Some 13 of the 31 members of Labour’s shadow cabinet have received donations from a prominent pro-Israel lobby group or individual funder, it can be revealed.
The list of recipients includes party leader Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, and even the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy, who is now shadow international development minister.
These donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region, and Sir Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon and long-time pro-Israel lobbyist.
More than half of Starmer’s shadow cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters or officers of LFI.
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Pro-Israel lobbying
Sir Trevor Chinn is a British multi-millionaire who has spent decades working in the motor industry, chairing such organisations as the AA, the RAC, and Kwikfit.
Chinn is also a longstanding pro-Israel lobbyist. Since the 1980s, he has funded LFI and Conservative Friends of Israel and played a leading role in groups such as Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) and the Jewish Leadership Council.
The Guardiandescribed BICOM in 2009 as “Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation – which flies journalists to Israel on fact-finding trips and organises access to senior government figures”.
It added that the organisation had “received nearly £1.4m in two years from a billionaire donor whose father made a fortune manufacturing arms in Israel”, referring to Poju Zabludowicz, a London-based business tycoon.
Starmer received a £50,000 donation from Chinn during his campaign for the Labour leadership in 2020 – and failed to declare this until after he’d won the election.
Declassified has found that Chinn has donated to eight other members of the shadow cabinet, including Rayner, Lammy, Reeves, Streeting, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, and shadow environment secretary Steve Reed.
Trauma surgeons treat an injured man after Israeli bombardment, at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on October 21, 2023 (Photo: Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)
Fresh demands for a major increase in humanitarian aid and an end to the bombing came as Gaza’s only cancer hospital shut down due to a lack of fuel.
As the World Health Organization warns of an “imminent public health catastrophe” in Gaza amid Israeli attacks on medical workers and infrastructure, doctors and other frontline medics said Wednesday that only an immediate cease-fire would give them a fighting chance to save countless lives.
Responding Wednesday to the shutdown of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only cancer treatment center—due to lack of fuel and damage from Israeli airstrikes, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “no words can describe our concern for the patients who have just lost the only possibility to receive lifesaving cancer treatment or palliative care.”
Tedros added: “I urge and I plead—for full medical and fuel aid access NOW! The more we wait, the more we put these fragile lives at risk.”
The WHO chief’s plea came a day after Christian Lindmeier, a spokesperson for the Geneva-based United Nations agency, warned that “an imminent public health catastrophe… looms with the mass displacement, the overcrowding, the damage to water and sanitation infrastructure.”
🚨The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the main cancer centre in the Gaza Strip, is no longer functional because of lack of fuel and damage due to airstrikes in its vicinity over the past 48 hours.@WHO calls for sustained access at scale for humanitarian aid –… pic.twitter.com/0MxMLJknVO
— WHO in occupied Palestinian territory (@WHOoPt) November 1, 2023
Meanwhile, James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that “child deaths due to dehydration, particularly infant deaths due to dehydration, are a growing threat.”
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called Gaza a “graveyard” for children, more than 3,600 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombardment, with another 1,000 minors reported missing, according to Palestinian and other officials.
Israeli forces have attacked numerous hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical workers, including the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and al-Hilu Hospital. The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that the bombardment that damaged al-Hilu “endangers the lives of women in the maternity wards and medical staff.”
According to an “urgent call for protecting healthcare workers in Gaza” published Tuesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, Israeli forces have attacked 57 medical facilities since launching the war on Gaza on October 7, killing 73 workers—including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and others—as of October 24. Sixteen of the medical personnel were killed while on duty.
We spoke with @GhassanAbuSitt1, a doctor who is operating inside Gaza – he's fearful of what is to come if fuel runs out in hospitals.
As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exacts a heavy toll on overwhelmed medical workers and infrastructure in the besieged strip, frontline medics like Dr. Noureddein al-Khateeb—a 38-year-old resident doctor in the emergency department at the Nasser Medical Center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis—say they are living “in a constant state of threat and fear.”
“It’s constant fear on top of the exhaustion we’re experiencing,” al-Khateeb toldThe New Humanitarian on Wednesday. “But one shouldn’t think of that too much. I can’t. If I do, I won’t get any work done.”
Al-Khateeb added that “we’re also afraid for our families’ safety, but what can we do?”
Inside Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, healthcare workers suffer trauma, burnout, and loss Medical staff must wrestle with the fear of not knowing if it will be their own loved-ones who are the next victims of Israeli airstrikes. https://t.co/PkxItCBDNl
Dr. Mohamed Abu Mousa, a radiologist at Nasser, said one of the few trips he’s made outside the hospital since Israeli bombardment began was to bury his 7-year-old son after he was killed in an October 15 Israeli airstrike on their family home.
