Anthony Albanese says Australia will recognise Palestinian statehood
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Daily Mail
30 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Israel's prime minister dismisses accusations that his regime is starving Gazans
Israel 's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 'if we had wanted to commit genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon' amid a growing war of words over starvation in Gaza. In a press conference, he rebutted accusations of deliberately starving civilians. Netanyahu has consistently denied claims that his forces are committing genocide in the Gaza strip, or imposing a policy of starvation, and has said that Israel tries to avoid civilians who are put in harm's way by Hamas. The remarks came during press conferences in Jerusalem as he defended his government's latest military push into Gaza City. The planned offensive, he said, is aimed at defeating Hamas, but it has drawn condemnation from some of Israel's closest allies and the United Nations, who say it 'will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza'. Netanyahu also rejected accusations that Israel had pursued a starvation policy, insisting on Sunday: 'There is no starvation. There hasn't been starvation. There was a shortage. And certainly, there was no policy of starvation. 'If we had wanted starvation, if that had been our policy, two million Gazans wouldn't be living today after 20 months.' However, humanitarian organizations have warned of 'imminent famine' in the region. Reports from Gaza of civilians starving to death has inflamed tensions with Israel's partners around the world and inspired backlash at home and abroad. Speaking on Sunday, Netanyahu also challenged claims that humanitarian aid had been fully cut off. At the press conference, he said: 'We never said we were stopping all entry of humanitarian aid. 'What we said was that, alongside halting the trucks that Hamas was seizing - taking the vast majority of their contents for itself, then selling the leftovers at extortionate prices to the Palestinian population… we would stop this.' Netanyahu also laid out his vision of victory in Gaza following 22 months of war, with the military ordered to attack the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City and the central camps further south. With a pre-war population of some 760,000, according to official figures, Gaza City was the biggest of any municipal area in the Palestinian territories. But following the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 that sparked the war, its population has only swelled, with thousands of displaced people fleeing intensive military operations to the north. Gaza City itself has come under intense aerial bombardment, and its remaining apartment buildings now rub shoulders with tents and other makeshift shelters. Amir Avivi, a former Israeli general and head of the Israeli Defense and Security Forum think tank, described the city as the 'heart of Hamas's rule in Gaza'. 'Gaza City has always been the center of government and also has the strongest brigade of Hamas,' he said. The first challenge for Israeli troops relates to Netanyahu's call for the evacuation of civilians - how such a feat will be carried out remains unclear. Unlike the rest of the Strip, where most of the population has been displaced at least once, around 300,000 residents of Gaza City have not moved since the outbreak of the conflict, according to Avivi. Israel has already tried to push civilians further south to so-called humanitarian zones established by the military, but there is likely little space to accommodate more arrivals. 'You cannot put another one million people over there. It will be a horrible humanitarian crisis,' said Michael Milshtein, an Israeli former military intelligence officer. Israel continues to face major backlash over the burgeoning humanitarian crisis in the strip. Dozens of people are reported to have died from starvation in recent weeks. The Israeli government claims the reports are unfounded, and says Hamas is harnessing a famine narrative for leverage in ceasefire talks. In July, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it would open humanitarian corridors to let in aid convoys into Gaza to deliver food and medicine. It also said there would be a 'local tactical pause in military activity' for humanitarian purposes. But international groups and journalists on the ground continue to report dire conditions inside the beleaguered Gaza Strip. Last week, it was reported that the Israeli prime minister and the U.S. president Donald Trump, had a heated phone call after Netanyahu denied that there was widespread starvation in Gaza. According to people familiar with the conversation, Trump cut him off and shouted at him. He also told him his aids had presented evidence that many children were starving. However, Netanyahu's office denied the reports and said it was 'fake news'. While Gaza's population continues to bear the brunt of the war, Israel is gearing up for a major push into Gaza City and continues to pound the strip. An Israeli airstrike killed Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, 28, and several of his colleagues outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on August 10. The network said the journalists were in a tent set up for media crews when it was hit. The Israel Defence Forces said al-Sharif was a Hamas operative who 'posed as a journalist', accusing him of running a 'terrorist cell' involved in rocket attacks, allegations that remain unverified and have been rejected by Al Jazeera. Local journalists who knew him say that earlier in his journalism career, he had worked with a communications office run by Hamas. Press freedom groups and the UN human rights agency condemned the strike, calling it a possible grave breach of international humanitarian law. On Monday, several Gazans gathered to pay their respects to Sharif and his four colleagues who also died in the attack. Media freedom groups and international organizations condemned the killing. A posthumous message written by the journalist in the eventuality of his death said he had been silenced and urged people 'not to forget Gaza'. Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to take control of the remaining parts of Gaza, including large sections of Gaza City and Al-Mawasi, an area designated by Israel as a safe zone but now crammed with displaced Palestinians. The plan has triggered further criticism abroad, with Germany suspending some arms exports to Israel and Australia joining other Western nations in recognizing a Palestinian state. The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says at least 61,499 people have been killed in the territory since Israel's campaign began, figures the United Nations deems credible. Hamas's October 2023 assault on Israel left 1,219 people dead, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
