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Al-Qassam Brigades hand over 3 female Israeli hostages to Red Cross at al-Saraya as part of 1st phase of ceasefire and prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, Gaza on January 19, 2025 [Dawoud Abo Alkas – Anadolu Agency]
A senior official in the Hamas movement, Taher Al-Nounou, has confirmed that the group has agreed to release 10 Israeli captives currently held in Gaza in order to guarantee the delivery of humanitarian aid and bring an end to the ongoing war on the Strip.
In remarks made to the press on Wednesday, Al-Nounou said that Hamas is showing a high degree of flexibility during the current negotiations taking place in the Qatari capital, Doha, and is responding positively to mediators.
He noted that this round of talks faces serious challenges, but stressed that the movement remains committed to its core demands, foremost among them the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and a comprehensive end to the aggression.
He emphasised that Hamas’s primary goal in any negotiations is to safeguard the interests of the Palestinian people and stop what he described as “the crime of genocide”, while also ensuring that humanitarian aid can enter Gaza freely and with dignity.
Al-Nounou pointed out that the flexibility Hamas has demonstrated in dealing with proposals from mediators has been one of the main reasons for progress in the talks. He confirmed that the decision to release the Israeli prisoners falls within this humanitarian and political context.
Stressing the importance of international guarantees, Al-Nounou noted that the United States holds real leverage over Israel to end the war, and could compel it to adhere to any agreement reached—if it exercises the political will to do so.
Over 400,000 people were forced to flee to El Fasher from the Zamzam refugee camp due to RSF ground operations. Photo: Doctors Without Borders
The specter of ethnic cleansing looms over hundreds of thousands trapped without food, water, or medicines in the North Darfur state’s besieged capital, El Fasher.
Nearly half a million people were forced to flee from North Darfur state’s capital, El Fasher, and the nearby Zamzam camp for displaced people in just the two months of April and May, the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said in a press briefing on Monday, July 7.
North Darfur is the only one of the five states where the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have retained a foothold in the war-torn Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur, overrun by its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), within six months of the war’s start in April 2023.
Moving against this last holdout, the RSF laid siege in May 2024 on El Fasher, where the SAF has a base, and the Zamzam camp on its outskirts, where some of the local self-defense units allied with the SAF are positioned.
“People are not only caught in indiscriminate heavy fighting between” the two warring forces, but are also being “actively targeted by the RSF and its allies, notably on the basis of their ethnicity,” Michel Olivier Lacharité, MSF head of emergencies, said on July 3.
SAF created the RSF in Darfur
The RSF was coalesced in 2013 from the militias the SAF had spawned from Arabic-speaking nomadic communities to perpetrate mass atrocities on the regional-language-speaking groups of sedentary farmers that supported the rebel groups during the Darfur civil war in the 2000s.
The partnership between SAF and the RSF lasted a decade, during which they seized power together to form a military junta in 2019, when mass pro-democracy protests forced the ouster of Omar al-Bashir after a 30-year-long dictatorship.
The duo deployed its troops to jointly repress the militant protests that continued until April 15, 2023, when the intensifying power struggle within the junta between the two forces crossed the Rubicon, mobilizing their forces against each other and hurling the country into a civil war.
IDPs under attack
Now continuing into its third year, the civil war has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives and displaced nearly 13 million people, unleashing in this poor North African country the world’s worst displacement crisis.
Over three million of the displaced have fled to other countries as refugees. An estimated 8.6 million have remained as Internally Displaced People (IDPs). Darfur, which already had almost 3.1 million IDPs from the regional civil war in the 2000s, was among the worst-affected regions by this new war.
The RSF maneuvered quickly to take control over this region, starting with West Darfur, where it committed ethnically targeted massacres in June 2023 against the Masalit community, most of whom were displaced in the Darfur civil war. Ethnic cleansing of this community from West Darfur was nearly complete by November that year.
By then, the RSF had taken over most of the region, with North Darfur as the SAF’s only holdout. Members of the state’s Zaghawa community, which had until then remained neutral, volunteered in large numbers to form self-defense units that aligned themselves with the SAF.
