and the first half of 2025.

Technology , surveillance , and data. The adoption of cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) by Israeli security forces has been key to processing massive volumes of intelligence and facial recognition data. This technological boom explains the 143% increase in new military startups during 2024, as well as the fact that 64% of Israeli exports last year came from defense-oriented companies.

Construction and infrastructure. Heavy armored vehicles, D9 excavators, and demolition equipment supplied by Caterpillar, HD Hyundai, and JCB have been contracted under U.S. foreign military assistance programs worth an estimated $2 billion. These machines have been used to create "security zones" and demolish thousands of homes in Gaza.

Finance and Capital Flows . Large asset managers, led by BlackRock and Vanguard, along with banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays, have underwritten or distributed Israeli sovereign bonds totaling $13 billion between 2024 and 2025—$5 billion in the first seven months of 2025 alone. Meanwhile, multilateral institutions such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) continue to finance infrastructure projects that, according to the report, are "directly useful" in sustaining the occupation.

While the 2024 report estimated 30,000 deaths and 71,000 injuries, the 2025 report raises those figures to 57,000 deaths and 135,000 injuries. In 2024, there was talk of massive home destruction; today, the figure is estimated at 70%. The generic mention of companies involved in 2024 gives way to a detailed list of nearly fifty companies in 2025.

From endless war to the profit cycle
In parallel with the stock market surge and the increase in contracts linked to the conflict, an official narrative is emerging that projects violence as a geopolitical asset. This is how Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, expresses it, who has drawn the links between military supremacy, conditional diplomacy, and economic benefits.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post on June 24, 2025, following the offensive against Iran, Smotrich maintained that "Israel is the dominant power in the region, the civilizational and moral axis between Africa, Asia and Europe," which, according to him, gives it the right to demand recognition and rewards. For Smotrich, "normalization" with the Arab world is a reward that "Arab countries must pay for Israel's work in dismantling the Iran-Hamas axis."

Smotrich proposed an extension of the Abraham Accords "on Israel's terms," denying any territorial concessions, flatly rejecting the existence of a Palestinian state, and calling the Palestinian cause "the biggest hoax in history."

His words not only eliminate the possibility of a political solution to the conflict but also consolidate a paradigm in which military superiority becomes a bargaining chip to secure investment and legitimize the occupation. In this logic, what is presented as "regional normalization" is actually the deepening of a model that, as the UN rapporteur denounces, fuels the economy of genocide under the guise of stability.

The prolonged violence in Gaza has transformed into a lucrative business based on endless war. From major arms conglomerates to major capital managers, everyone finds in the occupation fertile ground that fuels the intensification of hostility. Thus, each new episode of extermination reinforces corporate profitability and perpetuates a closed cycle whose economic roots are the main barrier to breaking it.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... -palestino

Google Translator

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Gaza on ‘brink of mass death’ due to Israeli-imposed famine

At least three children have died from acute malnutrition in the last few days due to a lack of food across the strip

News Desk

JUL 20, 2025


(Photo credit: Reuters)

Authorities in Gaza warned on 20 July that the strip is “on the brink of mass death” due to widespread famine and starvation resulting from Israel’s siege and genocidal war.


“Gaza is heading towards an unprecedented humanitarian disaster as the extermination by killing and collective starvation continues against more than 2.4 million people, including 1.1 million children in the Gaza Strip,” said the Gaza Government Media Office in a statement.

“We are on the brink of mass death due to the Israeli occupation's closure of all crossings for more than 140 days, preventing the entry of humanitarian and relief aid, baby milk, and fuel, tightening the siege completely, depletion of food and medicine, and the continuation of the starvation policy,” it added. “We are facing the largest mass massacre in modern history.”

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said, “unprecedented numbers of starving citizens of all ages are arriving at emergency departments in a state of severe exhaustion and fatigue.”


Do not be surprised when we journalists stop covering news here. I swear by God that today I could not get up from the hunger. There is no food. Even if someone has money, there is nothing in the market to even purchase.

We are all starving. We are all dying.

— Nahed hajjaj (@nahed_hajjaj99) July 18, 2025

“We warn that hundreds of those whose bodies have withered are now facing certain death from hunger, as their physical strength can no longer sustain them,” the ministry went on to say.

Despite the EU recently announcing a deal with Israel to expand the flow of aid into the besieged strip, the amounts entering Gaza remain nowhere near what is required.


Our minds are fixated on the color white — between shrouds and flour — and both signify death.

— Omar Hamad | عُـمَـرْ 𓂆 (@OmarHamadD) July 20, 2025

The UN has been bypassed due to the imposition of the US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a deadly displacement scheme framed as a humanitarian initiative.

Over 51 Palestinian aid seekers were shot dead by Israeli forces at GHF and other aid sites in Gaza on 20 July, bringing the number of starving civilians killed while receiving aid up to over 900 since the start of the US-Israeli scheme in May.
In the last 48 hours, three Palestinian children have died from malnutrition due to the unprecedented levels of famine across Gaza.


The child Razan Abu Zahir has passed away due to severe malnutrition and a lack of milk, amid the ongoing Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip and the closure of border crossings.

Her family was unable to provide her with the necessary food and milk, which led to a deterioration in… pic.twitter.com/ZsIydJ5M64

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) July 20, 2025

According to the Ministry of Health, at least 71 children in the Gaza Strip have died due to starvation and malnutrition since the start of Israel’s genocidal war.


In the early hours of 20 July, Israel carried out massive, destructive attacks on Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza with the aim of destroying whatever structures have remained standing until today.

The Israeli military said it targeted "Hamas infrastructure." pic.twitter.com/Ca64maqDWf

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) July 20, 2025

Only three aid trucks from the World Health Organization (WHO) carrying medicine are scheduled to enter Gaza on Sunday.

Thousands of aid trucks remain stuck outside the Gaza border.

UNRWA said in a statement on 19 July that it “has enough food for the entire population of Gaza for over three months stockpiled in warehouses–including this one in Al Arish, Egypt–awaiting entry.”

“The supplies are available. The systems are in place. Open the gates, lift the siege, allow UNRWA to do its work and help people in need, among them one million children,” it added.


Do not be surprised when we journalists stop covering news here. I swear by God that today I could not get up from the hunger. There is no food. Even if someone has money, there is nothing in the market to even purchase.

We are all starving. We are all dying.

— Nahed hajjaj (@nahed_hajjaj99) July 18, 2025

Money holds little value for many in Gaza, where markets are either completely empty or unaffordable, leaving residents unable to find food despite skyrocketing prices.

https://thecradle.co/articles/gaza-on-b ... sed-famine

Israel floods YouTube with ads to whitewash Gaza genocide, Iran offensive: Report

Israel has spent tens of millions to purchase ads viewed by 45 million Europeans in the past month

News Desk

JUL 18, 2025


(Photo credit: Josh Edelson / AFP/Getty Images)

Israel is spending millions of dollars each day on an expansive advertising campaign across YouTube, aimed at shifting European public opinion in support of its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its recent unprovoked attack on Iran, according to a new investigation by MintPress News published on 18 July.

The report reveals that the Israeli Government Advertising Agency has paid for ads, translated into five languages, that have reached at least 45 million YouTube users in the past month. These ads target viewers in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, and Greece, and portray Israel as both a victim of terrorism and a global force for good.

In one ad, viewers hear: “A fanatical [Iranian] regime firing missiles at civilians, while racing towards nuclear weapons ... We will finish the mission for our people, for humanity. Israel does what must be done.”

Another warns Europeans of a looming threat from Iran’s missile program: “Iran is developing missiles with ranges of approximately 4,000 kilometers ... placing Europe within striking distance,” as blood-red graphics engulf the continent.

Other ads use emotional appeals, such as depicting mothers with newborns under Iranian rocket fire, insisting that while Iran targets civilians, Israel responds with “precision” and only hits military targets.

However, MintPress highlights the factual inaccuracies in these ads. While the Israeli government claims to avoid civilian casualties, at least 935 Iranians have been killed in Israeli strikes since 13 June, compared to just 28 Israeli deaths from retaliatory Iranian missile fire.

At the same time, Israel has destroyed or damaged 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has documented 697 Israeli attacks on medical facilities.

Reports from UNICEF and other humanitarian agencies confirm that Israeli forces have killed or injured over 50,000 Palestinian children and killed more than 1,400 medical personnel. Among them was Dr Adnan al-Bursh, who was tortured to death in Israeli custody.

Despite Israel’s ongoing aid blockade in Gaza, which has caused 66 Palestinian children to die of malnutrition, the ads claim the country is conducting “one of the largest humanitarian operations in the world.” One promotional video from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declares: “This is what real aid looks like. Smiles don’t lie. Hamas does.”

The investigation also points to the failure of Google, which owns YouTube, to enforce its own advertising policies, which prohibit content that promotes hatred, violence, or discrimination.

All of the videos cited by MintPress are listed in Google’s Ads Transparency Center as paid content from the Israeli government.

The campaign is just one facet of a much larger public diplomacy effort. Israel’s foreign PR budget has grown by over 2,000 percent, with an additional $150 million allocated to the Foreign Ministry for such initiatives.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-fl ... ive-report

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“Death Traps”: Starve or Be Shot
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 16, 2025
Ansarollah



In the initial attacks in which the Zionist military targeted lines of starving Palestinians awaiting aid—perpetrating some of the most heinous crimes against civilians too weak to even stand—the justification was that armed elements were allegedly among those in line, preparing for hostile action. Soon after, these massacres were repeated without even the pretense of justification. The world came to realize that these summary executions were part of an ongoing systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.

The international community has grown numb. Its reactions have remained confined to rhetorical condemnation, never advancing beyond slogans. Meanwhile, the Zionist entity no longer bothers to justify its continuation of what Palestinians now call the “Death Traps.”

According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, the repeated crimes and the absence of a serious international response have led the Israeli military to stop issuing even fabricated justifications for its crimes against civilians. The Israeli entity no longer feels pressure of accountability, inquiry, or protest from relevant states and organizations.

The global reaction to these massacres has been largely symbolic. Despite condemnations and affirmations of Palestinians’ right to food and aid, these statements do little more than serve as face-saving measures. The very nations that present themselves as “champions of human rights”—quick to accuse others of violating international law—have stood idle while those same principles are crushed in the occupied Palestinian territories by the Zionist oppressors, who commit atrocities that defy every standard of human decency: luring the starving with promises of aid, only to slaughter them in cold blood.

United Nations: Wishes and Calls
In its latest display of ineffectiveness, the United Nations merely called for an investigation into the killings of those seeking humanitarian aid, but no action beyond that. Its statements have become little more than expressions of hope, as though issuing press releases is now the full extent of its role. Yet the UN has tools to turn these demands into real pressure to end the catastrophe and secure food and water for Palestinians.

Back in late April, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated: “Israel has prevented the entry of food, fuel, medicine, and commercial supplies into Gaza for nearly two months.” He further warned that this blockade is depriving more than two million people of life-saving aid. Guterres added: “Aid is non-negotiable. Israel must protect civilians, approve aid programs, and facilitate their implementation.”

Despite these statements and repeated calls to investigate what has become known as the “Death Traps,” nothing has changed. Recently, the U.S., with characteristic brazenness, stepped forward to defend the Israeli enemy—this time attacking the United Nations itself. Washington imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, for her detailed documentation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Albanese’s reports exposed horrific living conditions caused by bombing and starvation, and called for the prosecution of those responsible. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described her work as “illegitimate and disgraceful.” The UN once again did nothing, merely condemning the U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. Punishes a Free Voice
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric stated that the U.S. sanctions against Albanese are “unacceptable” and represent “a dangerous precedent.” He emphasized that Albanese acts as an independent expert reporting to the UN Human Rights Council, and that unilateral sanctions targeting UN personnel violate the independence of their work and are completely unacceptable.

Hamas called the sanctions “a blatant expression of the U.S. administration’s bias in favor of Israeli war crimes,” and a clear display of its contempt for international institutions and their representatives.

Francesca Albanese described the sanctions as “a dangerous precedent” and said they are “designed to undermine my mission.” She declared: “I will continue to do what must be done, even if it presents a challenge.”

Mariana Katzarova, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia, condemned the UN’s passivity, telling Reuters: “This is completely unacceptable. It opens the door for any government to do the same. It’s an attack on the entire UN system. Member states must rise and denounce this.”

Albanese’s pivotal report also exposed the complicity of global corporations in what she labeled the “economy of genocide” in Palestine. Experts and political analysts described the report as a turning point in revealing the extent of institutional support behind Israel’s assault.

Her report revealed that global arms companies had supplied Israel with 35,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza—six times the destructive force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It identified more than 60 major corporations involved in supporting this genocidal economy.

Among those named were tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which assist with surveillance technology, as well as arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, and construction companies such as Caterpillar and Hyundai, which provide the bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes, alongside Leonardo.

The U.S. reacted furiously to the report. The Israeli entity rejected it as “distorting facts and an abuse of the Rapporteur’s role,” even going as far as to label the report antisemitic. The U.S. mission to the UN echoed this, calling Albanese’s accusations “false and offensive,” and reportedly pressured Guterres to publicly condemn her and demand her dismissal.

A Stain on Global Institutions and Governments’ Silence
The leader of the resistance described the “Death Traps” as an American-Israeli scheme to control humanitarian aid distribution—those who approach it risk being killed. He stressed that many in Gaza are forced to seek aid but face imminent danger throughout the process: en route to aid centers, while gathering, during collection, and even on the way back home.

He noted that the Israeli military monitors those returning with flour bags and targets them upon arrival at their homes. These massacres during food distribution are among the most horrific crimes committed against the Palestinian people.

He condemned the silence of international institutions, states, regimes, and governments, stating it is a disgrace to remain silent while such atrocities are committed against aid seekers. He argued that Israel is emboldened by the inaction of world leaders, who have failed even to take basic steps in response.

The World Food Programme affirms that “most families in Gaza barely eat one meal a day due to the severe Israeli blockade imposed for months.” One in three people, it states, goes days without food. The WFP’s Deputy Executive Director admitted: “We have never seen anything like what is happening now in Gaza.”

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor concluded that the inaction of powerful countries and their failure to pressure Israel into halting its brutal aid policy has provided political and operational cover. This has enabled Israel to turn aid centers into mass killing zones, encouraged similar crimes elsewhere, and fostered practices that violate Palestinians’ most basic rights and human dignity.

Children of Gaza: Between the Flames of Genocide and the Hell of Siege



Gaza is no longer merely a geographic location that defends the dignity of the nation. It has become a revealing mirror, exposing a world that claims to uphold civilization while turning a blind eye to an unfolding genocide committed in plain sight.

The Israeli enemy targets and kills everything in Gaza—stones and people, displaced persons’ camps, hospitals, doctors, firefighters, and press crews. These crimes are carried out live, before the eyes and ears of a biased global community, backed by unyielding American support and disgraceful official Arab complicity—as if Palestinian lives hold no value.

According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, hospitals in the Strip have dealt with 94 martyrs, including 7 bodies recovered from under rubble, and 252 injuries in the past 24 hours. This brings the total number of casualties since March 18 to 7,750 martyrs and 27,566 injuries. Since the beginning of the aggression on October 7, 2023, the total has surged to 58,573 martyrs and 139,607 injuries. Among those are 851 martyrs and more than 5,634 injuries among Palestinians who were simply trying to earn a living.

Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, Director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, announced that the General Services Hospital has completely ceased operations. He warned that Al-Shifa and Al-Helou hospitals are on the brink of shutdown within hours. Hundreds of wounded and sick patients are now facing a real threat to their lives amid the collapse of Gaza’s remaining healthcare infrastructure.

Dr. Abu Salmiya also urged the closure of aid distribution centers, as they have turned into death traps. He confirmed that the medical system can no longer serve the ill and the hungry in Gaza—another form of death. Twenty-one Palestinians, including 15 children and elderly people, were martyred after suffocating from gas fired at an aid distribution center in southern Khan Younis.

Even Fetuses Are Not Spared

In a darkness punctuated by gunfire and explosions, true tragedies unfold—ones that can only be described through testimonies born of suffering. Amid this humanitarian catastrophe, desperate mothers and families cling to hopeless hopes, as children’s tears blend with unanswered cries for help.

Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, Director-General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, shed light on a new dimension of this brutal war: the targeting has not only hit homes but also the wombs—killing life before it begins.

In a post on the platform “X,” Al-Bursh cited official health data for the first half of 2025, revealing the full extent of the catastrophe facing mothers and newborns. He declared that the war has crossed all boundaries: “even fetuses and infants have become invisible targets in this arena of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the erasure of the Palestinian lineage.”

Over recent months, hospitals have recorded unimaginable tragedies. Life is ending before it even begins. The Strip has witnessed 2,600 miscarriages—15.3% of all pregnancies—due to immense physical and psychological stress under relentless bombardment and suffocating siege, with essential medical care nearly non-existent.

In a sorrowful scene, 220 pregnant women lost their babies either during pregnancy or before childbirth, amid severe shortages of food and medicine. Their dreams now hang by the fragile thread of survival, hoping only to see their children born alive.

The heartbreak continues with newborns who cry their first and last breaths within hours. Hospitals reported 21 infant deaths on the first day of life in the first half of 2025, all born into an environment unfit for human life, deprived of basic rights to nourishment and growth. Cases of congenital deformities have reached 67 (0.39%), caused by pollution, malnutrition, and war’s devastating health impacts on future generations.

