Climate activist targets Conservative election bus in protest at the government’s failure to adopt more ambitious climate policies
A Greenpeace activist climbed on to the top of the Conservative’s campaign bus this afternoon and unfurled a banner reading ‘Clean Power Not Paddy Power’, in protest at both the election date betting scandal engulfing the government and the Prime Ministers’ failure to deliver more ambitious climate policies.
Amy Rugg-Easey was able to get on to the bus at a campaign stop near Ollerton in Nottinghamshire, ahead of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s appearance in the last televised debate of the campaign, which is being hosted by BBC in Nottingham this evening.
“We’ve had enough of this government lurching from one scandal to the next, while gambling with our future,” Rugg-Easey said in a statement. “We need clean power, not Paddy Power.
“Fourteen years of Conservative governments has left this country broken. Sunak has gone backwards on climate action, ditching key pledges and promising to ‘max out’ the climate-wrecking oil and gas that are the cause of the cost-of-living crisis and our unaffordable bills. Our rivers are awash with sewage, and our economy, NHS and public services are on their knees.
“Enough is enough. We’ve climbed onto Sunak’s battle bus today to remind the British public that it is the Conservative government’s consistent failure to deliver greener, fairer policies that has created the mess we’re in. Don’t back the wrong horse – a vote for the climate is a vote for a better future.”
Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Forbidden Stories and its Gaza Project partners investigated Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza and elsewhere. (Illustration: Forbidden Stories/The Gaza Project)
“This is one of the most flagrant attacks on press freedom that I can remember,” said one campaigner. “The impact on press freedom in Gaza, in the region, and the rest of the world is something we cannot accept.”
With more than 100 media professionals—nearly all of them Palestinian—killed in Gaza since October, a group of 50 reporters from 13 international organizations this week shared the results of a new investigative journalism initiative aimed at exposing the deadly toll Israel’s onslaught has taken on those reporting it to the world.
The Gaza Project—led by the Paris-based nonprofit Forbidden Stories—”analyzed nearly 100 cases of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, as well as other cases in which members of the press have been allegedly targeted, threatened, or injured since October 7,” when Hamas-led attacks on Israel left more than 1,100 people dead and over 240 others kidnapped.
“Faced with what is being reported as the record number of journalists killed, Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to pursue the work of journalists who are killed because of their work, set out to investigate the targeting of journalists,” the group said
“For four months, Forbidden Stories and its partners investigated the circumstances of their killings, as well as those who have been targeted, threatened, and injured in the West Bank and Gaza,” it added. “These investigations point to a chilling pattern and suggest some journalists may have been targeted even though they were identifiable as press.”
🔴 How are Israeli drones killing journalists in Gaza?
Gaza Project member Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned what it called an “apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families,” noting cases in which media workers were killed while wearing press insignia and after being threatened by Israeli officials.
“This is one of the most flagrant attacks on press freedom that I can remember,” CPJ program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said of the ongoing war. “The impact on press freedom in Gaza, in the region, and the rest of the world is something we cannot accept.”
Basel Khair Al-Din, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza who believes he was targeted by a drone strike while wearing a press vest, said, “Whereas this press vest was supposed to identify and protect us, according to international laws, international conventions, and the Geneva Conventions, it is now a threat to us.”
“It’s this vest that almost got us killed, as has happened to so many of our fellow journalists and media workers,” he added.
Groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have called for official investigations into Israeli killing of journalists including an October 13 attack that killed 37-year-old Lebanese Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded half a dozen other journalists who were covering cross-border clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.
Dylan Collins, an American deputy editor at Al Jazeera English, was wounded while administering first aid to Christina Assi, an Italian Agence-France Presse journalist whose legs were blown off in the attack.
Reuters determined that an Israeli tank crew “fired two shells in quick succession” at the journalists, who HRW said were “clearly identifiable as members of the media, and had been stationary for at least 75 minutes.” HRW “found no evidence of a military target near the journalists’ location.”
Amnesty International, meanwhile, asserted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strike was “likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime.”
Asa Kasher, the lead author of the IDF’s Code of Ethics, told Forbidden Stories that “no member of the press should have been killed under normal circumstances of hostilities in Gaza.”
“It shouldn’t happen, even a single one,” he added. “It’s illegal. It’s unethical. The person who does it should be brought to court.”
Asked about the al-Aqsa network casualties, a senior IDF spokesperson told us there was “no difference” between working for the media outlet and belonging to Hamas’s armed wing, a sweeping statement legal experts described as alarming. #Israel#Gazahttps://t.co/iD2pnrTmp6
Israel’s alleged deliberate targeting of journalists is part of the evidence presented in a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel being reviewed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Separately, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), also located in the Dutch city, is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity including extermination and forced starvation in the case of the Israelis and extermination, rape, and torture in the case of Hamas.
The international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders last month filed a third ICC complaint alleging “war crimes against journalists in Gaza.”
According to Palestinian and international officials, at least 37,718 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed during Israel’s 264-day assault on Gaza, which has also left more than 86,300 people wounded and 11,000 others missing and feared dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of homes and other bombed-out buildings.
Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have also been forcibly displaced, and the Israeli siege on Gaza has caused widespread—and deadly—starvation and what the head of the United Nations food agency called a “full-blown famine” in northern parts of the strip.
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian doctor Hani al-Jaafarawi, Gaza’s ambulance and emergency teams chief, during his funeral in Gaza City, Gaza on June 24, 2024. (Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)
“This cannot be allowed to continue any longer,” said one advocate. “Every potential serious violation must be independently investigated and those responsible brought to justice.”
