Despite international pressure to free Hiba, Jordanian authorities held her for her full sentence in a “huge setback for press freedoms.
Jordanian authorities released journalist Hiba Abu Taha on Thursday, February 13, upon completing her prison sentence.
In June, 2024, Hiba was sentenced to one year in prison for violating Jordan’s controversial Cybercrime Law by allegedly “spreading false news, slandering, insulting or defaming a governmental authority or an official body,” and “inciting discord and strife among members of society, targeting community peace, and inciting violence.”
One of those charges was reportedly imposed on Abu Taha for an article she wrote, in which she criticized Jordan’s interception of Iranian drones and rockets launched against Israel in April, 2024.
Meanwhile, she faced the other charge for writing an investigative report, exposing Jordanian companies, which were transporting goods to Israel through the Jordanian territory during Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza.
The imprisonment of Abu Taha and the enactment of the Cybercrime Law were widely criticized by international human rights and press freedom organizations. These organizations described Hiba’s imprisonment as a “huge setback for press freedom” in Jordan. They labelled the Cybercrime Law “draconian.”
In October 2024, an online campaign titled “We stand in solidarity with Hiba Abu Taha” was also launched by 24 media platforms, including Peoples Dispatch. However, the Jordanian authorities ignored the widespread opposition from organizations and grassroots campaigns, and continued Hiba’s incarceration until the last day of her prison sentence.
People take part in a national march for Palestine, supported by more than 150 Irish civil society groups, in Dublin, January 25, 2025
TENS of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators are set to flood the streets of London on Saturday to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
The march and rally comes as the current ceasefire teeters on the brink of collapse, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatening to resume bombing and US president Donald Trump declaring “let all hell break loose” after Hamas delayed the release of more hostages, citing Israeli violations of the deal.
Protesters will gather at midday on Saturday at Whitehall before marching to the US embassy.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer departs 10 Downing Street, London, to attend Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, February 12, 2025
DOUBLE standards. The Prime Minister vows to close a “loophole” that allowed a Gaza family, whose home was destroyed by Israeli bombing, to claim asylum under a scheme designed for Ukrainian refugees.
There are deserving and undeserving refugees. Ukrainians are white, and fleeing from an army we don’t like, Russia’s. Palestinians aren’t and they are fleeing from an army we advise, fund and equip.
Labour’s anti-immigrant braggadocio won’t shorten NHS waiting lists or lower housing costs. Its zeal for action contrasts with its foot-dragging over employment rights and its indifference to rising energy and water bills. Keir Starmer only punches down: he cowers before the corporate crooks bleeding this country dry but talks tough when it comes to the powerless and penniless.
Most of all he cowers before Donald Trump. British laws can be amended if they offend the US president: an online safety Bill may be reshaped to please Elon Musk, and proper taxation of the digital sector’s huge profits may be permanently shelved.
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Minister of Justice and Correctional Services of South Africa Ronald Lamola answers the questions of press members related to the public hearings of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands on January 11, 2024 [Dursun Aydemir – Anadolu Agency]
South Africa has vowed not to withdraw its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), despite the Trump administration’s threats and aid cut.
There is “no chance” South Africa could withdraw the case it filed in December 2023, Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola told the Financial Times.
“Standing by our principles sometimes has consequences, but we remain firm that this is important for the world, and the rule of law,” he added.
South Africa was the first nation to drag Israel to the ICJ over its genocidal war on Gaza that has claimed more than 48,000 lives and reduced the enclave to rubble. A ceasefire that took hold on 19 January is currently in place.
Last week, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting financial aid to South Africa in retaliation for a new land appropriation law it claims seizes property from the country’s White minority, as well as the ICJ case against Israel.
The US also alleges that South Africa is working with Iran to “develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.”
“The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its ‘undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests,” the order read.
“While we do have a good relationship with Iran, we don’t have any nuclear programmes with them, nor any trade to speak of,” Lamola said.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently signed the expropriation bill into law, which will allow the state to expropriate land without compensation if it is “just, equitable and in the public interest.”
The government says the law aims to address apartheid’s past injustices, and that Trump’s accusations are lies, distortions and misinformation.
According to Ramaphosa, the country was only receiving HIV/AIDS prevention funding from the US.
After South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel alleging violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip, several countries joined the case including Nicaragua, Colombia, Cuba, Libya, Mexico, Spain, Belize and Turkiye.
The International Criminal Court has separately issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Trump has also sanctioned the ICC for investing Israeli officials.
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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
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Israeli soldiers and reservists in Southern Israel on November 13, 2023 [Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images]
Israel’s military has called up reservists in preparation for a possible resumption of its offensive in Gaza if Hamas fails to meet a Saturday deadline to release more Israeli hostages and a nearly month-old ceasefire breaks down, Reuters has reported.
