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UPDATE: On August 5, I spoke to Chris Cook for his Gorilla Radio show in Canada, about this article, and about the ongoing persecution of Palestine Action activists and their supporters in the UK. Listen to the whole show on Substack here. I’m in the second half-hour; Yves Engler in the first.

The world’s media has briefly remembered the beleaguered Gaza Strip today, after Donald Trump claimed, in a post on his inaptly-named Truth Social account, that the Board of Peace — the body set up under his administration last October to supervise the future of Gaza — has “reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all the other armed groups in Gaza”, which he described as “a monumental step towards lasting PEACE and SECURITY”, and “a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government that will work closely with the Board of Peace to help the Palestinian people.”

“At the same time”, he added, “Israel will have the security it deserves, with Gaza no longer used as a base for terror attacks.”

To briefly summarize the situation to date, last October, after two years of genocide, in which at least 70,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) had been killed, a ceasefire was negotiated whereby Hamas and the other armed factions in Gaza agreed to hand over the remaining Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023, in exchange for an end to Israeli hostilities, the withdrawal of their forces to a “Yellow Line”, behind which they retained military control of around 53% of Gaza, and the provision of adequate humanitarian aid for the surviving population, set at 600 trucks a day.

While Hamas faithfully adhered to its obligations, Israel did not. In at least 3,500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, it has killed around 1,300 Palestinians, has expanded its control of Gaza to around 70%, and has failed to allow in anything even vaguely resembling the agreed amount of humanitarian aid.

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On Sunday evening (July 19), a group of some of the most repulsive, ghoulish people on the face of the earth marched towards the perimeter fence separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world to declare their intention to re-colonize Gaza, to re-establish three Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when, under Ariel Sharon, 21 settlements in total were abandoned, occupied, at the time, by 8,000 Israeli settlers.

These fanatical Israeli settlers, on what was billed as the “March of Thousands”, although only a few hundred people attended, were led by the two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government — Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who is in charge of Israel’s prisons, which, for Palestinians, have become a gulag of torture facilities since October 7, 2023, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, and also the minister in charge of settlement affairs within the Defense Ministry, who has played a huge role in the ever-growing, and ever more violent expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Speaking at the rally, Ben Gvir said, “If someone had said three years ago that we would control 70% of the Gaza Strip, no one would have believed it. So today I say: there will be Jewish settlement throughout Gaza. We are returning home. Gaza is ours.”

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While the attention of the conscious world is, quite correctly, focused right now on Rakefet Prison, an underground detention facility inside Israel’s maximum-security Ramla Prison Complex, where the pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is held without charge or trial, brutalized and in fear of death, it’s important not to forget that, in the Gaza Strip, the surviving Palestinian population is still suffering from an acute and enduring humanitarian crisis.

The crisis is engineered solely by the State of Israel, which has failed to abide by the requirement, in the ceasefire deal agreed last October, to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid — containing, at a bare minimum, adequate supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies — to enter Gaza every day.

Insight into the humanitarian crisis can be found via regular updates issued by UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), established in 1950, which remains the largest provider of educational and health support to the Palestinians, despite persistent efforts by Israel to destroy it.

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Today marks 1,000 days of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, in which, at the most conservative estimate, almost a quarter of a million people have been killed or wounded. On June 29, Gaza’s shattered Health Ministry reported that the death toll stood at 73,058, and the numbers of those injured stood at 173,488, many of them gravely so.

These figures are devastating enough, as they constitute a death toll of 73 people every single day over the last 33 months, but they are, without any doubt, a serious undercount. The real death toll is at least double that figure, and maybe more, as I establish in my notes at the end of this article.

In addition, as was revealed last August, an official Israeli military intelligence database, keeping tabs on how many suspected militants had been killed in Gaza, revealed that, according the military’s own figures, only 17% of those killed in Gaza were assessed as having been militants: in other words, 83% were civilians, a figure that, as I discussed in my analysis at the time, could actually be as high as 95%.

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This is the last of three articles about the recent concerted assault on the direct action group Palestine Action in the UK courts. The first, “Punitive sentencing in the UK for Filton 4 activists on behalf of Israel”, focused on the sentencing of the Filton 4 last Friday, which I posted on Facebook here, where it has had over 330,000 views (although it also attracted an open sewer of deeply unpleasant trolls), and also on Substack, where I also sent it to my subscribers. Feel free to join me. The second, “The Renewed Ban on Palestine Action Confirms Legal Overreach in the Designation of Terrorism”, about the Court of Appeal’s unwise reinstatement of the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, in which I examined the root problems of “serious damage to property” having been designated as terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000, was posted here on my website, and this third article revisits the Filton 4 sentencing to provide detailed analysis about how the biased 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.

POSTSCRIPT: On June 24, I joined Chris Cook for his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada to discuss the fall of Keir Starmer (see my Substack post here), and the devious judicial efforts to secure terrorism-enhanced sentences for the Filton activists. Listen to the one-hour show on Substack here. I’m in the second half; Yves Engler in the first half.

Since the sentencing, last Friday, of the Filton 4 — activists with Palestine Action, who undertook direct action to damage drones intended for use in Gaza at a facility owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company — observers of justice, in the UK and around the world, have been reeling at the imposition by the judge of punitive sentences.

As I explained in my first article, Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio were given six-year sentences, minus 45 days for time served since the conviction, Fatema Zainab Rajwani was given a sentence of five years and eight months, minus 45 days, while Samuel Corner was given a sentence of eight years and eight months.

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In a dispiriting ruling yesterday, the Court of Appeal in London overturned a ruling in February, by the High Court, that the government’s proscription of the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, which was passed by Parliament last July, was unlawful.

