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Pose for a group photo following the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Foreign Ministers meeting with Japan’s Foreign Minister in Kuwait City on September 1, 2025. [Photo by YASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP via Getty Images]
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) called Monday for an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and detainees, and unrestricted humanitarian access to the enclave, Anadolu reports.
In a final communiqué following a ministerial session in Kuwait, the bloc pressed for full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2735, adopted in June 2024, and praised mediation efforts led by Qatar, Egypt and the US.
The ministers condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, citing mass killings, forced displacement, starvation policies and the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, mosques and churches. They urged the international community to take urgent steps to halt these crimes and hold perpetrators accountable.
The GCC rejected any Israeli attempt to annex parts of Gaza or impose direct military rule, stressing that Gaza and the West Bank must remain united under the Palestinian Authority.
The council also condemned repeated Israeli attacks on humanitarian convoys and aid workers, recalling UN Security Council Resolution 2730 on protecting humanitarian staff.
It welcomed statements by the European Union and a coalition of 26 international partners in July calling for an immediate end to the war and unrestricted delivery of aid.
On the Palestinian issue, the GCC reaffirmed its commitment to a two-state solution, calling for an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, in line with the Arab Peace Initiative and international law.
It praised an international conference held at the UN last month, co-chaired by Saudi Arabia and France, which underscored support for setting a timeline to establish Palestinian statehood and ensure regional stability.
The ministers also welcomed the planned recognition of Palestine by France, the UK, Portugal, Malta, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, urging all other states to follow suit.
The GCC condemned Israel’s plan to transfer control of Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque to a Jewish religious council, settlement expansion in the West Bank, and calls by Israeli lawmakers to annex the occupied territory.
Israel has killed over 63,500 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.
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/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Palestinians are seen on street following the Israeli attack on ez-Zeytun neighborhood in Gaza City, Gaza on August 8, 2025. (Photo: Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“People are being starved, children are being killed, families have lost everything,” said the United Nations agency for Palestinian Refugees.
The Gaza Health Ministry announced on Monday that more than 100 children in Gaza have died of severe hunger during Israel’s siege of the territory.
As Al Jazeerareported, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said that a total of 222 Palestinians have died from hunger during the siege, including 101 children. The vast majority of these deaths have come in just the last three weeks when the hunger crisis in Gaza started to garner international media attention, the ministry said.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East on Monday emphasized the direness of the situation in a statement calling for a cease-fire to allow more aid into Gaza.
“People are being starved, children are being killed,” the agency said. “Families have lost everything. Political will and leadership can stop an escalation and end the war. Every heartbeat counts.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that there is no starvation crisis in Gaza and has said such reports are part of a “fake” propaganda campaign waged by Israel’s enemies.
However, it isn’t just the Gaza Health Ministry warning of a hunger crisis in the region, as international charity Save the Children last week said that 43% of pregnant and breastfeeding women who showed up to its clinics in Gaza last month were malnourished, which represented a threefold increase since March, when the Israeli military imposed a total siege on the area.
The latest numbers about starvation in Gaza come as the Israeli government is pushing forward with a plan to fully invade and occupy Gaza, which experts have warned will only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis among its people.
“If these plans are implemented, they will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza, reverberating across the region and causing further forced displacement, killings, and destruction,” said Miroslav Jenca, the United Nations assistant secretary general, over the weekend.
Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images
The UK’s broken justice system is locking young activists like me away – and we’ll all suffer the consequences
My name’s Ella. I am a fairly average 22-year-old from Birmingham, central England. I have friends, a supportive family, and hopes and dreams for after graduation. I’m also facing up to ten years in prison.
On 5 August last year, I was arrested along with three others on a side street in Gatley, near Manchester, just after 4am. We had been planning to enter Manchester Airport’s airfield – provided it was safe to do so – to block the taxiway by glueing our hands to the tarmac.
We didn’t get near the airport, but I have been held in HMP Styal, a women’s prison just outside Manchester, ever since. I was charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and spent six months in prison awaiting trial. I was found guilty in February and will have served three months by the time I am sentenced at the end of this month.
