feckcops

[feckcops]

Quick, tangible change will see off the hard right – these are the things Labour must do now

“Fourteen years of austerity, economic incompetence and corruption under the Conservatives created the disillusionment and alienation from politics that Farage has been able to feed off. With a change of government, his focus now will be on damaging Labour.

“People will be relatively patient, but will want to see some early initial progress on a number of fronts – and significant results by at least the midterm of this government ... To guard against a rise of the hard right here, the left has to secure a wave of progressive policy delivery, and to start soon ...

“With 14 million people, including 4.3 million children, now living in poverty, an early win in the implementation of the anti-poverty strategy Labour committed to in its manifesto would be secured by the scrapping of the brutal two-child benefit cap, lifting 300,000 children out of poverty ...

“The wages of many workers have been effectively frozen since 2008 and there has been a widespread extension of insecure and often precarious work across the economy. Labour’s commitment to introduce its new deal for workers in its first 100 days could transform the lives of people at work, and address the scourge of low pay and insecure employment, but to be effective it has to be comprehensive with no further watering down ...

“People know how much pressure our public services have been put under by Conservative austerity, but will want to see change. They will support reform that puts control into the hands of the frontline professionals, but will react to reform that privatises and enables companies to profiteer, fuelling Farage’s claim of the corporate capture of the Labour party.

“Realistically, large-scale investment is needed ... We are at a defining moment not just for the new Labour government but for the politics of our country. Beware the danger but recognise the potential.”

[feckcops]

What can the Left learn from Nigel Farage?

“Farage’s mercilessness is notable. Only once did he hold back from running against the Tories – in the 2019 election when Boris Johnson’s Brexit purism and the threat of a Jeremy Corbyn-led government persuaded him to stand down ... In 2015, he almost cost the party its slim majority ...

“Contrast this with the approach of the ‘green blob’ of centre-left climate NGOs ... Their strategy was also clear: ask nicely and get what you can, not what’s needed to avert the climate crisis. Don’t take risks or rock the boat ... This focus on soft power alone – the inside game of cajoling and persuasion, being in the room and having the ear of a potentially sympathetic minister – is extremely limited ...

“The election of five pro-Palestinian independents – including Corbyn – along with four Green MPs has changed Starmer’s electoral calculation. Assumptions about the viability of independent and third party candidates have been swept away. The Greens came in second in 39 constituencies (most with a suspiciously Corbynite demographic), and some pollsters have suggested the collapse in Labour’s Muslim vote isn’t a momentary response to the party’s blunders on Gaza, but part of a longer-term trend.

“The left would do well to look to Farage for instruction. With a club in one hand and an olive branch in the other, he torments the Tories from the outside while organising sympathetic MPs within. He wages war on the party, while openly flirting with the idea of swooping in and rescuing it from the carnage he helped create ...

“If Farage was paying attention, he’d laugh at the never-ending argument on the left about whether to stay in Labour or leave ... Farage has always cultivated links with ideologically aligned MPs within the Conservative party. He’s left open the idea that he may one day join. Every vote he takes from them strengthens the hand of hard right Tory MPs. And the more viable Reform becomes, the more leverage his Tory allies have, as they can always go elsewhere ...

“The relative silence of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs wasn’t due to a moral failing, but their status as Labour MPs being in the gift of a hostile leadership. They fairly assumed that running as independents was electoral suicide ...

“Now, emboldened by the success of independent and Green candidates, these Labour MPs can be strident in their criticism of Starmer and leverage the public’s indifference towards him. They can form a leftwing caucus across party lines, exposing the prime minister’s politics by forcing him into deals with the Lib Dems. They can identify their own small boats issue, and use their platform to court controversy. And they can do all of this safely in the knowledge that they can cross the floor to the Greens or run as independents and have a decent chance of success.”

