We stand firmly against injustice in all its forms. Nothing can justify the current war crimes committed by Israel in occupied Palestine. Equally, nothing can excuse the continued support offered by other nations to this apartheid regime. If you believe in human rights, dignity, and justice, then we urge you to boycott this rogue state. Silence is complicity, do what’s right.
*[Scene: A grey, bombed-out landscape. Rubble and silence. Handala stands with his back turned, barefoot as always, facing the ruins of Gaza. Piers Morgan appears, looking weary, holding a microphone that no longer broadcasts lies but trembles with truth.]
Piers Morgan:
You’re… Handala, aren’t you? The boy from Naji al-Ali’s drawings. The symbol of resistance.
Handala (without turning):
You needed fifteen months of genocide to recognize me, Mr. Morgan. I have been standing here since 1948. The question is — where have you been?
Piers:
I was… reporting. Asking questions. Seeking balance.
Handala:
Balance? Between the boot and the neck? Between the bomb and the body? You called it “proportional.”
Piers (defensive):
I believed Israel had the right to defend itself.
Handala:
And the children buried beneath these stones — did they not have that right too? You said their deaths were collateral. Tell me, Mr. Morgan — when the truth bleeds, do your ratings rise or your conscience?
Piers (pauses):
I admit I was wrong. I see now what Israel is doing — the starvation, the destruction, the… genocide and apartheid.
Handala:
Genocide does not begin when you name it. It begins when you look away. When you interrupt the truth and give comfort to lies.
Piers:
You’re right. But it’s never too late to be on the right side of history.
Handala:
History doesn’t need spectators who arrive after the funeral. It needs witnesses who refuse to be silent at the first scream.
Piers:
Then what should I do now? Speak louder? Condemn more clearly?
Handala (turns slightly, for the first time — his face unseen):
Don’t speak louder. Speak truer. The world has enough noise. What it lacks is courage.
Piers (softly):
Do you forgive me?
Handala:
Forgiveness is not mine to give. It belongs to those you refused to hear when they were alive.
Piers (looks down):
And if I stand with them now?
Handala:
Then you must never again confuse neutrality with morality. Remember: silence feeds the illegal and criminal occupier. Doubt feeds denial.
Piers:
You think I can change minds?
Handala:
You changed yours, didn’t you? That’s a start. Just remember — truth delayed is truth denied.
(Handala begins to walk toward the horizon, still facing away. The rubble glows faintly in dawn light.)
Piers (calling out):
Where are you going?
Handala:
To where every child of Gaza goes — toward the sunrise that the world still owes us.
In a genocide where humanity is already hanging by a thread, one side continues to trample on every fragile hope for peace. Ceasefires—a sliver of relief for civilians—are being shattered, and the cost is horrendous: 246 innocent lives brutally extinguished, families ripped apart, and communities left in terror.
Even more horrifying is the deliberate blockade of humanitarian aid. Two million displaced people, starving, sick, and exhausted, remain trapped with no escape. Borders promised to be reopened for relief supplies remain shut, turning the most basic human right—access to food, water, and medical care—into a cruel illusion. Children grow weaker with each passing day, parents watch helplessly as hope dies, and entire communities face the slow agony of neglect.
This is not collateral damage. It is a conscious choice: to violate ceasefires, to ignore international law, to deny the desperate pleas of those who have already lost everything. Every broken promise by the apartheid is a betrayal not just of agreements, but of humanity itself.
The world cannot stay silent. Aid must flow. Lives cannot wait for diplomacy to catch up to morality. Accountability is urgent. Those who exploit ceasefires as mere political tools, while civilians starve and die, must face the full weight of international scrutiny.
For the two million displaced, for the children who go to bed hungry, for the families crushed under the weight of violence and broken promises—this is not a war over politics. This is a genocide over life itself. And humanity demands that it end.
Miko Peled, a well-known Israeli-American activist humanrights activist and author hailing from an Israeli military family, has sparked debate with his candid discussion about the ongoing brutal war on Gaza conducted by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Advocating for significant changes both in Israel and globally, Peled’s viewpoints have drawn attention to the urgent need for addressing the crisis in a more profound manner.
Peled asserts that the situation in Israel is deteriorating rapidly, going as far as to label it as the “beginning of the end” for the nation. He emphasizes the importance of transparency regarding the reality of the catastrophic situation in Gaza, highlighting the severity of the ongoing war.
