Reply With QuoteTaken a while for the MSM to find this story and decide to run it.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...raeli-military
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...israeli-attack
A footballer known as the “Palestinian Pelé” has been killed in an Israeli attack in southern Gaza, according to the Palestine Football Association (PFA).
Suleiman al-Obeid was killed on Wednesday when Israeli forces attacked civilians waiting for humanitarian aid, the PFA said.
‘‘During his long career, al-Obeid, 41, scored more than 100 goals, making him one of the brightest stars of Palestinian football,” it said.
Born in Gaza on 24 March 1984, Obeid began his footballing career with Khadamat al-Shati, later playing for Markaz Shabab al-Am’ari in the occupied West Bank, and Gaza Sport. A fixture in the Palestinian national side after his debut in 2007, Obeid gained 24 caps and scored twice, the PFA said, most memorably with a scissor-kick against Yemen during the 2010 West Asian Football Federation championship.
His talent on the pitch earned him the nickname of “the Palestinian Pelé” – a nod to the legendary Brazilian widely hailed as one of the greatest players of all time.
His death adds to a growing toll of athletes lost in Gaza since the war began, with at least 662 sportspeople and their relatives reported to have been killed.
“The number of footballers killed or who died from starvation has reached 421, including 103 children,” the PFA said.
Obeid is survived by his wife and five children.
According to the PFA, 288 sports facilities have been damaged or reduced to rubble across Gaza and the West Bank, from stadiums and training grounds to gyms and clubhouses. The vast majority, 268, were in Gaza, while 20 were in the West Bank, with about half serving football directly.
Among the sites hit was the PFA’s headquarters in Gaza, struck during an Israeli air raid.
Taken a while for the MSM to find this story and decide to run it.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...raeli-military
Another example here.Originally Posted by jon1959
https://x.com/kahlissee/status/1953791600917713249?s=61
JVL Introduction
This is a howl of outrage and passionate plea from Avrum Burg, former head of the Jewish Agency and speaker of the Israeli Knesset.
It is a call for Jews to take sides, to speak against the zealots, by appealing to the International Court of Justice:
“In our appeal, we shall declare: We will not allow the State of Israel, which systematically inflicts violence upon a civilian population, to speak in our name. We will not allow Judaism to be a cover for crimes. This is not a rejection of our people it is a defense of its soul. Not destruction but repair.”
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org...cles-for-you_1
JVL Introduction
This is Brant Rosen’s cautious welcome to the growing number of Jewish leaders who are speaking out against what is being done to Gaza. His concerns are less than that they are rather late to the struggle because coming late is better than not coming at all, but rather does the attention push Palestinians’ voices further into the background and what is the focus of their protest. As a Jewish organisation fighting for peace and justice for Palestinians, how to better raise Palestinian voices is a question for us all. However, a major issue is this failure to “join up the dots” and to put the blame only on this government in Israel as though the Nakba and Occupation under previous Israeli governments are somehow irrelevant and as if this barbarity is an aberration rather than a more extreme version of what has gone before.
It is good that it is becoming too much even for advocates for Israel but we note something similar to what Brant Rosen has observed in this approach from “Top Jewish Philanthropists” whose concern seems to be motivated by the damaging impact of the genocide on world Jewry more than the Palestinian people.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org...cles-for-you_1
What is it with senior American politicians called Mike?
In Trump's first term it was Mike Pence (Vice President) and Mike Pompeo (Secretary of State) - both evangelical Christians, Christian Zionists and uber supporters of ethnic cleansing to achieve 'biblical borders' for an expanded Israel (annexing Palestine and parts of surrounding countries).
In Trump's second term it is Mike Johnson (Speaker of the House) and Mike Huckabee (US Ambassador to Israel) doing the same and talking about 'real estate deals' between a god and his chosen people written in an old book!
Not sure Huckabee can decide whether he's working for Trump or Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...r-gaza-dresden
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...m-darkest-hour
As the world witnesses the horrors unfolding in Gaza, a related tragedy continues with chilling regularity: the systematic targeting and killing of journalists. Just as the Gaza journalistic community thought matters could not get any worse, Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal occupying forces carried out yet another cold-blooded murder on Sunday, this time of the Al Jazeera journalists Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqea, along with videographers Ibrahim Thaher, Mohammed Nofal and their colleagues. They were sheltering in a media tent near al-Shifa hospital, and were killed by a direct strike.
The Israeli war machine, accelerating its stated goal of occupying Gaza, showed no restraint in targeting journalists, in violation of international conventions. So far in this war it has killed 238 of us. The war on Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists and media workers in living memory, with 2024 recording the highest number of journalists killed, the vast majority at the hands of Israeli forces. The systematic targeting and elimination of journalists is not merely a local or regional tragedy; it is a catastrophic breach of international norms regarding the protection of journalists in conflict zones, signalling a global collapse of the moral responsibility in safeguarding those who risk everything to shed light on the realities of war.