Al-Bursh confirmed that 2,535 newborns are now in under-resourced neonatal units suffering from a 14.91% shortage in staff and supplies. Meanwhile, 1,600 infants were born underweight (9.41%), due to malnutrition suffered by their mothers. Many did not reach full term—1,460 premature births (8.59%) have been recorded, amid constant fear and devastation that now threatens their lives and deepens their families’ suffering.

Malnutrition Ravages Gaza’s Children
Meanwhile, UNRWA has warned that premature babies in Gaza are being born with unprecedented genetic mutations, a signal of the deepening health crisis across the Strip.

In a painful testament to this reality, UNRWA confirmed that one in every ten children examined at its Gaza clinics suffers from malnutrition. As of last Saturday, 67 children had died due to malnutrition, according to medical sources in Gaza. More than 650 children under the age of five now face a severe and immediate risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks, among over 1.1 million children living in what has become the world’s largest open-air prison.

Data indicates that over 70,000 children in Gaza are malnourished—a situation unprecedented in scale. Hospitals are facing critical drug shortages, while families starve and babies either die inside their mothers’ wombs or are left to an unknown fate, all under an unrelenting siege that spares neither children nor adults.

In another heartbreaking incident, 15 civilians, including renowned surgeon Dr. Ahmad Qandil, were martyred in an Israeli airstrike on a civilian gathering in central Gaza. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza mourned Qandil, describing him as a pillar of Gaza’s medical community, dedicated to serving the wounded and ill under war and siege.

Dr. Qandil was one of Gaza’s most skilled general surgeons, known for his professionalism, humanity, and inspirational role among young medical professionals.

Thirst as a Weapon of Silent Genocide

The Israeli enemy continues to wage a deliberate war of thirst against the Palestinian people in Gaza, using water as a collective weapon to exterminate the population. The Government Media Office reported that the Israeli enemy has targeted 112 freshwater filling stations, massacring hundreds of civilians waiting in water lines—700 have been confirmed martyred, most of them children. The most recent massacre took place at the New Camp northwest of Nuseirat Camp, claiming 12 lives, including 8 children.

The assault has not stopped there. The Israeli enemy deliberately destroyed 720 water wells, rendering them non-functional and depriving over 1.25 million people of access to clean water.

In parallel, the media office stated that the Israeli entity has barred the entry of 12 million liters of fuel monthly—fuel essential to operating water wells, sewage treatment plants, waste collection vehicles, and other critical sectors.

The crisis reached its peak when municipalities in Gaza’s central governorate declared a total halt to all basic services due to a complete fuel shortage. This shutdown includes water wells, sewage systems, garbage collection, and heavy equipment used to remove rubble and open roads.

In a statement, the municipalities expressed deep concern over the ongoing water outage from the “Mekorot” station—a key source for the region—since January 23, which has worsened the water crisis and heightened public health and environmental risks, especially with the rising number of displaced persons and the inability of service crews to mitigate suffering.

Another critical line was severed when the electricity supply to the central desalination plant south of Deir al-Balah was cut off on March 9, 2025, causing a sharp drop in drinking water production.

The Zionist enemy’s obstinate refusal to allow fuel entry—despite local and international appeals—has dramatically worsened the crisis, particularly with the prolonged Mekorot water cut-off and electricity outage. These actions have deepened the water crisis, amplified environmental threats, and exacerbated human suffering as summer heat intensifies.

These are not distant or abstract tragedies—they are real, unfolding in live footage, testifying to the agony of Gaza’s people as their dreams erode and their children’s lives shrink into fleeting moments of pain. Meanwhile, the world stands idly by as the catastrophe grows each day, threatening not just individuals but entire generations who now know nothing of their future, except that death chases them at every turn, while siege and denial of essentials continue to suffocate what remains of life in Gaza.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... r-be-shot/

[blindpig]

Gaza Isn’t Starving, It Is Being Starved

Gaza isn’t starving, it is being starved. And the people who are starving it have names and addresses.

Caitlin Johnstone
July 21, 2025

Malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza are beginning to climb, with the health ministry reporting 18 in a single 24-hour period. Doctors report that people are “collapsing” in the street, and Gaza journalist Nahed Hajjaj is warning the world not to be surprised if the remaining reporters in the enclave are soon silenced by starvation.

Unless something drastically changes, things can be expected to get much worse very rapidly.

Meanwhile Israeli forces are setting new records with their massacres of starving civilians seeking aid, with 85 killed in a single day on Sunday.

If this isn’t evil, then nothing is evil. If Israel isn’t evil, then nothing is.


So what’s the plan here? Do we just sit and watch Israel starve Gaza to death with the support of our own governments?

And then what? We just go along with our lives, knowing that that happened? That this is what we are as a society? That our civilization is comfortable allowing something like that to happen? And that our rulers could do the same thing to another inconvenient population at any time?

We’re just meant to be cool with that? And go on living like it’s normal?

I’m genuinely curious. How exactly is everyone planning to go about living their lives after that point? How does that work, exactly?

I’m asking because I don’t know. I mean, I know what my own government and its allies should do, but I don’t know what we as ordinary members of the public are supposed to do.


You’ll see western pundits and politicians asking “How do we get a ceasefire in Gaza?” or “How do we end hunger in Gaza?” as though it’s some kind of ineffable mystery, which is kind of like a man strangling a child to death while saying “The child is being strangled, but HOW do we stop the child strangulation from occurring?”

It’s not some mystery how to get a ceasefire in Gaza; the empire is the fire. It simply needs to cease firing. Israel’s holocaust in Gaza is made possible only by the support of its western backers, primarily the United States. Numerous Israeli military insiders have acknowledged that none of this would be possible without US support. If the United States and its western allies ceased backing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, a ceasefire would have to occur.

Likewise, it is not a mystery how to get food into Gaza. You just drive the food on in and give it to people. They’ve got roads and gates right there. The only reason people in Gaza are starving is because western governments (including my own Australia) conspired to pretend to believe that UNRWA is a terrorist organization to justify cutting off critical aid, while doing nothing to pressure Israel into allowing aid to flow freely.

And now Israel and the US empire are monopolizing the delivery of “aid” through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose facilities now see civilians massacred every day for the crime of attempting to obtain food.


The organizations, funding and delivery systems to feed Gaza are all 100 percent fully available (at no cost to Israel, by the way). They’re just not being allowed to provide aid because the goal is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza via death or displacement. The people of Gaza are starving because the west is helping Israel starve Gaza. It really is that simple.

This isn’t some kind of unfortunate famine caused by a drought or natural disaster. It is a deliberately manufactured starvation campaign, implemented with genocidal intent.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, Gaza isn’t starving, it is being starved. And the people who are starving it have names and addresses.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/07 ... g-starved/

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Heroic people of Gaza continue to resist murderous infamy

British workers must resolutely oppose the imperialist Labour party, which is complicit in, and the active perpetrator of, the Palestinian genocide.
Lalkar writers

Tuesday 1 July 2025


Weighing just 2kg, the photograph of emaciated five-month-old Siwar Ashour is the latest image to horrify workers all over the world, as Israel continues to use mass starvation as a means of warfare against civilians. And if anyone was in any doubt about the deep complicity of the entire British political and media establishment, recent analysis suggests that the current ‘Labour’ government granted more weapons licenses to Israel in a three-month period last year than the previous Conservative government did over four years.

While the focus of world attention has turned away from Gaza to the attack by Israel on Iran and Iran’s determined and powerful response, there is still no let-up in Israel’s war on Gaza or in the Palestinian resistance.

Israel continues to perpetrate barbaric crimes
Between January and May 2025, the World Health Organisation (WHO) documented 76 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, reflecting severe threats to medical infrastructure. The number of functional hospitals decreased from 20 to 17 between 24 May and 11 June, with some, including Al-Awda, Jabalia and Haifa hospitals, becoming non-operational owing to intensified fighting and insecurity.

Community-level medical points (GP polyclinics, essentially) also declined from 144 to 126, and all hospitals and primary care centres in the devastated areas of north Gaza were out of service. Health services continued only through one partially functioning medical point and an ICRC (Red Cross) field hospital in Rafah.

In addition, this month there have been murderous attacks targeting civilians trying to access food aid distribution sites in Gaza. On 16 and 17 June, more than 30 people were killed by Israeli gunfire while attempting to reach these sites.

Specifically, one person was killed near the Netzarim corridor [an area in central Gaza under Israeli occupation cutting off the north of Gaza from the south] and 33 near an aid distribution centre in Rafah in southern Gaza. An additional four people were found dead near the Netzarim corridor from an attack the previous day.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has condemned these deadly attacks, highlighting the unconscionable nature, not to mention the total breach of the Geneva conventions, specifically the additional protocol 54, prohibiting violence against civilians trying to access very limited food aid in Gaza.

Article 54 of the additional protocol to the Geneva conventions relates to “protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”, and states that:

“1. Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.

“2. It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”

The bombing of infrastructure also continues unabated. Satellite imagery and footage verified by Amnesty International showed extensive destruction in Khuza’a during May 2025, with large sections completely razed due to Israeli military operations starting mid-May, contributing to the overall humanitarian crisis.

Particularly shocking to the world has been Israel’s attempt to starve the population of Gaza into submission, a blatant war crime that UN secretary general Antonio Guterrez has condemned, saying that the amount of aid Israel has authorised to enter Gaza amounts to “a teaspoon”, when a flood of humanitarian assistance is needed.

“The image of Siwar Ashour [pictured above], a five-month-old Gazan baby with withered limbs and protuberant eyes, has become a defining portrait of Palestinian hunger. Deprived of baby formula, she weighed just 2kg – a third of the weight of a healthy child her age.

“‘There are more and more pictures now of emaciated children coming out of Gaza,’ Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa, told the Times. ‘I think that history will judge this with severity, as it should, and rightly so.’”

Even personnel employed by the misnamed ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF), an American private company that Israel has supposedly tasked with distributing aid to Palestinian civilians, have resigned in horror and disgust:

“Former workers for the GHF have claimed it is effectively acting on behalf of Israel. Jake Wood, the ex-US marine originally in charge of the GHF, resigned with a blistering attack on the organisation’s independence, accusing it of lacking ‘humanity, neutrality, impartiality’.” (Who are the US military contractors delivering aid to starving Gazans? by George Grylls, The Times, 1 June 2025)

But resistance intensifies
Throughout all this barbarity, Israel has continued to encounter significant and enhanced military resistance from various armed groups in Gaza. Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have intensified rocket fire targeting Israeli cities. Signals indicated that over 5,000 rockets may have been fired towards Israel in May 2025 alone.

Besides, there continue to be numerous instances of elaborate underground tunnel networks being used strategically by the resistance for surprise assaults on the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force (IDF) as well as for enabling the resistance to move its troops and hide munitions.

In mid-May 2025, Israeli ground forces launched a significant ground offensive into Gaza to destroy these tunnels and diminish the capabilities of the resistance forces. Fighting was particularly fierce in urban civilian areas, where militants used densely populated settings to their advantage. Zionist soldiers of the ‘IDF’ were countered by urban warfare, including ambushes, snipers, and improvised explosive device attacks from established militant positions, leading to casualties among IDF personnel.

The resistance employed various tactics, including drone strikes and advanced weapons systems, escalating their effectiveness. Reports indicated that they had introduced new short-range and long-range missile technology capable of reaching deeper into Israeli territory. Anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) were used to great effect against IDF armoured vehicles.

The resistance is continuing to show flexibility in its tactics, shifting between direct confrontations and guerrilla actions, utilising hit-and-run strategies, and then retreating into civilian areas to evade capture.

A surprising development
Mysteriously, the last few weeks have witnessed an apparent change of heart in British government circles and the tone of bourgeois media reportage, which are suddenly finding room to denounce Israeli war crimes where previously they had been labelling as ‘antisemitic’ and persecuting anybody who did just that. The above-quoted article from the Times is one example.

Who would have thought that the British government would impose sanctions on Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, despicable genocidal monsters though they are, or that Labour foreign minister David Lammy would put his name to a joint statement pointing out that these men had “incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights”?

Nevertheless, in the very same statement delivered to the House of Commons on 20 May 2025, Lammy said: “I want a strong friendship with Israel based on shared values [!], with flourishing ties between our peoples and societies. We are unwavering in our commitment to your security and your future; to countering the very real threat from Iran; the scourge of terrorism; and the evils of antisemitism.”

So, the very opposite of any policy that can bring pace to the middle east or hold Israel in any way accountable for genocide. Because of course Labour ministers are servants of the British imperialist ruling class. And it is their genocide. In that sense, Lammy and prime minister Keir Starmer share the exact same values as Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir.

Lammy’s statement (in total) gave the semblance of a ‘light scolding’ for Israel while carefully preserving the policy of using Israel as the genocidal base for subjugating and looting the middle east. It was nevertheless a telling climbdown.

Its true significance lay in the recognition that Israel was on the brink of collapse, and that the British and European Union ruling classes (and our ‘Labour’ government) are scrambling to distance themselves from the charges of genocide they should surely be facing.

Who would have thought that the BBC would allow its correspondent Jeremy Bowen to publish an investigative report exposing the fact that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza? Mr Bowen (who does not, however, recognise the Palestinians’ right to fight against the Israeli occupation of their land) reminded his readers:

“Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other, but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides …

“That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.”

Bowen was quite clear that in killing of tens of thousands of civilians, including so many little children, and in using famine as a weapon of war, Israel is in flagrant breach of the Geneva convention. (Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how governments respond could haunt them for years to come, 8 June 2025)

The Financial Times also weighed in with an article by Martin Sandbu: “Europe’s patience with Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza and Israeli settlers’ aggression in the occupied West Bank may finally be running out.

“In the past few weeks, EU foreign ministers have triggered a review of Israel’s association agreement with the bloc, Britain has halted trade talks, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted an Israeli company (singular!) for facilitating energy deliveries to West Bank settlements, and the leaders of France, the UK and Canada threatened (!) to put sanctions on the country. Even Germany, Israel’s most stalwart backer in Europe, is criticising the country’s conduct …

“Indeed, the United Nations has found overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and in connection with the increasingly brutal occupation of the West Bank.”

Sandbu’s conclusion was that Britain ought “in its own interests” to limit trade and travel and freeze foreign reserves in order to show that the EU is willing to act independently of the USA! (It’s in Europe’s interest to put sanctions on Israel, 2 June 2025)

It would seem that the British bourgeoisie is donning sheep’s clothing, but the wolf underneath is still clearly visible. Civil servants, for instance, have been told by Lammy’s senior foreign office civil servants (the permanent under-secretary, Oliver Robbins, and Nick Dyer, the second most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office) that if they disagree with Britain’s policy of supporting Israel, they should resign.

“After more than 300 civil servants wrote to the foreign secretary to question UK arms sales to Israel, officials urged dissenters to do the ‘honourable’ thing” – ie, resign! (Foreign Office staff told to resign if they don’t like Gaza stance by Oliver Wright and Alli Mitib, The Times, 20 June 2025)

Britain continues to arm genocide
Needless to say, Britain continues to send arms to Israel notwithstanding its supposed ‘condemnation’ of war crimes. There have been a few token cancellations, but Britain has definitely not stopped sending arms to Israel.

While the UK government suspended just 30 specific arms export licenses to Israel in September 2024, supposedly owing to “concerns that those military exports might be used in violations of international humanitarian law during the Gaza conflict” (!), this suspension covered only a small portion of the total licenses issued. About 350 arms export licenses exist, and the suspension targeted roughly 30 that are too obviously intended for military operations in Gaza.

Despite this partial suspension, many other licenses remain active, such as aircraft used for training and naval equipment. Reports indicate that UK-made military components, including parts for F-35 fighter jets — key to Israel’s air operations — continue to be supplied indirectly through legal loopholes and global spares pools. Data from Israeli imports showed thousands of munitions and parts have continued to arrive in Israel even after the suspension announcement.

In fact, recent analysis suggests that the current ‘Labour’ government granted more weapons licenses to Israel in a three-month period last year than the previous Conservative government did over four years.

Yet Palestine Action, a campaign group of British workers dedicated to disrupting the Israeli genocide, which has been damaging arms factories that are supplying weaponry for the commission of war crimes in Gaza, are to be proscribed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation!

One can only surmise that the apparent criticism of Israel on the part of the British bourgeoisie merely represents an attempt by the social-imperialist Labour government to throw out a sop in the hopes that it can thereby avoid losing the support of millions of people who are capable of recognising a genocide when they see one and have been horrified by a ‘Labour’ government’s continued support, provisioning and arming of Israel’s genocidal war.

It is high time the British trade union movement intervened decisively to mobilise the British working class against cooperating and conniving with the war crimes of its ruling class.

No more transportation of arms; no more loading vessels with arms bound for Israel; no more propaganda justifying war crimes.

We must resolutely oppose the imperialist Labour party, which is complicit in, and the active perpetrator of, the genocide. We must expose and depose those union leaders who act to prevent British workers from doing what is within their power to stop genocide, which is at once their obligation under international law and their moral duty and imperative.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/07/01/ne ... us-infamy/.

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Why Israel seeks a temporary Gaza truce to keep its genocide going

Behind the talk of calm, Tel Aviv is redrawing Gaza’s borders, displacing its population, and laying the groundwork for permanent control, one truce at a time.


