Israel

PRESS RELEASE – 6 OCTOBER 2025 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMSPEACE PRIZE FOR 2025 is awarded Francesca Albanese The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – as the person who, in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s will, has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and for the abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Francesca Albanese has forcefully and unwaveringly worked against Israel’s full-scale war on the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular Israel´s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. She has confronted Israel’s systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in a truly global outreach. Further, she has brought governments, international organisations and people’s groups together to underline the responsibility of the world at large to act and to stop arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s ongoing criminal actions. But first of all, Albanese...

This is the third appeal from TFF. The first and the second here. On August 22, 2025, the UN officially declared famine in Gaza. The world’s top authority on food security called for help and said starvation will spread further within the Strip unless fighting stops and much more aid is allowed in. More than half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic hunger conditions, while more than a million more are in a food emergency phase, the report states. This man-made catastrophic famine could have been prevented by a steady flow of humanitarian aid into the enclave, relief chief Tom Fletcher pointed out. “Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel,” Mr. Fletcher said. “It is a famine within a few 100 meters of food in a fertile land.” The UN’s top aid official underscored that the famine in Gaza is “caused by cruelty, justified...

Professor, Dr, TFF Board member The second of three TFF Appeals This is an example – for your inspiration – of how you can address your head of state, prime minister and other relevant ministers. To urge them to take action and not just use words.Instead of just sending it by email, which may not be read, it makes a stronger impression if you send it by snail mail – and millions do it too. It is urgently important that every citizen does something to stop the genocide on the Palestinian people now. Everybody can write a letter, short or long, and protest the lack of action. See also ideas to what you may constructively suggest in TFF’s first Appeal here. I address you deliberately in the way you prefer—in the feminine form. I write to you professor to professor, woman to woman, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother. I...

Contrary to what we stated when publishing this Call, the UN General Assembly (GA) opened on September 9, 2025, in New York, not in Geneva, as we initially wrote. However, due to the host role-violating US ban on visas to Palestinians, the Special GA Segment on Palestine will be held in the UN Geneva from September 22. And it builds up to something historic. Anyhow, here is what we believe you must advocate or do to help stop the Israeli genocide. It’s called people’s power or citizens’ diplomacy. SHARE! The first of three appeals from TFF. The second is here, and the third here. Across the world, people are witnessing the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives, homes, and communities. The scale and intensity of Israel’s military operations — especially in Gaza — have led leading legal bodies, including the International Court of Justice, to warn of a plausible genocide. The...

A slightly modified version of a text published on Sept. 1, 2025 in TMS. On August 25 Thomas Friedman, always a weathervane for political and economic establishment thinking in the West, wrote a notable column in the NY Times that was pragmatic in tone, misleading in substance, and regressive in intention. Yet it reflects a growing ambivalence toward Israel’s prolonged genocide even among longtime supporters of Israel that now highlights starvation, famine, and a gross distortion of the delivery of humanitarian aid under emergency conditions. But expressed dangerously without hiding the hope that Israel could even now restore its legitimacy without being held accountable for crimes in Gaza and despite all, still expecting to be rewarded by excluding Hamas from any further governance role in Gaza and continuing to move toward the annexation of the West Bank by formal action or through further settlement expansion. It is notable that the headline of...

Professor emeritus, TFF Associate Oxford (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) The dam has burst. Netanyahu and his far-right regime have gone too far. Public pressure on politicians in Europe and many other countries has become irresistible, forcing them to change course. Most countries, 147 of the UN’s 193 members, have formally recognized a Palestinian state, and last week, France pledged to do so at the UN meeting in September. Fourteen nations, including Canada, New Zealand and Australia, join France in a push to recognize a Palestinian state. The British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, one of Israel’s staunchest allies who even refused to condemn the Israeli blockade of food, water, medicine and fuel to the Palestinians after the terrible events of 7th October, has buckled under the pressure of public opinion. More than 255 MPs of all parties signed a letter addressed to the prime minister in which they urged him to...

