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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America.

The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.

The eight wars Trump claims he has ended include non-existent wars between Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo, and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended in 2023, after Azerbaijan invaded and ethnically cleansed the ancient Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh. Trump stole credit for peace between Thailand and Cambodia, which was actually mediated by Malaysia, while India insists that it ended its war with Pakistan without help from Trump.

Trump recently invited the presidents of Rwanda and the DRC to Washington to sign a peace deal, but it’s only the latest of many agreements that have failed to end decades of war and proxy war that rage on in the eastern Congo.

Trump even claims to have brought peace to Iran, which was not at war until he and Netanyahu plotted to attack it. Now diplomacy with Iran is dead—torpedoed by Trump’s treacherous use of negotiations as cover for the U.S.-Israeli surprise attack in June, an illegal war right out of Rubio’s neocon playbook.

Rubio has undermined diplomacy with Iran for years. As a senator, he worked to kill the JCPOA nuclear agreement, framed negotiations as appeasement, and repeatedly demanded harsher sanctions or militaryaction. He defended the U.S. and Israeli attacks in June, which confirmed the claims of Iranian hardliners that the United States cannot be trusted. He makes meaningful talks with Iran impossible by insisting that Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and long-range missile development. By aligning U.S. policy with Israel’s, Rubio closed off the only path that has ever reduced tensions with Iran: sustained, good-faith diplomacy.

Trump’s eighth claimed peace agreement was his Gaza “peace plan,” under which Israel still kills and maimsPalestinians every day and allows only 200 truckloads per day of food, water, medicine, and relief supplies into Gaza. With Israeli forces still occupying most of Gaza, no country is sending troops to join Trump’s “stabilization force,” nor will Hamas disarm and leave its people defenseless. Israel still calls the shots, and will only allow rebuilding in Israeli-occupied areas.

As secretary of state, it was Marco Rubio’s job to negotiate peace and an end to the occupation of Palestine. But Rubio’s entire political career has been defined by unwavering support for Israel and corrupted by over a million dollars from pro-Israel donor groups like AIPAC. He refuses to speak to Hamas, insisting on its total isolation and destruction.

Rubio even refuses to negotiate with the weakest, most compromised, but still internationally recognized, Palestinian Authority. In the Senate, he worked to defund and delegitimize the PA, and now he insists it should play no role in Gaza’s future, but he offers no alternative. Contrast this with China, which recently convenedfourteen Palestinian factions for dialogue. With a U.S. secretary of state who won’t talk to any Palestinian actors, the United States is only supporting endless war and occupation.

Ukraine is not on Trump’s list of “eight wars,” but it is the conflict he most loudly promised to end on day one. Trump took his first steps to resolve the crisis in Ukraine with phone calls with Putin and Zelenskyy on February 12, 2025. War Secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting of America’s NATO allies in Brussels that the U.S. was taking Ukraine’s long-promised NATO membership off the table, and that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Zelenskyy and his European backers are still trying to persuade Trump that, with his support, they can win back at the negotiating table what Ukraine and its western allies lost by their tragic decision to reject a negotiated peace in April 2022. Russia was ready to withdraw from all the land it had just occupied, but the U.S. and U.K. persuaded NATO and Ukraine to instead embark on this long war of attrition, in which their negotiating position only grows weaker as Ukraine’s losses mount.

On November 21st, Trump unveiled a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that was built around the policy Trump and Hegseth had announced in February: no NATO membership, and no return to pre-2014 borders. But once Rubio arrived to lead the U.S. negotiating team in talks in Geneva, he let Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and the Europeans put NATO membership and Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders back on the table.

This was a poison pill to deliberately undermine the basic concept of Ukrainian neutrality that Russia insists is the only way to resolve the security dilemma facing both NATO and Russia and ensure a stable and lasting peace. As a European official crowed to Politico, “Things went in the right direction in Geneva. Still a work in progress, but looking much better now… Rubio is a pro who knows his stuff.”

Andriy Yermak, who led Ukraine’s negotiating team in Geneva, has now been fired in a corruption scandal, reportedly at Trump’s behest, as has Trump’s envoy to Kyiv, Keith Kellogg, who apparently leaked Trump’s plan to the press.

Trump is facing a schism in his foreign policy team that echoes his first term, when he appointed a revolving door of neocons, retired generals and arms industry insiders to top jobs. This time, he has already fired his first National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, several NSC staff, and now General Kellogg,

Trump’s team on Ukraine now includes Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Deputy National Security Advisor Andy Baker and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who all seem to be on board with the basic policy that Trump and Hegseth announced in February.

But Rubio is keeping alive European hopes of a ceasefire that postpones negotiations over NATO membership and Ukraine’s borders for a later date, to allow NATO to once again build, arm and train Ukrainian forces to retake its lost territories by force, as it did from 2015 to 2022 under cover of the MInsk Accords.

This raises the questions: Does Rubio, like the Europeans and the neocons in Congress, still back the Biden-era strategy of fighting a long proxy war to the last Ukrainian? And if so, is he now in fact working to undermine Trump’s peace efforts?

Ray McGovern, the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, thinks so, writing “…we are at the threshold on Ukraine, at the beginning of a consequential battle between the neocons and Europeans on one side, and Donald Trump and the realists on the other. Will Trump show the fortitude to see this through and overcome his secretary of state?”

But it’s perhaps in Latin America where Rubio is playing the most aggressive role. Rubio has always promotedregime-change policies, economic strangulation, and U.S. interference targeting left-leaning governments in Latin America. Coming from a conservative Cuban familiy, he has long been one of the most hard-line voices in Washington on Cuba, championing sanctions, opposing any easing of the embargo, and working to reverse Obama-era diplomatic openings.

His position on Venezuela is similar. He was a leading architect of the Trump administration’s failed “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, promoting crippling sanctions that devastated civilians, while openly endorsing failed coups and military threats.

Now Rubio is pushing Trump into a catastrophic, criminal war with Venezuela. In early 2025, Trump’s administration briefly pursued a diplomatic track with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, spearheaded by envoy Richard Grenell. But Marco Rubio’s hard-line, pressure-first approach gradually overtook the negotiation channel: Trump suspended talks in October 2025, and U.S. policy shifted toward intensified sanctions and military posturing.

Rubio’s hostility extends across the region: he has attacked progressive leaders in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, and Brazil, while supporting authoritarians aligned with U.S. and Israeli interests. While Trump has warmed to Brazil’s president Lula and craves access to its reserves of rare earth elements, the second largest after China’s, Lula has no illusions about Rubio’s hostility and has refused to even meet with him.

