The leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, expressed willingness to potentially cooperate with the party Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are setting up. Photograph: James Manning/PA
Almost 1,400 people sign up in 24 hours to increase party membership by 10% since Zack Polanski’s leadership win this month
The Green party’s membership has jumped by more than 1,000 people in a day after a public split between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana cast doubt on the viability of the pair’s new leftwing party.
Almost 1,400 people signed up to the Greens in the 24 hours since the bitter disagreement emerged, in which Corbyn and his allies referred Sultana to the information watchdog after claims that she started collecting membership subscriptions without authority.
The leap has helped push the Greens in England and Wales above 75,000 members, a more than 10% increase on the number of members when Zack Polanski won the contest to be their leader at the start of the month, the party said.
After his victory Polanski expressed willingness to potentially cooperate with the party being set up by Corbyn, the former Labour leader, and Sultana, who was elected as a Labour MP but now sits as an independent.
However, the Green leader has said it is impossible to know if and how that might happen given the lack of any party structure or policies. He added that the Greens already offer a political home for left-leaning voters disillusioned with Labour.
‘Best way to deliver reform and a fair pay award is for government to negotiate directly with trade unions,’ RCN says
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FOURTEEN health unions today jointly announced they will not take part in the “failed” and “defunct” NHS Pay Review Body (PRB) process, demanding talks with ministers instead.
The independent advisory body has settled pay issues for the majority of the health service’s staff since 2007.
In a letter to Health Secretary Wes Streeting, unions representing staff on “agenda for change” contracts called on the government to deliver on its promise of direct talks for next year’s pay instead.
Union frustrations over lengthy delays, below-inflation awards and suspected political interference come as questions linger over Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership ahead of the party’s conference starting next week.
GMB had been the last major health union to engage with the PRB last year, which makes annual pay recommendations for NHS staff excluding doctors, dentists and some senior managers.
Chairwoman of the NHS unions and Unison’s head of health Helga Pile said: “The government promised talks over a year ago and they still haven’t got round the table with unions with any proper plan to sort things out.
Deputy United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Morgan Ortagus raises her hand to veto a United Nations Security Council veto of a Gaza ceasefire resolution at UN headquarters New York City on September 18, 2025. (Photo by UN News/X)
“Israel kills every day and nothing happens,” said Algeria’s UN ambassador. “Israel starves a people and nothing happens. Israel bombs hospitals, schools, shelters, and nothing happens.”
Against a backdrop of Israel’s genocidal obliteration of Gaza City and a worsening man-made famine throughout the embattled Palestinian exclave, the United States on Thursday cast its sixth United Nations Security Council veto of a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.
At its 10,000th meeting, the UN Security Council voted 14-1 with no abstentions in favor of a resolution proposed by the 10 nonpermanent UNSC members demanding “an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, the “release of all hostages” held by Hamas, and for Israel to “immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid” into the besieged strip.
Morgan Ortagus, President Donald Trump’s deputy special envoy to the Middle East, vetoed the proposal, saying that the move “will come as no surprise,” as the US has killed five previous UNSC Gaza ceasefire resolutions under both the Biden and Trump administrations, most recently in June.
#BREAKING United States VETOES Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded immediate, unconditional & permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and immediate, dignified & unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas & other groups
Ortagus said the resolution failed to condemn Hamas or affirm Israel’s right to self-defense and “wrongly legitimizes the false narratives benefiting Hamas, which have sadly found currency in this council.”
The US has unconditionally provided Israel with billions of dollars worth of armed aid and diplomatic cover since October 2023 as the key Mideast ally wages a war increasingly viewed as genocidal, including by a commission of independent UN experts this week.
Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said the torpedoed resolution represented the “bare minimum” that must be accomplished, adding that “it is deeply regrettable and painful that it has been blocked.”
“Babies dying of starvation, snipers shooting people in the head, civilians killed en masse, families displaced again and again… humanitarians and journalists targeted… while Israeli officials are openly mocking all of this,” Mansour added.
At the Security Council meeting on the famine in Gaza, and after the US veto, Ambassador Mansour said: pic.twitter.com/PCFfbyJNPV
Following the UNSC’s latest failure to pass a ceasefire resolution, Algerian Ambassador to the UN Amar Bendjama asked Gazans to “forgive” the body for not only its inability to approve such measures, but also for failing to stop the Gaza famine, in which at least hundreds of Palestinians have died and hundreds of thousands more are starving. Every UNSC members but the US concurred last month that the Gaza famine is a man-made catastrophe.
