… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Category: genocide

  • Pro-Israel Group Condemned for Demanding UK Ban on Doctors Without Borders

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    Article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Medics care for patients at a clinic set up by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) treating severe injuries and burns sustained in Israeli bombardment, at the Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 24, 2024. (Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)

    “Support for Israel requires you to be against everything good in this world, like an organization which sends doctors to conflict areas to save human lives,” said one observer.

    Doctors Without Borders on Saturday condemned allegations made by a British pro-Israel lobby group, which called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to investigate and potentially proscribe the group, whose medical providers and other humanitarian workers provide lifesaving aid in 70 countries and have worked in Palestine during Israel’s assault there.

    As The Telegraph reported, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKFLI) wrote to Mahmood as well as the Charity Commission and Fundraising Regulator, calling on the Labour government to investigate Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

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    The group claimed at least two of MSF’s workers who were killed by Israeli forces, physiologist Fadi Al Wadiya and driver Nasser Hamdi Abdelatif Al Shalfouh, had connections to terrorist groups in Gaza.

    Palestine Islamic Jihad published a poster earlier this year naming Wadiya as a “martyr commander,” and UKFLI claimed Al Shalfouh was a sniper for a Hamas battalion.

    MSF acknowledged the poster regarding Wadiya in February and said the medical group “had no indication that Fadi Al Wadiya might have been involved in military activity of any kind prior to his killing by the Israeli Forces.”

    “If the Israeli authorities had any reliable information about Fadi’s involvement in military activity, they never shared it with MSF either prior to his killing or when we reached out immediately after he was killed to ask for clarifications around the circumstances of his death,” the group added. “We would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity. Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and patients.”

    UKFLI sent its report on MSF to Mahmood asking her to ban the group, as the Labour government proscribed the protest group Palestine Action last year, labeling it a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act. The government took that action after members of the group vandalized planes at a military base.

    The designation put Palestine Action on the same legal footing as Al Qaeda in the UK and made membership of the group—or even expressions of support for it—punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

    The demand for the same designation for MSF, said former British Army general Charlie Herbert, was “absolutely grotesque.”

    MSF doctors and healthcare workers have treated thousands of Palestinians in Gaza since Israel began its onslaught there in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. At least 15 people working with the organization have been killed by Israeli forces. The group is also currently providing humanitarian and medical aid in Sudan as the civil war there has displaced millions of people and collapsed the healthcare system; in Yemen as the conflict between the Houthis and Saudi-backed government troops has escalated; and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is facing an Ebola outbreak as well as humanitarian crises exacerbated by years of conflict.

    “I work in aid, and when people ask who to support I always say MSF,” said researcher and activist Philip Proudfoot. “MSF, wherever I’ve been, are right there on the front, in dangerous conditions, in isolated outposts, providing life-saving support. They’re heroes. UK lawyers for Israel are not fit to wash their scrubs.”

    US-based researcher Shaiel Ben-Ephraim said the report by UKLFI demonstrates that “support for Israel requires you to be against everything good in this world, like an organization which sends doctors to conflict areas to save human lives.”

    Article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    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.
    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.

  • How Israel’s arms industry is integrated into Britain’s military

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    https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-israels-arms-industry-is-integrated-into-britains-military/

    Elbit has an MoD contract to provide a simulation trainer for Challenger 3 tanks (Photo: Stephen Bardens / Alamy)

    Ed Miliband’s decision to leave the military relationship with Israel intact raises serious concerns about Britain’s compliance with international law.

    …

    Genocide scholar Martin Shaw told Declassified: “The government’s acceptance that the occupation is illegal means that it should act against Israel itself, not just the settlers it has installed. 

    “The ICJ was clear that states must do nothing that provides ‘aid or assistance’ to Israel in maintaining the occupation, and must ‘ensure that any impediment’ that the occupation causes to the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination ‘is brought to an end’. 

    “Through the UK’s military alliance with Israel and its comprehensive military-industrial cooperation, Labour still appears to be failing in these legal duties, despite Miliband’s announcements”.