Gaza is not the only place where journalists are under siege. Threats, intimidation and murderous violence against journalists are on the rise. However, what differentiates Israeli crimes is the impunity with which the occupation forces murder journalists and the indifference shown by leaders of the so-called free world. What is especially shocking is when some media organisations repeat the Israeli regime’s false allegations against targeted journalists without verification.
By any measure, it is the most dangerous time to be a journalist in recent history. Reporters are threatened, harassed and killed merely for fulfilling their public duty of bearing witness and reporting the truth. Worldwide, the dangers faced by journalists in conflict zones have intensified. In 2023, a journalist or media worker was killed, on average, every four days. In 2024, this grim statistic worsened to once every three days, most of those by Israeli forces. The journalists in Gaza are not parachuted-in international correspondents but local journalists – those who know the land, the people and the stories best. These journalists are not just reporting on Gaza’s tragedy; they are living it.
This surge in violence against journalists is neither accidental nor isolated. It is part of a broader, deeply worrying trend: the systematic silencing of the media, often orchestrated by autocrats and regimes who seek to conceal their crimes in darkness. This should horrify us all. It is an assault not only on individual reporters but on the entire global public’s right to know, to understand the depth of human suffering, and to hold the powerful to account.
'Israel is wiping out the witnesses' - Editorial:
Anas al-Sharif knew that far from offering protection amid the slaughter in Gaza, his press credentials further endangered him. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) warned last month of acute danger to the 28-year-old’s life as the Israel Defense Forces stepped up online attacks on him. These were not merely smears, but a death threat in response to his coverage, the Al Jazeera reporter said. And now he is dead, one of five media workers killed in an airstrike on Sunday.
The CPJ says that more than 180 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in almost two years of war – more than the number who have died globally in the previous three years. This does not merely reflect Gaza’s vast death toll – 61,599, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry and many more if independent experts are correct. Nor does it merely reflect the courage shown by reporters, photographers, camera operators and others in a war zone. The CPJ says 26 of the reporters were targeted.
Israeli officials have bragged of killing Mr Sharif, whom they have claimed was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell, planning rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Mr Sharif and Al Jazeera had already denied this. It would surely be hard for such a prominent figure to combine reporting with command of such a unit. The documents offered up by Israel as evidence end two years before the war began, and were reportedly screen grabs of electronic spreadsheets, not independently verified.
Israeli officials have repeatedly offered wildly misleading and rapidly shifting accounts of events, including the killing of paramedics in Gaza this spring. In 2022, an IDF general reportedly told American officials within hours that one of its soldiers had probably shot dead the acclaimed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank – but Israeli officials insisted publicly that Palestinian militants were to blame. No justification has even been attempted for the deaths of Mr Sharif’s colleagues.
Mr Sharif’s 90-year-old father was killed in an airstrike on their home in late 2023, after Israeli military officials called the journalist telling him to stop reporting and leave Gaza. Israeli claims that he was a Hamas fighter resurfaced last month after his emotional reporting on starvation went viral. He was killed as outrage mounted over Gaza’s famine and shortly after Israel announced its plan to launch a ground offensive in Gaza City, which would only deepen the catastrophe and is reportedly opposed by many in the military too. The deaths of the Al Jazeera team in the city ensure few are left to bear witness to what unfolds. International correspondents are unable to enter Gaza except on escorted military trips during which they cannot speak to Palestinians.
Sheltered by the US, Israel’s government appears unmoved as international public opinion turns against it and even staunch allies blench at the horrors of Gaza. The Al Jazeera killings have been widely and rightly condemned. The Reporters sans Frontières group has also urged the international criminal court to investigate the treatment of media workers.
“If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice,” Mr Sharif wrote in a posthumously published statement. Deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime: an assault not only on the person, but on truth itself. Yet it cannot disguise Israel’s other atrocities. Rather, it adds to the charge sheet against its leaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-the-witnesses
Mass murder of journalists in Gaza (and the West Bank), with indifference or collusion from Western governments and influential parts of the Western mass media (especially German and American):
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...urnalists-gaza
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...anas-al-sharif
Israeli airstrikes on Tehran’s Evin prison in June killed scores of detainees, visitors and staff in what Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called an “apparent war crime”. Iranian authorities have since subjected survivors to abuse, enforced disappearances and inhumane detention conditions, the rights group said.
