Rabat Erupts in Protest Against Gaza Blockade, IOF Crimes
From Bab El Had to the Moroccan Parliament, the crowd marched with flags, chants, and the tragic message that Gaza's genocide is only getting worse, and silence is no longer an option.
For more than 21 months, Gaza has endured relentless Israeli massacres marked by daily deaths, hunger, and an unyielding violence.
Israel has carried out a military campaign in Gaza involving mass killings, starvation, destruction of infrastructure and forced expulsions since October 7, 2023.
In Morocco, the protest was organized by the 'Moroccan Front in Support of Palestine and Against Israeli Ties,' a national coalition bringing together political parties, trade unions, human rights organizations, and prominent public figures.
The movement mobilized a wide range of participants, men and women, young and old, united in their refusal to accept the ongoing Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) massacres.
Palestinian flags waved over the crowd, while chants echoed through the capital: 'With our souls and our blood, we sacrifice for you, Palestine' and 'Morocco and Palestine, one people, not two.'
Read also: Gaza Death Toll Tops 58,000 as Ceasefire Talks Stall
Others demanded an immediate break in diplomatic relations with Israel and urged urgent humanitarian aid for Gaza.
The march also carried a tone of defiance. Protesters called out Western and Arab governments alike, accusing them of ignoring or enabling the suffering of the Palestinians.
Placards and slogans rejected any form of political or economic connection with Tel Aviv, denouncing those links as a betrayal of justice and of Morocco's historical support for the Palestinian cause.
On the same day, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) renewed its urgent funding appeals, warning that Israel is deliberately starving civilians.
More than a million children are now caught in this humanitarian catastrophe, as the blockade continues to restrict life-saving aid from reaching Gaza.
Starvation has become yet another weapon in Israel's arsenal of oppression. Beyond bullets, airstrikes, and surveillance drones, Israel now relies on deliberate hunger as a means of forcing Palestinians to yield.
This systematic deprivation of food and aid is part of a wider plan to uproot Palestinians and impose a new reality on historic Palestinian lands. Tags: GazagenocideIOF massacresMorocco Gaza
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Morocco World
11 hours ago
- Morocco World
Calls Grow for UK to Intervene in Imprisoned Fighter Lee Murray's Case
Lee Brahim Murray-Lamrani is a British-Moroccan former MMA fighter, born on November 12, 1977, in London to a Moroccan father and English mother. In his early life in Woolwich, London, Murray gained notoriety due to his alleged linkage with illegal activities, including violence and drug dealing, before indulging in the MMA world. In 2006, Murray was involved in a robbery of £53m from a Securitas depot in Kent, England, with a group of masked men before he ran away to Morocco. After four months on the run, Murray was caught in Rabat in a joint operation conducted by Moroccan and British police. He was sentenced to 10 years in Moroccan prison before the sentence was increased to 25 years on appeal. Lee's younger son, Lenie Murray, was two years old during the incident. 'I was only two years old when my dad went to prison. I've spent my whole life without him. He's missed my childhood, and I've missed having a father by my side,' Lenie told Morocco World News (MWN) in an exclusive interview. Read also: Human Rights Groups Demand Inquiry into Lee Murray's Conviction 'He made a mistake a very long time ago that he's taken responsibility for and changed for the better. He's still my dad. I love him and miss him every day. I just want the chance to know him properly and to have him be part of my life. I'm not asking for anything more than the chance to share time with the father I've missed for 19 years. 'My father has spent 19 years in a Moroccan prison — far longer than anyone else involved in the same case received in the UK,' he added. Human rights groups are now demanding that the UK parliament take action in the case. 