    …

    Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, told Declassified: “This important investigation exposes precisely why the UK government’s recent measures are largely performative and designed to whitewash the multifaceted, shameless complicity of the UK with Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide.

    “The UK has failed to end the economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory, as it is obliged to do in order to comply with the ICJ ruling. 

    “It is absurd for the UK to sanction settlements while simultaneously purchasing and integrating Israeli surveillance and weapon systems that are field-tested on Palestinians into its own armed forces.

    “Comparing these largely symbolic measures with the far-reaching sanctions imposed by the UK on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine affirms the UK’s colonial hypocrisy and loss of credibility on the international stage”.

    …

    In addition to military collaboration, Britain’s intelligence relationship with Israel will be untouched, according to Miliband, and there are no signs that either the 2020 UK-Israel military cooperation agreement, nor the 2023 Road Map for UK-Israel bilateral relations will be suspended.

    In response to Britain’s sanctions, Israel has said it will close the British consulate in East Jerusalem, remove UK representatives from the International Gaza Support Centre in Kiryat Gat, and terminate Britain’s role in training Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank.

    Omar Barghouti added: “The UK has very clear obligations under international law, as triggered by the ICJ decisions of 2024 about Israel’s plausible genocide and its illegal occupation and apartheid.

    “The UK must end all military, intelligence, trade, financial, academic and other relations with Israel that enable its illegal occupation, apartheid or genocide, as the ICJ has called for”.

    See the original article at https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-israels-arms-industry-is-integrated-into-britains-military/

    UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
    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.
    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.
    Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
    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/O74hZCKKdpA

  • Israeli Documentary ‘NAZA’ Exposes ‘System of Killing’ in Gaza From Eyes of Secret Intelligence Unit

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    Article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

    NAZA co-directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham attend the photo call for their documentary at the 83rd International Venice Film Festival, at Venice Lido on September 10, 2026.
     (Photo by Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images)

    The directors of the film—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival—said they “felt the responsibility” to expose insider testimony about Israel’s systematic mass killing of Palestinians.

    “We really are looking at… a system of killing, which is mass killing [and] relies on mass surveillance,” Abraham told reporters in Venice on Thursday. “We felt the responsibility as Israelis to use our position… to bring insider testimony into how the system looks like from the inside… And this is the film that we made.”

    Szor said that “a lot of these things are also, it’s important to say… known because they’ve been documented by journalists, Palestinian journalists, in Gaza. It’s footage that has been out there.”

    “But I think that we felt that there is still some sort of an importance to take those testimonies and put it in a film in a way that, of course, first of all, it’s different to hear,” she added. “The people who designed and operated those systems talk about it in front of a camera.”

    According to the film, one former member bluntly said that the unit’s mission was to “thwart peace.”

    However, Abraham and Szor said their purpose was not to expose a handful of rogue soldiers, but to examine the machinery and policies behind the violence.

    The documentary’s title refers to an Israeli military acronym used to quantify the civilians expected to be killed in an attack—a chilling bureaucratic shorthand for people often referred to as collateral damage, or, in the so-called “War on Terror” still being waged by the United States 25 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, “bugsplat.”

    The film’s sources describe artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, mass surveillance, and the hacking of mobile phones to identify alleged Hamas operatives, sometimes despite the known presence of family members and other civilians.

    Israeli forces have operated under loosened rules of engagement that effectively permit the killing of an unlimited number of civilians when targeting even a single low-ranking Hamas member. The Israel Defense Forces utilizes cutting-edge AI technology to select targets at a far faster rate than humans alone could, and destroys them with weapons including 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many supplied by the US.

    The result has been the killing and wounding of more than 250,000 Palestinians since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Most of the victims have been civilians, including more than 21,500 children killed and tens of thousands more disabled or wounded.

    Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice—also in The Hague—and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

    Abraham and Szor are best known internationally for co-directing with two others the film No Other Land, which chronicled ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the illegally occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers. The film won the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary feature.

