A pro-Palestine protest outside the BBC. (Photo: Monica Wells / Alamy)
Britain’s ‘public service broadcaster’ is keeping the public in the dark about UK support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, new research finds.
…
Our research into the BBC’s written outputs since October 2023 finds the corporation has mainly not reported at all the major ways the UK government has been working with Israel.
It found that the BBC has reported just four times in 15 months that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza.
Only one BBC report on the subject has been written since December 2023, despite the fact that hundreds of such spy missions have been conducted, almost daily, in aid of Israeli intelligence.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says these flights are solely to aid the rescue of hostages held by Hamas. Only one BBC online report mentions the UK may be providing targeting information to Israel or flying weapons to the country.
None of the articles otherwise raise concerns about the UK being willing to collaborate militarily with Israel at a time it is devastating Gaza.
…
…
Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “The BBC is clearly utterly failing to inform the public about how the UK military and government is complicit in the horrors of Gaza. This is a national scandal, showing how far away the corporation is from being a public service broadcaster.”
He added: “The BBC’s failure to accurately report on Israel’s genocide in Gaza is as much to do with what it refuses to report as with what it does report. It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”.
…
A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC News teams are editorially independent and make their own decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
“We have reported the Gaza-Israel conflict in great depth and consistently across our programmes and services since 7 October 2023, ensuring audiences are kept updated with the latest developments as well as providing comprehensive analysis.
“We hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards and have reported the conflict impartially – without fear or favour.”
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 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/QILgUHrdWRE
U.S. President Joe Biden (L) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) meet in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: GPO/ Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
One Middle East expert said that it’s “hard to avoid the conclusion” that the U.S. administration’s ultimatums to Israel “have all just been a smokescreen.”
New reporting published Wednesday details the impotence and insincerity of President Joe Biden’s “multiple threats, warnings, and admonishments” to Israel as it annihilated the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians while receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. arms and unwavering diplomatic support.
Writing for ProPublica, Brett Murphy showed how multiple “red lines” issued by Biden administration officials were ignored by Israel with impunity. Murphy highlighted Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s October 2024 demand that Israel take “urgent and sustained actions” to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza—mainly by allowing far more aid into the embattled strip—within 30 days or face a military aid cutoff.
“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price.”
Thirty days came and went without significant improvement or letup in Israel’s onslaught. Yet the Biden administration insisted it found no indication that Israel was using U.S.-supplied weapons illegally. The arms flow continued.
As Murphy reported:
That choice was immediately called into question. On November 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations.
“Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity,” wrote Murphy.
This reporting is so utterly damning.www.propublica.org/article/bide…
Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Murphy that “Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him.”
“Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president,” al-Omari added.
Conversely, Murphy noted: “On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now, and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that [U.S. President-elect Donald] Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line.”
“Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months,” he added, “raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.”
As Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told Murphy, “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that [Biden’s] red lines have all just been a smokescreen.”
“The Biden administration decided to be all-in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something,” Walt added, as Israel kept killing Palestinians with U.S.-supplied weapons and continued a “complete siege” blamed for widespread starvation and sickness in the Gaza Strip.
Murphy wrote that Trump “will inherit a demoralized State Department” in which many officials who haven’t already resignedhave “become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.”
As one senior department official told Murphy, Gaza “is the human rights atrocity of our time.”
“I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this,” the official added. “I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”
People watch a television along a street in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 15, 2025. (Photo: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)
“The cease-fire alone will not end the ongoing genocide that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” said one Palestinian human rights organization.
This is a developing news story… Please check back for possible updates…
The U.S. and Qatar said Wednesday that negotiators have reached a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement between Israel and Hamas after more than 15 months of incessant Israeli bombing that killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions, and left Gaza in ruins.
At a press conference, Qatar’s prime minister said the agreement is set to take effect on Sunday. U.S. President Joe Biden said that “it is long past time for the fighting to end and the work of building peace and security to begin.”
Shortly before the formal announcement from the U.S. and Qatar, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the deal has yet to be cemented.
“Due to the strong insistence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas folded on its last-minute demand to change the deployment of IDF forces in the Philadelphi Corridor,” the prime minister’s office said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “However, several items in the framework have yet to be finalized; we hope that the details will be finalized tonight.”
The reported deal, brokered by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, would entail “a six-week initial cease-fire phase and includes the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by Israel,” according to Reuters, which cited an unnamed official briefed on the negotiations.
