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By Jonathan Kuttab

We sometimes hear that it is a pity that Palestinians do not know and are not being taught in their schools, as part of their curriculum, about the Holocaust in Germany. We are told that Palestinians need to learn about the Holocaust to better understand Israelis and how and why they act as they do.

I actually do believe it is important and entirely beneficial for Palestinians to learn about the Holocaust. Sami Awad, a Palestinian activist was indeed deeply moved when he took a trip to Auschwitz and the extermination camps in Poland. I, too, was moved when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The evil that was manifested there on an industrial scale is, in fact, something to ponder, and it needs to impact our attitude to toxic, racist, and fascist ideologies. We all need to be shocked and reminded of the potential for unimaginable evil that perhaps resides in all of us.

The real problem is in what lesson does one learn from the Holocaust? For one thing, the evil is so great that anything connected to it becomes an absolute that often clouds rational thinking, and prevents consideration of all other relevant factors. Unfortunately, many people take the wrong lesson from the Holocaust, namely that it shows that international law is meaningless, that the world is a cruel and uncaring place, and that the only security lies in having tremendous and overwhelming military power, in ignoring all laws and restrictions, and in creating your own standards. In other words, the message is that Hitler was correct after all and that “blood and iron” are the only factors to consider. “Never Again” to such people means only that Jews (or any other group for that matter) can only rely on their own military power and need to do whatever they think it takes to achieve security. It feeds a disdain for international norms and provides a justification for all manner of militancy and unjust practices in the name of security, to make sure this evil never happens again to one’s own group and to hell with everyone else.

There is another lesson, however, that can and should be learnt from the Holocaust. It is that even relatively small incidents of racism, discrimination, and bigotry can, if not checked immediately, mushroom into great and unimaginable evil of the type manifested in the Holocaust. It is the sobering thought that all of us, perhaps, carry within us the potential, if not checked, for carrying out unimaginable acts of cruelty towards others. That is why international law, in light of the Holocaust, developed mechanisms for international solidarity, accountability and sanctions against all forms of racism and racial discrimination. A convention dealing with this matter is called the Convention for the Prevention and Punishing the Crime of Genocide to indicate that genocide, like the Holocaust, does not suddenly occur in a vacuum but is often the result of incitement, laws and regulations, and practices that lead to the dehumanization of a particular group. It calls upon us to be vigilant and prevent, and not just punish, the crime of genocide.

The true response to genocide and the Holocaust is therefore to build respect for and to enhance enforceability of international law, norms and institutions. It is to work to improve collective sensitivity against all forms of toxic racism and discrimination, and to strengthen empathy and solidarity as effective tools to limit, marginalize and delegitimize all forms of racism and discrimination, regardless of which group is being targeted and who are the perpetrators. That is why all vulnerable groups (ethnic minorities, minority religious groups, undocumented migrants, children, women, and others) are the most vulnerable and likely to be victims of discrimination, and ultimately genocide. Those who still abide by ideologies that call for supremacy, whether it is Christian Nationalism, Jewish Zionism, or Islamic fanaticism, should be challenged and restricted. Yet we need to recognize also that past victims can easily use their victimhood to seek exemption and even justification for their own racism and violence. After all, German feelings of being unjustly treated in the aftermath of WWI provided potent ammunition for the rise of Hitler and his drive for German power and supremacy. The fact that a people have been traumatized in the past is no guarantee that they will refrain from oppressing and traumatizing others.

The state of Israel and the Zionist movement falls directly into that category. David Schipler of the New York Times argued that Palestinians and other Arabs need to be taught about the Holocaust in their schools. He said that precisely because of the Holocaust, Palestinians need to understand “Israel’s disdain for international law and its need for domination, supremacy and military superiority.” That is precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Holocaust.

19 December 2025

Source: fosna.org

By PALESTINE WILL BE FREE

An article under the title House Arab, published in Bidoun magazine, appeared some weeks ago. Written by Ismail Ibrahim, an Egyptian journalist, it recounts his experience working as a fact-checker at the liberal propaganda rag The New Yorker in the aftermath of October 7.

Among the article’s many illuminating passages, which bring to light the inner workings of highly-regarded Western pseudo-journalism institutions, there is one that stands out. Ibrahim writes:

I was assigned, at some point, a piece about a spree of killings and land thefts carried out with impunity in the West Bank since October 7th. The piece mostly focused on a single settlement where a man who had gone to pick olives on his land one Saturday was shot by an off-duty Israeli soldier. His execution had been captured on video. The story included a cast of settlers, anti-occupation rabbis, and West-Bank Palestinians who had spent their lives fearing that their homes would be stolen, and that if they were killed or dispossessed, there would be no recourse for them. I ran into the story editor in the hallway, who said he was having trouble balancing the narrative because all the Israeli characters seemed evil, while all the Palestinians were angels. A long section that documented, without any editorializing, that Palestinian dispossession was an ongoing process that had begun long before October 7th was whittled down to a single paragraph after a series of fights between the editor-in-chief and the story editor on one side, and myself and the freelance writer on the other. [Emphasis mine.]

That bit — “he was having trouble balancing the narrative” — is not a confession of editorial difficulty. It is a confession of ideological bankruptcy. It betrays an assumption so deeply embedded in Western journalism that it rarely even announces itself: that every story must be balanced between two sides, presumed to be morally equivalent, even when the material reality is defined precisely by radical imbalance. It is the quiet axiom that truth itself must be symmetrical, that injustice must be diluted until it resembles a disagreement between equals.

But some positions are not merely unbalanced; they are impossible to balance. One cannot “balance” the dispossessed with their dispossessors, the raped with the rapist, the murdered with the murderer, or the genocidaire with their victims. The very attempt to do so is complicity. Balance, in such cases, does not clarify reality — it falsifies it. And that’s precisely the project every mainstream Western journalism institution, not just The New Yorker, has indulged in ever since the supposed “founding” of the illegitimate Jewish state in Palestine.

For most distant observers, “balancing the narrative” was easy when Gaza was portrayed as a tiny block of land in what was labelled the “turbulent Middle East” — a decontextualised framing of both the region and its people, created by the same forces. But things have changed 180 degrees after October 7. Now everyone sees Gaza and they see the Palestinians of Gaza. And once you see them you can not unsee them.

This kind of narrative management was possible only because Gaza was distant, and its inhabitants unfamiliar. Politicians and editors relied on that distance and unfamiliarity to present the situation as complicated, and as an evenly matched fight between two forces, one righteous and the other barbaric. This, in turn, made it easy to repeat, for example, the mythical two-state slogan, a talking point that has functioned less as a political vision and more as a way to avoid admitting what was actually happening on the ground.

Moreover, the sheer repetition of the two-state mantra also served as a cloak that hid the inherent injustice of that equation: the genocidal land usurpers — who view their victims as subhuman cattle — occupy nearly all of the land, while their victims are forced to live in glorified pens in the name of a mythical state that would never materialise.

October 7 has not revealed anything new. It has merely stripped away the last shreds of plausible deniability. In its aftermath, what has come into view is a continuity: the genocidal campaign in Gaza being carried out with enthusiastic Western backing; the open celebration by Israeli politicians, media figures, and soldiers of collective punishment, mass starvation, systemic rapes, and annihilation; the treatment of Palestinian abductees — children included — subjected to torture, sexual violence, killings, and degradation in Israeli dungeons, practices that human rights organisations have documented for decades and that are now defended openly rather than denied.

The reality became impossible to “balance” once Gaza came into full view over the past two years. People now see, without mediation, the scale and nature of the atrocities to which Palestinians have been subjected. They see residential neighbourhoods reduced to dust. They see hospitals levelled, and maternity wards blown apart. They have seen way too many children with their heads blown off and their intestines splattered on the floor to keep a count. They see babies starving to death because food and water has been deliberately cut off. They see entire families killed and buried under rubble. They see soldiers recording themselves vandalising houses, burning down schools, prancing around in the lingerie of the dead and displaced women, and boasting about the devastation they have carried out.

While the world has witnessed the total moral bankruptcy and genocidal bloodlust of the Israelis, it has also seen the righteousness and steadfastness of the Palestinians in full detail. The Palestinians have continued their lives with rare dignity and faith under unbearable conditions. Students have studied for high school exams in flimsy tents. Teenagers have revised lessons on cracked phone screens because their schools no longer exist. Families have walked long distances to find potable water sources. Mothers have deprived themselves of food to keep their children alive. Doctors have operated without anaesthetic and without supplies. Journalists documented their people’s genocide until they themselves were targeted and killed.

For the uninitiated, however, what has perhaps been the most revealing is the social consensus surrounding Israeli barbarism. The public discourse inside Israel, far from recoiling at atrocities, has increasingly celebrated it. Calls for extermination are not fringe mutterings but prime-time talking points. Sexual violence against Palestinians, once euphemised or buried, is now joked about, justified, and dismissed in ways that would be unthinkable if the victims belonged to any population deemed fully human by the West. This is not a matter of individual pathology; it is the moral logic of settler colonialism turbocharged with religious bigotry reaching its logical conclusion.