So what drives a young person like me to take nonviolent action as drastic as this? You may have realised that I am a member of Just Stop Oil. At the time of my arrest, I was carrying boltcutters, glue, a hi-vis jacket, and a banner reading ‘sign the treaty’ in all caps.
It was the summer of 2024, the hottest year ever recorded. We were trying to send a message to the British government: it must sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and make an immediate plan to transition away from oil, gas and coal to prevent further global heating, climate breakdown, and eventual societal collapse.
We wanted to go to an airport – a symbol of the carbon economy – to make clear that the UK’s ‘business as usual’ approach is sending humanity over a cliff edge into destruction, displacement, and massive loss of life.
Our protest may have seemed drastic, but as I tried to explain to the judge and the jury, it was proportionate to the scale of the crisis we are facing. We all stand to lose everything.
Until my arrest, I was a final-year environmental science student at the University of Leeds. As I told the court, the science is clear: burning and extracting fossil fuels is heating the planet and leading to mass crop failure, with food insecurity and starvation for large parts of the world and drastic price hikes on staples for the rest of us. Crop failure on this scale will kill millions and displace many more. A billion people could be on the move within 25 years. The impacts will be felt everywhere, by everyone.
I spoke about my university lecturers, who are prominent climate scientists and are fearful for their children’s lives. They feel they aren’t being listened to, that the government is implementing policies contrary to science. I said that the knowledge I had gained from studying gave me a responsibility to act.
Court trials like mine are remarkably technical – you must submit a legal defence if you want the judge to allow jurors to consider your motivation, or the context of your actions. I did not have a lawyer and, like my co-defendants, put forward a defence of ‘self-defence’ and ‘necessity’.
I argued that I acted not only to protect the lives of the millions already living on the frontline of climate breakdown, but in defence of myself and young people globally. I told the court how I am afraid for my own future, the future of my brother, my friends, my cousins, and all young people everywhere.
The judge dismissed this, saying the climate crisis does not pose an ‘immediate threat to life’. He told jurors to ignore the context around our actions and focus only on whether we had planned to commit a ‘crime’, saying that anything they’d heard about climate change during the hearing was irrelevant as it was a political or philosophical belief.
But the climate crisis is not a belief, it is science, and science doesn’t care about legal defences, judges’ rulings or prison sentences. It will continue to worsen and take more lives until governments work together to stop burning fossil fuels.
Conservative ministers loudly championed free speech – right up until they outlawed it. Now, we’re all at risk
Over the past six months in prison, this truth has become clearer and clearer. Climate breakdown is no longer something I read about in textbooks, study in lectures, or write about in exams. I’m seeing it through the bars of my cell window.
On New Year’s Day, a state of emergency was declared as Greater Manchester was hit by heavy rains. Over a thousand people were evacuated from flooded homes – HMP Styal’s prison officers among them – their possessions ruined, and huge disruption caused.
The rising waters cut off the roads leading to the prison, causing a staffing crisis that compromised our safety, with no one allowed to leave their wings or houses. The prison’s library and workplaces were flooded, ruining books and leaving some prisoners with no work or activities even after the regime returned to normal.
Such extreme weather is being seen everywhere. On the penultimate day of my hearing, 14 people were killed in floods in the US state of Kentucky, including a seven-year-old girl and her mother, who were washed away in their car. I used my closing speech to tell jurors about this, about how upset it made me. How many people will die before we open our eyes?
The judge ruled it irrelevant.
Having been barred from considering almost everything we’d said, the jury had little choice but to find us guilty. I am grateful to all twelve of them, though, for listening to what we had to say for three weeks and making the only decision they could within the constraints given.
Despite the guilty verdict, being in prison and my impending sentencing, I am at peace. I should have had my whole life ahead of me, and my future now hangs in the balance, but I know that I acted in line with my conscience and moral convictions and, above all, nonviolently: without violence and actively against violence.
Being on trial at a crown court in my early twenties was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. But what choice did I have? At university, I studied the truth, and now I have to act on it.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Health workers, holding banners and placards, gather at the Nasser Hospital to protest Israeli army’s attacks on northern Gaza and the prevention of the entry of necessary equipment and supplies to the besieged hospitals in Khan Yunis, Gaza on October 19, 2024. (Photo by Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
As the situation inside Gaza is increasingly described as “indescribable,” medical NGOs blocked from providing care to Palestinians trapped inside besieged territory demand world leaders to stop turning ‘blind eye’ to Israeli war crimes and violations of humanitarian law.
