Welcome to Andy Worthington

An update on the dire situation in the Gaza Strip, after 1,012 days of genocide, as the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis continues to make a mockery of the ceasefire declared nine months ago, and as competing visions for Gaza’s future seek to exclude the Palestinians from having any meaningful say in their existence. On the ground in Gaza, the situation remains dire, with communicable diseases spreading, huge numbers of Palestinians with pre-existing medical conditions deprived of necessary medicine and medical equipment, and fuel shortages forcing hospitals to use recycled vehicle oil to power generators, leading to regular life-threatening power cuts. Meanwhile, Israel continues to expand its line of military control in Gaza, moving from roughly 50% at the time of the ceasefire, marked by a “Yellow Line”, from which it was supposed to steadily withdraw, to 60%, and, since the distractions of the war on Iran and Israel’s war on Lebanon, to around 70% via a new “Orange Line” that is cutting off an ever-increasing number of Palestinians from their homes. The only solution offered, however, is no less dire — the emergence, in Rafah, of a planned “concentration camp” of sterile, identikit prefabricated housing units in a fenced compound overseen by armed soldiers in elevated surveillance towers, to which entry will only be allowed to those who submit to security screening, and with no guarantees that they will be allowed to leave. As Israel and the US insists on Hamas disarming before any further progress can be made, the only good news is that Hamas unexpectedly announced last week that they were dissolving their government, in place since 2007, to hand over power to the Palestinian-led National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), which was supposed to take over the day-to-day running of Gaza (and the handing over of weapons) under the ceasefire deal, but whose entry into Gaza has been prevented by Israel for the last nine months. Will this work? I certainly hope so, because, otherwise, the future for the Palestinians appears to be one aimed solely at “disarming the Palestinian resistance and the abandoning of the struggle for Palestinian national liberation”, as Drop Site News described it. As I state in my conclusion, “It is dispiriting enough that the Palestinians continue to be punished for being victims of a genocide, while the aggressors remain, apparently, above reproach. For the Palestinians to be politically erased after all they have endured, and for Israel to be rewarded for its monstrous depravity, would be an outcome of unprecedented injustice, an inversion of morality so grave that it would be as though, at the end of the Second World War, the Nazis were rewarded for having created Auschwitz.”

21 photos from, and my report about the 42nd “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around Wednesday July 1, 2026. In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the proximity of this month’s vigils to July 4, and, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which was meant to bring to an end the 13 colonies’ subjection to the executive tyranny of the British government and King George III. As I explain, however, 250 years later, the continuing existence of Guantánamo makes a mockery of those claims, as it is, fundamentally, a place where the law has rarely applied, and where the 15 men still held — and all those held previously — owe their detention to the same exercise of executive tyranny that the Founding Fathers sought to overthrow in 1776, but this time around implemented by the US government under four successive presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Marking 1,000 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, I examine how recognition of the genocide developed in the first few months of Israel’s unprecedented and relentless violent assault on Gaza, run through some of the almost innumerable horrors that took place until the ceasefire was declared last October, and examine the numerous distortions of history and the history of warfare that Israel has used to try to justify its attacks. I focus in particular on the most egregious lie of all — that it all started on October 7, when, of course, for 75 years (now 78), Israel had been “engaged in the persistent and violent occupation of Palestinian land, the dispossession of its people, an apartheid regime of dehumanization, mass arbitrary imprisonment, and stupefyingly persistent murder.” I also discuss the validity of referring to Gaza as a death camp, with all the connotations that carries, because, although it lacks the Nazis’ machinery of industrial slaughter, that has been replaced by sustained aerial bombing of unparalleled intensity. In every other sense, Gaza is clearly a death camp, its population unable to leave, even if they wished to, for most of the last 33 months, a situation that also exposes as a lie Israel’s claim that it is seeking the “voluntary migration” of the population. I conclude by noting that, despite the ceasefire last October, Israel’s ongoing stranglehold on supplies, and the ever-deteriorating conditions in Gaza, confirm that it is still a death camp, and I lament how, shamefully, even after 1,000 days, there appears to be no exit route from Israel’s ongoing genocide.