[feckcops]

Starmer’s so-called “landslide victory” is built on sand

A deeply unpopular leader, Starmer has not secured the resounding endorsement his 412 seat tally would suggest, while record numbers of Green and independent MPs could pose a robust leftist challenge to Starmer’s Government ­– if they get organised

Keir Starmer, an ersatz Blair without a hint of his charisma or vision, is now Prime Minister, despite securing a vote share six percentage points lower than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. These results expose the widespread disillusionment, if not outright resentment, towards both Labour and the Tories. Smaller parties and independents had a great showing, with shock wins for Greens and pro-Palestine independents, but also Farage's Reform Party (if indeed you can call a limited company with a CEO and no membership a party). However, a large minority of eligible voters chose not to vote at all, with turnout dropping to 60 percent. This matches the record low set in 2001, when everyone knew Blair was set to be re-elected on a landslide. In elections expected to produce a new government, turnout usually rises – but not so this time. Shockingly, Labour’s mantra of “false hope is worse than no hope” failed to inspire any hope for real change.

It is a damning indictment of our voting system that a party can win over two thirds of seats and celebrate a “landslide victory” after winning over just one in five eligible voters. (Out of the 60 percent who voted, Labour only won a third of the vote.) Thanks to our twee unwritten constitution, this technical win grants Keir Starmer the right to form an electoral dictatorship for the next five years. However, the results do offer some silver linings...

Corbyn won his seat as an independent with a 7,250 vote lead over Labour, after he was blocked from running as Labour’s candidate in Islington North, a seat he'd held for 40 years. Labour also lost Chingford and Woodford Green to Ian Duncan Smith, after Faiza Shaheen was similarly blocked by Labour on dubious grounds and continued her campaign as an independent – ultimately this helped IDS win with around 17,200 votes, compared to Faiza Shaheen and the Labour candidate who each got around 12,500 votes. Shadow cabinet minister Jonathon Ashworth lost his seat to a pro-Palestine independent, along with three other Labour MPs, while another pro-Palestine independent left prominent Terf and shadow health minister Wes Streeting clinging on by a thread. Israel's brutal escalation of its 75 year-long genocide in Palestine has not only dismayed Muslims and anti-Semites, as the media love to imply, but a diverse coalition of people united by their outrage at leading politicians excusing, if not actively cheerleading, such barbarity. These results prove there is an electoral cost for enabling rogue states to commit crimes against humanity.

Beyond the three largest parties, the balance of power in Parliament now lies with a socialist, environmentalist, pro-Palestine left. The Greens won all four of their target seats – not only in the young, urban constituencies of Brighton Pavilion and Bristol Central, but also in the rural, once solidly Tory constituencies of Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire – an achievement few really thought possible. (Greens and pro-Palestine independents also came second in a record number of constituencies, laying the ground for more gains next time.) Those four Green MPs, along with Corbyn and the other four pro-Palestine independents, make up nearly double Reform’s five MPs. As such, we will have a principled leftist grouping in Parliament, not beholden to the Labour whip, to hold Starmer to account.

There is hope the new pro-Palestine independents can put aside subtle philosophical differences and work together to offer a robust left opposition to Starmer. We could see Corbyn and other independents join the Green Party. This would be a strategic move; they could still reasonably claim to be independent voices for their constituents as Green MPs, as the Green Party does not whip its MPs like other parties. Meanwhile, they would benefit from this established party’s resources, networks and mass membership. The highly democratic structure of the party means, if they brought a lot of their voters with them, new Green MPs could even secure a change to any Green policies they disagreed with. As for socialist Labour MPs, we could even see some defect to the Greens now they've secured their seats, especially if Labour remains a deeply hostile environment for them. Defections from Labour seem unlikely at this stage, but they cannot be ruled out.

More than anything, we should take heed that our best chance of enacting real change lies in our communities, through grassroots organising and direct, solidaristic action. Green and pro-Palestine independents only won by rooting themselves in their communities, engaging with the voters they hoped to represent, and inspiring masses of people to join their campaigns. We cannot rely on career politicians, whose class interests are diametrically opposed to ours, to protect us and our interests.