Al Jazeera, also citing anonymous sources, provided an outline of the reported deal:
The Israeli military will withdraw to within 700 meters (2,297 feet) inside Gaza.
Israel will release about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences.
Palestinian groups will release 33 Israeli captives.
Israel will allow injured people in Gaza to travel to receive medical treatment.
Israel will open the Rafah crossing with Egypt seven days after the start of the first stage.
Israeli forces will begin to pull back from Gaza’s border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, to withdraw from it completely in later stages.
Following news of potentially decisive progress toward a cease-fire, The Associated Press reported that “large crowds of cheering people” took to the streets in southern Gaza to celebrate. Meanwhile, the outlet noted, hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside of the Israeli military’s headquarters in Tel Aviv “calling for a deal to be completed.”
Reporting from central Gaza, Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud said that “we’re seeing people in tears” after news of a possible agreement spread in the besieged enclave.
“We’re seeing mothers here, who live in tents near the hospital… hugging and kissing their children, thanking God that they have survived,” said Mahmoud.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who voiced support for Israel’s catastrophic assault on Gaza during his 2024 campaign, took to his social media platform Wednesday to declare, in all-caps: “WE HAVE A DEAL FOR THE HOSTAGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. THEY WILL BE RELEASED SHORTLY. THANK YOU!”
Steve Witkoff, the incoming Trump administration’s Middle East envoy, joined members of Biden’s team in working to finalize the cease-fire agreement, which came as the official death toll from Israel’s assault climbed above 46,000—a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount. The majority of the people killed in Israeli attacks have been women, children, or elderly.
Drop Site‘s Jeremy Scahill reported Tuesday that “the terms of the deal being negotiated are largely consistent with what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it.”
“Biden allowed Netanyahu to steamroll him for months—rewarding Israel with billions of dollars in arms transfers and political support after rejecting that cease-fire deal,” Scahill wrote. “Since that time, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed and maimed and an unknown number of Israeli captives killed, either by their captors or Israeli strikes. All the while, the administration and its backers repeatedly assured voters in the U.S. that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were working tirelessly to achieve a cease-fire deal.”
“What is required is for Israel to end all ongoing genocidal acts, open Gaza, and for the international community to ensure accountability for those responsible.”
The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian organization, said the apparent cease-fire agreement marks “a crucial step toward reducing the killing of Palestinians through deadly force.”
“However, the cease-fire alone will not end the ongoing genocide that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” the group added. “What is required is for Israel to end all ongoing genocidal acts, open Gaza, and for the international community to ensure accountability for those responsible.”
Inger Ashing, CEO of the international humanitarian group Save the Children, said the cease-fire “must be permanent” and accompanied by urgent efforts to “end the siege and vastly increase the entry of aid.”
“For 15 months, about 1 million children in Gaza have been caught in a living nightmare with loss, trauma, and risks to their lives at every turn,” said Ashing. “If implemented, this pause will bring them vital reprieve from the bombs and bullets that have stalked them for more than a year. But it is not enough and the race is on to save children facing hunger and disease as the shadow of famine looms.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has vocally criticized Israel’s response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack and U.S. military aid to the Israeli government, said Wednesday that a cease-fire is “long-overdue” and “both sides must honor the deal and implement it as quickly as possible.”
“The senseless killing must stop. The hostages must be released,” said Sanders. “The United Nations and other aid organizations must finally be allowed unfettered access to all areas of the Gaza Strip in order to provide the massive amounts of humanitarian aid that is desperately needed. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people are struggling to survive, lacking food, water, and medical care in the middle of winter. Innocent lives hang in the balance.”
“This is just the first step to restoring peace,” the senator added. “The international community must insist that the cease-fire be sustained and formalized. A plan for rebuilding Gaza and establishing peaceful Palestinian governance of the area must be laid out. And there must be accountability for the many war crimes committed by both sides in this terrible conflict.”
A view of destruction following the Israeli attack on the courtyard of Kamal Adwan Hospital and its surrounding buildings in Beit Lahia, Gaza on December 25, 2024. (Photo: Khalil Ramzi Alkahlut/Anadolu via Getty Images)
One wonders if the world had paid even the slightest attention to Gaza and the cries of people trapped behind walls, barbed wire, and electric fences, whether the current war and genocide could have been avoided.
