“I saw it with my own eyes. My father was blasted out of the house. His face was burned, and his ears were torn off.” Amin Ahmad, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/16/athlete-pilates-instructor-teacher-human-toll-of-israels-attack-on-iran">speaking to Al Jazeera’s Saeedeh Fathi</a>, recounted his father’s death in eastern Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Sunday afternoon. An Israeli airstrike on the family home left him and his mother trapped inside. 
“I had to force the window bars open and call out for help. Someone brought a ladder, and my mother and I escaped”, he said. Amin’s father was a teacher. He worked all his life with the hope that he would one day retire in peace. “Now he’s dead, and the house is destroyed.” 
Amin’s story is one of hundreds. Israel has so far <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-conflict-news/card/iran-s-death-toll-surpasses-450-rights-group-says-Y8tyR2w2VwItM2BII2Ae">killed more than 450 people</a>, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a nongovernmental organisation that monitors the country. The Western political establishment calls this Israel’s right to self-defence. But like in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Israel’s war on Iran is an act of naked aggression. 
The wounded come in waves to Tehran’s major hospitals. One doctor described it as a bloodbath. He told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">the Guardian</a>, “We were overwhelmed by chaos and the screams of grieving family members”. Many of the wounded had been struck by deadly shrapnel from Israeli airstrikes. Patients were found with metal lodged in femur bones and the soft tissues of the hip joints. 
Iranian petrochemical workers on Karkov Island, their workplace having been deemed a high-risk target, were left by their bosses to fend for themselves. In a statement on their Telegram channel, they said: “[The managers] have not even put a plan in place for the possibility of an attack. There is no shelter or equipment. There is no catalog [sic] of instructions on what to do in the event of an attack, where to go, or how to protect our lives”. 
It’s impossible to know the real toll of Israel’s air war. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">Hospital staff have reported</a> being told not to post online about the number of wounded or dead. But we do know that Israel’s attacks are widespread. 
A Children’s Hospital in southern Tehran. An assistant professor of neonatal medicine and her three-year-old child. A student sitting in her home with her family. They were destroyed in a flash of fire as bombs rained down. Israel says that they’re all “legitimate targets”—just like the hospitals in Gaza; just like the residential buildings in Lebanon. 
“[They have] directly targeted the country’s infrastructure, such as oil and gas resources, automotive industries, water, airports, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation and even Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah”, a student in central Iran told Red Flag via Telegram. “Israel keeps saying that it’s only targeting military sites, which is not true at all.” 
The Middle East Monitor <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250616-report-israel-threatens-dahiya-style-assault-on-tehran-in-bid-to-destabilise-iran/">reported two days ago</a> that Israel is preparing for a massive, “Dahiya-style” attack on the capital:
“The plan, disclosed by Israeli broadcaster Channel 14, reportedly seeks to destabilise Iran’s government through systematic bombing of strategic sites while coercing mass evacuation from densely populated areas.
“The operation, said to have been greenlit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, draws directly from Israel’s controversial military doctrine first employed during its 2006 war on Lebanon.
“That assault saw the wholesale destruction of the Dahiya district in southern Beirut—a stronghold of Hezbollah—marking the beginning of what military officials would later describe as a deliberate strategy of ‘disproportionate force’ and the targeting of civilian infrastructure to achieve political objectives.”
Indeed, Defence Minister Israel Katz warned: “Tehran will be treated like Beirut”. 
The Israelis are trying to exploit the deep unpopularity of the Iranian regime to gain support for their war. In a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO8WlACdCB8">
televised address</a> to the Iranian public, Netanyahu smugly asserted: “We are clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, which is freedom”.
This narrative—that bombing people while they sleep will facilitate their freedom from the forces of political oppression—has been repeated time and again over the last twenty months of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. 
And it continues. Western media outlets <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLqP7SAlrYg">such as the British Broadcasting Corporation</a> have given a platform to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the disgraced former dictator of Iran, who says that Israeli strikes will help “liberate” the country. As if 90 million Iranians are hoping for the return of a US-backed monarchy. As if freedom rises out of the rubble of an Israeli bomb. 
“Most people still oppose the government”, the student in central Iran said. “The rulers of Iran, like many other countries, are dictators ... but they believe the invasion [by Israel] is wrong.” 
World leaders speak of “restraint” and “de-escalation” while arming Israel with advanced heavy weaponry. Netanyahu’s war on Iran is made in America, where the Congress approves billions for “bunker-busting” bombs, where politicians and the media manufacture consent for war crimes. 
President Trump is now <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/17/world/israel-iran-trump#trump-iran">calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”</a>, declaring: “We [Israel and the US] now have complete control of the skies over Iran”. 
Israel is unleashing hell across the Middle East with the backing of the world’s most powerful state and with the support of most of the “civilised” world. They speak of the “Iran-Israel conflict” when it’s an invasion. The Western media and politicians have tried to desensitise the world to such horror over the past twenty months of genocide in Gaza. 
Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese have been slaughtered with impunity. The calculation now is that hundreds or thousands of Iranians added to the toll will not be of any international consequence. But each death is more than a number. It’s a child who will never become an adult; it’s a family torn apart forever. 
Parnia Abassi was one of these lives: a student killed, along with three of her family members, as they slept in their home in Sattarkhan, Tehran. Parnia’s friends described her as funny and full of life. In interviews and <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hammihanonline.ir/%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AE%25D8%25B4-%25D8%25AC%25D8%25A7%25D9%2585%25D8%25B9%25D9%2587-23/40566-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25DB%258C%25D8%25B1-%25D9%2585%25D9%2588%25D9%2587%25D8%25A7%25DB%258C-%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25DB%258C-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25DA%25A9-%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25D8%25B1%25D8%25AA%25DB%258C-%25D9%2585%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B9%25D9%2584%25D9%2582-%25D8%25A8%25D9%2587-%25D9%25BE%25D8%25B1%25D9%2586%25DB%258C%25D8%25A7-%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B3%25D8%25AA&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1750205171857941&amp;usg=AOvVaw2c8RZUFj86VcTYEMPKZiN3">online</a>, they recounted their favourite memories. How she took them camping outdoors for the first time, how she gave them gifts, how her sense of humour often took a moment to sink in and then bowled them over with laughter. 
All of that, gone, in a second. Parnia was an aspiring poet. One of her last compositions reads: 
I burn
I fade,
I become a silent star,
That turns into smoke
In your sky