There's more to politics than elections, which only come around every few years and, all too often, seem to yield no real change. Real progress does not come from above. It is not gifted to us by the powers on high. It is fought for, from the ground up. In the words of Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand. We must keep faith, keep fighting and keep organising. This election shows us that hard work can bear fruit. We know a better world is possible, but we won't achieve it by just voting. It’s on us to bring it about.

[feckcops]

Help challenge the UK ban on puberty blockers

One day before the UK parliament was dissolved on 30 May 2024, the health secretary Victoria Atkins introduced an immediate ban for trans young people using puberty blockers.

Possession of puberty blockers for trans children is now punishable by up to two years in prison in the UK. Puberty blockers for cisgender children remains legal.

The timing of this act was careful and deliberate. As parliament was dissolved the next day, there are now no working MPs in the UK, meaning that citizens have no way to challenge the ban.

The Good Law Project is running a crowdfunder to challenge it in court. They have about £2,000 of £75,000 needed. Please support it if you can, in any way that works for you.

[feckcops]

Graffiti seen in a public bathroom in Calgary, Alberta

[feckcops]

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

[feckcops]

Spare a thought for Hilary Cass

“In the end, the anti-trans victory lap barely made it a few feet before being overtaken by hundreds of academics, experts and service users exposing the review as a sham.

“Over 100 academics signed an open letter by the Feminist Gender Equality Network condemning the review as ‘dangerous and potentially harmful to trans children’ due to its ‘unsound methodology, unacceptable bias [and] problematic and supported conclusions’. Therapists Against Conversion Therapy & Transphobia (TACTT) slammed the review as having an ‘eliminationist agenda, dressed up in the language of reasonableness’, urging clinicians to treat the Review’s findings with ‘extreme caution’. ‘Underpinning this report,’ wrote trans rights group TransActual, ‘is the idea that being trans is an undesirable outcome rather than a natural facet of human diversity.’ ...

“Cass also suggests that the rate at which young people move from puberty blockers to subsequent hormone treatments may, as anti-trans groups have warned, prove puberty blockers help cement a trans identity in these youth. Her data for this is the fact that in two studies, nearly all trans youth prescribed blockers went on to take hormones. Of course, this finding could just as easily suggest that puberty blockers are being prescribed very precisely – a possibility Hilary Cass does not entertain for even a second.

“While roundly ignoring the evidence of experts, the review mysteriously arrives at many of the same conclusions that anti-trans groups did years ago. Cass recommends that young adults aged 17-25 use an intermediary gender service instead of being referred to adult services, for example – a recommendation straight out of the mouth of anti-trans group Our Duty, which has long pushed to ban gender transition for under-25s. The influence of anti-trans groups like Sex Matters, Therapy First and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, all of whom appear in the citations, can be felt throughout the review.

“More worryingly still, many of Cass’s conclusions are based on evidence that does not corroborate, or in some cases, directly contradicts her findings. For example, her recommendation of an intermediate service is based on the idea that brains don’t reach maturity until 25 – a notion that Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and the author of The Idiot Brain describes as ‘guff based on hearsay, misunderstanding of neuroscience or wilful ignorance’.”

[feckcops]

Why is Labour still using the self-defeating, discredited ‘maxed out credit card’ analogy?

“Rarely has a lacklustre policy been abandoned for a reason so bad that it threatens to inflict long-term damage on a society. Independently of whether the £28bn green investment programme was the right policy for the next Labour government to commit to, Rachel Reeves’s reasons for ditching it were an undeserved gift to the Tories and a partial vindication of their disgraceful flirtations with an austerian, anti-green political narrative ...