Rather than advocating for minor adjustments, Peled stresses the necessity of comprehensive, transformative changes in societal attitudes and behaviors to address the root causes of the problems effectively. Expressing dissatisfaction with Israel’s leadership, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Peled criticizes their endorsement of aggressive measures against Gaza and their perceived lack of efforts to halt the violence. Peled also condemns Jared Kushner’s suggestion of demolishing Palestinian homes for financial gain, drawing parallels between this proposal and historical atrocities committed by the Nazis.
Peled scrutinizes the response of the United States to the crisis. He contends that the U.S. should play a more proactive role in ending the violence and advocating for justice for Palestinians.He envisions a world where fairness prevails and the rights of Palestinians are upheld.
Responding to the death in custody of Walid Daqqah, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after having spent 38 years imprisoned, Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns said:
“It is heart-wrenching that Walid Daqqah has died in Israeli custody despite the many calls for his urgent release on humanitarian grounds following his 2022 diagnosis with bone marrow cancer and the fact that he had already completed his original sentence.
“Walid Daqqah’s death is a cruel reminder of Israel’s systematic medical neglect and disregard for Palestinian prisoners’ rights. For Daqqah and his family, the last six months in particular were an endless nightmare, during which he was subjected to torture or other ill-treatment, including beatings and humiliation by the Israeli Prison Service, according to his lawyer. He was not permitted a phone call with his wife since 7 October. His final appeal for parole on humanitarian grounds was rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court, effectively sentencing him to die behind bars.
“Sanaa Salameh, Walid Daqqah’s wife who tirelessly campaigned for his release, could not embrace her dying husband one last time before he passed. Israeli authorities must now return Walid Daqqah’s body to his family without delay so that they that they could give him a peaceful and dignified burial and allow them to mourn his death without intimidation,” Erika Guevara-Rosas said.
The lawyer who last visited Walid Daqqah on 24 March in Ramleh prison clinic told Amnesty International that she was shocked by his sharp weight loss and visible fragility. Denying prisoners access to adequate medical care violates international standards on the treatment of detainees and may constitute torture.
Background
On 25 March 1986, Israeli forces arrested Walid Daqqah, then 24, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. In March 1987, an Israeli military court sentenced him to life imprisonment after convicting him of commanding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-affiliated group that had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. Daqqah was not convicted of carrying out the murder himself, but of commanding the group, an accusation he always rejected, and his conviction was based on British emergency regulations dating back to 1945, which require a much lower standard of proof for conviction than Israeli criminal law.
Amnesty International has campaigned for Walid Daqqah since last August, calling on Israeli authorities to release him on humanitarian grounds, citing independent medical opinion that Walid Daqqah’s days were numbered and the fact that Walid Daqqah had already completed his 37-year sentence in March 2023, but an earlier court ruling sentenced him to two additional years in prison – over his involvement in getting mobile phones to other prisoners to help them contact their families – putting off his release date until March 2025, a day which he tragically did not live to see.
During his time in prison, Walid Daqqah wrote extensively about the Palestinian lived experience in Israeli prisons. He acted as a mentor and educator for generations of young Palestinian prisoners, including children. His writings, which included letters, essays, a celebrated play and a novel for young adults, were an act of resistance against the dehumanization of Palestinian prisoners. “Love is my modest and only victory against my jailer,” he once wrote.
Walid Daqqah’s writings behind bars are a testament to a spirit never broken by decades of incarceration and oppression
In the long, tortured history of political doublespeak, few statements sink lower than the recent declaration by a belligerent political strongman—let’s call Smotritch what he is: a thug—who claimed that “without illegal settlements there is no security.”
It takes a special kind of moral inversion to argue that the path to safety lies in violating international law, displacing families, and turning civilian land into fortified fascist outposts. But for this thug, legality, ethics, and human dignity have never been obstacles—only inconveniences.
To call settlements “illegal” is not an opinion. It is a matter of international consensus. When a politician openly admits that his vision of security depends on illegality, he is confessing something far darker:
that he can only maintain control through domination, expropriation, and permanent war and apartheid.
Instead of offering diplomacy, coexistence, or long-term stability, he offers bulldozers, barbed wire, and nazi checkpoints, wrapped in the language of “security.”
This isn’t leadership. It’s illegal and brutal occupation dressed as strategy.
The thug’s statement reveals a truth he never intended to share:
the so-called security he champions is not universal. It is a selective security—
security for one group purchased at the cost of terrorizing another.
Under his vision, security does not mean peace.
It means permanent militarization.
It means normalization of the abnormal and illegal.
It means normalisation of theft and destruction.
