Saleh Zenati, carries the body of his infant nephew Khalid Zenati killed in an Israeli army airstrike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, May 18, 2025
AT LEAST 135 people, including children sleeping in tents, were killed over the weekend in relentless bombardment of Gaza, as all public hospitals in the north were rendered out of service.
It came as the Israeli military said that it has begun extensive ground operations throughout northern and southern Gaza as part of its Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which it claims aims to seize territory, displace large segments of the population to Gaza’s south and assert greater control over the distribution of humanitarian aid.
Among the dead were three journalists and 18 children, according to medical sources, after Israeli warplanes struck a tent encampment sheltering displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Verified footage shared by Al Jazeera shows charred bodies lying in the sand, including several children, with some on fire.
Hamas condemned the bombing as a “brutal crime” and accused the United States of complicity for providing political and military backing to Israel.A Civil Defence spokesman said that more than 200 people are missing under rubble, but emergency teams are unable to access the areas due to continued Israeli strikes.
“Hundreds of families have been erased from the civil registry due to the Israeli bombing,” he said. “Those who do not die from Israeli bombing in Gaza die of hunger.”
Israel has repeatedly targeted hospitals in its genocide, claiming Hamas operates within medical facilities.
But human rights organisations and UN experts have accused Israel of systematically dismantling Gaza’s health infrastructure.
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. 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 For Genocide Vote Labour.
Relatives mourn the loss of loved ones killed in an Israeli attack as bodies including children are brought to Indonesian Hospital before burial in Jabalia, Gaza on May 14, 2025. (Photo: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said one researcher. “No.”
Only a tiny number of progressive Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. have used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, and the U.S. public divided, with less than 40% of Americans saying last year that the term described the Israel Defense Forces’ bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and other civilian infrastructure.
But for seven leading international experts on genocide, the question is not controversial—even for those who previously rejected the label.
The seven experts were interviewed Wednesday by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe—some earlier than others—that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur.
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. “No.”
Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, added, “I don’t know them.”
The interview was published the day before Nakba Day, the 77th anniversary of Palestinians’ forced expulsion from their lands when Israel was established, and as the death toll in Gaza reached 53,010. At least 15,000 of those killed have been children, NRC reported.
When it comes to defining the last 19 months in Gaza as a genocide, reported the newspaper, “even cautious voices have changed.”
Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel “opposed the genocide label” until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government flouted the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza and halting top officials “incendiary language on Palestinians.” Israeli leaders have called Palestinians “human animals” and “Amalek“—an ancient enemy in the Hebrew Bible who Israelites were commanded to exterminate.
Lederman also began to see his government as genocidal after the Israel Defense Forces seized control of the Rafah crossing last year, cutting off the only humanitarian aid route as international experts warned famine was imminent, and as analysts warned the true death toll in Gaza could ultimately be close to 200,000.
“For me personally, the combination of this and the continued destruction of Gaza made the turn from harsh criticism of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza and warnings that we are getting close to that place, to the perception that the cumulative effect of what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocidal in every sense,” said Lederman on the social media platform X on Thursday. “I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide. Those who may have still had doubts—I estimate that they have dissipated following Israel’s actions since the cease-fire was broken.”
Since March, when Israel reimposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and broke a temporary cease-fire, nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in bombings, and nearly 250,000 people are now facing “extreme deprivation of food,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.
Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told NRC that Israel’s deliberate blockade on “food, water, shelter, and sanitation” convinced her the Netanyahu government was carrying out a genocide, while Segal pointed to “openly genocidal statements” by Israeli leaders.
“But for all it is about the sum of what would apply separately as ‘ordinary’ war crimes,” NRC reported. “The picture as a whole makes it a genocide. That is how the term is meant, says [British professor Martin] Shaw: ‘holistic.'”
“Apart from social debate, genocide is also the subject of science,” reads the article. “And that field of research, genocide studies, does not see it as a yes/no question, but as a process. Not a light switch, but a ‘dimmer,’ in the words of professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Uğur Ümit Üngör.”
NRC noted that the Western media and political debates have been consumed with “misunderstandings and simplifications.”
Those who continue defending Israel’s actions insist that “it is a military war to destroy Hamas, there is no clear eradication plan, not all Gazans have been killed, it does not look like the Holocaust, the judge has not yet ruled.”