As more Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed dozens of people Saturday, health workers from both inside and out of the besieged territory are again pleading with world leaders to bring an end to the indiscriminate attacks and imposed humanitarian crisis that witnesses on the ground increasingly say there are no words to describe.
At al Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis and elsewhere in Gaza, doctors and other medical staff on Saturday staged protests and held press conferences to call attention to the ongoing attacks in northern areas, including the latest targeting of Jabalia in which reporting indicated anywhere from 33 to over 50 people—including civilian men, women, and children—were killed.
“The world is watching, and history will judge us by how we respond to this grave injustice. I call upon each and everyone one of you to join this fight for the preservation of our shared humanity.” —Dr. Khaled Saleh, FAJR Scientific
Al-Jazeera reports that hospitals, which have repeatedly been bombed by Israel over the last year, were not immune from this latest round:
Three partially functioning hospitals treating severely wounded patients and sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza are now out of service after coming under intense Israeli fire, a Gaza health official told Al Jazeera, as the siege on Jabalia enters its third week, with at least 33 more people killed in the northern area.
Israeli forces bombed al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia early on Saturday, and have also shelled Kamal Adwan and the Indonesian hospitals in Beit Lahiya over the past few hours, Al Jazeera correspondents have reported.
Saturday’s attacks come days after Israel barred at least six medical service NGOs from continuing their life-saving work in Gaza. According to the Washington Post:
Two of those medical NGOs, Glia and the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), confirmed to The Washington Post that they were notified by the WHO this week about the bans. Both groups have worked in Gaza for years preceding the war.
“WHO is concerned about the impact of these denials on Gaza’s strained healthcare system,” the organization said Thursday in a statement. It added that international emergency medical teams (EMTs) deployed to Gaza are essential to keeping the system operational, as only 17 of the enclave’s 36 hospitals remain functionaland “healthcare needs far exceed the system’s capacity.”
Dr. Khaled Saleh, chair of FAJR Scientific, which provides surgical expertise and trauma specialists to war-torn regions and was another of the groups notified by the WHO that it had been barred from entering Gaza, said in a statement that the move by the Israeli government filled him with “deep sadness and concern for the current state of our global family, questioning our shared humanity and ethics.”
Blocked from providing aid to people in dire need, Saleh called on people worldwide to push for an end to Israel’s blocking of vital medical aid and those seeking to provide it.
“This is a devastating blow to humanity, representing a level of destruction that we have not witnessed since World War II, yet our world leaders turn a blind eye,” he said.
“As a member of the global community,” Saleh continued, “I implore all of you who value compassion, ethics, and the sanctity of human life to stand with us and raise your voices against this unconscionable decision. Together, we must advocate for the voiceless and demand restoration of the fundamental right to access to medical care.”
Israel’s ban on the medical NGOs comes after a string of healthcare professionals who spent time in the Gaza strip have gone public with what they witnessed on the ground, telling tales of unspeakable horror and trying to shake the world out of its complacency on what experts say is a genocide in motion being carried out by Israeli forces.
Earlier this week, the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, said that Israel’s continued blocking of food and medical supplies to Jabalia and other ares in the northern was “having life-threatening impacts” for the people there.
OCHA spokesperson Farhan Haq said the OCHA was calling on Israeli authorities “to allowed safe, sustained and unimpeded access to Jabalia and all areas of the north where people are in desperate need of assistance.”
In a post on Friday, Oxfam International mourned the killing of Dr. Ahmad Al-Najar and midwife Laila Jneid, both of whom worked with Juzoor, “killed by Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia,” the group said. “They were providing lifesaving health care in Gaza. Attacking aid workers is a war crime.” Oxfam repeated its demand for a “cease-fire now” and said healthcare workers should never be a target.
In a dispatch on Friday, Dr. Taghreed Al-Imawi, Juzoor staff and an OBGYN doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, described the untenable situation on the ground.
