Netanyahu hits back at Starmer over Gaza military offensive
But the Israeli prime minister said his country would press on for 'total victory' over Hamas.
In a joint statement, Sir Keir, Mr Macron and Mr Carney said: 'If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.'
My joint statement with @Keir_Starmer and @EmmanuelMacron on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank:
'We strongly oppose the expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza. The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable. Yesterday's announcement that Israel will allow…
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) May 19, 2025
The leaders called on Hamas to release the hostages it took in the 'heinous attack' on October 7 2023.
'We have always supported Israel's right to defend Israelis against terrorism,' the three leaders said.
'But this escalation is wholly disproportionate.'
Mr Netanyahu hit back, saying: 'By asking Israel to end a defensive war for our survival before Hamas terrorists on our border are destroyed and by demanding a Palestinian state, the leaders in London, Ottawa and Paris are offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities.'
He added: 'The war can end tomorrow if the remaining hostages are released, Hamas lays down its arms, its murderous leaders are exiled and Gaza is demilitarised.
'No nation can be expected to accept anything less and Israel certainly won't.
'This is a war of civilisation over barbarism. Israel will continue to defend itself by just means until total victory is achieved.'
Israeli authorities have temporarily allowed us to deliver limited aid to Gaza after 11 weeks of blockade.
A drop in the ocean. It must reach the civilians who need it so urgently, and we must be allowed to scale up.
We are determined to save as many lives as we can. pic.twitter.com/Ai5m9cawqt
— Tom Fletcher (@UNReliefChief) May 19, 2025
The UN's humanitarian relief chief Tom Fletcher – a former British diplomat – said nine aid trucks were cleared to enter after Israel's blockade was lifted, 'but it is a drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed'.
'Our expectations for today's crossings are realistic: given ongoing bombardment and acute hunger levels, the risks of looting and insecurity are significant,' he warned.
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Spectator
8 minutes ago
- Spectator
Has France got what it takes to stand up to the Islamists?
In the early 1990s, an underground organisation was launched called the Barbie Liberation Movement (BLM). Its mission statement was a 'commitment to challenging malign systems', by which it meant the patriarchy. The BLM was inspired by a talking Barbie doll, launched in 1992, who had 270 platitudes, one of which was 'math class is tough'. Outraged feminist groups forced Mattel Inc, the makers of Barbie, to remove what they described as a sexist slur. Now, though, may be the hour for the Barbie Liberation Movement to reform and once more fight the patriarchy. This time, however, the patriarchy is different. It no longer consists of ageing white men with their outdated views that science and maths are subjects best left to boys; it's Islamists, whose view on women make the men of Mattel in the early 1990s seem positively progressive. Last week, an Islamist mob forced the mayor of Noisy-le-Sec, a Parisian suburb run by the Communists, to cancel a screening of Barbie, the Hollywood blockbuster starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. They liked neither the feminist nor the homosexual elements in the film and threatened the mayor that there would be trouble if the open-air screening went ahead. The mayor succumbed to the threats, provoking an angry backlash among France's political class. Aurore Bergé, the minister for gender equality, said it was more than just a thuggish threat from a group of young men: it was an attempt by Islamists to 'infiltrate' society and impose their values at the expense of the Republic's. Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, also used the word 'infiltrate' and said the objective of the Islamists is 'to tip the whole of French society under sharia law'. In the face of such dedicated fanaticism, said Retailleau, 'the slightest retreat…is unacceptable'. The mayor of Noisy-le-Sec has promised to show the film – which was requested by residents of his district – at a later date; but rather than admit he was wrong to cave in to the Islamists, Mayor Olivier Sarrabeyrouse has tried to blame the furore on his political adversaries. At a press conference he declared: While I continue to condemn in the strongest terms the acts that I have described as obscurantism and fundamentalism, I condemn even more strongly the political exploitation and speculation, the racist and Islamophobic hatred that has been pouring out of the right and the far right. Sarrabeyrouse also pointed a finger at journalists, suggesting there were more important matters in the world than Islamists curtailing freedom of expression. I regret that you journalists are still arguing about our local issue, even though a few days ago, several of your colleagues were cowardly murdered by the Israeli army. Sarrabeyrouse doesn't appear to understand what is at stake; or perhaps he does and he knows, like others on Europe's political left, that pandering to elements of the Muslim vote is the only way to be re-elected, as they have long since lost the support of the white working class. The French call this 'clientélisme'. In June this year the official magazine for all France's elected mayors published a warning ahead of next May's municipal elections. Headlined 'Muslim Brotherhood: the risk of 'clientelist deals' in municipal elections', the article relayed the key findings of a recent government report about the Muslim Brotherhood in France. The secretive Islamist organisation had embarked on a new strategy, warned the report, which they described as 'municipal Islamism'. The Brotherhood would stand some of its members in next year's elections while also organising ''clientelist transactions' aimed at satisfying certain specific segments of the Muslim electorate'. Mayor Sarrabeyrouse will have a hard time trying to convince France that his critics are 'Islamophobic'; the threats made against Barbie are just the latest in a series of ugly incidents this summer. In June, a pop-up store opened in Lyon selling Islamic clothing. Stating that it catered to 'modest Muslim women', the shop refused entry to any customer whose head was uncovered. In July, a cinema in Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris, cancelled at late notice a documentary about freedom of expression inspired by the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff a decade ago. It was reported that the cinema felt that the film violated its 'welcome charter', which 'prohibits political events'. This hadn't prevented the cinema from showing a film a week earlier about environmental activism. At the end of July, a 28-year-old woman was beaten up at a station south of Paris by a man who called her a 'dirty whore' for wearing a short skirt. 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Spectator