HRW’s investigation, based on satellite imagery, videos and witness accounts, found the 23 June Israeli airstrikes destroyed visitation halls, prison wards, the central kitchen, the medical clinic and administrative offices. No evident military targets were identified in the facility, which held more than 1,500 prisoners at the time, many of whom had been jailed for peaceful activism.
“Israel’s strikes on Evin prison on June 23 killed and injured scores of civilians without any evident military target in violation of the laws of war and is an apparent war crime,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at HRW. “The Israeli attack placed at grave risk the already precarious lives of Evin’s prisoners, many of them wrongfully detained dissidents and activists.”
At least 80 people died in the attack, which occurred during visiting hours, when public areas were at their busiest. HRW described the strike as unlawfully indiscriminate. Israeli officials have called Evin a “symbol of oppression” but have provided no evidence of military use.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...hran-war-crime
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...e-palestinians
Microsoft has launched an “urgent” external inquiry into allegations Israel’s military surveillance agency has used the company’s technology to facilitate the mass surveillance of Palestinians.
The company said on Friday the formal review was in response to a Guardian investigation that revealed how the Unit 8200 spy agency has relied on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast collection of everyday Palestinian mobile phone calls.
The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found Unit 8200 made use of a customised and segregated area within Azure to store recordings of millions of calls made daily in Gaza and the West Bank.
In a statement, Microsoft said “using Azure for the storage of data files of phone calls obtained through broad or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank” would be prohibited by its terms of service.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/...estinian-state
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says he will approve thousands of housing units in a highly controversial and long-delayed illegal settlement project in the occupied West Bank, saying the move “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Smotrich on Thursday said he would approve tenders to build more than 3,000 homes in the E1 area settlement project that would connect Jerusalem and the existing illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, located several kilometres to the east.
“This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise,” he said. “Anyone in the world who tries today to recognise a Palestinian state will receive an answer from us on the ground,” he said.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the new settlement plan an extension of crimes of genocide, displacement and annexation, and an echo of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements regarding what he called “Greater Israel”.
In a statement before the announcement, Smotrich, who is also a minister in Israel’s Ministry of Defence with broad responsibility for approving settlements in the occupied West Bank, hailed the project as “Zionism at its best”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgdzxpkdd7o
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said plans to build more than 3,000 homes in a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank will "bury the idea of a Palestinian state".
The so-called E1 project between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement has been frozen for decades amid fierce opposition internationally. Building there would effectively cut off the West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem.
Smotrich said it would thwart the idea of a Palestinian state "because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise".
Settlements are considered illegal under international law and form one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.
About 700,000 settlers live in approximately 160 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now. It is land Palestinians seek for a future independent state.
"After decades of international pressure and freezes, we are breaking conventions and connecting Maale Adumim to Jerusalem," Smotrich said.
"This is Zionism at its best - building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel."
It follows declarations in recent days by a growing number of countries of their intention to recognise a Palestinian state in coming months, which Israel has denounced.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqxg3xg8xyyo
New footage shared on social media shows the far-right Israeli minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, taunting the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, in his cell.
The Palestinian Authority has condemned the video. Its Vice-President Hussein al-Sheikh described it as "the epitome of psychological, moral and physical terrorism."
The 13-second-long video clip, external is the first time that Barghouti has been publicly seen in years. He appears aged and gaunt.
An average of 420 children were admitted to hospitals in Gaza per day in July due to acute malnutrition, compared to a daily average of 112 from the beginning of the year until mid-June, according to a report published Thursday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e...&id=9ceeaea768
A special unit in Israel’s military was tasked with identifying reporters it could smear as undercover Hamas fighters, to target them and to blunt international outrage over the killing of media workers, the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine reports.
The “legitimisation cell” was set up after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack to gather information that could bolster Israel’s image and shore up diplomatic and military support from key allies, the report said, citing three intelligence sources.
According to the report, in at least one case the unit misrepresented information in order to falsely describe a journalist as a militant, a designation that in Gaza is in effect a death sentence. The label was reversed before the man was attacked, one of the sources said.
Earlier this week, Israel killed the Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and three colleagues in their makeshift newsroom, after claiming Sharif was a Hamas commander. The killings focused global attention on the extreme dangers faced by Palestinian journalists in Gaza and Israel’s efforts to manipulate media coverage of the war.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-gaza-to-hamas
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...e-laura-loomer
The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump who has described herself as “a proud Islamophobe”.
“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the state department said in a message posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, from which Loomer was banned before it was purchased by Elon Musk.
In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, Loomer had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with false claims that their shouts of joy were “jihadi chants” and that they were “doing the HAMAS terror whistle”.
Loomer also falsely claimed that she had “exclusively obtained” the two video clips she shared. One was copied from a medical aid charity’s public Instagram account and the other was from the Houston Chronicle’s YouTube channel.