'We are urging the UK government to formally support a pardon request for Lee,' Radha Stirling, CEO of Due Process International and founder of Detained in Dubai, told Morocco World News. She added: 'We're also urging an investigation into whether the UK government breached its obligation to its own citizens, to pursue a prosecution by a foreign government since this sets a dangerous precedent.' Murray's MMA Career Murray started his MMA career in 1999 at an event called 'Millennium Brawl' when he won over Rob Hudson by a first-round knockout, and gained the nickname 'lightning.' Lee fought four times in 2000 and won each fight with either a submission or a knockout. His aggressive, unpredictable style made him one of the most feared fighters at that time. Dana white, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), described him as 'the most legit gangsters of all time.' Dana detailed: 'I actually ran into Lee Murray right after he got stabbed. He got stabbed everywhere and they were still fresh…Days after Lee Murray got stabbed, he's walking around the event with all the stitches still in him. Lee Murray is one of the most legit gangsters of all time, he really is.' Murray has a professional record of 8-2-1 (win-loss-draw) with remarkable fights, including his win over Jorge Rivera at UFC 46 via triangle armbar in just 1 minute and 45 seconds of the first round. Eight months later, Lee delivered a competitive fight with the UFC legend and Hall-of-Fame Anderson Silva in Cage Rage 8, which ended by decision for Silva. On September 28, 2005, Murray faced the incident that would put an end to his MMA career. He was stabbed repeatedly in the heart at a birthday party at Funky Buddha nightclub in Mayfair. According to The Standard, Murray underwent open-heart surgery and needed 30 pints of blood, but no one was charged with the attack. 'First, they stabbed me in the head. At first, I thought it was a punch. When I felt blood running down my face, I wiped it away and kept fighting. Then I looked down and blood was spurting from my chest. I knew I had been stabbed in the heart by the blood gushing out of me. Blood sprayed from me about a meter away,' Murray said in an interview. Nearly two decades after the Securitas robbery, Lee Murray remains imprisoned in Morocco, and his case continues to draw attention from human rights advocates. Tags: human rightslee murrayMMA
Ya Biladi
11 hours ago
- Ya Biladi
Morocco : A national conference calls for equal reform of the Family Code
The Jossour Forum of Moroccan Women (Jossour FFM) held a national conference on Thursday, July 24, in Rabat, focusing on reforming the Family Code to promote equality. The event gathered politicians, institutional representatives, associations, academics, and media professionals «to collaboratively envision a family legislation that is more just, equitable, and aligned with contemporary Moroccan realities». According to a press release, the conference is part of the project «A Just and Equitable Family Law for All Women», supported by the organization Diakonia. For the organizers, it represents «a significant milestone in the advocacy efforts led by Jossour FFM», with recommendations drawn from their memorandum, crafted after extensive consultations. «This document, the culmination of thorough collective work, sets the stage for a comprehensive reform of the Family Code, in line with the 2011 constitutional principles and Morocco's international commitments», the source noted. During the conference, participants highlighted «the necessity to dismantle the legal and social obstacles that impede the realization of women's rights». Discussions centered on «the shortcomings of the current Moudawana, the contradictions between some of its provisions and the equality principles enshrined in the Constitution», as well as «the concrete proposals offered by Jossour FFM to forge a more inclusive new family pact». Speakers unanimously agreed that «reforming the Family Code is now a social and political imperative, essential to ensuring equal rights and accompanying the profound transformations within Moroccan society». Beyond the conference, Jossour FFM aims to «establish a diverse and civic dialogue platform». This inclusive approach also seeks to «enhance civic and political engagement, placing the issue of Moudawana reform at the forefront of the national agenda». In this context, the successful execution of the conference underscores that «Moroccan society is prepared to collectively embrace a new family pact, grounded in justice, equality, and dignity for all women», the organizers stated. The organizers further emphasized that «the goal is not merely to amend legal articles, but to fundamentally rethink the legal and social frameworks governing family life in Morocco». They affirmed that the advocacy will persist «with institutions, political parties, and civil society to vigorously champion the recommendations from this conference».
