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A protester seen with a “Stop Arming Israel” placard during the demonstration. Tens of thousands of people marched in Berlin under the slogans “All Eyes on Gaza” and “Stop the Genocide,” demanding a ceasefire, peace talks, and an end to German arms exports to Israel, on 27 September 2025 [Vasily Krestyaninov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]
A group of activists chained themselves to railway tracks at the Port of Hamburg in Germany to protest the government’s arms exports to Israel and draw attention to civilian suffering in Gaza, Anadolu reports.
Around 40 demonstrators took part in the action on Friday, blocking the rail line between the Eurogate and Burchardkai container terminals. The group prevented freight transport by occupying the tracks for several hours.
Jule Fink, a spokesperson for the activists’ group, said they took part in civil disobedience to show solidarity with Palestine.
“It is clear that the Israeli government has been committing war crimes in Palestine for a long time. This is genocide, and the German government is actively complicit. Germany continues exporting weapons to Israel through its ports. Why do the people of Hamburg allow their port to be used for arms shipments?” she said.
Due to safety concerns, the 15,000-volt power lines above the tracks were grounded during the protest.
Some port workers showed support for the demonstration. The protest was ended by police officers who carried the activists off the tracks one by one.
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Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Vote Labour for Genocide.
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Former EU representative to Palestine Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff [Photo by Selen Valente Rasquinho via AA]
Former EU representative to Palestine Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff has called on Brussels to keep the threat of sanctions against Israel alive, warning that failure to act could jeopardize the future of a Palestinian state, Anadolu reports.
Von Burgsdorff on Thursday joined a group of former EU ambassadors who gathered outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels.
The protest also drew participation from staff working in various EU institutions.
During his address, von Burgsdorff said that he and other former diplomats had repeatedly written to EU leaders, urging sanctions against Israel until a ceasefire was achieved.
He criticized his home country, Germany, for what he described as an indifferent stance on the issue.
Highlighting the ongoing Israeli attacks and civilian casualties in Gaza even after a declared ceasefire, he said: “This is not a real ceasefire.”
Von Burgsdorff warned: “If the EU and its member states do not act, in the coming months or years we will no longer be able to speak of a Palestinian state.”
He urged EU leaders to keep the sanctions proposed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to the European Council in October on the agenda and to take into account the rulings of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Addressing EU personnel directly, von Burgsdorff said, “We are former officials, but it is you who can influence the leaders,” calling on them to take action.
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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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
US Vice President JD Vance meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in Israel. Photo: US VP JD Vance/ X
Israel was able to carry out its live-streamed genocide in Gaza because of its powerful Western allies who supplied it with diplomatic cover and weapons
On October 26, Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières stated that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure”. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly,” she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches”. Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about ten to twelve percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.
“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield,” said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organization at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere”. As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb – creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.
Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to thirteen atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on August 6, 1945. This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defense systems, no air force, and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical. But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.
The opaqueness of official arms transfers means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries. A new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: a collective crime (October 20, 2025), makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way – including through diplomatic support – are utterly complicit in the genocide.
In other words, the obligation to abide by the UN Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime”.
The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999). On August 6, 2025, Matt Kennard told Palestine Deep Dive about how UK military aircraft left RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and escorted an unidentified plane over Gaza. Six days later, Iain Overton at UK Declassified revealed that amongst these planes was an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance plane flying alongside a Beechcraft Super King Air 350 owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation (from the United States) with a call sign CROOK 11. What were these aircraft doing? Who had sanctioned them this work? Who is CROOK 11?
In December 2024, Starmer told troops at RAF Akrotiri: “There’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time…We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here…because although we’re not saying it to the whole world for reasons that are obvious to you”. The obvious reason is that this is a genocide, and the UK is complicit, so they cannot talk about it.
The record for the United States is even more ghastly. One paragraph from the Special Rapporteur’s report is damning enough:
Since October 2023, the US has transferred 742 consignments of “arms and ammunition” (HS Code 93) and approved tens of billions in new sales. The Biden and Trump Administrations reduced transparency, accelerated transfers through repeated emergency approvals, facilitated Israeli access to US weapons stockpile held abroad, and authorized hundreds of sales just below the amount requiring congressional approval. The US has deployed military aircraft, special forces and surveillance drones to Israel, with US surveillance purportedly being used to target Hamas, including in the first raid on Al Shifa hospital.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Based on this recent UN report, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, should be obliged to file warrants against Rishi Sunak, Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump – at a minimum. Anything less makes a mockery of the rules-based international system, namely the United Nations Charter.