And yet Western media continues to act as though the primary ethical challenge is tone. It continues to “balance the narrative.” The problem, we are told, is excess — excess anger, excess grief, excess clarity. Palestinians must not only endure dispossession, dehumanisation, and death; they must do so politely, in a way that reassures their barbaric executioners and the audiences that identify with them. They must be silent victims of their own execution. To speak plainly about reality is to be accused of bias. To name genocide is to be “polarising.” To refuse false balance is to be “activist.” And to name the genocidaires “antisemitic.”

What Ibrahim encountered in that hallway was a refusal to abandon a murderous, genocidal fiction. The fiction that religiously-sanctioned overwhelming violence against defenceless people can be narrated without taking sides — even when the sides are the murderer and the murdered. The fiction that morality can be split down the middle. The fiction that a boot on a neck can be described as a balanced altercation.

There is no balanced narrative to be found here, because there is no balanced reality. Until journalism, diplomacy, and liberal conscience reckon with that fact, they will remain what they have long been: instruments of oppression that will insist upon a balance even in the face of a live-streamed genocide, while insisting that you deny the evidence of your own eyes and swallow their narrative whole.

Like Ibrahim, refuse to pay any more reverence to the hideous liberal pieties. If Gaza has awakened you, please don’t go back to sleep.

13 December 2025

Source: palestinewillbefree.substack.com

By Nancy Mancias

I arrived at the Taj Hotel in Baghdad’s Jadriyah neighborhood at 6 a.m., worn thin by the long flight from Los Angeles. After sleeping until mid-afternoon, I stepped out into the 90-degree heat on a simple mission: find falafel, fries, and a place to exchange money. A local bus picked me up and dropped me right across from a falafel shop—a small act of hospitality. Full and settled, I walked beside the Tigris River, watching construction cranes against the sky. Life was visibly moving forward. Yet the mental newsreel kept playing: bombs falling on these same banks twenty years earlier. I was a tourist now in a country I had once protested my own nation for invading. Needing to escape both the heat and the weight of those memories, I returned to the hotel for Nutella cake and Iraqi tea, yet deeply conscious of the complex layers beneath the surface.

The next day settled heavily. We started at Tahrir Monument and the roundabout where Saddam’s statue once stood—toppled in 2003 by U.S. Marines in an image seen around the world. Today, no plaque marks the spot. Only election banners fluttered in the wind. From there, we traveled to the Arch of Ctesiphon, a soaring Persian vault from 540 AD. Nearby lay the relics of a different era: a derelict tourist complex and a museum designed by North Koreans, its walls scarred with bullet marks. Al-Mada’in, our guide remarked, had been a final stronghold against the invasion. It’s one thing to read about war and occupation; another to stand where it happened and touch the pockmarked concrete. Just yards away, young boys kicked a soccer ball in the dust, a powerful scene of life insisting on moving forward. That contrast stayed with me: the tourist complex, once a thriving vacation spot with a luxurious pool, is now a place to store garbage. Aside from the enduring Arch, the entire area lies in ruins, destroyed in the war and never rebuilt. Who knows if it ever will be. For some parts of Iraq, rebuilding only began around 2017, over a decade after the invasion. With elections approaching, I wondered about Iraq’s future—and what accountability looks like when destruction runs so deep.

A slower day followed, wandering through Old Baghdad: its bazaar, colonial facades, antique shops, Christian churches, and tea houses thick with the smoke of cigarettes. But I felt an unease seeing Saddam-era memorabilia, like old currency, sold as casual souvenirs. My time in Iraqi Kurdistan, at Amna Suraka and Halabja Memorial, had shown me the human cost of his brutal regime. Later, we passed the haunting cement skeleton of one of Saddam’s grand mosques, frozen mid-construction by the 2003 war. It stood empty, monumental yet abandoned, like a set from Dune—a stark metaphor for interrupted futures.

We traveled to Babylon. Before entering, we paused before one of the last remaining monuments to Saddam. His image is now outlawed; we gazed at the bullet marks and graffiti scoring the stone. Nearby, his palace loomed over the Euphrates—a hollow shell gazing across timeless dust. After roaming Babylon’s ruins, we crossed a low fence onto the palace grounds. Entering the space once occupied by a brutal dictator again filled me with unease. While others explored the looted, spray-painted halls, I was struck by the collision of histories here: ancient civilization, the US invasion, and the regime’s own atrocities against the Kurds.

From there, we journeyed to Karbala and the breathtaking Al-Abbas Holy Shrine. I wore an abaya to enter, humbled by the devotion, chanting, and crying that resonated in the air. The contrast stayed with me: between ransacked palaces of fallen power, land ravaged by war, and this enduring faith. We paused briefly at one of the world’s largest cemeteries in Najaf before visiting the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali. The long drive south to Nasiriyah that followed gave me space to hold all these layers: history, belief, silence, and dust.

A highlight came in the Mesopotamian Marshes. Gliding by water buffalo through vast wetlands, said to be the Garden of Eden, I felt a deep connection to this ancient ecosystem and the Indigenous communities who sustain it. The use of reeds to build entire homes felt like a quiet miracle. Later, we visited the Great Ziggurat of Ur—a stairway to a Sumerian sky. We moved through biblical landscapes that day, though in the distance stood an old American military base, now repurposed by the Iraqis. Someone showed me photos of U.S. soldiers standing on those same Ziggurat steps.

As I leave Baghdad, I carry a sense of Iraq’s resilience, the palpable scars of war, the warmth of its people, the hope for a better future, and the ongoing story of a nation rebuilding itself. Now, as the world’s attention drifts to other conflicts, the weight of history here feels so obvious. The US footprint left in Iraq is deep—and as it threatens Iraq with sanctions, it is the last thing this country needs as it tries to move forward and heal.

Nancy Mancias, a dedicated organizer and educator, pursues her doctorate as an act of feminist decolonial scholarship, transforming anthropology from within the California Institute of Integral Studies.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Introduction

In my previous essay, The Settlers Are Not Leaving, I argued that Palestinian liberation cannot hinge on hopes of settler withdrawal, a sudden moral awakening among occupiers, or some negotiated coexistence. Zionist domination is a stable, externally reinforced system — bolstered by military superiority, intricate legal frameworks, deep economic ties, diplomatic shields, and the quiet routines of international management.

I pushed back against the liberal dream of peace side-by-side and the romantic idea of a single decisive rupture restoring an intact Palestine. Instead, our urgent task is to pinpoint what sustains Israel’s grip and then strain, disrupt, or erode those supports.

Predictably, the immediate reaction from some readers returned to a familiar refrain: if Israeli power is so deeply rooted, what can possibly weaken it short of total military defeat? For many, direct action — however righteous — seems strategically irrelevant when set against Israel’s violence and the West’s unflinching backing.

That question is what draws me to the CAGE report, Putting Bodies on the Line, released in November 2025. It meticulously tracks how activists strike at the exact points where Israeli violence intersects with legality, profitability, public acceptance, and political accountability.

These are the pressure points where friction builds — making domination heavier, more visible, more expensive to sustain. The report offers no fantasies of swift triumph. Its force lies in showing how entrenched power can be burdened and worn down long before it crumbles. Through precise analysis and documentation, targeted action exposes the contradictions domination desperately hides.

Despair carries political force: it reinforces the very structures that generate it. Naming its sources becomes the first act of loosening its grip.
 — -

1. Why “Entrenchment” Breeds Despair

The reaction resonates because it grows out of hard realities: Israeli domination has shown extraordinary staying power. Institutions endure across governments, military dominance in the region goes unchallenged, and Western alliances provide steady diplomatic cover, economic integration, and technological backing.

For so many of us watching in anguish, this accumulates into a crushing sense of futility — if the system appears this unbreakable, anything less than overwhelming force feels like symbolism rather than strategy.

This despair draws strength from several harsh, interconnected conditions. Extreme power imbalances can feel self-perpetuating: superior arms, global patrons, territorial control — how does resistance outlast that?

Western complicity runs deep: arms flows uninterrupted, vetoes in international bodies, leaders willing to swallow domestic outrage to keep the status quo intact.

And on the Palestinian side, political fragmentation and decades of siege, displacement, and surveillance have exacted a brutal toll. Together, these render domination self-reproducing and resistance as forever outmatched.

There is emotional weight here, but also intellectual weight. It is born from lived trauma: repeated defeats, shattered agreements, settlements expanding without pause. It voices the exhaustion when every door to justice slams shut, when international law is wielded selectively, when today’s horrors echo yesterday’s without relief. Any honest strategy has to grapple with this despair, not brush it aside.

Yet acknowledging the depth of entrenchment clarifies the stakes rather than foreclosing possibility. Entrenchment describes how power operates today, not what it is capable of tomorrow. Recognizing its sources is how we prevent pessimism from calcifying into fatalism. And once the roots of despair are named plainly, a sharper question emerges: not whether domination is strong, but where its strength can be made to cost more than its defenders can bear.
 — -

2. Friction as a Strategy Against Entrenched Power

When Israeli domination feels immovable — fortified by military superiority and Western backing — it is natural to question whether anything short of war can shift it. Yet political theory and historical experience offer a different strategic horizon: friction that accumulates through sustained pressure, making the system grind harder, slower, and more expensively over time.