“Israel kills every day and nothing happens,” Bendjama said. “Israel starves a people and nothing happens. Israel bombs hospitals, schools, shelters, and nothing happens. Israel attacks a mediator and steps on diplomacy, and nothing happens. And with every act, every act unpunished, humanity itself is diminished.”
Benjama also asked Gazans to “forgive us” for failing to protect children in the strip, more than 20,000 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, and blockade over the past 713 days. He also noted that upward of 12,000 women, 4,000 elderly, 1,400 doctors and nurses, 500 aid workers, and 250 journalists “have been killed by Israel.”
Condemning Thursday’s veto, Hamas accused the US of “blatant complicity in the crime of genocide,” which Israel is accused of committing in an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed in December 2023 by South Africa and backed by around two dozen nations.
Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and is believed to be holding 20 hostages left alive out of 251 people kidnapped that day—implored the countries that sponsored the ceasefire resolution to pressure Israeli Prime Minister
who along with former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, to accept an agreement to halt hostilities.
Overall, at least 65,141 Palestinians have been killed and over 165,900 others wounded by Israeli forces since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose figures have not only been confirmed by former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, but deemed a significant undercount by independent researchers. Thousands more Gazans are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the ruins of the flattened strip.
UK Ambassador to the UN Barbara Woodward stessed after Thursday’s failed UNSC resolution that “we need a ceasefire more than ever.”
“Israel’s reckless expansion of its military operation takes us further away from a deal which could bring the hostages home and end the suffering in Gaza,” Woodward said.
Thursday’s developments came as Israeli forces continued to lay waste to Gaza City as they push deeper into the city as part of Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians from the strip’s capital. Israeli leaders have said they are carrying out the operation in accordance with Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of Palestinians and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
In what some observers said was a bid to prevent the world from witnessing fresh Israeli war crimes in Gaza City, internet and phone lines were cut off in the strip Thursday, although officials said service has since been mostly restored.
Gaza officials said Thursday that at least 50 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces since dawn, including 40 in Gaza City, which Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Abu Azzoum said is being pummeled into “a lifeless wasteland.”
Azzoum reported that tens of thousands of Palestinians “are moving to the south on foot or in carts, looking for any place that is relatively safe—but with no guarantee of safety—or at least for shelter.”
Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it advised Palestinians were “safe zones,” including a September 2 airstrike that massacred 11 people—nine of them children—queued up to collect water in al-Mawasi.
“Most families who have arrived in the south have not found space,” Azzoum added. “That’s why we’ve seen people setting up makeshift tents close to the water while others are left stranded in the street, living under the open sky.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Members of the Global Sumud Flotilla wave a Palestinian flag and make a peace symbol with their hands. (Photo by Global Sumud Flotilla)
One journalist said that it “feels like the response is being set up to be more severe than in the past.”
After Hamas urged international support for the Global Sumud Flotilla, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday signaled another potential attack by claiming on social media that the peaceful humanitarian mission to feed starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip “is a jihadist initiative serving the terror group’s agenda.”
While Israel has not taken responsibility for recent drone attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla—whose name means perseverance in Arabic—the incidents have raised eyebrows, given the country’s history of attacking previous ones. The foreign ministers of 16 other nations on Tuesday implored Israel not to target this flotilla, which involves activists and political leaders from dozens of countries, including eight US veterans.
As Middle East Eye reported Thursday, Hamas—which Israel and the United States designate as a terrorist organization despite its governance of Gaza—called for escalating the global movement in solidarity with the strip “in rejection of the [Israeli] occupation’s aggression, crimes of genocide, and starvation.”
“We call for mobilizing all means to support the Global Sumud Flotilla heading to Gaza, and we warn the occupation against targeting it,” Hamas also said in a statement, part of which was quoted in the Israeli ministry’s post on X.
Responding on the same platform, journalist Séamus Malekafzali said: “Past comments from the Israeli government about the aid flotillas focused on celebrity vapidity or didn’t mention their aim at all. Now, they’re honing in on it being a supposedly terrorist instrument. Feels like the response is being set up to be more severe than in the past.”
Flotilla representatives and critics dismissed these claims as Israeli disinformation, echoing accusations leveled at prior missions, and called the report a case of “guilt by association,” reliant on photos and unverified affiliations rather than evidence of operational control.
Organizers emphasised transparent crowdfunding for aid, with no terror funding, and framed the convoy as a grassroots response to aid blockages.
Earlier this week, a commission of independent experts at the United Nations concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and an investigation from The New Humanitarianfound that Israeli forces have killed nearly 3,000 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded almost 20,000 others since October 2023. As of Thursday, the overall death toll has topped 65,000, though experts warn the true tally is likely far higher.
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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