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Aid trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies remain stranded at the Rafah Border Crossing on the Egyptian side due to Israeli attacks and closed border crossings, the delivery of aid is limited and delayed in Rafah, Egypt on August 6, 2025. [Mohamed Elshahed – Anadolu Agency]
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Thursday that around 170,000 tons of humanitarian aid are waiting to enter the Gaza Strip, pending approval from the Israeli occupying authorities that control all border crossings.
Speaking after the announcement of the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war on Gaza, an OCHA spokesperson said the aid—comprising medicines, tents, and other critical supplies—could reach nearly two million Palestinians facing severe shortages of food and basic necessities once access is granted.
OCHA reported earlier this week that Israel has blocked the entry of 45 per cent of registered aid convoys since the genocide began in October 2023, severely limiting relief efforts. The spokesperson emphasised that effective delivery requires open crossings, security guarantees for aid workers and civilians, visas for international staff, and unrestricted entry of supplies. He also underlined the need to revive Gaza’s private sector to restore minimum living conditions.
At dawn Thursday, Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to the first stage of his proposed peace plan, which includes a prisoner exchange and an Israeli withdrawal to the so-called “Yellow Line” as an initial step.
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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.Vote Labour for Genocide.
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Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes targeted residential areas in the Gaza Strip, as seen from Israel near the border, on October 07, 2025. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]
A new report has accused London’s £34 billion ($45.43 billion) public sector pension fund of investing billions in companies allegedly complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, Anadolu reports.
The Blood Money report, released Thursday by the campaign group Shake The CIV, claims that the London Collective Investment Vehicle (LCIV) — which manages £34.2 billion on behalf of 32 London local authorities — has over £7 billion ($9 billion) invested in firms “enabling Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights.”
The fund represents the deferred wages of around 700,000 Londoners.
According to the report, LCIV’s investments include almost £1 billion ($1.4 billion) in arms manufacturers, such as £10 million ($13 million) in Israeli weapons producer Elbit Systems and £228 million ($305 million) in British firm BAE Systems.
The report also highlights £5.2 billion ($7 billion) in technology companies accused of facilitating Israel’s surveillance and control of Palestinians, including over £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in Microsoft.
For the first time, the report reveals the names of elected councilors who sit on LCIV’s Shareholder Committee — information the organization has refused to make public despite multiple Freedom of Information requests.
LCIV, which quietly sold £6.7 million ($9 million) in Israeli government bonds in 2024, has faced growing protests and says it is reviewing its investments in 12 unnamed companies.
However, the fund has refused to disclose the names of those companies, even to the councilors representing the local authorities whose pension funds it manages.
The report also criticizes LCIV for deleting a July 2024 statement on Gaza from its website, later replacing it in July 2025 with a post claiming to be “neutral” on the issue.
Campaigners say this stance “belies its claims to be a responsible investor,” noting that LCIV took “swift action” over the Russian invasion of Ukraine but not in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Shake The CIV is calling on LCIV to “immediately, completely, and permanently divest from all companies complicit in Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.”
Cllr Liam Shrivastava, a member of Lewisham Council’s Pension Committee, said in a statement: “At stake here are not only the lives of millions of human beings but also local authorities’ right to make democratic decisions about financial matters. In the 1980s, many London councils made history by cutting financial ties with apartheid South Africa and recently, many have divested from fossil fuels. Genocide is the crime of crimes — we have to do whatever we can to stop it.”
Five boroughs — Waltham Forest, Islington, Tower Hamlets, Southwark and Lewisham — have announced plans to divest following local campaigns.
However, their pension funds remain invested through LCIV portfolios, and campaigners say progress has been slow.
Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed over 67,000 Palestinians in the enclave, most of them women and children.
The relentless bombardment has left Gaza largely uninhabitable, leading to widespread starvation and diseases.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Franciszek Sterczewski speaks at a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, on September 8, 2025, following the arrival of Polish activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla deported from Israel. [Photo by Marek Antoni Iwanczuk/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
Four Polish activists detained by Israel after a Gaza-bound aid flotilla was raided last week returned to Warsaw on Wednesday, accusing Israeli forces of brutality and rebuking Poland’s foreign minister for downplaying the assault, Anadolu reports.
