Importing more anti-Semites is the last thing France needs
Once a supporter of Israel as the model of la start-up nation, the French president now believes in ensuring his legacy among the bien-pensant Left – or, more practically, that he now stands a chance of being elected as the next UN secretary-general after he finishes his last presidential term.
Closer to home, with his personal polling in the doldrums, Macron has watched with keen interest the younger troops of the French Left, his original home, turning the issue of Gaza into a hot national button.
In hierarchical France, following up le Chef 's decisions with some gesture demonstrating your allegiance is de rigueur. France's foreign secretary, Jean-Noël Barrot, soon announced that following a month-old ruling by the National Court of Asylum all Gaza residents qualify for entry in France as full refugees. And 292 of their top students would be admitted in French academic institutions, with benefits and housing allocations extending up to three years depending on their degree program.
A list of suitable names was compiled within hours by the French Consulate in Jerusalem, which, unlike the one in Tel Aviv, only concerns itself with Palestinian territories matters.
The fiasco that followed was perfectly predictable. Nour Atallah, a student from Gaza in France, allegedly shared a video in October 2023 of Hitler with the caption: 'kill the Jews everywhere. I don't want a Jewish lineage on this earth, you must kill them before they kill you.'
Miss Atallah's acceptance into the prestigious Sciences-Po Lille for a master in media and business, complete with housing in the university's own president's accommodation, has now been rescinded.
The case of Fady Hossam Hanona is similar. His experience as a journalist in Gaza and as a stringer for, among others, the New York Times and the Guardian meant that when he arrived in France in July a job already awaited him in the Arabic Service at France 24. But Hanona reportedly said on social media in August 2022: 'The Jews are sons of dogs, and I am with killing them and burning them, like Hitler did to them – I would be extremely happy.' (He has deleted the post).
All 292 Palestinians asylum guests are belatedly being screened, and the programme has been suspended. But some of their bloodthirsty language – which has been for decades the vernacular in Palestinian school manuals, mosque preaches and the Internet – has long been present in France.
It is evident first among the country's resentful clusters of unintegrated and jobless youths; and now among the hard Left. It is no wonder that ten days after the October attacks, an employee of the foreign ministry called Sophie Pommier was caught on camera and seemed to be ragefully tearing down posters of Israeli hostages.
Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, French Jews have been subject to a number of horrific attacks and murders. In 2012, a man named Mohamed Merah went on anti-Semitic rampage and killed seven people in southern France; salesman Ilan Halimi was tortured and murdered in 2006; Sarah Halimi was beaten and defenestrated in 2017.
Macron's warm words of sympathy to the Jewish community, meanwhile, are invariably followed by strange decisions, such as declining to take part in a march against anti-Semitism in Paris in November 2023.
Thinking himself attuned to the Zeitgeist, the once-youngest president of the Fifth Republic, now a middle-aged 47, hankers after the political youth cred he believes he once enjoyed. He finds it at home among the keffiyeh-wearing crowd that Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise seems to effortlessly mobilise. And he finds it abroad at the UN, where his last decision is definitely popular.
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The Guardian
31 minutes 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.'