Rubio’s approach is the opposite of diplomacy. He refuses engagement with governments he dislikes, undermines regional institutions, and encourages Washington to isolate and punish rather than negotiate. Instead of supporting peace agreements—such as Colombia’s fragile accords or regional efforts to stabilize Haiti—he treats Latin America as a battleground for ideological crusades.

Rubio’s influence has helped block humanitarian relief, deepen polarization, and shatter openings for regional dialogue. A Secretary of State committed to peace would work with Latin American partners to resolve conflicts, strengthen democracy, and reduce U.S. militarization in the hemisphere. Rubio does the reverse: he inflames tensions, sabotages diplomacy, and pushes U.S. policy back toward the dark era of coups, blockades, proxy wars and death squads.

So why is Trump betraying his most loyal MAGA supporters, who take his promises to “end the era of endless wars” at face value? Why is his administration supporting the same out-of-control American war machine that has run rampant around the world since the rise of neocons like Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s?

Is Trump simply unable to resist the lure of destructive military power that seduces every American president? Trump’s MAGA true believers would like to think that he and they represent a rejection of American imperialism and a new “America First” policy that prioritizes national sovereignty and shared domestic prosperity. But MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Green can see that is not what Trump is delivering.

U.S. secretaries of state wield considerable power, and Trump is not the first president to be led astray by his secretary of state. President Eisenhower is remembered as a champion of peace, for quickly ending the Korean War – then slashing the military budget – and for two defining speeches at the beginning and end of his presidency: his “Chance for Peace” speech after the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin in 1953; and his Farewell Address in 1960, in which he warned Americans against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”

For most of his presidency though, Eisenhower gave his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, free rein to manage U.S. foreign policy. By the time Eisenhower fully grasped the dangers of Dulles’ brinksmanship with the U.S.S.R. and China, the Cold War arms race was running wild. Then Eisenhower’s belated outreach to the Soviets was interrupted by his own ill-health and the U-2 crisis. Hillary Clinton had a similarly destructive and destabilizing impact on Obama’s first-term foreign policy, in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and Honduras.

These should be cautionary tales for Trump. If he really wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, he had better make the necessary personnel changes to his inner circle before it is too late. War with Venezuela is easily avoidable, since the whole world already knows the U.S. pretexts for war are fabricated and false. Rubio has stoked the underlying tensions and led this escalating campaign of lies, threats and murders, so Trump would be wise to replace him before his march to war crosses the point of no return.

This would allow Trump and Rubio’s successor to start rebuilding relations with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to finally change longstanding U.S. policies that keep the Middle East, and now Ukraine, trapped in endless war.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Introduction: Research as a Technology of “Moderation”

As the UK braced itself for another round of Gaza-related culture-war fallout, a British think tank, More in Common, released a report with a deliberately soothing, above-the-fray title: After Choosing Sides: Britain’s Changing Views on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Its publication coincided with headlines warning of rising antisemitism and a society supposedly fracturing under the strain of Gaza and the wider regional war. Framed as an exercise in bridge-building, the report presented itself as a neutral map of public opinion at a moment of national volatility.

Yet neutrality is precisely what the report performs rather than practices. Its authors segment the British public into moralised categories — “rooted patriots,” who affirm Israel’s “right to exist,” and “progressive activists,” whose willingness to name Israeli violence in Gaza is framed as a threat to social cohesion. Within this schema, pro-Palestinian voices appear less as political actors responding to material realities than as indicators of social risk in a nation imagined to be permanently on the brink.

Mandy Turner, a former professor of research methods who confronted the authors at their own webinar, immediately identified the design problem. Why, she asked, does the term occupation — the standard language of international law and UN reporting — barely register in a document running to well over a hundred pages? Why is Israel’s “right to exist” treated as a central test of legitimacy, while Palestinian self-determination is never posed as a reciprocal claim? The survey’s structure, Turner noted, repeatedly frames questions in ways that invite affirmation of one side while casting suspicion on the other. As she put it, with measured precision, “research methods training and ethics tell us that the way questions are framed elicits certain responses.” The effect is a classic bait-and-switch: design choices quietly channel opinion, and the resulting skew is then offered as evidence of dangerous polarisation.

For Turner, this is not a methodological slip, but a case study in how ostensibly neutral research can be engineered to produce specific political effects: normalising occupation by refusing to name it; centring antisemitism while marginalising Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism; pathologising “progressive activists” as destabilising extremists; and sidestepping the legal and policy frameworks — such as the IHRA definition and the UK’s Prevent duty under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 — that already shape and police speech about Palestine.”

Her critique points to a broader genre of “attitudes,” “community cohesion,” and “campus climate” research in both the UK and the United States. These projects claim to measure fear, polarisation, and discrimination, yet in practice they help determine whose fear is legible, which words are rendered unsayable, and which forms of political solidarity are pre-emptively cast as suspect. Far from calming conflict, such research often functions as a technology of moderation: disciplining speech in the name of balance while leaving underlying structures of power intact.

This essay takes Turner’s critique as a lens through which to examine that genre across the UK and the US, focusing on research and policy initiatives addressing Israel/Palestine and the wider regional war discourse. The central question is not simply whether their data are accurate, but what political order they help sustain: who is framed as dangerous, who is deemed in need of protection, and which forms of speech are managed or suppressed in the name of civility. Ultimately, it asks how these reports operate not merely as descriptions of public opinion, but as instruments that regulate speech and press down — materially and discursively — on Palestinian life itself.

I. Knowing by Not Naming: Conflict Without Occupation, Antisemitism Without Islamophobia

Turner begins with what is absent. Across more than a hundred pages, More in Common’s report barely uses the word occupation — the standard term employed by the UN and by international legal bodies to describe Israel’s control over Palestinian territory. Instead, it consistently substitutes the language of “conflict.” That single lexical choice does heavy political work: decades of military rule are flattened into a symmetrical dispute, and law is quietly replaced by mood music.

The same asymmetry governs the report’s treatment of rights. Respondents are asked whether Israel has a “right to exist,” and the text repeatedly affirms a “Jewish right to self-determination.” Palestinians are never granted a parallel claim. In the survey design, one people appears as a sovereign state whose legitimacy must be defended; the other is encountered primarily as a security problem to be managed. The absence is systematic, not accidental.