In the last of three articles (two here, and one on Substack), about the recent concerted assault on the direct action group Palestine Action in the UK courts, I follow up on my first article, about the sentencing of the Filton 4 last Friday, with a detailed analysis of how the judge, Mr. Justice Johnson, was able to sentence the four activists for terrorism, when they weren’t convicted of terrorism by the jury in their retrial. As with the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, which was upheld by the Court of Appeal on Monday, and which drew extensively on the shameful redefining of terrorism to include “serious damage to property” in the Terrorism Act 2000, Mr. Justice Johnson’s legal subterfuge also involved focusing on deeply contentious legislation; in this case, Priti Patel’s Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021. Prior to the passage of the 2021 Act, judges were empowered, after a conviction by a jury, to deliver an aggravated sentence if the crimes for which defendants were convicted were determined to have a terrorist connection. That specifically meant crimes that included murder, a number of explosives offences, hijacking, hostage-taking and serious aviation offences, but in the 2021 Act Priti Patel arranged for it to be expanded to include any offence that carries a maximum penalty of more than two years’ imprisonment, and this was what was used by Mr. Justice Johnson, the biased judge in the case of the Filton 4, to augment their sentences after they were only convicted of criminal damage. The big question now, for anyone concerned with justice in the UK, is how we get Priti Patel’s absurd expansion of judicial powers involving augmented sentencing removed before another group of people who are not terrorists, and haven’t been convicted of terrorism, meet the same twisted judicial fate.

My analysis of yesterday’s dispiriting but ultimately predictable ruling by the Court of Appeal in London, reinstating the government’s proscription, as a terrorist organization, of the stunningly successful direct action group Palestine Action, which has been extraordinarily tenacious in its efforts to destroy or disable genocidal weapons produced in the UK by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company. The proscription was ruled unlawful by the High Court, in February, in a judicial review, initiated by Huda Ammori, one of Palestine Action’s two co-founders, on two counts — one involving legally technical issues relating to home secretary Yvette Cooper’s powers to proscribe, and the other relating to issues of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly under the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court stuck down both, in what was a very “pro-establishment” ruling, full of deference for the home secretary, and for the “expertise” of the intelligence services and the police, and insistent in its portrayal of Palestine Action as a shadowy, covert terrorist organization, operating via secretive “cells.” The biggest problem with the proscription, however, lies not with the courts, but with the Labour government of Tony Blair, which, in the Terrorism Act 2000, defined one aspect of terrorism as involving “serious damage to property.” As a group of UN Special Rapporteurs explained last July, when Palestine Action was proscribed, “While there is no binding definition of terrorism in international law, best practice international standards limit terrorism to criminal acts intended to cause death, serious personal injury or hostage taking”, not mere “damage to property.” As lawyers start working on an appeal, I hope that there will be increased scrutiny of the overreach of the Terrorism Act 2000, to redress a situation whereby those who, like the Palestine Action activists, are inspired by their consciences to cause damage to weapons for use in a genocide, are regarded as terrorists. If these activists are to be tried, they should be tried solely for criminal damage, and they should also be allowed to be acquitted by jurors on the basis of their own consciences, a long tradition that, in these fevered authoritarian times, when the establishment is doing all it can to protect Israel and to continue enabling its genocide, the judicial system has also sought to suppress.

Photos from, and my report about the 41st monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around June 3, 2026. In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the importance of remembering Guantánamo (which is so largely forgotten) via my interpretation of a well-known quote — “In a time of universal deceit, even the act of remembering is a revolutionary act.” I also discuss how the original quote — “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — is more significant than at any other time in most of our lifetimes, with a US president who dismisses the truth as “fake news”, and with western governments and mainstream media outlets insisting that a genocide is “self-defense” and that those undertaking it are the “children of light” fighting the “children of darkness.”

Marking the 41st anniversary, today, of the Battle of the Beanfield, when the British state undertook the most savage assault on unarmed civilians in modern British history. On June 1, 1985, riot police from six counties cornered a vastly-outnumbered convoy of vehicles seeking to make their way to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, in fields around the ancient sun temple on Salisbury Plain, and “decommissioned” them with extreme violence, brutally assaulting the men and women of the convoy, terrorizing their children, destroying their live-in vehicles, and making 537 arrests in total. As part of the necessary act of remembering acts of state violence that those responsible would prefer to keep hidden, I wrote a book about the Beanfield, published in 2005, which is still in print, and which followed on from an earlier book, ’Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion’, a social history of Stonehenge, in which the Beanfield featured prominently, and which is also still in print. Marking today’s anniversary, I revisit the history of the free festival and traveller movements that led up to the Beanfield, trace its impact on the communities involved, and also draw an important line from the draconian legislation that followed the Beanfield, undermining travellers’ rights, and our right to gather freely, through further legislation in the ‘90s, after the British counter-culture refused to accept Thatcher’s edict that all dissent was forbidden, through to the huge increase in even more draconian legislation in recent years, aimed primarily at climate activists, and, most recently, those taking direct action against Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, who, alarmingly, have, as a result, been designated as a terrorist organization by the Labour government.

