The Whole Truth Five (from left to right) Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw and Roger HallamPhoto: Just Stop Oil
SIXTEEN non-violent Just Stop Oil protesters handed draconian sentences since July have been granted an extraordinary mass hearing before the Court of Appeal next year, it was announced on Saturday.
The hearing on January 29 and 30 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London will examine four separate cases involving activists from the group. Key points of contention will include whether conscientious motivation should be considered a mitigating factor.
The outcome is anticipated to be a defining moment for protest rights in Britain.
The 16 include the “Whole Truth Five,” who organised a protest on the M25 calling for a halt to new oil and gas licences. Roger Hallam, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, Daniel Shaw, and Lucia Whittaker De Abreu received a combined total of 21 years for their action.
At the time, UN special rapporteur Michel Forst said the verdict marked a dark day for “anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms” in Britain.
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Spokesman for the Free Political Prisoners campaign Lex Korte said: “A subset of judges have responded all too eagerly to the call from the disgraced Lord Walney, the arms and oil industry lobbyist, to jail peaceful climate campaigners for longer than if they’d committed serious crimes of sexual violence.
Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Palestinians and UN workers examine the destroyed makeshift tents and shelters after Israeli attack hits a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) school, killing and injuring many in Nuseirat Refugee Camp of Deir al-Balah, Gaza on July 15, 2024 [Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu Agency]
The Basque Government has awarded UNRWA the 2024 Ignacio Ellacuria Prize for Cooperation and Solidarity as a result of its “dedication to the Palestinian people over 75 years in a context of continuous conflict”.
The jury highlighted “the more human side of the direct work that it carries out in favour of justice and human rights with the Palestinian population” and concluded that it deserves this award “because of the real risk of disappearing,” since “it would imply taking away the Palestinian population’s right to refuge and the right of return to their lands and homes.”
UNRWA works in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria and supports around 5.9 million Palestinians, providing them with education, medical care, camp infrastructure, microfinancing and other essentials.
Over the past few years, however, funding for the agency has been cut by donor states, while Israel has worked to defame and defund it.
Israel has lobbied hard to have UNRWA closed as it is the only UN agency to have a specific mandate to look after the basic needs of Palestinian refugees. If the agency no longer exists, argues Israel, then the refugee issue must no longer exist, and the legitimate right for Palestinian refugees to return to their land will be unnecessary. Israel has denied that right of return since the late 1940s, even though its own membership of the UN was made conditional upon Palestinian refugees being allowed to return to their homes and land.
Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon on November 25, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)
“It has long been clear that a cease-fire in Gaza is crucial to sustain any lasting cessation of hostilities across the region,” said one group.
Peace advocates on Tuesday cautiously celebrated Israel agreeing to a cease-fire with the Lebanese political and paramilitary group Hezbollah while also stressing the need for an immediate end to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.
Despite concerns about whether the truce will actually happen, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a U.S.-based Quaker group, welcomed the plans for it and called on “all parties to ensure this agreement is swiftly enacted.”
“The time for peace is now—not just in Lebanon, but in Gaza and across the region,” FCNL declared on social media. “We urge U.S. officials to ensure this agreement brings an immediate end to the Israeli government’s devastating and indiscriminate bombing and attacks against Lebanese civilians, which have been fueled by U.S. weapons.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that the National Security Cabinet approved the cease-fire in Lebanon with a 10-1 vote—only far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir voted no. The office added that “Israel appreciates the U.S. contribution to the process, and reserves the right to act against any threat to its security.”
Netanyahu said in a speech to Israelis that “the length of the cease-fire depends on what happens in Lebanon. With the United States’ full understanding, we maintain full freedom of military action. If Hezbollah violates the agreement and tries to arm itself, we will attack. If it tries to rebuild terrorist infrastructure near the border, we will attack. If it launches a rocket, if it digs a tunnel, if it brings in a truck carrying rockets, we will attack.”
Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden said that he worked with French President Emmanuel Macron to negotiate the cease-fire, which is set to begin at 4:00 am local time on Wednesday. The United States has spent at least tens of billions on Israeli military operations and related U.S. operations in the region since the Gaza-based Palestinian group Hamas led the October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.
“As Biden spoke tonight, Israel was raining U.S. bombs down on Lebanon and Gaza,” notedDrop Site journalist Jeremy Scahill.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Tuesday thanked France and the United States for negotiating the truce, which he said is “a fundamental step towards establishing calm and stability in Lebanon” and “helps to establish regional stability.” He also reiterated his government’s intention to “strengthen the army’s presence in the south.”