Bella Beiraghi

The human cost of Israel’s war on Iran

For nearly two decades, Israel has enforced a devastating land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip. Since March, almost all supplies have been blocked from entering the territory, <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/gaza-starvation-experiment">resulting in mass starvation</a>. 
In early June, the Madleen Freedom Flotilla set sail from Catania, Italy, towards Gaza. On board were twelve activists, including Greta Thunberg and French politician Rima Hassan. Their goal was to deliver humanitarian aid—rice, baby formula and medical kits—and to defy Israel’s criminal siege. Before reaching its destination, and while in international waters, the Madleen was intercepted by Israeli forces. Soldiers boarded the vessel, took the activists on board and held them in Israeli prisons for days. 
This wasn’t the first time Israel has used force to stop activists from breaking the siege. In 2010, Israeli commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara, a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza from Turkey, and killed nine activists aboard. 
But two years earlier, in 2008, the siege had been broken. Two small wooden boats, the Free Gaza and the Liberty, sailed to Gaza from Cyprus, carrying 44 international solidarity activists and medical supplies. Aviv Shiron from the Israeli foreign ministry <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7578880.stm">said at the time</a> that the government wanted to avoid a PR disaster: “They wanted a provocation at sea, but they won’t get it”. So, Israel let them through. 
When the boats arrived in Gaza, they were greeted by crowds of Palestinians. One participant described the scene: “Dozens jumped into the water and climbed aboard our boats, cheering and waving and hugging everybody”.
The idea to break the siege and deliver humanitarian aid had come from Michael Shaik, an organiser for Free Palestine Melbourne and a founder of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2008. He spoke to Red Flag’s Renee Nayef about the origins of the flotilla campaign. 
--------------------
What led to the formation of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2006, and what was your role?
There were a lot of experienced activists who had been deported from Palestine, and we were discussing what we could do. The purpose of international activists is to use their privilege to shine a light on the invisible aspects of the occupation. We’d had some success in working with Palestinian communities resisting the construction of the Separation Barrier through the West Bank and drawing attention to house demolitions in the Gaza Strip. 
The big hidden story in 2006 was that Israel was claiming that it no longer occupied the Gaza Strip because it had withdrawn its settlers, even though it was blockading imports and exports, forcing the population to rely on aid handouts to survive. That was the hidden violence we needed to shine a light on. So I proposed that we charter a boat to “break the siege of Gaza!” The plan was to place Israel in a lose-lose situation. If they let us through, we break the siege. If they don’t, then we highlight the fact that they have intercepted us—not in Israeli waters, but in Gaza’s waters—and that there was a real blockade. 
None of us had a boat, none of us could sail a boat, and we didn’t have any money. So we did a lot of fundraising around the world. Some people raised donations, some did cake stalls and other grassroots fundraising until we got together the money to purchase a couple of wooden boats. When, in 2008, we first broke the siege, it seemed that the whole population of Gaza came out to the docks to welcome us—just a couple of fishing boats. 
In 2008, the Kadima Party, led by Ehud Olmert, was in power in Israel. Their calculation was that it was best to let the boats through, rather than embarrass themselves with the spectacle of intercepting unarmed activists bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. We got three boats through before the end of the year, when <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mde150212009eng.pdf">Operation Cast Lead</a> commenced. 
After that, Israel became much more aggressive and we couldn’t get any boats through, so we decided to ramp it up to a flotilla of boats. In 2010, when the Likud Party, led by Netanyahu, had taken power, Israeli commandos attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla and shot dead nine activists. For the next four or five days it was headline news around the world. 
A flotilla carrying high-profile activists, including Greta Thunberg, was recently raided and its passengers taken by Israeli forces. What do you think is different this time?
I’ve been repeatedly shocked over the last twenty months at what Israel has done and gotten away with. They’re doing insanely vicious things in the Gaza Strip—cruel things that don’t seem to have any military logic. International solidarity is based on the premise that Israel will be less inclined to use lethal force against Westerners because it will be sanctioned by Western governments. 
Yet Israel got away with <a href="https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel">killing Rachel Corrie</a>. It got away with the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/02/australian-aid-worker-zomi-frankcom-killed-idf-strike-gaza-world-central-kitchen">murder of Zomi Frankum</a> and her colleagues from the World Central Kitchen. Every time they kill an international activist and [Australian Foreign Minister] Penny Wong expresses her regret and then refuses to demand an independent investigation and exonerates the Israeli military by abetting the cover-up, it normalises violence against international activists. We’ve known Palestinian life was cheap for a long time, but even internationals in the line of fire can’t count on their governments protecting them anymore.
The thing you learn when you’ve been doing this for a long time is that Israel’s supporters are active everywhere. They’re active in the mainstream media, they mobilise professional trolls and bots to obscure the facts of the genocide on social media, they are active in all the major parties except the Greens, and I think we have to be the same. The only antidote we’ve got to their big money is big organising—this applies to all movements, Palestine and the climate. 
Rallies are good, but we need to move beyond them. People want to do something to stop the genocide. The activists on the flotilla showed the world that there is something you can do. It’s great what they’re doing. Future generations will remember that when Gaza was on its knees, they, like so many others, stood up for justice and against genocide.
Why is international solidarity important in the struggle for Palestinian liberation?
When I was in Gaza, I noticed that, apart from the physical violence of having their relatives murdered and their homes destroyed, one of the things that most oppressed the people was the feeling that they were being strangled in the dark. 
They can’t leave, the media isn’t allowed in, the walls keep closing in on them, and nobody seems to see them. I think that’s why, when the boats came in in 2008, two pitiful little wooden boats, it was like, “Woah! These people from around the world have come to help, and we’re not invisible”. If nothing else, international solidarity is a morale boost for the people in Palestine—otherwise it’s like they’re fighting the empire on their own. 
Last month, Angela Davis said that Palestine is now the centre of the world. I think she was spot on. The struggle for Palestine, like the struggle for South Africa last century, is bigger than Palestine. Before 2023, I often felt like I was shouting into a void, like no-one was listening. I’d always dreamed that one day there would be an anti-apartheid mass movement in Melbourne, but I never really believed it would happen. Now, people in Melbourne and around the world understand that Palestine stands at the centre of the ancient and global struggle between racism and justice. They also know that Penny Wong and Donald Trump aren’t going to free Palestine, and we have to get up and do it for ourselves. 
I’m not saying that we will win. Or that we won’t suffer defeats and make mistakes—but I don’t think this movement is going to fall away. It radicalised a generation. Palestine is part of young people’s identity now. I think they understand the enormously powerful forces that are supporting Israel, that there will be no easy victories and that we need to be in it for the long term.

