Israeli soldiers are seen from a distance, appearing to throw and kick the bodies of Palestinians off a rooftop in [Qabatiya, a West Bank town.]
“There is no military need to do this,” said one rights advocate.
In the latest potential violation of international law by Israeli soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories, footage verified by media outlets on Friday showed members of the Israel Defense Forces pushing and kicking what appeared to be the lifeless bodies of three Palestinians off a rooftop in Qabatiya, a West Bank town.
The Associated Press obtained video showing three soldiers on the roof of a building that the IDF had attacked with grenades earlier, picking up a body and dragging it toward the edge of the rooftop before pushing it off. On another nearby rooftop, the soldiers in the footage are seen swinging a body by its limbs over the edge of the building onto the ground below, where a bulldozer operated by the IDF was moving.
A third body is seen being kicked by a soldier toward the edge of a building. Ultimately, the soldier kicks the human body all the way off.
An AP journalist and other reporters in Qabatiya also told the outlet they had witnessed the incidents, while Al Jazeera reported it had verified the footage.
Al Jazeera correspondent Hamdah Salhut posted the disturbing footage on the social media platform X.
[dizzy: The link to X is not working, failing with the message “Not found” so I have substituted the following Youtube video.]
Ameed Shehadeh, a correspondent for Al-Arabi who also witnessed the incident, told CNN that “a bulldozer tried to demolish the house to bring the bodies down.”
“That didn’t work,” said Shehadeh. “Soldiers went up and kicked and pushed the bodies off the roof, as we have seen.”
Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, said the video didn’t make clear whether the Israeli soldiers had verified whether the people “were still alive or not” before they kicked and pushed them off the rooftops.
Under the statute of the International Criminal Court, the war crime defined as “committing outrages upon personal dignity” prohibits soldiers from mutilating dead bodies in armed conflicts.
The IDF has been accused of “necroviolence” against the bodies of Palestinians they’ve killed in the past, including in 2020 when a journalist shot a video showing an IDF soldier running over a lifeless body with a bulldozer.
“The footage we’ve seen is horrific and it’s making the rounds here in Palestine. But ultimately, Palestinians are not surprised. Israel has a track record of disrespecting the bodies of the Palestinians they kill,” said Leila Warah, an independent journalist in Palestine.
The Israeli military released a statement saying the footage showed “a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values and the expectations from IDF soldiers.”
Other attacks and incidents in Gaza and the West Bank over the past year that the IDF has claimed were accidents or were not in accordance with its rules and values include, but are not limited to, the killing of U.S. activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi in the West Bank this month, the bombing of a so-called “safe zone” in Rafah, and air strikes that killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen in Gaza.
Following a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last October, Israeli officials also said they were releasing all “restraints” on the IDF in Gaza and referred to the enclave’s 2.3 million people as “human animals.”
The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that the IDF has killed at least 700 Palestinians in the West Bank since last October.
Shawan Jabarin, director of Palestinian rights group Al-Haq, said of the video released Friday, “there is no military need to do this. It’s just a savage way of treating Palestinian bodies.”
He added that the IDF will likely not hold anyone accountable for the abuse of the dead bodies.
“The most that will happen is that soldiers will be disciplined,” said Jabarin, “but there will be no real investigation and no real prosecution.”
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
SIR KEIR STARMER is facing a possible Labour rebuke over his deeply unpopular plans to cut winter fuel benefits for pensioners.
The party’s largest affiliate, Unite, will try to force a vote on the issue at Labour’s conference, which opens in Liverpool on Sunday.
Unite’s motion also calls for the scrapping of the Treasury’s fiscal rules, which have placed the new government’s spending plans in a strait-jacket.
It urges Labour to borrow more to invest in public services and infrastructure and says that “workers and communities voted for change — a better future, not just better management and not cuts to the winter fuel allowance.”
Calling for a U-turn on the winter fuel cut, the motion added: “We need a vision where pensioners are not the first to face a new wave of cuts and those that profited from decades of deregulation finally help to rebuild Britain.”
