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Palestinian residents flee the conflict zones by car, on donkey carts, and on foot, carrying their belongings to safer areas following intense Israeli military attacks on the Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza on May 21, 2025. [Saeed M. M. T. Jaras – Anadolu Agency
The Israeli army controls over 77% of the Gaza Strip, local authorities said on Sunday, Anadolu reports.
“Field data and verified analysis indicate that the Israeli occupation forces now effectively control approximately 77% of Gaza’s total geographic area,” Gaza’s government media office said in a statement.
The Israeli army gained control through “direct ground offensives, the deployment of its forces in residential and civilian areas, or preventing Palestinians from accessing their areas, lands, and properties via intensified fire, or forced evacuation,” it added.
The office strongly condemned the Israeli plans of mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, systematic genocide, and settler colonialism by force, “under the cover of a siege and an open war targeting both people and infrastructure.”
It held Israel and its supporters, including the US, UK, Germany, and France, fully responsible for the crime of genocide in Gaza.
On Thursday, Israel Hayom newspaper said that the army plans to control 70-75% of Gaza within nearly three months as part of an expanded military campaign in the enclave.
Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive against Gaza since October 2023, killing more than 53,900 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war crimes against defenseless civilians in the enclave.
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.UK 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.
Victims of the Israeli attack are taken from the morgue of al-Nasser Hospital to be buried after funeral procedures, on May 19, 2025 in Khan Younis. (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The United Nations human rights chief called Israel’s intensifying assault on Gaza “tantamount to ethnic cleansing.”
The Israeli military on Monday designated Gaza’s second-largest city a combat zone and ordered all residents to evacuate ahead of an “unprecedented attack,” the latest escalation of Israel’s U.S.-backed genocidal assault on the enclave’s besieged and starving population.
The forced displacement order came as Israeli tanks and troops pushed further into the Gaza Strip as part of a renewed ground assault on the territory, which has been decimated by relentless bombings that began in the aftermath of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Monday that the rate of Israeli killings in Gaza has intensified significantly in recent days, crushing any lingering hope of an imminent cease-fire and heightening alarm over the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian emergency on the ground.
The group estimated that more than 300,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced between May 12 and 18, with that number set to grow with the evacuation of Khan Younis.
“This surge in lethal attacks is part of a broader escalation by the Israeli military, marked by a scorched-earth policy and the systematic destruction of Gaza’s remaining residential areas and infrastructure,” said Euro-Med. “The ongoing campaign—now in its 19th month—has been characterised by mass killings, enforced starvation, and the deliberate dismantling of life-sustaining systems, with the explicit aim of eradicating the Palestinian population in Gaza and eliminating any possibility of return or reconstruction.”
Avichay Adraee, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), wrote in a social media post early Monday that “from this moment, Khan Younis governorate will be considered a dangerous combat zone.”
“The IDF will launch an unprecedented attack to destroy the capabilities of terrorist organizations in this area,” Adraee continued. “For your safety, evacuate immediately.”
Video footage posted to social media showed Israeli airstrikes pounding the area and residents scrambling to evacuate their families, many of whom have already been displaced multiple times since late 2023.
“They are literally forcing all of Gazans into a concentration camp in what used to be Rafah in southern Gaza, after destroying it. They are now planning on annihilating Khan Younis,” Elia Ayoub, a researcher based in the United Kingdom, wrote Monday. “There’s never been a genocide so thoroughly documented as it was live-streamed straight to our phones.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes in Gaza, said Monday that the IDF is moving to seize “full control” of the “entire strip” while allowing in “minimal” humanitarian aid—remarks that deepened concerns about Israeli plans to starve out Gaza’s population and annex the territory.
“If this means annexation, it violates international law,” Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in response to Netanyahu’s comments. “Sweden maintains that the territory of Gaza must not be changed or reduced.”
“There needs to be a cease-fire and end to the fighting, and the hostages must be released,” she added. “No more statements or plans from the Israeli government that exacerbate the situation for civilians in Gaza.”
Over the past 24 hours, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 130 people, bringing the official death toll since October 2023 to 53,486, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
In a statement late last week, United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk warned that Israel’s “latest barrage of bombs” and “methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods”—as well as the cut-off of humanitarian assistance—signals “a push for a permanent demographic shift in Gaza that is in defiance of international law and is tantamount to ethnic cleansing.”
“We must stop the clock on this madness,” said Türk.
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 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.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A Palestinian toddler hugs a woman as relatives of the deceased mourn as the bodies of Palestinians killed in the Israeli attack on Al-Saftawi region are taken out of Al-Shifa Hospital for burial in Gaza City, Gaza on May 18, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]
The United Nations children’s agency UNICEF said Sunday that the situation in the Gaza Strip has drastically worsened due to Israel’s crippling siege on the Palestinian enclave, Anadolu reports.
“The situation in Gaza has drastically deteriorated over the last two months due to the imposed siege and the prevention of humanitarian aid,” UNICEF said in a statement on X.
It said Gaza’s children continue to endure relentless Israeli airstrikes and are being deprived of essential goods, services, and life-saving care.
The organization called for the immediate resumption of a ceasefire and the urgent entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.
Since March 2, Israel has kept Gaza crossings closed to food, medical, and humanitarian aid, deepening an already severe humanitarian crisis in the enclave, according to government, human rights, and international reports.
Earlier this month, Israel’s Security Cabinet approved an aid delivery plan for the Palestinians in war-torn Gaza through private US security contractors based on handing over aid boxes to individuals.
The Israeli plan, however, has been rejected by the UN and dozens of international aid groups, saying it runs against humanitarian principles, is logistically unworkable, and could put Palestinian civilians and staffers in harm’s way.
The Palestinian resistance group Hamas also decried the Israeli plan as “political blackmail” and “a violation of international law.”
Nearly 2.4 million people in Gaza live completely dependent on humanitarian aid, according to World Bank data.
The Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Sunday that Tel Aviv is coordinating with a US firm to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza, suggesting that the aid distribution may start on May 24.
The Israeli army has continued its brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 53,300 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.
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.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Leeds May Day march. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
WORKERS rallied across Britain this weekend for May Day and International Workers’ Day in solidarity with all those in struggle for peace and justice, and in particular with their brothers and sisters in Palestine.
At Cardiff’s rally on Saturday — coinciding with World Press Freedom Day — the NUJ’s David Nicholson warned comrades that journalism was under attack at home and around the world, not least in Gaza and the West Bank.
“There were 1,000 journalists and media workers working in Gaza when Israel invaded in October 2023,” he said. “Almost 20 per cent have been killed by the Israeli military, with 171 dead and hundreds injured.
“This targeting of journalists is a war crime, and the NUJ and the International Federation of Journalists are building a case for the International Criminal Court.“
The Israeli government will not allow international journalists into Gaza — what have they got to hide,” he said.
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.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/QILgUHrdWRE
Leeds May Day march. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
