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Franciszek Sterczewski speaks at a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, on September 8, 2025, following the arrival of Polish activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla deported from Israel. [Photo by Marek Antoni Iwanczuk/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
Four Polish activists detained by Israel after a Gaza-bound aid flotilla was raided last week returned to Warsaw on Wednesday, accusing Israeli forces of brutality and rebuking Poland’s foreign minister for downplaying the assault, Anadolu reports.
The delegation, arriving on a flight from Athens, included ruling Civic Platform (PO) lawmaker Franciszek Sterczewski, activists Omar Faris and Nina Ptak, and journalist Ewa Jasiewicz. Faris, Ptak, and Sterczewski were deported to Greece on Monday, while Jasiewicz had left Israel earlier.
Sterczewski sharply criticized both Israel and Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski.
“Why, at a time when we were doing everything we could to end this genocide and draw the world’s attention to what was happening there, did Minister Sikorski downplay the situation?” Sterczewski said, adding that he had learned firsthand that “Israel is a barbaric and terrorist state, just like, for example, Russia.”
“We expect that if Sikorski can accuse Putin of his war crimes, we expect him to be consistent and accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of the same crimes, or even worse,” he added.
Sterczewski said the five days he spent in Israeli detention were marked by mistreatment. “It wasn’t pleasant. We weren’t allowed to sleep. Guards shone flashlights in our eyes for hours and played music from Israeli propaganda films. We were set on by dogs. We were spat on. We were threatened with weapons,” he said.
The MP added that around 11,000 Palestinians, including more than 400 children, remain in Israeli detention. “We point out that they are treated even worse there. They are often murdered, and all human rights are violated,” he said.
The four Poles were among 470 activists from 47 countries participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), a humanitarian convoy attacked in international waters by the Israeli navy last week. Forty-two ships were seized during the overnight raid from Wednesday to Thursday.
At Warsaw Airport, Faris told reporters: “We must all stand together against the genocidal war in the Gaza Strip.”
“They treated us absolutely brutally. For several hours, I’m 73 years old, they tied my hands behind my back and put me on rocks,” Faris said.
He added that during interrogation in an Israeli prison, the activists were questioned about possible links to Hamas. “Our problem is the occupation, which began 42 years before the founding of Hamas,” he said. “You won’t be able to kill us. And we don’t want to kill you either. We want a solution like in South Africa — a democratic state for all, regardless of religion.”
Pro-Palestine protesters in NYC (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
Pro-Palestine organizers credit “how the movement for Palestine has intervened,” for seismic shift in public opinion
US popular discontent over Israel’s war on Gaza has grown over the past two years, a Pew Research poll finds. Currently, 39% of those polled said that Israel’s military action against Hamas has gone too far – up from 31% a year ago and just 27% in late 2023. Six in 10 have an unfavorable view of Israel’s government. This survey was conducted before Trump and Netanyahu announced their so-called “peace plan”.
The Pew Research poll revealed that the percentage of those who believe President Donald Trump favors Israel too much has risen by five points since March, from 31% to 36%. Republicans remain far more likely than Democrats to back Trump’s handling of the conflict and view him as balanced between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet among voters of both parties, more people now believe he’s siding too heavily with Israel since previous polling in March.
Polling conducted by the New York Times and Siena University revealed a dramatic decline in support for Israel among US voters. Following October 7, 47% of US voters said their sympathies lay with Israelis, while just 20% sided with Palestinians. Today, that gap has vanished: 34% now say they back Israel, 35% back Palestinians, and 31% say they’re uncertain or support both equally. A majority of voters now oppose sending additional aid to Israel, at 51%.
Although the claims of antisemitism have been levied against the pro-Palestine movement, especially by the US government, Jewish people in the US have vastly shifted their stance against Israeli action in Palestine. According to a poll conducted by the Washington Post, 61% of surveyed Jewish people in the US believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, and 39% said Israel is guilty of genocide.
“The movement for Palestine has intervened”
According to Miriam Osman, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, these drastic shifts in public opinion reveal “the massive gap between the policies of the ruling class and the vast majority of people who are not represented by them.” Osman says that the cause of this change is “first and foremost the result of Israel’s brutal genocide, live-streamed to our phones daily unlike any other atrocity we have seen,” but also credits “how the movement for Palestine has intervened, expanded, and kept Palestine front and center, building mass protests and organizing infrastructure over the last two years.”
Groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement have been active in organizing mass mobilizations since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza on October 7 – including taking part in a march of half a million in Washington, DC on November 4, 2023, which to date is the largest demonstration in support of Palestine in US history.
Since then, the movement for Palestine has taken a constant array of diverse forms, engaging potentially millions of people in the US. These include the wave of Gaza solidarity encampments protests, started by students at Columbia University and quickly spread across the country and around the world. Visits to the United States by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have seen mass demonstrations in July of 2024 in Washington, DC, and September during UNGA week in both 2024 and 2025.