“When your credit card is ‘maxed out’, you do indeed need immediately to tighten your belt. The reason why parsimony works for you, and helps limit your debt, is that you are blessed with an income that is independent of what you decide to spend money on. In other words, if you don’t buy the shoes or new phone you covet, your income will not diminish, and so your deficit will shrink reliably. But the state’s budget is nothing like a credit card. As chancellor of the exchequer, your (tax) income is highly dependent on your (public) spending. Limit your spending and you have limited your income too. This is why the more Osborne slashed public spending in the 2010s, the more money he needed to borrow. By adopting the ‘maxed credit card’ narrative, Reeves endorsed Osborne’s flawed logic and, indirectly, absolved the Tories for the wanton damage they have inflicted on a generation of Britons.

“Austerity, and the credit card analogy that provides its thin veneer of logic, is not just bad for workers and people in desperate need of state support during tough times; it also depresses investment. By hastening the stagnation of a society’s aggregate income, it signals to businesses that they would be mad to put money into building up the capacity to produce the output that society is too impecunious to buy. That’s how austerity undermined investment in Britain and that’s how it will annul Labour’s ambition to draw in private green investments, now that Reeves has ditched her modest green public investment plan, replacing it with wishful thinking that the private sector will, magically, make up the difference ...

“These large sums can be raised, not through Treasury bonds that need to be repaid by taxpayers, but by bonds issued by a new public investment bank – to be repaid from the proceeds of the green enterprises they fund. The Bank of England could also help with an announcement: if the price of these green bonds were to fall below a certain point, it would buy them second-hand – even while selling off its stock of Treasury bonds. This mere announcement would ensure it would not need actually to buy them because investors would rush in to snap them up, thus leaving Britain’s public debt servicing costs unaffected.”

[feckcops]

Free Palestine seen in Chicago

[feckcops]

Police refused to label Brianna Ghey’s murder a hate crime. Why?

“In the hours after her murder, Cheshire police chief superintendent Mike Evans said her killing wasn’t a ‘hate crime’, pointing to the existence of the kill list as evidence. ‘I think if it hadn’t been Brianna, it would have been one of the other four children on that list,’ he said. ‘Brianna was the one who was accessible at that time, and then became the focus of those desires.’ At the subsequent trial, presiding judge Mrs Justice Amanda Yip also gestured towards online discussions of transphobia as a possible factor in the crime, telling potential jurors to discard ‘uninformed views’ about Brianna’s murder.

“This is a profound mistake. Brianna Ghey’s murder sits at the intersection of several social issues facing us in Britain today. 

“It’s a crime committed by desensitised children, numbed to the magnitude of their actions via consumption of violent content and the detachment enabled by digital-first communication. It’s another sad entry in the logbook memorialising the women and girls who’ve fallen victim to an epidemic of gender-based violence. And it’s an example of the extra vulnerability engendered upon trans people, particularly trans women and girls, by a climate of transphobia that has now seeped from mainstream politics into the schools and playgrounds.

“Messages swapped between the two killers reveal Brianna’s gender identity to be a prominent theme of conversation. Boy Y ‘didn’t agree’ with trans and gay people, testified his co-defendant. In texts, he referred to Brianna as ‘it’ and called her slurs. Meanwhile, Girl X spoke of an ‘obsession’ she had with Brianna, pairing praise for her beauty with reference to her genitals.  

“‘I think it’s quite clear that dehumanisation and fetishisation played a part in the psychosexual way in which they plotted this very, very violent murder,‘ says Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue.

“Brianna, Faye adds, was targeted as a victim because she was anxious and therefore vulnerable – something that Faye says is ‘very common among trans kids of her age. Yes, it might not be the sole motivating factor, that Brianna was trans,’ she explains. ‘But she was selected, or more vulnerable to being selected for this terrible crime because she was trans. Mainstream reporting […] reduces the inflection of transphobia on the whole thing.’

“Cross-examination during the trial of Girl X and Boy Y revealed that all other potential victims on their kill list were identified because one party had a personal grudge against them. Brianna was the exception. She was singled out because Girl X – who had struck up a friendship with Brianna the previous year – found her ‘really interesting’.”

