Journalist Sam Husseini is carried out of a State Department news conference after confronting Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the U.S. policy towards Gaza on January 16, 2025. (Photo credit: Ryan Grim/X.com)
“Physically dragging out a reporter from the State Department briefing room while preaching press freedom to the rest of the world is the perfect example of the Biden administration’s love affair with double standards and duplicity,” said one foreign policy observer.
Two journalists were removed from Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s final news conference on Thursday after interrupting Blinken’s remarks to heckle him about the United States’ policy toward Gaza, a day after a cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israelwas announced. One of the reporters, independent journalist Sam Husseini, was physically carried out of the briefing room by security.
Less than two minutes into Blinken’s remarks, as he was thanking the reporters in the attendance for “asking tough questions,” Max Blumenthal, the editor in chief of The Grayzone—an independent news—addressed Blinken, saying loudly in reference to the cease-fire deal:“300 reporters in Gaza were on the receiving end of your bombs. Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May?” On Wednesday, President Biden announced the breakthrough, saying that “this is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring.”
“Why did you sacrifice the rules-based order on the mantle of your commitment to Zionism,” Blumenthal continued, before being led to the door. “How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?” he yelled.
Blumenthal also called out State Department Spokesman Matt Miller, who is briefly visible in a video filmed by the journalist, who charged that Miller “smirked through a genocide.”
Not long after, Husseini also interrupted Blinken.
“I am asking questions after being told by Matt Miller that he will not answer my questions,” said Husseini, who also referenced the findings of Amnesty International, which concluded in December that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. “You pontificate about a free press… Criminal! Why aren’t you in the Hague.” The Hague is where the International Criminal Court is located.
Blinken can be heard saying “respect the process” in response to Husseini’s outburst.
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the non-interventionist “action tank” the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, remarked that “physically dragging out a reporter from the State Department briefing room while preaching press freedom to the rest of the world is the perfect example of the Biden administration’s love affair with double standards and duplicity…”
A pro-Palestine protest outside the BBC. (Photo: Monica Wells / Alamy)
Britain’s ‘public service broadcaster’ is keeping the public in the dark about UK support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, new research finds.
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Our research into the BBC’s written outputs since October 2023 finds the corporation has mainly not reported at all the major ways the UK government has been working with Israel.
It found that the BBC has reported just four times in 15 months that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza.
Only one BBC report on the subject has been written since December 2023, despite the fact that hundreds of such spy missions have been conducted, almost daily, in aid of Israeli intelligence.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says these flights are solely to aid the rescue of hostages held by Hamas. Only one BBC online report mentions the UK may be providing targeting information to Israel or flying weapons to the country.
None of the articles otherwise raise concerns about the UK being willing to collaborate militarily with Israel at a time it is devastating Gaza.
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Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “The BBC is clearly utterly failing to inform the public about how the UK military and government is complicit in the horrors of Gaza. This is a national scandal, showing how far away the corporation is from being a public service broadcaster.”
He added: “The BBC’s failure to accurately report on Israel’s genocide in Gaza is as much to do with what it refuses to report as with what it does report. It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”.
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A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC News teams are editorially independent and make their own decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
“We have reported the Gaza-Israel conflict in great depth and consistently across our programmes and services since 7 October 2023, ensuring audiences are kept updated with the latest developments as well as providing comprehensive analysis.
“We hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards and have reported the conflict impartially – without fear or favour.”
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/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
U.S. President Joe Biden (L) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) meet in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: GPO/ Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
One Middle East expert said that it’s “hard to avoid the conclusion” that the U.S. administration’s ultimatums to Israel “have all just been a smokescreen.”
New reporting published Wednesday details the impotence and insincerity of President Joe Biden’s “multiple threats, warnings, and admonishments” to Israel as it annihilated the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians while receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. arms and unwavering diplomatic support.
Writing for ProPublica, Brett Murphy showed how multiple “red lines” issued by Biden administration officials were ignored by Israel with impunity. Murphy highlighted Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s October 2024 demand that Israel take “urgent and sustained actions” to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza—mainly by allowing far more aid into the embattled strip—within 30 days or face a military aid cutoff.
“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price.”