This selective vocabulary aligns with existing policy frameworks, shaping how Palestine-related speech is classified, scrutinised, and disciplined within institutional settings. In Britain, lecturers have faced suspension or investigation for using terms such as apartheid in teaching, while Palestinian students have been called into disciplinary processes for circulating scholarly material that cites the International Court of Justice.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism, presented as a neutral monitoring tool, has increasingly functioned as a speech-regulating instrument on campuses. In the United States, similar frameworks have been invoked in cases involving faculty discipline and the denial or delay of student graduations. The Knight First Amendment Institute has warned that such policies risk operating as “de facto speech codes,” even when justified in the language of data collection and safety.

Turner also notes the report’s tone when it comes to the word genocide — a term the authors suggest makes “constructive conversation harder.” Yet the survey data they themselves present complicate that claim. A substantial portion of respondents regard the term as at least somewhat appropriate for describing Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while a much smaller minority rejects it outright. By the report’s own earlier logic — where majority views are cast as “moderate” and minority positions as “extreme” — the designation quietly flips. The discomfort, it seems, is not with extremism, but with facts that refuse to stay polite.

This pattern recurs in parallel US research. Advocacy organisations such as the ADL have produced campus “report cards” that penalise universities where students publicly use prohibited language, including chants naming genocide or apartheid, even as those same terms are absent from the organisations’ analytical prose except when quoted as evidence of student misconduct. The words are treated less as descriptors of reality than as markers of deviance.

The effect is consistent. Material violence is recoded as a problem of discourse. Once that transformation is complete, the emergency is no longer mass civilian death, starvation, and displacement, but the discomfort of observers: a British teenager wearing a keffiyeh; an American professor assigning Amnesty International reports. Structural atrocity fades from view; hurt feelings move to centre stage. And the think-tank reports — calm typography, colourful charts, claims of balance — supply the necessary alibi.

II. Asymmetric “Safety”: Eighteen Pages for One Fear, Eight for the Other

Turner counts pages the way a coroner counts bullet holes. Antisemitism is granted eighteen pages of anxious prose in the More in Common report; Islamophobia limps in with eight. Jews make up roughly 0.5% of Britain’s population, Muslims around 6%. Do the maths. The report does not.

The same lopsided ledger appears elsewhere. When several synagogues in Golders Green were vandalised in May 2025, the attacks dominated headlines for days. When a hijab-wearing teacher in Manchester was shoved and cursed as a “Hamas lover” the same month, it barely registered beyond local feeds. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,658 anti-Muslim complaints in 2024, a record high, many of them triggered by the visibility of keffiyehs or “ceasefire now” signs. One case among thousands illustrates the pattern: a Palestinian-American nurse in New York was dismissed after her employer took issue with an Instagram post citing Gaza’s rising child death tolls. Her case is typical of those documented by CAIR — meticulously recorded, briefly cited, and then quietly sidelined once the immediate news cycle passes.

Meanwhile, politicians and editorialists clutch antisemitism statistics like rosaries. Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative tracked US media framing during the 2025 spring encampments: headlines warned of “Jew-hatred on campus,” while relying on longstanding stereotyped assumptions that conflate pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism. The trope predates the present moment by decades — and it continues to do political work.

Turner highlights a striking asymmetry in the report’s own data. Pro-Israel respondents are far more likely to attribute hostile motives to their opponents: 65% describe pro-Palestine Britons as driven by Jew-hatred, and 62% say they deny Israel’s right to exist. Pro-Palestine respondents show a different pattern. They are more likely to credit pro-Israel views to sincere beliefs — Israel’s right to defend itself or historical Jewish vulnerability — and are less likely to attribute their opponents’ views to prejudice, with only around 40% citing Islamophobia.

The implication is hard to ignore: the group most inclined to interpret disagreement as hatred is later framed as calm, patriotic, and moderate, while the group that extends greater interpretive charity is classified as extreme.

What appears in the More in Common report as an asymmetry of attribution becomes, in the US context, an asymmetry of consequence. Universities that receive poor marks on the ADL’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card face reputational damage, donor pressure, and — in some states — heightened scrutiny tied to public funding and legislative oversight. Universities that ignore or sideline warnings from CAIR about anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim harassment, by contrast, face no comparable financial or political cost; the reports are acknowledged, archived, and quietly shelved.

In Britain, the imbalance is felt at the level of students’ daily lives. Palestinian and Muslim students have been referred to Prevent for displaying symbols such as watermelon badges or keffiyehs — forms of political expression treated as potential indicators of extremism — triggering monitoring, interviews, and enduring records. Jewish students, by contrast, displaying nationalist slogans such as Am Yisrael Chai typically encounter responses framed as pastoral or low-level disciplinary matters: a quiet conversation, an administrative note, reassurance rather than surveillance.

Pro-Palestinian expression is routinely coded as a security risk, while pro-Israeli expression is treated as an identity claim. One draws institutional enforcement and disruption; the other attracts institutional protection.

Safety, in these reports, is portion-controlled like siege rations: full bowls for one table, crumbs for the other. The think tanks call it data. Palestinians and their allies experience it as slow suffocation.

III. Who Gets to Speak? Segments, Focus Groups, and the Pathologisation of “Progressive Activists”

Turner dissects the report like a prosecutor cross-examining a biased witness, beginning with a basic question: who gets to speak, who gets labelled, and who disappears. More in Common sorts Britons into seven psychometric segments — “progressive activists” for the keffiyeh-wearers, “rooted patriots” for the flag-wavers — using proprietary survey modelling and attitudinal clustering, while keeping the criteria and weighting largely undisclosed.

The report does not publish the survey questions that generate these categories, nor does it provide full cross-tabulations by age, gender, region, class, or religion. Patterns that would complicate the typology — such as Scotland’s markedly more pro-Palestinian lean, or women’s lower levels of support for Israel — are noted in passing and never integrated into the segmentation model. The result is a black-box sorting exercise that assigns political meaning without disclosing how those meanings were produced.

Those segments then structure the focus groups — and stack the deck. Two groups are drawn from the “progressive activist” category, yet their collective voice is reduced to a small number of quotations, including repeated lines from the same participant clustered late in the report and framed with visible editorial disapproval. One such voice is introduced in language that signals excess or obstinacy, with remarks summarised along the lines of “you can’t talk about this without naming genocide” or “any attempt at balance is complicity” — positions presented less as political arguments than as evidence of emotional rigidity.