Qassem Qassem

JUL 20, 2025


Photo Credit: The Cradle

Twenty-one months into its brutal campaign against the Gaza Strip, Israel is again mulling a temporary ceasefire with the Palestinian resistance. Two brief truces have already collapsed into renewed bloodshed.

But is the genocidal war really coming to a close? This question looms over the proposed truce, raising doubts about whether Israel seeks an end, or simply a pause before its next assault.

This time, mediations led by Qatar and the US, with Egypt playing a minor role, are pushing for a 60-day cessation of hostilities. The deal hinges on a pledge from US President Donald Trump to extend the truce if talks progress.

Tel Aviv’s day-after plans for Gaza

These negotiations reflect a deeper shift in the occupation state’s security doctrine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly declared his intention to reshape Gaza’s future beyond a temporary lull in fighting.

He insists on disarming the resistance, dismantling Hamas’s authority and control, and eliminating any future threat from the besieged enclave. In Tel Aviv’s vision for the “day after,” there is not even a role for the collaborative Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Strip.

At most, Israel may tolerate an occupation state-backed militia resembling the Yasser Abu Shabab group or deploy Arab security forces to support local merchants or clans in governing Gaza – until the PA is “reformed” to Washington’s satisfaction, with Israel maintaining overarching security and military control.

This plan dovetails with the long-standing aspiration of Israel’s far-right government to re-establish illegal settlements in northern Gaza. Netanyahu is lobbying his army to construct a “tent city” in Rafah to forcibly relocate 600,000 Palestinians, a blatant demographic engineering scheme.

The 60-day truce proposal includes a phased Israeli withdrawal from west to east, a halt to air raids, permission for food and humanitarian aid entry, and a prisoner exchange. Unlike previous ceasefires, Trump’s involvement is being marketed as a guarantee that the occupation forces will not resume attacks once the deadline expires – as they did immediately after the March truce.

Yet despite signs of possible relief for Gaza’s starving and besieged population, Israel still believes it has not achieved its core objective: dismantling Hamas. One unnamed Israeli official was recently quoted as saying: “The flexibility we’ve shown paves the way for an agreement, but Netanyahu clearly doesn’t intend to end the war.”

Any upcoming truce is thus likely a pause to prepare the battlefield for the next round. Still, renewed war could prove challenging given the limits of the occupation army and the deepening cracks in its society.

Reconstruction as leverage and the Morag corridor ploy

As part of ongoing pressure, anti-resistance forces are using Gaza’s reconstruction as leverage. Israel has floated a deceptive offer to allow Qatari and international funds into Gaza during the truce, which is an attempt to lure Hamas into believing the war is truly ending. This is, in reality, a calculated deception by Israel to manufacture the illusion of an approaching end to war and draw Hamas into a false sense of security.

According to a report on 10 July by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel has “tentatively agreed” to Qatari participation in rebuilding the Strip, provided it does not monopolize the process. Other states are expected to co-fund reconstruction to prevent funds from reaching Hamas, although Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made their commitment to Gaza’s reconstruction conditional on the war’s conclusion.

A major sticking point is Israel’s new “Morag Corridor,” carved between Khan Yunis and Rafah to replicate the Philadelphia Corridor separating Gaza from Egypt. Much like the Netzarim axis that once bisected the Strip, the Morag route is presented by Israel as vital for its security. Tel Aviv plans to use the corridor to isolate the Rafah tent city from northern Gaza—effectively creating a walled-off holding zone for displaced Palestinians.

Palestinian resistance factions have flatly rejected this scheme. Not only does it violate Palestinian sovereignty, but it would turn Gaza into a cluster of disconnected, besieged cantons, with Israel occupying nearly 40 percent of the territory.

On 14 July, Netanyahu’s government submitted a third withdrawal map to mediators. Leaks reveal that Israeli forces plan to remain in a 900-meter belt near Beit Hanoun and a 3.5-kilometer strip east of Rafah. In a post on X, Kan political correspondent Gili Cohen, citing sources familiar with the negotiations, said that Israel is now showing “flexibility” on broader withdrawals from Rafah and the Morag axis.

But Rafah remains the core obstacle to any deal. Israel insists on cramming 600,000 Palestinians into the southern city, either to push them into Egypt, where alarm over Israeli designs is mounting, or force them toward the sea. Tel Aviv and Washington are actively probing third countries to receive Gaza’s expelled population.

A tactical pause, not a peace plan

Netanyahu’s real goal is to secure strategic gains for the post-war phase. During his visit to Washington earlier this month, he sought a written US assurance that would allow Israel to resume its war, even under a formal ceasefire.

He plans to wield this assurance as political cover at home, particularly to placate extremist coalition partners like Itamar Ben Gvir (Jewish Power) and Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionism), who demand total war and Hamas’ annihilation.

Netanyahu’s envoy and strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer put it bluntly in a 14 July podcast interview with US columnist and political advisor Dan Senor:

“Right now, what we’re trying to do is get to a ceasefire … the minimum requirement is that the force responsible for the Oct. 7 attack is no more. They have lost control of Gaza due to their decision to act.”

According to Walla News, Netanyahu convinced Trump to delay the agreement by an additional week—bringing the timeline closer to the end of the Knesset’s summer session (late July). The paper noted that Trump is “tired of the war,” but Netanyahu managed to buy time, though what he offered in return remains unclear.

The proposed truce cannot be viewed in isolation from Israel’s broader strategy. Far from signaling the war’s end, it is a calculated intermission. Tel Aviv seeks to redraw Gaza’s demographic and security map, while Hamas focuses on regrouping and fortifying its battlefield presence.

Netanyahu’s recent moves prove that this is no pursuit of peace. What Israel wants is a lull long enough to dismantle Hamas’ political infrastructure, impose buffer zones, and reengineer the population through its “tent city” blueprint.

Palestinian affairs analyst Michael Milstein mocked Tel Aviv’s “day after” vision in a 13 July column in Yedioth Ahronoth, arguing that Gaza has become a constant testing ground for flimsy Israeli schemes that collapse shortly after being proposed. He described Israel’s latest military campaign as a “ferocious effort devoid of dramatic gains,” noting that its aggression in northern Gaza ahead of the last ceasefire produced no lasting achievements. These include past attempts to build isolated ‘bubbles’ of alternate governance in Gaza, and the so-called ‘Generals’ Plan,’ which failed to yield results even amid heavy attacks in the north. He pointed to the long record of failed experiments, from the village leagues in the West Bank, to the occupation’s backing of the Kataeb militias in Lebanon, to the eventual collapse of the South Lebanon Army. These models, he wrote, reflect a deeply flawed understanding of reality, rooted in the belief that brute military force can compel Hamas to disarm, surrender, or abandon Gaza entirely.

He noted two competing camps inside Israel: one that seeks phased withdrawal while postponing Hamas’ fate, and another pushing for full reoccupation based on the racist logic that “Arabs are only deterred by losing land” and that “settlements prevent terrorism.”

Rather than a moment of transition, this seems to be a continuation of Israel’s campaign by other means. So long as Tel Aviv avoids a political reckoning for its war on Gaza, every ceasefire will be a battlefield in disguise. Between a fleeting truce and a deepening occupation, Gaza stands today at a decisive crossroads — one where the illusion of peace masks a relentless colonial project.

https://thecradle.co/articles/why-israe ... cide-going

Israeli army chief pushes for Gaza 'takeover' as alternative to concentration camps

Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is said to have suggested gradually expanding military control of the strip in a bid to pressure Hamas in stalled ceasefire talks

News Desk

JUL 21, 2025


(Photo credit: Israeli army)

The Israeli army’s chief of staff has suggested a plan to step up its genocidal assault on Gaza and seize more territory in the strip as an alternative to the previously suggested initiative for displacing the entire population and confining it to a “humanitarian city” in the south, Israeli media reported.

According to sources cited by Hebrew news outlet Channel 12, it has been described as a plan for “taking over Gaza.”

This would mean widening control over Gaza to include more than the 75 percent of the enclave currently held by Israeli forces, the report added.

The report does not specify how much more territory the army's chief, Eyal Zamir, has suggested taking over.

Zamir told ministers at a meeting recently that the proposal includes gradually capturing and holding a larger piece of Gaza in a bid to pressure Hamas into a deal.

The chief of staff reportedly opposes the plan for a “humanitarian city,” unveiled by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz earlier this month.

The plan involves the displacement of an initial 600,000 Palestinians into an Israeli-controlled “humanitarian city” built on the ruins of the southernmost city of Rafah, which has been destroyed by Israel. Palestinians would not be permitted to leave as part of the plan that has widely been described as a “concentration camp” for Palestinians.

The Israeli initiative would cost billions of dollars. Some have suggested that it is too unfeasible to implement and was announced as a pressure tactic.

The Channel 12 report comes one day after the Israeli military began ground incursions in the central city of Deir al-Balah, in which it had not yet operated.

Israel issued an evacuation order for the southwestern part of Deir al-Balah, one of the few remaining parts of Gaza that had not yet been razed by Israeli ground troops.

The order demanded that residents flee to the already overcrowded Al-Mawasi coastal zone, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

Heavy bombing targeted the area on Sunday night after the Israeli army said it was continuing to “operate with great force to destroy the enemy's capabilities and terror infrastructure in the area.”

Ceasefire talks have recently stalled once again, despite reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared for “concessions” including a withdrawal of troops from the Morag Axis, established in southern Gaza earlier this year.

However, Tel Aviv continues to insist on the complete defeat of Hamas and has repeatedly signaled that it will continue the war after any potential captive exchange.

Hamas is demanding a permanent end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal, rejecting Netanyahu’s term that the resistance surrender its weapons.

As the talks stall, starvation has overtaken the strip due to the famine caused by Israel’s siege of Gaza.

At least 18 people, among them infants and children, have died of malnutrition in the last few days.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-a ... tion-camps

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Death From the Sky, Silence From the State: Israel Must Be Stopped
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 20, 2025



Free Palestine TV

Laith Marouf and Hadi Hotait travel to the village of Qabrikha close to the borders of Lebanon and occupied Palestine to inspect the seen of a Zionist attack on the Hijazi family, where 9 years old Zaynab Hijazi watched as her parents took their last breaths after two fragmenting missiles were fired on them while drinking tea. The two also rush to Khiam, where a drone fired missiles on civilians reconstructing their home, and speak to their neighbor Abu-Ali who directs his anger at the inaction of the President and the Prime Minister, while calling on Hizbullah to take action.

Filmed on: 20/7/2025
Producer: Hadi Hotait
Montage: Rabih Ghannam

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... e-stopped/

[blindpig]

Hamas Spokesperson Abu Obedia: State of Resistance
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 20, 2025



This criminal nazi enemy would never have committed this genocide before your very eyes and ears had it not been confident of impunity, assured of your silence, and secure in your betrayal. We do not absolve anyone of responsibility for this flowing blood, and we exclude no one who possesses the ability to act—each according to their capacity and influence.

The zionist enemy resumed its barbaric, nazi aggression against our people and families in the Gaza Strip four months ago—after betraying and breaking covenants, turning against the agreement reached with the resistance in January of this year, lying to mediators and to the world, and returning in search of its so-called victory. For four months, the enemy has continued its sadism against civilians and children, indulging its gangs’ obsession with the systematic destruction of neighborhoods, cities, and civilian residential areas. It persists in this battle and in this brutal war against our people.

Twenty-one months—summarized in the steadfastness of mountains from the fighters and resistance of our people, and the patience of prophets from our great, proud, and generous nation.

Twenty-one months of shame and disgrace have haunted the wicked, occupying usurpers, along with disgraceful abandonment by brothers in blood, Arab identity, and Islam—except those whom God has shown mercy among the sincere and the fighters, among the oppressed and overwhelmed peoples, and among the free people of the world who remain in harmony with their humanity.

In recent months, the enemy announced an operation it called “Gideon’s Chariots,” attempting to project biblical myths in order to confer false sanctity on its racist, nazi war—a war resembling nothing but the deeds of devils and the practices of filthy, cowardly gangs.

We confronted the “Gideon’s Chariots” operation—and continue to do so, by the power of God—through a series of “Stones of David” operations, inspired by God’s victory for His believing servant David (peace be upon him) in his confrontation with the oppressive, tyrannical Goliath. God granted our fighters success and guided their aim by His permission. God was with His soldiers, as they repeated with every strike: “And you did not throw when you threw, but God threw.”

Our fighters—side by side with the fighters and resistance members from our brother factions, especially our brothers in Saraya Al-Quds—are engaged in an unequal confrontation, with unmatched faith, great strength, and unbreakable determination, through the power, grace, and success granted by God.

During these months, we have caused hundreds of casualties among the enemy’s soldiers—killed and wounded—and thousands have suffered from psychological disorders and trauma. The number of enemy soldiers committing suicide continues to rise, due to the horror of the filthy and bloody acts they commit, and the magnitude of the resistance they face, surrounded by God’s presence and His soldiers.

Our fighters continue to surprise the enemy with new and varied tactics and methods, having drawn lessons from the longest war and confrontation in our people’s history. They have carried out unique, heroic, and high-level operations. They continue targeting enemy vehicles with shells and explosive devices, engaging in direct combat, sniping soldiers and officers, blowing up buildings and tunnel openings, setting complex ambushes, and launching raids on enemy forces.

The world witnessed our heroes climbing onto enemy vehicles in Khan Younis, reaching the occupying soldiers at point-blank range, pursuing the criminal soldier who had mastered the demolition of civilian homes, finishing him off, and seizing his weapon.

Our fighters have attempted in recent weeks to carry out several operations to capture zionist soldiers. Some of these operations nearly succeeded—were it not for the will of God first, and then the enemy’s use of a tactic of mass killing of its own soldiers suspected of being exposed to capture attempts.

Our fighters’ operations have extended from the far north and east of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, through the neighborhoods of Al-Tuffah, Shuja’iyya, and Al-Zaytoun in Gaza City, reaching all the way to Khan Younis and Rafah—making Gaza’s resistance the greatest military school for a people’s resistance confronting its occupiers in modern history.

O our people and our nation, we in the Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades—after 21 months of the Al-Aqsa Flood battle and the zionist nazi war against our people—affirm that our fighters and our brothers in the resistance factions are fully ready to continue a long war of attrition against the occupation forces, regardless of the form of their aggression or their offensive plans. Our fighters have pledged themselves to steadfastness and to inflicting heavy blows on the enemy until the aggression is defeated or they attain martyrdom.

Our fighting is a principled matter and an indisputable right—a sacred religious and national duty. We have no choice but to fight with full strength, determination, and severe might, with the help and support of God. We will fight with the stones of the earth and with what we possess—willpower and believing men who, with little weaponry, perform astonishing miracles by God’s grace.

The strategy and decision of the Al-Qassam leadership at this stage is to ensure deadly blows against enemy soldiers, carry out focused, high-impact operations at point-blank range, and pursue the capture of zionist soldiers.

If the enemy’s terrorist government chooses to continue the war of extermination, it is at the same time choosing to continue receiving the coffins of its soldiers and officers. Their tanks will not save them, nor will they protect them from the torrents of death forged by faithful hands and cast by the hand of God. They thought their fortresses would protect them from God—but God came to them from where they did not expect and cast terror into their hearts.

We are proud of the steadfastness and heroism of our fighters, and we are deeply aware of the pain and suffering endured by our wounded people and our patient families—whose pain we live with day by day. Our fulfillment of the duty entrusted to us by our Lord, in resisting and fighting this enemy, does not absolve the two-billion-strong nation from its own duty—a duty it has unfortunately abandoned.

Our enemy is supplied by the most powerful oppressive forces in the world with endless convoys of weapons and ammunition, while the regimes and powers of our own nation look on at their suffering in the land of steadfastness—as they are killed by the tens of thousands, starved, and denied water and medicine.

We say this to history—with all bitterness and pain—and in front of all the sons and daughters of our nation: O leaders of this Islamic and Arab nation, O its elites and major parties, O its scholars—you are our adversaries before Almighty God. You are the adversaries of every orphaned child, every grieving mother, every displaced, homeless, wounded, devastated, and starving person. Your necks are burdened with the blood of tens of thousands of innocents who were betrayed by your silence.

This criminal nazi enemy would never have committed this genocide before your very eyes and ears had it not been confident of impunity, assured of your silence, and secure in your betrayal. We do not absolve anyone of responsibility for this flowing blood, and we exclude no one who possesses the ability to act—each according to their capacity and influence.

By God, we see the humiliation and contempt with which the enemy treats our nation—its desecration of it, its rampage through it—and our hearts bleed with pain, because we understand the cowardice, weakness, and disgrace of this enemy, and its true size.

And we understand, before all else, the divine truth about it: “Indeed, you are more feared in their hearts than God—if only it were met with the dignity of Islam from its people and the lost Arab pride.” But it is weakness, and God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs.

Can a great, mighty, and noble nation not bring food, water, and medicine to the starving and besieged people of Gaza? Can it not stop the bloodshed that is being poured out in terror against our nation and in a greedy effort to break it—to establish a zionist empire on the land of Arabism and Islam, with its capital as your first Qibla and the site of your Prophet’s Night Journey (peace be upon him)—or perhaps upon its ruins?

May the eyes of the cowards never sleep.

