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Palestinian schools teach kids to glorify suicide bombers who kill Jews, reveals dossier as PM plans to recognise state

Palestinian schools teach kids to glorify suicide bombers who kill Jews, reveals dossier as PM plans to recognise state

The Sun4 days ago
PALESTINIAN schools teach children to glorify suicide bombers who slaughter Jews, a shocking dossier reveals.
Kids are taught to look up to terrorists in classroom textbooks and even learn to add up by calculating how many 'martyrs' have died.
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The Palestinian Authority (PA) - which runs the West Bank - also spends hundreds of millions of pounds a year on a 'Martyrs Fund".
This pays monthly salaries to the families of Palestinians who have died or are in jail for carrying out attacks on Israelis.
A prisoner's pay increases the longer the jail term.
The families of those serving 30 years or more can get up to 3,400 US dollars - the equivalent of £2,500.
The shocking revelations are contained in a dossier shared exclusively with The Sun on Sunday.
They will spark fresh criticisms of Sir Keir Starmer's decision to recognise an independent state of Palestine in September unless Israel signs up to a peace process.
Michael Rubin, Director of Labour Friends of Israel, backed the creation of a Palestinian state - but said the PA must clean up its act before it can be founded.
He said that under leader Mahmoud Abbas the PA is 'authoritarian, riddled with corruption, and commits shocking human rights abuses'.
He added: 'The PA must clean up its act if we're going to recognise a Palestinian state.
'We need to tell it to abolish the morally repugnant payment of 'salaries' to terrorists, quit glorifying suicide bombers in schoolkids' books, and stop naming its schools after Nazi collaborators.'
The PA's South Hebron Directorate of Education posted a photo of a children's book about female suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat.
She killed 21 Israelis and injured over 50 more when she blew herself up at a restaurant in Haifa in 2003.
In another shocking example, a grade 5 textbook Palestinian terrorist Dalal al-Mughrabi is celebrated for her heroism.
She carried out the 1978 Coastal Road massacre which killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children.
Earlier this year, Mr Abbas said he will end payments to the families of Palestinian 'martyrs'.
The PM has defended his decision to set the UK on a course to recognise Palestine.
Speaking earlier this week, he said: 'We do need to do everything we can to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, where we are seeing the children and babies starving for want of aid which could be delivered.
'That is why I've said unless things materially change on the ground, we'll have to assess this in September, we will recognise Palestine before the United Nations general assembly in September.'
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Only 1.5% of Gaza cropland left for starving Palestinians due to Israel's war, UN says
Only 1.5% of Gaza cropland left for starving Palestinians due to Israel's war, UN says

The Guardian

timean hour ago

  • The Guardian

Only 1.5% of Gaza cropland left for starving Palestinians due to Israel's war, UN says

Israel's destruction of Gaza has left starving Palestinians with access to only 1.5% of cropland that is accessible and suitable for cultivation, according to new figures from the UN. This is down from 4% in April, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, suggesting Israel has continued to target Palestinian farmland since initiating a complete blockade in early March, severely restricting aid from entering the Gaza Strip, where 2 million starved people are trapped. Before the conflict, Gaza was a thriving agricultural hub, where farmers and ordinary Palestinians cultivated a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains for local consumption. According to the FAO, agriculture accounted for around 10% of the Gaza Strip's economy, and more than 560,000 people, or a quarter of the population, were at least partially supported by agriculture and fishing. Israel has targeted food sources – orchards, greenhouses, farmland and fishers – since the beginning of its siege on Gaza in October 2023. By 28 July 2025, Israel had damaged 86%, the equivalent of almost 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres), of farmland in the Gaza Strip – up from 81% in April, the FAO said. While just under 9% of cropland is still physically accessible, only 1.5% – the equivalent of 232 hectares – is both accessible and not damaged by the Israeli offensive. 'Gaza is now on the brink of a full-scale famine. People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked, local agrifood systems have collapsed, and families can no longer sustain even the most basic livelihoods,' said FAO director-general Qu Dongyu. 'We urgently need safe and sustained humanitarian access and immediate support to restore local food production and livelihoods – this is the only way to prevent further loss of life. The right to food is a basic human right.' In northern Gaza, Israeli tanks and bombs have destroyed or damaged 94% of what was among the most fertile, productive land in the territory, and Palestinians have no access to the remaining 6% of their cropland. In Rafah, near the Egypt border, 79% is flattened and the rest has been blocked as part of Israel's so-called military corridor. Last week, Israeli forces partially demolished a seed bank in Hebron, in the West Bank, destroying tools and equipments used to used to reproduce heirloom seeds. UN experts, agencies and aid groups have been warning since early 2024 that Israel is orchestrating a campaign of deliberate mass starvation in Gaza by systematically destroying local food production and blocking aid, in violation of international law. Hundreds of Palestinians have now starved to death, and thousands more have been killed trying to access food aid. Earlier this week, Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian: 'Israel has built the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine. So while it's always shocking to see people being starved, no one should act surprised. All the information has been out in the open since early 2024.'