[feckcops]

What does it mean to erase a people – a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out

“Earlier this month, Gaza’s oldest mosque was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. The Omari mosque was originally a fifth century Byzantine church, and was an iconic landmark of Gaza: 44,000 sq ft of history, architecture and cultural heritage. But it was also a live site of contemporary practice and worship. A 45-year-old Gazan told Reuters that he had been ‘praying there and playing around it all through my childhood‘. Israel, he said, is ‘trying to wipe out our memories’.

“St Porphyrius church, the oldest in Gaza, also dating back to the fifth century and believed to be the third oldest church in the world, was damaged in another strike in October. It was sheltering displaced people, among them members of the oldest Christian community in the world, one that dates back to the first century. So far, more than 100 heritage sites in Gaza have been damaged or levelled. Among them are a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery and the Rafah Museum, which was dedicated to the region’s long and mixed religious and architectural heritage.

“As the past is being uprooted, the future is also being curtailed. The Islamic University of Gaza, the first higher education institution established in the Gaza Strip in 1978, and which trains, among others, Gaza’s doctors and engineers, has been destroyed, along with more than 200 schools. Sufian Tayeh, the rector of the university, was killed along with his family in an airstrike. He was the Unesco chair of physical, astrophysical and space sciences in Palestine. Other high-profile academics who have been killed include the microbiologist Dr Muhammad Eid Shabir, and the prominent poet and writer Dr Refaat Alareer, whose poem, If I must die, was widely shared after his death ...

“As the ability to tell these stories publicly comes under attack, so do the private rituals of mourning and memorialisation. According to a New York Times investigation, Israel ground forces are bulldozing cemeteries in their advance on the Gaza Strip, destroying at least six. Ahmed Masoud, a British Palestinian writer from Gaza, posted a picture of him visiting his father’s grave, alongside a video of its ruins. ‘This is the graveyard in Jabalia camp,’ he wrote, where his father was buried. ‘I went to visit him in May. The Israeli tanks have now destroyed it, and my dad’s grave has gone. I won’t be able to visit or talk to him again.’

“A memory gap is forming. Libraries and museums are being levelled, and what is lost in the documents that have burned joins a larger toll of record-keeping. Meanwhile, the scale of the killings is so large that entire extended families are disappearing. The result is like tearing pages out of a book. Dina Matar, a professor at Soas University of London, told the Financial Times that ‘such loss results in the erasure of shared memories and identities for those who survive. Remembering matters. These are important elements when you want to put together histories and stories of ordinary lives’ ...

“This is what it would look like, to erase a people. In short, to void the architecture of belonging that we all take so much for granted so that, no matter how many Gazans survive, there is, over time, less and less to bind them together into a valid whole. This is what it would look like, when you deprive them of telling their story, of producing their art, of sharing in music, song and poetry, and of a foundational history that lives in their landmarks, mosques, churches, and even in their graves.”

[feckcops]

‘Transphobic bullying is rife’: a 15-year-old trans boy’s view of coming out at school

“When I started secondary school I was allowed to use the disabled toilet but the lock on the door didn’t work and it didn’t feel safe. I was badly bullied and my mental health plummeted so I stopped attending and was home schooled for a year. Now I’ve joined a 14-16-year-olds GCSE equivalent group at my local college. I’d hoped things would be different there but people still laugh and make up rumours about me.

“My secondary school counsellor always said to me she’d deal with my bullies ‘by the book’, but that really meant she was worried about red flags for Ofsted rather than reassuring me that it wasn’t OK to abuse me just because I’m trans.

“Transphobic bullying is rampant and I think 100% this guidance only fuels that fire. If I’d been able to exist in my school as a trans kid from the beginning, nobody would have complained because I wasn’t asking for anything special. The only reason other kids saw the difference was because it was pointed out to them.

“It’s inexcusable to say a child needs to have permission to experiment with their name or wardrobe. Cis kids do that all the time without their parents being informed.