We extend our salutations to our dear and blessed people in Yemen—the land of wisdom and faith—to their armed forces, and to the sincere brothers of Ansarallah, who astonished the world with their steadfastness and the truthfulness of their stance with Palestine, Gaza, its people, and its fighters. They imposed an effective front on the enemy and presented a decisive argument against those who remained idle and submissive—among the major Arab and Islamic regimes, powers, and parties—some of whom, sadly, have become fronts for injustice and sedatives for the people and their free youth. Their credibility and grand slogans have been put to the test in the face of their betrayal and failure to support the purest and holiest cause of Arabs and Muslims.

Salutations to all the free people in the world who are striving to show solidarity, break the siege, and lift the oppression from our people by all means—disregarding danger, betrayal, and attempts at defamation by the hypocrites of this nation, who think every outcry is aimed at them.

All initiatives and expressions of solidarity from the free people of the world—whether they succeed or are sabotaged under zionist pressure—are a source of pride and honor for our people. We call for these efforts to escalate and continue, and for the exposure of this enemy by every means and in every arena and field.

We strongly support the stance of the Palestinian resistance delegation in the indirect negotiations with the enemy. We have repeatedly offered in recent months a comprehensive deal in which we would release all of the enemy’s prisoners at once—but the war criminal Netanyahu and his ministers from the nazi movement have rejected this offer.

It has become clear to us that the government of the criminal Netanyahu has no real interest in the captives because they are soldiers. Their case is not a priority, and the regime has prepared the public to accept the possibility that they are all dead. Still, we have held to preserving their lives as much as possible until now.

We are closely monitoring the ongoing negotiations, and we hope they lead to an agreement and a deal that guarantees an end to the war on our people, a withdrawal of occupation forces, and relief for our families. But if the enemy remains obstinate and withdraws from this round—as it has done in every previous one—then we do not guarantee any return to partial deals or to the “ten prisoners” proposal.

One of the clearest signs of the zionist failure in confronting the resistance and breaking our people’s will is its resort to vile solutions—war crimes, collective punishment, genocide, and ethnic cleansing—openly supported, unfortunately, by the U.S. administration.

The enemy excels in torturing innocents, openly declares his intention to displace people, boasts about systematic destruction as a military achievement, and presents plans to the world for establishing Nazi concentration camps under false, deceptive humanitarian pretexts.

It is as if this enemy wants to practice experiments that occurred many decades ago, and inflict them upon its enemies with a sadism and criminality that makes Nazism pale in comparison, which necessitates the rejection of these camps by the entire world.

The lie of antisemitism, which our enemies have fed on for decades, will be a farce and a scandal. It is not our people’s fault to pay the price for the psychological complexes of criminal zionism; rather, the zionists must know that the reason for nations’ animosity and innate hatred towards them is their actions and crimes against humanity.

Attempts to employ mercenaries and agents for the occupation under Arab names are a sign of failure, and a guaranteed recipe for defeat. These agents will be nothing but a burnt card in the consciousness and dignity of our people and their rejection of betrayal, and what the enemy spends on them will be regret, calamity, and a clear loss for the occupation and its agents, Allah willing.

We call on these agents to repent immediately and return to the embrace of their people before it is too late, when regret will be of no avail. Otherwise, their end will be tragic and a lesson for every traitor and coward. We also express our great thanks and pride in the stances of our noble people’s families and clans, who have disavowed this isolated group of agents who represent no one but themselves.

O sons of our great, patient people, O source of revolution and factory of men, O you who bid farewell every day to a luminous convoy of martyrs, O brothers of Moses, the one to whom Allah spoke, whom the enemies of Allah harmed, but he only smiled because of you, “No, indeed, my Lord is with me; He will guide me.”

O descendants of Yousef (Prophet Joesph) the Truthful, when his brothers abandoned him and cast him into the bottom of the well, victory and empowerment came to him. O beloved of Muhammad (peace be upon him), who was besieged in the valley, expelled to the cave, and sought refuge in Uhud, then relief came to him from his Lord: “Allah will suffice you against them.”

O brothers of the family of Yasir, when they were tortured for the sake of Allah, they were given glad tidings: “Patience, O family of Yasir, for your appointed time is Paradise.” Indeed, your steadfastness despite abandonment, your patience, your generosity, and your defiance of oppression and deprivation, are what most enrages your enemies. And this night will surely have an end, and victory comes with patience, and relief with distress, and indeed, with hardship comes ease.

And we kiss the heads of all the elders of our patient, steadfast people, who are victorious by the permission of Allah, and we extend to them the greatest greetings, and we give them the glad tidings from our Lord, the Exalted: “To Allah belongs the command before and after. And on that day, the believers will rejoice in the victory of Allah. He grants victory to whom He wills, and He is the Almighty, the Merciful.”

Source: Abolition Media

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... esistance/

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Rabbi Salman: Israel lost 893 people in the war with Iran
July 21, 19:33



Israeli businessman Rabbi Salman stated https://t.me/IRIran_ru/1301 that Israel's official losses are understated several times and Israel's real losses in people during the exchange of blows are actually comparable to Iran's. According to him, Israel lost 893 killed (military + civilians). Officially - 35.
Iran officially lost about 1,200 people killed (military + civilians)

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9968483.html

Google Translator

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The end of the two-state illusion: West Bank is gone, Jordan is in the firing line

Israel's annexation of the occupied West Bank has killed any prospect of Palestinian sovereignty. Now, with Tel Aviv and Washington backing plans to offload the Palestinian cause onto Jordan, the Hashemite Kingdom faces the gravest threat to its stability in decades.


A Cradle Correspondent

JUL 21, 2025


Photo Credit: The Cradle

Successive Israeli governments, whether Labor, Likud, or their extremist coalitions today, have never viewed the West Bank as occupied land. Within the Zionist project, it is not a disputed territory but a divine entitlement – “Judea and Samaria,” core to the mythology of Eretz Israel.

The Israeli presence there is not a military necessity or a negotiating chip. It is the bedrock of a colonial vision that treats Palestinian sovereignty as a threat to be dismantled, not a right to be recognized.

‘Creeping annexation’

Today, the occupation state is executing the most aggressive stage of this project through silent, sustained annexation. Without declaring it formally to avoid diplomatic fallout while the genocide continues in Gaza, Tel Aviv is redrawing maps on the ground.

It is expanding settlements at an unprecedented pace, building bypass roads exclusively for Jewish settlers, and entrenching the architecture of apartheid across Area C, which is the largest segment in the occupied West Bank, comprising over 60 percent of the territory. Israeli military control, sanctioned by the 1993 Oslo Accords, is being leveraged to achieve full territorial domination.

The occupation state exploited its 13 June military assault on Iran to escalate its chokehold on the occupied West Bank by erecting new checkpoints, blocking access to Palestinian villages and towns, intensifying daily raids and mass arrests, and severely restricting the daily life of some 3.2 million Palestinians. A systematic destruction of infrastructure in refugee camps has displaced at least 40,000 Palestinians in recent months – a slow, quiet ethnic cleansing unfolding beneath the fog of war.

These tactics are reinforced by an Israeli cabinet decision on 11 May to initiate widespread land registration in Area C. While not officially labelled a “Regularization Law,” the “land settlement process” mirrors the intent and structure of the 2017 legislation by legalizing settler outposts and formalizing the theft of Palestinian land.

The revived effort gives the occupation state sweeping authority to expropriate land and deepen its hold over occupied territory under the guise of bureaucratic order.

In parallel, Israeli authorities moved to revive the long-stalled E1 settlement plan near occupied East Jerusalem, which includes the construction of 3,412 settler housing units. The plan would cut off occupied East Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied West Bank and forcibly displace Bedouin communities like Khan al-Ahmar.

In late May, the Israeli cabinet also approved the establishment of 22 new illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank and retroactively legalized several existing settlement outposts. This reinforces the apartheid architecture stretching from Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley.

The goal is not a secret – to reshape the map in ways that render a future Palestinian state geographically and politically unviable. It is the creation of a West Bank with no Palestinian sovereignty, no territorial contiguity, and no future state. Under this plan, compliant Palestinian Authority (PA) will govern civil affairs under the boot of Israeli military control, a Potemkin authority with no power, no land, and no dignity.

Jordan faces the heat

In the face of these developments, Jordan is perhaps the most concerned neighboring state. The Hashemite Kingdom shares deep historical, geographic, and societal ties with the occupied West Bank, particularly during the period of union from 1948 to 1967. This history grants Amman special sensitivity to changes across the Jordan River.

Yet what raises alarm is the absence of a serious, clear, and direct Jordanian position on the growing threat of Israeli control over the occupied West Bank. Official statements remain limited to generic diplomatic objections, lacking any firm deterrent policy or strategic mobilization.

The Hashemite Kingdom has long feared being forced into playing the role of a “substitute homeland” for Palestinians. Ideas like the “Alternative Homeland” and confederation – which aim to shift the Palestinian issue onto Jordanian soil – are not new. They have resurfaced cyclically since the 1970s, but today they appear increasingly structured as an alternative path to liquidate the Palestinian cause.

More than half of Jordan's population is made up of Palestinian refugees and citizens of Palestinian descent, with deep familial and national ties to the occupied West Bank. Any attempt to dissolve the two-state formula without a sovereign Palestinian alternative risks turning Jordan into a demographic pressure valve. It would trigger unrest, displace new waves of Palestinians, and unravel the fragile equilibrium within the kingdom.

Jordanian officials have consistently warned that forced transfers of Palestinians would be considered acts of war. Their concern is not hypothetical. Israeli lawmakers have repeatedly promoted variations of the “Jordan is Palestine” plan, where West Bank Palestinians would either be displaced or ruled by Jordan through an Israeli and western-imposed confederation that absolves Israel of all responsibility. The “Jordanian–Palestinian Confederation” aims to assign Jordan the role of administrating the remnants of the Palestinian population, following Israel’s completion of territorial control.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear his strategy: Palestinians may receive administrative authority, but not territorial sovereignty. He seeks to preserve Israeli control under a veneer of delegated power, turning any Palestinian “authority” into a fig leaf for continued domination.

In an interview with Fox News, Netanyahu made a telling statement:

“We aspire to give the Palestinians authority, not land.”

The confederation trap

This is why Amman views the confederation proposal as a strategic trap. Without the establishment of a truly independent Palestinian state, any form of administrative arrangement serves as a smokescreen for annexation.

The real objective is to outsource the management of Palestinians to Jordan until Israel can complete its demographic re-engineering of historic Palestine.

Proponents of this plan believe regional conditions are more favorable than ever. Since US President Donald Trump's first term in office in 2017, several Arab League states have normalized relations with Israel as part of the 2020 “Abraham Accords.” This is despite longstanding treaty violations, including Israel’s repeated breaches of the 1994 Wadi Araba peace agreement with Jordan, one of the first Arab states to formalize relations with the occupation state.

Others, including Saudi Arabia, are reportedly nearing similar agreements. After the fall of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's government, Syria – now ruled by ex-Al-Qaeda chief Ahmad al-Sharaa – is also being groomed to join this “Abraham Alliance.”

Elements of this scheme can already be found in US President Donald Trump's 2020 so-called “Deal of the Century” peace plan and in a 2020 Saudi initiative for a “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine,” allegedly endorsed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS).

Diplomacy buried under bulldozers

With Washington's political posture shifting, the collapse of the two-state formula has gone from possibility to policy. Trump has made clear that he intends to discard Palestinian statehood altogether.

His State Department has refused to endorse the two-state solution, and in February, Trump declared, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” in reference to his post-war Gaza Riviera plan.

Even UN Security Council Resolution 2735, drafted by former US president Joe Biden's administration and adopted in June 2024, now rings hollow. It calls for two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace. But Israel's ongoing annexation makes this vision impossible. Tel Aviv is burying the resolution in the same ground it paves for Zionist settlers.

Jordan, which rushed to Israel’s defense during the three direct Iran–Israel military engagements, is no longer on the sidelines – it is now directly threatened by the occupation state’s expansionist ambitions.

As Tel Aviv accelerates its efforts to erase the Palestinian cause, Amman finds itself cornered – pressured by Washington’s apathy, surrounded by Arab states deepening ties with Israel, and bound to a peace treaty that no longer offers even the pretense of balance.

The PA, once Washington’s preferred administrator for Palestinian affairs, is collapsing under the weight of its own irrelevance. It commands no land, wields no authority, and retains little popular legitimacy. If it disintegrates entirely, Jordan will be the first to feel the impact.

The Hashemite monarchy faces a moment of real historic peril. To avoid being conscripted into managing Israel’s occupation by proxy, Amman must break decisively from failed formulas and build a coherent, collective Arab-Palestinian front.

Without this, Jordan risks being swept into a new regional order in which it becomes both the buffer and the scapegoat for the final burial of Palestinian statehood.

https://thecradle.co/articles/the-end-o ... iring-line

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New Khan Younis Corridor Severs 18% of the Entire Gaza Strip
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 18, 2025
Youssef Fares



AFPGaza | The Israeli military announced yesterday that it had seized control of a newly established corridor in the southern city of Khan Younis. Named “Magen Oz”, or Shield of Courage, the route cuts through the city, effectively separating its eastern neighborhoods from the central and western parts of the South Gaza governorate. The announcement followed a lengthy war cabinet meeting at the Kirya military headquarters, where officials discussed the ongoing prisoner exchange negotiations, updated redeployment plans to Gaza, and the level of flexibility allowed in maneuvering on the ground.

The new corridor stretches from Kissufim, southeast of Deir al-Balah, to the northern section of the Morag axis near Rafah. It runs through central Khan Younis, effectively bisecting the city and encompassing large swathes of territory, those include: Abasan al-Kabira, Abasan al-Saghira, Bani Suheila, Khuzaa, al-Zana, al-Fukhari, Maan, al-Qarara, Eastern and Western Satar, Hayy al-Nasr, al-Manara, Jourat al-Lout, the Station area, the Katiba area, al-Tahlia, Sheikh Nasser, and parts of the city center. The total area seized amounts to approximately 68 square kilometers, roughly 18% of the entire Gaza Strip.

According to Israeli Army Radio, the timing and announcement of the Magen Oz axis signal a deliberate military maneuver with clear political intent: the division of Khan Younis into two parts. The fully evacuated eastern section now mirrors the status of Rafah, while the western half, where most of the displaced are concentrated, continues to endure intense airstrikes and ground fighting.

The strategy behind this division appears to be twofold. Militarily, it aims to create a new “safe zone” akin to the one established in Rafah, a corridor that may later be expanded and reinforced. Politically, it’s a move to increase Israel’s leverage at the negotiating table. Until recently, Rafah alone served as Israel’s primary bargaining chip in potential ceasefire deals. The establishment of Magen Oz creates additional room for political maneuvers and opens the door to merging Khan Younis with Rafah into a larger “humanitarian zone” — potentially a self-contained urban area managed by the United Nations and international organizations.

This development adds a new layer of pressure designed to accelerate Hamas’s acceptance of the proposed redeployment maps. Should the group reject the terms associated with the Morag axis, it may later be forced to negotiate withdrawal from the Magen Oz corridor as well, a coercive bargaining tactic.

The announcement also coincided with a statement from Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, who declared the completion of Operation “Merkavot Gideon” and the achievement of its stated objectives. “The army has ensured that Gaza will not pose a threat to Israel for generations,” Halevi claimed. “If an agreement is reached, we will halt and reposition according to political directives. If not, my order to Southern Command is to escalate and expand operations beyond the current scope. We will push into additional areas and continue with the current offensive,” he added.

This latest corridor plan, combined with Israel’s updated maps shared with Hamas and the start of a new round of ceasefire talks, appears to be an attempt to generate enough pressure to force concessions. It’s a strategic gambit that could place Hamas in a position where refusing the Morag arrangement compels them to negotiate over Magen Oz instead.

On the ground, Israeli attacks have intensified across the Gaza Strip. The most severe escalation was recorded in Gaza City’s al-Zaytoun neighborhood, where hundreds of homes have been systematically destroyed. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health reported the killing of 150 Palestinians in just 24 hours, including 20 people at a US aid distribution center near the “Alam” checkpoint. Eyewitnesses said US security forces herded tens of thousands into a narrow corridor fenced with barbed wire. As the crowd surged, soldiers fired dozens of toxic gas canisters into the crowd, resulting in hundreds of injuries and the suffocation deaths of 20 people.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... aza-strip/

[blindpig]

The Day After Genocide in Gaza
July 23, 2025

Neither the Abu Shabab gang nor the Hebron “emirate” will govern Palestinians, either in Gaza or the West Bank, writes Ramzy Baroud.


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the U.N. General Assembly holding a map that omits Palestine and shows Iran’s allies as a dark crescent across the Middle East, Sept. 27, 2024. (UN Photo/Loey Felipe)

By Ramzy Baroud
Z Network

Israel is aggressively implementing plans to shape Palestine’s future and the broader region, sculpting its vision for the ‘day after’ its genocide in Gaza.

The latest, bizarre iteration of this strategy proposes fragmenting the occupied West Bank into so-called emirates, starting with the “emirate of Hebron.”

This unexpected twist in Israel’s protracted search for alternative Palestinian leadership first surfaced in the staunchly pro-Israeli U.S. newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. It then quickly dominated all Israeli media.

The report details a letter from a person identified by the WSJ as “the leader of Hebron’s most influential clan.” Addressed to Nir Barakat, Jerusalem’s former Israeli mayor, the letter from Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari appeals for “cooperation with Israel” in the name of “co-existence.”

This “co-existence,” according to the “clan leader,” would materialize in the “Emirate of Hebron.” This “emirate” would “recognize the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people,” in exchange for reciprocal recognition of the “Emirate of Hebron as the Representative of the Arab residents in the Hebron District.”