As historian Rutger Bregman said on X Thursday, the scholars interviews by NRC make clear: “Genocide is a process, it’s not a binary switch. And it’s not about matching the Holocaust.”
Genocide is not just another war crime. It’s the “crime of crimes” — the deliberate attempt to destroy a people.
That’s what’s happening in Gaza, say the world’s top genocide experts.
Segal, who is Jewish, told NRC that he is “regularly accused of antisemitism” for speaking out against Israel.
“A German authority in the field that wants to remain anonymous calls the subject ‘poisoned’ in his country,” reported NRC. “You are, he says, called directly [antisemitic] if you mention ‘possible genocide.’ If these acts are subjected to a country other than Israel, he says, all Germans would immediately sound the alarm and speak of genocidal violence, as happened with the Russian massacre in the Ukrainian city of Botzja. But now, he says, it remains silent.”
Dirk Moses, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research, said that portions of the field of research are “in crisis” if experts don’t “combat the artificial distinction between [genocide] and military targets” and continue to defend Israel’s actions.
“Then parts of the field of research are actually dead,” he said. “Not only conceptually incoherent, but complicit.”
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. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Attacks on journalists and hospitals continue in Gaza. Pictured here are Hossam Shabat and Mohammad Mansour who were killed on Monday, March 24 in airstrikes. Photos via X
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is in full swing as the Trump administration unleashes its ally and provides it with all the weapons it needs.
One week after the resumption of Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza, Netanyahu appears determined to continue on a path of massacres and devastation rather than return to negotiations to restore the ceasefire.
For almost a year and a half, using the most advanced military technology, Israel systematically targeted journalists and media workers, hospitals, and shelters full of civilians. The attacking of such “strategic” targets across Gaza by Israeli forces has resumed with the return to genocide.
Bombardment of hospitals
The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital
On Friday, March 21, the IOF blew up the only cancer health facility in the war-torn enclave; the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in central Gaza. The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza clarified that the IOF detonated the hospital after using it “as a headquarters” for its troops throughout the time they have been occupying the Netzarim Corridor, which separates the northern part of the Gaza strip from its south.
The ministry described the bombardment of the hospital as a “heinous crime” and affirmed that “this criminal behavior by the occupier is consistent with the systematic destruction of the healthcare system and is part of the ongoing genocide.”
For its part, the Turkish Foreign Ministry denounced the destruction of the hospital, which was built by Türkiye and operated by local authorities in Gaza, in a statement on Friday. The ministry said that the attack is part of Israel’s broader policy that aims at “making Gaza uninhabitable”.
“The deliberate targeting of a hospital providing healthcare services to civilians in Gaza is part of Israel’s policy to render Gaza unlivable and force the Palestinian people to displacement,” the statement said.
The ministry further urged the international community to take “firm and effective steps against Israel’s unlawful attacks and systematic state terrorism.”
Nasser Hospital
Israel’s systematic targeting of hospitals and healthcare workers has continued with a new deadly air strike that hit the surgical unit at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in Northern Gaza on Sunday, March 23.
The assault killed at least two people and injured several staff members. One of those killed was identified as Ismail Barhoum, a member of Hamas’s political bureau in the Gaza strip, who was receiving medical treatment in the surgical unit at the time of the assault. The other slain person is a 17-year-old boy.
Barhoum was reportedly admitted to Nasser hospital as he had sustained critical injuries in an Israeli airstrike around one week ago.
Many believe the attack was launched to assassinate Barhoum. However, analysts and activists suggest that it also targeted four non-Palestinian physicians, who were frequently interviewed by western media outlets about the crimes committed by the IOF that they witnessed during the genocide in Gaza.
These physicians are:
Dr. Mark Perlmutter
Dr. Feroze Sidwha
Dr. Tanya Haj Hassan
Dr. Tammy Abughnaim
They were operating for hundreds of days on ICU patients and saving lives with limited medical supplies amid daily power outages.
Analyzing the attack, the Palestinian Youth Movement highlighted the significant role these physicians would play as witnesses at future international tribunals against Israeli officials via a post published on Instagram.
