Displaced Palestinians flee northern Gaza by foot and in vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, September 15, 2025
Labour faces fresh condemnation amid Israel’s ground offensive into Gaza City
… KEIR STARMER’S government faced fresh condemnation yesterday for its failure to oppose Israel’s brutal war on the Palestinians as the country’s military began a ground offensive into Gaza City and a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide.
“Gaza is burning,” boasted Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz. “We will not relent and we will not go back — until the completion of the mission.”
…
The report by a team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council calls on the international community to end the genocide and take steps to punish those responsible for it.
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Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana said Sir Keir and his Labour ministers “must be held criminally accountable.”
She wrote on X: “For nearly two years, we’ve witnessed the deliberate slaughter of civilians, starvation of an entire population and the systematic destruction of hospitals and essential infrastructure.
“Yet just two weeks ago, the UK government claimed it had not concluded Israel was acting with genocidal intent.
“It continues to arm Israel’s genocide, provide RAF reconnaissance support and roll out the red carpet for Israeli war criminals.
“The government’s position was already morally indefensible. It is now politically untenable.”
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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir 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.Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.
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Israeli army enters the city with tanks for the first time since 2002 following after the ceasefire and prisoner and hostages swap agreement in Gaza entered into force in Jenin, West Bank on February 23, 2025 [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]
Calls to displace Palestinians from Gaza are already being translated into action in the occupied West Bank, where the occupation army has forced tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes, Haaretz reported today.
The Hebrew edition of the newspaper referred to the statements of the Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, who proudly announced yesterday the goal of the operation that the army is waging in the occupied West Bank: the expulsion of the residents of the refugee camps.
The newspaper added that in the context of the Gaza Strip, they dream of transfer, but in the West Bank they are actually implementing it.
The minister added that “it is assumed that the 40,000 Palestinians who have already been expelled from the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams will not be allowed to return there for at least a year.”
The newspaper said: “Katz’s statements completely contradict the official claim of the Israeli army since the beginning of the operation in the West Bank, which is that it is not evacuating the residents of the West Bank.”
According to the newspaper, “the residents of the refugee camps who were evacuated from their homes are taking refuge in the villages and towns in the area.”
Dozens of them sleep on the floors of temporary shelters run by local volunteers, while tens of thousands of them were forced to evacuate their homes quickly, without enough clothes, medicine or money. Children have not been to school for weeks.
It added that “the army is demolishing homes in refugee camps to widen roads, and has decided to tighten the atmosphere even more, as the army has brought its tanks into the Jenin refugee camp – for the first time in 20 years.”
The newspaper considered that “the army’s practices in the West Bank are the fruits of a campaign led by the settler leadership that has been pushing in these directions for more than a year, as the settlers have succeeded in turning the West Bank into a war zone in every sense of the word.”
Palestinians have reported being forced out of their homes by Israeli occupation forces, while others were used as human shields, then ordered to leave the refugee camp. One elderly blind man recounted how the army took over a building, brought him inside and locked him in a room with another family for two days without being able to communicate with anyone.
The newspaper stressed that
the rapid escalation in recent weeks – is compensation for the Israeli far-right for the disappointment and grief caused by the prisoner exchange deal.
The newspaper said that “Israel, as usual, instead of solving the root problems of the conflict, is proving that it only understands force, and that it is only capable of short-term thinking.”
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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
A man walks between tents for displaced Palestinians next to destroyed buildings following the Israeli air and ground offensive in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, February 6, 2025
ISRAEL publicly began “preparations” for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza today despite international rejection of US President Donald Trump’s proposal to empty the territory of its population.
Egypt has launched a diplomatic blitz behind the scenes warning any such action would put its peace deal with Israel at risk, officials said.
The Trump administration has already dialled back aspects of the suggestion given its frosty international reception, saying any relocation of the region’s 2.3 million people would be temporary.
US officials have provided few details about how or when the plan could be imposed on Palestinians.
In a social media post, President Trump said today that Israel would turn Gaza over to the US after the war and no US soldiers would be needed for his plan to redevelop it.
The Palestinians have strongly rejected Mr Trump’s proposal, which amounts to ethnic cleansing.
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Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that he has ordered the military to make preparations to facilitate the emigration of large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza through land crossings as well as “special arrangements for exit by sea and air.”
Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Israeli troops enter Nablus, West Bank on August 19, 2024. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]
Promises of “absolute victory” in Gaza are nothing but “gibberish”, according to Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant’s comments were not meant to be public, but somehow were leaked and published by Israeli media on 12 August.