The story may seem perplexing. This is because Palestinian discourse, regardless of geography or political affiliation, has never entertained such an absurd concept as united West Bank “emirates.”

Another element of absurdity is that Palestinian national identity and pride in their people’s unwavering resilience, especially in Gaza, are at an unprecedented apex. To float such clan-based alternatives to legitimate Palestinian leadership seems ill-conceived and is destined to fail.

Israel’s desperation is palpable. In Gaza, it cannot defeat Hamas and other Palestinian factions who have resisted the Israeli takeover of the Strip for 21 months. All attempts to engineer an alternative Palestinian leadership there have utterly collapsed.

The Desperation of Failure

This failure has compelled Israel to arm and fund a criminal gang that operated before Oct. 7, 2023, in Gaza. This gang functions under the command of Yasser Abu Shabab.

The gang has been implicated in a litany of violent activities. These include hijacking humanitarian aid to perpetuate famine in Gaza and orchestrating violence associated with aid distribution, among other egregious crimes.

Like the clan leader of Hebron, the Abu Shabab criminal gang possesses no legitimacy and no public support among Palestinians. But why would Israel resort to such disreputable figures when the Palestinian Authority (PA), already engaged in “security coordination” with Israel in the West Bank, is ostensibly willing to comply?

The answer lies in the current Israeli extremist government’s adamant refusal to acknowledge Palestine as a nation. Thus, even a collaborating Palestinian nationalist entity would be deemed problematic from an Israeli perspective.

While Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is not the first Israeli leadership to explore clan-based alternatives among Palestinians, the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies are exceptionally determined to dismantle any Palestinian claim to nationhood.

This was explicitly stated by extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. He famously declared in Paris, in March 2023, that a Palestinian nation is an “invention.”


Smotrich celebrating election victory in March 2021. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Thus, despite the PA’s willingness to cooperate with Israel in controlling Gaza, Israel remains apprehensive. Empowering the PA as a nationalist model fundamentally contravenes Israel’s overarching objectives of denying the Palestinian people their very claim to nationhood and, consequently, sovereignty.

Though Israel has consistently failed to establish and sustain its own alternative Palestinian leadership, its repeated efforts have invariably proven disruptive and violent.

Prior to the Nakba of 1948, the Zionist movement, alongside British authorities colonizing Palestine, heavily invested in undermining the Arab Higher Committee, a nationalist body comprising several political parties. They achieved this by empowering collaborating clans, hoping to dilute the Palestinian nationalist movement.


Lord Peel and Sir Horace Rumbold, chairman of the Palestine Royal Commission, after taking evidence from the Arab Higher Committee on the “Palestine disturbances,” 1937. (U.S Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

When Israel occupied the remainder of historic Palestine in 1967, it reverted to the same divide-and-conquer tactics. For instance, it established a Palestinian police force directly commanded by Israeli military administrations, in addition to creating an underground network of collaborators.

Following the overwhelming victory of nationalist candidates in the 1976 elections in occupied Palestine, Israel responded by cracking down on PLO-affiliated politicians, arresting, deporting and assassinating some.

Two years later, in 1978, it launched its “Village Leagues” project. It hand-picked compliant traditional figures, designating them as the legitimate representatives of Palestinians.

These individuals, armed, protected and financed by the Israeli occupation army, were positioned to represent their respective clans in Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Gaza and elsewhere.

Palestinians immediately denounced them as collaborators. They were widely boycotted and socially ostracized.

Eventually, it became evident that Israel had no alternative but to engage directly with the PLO. This culminated in the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the subsequent formation of the PA.

The fundamental problem, however, persisted: the PA’s insistence on a Palestinian state remains anathema to an Israel that has shifted dramatically to the right.

This explains the Netanyahu’s government’s unwavering insistence that the PA has no role in Gaza in any “day after” scenario. While the PA could serve Israel’s interest in containing the rebellious Strip, such a triumph would inevitably recenter the discussion of a Palestinian state — a concept repugnant to most Israelis.

There is no doubt that neither the Abu Shabab gang nor the Hebron emirate will govern Palestinians, either in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel’s insistence on fabricating these alternatives, however, underscores its historic determination to deny Palestinians any sense of nationhood.

Israel’s persistent fantasies of control invariably fail. Despite their profound wounds, Palestinians are more unified than ever, their collective identity and nationhood hardened by relentless resistance and countless sacrifices.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/07/23/t ... e-in-gaza/

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Israel urges West Bank annexation as ‘just response’ to French recognition of Palestine

France’s president vowed to recognize Palestinian statehood on Thursday, after Israel’s Knesset voted to ‘establish sovereignty’ over the occupied territory

News Desk

JUL 25, 2025


(Photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Israel has escalated calls for an illegal annexation of the occupied West Bank, following French President Emmanuel Macron’s vow to recognize Palestinian statehood at an upcoming UN session.

“The decision of French President Macron to recognize the fictitious Palestinian state is a black stain in the history of France and direct assistance to terrorism,” Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, said on 24 July.

“The time has come to establish sovereignty over the West Bank as a historic and just response to the French decision [to recognize Palestine],” he added.

Macron announced on Thursday that he will recognize a Palestinian state at the upcoming UN General Assembly session in New York in September.


“True to its historical commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, I have decided that France will recognize the State of Palestine. I will make this solemn announcement at the United Nations General Assembly in September. The urgent priority today is to end the war in Gaza and to save the civilian population. Peace is possible,” Macron said on X.

He called for an “immediate ceasefire, release of all hostages, and massive humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” adding that the strip must be “demilitarized, secured, and rebuilt.”

“Finally, we must build a Palestinian state, ensure its viability, and allow it – by accepting demilitarization and fully recognizing Israel – to contribute to security for all in the Middle East. There is no alternative.”

Washington condemned the announcement, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling it a “reckless decision” that “only serves Hamas propaganda and sets back peace.”

On Wednesday, Israel’s Knesset passed a vote in favor of “applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley.” The motion was described as largely symbolic, with no direct legal implications.

However, it could further advance the issue of annexation on the Knesset agenda.

France had been planning recognition of Palestine for a UN meeting in June, but ended up backtracking.

Israeli officials have consistently warned that such a move would be met with an acceleration of plans to illegally annex the occupied West Bank – plans which have been in motion since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition came to power in late 2022.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich warned on 6 June that Tel Aviv has prepared an “escalation plan” in the occupied West Bank if European countries move forward with a push to recognize a Palestinian state.

He added that the Israeli plan “includes imposing sovereignty over Area C in the West Bank, displacing the residents of Khan al-Ahmar, and disrupting the banking system.”

Israel has been rapidly expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, coinciding with a surge in settler violence against Palestinians, forced displacement, and illegal land grabs.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-ur ... -palestine

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We Don’t Deserve to Be Forgiven
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 23, 2025
Ahmad Ibsais

Gaza cannot wait. Let the record show that the aid was at the border. Let the record show that the sea was closed. Let the record show that the world stood idle while an entire people was denied food, light, and breath. And let the record show that we are all guilty.


Razan, on June 23, 2025, before she was killed by Israel’s mass starvation campaign

Some mornings, I forget to eat. Not in protest or in solidarity, but because I cannot. Because a spoonful of rice feels like a betrayal when I’ve just read about a baby who died in Gaza, her breath slowing in the final hours not from injury, but from hunger. The blood had dried on her scalp days earlier. The doctors tried to keep her warm. But no amount of blankets could undo the fact that she had not eaten in days. Her name was Razan Abu Zaher. She was 4 years old.

Eighty-five percent of Gaza is entering the fifth stage of starvation. That’s the final stage. There is no sixth. No cliff to tumble from, no miracle drug. Only the body beginning to consume itself. The tongue dries. The stomach walls shrink. Children lose their hearing, their eyesight, their ability to cry. They die quietly, or loudly, or in the arms of a mother who knows what death smells like because it lives on every street now.

Starvation kills children first. Their smaller bodies succumb faster to dehydration, their organs shut down sooner, their cries grow silent before anyone else’s. At least 18,000 children have already been killed by bombs, but thousands are at risk of wasting away, dying hungry. To withhold food from children is not just to kill them, it is to end the future they represent. It is to deny Palestine its continuity. No society can rebuild when its youngest are buried before they learn to walk.

But here I am, thousands of miles away. I walk through grocery aisles that hum with fluorescence. I see toddlers playing with grapes in their mother’s carts. And I think of Gaza, where parents carry their children to morgues in plastic bags. Where every meal is a negotiation with fate. Where you must choose between starvation or being gunned down at a so-called aid distribution site. Israel has killed more Palestinians waiting for aid than were killed on October 7, 2023.


14 yo Khaled, killed at an “aid” site

On July 20, Israeli forces opened fire on yet another aid convoy in Gaza, killing at least 100 Palestinians as they waited for food. They had been standing in line for hours under a punishing sun. Some were carrying infants. Others had brought plastic bags, hoping to fill them with flour. Instead, the asphalt was covered in blood. Days earlier, a convoy organized with international coordination was similarly attacked. The UN has reported that 798 Palestinians have now been killed while receiving aid. That is not negligence. That is deliberate. That is hunger weaponized.



This grotesque inversion of aid in Gaza reveals a truth far more violent than absence. In 2024, Israel fired on starving civilians near the Kuwait roundabout as they rushed toward flour trucks. That massacre was filmed. The screams echoed across the internet. But flour still does not pass easily through the blockade. Rice still waits in trucks at the border. Medical equipment still sits in warehouses while babies die in incubators that have lost power. There are more than 30 recorded cases of infants left to die without oxygen because hospitals were denied fuel.

And yet, the UN still will not declare famine. But there is no ambiguity in a toddler whose skin is breaking from dehydration. There is no lack of clarity in an old man dying for bread, as we all watch. The hesitation to name this genocide is not about evidence. It is about permission. If they name it, they will have to act. And they have no intention of acting.

But let us not get distracted by our feelings. We don’t deserve to be forgiven. Not while we sit in comfort watching our people shrink. Not while Gaza rots and the world is consumed by its own grief or inaction. The only thing that matters is liberation. The only thing that matters is that Palestinians eat a meal in peace, beneath a sky that does not deliver death.

Anything other than that is theater. They want us to numb our minds, to confuse grief with surrender. But the sumud of the Palestinian people is not fragile. It is not a poem. It is the will to remain human under conditions that seek to turn us to dust. It is a father digging through the rubble with his hands. It is a mother not eating so her children can. It is a boy dying in his superman t-shirt, holding to hope that someone would save him, because hollywood told him that he would not be buried in blood soaked clothes.

In Gaza, starvation is not a byproduct. It is administered with precision. The Israeli government has long admitted to calculating the caloric threshold needed to keep Palestinians “on the brink” without triggering international intervention. This is a system designed by bureaucrats and engineers, not just soldiers, and upheld by a society that protests aid at the gates. And it is implemented with the support of Western democracies who claim to uphold human rights.

There is no dignity in begging your occupier to feed you. And yet that is what the world demands of Palestinians. That they perform gratitude while choking on powdered milk. That they smile for aerial photos of aid trucks while burying another child in a mass grave. That they bow our heads and say thank you, while the hand that feeds us is the same hand that starves us.

But Palestinians will not bow. They will not smile through genocide. They will not confuse survival with justice. The only acceptable future is one where Palestinians control their own borders, their own food, their own lives. Where the next generation does not learn to count their ribs before they learn to read.

Sumud is not just the ability to endure. It is the knowledge that even under siege, a people can remain whole. Not because of pity, or charity. But because they know who they are.

And who we are, above all, is a people who still believe that liberation is possible. Even as the world forgets us. Even as the UN stalls. Even as our children cry from hunger and no one listens. We hear them. We cry for them. And we will not forgive the world for making us starve in silence. But who cares what we think…

On the Day of Judgment, every drop of blood will be weighed, and every hunger pang will rise as testimony. The martyrs of Gaza are not gone. They are alive, provided for and at peace. It is the living who must answer. It is we who will be asked what we did when Gaza starved, and the gates of heaven will not be opened to those who turned away.

So we continue. We protest. We boycott. We call for economic sanctions. We demand a world where those who were complicit this genocide are haunted by its memory forever. Let their lives be filled with the hollowness of hunger they inflicted. Let them live out their days with the same emptiness they created in the bellies of children.

Gaza cannot wait. Let the record show that the aid was at the border. Let the record show that the sea was closed. Let the record show that the world stood idle while an entire people was denied food, light, and breath. And let the record show that we are all guilty.

Testimonies from Gaza:











https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... -forgiven/

[blindpig]

Famine In Palestine - 400,000+ Are Already Dead



The fanatical colonial settlers of the Zionist entity have become a danger to all other people. They must be dispersed.

Gaza has passed the tipping point to famine:

Once this tipping point is passed, famines tend to follow a catastrophically self-reinforcing pattern, which is already visible in Gaza. A slow creep of death yields to swift mass mortality as organs fail, immune systems collapse and victims lose the will to go on. Once famine begins, deaths tend to rise exponentially, meaning that waiting for confirmation that the technical line has been crossed to take remedial action could condemn thousands of people – especially young children – to death.

If nothing is done there will be, not just thousands, but several hundred thousands of dead in Gaza.

I am embarrassed to live in a 'western' country where the government claims moral superiority but rejects to do anything about this.

Added:

Back in February Trump said that there were 1.8 million people left in Gaza.

I headlined:

Trump Wants To Take Over Gaza, Announces 500,000 Dead

In 2023 the internationally acknowledged Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics' count of the population of Gaza was standing at 2,226,544. Trump wants to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and gives their number as 1.7 or 1.8 million:

Reporter: How many people are you thinking need to leave Gaza?
Trump: “All of them. Probably a million seven, maybe a million eight. They’ll be settled in areas where they can live a beautiful life.” (video)

This is an acknowledgement, by the president of the United States, that the genocidal Zionists have murdered up to 500,000 people in Gaza.

Steven Donziger's calculations now confirm that range.

SHOCK: Israel Has Killed 20.7% of Gaza's Population. That's 434,000 People. - Donziger on Justice, Jul 22 2025

Here is the latest data, updated as of yesterday (July 21): based on a statistical model developed by a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet, Israel has killed roughly 434,800 people in Gaza since the country’s military started to attack the territory on 8 October 2023. That’s 20.7% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population dead. Over half are women and children.

If the same level of killing and indirect death that took place in Gaza during the 594 days of the conflict happened in the United States proportional to population, roughly 70 million Americans would have been killed.

Posted by b on July 25, 2025 at 16:23 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/07/f ... l#comments

******

THAAD didn't pull it in
July 25, 15:17



THAAD didn't pull it in

Wow.. As the American Wall Street Journal writes with reference to American officials, it turns out ( https://www.wsj.com/world/israel-iran-u ... e-08a65396 ), not one, as was previously known, but two American THAAD missile defense system batteries in Israel helped repel Iranian missile attacks. That is, the United States did transfer a second THAAD battery to Israel before the war. The United States has only 7 such batteries. Moreover, in 12 days of the war, these two American THAAD batteries in Israel alone expended more than 150 interceptor missiles. This is about a quarter of all THAAD missiles acquired by the US Department of Defense over the entire period. A large number of naval interceptor missiles from American destroyers were also expended, not to mention the expenditure of missiles from the Israeli Arrow family of missile defense systems. What was the density of missile defense systems and despite this, some Iranian missiles still broke through to their targets until the very last hours of the war.

https://t.me/ImpNavigator/11437 - zinc

As was said during the war, Iran steadily penetrated the powerful consolidated air defense/missile defense system of the USA and Israel, inflicting significant losses on Israel until the end of the war.
The key problem is that the USA and Israel underestimated Iran's missile capabilities and the stability of its internal structure, as a result of which it was not possible to achieve the collapse of Iran's military-political leadership, and it was not possible to neutralize Iran's strike capabilities. Therefore, the war was hastily curtailed, since it would only get worse.

The further it goes, the funnier the war-time grunts about Israel's complete victory look.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9973740.html

Google Translator

*****

Netanyahu says exploring 'alternative options’ with US as Gaza ceasefire talks collapse

Israel is seeking to extend the war to 'wipe out Gaza' and build a high-tech resort city for Israeli Jews in its place

News Desk

JUL 25, 2025


(Photo credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former US President Donald Trump announced on 25 July that they would abandon ongoing Gaza ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, declaring their intention to pursue “alternative options” to resolve the conflict.

The announcement came a day after both governments withdrew their delegations from the latest round of talks in Doha.

“We are now exploring alternative paths to bring our hostages home and end Hamas's rule in Gaza,” Netanyahu stated, echoing sentiments from US envoy Steve Witkoff, who accused the resistance movement of obstructing progress in the negotiations. “Witkoff got it right. Hamas is the obstacle to a deal,” Netanyahu said.

Trump backed the Israeli position and criticized Hamas directly. “They don't want peace,” Trump said of the group. “Their leaders will now be hunted down.”

However, according to past reports in Israeli media, Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged ceasefire negotiations with Hamas since the beginning of the war in 2023, preferring to continue the war instead. In March, Israel unilaterally withdrew from a ceasefire reached in January, preventing it from reaching a second stage.

The sharp rhetoric followed Hamas's response to a US-backed ceasefire proposal delivered on Thursday. The plan included a 60-day pause in fighting, increased aid access to Gaza, and a limited prisoner exchange. Yet, hours after receiving Hamas's feedback, Israel pulled its negotiators from the talks for consultations.