The delegation, arriving on a flight from Athens, included ruling Civic Platform (PO) lawmaker Franciszek Sterczewski, activists Omar Faris and Nina Ptak, and journalist Ewa Jasiewicz. Faris, Ptak, and Sterczewski were deported to Greece on Monday, while Jasiewicz had left Israel earlier.
Sterczewski sharply criticized both Israel and Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski.
“Why, at a time when we were doing everything we could to end this genocide and draw the world’s attention to what was happening there, did Minister Sikorski downplay the situation?” Sterczewski said, adding that he had learned firsthand that “Israel is a barbaric and terrorist state, just like, for example, Russia.”
“We expect that if Sikorski can accuse Putin of his war crimes, we expect him to be consistent and accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of the same crimes, or even worse,” he added.
Sterczewski said the five days he spent in Israeli detention were marked by mistreatment. “It wasn’t pleasant. We weren’t allowed to sleep. Guards shone flashlights in our eyes for hours and played music from Israeli propaganda films. We were set on by dogs. We were spat on. We were threatened with weapons,” he said.
The MP added that around 11,000 Palestinians, including more than 400 children, remain in Israeli detention. “We point out that they are treated even worse there. They are often murdered, and all human rights are violated,” he said.
The four Poles were among 470 activists from 47 countries participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), a humanitarian convoy attacked in international waters by the Israeli navy last week. Forty-two ships were seized during the overnight raid from Wednesday to Thursday.
At Warsaw Airport, Faris told reporters: “We must all stand together against the genocidal war in the Gaza Strip.”
“They treated us absolutely brutally. For several hours, I’m 73 years old, they tied my hands behind my back and put me on rocks,” Faris said.
He added that during interrogation in an Israeli prison, the activists were questioned about possible links to Hamas. “Our problem is the occupation, which began 42 years before the founding of Hamas,” he said. “You won’t be able to kill us. And we don’t want to kill you either. We want a solution like in South Africa — a democratic state for all, regardless of religion.”
Crowds gather in downtown Chicago for an emergency rally, waving flags and holding signs to oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement and National Guard presence on October 8, 2025. (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The rule of law is falling apart, so we all need to do something to make sure that it doesn’t keep going in this direction.”
President Donald Trump and his allies have been relentlessly pushing the narrative that the aim of the White House’s deployment of federal immigration agents and hundreds of National Guard members to Chicago is to protect the public in what Trump has called “a war zone.”
But hundreds of people who marched through the city on Wednesday evening were clear about who is wreaking havoc in their communities.
“No ICE, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” residents of the nation’s third-largest city chanted, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave Chicago and its surrounding suburbs.
Hundreds are marching in downtown Chicago to protest the deployment of National Guard troops and ICE enforcement operations in the city. pic.twitter.com/k23xNvHHOx
Signs at the rally read, “ICE Is Trump’s Gestapo,” “Stop ripping families apart,” and “They blame immigrants so you won’t blame billionaires.”
The demonstration was organized soon after about 300 troops with the Illinois National Guard and 200 Texas National Guard members arrived in the city over the vehement objections of Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker, Democrats who have condemned Trump for deploying masked, armed ICE agents to the city for the past month.
While Trump has claimed that “Operation Midway Blitz” is aimed at protecting the public from undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, US citizens have been targeted in raids and with violence perpetrated by immigration agents, who have shot pepper balls at a priest and a journalist, fatally shot a man during a traffic stop, and “deliberately” attacked peaceful protesters, according to a lawsuit filed this week.
The president has continued pushing the claim that protesters and immigrants are responsible for the chaos unfolding in Chicago and has suggested he could invoke the Insurrection Act, empowering him to order a larger military force to the city, if court cases filed against the administration halt the deployment of the National Guard.
At the protest Wednesday, one man toldSky News he is “concerned the US is slipping away from democracy to authoritarianism.”
Hundreds of people in downtown Chicago are marching to protest the Trump administration's deployment of National Guard troops and immigration authorities here.
Joely King, who is running to represent Illinois’ 1st Congressional District, toldThe Columbia Chronicle that attending the protest was “like standing up to a bully.”
