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Jake Wood, seen in 2021, the CEO of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. [Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images]
Jake Wood, the CEO of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has announced his resignation, saying current conditions make it impossible to deliver aid to Gaza without violating basic humanitarian principles—something he refuses to do.
In his resignation statement, Wood said that the current circumstances make it impossible to deliver humanitarian aid without compromising “the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”
Wood also called on Israel to “significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms” while also urging “all stakeholders to continue to explore innovative new methods for the delivery of aid, without delay, diversion, or discrimination.”
He stressed that the only path to a lasting solution lies in the release of all hostages held by Hamas, a ceasefire, and a clear roadmap toward peace, security, and dignity for everyone in the region.
Not much is known about the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which is supported by Washington and Tel Aviv and whose headquarters have been registered since February in Geneva, but the United States supported this foundation without revealing whether it contributes to it directly.
Jake Wood, the founder and outgoing CEO, is a former US Marine sniper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has expressed support for Israel on social media platforms in the past.
Israel continues its policy of systematic starvation against around 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza by closing border crossings to aid convoys, which have been stuck at the borders since 2 March. This has pushed the territory into a state of famine and has led to the deaths of many.
In recent days, the Israeli military has intensified its operations in both the northern and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, announcing a new ground offensive.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
UK 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.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 Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘‘not a genocide’‘ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from Unicorn horn dust
Original article by Robert Inlakesh republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Last week, headlines lit up with a staggering development: Microsoft locked the world’s top war crimes prosecutor out of his email. Karim Khan, chief of the International Criminal Court (ICC), had dared to go after Israeli officials for war crimes and was instantly digitally silenced. His accounts were frozen. His name smeared. His power stripped.
It looked like petty revenge. But it wasn’t just that. It was the latest move in a coordinated campaign, backed by Washington, Tel Aviv, and Silicon Valley, to destroy the one court willing to challenge Israeli impunity.
And Microsoft is at the center of it.
While the press obsessed over the email lockout, few paid attention to what came before: a U.S.-Israeli information war against the ICC.
After the court announced arrest warrants against both Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes in Gaza, U.S. officials went into overdrive. Biden called the decision “outrageous.” Lawmakers threatened sanctions. Netanyahu smeared the court as “antisemitic.”
Despite the outrage, the warrants reflected a 3-to-2 ratio: Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed al-Deif of Hamas; Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
All three Palestinian leaders have since been killed. The Israeli officials remain untouched.
Then came the kicker: the U.S. government sanctioned Khan himself. His bank accounts were frozen, and his allies were warned: help him and face criminal charges.
It wasn’t the first time, either. In 2002, Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, better known as the Hague Invasion Act. It authorizes the president to send troops into the Netherlands if any American or allied official is detained by the court.
But while the U.S. handled the threats and the muscle, Microsoft played a more subtle role. According to Khan, the company blocked him from his official ICC email account just as he was formalizing charges against top Israeli leaders. The timing, to many, wasn’t a coincidence—it was a message.
Following October 7, Microsoft signed $10 million in new contracts with the Israeli military. Through a secretive program called “Project Azure,” the company provided infrastructure for Israeli intelligence and air force units, including Unit 8200 and Unit 81. These are the same units compiling “kill lists” in Gaza.
The company stayed quiet until recently, when it admitted to providing “emergency support” to Israel. But insisted that there was “no evidence” its tech harmed civilians.
That’s not all. Microsoft previously poured $78 million into the Israeli surveillance firm AnyVision, whose facial recognition tech was deployed across the West Bank. It also powered an app developed by the Israeli military—“Al Munaseq”—which spies on Palestinian permit-holders. Its cloud systems processed their private phone data.
Worse still, Microsoft has been stacking its upper ranks with veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200, effectively embedding a foreign intelligence agency into the core of one of America’s most powerful corporations and building its next data centers in Israel.
