Green party leader Zack Polanski (Green Party of England and Wales). Image: Bristol Green Party Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
The Green Party of England and Wales has announced it has surged past 80,000 members on the first day of the Labour Party conference – a record high for the party. The announcement was made by Green Party Leader, Zack Polanski, speaking at a campaign event in North London.
The new membership record marks a near 20% increase in membership since Polanski was elected leader less than a month ago. Green Party leader Zack Polanski said
“This is a huge milestone for the Green Party of England and Wales. The tired, old two-party system is over. More and more people are looking to a politics rooted in tackling the climate crisis and inequality. The Green Party is the party that wants to bring water into public hands, wants to lower bills, and wants to protect our National Health Service. Our party conference is just a week away. Our membership growth is a fantastic foundation from which to deepen our roots in local communities and build a bolder politics. This is just the beginning, and we have no time to waste.”
Zack Polanski said before the Labour Party conference opening, “When I said we intend to replace Labour, I meant it. As another Labour conference comes round, it’s another emergency government reset. It just confirms what we already know: Labour has failed. By his own standards, Starmer has broken the promises he was elected on, ditched the principles he claimed to stand for, and his government has made inequality worse, ignored the climate crisis and contributed to arming a genocidal Israeli government. And for all the talk, this conference isn’t a vision for the future. It’s a desperate attempt to rewrite the past.”
“People are crying out for bold leadership, not cautious tinkering. This will probably be Starmer’s last conference. Labour’s future candidates aren’t offering any of the solutions we need. The Green Party is offering these solutions. A wealth tax on the super-rich, investment in public services and action to protect our climate. We are ready to turn this country around by offering a bold, positive alternative to a crumbling Labour government.”
A doctor’s office is left empty after Doctors Without Borders staff were forced to evacuate its last functioning medical facility in Gaza City, on September 26, 2025. (Photo by Doctors Without Borders on X)
“We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities,” said the humanitarian group’s Gaza coordinator. “This is the last thing we wanted.”
The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders has been forced to suspend all its medical operations in Gaza City as its clinics have come under “escalating attacks from Israeli forces.”
In a statement published Friday, the group—officially known as Médecins Sans Frontières—said “the relentless Israeli offensive in Gaza City, Palestine, has forced [MSF] to suspend vital medical activities in the area due to the rapidly deteriorating security situation.
“The situation includes continued airstrikes and advancing tanks less than one kilometer from our healthcare facilities,” the group continued. “The escalating attacks from Israeli forces have created an unacceptable level of risk for our staff, forcing us to suspend lifesaving medical activities.”
As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have pushed further into Gaza’s largest city in recent days, hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands more have been trapped in the besieged city.
These rooms should be filled with newborn cries, the beeping of monitors, pregnant women being cared for, patients finding relief amid a genocide.
Instead, these rooms now stand empty because MSF was forced to evacuate our last functioning health facility in #Gaza city. pic.twitter.com/Fk8M2LsNc9
— Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (@MSF_canada) September 26, 2025
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has destroyed much of the strip’s healthcare infrastructure and inflicted widespread disease and starvation.
Since it began in October 2023, MSF has provided over 1.1 million medical consultations, including in over 347,000 emergency cases, according to its website.
Just this week, even as Gaza City was pounded with airstrikes, the group says it carried out over 3,640 consultations and treated 1,655 people with malnutrition. They have also treated patients with severe trauma injuries and burns, as well as pregnant women and others who are unable to leave the city.
Earlier this month, Israel ordered everyone in Gaza City, over 1 million people, to evacuate or face the threat of military force. Hundreds of thousands have fled south. When the order was issued, MSF warned that it would be a “death sentence” for the many critically ill patients and newborn babies who’d be forced to abandon medical treatment.
“While large numbers of people have fled south due to evacuation orders, there are still hundreds of thousands in Gaza City, who are unable to leave and have no other option but to stay,” MSF said. “Those who are able to leave face an impossible choice: either remain in Gaza City under intense military operations and the deterioration of law and order, or abandon what’s left of their houses, their belongings, and their memories, to move to areas where humanitarian conditions are rapidly collapsing.”