“In light of the ethnically motivated mass atrocities committed on the Masalit in West Darfur… MSF fears such a scenario will be repeated in El Fasher – notably because witnesses report that RSF soldiers spoke of plans to ‘clean El Fasher’ of its non-Arab, and especially Zaghawa, community,” MSF said in a report released on July 3.
Titled “Besieged, attacked, starved: Mass atrocities in El Fasher“, the report added: “Aside from the direct violence exerted on civilians, residents from El Fasher and surrounding areas [also] have been prevented from meeting their basic needs.”
Famine
The RSF’s siege since last May has cut off the city and its surrounding localities from supplies. Its markets have been repeatedly bombed by both sides. At the Zamzam camp located seventeen kilometers south of El Fasher, a famine was declared in August 2024.
Among the largest IDP camps in the country, it was already sheltering about 350,000 displaced people from the Darfur civil war. With new displacements from this intra-junta civil war, IDPs nearly doubled in Zamzam. Its meagre resources in the form of aid were already stretched when its supply was cut off by the RSF’s siege in May 2024.
“When fighting erupted in Zamzam in December 2024 and then intensified at the end of January and in February 2025, the camp was hosting … up to 700,000,” MSF’s report added.
Most of them had to flee again, for the second, even third time, after the RSF’s large-scale ground offensive this April, displacing over 400,000 in three weeks, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
“A large proportion of the population fled to El Fasher, where they remained trapped, out of reach of humanitarian aid and exposed to attacks and further mass violence,” the report warns.
No escape for the Zaghawa community
Over 68,000 others have fled across the western border to Chad, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). No one identified as Zaghawa was let through the RSF checkpoints, multiple survivors told the MSF. “They would only let mothers with small children under the age of five through,” said one of the refugees interviewed in Chad.
“Other children and adult men didn’t go through. Males over fifteen can hardly cross the border [into Chad]. They take them, they push them aside, and then we only hear a noise, gunshots … Fifty families came along with me. Not even one boy of 15 years old or above.. [is] among us” in Chad.
“The number of people killed and injured” in the RSF’s offensive on Zamzam is “unknown”, the report said, adding “with no functional hospital within the camp, most of the wounded had no access to life-saving medical assistance.”
“Access to healthcare has been rendered near impossible, as most healthcare infrastructure has been partially or completely damaged.” MSF’s own medical facilities have been attacked over a dozen times since last May.
This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.
Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”
Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”
Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).
Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”
‘A Holocaust in Gaza’
Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).
It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.
Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”
Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”
Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”
‘Antisemitism forever!’
Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.
If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.
Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.
Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”
Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).
‘Generated threats of personal violence’
A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.
Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.
Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”
After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.
It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.
Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.
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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect 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.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
‘Perhaps the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel will reach a temporary deal again, with more aid allowed in. Even so, no one few expect that a lasting peace would result.’ Photograph: Getty
Visiting Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu delighted in telling Donald Trump that he had nominated him for the Nobel peace prize. The Israeli prime minister cited Mr Trump’s efforts to end conflicts in the Middle East. But in truth he is grateful to the US president for joining his war against Iran last month and for allowing carnage in Gaza to continue after a brief pause. He is also eager that the US president does not strong‑arm him into another ceasefire. Perhaps the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel in Qatar will reach a temporary deal again, with hostages released and possibly more aid allowed in. Even so, few expect that a lasting peace would result.
Words matter. They have become so detached from reality when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza that it is not merely absurd, or despicable, but obscene. The defence minister, Israel Katz, has laid out plans for a “humanitarian city”: this means forcing all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp that the military would bar them from leaving. Prof Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust, used the accurate words: it would be “a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them”. The “emigration plan” which Mr Katz says “will happen”, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, is in fact an ethnic cleansing plan. No departure can be considered voluntary when the alternative is starvation or indefinite imprisonment in inhuman conditions.
…
Destroying Palestinians’ means of survival, planning the removal of Gaza’s population and envisioning its outright destruction are surely not merely brutal acts but ones committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – the definition of genocide in the UN convention.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect 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.