While the ICC is being sabotaged from the top, resistance is brewing from within. On April 4, two Microsoft employees, one a whistleblower, disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary celebration, accusing it of complicity in genocide. Both were fired.
Then, at the Build 2025 conference, Palestinian engineer Joe Lopez interrupted CEO Satya Nadella mid-speech: “My people are suffering!” Security dragged him out. A day later, another protester shouted down a separate keynote: “No Azure for Apartheid!” Protesters outside waved Palestinian flags and demanded answers.
These demonstrations were organized by the group No Azure for Apartheid, which has been documenting how Microsoft’s tools are helping Israel wage war. Inside the company, those who speak out face retaliation.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu is gloating. “The prosecutor should be worried about his status,” he said after the warrants were announced. That threat has aged well.
Many critics of Microsoft’s outsized role in Israel’s war argue that when a foreign state and its allies in Silicon Valley can paralyze an international court with the click of a button, it’s not just Gaza under siege, it’s in our institutions, our tech, and our sovereignty.
Feature photo | An Israeli officer wears Microsoft’s HoloLens headset during military testing in Ramat Gan, Israel. Stefanie J’rkel | AP
Original article by Robert Inlakesh republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Palestinian children receive donated food at a distribution center in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, April 21, 2025
THE UNITED Nations emergency relief co-ordinator urged Israel today to lift its blockade of aid into the Gaza Strip, saying the halting of humanitarian aid amounts to “cruel collective punishment.”
Israel has blocked any humanitarian aid from entering the territory since it broke the ceasefire agreement with Hamas in March, throwing Gaza into what is believed to be the worst humanitarian crisis in nearly 19 months of bombings.
Israel claims that the blockade and its renewed military campaign are intended to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages it still holds and to disarm.Israel’s latest destruction of Gaza followed Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, in which the militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251.Hamas is still holding 59 hostages, 24 of whom are believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.As Israel continued its strikes on the Palestinian enclave, another 18 people were killed and dozens more were wounded, Gaza’s Health Ministry said today.
Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, said today that while the hostages should be released and should never have been taken in the first place, international law mandates that Israel allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. …
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support.
Palestinian ambassador Ammar Hijazi (R) looks on as he attends an interrogation on Israel’s humanitarian obligations towards Palestinians at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on April 28, 2025. (Photo: Robin Utrecht/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)
“Israel is starving, killing and displacing Palestinians while also targeting and blocking humanitarian organizations trying to save their lives,” said Palestinian envoy Ammar Hijazi.
With Israel’s “total and complete blockade” leaving people across Gaza “slowly dying” if they aren’t being “killed with bombs and bullets,” according to one United Nations official, Palestinian envoy Ammar Hijazi was among those who described the reality on the ground to the U.N.’s top court on Monday as the body considered Israel’s legal obligations in Palestine.
Ammar Hijazi, Palestinian ambassador to the Netherlands, warned the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that since October 2023, Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid “has progressively turned into a total siege.”
“Israel is starving, killing, and displacing Palestinians, while also targeting and blocking humanitarian organizations trying to save their lives,” he said, accusing the Israeli military of waging a “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.
On March 2, for the second time since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began bombarding Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack in October 2023, Israel halted all humanitarian aid into the enclave. The total blockade was followed by Israel’s decision to end a cease-fire that has begun in January, conducting a bombing campaign that killed hundreds of Palestinians in its first day.
For nearly two months, food supplies have dwindled in Gaza, and the World Food Program announced last week that it had delivered its last remaining stocks of hot meals to food kitchens.
The siege has created conditions that are “incompatible with sustaining life or the continued existence of Palestinians in Gaza,” Hijazi said.
The ambassador noted that the ICJ hearing was taking place to consider whether Israel is violating international law.
“It is not about the number of aid trucks Israel is or is not allowing into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, especially Gaza,” said Hijazi. “It is about Israel destroying the fundamentals of life in Palestine while it blocks U.N. and other humanitarians from providing lifesaving aid to the population. It is about Israel unraveling fundamental principles of international law, including their obligations under the U.N. Charter.”