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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Francesca Albanese (international lawyer) briefs the media ahead of the 23rd Nelson Mandela annual lecture at the Nelson Mandela Foundation on October 22, 2025, in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Luba Lesolle/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
Francesca Albanese wrote that states that supported Israel financially and militarily “could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting, or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts.”
A report by one of the United Nations’ leading expertson Israel-Palestine describes the more than two years of genocide in Gaza as a “collective crime,” for which all nations with financial, diplomatic, and military ties with Israel are culpable.
The draft report, published Monday, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who is expected to speak at length on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza this weekend as part of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s lecture series in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Her report names more than 60 countries, without which she says the systematic destruction of Gaza—which has killed or injured more than 10% of the strip’s population and displaced nearly everyone there—would not have been possible.
“Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this livestreamed atrocity has been facilitated through third states’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection, and, in some cases, active participation,” Albanese wrote. “The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met, and justice is upheld.”
🚩My new report is out. With their actions and omissions, third states have enabled the oppression of the Palestinian people and their genocide.
Those states have an obligation to stop their complicity and deliver justice.
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) October 22, 2025
Her report says that the states most responsible are “primarily Western ones,” the United States being chief among them.
The US accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s annual arms imports. And according to a report out this week from the Center for International Policy, it has spent over $38 billion since October 2023, both directly arming Israel through military grant programs and waging war against its enemies in Iran, Lebanon, and other nations across the Middle East.
Under both a Democratic and Republican administration, the US has also provided critical diplomatic cover for Israel, proposing temporary “pauses” and “truces” to the conflict before international bodies, “sidestepping a permanent ceasefire and ensuring a continuation of the violence.”
On several occasions, the US has used its veto power to block unanimous votes in favor of a binding ceasefire resolution by the UN Security Council. In September, it did so for the fifth time, vetoing a 14-1 resolution that would have required both parties to halt the violence and release all hostages.
American non-governmental organizations supported by US President Donald Trump were also directly involved with the creation and administration of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which administered aid sites after humanitarian organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were pushed out. In just over three months, more than 1,000 Palestinian aid seekers were killed in routine massacres by Israeli troops, who have described the GHF sites as “killing fields.”
Many senior US politicians, Albanese said, have helped to prolong the genocide through rhetoric that frames Israeli lives as more important and worthy of protection than Palestinian ones.
“Israelis were depicted as ‘civilians’ and ’hostages,‘ and Palestinians as ’Hamas terrorists,‘ ’legitimate’ or ‘collateral’ targets,’ ‘human shields’ or lawfully detained ’prisoners,‘” she wrote.
Albanese also singled out many European nations as particularly culpable. These include Germany, which provided Israel with over $565 million worth of weapons, making it the second-largest exporter behind the US; and the United Kingdom, which has participated in hundreds of surveillance missions over Gaza and whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, defended Israel’s right to cut off water and power to civilians at the war’s outset.
She also called out others that increased trade with Israel during the two years of genocide—Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, Denmark, and France—as well as Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. She said their continued economic support not only “legitimizes and sustains the Israeli apartheid regime” but “countered the trade decline Israel might otherwise have faced” as a result of its increasing global isolation.
Albanese wrote that for helping Israel, which she described as a “genocidal apartheid state,” these nations “could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting, or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts.”
Though a ceasefire is now in effect between Israel and Gaza, Albanese said on Wednesday that the plan, which currently has Israel occupying more than half the Gaza Strip, was “absolutely inadequate and it doesn’t comply with international law.”
She said that the recognition of a Palestinian state by several Western nations in recent months has “been a pretense of doing something while the emergency was to discuss… how we stop the genocide.”
Albanese said that the states “who still have ties with Israel, diplomatic, but especially economic, political, and military ties, are all responsible in some measure.”