“The situation is beyond horrific and is very difficult and indescribable,” said Al-Imawi. “Dead people, severed body parts and injured people everywhere. We are receiving emergency calls from all the areas of the north. Ambulances are not able to reach the injured. We have seen more than 23 pregnant women among the injured coming to the hospital since last week, wounded either by shrapnel or gunfire, suffering from fractures. Some were in a critical condition. Kamal Adwan Hospital and other semi-operational hospitals have received displacement orders but there is no way to evacuate in any case.”
“The pediatrics section is closed as it is full of injured people,” Al-Imawi added, “the surgery section is full of injured people, even the reception, the hospital has been shelled several times and targeted by snipers, people are terrified to come to the hospital now.”
Having recently returned from a field mission in Gaza, pediatric nurse Becky Platt, working through Save the Children—who posted her testimony Saturday—described a situation on the ground that was “like nothing I’ve seen before.”
Platt said the horrific situation is “both in terms of healthcare need and just in terms of the whole humanitarian context—seeing homes and landscapes completely devastated and seeing just the absolute level of human suffering and need as absolutely mind blowing.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1847518629484478816
“No child should have to be in pain,” she said. “And it just feels like your hands are tied when you can’t do what you know that you could do easily at home or in another context. I think that when it really hits. It’s just—it’s just not fair. It’s not okay that we’ve got children with devastating injuries who don’t have access to pain relief.”
For his part, Dr. Saleh of FAJR Scientific, said it was up to everyone in the world to make their voices heard.
“The world is watching,” he said, “and history will judge us by how we respond to this grave injustice. I call upon each and everyone one of you to join this fight for the preservation of our shared humanity.”
A van flows in floodwaters near the Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
“To those insisting that, ‘This is not the time!’ to have those other conversations, I say: This is *exactly* when we need to be having them,” said one climate scientist.
As emergency crews have worked through the weekend to rescue people and restore essential services across several southeastern U.S. states, green groups in recent days have pointed to the death and damage from Hurricane Helene as just the latest evidence of the need for sweeping action on the climate emergency.
Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane with 140 mph winds in Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday, then left a path of destruction across hundreds of miles of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee. As of early Sunday, at least 64 people are confirmed dead—including at least two people in Virginia—though that figure is expected to rise.
“Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage,” The Associated Press reported Sunday on what is now a post-tropical cyclone. “AccuWeather‘s preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the U.S. is between $95 billion and $110 billion.”
The youth-led Sunrise Movement said Sunday that “any reporting about Hurricane Helene needs to be clear—this is not normal. This is not just a tragedy. This is a crime. Fossil fuel companies have known this would happen for the last 50 years. They lied to the public and bought out our government just to make a profit. Make them pay.”
Greenpeace USA similarly declared on social media Saturday that “#HURRICANE HELENE MUST BE A WAKE-UP CALL FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE!”
“We are heartbroken,” the group said, noting the dozens of people killed. “Communities have been devastated. The corporations heating the climate must be held accountable.”
Climate chaos does not care if you deny it, it does not care if you vote Democratic, Republican, or Independent—climate chaos will impact us all.
Dozens of communities across the United States have already launched climate liability lawsuits against Big Oil, which knew for decades that fossil fuels would heat the planet but promoted disinformation and raked in huge profits. Recently there have been calls for legal action by the U.S. Department of Justice and potential homicide cases brought by state and local prosecutors.
“Our hearts and solidarity go out to everyone facing the devastation. Please support mutual aid relief efforts and demand oil companies #StartDrillingStartPaying!” Greenpeace said Saturday.
Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Aja on Sunday offered a “friendly reminder that fossil fuel companies get 20 BILLION dollars in [government] subsidies every year,” while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “runs out of money to respond to disasters like Helene.”
Both Shiney-Aja and Greenpeace shared footage from Asheville, North Carolina, which endured what Ryan Cole, the assistant director of Buncombe County Emergency Services, described as “biblical flooding.”
Just two years ago, The New Lede reported that “from wildfires racing through the drought-stricken West, to heavy flooding in the central and eastern regions of the United States, extreme weather events are spurring many Americans to seek refuge in more environmentally stable cities, so-called ‘climate havens,'” including Asheville.