By contrast, participants drawn from “rooted patriots” and adjacent categories are quoted frequently, at length, and often without visible labelling. Their comments circulate as common sense: paraphrased statements such as “both sides have suffered,” “it’s too complicated to take a side,” or “activists are making things worse by being so extreme” appear unmarked by category and unchallenged by editorial framing. These views are allowed to stand as reasonable observations rather than as one position among many.

Some comments even mock the segmentation itself, floating above the taxonomy that constrains others. Several participants, quoted without categorical labels, dismiss the entire issue as something activists and the media have “turned into a drama,” or complain that “both sides make it impossible to talk normally” — language that implicitly rejects the premises of international law without ever naming the occupation itself. One respondent shrugs that they are “tired of hearing about occupation, history, who started it,” and would rather “get back to normal life,” a sentiment presented as pragmatic moderation rather than political erasure. Another complains that discussions of Gaza have become “moral grandstanding,” positioning disengagement as a sign of balance and maturity.

What emerges is not a balanced qualitative inquiry but a selective audition, in which denial — whether overt or through cultivated indifference — enjoys the longest airtime, and silence about occupation passes as common sense rather than political choice.

The rigged chorus is not a one-off. In Britain, a 2023 report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) documented the same silencing pattern across higher education. Examining dozens of cases between 2017 and 2022, it showed how IHRA-related complaints triggered investigations: lecturers questioned for teaching about apartheid, student unions scrutinised over BDS motions, and events cancelled because Nakba appeared in a title. In the overwhelming majority of cases, no sanctions ultimately followed. Yet the damage was already done — months-long investigations, reputational strain, stalled careers, and lost opportunities.

The BRISMES/ELSC report also documented a broader chilling effect. Palestinian and Arab academics described altering syllabi, withdrawing from public events, or shelving research after informal warnings or “monitoring” concerns, even in the absence of any finding of wrongdoing.

In publicly reported cases at UK universities, including Edinburgh and SOAS, staff cited fear of complaints and reputational harm as reasons for scaling back teaching and programming related to Gaza, settler-colonialism, or Zionism. Institutional reviews of antisemitism and racism increasingly relied on external guidance aligned with pro-Israel advocacy, with IHRA functioning less as one definition among others than as a default threshold for scrutiny.

In the United States, the same dynamic appears through administrative compliance mechanisms that prioritise risk management over open inquiry. At Northwestern University, a mandatory antisemitism training module introduced in 2025 — developed in consultation with mainstream Jewish communal organisations, including the ADL — provoked protest from Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish students. Critics argued that the material blurred the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, presented contested political claims as settled fact, and framed Palestinian advocacy primarily through a security lens. When many students delayed or refused completion, the university responded with administrative holds affecting enrolment status and access to funding, reframing a pedagogical dispute as a matter of safety and compliance. Legal challenges followed; the policy remained in force while objections were processed.

Rutgers University’s Center for Security, Race and Rights analysed the architecture behind such measures in its 2023 report Presumptively Antisemitic. The study traced how counter-extremism discourse, donor-funded research, and lobbying networks converge to cast Muslim and Palestinian political expression as inherently suspect — treating speech not as a protected right, but as an early warning signal. Within a short period, the Center itself became a target. In 2024, Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and the House publicly accused it of promoting antisemitism or extremism, initiating inquiries into its funding and programming. The message was unmistakable: scrutinise the system, and you are reclassified by it. The “progressive activist” emerges less as a social category than as a managed threat.

Turner’s demand to “show your workings” is therefore not methodological nit-picking; it is a democratic insistence. Why are those who name occupation, apartheid, or genocide treated as pathological or dangerous, while denial and disengagement are welcomed as maturity? Speech here is not free; it is licensed. Moderation functions as a franchise, with silence as its entry fee. Everyone else auditions for erasure.

As encampments are dismantled and humanitarian access to Gaza remains obstructed, the central danger is not unruly protest but this engineered quiet. It operates through curated quotations, stalled investigations, missing datasets, and sealed reports — one vetted soundbite, one vanished testimony, one locked ledger at a time.

IV. Recommendations That Ignore the Machinery of Repression

Turner saves the scalpel for last: the report’s closing recommendations. They are presented as practical correctives to polarisation: explicit reassurance that criticism of the Israeli government is “legitimate”; encouragement for schools to host “open debate” on Israel–Palestine; calls for educators to distinguish clearly between antisemitism and political disagreement; and appeals for more empathetic dialogue across divided “segments.” Offered as solutions, these prescriptions function like aspirin for a bullet wound. On paper, they sound measured and reasonable. In practice, they read like dispatches from an alternate universe — one in which speech on Palestine is not already regulated by statute, funding leverage, and security doctrine.

This mismatch between prescription and reality becomes clear once the institutional terrain is examined. In Britain, the IHRA definition did not simply drift into policy. After its adoption by the UK government in 2016, universities came under sustained pressure to comply. In 2020, then education secretary Gavin Williamson warned institutions that failure to adopt IHRA could expose them to investigation and potential sanctions by the Office for Students, including financial penalties following antisemitism complaints.

The chilling effects are now well documented: events cancelled over a single word in a title, lecturers investigated for teaching about apartheid, student unions scrutinised for BDS motions. While a small number of universities — including Edinburgh — have periodically revisited adoption, most have opted for pre-emptive compliance and routinised self-censorship. In this environment, appeals to “open debate” that omit the enforcement architecture read less like principle than evasion.

The Prevent duty compounds the contradiction. Since 2023, civil-liberties groups, journalists, and educators have documented increased referrals involving children and students for expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity — badges, drawings, chants, or statements of anger about Gaza interpreted as potential indicators of extremism. Many referrals result in no further action, but the consequences are nonetheless real: interviews, safeguarding panels, family anxiety, and enduring records. Human-rights organisations, including Amnesty International, have repeatedly criticised Prevent for racialised overreach and called for its repeal. By 2025, universities such as SOAS again became sites of controversy over disciplinary measures and intensified scrutiny of Palestinian activism. Recommending “debate” in this terrain is not naïve; it is disingenuous.

Across the Atlantic, the same dissonance appears at scale. Harvard University released two major task-force reports on 29 April 2025 — one on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, the other on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias — together exceeding 500 pages. Both acknowledged fear, harassment, and exclusion across communities and affirmed commitments to inclusion and free expression.

Yet their publication coincided with intensified federal pressure. Under expanded Title VI enforcement tied to campus protests over Gaza, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding were placed under review across US universities. Columbia, Northwestern, UCLA, and dozens of others faced investigations or funding threats by mid-2025. In this context, universities learned quickly that institutional survival depended less on protecting speech than on managing it.