Hamas disputed Witkoff's characterization, saying negotiations were ongoing and progressing. In a statement, the group accused the US envoy of attempting to pressure Hamas on Israel's behalf and manipulating public perception ahead of future talks.

The proposed ceasefire would have seen some of the approximately 50 remaining Israeli captives exchanged for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, and allowed increased delivery of aid to Gaza's besieged and starving population.

Meanwhile, genocidal comments from Israel's far-right Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu have drawn widespread condemnation. In a Thursday interview with Haredi radio station Kol Barama, Eliyahu declared that the Israeli government is “racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out.”

“Thank God, we are wiping out this evil,” he said. “All Gaza will be Jewish.”

Eliyahu, a member of the Jewish Power party led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, also dismissed concerns about widespread hunger and starvation in Gaza, where the UN and aid agencies report catastrophic levels of food insecurity. “There is no hunger in Gaza,” he claimed. “But we don't need to be concerned with hunger in the strip. Let the world worry about it.”


At the same time, a group of far-right Israeli lawmakers and settler leaders convened in the Knesset on Tuesday to promote a radical redevelopment scheme titled “The Master Plan for Settlement in the Gaza Strip.”

Inspired by Trump's previous proposal to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” the plan envisions building 850,000 housing units for Jewish Israelis and smart cities trading in cryptocurrency, connected by a metro system.

The plan calls for the forced displacement of Gaza's 2.1 million residents and the theft of their land to make way for the envisioned Israeli enclave – a proposal widely condemned by legal experts.

Human rights lawyer Michael Sfard warned that the scheme amounts to “a plan for ethnic cleansing,” stating that under international law, mass deportation constitutes a crime against humanity.

https://thecradle.co/articles/netanyahu ... s-collapse

Israeli army chief says soldiers face ‘deep fatigue’ after 21 months of genocide in Gaza

Fifteen soldiers have been killed in Gaza this month, with Hebrew media reporting a surge in the 'boldness' of Palestinian resistance fighters recently

News Desk

JUL 25, 2025


(Photo credit: Ilia Yefimovich/dpa)

The Chief of Staff of the Israeli military Eyal Zamir has informed the political echelon that Tel Aviv’s forces are “exhausted” from the fighting in the Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported on 25 July.

In a radio interview, Avi Ashkenazi, the military correspondent for Hebrew newspaper Maariv, said Zamir has told the government that “the army is exhausted from the fighting” and pointed to increased fatigue among soldiers operating in the strip.

Ashkenazi referred to the “operational incident” which occurred in Gaza on Thursday, when at least eight soldiers were wounded in an ammunition explosion inside a building. He noted a decrease in the army’s operational efficiency.

“When you operate a large military force for a long time, things don't go smoothly. Autonomic wear and tear occur, tools start to wear out, and soldiers become exhausted,” he said.

“Take a soldier who slept in an armored personnel carrier for eight months ... How good would you expect him to be? Not like the first day, certainly,” he added, saying there are signs of “deep fatigue” among troops. “We must stop and say that we cannot fight indefinitely. We must set clear goals and work to rebuild the military force. This is what the chief of staff told the political level."

As Israel starves the population of Gaza and commits daily massacres, Palestinian resistance fighters are escalating operations against troops across the strip.

Recent weeks have seen a jump in what Tel Aviv refers to as “security incidents,” with Israeli media noting “an increase in the boldness” of Palestinian resistance fighters.

Israel acknowledged the deaths of 15 soldiers in Gaza in the month of July. The previous month, 20 Israeli soldiers were killed in the strip.

Israeli government officials told Israel Hayom on 29 June that they reject the army’s assessment that Operation Gideon’s Chariots is nearing completion, stating that Hamas has not yet been defeated.

Officials cited in the report added that Hamas still maintains senior leadership, organized forces, and operational control in the field.

Israeli intelligence estimates say that around 20,000 of the Palestinian resistance movement's military operatives remain alive, including several commanders, some of whom are senior officers.

Thousands of new fighters have been recruited since last year. Meanwhile, the Israeli political echelon has continued to procrastinate reaching a deal to end the war, demanding a complete surrender of the resistance and vowing that, otherwise, any ceasefire will be temporary.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-a ... de-in-gaza



*****



They’re Starving Civilians To Steal A Palestinian Territory, And They’re Lying About It

The more evil Israel gets, the more frenetic its apologists need to get with their lies to justify its behavior.

Caitlin Johnstone
July 26, 2025

Just so we’re all absolutely clear about what we’re watching here, Israel is intentionally starving civilians in order to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and steal a Palestinian territory. That’s all this is, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

This isn’t a theory. This is what’s happening. The facts are in and the case is closed. Israeli officials aren’t even hiding it anymore.

Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu is telling the Israeli media that “the government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” and that “all Gaza will be Jewish.”

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is tweeting in Hebrew that a “complete halt of ‘humanitarian aid’” will allow “encouragement of migration” and “settlement” in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced earlier this month that the official plan is to build a giant concentration camp for Gaza’s population on the ruins of Rafah while working to deport the population to other countries.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself made it clear back in May that implementing Donald Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza was a precondition to having peace in the enclave.

Trump made it clear back in February that his plan was for “all” Palestinians to be removed from the Gaza Strip on a “permanent” basis.

Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”

Indeed, Israel has been on record scheming to find a way to relocate the population of Gaza for many decades.

That’s what this is all about. That’s all this has ever been about. It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about Israel defending itself. It’s about stealing a Palestinian territory, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

And the lies have been erupting like a geyser in recent days. Israel and its apologists have been frantically pushing the narrative that Gaza is starving because the UN isn’t allowing aid in (swiftly refuted by Drop Site News), that Gaza is starving because Hamas is stealing the aid (swiftly refuted by Reuters), and that Gaza is starving because Hamas attacks people who try to go to aid sites (already refuted by Israeli soldiers telling the Israeli press that they’re the ones shooting the aid seekers).

The more evil Israel gets, the more frenetic its apologists need to get with their lies to justify its behavior.

Starvation deaths in Gaza are skyrocketing. Many of those still alive have already suffered permanent damage, and even with a massive influx of aid and complete reversal of Israeli policies it will be very difficult to undo the effects of the famine.

Western governments are beginning to speak out against the mass atrocity in Gaza, far too little and far too late. We can expect Israel and the United States to respond to this outcry by saying that Palestinians need to be evacuated out of Gaza as quickly as possible in order to rescue them from this deliberately manufactured humanitarian crisis. We can expect them to denounce anyone who opposes this ethnic cleansing operation as evil monsters who want to starve the poor Palestinians.

And it will all be lies. They lied this entire time.

It’s about the most evil thing you could possibly come up with, really. If this is not evil, then nothing is.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/07 ... -about-it/

*******



I live in Gaza. Famine is not coming—it’s already here
Originally published: Countercurrents on July 21, 2025 by Malak Ridwan (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Jul 25, 2025)

The specter of famine has returned to Gaza, creeping through its shattered streets like a thief in the night, stealing the breath of children, the strength of mothers, and the dignity of fathers. It is a slow, cruel death—one that does not come with the sudden roar of bombs but with the silent gnawing of empty stomachs, the hollow eyes of those who have not known bread for days.

This is not Gaza’s first famine. Only last year, in January 2024, the people of the north endured a hunger no less severe than the current torment. Then, as now, flour, sugar, lentils—staples that once seemed too humble to notice—became treasures beyond reach. Families rationed grains like gold, stretching meager supplies to keep their children alive. Even then, medicine was a luxury few could afford. My own father, a diabetic, clutched his dwindling pills with trembling hands, counting each one, measuring his pain against the fear of running out.

Now, famine has returned, darker, deeper. The markets, if they can be called such, are graveyards of empty stalls. The few who find a sack of flour guard it like a secret, grinding it into coarse bread that tastes of dust and despair. Children no longer cry for sweets; they have forgotten the taste of sugar. Instead, they whimper weakly, their bellies swollen with hunger, their ribs pressing against skin stretched too thin.

And still, the world watches. Still, the trucks are stopped, the aid is delayed, the borders remain choked. Gaza starves in plain sight, while the powerful debate the arithmetic of suffering—how many calories a person needs to survive, how many grams of rice constitute a meal. But famine is not numbers. It is a father breaking his last piece of bread in half, pretending he is not hungry. It is a mother boiling water with a handful of salt, calling it soup. It is my diabetic father, counting his pills, praying they outlast the siege.

Gaza has known hunger before. It knows it too well. But how many famines must a people endure before the world remembers they are human?

https://mronline.org/2025/07/25/i-live- ... eady-here/

******

Beirut Protesters Call Out Egyptian Complicity in Starvation of Gaza
July 25, 2025



Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Egyptian Embassy in Beirut on Monday afternoon to demand the immediate reopening of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the besieged Gaza Strip, as famine tightens its grip on the population and humanitarian aid rots in Egyptian warehouses. The demonstration quickly swelled in size as buses transporting protestors arrived from Palestinian camps across Lebanon.

The entrance to the Egyptian Embassy was barricaded by the Lebanese army and security forces from both sides. Participants waved Palestinian flags, held up pictures of starving children in northern Gaza, and carried banners that read: “Open Rafah Now,” “Starvation is a War Crime,” and “Aid is Not a Weapon.” The air was thick with chants condemning Egypt’s complicity in the blockade.

The protesters specifically called on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to halt what they called a “deliberate and deadly blockade policy” by opening the crossing and facilitating the immediate entry of food, medical supplies, and fuel into Gaza. Several prominent Lebanese and Palestinian public figures took part in the protest, including representatives from the Palestinian Cultural Club and Palestinian Youth Movement.

“We’re here because we can’t stay silent while our people in Gaza starve,” said 22-year-old Layal Abu Hijleh, a Palestinian university student from the Mar Elias camp in Beirut. “We know aid is waiting in Rafah. Egypt needs to open the gates. Not in a week, not tomorrow, but now.”

Another protester, Jamal Mansour, who traveled from Baalbek, said he came because the siege has gone too far. “Egypt says it supports the Palestinian cause, but it is guarding the gates of famine.”

The protest remained peaceful for nearly two hours. But tensions rose toward the end of the protest when a group of protesters attempted to enter the embassy premises. Lebanese Army soldiers stationed outside the embassy blocked the group from advancing, forming a human barrier. Scuffles soon broke out, and several protesters were beaten by Lebanese army men as onlookers screamed in protest.

A statement released following the protest by Free Palestine Front, one of the participating groups, read: “Gaza, like South Lebanon, stands alone against a project that threatens to dominate our entire region: the project of Zionist expansion, and the project of submission to American imperialism.”

The group decried the shameful apathy of Arab regimes and their direct collaboration with the occupation: “It is inconceivable that Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, and all Arab governments stand powerless to deliver medicine and aid. On the contrary, our states are suppressing demonstrations in support of Gaza, blocking convoys that seek to break the siege, and cooperating economically and militarily with the Zionist enemy by intercepting missiles that threaten its security and providing it with land and air corridors.”

Egypt’s role in starving Gaza
Egypt’s decision to maintain the blockade played a critical role in Gaza’s catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Since May  2024, following Israel’s military seizure of the Palestinian-controlled side of the crossing, Egypt has kept Rafah effectively closed from its side, asserting that the exit gate cannot operate without coordination with a functioning Palestinian Authority.

The Egyptian government refuses to reopen the crossing, even as food, medicine, and fuel accumulate in North Sinai warehouses, and are left to spoil.

The impact on Gaza is stark. The UN warns nearly half a million people face famine, fuel shortages are critically undermining bakeries and hospitals, and malnutrition-related deaths are nearing catastrophic levels. While aid convoys through Rafah remain barred, Gaza’s last relief lines have been drastically curtailed. Reports detail dire scenes of people collapsing just to reach UN or NGO food hubs, and over 1,000 individuals have died seeking aid since May.

(al-akhabar)

https://orinocotribune.com/beirut-prote ... n-of-gaza/

[blindpig]

The Gaza Rivera
Posted by Internationalist 360° on July 26, 2025
Chris Hedges


Never Again (Certain Restrictions Apply) – by Mr. Fish

Israeli society cheers on the Gaza slaughterhouse and sees in genocide not a crime, but a utopian fantasy.

Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors or journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.

Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.

They are the heirs of Pol Pot, the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis. Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann.

Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.

Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza.

Nearly, one in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the U.N.


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. (Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not.

I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.

The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea. They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains.

Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function. Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.This is the future Israel has preordained for the two million people in Gaza.


Palestinians shove to receive a hot meal at a charity kitchen in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 22, 2025. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist. They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump.

In the new video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront. Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside.

Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza. Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan.

Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen, or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory.

These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia.

Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank.

These ultranationalists, who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel. They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead.

These rouge militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7.

Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other.

The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/07/ ... za-rivera/

It is a matter of record that Adolf Hitler had great admiration and interest in US policy towards native Americans. The Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee(1) and all the rest were templates for a future made by monsters.

******

Hamas condemns Israeli-approved Gaza 'aid airdrops' as stunt amid soaring starvation

The resistance movement is demanding a humanitarian corridor to allow aid trucks to enter Gaza to alleviate the Israeli-created famine

News Desk

JUL 25, 2025


(Photo credit: Mohammed Saber/EPA via Shutterstock)

A senior Hamas official condemned Israel’s decision on 25 July to allow foreign countries to resume airdrops of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, calling the move a “stunt” that does little to alleviate the deepening famine.

“The Gaza Strip does not need flying aerobatics,” said Ismail al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza Government Media Office, in a statement to Reuters. “It needs an open humanitarian corridor and a steady daily flow of aid trucks to save what remains of the lives of besieged, starving civilians.”

His comments came after the Israeli Army Radio quoted a military official on Friday saying that Israel would permit foreign governments to parachute aid into Gaza. The Israeli military did not respond to requests for clarification.

The announcement follows earlier US and Israeli efforts in 2024 to use airdrops and a temporary maritime port to deliver aid – plans widely criticized as symbolic and ineffective.

At the time, UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri called the airdrops “absurd” and “cynical,” warning that they would do little to slow famine while creating chaos as desperate civilians scrambled for supplies.

In March 2024, at least five Palestinians were killed – and several injured – when an airdropped supply pallet fell into a crowd in northern Gaza after its parachute failed to deploy correctly.

‼Israeli authorities have given permission to other countries to begin #airdropping humanitarian aid to #Gaza residents.

In previous similar operations (on video), dozens of people were killed and injured as a result of the cargo falling. pic.twitter.com/4YyQbX5X58

— News.Az (@news_az) July 25, 2025

The airdrops and maritime port were used as a pretext to dismantle and replace UNRWA, the primary provider of aid to Gaza under Israel’s embargo and bombing of the strip.

Despite international aid initiatives, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has continued to deteriorate since Israel launched its genocidal military campaign in October 2023.

Israeli bombardment and a strict blockade have crippled Gaza’s infrastructure, decimated supply chains, and triggered a hunger crisis that health experts now say affects nearly every resident of the territory.

On 24 July, the New York Times reported that starvation is spreading rapidly. “There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself,” said Dr Ahmed al-Farra, head of the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis.

He described how children with no pre-existing conditions were dying of hunger, including 11-month-old Siwar Barbaq, who weighs just nine pounds – less than half of what a child her age should weigh.

The World Food Programme (WFP) warned this week that Gaza is experiencing “new and astonishing levels of desperation,” with one-third of the population going without food for multiple days. Doctors and aid agencies report rising deaths due to malnutrition, especially among children.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 9 have died from starvation in the last 24 hours, bringing the death toll from famine and malnutrition in the strip to 122 – including 83 children.

Human rights experts, including officials at the International Criminal Court (ICC), have accused Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war, part of a broader strategy to forcibly displace Gaza's 2.1 million population and open the strip for Jewish settlement.

No starvation in gaza?

How about these pictures?

Are you gonna claim these are AI? Disgusting. https://t.co/FDjvCM7cdl pic.twitter.com/5YAjsy2auY

— Master Oogway (@masteroogwgay) July 21, 2025

Israel announces ‘humanitarian pauses’ to alleviate global outrage over Gaza famine

US contractors and Israeli soldiers continue to kill starving Palestinians seeking food aid with live ammunition and tank fire

News Desk

JUL 27, 2025


(Photo credit: Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu/Getty Images)

Amid mounting international outrage over its deliberate famine in Gaza, which has been killing Palestinians at an increasingly visible and alarming pace, the Israeli military announced a series of so-called "humanitarian" measures over the weekend.

These include controversial airdrops, limited daily "tactical pauses" in fighting from 10 am to 8 pm, and the opening of corridors for UN aid convoys.

Israel announced the measures in response to the backlash against its efforts to starve Palestinians in Gaza, which has intensified in recent days. A growing number of images of skeletal child corpses are circulating online, as the number of victims of Israel's blockade and siege of the strip continues to rise.


On Friday, a 5-month-old Palestinian baby suffering from malnutrition, Zeinab Abu Halib, died in her mother's arms, while doctors are running out of room inside hospitals as they try to treat starving patients.

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, 127 people, including 85 children, have died from hunger and severe malnutrition since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

The "tactical pauses," announced Saturday by the Israeli military, are only being implemented in select areas such as Al-Mawasi, Deir al-Balah, and Gaza City, leaving much of the besieged enclave under continued assault.