Renee Nayef 

When the first freedom flotilla broke the siege of Gaza

Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states.
Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The Financial Times on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”. 
And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 
Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory.
Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state. 
Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will. 
Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier.
“Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v01p2/d159">a joint departmental report</a> to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.”
Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country.
But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since.
The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks. 
“[S]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks [in 1988]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/">an exclusive investigation</a> for Foreign Policy journal in 2013. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo">US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded</a>: “We think the price is worth it”. 
Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html">hundreds of thousands dead</a> in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State.
This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region. 
No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record.
It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history.

Editors

Rogue empire

Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families.
“People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, <a href="https://msf.org.au/article/project-news/gaza-dozens-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites">told Doctors without Borders</a>, a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.”
Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis. 
Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-the-united-kingdom-france-and-canada-on-the-situation-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank">issued a joint statement</a> criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions. 
At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze5w2wd4x0o">wrote on X</a>: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “<a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-fighting-human-animals-dehumanization-of-palestinians/">fighting human animals</a>” as he announced a complete siege of the territory.
“It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!” 
Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months. 
Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”. 
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been <a href="https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/27/no-longer-comprehensible-german-chancellor-slams-israels-gaza-strikes/">hyped in some quarters</a> as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu">International Criminal Court arrest warrant</a> for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250304-german-ministry-dismisses-lawyer-for-supporting-gaza-rejecting-genocide/">fired</a>, <a href="https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-palestine-protest-free-speech-police-arrest-violence/">raided, arrested</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-palestine-activists-deportation-state-repression">deported</a>. 
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo">retired British surgeon</a>, those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been <a href="https://thebristolcable.org/2025/02/filton-18-palestine-action-activists-treated-like-terrorists-elbit-israeli-arms-factory-action/">arrested</a> by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government. 
Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results. 
For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post publishes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-2/">opinion pieces</a> decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations. 
But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours.
One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson. 
The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital. 
The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/5/failing-gaza-pro-israel-bias-uncovered-behind-the-lens-of-western-media">blow the whistle</a>. In Australia, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed">journalists have complained</a> that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports.
It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps. 
During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”.
When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry. 
It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”.
As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial. 
Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action. 
All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn. 
States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/violent-israeli-settlers-under-uk-sanctions-join-west-bank-outpost">a handful of West Bank “settlers”</a>. The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians. 
As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven.

Luca Tavan

Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis

The weaponisation of food echoes the horrors of the Jewish ghettos, as Palestinians are pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, writes Soumaya Ghannoushi. This article was first published at <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-israel-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics">Middle East Eye</a>.
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A woman <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKUjoFXMjiV/?igsh=aDRhcnAxM3hrZTEw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">kneels</a> in the dust.
She is thin, trembling—not old, but famine has aged her. Her bones protrude through a threadbare dress. Her face is ash. Her fingers claw at the ground. 
Around her, others bend too—not in prayer, but in desperation, scraping at the dirt for flour. Not even full grains. Just remnants. Scraps. Whatever the wind and boots and bombs have not yet claimed.
Then she breaks.
She sinks fully to the earth, as if the weight of hunger is too heavy to carry. And she cries, not softly, but with a violence that cuts through the silence of the ruined street: “My kids will eat flour scraped from the floor”.
She weeps into the gravel.
This is not just starvation. It is the calculated breaking of a people, pushing them beyond the limits of human endurance.
This is what Gaza’s “aid” looks like.
Not distribution, but oppression. Not relief, but ritual debasement.
Rations of suffering
The flour had been withheld for weeks—stockpiled, blocked, used as bait. Exhausted families walked for miles, past corpses and craters, to reach the drop sites—only to find cages, soldiers and drones. When they ran towards the food, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kills-32-starving-palestinians-latest-us-aid-point-massacre" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">they were shot</a>.
More than 30 <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Palestinians</a>
were massacred on Sunday, and more than <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/01/israel-gaza-aid-rafah-shooting/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">170 were wounded</a> near an aid distribution site in Rafah, as <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli</a>
forces opened fire on starving civilians trying to collect food. The drop was coordinated by the <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US</a>-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Aid has become a trap. And hunger, a pretext for slaughter.
They have built a bureaucracy of starvation, calling it a “humanitarian foundation”.
But let’s call it what it is: the GHF doesn’t deliver aid, but control. It rations not food, but suffering.
Even the food they promise, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/the-u-s-backed-gaza-aid-plan-has-started-operating-why-are-so-many-humanitarian-groups-opposed-to-it" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1,750 calories per person</a>, is not enough to stave off malnutrition. The World Health Organisation sets the emergency minimum at 2,100 calories.
But most Palestinians in Gaza receive far less than that because the food never comes.
In April 2024, people in northern Gaza were surviving on an average of<a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/people-northern-gaza-forced-survive-245-calories-day-less-can-beans-oxfam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> 245 calories a day</a>, less than a can of fava beans, according to Oxfam.
Grandparents chew flour laced with sand. Toddlers are fed leaves.
The body begins to consume itself: the mind flickers, the breath slows.
Death comes not with a bomb, but with a whisper in the stomach: empty, empty, empty.
And all of this is not accidental. It is replication.
No one spared
In the weeks leading to <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/germany" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Germany</a>’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Reich Minister of Food Richard Darre and his state secretary, Herbert Backe, developed the <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hunger Plan</a>, a strategy of deliberate starvation to exterminate Soviet civilians and Jews while feeding German troops.
It killed at least 7 million people, not as collateral, but by design.
The Nazi regime’s food ration system reflected a <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">racial hierarchy</a>: 100 percent for Germans, 70 percent for Poles, 30 percent for Greeks and 20 percent for Jews.
In the Jewish ghettos, food was weaponised. Access to meat or bread was controlled. Shops were empty. Hunger was not a failure—it was policy. 
“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally”, <a href="https://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/en/news/hitler-s-hungerplan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hans Frank</a>, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry.
Today, more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza—the territory’s entire population—are being forced, by design, into famine.
Not one million. Not most. All of them.
Women and men, infants and the elderly. No one is spared.
And yet—in a twisted echo of history—the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-plan-to-initially-only-feed-60-of-gazans-as-they-endure-extreme-deprivation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">GHF’s plan</a>, like the Nazi food hierarchies before it, will serve only 1.2 million people in its initial phase, excluding the rest of the population.
And that should never be noted marginally.
Even if the GHF achieves its goals, the average Palestinian in Gaza, by design, will receive fewer than 1,000 calories a day, when those receiving no food at all are taken into account. 
This is very close to what Jews in the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-defiant-jewish-doctors-in-warsaw-ghetto-detailed-effects-of-nazi-starvation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Warsaw Ghetto</a> were receiving, through both their allocated rations and smuggling. 
Mockery of the dying
Gaza is now the hungriest place on earth—the only area where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/30/gaza-hungriest-place-earth-all-people-risk-famine-un" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">100 percent of the population is at risk of famine</a>, according to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in April that not even “<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/smotrich-says-not-even-grain-wheat-will-enter-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a grain of wheat</a>” should enter Gaza.
In <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Britain</a>, the advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel grotesquely suggested that the war might help <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for-israel-condemned-over-claim-war-may-reduce-obesity-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“reduce obesity” in Gaza</a>.
This is not just cruelty. This is contempt; it is mockery of the dying.
Even the man appointed as executive director of the Gaza Humiliation Foundation, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/54ec0009-5023-4130-b69e-300c7333e63d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a former US Marine</a>, recently resigned, warning that the project is incompatible with humanitarian standards.
And no wonder. This is not a relief effort. It is a siege conceived by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed by US President Donald Trump, and inspired—in logic and layout—by the Nazi Hunger Plan.
Armed gangs loot aid convoys with impunity, moving freely in areas under Israeli control.
An internal<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/18/gaza-looting-aid-convoys-israel-famine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> UN memo</a> seen by The Washington Post last year warned these groups “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the Israeli army.
When guards in Gaza tried to stop these gangs, Israeli air strikes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfD4NK2Z3H4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">killed twelve</a>—not the looters, but those trying to protect the food.
This is not chaos. It is a calculated breakdown.
It aims to turn hunger into disorder, starvation into surrender.
Stripped of dignity
There are conflicts in the world. There are wars, occupations, displacements.
But nowhere on Earth—not anywhere—is an entire population, young and old, locked inside a flattened, walled-off strip of land, bombed from the air, shelled from the sea, and systematically starved under total siege.
Gaza is not a battlefield. It is a prison. A graveyard.
Eighty years ago, a group of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto documented the effects of hunger on the human body.
They called their book <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-defiant-jewish-doctors-in-warsaw-ghetto-detailed-effects-of-nazi-starvation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Maladie de Famine</a> (The Disease of Starvation). In it, the project’s lead doctor, Israel Milejkowski, wrote: “I hold my pen in my hand and death stares into my room … In this prevailing silence lies the power and the depth of our pain and the moans that one day will shake the world’s conscience”.
This is exactly what doctors in Gaza are saying today.
They treat toddlers who haven’t eaten in days. They watch infants die with sunken eyes and protruding ribs. They speak to the world, but the world does not listen. 
That day is now.
After seeing their homes, schools and bakeries razed; after being displaced again and again, infants on shoulders, elders in wheelchairs, entire families turned to ash—they are now denied bread.
Gaza’s people are not just being starved. They are being stripped of the final thing left to them: their dignity.
They are treated worse than animals. Hunted when they gather. Shot when they eat.
Because Israel is not content with crushing Palestinian bodies. It wants to crush their souls. To erase not just their presence, but their will to exist.
And while the world looks away, somewhere, in a corner of the rubble, a mother kneels.
Still scraping. Still crying.
Trying to feed her children with flour dusted in dirt, and drenched in blood.
Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer. This article was first published at <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-israel-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics">Middle East Eye</a>.