“We don’t have the luxury of pausing to grieve,” he told The New Humanitarian. “The heartache is immense, but the wounded are endless. We have to keep going.”
Conditions are dire inside Gaza’s hospitals, which are running out of or low on fuel, medicines, equipment, and other essential services and supplies.
“We’re operating on children without anesthetics,” Léo Cans, who heads the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) mission in Palestine, toldCNN Tuesday. “We don’t have morphine for them.”
"Doctors are distressed. They are calling us crying…by the horror they are seeing…This has to stop. We're operating on children without anesthetics. We don't have morphine for them."
On Wednesday, MSF international president Dr. Christos Christou said in a video published on social media that “we’ve seen and heard the stories of the hell being unleashed on Gaza” as “helpless people are being subjected to horrific bombing” and “families have nowhere to run or hide.”
Christou continued:
So many people need help. What medical staff can do is just a drop in the ocean compared to the immense needs. Our teams working in Gaza are exhausted and terrified. Our staff tell us that pregnant women can’t get to hospitals to deliver. People are stuck under the rubble of shelled-out buildings. Children are having limbs amputated while lying on the floor.
“An immediate cease-fire is the only way the people of Gaza can find safety and the essential aid they urgently need,” Christou asserted. “The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop now… As a human being, I beg—stop the bombing and allow people in Gaza to live.”
“The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop. NOW.”
“As the president of a medical humanitarian organisation, I urge – implement an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.” – @DrChristou calls for an immediate ceasefire in #Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday afternoon that at least 8,796 Palestinians—including nearly 2,300 women and over 3,600 children—have been killed in Israeli attacks, while around 23,000 other people have been injured.
We cannot vote for the re-election of a U.S. president who enables Israel’s campaign of mass starvation, bombardment, and murder of Palestinian civilians.
As an anti-Zionist Jew and a lifelong Democrat, I have signed a public statement that bluntly declares, “We will not vote for Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential elections if he continues to support Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the more than 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.”
In signing this statement, I join with over 1,000 Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and allied U.S. voters who have signed the statement to express our disgust with the horrifying policies being embraced by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. As the statement goes on to say, “We cannot vote for the re-election of a U.S. president who enables Israel’s campaign of mass starvation, bombardment, and murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” Please check it out and join me in signing.
Biden’s actions in blindly supporting Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the plan to give Israel another $14 BILLION in military aid, are the last straw.
In addition to always having voted for Democrats, I have also volunteered for and donated money to many Democratic campaigns. In primary campaigns, I have focused my support on brave candidates like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. I have done so, not only because of their support for Palestinian rights, but for their overall progressive positions on many issues that I am concerned about. But all too often, I have had to bite my tongue and vote for a Democrat as the least worst candidate in a general election. However, enough is enough. The administration has gone too far by failing to protect Palestinian civilians from a continuing genocide. It is now time to step up and tell the Democratic Party that nominating Biden and Harris for 2024 is both a losing strategy and an act of great immorality.
I too mourn for the many civilians who have been killed in Israel and Gaza, and I demand that all war crimes be vigorously prosecuted. As my late mother often said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” yet too many elected leaders ignore Israel’s brutality while condemning the Palestinian victims. Indeed history is clear that for the last 75 years, Israel has been exempted from responsibility for its frequent violations of Palestinian rights, as it uses lethal violence to confiscate Palestinian land and hand it over to Israeli Jews.
We know that Hillary Clinton lost because many Democrats didn’t come out and vote. Biden and Harris won because many of us progressives held our noses and voted for them as the only alternative to former President Donald Trump. However, Biden’s actions in blindly supporting Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the plan to give Israel another $14 BILLION in military aid, are the last straw.
While elected officials like Biden, Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi spout Zionist talking points, many Americans are demanding an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. In a recent Data for Progress poll, 80% of Democrats and 66% of likely voters want the president to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. A CBS News poll showed that 53% of Democrats oppose sending more weapons to Israel, and 70% support U.S. aid to Gaza.
America’s elected leaders supported apartheid South Africa’s crimes for far too long, and the same can now be said about today’s Democrats as they continue to ignore Israel’s crimes. It is time for all Democratic voters to make it clear that only a significant change in Biden’s approach to Palestine can enable him to earn our votes in 2024. Please join me and over 500 other voters who have declared that we cannot vote for Biden in 2024 if he continues to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Gazan father Muhammed Gouda and his baby daughter Misk lay dead at Aqsa Hospital after an Israeli airstrike hit Deir al-Balah Photo by Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images
We apologize. The unprecedented human tragedy in Gaza hurtles on; we can record only pitiless catastrophe afflicting the innocent, its numbers and names. Over 3,400 Palestinian children have been killed and 6,300 wounded; Israel is hitting ravaged hospitals without fuel or light with de-facto bombings; their mad “leader” is quoting Biblical bloodbaths, declaring a “holy mission” of annihilation, and refusing to stop in the name of vengeance: “This is a time for war.” Once again: Murdering children is not “war.”