It means making an entire people invisible so that a political project can continue unchallenged.
There is a chilling historical echo in such rhetoric. When leaders claim they need illegal actions to achieve safety, societies slip into cycles of violence that become self-justifying.
First come the illegal settlements.
Then come the walls.
Then come the armed guards.
And finally comes the narrative that the system must remain forever because “look at how dangerous the situation is.”
A crisis manufactured to justify its own perpetuation.
The thug’s words deserve not just criticism but shame.
Shame for using “security” as a mask for expansion.
Shame for treating the lives and homes of others as disposable.
Shame for reducing a deeply human conflict to the geometry of land grabs.
No society that relies on illegality for its safety deserves to call itself secure.
No leader who glorifies violations of law deserves the trust of any people.
Real security does not grow out of stolen land, demolished homes, or the normalization of apartheid and fascist policies.
Real security is built through justice—something this thug, and those like him, fear more than any external threat.
Because justice would expose the lie at the heart of their political empire:
that their power depends not on protecting people, but on controlling them.
When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrantsagainst Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”
Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.
Published date: 22 March 2024 09:59 GMT| Last update: 6 hours 23 mins ago
New documentary reveals how false and inflammatory allegations made their way into the journalistic mainstream
This screenshot from the Al Jazeera film “October 7” shows a building in Israel that appears to have been damaged by Israeli weaponry after the Hamas incursion (Al Jazeera screenshot)
Forensic. Sober. Clear-sighted. Scrupulous. Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has produced a film that tells the story of what really happened on 7 October.
This authoritative documentary does not flinch from detailing the atrocities and war crimes carried out by Hamas. But it shows beyond reasonable doubt that many of the lurid accounts that emerged from Israeli sources were false.
Deeply inflammatory stories, whether concerning allegations of mass rape or the beheading and burning of babies, were either unsupported by evidence or straightforward lies. Yet, they prepared the way for the murderous savagery of the ensuing Israeli assault on Gaza, which has been described by the International Court of Justice as a plausible genocide.
Al Jazeera painstakingly analyses how these accounts entered the public domain. This involves a sustained look at Zaka, Israel’s emergency response unit of trained paramedics who handle terrorist episodes and homicides.
Al Jazeera shows how Zaka gave details of atrocities that never happened, including of burned and beheaded babies, which made headlines around the world and were used for maximum propaganda effect by Israel to gain sympathy.
One Zaka employee, Yossi Landau, told reporters that Hamas burned to death “two piles of 10 children each” in a house in Kibbutz Be’eri.
This account was pounced on by the media, and a version was repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation with USPresident Joe Biden: “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them.”
Vital reporting
But as Al Jazeera shows, these accounts were untrue. An examination of the list of the dead showed that two 12-year-old twins were tragically killed when police and soldiers stormed the house in Be’eri, but there were no other children at that location, the documentary notes.
More generally, the list reveals that two babies died on 7 October. One was killed when a bullet was fired through a door, while the other died following an emergency caesarean section after the mother was shot. Neither was burned or beheaded.
Al Jazeera also shows that there is no serious evidence to support claims of widespread and systematic rape, setting out the known facts before quoting British lawyer Madeleine Rees of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, who says: “Nothing that I’ve seen put forward so far suggests that [rape was] widespread and systematic.”
It has been left entirely to non-mainstream outlets to exercise scrutiny and scepticism, and to behave like professional journalists
This is serious, measured and vital reporting. It raises one interesting and significant point: why was it left to Al Jazeera to carry out this work?
Why couldn’t the BBC have done it? ITN? Sky News? The famous Sunday Times investigative unit? Campaigning tabloids like the Daily Mail or Daily Express? Hard-hitting broadsheets like the Times of London?
The answer might be simple: the UKmainstream media has itself played a significant role in promoting and endorsing fabricated Israeli accounts of 7 October. The Express, the Daily Mail, the Times, the Independent and Metro all ran front-page stories amplifying Israeli claims about 40 dead babies. The Daily Mail front page read: “This was a holocaust pure and simple.”
Even to question these terrifying accounts drew accusations of bad faith. According to one Telegraph headline: “Israel shouldn’t have had to prove that Hamas slaughtered babies.”
Dehumanising Palestinians
The early reports of burned and beheaded babies presented Hamas as subhuman barbarians, comparable to the Islamic State.
These reports could be used to justify Israel’s own savagery towards the Palestinianpopulation of Gaza. “I hear the calls for a ceasefire,” Israel’s then foreign minister, Eli Cohen, said at the United Nations. “Tell me, what is a proportional response for killing of babies? For rape women and burn them? For beheading of a child? The proportional response to the October 7th massacre is total destruction, total destruction, to the last of the Hamas.”