Soumaya Ghannoushi

Israel is replicating Nazi starvation tactics in Gaza

Senior officials in the Israeli government are increasingly open about the genocide they have been carrying out, and the endgame they believe to be within their reach. 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month that the forced expulsion of Palestinians will be the “inevitable outcome” of the destruction of Gaza. 
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an advocate of starvation as a weapon of war, said at a press conference: “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us”.
The army plans to force Palestinians into the south of Gaza and then to third countries. “This is a change of the course of history—nothing less”, Smotrich said.
And in a piece last week for Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote:
“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit—but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with reckless abandon. Yes, we are committing war crimes.”
The liquidation of the Gaza Strip through starvation, disease, relentless bombardment and terrorism would represent Israel’s final solution: the annihilation of the centre of Palestinian national life and the redrawing of the Middle East’s political map. 
It is increasingly clear that this is the crime of the century. Not because it has generated more death or suffering than other atrocities, but because the death and suffering have been backed and justified down the line by those who claim to represent the “civilised” world.
With this war, all the old, purportedly “banished” colonial-era canards about civilisation taming barbarism return with a vengeance to justify the slaughter and starvation of several million people.
Last week, the governments of Britain, France and Canada—staunch backers of the Zionists’ genocide—finally appeared to waver in the face of a renewed Israeli offensive. In a joint statement, they described conditions in Gaza as intolerable.
“We will not stand by while the Netanyahu government pursues these egregious actions. If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response”, the three governments said.
But this was theatrics. One Israeli official told Haaretz
newspaper that the public pressure was “all part of a planned ambush we knew about”.
Netanyahu has been clear that the resumption of small deliveries of aid to starving Gazans is about “the operational need to enable the expansion of the intense fighting” and to ward off international pressure while the genocide continues.
At any rate, Western politicians cannot claim ignorance. The historical record will inevitably contest any attempt now to rewrite their history of support for these crimes.
From the very beginning in October 2023, the Israelis talked about destroying every last building in Gaza. Within weeks of the ground invasion of Gaza, United Nations officials were warning about ethnic cleansing and a potential genocide.
Western governments not only ignored these warnings. They provided support for the slaughter and to this day continue to slander opponents of the genocide as racists. 
Israeli politicians who attempt to rewrite their place in this gruesome event will also face history’s judgement.
Yair Golan, leader of the opposition Democrats party, in a now widely reported interview with Kan public radio, recently said Israel was “on the path to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa once was”. He continued: “A sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population”.
But like all politicians trying to cover their arses, Golan is up to his neck in these crimes.
“First of all, we need to cut off any supply to Gaza”, he said in October 2023. “I think that in this war, a humanitarian effort should not be allowed. They should be told: Listen, until they [the hostages] are freed, we don’t care if you starve to death. It’s completely legitimate.”
A few months later, on the Haaretz podcast, he said: “We’d all like to wake up one spring morning and find that 7 million Palestinians who live between the sea and the river have simply disappeared”.
This has been the standing position of the Israeli establishment: from the river to the sea, a Jewish ethnostate free of Palestinians. 
Israel’s Western backers knew this then, and they know it now. They have given unconditional support to the Zionist state in full knowledge of its intentions and its crimes against humanity.
As the endgame draws nearer, still they support the government in Tel Aviv.
This shall never be forgotten. And they should never be forgiven.