Cross-border battles between Israeli forces and Hezbollah over the past nearly 14 months have displaced tens of thousands of people in Israel and over 1 million in Lebanon. The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health said Tuesday that Israel’s assault—which has intensified since September—has killed at least 3,823 people and injured another 15,859.
In Gaza, the death toll is at least 44,249, with 104,746 wounded, according to local officials. Israeli forces have also decimated civilian infrastructure and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents, who are struggling to access necessities, due to limits on aid. Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court last week issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, former Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas leader.
“It has long been clear that a cease-fire in Gaza is crucial to sustain any lasting cessation of hostilities across the region,” said FCNL. “More violence and suffering in Gaza will not make Israel, the U.S., or anyone safer or more secure. It must end now. We reiterate our calls for our government to use all U.S. leverage to bring about a full regional cease-fire to end the horrific suffering of Palestinians, protect all civilians, return all hostages home, de-escalate regional tensions, and begin the long road toward healing.”
“That must include prohibiting more offensive weapons shipments and U.S. military involvement, which would send a message of impunity to the Israeli [government] in the face of repeated and grave violations of U.S. and international law in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, and beyond,” the group added—just days after a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate rejected a trio of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have halted some arms sales to Israel.
Nancy Okail, president and CEO of the U.S.-based Center for International Policy, responded similarly to the Tuesday development, saying in a statement that “we welcome news of a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon and hope that it can be implemented and sustained to prevent further harm to civilians who have been under threat of attack or suffered other great loss during the fighting.”
“This agreement nonetheless comes too late. While Israel has the right to legitimate self-defense against Hezbollah, the Netanyahu government’s deliberate escalation of the conflict in September resulted in disproportionate harm to civilians, hundreds of whom have been wounded or killed, with hundreds of thousands more displaced,” Okail said. “Mixed messages and prevaricating by the Biden administration on its position on Israel’s escalation and the need for a cease-fire [have] further prolonged the fighting and exacerbated the death and destruction it has brought.”
“The U.S. and its partners must ensure that the terms of this agreement are fully honored so that civilians on both sides of the border can safely return to and rebuild their communities,” she added. “What remains of the utmost urgency, however, is also ending the war in Gaza, where the U.S. arming of the Netanyahu government’s campaign of displacement, starvation, slaughter and—per the repeated vows of senior Israeli officials—settlement continues in violation of American and international law.”
Original article by Misbah Khan republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Israeli blockades and bombings have left doctors without basic medicines to treat infections
Content warning: This story contains graphic images and descriptions of injuries
There is a growing and dire public health crisis taking place in Gaza. Israeli blockades and hospital bombings are fuelling a superbug emergency, with civilians who survive starvation and injury later facing untreatable, life-threatening infections.
Doctors on the ground told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) they were treating wounds infested with maggots and using vinegar to fight infections.
“Wounds are left open much longer [and the] injured are delayed in receiving proper care or not able to get care at all, which increases the risk of infections and emergence of antimicrobial resistance [AMR],” says Krystel Moussally, an epidemiologist monitoring the situation for Doctors without Borders (MSF).
The infections are so severe that they don’t respond to many of the antibiotics that are designed to treat them. Badly infected wounds can lead to limb amputations and, in some cases, death.
Vinegar is being used to disinfect and treat wounds because other medicines are unavailable. Dr Khaled al Shawwa
Medical organisations, including MSF and Medical Aid Palestine, say that targeted bombings of hospitals and humanitarian aid blockades are restricting access to healthcare in Gaza, exacerbating infections that don’t respond to essential medicines.
In some cases, doctors have run tests to discover that infections can be fought with certain antibiotics – but have not been able to get their hands on the life-saving drugs.
‘I’ve never seen these types of cases before’
As explosions sound in the background, Dr Alaa Alshurafa tries to relay her day-to-day experience treating superbug infections in Gaza city. Over a WhatsApp call that keeps cutting out, she conveys the damage these drug-resistant infections are inflicting in the war zone.
Dr Alaa, 30, was forced to flee her home in northern Gaza with her family after the war began. Despite this, she is serving as a doctor at one of the medical points set up by The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Gaza city.
Every morning, before she leaves for work, she checks that no one on her route has reported a warning from the Israeli Defense Force of a potential airstrike. The clinic is a 15-minute walk from where she lives. She has to do the journey on foot, leaving her exposed to a potential attack by drone, air or sniper.