Thirty days came and went without significant improvement or letup in Israel’s onslaught. Yet the Biden administration insisted it found no indication that Israel was using U.S.-supplied weapons illegally. The arms flow continued.
As Murphy reported:
That choice was immediately called into question. On November 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations.
“Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity,” wrote Murphy.
This reporting is so utterly damning.www.propublica.org/article/bide…
Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Murphy that “Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him.”
“Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president,” al-Omari added.
Conversely, Murphy noted: “On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now, and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that [U.S. President-elect Donald] Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line.”
“Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months,” he added, “raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.”
As Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told Murphy, “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that [Biden’s] red lines have all just been a smokescreen.”
“The Biden administration decided to be all-in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something,” Walt added, as Israel kept killing Palestinians with U.S.-supplied weapons and continued a “complete siege” blamed for widespread starvation and sickness in the Gaza Strip.
Murphy wrote that Trump “will inherit a demoralized State Department” in which many officials who haven’t already resignedhave “become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.”
As one senior department official told Murphy, Gaza “is the human rights atrocity of our time.”
“I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this,” the official added. “I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”
Palestinians celebrate after US President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement of hostage deal between Israel and Hamas , in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, Gaza on January 15, 2025 [Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu Agency]
Palestinians burst into celebration across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday at news of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, with some shedding tears of joy and others whistling, clapping and chanting “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest), Reuters reports.
“I am happy, yes, I am crying, but those are tears of joy,” said Ghada, a mother of five displaced from her home in Gaza City during the 15-month-old conflict.
“We are being reborn, with every hour of delay Israel conducted a new massacre, I hope it is all getting over now,” she told Reuters via a chat app from a shelter in Deir Al-Balah town in central Gaza.
Youths beat tambourines, blew horns and danced in the street in Khan Yunis in the southern part of the enclave minutes after hearing news of the agreement struck in the Qatari capital, Doha.
The deal, not yet formally announced, outlines a six-week initial ceasefire phase and includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
The accord also provides for the release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by Israel, an official briefed on the negotiations told Reuters.
Ahmed Dahman, 25, said the first thing he would do when the deal goes into effect is to recover the body of his father, who was killed in an air strike on the family’s house last year, and “give him a proper burial.”
‘A day of happiness and sadness’
“I feel a mixture of happiness because lives are being saved and blood is being stopped,” said Dahman, who like Ghada was displaced from Gaza City and lives in Deir Al-Balah.
“But I am also worried about the post-war shock of what we will see in the streets, our destroyed homes, my father whose body is still under the rubble.”
His mother, Bushra, said that while the ceasefire wouldn’t bring her husband back, “at least it may save other lives.”
“I will cry, like never before. This brutal war didn’t give us time to cry,” said the tearful mother, speaking to Reuters by a chat app.
Iman Al-Qouqa, who lives with her family in a nearby tent, was still in disbelief.
“This is a day of happiness, and sadness, a shock and joy, but certainly it is a day we all must cry and cry long because of what we all lost. We did not lose friends, relatives, and homes only, we lost our city, Israel sent us back in history because of its brutal war,” she told Reuters.
“It is time the world comes back into Gaza, focuses on Gaza, and rebuilds it,” said Qouqa.
Israeli troops invaded Gaza after Hamas-led gunmen broke through security barriers and burst into Israeli communities on 7 October, 2023, killing 1,200 soldiers and civilians and abducting more than 250 foreign and Israeli hostages.
However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 46,000 people, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures, and left the coastal enclave a wasteland, with many thousands living in makeshift shelters.
People watch a television along a street in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 15, 2025. (Photo: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)
“The cease-fire alone will not end the ongoing genocide that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” said one Palestinian human rights organization.
This is a developing news story… Please check back for possible updates…
The U.S. and Qatar said Wednesday that negotiators have reached a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement between Israel and Hamas after more than 15 months of incessant Israeli bombing that killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions, and left Gaza in ruins.
At a press conference, Qatar’s prime minister said the agreement is set to take effect on Sunday. U.S. President Joe Biden said that “it is long past time for the fighting to end and the work of building peace and security to begin.”
Shortly before the formal announcement from the U.S. and Qatar, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the deal has yet to be cemented.