The first official reference to Gaza becoming increasingly uninhabitable was made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD, in 2012, when the population of the Gaza Strip was estimated at 1.8 million inhabitants.
The intention of the report, The Gaza Strip: The Economic Situation and the Prospects for Development, was not merely to prophesize, but to warn that if the world continued to stand idle in the face of the ongoing blockade on Gaza, a humanitarian catastrophe was imminent.
Yet, little was done, though the U.N. continued with its countdown, increasing the frequency and urgency of its warnings, especially following major wars.
Even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of the strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has caused will remain for many years to come.
Another report in 2015 from UNCTAD stated that the Gaza crisis had intensified following the most destructive war to that date, the year before. The war had destroyed hundreds of factories, thousands of homes, and displaced tens of thousands of people.
By 2020, though, based on the criteria set by the U.N., Gaza should have become “uninhabitable.” Yet, little was done to remedy the crisis. The population grew rapidly, while resources, including Gaza’s land mass, shrank due to the ever-expanding Israeli “buffer zone.” The prospects for the “world’s largest open-air prison” became even dimmer.
Yet, the international community did little to heed the call of UNCTAD and other U.N. and international institutions. The humanitarian crisis—situated within a prolonged political crisis, a siege, repeated wars, and daily violence—worsened, reaching, on October 7, 2023, the point of implosion.
One wonders if the world had paid even the slightest attention to Gaza and the cries of people trapped behind walls, barbed wire, and electric fences, whether the current war and genocide could have been avoided.
It is all moot now. The worst-case scenario has actualized in a way that even the most pessimistic estimates by Palestinian, Arab, or international groups could not have foreseen.
Not only is Gaza now beyond “uninhabitable,” but, according to Greenpeace, it will be “uninhabitable for generations to come.” This does not hinge on the resilience of Palestinians in Gaza, whose legendary steadfastness is hardly disputed. However, there are essential survival needs that even the strongest people cannot replace with their mere desire to survive.
In just the first 120 days of war, “staggering” carbon emissions were estimated at 536,410 tons of carbon dioxide. Ninety percent of that deadly pollution was “attributed to Israel’s air bombardment and ground invasion,” according to Greenpeace, which concluded that the total sum of carbon emissions “is greater than the annual carbon footprint of many climate-vulnerable nations.”
A report issued around the same time by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) painted an equally frightening picture of what was taking place in Gaza as a direct result of the war. “Water and sanitation have collapsed,” it declared last June. “Coastal areas, soil, and ecosystems have been severely impacted,” it continued.
But that was over seven months ago, when parts of Gaza were still standing. Now, almost all of Gaza has been destroyed. Garbage has been piling up for 15 months without a single facility to process it efficiently. Disease is widespread, and all hospitals have either been destroyed in the bombings, burned to the ground, or bulldozed. Many of the sick are dying in their tents without ever seeing a doctor.
Without any outside assistance, it was only natural for the disaster to worsen. Last December, Médecins Sans Frontières issued a report titled Gaza: Life in a Death Trap. The report, a devastating read, describes the state of medical infrastructure in Gaza, which can be summed up in a single word: non-existent.
Israel has attacked 512 healthcare facilities between October 2023 and September 2024, killing 500 healthcare workers. This means that a population is trying to survive during one of the harshest wars ever recorded, without any serious medical attention. This includes nearly half a million people suffering from various mental health disorders.
By December, Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that there are an estimated 23 million tons of debris resulting from the dropping of 75,000 tons of explosives—in addition to other forms of destruction. This has released 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air.
Once the war is over, Gaza will be rebuilt. Though Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) is capable of restoring Gaza to its former self, however long it takes, a study conducted by Queen Mary University in the U.K. said that, for the destroyed structures to be rebuilt, an additional 60 million tons of CO2 will be released into an already severely impacted environment.
In essence, this means that even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of the strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has caused will remain for many years to come.
It is baffling that the very Western countries, which speak tirelessly about environmental protection, preservation, and warning against carbon emissions, are the same entities that helped sustain the war on Gaza, either through arming Israel or remaining silent in the face of the ongoing atrocities.
The price of this hypocrisy is the enduring suffering of millions of people and the devastation of their environment. Isn’t it time for the world to wake up and collectively declare: enough is enough?
A father cries while carrying the body of his child wrapped in a blood-stained shroud west of Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, on January 14, 2025. (Photo: Youssef Alzanoun/Middle East Images via AFP via Getty Images)
“As a cease-fire in Gaza is near, Israel is expanding its assault on the West Bank,” said one expert. “It was always a war on Palestinian existence.”
