David Dinsmore started as a Sun reporter in 1990, rising to the position of editor in 2013. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
The appointment of David Dinsmore, who has served at the top of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK for years, has drawn consternation
The former Sun editor David Dinsmore has been announced as the government’s new communications chief, despite concerns about his long service at the top of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK.
Having worked as a tabloid journalist, editor and news executive since the 1990s, Dinsmore was appointed to the civil service role from a shortlist of two, beating the PR man Tim Allan, formerly an adviser to Tony Blair.
He will join the civil service as a permanent secretary for communications in the Cabinet Office in November, having served as chief operating officer of News UK, which is run by Murdoch’s ally Rebekah Brooks.
His appointment has been met with surprise and some consternation within the civil service and by some Labour figures, given the controversies that have dogged News UK over the years, from the phone-hacking scandal to its Hillsborough coverage, which led to an apology to fans.
Although Dinsmore was not editor of the Sun at the time of either episode, he has been senior at News UK for the last decade while settlements for hacking have been reached. Hacked Off, the campaign group, described his appointment as being a “dangerous misjudgment and insult to the public”.
dizzy: Not absolutely certain but it looks like Starmer is sucking up to Rupert Murdoch, possibly as a response to the new left party being formed by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. A similar thing happened when Starmer appointed a former Israeli spy from Unit 8200 to Labour to spy on Labour members. I regard that as reporting straight to Israel, possibly taking orders directly from Israel.
UPDATE: I need to spend time on other projects for the next few years. We need left bloggers and social media activists. It’s a hard slog to get established but go for the long term. Teams of 10 or more would be ideal because you could share the work, maybe concentrate on your own area of interest. Suggest that you change passwords regularly and drop and replace people who don’t pull their weight. In a few years, ready for the next election, you should be kicking and taking on number 10’s influence and influencers reported in the article.
Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu this week announced he has nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize during a visit to Washington | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The US president is desperate for a peace prize. That doesn’t align with Netanyahu’s plans for ethnic cleansing in Gaza
Donald Trump’s claim to be nearing a breakthrough in the Gaza conflict, as he insisted ahead of his meetings with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu this week, in the end came to nothing.
Netanyahu has returned home from Washington. Mediating sessions continue in Qatar, but prospects are poor, which is hardly surprising given Netanyahu’s war aims of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in Gaza and much of the occupied West Bank.
Away from Gaza, Netanyahu wants to denuclearise Iran and force a change to its government. While Israel may present the recent war with Iran as a great success, developments since then suggest otherwise.
The key to the nuclear weapon issue is how much of the 60% enriched uranium that Iran has hidden away has survived, not whether it needs to enrich it further for a potential nuclear weapon. The common belief that the 90% enrichment is essential for weapons-grade uranium is wrong; the Hiroshima bomb used 80%.
Even 60% would be enough. Such a device may not be as efficient as one with 95% enrichment; it would be crude and cumbersome and might even be too heavy to deliver, but it could certainly power a test device and detonate.
That would be a huge symbolic moment, and would certainly make it much more important to move to a diplomatic outcome to the crisis, however much Netanyahu would oppose that.
In short, Netanyahu’s war has not ended Iran’s nuclear potential, with its programme damaged but far from destroyed. Similarly, the Iranian regime shows little sign of instability despite being under economic pressure.
Gaza, meanwhile, is turning into a double disaster for Israel as it transitions to fully fledged pariah status. In the past five weeks, another 640 Palestinians have been killed and over 4,500 wounded.
Hungry children are being killed and maimed as they wait for food. One of the few emergency hospitals still functional is a small, 60-bed Red Cross hospital in the south of Gaza. It says it has dealt with 2,200 weapon-related wounds in recent weeks.
To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s defence minister, Israel Katz, insists that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will now be concentrated into a huge detention camp in the south of the strip pending deportation to who knows where.
On top of this, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are even failing to destroy Hamas. Just ten IDF soldiers have been killed in the last two weeks, and another 14 injured. These figures may be very low compared with the scores of Palestinians killed every week, but they are more than enough to demonstrate that Hamas is still active and even controls parts of Gaza. We can also assume there is little shortage of angry young recruits to Hamas who have seen their families and friends killed and maimed.
The conflict continues in other ways, as well. When Israel fought its air war against Iran last month, the impression given by most of the mainstream media was that while occasional Iranian missiles might have got through the multi-layered Israeli air defences, their impact was minimal – perhaps causing some damage and even a handful of deaths and injuries, but with far greater costs to Iran.
While the extent of the fatalities and injuries may be correct, the 42 Iranian ballistic missiles that reached Israeli territory had a substantially greater impact than was admitted, with at least six hitting heavily protected military targets, including a major airbase and an intelligence-gathering centre.
Iran’s non-military targets included oil and power facilities, while its other missiles exploded in densely populated residential areas and left 15,000 homeless. These attacks cannot be reported within Israel due to strict military censorship rules.
This is relevant because it relates to possible future developments, especially Trump’s pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, for which Netanyahu announced he had nominated him this week.
For Israel, US support was crucial in its support during its war with Iran. The IDF’s air defences relied heavily on an advanced X-Band Radar run by the US military, while two US Navy destroyers provided anti-missile cover. The Pentagon also provided two ground-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defence anti-missile systems, which launched at least 36 interceptor missiles, reportedly costing $12m each.
In the immediate post-conflict period, direct US support will expand further. Even before the war on Gaza began in October 2023, the US spent an annual $3.8bn on military assistance for Israel. That has since shot up, reaching $18bn in the first 12 months of the war.
The US is deeply embedded in the defence of Israel, but Netanyahu’s war aims have not been met, and he needs the conflict to continue for his own political survival. When the next phase of war starts, the US will be intimately involved, and Trump will see his vision of a Nobel Peace Prize disappearing over the horizon.