The Knight First Amendment Institute has repeatedly warned that embedding IHRA in disciplinary or compliance frameworks risks violating academic freedom. Yet campus trainings routinely conclude with the same hollow assurance — that legitimate criticism of Israel is permitted — even as students report being labelled extremists, harassed for wearing keffiyehs, or discouraged from pursuing research on Palestine. The contradiction is structural, not accidental.

Turner’s point is devastating precisely because it is modest: show your workings. Name the mechanisms before prescribing the cure. When reports urge moderation without confronting IHRA, Prevent, or Title VI enforcement, they normalise repression. Suspicion becomes procedural. Surveillance becomes common sense.

Addendum: Extending the Frame — Lebanon and Iran

The same research grammar that governs Palestine discourse is increasingly visible in studies and policy reports on Lebanon and Iran. In both cases, structural conditions — foreign intervention, sanctions regimes, occupation by proxy, and economic strangulation — are displaced by the language of “instability,” “sectarianism,” or “radical influence.” Research on Lebanon, particularly following Israel’s repeated military campaigns and the country’s economic collapse, often treats Hezbollah primarily as an extremist pathology rather than as a political actor embedded in a society shaped by displacement and unresolved war. Iran is similarly framed less as a state responding to encirclement and sanctions than as a civilisational threat whose internal dissent must be read through a security lens.

These studies acknowledge civilian suffering but avoid analysing the political forces that produce it. They frame resistance as a problem of radicalisation rather than as a response to violence or dispossession. They largely omit legal questions surrounding occupation, sanctions, and the use of force. Lebanon and Iran therefore confirm, rather than complicate, the argument: the same moderating logic operates across different national contexts.

Conclusion: Reading Research as Part of the Battlefield

In the UK and the United States, research on “social cohesion,” “campus climate,” and “changing attitudes” describe as well as govern opinion. These reports help decide which forms of grief are intelligible, which solidarities are acceptable, and which kinds of speech are reclassified as threats. Read this way, research is not downstream from power. It is one of its quieter instruments.

Across the literature examined here — from After Choosing Sides to campus audits, task-force reports, and security-framed studies — certain patterns recur. Structural realities are displaced by abstract language; antisemitism is positioned as the organising threat; Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism remain secondary; and the legal and policy frameworks that already discipline speech fade into the background. The result is containment.

Turner’s intervention offers a method for reading this genre against itself. Her insistence on transparency asks who sets categories, whose fear counts, and which pressures are rendered invisible. It reframes research as a site of political struggle, rather than neutral mediation.

For scholars committed to justice, it is not enough to measure attitudes towards a sanitised “conflict.” One must also map the conditions under which those attitudes are permitted to surface at all. And for activists and students encountering these reports from the outside, Turner’s critique offers both a warning and an invitation: research is itself a battlefield. Vigilant reading, critique, and counter-research are forms of resistance.

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.

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

The core ethos of Humanity is Kindness and Truth but this is grossly violated by genocidally racist, egregiously mendacious and endlessly thieving Apartheid Israel. In its killing of Palestinians in the ongoing Gaza Genocide US-backed Apartheid Israel hugely exceeds all countries in the killing of children and journalists on a per capita basis. Femicide is the intentional killing of women or girls and in the Gaza Genocide Apartheid Israel vastly exceeds all countries in the killing of females.

According to the World Population Review: “Femicide, also known as feminicide, is the intentional murder of women or girls because of their gender. It’s a severe form of violence against women, often occurring within intimate relationships or families, and can be linked to harmful gender roles, religious beliefs, or social practices” [1].

However in actuality the definition is broader and encompasses “intentional” killing of females for a variety of reasons e.g. the extreme narcissism of the psychotic killers, rejection of sexual advances, infidelity, sexist cultural reasons, and likely victim complaint to police about sexual and other violent abuse. Thus in Australia “femicides per year per 100K females” in 2025 is 0.4 [1]. The population of Australia in 2025 is 27.5 million and about 50% (13.75 million) are female, this indicating (0.4 deaths per 100,000 females) x 137.5 = 55 femicides per year. This accords with the Australian Institute of Criminology that estimated 72 female homicides in about 2023 (female population about 13.45 million) for “femicides per year per 100K females” of (72 deaths / 13.45 million females) / 10 = 0.54 [2].

(A). 1.26 “femicides per year per 100K females” for the World.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW): “Females are disproportionately the victims of intimate partner and domestic homicide around the world. A United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report on homicide estimated that globally, while 81% of all homicide victims were male, 82% of intimate partner homicide victims were female and 64% of intimate partner/family-related homicide victims were female in 2017 (UNODC 2019). A UNODC report on femicides estimated that 3 in 5 (60% or 51,100) women and girls who were intentionally killed worldwide in 2023 were killed by an intimate partner or other family member (UNODC and UN Women 2024). For Oceania (which includes Australia), the intimate partner/family-related homicide rate for females was 1.5 victims per 100,000 females in the population. Across global regions, the intimate partner/family-related homicide rate ranged from 0.6 victims per 100,000 females in Europe to 2.9 victims per 100,000 females in Africa (UNODC and UN Women 2024)” [3].

Females represent a bit over 50% of Humanity. Accordingly the world female population in 2023 was about 8,090 million/2 = 4,045 million. 51,100 women and girls killed globally in 2023 means that the femicide rate in 2023 for the World (“femicides per year per 100K females”) was (51,100 females killed/4,045 million females)/ 10 = 1.26.

“Femicides per year per 100,000 females” has been reported by World Population Review for various countries (2025) with the very worst countries being as follows: Paraguay (19.0), Central African Republic (10.6), Jamaica (9.3), South Africa ( 9.0), Botswana (7.6), Myanmar (7.3), and Namibia (6.8) [1]. However as carefully explained below “femicides per year per 100,000 females” is an utterly shocking 18,949 for the Gaza Genocide inflicted by US-backed Zionist Israelis on the Gaza Concentration Camp.

(B). Utterly shocking femicide in the Gaza Genocide by US-backed Apartheid Israel in Gaza – 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in Gaza..

Based on the data of expert epidemiologists published in the leading medical journal The Lancet it is inexorably estimated that after 2 years of the Gaza Genocide deaths from violence and deprivation totalled 875,000 in Gaza, with this including an estimated 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men [4]. The females killed over 2 years include 207,000 women plus 325,000/2 = 162,500 female children, for a total of 369,500 females killed over 2 years. . One can thence estimate an utterly shocking 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in Gaza. A detailed and documented analysis is systematically set out below.