38 minutes ago
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Hamas is using Israel's protests as a weapon of war
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The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Gaza's journalists are talented, professional and dignified. That's why Israel targets them
The first time I met Al Jazeera's Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn't seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead. I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza's veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members of that team have since been killed in a chain of assassinations. Each time I sent condolences, the response was always that the coverage would not cease. 'We are continuing,' the Gaza editor told me last week, after he lost his entire Gaza City team in the targeted strike that claimed the lives of Sharif, Mohammed Nofal, Ibrahim Thaher and Qraiqea. 'We will not betray their message, or their last wishes.' As these killings dazed the world – and the response to them became mired in unproven and in some cases risibly implausible claims that some of these journalists were militants – little has been said about the calibre of journalism in Gaza. How fluent, articulate and poised its journalists are under impossible circumstances. How much they manage to capture horrific events and pain on a daily basis, in a journalistic Arabic that they have perfected to an art, while maintaining a professional, collected presence on camera. How much they manage to keep their cool. I struggled often to translate their words into English, so rich and expansive is their expression. Even Sharif's final message, a text for the ages, loses some of its power in translation. In it, he addresses those who 'choked' our breath, but the word he uses is closer to 'besieged' – evoking not just physical asphyxiation but the silencing of a surveilled people's voice. What strikes me when I speak with journalists in and from Gaza is how evangelical and heartbreakingly idealistic they are; how much journalism to them was a duty even if it meant certain death. All who have been killed had a choice, and those who are still alive and reporting still do. Sharif said he had been threatened several times by Israeli authorities over the past two years. Al Jazeera told me that he was sent a warning by Israeli intelligence and told to stop reporting. When he refused, his father was killed in an airstrike. When Ghoul took over from Dahdouh early last year, Dahdouh told him that it was a dangerous job, and no one would fault him for leaving his post and returning to his wife and child. Ghoul refused, and was decapitated in a targeted strike. What the Israeli government is trying to do with these killings is not just stop the stream of damning reports and footage, but annihilate the very image of Palestinians that these media professionals convey. The credibility, dignity and talent that Gaza's journalists exhibit to the world in their reports and social media posts has to be extinguished. The more Gaza is a place that is teeming with militants, where there are no reliable narrators, and where Israel's justifications for killing and starvation cannot be challenged by plausible witnesses, the easier Israel can prosecute its genocidal campaign. A recent investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call identified the sinisterly named 'legitimisation cell', a unit of the Israeli military tasked, in the words of the report, with 'identifying Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters'. According to the investigation's sources, the effort is 'driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were 'smearing [Israel's] name in front of the world''. Central to this effort is Israel's ability to rely on western media to treat its claims as somehow plausible, despite the fact that time and time again, it has made claims that turn out not to be true. Emergency workers who were killed because they were 'advancing suspiciously', according to the IDF, were said to be found in restraints with execution-style shots. The claim that Hamas was systematically stealing aid, which is used to justify blockade and starvation, was contradicted by sources within the Israeli military itself. It is Hamas that is shooting Palestinians queueing for aid, Israel has said, not us. Eventually, this behaviour deserves to be called what it is: systemic deception that forfeits your right to be a credible authority. And still we are told that Israel has killed a journalist, but here is Israel's claim that the journalist was a militant. You can make up your mind. The resulting ambiguity means that even if these claims cannot be verified, they are imbued with potential truth. Do you see how that works? The truth is that journalists in Gaza have been colossally failed by many of their colleagues in the western media – not just in terms of how their killings are reported, but in how the entire conflict is described. Figures of the dead and starving in Gaza are often described as coming from 'Hamas-run' ministries, but you don't see the statements coming from Israeli authorities caveated as serially unreliable, or the phrase 'wanted by the international criminal court' attached to the name Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, the word of Palestinian journalists is never quite enough – not until foreign media (who are not allowed into Gaza) can give the final gold-standard judgment. They are cast out of the body of journalism, their truth buried along with them. In Gaza, however, there will always be someone brave and clear-eyed who continues the coverage. Who puts on a press flak jacket that makes them a target. They continue to bear, alone, the responsibility of bringing the world the reality of events in Gaza, even as their voices and breaths are besieged. Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