“Starvation is here,” Hijazi added. “Humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war.”
The hearing on Monday was the first of several that will take place at the ICJ over the next five days, following a resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly last year calling on the court to consider Israel’s legal responsibilities after the government blocked the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in the Palestinian territories—cutting Palestinians off from the agency that has for years provided crucial food aid, cash assistance, and health services, among other necessities.
Elinor Hammarskjold, U.N. undersecretary-general for legal affairs, argued during the hearing that Israel’s ban on UNRWA is “inconsistent with Israel’s obligation under international law” and warned that Israel has an “overarching obligation to administer the territory for the benefit of the local population” and must “agree to and facilitate relief schemes.”
As the hearing was underway, medical sources in Gaza toldAl Jazeera that at least 36 people had been killed in Israeli attacks since dawn while eight out of 12 ambulances in southern Gaza were no longer operating due to a lack of fuel.
The Palestinian Civil Defense said its capacity to respond to residents in need will be increasingly reduced by the blockade, “threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelters.”
“We hold the Israeli occupation responsible for the worsening suffering of our people in the Gaza Strip due to the ongoing war and the continued imposition of the blockade,” said the civil defense.
In addition to describing to the court the impact of Israel’s blockade, Hijazi spoke about the IDF’s attacks that have killed hundreds of aid workers, including nearly 300 UNRWA staff members and dozens of paramedics.
“These killings are deliberate, not accidental,” he said of the killing earlier this month of 15 paramedics who were found with bullet wounds in a mass grave, and whose vehicles were shown to be clearly marked in cellphone footage that was later released—despite Israeli claims that they had provoked suspicion by driving in the dark without headlights on.
One of the attorneys representing Palestine at the ICJ, Paul Reichler, said that “the inhumanity of this Israeli policy is compounded by its unlawful objective: to forever extinguish the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
“In these circumstances, there can be no doubt that Israel is violating its obligations under international humanitarian law, including obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention and customary international law,” said Reichler.
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, another of the international human rights lawyers who represented Palestine at the ICJ on Monday, cataloged just some of Israel’s recent displays of hostility to the rule of law, noting that Defense Minister Israel Katz said earlier this month that “Israel’s policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza,” and that the Israeli government is planning to annex 75 square kilometers of the southern Gaza city of Rafah as part of a so-called “buffer zone.”
Ní Ghrálaigh emphasized that “despite the extraordinary efforts of Palestinian journalists, who are themselves repeatedly targeted and killed, so much remains undocumented.”
“As stated by UNRWA’s commissioner-general, I quote, ‘I shudder to think of what will still be revealed about the horrors that have taken place in this narrow strip of land,'” she said.
Forty states and four international groups are scheduled to present in the upcoming ICJ hearings, which are separate from the genocide case filed at the court by South Africa. The ICJ said in January 2024 that Israel was required to take steps to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide and to provide humanitarian aid.
A ruling in the case that began Monday is expected to take several months to be announced.
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 Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support.
ISRAEL’S killing spree continued across Gaza today as a deadly air attack killed at least 28 people, mostly women and children, said the territory’s Health Ministry.
The attack came a day after a far-right Israeli minister claimed lawmakers in the United States supported Israel’s targeting of “food and aid depots” in Gaza.
In Thursday’s attacks at least nine people were killed in a strike on a police station in the northern Jabaliya area, the ministry said. The Israeli military claimed without evidence that it had targeted a command and control centre for Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group.
At least seven people were killed, including a mother and her two children, and another two children, in three strikes on the southern city of Khan Younis. Strikes in central Gaza killed six people, including two women and two children. An air strike on a home in Gaza City reportedly killed four children and their parents.
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/QILgUHrdWREVote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Palestinian children receive donated food at a distribution center in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, April 21, 2025