After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone”, Loomer demanded to know “who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone”.
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The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, a US-based charity, called on the Trump administration to “reverse this dangerous and inhumane decision.” Over the last 30 years the charity has evacuated thousands of Palestinian children to the US for medical care, it said in a statement.
“Medical evacuations are a lifeline for the children of Gaza who would otherwise face unimaginable suffering or death due to the collapse of medical infrastructure in Gaza.”
The Council on Islamic-American Relations said the block on visas was “the latest sign that the intentional cruelty of President Trump’s ‘Israel First’ administration knows no bounds” and added that it was “deeply ironic” that the Trump administration was meanwhile “rolling out the red carpet for racists and indicted war criminals from the Israeli government.”
“This ban is just the latest example of our government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, which is increasingly rejected by the American people,” it continued.
The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump who has described herself as “a proud Islamophobe”.
“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the state department said in a message posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, from which Loomer was banned before it was purchased by Elon Musk.
In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, Loomer had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with false claims that their shouts of joy were “jihadi chants” and that they were “doing the HAMAS terror whistle”.
Loomer also falsely claimed that she had “exclusively obtained” the two video clips she shared. One was copied from a medical aid charity’s public Instagram account and the other was from the Houston Chronicle’s YouTube channel.
After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone”, Loomer demanded to know “who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone”.
-
The Council on Islamic-American Relations said the block on visas was “the latest sign that the intentional cruelty of President Trump’s ‘Israel First’ administration knows no bounds” and added that it was “deeply ironic” that the Trump administration was meanwhile “rolling out the red carpet for racists and indicted war criminals from the Israeli government.”
“This ban is just the latest example of our government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, which is increasingly rejected by the American people,” it continued.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...e-laura-loomer
Israeli media ‘completely ignored’ Gaza starvation – is that finally changing?
A growing focus on hunger in Gaza in the global media has led some Israeli outlets to report on it for the first time.
Images of Palestinian children in Gaza, emaciated by hunger under the blockade imposed by Israel, and of families grieving the more than 61,000 people killed in the territory have stirred outrage among foreign governments and much of the global public. Inside Israel, however, the reaction has been markedly different.
In a poll conducted in late July by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), more than three-quarters of Jewish Israelis – 79% – said they were either “not very troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among Gaza’s Palestinian population.
According to Anat Saragusti, an expert on the media, the reason is simple: most people in Israel are unaware of those reports because for months they have never seen them.
“Until a couple of weeks ago, you could count only a handful of reports from Gaza not filtered by the IDF,” said Saragusti, the head of freedom of the press at the Union of Journalists in Israel. Except for a few newspapers such as the leftwing Haaretz, she said, “all the other mainstream media completely ignored what’s going on on the Palestinian side – the human casualties there, the numbers of children killed in this war. The Israeli audience simply did not see that at all.”
In the past few weeks, the growing focus on the issue in the international media has led to some Israeli newspapers and TV channels reporting on hunger in Gaza for the first time, albeit as a debatable issue.
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Saragusti said: “Despite images of emaciated children published by major newspapers around the world, Israel pushed back. And Israeli media outlets adopted the narrative set out by the Israeli leadership, insisting that there is no starvation in Gaza.”
Although Israel appears to exist within its own bubble, shielded by a narrative that leaves no room for the suffering of people in Gaza, thousands of demonstrators who recently filled the streets of Tel Aviv are now urging the government to halt the atrocities against the Palestinians.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...nally-changing
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...7-october-gaza
The Israeli general who headed military intelligence on 7 October 2023 has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day and “it does not matter now if they are children”, in recordings broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12 TV station.
Aharon Haliva said the toll in Gaza, which he put at more than 50,000 dead, was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians.
“They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price,” he added, referring to the mass expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands after the creation of Israel in 1948. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic.
Much of Israel’s leadership and media has used genocidal rhetoric about Palestinians since Hamas’s 7 October attacks, including describing them as “human animals”, saying there are “no innocents” in Gaza and calling for Gaza’s total destruction and its ethnic cleansing.
However, Haliva’s description of a campaign of mass killing including children was an unusually direct description of collective punishment of civilians, which is illegal under international law.
Hopefully positive.
Hamas source says group agrees to latest Gaza ceasefire proposal
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgjye15zdlo
https://www.reuters.com/world/americ...sos-2025-08-20
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) - A 58% majority of Americans believe that every country in the United Nations should recognize Palestine as a nation, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, as Israel and Hamas considered a possible truce in the nearly two-year-long war.
Some 33% of respondents did not agree that U.N. members should recognize a Palestinian state and 9% did not answer.
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