Antonio Gramsci helps illuminate the terrain. He argued that power endures not only through coercion but through the sense that its dominance is inevitable. Challenging that inevitability requires a “war of position” — a long struggle in which networks, counter-narratives, and persistent disruptions chip away at the cultural and institutional foundations that make domination feel natural.

James C. Scott extends this insight by showing how the powerless resist in ways that rarely appear dramatic but steadily erode the efficiency of oppressive systems. Slowdowns, refusals, and small acts of sabotage force rulers to spend increasing energy on basic maintenance. These forms of resistance accumulate drag, turning everyday life into a site of pressure.

Gene Sharp then maps how this drag becomes strategic. Power depends on the cooperation of workers, firms, bureaucrats, and institutions. When that cooperation is withdrawn — through boycotts, blockades, and civil disobedience — costs rise, legitimacy fractures, and the machinery of domination becomes harder to operate. Repression often accelerates this process by exposing the violence required to keep the system intact.

Frantz Fanon adds a crucial dimension: colonial regimes concede nothing without sustained pressure. Appeals to conscience fail in systems built on dehumanization. Yet Fanon also insists that resistance must be fitted to the moment — strategic, deliberate, and aimed at reclaiming agency by forcing power to yield because the price of maintaining domination becomes too high.

Taken together, these thinkers outline the logic of friction. It is not a softer alternative to confrontation; it is a form of pressure that targets the system’s dependencies — where violence intersects with profit, law, and legitimacy. By imposing costs at these junctions, friction burdens the apparatus of domination until its upkeep becomes increasingly difficult to justify or sustain.

My point here is not theoretical. Real-world examples show friction already working, undermining the sense that entrenched power is impervious.

In the UK, Palestine Action has repeatedly hit Elbit Systems — Israel’s largest private arms manufacturer — with blockades, occupations, and site shutdowns. These disruptions force expensive security upgrades, delays, and ultimately retreats, like the closure of the Bristol Aztec West facility in 2025, despite a lease extending to 2029.

Broader BDS campaigns deepen the pressure: firms distancing themselves from Israeli partnerships, pension funds divesting, port workers refusing cargo. Each action seems small in isolation, but together they slow procurement, complicate logistics, trigger reviews, and shift public debate. They make domination more expensive to administer long before any formal collapse.

Friction is the deliberate creation of administrative, economic, legal, and reputational burdens that force a system of domination to expend increasing energy simply to reproduce itself.

It promises no miracles. What it offers is something more durable: proof that the system has weak points, and that persistent strikes — boycotts, disruptions, divestments — can make injustice increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is a real, grounded strategy that refuses to let domination operate uncontested.
 — -

3. The CAGE Report in Detail: Mapping the Pressure Points

If theory outlines friction’s logic, the CAGE report Putting Bodies on the Line makes it tangible. Released in November 2025 by CAGE International — a group dedicated to exposing state repression — the study examines five years of direct action for Palestine in Britain (2020–2025). Drawing from more than 70 disruptions, including 45 attributed to Palestine Action, it documents how ordinary people channel indignation into targeted interventions that hit the system where it is structurally exposed.

The CAGE report functions as a map of where Israeli domination relies on British cooperation — and therefore where it can be pressured.
The methodology is meticulous: timelines, media coverage, court records, procurement data, and financial reports cross-checked to show ripple effects — delays, reviews, policy reversals, and reputational damage.

The core insight is straightforward but profound: these are not symbolic stunts; they are interventions that force Britain to reckon with its material role in Israeli violence. They make the infrastructure of complicity harder to conceal.

The report identifies four intersections where Israeli power, channeled through UK partnerships, is vulnerable: legality, profitability, public legitimacy, and political risk. Targeting these points produces compounding friction. These four domains — law, finance, legitimacy, and political risk — form the scaffolding that keeps Israeli military production stable. Each becomes a site where friction can be deliberately introduced.

Legality

Pressure begins in the legal arena, where activists turn the state’s own frameworks into sites of exposure. Strategic lawsuits, license challenges, and filings reveal how arms exports evade international obligations. Cases documenting ignored evidence of war crimes have triggered reviews and temporary shipment suspensions. Crowdfunded suits mire regulators in procedural knots, eroding institutional credibility and forcing officials to defend practices that once operated in silence.

Profitability

Legal strain quickly bleeds into financial strain. Once the law casts doubt on an operation’s legitimacy, the economic foundations become more vulnerable. Multi-year campaigns against Elbit facilities have halted production, damaged equipment, forced millions in security spending, and even prompted insurers to withdraw coverage due to “reputational risk.” Small groups of activists have generated disproportionate economic shock across Elbit’s UK operations, demonstrating how targeted disruption destabilizes a corporation’s cost-benefit calculus.

Public legitimacy

Financial pressure reverberates into the realm of public legitimacy. As companies scramble to contain losses, their ties to Israeli violence become harder to obscure. Student occupations have pushed universities to divest from arms-linked pensions; projections and leaked documents have exposed institutional partnerships that depended on silence. Jury acquittals further puncture the state’s narrative, signaling that the public rejects the criminalization of direct action taken in defense of Palestinian life.

Political risk

Eroded legitimacy inevitably heightens political risk. Once the public sees the machinery of complicity, elected officials can no longer rely on quiet consensus. Lobby disruptions have confronted MPs with hard data on arms transfers, prompting debates and motions for tighter export controls. When the UK government attempted to proscribe Palestine Action in July 2025, the move backfired — drawing international condemnation and revealing the political anxiety that sustained activism now produces.

Documentation as force multiplier

Across all four domains, documentation magnifies impact. Timestamped evidence, livestreams, and shared footage transform local disruptions into global templates. A blockade in one city becomes a blueprint for another; leaked contracts fuel lawsuits; acquittals circulate as precedents. Documentation does more than record — it multiplies the force of each action, accelerating replication and widening the terrain of pressure. In a landscape defined by institutional indifference to Gaza, documentation compels attention one disruption at a time.
 — -

4. How Friction Accumulates: The Evidence

Accumulation is the slow conversion of isolated disruptions into systemic instability.

The CAGE report quantifies what friction looks like when sustained over time. Between 2020 and 2025, more than 70 documented disruptions — 45 carried out by Palestine Action — inflicted substantial financial and operational strain on companies involved in supplying Israel’s military apparatus. These were not dramatic coups but steady, cumulative actions: blockades, occupations, strategic lawsuits, and repeated interruptions to production and delivery schedules. Each disruption forced delays, added costs, or compelled defensive adjustments; together they strained entire supply chains and corporate risk calculations.

The Elbit campaign is the clearest example. Persistent pressure led to site closures, such as the shuttering of Aztec West in 2025, years before its lease expired. Suppliers grew wary; insurers withdrew coverage; the company faced spiraling security expenditures. What appeared at a distance as isolated protests, once aggregated, revealed a steady degradation of Elbit’s UK footprint.

These shocks were amplified by broader BDS momentum. Barclays reported zero Elbit holdings after sustained activism. Universities withdrew millions from arms-linked pension funds. The Co-operative Group halted Israeli sourcing in 2025 due to human rights concerns. Each decision chipped away at the web of commercial relationships that insulate Israeli military production from accountability.

These dynamics are not confined to Britain. In the United States, dockworkers in Oakland have repeatedly refused to handle Israeli-linked cargo, delaying shipments and forcing companies to reroute logistics at significant cost.

Political effects followed. In September 2024, the UK government suspended nearly 30 export licenses over concerns about violations of international humanitarian law. Parliamentary debates exposed regulatory loopholes and escalated scrutiny. Support for Israel’s arms network became politically riskier, not safer.

Repression, of course, intensified. Repression is not a sign of activist overreach; it is a sign that the state has been forced into a defensive posture.

July 2025 saw Palestine Action proscribed; arrests mounted; facilities were fortified. But repression did not negate the strategy — it confirmed its potency. Crackdowns drew UN criticism, generated new solidarity, and emboldened activists through high-profile acquittals. The costs of maintaining domination rose faster than the state could contain.

Against the backdrop of Gaza’s devastation, these details are the evidence. They show that entrenchment is not immutable. They turn abstractions into evidence. They offer a sober but vital insight: persistence makes empires pay. Friction erodes the scaffolding of complicity one delay, one withdrawal, one disrupted shipment at a time.

Friction does not promise linear progress; its effects accumulate unevenly, often invisibly, until they suddenly become undeniable.
 — -

5. The Path Forward: Risks, Resilience, and Resolve

The CAGE report, and the actions it chronicles, mark a shift in the terrain of solidarity. Too often, global movements have relied on symbolic acts — marches, statements, social-media waves — that express moral outrage but rarely affect the infrastructures that sustain domination.

These actions matter; they build community and articulate dissent. But entrenched systems require something more: sustained, analytical intervention aimed at the structures that make Israel’s violence materially possible.

Friction reorients the struggle. It channels outrage into disciplined disruption. Palestine Action exemplifies this shift — mapping supply chains, selecting vulnerable sites, repeating strikes until companies retreat. Moral clarity becomes operational leverage.

These actions force public contradictions into view, impose financial and political consequences, and build a movement with the capacity to inflict real costs: delayed arms transfers, abandoned facilities, divestments, regulatory reviews.