The Guardian
39 minutes 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
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Moment former Tory justice minister Chris Philp finds huge boat of illegal migrants crossing the Channel
Former Tory justice minister Chris Philp has poked holes at Labour's new migrant returns deal after witnessing two 'massively packed' small boats entering UK waters while French officials 'made no attempt' to stop them. Mr Philp, who now serves as shadow Home Secretary, today posted a series of videos taken aboard a chartered ship in the English Channel. After seeing one migrant boat being 'shadowed' by a French warship and then another just ten minutes later, the incandescent politician said it showed the Anglo-French deal was a failure, adding that occupants of the boats were 'coming to a hotel near you soon'. He said: 'On the very day Labour's flagship Channel deal was meant to kick in, I watched French ships escort illegal migrants straight into British waters. 'Labour's migrant surrender deal with France is in shambles and today has proven that it will have no deterrent effect whatsoever.' Last month Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer pledged migrants would be 'detained and returned to France in short order' under the agreement. But a determined Mr Philp explained he would spend the day trying to discover 'if the Government really has sorted out' the issue of illegal migrants arriving in the UK from across the English Channel. Within minutes, he is informed that French patrol vessel Minck had turned directly towards the shore of Calais in anticipation of a migrant boat getting ready to leave. He said: 'So you can see the migrant boat in the water absolutely rammed full of illegal immigrants crossing the Channel and we see right next to it a French warship shadowing it across, making no attempts to stop it at all. 'That French warship has been with it about three hours now. They could have stopped that illegal migrant boat near the French shore if they had chosen to, like the Belgians do, the Australians do. 'They could have stopped it, but instead they are shadowing it across, escorting it into British waters.' He added that within the next two hours the migrants would reach British waters. Within minutes, Mr Philp then spotted a second migrant boat, with around 80 people aboard. 'The Government's new deal they announced is obviously having no effect whatsoever. '[The migrants] are clearly not deterred by the government's deal. I can see the evidence in front of my eyes,' the politician added, before witnessing UK Border Force vessel Typhoon approaching the French warship to pick up the migrants. Mr Philp added: 'They should return all the people - if you return all the people then they won't attempt the crossing in the first place.' He witnessed the scenes on the first day of Labour's new migrant returns deal, which had already suffered a bumpy introduction after one minister appeared to contradict the terms of the treaty. Cabinet minister Lisa Nandy said on Wednesday that small boat migrants sent back under the deal would see their human rights claims heard after being sent back to France. However, it later emerged that some types of human rights cases would, in fact, block the Home Office from being able to remove migrants in the first place. Asked whether human rights challenges amounted to a loophole in the plan, Culture Secretary Ms Nandy said: 'That's not the case at all. 'The deal that we've struck will allow… us to send people back to France who have human rights claims. 'Those claims will be heard in France.' She told Sky News: 'I know that the Conservative Party has been saying that this is a loophole. It isn't and we're really confident about that.' However, the treaty clearly sets out how small boat migrants cannot be sent back to France if they have 'an outstanding human rights claim'. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed the new deal last month after a Downing Street summit The Home Office confirmed some human rights claims will block migrants' removal until they have been concluded in full. It will include cases which cannot be formally 'certified' by officials as 'clearly unfounded'. A Home Office spokesman said: 'Not everyone will fall within the scope of certification. 'No doubt there will be examples where people who file a human rights claim will fall outside the scope of certification and that would have to be heard.' It was a narrower interpretation of the circumstances than those set out by Ms Nandy, and legal proceedings could take months or even years to wrap up. The Mail has learned pro-migrant groups have begun informal discussions about launching a joint legal action against Labour's plan – just as they did against the Tories' Rwanda scheme. Sources said there had already been 'a certain amount of co-ordination' between charities and other groups, with details of the treaty still being analysed. The Free Movement website, which offers advice to immigration lawyers, has published an analysis of the new measures which says: 'Legal challenges will be more difficult than for Rwanda, however there are still likely to be grounds on which some people can resist removal to France. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper repeatedly refused to say how many migrants will be returned under the deal because it 'could help the smuggling gangs' 'For example, if the inadmissibility decision was wrong, if people have family in the UK, or had experiences in France which make it inappropriate to send them back.' Meanwhile, the French interior ministry led by Bruno Retailleau - who signed the treaty alongside Home Secretary Yvette Cooper - declined to answer questions about the deal. It is unclear whether the Home Office had detained any of the new arrivals for possible removal to France. Officials had previously described how migrants would be taken to the Home Office's processing centre at Manston, near Ramsgate in Kent, for initial screening. Those selected would be sent to short-term detention facilities for further screening, and then on to an immigration removal centre. Under the terms of the treaty the UK must hand France the names of those to be removed within 14 days of their arrival. The French government then has up to 28 days to respond. Labour's deal with France came a year after Sir Keir scrapped the Tories' Rwanda asylum scheme as one of his first acts in office. The Rwanda deal, designed to deter Channel crossings and save lives, was ready to finally get off the ground after more than two years in legal limbo.