The measures, unveiled following a high-level review, include allowing foreign governments to parachute aid into Gaza.


The announcement follows earlier US and Israeli efforts in 2024 to use airdrops and a temporary maritime port to deliver aid that proved merely symbolic and ineffective.

At the time, UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri called the airdrops "absurd" and "cynical," warning that they would do little to slow famine while creating chaos as desperate civilians scrambled for supplies.

On Saturday, the head of the UN's Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, reiterated that the air drops are "expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians" if they go awry.

Lazzarini said the airdrops were a "grotesque distraction," and that UNRWA had "the equivalent of 6,000 trucks" in Jordan and Egypt, waiting for the "green light" to enter Gaza.

He said that to end the crisis, Israel must simply "lift the siege, open the gates and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need."

"Driving aid through is much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper & safer. It's more dignified for the people of Gaza," Lazzarini wrote.

Israel continues to kill Palestinians seeking aid from distribution points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a group run by a private military contractor and established by the US and Israel to replace UNRWA.

On Sunday morning, the Israeli military killed at least 38 people in Gaza, including 24 waiting for aid, according to hospital sources in the strip.


The bodies of nine Palestinians killed while trying to receive aid from the GHF's Netzarim site were taken to Al-Awda Hospital in Al-Nuseirat. Fifty people who were injured while seeking aid were also transferred to the hospital.

US military contractors guarding GHF aid sites often use live ammunition and stun grenades on hungry Palestinians seeking food, while Israeli forces target them with tank fire.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that as "Gaza starves, Israel's far right sees a dream coming true."

Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government say they wish to destroy Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of more than 2 million Palestinians, and build high-tech modern cities for Jewish Israelis in the strip.

"Members of Israel's government embrace the Trump-inspired vision of a Gaza of gleaming towers, ritzy tourism and pristine neighborhoods, but without Palestinians," The Post wrote, following a conference titled: "The Gaza Riviera — from Vision to Reality."

Plans discussed at the conference "included the creation of two separate cities in the narrow territory, alongside a tourist district with beachfront hotels and new industrial and agricultural zones."

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that there were plans, supported by US President Donald Trump, to "relocate Gazans to other countries" to make the vision a reality.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-an ... aza-famine

Activists, journalists detained as Israel seizes Freedom Flotilla’s ‘Handala’

The vessel was boarded by Israeli troops as it was trying to break the siege on the Gaza Strip

News Desk

JUL 27, 2025


(Photo credit: Giovanni Isolino/AFP)

Handala, the aid vessel sent by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was brought into the port of Ashdod by Israeli forces on the morning of 27 July, after it was intercepted and seized the night before while trying to break the siege on Gaza and deliver aid to the besieged strip.

The crew was arrested by Israeli troops after they boarded the vessel late on Saturday night.

“Israeli forces illegally boarded ‘Handala’ in international waters, abducting 21 unarmed civilians. Demand your government end its complicity in Israeli war crimes, ensure the unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid, and call for the immediate release of all crew members,” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition said on Sunday in a statement on X.

On board were about 19 activists and two journalists from different parts of the world, including Australia, France, the UK, and the US.

Two Al-Jazeera journalists were on board, as well as French National Assembly member Gabrielle Cathala and French politician and member of the European Parliament Emma Fourreau.


The two Australian citizens were journalist Tania Safi and human rights activist Robert Martin.

Israel had “no legal authority to detain international civilians aboard,” said the member of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s steering committee, Ann Wright.

“This is not a matter of internal Israeli jurisdiction. These are foreign nationals operating under international law in international waters. Their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end,” she added.

Video footage showed the vessel – named after the famous Palestinian cartoon character Handala created by Naji al-Ali – being boarded by Israeli troops late on 26 July.

The activists were held at gunpoint and cameras were disabled by Israeli forces.


The Adala Human Rights Center said that Tel Aviv has refused several demands to allow lawyers to contact the detained crew of the Handala vessel, thereby preventing them from receiving legal consultation.

It added that those onboard were peaceful, trying to break the siege on Gaza, and that their arrest is a violation of international law. The incident comes as Gaza faces catastrophic levels of famine due to Israel's continued blockade of the strip. Dozens, including children, have died of starvation over the past week.

This was the second Freedom Flotilla Coalition vessel intercepted by Israeli forces since last month.

Israeli forces intercepted the Gaza Freedom Flotilla’s Madleen vessel in international waters on 9 June as it was approaching Gaza to break the siege, seizing the boat and detaining the 12 activists on board.

It was carrying Swedish activist Greta Thunberg as well as French-Palestinian politician and member of the European Parliament Rima Hassan.

In May this year, an Israeli drone bombed a Freedom Flotilla aid vessel that was en route to Gaza, blowing a hole through the ship, causing a fire, and putting it at risk of sinking.

In 2010, Israeli commandos raided a group of Freedom Flotilla ships with helicopters as they were carrying aid and headed towards Gaza to break the siege. The commandos killed nine Turkish civilians and injured 30 others of several nationalities.

https://thecradle.co/articles/activists ... as-handala

[blindpig]

How Israel Used Daesh-Linked Gangs and GHF To Weaponize Aid Against Palestinians
July 28, 2025



By Robert Inlakesh – Jul 27, 2025

Following the bombshell admission that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was backing a Daesh-linked criminal network to fight the Hamas resistance movement in Gaza, the issue finally received the widespread attention it deserved.

Yet, the scandal goes much deeper than simply backing gangsters.

Since the beginning of the Gaza genocide more than 600 days ago, Israel has worked to systematically target Gaza’s police and security officers in a bid to plunge the territory into chaos and lawlessness.

This was also done in conjunction with bombing, invading and disabling the besieged territory’s hospitals, killing local community leaders and emergency workers.

In fact, during the initial months of Israel’s ground offensive in 2023, where the efforts were focused almost entirely in northern Gaza, each significant incursion ended up culminating in the takeover of a major medical complex.

Perhaps the most well-known case was that of the invasion of al-Shifa Hospital, which Israel erroneously claimed to be a command and control center for the Qassam Brigades of Hamas.

This was later thoroughly debunked.

Having inflicted the maximum damage in northern Gaza, a number of schemes were then attempted in order to overturn law and order, including using local criminal elements and even forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority, to begin taking over the north of the territory.

However, what remained of the Palestinian police and intelligence services crushed these conspiracies at an early stage. Most of those involved were executed or fled.

Yet, as the months went on, Israel refused to give up on this strategy of recruiting a collaborator force that would be capable of doing its dirty work. By early 2024, most of Gaza’s civilian population had fled to the southern Rafah border area and were forced to live in tent cities there.

During this period, although the Hamas-led government-aligned police forces were targeted and killed in the event that they attempted to provide security to the limited number of aid trucks that were permitted to enter the territory, they were still able to maintain a presence there.

At the time, an informed source, who works for the Palestinian Authority (PA), told me that the occupied West Bank-based PA was communicating with their Israeli counterparts about potential plans to stifle Hamas funding and security networks, believing that Rafah was the key.

A security source in Gaza informed me that during the months the Israeli military threatened to invade Rafah, the calculation to seize the Gaza-Egypt border area was based upon joint PA-Israeli assessments regarding the economic impacts on Hamas in the event of the move.

The assumption was that the Rafah invasion would eliminate Hamas’s financing operations and cripple their security services, allowing for other forces to eventually take over.

Looting aid and starving the people
Upon Israel’s seizure of the Rafah border, all aid transfers into the territory came to a periodic halt, which began to exacerbate the already unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

When the aid trucks were eventually permitted entry, they were then forced to take designated routes through south-east Rafah, where Israel had been forming gangs that would go on to loot aid from non-governmental organizations that were meant for the starving civilian population.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, two senior figures at NGOs working in the Gaza Strip stated that it was begrudgingly accepted that, in order to bring in humanitarian assistance, all organisations were going to be forced to pay bribes to Israel’s collaborator militia forces.

Once their trucks would enter, even if the bribe was paid, the gangsters would still routinely seize entire trucks or loot part of the aid.

The reason why NGO staff have been unable to speak on record about the issue is that their decisions to pay the bribes had contributed to price hikes in Gaza’s markets.

One prominent figure at a major humanitarian organisation admitted that it was “unfortunate and even saddens me, because technically we were part of this, but if we didn’t pay the bribes, then no food would enter, so many organisations decided that some aid was better than none.”

The system in place was one where the aid was looted, before being transported to secured warehouse locations under the watchful eyes of Israeli drones, in a territory considered a kill-zone for any Palestinian civilian or emergency worker that dared to enter.

Once the hoarding process was complete, the gangsters would slowly drip-feed the aid onto the black market, where it was sold at a massive profit. For Palestinians who still have savings left, such as those receiving salaries from the PA, they could afford to eat, yet the criminals made attaining food impossible for those without sufficient funds.

According to a Haaretz report from late last year, the “protection fee” charged by the gangs was around $4,000 per truck. This was also the amount Press TV was informed to be the case, yet a comment was added that sometimes the price was arbitrarily altered.

The most prominent gang leader, whose name has now become infamous, is Yasser Abu Shabab. He had been imprisoned by the Gaza security forces and found guilty of drug trafficking, only to escape when Israel bombed Gaza’s prison facilities at the start of the war, which appeared to have happened in a systematic way that allowed for hardened criminals to roam free.

For some time, Abu Shabab and his gang were out of the public eye, known only as a group of criminals who were using their Israeli protection as a cover for running what could only be described as a criminal enterprise.

Yet, over time, the criminal cadres evolved and would begin painting themselves as some kind of “grassroots” resistance to Hamas. In November of 2024, Yasser Abu Shabab gave an interview to the Washington Post, claiming to be a victim and stating that “Hamas has left us with nothing”.

Much like his Israeli handlers, Abu Shabab blames all his own war crimes on Hamas, even admitting to stealing aid but positing that he was forced to do it in order to survive.

Abu Shabab’s ramblings about how he is misunderstood, a drug trafficker who looted aid out of the goodness of his own heart, according to his framing, culminated in him claiming not to have seized baby formula in his WP interview.

That same month, the Financial Times published information from an internal UN memo that stated the gang leader had been looting aid with “the passive, if not active benevolence” of Israel.

Abu Shabab, along with many other militants belonging to his militia, has long maintained ties to the Daesh terrorist group in the Sinai and a slew of Takfiri groups linked with Al-Qaeda.

The notorious criminal, despite never appearing on any Palestinian media outlet for an interview, has been granted access to the US and UK mainstream media outlets in recent months to espouse his terrorist propaganda.

He is now selling his militia force as the “popular forces”, who carry Israeli-supplied weapons, sport Israeli tactical vests and helmets, while claiming to be an alternative to Hamas in Gaza.

Shockingly, the Daesh-linked Gaza was even given a full opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Published on July 24, the article purportedly written by Yasser Abu Shabab was entitled “Gazans Are Finished With Hamas”. It is more than likely that one of his Israeli handlers actually wrote the article, according to knowledgeable sources.

Aside from being promoted in Western corporate media, Abu Shabab is granted airtime on Israeli media, including its Army Radio, where he once claimed it was Hamas propaganda to say Israel controls him.

Although Abu Shabab claims to be some grassroots resistance to Hamas, even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted to backing his criminal network.

This group of gangsters and terrorist outlaws is tasked with securing aid transfers to the Israeli-US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

This means that the privatised aid scheme, which employs Private Military Contractors (PMCs) to manage its sites and has been accused by whistleblowers of committing war crimes, is actively working with Daesh-linked gangsters.

GHF and a web of Palestinian collaborators
One of the most prominent gang leaders was a Salafist man named Issam al-Nabahin, who had previously murdered a police officer in 2023.

He also fought the Egyptian army after joining Daesh in the Sinai, before being smuggled back to the Gaza Strip. Despite the defeat of Daesh in the Sinai and Gaza, he continued to belong to underground Salafist groups.

An Israeli collaborator by the name of Ghassan al-Dahini has been identified as Abu Shabab’s right-hand man and is tasked with recruiting new militants into the so-called “popular forces”, along with another shady figure known as Saddam Zakkar.

Al-Dahini was reportedly a militant with the Daesh-linked Jaish al-Islam group.

Meanwhile, Israel’s GHF aid scheme not only coordinates with Abu Shabab’s militants, but also with three wealthy brothers from Gaza City who own the Al-Khazindar Company.

According to sources, one of the brothers, Mohammed al-Khazindar, has direct contact with a man named Baha Balousha, who provided an inroad to the Israeli intelligence.

Balousha is a Palestinian Authority-aligned figure whose son was infamously killed by unidentified militants during the Hamas-Fatah conflict, which began in 2006. He blamed Hamas, which denied involvement in the brutal murder.

The Khazindar brothers were known for their involvement in Gaza’s oil and gas sector, but ran into a corruption scandal only months before the outbreak of genocidal war on Gaza in 2023, allegedly setting them back 10 million dollars in debt. All three left Gaza and reside in Egypt.

Rafaat al-Khazindar, who is the company director out of the three, made statements to CNN, accusing Hamas of killing 8 people who were widely described as “humanitarian workers” of the GHF. Yet, the GHF does not employ professional humanitarian aid workers.

A Palestinian researcher from Gaza, Muhammad Shehada, who has conducted some of the most extensive research in exposing Abu Shabab and his associates, recently published an exclusive list identifying key members of the gang.

The second deputy to gang leader Abu Shabab has been identified as Saleh Abu Shabab, who is “responsible for coordinating the gang’s movements” with the Israeli military.

Then there are notorious militants such as Samir Sabbah, Fadi al-Dubari, Jamal Fatayir, Abdel-Rahman Al-Dubari, Bakir al-Waqili and Ali Zuhair abu Harb, all of whom are drug dealers.

There is also Nassir and Bakir Hisham Abu Bakra, both of whom are teenagers – under the age of 18 – who were previously convicted of murder.

Another militant is Ashraf Sawalha, previously detained on charges of collaboration with Israel.

Then there is escaped prisoner Hassan Ashour and Tamer Abu Obaid, who became a fugitive after the killing of a policeman in Deir al-Balah, along with Raed Abu Samra, who is also a murderer.

The gangsters calling themselves the “popular forces” and the GHF go hand in hand as part of an Israeli strategy to ethnically cleanse Palestinians through the tight restriction and control of so-called “humanitarian aid.”

As famine now grips the population of Gaza, threatening thousands of children’s lives, the GHF aid system itself has resulted in the mass murder of over 1,000 starving civilians

(Press TV)

https://orinocotribune.com/how-israel-u ... estinians/

******

Genocide’s Hard When You’ve Got a PR War to Win
July 28, 2025

Israel’s quest to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians through expulsion or extermination keeps getting interrupted for photo ops of aid airlifts or a few aid trucks to satisfy feigned Western grievance, writes Joe Lauria.


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the General Assembly’s 79th session on Sept. 27, 2024. (U.N. Photo/Evan Schneider)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News



Winning the public relations war is proving to be a lot more difficult for Israel than the genocide against the Palestinian people.

As the conscience of Western publics pushes their governments to stop supporting Israel’s historic crimes, U.S. and European governments are forced to make displays of scolding Israel.

But that act is getting old. The money and guns keep flowing as the killing and starvation keeps growing.

Western allies want Israel to make a gesture that it still has a shred of humanity left. At various junctures during the slaughter, U.S. and European governments have disingenuously leveled criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians to keep their own populations at bay.

For instance, during the last U.S. presidential campaign, with a large number of Democrats condemning Israel for their actions, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris had to issue criticism of Israel while insincerely repeating that they were working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire.

This was fake because if the Biden or now Trump administrations really want to stop the killing they can do it almost immediately: tell Israel no more guns and money if the killing doesn’t stop.

The German authorities, who seem to relish the opportunity to enforce a new genocide, could do the same, as Germany is Israel’s second largest arms supplier after the U.S.



Losing on the PR Front

Whenever Western governments start feeling the heat they tell Israel to cool it for a while and stage some kind of show of humanitarian aid.

Israel usually complies because they are fighting two wars: one of ethnic cleansing and/or extermination of the Palestinians, and the other a public relations war with the Western public, particularly its youth.

As Consortium News reported last week, Israel is inviting over 500 delegations of social media influencers to tour Israel and learn the right message to spread to their millions of followers because Israel realizes it is losing the PR war.

The daily Haaretz reported:

“Foreign Ministry officials say the tour delivers significant media, advocacy, and diplomatic benefits – and represents a strategic shift, as traditional outreach is no longer sufficient to shape public opinion. … We’re working with influencers, sometimes with delegations of influencers. Their networks have huge followings, and their messages are more effective than if they came directly from the ministry.”

On Friday, Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement saying the Gaza “humanitarian catastrophe must end now.” They said Israel must “immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid.”

“The humanitarian catastrophe that we are witnessing in Gaza must end now,” the joint statement says. “Withholding essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.”

Italy separately said, “We can no longer accept carnage and famine.” Barack Obama chimed in too, also on Friday. On Monday, Donald Trump said: “There is real starvation in Gaza — you can’t fake that.”

France said it would recognize the State of Palestine, a step too far for Britain, Germany and Italy, and which the U.S. condemned.

These leaders’ consciences would be shocked if they indeed have a conscience. They’ve seen reports like this one from the BBC confirming that desperately starving people have been shot and killed as they try to reach the only food aid distribution points by the Israeli forces and private U.S. contractors.



And yet they keep sending 2,000 lbs. bombs and F-35 spare parts.