“The ability of these world-class surgeons to serve as highly educated, Western-based, ‘credible’ outside witnesses to the genocide, put their lives at existential risk from the moment they began their work during the genocide. The doctors knew this, yet despite the grave danger they continued to be under, they never stopped working and serving their patients, refusing to abandon them even after Israel’s ceasefire violations that caused the all-out war to resume,” the group wrote.
Surviving the attack, American trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidwha wrote on his account on X: “I was at Nasser Hospital in Gaza when it was bombed today. One of my patients, a 17-year-old boy, was killed. He would have gone home tomorrow. If I had been changing his dressings, as I planned to this evening, I probably would have been killed too. Attacking hospitals is a war crime, and it needs to stop.”
Two Palestinian journalists killed in one hour
Amidst the resumption of its genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip, Israel has resumed the systematic targeting of journalists in an attempt to silence the truth. On Monday, March 24 two Palestinian journalists were assassinated in two separate attacks in one hour.
Palestine Today correspondent Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli airstrike north of Khan Younis, before another airstrike hit the car of Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Hossam Shabat in Salah al-Din Street in the northern Gaza strip.
Videos of Mansour’s family bidding him a farewell were posted online. The videos showed the journalist’s grief-stricken father carrying his microphone and trying to make Mansour hold it again with his lifeless hands.
“Speak up, speak up, tell the whole world about what has been happening, the image can express everything,” Mansour’s father said as he was sobbing over his son’s dead body.
Hossam Shabat’s team shared his final message via his official X account, which he seems to have requested be published after his death.
“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old—a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents—anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side,” he wrote.
“By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people.”
“I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free,” Hossam urged the free people of the world at the end of his message.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned the assassination of the two journalists in a statement on Monday.
“CPJ is appalled that we are once again seeing Palestinians weeping over the bodies of dead journalists in Gaza,” CPJ’s Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna said.
“This nightmare in Gaza has to end. The international community must act fast to ensure that journalists are kept safe and hold Israel to account for the deaths of Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour. Journalists are civilians and it is illegal to attack them in a war zone,” De la Serna added.
Israel appears indifferent about the lives of its captives
Since October 2023, Israeli fighter jets have been launching arbitrary shelling across the Gaza strip putting the lives of everyone there at imminent risk, including Israeli captives.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, released a new video on Monday showing the two Israeli captives Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Haim Ohana, speaking to the Israeli public about their suffering.
Ohana emphasized that the video was not broadcast as an act of psychological warfare on Hamas’ part, but was instead something that he and Bohbot requested from their captors to have their voices heard by their people.
The captive stressed that closing the border-crossings and blockading humanitarian aid to Gaza by their government has left them with no food to consume. He also affirmed that Hamas fighters were “keen and concerned”, providing them with everything they needed.
Ohana said that he received a “severe blow” by his government when it decided to resume its aggression on Gaza on March 18, as the IOF’s aerial attacks could have killed them, and that they saw death before their eyes.
With an obvious outrage at the Israeli government, Bohbot said: “Enough with this government silencing our voice.”
“The prisoners who were with us before and now released, give them a chance to speak and express their opinions. Stop silencing their voices. Let them Speak. Let the truth come out,” he added.
Ohana and Bohbot called on released captive Ohad Ben Ami to recount his experiences in captivity, thus, that would pressure the Israeli government for speeding up their release.
The US has “unleashed Israel” with all the weapons it needs to proceed with genocide
Confirming the US’s full support and partnership in the renewed genocide in Gaza, Deputy US Special Envoy to “the Middle East” Morgan Ortagus told Fox News on Sunday, that the Trump administration “has unleashed Israel and provided all the weapons needed to continue the war.”
While the US seeks to reaffirm its partnership in murdering Palestinians, Israel continues to commit daily massacres across the Gaza strip, raising the official death toll to over 50,021 people killed since October 2023, according to the latest report published by Palestinian health authorities.
Widely respected institutions such as The Lancet medical journal, and UN human rights bodies have asserted that the death tally is likely severely undercounted, with the actual number being up to 40% higher.
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Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves arrives to meet students on the carpentry course during a visit to Bury College in Greater Manchester, March 20, 2025
…
Fourteen years of Tory rule have cut services to the bone. The notion that “efficiency savings” can slice off further billions without worsening already degraded services is absurd.
Ironically, the cuts are intended to fund increased military spending — though if there is a department renowned for waste it is the Ministry of Defence. The MoD is repeatedly excoriated by the public accounts committee for the huge sums squandered on projects that end up delayed by years or not delivered at all.