An international team of expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet found that 64,260 Gazans had been killed violently by 30 June 2024 (Day 269 of the Gaza Genocide) [5]. Assuming the same rate of killing, this translates to 174,625 Direct (violent) deaths by 7 October 2025 (Day 731 i.e. after 2 years) [5-8].

However other expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet and elsewhere have “conservatively” estimated that deaths from deprivation (Indirect deaths) are 4 times the Direct deaths [9-13], this implying 174,625 x 4 = 698,500 or about 700,000 Indirect deaths and a total of 875,000 “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase) by 7 October 2025 [6-8].

Euro-Med Monitor: “ The Israeli army killed 42,510 Palestinians over the course of the 200-day attack, 38,621 of whom were civilians, including 10,091 women and 15,780 children”. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has thus estimated that of deaths reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health the breakdown was 37.1% (children), 23.7% (women) and 39.1% (men) [14, 15]. Conservatively assuming that these proportions apply to the total of 875,000 Gaza deaths (and in particular ignoring the extreme vulnerability of infants [16]) indicates deaths of 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men after 2 years of the Gaza Genocide [6-8] (for related pertinent articles and sites overwhelmingly ignored by Zionist-perverted Western Mainstream media articles see [17-56]).

The genocidal Zionist “intent to destroy in whole or in part” the Palestinians has been explicitly expressed by Zionist leaders for 140 years (for details see “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide” [57]) and is apparent from US-backed Apartheid Israel having killed 36.5% of the pre-war Gaza population in 2 years, and despite a supposed “ceasefire” is still mercilessly killing them. This is genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [58], and the female part of it is the sustained, continuing and intentional killing of females i.e. femicide.

The females killed in 2 years of the US-backed Zionist Israeli femicide include 207,000 women and 162,500 female children for a total of 369,500 females. The average population of Gaza in this period has been (2.4 million + 1.5 million) / 2 = 1.95 million, of which half (0.975 million) were female

Accordingly the “femicides per year per 100K females” in Gaza over 2 years has been (369,500 females killed /0.975 million average female population)/(2 years x 10) = 18,949. This is 18,949/ 19.0 = 997 times greater than that for the world’s worst country for femicide, Paraguay (19.0) [1] and 18,949/1.26 = 15,039 times greater than that for the whole World [1, 3].

(C). Comparing 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in the Zionist-imposed Gaza Genocide with 17,544 in the Nazi-imposed Jewish Genocide in WW2.

5.1-5-8 million Jews were killed out of a pre-war Jewish population of 8.7 million in Nazi-occupied Europe [59-61]. For simplicity let us use the extremely widely-quoted figure of 6 million Jewish deaths from violence and deprivation in the 6 years of WW2. Of 8.7 million Jews pre-war in the occupied territories about half (4.35 million) were female adults and female children. 1.5 million Jewish children and hence 4.5 million Jewish adults were killed [62]. Assuming that half the adults killed were females (2.25 million) and likewise half the 1.5 million children killed were female (0.75 million) then female deaths totalled 0.75 million + 2.25 million = 3.00 million. The average female Jewish population was (4.35 million + 1.35 million)/2 = 2.85 million. Accordingly Jewish “femicides per year per 100K females” in Nazi-occupied Europe = (3,000,000 female Jewish deaths/ 2.85 million)/ (6 years x 10) = 17,544 – similar to the 18,949 “femicides per year per 100K females” in the Gaza Genocide.

Nazi is as Nazi does. Nazism is as Nazism does, Terrorist is as terrorist does. Terrorism is as terrorism does.

(D). The moral unresponsiveness of Western women, men and journalists.

The West has looked on passively in the face of an ongoing Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust involving 875,000 Gaza deaths from violence and deprivation over 2 years. The Gaza Genocide has involved the killing by Zionist Israelis of an estimated 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men in the Gaza Concentration Camp [4]. Yet the women (and men) of the West are silent (except for the humanitarians of the Left) in the face of horrific killing of women, children, men and journalists.

(1). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli-imposed mass Femicide. The Australian Labor Party or ALP (presently in government) has commented on its success in promoting women and gender equality: “In addition to leading the major policy changes that have propelled gender equality in Australia, the ALP also leads in the representation of women in parliament. Labor is the first majority woman Federal Government, with women making up 52% of the Labor Caucus. And the Albanese Labor Government’s Cabinet is now the first ever Federal Cabinet to be gender equal – with women comprising 11 of the 22 Ministers” [63]. However the Zionist-perverted Labor Government (52% women) has failed to take any concrete action against the perpetrators of the Gaza Genocide – it rightly imposed sanctions on Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine but refuses to take any concrete action against Apartheid Israel over its ongoing Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust. Conversely it has backed a 2 year Zionist campaign of “antisemitism hysteria”, “terror hysteria” and “Zionist McCarthyism” threatening Australian human rights to minimize public discussion of the horrific Gaza Genocide. The only Federal MPs protesting the Gaza Genocide have been the Greens and several decent, like-minded Independents (notably ex-Green Senator Lidia Thorpe, ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman, Senator David Pocock and decent Independent MPs Dr Helen Haines and Andrew Wilkie). The women of the pro-Zionist Australian Center-Right Labor Government and Right-Far Right Coalition Opposition are silent in the face of the horrific Gaza Femicide. Western women (and men) are silent except for the Left.

(2). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli-imposed mass Paedocide (child killing). Even before the Zionazi-planned Gaza Genocide commenced on 7 October 2023, Apartheid Israel was among world leaders in the killing of children. Thus as assessed in June 2022 “children killed per year per million of total territory population” was 25.8 (Occupied Palestinian Territory), 53.6 (Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of Congo), 75.7 (Honduras), 7.6 (the World) and 2.6 (Indian Jammu and Kashmir) [64]. However “children killed per year per million of total territory population” in 2 years of the Gaza Genocide = (325,000 children killed / 2 years)/ (1.95 million average population) = 83,333 versus 7.6 for the World. Western women (and men) are silent except for the Left.

(3). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide. Western Mainstream media report about “70,000” Gazans killed over 2 years whereas based on data from expert epidemiologists and published in the leading medical journal The Lancet, Gaza “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google the phrase) total 875,000. Western women (and men) are silent except for the Left.

