This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the European Union (EU) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy speaks during press conference following his meeting on Syria in Aqaba, Jordan, on December 14, 2024. [Arda Küçükkaya – Anadolu Agency]
The European Union has not ruled out imposing sanctions on Israel, despite the recent ceasefire in Gaza, EU foreign policy chief Kaya Kallas said on Monday.
Speaking after a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Kallas emphasised that while the ceasefire had shifted the political context, the bloc would maintain pressure on Israel to ensure the truce is upheld and humanitarian conditions improve. “The ceasefire has changed the context—that is very clear to everyone,” Kallas said. “However, unless we see real and sustainable change on the ground, including more aid reaching Gaza, the threat of sanctions will remain.”
Prior to the ceasefire deal brokered by US President Donald Trump, Brussels had discussed potential punitive measures against Israel, including the blacklisting of senior Israeli officials and restrictions on trade relations. “We are not taking these measures now, but we are not taking them off the table either, because the situation is fragile,” Kallas added.
EU officials have repeatedly urged Israel to facilitate unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza and warned that any backsliding on ceasefire commitments could reignite instability across the region.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir 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.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/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas 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.
Kids are seen in a classroom at Beit Lahia High School in northern Gaza, where a group of volunteer teachers is providing education to nearly 400 displaced children under extremely limited conditions, as Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue unabated, on April 11, 2025. [Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini – Anadolu Agency]
About 300,000 Palestinian students will resume classes in Gaza on Saturday under the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, the agency said, although Israel’s blockade continues to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from entering the enclave, Anadolu reports.
The agency has “put plans in place to resume the educational process for 300,000 Palestinian students in UNRWA and this number is likely to increase,” Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA’s media advisor, said in televised remarks published through the US social media company X.
He said around 10,000 students will attend in-person classes in schools and shelters, while the vast majority will receive remote instruction because “it is absolutely impossible to have two years without schooling, preceded by two years of Corona.”
Abu Hasna said 8,000 teachers will take part in the program.
The educational process in Gaza has been suspended since Oct. 8, 2023, following the start of Israel’s genocide in the enclave. Most UNRWA and government schools were turned into shelters for displaced families, while many others were destroyed or severely damaged.
According to data from the Palestinian Education Ministry, as of Sept. 16, Israel had destroyed 172 government schools, bombed or damaged 118 others, and struck more than 100 UNRWA-run schools.
The ministry said 17,711 students have been killed in Gaza since the start of the genocide and 25,897 injured. It also reported the deaths of 763 education-sector employees and injuries to 3,189 others.
“We also have a plan in the health sector to revitalize 22 central clinics in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “We have dozens of food-distribution points and thousands of employees with great logistical experience.”
He added that UNRWA had already purchased supplies worth hundreds of millions of dollars that remain stuck outside Gaza.
Abu Hasna condemned Israel’s obstruction of the relief effort, saying: “Many basic necessities, including shelter materials, blankets, winter clothing, and medicines, are not being allowed into Gaza from the Israeli side, worsening the humanitarian situation.”
He warned that 95% of Gaza’s population now depends on humanitarian assistance after losing their sources of income, and that conditions are deteriorating rapidly.
“Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are living in the open after returning to Gaza City following the entry into force of the ceasefire on Oct. 10,” he said. “Bringing in aid has become an urgent necessity before winter.”
The Gaza ceasefire deal was reached between Israel and Hamas last week, based on a plan presented by US President Donald Trump. Phase one included the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The plan also envisages the rebuilding of Gaza and the establishment of a new governing mechanism without Hamas.
Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, and rendered it largely uninhabitable.
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.
Destruction in El Fasher, Sudan. Photo: Resistance Committees
After running out of animal fodder, people are now consuming cow skin as a last resort against starvation in North Darfur state’s besieged capital, cut off from all food supply by a 57-km wall the paramilitary has built around the city.
Walled in by war-torn Sudan’s paramilitary, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), over two hundred thousand civilians in North Darfur state’s besieged capital El Fasher “have nothing left but resistance and a collective death,” warned the city’s Resistance Committees (RC)*.
Traders report having completely run out of food supplies as famine closes in on the malnourished population, cut off from food aid since the RSF laid siege on the city in April 2024 to oust the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) from its last foothold in the Darfur region.
There were “only some secret points to enter and exit the city”, through which small quantities of food supplies were being smuggled through the siege, reportedly with the collaboration of some RSF troops, said Saleh Osman, President of the Darfur Bar Association.
However, severe shortages and hoarding meant that grains were sold at prices multiple times higher than before the war started in April 2023. Unable to afford, most people were surviving on small portions of porridge made from kora ambaz – a type of animal fodder left behind after extracting oil from peanuts.
Unsafe for long-term human consumption, it had nevertheless become a staple of last resort for the survival of El Fasher’s residents. Now, however, the “ambaz is gone too”, the RC said in a statement on October 14.
Total siege
The earthen wall that the RSF started building around the city this May to totalize its siege is reportedly complete, 57 km long, leaving little or no opening for food or any other essentials to be smuggled in.
“El Fasher is now effectively under siege from all directions,” Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said in a briefing on Wednesday, October 15. With the “earthen barriers around the city… preventing movement of both people and supplies”, the city’s markets, which have been repeatedly bombed by the RSF, “are largely empty”.
