Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during an interview at the Senedd, in Cardiff, Wales, during his tour of the UK following Labour’s victory in the 2024 General Election, July 8, 2024
ONE of the clearest messages from last week’s general election was the disillusionment very many British Muslims feel with the Labour Party.
Labour’s vote fell far further in constituencies with a large Muslim electorate, confirming the antipathy expressed in May’s local election results.
After that poll, the party claimed that it was ready to listen to the community’s concerns. Yet just a few weeks later, it axed Faiza Shaheen, a Muslim, as a party candidate in a brutal and unjustifiable fashion.
The core concerns of Muslims, who are in the great majority working-class, about Labour come under two well-understood headings.
First, there has been the persistent willingness of Starmer and his party apparatus to ignore or downplay evidence of Islamophobia. It is simply not taken as seriously as other forms of racism by Labour.
Indeed, Starmer has not seemed averse to consciously indulging in it, as when he made dog-whistle remarks about deporting Bangladeshis in the last week of the campaign.
Second, of course, is the party’s position on the genocide in Gaza, which it gave full-throated support to at the outset. For week after murderous week it refused to call for a ceasefire and only eventually did so when Washington had given permission to shift line.
The slaughter of Palestinians has aroused revulsion in all parts of the community. But there is no doubt that this indifference to the lives of Israel’s victims is particularly keenly felt in Muslim communities.
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.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Met police confirm protesters held on suspicion of public order offences, including one related to placard
Four people were arrested on Saturday on suspicion of public order offences while attending a pro-Palestinian march in central London, including one relating to a placard.
The Metropolitan police confirmed on X that three people were held on suspicion of breaching Public Order Act conditions imposed on the march, with a fourth man detained on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence relating to a placard.
Organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets on the first day of a new Labour government to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
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This latest protest comes after the health ministry in Gaza confirmed that at least 38,098 Palestinians have been killed and 87,705 others injured since Israel’s military offensive in Gaza began on 7 October.
Jeremy Corbyn, the independent MP for Islington North, joined pro-Palestine march in London. Photograph: Yann Tessier/Reuters [Jeremy Corbyn 2nd from right is joined by Andrew Feinstein, far right, former ANC Member of the National Assembly of South Africa who stood as an independent candidate against Starmer because of Starmer’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.]
In attendance was the re-elected independent MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, who told protesters that “a change in government doesn’t change the facts that the people of Gaza are still being murdered in their sleep”.
“We said it to the Tories, and now we will say it to Labour: a government that sells arms to Israel is a government that is complicit in crimes against humanity.”
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.
Footage shows a Palestinian man being used by the Israel Defense Forces as a human shield. (Photo: Al Jazeera)
“These crimes, and dozens of similar cases, require urgent intervention from the international justice system,” said one human rights group.
The latest video evidence of Israel’s use of Palestinians as “human shields” during combat was condemned by one human rights advocate on Monday as “horrifying but not surprising,” as campaigners emphasized that the Israel Defense Forces has long used civilians in Palestine to shield their own soldiers from harm while bombarding Gaza and the West Bank.
Footage released by Al Jazeera on Sunday night showed Israeli forces attaching body cameras to handcuffed Palestinians who they had detained, dressing them in IDF uniforms, and sending them into buildings and tunnels to ensure the locations weren’t rigged with explosives.
The footage presented “evidence of a systematic tactic of the army,” said the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
I translated Al Jazeera’s exclusive report on footage showing Palestinians being used as human shields
The footage reveals instances such as forcing men to search for explosives, tying them with ropes & throwing them into tunnels, and using injured to search for fighters pic.twitter.com/hEla1ZFoq1
“The leaked horrific scenes that were obtained and published by Al Jazeera reveal how the Israeli army uses civilians, including injured detainees, as human shields and forces them into hazardous combat zones after installing cameras on their bodies and binding them with rope,” said Euro-Med. “Each of the aforementioned acts of criminal, brutal, and inhumane behavior constitutes a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law, and is a full-fledged war crime. These crimes, and dozens of similar cases, require urgent intervention from the international justice system to ensure the protection of civilians, prevent their use as human shields, and hold the Israeli political and military perpetrators.”