As negotiators in Qatar navigated the “final stage” of a cease-fire agreement to end the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, Israel’s forces on Tuesday continued to kill Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave and the illegally occupied West Bank.
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have killed at least 46,645 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 110,012, with over 10,000 others missing, health officials said Tuesday. The true death toll could be much higher. A peer-reviewed analysis published last week in The Lancetfound that the official tally through last June was likely a 41% undercount.
The Palestinian National Authority’s news agency WAFA reported Tuesday that IDF shelling killed at least two civilians at the Nuseirat refugee camp and a correspondent in Gaza City “said that Israeli warplanes fired missiles at a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, north of Gaza City, and another house in the Manara neighborhood, south of Khan Younis City, killing several civilians and injuring others.”
According to multiple media outlets, Israeli forces also killed at least 13 people in an attack on a home in Deir al-Balah.
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its assault on Gaza and in November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
In addition to waging war on Gaza over the past 15 months, Israel has stepped up its military activity in the West Bank—where a Tuesday strike on the Jenin refugee camp killed at least six Palestinians and wounded several others. The Times of Israel reported that “the IDF said it carried out the strike in a joint operation with the Shin Bet, without immediately providing further information.”
The Israeli newspaper also noted that “on Tuesday evening, as on many previous Tuesday nights, thousands gather for a unity rally of prayer and song held in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square,” while hundreds of right-wing demonstrators blocked “an intersection in central Jerusalem, in protest of the ongoing hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas.”
According to a draft obtained by The Associated Press, the first part of the three-stage deal would involve a halt to the fighting, both sides releasing captives, displaced Palestinians in Gaza returning home, and more humanitarian aid entering the strip.
Phase two would feature a declaration of “sustainable calm” and Hamas freeing more hostages in exchange for additional Palestinian prisoners and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, AP reported. The third part would include an exchange of bodies, a reconstruction plan for the strip—where civilian infrastructure is in ruins—and the reopening of border crossings.
“The terms of the deal being negotiated are largely consistent with what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it. Biden allowed Netanyahu to steamroll him for months—rewarding Israel with billions of dollars in arms transfers and political support after rejecting that cease-fire deal,” Jeremy Scahill detailed at Drop Site News.
The latest cease-fire talks come as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump prepares for his inauguration next Monday. The Republican has been pushing for a resolution to Israel’s assault on Gaza—or at least an appearance of one—before he returns to office.
“The fact that Trump emerged as the decisive player in pushing a potential cease-fire forward is evidence that Biden never used the full powers available to a sitting U.S. president to seal the deal in the summer,” wrote Scahill. “While Trump has publicly repeated his threat that he will ‘unleash hell’ on Hamas if the Israeli hostages are not freed, his pressure has not been solely focused on Hamas; Trump and his aides have made clear to Netanyahu that the president-elect expects Israel to comply with his demands, too.”
Netanyahu on Tuesday told hostages’ families that “he is willing to agree to a prolonged cease-fire Gaza in exchange for their return,” according toHaaretz. Later Tuesday, The Times of Israel reported that the prime minister was meeting with “Israel’s hostage negotiation team and with members of Israel’s security establishment,” and expected negotiations to go through the night.
Even if a deal is reached regarding Gaza, some experts fear the bloodshed will continue there and in the West Bank
“There will possibly be an end to the Gaza war, but there will be now another war in the West Bank,” Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian analyst and director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University, told Scahill. “It may not be on the same scale, but it would be as vicious from the settlers, from the Netanyahu government.”
Gazan writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada wrote for the U.S.-based Center for International Policy last week that a senior Arab official told him the U.S. president-elect asked the Qataris and Egyptians to finalize a deal before he takes office but the Israeli prime minister “is not budging while at the same time issuing false positive statements of a breakthrough and progress to buy time and pretend to seek a deal until Trump is in office, where Netanyahu can trade the Gaza war for something big in the West Bank.”
Sharing on social media a video of the Tuesday strike on Jenin, Middle East expert Assal Rad said that “as a cease-fire in Gaza is near, Israel is expanding its assault on the West Bank. The Gaza genocide is only the most recent atrocity Israel—with the help of the U.S.—has carried out against Palestinians. The same story for 77+ years. It was always a war on Palestinian existence.”