The Gaza Health Ministry reported that 60 Palestinians have been killed and dozens more injured since dawn on Friday, bringing the official death toll since October 2023 to 65,549 people and the number of wounded to 167,518.
Meanwhile, at least seven hospitals have been forced to close due to heavy bombardment. Munir al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,723 healthcare workers and damaged 38 hospitals since the war began in October 2023.
“We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities, as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces,” says Jacob Granger, the emergency coordinator for MSF in Gaza. “This is the last thing we wanted, as the needs in Gaza City are enormous, with the most vulnerable people—infants in neonatal care, those with severe injuries and life-threatening illnesses—unable to move and in grave danger.”
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide.Vote Labour for Genocide.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses world leaders during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 26, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“I don’t recall seeing such a large walkout for quite some time at UNGA,” said one observer. “Israel has chosen to be a pariah and is increasingly treated as such by the international community.”
Dozens of delegates in the United Nations General Assembly walked out in protest on Friday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to deliver an address.
Video posted on X by Axios reporter Barak Ravid showed United Nations delegates from multiple countries standing up from their seats and exiting the chamber as Netanyahu took to the podium and prepared to deliver his address.
The mass walkout left the assembly hall mostly “empty,” Ravid subsequently reported.
🚨🚨🚨Massive protest walk out in the UN general assembly hall as Netanyahu takes the stage pic.twitter.com/toiZncmrRj
The protests against Netanyahu came as Israel is causing a famine in Gaza with its near-total blockade on humanitarian aid, which has killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Israel has launched a full invasion of Gaza, and its right-wing government has explicitly said that it plans on expelling all Palestinians who are still living in the exclave. The Israel Defense Forces’ assault has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel has become increasingly isolated on the international stage in recent weeks, as the governments of France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia have all formally recognizedPalestine as an independent state.
New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who has vowed to arrest the Israeli prime minister on war crimes charges filed last year by the International Criminal Court should he set foot in the city during the progressive’s potential mayoral tenure, blasted Netanyahu for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza while again pledging to do everything he could to hold him accountable.
“This morning, Benjamin Netanyahu will address the United Nations—an institution which has concluded his government is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” he said in a social media post, referring to a UN commission’s finding earlier this month. “He arrived in New York after a flight that added hours to its path to circumvent the airspace of countries which might enforce the International Criminal Court’s warrant for his arrest.”
Mamdani added that “during the course of his speech, another Palestinian child will undoubtedly be killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, as they have been every single hour for nearly two years.”
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued that the mass walkout was symbolic of Israel’s near-total isolation in the international community.
“I don’t recall seeing such a large walkout for quite some time at UNGA,” he said. “Israel has chosen to be a pariah and is increasingly treated as such by the international community.”
CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin joked that she felt envious of those delegates who left the assembly hall.
“Those who walked out when Netanyahu was speaking at the UN are the fortunate ones,” the longtime peace advocate wrote. “Those of us who listened to his speech online are feeling sick. He is such a bold-faced liar and a mass murderer.”
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAVote Labour for Genocide.
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Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 26, 2025 in New York City, United States. [Mostafa Bassim – Anadolu Agency]
It takes a lot to make UN delegates walk out from an address to the General Assembly. But this was precisely what Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, managed to achieve in his September 26 speech. His address began by attempting to show his country as a guardian of law and civilisation, fighting a lonely, unsupported war against fiendish barbarians. “Last year I stood at this podium and I showed this map. It shows the curse of Iran’s terror axis.” Such an axis threatened “the peace of the entire world. It threatened the stability of our region and the very existence of my country, Israel. They were meant also to threaten the United States and blackmail nations everywhere.”
The speech then moved into a triumphant register. Hezbollah had been cowed. The Houthis had been “hammered”. The “bulk of Hamas’s terror machine” had been “crushed”. The armaments of Bashir al-Assad had been destroyed, Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq deterred. “And most importantly, and above everything else that I could say to you or that we did in this past year, in this past decade, we devastated Iran’s atomic weapons and ballistic missile programs.” Israel’s assassination program – the slaying of Iranian nuclear scientists, the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, the slaughter of half of the Houthi leadership – were also points of celebration. Regarding Hamas, Netanyahu offered the following: “The final remnants of Hamas are holed up in Gaza City. They vow to repeat the atrocities of 7 October again and again. That is why Israeli must finish the job.”