Gaza: never forgive, never forget

Babies should be chubby. They should be content and well fed. They should be happy and protected. Gaza’s children are none of these things. They are thin, sometimes to the point of total emaciation. Their bones can be seen through their skin. They are often silent with haunted eyes. 
The UN’s child rights agency (UNICEF) recently reported that around 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition since the start of the year. Al Jazeera recently reported on a five-year-old boy who weighed only nine kilograms. This is the result of human decision-making. It is the conscious policy of the Israeli state, which has blocked all food, fuel and medicines from reaching Palestinians in Gaza since 2 March. 
Much has been made of Israel’s “advanced” and “precise” weapons. It is part of what has made it one of the most profitable weapons manufacturing countries in the world. These weapons have, since January, “precisely” targeted families sheltering in makeshift tents in “humanitarian zones”. 
They have also targeted bulldozers and other equipment intended to allow Gazans to rebuild their homes. It is precision barbarism. At least 2,300 Palestinians have been killed over the past six weeks alone—more than 50 people killed every day on average. More than 740 of the dead are children, according to the director of the Information Unit at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Zaher Al-Wahidi. 
At Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, Dr Ahmed Abu Nasir said the situation has become “worse than ever”. It is hard to imagine the situation in Gaza getting worse. Worse than whole neighbourhoods, whole cities flattened. Worse than tens of thousands of human bodies ripped apart by bombs, by bullets, by shrapnel. Worse than forced displacement over and over and over again. 
It’s hard to imagine, but true. Since the end of the ceasefire, the Israeli war machine has ramped up its genocidal efforts. Indeed, since 18 March, Israel has launched what can only be described as a scorched earth campaign. “The massacres do not stop. We are being slaughtered from vein to vein”, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif said in a social media post. 
Now Israel is calling up reservists and has indicated a further escalation with Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The Israeli security cabinet has approved a plan for “conquering” the Gaza Strip. On X, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video declaring that the “population will be moved, for its own protection”. 
Fascist Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich has finally been let off the leash and is saying what other Israeli politicians have been thinking all along: “We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip. We will stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation’”. The last eighteen months have been leading to this point. The acting head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Jonathan Whittall, said in a statement:
“Land is being annexed from the north, from the east, from the south of the strip as forces advance ... Gaza is being starved, it’s being bombed, it’s being strangled. This looks like the deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life.” 
For over a year, Israeli politicians and their supporters across the West have claimed that the Israeli decimation of Gaza has had something to do with “tackling terror” and “defending democracy”. Red Flag and activists in the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel has had a very different agenda. 
We said that Israel would use the pretext of 7 October to murder, punish and humiliate Palestinians. We said that, if they could get away with it, the Israelis would try to conquer the Gaza strip. This has now come to pass. Even Netanyahu is saying the quiet part out loud. 
US President Trump will visit the Middle East over the next few weeks and will no doubt give his blessing to this explicit effort at 21st-century ethnic cleansing. At the same time, Israel is waging an increasingly violent war on Palestinians living in the West Bank. If it can achieve total victory in Gaza, it will no doubt turn its sights to the total defeat of the Palestinians. 
The Australian media have largely remained silent about these realities. Australia’s federal election campaign only further sidelined the issue of Palestine. 
Over the last eighteen months, the ALP has been steadfast in its determination to maintain political, economic and military ties with Israel, despite the depths of the barbarism we have all witnessed. Labor politicians have been deeply complicit in what is happening. Now that they have been re-elected with a majority, they will feel like they can ignore the genocide. We cannot let this happen.
In a campaign meeting recently in Perth, an activist with family in Gaza reported that, while generations of Palestinians have remained steadfast—have held out hope for their own liberation—they are increasingly exhausted. They feel abandoned by the world. 
It is our responsibility to call out what is happening. We need to maintain pressure on our own government and continue to show solidarity with a population suffering from the most extreme, conscious form of imperial barbarity in the 21st century.

