Israel attacks Gaza and the occupied West Bank as Palestinian humanitarian crisis deepens
Israeli soldiers during a raid in the occupied-West Bank town of Nablus, February 11, 2026ISRAELI forces launched a series of raids across Gaza and the occupied West Bank today as the Palestinian humanitarian crisis deepened.
Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling targeted areas east of the southern city of Khan Younis in Gaza.
The Israeli army also continued raids across Hebron in the West Bank, with a number of Palestinians needing treatment for tear gas suffocation.
Since the so-called ceasefire with Hamas and other resistance fighters came into force in Gaza on October 10 last year, the Israelis have killed at least 586 Palestinians and injured another 1,558.
Israeli forces have violated the ceasefire agreement at least 1,620 times, according to the Gaza Media Office.
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Israel has also continued to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gazans and have created obstacles for Palestinians to get through the Rafah crossing between the enclave and Egypt.
Thousands have been waiting to use the crossing to access desperately needed medical treatment.
Many of those crossing have reported mistreatment by the Israelis as they attempted to cross at Rafah.
The Israelis have also continued to choke off access to aid for the Palestinian population.
The ceasefire agreement said that “full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip.”
Since the ceasefire, only 31,178 aid trucks have been allowed into the enclave, averaging 260 trucks a day, according to the Gaza Media Office.
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See the origginal article at https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/israel-attacks-gaza-and-occupied-west-bank-palestinian-humanitarian-crisis-deepens
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Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.
The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.
While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.
Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital.
So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.
A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.