The Israeli government has long blamed Hamas’ use of “human shields” for deaths in Gaza, which now number at least 37,900, saying the group operates out of civilian infrastructure and places Palestinians in harm’s way.
Journalist Dan Cohen pointed out that the IDF has used what it calls “the neighbor procedure” for decades, forcing Palestinian “messengers” to approach the homes of suspected fugitives alone and unarmed while Israeli soldiers announce over a loudspeaker that they are surrounding the building.
The procedure “is so commonplace that the military tried to justify it as a lifesaving measure in use since the 1980s,” said Cohen. “The images… show the reality of this criminal practice.”
In its statement on the new footage, Euro-Med detailed numerous instances in which Israel has appeared to use human shields as defined by the Geneva Conventions: “cases where persons were actually taken to military objectives in order to shield those objectives from attacks.”
As Euro-Med reported:
During the Shifa Medical Complex raid in March 2024, Israeli forces used civilians, including patients and displaced individuals sheltering inside the complex, as human shields. To protect their military operations within the hospital and its vicinity, Israeli forces exploited Palestinian civilians by making them form human barriers to surround Israeli soldiers and military vehicles, or sending them under threat to residential homes and buildings to either help arrest or forcibly evacuate other civilians before army raids and the subsequent destruction of many of these buildings.
[…]
Furthermore, several families residing near the Shifa Medical Complex reported that Israeli forces arrested young men from inside the medical facility, then used them to enter the families’ homes and demand that they immediately evacuate to the central and southern Strip.
The group also cited a recent example from June 22 in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, where Israeli forces placed a wounded Palestinian man on the hood of a military vehicle and drove through the Jabariya neighborhood, and “a compound and comprehensive crime” against a civilian family in Gaza City on June 27.
“A family comprising an elderly woman and her four children, including three young women and a one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, was attacked with gunfire and bombs by Israeli forces who stormed their house in the Gaza City neighborhood of Al-Shujaiya,” said the group. “They were later taken outside and detained for over three hours near Israeli tanks in a dangerous combat zone, despite the injuries they sustained in the initial attack on their home, and were used as human shields. The 65-year-old mother, identified as Safiya Hassan Musa Al-Jamal, was run over by an Israeli tank and killed in front of her son.”
On Monday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the footage released Sunday from the incident in Gaza while noting that Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir was recorded over the weekend calling for Palestinian prisoners to be executed and fed reduced food rations as a “deterrence” tactic.
Almost 10,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces, including women and children, CAIR said, demanding that the U.S. end its military support for Israel.
“Israeli war crimes, and calls for more war crimes, are occurring daily in Gaza and the West Bank, while the Biden administration rushes more American bombs to Israel to complete the genocide,” said CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper. “The U.S.-Israeli partnership in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced starvation will shape the international community’s image of America for generations to come. The Biden administration must change course to uphold universal human rights and recognize Palestinian humanity.”
Gazans, including children, walk past rubble and leaked sewage at Bureij camp after Israeli attacks in Deir al Balah, Gaza on June 20, 2024. (Photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
As the IDF stepped up attacks in Gaza City, one resident said, “We are being starved… with no hope that this war is ever ending.”
Residents of Gaza City’s Shujayea neighborhood found themselves on Thursday among the main targets of new Israeli military operations, with thousands of people fleeing as they were “hunted by tanks and planes,” as one Palestinian man told Reuters—even as Israel claimed the “intense” phase of the war was over.
Al Jazeera reported that the Israel Defense Forces targeted five residential homes in the Shujayea and Sabra neighborhoods in the early morning hours of Thursday, killing at least five people in the former area and three in the latter.
Evacuation orders from the IDF came about 30 minutes after the shelling began in Shujayea, according to Al Jazeera, with families rushing to move west after receiving text messages and leaflets from the military. The IDF published a map showing that certain blocks of the residential neighborhood were now part of a combat zone where tanks were moving in.
“We were suddenly and intensively bombarded by Israel,” one man fleeing the area on foot told Al Jazeera. “We came out and we don’t know where to go.”
Artillery attacks were also reported in the Zeitoun, Hawa, and Sheikh Ijlin neighborhoods of Gaza City. Shujayea was a key target of the IDF in the first weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza last October.