Vashti Fox

The quiet part out loud: Israel announces Gaza takeover

Resistance returned to the streets of Türkiye following the 19 March arrest of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival. İmamoğlu’s university degree had already been annulled, preventing him from standing in the 2028 presidential election. He was subsequently arrested on charges of terrorism and corruption by a politically motivated court ruling. Mass protests have since erupted nationwide to protect the right to free elections and democracy. 
Millions of people have participated in protests in most Turkish provinces. Students and young people, who have grown up under the rule of Erdoğan, are the main drivers of the movement and have organised a boycott of government-aligned businesses. The police have arrested thousands and imprisoned hundreds, focusing their attention on socialists, leftists and unionists. Prosecutors are now on the hunt for those encouraging the boycott. Defying the repression, actions continue.
Red Flag’s Can Yilmaz interviewed the leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEP) Güneş Gümüş to discuss the developments and the left’s role in them.
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President Erdoğan has been in power for more than twenty years. How much has he changed Turkish politics and what’s behind the current crisis?
Since coming to power in 2002, Erdoğan has gradually built an authoritarian regime. He already controls the state apparatus—the military, police, judiciary, media and universities. Thousands of dissidents are currently in prison. Any serious opposition voice can be jailed simply by accusing them of “terrorism”. But the AKP’s [the conservative Justice and Development Party, which Erdoğan leads] latest move represents a qualitative leap in building an authoritarian regime.
Despite past interruptions by coups, Turkey had an 80-year history of multi-party democracy and a tradition of governments changing through elections. In the 2024 local elections, the AKP lost almost all major municipalities. Most state resources are now under CHP [the Republican People’s Party, a secular nationalist party founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Türkiye] control. Some CHP figures became serious rivals to Erdoğan. Turkish society is dynamic—young people have largely broken from the AKP, and its social base is shrinking.
These concerns drove the AKP to a kind of coup. What they are now trying to establish is a fully authoritarian regime—a Putin-style system where elections exist only on paper. A silent society under an autocracy with opposition leaders sidelined: this is their goal.
How sizeable are the demonstrations and how severely are they being repressed? What is the political significance of these developments?
Millions have taken to the streets. The driving force of the protests is university students and youth. For some time, young people have been leaving the country. Injustice, unemployment, impoverishment, repression, favouritism—this is the only reality for someone in their early 20s. They’ve seen no government other than Erdoğan’s, and things keep getting worse Eventually, this angry generation exploded.
No-one—including us—predicted the protests would grow so quickly. Erdoğan has not yet managed to fully establish the authoritarian regime he desires because strong pockets of resistance have always emerged. This wave of mass protests came as a rebellion of a generation previously thought to have been subdued. The moment the first police barricade was breached, a psychological threshold was crossed—and Erdoğan was forced to step back.
The protest wave, led by the three largest cities, has put pressure on the bourgeois opposition. Police were forced to retreat in many places, but where protester numbers increased or they attempted to break through barricades, police responded with extreme violence. Erdoğan also employed another tactic: every morning for a week, protesters’ homes were raided, and arrests were made daily. Using media power, the protests and protesters were criminalised. In total, 2,600 people were detained, more than 300 imprisoned, and dozens placed under house arrest.
The most important outcome so far is that Erdoğan, unexpectedly, had to hit the brakes. A trustee couldn’t be appointed to the İstanbul Municipality. Some of Erdoğan’s planned moves may also have been postponed—we’ll see in time. But we know this: Erdoğan is determined to go all the way. 
How does this moment compare to previous instances of resistance, such as the 2013 Gezi Park protests?
University students are playing a much more decisive role in the struggle. The average age is much younger. In 2013, the broader opposition was more self-confident, and people of all ages participated in the protests. Neighbourhood-based local protests were widespread—even small cities saw large demonstrations. Today, fear is more prevalent, so middle-aged and older generations are more hesitant. Still, over 2 million people joined a large, low-risk CHP-organised demonstration in İstanbul.
In 2013, Erdoğan’s polarisation strategy worked—half the country was still behind him, the other half on the streets. Today, the AKP’s support base has shrunk significantly, and Erdoğan is even struggling to consolidate that. In 2013, police violence was more brutal—10 protesters were killed. This time, despite pressure to crack down, police have been relatively softer in some cases.
The socialist left was larger in 2013 and had more influence on the movement. Today, right-wing Kemalist influence is stronger among the youth. Still, socialist groups—including the SEP’s youth organisation Marxist Thought Communities—remain influential in protest and boycott committees. Middle East Technical University, a historical stronghold of the socialist left, has had a nationwide impact once again.
Back then, pessimism wasn’t as deep. But the extraordinary years that followed 2013 led to the withdrawal of a generation and weakened the socialist left. Now, a new generation has emerged.
The key continuity between 2013 and 2025 is the defence of democratic rights against AKP authoritarianism. The defence of secularism—and the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—continues. Another continuity is the absence of the working-class movement from the struggle. Despite some significant labour strikes today, they remain localised and focused on economic demands, not political ones.
The class dynamic also plays a major role in why the youth are so determined and at the forefront. They don’t believe they have a future in Turkey and are resisting the transformation of their country into a typical Middle Eastern-style tyranny. Democratic rights and freedoms are among their most basic demands.
What’s the role of the left? How has your group the SEP and other socialist groups been active? 
The left has significantly shrunk and lost influence over the past decades due to ideological defeats and pressure from the regime. Identity politics became central, leaving the working class vulnerable to either Islamism or despair. With a few exceptions, universities are now dominated by state-supported fascist groups.
Still, the radical left has influence in a few key universities and youth centres. It has an outsized impact compared to its numerical strength. For example, the first protest that sparked the uprising was organised by socialists, including us. We play critical roles in organising university boycotts and unifying the student movement in city centres.
Socialists have played decisive roles at key moments and places, but we need to build a united front to sustain momentum. We must bring in the power of the working class and the grievances of the poor. We are working within the unions where we are active to build pressure for participation in the movement.
What other organised political groups are taking part in the actions? Is there a clear leadership to the movement?
 
The movement is heterogeneous and scattered. On the streets, you can find ultra-nationalist youth, Kemalists, and left-leaning students united by their hatred for Erdoğan’s regime. Almost all socialist and left groups are involved. But there’s one critical exception: the leadership of the Kurdish political movement. They’ve been engaged in negotiations with the state regarding disarmament of the PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. Within this framework, they and the socialist groups aligned with them, including the unions they influence, have deliberately stayed out of the protests. 
Another group absent from the demonstrations was the Communist Party of Turkey. Despite the massive nature of the revolt, they initially avoided joining, making political statements to justify their inaction. But under grassroots pressure, they were eventually forced to participate in a controlled way.
It seems the question of what to do next is causing some debate. What are people arguing about where to go from here?
SEP advocates for strengthening the boycott committees at universities, establishing local committees in neighbourhoods and workplaces, and building a non-bureaucratic organisational structure that sustains the movement through concrete campaigns.
The economic crisis is the country’s most fundamental issue. The movement needs to incorporate economic demands. Also, 301 students, leftists and unionists are still in prison, with hundreds under house arrest. We need solidarity networks and a campaign for their release.
While a general strike is not realistic at this point, it’s vital to appeal to the working class and embed demands that resonate with them. Right now, consumer boycotts are the most widespread form of protest among the public. CHP is calling for boycotts of companies close to the AKP. On social media, calls for boycotting shopping are gaining traction.
People are discussing how Turkey lacks oil or other internal resources to finance authoritarianism, making it vulnerable to consumer boycotts. But we argue that producer strikes, direct action, neighbourhood and workplace committees, and organised struggle—not consumer boycotts—will ultimately determine the outcome.
In what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?
The anger of the youth, the suffering of the working class, and the Kurdish people’s desire for freedom all point to the need for a revolutionary solution. Existing left organisations are bureaucratic, closely tied to the system and, unfortunately, have lost their class perspective and character. As a result, they can’t go beyond defending the democratic space or develop more advanced strategies for struggle. Now that the masses are beginning to push beyond those limits, we must organise a new revolutionary generation out of this movement.

