"It’s a deliberate policy, not a natural disaster. In fact, the UN specifically called on Israel to lift the restrictions on aid, making this headline deliberately misleading...." Assal Rad

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

It’s a deliberate policy, not a natural disaster.

 

 https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2001477328028012898/photo/1

In fact, the UN specifically called on Israel to lift the restrictions on aid, making this headline deliberately misleading.  The only time the article refers to Israel’s role in the lack of aid is to platform their denials.

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2001479304275022137  

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OWEN JONES: "The letter notes that the BBC’s reporting on Israel and Palestine “falls short of our own editorial standards”, with “a gulf between the BBC’s coverage of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank and what our audiences can see is happening via multiple credible sources including human rights organisations, staff at the UN and journalists on the ground.”  https://www.owenjones.news/p/bbc-staff-were-forced-to-do-pro-israel

Assal Rad 

@AssalRad

 

Ethnic cleansing in plain sight. Where is the news coverage?

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2001351467559719123 

 

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Owen Jones Goes To Palestine

"Why are Western politicians and media outlets suddenly speaking about Israel's crimes? Not to save the Palestinian people from genocide. It's to protect their own reputations." OWEN JONES: Have Israel's Friends ABANDONED It? w/. Omar Baddar

"Why are Western politicians and media outlets suddenly speaking about Israel's crimes? Not to save the Palestinian people from genocide. It's to protect their own reputations."

Owen Jones in The Guardian: Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the west’s help. The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty bluster. They knew what was happening all along.

"Israel has perpetrated the biggest slaughter of aid workers in history, killing more than 400 by the spring. It waged a relentless war against Gaza’s main humanitarian agency – Unrwa, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency – and banned it from the occupied territories last October. Its military killed police officers charged with escorting aid and preventing looting. It’s not just the blocking of aid from entering. Israel’s onslaught has left nearly all agricultural land unusable, as well as damaging 80% of cropland. Nearly all livestock and most plant life is dead. Gaza’s port and fishing vehicles have been destroyed, and Palestinians defying Israel’s ban on fishing face slaughter.The massacre of starving Palestinians looking for aid has been a consistent theme..."  Owen Jones

 

Wed 30 Jul 2025 03.00 EDT

Palestinians waiting for food aid from a charity in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, 29 July 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

What have we done? As the UN-backed monitor declares that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip”, this should have been the question ricocheting between the walls as Keir Starmer met Donald Trump this week. Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza is, after all, a crime confessed to, designed and implemented in plain sight. Starmer has said the UK will recognise Palestinian statehood if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire and a two-state solution, but don’t be beguiled: Palestinian national self-determination is an inalienable right, not a bargaining chip, and it’s the most symbolic action he could take rather than, say, imposing sweeping sanctions and ending all arms sales. The hand-wringing of western politicians and media outlets will not feed Gaza’s emaciated children, any more than it will absolve them of guilt.

Israel’s leaders have said, explicitly, repeatedly, from the very beginning, that they are deliberately starving Gaza’s people. “Man-made famine is not something that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Martin Griffiths, the UN’s former humanitarian chief, tells me. On 9 October 2023, Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced “a complete siege on [Gaza]: no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”, justified on the grounds: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”. The next day, the Israeli general charged with humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank – Ghassan Alian – declared that the “citizens of Gaza” were “human beasts” who would suffer “a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

The following week, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised “we will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip”. These statements were not reported at all by many western media outlets – or, if they were, it was in passing and with no explanation given about their objectively illegal intent. It’s as though these statements were being uttered in a parallel universe, because if they were accurately covered with due prominence, then our media would have been forced to cover Israel’s onslaught as a criminal enterprise, rather than a war of self-defence.

Israel’s western allies knew exactly what it was up to.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/30/israel-starvation-gaza-keir-starmer-west

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BBC staff: we're forced to do pro-Israel PR.... A devastating letter signed by over 100 BBC journalists underlines one of the great scandals of our age- Owen Jones Jul 02, 2025

 Owen Jones

@owenjonesjourno

 

Just the latest chapter in the biggest scandal of Western journalism of our time... 

BBC staff: we're forced to do pro-Israel PR

A devastating letter signed by over 100 BBC journalists underlines one of the great scandals of our age

Owen Jones

Jul 02, 2025

 

This is a devastating intervention. More than a hundred BBC employees have written a letter to the director general, Tim Davie, complaining that the Corporation has become a mouthpiece for Israel.

It was also signed by 300 other journalists and media professionals: one of them was yours truly. The BBC employees, as you would expect, are all anonymous, because otherwise they would face grave consequences to their careers.

The letter says:

We’re writing to express our concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine. We believe the refusal to broadcast the documentary ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ is just one in a long line of agenda driven decisions. It demonstrates, once again, that the BBC is not reporting “without fear or favour” when it comes to Israel.

It goes on to note that the decision not to broadcast the investigation was taken by BBC management despite the content being signed off in accordance with BBC guidelines and editorial policy, which it says “Appears to be a political decision”, adding that the BBC response shows the organisation “is crippled by the fear of being perceived as critical of the Israeli government.”  ... READ MORE https://www.owenjones.news/p/bbc-staff-were-forced-to-do-pro-israel

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Compare the courage of Greta Thunberg’s Gaza aid mission with the inaction and complicity of western governments- The Madleen is no ‘selfie yacht’. It is a symbol of human compassion in a world that has decided to look away

Greta Thunberg aboard the Madleen when it sailed from Catania, Italy, on 31 May. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

by Owen Jones

Tue 10 Jun 2025 01.00 EDT

Imagine this: over the weekend, Britain – shocked by the scale of suffering in Gaza – decided to bypass international norms and institutions, and used its navy to deliver much-needed food, baby formula and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip’s ports.

This, of course, did not happen. Instead, it was left to activists on the Madleen, including Greta Thunberg, to make a symbolic attempt to break the blockade of aid and raise awareness of a looming “starvation crisis”. In the early hours of Monday morning, the ship was boarded by Israeli soldiers, allegedly in international waters, and the crew were taken to Israeli ports in anticipation of being repatriated. Lawyers for the activists have claimed that this is overreach by the Israeli armed forces, but the crew should consider their treatment light-touch. In 2010, the Israeli military stormed another aid flotilla and killed 10 activists in the process.

Since the news broke, Israel’s propaganda machine has gone into overdrive, dismissing the Madleen as a “selfie yacht”, a line echoed by western media outlets. “There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip – they do not involve Instagram selfies,” declared a shameless Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israel knows all about those ways, because it has systematically blocked them.

It’s worth noting that the Freedom Flotilla Coalition – the movement behind the Madleen – was launched in 2010, 13 years before 7 October. The blockade on the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza has been in place for nearly two decades. As an adviser to the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert put it: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

In 2012, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a leaked official document in which government officials calculated the minimum number of calories required for a human not to starve. The point: to make life miserable for the people of Gaza without incurring global outrage through mass starvation. A year before 7 October, the World Food Programme warned of the “dire humanitarian situation there”, noting that around half of Gaza’s caged population was “severely food insecure”.

In the past 20 months, Israel has ratcheted up the blockade.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/10/greta-thunberg-gaza-aid-mission-madleen

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