The little amount of grain left in the city is priced beyond reach. “A kilo of rice costs 450,000 Sudanese pounds” – over USD 748 – said Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees. Early this month, even the cost of a 50-kilo sack of ambaz had reached 2 million Sudanese pounds, over USD 3,300.
The last of the community kitchens, which Dujarric described as the “last line of support”, closed down on October 11. “People are now eating cow skin to survive”, the RC said, posting a video of a resident roasting the animal hide over an open fire. “This is not just hunger. It’s a slow, deliberate death under the RSF siege.”
Famine – which first broke out in August 2024 in displaced people’s camps on the outskirts of El Fasher – is fast closing in on the city where about 260,000 residents, including 130,000 children, remain trapped, awaiting death by starvation, if they are not killed by the RSF first.
The smell of death now fills the streets
Composed of the Janjaweed militias organized by the SAF to commit mass atrocities during the civil war in Darfur in the 2000s, the RSF has ethnically cleansed several areas in the other four states of Darfur that it has taken over.
In over 250 attacks on El Fasher, the RSF has already killed hundreds in shelling. “The shells pour down like rain, not distinguishing between a sleeping child or a mother pleading to the heavens to protect her children,” the RC said after the intense bombardment of the city on October 3.
“The smell of death now fills the streets, blood washes over the pavements, homes are destroyed on top of their inhabitants, markets have been reduced to ashes, and bodies are being pulled from beneath the rubble – without names, without faces, only numbers in a long record of massacres.” Hundreds of bodies remain in the rubble of residential neighborhoods struck by drones.
Later on the night of October 7, RSF shelled the hospital multiple times, killing at least 13 and wounding sixteen others, including medics. The shelling destroyed several wards in one of the last remaining hospitals in El Fasher.
“No aid planes, no humanitarian bridge, no genuine international action”
“After over 500 days of unremitting siege by the RSF and incessant fighting, El Fasher is on the precipice of an even greater catastrophe if urgent measures are not taken to loosen the armed vice upon the city and to protect civilians,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned earlier this month.
“The international community – led by the United Nations – continues to speak in the language of proposals without action. The UN proposal to deliver humanitarian aid by air to Al-Fasher has been awaited far too long, at a time when waiting is no longer an option – because people are dying of hunger now,” the RC complained.
“No aid planes, no humanitarian bridge, no genuine international action, no ground movement to lift the siege,” it lamented. “We cry for help and no one answers… We see our city being erased and we die resisting, because we have nothing left but resistance and a collective death in the silence of the world.”
*Organized in localities across Sudan’s cities, the Resistance Committees comprise a decentralized network of youth activists. It spearheaded the mass pro-democracy protests against the military junta before its components – the SAF and the RSF – turned on each other, hurling Sudan into a civil war in April 2023. Since the war, the Committees have been at the forefront of coordinating and organizing relief, rescue and defense of stranded civilians.
Activists block railway track into Rotterdam port, April 2025. Source: Geef Tegengas
The Port of Rotterdam faced major disruptions over the past several days as dockworkers and activists launched strikes and direct actions.
The Port of Rotterdam, one of Europe’s most important logistics hubs, faced serious obstructions over the past several days as a result of dockworkers’ strikes and direct action against complicity in genocide, human rights violations, and pollution.
According to the collective Geef Tegengas, approximately 800 people took part in a blockade of the port’s railway track as part of an international campaign organized by the network alongside Soulèvements de la Terre (France), Code Rouge, Stop Arming Israel, Soulèvements de la Terre Bruxelles (Belgium), and Disrupt Germany. Coordinated actions took place between October 10 and 12 under the umbrella of the International Days of Action Against Bombs, Barrels, and Bullshit.
“The organizations are fighting back against the global, capitalist system that is raining down bombs, pumping out pollutants, creating inequality, colonizing lands, fracturing communities and destroying ecosystems,” the coalition said in a joint statement.
Nora Kilembe of Geef Tegengas warned about the role of Rotterdam’s port in what the groups term as the Logistics Empire: a global network of transport companies, port authorities, shopping platforms, and terminals that prioritize private profit over human life and the planet’s health. “The Logistics Empire, Port of Rotterdam up front, is destroying our planet,” Kilembe said. “Indigenous peoples are robbed of their self-determination whilst Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. In the West, we are being brainwashed to keep on buying to fill our empty lives, leading to mass depression and alienation. All so the ultra-rich can further enrich themselves. This system of death can only be brought down if we fight back together.”
Geef Tegengas emphasized the action targeted the sector’s deep complicity in Israel’s genocide and other human rights abuses. “We demand that the port of Rotterdam immediately implement a complete arms and trade embargo on Israel, stop importing products and raw materials from areas where human rights are violated, and make a plan to phase out all polluting waste as quickly as possible,” they said.
With the blockade, the group stressed, activists are reclaiming public control over vital infrastructure. “The port belongs to the people, not to big business,” they said. “They are demanding control over this port.”
The blockade coincided with the largest lashers’ – dockworkers responsible for securing cargo on vessels – strike in decades, which caused a backlog that port authorities say could take until the end of October to clear. Activists pointed out that the industrial action only reinforces the broader struggle for justice in Europe. “Their struggle for good wages and better working conditions is one that we wholeheartedly support,” they said, adding that the lashers’ demonstration of collective power should serve as an inspiration for all movements seeking a fairer society.
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.Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