Can Yilmaz

Erdoğan’s attack on democratic rights sparks mass protests in Türkiye

It was a relief when, in December, Israel finally agreed to a ceasefire. It didn’t guarantee Palestinians access to aid and construction materials to rebuild their shattered homes. It didn’t address the structural injustice of millions of Gazans being unable to travel to see their families in the West Bank. It wasn’t going to liberate the thousands of Palestinian hostages being tortured in Israeli prisons. 
Yet it was impossible not to be moved by scenes of Gazans rejoicing at what was supposed to be the end of this historic slaughter, of hundreds of thousands commencing their slow march back to Gaza’s devastated northern region. 
Yet in just a few weeks, Netanyahu has taken any hope that Gaza could return to some semblance of normality and smashed it to pieces. Once again, the bombs are dropping on defenceless refugees. Israel made its intent clear by kicking off with a massacre of 400 people, nearly 200 of them children.
Israel’s military has now directly killed more than 50,000 people, according to the Gaza Ministry for Health. A figure that includes preventable losses due to sickness, starvation and other issues associated with the war and decades-long siege would be far higher, potentially over 200,000.
In typical form, much of the Western media repeated Netanyahu’s lies that it was Hamas that broke the ceasefire. But the truth is clear to anybody who cares to see, and has been discussed widely within Israel’s own press. Netanyahu needs the genocide to continue to keep his governmental coalition together.
In any case, the ceasefire was never real. Israeli forces killed at least 155 Gazans <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-israel-violate-gaza-ceasefire-new-escalation">throughout the truce period</a>. The ceasefire also brought a brutal escalation in Israel’s colonial efforts in the West Bank, with Jenin, Tulkarem and other villages besieged. This represented a crescendo of activity that began in the days after 7 October. A <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5873-israeli-settlements-occupied-palestinian-territory-including">report</a> released by the UN Human Rights Office on 18 March revealed that more than 20,000 new Jewish homes have been approved for construction in occupied East Jerusalem since that time, with another 10,000 more planned for the occupied West Bank. 
The same report also estimated that an unprecedented 49 new illegal outposts have been established, part of the steady integration of the West Bank into Israel. While former US President Joe Biden liked to pretend that these illegal activities are unrelated to official Israeli policy, the report also found that “the line between settler and state violence [has] blurred to a vanishing point”. 
The resumption of the war means attention will return to Gaza, where the possibilities for Israeli barbarism are endless. Well-informed commentators were speculating late last year that Israel was planning to occupy permanently at least some parts of Gaza, if not the whole strip. The topic was openly discussed in <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/in-defense-of-the-generals-plan-laying-siege-to-israels-enemy-isnt-a-war-crime/00000192-e406-d2fe-affe-e76f2f410000">Haaretz</a> newspaper, for instance. 
It’s possible that the ceasefire was always conceived of as a momentary pause designed to give Trump a small boost, appease some of the pro-hostage sentiment in Israel and allow for serious preparations for a new attempt at ethnic cleansing. 
The US is certainly no barrier to this fascistic project. Indeed, not long after taking office, President Trump declared himself in favour of the total cleansing of Gaza, later re-posting a psychotic AI-generated video of the territory re-imagined as a holiday resort. Such a move would fit with Trump’s imperial vision of the world, where might makes right. 
The rest of the world has reacted to the renewal of Israel’s genocidal onslaught with utter indifference. Arab and Muslim leaders have said nothing, and done even less. Turkey’s Erdogan is too busy arresting opposition leaders and whipping up anti-refugee racism to speak up for Gaza. In any case, Turkey is part of the US global war machine via its membership of NATO, which makes his government utterly complicit in all that has taken place. 
The European powers are in a similar boat. They are hypocritically using Trump’s undermining of Ukraine to justify a historic boost in military spending while remaining unmoved by an actual genocide in Palestine. 
Here in Australia, the establishment has chosen to ignore the resumption of war. The media have run dead on the issue, and the political class are silent. On one level, it’s understandable, as recent events have made open promotion of Israel’s talking points somewhat difficult. 
It was a bit embarrassing (though unsurprising) when police revealed that the much-hyped surge of antisemitism in NSW was a total hoax. And now their darling Israel has broken yet another peace agreement, preferring to reopen a campaign of mass destruction.
Yet this silence confirms their despicable complicity. 
In light of that, it was heartening to see a substantially increased turnout at the demonstrations against the war across Australia last weekend. It’s never been clearer that it will take an international grassroots movement to win justice for the Palestinians. Each and every act of protest and resistance is important; each one of us can and must play our part.

