The Israeli government has no desire to reach a ceasefire/hostage-release agreement with Hamas and is leading the Middle East into ‘a comprehensive, multi-front confrontation with no reasonable timetable for ending it’. That’s not some Western peace activist’s view; that’s the opinion of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, writing in an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on 25 August.
Olmert wrote: ‘Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want the hostages back. There is no chance…
During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with 12 different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands (see the 19 July advisory opinion of the international court of justice), the genocide…
Felicity:
Here is the latest news from the Villages Group, who continue, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, to visit their friends in the South Mount Hebron hills [near the southern border of the West Bank]. This report concerns a tiny village, Umm al-Khair, where once I sat with children in a tent and sang with them. Already, they knew constant violence from their neighbours in the settlement, and they were already deeply traumatised.
Since 7…
The British public want to ban arms sales to Israel by a majority of three to one, of those who have an opinion. That’s according to a Deltapoll survey carried out at the end of June for the online UAE news site, the National.
Worryingly, the poll also found that 36 percent of Britons thought Gaza ceasefire protests should not be allowed to go ahead in future, compared to only 41 percent who think they should be allowed. Freedom to protest does not have majority support, at…
‘Israeli soldiers routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply because they entered an area that the military defined as a “no-go zone”.’ This was some of the horrifying testimony six Israeli soldiers gave to an Israeli magazine, +972, in July.
The six ‘paint[ed] a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals; the army only hides them from view ahead of the arrival of international aid convoys, so that “images of people…
Since December, PN has carried a series of reports by the Electronic Intifada gathering together evidence that a number of Israeli citizens were deliberately killed by the Israel defence forces on 7 October last year, during the Hamas-led attacks (see PNs 2669, 2670, 2671 - print editions only).
The weight of evidence has finally broken through into the mainstream British press, in the Telegraph and the Guardian.
A long story on this…
Throughout the last six months, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ‘repeatedly torpedoed’ the progress of ceasefire talks in the Gaza War – ‘particularly when it came to decisive moments’ – according to Haaretz, the left-liberal Israeli newspaper.
As we go to press, Netanyahu is continuing this pattern, undermining the latest attempted ‘breakthrough’ in the ceasefire talks with impossible demands designed to drive Hamas out of the negotiations.
Netanyahu’s…
Over 15 Gaza solidarity camps (or ‘encampments’) have sprung up around the UK, following the example of those at more than 140 universities in the US which have often been met with police violence and mass arrests. Here in the UK, after occupations of two Bristol university buildings were forced to end in late March and early April (because of the threat of legal action), students began an encampment on 1 May. The focus, as elsewhere, is on getting institutions to break ties with companies…
After right-wing Israeli activists stopped an aid convoy to Gaza, destroyed food supplies, set two trucks on fire and beat up a Palestinian driver, a Jewish-Arab peace group called ‘Standing Together’ mobilised hundreds of supporters on 19 May to protect the aid trucks, which all got through. Standing Together believe their ‘Humanitarian Guard’, which included a convoy of cars, forced the police to take stronger action.
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition has two missions on. The main ‘Break the Siege’ effort involves one large cargo ship, the Anadolu (Anatolia), and a ferry, the Akdeniz (the Mediterranean).
The Anadolu is trying to break the illegal Israeli siege on Gaza by delivering 5,000 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The Akdeniz is said to be carrying hundreds of participants from over a dozen countries including Australia, Indonesia, Ireland,…
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis was banned from entering Germany in April to stop him giving a speech at the Palestine Congress in Berlin.
On 12 April, 930 German police officers were sent to shut down the three-day event as it began. The congress had been organised by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East and the German branch of DiEM25, the left-wing European movement.
Varoufakis and other banned speakers were told that appearing at the congress by…
A majority of British people want to end arms sales to Israel, two recent polls have found.
A YouGov poll for Action for Humanity in early April found that 56 percent of people want to end the export of weapons and parts to Israel, with only 17 percent wanting them to continue: www.tinyurl.com/peacenews4237
Another YouGov poll in early May for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the Council for Arab-British Understanding (…
Hamas stunned the world by agreeing to an Israeli-US-Qatari-Egyptian ceasefire proposal on 6 May. Israel then refused to accept the ceasefire deal it had previously agreed – and immediately launched military attacks on Rafah in the south of Gaza, where over a million Palestinians had fled for safety from other, more devastated parts of the territory.
Earlier, on 30 April, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ‘said he would invade Rafah “with or without a deal,” a vow that…
In the general election campaign, every candidate for the Westminster parliament must be told that if they do not call for an immediate, permanent, ceasefire in Gaza, they will not receive your vote.
Out of all the crises and pressing issues in the world, the slaughter in Gaza must be the most urgent question of the British general election.
Both the Conservatives and Labour pretend to be calling for a ceasefire, but all they mean by that is a few weeks’ pause to get…
Its text finalised in early December 2023, Deluge brings together expert analysis and commentary from journalists, academics and campaigners, its 13 contributions divided into three sections.
In the first (‘Contexts’), two stand-out essays dismantle the myth that Hamas is to blame for the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the facile notion that Gaza’s current plight is a consequence of its people’s failure to adopt nonviolence.
In reality, as academic Colter…