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Hundreds gather near Wilmersdorfer Strasse metro station to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and to show support for Palestinians, on July 5, 2025, in Berlin, Germany. [Erbil Basay/Anadolu via Getty Images]
For several years now, the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany has faced severe repression. Yet after 7 October 2023, this harassment reached new levels: In the first weeks following the Gaza uprising and the beginning of the genocide, demonstrations were broadly banned in a number of German cities – especially in the capital, Berlin. Both Hamas and the international prisoner solidarity network “Samidoun” were declared illegal by executive order, and the slogan “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” was classified as a prohibited “symbol” of Hamas.
To this day, censorship, criminal charges and brutal police violence against pro-Palestinian demonstrators remain commonplace. Events are regularly cancelled – even UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, was denied access to university venues in Munich in February 2025. Repeatedly, police have conducted house searches because individuals “liked” posts online, used the phrase “From the river to the sea…”, compared Israel’s actions to Nazi crimes, or accused German politicians of complicity in war crimes.
According to estimates, police have opened around 10,000 criminal investigations related to Palestine solidarity over the past 24 months. In May 2024, the Berlin Palestine Congress was forcibly shut down by authorities; internationally recognised guests were denied entry to Germany. Six months after the bans on Samidoun and Hamas, the group “Palästina Solidarität Duisburg“ (Palestine Solidarity Duisburg) was outlawed as well, and further bans are reportedly being prepared by German authorities, including against the international BDS movement. Since the beginning of this year, there have also been multiple deportations of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian foreign nationals. The legal aid organisation “3ezwa” estimates that several thousand people across Germany are currently at acute risk of expulsion or deportation.
This campaign to suppress freedom of expression – which is openly racist and particularly targets Arab and Muslim communities – is drawing increasing international attention. As early as late October 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) raised the alarm, criticising, among other things, the handling of pro-Palestine demonstrations by German authorities. Soon after, criticism also came from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). In mid-May 2025, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) launched the “first available database on anti-Palestinian repression in Germany”. At that time, the database already documented 766 cases of censorship, surveillance, bans on demonstrations, arrests, workplace and financial repression, relevant laws and resolutions, intimidation, and migration-related reprisals.
In June, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights felt compelled to send a letter to the German Interior Minister. In it, he referred to “reports of excessive use of force by police against protesters, including minors,” expressed “concern” that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition “has been interpreted by some German authorities in ways which lead to the blanket classification of criticism of Israel as antisemitic,” and “recalled” that EU member states “have both an obligation to refrain from undue interference with human rights and also positive obligations to safeguard these rights by securing their effective enjoyment for everyone.”
Last week, the United Nations intervened again. Six independent experts called on Germany “to halt criminalisation and police violence against Palestinian solidarity activism.” They, too, focused on police brutality, but also explicitly criticised the criminalisation of the slogan “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free.” Their concluding statement declared: “Germany must support, not suppress, actions aiming to stop atrocity crimes and genocide.”
International media now report regularly on the state-driven anti-Palestinian repression and violence in Germany. Images of police officers beating peaceful demonstrators with their fists circulate around the world. Journalists and analysts attempt to explain to a bewildered international audience why a state that so often invokes human rights, freedom of expression and the rule of law acts in such a repressive and inhumane way. Frequently, reference is made to Germany’s “special historical responsibility” arising from the Holocaust. But this explanation is part of the myth.
In reality, the issue has always been about power and money: After the Second World War, West Germany had to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the Western public. The Federal Republic was built by men who, only yesterday, had been committed Nazis – politicians, bureaucrats, judges, officers, police and intelligence agents who had all taken part in the crimes of the fascist regime, including mass murder and world war. The focus on the genocide of the Jews – the second-largest group of victims after the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe (who were, however, the enemy during the Cold War) – coincided with Israel’s emergence as an outpost of Western imperialism. The so-called “reparations payments”, which went not to Holocaust survivors or their descendants but to the “Jewish state”, in fact served as a programme for the economic development and militarisation of the Zionist regime in Palestine. The phrase “historical responsibility” thus functions as a euphemism, much like the colonial “protection treaties” and “protectorates”.
What Germany has created through its “ideology of guilt” is unique: instead of denying or relativising its own crimes, it has singularised, dehistoricised and fetishised them. Germany is perhaps the only country that does not deny a genocide it itself committed, but rather invokes it to justify its imperial foreign policy – even to the point of supporting another genocide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.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/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