How German media outlets helped pave the way for Israel's murder of journalists in Gaza
What is the role of journalism when Palestinian reporters are treated as criminals and left to die? Last October, I spoke with the journalist Hossam Shabat. He described families packing what little they had left in northern Gaza as Israel began implementing its 'generals' plan'. Six months later, Shabat was dead – killed by Israel, accused of being a Hamas operative. Israel does not try to hide these killings. Instead, it often smears its victims in advance – branding journalists as 'terrorists', accusations that are rarely substantiated. These labels serve a clear cause: to strip reporters of their civilian status and make their killing appear morally acceptable. Journalists are not legitimate targets. Killing them is a war crime. The latest round shook the world: five Al Jazeera journalists were assassinated in a press tent in Gaza City, among them Anas al-Sharif, whose face had become familiar to anyone following Gaza up close. Both the UN and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had warned that al-Sharif's life was in danger. Weeks later, he was dead. Meanwhile, a growing consensus recognises Gaza as the site of a livestreamed genocide. Yet in Germany – a country that prides itself on having learned the lessons of its own genocidal history – some of the most powerful media institutions have played a part in enabling Israel's actions. Some German journalists have even justified the killing of their Palestinian colleagues. The clearest example is Axel Springer, Europe's largest publisher and owner of Bild, Germany's biggest newspaper. Hours after the killing of al-Sharif became public, Bild splashed his image under this headline: 'Terrorist disguised as journalist killed in Gaza' (which was later changed to 'Journalist killed was allegedly a terrorist'). Let that sink in. About a week before, Bild had published another piece: 'This Gaza photographer stages Hamas propaganda.' The article targeted the Palestinian photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, accusing him of staging images of starving Palestinians as part of a Hamas campaign, despite the evidence that the subjects of the photos were indeed starving and waiting for food. In the article, Fteiha's title as journalist appeared in quotation marks, implying he wasn't a real journalist, and that images of starvation were exaggerated fabrications. The Bild story – along with a similar piece in the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) – was swiftly amplified on X by Israel's foreign ministry, which cited them as proof that Hamas manipulates global opinion. Fteiha was branded an 'Israel- and Jew-hater' serving Hamas. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation quickly piled on, joined by rightwing influencers. In this case, German media had become a direct pipeline for Israeli talking points, quickly recycled into the international arena and repackaged as 'evidence'. Fteiha said in response: 'I don't create suffering. I document it.' Calling his work 'Hamas propaganda', he continued, 'is a felony against the press itself'. Just days before the Bild and SZ articles were published, one of Germany's largest journalists' associations, Deutscher Journalisten-Verband (DJV), issued a statement warning of 'manipulation' in press photography. It specifically cast doubt on images showing emaciated children in Gaza, claiming their condition 'apparently is not attributable to the famine in Gaza'. The DJV offered no evidence for this claim – largely because no such evidence exists. Facing backlash online, the association cited a July article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose author had speculated whether images of emaciated infants were really the result of starvation – or rather of preexisting conditions such as cystic fibrosis. The piece suggested that publications had been either negligent or manipulative in publishing these photos without further detail. Omitted was the fact that hunger and preexisting conditions can't be neatly separated and that no preexisting condition alone could produce such extreme emaciation. Bias isn't new in the German media landscape. At Axel Springer, support for the existence of the state of Israel is second on the list of the company's guiding principles, its so-called essentials. In September last year, Bild helped derail ceasefire negotiations by publishing an 'exclusive' report – excerpts from a Hamas strategy leaked to Bild by Benjamin Netanyahu's aides. In it, Bild claimed Hamas was 'not aiming for a quick end to the war', which neatly absolved Netanyahu of any responsibility for the breakdown in talks at the time. (In response to queries about the story, a Bild spokesperson told +972 magazine that the publication does not comment on its sources.) As it turned out, the Hamas document had been broadly misrepresented by Bild. The timing couldn't have served Netanyahu better: the story landed as mass protests put pressure on his position. Shortly after the Bild report was published, Netanyahu cited it in a cabinet meeting to cast the demonstrators as pawns of Hamas. The Bild article remains online, uncorrected. The problem, however, extends far beyond Bild and Axel Springer. Across legacy