Displaced Palestinians fleeing Beit Lahia amid ongoing Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip arrive in Jabalia, northern Gaza, May 16, 2025
LAWYERS shared harrowing testimonies today from doctors who treated children shot through the heart in Gaza as the government defended its decision to continue exporting arms to Israel in court.
In written submissions for the case, the government has claimed there is a “tenable view that no genocide has occurred or is occurring.”
But last August, doctors submitted chilling evidence now being shared by Global Legal Action Network (Glan), which launched the challenge alongside Palestinian organisation Al-Haq.
Dr Mark Perlmutter, who has been a humanitarian surgeon for 30 years, travelled to Gaza with the World Health Organisation last year.
He recounted how he “saw more incinerated and shredded children than I have ever seen in my entire life of working in war zones combined.”
He described treating children “whose faces had been completely disfigured, exposing the muscles.“They no longer had faces”.”I treated so many children that had been snipered, some of them multiple times.”
He said that he evaluated two children who had been snipered twice each in the head and chest.
“These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately.”
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.
More than 20 doctors are believed to remain inside detention facilities. Right, doctors being detained near Kamal Adwan hospital, including Dr Khalid Hamoudeh (left) and Dr Wadee Qasem (right). Composite: Guardian
At least 160 healthcare workers from Gaza, including more than 20 doctors, are believed to still be inside Israeli detention facilities as the World Health Organisation expressed deep concern about their wellbeing and safety.
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A lawyer representing Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, whose detention by Israeli forces in December sparked international condemnation, recently said he had been allowed to visit Abu Safiya in detention in Ofer Prison in Ramallah for the first time and that he said he had been tortured, beaten and denied medical treatment.
The Guardian and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) have alsoheard detailed testimony from seven senior doctors who claimed they were taken from hospitals, ambulances and checkpoints in Gaza, illegally transferred across the border into Israeli-run prison facilities and subjected to months of torture, beatings, starvation and inhumane treatment before being released without charge.
“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital, who was detained for seven months in Israeli prisons before being released without charge.
“I am talking about clubbing, being beaten with rifle butts and being attacked by dogs. There was little to no food, no personal hygiene, no soap inside the cells, no water, no toilet, no toilet paper … I saw people who were dying there … I was beaten so badly I couldn’t use my legs or walk. No day passes without torture.”
Relatives and friends mourn over the bodies of five Palestinian journalists who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, December 26, 2024
ISRAEL bombing the airport in Yemen’s capital Sana’a when World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was actually at it shows a brazen contempt for the United Nations.
It is not new. Israel has expressed this contempt repeatedly. Most dramatically when its ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan used a miniature shredder to shred the UN Charter after the general assembly voted in favour of giving Palestine full membership in May.
But it is seen too in the bombardment of UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. In the evidence-free assertion that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA harbours Hamas fighters and subsequent decree banning the agency from operating in Israel-controlled territory — meaning the whole of Palestine.
Benjamin Netanyahu accuses the United Nations of intrinsic hostility to Israel, calling it an “anti-Israel flat Earth society” which has “an automatic majority willing to demonise the Jewish state.”
The siege mentality is deliberate: only by presenting this fortress state, so extravagantly armed by its Washington sponsors that it can extend its bombing campaigns across Lebanon, Syria and Yemen after over a year of carpet-bombing Gaza, as under constant existential menace can he justify its frenetic aggression.
Enforcing this narrative is why Israel has become more authoritarian in step with its increasing belligerence, codifying institutional racism through measures like the Nation-State Law and pending legislation that could bar parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel (and the Communist Party of Israel to boot) from standing in elections.
As its suspended communist MP Ofer Cassif warns, there is no positive outcome possible from this vicious cycle: an unendable, unwinnable war against the world will bring Israelis neither security nor peace.
Israel is a rogue state, a danger to itself and others, but it will not be stopped by other rogue states. Just as the agony of the Palestinians continues due to the US policy of unlimited support for Israel, we cannot expect the so-called “free world” to step in on Yemen’s behalf.
Least of all Britain. When evidence of Saudi Arabia deliberately bombing Yemeni schools and hospitals became undeniable, even the United States paused arms sales — but Britain did not.
Expecting our government to be persuaded or even shamed into upholding international law is a fool’s errand.
There is much to criticise in the United Nations: its undemocratic structure, the way the veto power can be wielded to shield perpetrators of war crimes.
Even so, since the beginning of the 21st century a clear division has emerged between the US-led West, awarding itself the right to violate international law by invading, bombing and assassinating whoever it likes, and emerging powers which support the United Nations — a creation of the Allied victory over fascism, intended to prevent the lawless aggression that characterised Nazi Germany and its allies.
China brokered peace in Yemen through a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. China continually makes the case too for UN recognition of a Palestinian state, and hosted talks between 14 Palestinian factions last year in an attempt to forge a united Palestinian leadership capable of taking that project forward.
China, like most of the global South, is not happy with an international system designed in Western capitals 80 years ago, and calls for a more equitable international order. Yet China, unlike the Western founders of that system, is acting to uphold its principles and prevent the world descending into the kind of “might is right” violence the UN was supposed to stop.
We need to recognise how the world looks from outside the West. The “rules-based international order” is not threatened by emerging powers, but by the US-led imperialist camp. We don’t rein in Israel, because its violence is ours.
This is why solidarity with Palestine means fighting for peace and disarmament in Britain, and resisting the constant militarist propaganda pretending our country is under threat.
An Israeli armoured vehicle sits on an Israeli army position at the Israel-Gaza border, as seen from southern Israel, December 1, 2024
A TOP aid group accused the Israelis today of “suffocating” humanitarian support for the Palestinians in Gaza.
Spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council, Ahmed Bayram, said the people of Gaza are suffering from a massive shortage of humanitarian supplies.
Mr Bayram said: “I think, at this rate, Israel is suffocating the support for these people,” adding that Gaza needs 25 supply trucks to enter each week instead of the “10 or 11” that bring aid into the enclave now.
He said the Israelis are not “only constraining access, the roads and the safety of the people and the aid workers, but also there is a systematic attempt here to keep people in the cold and keep them starving.”
In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the Israeli army has reportedly continued to target agricultural plots which has caused widespread destruction and worsened the already dire humanitarian situation facing the Palestinian people.
The World Health Organisation reported on Sunday that it had managed to drop off some food, fuel and medical supplies to the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
Original article republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced on Monday that 540,000 Yemeni children under the age of five are severely emaciated. The WHO made its announcement in a post on X to mark World Humanitarian Day.
“Yemen faces a double burden of disease and conflict, whereby 17.8 million need health assistance, including 540,000 children under 5 with severe wasting,” said the UN-affiliated organisation. “With ongoing conflict and a collapsing healthcare system, it is crucial that we #ActForHumanity.”
The health sector in Yemen faces difficult challenges, amid great suffering experienced by most citizens who are in dire need of assistance due to the repercussions of the war that has been ongoing for a decade.
Displaced Palestinians fleeing Beit Lahia amid ongoing Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip arrive in Jabalia, northern Gaza, May 16, 2025