(4). Western silence over horrific Zionist Israeli killing of journalists.On 18 August 2025 I estimated that “In the 7 October 2023 onwards Gaza Massacre “journalists killed per year per million of population” is presently 64.5 , this being a shocking 7,679 times greater than the World average in the same period (0.0084)” [65, 66]. After 2 years of killing [4] the “journalists killed per year per million of territory population” for Gaza was (270 journalists killed/ 2 years) /(1.95 million average population) = 69.2. Cowardly, craven, US-beholden and Zionist-perverted Western female and male journalists (presstitutes) are silent except for the Left.

Final comments and conclusions

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can (Mainstream media, politicians and commentariat presstitutes certainly won’t), (b) demand “all human rights for all”, and (c) urge and apply draconian global Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist and child-, mother-, and women-killing Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, companies and countries complicit in its appalling crimes against Humanity.

References.

[1]. “Femicide rates by country 2025”, World Population Review, 2025: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/femicide-rates-by-country .

[2]. Australian Institute of Criminology, “Australia sees a rise in female intimate partner homicide in new research report”, 30 April 2024: https://www.aic.gov.au/media-centre/news/australia-sees-rise-female-intimate-partner-homicide-new-research-report .

[3]. “Family, domestic and sexual violence”, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), 30 July 2025: https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/responses-and-outcomes/domestic-homicide .

[4]. Gideon Polya, “ Unforgivable 2-Year Gaza Massacre, Gaza Genocide & Gaza Holocaust By 50 Appalling Numbers”, Countercurrents (and thence perforce re-published in in Mainstream media lying”) , 14 October 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/14102025-msm-ignored-gaza-genocide-by-50-appalling-numbers .

[5]. Zeina Jamaluddine, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Oona M R Campbell, and Francesco Checchi, “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis”, The Lancet, 9 January 2025: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02678-3/fulltext .

[6]. Gideon Polya, “Gideon Polya Rally Speech Demanded Action On 680,000 Gaza Deaths By 25/4/25 – Now 872,000”, Countercurrents, 7 October 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/10/gideon-polya-rally-speech-demanded-action-on-680000-gaza-deaths-by-25-4-25-now-872000/ .

[7 ]. Gideon Polya, “Genocide denialists and apologists must remember the entreaty to ‘bear witness’”, Green Left, 8 October 2025: https://www.greenleft.org.au/2025/1440/analysis/genocide-denialists-and-apologists-must-remember-entreaty-bear-witness .

[8]. “Australian Mainstream media lying & censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/australian-mainstream-media-lying-censorshp .

[9]. UNWRA, “UNRWA Situation Report #184 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem”, 15 August 2025: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unrwa-sitrep-184-15aug25/ .

[10]. World Food Program, “Risk of famine across all of Gaza, new report says”, 12 May 2025: https://www.wfp.org/news/risk-famine-across-all-gaza-new-report-says

[11]. UNHCR, Refworld, “Geneva. Declaration Secretariat. Global burden of armed violence”, 2008: https://www.refworld.org/reference/research/gds/2008/en/64390 .

[12]. Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential”, The Lancet, Volume 404, Issue 10449, p237-238, 10 July, 2024: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext .

[13]. Devi Sridhar, “Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza”, The Guardian, 5 September 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/scientists-death-disease-gaza-polio-vaccinations-israel.

[14]. Euro-Med Monitor, “Israeli Army Poised to Demolish Beit Lahia, Gaza”, Mirage News, 24 April 2024: https://www.miragenews.com/israeli-army-poised-to-demolish-beit-lahia-gaza-1221354/ .

[15]. Euro-Med Human Rights Watch, “Of the 50,292 Palestinians killed—including those still buried under the debris—33 per cent were children, and 21 per cent were women [and hence 46% men]”, 6 October 2024: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6494/New-report..-De-Gaza:-A-Year-of-Israel%E2%80%99s-Genocide-and-the-Collapse-of-World-Order .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, 2nd edition, Korsgaard Publishing, 2021.

[17]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya,Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Australian mainstream media continue to hugely understate Gazan death toll”, Countercurrents, 15 September 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/26625-european-zionist-settler-colonialism-summarized .

[18]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza: Apply Sanctions To Apartheid Israel, US, UK, German, French, Australian & US Alliance State Terrorism”, Just International, 22 August 2025: https://just-international.org/articles/gaza-apply-sanctions-to-apartheid-israel-us-uk-german-french-australian-us-alliance-state-terrorism/ .

[19]. “Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/home .

[20]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead”, Arena, 11 July 2025: https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/ .

[21]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Gaza death toll far worse than reported in Western media” Independent Australia, 12 August 2025: https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/gaza-death-toll-far-worse-than-reported-in-western-media,20034 .

[22]. Kevin Maimann, “1.7 million” Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll”, CBC, 13 February 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559 .

[23]. John Menadue, “The real death toll in Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 5 September 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/the-real-death-toll-in-gaza/ .

[24]. Ralph Nader, “Open letter to journalists on the vast undercount of deaths and serious injuries in Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 20 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/open-letter-to-journalists-on-the-vast-undercount-of-deaths-and-serious-injuries-in-gaza/ .

[25]. Gideon Polya, “10-fold MSM undercounting of 680,000 Gaza deaths”, Pearls & Irritations, 21 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/letters_to_editor/2025/08/10-fold-msm-undercounting-of-680000-gaza-deaths/ .

[26]. Gideon Polya, “Chinese, Bengali and Gaza holocausts”, Pearls & Irritations, 2 September 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/letters_to_editor/2025/09/chinese-bengali-and-gaza-holocausts/ .

[27]. Middle East Monitor, “680,000 dead”, 13 September 2025: https://x.com/MiddleEastMnt/status/1966532981058605192 .

[28]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025: https://eurasia.ro/2025/07/07/gaza-genocide-by-numbers-apply-bds-over-0-7-million-gaza-deaths-from-violence-and-imposed-deprivation/ .

[29]. Gideon Polya, “Estimated 273,000 Gazans Killed In the First Year Of Oxford Union-Perceived Gaza Genocide By Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 6 December 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/12/estimated-273000-gazans-killed-in-the-first-year-of-oxford-union-perceived-gaza-genocide-by-apartheid-israel/ .

[30]. Gideon Polya, “Reckoning: 553,000 Gaza Deaths From Violence & Deprivation Demand Global Sanctions & Huge Reparations”, Countercurrents, 21 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/reckoning-553000-gaza-deaths-from-violence-deprivation-demand-global-sanctions-huge-reparations/ .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “Zionist-perverted, US Lackey Australia Ignores Palestinian Genocide On Anzac Day & Election Day”, Countercurrents, 23 April 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/zionist-perverted-us-lackey-australia-ignores-palestinian-genocide-on-anzac-day-election-day/ .

