At least 16 civilians killed, others injured in Israeli airstrikes on different areas in Gaza
GAZA (WAM)At least 16 Palestinians, including multiple women and children, were killed and others wounded in Israeli airstrikes that targeted various areas across the Gaza Strip early Saturday, according to medical sources.In one of the incidents, a mother and her three children were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit a residential area along Jamal Abdel Nasser Street, near the Islamic University in western Gaza City.Four more women were killed, and 10 others injured in a separate strike on a home near Yaffa School in the Al-Tuffah neighbourhood, also in Gaza City.
Gaza ceasefire talks held up by Israeli withdrawal plans, according to informed Palestinian sources cited by AFP.
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Middle East Eye
29 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
US actors criticise use of antisemitism to shut down discussion on Gaza
A prominent American Jewish acting family has criticised the use of antisemitism to shut down discussions about Israel's policies in Gaza. Actors Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody also told The New York Times they thought the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were threatening the safety of Jewish communities internationally. "The politics of what he's doing is the worst thing for Jewish people. It's like lighting a candle for anybody that has any antisemitic feelings," said Grody. "It's creating a generation of wounded and hurt kids who will understandably be very angry. I feel deeply troubled and horrified by what is happening in my name. So I am very proud of every Jewish person that stands up for the humanity of people in the Middle East." Patinkin concurred, referencing a line from the film The Princess Bride, in which he starred. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters "'You know, I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it's over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life,'" he said. "And I ask Jews all over the world to consider what this man Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing government, is doing to the Jewish people all over the world. "They are endangering not only the State of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but endangering the Jewish population all over the world." Industry pressure The US entertainment industry has been divided over the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 60,000 people since October 2023. Some artists, actors and production staff have alleged that there is a concerted campaign by industry executives to silence solidarity with Palestinians. How America's entertainment industry manufactured silence on Gaza Read More » Dozens of individuals - from actors and dancers to carpenters, set dressers, animators, composers and screenwriters - recently told Middle East Eye that they had been punished for speaking out against the conflict. In February, Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank assaulted and detained Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land - an attack that Ballal's co-director, Basel Adra, suggested may have been "revenge on us for making the movie". Although the Academy had recognised Ballal's work with an Oscar just weeks earlier, it refused to condemn Israel's actions, issuing only a vague statement about "reports of violence" against Ballal and condemning "violence of this kind anywhere in the world". Speaking to The New York Times, Grody and Patinkin - who have been open advocates for a ceasefire in Gaza - criticised the use of antisemitism as justification for shutting down discussion about the conflict. "I hate the way some people are using antisemitism as a claim for anybody that is critical about a certain policy," said Grody. "As far as I am concerned, compassion for every person in Gaza is very Jewish, and the fact that I abhor the policies of the leader of that country does not mean I'm a self-hating Jew or I'm antisemitic."