The explanation of why Benjamin Netanyahu is pursuing a losing war in Gaza has been largely confined to the prime minister’s personal interests, not least the avoidance of corruption trials, preserving his extremist government coalition and avoiding an early general election. Still, none of these rationales explain the absurdity of continuing with a war which, in the words of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is “The worst failure in Israel’s history.”
What else could explain Netanyahu’s motive for the war? And why are his most crucial government allies, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, determined to prolong it? The answer may not lie in Gaza, but in the occupied West Bank.
While Israel is extending its failed military campaign in the Strip with no clear strategic objectives, its war on the West Bank is driven by very clear motives indeed: the annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory and the ethnic cleansing of large sectors of the Palestinian population. This is not only obvious through Israel’s daily actions in the West Bank, but also because of the clear statements made by Israel’s extreme far right government officials, including a commitment by Netanyahu’s own Likud party to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights and Judea and Samaria.” The latter, of course, is what Zionists call the West Bank.
An audio recording obtained by the Israeli group Peace Now conveyed the following remarks by Smotrich at a June 9 conference: “My goal is to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent, for God’s sake, its division… and the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
To do so, the far-right politician has assigned himself the job of “change(ing) the DNA of the system.” This “system” was put in place decades ago, following Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank in 1967. It began a slow but determined process of illegal annexation of Palestinian territories. The process included the establishment, in 1981, of the so-called Civil Administration.
This was and remains essentially a branch of the Israeli military.
However, it was described as “civil” as part of a government effort to convert a temporary military occupation into the permanent colonisation of Palestine. This entailed the practical annexation and continued expansion of the illegal Israeli Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land after the June 1967 Six-Day War.
The Oslo Accords in 1993-94 gave Palestinians nominal administrative control over small areas in the West Bank, designated as areas A and B. This necessitated the transfer of some of the Civil Administration’s responsibility to the newly-formed Palestinian Authority, based on the understanding that the PA will always prioritise Israel’s security. The arrangement allowed Israel to expand, unhindered, its illegal settlements in most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, tripling both the size and population of the settlements between 1993 and 2023.
As Israel’s colonial plan in the West Bank reached its zenith, Netanyahu sought in 2020 to reinforce Israeli gains with the annexation of more than 30 per cent of the West Bank. Due to international pressure and growing Palestinian resistance, however, Netanyahu postponed his plan, albeit with the understanding that “annexation remains on the table”.
Without much fanfare, though, Israel swapped its hope for a sweeping de jure annexation of the West Bank with de facto control, through rapid seizures of Palestinian land and the expansion of its settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.
Although the Israeli military is faltering in Gaza, the genocide is being used as a smokescreen to finalise Israel’s settler-colonial plans in the West Bank.
This process was dubbed by Smotrich in 2017 as a “victory by settlement”. Now in a position of power and with access to a massive budget, he is making his life’s goal a reality.
For Smotrich’s dream to be realised, he needed to revitalise the once central role of the Civil Administration. In May, he invented a new position called “deputy head” of the administration, granting the position to his close associate Hillel Roth.
Now both men have unparalleled and sweeping rights to expand the settlements. Since coming to power in December 2022, Netanyahu’s latest government has approved 12,000 new housing units for illegal settlements, while ordering the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes and other civilian infrastructure.
In the first three months of 2024, Israel declared nearly 6,000 acres of the West Bank to be “state-owned land”, and therefore made it eligible for settlement construction. The decision was described by the Israeli watchdog Peace Now as the “largest West Bank land grab in 30 years.”
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is already under way. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in the first half of 2024 alone, at least 1,000 Palestinians were forcefully displaced while nearly 160,000 were affected by home demolitions.
The Israeli war on the West Bank has come at a high price in Palestinian blood. As of 12 August, at least 632 Palestinians had been killed with 5,400 wounded in the West Bank alone, according to the Ministry of Health. When the war on Gaza is over, the war on the West Bank will grow more intense and bloodier, but with the clear strategic goal of annexing the whole territory, even though the International Court of Justice resolved on 19 July that Israel’s “annexation and… assertion of permanent control” in the West Bank is illegal.
To avoid an even greater war and genocide than that which is taking place before our eyes in Gaza, the international community must use all available means to enforce international law and bring to an end Israel’s brutal, genocidal occupation of Palestine.
Displaced Palestinians flee northern Gaza by foot and in vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, September 15, 2025