Anyone familiar with Netanyahu’s streaky command of Disney cartography or predictive assessments on the military power of other states already knows the strained performance here. Vital to his argument is delegitimising the cause of Palestinian statehood, treating it as an annex of a foreign power and a foreign movement. He goes on to link with little effort Iran’s “massive nuclear weapons program and massive ballistic program” to the late Yahya Sinwar’s “dispatched” terrorists of Hamas as they made their way into Israel on 7 October 2023, to Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets in Lebanon, to Syria’s now deposed Assad regime, which “hosted Iran’s forces, tightening the noose of death around our throats.” For good measure, the Houthis in Yemen were also thrown in.
This shoddy reasoning shares the strain of paranoia US strategists demonstrated with feverish intensity during the Cold War. There was a stubborn refusal, at least till the Nixon administration, to see Communist insurgencies as the product of indigenous conditions rather than directed movements from Moscow and Peking. Assistance and aid to North Vietnam, for instance, was misconstrued as command and control.
Similarly, Netanyahu sees radical Islam as a monolithic bloc of obscurantism that has absorbed the Palestinian cause. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all shout “Death to America”. All had “murdered Americans and Europeans in cold blood.” Israel’s enemies were enemies of the West. “They want to drag the modern world back to the past… to a dark age of violence, fanaticism, and terror.” With demagogic purpose, he also pointed to “the radical Islamist surge” in the societies of Israel’s allies. Thank Israel, he declared, for having the capacity to supply the intelligence of five Central Intelligence Agencies, for doing, to quote German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, “the dirty work for all of us.”
The Israeli PM represents a country whose magistrates and representatives sneer and mock international law, treasuring an exceptionalism that have given it an increasingly roguish character. He is contemptuous of accusations that the IDF is not minimising harm to civilians, claiming that the ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties is “less than two to one”, one much “lower than NATO’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”. This is an astonishing view, given that Israel’s own military data, as revealed by The Guardian, +972 magazine and Local Call, shows that 83 per cent of those killed in Gaza have been civilians.
Besides, even where civilians were killed, they only did so under coercion from Hamas. The oft repeated claim was made that the organisation “implants itself in mosques, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and tries to force these civilians not to leave, to stay in harm’s way”. This is a convenient spread, justifying the destruction of critical infrastructure and the essential features of a functioning society. Unfortunately, evidence from the IDF on many of these claims has been skimpy.
The allegations of genocide, firmed up by the findings of an independent UN commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and numerous human rights groups including Israel’s own B’Tselem, were also swatted away as blood libels. Those wishing to commit genocide would never “plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting to get out of harm’s way.” The Nazis were never good enough to tell Jews to “kindly leave”.
As for the starvation policy, this was yet another lie. “There’s one ton of aid for every man, woman and child in Gaza” with each person receiving 3,000 calories per day. “Some starvation policy!” It takes some gumption to embrace such mendacity and self-imposed delusion, denying the militarisation of the aid model in the Strip, with necessaries drip-fed through a limited number of delivery points defended by private contractors and trigger-happy IDF personnel.
Regarding the latest round of countries recognising Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu could only hector. “Murdering Jews pays off.” The forces of antisemitism had been rewarded by France, Britain, Australia and Canada, along with other states. “Your disgraceful decision will encourage terrorism against Jews and against innocent people everywhere.”
On the issue of the two-state solution, the argument was slyly inverted. Israel did believe in the formula. It was those nasty, ungrateful Palestinians who never did. They were “given territory” only to then attack Israel in “totally unprovoked” circumstances. Absurdly, Netanyahu even called Gaza a proto-Palestinian state, a gift from the Jewish state. Never mind that it became the world’s largest open-air prison, its residents the convenient lab rats of Israeli surveillance, technology and military experimentation.
As long as Palestinians exist in Gaza and the West Bank, they are unsettling reminders of the colonial project, the thefts, the dispossessions, the habitual violence. As long as they have political representatives of any stripe, or any voice uttered through any form – literature, media, the podium, and even the gun – they are exercising the very same rights to self-determination that saw the creation of Israel. It is those rights that Netanyahu showed such withering contempt for in this indignant address.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