Doctors and humanitarian organizations demanded international investigations and action on Wednesday after the United Nations announced that Israel’s military has now killed 500 healthcare workers in Gaza—roughly two per day on average—during its nearly nine-month assault on the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement Tuesday that Israeli forces’ killing of hundreds of healthcare workers has “occurred against the backdrop of systematic attacks on hospitals and other medical facilities in violation of the laws of war.” The World Health Organization has documented more than 460 attacks on healthcare workers and infrastructure in Gaza since October 7.
“The latest health worker reportedly killed was Mr. Hani Al Ja’afarwi, head of Emergency and Ambulance Services at a health clinic in Gaza City on 23 June 2024,” said the U.N. Human Rights Office. “Many health workers have also died with their family members when residential buildings were struck by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).”
The U.N.’s latest tally did not include Fadi Al-Wadiya, a 33-year-old Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staffer who was killed along with five other people Tuesday in an attack in Gaza City. MSF did not explicitly assign blame for the attack, which the group described as “yet another brutal example of the senseless killing of Palestinian civilians and healthcare workers in Gaza.”
Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said Wednesday that “hospitals, medical staff, and civilians all have protected status under international law, law that the Israel military has flagrantly ignored every day through its repeated targeting of healthcare facilities and staff.”
“Though now happening at an unprecedented rate in Gaza, attacks on Palestinian healthcare by the Israeli military have recurred over many years, ever-worsening because of chronic impunity,” said Talbot. “This cannot be allowed to continue any longer. Every potential serious violation must be independently investigated and those responsible brought to justice.”
🚨An Israeli military airstrike has killed Hani al-Jaafarawi, the director of Gaza’s Ambulance and Emergency Department during a strike on a clinic in Gaza City.
— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) June 25, 2024
Not a single hospital is fully functioning in the Gaza Strip after months of relentless Israeli bombing, and medical workers have been forced to treat airstrike victims and other patients in overwhelmed facilities without necessary equipment and medications, including anesthesia.
As Israel’s blockade leaves the occupied territory’s population without sufficient access to clean water and other essentials, infectious diseases have been spreading rapidly as the health crisis spirals out of control, starvation proliferates, and the death toll mounts.
“Systematic attacks on healthcare by Israeli forces are exacerbating the worst humanitarian crisis ever seen in Gaza,” MAP said Wednesday. “More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed and at least 86,000 injured since Israel’s assault began, with an estimated 10,000 still trapped under rubble, most presumed dead. Instead of being able to safely provide medical care for those in urgent need, Palestinian healthcare workers have themselves come under both indiscriminate and apparent targeted attack by the Israeli military.”
Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who volunteered in a hospital with MAP earlier this year, said that “Palestinian healthcare workers have told me that when they leave the hospital, civilians give them civilian clothing because wearing scrubs is putting a target sticker on their back.”
“This is how systematically healthcare has been targeted in Gaza,” Haj-Hassan added.
Haider Al-Qudra, executive director of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Gaza, told MAP that “as long as the international community does not take any measures against Israeli forces that continue to violate international humanitarian law, we will lose more personnel working to meet the health and humanitarian needs of citizens on the frontline.”
“Because of this systematic targeting from Israeli forces,” said Al-Qudra, “34 PRCS staff have lost their lives, most of them emergency medical services staff, including 19 while they tried to respond to emergency calls from citizens.”
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Aides to Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting took Israel lobby funding. (Photo: Stefan Rousseau via Alamy)
Israel is quietly financing assistants of British MPs, Declassified has found.
Israel has paid for at least a dozen UK parliamentary staff to visit the country on special delegations in the last five years.
A further 18 staffers have accepted funding or hospitality from pro-Israel lobby organisations in Britain such as Labour Friends of Israel and We Believe in Israel.
Several worked for MPs in Keir Starmer’s front bench team, including shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting and shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson.
Our investigation found how the Israeli embassy in London, its ministry of foreign affairs and associated lobby groups seek to influence not only MPs but also their assistants.
Declassified previously revealed that one in four British MPs in the last parliament accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups or individuals.
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Israel lobby organisations have also sought to gain backdoor influence by funding, meeting, and providing hospitality to ministers’ special advisers, known as SPADs.
Special advisers are exempt from the Civil Service Code’s requirement of political impartiality.
Governmental departments are therefore [not?] required to publish the gifts and hospitality that they receive.
Deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden accepted funding from CFI when he was David Cameron’s SPAD in 2014.
Dowden was a prospective parliamentary candidate for Hertsmere at that time.
CFI paid for a special adviser to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to travel to Israel that same year, while in 2015 another four Downing Street special advisers received hospitality from CFI.
The group has continued to lobby SPADs in the prime minister’s and deputy PM’s office, as well as the leader of the House of Lords.
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Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
POLITICIANS have gone “awol” on the environment despite four in five voters expressing concern about the climate and the natural world, conservationists warned today.
New polling for conservation charity WWF shows that while 80 per cent say they care about issues relating to climate, nature and the environment, only 45 per cent believe that politicians share their level of concern.
They face increasing pressure to do more on the environment after tens of thousands of people marched through London at the weekend.
WWF warned today that the next five years will be “absolutely vital” for conservation efforts in Britain and abroad, with native wildlife from puffins to bluebells and mountain hares at risk from climate change, pollution and habitat loss.
Chief executive Tanya Steele said: “Our polling shows the environment is clearly a key issue for the public and they deserve to hear what the next government plans to do to restore nature and meet our climate targets.
“Unfortunately, politicians have largely gone awol on the environment during this campaign, but the next five years will be absolutely vital in bringing nature back from the brink, both at home and around the world.
“As the campaign enters the final straight, we’re calling on all parties to commit to action on nature and climate that’s hugely popular with the public.”