“The thing with authoritarians, which is what we’re dealing with with the Trump administration, is that they need people to comply in advance to have any power, because it really is a weak movement, it does not support the people,” King said. “So showing up and saying no, you don’t actually have the popular support, you don’t have the power—it shows them that we will not give them what they want and just let them roll us over.”
Dozens of people also gathered Wednesday in “free speech zones” that have been designated outside the ICE facility in Broadview where agents have been taking people they’ve detained, and more assembled for a candlelight vigil in Joliet, where Texas troops were stationed before heading to Broadview.
“To people who are scared, who are detained, we are fighting for you,” Meredith Shoemaker, a 19-year-old Loyola University Chicago student who marched downtown, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We don’t support what is happening.”
On Thursday, Judge April M. Perry in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois heard arguments for and against the National Guard deployment. Illinois officials filed a lawsuit to block the forces from coming to Chicago—a move that prompted Trump to say that Pritzker should be imprisoned for “failing to protect ICE officers.”
Perry, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, declined to rule on the case earlier this week, saying she wanted to hear arguments in a hearing.
At the march on Wednesday evening, another Chicago resident, Jinah Yun-Mitchell, told the Sun-Times that many in the city are determined to “stand up for people that can’t stand up for themselves” as Trump intensifies Operation Midway Blitz, in which more than 1,000 people have been arrested so far.
“The rule of law is falling apart,“ said Yun-Mitchell, ”so we all need to do something to make sure that it doesn’t keep going in this direction.”
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.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
US President Donald Trump reads a note as Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a roundtable discussion at the White House in Washington, DC on October 8, 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
US Attorney General Pam Bondi generated alarm on Wednesday when she said the Trump administration is going to take the “same approach” to Antifa as it has to drug cartels—as the military bombs boats in the Caribbean it claims are smuggling drugs.
Antifa encompasses autonomous anti-fascist individuals and loosely affiliated groups who lack a national organizational structure or leadership. Still, as the increasingly authoritarian administration works to quash dissent on all fronts, President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order designating the Antifa movement as a domestic terrorist organization.
During a related roundtable on Wednesday—held as the administration worked to deploy the National Guard in Democrat-led cities—Bondi said that “we’re not gonna stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets. Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets; it’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels.”
Glancing toward Trump, she continued: “We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa: Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart. Thanks to your bold leadership, and the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization—which is exactly what they are—Americans will no longer tolerate their unhinged violence.”
Lawyer and radio host Dean Obeidallah warned: “Please understand that this is Trump regime explaining how they will use the government to prosecute Democrats. Page 1 of the fascist playbook is imprison political opponents so that the fascist has one-party rule.”
Others noted the violence the administration has already taken. Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker said: “My gosh. After the US bombed multiple boats in the middle of the ocean, murdering people on grounds that they were allegedly ‘carrying drugs,’ the US attorney general says, ‘Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take the same approach…with Antifa.’”
Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan said, “So he is going to drone strike American citizens?”
HuffPost‘s SV Dáte similarly asked, “So the US military will be summarily killing them from above now?”
Trump has recently announced four bombings of boats he claimed were running drugs, without releasing any evidence. Those US military attacks have killed at least 21 people. Critics in Congress and beyond argue the strikes are illegal under federal and international law.
On Tuesday, top Democrats from key committees in the US House of Representatives demanded further information about the bombings and reminded Trump: “Congress has the sole constitutional responsibility to declare war and to authorize the use of force. You have failed to secure such authorization for these strikes.”
Also on Tuesday, Bondi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where lawmakers grilled her on a range of topics. Asked about legal justification for the boat bombings by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), she declined to comment.
COONS: How did you conclude that these strikes on boats in the open ocean are legal?
BONDI: I'm not going to discuss any legal advice that my department may or may not have issued pic.twitter.com/Lg1FNPBpk7
Ahead of Bondi’s Senate testimony, watchdog groups and hundreds of former employees of the US Department of Justice expressed alarm about her leadership of the DOJ.
“We’re seeing the erosion of the Justice Department’s fabric and integrity at an alarming pace,“ says a letter signed by 282 former DOJ officials. ”Our democratic system cannot survive without the primary institution that enforces the law.”
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.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