The attitude of other affiliated unions will be critical to the success of the motion, which will have to leap procedural hurdles to be debated, something submissions from large unions usually accomplish.
More than 1.7 million households plan on keeping their heating off this year, survey reveals
LIVES will be lost, campaigners warned today after a survey revealed that more than 1.7 million households do not plan on turning on their heating this year.
The number of those who said they will keep the heating off in polling for Uswitch is nearly double the 972,000 who said they did not heat their homes last year.
Fifty-five per cent of those blamed the continued rise of the cost of living, while 25 per cent of those over 65 said their decision followed the loss of winter fuel payments.
Another one million households will not turn on the heating until December to keep costs down, according to the poll.
About 43 per cent of households said they will only turn the heating on if they are too cold while 31 per cent will only heat some rooms in their home.
Hedge fund Quadrature Capital has given £4m to Keir Starmer’s Labour – the largest donation in the party’s history | Jack Taylor – WPA Pool / Getty Images
Quadrature’s donation is noteworthy not just for being Labour’s largest-ever, but for its timing ahead of election
The Labour Party’s largest-ever donation came from a Cayman Islands-registered hedge fund with shares worth hundreds of millions of pounds in fossil fuels, private health firms, arms manufacturers and asset managers.
While the £4m donation by Quadrature Capital is the sixth-largest in British political history, it is noteworthy not just for its size, but also its timing.
Electoral Commission records suggest Labour received the donation in the one-week window between former prime minister Rishi Sunak announcing the general election and the start of the ‘pre-poll reporting period’ in which all political donations over £11,180 had to be published weekly, rather than the quarterly norm.
This means that despite being made on 28 May, Quadrature’s generous donation was published by the Electoral Commission only last week, more than two months after Labour won the election.
Neither the Labour Party press office nor No 10 responded to openDemocracy’s questions on whether the timing of accepting this donation was intended to minimise scrutiny and critical coverage during the election.
Paul Holden, an investigative journalist and author of The Fraud, a forthcoming book on Starmer’s leadership, told openDemocracy that the donation’s timing fits the Starmer project’s pattern of delaying the disclosure of potentially sensitive or controversial political donations.
Holden said: “Sir Keir Starmer and the organisations close to him have an unfortunate history of reporting donations in controversial ways.
“During his bid to become leader of the Labour Party, Starmer refused to contemporaneously publish details of who had donated to his leadership campaign. His rivals, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, agreed to share details of their donors in real-time, which they published. Starmer, however, decided only to declare his donations via his MP’s register of interests, which created a significant lag between when Starmer accepted his donations and when they were made public.
“Labour members, as a result, had no idea at the time of voting that Starmer had been funded with large donations from the likes of wealthy millionaires like Martin Taylor and Sir Trevor Chinn and Baron Waheed Ali; the latter now at the centre of the furore about Starmer’s acceptance of gratuities.”
Holden also referred to a fine issued by the Electoral Commission to Starmerite think tank Labour Together in 2021 for its failure to declare donations worth more than £800,000 – including £730,000 received while it was under the directorship of Starmer’s key adviser and No 10’s director of political strategy, Morgan McSweeney.
openDemocracy has consistently reported on Labour’s increasingly strong ties with the financial sector in recent years.
The party has received more than £8m from businesses or people linked to the financial industry since Starmer became leader in 2020 and now boasts two multi-million-pound donors from the world of hedge funds; Quadrature and Taylor, who has managed several billion-dollar funds over his career.
While Quadrature had not donated to Labour before May, one of its senior employees has contributed significantly to the party under Starmer. Daniel Luhde-Thompson, a strategic adviser at the firm, has given the party more than £500,000 this year, according to the Electoral Commission.
Transparency campaigners have warned Quadrature’s huge donation raises questions about what the financial sector is getting in return.
Rose Whiffen, senior research officer at Transparency International UK told openDemocracy: “When the public see political parties relying on such large sums of money in donations from private sources, it understandably raises questions as to in whose interest politicians are working and can give the impression our democracy is for sale.
“More must be done to take this kind of big money out of politics. The new government should commit to introducing caps on individual donations to tackle this problem [and] restore public trust in how our democracy functions.”