This weekend, Asheville—which is over 2,000 feet above sea level and more than 250 miles from the coast—and surrounding communities are contending with disrupted water, power, and communications services due to what officials are reportedly calling “Buncombe County’s own Hurricane Katrina.”
Noting Asheville’s elevation and distance from the coast, Lucky Tran, director of science communications and media relations at Columbia University in New York City, said Sunday that “no place is safe from climate change. We all suffer the consequences. We must all take action. We are all in this together.”
If you think of hurricanes as a coastal danger, I invite you to look at a map and see where Asheville is located. https://t.co/JUplknI0UE
People across western North Carolina chainsawed their way to loved ones and drove for hours Saturday on dwindling gas tanks in search of food and power, in what one resident described as a “mini-apocalypse” after Hurricane Helene.
Authorities said the region was facing a historic disaster a day after the powerful storm swept through the Southeast, downing power lines and washing out highways. Landslides, spotty cellphone service, and a gas shortage complicated rescue and recovery efforts. Some stranded people were being airlifted to safety.
Antonia Juhasz, a leading climate and energy journalist and author, said Saturday that “Asheville, North Carolina is being wiped off the map by the worst storm to hit the region in a generation. This is what the climate crisis looks like: the production and use of fossil fuels changes the climate, intensifying extreme weather events and making them more frequent.”
As hurricane scientist Jeff Masters detailed Friday, fossil fuel-driven climate change “makes the strongest hurricanes stronger,” boosts rainfall from such storms, leads to more rapid intensification, and causes sea-level rise that increases storm surge damage.
In an effort to emphasize the climate change connection to extreme weather, from heatwaves to hurricanes, some climate campaigners have suggested naming such events after oil and gas companies.
“What did a Helene ever do to deserve getting this horrific hurricane named after her? We should be naming hurricanes after fossil fuel CEOs instead. How about Hurricane Darren?” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, taking aim at ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods.
This is Asheville, North Carolina. Fossil fuel companies and their ultra-rich CEOs are profiting from what causes pain and death to people and planet. Enough is enough. #PollutersPayhttps://t.co/EGyhAYTeEn
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist focused on extreme weather, said on social media Saturday, “The images and stories just beginning to emerge from eastern TN and western NC in the aftermath of widespread catastrophic flooding wrought by Helene are genuinely horrifying, and the full scale of the disaster is likely as yet untold.”
“This was, by far, the most extreme rain event in observed record across much/most of the region, where reliable records date back over 100 [years]. Unsurprisingly, the flooding which resulted has also been widespread, historic, and generally catastrophic across a broad region,” he explained. “These floods, which were concentrated in valleys containing rivers and typically modest creeks and streams, involved extremely large volumes of water moving downhill at high velocity. This was not a gradual or ‘gentle’ inundation by any means.”
Swain stressed that “sometimes ‘worst-case’ scenarios really do come to pass, and I think we often lack the collective imagination to fully envision what that looks like. That’s a problem, because being honest about risks that exist is [the] first step toward mitigating them and preventing harm!”
“Ultimately, there many folks in FL, GA, NC, and TN who are in need of urgent assistance—and that is/should be foremost priority,” he added. “But to those insisting that, ‘This is not the time!’ to have those other conversations, I say: This is *exactly* when we need to be having them.”
The AP reported that “in Atlanta, 11.12 inches (28.24 centimeters) of rain fell over 48 hours, the most the city has seen over two days since record-keeping began in 1878,” while “in Florida’s Big Bend, some lost nearly everything they own, emerging from the storm without even a pair of shoes.”
South of there, in Pinellas County, officials have identified over 18,000 homes damaged by Helene—and at least 11,000 are “uninhabitable,” as the Tampa Bay Times put it.
Trump's Project 2025 wants to ban the national weather service so that companies can profit off of you being trapped in a literal hurricane https://t.co/6P2gvoFFl5
Highlighting the connection between climate change and more intense hurricanes, Congressman Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said Thursday that “the climate crisis is here. We must act to save lives.”
