It’s Official: UN Declares Catastrophic Famine Conditions in Gaza; Israel Still Denies It
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Today, in an extraordinary declaration, delivered from Geneva with articulate, controlled fury and indignation, Tom Fletcher, a British diplomat, and, since October last year, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, confirmed to the world what has been increasingly apparent over the last six months: that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, that this is an “entirely man-made” disaster, deliberately engineered by the State of Israel, and that it can and must be “halted and reversed”, via an immediate ceasefire “to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip.”
According to the devastating new report by the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which Fletcher was presenting to the world, 514,000 people, roughly a quarter of Gaza’s surviving population, are experiencing famine, with the number rising to 641,000 by the end of September unless immediate action is taken.
The IPC sets stringent conditions on the evidence required for a famine to be declared. Famine (Phase 5) requires an area to have 20% of households facing an extreme food shortage, 30% of children to be acutely malnourished, and two adult non-trauma deaths or four child non-trauma deaths for every 10,000 people to be taking place every day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”
Israel Murders Anas Al-Sharif to Create a Media Blackout For Its Imminent Annihilation of Gaza City
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UPDATE: Please free free to check out my one-hour interview with Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, recorded on August 13, in which we discussed the targeted murder of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues, Israel’s war on journalists and its persistent lies, as well as the self-inflicted problems created by the British government following its proscription of Palestine Action, a direct action group, as a terrorist organization.
Yesterday, at around 11.35pm, in a deliberate targeted attack on the press tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Israel murdered the whole of the remaining crew of Al Jazeera Arabic in northern Gaza — the journalists Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, the cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, and an assistant, Moamen Aliwa. Also killed was a freelance journalist, Mohammed al-Khaldi, and Al-Sharif’s teenage nephew Musab, who had hoped to follow in his uncle’s footsteps.
My heart sank when I read the news last night. Al-Sharif, 28, was probably the most hard-working journalist in history, relentlessly chronicling the genocide for 22 months with barely a break. It’s unimaginable how, hurrying from one atrocity to another, repeatedly reporting on shattered bodies and erased families, and always enveloped by the smell of blood, he carried on working.
Well known in the Arabic-speaking world, and with millions of followers on social media, where he posted in both Arabic and English, Al-Sharif, who leaves a wife and two young children he adored, kept going even though he must have known that his days were numbered. He was the last of the tireless and ever-visible Al Jazeera journalists, surviving as his closest friends and colleagues were picked off one by one — journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami Al-Rifi, who were killed on July 31, 2024, cameraman Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was paralyzed after an attack on October 9, 2024, and Hossam Shabat, who was targeted and murdered on March 24 this year.
Despite Condemnation of Mass Starvation in Gaza, Israel Steps Up Its Extermination and Plans to Annex the Whole of Gaza and the West Bank
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For a moment, there seemed to be hope.
After 21 months of Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza, and the relentless flow of photos and videos of shredded babies, children and adults, which somehow failed to stir any noticeable outrage from the majority of those with power and influence in the west, photos last week of starving children in Gaza finally prompted a tsunami of criticism and even condemnation from world leaders, the mainstream media and prominent individuals worldwide.
In response, Israel reluctantly promised to lift some aspects of the genocidal siege it imposed on the whole of the Gaza Strip on March 1, claiming that it would allow airdrops of food (by Jordan and the UAE), and that it would create safe humanitarian corridors for aid deliveries by the UN and other aid organizations, while ceasing military activities for ten hours a day in three regions of Gaza.
This sounded positive. The recovering Zionist Shaiel Ben-Ephraim wrote on X that an IDF source had told him, “Everything we have done in the last few months has failed. The government has finally realized that. The pictures broadcast around the world have weakened our hand and strengthened Hamas.”
Horror As Israel Implements the “Mass Death” Phase of Its Genocide in Gaza Through the Deliberate Starvation of the Entire Population
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It hardly seemed possible, when a six-week ceasefire began in Gaza in January, after 15 and a half months of the most horrendous war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions undertaken by the State of Israel against the trapped Palestinian population, that the situation could get worse.
However, since the start of March, when Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire deal without any justification whatsoever, the situation has indeed become worse, to such an extent that it is now appropriate to regard what is happening in Gaza as the “mass death” phase of Israel’s genocide.
Three particular developments have led to the current situation.
The first of these began on March 2, when Israel imposed a sustained siege on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel in Gaza, which has been deeper and even longer-lasting than the initial siege imposed in response to the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, when, notoriously, defense minister Yoav Gallant stated, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Israel Cries “War Crimes” as a Hospital is Hit by Iran, While Sickeningly Ignoring its Genocidal 20-Month “War” on Gaza’s Hospitals
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In Iranian attacks on Israel yesterday, as part of its ongoing retaliation for Israel’s initial unprovoked attacks a week ago and its repeatedly ongoing aggression, an Iranian missile reportedly struck the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, the largest hospital in southern Israel.
Iranian sources claimed that, rather than striking the hospital, they had struck two military targets nearby, “the Israeli Defense Forces’ Command and Intelligence (IDF C4I) headquarters, as well as a military intelligence facility located in the Gav-Yam Technology Park.” The hospital is located between the two sites, and, according to Iran, “sustained minor damage from the blast shockwave.”
Israel disputed this, claiming that it was a direct attack, and footage showing a plume of smoke rising from the caved-in top of the building would seem to vindicate their analysis.