[32]. Gideon Polya, “The Lancet: 64,260 Gaza Violent Deaths Indicating 257,000 Indirect Deaths In 9 Months”, Countercurrents, 14 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/the-lancet-64260-gaza-violent-deaths-indicating-257000-indirect-deaths-in-9-months/

[33]. Gideon Polya, “Open Letter To Australian MPs: Mainstream Undercounting 0.6 Million Gaza Deaths”, Countercurrents, 5 April 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/open-letter-to-australian-mps-mainstream-undercounting-0-6-million-gaza-deaths/ .

[34]. Gideon Polya, “Australian Elections: Australian Voters Deceived By US- And Zionist-perverted Mainstream Media & Politicians”, Countercurrents, 10 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/australian-elections-australian-voters-deceived-by-us-and-zionist-perverted-mainstream-media-politicians/ .

[35]. Susan Abulhawa, “Math proves that Israel’s stated goals are an epic lie”, The Electronic Intifada, 27 June 2024: https://electronicintifada.net/content/math-proves-israels-stated-goals-are-epic-lie/47371 .

[36]. Gideon Polya, “Estimated 273,000 Gazans Killed In the First Year Of Oxford Union-Perceived Gaza Genocide By Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 6 December 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/12/estimated-273000-gazans-killed-in-the-first-year-of-oxford-union-perceived-gaza-genocide-by-apartheid-israel/ .

[37]. Gideon Polya, “Holocaust Denial Exposed: US, Western & Australian Mainstream Media Lying By Omission Over Gaza Genocide”, 20 October 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/holocaust-denial-exposed-us-western-australian-mainstream-media-lying-by-omission-over-gaza-genocide/ .

[38]. Gideon Polya, “335,500 Gaza Dead Ignored By Western Mainstream Media: Input To Special Rapporteur Report To Human Rights Council”, 17 October 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/335500-gaza-dead-ignored-by-western-mainstream-media-input-to-special-rapporteur-report-to-human-rights-council/ .

[39]. Ralph Nader, “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount. 40,000? It’s more like 300,000 – treachery on both sides”, Capitol Hill Citizen, August-September 2024: https://www.capitolhillcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CHC10.August2024WEB2_01.pdf

[40]. “EXPOSING THE GAZA DEATH UNDERCOUNT, BY RALPH NADER; Congressional Record Vol. 170, No. 152: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-170/issue-152/extensions-of-remarks-section/article/E1000-3 .

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Stop The Killing & Occupation: Comparisons Of Jewish Israeli-Imposed Gaza Genocide Deaths With Nazi Atrocities”, Countercurrents, 12 November 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/11/stop-the-killing-occupation-comparisons-of-jewish-israeli-imposed-gaza-genocide-deaths-with-nazi-atrocities/ .

[42]. Gideon Polya, “Why Cowardly & Racist Australian Labor Government Won’t Apply Sanctions To Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Counteercurrents, 27 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/why-cowardly-racist-australian-labor-government-wont-apply-sanctions-to-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

[43]. “Racist & lying Australian Mainstream ignores awful truths”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/racist-lying-australian-mainstream-ignores-awful-truths .

[44]. Gideon Polya, “LeMay, Albright & Trump: 3 US Officials Who Confessed To US Mass Murder Of Civilians”, Countercurrents,17 March 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/03/lemay-albright-trump-3-us-officials-who-confessed-to-us-mass-murder-of-civilians/ .

[45]. Kevin Maimann, “1.7 million’ Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll”, CBC, 13 February 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559 .

[46]. Arwa Mahdawi, Trump’s Gaza remarks are no surprise: ethnic cleansing was always the plan”, The Guardian, 6 February 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/trump-gaza-ethnic-cleansing

[47]. Jonathan Cook, “Trump Gaza Plan ”, X, 5 February 2025: https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1887109208752918549 .

[48]. Gideon Polya, “Why Cowardly & Racist Australian Labor Government Won’t Apply Sanctions To Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 27 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/why-cowardly-racist-australian-labor-government-wont-apply-sanctions-to-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

[49]. Quds News Network, “377,000 Missing in Gaza, Half of Them Children, from Pre-Genocide Population of 2.2 Million”, Countercurrents, 25 June 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/06/377000-missing-in-gaza-half-of-them-children-from-pre-genocide-population-of-2-2-million/ .

[50]. Stuart Rees, “A century of deceit: Towards a new understanding of the colonisation of Palestine”, Pearls & Irritations, October 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/a-century-of-deceit-the-colonisation-of-palestine-towards-a-new-understanding/ .

[51]. Gideon Polya, “ Gideon Polya Rally Speech Demanded Action On 680,000 Gaza Deaths By 25/4/25 – Now 872,000”, Countercurrents, 7 October 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/7102025-gaza-rally-speech-680000-deaths-2542025-8750002-years .

[52]. “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/home .

[53]. Australian Mainstream lying & censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/australian-mainstream-media-lying-censorshp .

[54]. “Gideon Polya Countercurrents articles”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/gideon-polya-countercurrents-articles .

[55]. “Countercurrents articles by Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/countercurrents-articles .

[56]. “Palestine genocide essays”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/ .

[57]. “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/zionist-quotes .

[58]. “UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf .

[59. Gideon Polya, “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurents, 19 February 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm .

[60]. Martin Gilbert, “Jewish History Atlas”, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969.

[61]. Martin Gilbert “Atlas of the Holocaust”, Michael Joseph, London, 1982.

[62]. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopaedia, “Children during the Holocaust”: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/children-during-the-holocaust .

[63]. Labor, “Labor Government and women”, 16 April 2025: https://www.alp.org.au/our-history/labor-governments-and-women/ .

[64]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Among World Leaders For Killing Children”, Countercurrents, 15 June 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/apartheid-israel-among-world-leaders-for-killing-children/ .

[65]. Gideon Polya, “Anas Al-Sharif Died Reporting Gaza Holocaust: Israel Leads World In Killing Journalists”, Countercurrents, 18 August 2025: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/18825-anas-al-sharif-heroic-gaza-journalists .

[66]. Gideon Polya, “Anas Al-Sharif Died Reporting Gaza Holocaust: Israel Leads World In Killing Journalists”, Just International, 28 August 2025: https://just-international.org/articles/anas-al-sharif-died-reporting-gaza-holocaust-israel-leads-world-in-killing-journalists/ .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

9 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org