The High Court’s ruling, in response to a judicial review submitted by Huda Ammori, one of Palestine Action’s two co-founders, repudiated the two counts on which the High Court had ruled the proscription unlawful.

Garden Court Chambers, whose barristers represented Huda Ammori at the judicial review in February, explained that these two counts were, firstly, that the Court “upheld the Claimant’s challenge that the Home Secretary failed to comply with her own policy when making the decision to proscribe Palestine Action”, and, secondly, that “proscription breached the rights of Freedom of Expression and Assembly as protected under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

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Largely overlooked amongst the grotesque collection of messianic, supremacist enthusiasts for genocide who make up the leadership of the State of Israel — in particular, of course, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the two far-right ministers in his coalition government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — is the figure of Israel Katz, a longtime “hardliner” and ally of Netanyahu who was appointed as the defense minister in November 2024 after Netanyahu sacked his predecessor Yoav Gallant.

Now 70 years of age, Katz first emerged publicly as a far-right student agitator at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1980s, opposing what he saw as “Arab students’ campus violence”, when he was suspended for a year for tying the university’s rector, the renowned chemist Raphael Mechoulam, to a chair using a rope. A former solder, whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Romania, he has been a member of the Knesset since 1998, and had held numerous ministerial positions, mostly under Netanyahu, since 2003.

Israel Katz as the epitome of relentless genocidal intent

For the last 18 months, Katz has been the epitome of relentless genocidal intent. In a statement issued after his appointment, he spoke of his intention to secure “victory over our enemies and to achieve the goals of the war: the return of all hostages as the most important moral mission, the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the containment of Iranian aggression, and the safe return of the residents of the north and south [of Israel] to their homes.”

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My detailed analysis of the current situation in the Gaza Strip, after Nickolay Mladenov, 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. I draw extensively on interviews by Drop Site News with senior Hamas officials, and an article in Haaretz by the head of an Israeli NGO supporting the Palestinians, pointing out the complicity of the west in the ongoing humanitarian disaster.

962 days since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and 227 days since a ceasefire took effect through the implementation of the first phase of Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian former UN official who is now the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, has alarmed those seeking a balance between Israel’s obligations under the ceasefire deal and an acceptable response by Hamas by telling the UN Security Council on May 21 that Hamas was the “principal obstacle” to the continued implementation of the next phase of the “Peace Plan” because “it refused to accept verified decommissioning, relinquish coercive control and allow a genuine civilian transition.”

Mladenov’s speech to the UN followed what Drop Site News, on May 22, described as a “15-point roadmap” that he delivered to Hamas in April, which “amounted to an ultimatum: If the Palestinian resistance does not surrender its weapons, no meaningful reconstruction will be permitted in Gaza and Israeli forces will not withdraw.” In his report to the UN Security Council, Mladenov described the total disarmament of Hamas and other resistance groups as “the single factor that unlocks every other element of the plan.”

As Drop Site News proceeded to explain, however, “disarmament was categorically not a part of the phase one deal signed by Hamas and Israel in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in October 2025.” As they added, “Despite repeated claims by US and Israeli officials that Hamas agreed to all of Trump’s terms, [they] and other Palestinian factions did not sign an agreement beyond a ceasefire, exchange of captives, and an initial framework for the redeployment or withdrawal of Israeli forces from some parts of Gaza.” The limited deal, they added, “also included the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the resumption of deliveries of life essentials and equipment to clear rubble and begin early reconstruction efforts.”

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As the beleaguered International Criminal Court seeks an arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of Israel’s torture prisons, and a key driver of legislation approving the death penalty for Palestinians, and establishing a special military tribunal to prosecute and execute those seized on Oct. 7 , 2023, continues to evade accountability.

When the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference on January 1942 to co-ordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the extermination of all the Jews in German-controlled Europe — it was attended by 15 high-level administrators in the relevant government departments, and the SS.

When senior officials in Israel were planning the genocide of the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, after October 7, 2023, no single conference was convened to facilitate what it would be appropriate to call Israel’s “Final Solution to the Palestinian Question”, but key officials can be readily identified.

The first two are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, for whom arrest warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court on November 21, 2024, for war crimes and crimes against humanity — the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

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What do we call a legal system that allows a judge to add a terrorism conviction at the sentencing phase of a trial, when the jury, who convicted the defendants of criminal damage, were not even told about it? Rigged, broken and a travesty of justice.

I haven’t published an article about Palestine Action here on my website since July last year, when I posted Why We Are All Palestine Action, and Why Direct Action to Prevent Genocide Is the Opposite of Terrorism, after MPs voted to support the scandalous proscription, by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper, of the direct action group as a terrorist organization.

I have, however, continued to cover developments on my Substack. See Mass arrests in London for opposing genocide last August, as hundreds of concerned citizens were arrested for peacefully holding up placards stating, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, and Palestine Action ban ruled unlawful in February, covering the High Court ruling that is now being contested by the government in the Court of Appeals.

Two weeks ago, I posted Defending direct action to prevent a genocide, at the end of the retrial of the Filton 6, activists who, in August 2024, undertook direct action against a factory in Bristol owned by Elbit Systems, the Israeli arms company that manufactures drones and other weapons used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and which included a powerful closing statement by one of the defendants, Charlotte Head. The first trial of the Filton 6, who had been held on remand (without charge or trial) since August 2024, in punitive conditions that encouraged many of them to engage in hunger strikes, began last November and ended in February with the jury dismissing some charges and unable to reach a verdict on others, but, instead of backing down, the government immediately launched a retrial.

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