However, even if the hospital was directly hit, a third possibility has not been addressed. According to reports, a barrage of 20 to 30 Iranian missiles were aimed at the Beersheba area and other targets, so it may be that, while targeting and hitting the military targets, another missile inadvertently fell on the hospital.
Israel’s Attack on Iran Marks the Pinnacle of Netanyahu’s Long and Deranged Obsession with Seeking Israeli Security Through Endless War
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In the last week, Benjamin Netanyahu has opened up a fifth front in his claimed efforts to ensure the safety of Israel, launching an unprovoked attack on Iran on the basis of claims — which he has been making for the last 30 years — that Iran was close to establishing a viable nuclear weapons program.
No evidence exists to suggest that Netanyahu is correct. Just three months ago, in testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed that the United States intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
In addition, US negotiators were engaged in active discussions with the Iranians regarding their nuclear program when Israel launched its unprovoked attack. These had been taking place since April 12, with a sixth round of talks scheduled for Sunday June 15, but these talks were, of course, scuppered by Israel’s actions.
600 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Has Humanity’s Light Been Forever Extinguished?
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Today, May 28, marks the 600th day of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, a milestone of such shame and horror that the words to describe it adequately don’t even exist.
In the last six days, since my most recent article, Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies, the growing discomfort with Israel’s increasingly savage treatment of the Palestinians over the last three months has not led to any of the “concrete actions” threatened by the UK, France and Canada in a strongly-worded statement, and has not lifted the starvation blockade condemned by 22 foreign ministers.
Instead, after Netanyahu barked insults in response, accusing Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of supporting Hamas, and ignoring the 22 foreign ministers’ entreaties to “allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza immediately and enable the UN and humanitarian organizations to work independently and impartially to save lives, reduce suffering and maintain dignity”, Israel has continued its merciless and unsupportable military attacks, still killing, on average, a hundred people a day — almost all civilians — and, yesterday, imposing a new humanitarian aid delivery system that immediately collapsed into violence.
The deaths over the last week have been horrific, including the bombing of a former school, where displaced families were sheltering, which led to dozens of deaths, and a grimly iconic image of the silhouette of a young girl, engulfed in flames, seeking to escape the inferno, and the targeting of the home of a renowned paediatric surgeon, Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, killing nine of her ten children, whose charred bodies were delivered to Nasser Hospital while she was on duty.
Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies
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In international relations, when your “friend” treats you with arrogant condescension, you have to calibrate your response based on your power relationship with them. If that “friend” is the US, then rocking the boat too much might have serious repercussions, but when your “friend” is Israel, a country that wouldn’t even exist without your economic backing, and which has been demanding and receiving “ironclad” and unconditional support for a 19-month long genocidal assault on a territory it has illegally occupied for the last 58 years and is now threatening to exterminate completely, not responding, in the end, seems to be nothing more than succumbing to patterns of bullying and abuse.
Since its blood-soaked founding in 1948, when it killed 15,000 Palestinians and expelled 750,000 others, Israel — with the support of the US and other countries in the west — has been allowed to carve out for itself an exceptionalism that has enabled it to consistently subvert international law without ever being held to account.
Despite illegally occupying the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, imposing a horrendous system of apartheid, strangling Gaza and illegally colonizing the West Bank, repeatedly murdering Palestinians with impunity and establishing a prison system of exceptional brutality and lawlessness, its status as the world’s pre-eminent victim, because of the Holocaust, has allowed it to behave like an indulged sociopathic teenager, or as an entire nation of indulged sociopathic teenagers.
Unparalleled Depravity as Israel Implements Its “Final Solution” for Gaza
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On the night of May 15, and throughout the darkest hours of the morning of May 16, the genocidal State of Israel, as it promised ten days before, launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan that is nothing less than its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, a plan as inhuman and depraved as the “final solution” that the Nazis approved for the “Jewish problem” at the Wannsee Conference in Germany in January 1942, which led, in the years that followed, to the industrial-scale expansion of extermination camps.
It ought to be inconceivable that this is happening, because, for 15 and a half months, from October 2023 to January this year, Israel had already been engaged in relentless genocidal assaults on the trapped civilian population in Gaza, in which almost the whole of the built environment was destroyed with Hiroshima-like fury, and at least 50,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
For six weeks, from January 19 until March 1, the ceaseless slaughter and destruction seemed to have finally come to an end, via a ceasefire deal in which the bombing stopped and humanitarian aid resumed, and Israeli hostages, seized on October 7, 2023, were exchanged for around 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.
Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza
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Israel’s latest plan for the Gaza Strip, approved by the Security Cabinet on May 5, has, astonishingly, managed to plumb new depths of screamingly illegal depravity in a 19-month genocidal campaign in which screamingly illegal depravity has, from the very beginning, been the norm.
The new plan, which theoretically aims “to destroy Hamas and rescue [the] remaining hostages” seized on October 7, 2023, has four main components: firstly, the permanent military occupation of the Gaza Strip; secondly, the forced displacement of the entire surviving population to a small portion of land in south; thirdly, the conversion of that small portion of land into a concentration camp; and, fourthly, the illusion of “voluntary migration”, behind which extermination — via direct killing, starvation and, probably most potently, medical neglect through the almost complete destruction of medical supplies and equipment — will continue until everyone is dead.
This isn’t how it’s being described in news reports, because it’s a truth that eludes most mainstream journalists and their editors, who have been cowed into submission by pro-Israeli bias for so long now that they have forgotten that their job is supposed to entail them analyzing information rather than simply regurgitating it unquestioningly.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