Concern that the ceasefire will collapse is growing as fury mounts in Arab countries over President Donald Trump’s plan for the United States to take over Gaza, displace its Palestinian inhabitants and build an international beach resort.
Under the ceasefire deal in force since 19 January, Hamas agreed to free three more hostages on Saturday. However, the Palestinian resistance movement said this week it was suspending the handover because of what it said were Israeli violations of the ceasefire terms. Trump responded by saying that all hostages must be freed by noon on Saturday or he would “let hell break out”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then warned on Tuesday that his country would resume “intense fighting” if Hamas did not meet the deadline, but he did not say how many hostages should be freed.
Netanyahu added that he had ordered the military to gather forces in and around Gaza, and the military announced it was deploying additional forces to Israel’s south, including mobilising reservists.
The head of Hamas in Gaza, Khalil Al-Hayya, arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for a surprise visit to discuss the fragile ceasefire. A Hamas official told Reuters that mediators Egypt and Qatar had stepped up efforts to end the current impasse.
The standoff threatens to reignite a conflict in which Israel has devastated the Gaza Strip, internally displaced most of its people, caused shortages of food and running water and pushed the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.
Palestinians in Gaza expressed alarm that the ceasefire might collapse and urged Hamas and Israeli leaders to agree on an extension.
“We had barely started believing that a truce would happen and that a solution was on the way, God willing,” said Lotfy Abu Taha, a resident of Rafah in southern Gaza. “The people are suffering. The people are the victims.”
Israeli officials said government ministers had endorsed Trump’s threat to cancel the ceasefire unless all hostages are released on Saturday. Hamas, meanwhile, said it remained committed to the agreement, but that Israel must fulfil what it agreed to do when it signed the deal. Despite the Trump and Netanyahu threats, the movement has not agreed to release the hostages on Saturday.
Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in Dubai that Trump’s vision for Gaza could lead the Middle East into a new cycle of crises with a “damaging effect on peace and stability.”
Trump has said Palestinians in Gaza could settle in countries such as Jordan and Egypt. Both reject the proposal.
Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit on 27 February to discuss “serious” developments for Palestinians.
In a sign of Arab anger over Trump’s vision of Gaza, two Egyptian security sources said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi would not go to Washington for talks if the agenda included Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians. The date for such a visit has not been announced, and the Egyptian presidency and foreign ministry did not comment.
The Gaza war — described by the International Court of Justice as “plausible genocide” — followed the Hamas-led cross-border incursion on 7 October, 2023, in which at least 1,200 people were killed, many of them by the Israel Defence Forces carrying out the controversial “Hannibal Directive”. An estimated 250 Israelis and Thais were taken into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
In response, Israel began its military offensive against Hamas which has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians in small, densely populated Gaza, according to Gaza health officials. Around 112,000 have been wounded, and 11,000 are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by the apartheid state.
Hamas has freed 16 Israeli hostages from an initial group of 33 children, women and older men to be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in the first stage of the ceasefire deal. It also returned five Thai hostages.
Negotiations on a second phase, which mediators hoped would include agreement on releasing the remaining hostages and a full Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza, should be under way in Doha but an Israeli team returned home on Monday.
Palestinians fear a repeat of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), when nearly 800,000 people were driven out by Zionist terrorists when Israel was created in occupied Palestine. Trump has said that Palestinians would lose their legitimate right to return to their homes under his plan for Gaza.
Meanwhile, he wants Saudi Arabia, which wields heavy influence in other Arab and Muslim countries, to normalise ties with Israel. Riyadh has previously said that it will not establish ties with Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state.
Under his first administration in 2017-21, Trump brokered normalisation accords between Israel and some Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates. Asked if the UAE could find common ground with Washington on Gaza, Abu Dhabi’s ambassador to the US, Yousef Al-Otaiba, said the US approach was difficult. “But at the end of the day we’re all in a solution-seeking business, we just don’t know where it’s going to land yet,” he said.
UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday that peace efforts in the region should be on the basis of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, state news agency WAM reported.
Trump’s Gaza plan upended decades of US Middle East policy which called for a Palestinian state co-existing in peace alongside Israel as the solution to one of the world’s most complex and volatile problems.
The Arab League’s Aboul Gheit said that the idea of the Arab Peace Initiative drawn up by Saudi Arabia in 2002 — in which Arab nations offered Israel normalised relations in return for a statehood deal with the Palestinians and full Israeli withdrawal from territory captured during the June 1967 war — would be reintroduced.
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UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide 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/O74hZCKKdpA