In my new article, I focus on Israel’s ferociously genocidal defense minister Israel Katz, who I describe as having become “the epitome of relentless genocidal intent” since his appointment in November 2024, obsessed with describing everyone who opposes Israel as comprising “nests of terror” to be violently eliminated, and backing extreme and exterminatory violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, as well as hoping for the mass ethnic cleansing of the surviving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I compare and contrast Katz with Yoav Gallant, who he replaced as defense minister, and run through Gallant’s often significant disagreements with Netanyahu that led to his sacking. I also examine how, although both Netanyahu and Gallant’s words and actions justified the issuing of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court — ironically, just after Gallant was sacked — Israel Katz’s words and actions confirm that the beleaguered ICC should also issue an arrest warrant for him, along with Bezalel Smotrich (who the Court is currently pursuing) and the monstrous Itamar Ben-Gvir, the master of Israel’s repugnant torture prisons, who has somehow still evaded official condemnation. I also examine disturbing new revelations of Israel’s unending obsession with vengeance for the October 7 attacks, via a special task force set up, as I describe it, “to scrutinize every video and photo on social media, and messages on phones, to locate and eliminate anyone involved in any way with the events of October 7, including through the use of facial recognition software, and, most disturbingly, through the interrogation of Palestinians seized on the day and held in Israeli prisons under brutal conditions, including the use of torture, which would render any confessions they make fundamentally unreliable.” Sadly, as Israel uses this task force — of death squads — to target and kill surviving Hamas leaders in Gaza, suggesting that they are unilaterally breaking with the demands from Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Hamas’ disarmament, it seems clear that Israel’s fanatical obsession with genocidal mass murder, supremacist colonial expansion and endless vengeance shows no sign of ending, and, instead, just grinds on and on and on.

My detailed analysis of the current situation in the Gaza Strip, after Nickolay Mladenov, a former UN official and the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, insisted that no reconstruction will take place in Gaza without the complete disarmament of Hamas, even though Hamas never agreed to that, and even though the humanitarian situation in Gaza, as controlled by Israel, remains dire. The leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian factions only agreed to the ceasefire last October on the basis that a particular requirement of the first phase of the deal — the regular delivery of adequate humanitarian aid to support the surviving population — would be confirmed before discussion would begin on a second phase, including disarmament. The delivery of aid has, however, been woefully and deliberately inadequate, and the demand for Hamas’ disarmament has also run up against a refusal by the Israelis to allow the entry into Gaza of the members of the Palestinian technocratic committee appointed under the “Board of Peace” to undertake the day-to-day running of Gaza, to whom Hamas were prepared to hand over most of their weapons. Instead, the Palestinians are being sidelined, and are then being blamed for not fulfilling obligations that they never agreed to, as their hopes for Palestinian sovereignty are ignored, and Mladenov’s actions appear only to take account of Israel’s interests. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he seems to be entrenching a jaw-droppingly unacceptable warping of the history of the last 31 months in which Hamas are perceived as the only aggressor, and Israel’s responsibility for an ongoing genocide is cynically swept aside.

Comparing and contrasting ongoing efforts by the international legal community to hold Israel to account for its war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, as Israel itself sinks deeper into extralegal depravity, I discuss how the beleaguered International Criminal Court (ICC) is reportedly seeking an arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right Minister of Finance in Netanyahu’s coalition government, following the ground-breaking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024, which triggered a witch hunt against chief prosecutor Karim Khan KC, involving what appears to have been a confected sexual misconduct scandal. Unfortunately, other arrest warrants have not yet materialized — especially for Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right Kahanist thug who is the Minister of National Security, and is responsible for Israel’s reviled prison system for Palestinians, where the torture, abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners has become normalized since October 7, 2023. Ben-Gvir is also the most vocal supporter, within the government, of sickening new laws approving the death penalty for Palestinians, including, most recently, a law authorizing the creation of a special military tribunal to prosecute the Palestinians, between 250 and 400 in number, who were seized in Israel on October 7. Israel’s military courts for Palestinians have long been condemned for their fundamental bias and unfairness, the use of so-called “evidence” derived through the use of torture, and a conviction rate that is close to 100%, but the new tribunal, while entrenching this fundamental lawlessness, will also be empowered to deliver the death penalty. I compare the plans with the military commissions at Guantánamo, introduced by Dick Cheney, who had the same intentions, but was rapidly derailed by internal dissent from principled prosecutors who refused to take part in “show trials” using torture evidence to deliver the death penalty. Israel, however, has no such compunctions, as its long history of unfair trials, and its generally corrupted and compliant judiciary reveals, but, as I note, “If its special military tribunal goes ahead, it will only open Israel up to global confirmation of how it is prepared, with gleefully vindictive enthusiasm, to sacrifice all notions of justice on the altar of vengeance.”