“Due to the strong insistence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas folded on its last-minute demand to change the deployment of IDF forces in the Philadelphi Corridor,” the prime minister’s office said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “However, several items in the framework have yet to be finalized; we hope that the details will be finalized tonight.”
The reported deal, brokered by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, would entail “a six-week initial cease-fire phase and includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by Israel,” according to Reuters, which cited an unnamed official briefed on the negotiations.
Al Jazeera, also citing anonymous sources, provided an outline of the reported deal:
The Israeli military will withdraw to within 700 meters (2,297 feet) inside Gaza.
Israel will release about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences.
Palestinian groups will release 33 Israeli captives.
Israel will allow injured people in Gaza to travel to receive medical treatment.
Israel will open the Rafah crossing with Egypt seven days after the start of the first stage.
Israeli forces will begin to pull back from Gaza’s border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, to withdraw from it completely in later stages.
Following news of potentially decisive progress toward a cease-fire, The Associated Press reported that “large crowds of cheering people” took to the streets in southern Gaza to celebrate. Meanwhile, the outlet noted, hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside of the Israeli military’s headquarters in Tel Aviv “calling for a deal to be completed.”
Reporting from central Gaza, Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud said that “we’re seeing people in tears” after news of a possible agreement spread in the besieged enclave.
“We’re seeing mothers here, who live in tents near the hospital… hugging and kissing their children, thanking God that they have survived,” said Mahmoud.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who voiced support for Israel’s catastrophic assault on Gaza during his 2024 campaign, took to his social media platform Wednesday to declare, in all-caps: “WE HAVE A DEAL FOR THE HOSTAGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. THEY WILL BE RELEASED SHORTLY. THANK YOU!”
Steve Witkoff, the incoming Trump administration’s Middle East envoy, joined members of Biden’s team in working to finalize the cease-fire agreement, which came as the official death toll from Israel’s assault climbed above 46,000—a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount. The majority of the people killed in Israeli attacks have been women, children, or elderly.
Drop Site‘s Jeremy Scahill reported Tuesday that “the terms of the deal being negotiated are largely consistent with what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it.”
“Biden allowed Netanyahu to steamroll him for months—rewarding Israel with billions of dollars in arms transfers and political support after rejecting that cease-fire deal,” Scahill wrote. “Since that time, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed and maimed and an unknown number of Israeli captives killed, either by their captors or Israeli strikes. All the while, the administration and its backers repeatedly assured voters in the U.S. that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were working tirelessly to achieve a cease-fire deal.”
“What is required is for Israel to end all ongoing genocidal acts, open Gaza, and for the international community to ensure accountability for those responsible.”
The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian organization, said the apparent cease-fire agreement marks “a crucial step toward reducing the killing of Palestinians through deadly force.”
“However, the cease-fire alone will not end the ongoing genocide that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” the group added. “What is required is for Israel to end all ongoing genocidal acts, open Gaza, and for the international community to ensure accountability for those responsible.”
Inger Ashing, CEO of the international humanitarian group Save the Children, said the cease-fire “must be permanent” and accompanied by urgent efforts to “end the siege and vastly increase the entry of aid.”
“For 15 months, about 1 million children in Gaza have been caught in a living nightmare with loss, trauma, and risks to their lives at every turn,” said Ashing. “If implemented, this pause will bring them vital reprieve from the bombs and bullets that have stalked them for more than a year. But it is not enough and the race is on to save children facing hunger and disease as the shadow of famine looms.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has vocally criticized Israel’s response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack and U.S. military aid to the Israeli government, said Wednesday that a cease-fire is “long-overdue” and “both sides must honor the deal and implement it as quickly as possible.”
“The senseless killing must stop. The hostages must be released,” said Sanders. “The United Nations and other aid organizations must finally be allowed unfettered access to all areas of the Gaza Strip in order to provide the massive amounts of humanitarian aid that is desperately needed. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people are struggling to survive, lacking food, water, and medical care in the middle of winter. Innocent lives hang in the balance.”
“This is just the first step to restoring peace,” the senator added. “The international community must insist that the cease-fire be sustained and formalized. A plan for rebuilding Gaza and establishing peaceful Palestinian governance of the area must be laid out. And there must be accountability for the many war crimes committed by both sides in this terrible conflict.”