Middle East Eye
an hour ago
- Middle East Eye
Israel has distilled western colonial war techniques, but fails to quell resistance
Palestine is bearing the brunt of the imperial boomerang: in globalised capitalism, regimes of domination adapt to those who resist them by circulating techniques of war, surveillance and repression between colonial and metropolitan battlefields. Although this imperial mechanism has propelled the colonisation of Palestine from the beginning, it has failed to extinguish the "arts of resistance". Since the start of the British Mandate in Palestine, colonial domination has suffered regular counterattacks. To maintain its hold, the occupier articulated methods of counterinsurgency - that is, war within and against populations - tested in the empire and throughout the history of western colonisation. This dynamic gained momentum in the face of the Arab Revolt, the Palestinian uprising against the British Mandate and its support for Zionism that took place from 1936 to 1939. Officer Charles Tegart, who led the counter-guerrilla operations, had made a career in intelligence in Northern Ireland during the Irish War of Independence before heading the Calcutta police, where he was notorious for the widespread the use of torture against separatists. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters In Palestine, where he was sent in 1937, he ordered the building of numerous fortified police stations, a border fence and torture centres. A vast system of registration, mass arrests and administrative detention was combined with torture, collective punishment, deportations and summary executions Another senior office in Mandate Palestine was General Orde Wingate, originally from a family of British settlers in India. He served in Sudan before being dispatched to Palestine, where he developed the "Special Night Squads". These police commandos made up of Jewish settlers were tasked with punitive expeditions against Palestinian villages. These paramilitary militias helped found the Israeli army. French colonial expertise also played an important role. Like in Haiti, where it was used to re-establish slavery in the early 19th century, paramilitary units and dogs were used to hunt insurgents. Modelled on French colonial methods in Syria and Algeria, a vast system of registration, mass arrests and administrative detention was combined with torture, collective punishment, deportations and summary executions. All of these techniques profoundly influenced the early Israeli military and security apparatus, but none was sufficient to quell the sumud, the spirit of Palestinian resistance. A global and permanent war against Palestinians The Israeli state was concretely forged on the basis of a colonial war involving the destruction of numerous villages, mass expulsions and massacres in the classic style of western colonisation. Facing persistent indigenous resistance like his European predecessors, the Israeli officer of the Carmeli Brigade tasked with "de-Arabising" Haifa in August 1948 seized on the genocidal dynamic. He ordered: "Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives." Palestinian refugees were bombarded with mortars. War on Gaza: Why Frantz Fanon's words are more relevant today than ever Read More » Faced with the reorganisation of the rebellion, Israeli counterinsurgency methods continued to evolve through regular exchanges with western colonial powers. In January 1960, two Israeli generals, Yitshak Rabin and Chaim Hersog, future prime minister and president respectively, observed French techniques of "counter-revolutionary warfare" in Algeria: separation walls, population displacement and mass internment, widespread torture, rape and enforced disappearances, massacres by bombing and chemical weapons, all combined with industrial propaganda following a dynamic of general militarisation of society. This savoir-faire similarly failed to break the determination of the Algerian people, but it has continued to resonate through the methodical crushing of Palestinian lives. In 1967, during the so-called Six Day War, patrols sent to Gaza were trained to throw grenades into homes before entering them. Soldiers were ordered to shoot and kill any civilian who resisted the raids. Mechanisms of extreme violence also governed the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the war launched in 2002 against the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada. During Operation Defensive Shield, the military-police lockdown of the West Bank city of Jenin likewise failed to overcome the rebellion. These methods are taught to security forces around the world and thereby contribute to updating global counterinsurgency It served however as a model for the new imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for urban security planning in the world's major cities. Mass racial internment has also structured the global history of counter-insurgency since the first concentration camps created by Spain in Cuba at the end of the 19th century or those established by Germany to intern the Herero and Nama people in Namibia as part of the first genocide of the 20th century. Israel has seized on it as a "social engineering" technique aimed at emptying the "human terrain" and reformatting the inmates' personalities. These principles guide the arbitrary, sometimes indefinite, incarceration of thousands of Palestinians and the transformation of Gaza into an open-air concentration camp. Nevertheless, Palestinian resistance perseveres and continually reorganises itself beyond the walls. A laboratory for counter-insurgency As early as 2010, researcher Laleh Khalili described Palestine as "an archetypal laboratory and a crucial