‘I must document everything': the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza
‘I must document everything': the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza

The Guardian

timean hour ago

  • The Guardian

‘I must document everything': the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza

Israel has sought to pursue its campaign of annihilation against Gaza and its people behind closed doors. More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far, and no outside reporters or cameras are allowed in. The effects of this policy of concealment – which the Guardian managed to pierce this week with a shocking aerial photograph that made the front page – are to ensure that the outside world only catches sight of Gaza's horrors in small fragments, and to stifle empathy for those trapped inside by hiding them from view, obscuring their humanity. But a new documentary film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, seeks to open a window to the unfathomable suffering inside Gaza. It focuses on the life of a single young Palestinian woman named Fatma Hassouna, known as Fatem to those close to her. She is 24 years old when we meet her, and has such a broad smile and enthusiasm for life that she compels attention from her first appearance, a few minutes into the film. We see Hassouna's life through the screen of a mobile phone belonging to the director, Sepideh Farsi, and most of the film is made up of the conversations between these two women as they develop an increasingly strong personal bond over the course of a year. The director knows all about conflict and oppression. Farsi is Iranian-born and was a teenager at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. When she was 16 she was imprisoned by the Islamic Republic regime, and she left the country for good two years later, settling in France. She was on tour with her film The Siren, a feature-length animation about the Iran-Iraq war, when the Gaza conflict erupted in October 2023. As the civilian death toll mounted, she found herself unable just to sit on the sidelines, watching endless debates that did nothing to stop the slaughter. 'The common denominator was that there was never the Palestinian voice there,' Farsi says. 'We had different points of views: the American, the European, the Egyptian, the Israeli, but never the Palestinian. It started really bothering me, and at some point I couldn't live with it any more.' In spring last year she flew to Cairo with the idea that she could somehow find a way across the Gaza border to film the war firsthand. That quickly proved a naive and futile mission, so she began filming Gazan refugees in Egypt. One of them suggested to Farsi that if she wanted to talk to someone inside, he could put her in touch with his friend Fatma in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City. We first see Hassouna the way Farsi meets her, on her little phone screen, materialising with green hijab, big glasses and her broad white strip of a smile. They clearly delight in each other's presence from the outset. 'From the first call, I felt that she was someone very special, and that something clicked between the two of us immediately,' Farsi says. 'As soon as we connected, I would be smiling or laughing, and she was the same on her side.' There had been no guarantee the two would get along. Farsi is significantly older, with a daughter Hassouna's age, and she is a cosmopolitan, sophisticated woman who has travelled the world, while Hassouna has been restricted to Gaza all her life. Hassouna is devout while Farsi is profoundly sceptical of any religious talk and challenges her new young friend over what kind of god would allow innocent people to suffer so painfully. However there is far more that draws them together, in ways that are harder to define. 'She had this energy, this shining thing. She was solar,' Farsi says. 'That's the adjective that fits her. Her natural smile. There was this mutual fascination, sorority, comradeship – a mixture of all of these things – and we were happy as soon as we connected.' Farsi makes her phone a portal through which Hassouna recounts her story and the tragedy of Gaza. She talks about her family and introduces her shy brothers to Farsi. She has already made herself a photographer and poet by the time they meet, and Farsi coaches her into being a film-maker and to send out video of the ruination around her. Hassouna is supremely, naturally talented. Her pictures capture the everyday effort of her neighbours trying to survive in the rubble, while her use of language – in her poems and in conversation – is every bit as evocative. The film's title is taken from her passing description of what it is like to venture outside: 'Every second you go out in the street, you put your soul on your hands and walk.' In another conversation, struggling to make sense of what is happening, Hassouna asks: 'We live a very simple life, and they want to take this simple life from us. Why? I'm 24 and I don't have any of the things that I want. Because every time you reach what you want, there's a wall. They put up a wall.' The film should not work. It is determinedly rudimentary, filmed largely on one phone pointed at another. The image of Hassouna sometimes freezes and buffers as the internet connection ebbs and flows. But these glitches draw us in and make us experience the precariousness of their connection. 'That's why I decided to keep this low resolution and not to use a regular camera,' Farsi explains. 'I wanted it to be very low-key technically, to match the connection problems with her, to match the disparity of life here and there.' She had originally attempted a cleanly edited version with all the disconnections cut out. 'It was lacking soul. It didn't breathe. So we put it back in – this brokenness of image and sound.' The sweetness of the relationship at the core of the film is made bittersweet by the constant threat of death around Hassouna. Every so often she reports the death of relatives, or neighbours whose eviscerated homes she points to out of her window. It feels like the encircling darkness is in a direct struggle with Hassouna's smile and her instinctive optimism. Anyone who does not want to know which triumphs in the end should stop reading here. Towards the end of the film, Farsi calls Hassouna to give her the happy news that the film has been selected to be screened at Cannes. They excitedly talk about Farsi obtaining a French visa that might allow Hassouna to get out of Gaza temporarily to attend the festival. While they are talking, the young Palestinian sends the film-maker a photo of her passport. That was 14 April this year. The next day, a Tuesday, Farsi could not get through to Gaza to give Hassouna an update on preparations. 'So I said, 'OK, we'll do it on Wednesday,' the director recalls. 'On Wednesday, I was working on the film on my computer with my phone beside me, and all of a sudden I saw a photo pop up. I opened the notification and saw her photo with a caption saying she had been killed. I didn't believe it. I started calling her frantically, and then called a mutual friend, the one who introduced us, and he confirmed it was true.' In the middle of the night, two missiles fired by an Israeli drone had pierced the roof of her building and burrowed through before detonating, one of them exploding in the family's second floor apartment, the other just below. Fatma Hassouna was killed along with her three brothers and two sisters. Her father died later of his wounds leaving her mother, Lubna, as the sole survivor. The investigative group Forensic Architecture studied the missile strike and declared it a targeted strike aimed at Hassouna for her work as a journalist and witness. Farsi has no doubt. 'She was targeted by the IDF,' she says. 'There were two missiles dropped by a drone on her house. It means they found out where she was living, planned a drone with missiles to go through three storeys of that building and explode on the second floor. It's amazingly well planned in order to eliminate somebody who just does photography. 'I still can't believe it,' Farsi says, speaking from Bogotá, where she is touring with the film, which is now Hassouna's legacy. 'It's three months now, a bit more, and it's still quite unbelievable. For me, she is somewhere out there and I believe I will meet her someday.' In their conversations, Hassouna talked about all the places in the world she dreamed of seeing, while insisting she would always return home to Gaza. Shortly before she died, she told Farsi: 'I have the idea that I must keep going and I must document everything, to be part of this story, to be me!' She imagined passing on her experiences to her children, but instead they have been captured for a cinematic audience, and Hassouna's arresting personality has been preserved at the same time, a portrait of a unique individual among the 60,000 dead. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 August. Tickets at

