UK must not look away from Gaza genocide amid Iran-Israel war
Israel's blockade and military campaign have caused widespread hunger and raised the risk of famine in the country. Now, Israel is reportedly set to pursue the military campaign for "weeks, not days," according to multiple Israeli and US sources.
READ MORE: 'It's a trap': 8 killed by Israeli soldiers in shooting at Gaza aid site
Sacha Deshmukh, the chief executive of Amnesty International UK, said it was "crucial" that Keir Starmer's Government "do not get distracted" by the escalating tensions from the reality in Gaza.
Deshmukh said: 'It is crucial that Israel's attacks on Iran do not distract the UK Government from action it must take to stop Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, rampant state-backed settler attacks in the West Bank, and Israel's cruel system of apartheid.
"These violations demand that States, including the UK, focus immediately on the urgent need for a sustained ceasefire in Gaza and fast-track their diplomatic efforts to help end Israel's decades-long illegal occupation.'
Israeli officials have claimed the country's initial strikes were an act of self-defence and argued Iran had rejected diplomatic efforts to ease tensions.
Israel said the barrage was necessary before Iran got any closer to building a nuclear weapon, although experts and the US government have assessed that Tehran was not actively working on such a weapon.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that if the Israeli strikes on Iran stop, then 'our responses will also stop'.
First Minister John Swinney also urged the UK Government to "de-escalate" the "dangerous situation".
READ MORE: UK Foreign Office advises against all travel to Israel as Iran strikes escalate
Swinney said: 'The situation in Gaza and the wider Middle East is deeply concerning. The international community - including the UK Government - must do all it can to de-escalate this dangerous situation.
"Further escalation will result in even greater devastation and stability across the region is of paramount importance to us all.'
Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie said that Israel's attacks were "a clear attempt to escalate the conflict and provoke a much wider war" in the region.
He accused the Israeli government of "flooding the media with images of their own choosing, while blocking media access to Gaza to prevent the world from seeing the atrocities they are committing".
'Even a former Israeli Prime Minister has called Netanyahu's government a gang of thugs, and every day they find new ways to prove him right," Harvie said.
'The UK should immediately withdraw all support for this violent rogue state, and work with other countries to have them held accountable for their war crimes.'
Harvie added: 'The Scottish Greens have long called for a lasting ceasefire and an end to the UK's active participation in the ongoing genocide of Gaza. Keir Starmer must end the UK's involvement in conflict rising between the state of Israel and other nations.'
"Israel's declaration of war on Iran is intended to bring war to the entire Middle East," national convenor of the Stop the War Coalition Lindsey German told The National.
"Netanyahu is already bombing five countries and we can only assume those conflicts will escalate. None of this would be possible without the support of the British and US governments.
"We've been demanding for months that the UK stops arming Israel, stops the genocide, stops using the Akrotiri RAF base to attack Gaza. Now Starmer's sending jets to the region, clearly prepared to support and enable further war crimes, without so much as putting it to a vote in Parliament.
"It's absolutely abhorrent and removes any prospect of the de-escalation he so weakly called for."
READ MORE: David Pratt: A perilous 'game' – Israel attacks, Iran bleeds, and America plays God
Starmer and the president of the UAE had a conversation discussing the conflict between Israel and Iran, according to Downing Street.
The Prime Minister called His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan while in Ottawa on Sunday afternoon.
Issuing a readout of the conversation a Number 10 spokesperson said: 'They discussed the grave situation in the Middle East.
'The Prime Minister reiterated that his priority is diplomacy and dialogue, in order to de-escalate as quickly as possible.
'The Prime Minister said this would be top of the agenda during his conversations with G7 partners in the next two days. They also discussed Gaza, and the need to bring an end to the devastation there.
'They agreed to stay in close touch.'