node of global counterinsurgencies". Researcher Jeff Halper, for his part, sees Israel as a model of "security state" based on a form of permanent counterinsurgency. In this framework, deploying extreme violence against civilians constitutes a rationalised doctrine. For example, Israel recommends shooting in the head to kill (shoot-to-kill policy), as well as the principle of "escalation dominance" that justifies the intentional use of disproportionate force to subdue the enemy. These techniques are integrated into a concept known as "cumulative deterrence" that advocates the systematic conjunction of violent treatments. The war against the people has caused human carnage while largely benefiting the military-security industries. However, it has failed to eradicate the spirit of liberation of the oppressed These methods are taught to security forces around the world and thereby contribute to updating global counterinsurgency. They constitute commodities valued in the same way as all the weapons tested by Israel against the Palestinian people and then labelled "combat-proven" in the international fairs of war and control. In the era of security capitalism, the crushing of Palestine constitutes a global political economy. Since the counterattack of 7 October 2023, this economy has been operating at full capacity to benefit a "Greater Israel" plan to colonise the entire region through the destruction of Gaza and its inhabitants. Armed, financed and given impunity by the Western bloc, this phase of intensified genocidal warfare operates through the systematic bombing of civilians. This technique, too, is rooted in colonial history, dating back to 1911 when an Italian plane struck a camp in Libya in the first aerial bombardment in history. Israel is innovating by integrating artificial intelligence technologies to automate, maximise and accelerate the mass killing of civilian populations. Algorithmic extermination thus joins the global counterinsurgency repertoire. Blood or bread: Surviving Israel's vicious hunger regime in Gaza Read More » In Gaza, the Israeli state is destroying homes, schools and hospitals, refugee camps and facilities delivering vital supplies. Humanitarian aid and access to healthcare are blocked through a strategy known as "food and resource control" that was used by the United Kingdom in South Africa during the colonial era and by the United States military in Cuba, the Philippines and Vietnam. Israel stands out by weaponising humanitarian aid to massacre starving populations. Chemical weapons such as white phosphorus and toxic gases that have been used to make Palestine uninhabitable resonate with the use of mustard gas by France and Spain against the anti-colonial resistance in the Moroccan Rif, as well as the use of napalm and Agent Orange against the Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions. On each of these battlefields, the "war against the people" has caused human carnage while largely benefiting the military-security industries. However, it has failed to eradicate the spirit of resistance of the oppressed. Following Haiti, Vietnam or Algeria, Palestine embodies what rises up and holds firm against global counterinsurgency. Across borders, against the imperial boomerang, its name resonates through international solidarity, showing the determination of the oppressed to resist in order to exist and to unite for emancipation. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Al Etihad
2 hours ago
- Al Etihad
Federal Tax Authority seizes over 3.5 million non-compliant excise goods
14 July 2025 15:02 DUBAI (WAM) During an operation conducted by a team of Federal Tax Authority (FTA) inspectors, a number of unauthorised excise goods were recently seized from a facility in Dubai, where fraudulently packaged and concealed tobacco and beverage products were being purposefully smuggled into the UAE part of its ongoing commitment to combat tax evasion, enhance tax compliance, and safeguard consumers, the FTA inspection team successfully uncovered the UAE-based operation, which was concealing an illegal cache of excise goods within shipments of clothing and footwear – in clear violation of UAE tax FTA clarified that all seized excise goods have now been permanently confiscated, a tax assessment conducted, and corresponding fines have also been applied. The total number of illegal goods seized exceeded 3.5 million items. These included 1.56 million packs of cigarettes, 1.77 million packs of electronic smoking devices and accessories, 111,360 packs of raw tobacco, 4,000 packs of hookah tobacco, 121 packs of nicotine pouches, and 4,600 packs of excise tax due on these products was equivalent to Dh133.2 million, and legal action has been taken against the non-compliant FTA stated that this operation is part of continuous monitoring efforts it undertakes in collaboration with the relevant local and federal authorities, and emphasised that – in order to avoid penalties and fines for non-compliance – producers, importers, and stockists of excise goods must adhere to the tax regulations set forth in Federal Law No. 7 of 2017 on Excise Tax and its line with best international practices, the FTA confirmed that in its battle against tax evasion, it uses the latest advanced electronic control mechanisms, including the application of digital tax stamps on tobacco and tobacco-related products. Each stamp contains electronically registered data, which FTA inspectors verify to ensure the appropriate tax has been paid. The FTA also stressed its commitment to enhancing coordination and cooperation with all relevant federal and local government entities to ensure compliance with tax laws – across all seven emirates of the UAE.