Hezbollah dismisses Lebanon's move to restrict arms as ''a grave sin'
Hezbollah dismisses Lebanon's move to restrict arms as ''a grave sin'

BBC News

time4 hours ago

  • BBC News

Hezbollah dismisses Lebanon's move to restrict arms as ''a grave sin'

Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militant and political movement, says it will disregard a decision by Lebanon's government to task the army with establishing a state monopoly on arms."We will treat this decision as if it does not exist," Hezbollah said in a statement on Wednesday, describing it as a "grave sin".The comments come despite mounting international pressure for the group to Iranian-backed group was significantly degraded in last year's war with Israel but has, so far, refused to give up its arsenal, despite calls from the US and domestic rivals. Hezbollah also said that the Lebanese cabinet's decision to try and confine arms supply and production to state forces was the result of American "diktats".It added that it was open to dialogue and discussions on "the national security strategy", but not "in the context of aggression".On Tuesday, Lebanon's cabinet asked the military to present a plan that will see all arms brought under state control by the end of the plan is to be presented to the cabinet by the end of this month for discussion and approval, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told a press conference after the six-hour cabinet meeting. In June, American officials presented a roadmap to Lebanese authorities that proposed Hezbollah's full disarmament in exchange for Israel halting its strikes and withdrawing troops from five locations in southern Lebanon, which have been occupied despite a ceasefire deal reached in November. The group's leader, Naim Qassem, in a televised address while the cabinet meeting was underway, said Hezbollah would not discuss "the issue of the weapons" while Israeli attacks continue, accusing Israel of breaching the terms of the ceasefire. Israel says its attacks are to prevent Hezbollah from regrouping and its weakened status, Hezbollah still enjoys significant support among Lebanon's Shia Muslim population, and discussions around its disarmament risk elevating tensions in the country, where many still remember the 1975-1990 civil war.

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