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Leader Live
10 minutes ago
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I push Keir Starmer to be more extroverted in Scotland
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Economist
40 minutes ago
- Economist
The long-term effects of hunger in Gaza
FOR two weeks, the world has claimed it is working to end the widespread hunger in Gaza. The UN is pleading with Israel to allow more lorries of aid into the territory. Arab and Western states are airdropping food. On August 5th Donald Trump said America would take a larger role in distributing aid, though he was vague about the details. 'I know Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution, and also money,' he said. Yet on the ground, Gazans say little has changed. There is not enough food entering Gaza, nor is there law and order to allow its distribution. Airdrops are hard to reach. Convoys are looted soon after they cross the border. Finding food often requires making a risky trip to an aid centre, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent months, or paying exorbitant sums on the black market. This is a calamity in its own right, one that will have long-term consequences for many Gazans, particularly children. But it is also a glimpse of Gaza's future. Even after the war ends, it will remain at the mercy of others for years to come. Wedged between Israel and Egypt, the tiny territory was never self-sufficient. Its neighbours imposed an embargo after Hamas, a militant group, took power in 2007. The economy withered. Half of the workforce in the strip was unemployed and more than 60% of the population relied on some form of foreign aid to survive. The UN doled out cash assistance, ran a network of clinics that offered 3.5m consultations a year and operated schools that educated some 300,000 children. Still, Gaza could meet at least some basic needs by itself. Two-fifths of its territory was farmland that supplied enough dairy, poultry, eggs and fruits and vegetables to meet most local demand. Small factories produced everything from packaged food to furniture. The Hamas-run government was inept, but it provided law and order. After nearly two years of war, almost none of that remains. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says that Gaza's 2m people need 62,000 tonnes of food a month. That is a bare-bones calculation: it would provide enough staple foods but no meat, fruits and vegetables or other perishables. By its own tally, Israel has allowed far less in. It imposed a total siege on the territory from March 2nd until May 19th, with no food permitted to enter. Then Israel allowed the UN to resume limited aid deliveries to northern Gaza. It also helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy outfit that distributes food at four points in southern and central Gaza. In more than two months of operation, it has handed out less than 0.7 meals per Gazan per day—and that assumes each box of aid, stocked with a hotch-potch of dried and canned goods, really provides as many meals as the GHF claims it does. All told, Israel permitted 98,674 tonnes of food aid to cross the border in the five months through July, an average of 19,734 tonnes a month—just 32% of what the WFP says is necessary. Although the volume of aid has increased in recent days, it is still insufficient. 'We're trying to get 80 to 100 trucks in, every single day,' says Valerie Guarnieri of the WFP. 'It's not a high bar, but a realistic bar of what we can achieve.' On August 4th, though, Israel allowed only 41 of the agency's lorries to enter a staging area on the Gaza border, and it let drivers collect just 29 of them. Getting into Gaza is only the first challenge. Distribution is a nightmare. Since May 19th the UN has collected 2,604 lorryloads of aid from Gaza's borders. Just 300 reached their intended destination. The rest were intercepted en route, either by desperate civilians or by armed men. Aid workers are nonchalant about civilians raiding aid lorries, which they euphemistically call 'self-distribution': they reckon the food still reaches people who need it. 'There's a real crescendo of desperation,' says Ms Guarnieri. 'People have no confidence food is going to come the next day.' But the roaring black market suggests that much of it is stolen. Gaza's chamber of commerce publishes a regular survey of food prices (see chart). A 25kg sack of flour, which cost 35 shekels ($10) before the war, went for 625 shekels on August 5th. A kilo of tomatoes fetched 100 shekels, 50 times its pre-war value. Such prices are far beyond the reach of most Gazans. Those with a bit of money often haggle for tiny quantities: a shopper might bring home a single potato for his family, for example. Israel's ostensible goal in throttling the supply of aid was to prevent Hamas from pilfering any of it. Earlier this month the group released a propaganda video of Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage still held in Gaza. He was emaciated, and spent much of the video recounting how little he had to eat: a few lentils or beans one day, nothing the next. At one point a militant handed Mr David a can of beans from behind the camera. Many viewers noted that the captor's hand looked rather chubby. As much of Gaza starves, Hamas, it seems, is still managing to feed its fighters. The consequences of Israel's policy instead fall hardest on children—sometimes even before birth. 'One in three pregnancies are now high-risk. One in five babies that we've seen are born premature or underweight,' says Leila Baker of the UN's family-planning agency. Compare that with before the war, when 8% of Gazan babies were born underweight (at less than 2.5kg). There were 222 stillbirths between January and June, a ten-fold increase from levels seen before the war. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed outfit that tracks hunger, said last month that 20,000 children were hospitalised for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. Even before they reach that point, their immune systems crumble. Moderately malnourished children catch infections far more easily than well-fed ones, and become more seriously ill when they do, rapidly losing body weight. The body takes a 'big hit' when food intake falls to just 70-80% of normal, says Marko Kerac, a paediatrician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has treated children in famine-stricken places. Most children in Gaza are eating a lot less than that. In July the World Health Organisation reported an outbreak of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that may have links to hunger. Gaza's health ministry says cases are multiplying, including among children. Give us our daily bread Nor is calorie intake the only concern. Although flour and salt in Gaza are fortified with some vitamins and minerals, such as iodine, they are consumed in limited amounts—especially now, since many bakeries have been closed for months, owing to a lack of flour and fuel. In February, during the ceasefire, Israel allowed 15,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 11,000 tonnes of meat and fish into Gaza. Since March it has allowed just 136 tonnes of meat. All of this means there is widespread deficiency of essential nutrients that help children's brains develop. Every child in Gaza, in other words, will remain at lifelong risk of poor health because of today's malnutrition. There is consistent evidence for this from studies of populations that have lived through famine: during the second world war, the 1960s famine in China and, more recently, places like Ethiopia. Children who have suffered acute malnourishment have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases as adults. 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The seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, the longest and deadliest before the current one, produced 2.5m tonnes of debris. It took two years to remove. Rebuilding a productive economy will be no less difficult. Take agriculture. The UN's agriculture agency says that 80% of Gaza's farmland and 84% of its greenhouses have been damaged in the war. Livestock have been all but wiped out. A satellite assessment last summer found that 68% of Gaza's roads had been damaged (that figure is no doubt higher today). The two main north-south roads—one along the coast, the other farther inland—are both impassable in places. Even if farmers can start planting crops for small harvests after the war, it will be hard to bring their produce to market. The picture is equally bleak in other sectors: schools, hospitals and factories have all been largely reduced to rubble. The Geneva Conventions are clear that civilians have the right to flee a war zone. Exercising that right in Gaza is fraught: Palestinians have a well-grounded fear that Israel will never allow them to return. Powerful members of Binyamin Netanyahu's government do not hide their desire to ethnically cleanse the territory and rebuild the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. Still, the dire conditions have led some people to think the unthinkable: a survey conducted in May by a leading Palestinian pollster found that 43% of Gazans are willing to emigrate at the end of the war. Mr Netanyahu may not follow through on his talk of reoccupying Gaza, which he hinted at in media leaks earlier this month. His far-right allies may not fulfil their dream of rebuilding the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. In a sense, though, the ideologues in his cabinet have already achieved their goal. Israel's conduct of the war has left Gazans with a grim choice: leave the territory, or remain in a place rendered all but uninhabitable. ■
Daily Mirror
40 minutes ago
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Keir Starmer urged to drop 'toxic' NIMBY term by Labour MPs
In recent months Keir Startmer has vowed to take on 'the NIMBYs' to get spades in the ground of major infastructure projects and deliver on promise to build 1.5million new homes Keir Starmer should drop the "toxic" term NIMBY for those who rally against developments in their own area, a group of Labour MPs have suggested. In recent months the PM has vowed to take on "the NIMBYs" - an acronym which stands for 'not in my back yard' - to get spades in the ground of major infrastructure projects. But Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Rural Research Group, told The Mirror"many people rightly despise the term". "The term NIMBY isn't just toxic, it's politically pointless. We win nothing by labelling people 'anti development' or 'anti growth'," she added. It comes after The Mirror's Kevin Maguire wrote: 'Labour must find engaging story for the UK - or face election wipeout'. The group of 26 Labour backbenchers Labour Rural Research Group - set up to champion rural issues - have published their first report today on the attitudes of their countryside constituents. Their survey of 1,412 people found 56% "firmly do not see themselves as NIMBYs". Over 60% also agreed developments in their areas should go ahead "as long as it is delivered thoughtfully, and with consideration for local needs and identity". The report says: "The rhetoric in today's political world and media, which tends to focus on dividing lines, often pits rural against urban, and NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) against YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard). YIMBYs are often presented (in the media at least) as proud urban voters, whilst NIMBYs are seen as people living in rural or semi-rural communities." It also found almost three quarters believe rural communities have been overlooked over the past 15 years. And three in five feel their communities are in decline. The MPs' report said: "We must ensure that rural communities, left behind by successive Conservative governments, are front and centre of the Labour government's mission for inclusive growth and opportunity." Ms Riddell-Carpenter, who overturned ex-Tory Deputy PM Therese Coffey's massive majority in the Suffolk Coastal constituency last year, added: "Our report shows – in black and white – rural voters do not see themselves as NIMBYs, in fact many people rightly despise the term." She added: "They are rightly proud of, and ambitious for, their local area - they want to see new jobs, more affordable homes, and better opportunities for young people. We need to make sure that growth and development in rural areas matches this strong local identity, and that we put forward proposals that local people can be proud of in their back yard." A Labour source told The Mirror: 'Labour was elected to deliver change. We are proud of our ambition to create a fairer Britain. Working families don't feel that sense of fairness yet. People work hard and deserve a secure place to call home for them and their loved ones. 'Through our Plan for Change, Labour will unashamedly deliver on that promise. We'll build 1.5 million new homes during this Parliament, and create the infrastructure that gets them to work more quickly and seen by a doctor more swiftly.'