German media, failures to provide fact-based, balanced coverage of Israel and Palestine have been far reaching – and became glaringly obvious after the 7 October attacks. Fabricated claims, such as that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies, along with various other pieces of deliberate misinformation, remain uncorrected. Outlets across the political spectrum in Germany routinely omit historical context, frame Palestinian deaths in passive, depoliticised terms, and display a near-blind faith in Israeli military 'verification' – while ignoring a well-documented record of misinformation by Israeli state sources. In January, the ostensibly leftwing Die Tageszeitung ran a piece headlined: 'Can journalists be terrorists?' The article cited the Israeli military four times – and did not quote a single journalist in Gaza. Across the German media landscape, such narratives contribute to stripping Palestinian journalists of credibility, and – in the worst case – handing Israel readymade justifications for targeting them. Germany's 'never again' pledge should carry weight given its deeply genocidal history. Yet it rings hollow when the country's dominant outlets launder or supply propaganda to legitimise mass killing in Gaza. This is not journalism in the service of truth – it is journalism in the service of violence. Breaking this cycle would require a serious reckoning with the editorial cultures and political loyalties that have enabled German journalism to be weaponised in this way. The killing of journalists in Gaza makes one thing painfully clear: Israel does not want a record to be left. When the history of this genocide is written, there will be chapters on the media's role. Germany's section will be uncomfortably large. No one should claim they didn't see it happening. Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung's culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Victoria could save nearly $500m over 10 years by scrapping greyhound racing, estimates show
The Victorian government could save almost half a billion dollars if it follows Tasmania in phasing out greyhound racing in the state, according to independent analysis. A policy costing by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), to be released on Thursday, estimates the government would save $451.6m between 2025–26 and 2035–36 if it stopped subsidising greyhound racing and closed the industry. The figure is based on an estimated $687.4m drop in government spending on the industry over the decade, offset by a $235.8m loss in revenue, as Victorians would no longer be able to bet on greyhound races held in the state. The analysis said the government 'increased ongoing support' to the entire Victorian racing industry, which includes thoroughbred and harness racing, in 2024. This was through a higher point of consumption tax on wagering revenue, which was increased to 15% from 10%, with half of the revenue going to racing, and a funding deed providing $90m annually. The PBO analysis didn't factor in the 'risk or cost of potential legal claims against the Victorian government' from breaking agreements, such as current racing club or racecourse licences or its wagering contract with Tabcorp. Sign up: AU Breaking News email The report was commissioned by Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell, who said she was 'not surprised' but 'absolutely appalled' to learn how much the Victorian government was subsiding the industry. 'For this government to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the greyhound racing industry while they fail to fund the operation of new women's crisis shelters, fail to meet their Gonski requirement, fail to adequately fund mental health care and fail to properly support regional Victorians is frankly astounding,' Purcell said. She said according to the Coalition of Protection of Greyhounds, which collects publicly available stewards' reports after meets, 29 dogs have died on racetracks in Victoria this year. 'Meanwhile, Tasmania has made a principled and ethical decision after one dog, their Greyhound of the Year, was killed on July 28,' Purcell said. 'It certainly says a lot about the direction of the Victorian Labor government when even the Liberals are doing better than them on animal protection.' The Tasmanian premier, Jeremy Rockliff, on Sunday announced his Liberal government would end funding for greyhound racing in the state by 2029, effectively winding up the industry. In May, a report by economist Saul Eslake into the Tasmanian greyhound industry found the state government funded the sport 'more generously than any other jurisdiction, to the tune of $12.70 per head of population in 2023-24'. This includes by returning 80% of revenue from its point of consumption tax to racing. Eslake told Guardian Australia greyhound racing 'likes to style itself as an industry' but relies on the 'public purse' in most states. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'We don't talk about the football industry or the basketball industry or the tennis industry,' he said. 'Racing likes to call itself an industry, so maybe its claims ought to be tested in the same way as when another industry comes along wanting a handout. It should be subject to the same rigorous scrutiny.' The Victorian racing minister, Anthony Carbines, on Monday said he had no plans to end greyhound racing in the state, describing the Tasmanian government's announcement as a 'desperate' attempt to secure the support of crossbench MPs after failing to win a majority at the recent state election. 'No one's safe in Tasmania. Throw everyone overboard to form a majority,' Carbines said. He said greyhound racing generated $850m a year in economic activity and employed almost 5,000 people in full-time work in Victoria. 'The government here in Victoria backs greyhound racing,' Carbines said. In 2018, the ACT banned greyhound racing. New South Wales proposed a ban in 2016 before then premier Mike Baird backflipped after a backlash. Last year, an inquiry into the industry in the state was called, following allegations of widespread animal abuse.
