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Trucks carrying humanitarian aid sent to Gaza arrive at the Rafah Border Crossing after departing from Egypt’s Port of Arish aboard the 20th Humanitarian Aid Ship prepared by the Turkish Red Crescent, delivering approximately 1,400 tons of supplies on January 27, 2026. [Stringer – Anadolu Agency]
Israel announced Friday it will reopen Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt in both directions starting Sunday, allowing limited movement of people, after two years of closure, Anadolu reports.
The Israeli army said the move comes as part of the ceasefire agreement in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“In accordance with the ceasefire agreement and the directive of the political echelon, the Rafah Crossing will open this coming Sunday (Feb. 1) in both directions for limited movement of people only,” the army said in a statement.
It added that exit from and entry into Gaza through the crossing will be coordinated with Egypt and subject to prior security clearance by Israel, under the supervision of a European Union mission.
The army said the reopening will also allow the return of residents who left Gaza during the war, following coordination with Egypt and after obtaining Israeli security approval.
There was no immediate comment from Palestinian or Egyptian authorities.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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 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.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
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In this photo illustration an Aljazeera logo seen displayed on a smartphone on 23 Mar, 2023 [Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]
Al Jazeera Media Network denounced YouTube’s compliance with an Israeli decision to ban its channels, calling the move a “violation of media freedoms and international standards,” Anadolu reports.
In a statement late Thursday on the US social media company X, Al Jazeera stated: “We strongly denounce YouTube’s submission to the Israeli authorities’ decision to ban the broadcast of our channels on the platform and the blocking of our websites in Israel.
“This response violates the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which require global technology companies to protect freedom of expression and resist government pressure that silences independent journalism.”
Israeli authorities earlier this week decided to block broadcasts of Qatar-based Al Jazeera and Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen for 90 days, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi announced Sunday on X that Al Jazeera and Al-Mayadeen would be blocked in Israel on their websites, television broadcasts, and YouTube beginning that day.
Al Jazeera said: “The banning of our digital platforms and websites on weak security grounds sends a dangerous signal that major technology companies can be co-opted as instruments of regimes hostile to freedom.
“This escalation is part of a broader and systematic pattern of Israeli violations, including the killing and detention of our journalists and the closure of our offices in the occupied territories, aimed at suppressing the truth.
“We call for an international investigation into how technology platforms submit to censorship and for safeguards against political pressure.”
As of 1100GMT, there had been no reaction from YouTube management.
Israel began barring Al Jazeera from operating in May 2024, and the decision has since been extended, citing the network’s coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported.
During the war, Israel killed more than 71,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 171,000 others, most of them women and children, and destroyed about 90% of the civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has occupied Palestinian territories, as well as land in Syria and Lebanon, for decades and has rejected withdrawal and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital along pre-1967 borders.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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 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.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Palestinians fill jerrycans with water distributed by tankers and carrying them back to their living areas in the Nuseirat camp, where infrastructure has been severely damaged by Israeli attacks and a water crisis persists, on January 10, 2026. [Adam Bilal – Anadolu Agency]
Gaza Municipality has warned of an escalating water emergency in the city, saying a severe shortage is worsening amid a sharp depletion of supplies after damage to a key pipeline.
In a statement published on its official Facebook page on Wednesday, the municipality said the water pipeline provided by the Israeli water company, Mekorot had been disrupted during bulldozing operations carried out by Israeli occupation forces east of the city and was directly damaged, cutting a supply line that previously covered around 70 per cent of Gaza City’s current water needs.
The municipality said the crisis has been compounded by extensive damage to water infrastructure, including the destruction of nearly 85% of water wells in Gaza City, further restricting available supplies for residents.
It said daily water demand before the war exceeded 100,000 cubic metres, but only a limited proportion of that need is now being met, leaving a deficit of about 90 per cent compared with pre-war levels.
The statement added that the destruction of nearly 150,000 linear metres of water networks, as well as damage to a desalination plant in the Sudaniya area north-west of the city, has reduced alternative sources that had previously eased pressure on the system.