Friction multiplies through connection. Documentation multiplies impact. A blockade’s footage feeds campaigns abroad; leaked contracts inform lawsuits; successes circulate as templates. Coordination spreads across borders: UK disruptions inspire actions in the United States and Europe; BDS victories in one country strengthen union and municipal resolutions elsewhere. Coalition-building weaves these threads together — labor boycotts, campus divestments, cultural refusals — creating a web of pressure no single corporation or government can easily untangle.

Hunger strikes transform the body into a site of political indictment.
In UK prisons, Palestine Action members — Teuta “T” Hoxha, Heba Muraisi, Qesser Zuhrah, Kamran Ahmed, Amu Gib, Jon Cink, Muhammad Umer Khalid, and Lewie Chiaramello of the Filton 24 — have surpassed five weeks without food. Hospitalized, weakened, yet resolute, they demand bail, fair trials, and the shutdown of Elbit. Their strike joins a lineage of political prisoners who weaponize their own vulnerability to expose the violence of the state.

The impact is immediate: solidarity hunger strikes from prisoners in the United States, amplified by networks such as Samidoun; renewed scrutiny of Elbit’s operations; mounting public pressure on the UK’s punitive excesses. Even behind bars, they reveal the brittleness of the system.

Burnout and despair are real dangers too. Gaza’s relentless horror drains the spirit; activism’s grind isolates those carrying its weight. But friction adapts faster than repression: every crackdown widens the audience, every arrest generates new alliances, every escalation of violence erodes the state’s legitimacy further. Costs accumulate across every layer of the system that once seemed unshakable.

Friction operates on a different timeline than spectacle; its power lies in duration, repetition, and cumulative strain.

It restores agency to a people pushed toward hopelessness, offering not romantic rupture but durable resistance. It provides direction amid devastation — document, coordinate, sustain — and transforms despair into determination. Each action, however small, is one more weight on the system’s supports, making domination less affordable, less stable, less permanent.

The state escalates because it cannot absorb the costs indefinitely. Each crackdown signals a system pushed into defensive posture, and each escalation widens the field of solidarity that sustains the movement.
 — -

Conclusion

The arc of this essay — from the despair bred by entrenchment to the concrete evidence of friction’s effectiveness — reveals something essential. Weakening Israeli domination is the indispensable foundation of liberation’s long horizon.

Injustice rarely collapses spectacularly; it erodes as the structures that uphold it become too costly to maintain. Targeted disruption does not wait for the perfect balance of forces. It burdens domination now.

Here lies a sober form of optimism. No illusions of imminent victory, no fantasies of collapse — but proof of real shifts already underway: sites abandoned, holdings shed, sourcing halted, licenses scrutinized, juries unconvinced. These are the slow deconstruction of the supports that make domination viable. Each act of friction accumulates force, raising the cost of complicity for those who depend on it.

The task before us is clear. Not to redict when domination will fall, but to make its continuance increasingly untenable. Every disruption, every coordinated effort, every refusal adds weight. When despair feels justified — and it often does — this strategy offers something fiercer: a path that honors Palestinian urgency and refuses the constraints imposed by the oppressor’s imagination.

As I argued in my previous essay, Israeli settlers will not leave voluntarily. But collective friction can raise the price of their permanence until even fortified structures begin to crack. That is where real change begins.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Feroze Mithiborwala

By any sober reading of recent events, the seizure of oil tankers has become the latest theatre in a widening confrontation between a declining unipolar order and a constellation of states determined to defend sovereignty against sanctions, coercion, and regime‑change politics.

The U.S. capture of a tanker accused of carrying Venezuelan and Iranian oil was not an isolated action. It was an escalation—another step in Washington’s long campaign to strangle the Bolivarian People’s Socialist Democratic Revolution and to punish Iran for refusing submission to U.S. diktat. Within hours, Tehran answered in kind. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized a tanker in the Gulf of Oman, once again signalling that the era of one‑way maritime coercion is over. The IRGC boarded the Phoenix, a foreign oil tanker sailing under the flag of the Cook Islands. Iran affirms that the ship lacked proper documentation and was involved in smuggling 2 million litres of diesel fuel. The 17 crew members on board are reportedly from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Earlier, a few days ago, the U.S. had hijacked a Venezuelan Oil Tanker carrying around 2 million litres of crude oil, heading for Cuba. The ship, the VLCC Skipper – formerly Adisa, was earlier sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022, as they believed that it was part of a shadow fleet of Iranian-linked fleet carrying Iranian oil including crude.

This article follows from my earlier examination of Washington’s hijacking of Venezuelan oil on the high seas. What has changed since then is not the logic of empire but the balance of resolve. Venezuela and Iran—two countries with long histories of resisting Western colonialism—are no longer isolated targets. They are nodes in a growing network of political, economic, and military cooperation that now stretches from South America to West Asia, anchored by deepening ties with China and Russia.

Sanctions as Warfare by Other Means

Sanctions are meant to weaken and break societies, weaken the will of the people to resist and eventually bring about the downfall of popular governments that refuse to align and surrender to the West. In practice, they function as collective punishment and economic warfare destroying the economy of entire nations, devastating millions of lives. The seizure of tankers carrying Venezuelan or Iranian crude—often far from U.S. territorial waters—pushes sanctions into openly piratical territory. As Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has argued, unilateral sanctions violate international law and devastate civilian populations while entrenching hardline politics in the targeted states. “Economic strangulation,” Sachs notes, “is a form of warfare that kills silently.”

For Caracas, the oil tanker seizures are part of a familiar script. Since Hugo Chávez first challenged U.S. hegemony, Washington has backed coups, funded

opposition networks, frozen assets, and attempted to throttle Venezuela’s primary source of revenue. Yet the Bolivarian project endures, precisely because it is rooted in mass politics. Elections continue. Communal councils and social programs survive and empowers the masses. The state refuses to bend and does not break.

Iran’s experience is parallel. Since the 1979 revolution, Tehran has lived under varying intensities of sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and covert war. The response has been strategic patience combined with steady investment in self‑reliance, in developing, diversifying the national economy — and particularly in defence and technology.

Fearless Retaliation and Deterrence

Iran’s seizure of a tanker in the Gulf of Oman was not mere tit‑for‑tat. It was deterrence. As retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has repeatedly warned, Washington underestimates both Iran’s capabilities and its willingness to defend its interests. Iran today fields one of the most sophisticated missile forces in the world, encompassing short, medium, and long‑range systems. During the recent 12‑day war, Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israeli targets and on the U.S. Al‑Udeid base in Qatar exposed the limits of missile defence and the fragility of escalatory dominance.

Whatever Western media attempted to obscure, the outcome was unmistakable: Israel sought a cessation of hostilities. Airports were closed to prevent a mass exodus. As journalist Chris Hedges has observed, states that rely on permanent war to sustain legitimacy are uniquely vulnerable when their populations lose faith in the promise of security.

Venezuela–Iran: A Partnership of the Sanctioned

Under pressure from successive U.S. regimes, Venezuela and Iran have moved closer. Their cooperation spans energy swaps, refining technology, shipping, industrial production, banking alternatives, and defence. Iranian technicians have helped rehabilitate Venezuelan refineries crippled by sanctions. Caracas, in turn, has provided diplomatic backing and strategic access in the Western Hemisphere.

This is not a relationship of patron and proxy. It is a partnership forged in resistance. George Galloway has framed it bluntly: “The crime of Venezuela and Iran is not dictatorship; it is independence.”

Russia, Iran and China – the RIC Axis

The broader context is the emergence of the Russia‑Iran‑China (RIC) axis. Russia provides energy coordination, arms cooperation, and diplomatic cover at the UN. China brings advanced technology, trade, infrastructure, finance, and an alternative development model free of IMF conditionalities. Together, the three are knitting a lattice of economic corridors, technology sharing, and military coordination that challenges U.S. and NATO influence from West Asia to Latin America.

Iran’s accession to BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has accelerated this shift. These forums are no longer symbolic. They are becoming platforms for de‑dollarization, settlement in local currencies, and coordinated development—trends that terrify a sanctions‑dependent empire.

Regime Change Fantasies

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Washington and Tel Aviv continue to bet on regime change. The Trump‑Netanyahu axis appears increasingly desperate: Venezuela is threatened with invasion rhetoric while suffering ongoing economic siege; Iran is encircled, provoked, and demonized.

Yet both governments retain substantial popular support, not least because external pressure discredits domestic opposition aligned with foreign powers. Anya Parampil has documented how U.S. regime‑change operations repeatedly misread social realities, mistaking online dissent and elite disaffection for mass revolt.

The likely trajectory in Venezuela is not invasion—an act that would ignite continental backlash—but continued economic warfare, asset seizures, and maritime interdictions. These are cheaper politically, though no less brutal in human cost.

Israel’s Escalation Ladder

Meanwhile, Israel continues to bomb southern Lebanon, provoking Hezbollah—a close ally of Iran and not a proxy, as is pejoratively stated. Israel’s long‑term objective is clear: expand the war, manufacture a casus belli against Iran, and drag the United States in. Alone, Israel lacks the capacity to confront Iran. Its last direct exchange demonstrated that starkly.