Members of the Palestine Red Crescent and other emergency services pray by the bodies of fellow rescuers killed a week earlier by Israeli forces, during a funeral procession at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on March 31, 2025. (Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)
“This report doesn’t even attempt to engage with the truth,” said the Israeli group Breaking the Silence.
The Israel Defense Forces’ report on the killing of 15 paramedics in Gaza last month was “sure to lead to increased demands for an independent investigation,” said one journalist for Sky News, which recently released an extensive account of the incident that experts and advocates have called a potential war crime.
The IDF said it had found “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident” that took place on March 23, when Israeli troops opened fire on a convoy of vehicles that included ambulances, killing the 15 rescue workers.
But officials claimed that there was “no attempt to conceal the event” and the report suggested the firing of a deputy commander for providing an “inaccurate report” and the reprimanding of a commanding officer should satisfy the international outcry over the incident, after which United Nations and Palestinian Red Crescent officials discovered the medics’ bodies and their crushed rescue vehicles had been buried in a shallow mass grave.
An Israeli probe into Israel's killing of 15 Palestinian medical and rescue workers in Gaza finds no cover-up even though Israeli forces lied about their vehicles not having had their lights on and Israel continues to detain the sole survivor. https://t.co/p7Xi4DA2rV
“Is this meant to be a joke?” said Palestinian writer and poet Mosab Abu Toha after the IDF announced the commanders would be fired and reprimanded. “How is this supposed to help the children and families of these medics? …These war criminals should be arrested and handed over to the [International Criminal Court] for due legal processing.”
The IDF report found that six out of 15 Palestinians killed “were identified in a retrospective examination as Hamas terrorists,” but did not produce evidence to support the claim; Sky News, which released its investigation on on Friday, also did not find evidence.
The report also claimed that the army decided to “gather and cover the bodies to prevent further harm and clear the vehicles from the route in preparation for civilian evacuation”—an explanation for the buried bodies and ambulances.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the IDF’s claim that soldiers “did not randomly attack” the convoy but rather fired on suspected “terrorists” in “suspicious vehicles” was refuted by video evidence from the phone of one of the medics who was found in the mass grave—believed to be Refaat Radwan.
The video showed a convoy of clearly marked ambulances and fire truck, with headlights and flashing lights on—contradicting the IDF’s claim that the vehicles were driving with their lights off.
Despite the video evidence, the IDF report said there was “no evidence to support claims of execution” and accused those who have made such accusations of “blood libels.”
The Sky News report released Friday found that Israel’s claim that the medics were not fired at from a close distance was false and that expert analysis of Radwan’s cellphone video determined shots had been fired from as close as 12 meters away
Palestinian-American policy analyst Yousef Munayyer said that in the case of the medics’ killing, “video evidence exposed [the IDF’s] lies forcing this flimsy effort mascarading as accountability so they can sweep it under the rug.”
Israel is able to repeatedly attack civilians and aid workers and claim that their deaths were accidental, Munayyer suggested, because “western media is willing to believe as fact initial Israeli narratives around atrocities.”
Given how frequently this happens, there is simply no other plausible explanation for the failure of western media to adjust by treating the Israeli military a source of information without credibility than this: they want to support their atrocities.
The Israeli probe found “professional failures,” said former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, but the IDF “doesn’t seem to have examined the rules of engagement, approved by senior officials, that permit killing before clear identification of a combatant.”
The killing of the paramedics underscored the “atmosphere of impunity” in Gaza, said one Israeli policy analyst.
“What we know is that we cannot trust the Israeli [military]. Unless The New York Times would have gotten hold of that video clip, I don’t think that we would know the truth,” Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera. “It would be another cover-up.”
Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Nice told Al Jazeera that the IDF report “invites many questions that it will be difficult, I suspect, for the [Israeli military] to answer.”
“For example, [there is] the proposition that six of these people were Hamas, presumably members of Hamas on active [military] service, not people who might have been associated with Hamas in some way. No documentary evidence at all is identified [for that],” he told the outlet.
Breaking the Silence, a group made up of Israeli veterans of the IDF who speak out against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, said the report was “riddled with contradictions, vague phrasing, and selective details.”
“We all remember when the IDF claimed that the ambulances emergency lights weren’t on—and then we saw the footage proving otherwise. Not every lie has a video to expose it, but this report doesn’t even attempt to engage with the truth,” said the group.
“Another day, another cover-up,” Breaking the Silence added. “More innocent lives taken, with no accountability.”
DOSSIER: The lawyers hand in the evidence to New Scotland Yard
POLICE are assessing evidence that 10 British nationals committed war crimes in Gaza including sniping down children and aid workers.
Lawyers handed evidence accusing the group of the murder and torture of civilians while on active service with the Israeli military to the Metropolitan Police’s war crimes unit yesterday.
Speaking outside New Scotland Yard, they said their 240-page dossier is “just the tip of the iceberg,” with reports of more than 100 Britons having served with Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) since October 2023.
Nearly 100 legal and human rights experts have signed a letter urging the War Crimes Team to investigate the dossier by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC).
PILC legal director and founder Paul Heron said that the report is based on six months of extensive evidence-gathering using open-source evidence and witness testimony.
It shows 10 Britons “committed war crimes and crimes against humanity while serving for the Israeli military on active service in Gaza,” he said.
SINCE the Netanyahu government engineered the collapse of the ceasefire, Israel’s crimes in Gaza have escalated horrifically, killing 400 people in one night and more than 100 children a day on average since last month.
Israel has been exposed executing paramedics and rescue workers and hiding their bodies and vehicles and has killed more journalists during the genocide than died during the US civil war, both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Russia combined.