According to the municipality, the latest break in the Mekorot pipeline led to water outages across wide areas of the city, including the Old City, Zeitoun, Sabra and Tel al-Hawa neighbourhoods, as well as parts of western Gaza City.
Gaza Municipality said it is continuing to coordinate with the Palestinian Water Authority to access the site and begin repair work, in an effort to restore part of the lost supply and limit the scale of the outage.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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 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.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Israeli forces detain a photojournalist and distrain his equipment as they enclose the area around Jewish Brigade base where they ‘neutralized’ a Palestinian for allegedly carrying a knife according to their announcement in Hebron, West Bank on October 03, 2024. [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency]
A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has ranked Israel as the third worst jailer of journalists in the world, behind only China and Myanmar, in a damning indictment of the state’s escalating war on press freedom.
The CPJ’s annual global census, released this week, recorded 320 journalists imprisoned worldwide as of 1 December 2025, with authoritarian governments using detention, legal harassment and violence to stifle independent reporting and silence dissent.
While China and Myanmar retained the top two spots, Israel’s position as the third worst jailer of journalists reflects its entrenched and systematic repression of Palestinian media workers, carried out through arbitrary arrests, administrative detention, and sweeping military censorship.
The report highlights the growing use of vague security charges, prolonged pretrial detentions, and denial of access to lawyers—tactics long used by Israel against Palestinian media workers.
Many of the journalists imprisoned by Israel are held under administrative detention, without formal charges or trial, a practice widely condemned by human rights organisations as a violation of international law.
The CPJ also confirmed that Israel continues to bar international journalists from entering Gaza, denying independent access to a war zone where it is conducting what leading legal scholars, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, have described as a genocide.
CPJ found that since 7 October 2023, Israel has Israel arrested more than 90 journalists during the course of the genocide and according to Reporters Without Borders killed at least 210.
Despite the mass killing of civilians and destruction of media infrastructure in Gaza, Israel has refused to allow international press into the territory, even as it claims to be a democratic state with “the most moral army in the world”.
“Israel, the only country on the worst jailers’ list that is traditionally considered a democracy, began imprisoning Palestinian journalists rapidly following the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023,” the report said.
Regarding torture of prisoners CPJ said that the “greatest number of torture and beating claims since 1992 have occurred in Iran, followed by Israel and Egypt”.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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 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.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
The bodies of victims of the October 31, 2023 Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip are lined up outside the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City.(Photo by Fadi Alwhidi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The real figure is much higher,” said one UK lawmaker. “This is a ‘ceasefire’ in name only. The slaughter goes on.”
After two years of denial and deception, the Israel Defense Forces acknowledged Wednesday for the first time that over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, while continuing to deny the famine Israel caused by blocking humanitarian aid from entering the obliterated strip.
Israeli media including the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and others reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accepts the accuracy of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) death toll, which currently stands at least 71,667, with more than 171,000 others wounded and 9,500 missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings.
“How many years did we spend screaming, with checked and re-checked figures, lists showing names and ID numbers, being told the numbers were completely fanciful despite rigorous, transparent verification, and now the IDF quietly accepts that they were correct all along,” Beirut-based journalist Séamus Malekafzali said on X in response to the IDF admission.
Experts—including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—assert that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than reported. Last June, a study published in Nature reported 84,000 deaths in Gaza. Others say the toll could be even higher, with one Economist study estimating between 77,000-109,000 Gazans killed by Israeli forces.
“We should not care what the IDF accepts or not—they perpetrated the genocide,” said Jake Romm, the US representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation, which tracks suspected IDF war criminals and is named after a 5-year-old Palestinian girl massacred along with relatives and rescue workers by Israeli occupation forces on January 29, 2024. “Their communications are in service of that project.”
“This is, in any event, an admission that will only be used to discredit the real, much higher death toll as the scale of the atrocity becomes known,” Romm added.