Israel’s ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank have led to unprecedented global revulsion and anger. Billions spent on narrative management have failed to stem the tide of outrage. From university campuses to trade unions, from the Global South to sections of Western public opinion, Israel’s moral capital is exhausted.

False Flags and Manufactured Consent

As Israel’s position weakens, suspicions grow that it may resort to false‑flag operations—spectacular acts of terror blamed on Hamas or Hezbollah—to reshape public opinion and force U.S. intervention. History offers precedents, from the Lavon Affair to more recent covert actions. Whether such operations materialize or not, the danger lies in the willingness of desperate elites to gamble with mass casualties to preserve power.

This danger is compounded by the fragility of U.S. domestic politics. Donald Trump, weakened by economic turbulence, the Epstein revelations, and serial electoral defeats—including the recent Miami loss—faces a looming 2026 midterm disaster. His MAGA base is fractured, increasingly hostile to foreign wars, and sceptical of blank‑check support for Israel.

A World at the Brink

As 2026 approaches, the crisis of the U.S.‑led order deepens. From seized tankers in the Caribbean to missile exchanges in West Asia, the message from Caracas and Tehran is unmistakable – sovereignty will be defended. As the hitherto US/Western dominated unipolar world order withers away and a multipolar world emerges, the US regime dominated by a predatory Oligarchy, will continue to conserve its fast-declining power and this will create further turbulence and worse – wars.

The Global South, the Global Majority will continue to resist and march ahead to defend its freedom & sovereignty from decades of imperial overreach. Whether Washington adapts to this reality or doubles down on coercion will shape the next decade. What is certain is that the age of uncontested U.S. maritime, financial, and military dominance is ending—and the tankers seized on distant seas are among its clearest symbols.

Footnotes & References

1. Jeffrey D. Sachs, writings and public statements on unilateral sanctions and international law.

2. Douglas Macgregor, interviews and analyses on Iran, Israel, and U.S. military overstretch.

3. George Galloway, speeches and broadcasts on Venezuela, Iran, and anti‑imperialism.

4. Anya Parampil, Corporate Coup, and investigative reporting on U.S. regime‑change operations.

5. Chris Hedges, essays and books on Israel, Gaza, and the logic of permanent war.

6. UN Special Rapporteur reports; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch documentation on Gaza and the West Bank.

Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian & International Geostrategic issues. He is the Founder-Gen. Sec. of the India Palestine Solidarity Forum.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – An Israeli military bulldozer deliberately ran over a wounded Palestinian child, cutting his body in half while he was still alive, after shooting him and preventing medical aid from reaching him. This premeditated killing reflects extreme brutality and forms part of Israel’s ongoing pattern of targeting Palestinian civilians as a national group in the Gaza Strip within the broader two-year-long genocide.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s field team documented the injury of 16-year-old Zaher Nasser Shamia from Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip by Israeli forces on Wednesday afternoon, 10 December 2025. The wounded child lay bleeding, with no one able to reach him due to continuous gunfire. Minutes later, a military bulldozer advanced towards him and deliberately ran him over while he was still alive on the ground, splitting his body in two and tearing it into pieces.

In his testimony to Euro-Med Monitor, the child’s uncle said that Shamia had been near the Jabalia Services Club, about 50 metres from the Yellow Line, when Israeli army vehicles arrived at around 9 a.m. near the yellow concrete cubes amid heavy gunfire. Shamia remained in the camp until a friend told him that the army had withdrawn from the Yellow Line. He then walked with a group of friends towards the concrete cubes. As he reached the middle of al-Hadad Street, Israeli forces fired at him, most likely from a quadcopter drone, striking him in the head, according to eyewitnesses. He was seen still moving his head before his friends fled, leaving him lying on the ground.

The child’s uncle added that Israeli forces then fired smoke bombs and advanced towards Zaher’s location. Soldiers dismounted, and military bulldozers arrived to erect a berm in front of the yellow cement blocks. During this time, one of the bulldozers deliberately ran over Zaher’s body as he lay on the ground, tearing it into pieces. His friends were later able to collect the remains and transfer them to Al-Shifa Hospital.

The Israeli army’s repeated practice of running over Palestinians, whether alive or wounded, with tanks and bulldozers, is not a series of isolated incidents but one of the most brutal forms of deliberate killing carried out over the past two years. This reflects an organised policy to dehumanise Palestinians and inflict physical and psychological terror, forming an integral element of the genocide committed against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.

Euro-Med Monitor also documented the Israeli army’s killing of 62-year-old Palestinian Jamal Hamdi Hassan Ashour, who was deliberately run over in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, southeast of Gaza City, on 29 February 2024. Testimonies confirmed that soldiers arrested him, zip-tied his hands, and interrogated him before running him over with an armoured vehicle, crushing first the lower half of his body and then the upper half.

Another compound crime was documented on 27 June 2024, when Israeli forces targeted a family consisting of an elderly mother and her four children, including three daughters and a granddaughter barely a year and a half old, in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood east of Gaza City. The forces stormed the house, firing live ammunition and grenades inside and forcing the family out. They then detained the injured family members in and around tanks for more than three hours in an active combat zone, using them as human shields. A tank subsequently ran over the mother, 65-year-old Safiya Hassan Musa al Jamal, while she was still alive and in front of her son, killing her in a particularly brutal manner.

On 23 January 2024, Euro-Med Monitor documented an Israeli tank running over a temporary shelter caravan in the Tayba Towers area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, while members of the Ghannam family were sleeping inside. The attack killed the father and his eldest daughter and injured his wife and three other children.

On 16 December 2023, Israeli tanks and bulldozers ran over displaced people sheltering in tents in the courtyard of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, killing several individuals, including wounded patients receiving treatment. The machinery also crushed graves, and the bodies of people buried in one side of the courtyard.

Killing Palestinians by running them over with heavy military machinery is among the most brutal methods used by the Israeli army, showing complete disregard for their lives and dignity. This pattern reflects an attempt to destroy Palestinians as a national group in Gaza, reinforced by repeated public incitement to exterminate them and by the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators in the absence of any genuine avenues for accountability at all levels.

Despite the ceasefire agreement of 10 October 2025, Israel continues to kill Palestinian civilians through aerial and artillery bombardment and direct gunfire, resulting in 389 civilian deaths and about 1,000 injuries since the agreement took effect. This pattern forms one dimension of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

This continued killing is accompanied by the deliberate maintenance of deadly living conditions for hundreds of thousands of displaced people, including obstructing the entry of aid and basic lifesaving supplies, blocking reconstruction, and leaving people exposed to cold weather, disease, and collapsing health services. Together, these actions reflect a policy aimed at destroying the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, in whole or in part.

The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court must give special priority to investigating the widespread killing and targeting of the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip, including the killing of children, the wounded, and the displaced, as well as the imposition of deadly living conditions, as part of the crime of genocide and other crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction. It must also advance towards determining individual responsibility at the highest military and political levels.

States that recognise universal jurisdiction must open criminal investigations into the documented incidents of vehicular attacks, deliberate killings, and other serious violations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and prosecute all those for whom sufficient evidence of responsibility exists, regardless of their nationality or official position.

States Parties to the Genocide Convention, as well as other influential states, must take concrete and immediate steps to prevent the continuation of genocide in Gaza, including halting the supply of weapons and military support to Israel that are used to commit violations, and reviewing existing political and security cooperation in line with their obligation to prevent, and not contribute to, genocide.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- Three Palestinian children have died from extreme cold in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, raising the storm-related death toll to 14 as families displaced by Israel’s two-year genocide are trapped in flooded shelters as a winter storm, now in its third day, brings heavy rain and strong winds.

On Friday, medical sources confirmed that nine-year-old Hadeel al-Masri died in a shelter for displaced people west of Gaza City. Baby Taim al-Khawaja also passed away in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City.

The grandfather of the baby boy said his family had been sheltering in a house with no roof after their house was bombed during an Israeli attack.

“Yesterday, we were surprised to hear his mother screaming, saying, ‘My son is blue!’ so we carried the boy and went to al-Rantisi Hospital,” the grandfather explained.

“His temperature remained between 33 and 34 degrees, which has affected all his organs. His brain began to deteriorate, and that was the end of it,” he added.

A day earlier, 8-month-old Rahaf Abu Jazar also died of exposure to the brutal weather conditions after her family’s tent in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis took in water.

Displaced Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are waking up to inches of water flooding their tents, after nights of heavy rainfall that left their shelters and belongings soaked.

Three days of cold thunderstorms are expected to hit Palestine starting from Wednesday, the Palestinian Meteorological Department has warned, unleashing flash floods, high winds and even hail.

Gaza’s Government Media Office has called on the world to respond “to save the catastrophic humanitarian reality” in Gaza as cold weather and rain bears down on the enclave.

The storm Byron hit occupied Palestine, including Gaza, on Wednesday and is set to last until Friday, bringing with it heavy rains that are flooding the tens of thousands of tents sheltering Gaza’s displaced people.

It is also bringing heavy winds, fierce waves from the sea and thunderstorms, according to the Office.

The Office said the weather “may cause extensive damage to tens of thousands of families living in tents and primitive shelters that do not protect them from the cold winter or the harshness of weather lows.”