Dr Alaa al Shurafr’s walk to her clinic takes her past rubble. Dr Alaa al Shurafr
Once she does arrive at the clinic, the medical point is flooded with more than a hundred patients a day.
When she spoke to TBIJ, she was facing an outbreak of impetigo, a highly contagious bacterial skin infection most common in children. It causes blisters and itchy sores and is usually treated with an antibiotic cream.
“I’ve never seen these types of cases before,” Dr Alaa said. “It’s a very severe form of impetigo, an extensive form which includes faces and the whole body. We don’t have sufficient antibiotics.”
What little medicine is available is extremely expensive and while it does work sometimes, it is not always effective. “I’ve seen many cases that come again and again because of failure of treatment,” she said. “The rate of reinfection [could be] because of overcrowding and maybe misuse of antibiotics or nonadherence to the antibiotic regime plays a role.”
The most common type of bacteria that leads to impetigo is Staphylococcus aureus. A drug-resistant variant of this bacteria is behind the MRSA superbug.
70% of Staphylococcus aureus infections in wounded patients in Gaza are the MRSA superbug strain
MRSA infections are resistant to many common antibiotics, making them severe and even potentially fatal.
Moussally, the MSF epidemiologist, said: “It might be that this type of infection is difficult to treat not only because of [lack of] access to oral antibiotics, but more so because of a high resistance of the Staphylococcus bacteria causing it.”
Without adequate laboratory testing it is hard to say if the bacteria has developed stronger resistance.
Moussally’s work tracking drug-resistant bacteria in Gaza dates back to before 7 October and the start of the war. Then, MSF could monitor infections through labs at Nasser and Al-Awda Hospitals in Gaza. But over the course of the war, both hospitals have been besieged and attacked, making lab tests extremely challenging.
However, data collected by MSF at the hospitals from 2019 to 2023 showed that more than 70% of Staphylococcus aureus in wounded patients was the MRSA superbug strain.
Even before the war, superbugs were already a problem in Gaza; TBIJ reported on the issue as far back as 2018.
Open wounds left to fester
Content warning: graphic imagery below
In Gaza’s remaining hospitals, surgeons are overwhelmed by critical cases. Patients with open, but not initially deadly, wounds that need reconstructive surgery are lower priority, and often forced to wait or seek help at Red Cross and Red Crescent medical points.
Any length of time a person spends with their flesh or, in many cases, bone exposed raises the risk of superbugs and – as multiple doctors report – maggots.
“It is not uncommon to see explosive injury patients with limb injuries and open fractures to develop infections either from the wound itself or from… operations,” says Dr Abdulwhhab Abu Alamrain, who currently works in the orthopaedic department of a government hospital.
A leg injury, which developed a drug-resistant infection, sustained by a 35-year-old man in an explosion in September
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is another highly drug-resistant bacteria. It can infect wound dressings, causing bandages to turn green and smell like mown grass. Doctors in Dr Abdulwhhab’s orthopaedic department have seen cases; tests, available at a few private labs still operating in Gaza and seen by TBIJ, show some Pseudomonas infections don’t respond to any antibiotics at all.
Dr Abdulwhhab said: “This results in two options, either amputation or refusal [of an amputation] and face death. Unfortunately, we have seen many cases that have died either because of refusal or because they accept [the amputation] at the last moment [and die] waiting for surgery or on the operation table.”
Lessons from history
This is not the first time war has worsened a superbug crisis. During the war in Iraq, a lethal strain of the drug-resistant bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii infected American soldiers. Media at the time called it ‘Iraqibacter’.
The superbug infections weren’t confined to the borders of Iraq. Injured soldiers lost limbs, suffered sepsis, and some died back home in US hospitals after their wounds became infected with the bacteria.
The emergence of this strain of Acinetobacter baumannii was detected after its spread in the US hospitals. But due to the lack of testing capacity in Iraq, the extent to which it affected Iraqi civilians at the time is unknown.
“Iraq is a lesson about what war has done and why we have an ongoing crisis of AMR in a place like Iraq. We need to learn these lessons,” said Dr Omar Dewachi, an Iraqi medical anthropologist who narrates the touring exhibit The Pathogen of War.
Acinetobacter baumannii infections have also been reported in Gaza.
Using vinegar as medicine
With so many patients and so few drugs, some doctors report resorting to using vinegar to disinfect and treat wounds.