Writer Ahmed Nehad bitterly documents a grim former “normal” Gaza: Scarce food, water, electricity, hospital beds, jobs, hope. That “normal” was long met with “deafening global silence” until the Oct. 7 killings of Israeli civilians: Then, “the world sat upright and saw the horror of blood spilled in historic Palestine, when the blood took on a different hue.” In just over three weeks, Israel has dropped over 12,000 tons of bombs on Gaza; they have killed over 8,300, but their “true cost, says UNICEF’s Catherine Russell, “will be measured in children’s lives.” Over 420 children a day are killed or injured, roughly one every 10 minutes; over 2,000 children are missing under the rubble, and likely dead; 70% of the dead are children and women; frantic rescue crews must decide between retrieving dead bodies or trying to dig out wounded ones; entire families have been wiped out, leaving young survivors as orphans asking where their parents are; over 16,000 people have been wounded, with little medical help available; over 1.4 million people, more than half the population, have been displaced; and there is “no safe place in Gaza.”
Including, grotesquely, hospitals, where many have sought shelter. Over 50,000 people have taken refuge at al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital; perhaps 12,000 have fled to al-Quds hospital, the next biggest. But under a siege that has blocked all fuel and medicine, and with over a third of the city’s hospitals shut down, the rest are struggling. Doctors dependent on one generator are operating by flashlight, rationing anesthetics, sterilizing with vinegar or laundry detergent, cutting back on dialysis and chemo treatments, having to choose, “like God,” which of two intensive care babies to save. Meanwhile, “If the electricity goes, it just becomes a mass grave.” Israel has ordered hospitals to “evacuate,” knowing well that’s impossible; says Nebal Farsakh of the Palestinian Red Crescent, “Evacuating them means killing them.” Israel has also issued cruelly pointless “warnings” to “evacuate” before bombardments, face-saving mockeries of humanity that “do not make targeting hospitals less of a war crime,” says Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah: “A crime is a crime, even if you make it by appointment.”
On Democracy Now, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician who’s helped provide emergency care in Gaza for 16 years during “very hectic periods” – Israeli assaults in 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014 – cites an “urgent fear” among colleagues Israel will move to bomb hospitals directly, as opposed to its “de facto” bombardments of nearby sites. He particularly condemns Israel’s threat to bomb the (clearly civilian) al-Shifa based on their claim Hamas’ command center is under it – a claim he’s heard since 2009, with no proof forthcoming despite having walked freely there, slept there, filmed there for years. As he anxiously waits in Cairo for entry to Gaza, he praises health workers who remain, “moral compasses” and “cornerstones of a social fabric” that’s been largely ripped away. “It’s completely absurd that (we) have a state army threatening to bomb hospitals and killing children” – 5,300 to date – “in what is called a war,” he says, blasting Biden’s refusal to demand a ceasefire. “This has to stop. I don’t need to use the word ‘genocide.’ It’s enough to say ‘mass murder of civilians.’ We need to stand up and say we don’t accept this.”
As to Netanyahu, his blood lust is far from sated. On Monday, in a chilling speech experts deemed “an explicit call to genocide,” he termed Israel’s slaughter of innocents “a holy mission” and invoked their ancient foe from the Old Testament: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible: ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'” Calls for a ceasefire, he declared with stunning cognitive dissonance, are “a call for Israel (to) surrender to barbarism…The Bible says there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war.” Still, mournfully, Ahmed Nehad nonetheless pleads for the trifling mercy of a ceasefire, that “a mere handful might endure.” “Grant us the luxury of one last hug,” he writes. “Our end is nigh, rest assured.” Those already dead and documented – name, age, ID number – total 6,747; the number excludes thousands still under rubble or not yet identified. To read the list, you must keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. May their memories be for a blessing.
Injured child at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital after Israeli airstrikes. Photo by Saeed Jaras/APA Images
“Gaslighting Americans into facilitating long-held Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ is a cruel and grotesque hoax.”
Human rights advocates are warning that U.S. President Joe Biden’s new supplemental funding request could—under the guise of humanitarian aid—bolster, or even help finance, the far-right Israeli government’s plans for ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) raised alarm on Monday over language in Biden’s request that says resources from the supplemental package “would support displaced and conflict-affected civilians, including Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the West Bank, and to address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.”