Omar Hassan

Israel’s renewed Gaza slaughter

The West Bank has been the primary region for the Israeli colonisation of Palestine for decades. There, Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and steal their land and homes under the protection of the Israeli military. 
In the mid-1990s, the Oslo Accords divided the territory into zones under Palestinian Authority control, joint Israel-Palestinian Authority administration, and total Israeli control. The last of these zones covers most of the land.
Israeli military violence in the West Bank escalated when the genocide in Gaza began. It has now increased further since the delicate Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed in January. Far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have openly declared that they want to annex the entire West Bank.
Ghaied Hijaz is a student activist with the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University, which defends the right of Palestinians to education in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag
about the current situation. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
--------------------
The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza must have been a great relief. But there are reports that Israel has since escalated its operations in the West Bank. What’s going on?
When the ceasefire was announced, it was of course the moment we’ve all been waiting for, especially for the people in Gaza. It gave this moment of relief and comfort.
But since the beginning of the ceasefire, everything in the West Bank got much worse.
Even though through the last fifteen months of war the West Bank was not technically living in war, we were witnessing daily raids, daily attacks on the villages and towns, daily arrests, daily killings. But when the ceasefire was announced, many troops that were in Gaza came to the West Bank, and they started by completely closing all the checkpoints, the entrances of all cities in the West Bank, and everybody was stuck. 
It was very, very sudden. At my university, we turned to online learning because there was no way anyone could reach the university if they were outside of Ramallah. People were stuck at the checkpoints for hours.
They continued closing everything for two weeks. And then, after two weeks, it started to get a bit easier, but now they’re going back at it again, they are pushing for more troops to go into the West Bank. 
Yesterday [23 February], they decided that they’re going to have tanks inside the cities, especially in Jenin. The last time Palestinians in the West Bank saw Israeli tanks in the middle of our cities and towns was during the Second Intifada in 2002-04. 
Now what we’re seeing is that the war is paused in Gaza because we’re still not sure if the ceasefire is permanent. And we’ve been hearing statements from Israeli officials claiming that they will go back to war very soon, and that they will not go on with the deal and so on. 
But the war in the West Bank is just starting. We’re just starting to see the plans that they have for the refugee camps, especially for the cities inside of the West Bank, to displace people, to change how cities look, to change the structure of cities and towns. 
They started in Tulkarm and Jenin. They are completely wiping out the refugee camps, they’re destroying all houses, they are building new streets, and they loudly say that they will not leave the cities for at least a year, and some say that they will never leave.
So Israeli forces are saying they’re going to be in Palestinian cities in the West Bank long term?
Because of the Oslo Accords the areas in the West Bank are separated into A, B and C areas, and the A area is for the Palestinian Authority, where the Israeli military is not supposed to enter. But of course, that was never a reality—the Israeli military would enter any city or town that is in the Palestinian area anytime they want.
But they were never inside the city or town for a long time. Now they’re saying that they are going to create bases inside the cities and the towns. They demolished most of the homes in the Tulkarm refugee camp and in Nur Shams refugee camp. Just like how they did the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza, they want to do this in the heart of towns and cities and refugee camps, and they don’t want to leave.
They say that this will be the new reality. No A areas, no Palestinian Authority. They’re going to rule everything, which they already did, but this is in a different way. This is more intense. It puts the West Bank in the middle of a war and creates new questions. What’s the future of the Palestinian Authority, if everything that the Palestinian Authority is based on is being torn apart?
Has there been more violence and land theft by Israeli settlers?
Yes. After the ceasefire was announced, with the plans for annexation, with what Trump is saying, with Netanyahu’s promises to Israeli officials on the right wing to increase attacks in the West Bank instead of Gaza, they’ve just got more nerve now. They keep blocking roads for everyone, attacking people in their farms. In the olive picking seasons, we’ve seen settlers go into lands burning trees [and] hurting people.
And they also organise attacks on a city or a town, and they shoot and kill people because they are all armed. And most of the time, that would be with the protection of the IDF [the Israeli military]. So the IDF would be there just to protect settlers from people who are throwing stones at them as they are shooting with their machine guns at everyone.
In many areas, especially the C areas in the West Bank, you would have land. It’s in your name; it’s yours. The Israeli government hasn’t exactly taken it, but you’re not allowed to do anything in it. It’s yours, but you can’t go there, sometimes you need a permit to go there, you can’t remove anything, you can’t grow anything. You can’t even pick the fruits of the trees.
Since the right-wing politicians and officials in the Israeli government refused a ceasefire and didn’t want to halt the attack in Gaza, Netanyahu promised [Bezalel] Smotrich, who is the finance minister and is kind of the de facto ruler of the West Bank, to take the war from Gaza to the West Bank to achieve what they’re planning for annexation and displacement of Palestinians.
The ceasefire deal has included the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. How has the community responded?
We have been waiting for our detainees and prisoners to be released for years, especially the ones who were sentenced to life sentences. And also many of the women, many of the children who were living under cruel circumstances in Israeli prisons, under torture, starvation and everything.
So it was a moment of happiness that was long waited for. On the first day of the ceasefire, many people gathered to welcome the released Palestinian women and children that day. And even though it was so cold we were waiting in the streets under the threat of Israeli forces attacking. And they did, throwing tear gas, live bullets or rubber bullets.
We needed to give our prisoners the welcome they have long been waiting for. And so even though it was delayed for six hours, there were a lot of people who were not going to let Israeli forces ruin this moment for us. And every week after that, when there’s a release as part of the exchange deal, hundreds gather to welcome their loved ones.
But as we’re seeing people getting out, we’re hearing more horrible stories about the situation they were living in. When they get out of the bus and we see them, sometimes we don’t even recognise them. Like, if you saw Khalida Jarrar—she was right next to me and I didn’t recognise her. She was in such bad shape and bad condition that it was tearing my heart apart. [Jarrar is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was released as part of the prisoner exchanges.]
Last Saturday [22 February], it was supposed to be the last day of prisoner exchange. Six hundred Palestinian prisoners were supposed to be released. More than half of them were women, children, and men who were detained in Gaza after 7 October [2023]. And Israel, after delaying and delaying again and again, at 2am the next day decided they are not going to release the Palestinian prisoners, and they still haven’t released them [as of 25 February].
Has your activism with the Right to Education campaign been able to continue?
There’s a whole discussion in universities whether we should be on campus or just go to online learning because of how bad the situation is, because they always live with the threat of the settler attacks, threat of arrests, killing at checkpoints, and it’s actually dangerous. But what we always say is that getting to the university and moving between cities is a form of defiance and resistance, because what they want is to separate cities, and for every community to live alone, separated, isolated. And we don’t want that to happen.
We want to keep connected, no matter the hardships. And we continued doing that, even though it was becoming more difficult and challenging by the day. But since the ceasefire agreement, it became impossible.
Students were separated again. The campuses are really important for students to gather and communicate, and to organise together, to have the spirit of community. When everyone at home can’t move, that just crushes it.
And so for the past fifteen months, we’ve been on and off. When we go home, we need to come back and rebuild things again, rebuild the spirit, rebuild the organising efforts. But as the Right to Education, we continued working, because our work with advocacy and building alliances is just more online.
Other student groups and campuses have taken really big hits. Most of their activists are currently in prison or just released from prison, traumatised and not able to work or maybe not able to come back to university. So we’re going through difficult times where we’re trying to maintain student activism overall, not just in the Right to Education, but in all universities with all student groups.
US President Donald Trump recently declared his intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. How did people in the West Bank respond?
Palestinians have been living under the threats of displacement, and in the West Bank, annexation, for 75 years. It’s not new. So when Trump said it, it was not really a new thing since in his previous term, he suggested the “deal of the century”, which was not exactly the same, but was leading to the same thing: to liquidate the Palestinian cause and get Palestinians scattered around the world.
It is [now] much more difficult circumstances, in a much more tense environment. But what we know is we’re not leaving. The core of the Palestinian cause is that Palestinians don’t want to leave. Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are either refugees or they are residents from these cities. If they are refugees, they don’t want to become refugees again. And if they are originally not refugees, they don’t want to become refugees at all.
So, leaving is not an option for us. And it doesn’t matter if Trump said it or not. People are defiant of what Trump is saying. And that is just the stance of everyone. Every single political group, no matter the differences between them, they all say clearly we don’t want to leave.
I personally think that Trump’s plan is not about displacement. And it’s not going to work, because there’s no way to do it unless he wants to take Palestinians to the US, because nobody is willing to take Palestinians in, as we’ve seen statements from around the world. I think that Trump’s plan is about pushing normalisation [with Israel] in an economic trade way, especially with Saudi Arabia.
And I think that’s what’s dangerous about the plan. He’s just proposing something big that would make everybody say no, especially Arab countries, who are not exactly allies, but still hold on some grounds in supporting Palestinians. So he proposes this big thing to achieve other things he wants.
So it seems that, yes, they rejected the displacement plan, but they accepted normalisation with Israel. They accepted increasing cooperation with Israel, which is the kind of peace Trump is looking at. Trump is a businessman who’s just looking at everything and everyone as a profit. So when he’s trying to manipulate the Middle East, he’s just trying to make more profit. 
Is there anything else you would want our readers to know about what’s happening in the West Bank?
I don’t think that what’s happening in the West Bank is getting much coverage or much attention. Right now, I think we have 40,000 people displaced from three refugee camps, and these displaced people went to surrounding cities and towns. And we hear Israelis, what they’re saying is that they’re going to attack them.
It’s not enough for them that they’ve destroyed the refugee camp, that they have destroyed the houses, that they displaced everyone. They want to go after every single refugee. And we see this as they are attacking UNRWA and suspending their services in Jerusalem. 
If we’re still under the threat of displacement and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in Gaza, and the threat of going back to genocide as Israeli officials want to resume the fighting, the fight is not over. It’s just starting, even though the past fifteen months were mentally exhausting and physically exhausting, and it caused a lot of damage and losses for a lot of people in the West Bank and in Gaza and around the world. People lost their jobs. They were getting harassed by Israeli activists and [the] Israeli government and everything. 
But we still have to keep going, because it’s not over.

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