Morocco World
12 hours ago
- Morocco World
The Colonial Grammar of Resistance: Taleb Sahara and the Paradox of Racialized Militancy
In the aftermath of decolonization, Frantz Fanon warned that the greatest danger to liberation movements was the internalization of colonial logics under the guise of resistance. Today, figures like Taleb Sahara illustrate a troubling mutation of this insight: militants of identity politics who, in the name of emancipation, reproduce the very epistemologies of racism, hierarchy, and essentialism that colonial power once used to dominate the 'native.' In this essay, I argue that Taleb Sahara represents a paradigmatic case of postcolonial racialized militancy that harnesses Eurocentric morophobia to define 'identity,' while simultaneously undermining the moral and ontological legitimacy of the very subject he claims to liberate. I. The Psychoanalytic Seduction of Purity Taleb Sahara's rhetoric is fixated on a fantasy of racial and moral purity, one that opposes the 'civilized Sahrawi' to the allegedly 'criminal' Moroccan. Drawing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, we see here a classic mechanism of projection and scapegoating. The abject Other — in this case, the Moroccan migrant — serves to stabilize a fragile Sahrawi self-image. This maneuver constructs identity through negation: I am Sahrawi because I am not Moroccan. Such boundary-drawing is a response to postcolonial anxiety — an attempt to fix identity in the face of historical fragmentation, hybridity, and geopolitical ambiguity. But this disavowal of the Other is a double bind. As Judith Butler reminds us, identity is never self-possessed; it is always relational, citational, and embedded in power. The Sahrawi subject, as articulated by Taleb Sahara, is only imaginable through the disarticulation of the Moroccan. This is not liberation; it is a psychic repetition of colonial race-thinking. II. The Racial Instrumentalization of the Migrant Taleb's claims — that Morocco 'exports criminals' to Spain as a form of hybrid warfare — echo right-wing conspiratorial narratives across the Global North. The irony is stark: in his attempt to demonize Moroccan statecraft, he borrows the exact racist discourses used by Vox, Rassemblement National, and AfD to exclude all North Africans from the European political imaginary. Here, Taleb joins what Paul Gilroy once called 'the new raciologies' — postcolonial actors who co-opt the biopolitics of race in service of ethno-nationalist agendas. By portraying Moroccan migrants as criminal by default, he reproduces the colonial trope of the 'unassimilable native,' whose very presence threatens the integrity of the Western state. This is not an anti-colonial critique; it is racial ventriloquism. What's more disturbing is Taleb's instrumentalization of state clemency — claiming that Moroccan prisoners pardoned near the end of their sentence are 'weaponized' as migrant criminals. He offers no data, no causality, only paranoid inference. His accusation is not just empirically hollow; it is conceptually perverse. It enacts what Edward Said called a 'travesty of liberation': deploying colonial frameworks of control and suspicion in the name of postcolonial freedom. III. Identity as Fetish, Race as Tool The contradiction in Taleb Sahara's position lies in the fact that while he invokes anti-colonial language — 'liberation,' 'resistance,' 'self-determination' — he does so by deploying the race card as a tactical weapon. But race, as Stuart Hall taught us, is not a stable ground on which to construct identity. It is a floating signifier, subject to the ideological work of power. Taleb's use of race as a tool — to divide, to criminalize, to stigmatize — reintroduces the logics of colonial racial classification into the bloodstream of liberation discourse. He is not dismantling the coloniality of power; he is repurposing it with new targets. This is identity as fetish — a reified, purified ideal that occludes the messiness, plurality, and shared histories of Maghrebi peoples. Postcolonial theorists from Achille Mbembe to Homi Bhabha have shown us that identity is always impure, always in process. To build identity on the foundation of exclusion is not only politically dangerous; it is philosophically bankrupt. It transforms difference into deviance, solidarity into suspicion. IV. The Political Economy of Morophobia Taleb's discourse cannot be separated from a broader European context in which morophobia — a racialized fear of Moroccans — is increasingly weaponized to shape migration policy and diplomatic alignments. His narratives are not isolated; they feed into a transnational economy of fear, one that seeks to devalue Morocco's partnerships and delegitimize its strategic role in Africa and the Mediterranean. But here's the contradiction: while Taleb accuses Morocco of using migrants as pawns, he himself instrumentalizes migrants as political symbols. He invokes the figure of the Moroccan prisoner, stripped of name, voice, or humanity, to enact a rhetorical performance of Sahrawi purity. The migrant becomes a cipher, a blank screen onto which fantasies of contamination, crime, and geopolitical conspiracy are projected. This is not anti-imperialism. It is a re-enactment of imperial power — now in the hands of the postcolonial militant. V. Conclusion: The Trap of Reactive Identity Taleb Sahara's rhetoric exemplifies the danger of what I call reactive identity politics: the construction of selfhood not through affirmative liberation, but through the negation of the Other. This is not a politics of becoming; it is a politics of boundary policing. As Fanon once warned, 'the oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.' Taleb has taken this one step further — he believes the worst about others in order to justify his own imagined virtue. But in doing so, he resurrects the skeleton of colonial race-thinking and dresses it in the clothes of resistance. True liberation does not require scapegoats. It requires solidarity, plurality, and the rejection of racial logics — especially when they are dressed as emancipation.
