Protesters outside the University of ManchesterPhoto: Neil Terry Photography
WORKERS and students walked out across the country today to demand the government back a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, as the death toll climbs to over 27,000.
As part of the day of strike action, called by the Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, workers gathered for a lunchtime rally outside Parliament organised by civil servants’ union PCS. Members of NEU and the UCU also walked out across the country.
Media workers protested outside BBC headquarters over its coverage of Israel’s war crimes as the death toll for journalists tops 85.
A Media Workers for Palestine spokesperson said: “A number of the BBC’s own journalists have accused the corporation of investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims of the war compared with Palestinians and failing to provide key historical context in its coverage.
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Students and lecturers joined the action and walked out of universities across the country including in Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow and Manchester.
HUNDREDS of activists blocked the Barclays headquarters in Canary Wharf today, protesting against the bank’s involvement in Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza.
The protest comes amid growing pressure for a permanent ceasefire as the Palestinian death toll exceeds over 27,000.
According to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Barclays has invested over £1 billion in companies supplying weapons and military technology to Israel.
The campaigners say the bank also provides the firms with over £3bn in loans and underwriting.
Rallying in front of the bank’s headquarters, a coalition of protesters from London for a Free Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Queers for Palestine and Black Lives Matter told passers-by to close their bank accounts and “stop banking on apartheid.”
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London For a Free Palestine activist Rebecca Rumford said: “British people cannot continue banking with Barclays as it actively funds the genocide on Palestinians.
“We ask everyone with a Barclays account to close it this February 9, until the bank cuts ties with Israel.”
Nation whose case put Israel formally on trial for genocide joins Nicaragua in turning its sights on accomplices in genocide
A team of almost fifty South African lawyers is preparing a legal case to bring to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ top court, against the US and UK, for their complicity in Israel’s array of war crimes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
South Africa’s successful ICJ case against Israel last month led to Israel being put formally on trial for genocide and resulted in a string of binding orders on Israel to stop its slaughter of Gazans and even to protect Palestinians from harm, as well as to ensure adequate aid reaches the strip’s 2.5 million people, many of whom are now starving and homeless.
Israel has flouted the rulings, continuing and even intensifying the mass murder and blockade, and is being supported in its flagrant disregard for international law by the UK and US, who are providing both material and financial aid, and giving political cover by refusing to condemn Israel’s actions or to call its crimes what they are, instead casting doubt on the mass deaths and brutality and denigrating the Court’s ruling.
The team of lawyers, which already numbers around fifty, is likely to grow further as more lawyers are set to join from other nations. Wikus van Rensburg, who is leading the action, said that it was time for the US and other complicit nations to “be held responsible for [their] crimes”.
Palestinians gather for a demonstration in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on January 30, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)
“People in Gaza are starving, and because of spurious allegations made in a dodgy dossier, they will experience worse hunger.”
An Israeli dossier that more than a dozen countries have cited to justify cutting off funding to the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency “provides no evidence” that a small number of the key U.N. aid body’s employees were involved in the October 7 Hamas-led attack, according to an investigation released Monday by the British outlet Channel 4.
The dossier merely states that “from intelligence information, documents, and identity cards seized during the course of the fighting, it is now possible to flag around 190 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist operatives who serve as UNRWA employees.”
“More than 10 UNRWA staffers took part in the events of [October 7],” reads the six-page dossier, which Israel provided to UNRWA donor countries—including the agency’s top contributor, the United States—shortly after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down an interim decision ordering Israel to take concrete steps to prevent genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The ICJ instructed the Israeli government to ensure that sufficient humanitarian assistance flows to desperate and starving Gazans, but Israel’s allegations against UNRWA employees led at least 16 countries to suspend funding for the agency, the most critical aid body operating in the Palestinian enclave. Around a million displaced Gazans are currently sheltering at facilities run by UNRWA, which has 13,000 employees across the strip.
The UNRWA is reportedly set to lose $65 million by the end of February as donors’ funding cuts take effect, imperiling the agency’s operations in Gaza and across the Middle East.
Channel 4 noted Monday that all 13,000 of UNRWA’s Gaza employees’ names “have been checked against the U.N. terrorism list and, as recently as last May, were vetted and approved by Israel.”
The UNRWA quickly fired nine of the employees named by Israel. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres established “an independent review group to assess whether the agency is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.”
The Daily Beast also obtained a copy of the Israeli dossier and—similar to Channel 4—reported Tuesday that it “includes little evidence to back up” Israel’s allegations against UNRWA employees.
Ashish Prashar, a spokesperson for Gaza Voices, said in response to the new reporting that “we now know that the document used to suspend funding to UNRWA ‘provides no evidence.'”
“This is the latest campaign in a decades-long attack on UNRWA by Israel and a subset of the broader campaign to eliminate the Palestinian refugee issue,” said Prashar. “People in Gaza are starving, and because of spurious allegations made in a dodgy dossier, they will experience worse hunger. This scandal should lead to resignations from officials in the U.S., UK, Germany, and elsewhere who all suspended funding to a besieged people experiencing a genocide as a result of a baseless accusation by the génocidaires themselves.”
“The fact that the U.S., U.K., and several other Western governments instantly attacked UNRWA on the orders of a genocidal foreign government (based on bogus claims) should make you very worried about your own democracy.”
Jeremy Scahill, a senior correspondent at The Intercept‘s criticized the Biden administration and The Wall Street Journal for characterizing the dossier as “some smoking gun.”
During a press conference last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the allegations in the dossier “highly, highly credible.”
The same day as Blinken’s remarks, the Journal ran a story stating that “around 10%” of UNRWA’s Gaza employees have ties to Islamist militant groups,” pointing to an “intelligence dossier.”
But questions about the reliability of the purported intelligence cited in the Israeli dossier have been swirling since the details of its contents began to trickle out in the press late last month. Citing one unnamed senior Israeli official, Axios reported that “the intelligence is a result of interrogations of militants who were arrested during the Oct. 7 attack.”
Israeli forces have repeatedly been accused by U.N. experts and human rights groups of using torture to extract forced confessions from Palestinian detainees.
“The fact that the U.S., U.K., and several other Western governments instantly attacked UNRWA on the orders of a genocidal foreign government (based on bogus claims) should make you very worried about your own democracy,” Craig Mokhiber, a former U.N. official who resigned over the global institution’s failure to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza, wrote Tuesday.
Protesters with the #ShutItDown4Palestine movement took the streets of New York City once again on February 4 to demand an end to all US funding of Israel and a permanent ceasefire
New York City police cracked down on pro-Palestine activists with the #ShutItDown4Palestine movement for the third week in a row and arrested several protesters, including march organizers. The crackdown comes as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza completes four months. Israeli forces have killed over 27,000 Palestinians in the enclave including over 11,000 children.
People across the United States have mobilized week after week to demand an end to US complicity in Israel’s war on the people of Palestine and an immediate ceasefire. Major public opinion polls show that a majority of US voters from both parties support a ceasefire, yet the Biden administration has refused to call for one.
Organizers have vowed to continue protesting, in spite of the crackdown, until there is a ceasefire and Palestine is free.