The waves of pro-Palestine organizing in the United States have been sustained by a variety of organizations and coalitions, some in existence prior to October 2023 and some coming on the scene after. While the Palestinian Youth Movement has been active for decades, two years ago the Palestinian diaspora organization joined forces with other groups including the ANSWER Coalition and the People’s Forum to form “Shut it Down for Palestine”, a coalition which holds public meetings in New York City each week.
List of US citizens killed by Israel grows
The victims of Israel’s genocide and occupation includes US citizens, but the Israeli government has faced not accountability from the US for these killings. These include Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an activist shot by Israeli forces while at a protest in the West Bank, and Sayfollah Musallet, a Palestinian-American beaten to death by Israeli settlers while visiting family, also in the West Bank.
The US Department of Justice launched investigations against the alleged killings of US citizens by Hamas during October 7, and charged Hamas leaders with terrorism. However, when it comes to Israeli killings of US citizens, the US government has deferred to Israel to conduct its own internal investigations.
Establishment digs heels in
Demonstrations have also targeted members of the political establishment who have refused to respond to the sea change in constituent opinion and shift their stance in support of Israel. These include those in the liberal wing of politics, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – who has faced waves of activist pickets both outside his office and his home in New York City.
Some activists, notably, members of the anti-war group CODEPINK have taken to filming direct confrontations with politicians in the halls of Congress over their support for Israel – including those in the Democratic Party. When campaigning as Kamala Harris’ running mate last year, Tim Walz was called out by CODEPINK activists while at a DNC women’s caucus event for his support for Israel.
After 2 years of Israel’s genocide and war on Gaza, the US government shows no sign of changing its unwavering financial and political support for Israel. Although the Trump administration has been especially staunch in its support, establishment leaders of the Democratic Party have also remained, in many ways, just as supportive as two years ago. As recently as April of this year, establishment Senators including Schumer, fellow New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker of New Jersey, voted down a Bernie Sanders-led effort to limit US arms sales to 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.
Larry Ellison speaking at a conference. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The pending purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests.
Launched in 2017 by the private Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok quickly became one of the most important social networks on the planet. By early 2025, it had 1.6 billion active users, more than half of them outside China, of whom an estimated 170 million are North American; 1 in 5 people in the US get their news from this network, 4 in 10 among the 18-29 age group. Today, it is the fastest-growing platform among the younger segments of the global population.
The US government has waged a long battle to force ByteDance to sell the US branch of TikTok to a group of “domestic” capitalists, citing national security concerns and threatening to ban the platform in the US if the deal did not go through. On September 25, the White House announced through an Executive Order signed by Trump, “Save TikTok by Protecting National Security”, the terms under which the transaction would take place. According to the document, the app in the US “will be majority-owned and controlled by US persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary, as ByteDance Ltd. and its affiliates will own less than 20% of the entity, with the remainder held by certain investors.” Who are these mysterious “certain investors” that the Executive Order does not directly mention?
None other than a consortium led by the giant Texas-based company Oracle, which already stored TikTok data in the US. Its main shareholder is an 81-year-old American tycoon who, unlike Elon Musk, is relatively unknown to the public: Larry Ellison. Ellison, in addition to being the new owner, would also take on key roles in managing security, data, and algorithm auditing. In a nutshell, he will be the new boss of the vertical video platform in the United States, a company valued at USD 14 billion. But perhaps the most relevant aspect of the case is not the amount of the transaction, but its long-term implications for power. As a BBC article states, “Investors will control the algorithm that powers the US version of TikTok, and Americans will occupy six of the seven seats on the board of directors that will oversee it.”
Why is Larry Ellison’s role (geo)politically relevant, and what does Israel have to do with it?
What is admitted need not be proved, as the old adage goes. The day after the announcement, before an audience of podcasters and TikTokers at the Israeli consulate in New York, a blunt Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Weapons change over time; the most important ones are social media,” adding that the purchase of TikTok “is the most important purchase being made right now.” A purchase that, incidentally, had been preceded a month earlier by the appointment of Erica Mindel, a US citizen and former Israeli military instructor, as the company’s new Director of Public Policy for Hate Speech. So did Israel buy TikTok? It depends on how you look at it. The key lies with Larry Ellison and his ties to the genocidal state. So who is this Ellison?
The owner of Oracle – cloud applications, databases, and servers, with 160,000 employees around the globe – is currently the second richest person on the planet (behind only Musk), with a fortune valued at USD 350 billion, according to Forbes. He lives on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought in 2012 for USD 300 million; he is a shareholder in X and Tesla; he owns almost 50% of the media giant Paramount-Skydance (including CBS), valued at USD 28 billion. An interesting fact provided by Forbes: “Ellison never finished college. He started out creating databases for the CIA.” His trusted business partner: Safra Catz, Oracle’s CEO since 2014, born in Israel and, like Ellison, a personal friend of … Netanyahu. According to a press release, “a few months before the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, Catz met with Netanyahu to discuss the expansion of Oracle’s projects in the Israeli-occupied territories.” But this is not an isolated incident. The close relationship between the new owner of TikTok and Israel goes back a long way, so much so that on one occasion Ellison even offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle’s board of directors.
