UK prime minister Andy Burnham with Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud at the UN (Photo: Alamy)
‘Defensive’ refuelling of planes bombing Yemen can still cause war crimes. Just ask Keir Starmer
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Pollard would not provide details on what he described as “a range of defensive missions” that have been agreed with Saudi Arabia and acknowledged “a grey” area of what defensive action included.
Reporting by The Timesclaimed “the remit for Saudi operations goes wider” and includes refuelling of Saudi fighter jets bombing “defensive targets on land and along coastal areas, such as weapons depots and sites used to launch missiles and drones” adding to the opaque nature of Britain’s military support.
British refuelling support to Saudi Arabia, especially if it facilitates Saudi fighter jets carrying out bombing runs into Yemen, risks drawing UK-linked maritime vessels into Houthi targeting criteria.
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Three successive Conservative prime ministers supported Saudi Arabia’s first air war against the Houthis from 2015 to 2022.
The war resulted in more than 19,000 civilian casualties in up to 75,217 individual strikes over the seven years of bombing, according to airstrikes monitor Yemen Data Project (YDP). Saudi Arabia successfully lobbied to remove UN experts from investigating the conflict.
In October 2021, in an unprecedented move by member states, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) voted down a resolution for a two-year renewal of the Group of Eminent Experts (GEE) on Yemen.
The GEE was created in 2017 to investigate and monitor violations of human rights, international humanitarian law (IHL) and war crimes by all belligerents. It was the first time in UNHRC history for a resolution to be voted down. Saudi Arabia reportedly influenced the vote by lobbying member states using “incentives and threats”.
The GEE mandate ended on 31 October 2021, halting the only international mechanism for accountability for IHL violations in the conflict.
In the three months following the UNHRC vote, civilian casualties in Saudi’s air war more than trebled every month, taking the monthly average of civilian casualties in bombings after October 2021 to 141, compared to less than six per month in the 12 months preceding the dissolution of the GEE, according to YDP records.
Adding to Saudi Arabia’s documented track record of civilian harm and accountability prevention is an absence of any record keeping or process for assessing civilian casualties by the British Ministry of Defence.
Yet Pollard asserted in one of his BBC interviews on Tuesday that all British actions would “be compliant with international humanitarian law”.
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Zack Polanski, UK Green Party leader. [Photo/AA]
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has said Zionism is a form of racism and declared himself an anti-Zionist, drawing boos and heckling at a Jewish community election hustings in London.
Asked whether Zionism was racist, Polanski said: “If you’re defining Zionism as a displacement genocide, which is how, in practice, Zionism has become, then that is racism.” His answer followed a qualification that people understood the term differently, Jewish News reported.
Speaking in Holborn and St Pancras on Thursday, Polanski acknowledged that his declaration of anti-Zionism would be difficult for some audience members to hear.
When challenged about where Jewish people should go, he argued that Israel’s exercise of self-determination relied on the displacement and genocide of Palestinians. The response prompted further boos.
Jewish News described his explicit identification as an anti-Zionist as a shift from his previous non-Zionist label.
The hustings were organised by pro-Israel lobby group Board of Deputies of British Jews and the London Jewish Forum ahead of the constituency’s 8 October by-election.
Polanski, who is Jewish, also argued that criticism of Israel must be distinguished from anti-Semitism. “I think we need to separate antisemitism from criticism of the Israeli state, and I think far too often those things become conflated”, Polanski said.
Commenting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Polanski said: “Many genocide scholars around the world recognise it as a genocide, and calling it that is not antisemitic. And I think as a Jewish community we need to come together to recognise that, when we call that antisemitic, we are making ourselves as Jewish people less safe.”
His comments echo a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly more than five decades ago.
On 10 November 1975, the assembly passed Resolution 3379, determining that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. The resolution was adopted by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions.
The General Assembly revoked that determination on 16 December 1991 through Resolution 46/86.
Polanski’s remarks also come amid a debate within his own party. Green members are expected to discuss a motion declaring Zionism racist at their forthcoming conference.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.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. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
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Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Badr Abdelatty in El Alamein, Egypt, on August 13, 2026. [Turkish Foreign Ministry – Anadolu Agency]
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty urged “sustained and unhindered” humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip on Thursday and the start of early recovery efforts to provide livelihoods for Palestinians, according to a statement by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Anadolu reports.
Abdelatty made the remarks while participating in a ministerial roundtable on humanitarian access and healthcare in Gaza.
The meeting was held in New York on the sidelines of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly and hosted by the UK in partnership with Jordan and Qatar to discuss humanitarian access and healthcare in Gaza.
UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Secretary Ed Miliband hosted the meeting, which was co-chaired by Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi and Qatar, whose representative was not named in a statement.
Several foreign ministers, senior officials and representatives of international organizations and humanitarian agencies also attended.
Abdelatty outlined Egypt’s humanitarian efforts to support Palestinians and its continued contacts with parties aimed at improving humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
He stressed the importance of preserving the unity of Palestinian territory and maintaining geographic and political contiguity between Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Abdelatty also emphasized the need to “support Palestinian institutions and enable them to fulfill their responsibilities while preserving the central role of UN agencies, particularly the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).”
“Such efforts would strengthen the resilience of Palestinians on their land and pave the way for early recovery and reconstruction as part of a credible political process leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he said.
Participants discussed developments in the humanitarian, health and field situation in Gaza and ways to translate international efforts into practical measures to improve living conditions for Palestinians.
They also discussed completing the requirements of the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan and moving without delay to the second phase while ensuring that all parties fulfill their commitments and consolidate the ceasefire.