As Israel claims to be drawing down its attacks while rejecting a permanent cease-fire agreement, “the world must not stay silent” about the ongoing assault on Gaza, said researcher and academic Nour Naim.
🚨Breaking: Brutal massacres are occurring now in #Gaza City due to intense and sudden attacks by the Israeli army, leaving many injured and trapped under the rubble.
The Gaza Health Ministry reported Thursday that the people who were killed in Gaza City overnight were among 47 Palestinians killed across the enclave in the past 24 hours. Fifty-two people were reported wounded in the same time period—the latest of dozens each day who are taken to hospitals where doctors struggle to treat people with severely limited supplies due to continued humanitarian aid delays and blockades.
“There are moments when anesthesia is not available, but in order to save the lives of citizens, we resort to amputation, and this causes severe pain for the wounded,” a surgeon at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, told AFP. “Every day, there are attacks that result in amputations of legs or arms for children, adults, and women.”
Six people were killed overnight in an Israeli attack in Jabalia, northern Gaza, and an attack on a family home killed one person in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
In southern Gaza, women and children were among those killed in an attack on a school where displaced people have been staying, and Israeli ground forces “systematically demolished residential buildings in the west of the city” of Rafah, Al Jazeera reported.
As the IDF has stepped up attacks in Gaza City and continued its bombardment of other areas across the enclave, doctors, humanitarian workers, and civilians described the realities of daily life in Gaza, where aid blockades and the disruption of sanitation services and water treatment have all contributed to “grim living conditions” and heightened health risks.
Joanne Perry, a doctor working with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), described to the Associated Press living conditions that have caused concern that a cholera outbreak could soon take hold.
“The crowded conditions, the lack of water, the heat, the poor sanitation—these are the preconditions of cholera,” Perry told the AP.
Israeli attacks since October have destroyed Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants, water desalination plants, sewage pumping facilities, and wells, and have killed government workers who have tried to repair the infrastructure, leading Palestinians to rely on contaminated and “salty” water.
“We found worms in the water. I had been drinking from it,” 21-year-old Adel Dalloul told the AP. “It was salty, polluted, and full of germs… I had gastrointestinal problems and diarrhea, and my stomach hurts until this moment.”
The World Health Organization has reported 485,000 cases of diarrhea—the third-leading cause of death in young children worldwide—since October, and has warned of at least one outbreak of Hepatitis A, which is spread through the consumption of water and food contaminated with fecal matter.
A mother of six in Khan Younis told Reuters that her family is relying on a charity kitchen’s daily visits to their U.N.-run shelter, as 12 million pounds of food aid and other supplies have been held up since June 9, according to U.S. officials.
“If the charity kitchen did not come here for one day, we would wonder about what we will eat that day,” Umm Feisal Abu Nqera told Reuters. “We are living the worst days of our lives in terms of famine and deprivation… Today, your son looks at you and you bleed from within, because you cannot provide him with his most basic rights and the simplest needs for his life.”
A girl died of malnutrition on Thursday at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, bringing the official death toll from malnutrition and dehydration among children to 31. “We are being starved in Gaza City,” 25-year-old Mohammad Jamal toldReuters as the renewed Israeli offensive took hold, “with no hope that this war is ever ending.”
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
JEREMY Corbyn has claimed he was once asked to give a “blanket undertaking” that he would automatically support any military action Israel undertakes while Labour leader.
Corbyn – who is running as an independent candidate at the General Election – said during an interview with Declassified UK co-founder Matt Kennard that he was confronted with the request at an “extremely hostile” meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party Committee and declined.
He said: “During one extremely hostile meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party Committee they confronted me and said will you give a blanket undertaking that you, as party leader and potentially prime minister, will automatically support any military action Israel undertakes?
“And I said no, I will give no such undertaking, because the issue of Palestine has to be resolved and Palestinian people do not deserve to live under occupation, and the siege of Gaza has created such incredible stress.
“By the way I’ve been there on nine occasions in Israel, Palestine and the West Bank.”
Jeremy Corbyn says during a meeting with the Parliamentary Labour Party Committee he was confronted and asked to give assurances that as Labour leader – and potentially prime minister – he would automatically support any military action Israel undertakes👇 pic.twitter.com/RIN13HkHpF
Jeremy Corbyn makes the claim in this interview (50 min long)
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