According to data provided by the BDS Movement, in 2019, Oracle leased an underground data center in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, to provide Israeli banks, health funds, and military forces with AI processing and information storage services; in 2021, it became the first multinational technology company to sell cloud services to Israel within the occupied territories; in 2022, it hosted soldiers and software developers from the Israeli army’s C41 Corp. to learn how to use Oracle’s cloud for military purposes…
It is no coincidence that Catz, Oracle’s all-powerful CEO, states that “for employees, it’s clear: if you’re not pro-US or pro-Israel, don’t work here”; nor is it surprising that some of her employees commented to The Intercept that “the atmosphere is horrible, people are terrified to even mention Palestine.” According to the same source, as soon as Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza began in October 2023, Catz demanded that the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” appear on all company screens in more than 180 countries. In the same context of the aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, Oracle developed the “Words of Iron” project, in collaboration with Israeli ministries, “to help the country elevate pro-Israel content and counter critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.” In other words, a weapon at the service of propaganda, in that theater of operations that has now become fundamental, as Netanyahu himself knows: cognitive warfare. The Intercept also reports that a year ago, Oracle partnered with one of Israel’s largest defense companies, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, on an AI project to provide “fighters with rapid, actionable information on the battlefield.” In other words, war on the ground.
The relationship with Trump and his consolidation as media emperor
However close Ellison’s relations with the State of Israel and its army may be (he has also been a major donor to the US organization Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which channels millions of dollars to the soldiers of that country) it would have been very difficult for his company to win the approval of the Trump administration if its owner were not close to the president of the United States himself. After many years of donating to both parties but closer to the Democrats – an admirer of Clinton, disenchanted with Obama – Ellison’s balance began to shift toward the Republican side, especially its more radical wing. In 2016, he donated a significant sum to Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries and, according to Wired, later became a “reliable donor and fundraiser for the Republican Party during the 2020 and 2024 cycles,” which allowed him to become very close to Donald Trump. Although perhaps somewhat exaggerated, one of Trump’s advisers interviewed by that website referred to the Oracle owner as “the shadow president of the United States.”
In any case, what is certain is that Netanyahu and Trump’s personal friend will not be satisfied with his latest acquisition from the Chinese. The US media has been reporting in recent weeks that the Ellisons, Larry and his son/heir David, are going for more. They now have their sights set on the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery – which includes CNN. According to the national media watchdog organization FAIR, if the sale goes through, it would “create an unprecedented level of media consolidation” in the history of global media, including powerful news channels, film production companies, cable television … to which must be added control over TikTok. The danger of hyper-concentration of media power has been pointed out by various groups. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that regulatory agencies should block the potential merger “because it is a dangerous concentration of power.” Or, as professor of digital sociology Steven Buckley points out: “It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires buy up all the cultural consumption media.” For now, regardless of whether this latest move by the Ellison clan comes to fruition, his purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests; just at a time when global awareness seems to be awakening to the urgent need to stop the war machines of Israel and the United States.
Miguel Ruíz is a Mexican-Ecuadorian sociologist. He holds a PhD in Latin American Studies (UNAM). He has been a professor and researcher at various universities in Mexico and Ecuador. He currently teaches at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences and is a member of the Institute of Economic Research, both at the Central University of Ecuador.
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.
The value of UK arms imported by Israel has reached a record high value in 2025, FactCheck can exclusively reveal.
Our analysis of Israel Tax Authority customs data finds that Israel imported nearly £1 million worth of UK munitions in the first nine months of the year.
That’s more than double the amount received in any of the previous three years.
Last week, FactCheck revealed that Israel imported over £400,000 worth of arms from UK companies in June 2025 – the highest monthly amount since these records began in January 2022.
The exact nature of the items wasn’t specified in the data, but they were listed under a category that includes bombs, grenades, torpedoes, missiles, and ammunition.
Genocide 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.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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Relatives and loved ones of Palestinians, who lost their lives in an Israeli attack ON Sabra neighborhood, mourn for their deceased ones at Al-Ahli Baptist hospital during their funeral procedures on October 03, 2025 in Gaza City, Gaza. [Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea – Anadolu Agency]
At least 67,139 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip since October 2023, the Health Ministry said on Sunday, Anadolu reports.
A ministry statement said that 65 bodies were brought to hospitals in the last 24 hours, while 153 people were injured, taking the number of injuries to 169,583 in the Israeli onslaught.
“Many victims are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them,” it added.
It also noted that two Palestinians were killed and 30 others injured by Israeli army fire while trying to get humanitarian aid in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed while seeking aid to 2,605, with over 19,124 others wounded since May 27.
The Israeli army resumed its attacks on the Gaza Strip on March 18 and has since killed 13,549 people and injured 57,542 others, shattering a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement that took hold in January.
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.
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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.