War on Gaza: How British media favours the Israeli narrative
In the words of US Republican Senator Marco Rubio: “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic offramp with these savages.”
According to researcher Marc Owen Jones, quoted in the Al Jazeera film, “sexual violence and other forms of violence are being weaponised to dehumanise an enemy, and dehumanisation is important in conflict. Why? Because dehumanisation lowers the threshold by which you will willingly agree to attack or harm another group of people. And how do you you do that? You see them as subhuman.”
This Al Jazeera film does much more than simply correct the record about events on 7 October. It also raises serious concerns about the British media failing to question the Israeli narrative.
It has been left entirely to non-mainstream outlets to exercise scrutiny and scepticism, and to behave like professional journalists. Let’s name them: excellent work has been done by the Grayzone, the Intercept, the Electronic Intifada, Yes! Magazine, Mondoweiss, and to some extent, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Meanwhile, the British mainstream media has laid itself open to the charge that it has been complicit in the dehumanisation of Palestinians, which in turn has opened the way to what looks more every day like a genocide in Gaza.
Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
For decades, the word security has served as a political shield—invoked to rationalise walls, raids, land theft, assassinations, torture, imprisonment, blockades, and discrimination. Yet when the state demanding security is also an occupying power, its claim deserves scrutiny. Can a government that maintains brutal military rule over another people truly present itself as a victim in need of protection?
Occupation is not a defensive act; it is a mm illegal structure of control. International law—most clearly the Fourth Geneva Convention—prohibits the permanent seizure of land and the transfer of an occupier’s population into occupied territory. Still, large-scale settlement construction continues, carving up territory, isolating communities, and tightening the machinery of apartheid.
The daily reality at hundreds checkpoints, where residents queue for hours to pass through metal gates, is not about keeping anyone safe. It is about reminding a population who holds the power. Administrative detention, demolition orders, and collective punishments all flow from the same premise: that one group’s security justifies another’s subjugation.
Beyond the statistics of demolished homes and confiscated land lies a deeper wound—the erosion of dignity. Children learn early that armed soldiers control the rhythm of their days. Parents rebuild what bulldozers destroy, only to see it flattened again. “Security” becomes the occupier’s justification for acts that would never be accepted within its own borders and against its citizens.
Such a system does not create safety. It breeds resentment and despair, ensuring that fear persists on both sides of the wall. No society can live indefinitely with its foot on another’s neck without losing its moral balance.
History’s verdict on systems of domination is consistent. Colonial regimes and apartheid governments once claimed they were defending civilisation or order. None survived unchanged. Power maintained by injustice eventually collapses under its own contradictions, leaving behind a legacy of shame and loss.
When the present conflict is studied in future classrooms, historians will not quote the slogans of security; they will examine the testimonies of those who endured occupation—the families displaced, the children starved and imprisoned without trial, the civilians killed in the name of calm. The question will not be whether the occupier was threatened, but what it became in the pursuit of control.
Real security cannot be built on domination. It rests on justice, equality, and the recognition of shared humanity. Lasting peace will not come from more walls or checkpoints or land theft or genocide or starvation but from a political settlement that ends dispossession and grants every person equal rights under the law.
A state that seeks security while denying another people their freedom is chasing a mirage. True safety will come only when both occupier and occupied are liberated—from fear, from vengeance, and from the cycle of oppression that binds them.
How many storms have passed over your branches, how many seasons of silence have you endured? Your bark bears the story of centuries — carved by wind, scarred by fire, yet still you rise against the sky of Palestine. You stand where the soil remembers every footstep, every prayer whispered into the dust.
When I touch your trunk, it feels like touching the heartbeat of my homeland — steady, patient, eternal. You have seen generations come and go: farmers who sang to you at dawn, children who climbed your limbs with laughter, and mothers who pressed your oil into bread and hope. You have also witnessed exile, the quiet ache of absence, and the longing that lives in every stone of this land.
Even when the fields were taken and the hills grew silent, you refused to die. Each spring you bloom again, small white blossoms trembling in defiance — a soft, living protest written in petals. You remind us that to belong is not a privilege, but a birthright; that roots, once deep, cannot be erased by borders or time.
You are more than a tree — you are Palestine itself: wounded, beautiful, unyielding. In your shadow, I remember who we are — a people who endure, who rebuild, who love their land even in absence.