    NAZA—which reportedly received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere—is the sole documentary among the films competing for the festival’s famed Golden Lion. It joins a growing body of recent films about the Gaza genocide.

    American Doctor, directed by Poh Si Teng, follows US physicians working inside Gaza hospitals amid Israel’s deliberate destruction of the strip’s medical and healthcare systems.

    Last year’s The Voice of Hind Rajab offered a harrowing mix of acted scenes and the actual 70-minute audio recording of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl’s desperate final phone call to Palestine Red Crescent Society personnel amid an Israeli massacre of her family as they were trapped in a car under tank fire.

    Article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    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.
    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.

  • The UK’s sanctions on Israeli settlements are a great victory – but must be only the beginning

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    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/uk-sanctions-israel-settlements-activists-palestine-movement

    The change in policy is a direct result of sustained pressure from activists and organisers across the Palestine movement. But what comes next?

    …

    We can certainly retain our anger at the government’s complicity. No sanction can offset the foreign policy decisions made by the former prime minister Keir Starmer and former foreign secretary David Lammy, the repression of domestic pro-Palestine advocacy, or the sheer loss of life. But we must balance this with cautious optimism that the political tide is turning.

    …

    The necessary next step is a full arms embargo and an end to cooperation with Israeli security forces – to truly have teeth, these sanctions must not take with one hand and then give with another. Miliband has said that “we’ve already suspended over 30 arms licences used by the IDF in Gaza. That suspension remains fully in place”, and that the government will “now also refuse all licence applications for arms and other exports that materially contribute to the occupation”. But components of F-35 jets continue to be exported to Israel and used for operations in Gaza, as are surveillance technologies such as drones and radar made in the UK by Elbit Systems. This is a total dereliction of duty by the British government.

    Miliband’s announcements were a necessary reminder that a just political future is possible and, within it, a reckoning with past crimes. As a campaigner, I have borne witness to Israel’s most egregious human rights violations: I have documented Israeli settlers committing pogroms against the community of Al-Mufaqara, sat in Palestinian villages threatened with home demolitions and army raids, and witnessed the ongoing daily misery of Israel’s apartheid policies. This has all strengthened my motivation to see the end of the Israeli occupation.

    See the original article at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/uk-sanctions-israel-settlements-activists-palestine-movement

    Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
    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/O74hZCKKdpA
    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.
    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.
    Genocide denying former UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government's support for Israel's Gaza genocide and the UK government and military's active participation in genocide.
    Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.

  • MSF UK: Open letter to PM Andy Burnham on Gaza and the West Bank

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    Médecins Sans Frontières logo.

    Médecins Sans Frontières logo.

    10 September 2026 – Please find below a letter from Dr Natalie Roberts, Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders to the Prime Minister Andy Burnham and the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.

    Dear Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary,

    Congratulations on your appointments as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. I am writing to you as the Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the United Kingdom to request an urgent meeting regarding the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in Gaza.

    Since 1 November 2023, we have repeatedly written to your predecessors to provide evidence of atrocities directly witnessed and experienced by our 1,500 colleagues working in Gaza, to remind the UK of its power and its obligation to act, and to request an urgent high-level meeting. We have never received clear acknowledgement of the evidence that we have provided, nor have we ever been offered that meeting. In July last year we concluded that the UK Government just did not want to acknowledge what everybody else can see: that genocide is being committed in Gaza, and it is being committed with the military, diplomatic, and material support of the UK.

    We therefore greatly welcome your decision to sanction illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to recognise that what is happening in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing, and to align with the 2024 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful. Thank you for finally taking some first tangible steps towards action, rather than claiming that the UK could only powerlessly stand by while a foreign government committed war crimes with complete impunity. But while the new UK sanctions are a welcome, and necessary, response to the illegal occupation and spiralling violence in the West Bank, it is difficult for us to understand how they will have any tangible impact on the catastrophic situation in Gaza.