The collective cynicism is ugly. The innocent Syrian people are now doomed. The author hopes that his predictions shall soon be proven wrong… This article was published at 02:36, about 4 hours before the HTS terrorists occupied Damascus. • Lebanon-based al-Mayadeen reports tonight, December 8, 2024, that Russia, Iran, Turkey call for immediate end to hostilities in Syria. My cynical interpretation of this – beyond pathetic – “call” is the following: Turkey knew and did/does all it can – again – to destroy Syria. Russia and Iran were surprised or act surprised; they can do nothing given their own malaise. Or their “intelligence” services failed miserably? Their common statement is devoid of constructive steps in this uniquely urgent situation. It does not even mention the Syrian government or its President. They “call for” terrorists who are approaching the outskirts of Damascus and have declared long ago that they want to...

Israel has long been renowned for its ability to shape public discourse pertaining to its behaviour toward the Palestinians, particularly in the West. Its greatest triumph is undoubtedly the manner in which it managed the media treatment of its response to October 7 (2023) in North America and Europe. Israel’s response was depicted as purely a matter of defensive security against Palestinian terrorists who staged an unprovoked and barbaric surprise attack by Hamas. This public distortion of the event gave the Western governments the political space needed to justify their closed eyes military, diplomatic, and intelligence support of Israel while genocide unfolded daily in Gaza. This article is drawn from two articles published on October 7, 2024, on the author’s blog. This political manipulation of this incident in the long struggle between Israel and Palestine has several different dimensions. Above all, it absolutizes October 7 to create the false impression...

Source: Getty Images As Western elites shape their countries’ relationship with the Jewish state, they should apply one standard for all. Michael Young* August 20, 2024 On August 5, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that starving 2 million Palestinians in Gaza “to death” might be the “right and moral” thing to do until Israeli hostages held in Gaza are released, but that the “world won’t let us.” It took several days for countries to react to Smotrich’s effort to transform a genocidal impulse into a morally justified action. The U.S. State Department spokesman said his government was “appalled by these comments and reiterate[s] that this rhetoric is harmful and disturbing.” Under the circumstances, the rebuke was rather tame. Calling for the mass starvation of an entire civilian population should qualify as more than just “harmful and disturbing.” But perhaps the State Department was unwilling to go too far in...

Liberal democracies remain shamefully complicit with Israel, despite its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people Students of world politics have long understood that when it comes to the strategic interests of leading states, international law is marginalised unless it is useful in waging a propaganda war against adversaries.  Indeed, the United Nations was designed in ways that recognised this feature of international political life. Otherwise, giving the winners of World War II a right of veto would make no sense.  Such an exemption from international law was also evident at the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, at which only the crimes of the losers were scrutinised for legal accountability, and obvious crimes of the victors – such as the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were not prosecuted.  To this day, for understandable reasons, many...

Suzie Halewood April 15, 2024 “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime”Ernest Hemingway, 1946 This tax year, the so-called Ministry of Defence will be given £69BN of taxpayers’ money, to effectively subsidise the arms industry and fund more wars of aggression while offering little or nothing in the way of defence. A further £116BN of taxpayers’ money will go to the banks, interest on money that never existed for wars that are not only unnecessary and illegal, but which neither benefit the UK taxpayer, nor those who have lost life and limb in any one of the smorgasbord of conflicts the UK has instigated since WWII. Originally published on Off-Guardian on April 12, 2024 War was outlawed in 1928 by the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War. Known as Kellogg-Briand Pact, the treaty was signed by sixty-three nations, including Britain &...

Daryl Guppy April 11, 2024 This article, first published by Pearls & Irritations on April 4, 2024, focuses on Australia but there is no reason that you could not insert any Western country in its place. Hannah Arendt’s BANALITY OF EVIL report on the Eichmann trial failed to adequately address a key question. How could the German people not have known and how could they have let the holocaust happen? Arendt’s observation that the administrative industrialisation of evil led to its banality is most relevant today, but it is enhanced and magnified by the pervasive distribution of horrendous images by ubiquitous social media. What the mainstream Western media chooses not to show, or report, is readily available on Facebook, X and Instagram. Israel’s disproportionate response in Gaza to the Hamas’ attack, the al-Shifa hospital massacre, images of children crushed beneath tanks, joyous Israeli troops looting houses and the outright lie...