Green Party co-leader Zack Polanski told openDemocracy that the donation shows Labour now “stands for multi-millionaires and billionaires over our working-class communities”.
Polanski said: “Far from being the party in service of working people, Starmer’s Labour Party seems indebted to the bankers and bosses who profit from pillaging our public services and our planet.
“Simply ‘following the rules’ and declaring donations isn’t enough to cast aside the doubts that the main parties have their loyalties tested by big donors. It’s time to implement strict rules on funding political parties, including a cap on how much any individual or business can donate to politics. Elections should be won by the people with the best ideas, not the parties with the biggest donors.”
Registered in the Cayman Islands
Quadrature Capital has a diversified share portfolio worth around $6bn, according to records filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month.
After its donation was made public last week, the firm shared a statement on its website.
It said: “In May 2024, we came to the view that a UK government with a commitment to the green transition of the economy would have the ability to drive change that is so urgently needed. Having analysed commitments set out by each party, we donated £4m to The Labour Party, in support of policies that will deliver climate action while also promoting social equity and economic resilience.
“This was a values-based donation, not a political donation, as Quadrature Capital Ltd remains non-partisan and apolitical. Going forward, our private giving will continue to be led by our values, and any further donations to political parties will depend on the parties’ commitments, track record and alignment with our mission for sustainable and equitable growth.”
Last year, the Guardian reported that despite donating to environmental charities through its climate foundation, Quadrature had holdings in fossil fuel companies worth more than $170m. The paper highlighted three holdings in particular with major polluters: ConocoPhillips, Cheniere Energy and Cenovus Energy.
openDemocracy’s analysis of the firm’s latest SEC filings shows that Quadrature has since increased its holdings in Cenovus, which was this year fined millions for an oil spill that released 250,000 litres into the Atlantic Ocean. Quadrature has scaled back its holdings with the other two firms but has taken up a major $67m stake in ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world.
Among Quadrature Capital’s other investments, its largest holding is in Apple, valued at $231m, and among its 10 largest holdings are other ‘bluechip’ stocks like Amazon, Shopify and Costco.
Quadrature also maintains significant holdings in the arms manufacturers Northrop Grumman ($31m) and Lockheed Martin ($6m); US private healthcare companies such as UnitedHealth ($31m) and HCA Healthcare ($16m); some of the largest asset management companies like Blackstone ($22m) and KKR ($7m), who potentially stand to benefit significantly from Labour’s plans to utilise private investment for infrastructure; and tech firms, including Palantir ($71m) and Oracle ($8m).
UK accounts filings for the firm show profits before tax of more than £230m in the financial year ending 31 January 2023, but paid corporation tax of only £5.3m. As is noted in the accounts, had the firm paid the standard rate of UK corporation tax of 19% during that period, this would have amounted to more than £43m.
The UK-based fund paid out £343m in wages last year – an average of £3m for each of its 113 employees – while back in 2021 one of its founders was eyeing a luxury central London penthouse valued at around £110m, according to a report by Bloomberg that cited “two people with knowledge of the transaction”.
openDemocracy can reveal that Quadrature was last year acquired by QC Ventures, a company registered in the Cayman Islands, which is now the 100% shareholder in the firm.
The Cayman Islands is a well-known tax haven, and the transparency requirements for companies registered there are much less than in the UK and most other countries.
Documents obtained by openDemocracy show that when QC Ventures was established in the Cayman Islands back in 2018, its directors were three senior directors at Quadrature and a corporate services provider based in Cayman.
Speaking in the Commons in July, Labour’s foreign secretary David Lammy pledged to tackle individuals and companies taking advantage of offshore tax havens “with full vigour”.
He added: “We were concerned that parts of the last government were turning a blind eye to these issues. I hope to come forward with further proposals in the coming weeks.”
When openDemocracy contacted Quadrature to ask about the donation and the acquisition by QC Ventures, a representative of the firm directed us to the statement on the company’s website. They also said the decision to set up a holding company based in the Cayman Islands to acquire Quadrature was not motivated by, or related to, taxation.