Moussally said: “Partially functioning hospitals are overcrowded with a huge caseload of injuries, lack of basic supplies needed to treat infections and do proper wound care management and are functioning with sub-standard infection prevention and control measures being the best they can do under the conditions they face. All of this drives AMR.”
Dr Khaled al Shawwa came home to Gaza city from Jerusalem to visit his family for the weekend on 5 October 2023 – two days before the Hamas attacks. He has been in Gaza ever since. He was previously a GP and had just completed his surgical qualification in Jerusalem.
He now works in the outpatient department at a clinic set up by MSF. There he deals with 80-130 patients a day. He told TBIJ: “We see Pseudomonas very frequently and sometimes we use vinegar, we apply it on the wounds. Nurses have a bottle of vinegar on the wound-dressing shelf.”
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The World Health Organization has repeatedly raised concerns about drug-resistant strains of Pseudomonas.
The best practice to prevent bacteria gaining resistance to even more antibiotics is to treat infections carefully with specific drugs, preferably after lab testing to make sure the medicine will work. In Gaza, however, doctors have to work with what they have.
“Drugs are not always available. We are guided by the availability of the drugs and availability of the tests. Where I work, the drugs come in shipments and donations. In some shipments you have one or two types of antibiotics. You don’t have many options … It’s not your decision,” Dr Khaled said.
Despite the limited resources, he and his colleagues at the local pharmacies have concocted a mixture of available antibiotics and steroids to try to treat difficult infections. “You have to do anything. You can’t just leave the patients alone.”
Israel Defense Forces did not respond to TBIJ’s request for comment.
Header image: The wreckage of an ambulance at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. Credit: AFP via Getty Images.
Reporter: Misbah Khan Video editor: Katia Pirnak Global Health editor: Fiona Walker Deputy editors: Chrissie Giles and Katie Mark Editor: Franz Wild Production editor: Frankie Goodway Fact checker: Somesh Jha Additional contributor: Hitham Toman
TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Original article by Misbah Khan republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Police raided the home of journalist Asa Winstanley. (Photo: AsaWinstantley.com)
Why are no national news outlets covering the crackdown on pro-Palestinian journalists in Britain?
“Journalism is the lifeblood of democracy” proclaimed prime minister Keir Starmer in a comment piece for the Guardian at the end of October. “Just because journalists are brave does not mean they should ever suffer intimidation”, he wrote.
Yet 11 days before his article was published, officers from the counter-terrorism unit of the Metropolitan Police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a well-known pro-Palestinian journalist with the Electronic Intifada, and seized his devices under provisions of the UK’s Terrorism Act.
Winstanley was presented with a letter indicating that the raid was part of ‘Operation Incessantness’, a counter-terror initiative about which little is known.
This is not the first use of anti-terror laws to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices in recent months.
It follows the detention at Heathrow Airport of Richard Medhurst and the arrest of Sarah Wilkinson in August 2024, both of whom are independent journalists prominently associated with reporting Israel’s war on Palestinians.
The attacks on journalists are part of a wider pattern of harassment of pro-Palestine activists.
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In response to these outrageous infringements of journalists’ ability to do their jobs, Declassified UK noted back in September that “they are part of a sinister development that has serious implications for civil liberties and freedom of speech, yet it has been ignored by the mainstream media”.
This continues to be the case. Not a single national news outlet in the UK has reported on the policing of British pro-Palestinian journalists. Not one of them has thought to investigate what ‘Operation Incessantness’ might mean for press freedom.
Not one of them has reflected on the precedent set by the use of anti-terror laws for reporting on Gaza.
dizzy: Bloggers are journalists and journalists are bloggers. Restrictions are applied to this blog contrary to human rights principles. Comments are not permitted, stats are manipulated. I finally managed to connect to Google Analytics and it told me I had 8 page views on one day, 14 on the following day – at least it’s obviously total BS.
I assume that UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is responsible for this but it could be Germany since this blog is hosted in Germany. I have no idea tbh because I’ve never been told and never been given the opportunity to challenge it.
On the plus side, I think that the Fascist human rights violators may also be paying for my hosting. If I’m reaching a far wider audience than acknowledged, somebody is paying for that bandwidth. Somebody is also paying to hide my name. I used to pay for it – about £20 a year – but decided that I couldn’t afford it one year. My name appeared on the DNS record but was hidden within about 20 minutes.