On Thursday, the Palestinian Civil Defense reported that its crews in southern Gaza evacuated 14 tents flooded by rainwater in various areas of Khan Younis, moving displaced Palestinians to other locations . The Civil Defense crews also freed two cars stuck in sandy, muddy roads, despite the difficult access and limited resources.

On Wednesday morning, the rescue group warned that the coming hours are extremely dangerous and that Gaza may once again “witness a disaster as displaced families face severe flooding. We are in a very difficult situation, and global action is urgently needed to save Gaza from being submerged.”

The Gaza City Municipality also confirmed that the storms pose a major threat to the displaced people and to residents due to the destruction of the infrastructure after two-year Israeli genocide.

It noted the Israeli occupation has destroyed more than 85% of the equipment, “which hinders our ability to assist the population,” adding “the situation in the Strip is catastrophic due to the storms and the severe shortage of essential supplies.”

Gaza City Mayor Yahya al-Sarraj said on Wednesday, “We expect another wave of the storm, but we lack the necessary equipment to deal with it. We rely on equipment rented from the private sector, which is old and unsuitable for dealing with the storm.”

“The storm is exacerbating the humanitarian crisis amid the destruction of infrastructure and a lack of resources,” the mayor added.

Shelters, makeshift tents and damaged homes have borne the brunt of the storm, collapsing under the pressure of strong winds and rainfall, leading to the deaths of displaced Palestinians. 

On Friday, the Office confirmed that the death toll from Storm Byron has increased to 14 as homes collapse under strong winds and flooding. 

According to the Office, the storm has begun to materialise on the ground in the enclave, leaving Gaza’s one and a half million displaced people in “direct confrontation with the danger of drowning and collapses”.

“The Gaza Strip has witnessed dangerous developments, including: 14 casualties, including martyrs and missing people, as a result of the storm’s impact and the collapse of bombed buildings across all governorates of the Gaza Strip,” the statement read.

“The collapse of at least 13 homes, most recently in the al-Karama and Sheikh Radwan neighbourhoods of Gaza City, with civil defence teams still responding to hundreds of calls for help; the flooding and destruction of more than 27,000 tents belonging to displaced people, which were either inundated, swept away by floods, or torn down by strong winds,” it added.

The Ministry of Interior and National Security in Gaza also said on Friday that the operating teams have received more than 4,300 distress calls from people across the enclave since the onset of the storm.

Over the past few hours, at least 12 incidents were recorded of previously shelled buildings collapsing as a result of the strong wind and heavy rains, it said in a statement.

The Ministry said its police forces are helping civil defence and municipal teams conduct rescue operations despite limited resources as several people remain missing and are believed to be under the rubble.

“What is happening now is a wakeup call for everyone to face up to their responsibilities,” the statement said, calling on the international community to intervene in order for Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Earlier, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres criticised Israeli restrictions on supplies going into Gaza.

Despite the UN providing tents, tarpaulins, blankets and winter clothes, more lasting preparedness for shelters and floods remains impossible, Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

“You will recall that a major impediment to shelter response is the restrictive registration requirements for NGOs imposed by the Israeli authorities,” Dujarric told reporters in a daily briefing.

“Many of our NGO partners remain blocked from bringing in relief, and nearly 4,000 pallets of shelter materials have been rejected by Israeli authorities,” he said.

“Gaza urgently needs heavy machinery, tools and many more shelter items to prevent catastrophic flooding,” he said.

It is now the third winter displaced Palestinians have endured since the start of the two-year Israeli genocide. 

Videos and photos circulating on social media show displaced families’ tents flooded by rain on Wednesday, with mattresses, blankets, and personal belongings soaked. 

People were also seen taking shelter from the rain with little clothing to protect them. Videos showed the displaced trying to remove large amounts of water from their tents with buckets. 

According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, nearly all of the Gaza Strip’s residents have been displaced. Following the start of the ceasefire, many families tried to return to their homes, most to find only rubble. However, according to the UN Satellite Centre, around 81% of all structures are damaged. 

As the ceasefire enters its third month, humanitarian agencies say that far too little aid is reaching Gaza, as hunger persists and old tents start to fray.

The Israeli military has refused to allow the entry of many tents and mobile homes to Gaza despite the harsh weather conditions and the destroyed infrastructure.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), nearly 1.5 million people already required tents and other emergency shelter materials and more than 282,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed across Gaza, leaving families without protection, privacy, or adequate shelter as temperatures drop. 

On Tuesday, Israeli forecaster Tzachi Peleg mocked Gaza’s displaced residents, saying: “Not a single tent will remain… and I have no problem if people don’t survive either.”

Peleg predicted that strong winds and heavy rain could destroy most tent camps in the Gaza Strip. He excitedly said that drainage infrastructure is largely destroyed and will not withstand the storm. Underground tunnels are also expected to flood, he added.

Save the Children called on Israel to allow tent poles and other banned items to enter Gaza, along with tents, winter clothes and blankets, to better protect families from Storm Byron’s effects.

Since the ceasefire took effect in October, Israel has not allowed the Strip to receive timber, tent poles or tools because it considers them “controlled dual-purpose” items.

“No child should lie awake all night freezing in sewage-sodden bedding. This is unconscionable,” said Ahmad Alhendawi, the organisation’s regional director for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe. 

“What Palestinian children in Gaza need immediately is tents including tent poles, shelter, warm clothes, blankets and bedding”, as well as repairs to the sanitation system.

Last month’s storms forced half of Save the Children’s child-friendly spaces to close as camps were deluged with flooding, sewage and water damage, while attendance at its remaining four spaces has halved, the group said.

Nearly 850,000 people, currently sheltering in 761 displacement sites in the Gaza Strip, face the highest risk of flooding this week, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

In an update, OCHA said it had tracked more than 3,500 displacement movements between December 7 and 8, likely in anticipation of the heavy thunderstorms forecast to batter Palestine starting Wednesday.

Flooding has previously been recorded at more than 200 of the highest-risk sites, the office said, affecting more than 140,000 people.

UNRWA said on Thursday some streets in Gaza are flooded and tents are soaked after the latest winter rains, making dire living conditions even worse for the enclave’s forcibly displaced population.

“Cold, overcrowded, and unsanitary environments heighten the risk of illness and infection,” the agency said. “This suffering could be prevented by unhindered humanitarian aid, including medical support and proper shelter.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said Palestinians have been left to starve amid the storm, as the unstoppable “nightmare” continues in the enclave.

13 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Amanda Sperber

U.S. airstrikes and Somali government ground troops, including a militia trained by the U.S., killed at least 11 civilians, including seven children—one as young as seven months—during an operation on an al-Shabaab stronghold in southern Somalia last month.

Drop Site News spoke to four witnesses of the attack from Jaaame, a major town in the Lower Jubba region, that has been under control of al-Shabaab—an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group—for decades. On November 15, the witnesses said, after hours of aircraft circling overhead, shelling and bombing started, leaving body parts strewn on the ground and caught in trees.

The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) released a statement confirming that it conducted strikes in the area to support Somali troops. AFRICOM did not respond to requests for comment about the operation it supported killing civilians; neither did the government of Jubbaland.

“The baby was motionless and I was trying to save my wife,” Mohammed Hassan Abdulle said. Nurto Mohamed Hassan, his seven-month-old daughter, died instantly after two pieces of shrapnell hit her head and thigh. Nurto had been wrapped on her mother’s back when the two were hit. Abdulle tried to get his bleeding wife, Farhiya Hassan Omar, help at the local clinic but “the shelling was like rain.” Finally, they managed to hitch a ride in a small Suzuki to get to a hospital in Jilib, alShabaab’s de facto capital, about 40 miles north.

Abdulle held her during the five-hour drive over dunes and flooded roads. Her torso and shoulders were badly injured. At one point, their car broke down. Abdulle was in the middle of donating blood at the hospital when a doctor informed him that Farhiya had died. He says he does not know who carried out the attacks but that he saw mortar shelling from the west, across from the Jubba River, as well as about six bombs from the sky. He said a drone was still hovering overhead as he conducted the interview with Drop Site, about three weeks later. “All the time it is in the sky,” he said.

A combination of forces, including Somali government and regional troops, as well as the U.S.-trained Danab counterterrorism unit with its own Jubbaland regional force, carried out the mid-November attacks backed by U.S. airstrikes, in an effort to bring Jubbaland under its control.

Videos and photos of the aftermath of the mid-November assault have been circulating across social media and regional outlets. Upwards of 50 people were killed, according to media reports, with varying estimates on the numbers of civilians killed. Two community leaders who no longer live in the region separately gathered the names and ages of at least 11 civilians killed and six wounded and shared their lists with Drop Site.

Four of them were siblings, ranging from four years old to ten, who were killed alongside their mother. Their grandfather, Mohamed Abo Sheikh Ali Muudey, said Jamaame is nearly empty of residents, but al-Shabaab is still in control. Muudey was in town during the assault and said he saw the planes come from the “Kismayo-side,” the regional capital where AFRICOM planes and troops are stationed at the airport, and where Danab commandos are trained.

