Omar el Qataa is a photojournalist operating out of northern Gaza
Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, according to BBC research.
In a comprehensive analysis of Facebook data, we found that newsrooms in the Palestinian territories – in Gaza and the West Bank – had suffered a steep drop in audience engagement since October 2023.
The BBC has also seen leaked documents showing that Instagram – another Meta-owned platform – increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments after October 2023.
Meta – the owner of Facebook – says that any implication that it deliberately suppressed particular voices is “unequivocally false”.
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During a period of war, audience engagement might be expected to rise. However, the data showed a 77% decline after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.
Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook. Journalists at the newsroom shared statistics with us showing a 60% drop in the number of people seeing their posts.
“Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people,” says Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel.
Over the past year, Palestinian journalists have raised fears that their online content is being “shadow-banned” by Meta – in other words, restricted in how many people see it.
To test this, we carried out the same data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news organisations such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13. These pages also posted a large amount of war-related content, but their audience engagement increased by nearly 37%.
Hundreds of demonstrators, holding Israeli flags and photos of prisoners, gather at the streets and march from Jaffa Street in Jerusalem towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence, to demand a ceasefire and prisoner swap deal in Gaza in Jerusalem on December 14, 2024. [Saeed Qaq – Anadolu Agency]
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, said Saturday that the Israeli army bombed a location in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli hostages were held, confirming that the bombing was repeated to ensure their death, Anadolu reports.
Abu Obaida, the spokesperson for the group, said on Telegram: “The occupation army recently bombed a location where some enemy prisoners were present and repeated the bombing to ensure their death.”
“We have intelligence confirming that the enemy deliberately bombed the location with the aim of killing the prisoners and their guards,” Obaida noted.
He added: “Our fighters attempted to rescue the enemy prisoners and succeeded in retrieving one of them, whose fate remains unknown.”
Obaida held Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government, and the Israeli army “fully responsible for this event and the lives of their prisoners.”
A video released by al-Qassam Brigades showed the bombed location and a person without clarifying whether they were killed or injured, with no facial features shown.
The video included a statement: “Netanyahu and [Chief of General Staff Herzi] Halevi seek to get rid of their prisoners in Gaza by all means.”
Israel estimates that there are currently 101 Israeli prisoners held in Gaza.
Mediation efforts led by the US, Egypt, and Qatar to reach a cease-fire and prisoner swap agreement between Israel and Hamas have failed due to Netanyahu’s refusal to halt the ongoing conflict.
Israel has launched a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 44,800 victims, mostly women and children, since an attack by the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, on 7 October 2023.
The second year of genocide in Gaza has drawn growing international condemnation, with officials and institutions labeling the attacks and the blocking of aid deliveries as a deliberate attempt to destroy a population.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last month for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief 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 Gaza.
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A lifeguard hut rests on its side after Hurricane Milton, October 11, 2024, at Clearwater Beach, Fla.
RICH countries received strong criticism at the Cop29 conference in Azerbaijan today for wanting to spend more on wars and weapons than on preventing climate change.
“Global military spending stands at $2.5 trillion (£1.9trn) annually,” Panamian climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez told delegates at the faltering annual talks sponsored by the United Nations.
“For some, $2.5trn dollars to kill each other, it’s not enough, but $1trn to save lives is unreasonable.”
“Causing our own extinction is the most ridiculous thing. At least the dinosaurs had an asteroid. What is our excuse?”
Palestinian Environment Quality Authority chairwoman warned that Israel is committing “ecocide” after over a year of bombardments in Gaza.
“Protection of the environment is actually not an ancillary issue, it is not a secondary option, it is a basic right that is related to all of us as human beings,” she said.
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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva urged developed nations to consider moving their 2050 emission goals forward to 2040 or 2045.
“The G20 is responsible for 80 per cent of greenhouse-effect emissions,” he said. “Even if we are not walking the same speed, we can all take one more step.”
Meanwhile, a new scientific study has found that climate change has made Atlantic hurricanes about 18mph stronger in the last six years.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, center, stands with other dignitaries at the BRICS Plus conference in Kazan, Russia, on October 24. 2024. (Photo: Maxim Shipenkov/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“We need peace in Ukraine,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, speaking before Russian President Vladimir Putin.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking in Russia on Thursday, called for peace in Ukraine and “across the board” as wars also rage in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan.
Guterres spoke before Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders from “BRICS Plus” countries gathering in Kazan, a city roughly 500 miles east of Moscow.
“Across the board, we need peace,” Guterres said.
“We need peace in Ukraine,” he added. “A just peace in line with the U.N. Charter, international law, and U.N. General Assembly resolutions.”
After the speech, Guterres renewed his call for a cease-fire in Lebanon and Gaza.
“We need a cease-fire in Lebanon—as we need a cease-fire in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages,” he wrote on social media. “Escalation after escalation is leading to the unimaginable for the people of the region.”
We need a ceasefire in Lebanon – as we need a ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages.