The White House request adds that “this crisis could well result in displacement across [the] border and higher regional humanitarian needs, and funding may be used to meet evolving programming requirements outside of Gaza.”
DAWN said that “any authorization for funding activities, infrastructure, or aid outside of Israel and Palestine” should be opposed “because they effectively facilitate, fund, and reward the forced transfer of Palestinians.”
Days after the Biden White House sent its request to Congress, an Israeli newspaper reported on a leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry that proposes the forcible and permanent transfer of all of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A full English translation of the document was published Monday by +972 Magazine.
The internal document states that the “evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai” would “yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel” and “is an executable option” that is preferable to alternatives, such as “the population remaining in Gaza along with the emergence of a local Arab authority” following Israel’s devastating assault on the territory.
The policy paper adds that the Israeli government’s efforts to “bring about a significant change in the civilian reality in the Gaza Strip” would require “intensive action to harness the United States and other countries to support this goal.”
“Both by word and by deed, Israeli officials are pursuing a broader strategy to permanently remove Palestinians from their native lands, and counting on the U.S. to pay for it.”
DAWN expressed grave concern Monday that, if approved by Congress, Biden’s supplemental funding proposal would provide critical support for the Israeli government’s plans for forcible transfer, which is a violation of international law.
“The Biden administration isn’t just giving a green light for ethnic cleansing—it’s bankrolling it,” said DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson. “Gaslighting Americans into facilitating long-held Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ is a cruel and grotesque hoax.”
DAWN urged Congress to vote against any supplemental funding legislation that includes humanitarian aid language mirroring the White House’s request, which also includes $14 billion in military aid for Israel on top of weaponry that the U.S. has already sent to Israel in recent weeks.
“Supporting Israeli efforts to forcibly transfer Palestinians to Egypt would make U.S. officials liable for complicity in war crimes,” the group said.
Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth echoed DAWN:
The US government should not fund another Nakba. No US funds should be used to forcibly displace Palestinian civilians from Gaza to neighboring countries, given the history (from 1948) of such "temporary" departures becoming permanent. https://t.co/HIz6XxFGxS
House Republicans introduced legislation on Monday that includes mostly military assistance for Israel—omitting Ukraine funding, disaster relief, and humanitarian aid that the Biden administration requested. The GOP bill is likely a non-starter in the U.S. Senate, where Democratic lawmakers objected to the inclusion of Internal Revenue Service cuts.
“Both by word and by deed, Israeli officials are pursuing a broader strategy to permanently remove Palestinians from their native lands, and counting on the U.S. to pay for it,” said Whitson. “Congress should vote against any aid package that could support these acts, which amount to violations of human rights and grave breaches of the laws of war.”
+972 Magazine reported Monday that the Israeli Intelligence Ministry document “proposes promoting a campaign targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza that will ‘motivate them to accept this plan’ and lead them to give up their land.”
“The messages should revolve around the loss of land, making it clear that there is no hope of returning to the territories Israel will soon occupy, whether or not that is true,” the document states. “The image needs to be, ‘Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership—there is no choice but to move to another place with the assistance of your Muslim brothers.”
A similar plan has been outlined by an Israeli think tank with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As his government continues its bombardment of Gaza and ramps up its ground attack, Netanyahu has reportedly lobbied European leaders to pressure Egypt to accept refugees from Gaza. More than a million Gazans have been internally displaced since October 7, when Israel launched its latest assault on the Palestinian territory in the wake of a deadly Hamas attack.
An unnamed Western diplomat told the Financial Times that Netanyahu “pushed quite hard that the solution was for Egyptians to take Gazans at least during the conflict.”
“But we didn’t take it very seriously,” the diplomat added, “because the Egyptian position is and has always been very clear and they just won’t do it.”
The Israeli government’s actions and rhetoric since October 7 have sparked international warnings that Palestinians are “in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing,” as United Nations expert Francesca Albanese put it earlier this month.
“What we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale,” Albanese said. “The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again.”
Israel’s attack on Gaza has killed more than 8,000 people—including more than 3,400 children—in just over three weeks. The Israeli military’s bombing campaign has destroyed or damaged at least 45% of Gaza’s housing units.
Around 40% of Gaza’s schools have also been damaged by Israeli bombs, according to the United Nations.
“The best way to protect Palestinian civilians from the wrath of war is to announce and enforce a cease-fire,” Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director, said Monday. “Rather than pushing Palestinians to Egypt, Israel should allow Palestinian civilians to cross the apartheid fence into Israel. Maybe Palestinians can set up tent cities in the same towns and villages they were displaced from during the first Nakba 75 years ago.”