On top of a decades-long civil war, Somalia is in the midst of a years-long political dispute between federal member states. Jubbaland recently formally left the federal structure and announced itself as an independent government. “Due to ongoing political fragmentation in Somalia, regional governments are trying to demonstrate they are a good counterterrorism partner to the U.S. in order to receive direct support. As part of this, you have ongoing operations by Puntland, Jubbaland and the federal government which are not always coordinated,” Omar Mahmood, the senior analyst for Somalia and the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group, told Drop Site News.

The attacks were part of a wider offensive on key al-Shabaab bases in the district, about 10 miles away from Jamaame town, on the other side of the river that divides the area that started earlier this year. Significant al-Shabaab bases and strategic footholds surrounding the town have fallen since the offensive was launched, according to local media. This is likely the first time in over a decade that forces besides al-Shabaab have controlled areas in the Jamaame district.

The impacted civilians in Jamaame are from the Biamaal clan, a group that is not well represented in Jubbaland’s government and is indigenous to the area. A leader from the clan, known as Ugaas, who lives in Mogadishu spoke to Drop Site News. “We were there before al-Shabaab and we want to remain there after al-Shabaab,” Ugaas Ahmed Ugaas Said Ali said. “We don’t know why we are being targeted unless someone wants to grab our land and take our resources.”

“It was a very shocking day,” Maria Abdi Haji Guled, a mother of eight, said. “So many people died. Children were running around. Everything was a mess.”

Guled was in the kitchen feeding five of her children breakfast after their morning session at school when the carnage began. Her husband was on their farm, outside of town. She stressed that al-Shabaab was not present when the shelling and bombing unleashed mayhem on the ground. She had observed a plane in the sky, and never seen one like that before, but “we did not expect it to bomb us,” she said. There had never been fighting around Jamaame, according to her. Guled also witnessed baby Nurto and her mother get hit, and the seven-month old die on the spot; they lived nearby.

It took Guled multiple days to take two of her wounded children to get medical care in Mogadishu, the national capital. Her youngest child, a seven-year-old, has shrapnel in two places in his back and waist. He was unable to walk for over two weeks. He is able to move now, but Guled cannot afford the $1,000 charge to have the metal removed from his body.

“It is well known what happened in Jamaame. There was a massacre and bombardment of residential areas,” Ugaas Ali said.

In late November, AFRICOM told FOX News that it had conducted 100 strikes on Somalia this year. The media outlet Stars and Stripes observed “strikes are occurring at a faster clip than the Pentagon’s campaign against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea.”

“We are dying for nothing,” Mariam Omar Nur Buruji, another resident of Jamaame said. Buruji was not in Jamaame during the attack but on her family farm in an area called Bugeey, less than an hour’s walk from town. From there she could see burning houses and bombardment. Today, Buruji is staying in a village called Hongore with her three grandchildren. Their mother was killed in the offensive. Her son, their father, is back on the farm. She told Drop Site News that can still hear the aircraft, but cannot see them. The children are scared.

Amanda Sperber Multi-award-winning freelance investigative reporter & correspondent. Occasional professor of journalism, researcher & media strategist. Writing a book.

13 December 2025

Source: dropsitenews.com

By Harsh Mander

The medical profession in India – as in much of the world – today has lost its way.

From a vocation of care and service, it has widely transformed into a soulless vehicle for super- profits. The growing separation of the medical profession from ethical practice and the overwhelming sway instead of profiteering is indeed the greatest, most intractable crisis of medical education today.

Medical colleges teach medical knowledge, skills and sophisticated clinical technology and practice. But can they equally teach an ethical approach to medical practice, a commitment to equity and a resolve to serve those most in need of one’s services without considerations of money? Can medical colleges restore a profession inebriated with private gain and profit to its core mission of care especially of people who are most disadvantaged?

Searching for answers, I look at two widely contrasting pathways chosen by India and Cuba, both middle-income countries that have adopted vastly different models for medical education.

The case of India

India has the largest numbers of medical colleges in the world. India also has one of the most privatised health care systems in the world.

The case of India illustrates best why training more health workers does not automatically bring the country closer to the goal of universal health care. It establishes emphatically that more trained health workers do not result necessarily in more doctors and nurses who serve in rural and forested regions and shanty towns.

As many as eight out of 10 trained physicians in India work for the private health sector, many in large corporate hospitals. This leaves just two out of ten trained physicians in India who choose to work in the public health sector. These too are mostly bunched in tertiary and super-tertiary hospitals in urban areas.

Even the small numbers in public hospitals do not guarantee greater health equity. Even doctors employed in public hospitals in India are notorious for running private practices on the side. Patients learn that they are more likely to be prescribed hospital beds and surgery in the public hospital if they first visit the same doctor’s private clinic and pay a few.

The ratio of just two out of 10 doctors in India who choose to work for the public health system is still a considerable over-statement if we consider the numbers of doctors who graduate in India. Among all low- and middle-income countries, India is the biggest source of trained physicians exported to the high-income countries.

Research shows that 4.9% of American physicians and 10.9% of British physicians are physicians trained in India. Studies indicate that many of these train in the leading public institutions of the country. Therefore, of all the doctors who graduate from Indian medical schools, even far less than two in 10 work in public health within India.

India’s most prestigious and top-ranked medical college is the super-tertiary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, the national capital. From around 30,000 applicants, only 45 students (0.15%) are selected each year.

A dear friend teaches in this institute. He resigned from his comfortable position in the National Health Service in London to return to serve in the country of his birth. He loves his work and is greatly sought out by patients who travel from far corners of the country, drawn by his reputation. But when I asked him once how he likes his teaching responsibilities in the hospital, he replied dryly. “It’s okay,” he began laconically. “Except that even in their first year in the institute, only the bodies of my students are in the classroom. Their souls have already migrated to the US and the UK!”

That he was not exaggerating was confirmed by the findings of a significant study which revealed that 54% of AIIMS graduates during 1989-2000 now reside outside India. Students who qualified under the “general category” (meaning they were not in the affirmative-action category) were twice as likely to migrate abroad. Other studies also confirm similarly that elite medical schools contribute disproportionately to the ranks of emigrant physicians. Moreover, even within the elite schools, students with the highest academic achievement have the greatest likelihood of migrating.

This raises fundamental doubts not just about the quantum of medical education facilities available in low- and middle-income countries but also their quality. If high achievement is closely tied to a high likelihood of migrating to high-income countries, we need to ask what is considered high achievement in medical education? More so, when, for the overwhelming majority of those who do not migrate, the preferred career course is the private corporatised health sector.

The India story is a sombre reminder that the central challenge is therefore not of creating significantly larger numbers of health professionals trained in curative skills that are valued in the health sectors of high-income industrialised countries. If low- and middle-income countries expend limited public revenues to train health workers whose skills are valued in high-income countries, and these countries or the private health sector are the preferred sites of their vocation, these public revenues are contributing little to advancing the right to health care in their countries.

In the early decades of India’s freedom, the state vested significant public funds on establishing public medical colleges. These were attached to large tertiary care public hospitals. The clinical skills that students gathered must have been of sufficiently high-quality for the acceptance of Indian medical graduates in high-income countries in larger numbers than from any other country of the Global South. The students, through their internships and residencies, treated large numbers of lower-income patients who crowded the corridors of these public hospitals. Still, large numbers chose to leave the country, or cluster in urban centres, reluctant to serve the vast hinterland of the countryside and towns where more than half the population lived.

But neo-liberalism from the 1990s brought with it first the rapid decline of public health systems and growing reliance of rich and middle-class Indians on private corporate hospitals. We also have noted that after a large migration of graduates from the best-ranking medical schools, eight out of 10 doctors opted to work with the private health sector.

These winds of change transformed also the medical education sector. That India has more medical colleges than any other country in the world is not surprising because it is now the world’s most populous country. But India ranks very low in the number of doctors as a ratio of its population.

The difficulties of finding sufficient budgetary resources for financing health worker education led many governments, such as India, to turn to the private sector to open private medical and nursing schools. The advocates for this argue that privatisation not only provides necessary resources, but also flexibility and quality that can be complementary to public-sector training. International organisations advocate cautious integration of private resources within strong regulatory frameworks, prioritising public health needs. Health activists on the other hand typically oppose extensive privatisation due to equity concerns, advocating instead for strong public investment.

In a bid to fulfil the massive gaps in the health workforce, since the 1990s, the Indian government changed policy that resulted in transmuting medical education into a lucrative business. Businesspersons and politicians with no experience in running medical schools swarmed the country with money and connections to establish medical colleges. The result is that since the 1980s, the number of government colleges have doubled, while those run by the private sector rose 20 times. The number of medical schools rose steeply from 256 in 2006 to 479 in 2017. Of these, 259 are privately owned and managed. Around 48% of MBBS seats in India today are offered in private medical colleges.

Avinash Supe and Soumendra Sahoo in a significant essay titled “Malpractice in Medical Education” lament, “Medical education is now seen as a lucrative business linked to large profits. It has drifted away from its social mission.” These private medical colleges are founded and run by trusts established by powerful political and business interests. They “charge huge fees from aspiring students”.