The meeting stressed the need to guarantee safe, full, sustained and unhindered access for humanitarian and medical aid, facilitate medical evacuations for patients and injured people, and allow the entry of supplies, medicines and equipment needed to operate hospitals and vital facilities.
Participants also discussed urgent preparations to meet humanitarian needs in Gaza as winter approaches.
The talks come as Gaza faces catastrophic humanitarian conditions amid Israel’s genocidal war since Oct. 8, 2023, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and injured 174,000, while 90% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been destroyed.
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Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
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A view of Universal Pictures logo displayed on a digital screen and an artificial intelligence (AI) illustration shown on a mobile phone screen in Ankara, Turkiye on August 20, 2025. [Erçin Ertürk – Anadolu Agency]
Much is being said right now about the dangers posed by AI and the possibility that it could ultimately wipe out humanity. Some experts, such as Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead and one of the AI industry’s leading safety researchers, have gone much further, warning publicly that there is more than a 10 percent chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
When senior executives from some of the world’s leading AI companies met in San Francisco for Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, held 15th–17th September 2026, they differed sharply over the seriousness of the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI and over how those risks should be managed. They did, however, share a fundamental belief: that the industry itself is capable of developing safeguards, testing systems, monitoring their behaviour and preventing or correcting dangerous failures. Where they differed was over how much restraint was necessary, who should impose it, and whether governments should intervene through new legislation and regulation.
The leading AI developers’ position is aligned with that of President Donald Trump, He wants AI to realise its full potential as quickly as possible and supports the industry’s drive to keep the AI race moving. Trump’s position is essentially this: let AI run; give developers the time, resources and freedom they need to take the technology to the next level. Trump, whose country is currently leading the AI race, has dismissed warnings about AI’s potential to destroy humanity as a “HOAX,” just as he has dismissed warnings about climate change despite the scientific evidence. He has also repeatedly argued that the US cannot afford to slow the development of AI while China is racing on. Just yesterday, before the United Nations he said: “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.”
To Trump, AI is another strategic opportunity that his country cannot miss: develop it, exploit its economic and strategic potential, and make sure China stays behind. In that sense, it fits a broader strategic logic in which Washington seeks to secure control or advantage over resources and technologies considered vital to American power, rather than leave them available to rivals.
Simply put, the logic sounds like this: let the flock of sheep spend the night with a pack of hungry wolves, and see what happens in the morning.
What is striking about the latest discussion among the leaders of the AI industry in San Francisco is that, while some of them referred to the possibility of AI causing catastrophic harm to humanity, few, if any, pointed to a specific, real-world example of what that danger could already look like. More striking still, no one used Gaza as the obvious real-world example: how AI has already been incorporated into warfare and how technology supplied by some of their own companies has been used by the Israeli military in its war on Gaza.
Some of those present know, from the experience of their own companies, that their technologies have been used extensively in support of the Israeli military.
Commercial AI models from both Microsoft and OpenAI have been deployed by the Israeli military, along with Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, while Google and Amazon have provided cloud computing and other AI services to the Israeli occupation military under Project Nimbus.
The Associated Press has documented how these technologies have been used to process intelligence, translate and analyse intercepted communications, and support the identification of targets in Gaza and Lebanon. The question, therefore, is not whether AI could one day become a danger to humanity. In Gaza, the question is what it is already doing when placed in the hands of a military at war.
The human consequences are before the world. More than 75,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, while the destruction of housing alone has affected some 1.7 million people, with more than 320,000 homes damaged. The United Nations estimates that 1.98 million people—94 percent of Gaza’s population—required shelter assistance in its latest assessment. Gaza’s infrastructure has been devastated, while essential services, including health, water and sanitation, remain severely compromised.
This is not a hypothetical future in which an uncontrolled machine decides to destroy humanity. It is a real war, taking place now, in which AI is increasingly being incorporated into systems of surveillance, intelligence and targeting. Yet no one at the summit appears to have asked the obvious question: if these companies know what their AI is doing in Gaza, why is Gaza not the first example they cite when discussing the dangers of this technology?
And if AI can already contribute to this scale of destruction in Gaza, what happens when the technology becomes even more powerful, more autonomous and more deeply embedded in warfare elsewhere in the world?
In addition to this, there is now documented evidence that Israel has sought to interfere with the information on which AI systems train, by flooding the online environment with misleading and fabricated material designed specifically to influence what AI models tell users. Israel funded the creation of a fake American think tank called the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, whose stated purpose appeared to be legitimate research but which had no apparent legal existence, physical address, named researchers or bylines on its reports. Created on behalf of Israel’s Government Advertising Agency through the US public-relations firm Piro Inc., the institute produced more than 560,000 words across 124 reports in just nine days, much of it focused on Israel, Palestine and Gaza. The material was deliberately structured and optimised for discovery and citation by AI systems, effectively attempting to make propaganda look like credible research and feed it into the information environment from which AI systems generate answers.
This goes far beyond the conventional hacking of communications or the gathering of intelligence. It represents an attempt to manipulate the information environment itself—to establish databases and bodies of supposedly authoritative knowledge built partly on fabrication, distortion and selective framing, so that AI systems encounter and potentially reproduce those claims as they become increasingly capable of simulating human reasoning. In other words, Israel is not only using AI in the war in Gaza for surveillance, intelligence, communications and the identification of targets; it is also seeking to interfere with the informational foundations on which AI systems operate, attempting to shape what they learn, what they retrieve and ultimately what they tell human beings.