After more than 2 years of Hasbara efforts to label journalists and NGOs as “useful idiots of Hamas” for using this data, the IDF has confirmed its accuracy. Yet with Gaza’s health system destroyed and long-standing aid restrictions, this estimate is only the tip of the iceberg. https://t.co/GDxppEr3ir
Israeli academic Ori Goldberg was also skeptical of the IDF’s admission, asserting on X: “’Accepts’ means that even the vast network of lies no longer holds. If the IDF ‘accepts’ 70,000, it has killed innumerably more.”
While the IDF accepted GHM’s death toll, it argued that the famine in Gaza—which officially lasted from August-December 2025, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the standard international framework for classifying food insecurity and malnutrition—did not happen.
GHM says at least 453 Palestinians, including 150 children, have died of malnutrition in Gaza since October 2023. The IDF contends that the figure is a mix of lies and misleading reporting about people who had preexisting health conditions before they starved to death.
However, famine experts argue that Israel orchestrated a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in Gaza.
Throughout the war, Israeli leaders, their supporters abroad, and mainstream US media attempted to discredit GHM casualty figures by casting aspersions upon the “Hamas-run” ministry. This, despite Israeli military intelligence deeming the figures accurate and historical confirmations of their reliability.
“The phrase *Hamas* Health Ministry was used as a slur for years to signal unreliability, even though it was pointed out again and again that its numbers had always held up,” noted journalist Jasper Nathaniel, adding sardonically that “I’m sure the ‘Pallywood’ crowd will be rushing to apologize today.”
Well this is truly appalling:
The IDF now accepts the Gaza Health Ministry’s conservative official death toll figure of 71,000 Palestinians. Yet, for 2 years of a genocide it claimed those same figures were false – and the BBC News and other media insisted on seeding doubt in… https://t.co/D5W7vj9huL
The International Center for Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said on social media that “every media outlet that cast doubt over these figures with dogwhistling phrases like ‘Hamas-run MoH’ is complicit in these killings.”
“In truth, the 71,000+ figure is conservative,” ICJP added. “Palestinian bodies are buried under the rubble and can’t be counted and many more have died from malnutrition due to Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians. Different tools, same outcome: Israeli genocide of Palestinians.”
In the United States—which has supported Israel’s annihilation of Gaza with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid and diplomatic cover including vetoes of numerous United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions during both the Biden and Trump administrations—the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan amendment in June 2024 that banned US officials from using State Department resources to cite GHM casualty figures.
The amendment’s lead sponsor, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.)—whose all-time top campaign contributor is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—contended that “at the end of the day, the Gaza Ministry of Health is the Hamas Ministry of Health.”
Jared Moskowitz wrote the legislation to bar the state department from citing data from the Gaza Health Ministry. Now even the IDF accepts these numbers. The real death toll is certainly much higher.
A senior IDF official told the Times of Israel that the military is in the process of determining how many of the Gaza dead were members of Hamas or other militant groups.
While the Israeli government has claimed a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, classified IDF intelligence data obtained last year during an investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians—or 83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were civilians.
Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who led the IDF through most of the war—acknowledged after retiring last year that “over 10%” of Gaza’s population, or about 220,000 Palestinians, had been killed or wounded as of September 2025.
“This is not a gentle war,” Halevi said at the time, “we took the gloves off from the first minute.”
Following the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.
The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks, and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes.
The killing isn’t over. Since a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect last October 10, Israeli forces have killed more than 500 Palestinians in over 1,200 violations of the truce. Palestinians—mostly children and infants—are also still dying of exposure to cold weather as Israel continues to restrict the entry of aid into Gaza.
“They said Palestinians were exaggerating. Lying. Propagandists,” Independent UK Member of Parliament Shockat Adam said on X Thursday. “Now, even the IDF accepts 70,000+ killed in Gaza. The real figure is much higher. This is a ‘ceasefire’ in name only. The slaughter goes on.”
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 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.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