Escalation after escalation is leading to the unimaginable for the people of the region. pic.twitter.com/YhwLkSbXzV
Putin presided over the closing ceremonies of the BRICS conference on Thursday, saying the group provided a counterbalance to the “perverse methods” of the West. Brazil, Russia, India, and China formed the group in the 2000s, with South Africa joining in 2010; BRICS recently expanded to include a number of other developing countries.
The conference drew the largest gathering of international diplomats into Russia since Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, escalating a conflict that had begun in 2014.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry criticized Guterres for attending the conference and noted that he did not attend Ukraine’s global peace summit in Switzerland in June.
“This is a wrong choice that does not advance the cause of peace,” according to the ministry’s social media account. “It only damages the U.N.’s reputation.”
Guterres has repeatedly called for a cease-fire in Gaza in the last year. The Israeli government declared him persona non grata earlier this month, barring him from entering the country on the grounds that he had not strongly condemned an Iranian barrage of missiles into Israel—an accusation Guterres denied, saying he did forcefully condemn the Iranian attack.
For U.N. Day, celebrated annually on October 24, Guterres issued a video statement calling for the world’s nations to keep the “beacon of hope” that is the U.N. “shining.”
The U.N. has had only limited success in stopping or slowing the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan, which are among many dozens of conflicts across the world and have brought mass death and destruction.
The total number of Ukrainians and Russians who’ve died since February 2022 has reached roughly one million, The Wall Street Journalreported last month.
In Gaza, more than 42,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces in roughly the last year, following the Hamas-led October 7 attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis. More than 2,500 people have been killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon over the same period, including 1,900 in the escalation that’s occurred in the last five weeks, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Dozens of Israelis have also died in that conflict.
A U.N. official said last month that the death toll in Sudan, which has been ravaged by civil war since April 2023, is at least 20,000 and could be much higher. The country is facing the prospect of a large-scale famine, with Save the Children on Tuesday raising the alarm that conditions there are worsening.
Netanyahu meets Harris July 2024. | Kenny Holston/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
This week, the US quietly deployed more weapons to Israel – particularly those that will be effective against Iran
US and Israeli leaders have celebrated this week’s death of Hamas military commander Yahya Sinwar. But while attention is focused on what it means for Gaza and the unlikely possibility of a ceasefire – few have noticed what this means for the much wider US-Iran war.
The US has, of course, put its military might, money and rhetoric behind Israel in its devastating operations in Gaza since last October. More specifically, the US even has a little-noticed permanent military presence in Israel itself – an advanced long-range over-the-horizon X-Band Radar system in the Negev. It is believed to be particularly effective against Iranian medium-range ballistic missiles.
But this week, two recent developments point to the US preparing for direct confrontation with Iran as it sharpens its ammunition and shares even more weaponry with its ally Israel.
First, we saw the US use long-range B-2 stealth bombers in attacks on underground weapons stores in Yemen for the first time. Only the US has these weapons which are thought to be the world’s most powerful ‘bunker-busters’ and can reach 200-feet underground. If there is a war with Iran it will be one of the very few means of inflicting damage on some of Iran’s most heavily protected targets.
That might sound scaremongering but the bombing of the Houthi targets in Yemen with these tools looks uncomfortably like a dry run for any conflict with Iran.
Secondly, we saw the deployment of an advanced US anti-missile system to Israel, again involving US military personnel. This is the THAAD weapon (terminal high-altitude aerial defence) which will supplement Israel’s own system that has not been as effective as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) would like.
From an IDF perspective, if Netanyahu agrees to a substantial military attack on Iran, the likely response from Iran will be to do its best to swamp Israeli missile defences. Thus, the US THAAD deployment will reduce the risk of an effective Iranian response.
This all seems a far cry from the repeated US calls for a ceasefire, but these are best seen as part of a smoke screen, behind which lies a long-term enemy
This all seems a far cry from the repeated US calls for a ceasefire, but these are best seen as part of a smoke screen, behind which lies a long-term enemy. Most Europeans, including the British, tend to forget that ever since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 it has been Iran that is seen in Washington as by far the worst threat to US political and economic interests in the Middle East.
This fits in substantially with the Israeli position where Iran is, in the longer term as by far the greatest threat to its security – far worse than Hamas, Hezbollah or any other political movement. Moreover, an an Iran equipped with nuclear weapons really would be seen as an existential threat. That existential threat may not fully extend to the US view, but Iran is by some measure the greatest challenge to US Middle East policy.
“Israeli military strikes are targeting Iran’s armed allies across a nearly 2000-mile stretch of the Middle East and threatening Iran itself. The efforts raise the possibility of an end to two decades of Iranian ascendancy in the region, to which the 2003 US invasion of Iraq inadvertently gave rise.”
Israel wants rid of the regime in Tehran but that would also be a very good outcome for the many hawkish elements in the US political system. While world attention may be on the war in Gaza with this week’s killing of Yahya Sinwar, a potential conflict involving Iran may turn out to be even more significant.