Current Defence Secretary John Healey, when in the shadow cabinet, published a report identifying billions it had overspent on projects and billions more paid for cancelled contracts with its often extortionate suppliers. The report noted that the MoD had even been fined £32.6 million by the Treasury for its “poor accounting practices.” Yet it is this department which is having more billions thrown its way.
As for extortionate suppliers, the evidence is plain that besides tying institutions from hospitals to schools into contracts forcing them to repay PFI debts worth multiples of the original loans, many such agreements also tie them into inflexible and costly servicing contracts.
Outsourcing services is massively inefficient, yet remains the norm, despite Reeves’s one-time promise to deliver “the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation.”
As the Prison Officers Association (POA) points out of outsourced prison maintenance, we end up paying through the nose for “crumbling cells, compromised safety and rodent-infested jails.”
“We do not for one minute accept that the privatised model of prison maintenance is more cost effective than insourcing … it is completely delusional to claim it provides best value for the taxpayer,” POA general secretary Steve Gillan observes.
Clearly value for money is not Reeves’s priority — corporate profits are, including at the Treasury’s expense.
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the “hard times”.Keir Starmer explains the moral case for cutting disability benefits. He says work will set you free.
The intensive care unit of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip is shown on January 20, 2025, the day after a cease-fire deal took effect. (Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)
The Palestinian group Al-Haq outlined the “targeting of hospitals and health centers, the denial of adequate medical provisions into and around the Gaza Strip, and the abduction, torture, and killing of medical personnel.”
Less than a week into a fragile cease-fire between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq on Thursday released a report detailing how “Israel has systematically targeted and attacked the healthcare system to the point of its collapse in a campaign of genocide.”
“The Israeli occupying forces’ (IOF) targeting of hospitals and health centers, the denial of adequate medical provisions into and around the Gaza Strip, and the abduction, torture, and killing of medical personnel is evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent to: (i) inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and (ii) impose measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in the Gaza Strip,” states the 116-page report.
“The concerted policy to destroy the healthcare system in Gaza is directly and causally linked to statements made by Israeli officials,” the document continues, offering various examples and highlighting how it wasn’t just hospitals—Israel also attacked “civilian residences, schools, shelters, mosques, churches, and other protected areas under international humanitarian law.”
The report argues that “Israel’s systematic campaign against Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure as a whole is exemplified by the targeted destruction of al-Shifa Hospital,” which is the largest hospital in the occupied Palestinian territory and “older than Israel.” The document also addresses Israel’s attacks on Adwan, al-Amal, al-Aqsa, al-Awda, Indonesian, Kamal, and Nasser hospitals.
Along with offering a summary of facts and legal analysis of “Israel’s systematic attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system as acts of genocide,” war crimes, and violations of international humanitarian law, the publication features recommendations for other countries and blocs, international tribunals, U.N. experts, companies, and healthcare professionals.
Al-Haq called on the international community to “name and condemn Israel’s ongoing genocide,” impose an arms embargo, support the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and demand the release of Palestinian political prisoners and those who have been arbitrarily detained by Israel, including healthcare workers.
The report was published as the death toll in Gaza continues to grow, as displaced residents of the Palestinian enclave return to the remnants of their homes and communities decimated by more than 15 months of Israeli bombings and raids.
The Gaza Ministry of Health said Thursday that the official death toll rose to 47,283, after 120 bodies “were recovered from under the rubble” in the past 24 hours, and 111,472 people have been injured. Global experts warn the true death toll is likely far higher.
Israel faces a genocide case led by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over its military assault and restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
Al-Haq’s report notes both the ICC warrants and the ICJ case, urging other governments to formally support the latter effort.
Throughout the 15-month assault on Gaza, Israeli settlers and troops also targeted Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank—where Al-Haq is based. However, since the cease-fire took effect Sunday, attacks in the West Bank have sparked fresh alarm.
In addition to pushing for the investigation of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the new report urges a U.N. commission to probe “genocidal acts in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, including but not limited to killings of Palestinians, causing serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people.”
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
Saleh Zenati, carries the body of his infant nephew Khalid Zenati killed in an Israeli army airstrike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, May 18, 2025