Robert Palmer, director of Tax Justice UK, said that “any company moving to a tax haven like the Cayman Islands has questions to answer” as the islands are “notorious for a lack of transparency and for ultra-low taxes”.
“Ultimately governments need to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share in tax, especially when public services are desperately in need of investment and we need to fund the transition to a greener economy,” he said.
Fran Boait, co-executive director at Positive Money, said: “In taking large donations from financial firms registered in tax havens, we have to question what influence the sector is getting in return.
“Labour’s plans to continue the previous government’s deregulation of the City of London are particularly concerning, especially when it has been shown that an oversized financial sector hinders rather than helps the rest of the economy.
“Labour should be looking at how to weaken the power of big finance in our democracy and economy. Right now it seems they are doing the opposite.”
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives. The child poverty and neglect discussed in this article occurred previously to Keir Starmer and the Labour Party being in office. They polices are however certainly continuing and reproducing child poverty and destitution.
But why did this happen to our children? This rise in child poverty is a change that has not been found to have occurred to the same extent anywhere else in the world, among all the places that the United Nations measures in the same way.
This graph tells a story of hope and success. In much of Eastern Europe, child poverty has fallen by between as much as a third – and often at least a quarter – in a mere seven years.
But it also shows that child poverty has risen the most in the UK. The poorest fifth of households in the UK are poorer than the poorest fifth in most of Eastern Europe. For many people in the UK, this will come as a surprise. Some will refuse to believe it can be this bad.
The evidence for this poverty is seen in the declining heights of five-year-olds since 2010.
A 5-year-old in 1990 would have been born in 1985 and their height influenced mostly by nutrition in the years 1985–1990. Those were hard years for the UK: mass poverty resulting from over three million people being out of work in the early 1980s. But the average height of children was still increasing.
It was not until 2010, for those children who had lived between 2005 and 2010, that we first saw heights plateau and then fall, coinciding with the post-2010 austerity years.
My forthcoming book attempts to make sense of what has happened to the UK: why, in 2024, it is not merely one of the countries in Europe with a high rate of child poverty, but the one country above all others that the UN has singled out as having had the greatest rises in child poverty among all those it surveyed.
Seven children
To try to understand more about children’s lives in the UK, I constructed seven typical children. I divided all 14 million children living in the UK into seven groups of 2 million, according to the income of their families in 2018 and 2019. I then chose the middle child of each 2 million. I next looked at what had happened to those families between 2018 and 2024.
Annual household incomes after tax, benefits and housing costs in the UK, families with children 2019/20
Annual household incomes after tax, benefits and housing costs in the UK, families with children 2019/20: seven typical children marked in colour. Danny Dorling, CC BY-NC-ND
The first thing to note is just how incredibly well-off the children are who are better-off than our seven typical children.
Some 6% of all children in the UK live in households richer than the best-off typical child in my analysis. Those 6% of children, the best-off children of all, live in families that each year receive and spend a third of all the income in the UK.
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These 6% are not typical, and neither are the 6% poorest: those most destitute, those whose families are most likely to use food banks. If you pick seven typical children, equally spaced out across the income scale, then these extremes are not part of what you see.
But four of our typical seven children now live lives that most better-off people would consider to be in poverty. The other three are hardly well-off.
The least well-off are in families struggling to pay bills and making sacrifices others do not have to think about. For instance, whether to save £10 a month, or have insurance against the effects of flood, fire or theft. Increasingly often they cannot afford both.
But even the most well-off of our seven children lives in a family that worries about paying for an annual holiday. That is rare among the most affluent two million families, but possible.
The UK in 2024 demonstrates to the world what living with high inequality means in a once affluent country. It means a few using up far more resources than the vast majority of other children, such as having access to many more school teachers – per child – as compared to the rest, better food, better shelter, more warmth, more toys, better material everything; often more than you might think any child needed.
In future, almost all our children will tell their stories of growing up in the UK of the 2020s and – hopefully – what changed to make things better. It is hard to imagine them becoming much worse.