Nevertheless, Israel realizes it must win the PR war fought not against the Western leaders who back them, but against the Western public. (Western leaders are engaged in their own PR war with their people.) Thus on Sunday Israel announced it would begin an airlift of food into Gaza.

It’s surely part of a genocidal plan to occasionally respond to this criticism, hold some fire and make a big show of letting in aid before resuming the gruesome task. It sure makes finishing a genocide more difficult.

The Hard Part

For Israel this is the hard part: completing a genocide while making it look like you are not completing a genocide. In an age of mobile telephone cameras and wireless transmission of images from virtually anywhere by anyone, genocide while few are looking is a thing of the past.

One way to mislead the public is to kill at a pace intended to fool them into thinking there is more or less routine combat going on in Gaza and an unfortunate number of civilians are just being killed in the crossfire. (There was an uproar over the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week ignorantly reporting the deliberate murder of unarmed, starving civilians at the aid distribution points as having died in “the crossfire.”)

So Israel needs to keep the official daily death toll in Gaza to around 100. Don’t start wiping out entire encampments, killing thousands a day. Make it look more or less like a normal war. Leave doubt in people’s minds. Netanyahu did say this would take a very long time.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz openly says the plan is to concentrate the entire 2 million plus population of Gaza in a camp in the south to ready them for expulsion. And if Egypt and others refuse to take them? The rate of killing in this concentration camp may well explode if Western governments keep tolerating this evil.

But for now, the rate of killing allows a propagandist like Bret Stephens to argue in The New York Times that it can’t be genocide because the killing is too slow. He actually wrote this:

“If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war? It’s not that Israel lacks the capacity to have meted vastly greater destruction than what it has inflicted so far.”

Quick, somebody show the Genocide Convention to Stephens. It defines genocide in black and white:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Stephens falls prey to a common misconception of genocide, namely that it depends on the number of people killed. Acts must be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part.”

The hardest part of proving genocide is intent. Israeli leaders have provided folders full of statements of genocidal intent. It was then followed by actions that systematically destroyed the conditions of life for the Palestinians of Gaza.

One by one they wiped out the infrastructure of Palestinian culture and civilization: schools, universities, mosques, churches, museums, theaters, libraries, hospitals and incalculable residential buildings, while people were still living in them. There has been a wholesale assassination of journalists, artists, academics and doctors — and an imposed starvation.

This is textbook genocide.

The Big Lie sent out from Israel, parroted almost word-for-word by the likes of Stephens and Alan Dershowitz, Israel-defender supremo, and by an Israeli zealot who appeared on Piers Morgan’s show last, week with piercing, fanatical eyes is this: This is war, unfortunately civilians get killed and there is no army in the world that takes greater care to avoid civilian casualties than Israel’s, none.

The zealot with Morgan went a step further to say he was “proud” of the conduct of the IDF in Gaza, to which Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, also on the panel, said, “I’m sorry, only Nazis spoke like that.”

There is also a Big Truth. If Western governments and media repeated it and more crucially acted upon it, it would cause Israel to lose both wars: public relations and the elimination of the Palestinian people.

The world is waiting.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/07/28/g ... r-war-too/

******

Israel 'freezes' plans for concentration camp in southern Gaza: Report

International pressure is growing for Israel to end its effort to starve millions of Palestinians in Gaza

News Desk

JUL 28, 2025


(Photo credit: AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Israel's so-called “Humanitarian City” project, which was planned to be established on the ruins of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, has been frozen, Israeli media reported on 28 July.

“There is no decision to proceed with this, and there is no alternative plan. The political echelon was certain it was heading toward a hostage deal that included withdrawals in the southern Gaza Strip, so it seems they've abandoned this initiative – it's on hold for now,” a senior security source told Yedioth Ahronoth.

The project, described as a concentration camp in Palestinian and Israeli media, was intended to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to an isolated area near the Egyptian border. Gathering Palestinians there is seen as a first step to ethnically cleansing Gaza and forcing millions of Palestinians to flee to foreign countries as refugees.

Rather than fight Hamas, Israeli forces in Gaza are exerting most of their effort and resources to demolishing homes, residential buildings, and infrastructure to ensure displaced Palestinians have nowhere to return to.

The “Humanitarian City” project aimed to initially force some 600,000 Palestinians into an area between the Philadelphi and Morag axes on the ruins of Rafah.

Military reports estimated that its completion would take at least a year, which angered the Israeli cabinet.

The decision comes as Israel continues to severely restrict aid reaching Gaza, causing starvation and famine in the strip to worsen as a result.

Not only is there little media coverage, when there is the language is watered down to sound less extreme.

Call it what it is, a CONCENTRATION CAMP to hold Palestinians until they’re ETHNICALLY CLEANSED from Gaza.

This is GENOCIDE, what deserves more attention than that? pic.twitter.com/b4VbBlrkvT

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) July 9, 2025

The security source admitted that Israel had blocked aid deliveries to Gaza since last March for domestic political reasons, fearing the disintegration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition, despite warnings of the damage this would cause to Israel's global image.

Earlier this week, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich expressed his opposition to plans to slightly ease the blockade. “Not a single grain of wheat will enter Gaza,” he vowed.

Over the weekend, the Israeli military announced a series of so-called “humanitarian” measures.

These include controversial airdrops, limited daily “tactical pauses” in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm, and the opening of corridors for UN aid convoys.

Suwar was evacuated from Gaza & underwent 6 weeks of intensive medical attention & nutrition

But his weight only increased from 3kg to 3.9kg

It'll take months & months & he'll never fully recover. The damage already done!

That's what genocide by starvation looks like;… pic.twitter.com/Q0LCX9ZDZk

— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) July 27, 2025

Israel announced the measures in response to the backlash against its efforts to starve Palestinians in Gaza, which has intensified in recent days. A growing number of images of skeletal child corpses are circulating online, as the number of victims of Israel's blockade and siege of the strip continues to rise.

On Friday, a 5-month-old Palestinian baby suffering from malnutrition, Zeinab Abu Halib, died in her mother's arms, while doctors are running out of room inside hospitals as they try to treat starving patients.

Gaza's Ministry of Health announced on Monday that the number of Palestinians who have died from Israeli-induced starvation in the devastated enclave has risen to 147, including 88 children.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-fr ... aza-report

Is Europe pushing for Palestinian statehood or Palestinian surrender?

Europe’s belated recognition of Palestinian statehood is a naked geopolitical maneuver – part of a wider normalization push that sidelines Palestinian liberation, while repackaging defeat as diplomatic progress. Are we witnessing the birth of a state? Or the declaration of its defeat?


Malek al-Khoury

JUL 28, 2025


Photo Credit: The Cradle
Since its inception in 1948, Israel has never operated within fixed borders. Expansion has always been its doctrine – not constrained by law, but propelled by force and endorsed by unwavering western support. Israel has refused to define its boundaries for almost eight decades because its very identity is rooted in a colonial ambition that has never truly ended.

From the Nakba (Catastrophe) to the Naksa (Setback), from territorial invasions to the annexation of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, the occupation state has continued to redraw its borders according to power, not legitimacy.

This expansionist project has only grown stronger with the rise of the messianic-nationalist current inside Israel, which sees full control over “Greater Israel” as a historical right that cannot be compromised.

Today, 77 years since the Nakba, Israel has advanced to full-throttle expansion mode – dispossessing Palestinians, destroying entire towns and villages, entrenching illegal Jewish settlements, and enforcing apartheid. Yet paradoxically, European states like France and the UK are preparing to recognize a “Palestinian state” precisely when Palestinian political geography is at its most fragmented, and when the Zionist project is at its most aggressive.

So what does this recognition actually mean? Is it a strategic achievement for Palestinians, or a diplomatic ruse that rebrands surrender as success?

A state without borders, a project without restraint

The 1917 Balfour Declaration marked the formal launch of a settler-colonial project in Palestine. What followed was not immigration but calculated dispossession – from British-facilitated land seizures and massacres, to the mass expulsions of the 1948 Nakba, which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians.

This was not mere colonialism. It was ethnic replacement: Land was seized under imperial protection, then militarily conquered. This campaign never ended. It continued with the occupation of Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, and escalated after 1967. Israel's goal has never been coexistence. It has always been Jewish supremacy.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) granted over 55 percent of historic Palestine to the Zionist movement, despite Jews owning just six percent of the land. The Zionist movement accepted this on paper to gain international legitimacy, then immediately violated its terms, occupying 78 percent of the territory by force.

To this day, the occupation state has not adopted a formal constitution, and the reason is that basing itself on the Partition Plan would have constrained its expansionist ambitions. The Zionist doctrine never recognized final borders, instead establishing a state with no official frontiers – because its ambitions stretch beyond Palestinian geography to include parts of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.

The internal debate in Israel over declaring a “Jewish state” is not merely a legal argument, but an attempt to solidify an exclusionary and replacement-based identity – one that legally enshrines racial discrimination and denies Palestinians their status as an indigenous people.

Resistance realignment: 7 October and the Two-State shift

The earthquake triggered by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood shook not only Israel but also the political discourse of the Palestinian movement. Strikingly, Palestinian factions – including Hamas – have begun explicitly voicing support for the “Two-State Solution” after years of insisting on liberating historic Palestine in its entirety.

In an unprecedented statement, senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya said in May 2024:

“We are ready to engage positively with any serious initiative for a two-state solution, provided it entails a real Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital and without settlements.”

This tactical adaptation signals a significant shift. After decades of insisting on full liberation, key Palestinian actors are now openly considering a truncated state. Is this a reflection of changing power dynamics? Or an imposed realignment under regional and international duress?

Recognition as Leverage: France, Saudi Arabia, and normalization

Last week, in a post on X, French President Emmanuel Macron said:

“Consistent with its historic commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, I have decided that France will recognize the State of Palestine. I will make this solemn announcement before the United Nations General Assembly this coming September … We need an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and massive humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza. We must also ensure the demilitarization of Hamas, secure and rebuild Gaza. And finally, we must build the State of Palestine, guarantee its viability, and ensure that by accepting its demilitarization and fully recognizing Israel, it contributes to the security of all in the region. There is no alternative.”

France's anticipated recognition of a Palestinian state in September is not driven by principle, but is a hard, cold geopolitical maneuver. It would appear that Paris is seeking closer ties with Riyadh, which has tethered normalization with Tel Aviv to progress on the Palestinian file. French recognition is thus a calculated signal to Saudi Arabia – not a gesture of solidarity with Palestinians.

In this equation, Palestine becomes currency. Its statehood is not affirmed as a right, but dangled as a precondition in normalization deals between Arab monarchies and the occupation state.

Strategic alignments: The Ankara–London Axis

With a third of MPs calling on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to recognize Palestine, pressure is also piling on London.

In a statement, Starmer said:

“Alongside our closest allies, I am working on a pathway to peace in the region, focused on the practical solutions that will make a real difference to the lives of those that are suffering in this war. That pathway will set out the concrete steps needed to turn the ceasefire so desperately needed, into a lasting peace. Recognition of a Palestinian state has to be one of those steps. I am unequivocal about that.”

Britain, too, is not moving toward recognition out of moral clarity, but to reinforce its post-Brexit strategic axis with Turkiye. Ankara, a key trading partner of Israel and political backer of Hamas, views the recognition of Palestine as a tool to elevate its regional stature and energy leverage. For London, deepening ties with Turkiye promises economic and geopolitical dividends. The result is a converging Paris–Riyadh and Ankara–London recognition track.

Thus, two informal axes are forming: Paris–Riyadh and Ankara–London, both converging on the recognition of a Palestinian state. Yet neither axis approaches it from a principled belief in Palestinian rights, but rather through the lens of power, influence, and realpolitik.

The Palestinian state: Recognition without sovereignty

Even if every European country were to recognize Palestine, it would amount to little more than symbolism without enforcement. There would be no defined borders for the state, no control over its own territory, and no halt to the settlement expansion or annexation policies pursued by the occupation state.

Tel Aviv rejects the premise entirely. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that any future Palestinian state would be “a platform to destroy Israel,” and that sovereign security control must remain with Israel. He has repeatedly ruled out a return to the conditions that existed prior to 7 October.

The reality is that 68 percent of the West Bank, classified as Area C, remains under full Israeli control. More than 750,000 settlers are embedded across that territory, under the full protection of the occupation army. How can a state exist on occupied, fragmented land, under constant siege, and without sovereignty?

“I’ve just returned from a lecture tour around the world, and I can confidently say Israel’s global image and position are at their lowest point in history,” writes Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini.

Yet despite this, Netanyahu’s far-right government is doubling down - pushing for full annexation of the occupied West Bank, eyeing new territorial footholds in Sinai, southern Syria, even Jordan, while maintaining military positions in south Lebanon.

Israel’s global brand may be eroding, but its strategic project is advancing.

If Israel is expanding and entrenching, while the Palestinian movement scales back demands and regional states normalize ties, what exactly has been achieved?

Resistance factions that once rejected Tel Aviv’s existence now propose statehood on its terms. European recognition comes with no teeth. Settlements grow. Displacement continues. This is not liberation. It is the burial of the dream under the guise of diplomacy.

The interim solution will become the final arrangement. The Palestinian “state” becomes a diplomatic euphemism – an empty structure praised in speeches, but denied on the ground.

https://thecradle.co/articles/is-europe ... -surrender

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They Intend To Keep Lying About Gaza Until They’ve Emptied It Out

The fact that Israel and its supporters tried to blame the UN and Hamas for Israel’s extensively documented starvation campaign makes it clear that these freaks intend to keep lying about this thing until the last dying gasp of the last Palestinian.

Caitlin Johnstone
July 27, 2025

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We’re back at the part of the news cycle where Israel tells the world it’s going to allow a bit more aid into Gaza in order to mollify its allies and reduce the public outcry as images of starving children draw objections from the west.

This is just Israel giving the Kier Starmers and Anthony Albaneses of the western world just enough of an excuse to go silent about the starvation of Gaza again. They will then continue starving Gaza. This psychopathic python-like suffocation tactic is how Israel has gotten Gaza to the point it’s at now.

And of course it’s worth noting that Israel’s announcement that it will allow more food into Gaza so people don’t starve completely debunks all its claims these last few days that people in Gaza are starving because of Hamas and the UN. They’re starving because Israel is starving them.

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Israeli officials have told The New York Times that there has never been any evidence of Hamas stealing aid from UN trucks in any significant way, a claim Israel and its apologists have been falsely asserting for two years. They lie about everything. They never stop lying.

We’ve been asked to believe a lot of intensely stupid narratives throughout this genocide, but “it’s actually HAMAS who’s starving Gaza” has got to be the dumbest one yet. The fact that Israel and its supporters tried to blame the UN and Hamas for Israel’s extensively documented starvation campaign makes it clear that these freaks intend to keep lying about this thing until the last dying gasp of the last Palestinian.

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Gideon Levy has a new article out titled “Denying Gaza’s Starvation Is No Less Vile Than Denying the Holocaust”. Personally I’d take it much further and say it’s vastly worse than denying the Holocaust, because it’s helping to kill people right this very moment.

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I’m sorry if this is antisemitic but I think it’s wrong to deliberately starve thousands of children to death.

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If you found out someone was trapping small children in a confined space and then intentionally starving them to death, what words would you use to describe that person?

Think about how fucked up you’d need to be inside to starve a baby, or to support someone who is doing so. Think how many millennia of evolutionary conditioning you’d have to override as a human, as a primate, as a mammal, to stifle the screaming you feel inside when you see a skeletal infant. You’d have to make yourself less of a human inside to support the inhumanity.

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The worst thing Donald Trump has ever done is commit genocide in Gaza. Everything else pales in comparison. He could end the Gaza holocaust with a phone call just like Biden could have, and he hasn’t. For that reason alone he deserves to die in a cage.

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Children’s Youtube star Ms Rachel has announced that she won’t be working with anyone who doesn’t publicly oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The thing I love about Ms Rachel is that nobody was pushing her to speak out about Gaza. Not one person was out here saying “Ms Rachel’s silence on Rafah is deafening!” She could’ve gotten away with being silent on Gaza forever and suffered no professional consequences, but she spoke out anyway because she’s a genuinely good person.

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Today I got my first comment telling me I was wrong to oppose Israel in October 2023 but now I’m right because things have changed. I expect to receive many more such comments going forward as people navigate the difficult cognitive dissonance terrain of realizing they’ve been wrong this entire time.

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Israel apologists love using circular reasoning to dismiss outlets and organizations which criticize Israel. If you’ve ever argued with them online you know what I’m talking about.

It’s basically this — 

Normal person: Here’s evidence of Israel doing bad things.

Israel apologist: You can’t cite THAT outlet! That outlet is Hamas propaganda!

Normal person: What? What makes them Hamas propaganda?

Israel apologist: They’re always saying Israel does bad things!

Or this — 

Normal person: Israel is committing genocide.

Israel apologist: Nuh-uh, that’s blood libel.

Normal person: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN human rights experts all say it’s genocide.

Israel apologist: Those groups are antisemitic!

Normal person: What? Why do you say that?

Israel apologist: They’re always spreading antisemitic lies about Israel!

Normal person: Such as?

Israel apologist: Such as saying Israel is committing genocide!

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Everyone spreading lies today to help Israel carry out the final stages of its final solution knows exactly what they’re doing. We see you, you sick fucks. We’ll remember you forever.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/07 ... ed-it-out/