    On that subject, we urge you to hear directly from MSF. MSF is the UK’s largest medical humanitarian organisation still operating in Gaza. Since January 2026, we have been prevented by the Israeli authorities from bringing international staff and supplies into Palestine, yet we continue to work at scale across Gaza and the West Bank. Around 1,500 Palestinian MSF staff are providing surgical support, wound care, physiotherapy, maternity and paediatric care, general healthcare, vaccination, and mental health services as well as water production and distribution, under extraordinarily difficult conditions. My Palestinian colleagues see every day, in our hospitals and clinics, the human consequences of political decisions taken far from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

    Despite the October 2025 ceasefire, Palestinians in Gaza continue to face daily violence, repeated displacement, severe restrictions on humanitarian access, and appalling living conditions. The situation is characterised by the systematic erosion of Palestinians’ possibility to survive with dignity.

    MSF teams witness catastrophic medical needs: traumatic injuries, malnutrition in infants and pregnant women, and rampant infectious disease. The Israeli military is now estimated to occupy at least 60 percent of the Strip, as Gaza has been divided by an unclearly marked and constantly shifting Israeli-military-controlled “yellow line”. MSF teams continue to treat patients suffering from blast injuries, fragment wounds, and blunt trauma caused by explosions and gunshot wounds, including people who are shot by Israeli forces when approaching the shifting boundary. Israeli forces continue to issue sudden displacement orders, forcing Palestinians to flee with almost no warning. Palestinians in Gaza are also dying from preventable diseases and untreated health conditions, as communicable diseases spread amid severe Israeli restrictions on essential supplies and a lack of access to basic services. Israeli authorities are leaving Palestinians to suffer and die through its illegal blockade, and Israel’s deliberate policies of violence, destruction, and denial of basic needs have created a deadly cycle of extreme deprivation, suffering, and death, fuelling its genocidal campaign and violating international humanitarian law. More than two and a half years of global inaction and complicity in the face of genocide have allowed this catastrophe to persist.

    Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained hundreds of Palestinian healthcare workers from Gaza since October 2023, holding many without charge and routinely denying access to those imprisoned. They include our colleague, MSF orthopaedic surgeon Dr Mohammed Obeid, who was arrested during an Israeli military raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in October 2024. Dr Obeid is still detained by Israel without charge, and we are very concerned for his safety and wellbeing.

    Fifteen Palestinian colleagues have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, and many more injured. Yet the Israeli military has denied any criminal investigation into the killing or injury of MSF staff. Last month, the Israeli Military Advocate General decided to close without investigation the cases MSF submitted for review: the multiple attacks on an MSF convoy in Gaza City in November 2023 that killed two, and the February 2024 strike on an MSF shelter in Khan Younis that killed two and injured six. With this decision, the Israeli authorities made it clear that there is no prospect of accountability within the Israeli legal system for the killing of our staff, just as there has been no accountability for Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. Although we support the efforts of the International Courts in pursuing accountability for war crimes, our colleagues, their families, and the Palestinians living in Gaza cannot wait for the outcome of lengthy processes – processes which the Israeli government has anyway stated it considers invalid.

    Over a year ago we asked that the UK Government:

    • Acknowledges and respects the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and acts decisively to end the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the Israeli government in Gaza
    • Ends all military cooperation with Israel and suspends all arms transfers to its government
    • Ends all material and diplomatic support to the Israeli government
    • Speaks out to acknowledge and condemn the genocide in Gaza
    • Pushes to end the siege and allow unfettered access of humanitarian aid, including medical supplies, into Gaza
    • Creates a pathway for the evacuation of medical patients from Gaza to the UK to be treated

    While the recent shift in UK policy makes progress in responding to those asks, and we once again thank you for showing moral leadership, we would like to meet to discuss further steps the UK Government should take to uphold fully its obligations to act under International Humanitarian Law to protect all civilians in Gaza.

    Yours sincerely,

    Dr Natalie Roberts

    Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) UK