In addition, many take large bribes to admit students. Regulation is wantonly weak. Regulatory bodies “have turned a blind eye to the deficiencies and subversions of the minimum standards laid down in several such institutions”. They do this because they are “passively caving in or actively succumbing to pecuniary temptations”.

The result of the high fees and bribes is that “for a middle-class student, it means the family having to mortgage their homes in order to fulfil their child’s ambition”. Supe and Sahoo observe that “earning money has become the major priority of a student graduating from medical college”. When such students start private practice, “they are tempted to over-investigate and over-treat their patients in order to earn back the money they spent in getting their medical degrees”.

Typically, hospitals run by private medical colleges offer a much smaller range of patients than those in public medical colleges. Further, examinations rely on rote-learning, diverting students even further away from patients and wards, which is where they should truly learn their vocation. The integrity of the exam system has also been disgracefully compromised.

In all of these ways, our assessment is harsh, but I believe it is not unfair that the medical education imparted by profit-seeking medical schools in India prepares a health workforce that learns early to value personal profit over their patient’s well-being. India’s is a morality tale of how to add large numbers to a country’s trained health care workforce while doing little to take health care to the doors of those who need it most.

The case of Cuba

Cuba’s accomplishments in medical education would place Cuba at the other end of the spectrum from India. Perhaps more than any other country in the world, Cuba has accomplished significantly equity-driven medical education. It has paved innovative pathways to building a massive health workforce equipped with not just the skills, but also the dedication and values of public service. This skilled and devoted workforce has enabled Cuba to secure, despite being a middle-income country, health outcomes that are comparable or better than those of rich countries. Cuba’s health workers are reported to be the soul of Cuba’s accomplishment of extending free quality health care to the entire population.

Accounts of Cuba’s remarkable accomplishments in medical education reveal that its first feat is in numbers. Before the revolution in 1959, Cuba had a single medical school and 6,300 doctors. Half these doctors left the country. Today, Cuba has the highest doctor to population ratio in the world.

But its achievements are much more than its incredible accretion of numbers. Cuba’s greater triumph is that Cuban doctors are widely acknowledged to stand out among their peers around the world for their willingness, even eagerness, to live among and serve disadvantaged populations, within Cuba and the rest of the world. Although it was not compulsory, almost all graduates have volunteered to serve in rural areas.

What in Cuba’s medical education policies made these singular, accomplishments possible? One significant difference from medical education around the world was that the basis for selection of medical students for entry into medical school was altered to prioritise the mettle of character over of the mind. Academic qualifications were not the sole or paramount criteria for admission to medical schools. Selectors gave weight to their sense of vocation, responsibility and commitment to solidarity.

Next, the students, unlike in most medical schools, spend a much smaller time in tertiary hospitals. A lot of their training is decentralised to health institutions located in communities. This is linked to three major innovations in the Cuban health system. The first of these was to extend health services to rural areas and develop a nationwide primary health care network. Then in 1965, Cuba created a network of 498 “comprehensive” polyclinics that initially covered 45,000 persons each, and then in the 1970s, 25,000-30,000 persons. These combined primary care, specialist services, diagnostics and health education. The third institutional innovation from the 1980s was the Family Doctor Programme. Family Medicine Clinics with a doctor and a nurse each covered neighbourhoods of 120-150 families, with curative services but also health education, epidemiologic surveys, linkages with social institutions like homes for the elderly and teaching.

This called for a new medical curriculum to train doctors who would “understand, integrate, coordinate and administer the treatment of each patient’s health needs, as well as the community at large”. Students learned to understand patient needs “holistically rather than as fragmented ‘organ/systems’ diagnosed and treated by different hospital specialists”. In 2003, this coalesced into a new medical training model that shifted further from medical schools and teaching hospitals to community polyclinic and clinics as the central sites for teaching general medicine.

Students studied in diverse settings, ranging from traditional classrooms, doctors’ surgeries, primary health care centres, polyclinics and hospitals. Approximately 75%-80% of the teaching occurred in community primary care facilities with an accredited polyclinic as the central teaching unit. The curriculum was designed to integrate clinical practice with public health principles, equipping students with the skills to address diverse health care challenges. Interdisciplinary approaches, such as combining biomedical sciences with psychology and sociology, ensured that graduates were prepared for the complexities of modern health care delivery. The emphasis on active learning and community engagement also fostered a sense of responsibility among future doctors.

Cuba’s focus on primary care and health promotion, designed to prevent 90% of health problems, was central to its medical education. A student spoke to The Lancet about how inspired he was by the focus on preventive medicine and public health. “The doctors actually take time to educate the community,” he said, such as going to a patient’s home to show them how to cook with less salt, or demonstrating proper hand-washing to mitigate infectious diseases such as cholera.

Evaluations revealed that the clinical skills of these doctors were no way less than those more conventionally trained. But they had a much higher average level of public spiritedness and willingness to serve in difficult areas, not just in Cuba but around the world.

The remarkable success of the Cuban health system deeply rooted in neighbourhood communities is widely acknowledged even by outside observers. A visiting American team of pharmacy college staff, for instance, applauded Cuba’s universal health care delivery system. This, they said, “exemplified home health” in which “doctors and nurses live within the communities and open their doors to all-hour care for their neighbours”. The Cuban health staff “devote considerable human resources to providing care and doctors are basically embedded in the neighbourhoods. When something is wrong, they can react quickly. They have achieved a high quality of life for their patients for the most part, which wasn’t a surprise”. “They have much better access to physicians for primary care than we have” in the United States, a team member opined. This gives a sound foundation to the focus of Cuban medical education on equity and service.

The Cuban government maintains that the spirit of service and solidarity that Cuban medical education has fostered has benefited not only less advantaged populations within Cuba. From the 1960s onward, Cuba dispatched medical brigades to provide disaster relief and long-term health care support in underserved regions worldwide. Cuban doctors have reached underserved and disaster-hit populations in the poorest regions of the world and also offered medical training to students from other Latin American and African countries. Stirred by this singular spirit of humanitarianism, Cuba has sent 325,000 of its health workers to 158 countries in over five decades since the revolution. A total of 49,000 Cuban health care workers are working in 65 countries around the world.

This is often presented as glowing demonstrations of Cuba’s unparalleled international medical solidarity through its medical internationalism programmes. Time magazine, however, underlines that this is not all about altruism. “When you have a very well-educated population but also shortages of cash and goods, you want to find a way to monetize it,” a Cuba expert told them. Cuba’s “army of white coats” leased to foreign governments brings in remittances of around 11 billion dollars a year, making this a higher revenue earner for the country even than the tourism industry.

In 1998, Cuba started an international medical school offering free medical education to people from low-income communities from around the world. It has trained, with full scholarships, free room and board and some spending money, more than 26,000 students drawn from more than 123 countries. Several students are Latin American and from sub-Saharan Africa. Many return to work with disadvantaged communities in their countries.

What still sets Cuban medical education apart from conventional models is its integration of social responsibility, equity and public health into the curriculum. Cuban medical training emphasises a broader skill set, including roles as caregivers, managers, community leaders and educators.

Right from 1965, a tradition grew in Cuban medical schools that medical graduates would pledge to renounce private practice.

Cuban medical education teaches not only primary care, but also the ethics and obligations of the medical profession. The ideology of solidarity is an inherent part of the curriculum. If there is a crisis anywhere in the world, a student said proudly to The Lancet, “I just pack some underwear and I’m ready to go.”

It is the “right of every citizen to have free and quality care”, that is also accessible and equitable, declares another student. “To be able to have a health system like we have, you need the political will.”

I am grateful for research support from Rishiraj Bhagawati.

Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, teacher who leads the Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to fight hate with radical love and solidarity. 

10 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said that Israeli forces killed almost half of the journalists who lost their lives in 2025. The group reported that 43% of all journalists killed this year were kilked in Israeli attacks in Gaza.

The Government Media Office in Gaza also released updated numbers. It said Israeli forces have killed 257 Palestinian journalists since the genocide in Gaza began on October 7, 2023.

RSF said 67 journalists died in. According to the group, 53 journalists died in war zones or at the hands of criminal gangs.

RSF also described Sudan as an exceptionally deadly war zone for media workers this year.

In Mexico, organized crime groups drove a sharp rise in journalist killings. RSF said 2025 became the deadliest year in at least three years, with nine journalists killed. Mexico now ranks as the second most dangerous country in the world for reporters.

RSF noted that journalists face the highest risk inside their home countries.

Globally, 135 journalists are missing in 37 countries. RSF said 72% of them disappeared in the Middle East and Latin America, and that some have been missing for more than 30 years.

RSF director-general Christophe Deloire said the killing of 67 journalists this year did not happen by chance. He said they died because of their work.

He stressed that media criticism is legitimate when it pushes reform and protects press freedom. But he warned against hate campaigns targeting journalists. He said armed forces and criminal groups often create or fuel this hostility.

Deloire said impunity drives the violence. He argued that international bodies have failed to protect journalists and defend their rights in wars and conflicts because governments have lost the courage to act.

He warned that journalists have become “side victims, disturbing witnesses, bargaining chips, and pieces on diplomatic chessboards.” He said no journalist “sacrifices” their life for the profession. Instead, their lives are taken.

“Journalists do not die,” he said. “They are killed.”

10 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org