“The politicians behind this guidance don’t know what it is to be trans, they’ve never listened to a trans voice so they don’t know what damage it will cause.”

[feckcops]

The corruption behind Starmer’s rise has finally been exposed

“A massive fraud was perpetrated in the 2020 Labour leadership election. It is now clear that Starmer was a kind of Manchurian Candidate, a sleeper agent for entirely other interests than was made to appear at the time.

“There is little need to rehearse here the manner in which the infamous ten pledges that underpinned Starmer’s leadership bid have been serially and comprehensively abandoned: this is by now well understood, with social media awash in evidence so egregious that even occasional mainstream media interviews have sought to hold Starmer to account. Starmer’s own explanation for whether he has broken particular pledges or not – in some instances, whether he even made them in the first place – shifts back and forth according to expediency ...

“What’s significant, though, is the extent to which Starmer’s dishonesty has been facilitated by a mainstream media actively conniving in his marginalisation of the left after the shock upsets of the Corbyn period, a form of journalistic omertà. The most dishonest leadership campaign in British political history has also been one of the least cross-examined.

“It has thus been politics on easy mode. Starmer has had the easiest ride of any Labour leader since Blair, able to get away with the flimsiest of justifications for his shape-shifting positions because they are barely given a moment’s proper scrutiny. This extends beyond factional struggles in the Labour party to the most fundamental questions of policy and posture, on which Starmer and Reeves and the rest have largely been given a free pass.

“The result is basic incoherence. To pick an example almost at random, Starmerism declares itself to be a break with ‘trickle-down economics’, but immediately contradicts that with an insistence on growth as the cure-all whilst rejecting redistribution or structural changes in the economy, meaning that unless by magic there is no logical way that growth can benefit most people in any way other than trickling down in Starmer’s model.

“Relatedly, Starmer’s insistence that ‘when business profits, we all do‘ is the polar opposite of what has actually been happening in the economy, actively and aggressively belied by the current cost of living crunch. Sellers’ inflation and corporate profiteering have been occurring at the expense of the vast majority, for whom living standards have been declining as profits have soared, prices risen, and interest rates shot up. Only a political party that has hitherto been allowed to play on easy mode could get away with such glaringly self-evident contradictions.”

[feckcops]

Workers face the sack if they don't cross their own picket lines. What kind of country is this?

“Six sectors of public services in Britain – some of them privatised – will in the next month or so be subject to Minimum Service Levels. The list covers health services, fire and rescue services, education, transport, nuclear decommissioning, and border security. 

“What this means in practice is that when workers vote to strike in these sectors from now on, a significant proportion of them will be forced to come in – even if they voted to strike – or face the sack.

“For most sectors so far – including transport and education – that figure is 40%. The Trades Union Congress estimates that five million workers are now affected by the workers’ rights clampdown, with many told to cross their own picket lines even if they vote to strike ...

“The new Code of Practice is a convoluted mess which requires unions to instruct their members to defy strike actions they democratically voted for ... Unions must now navigate a complex web of requirements, pushing them to act against their members’ interests and their own principles. Members will be told to break their own strikes, or face the sack. Unions will be told to break their own strikes, or face hefty fines.”

[feckcops]

Parents hold playgroup at arms company office in protest at Gaza genocide

“Dozens of parents and children staged a noisy playgroup at the London office of arms manufacturer BAE Systems on Friday to highlight its complicity in Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children.

“Pushing prams and toting a parachute banner, Parents for Palestine flooded into the lobby of the glittering Blue Fin building, which houses BAE’s Digital Intelligence division. The group released 100 black balloons in memory of children killed in Gaza, called out BAE with chants and songs, and urged the building managers to evict ‘murderers’ who work alongside them. 

“‘Our government allows BAE to export arms knowing full well they’ll be used to perpetrate a genocide,’ said Rees Nicolas, one of the organisers, there with four-month-old Sylvia. ‘As parents, we couldn’t stand by and let this happen.’

“Outside, the group taped photos of murdered Palestinian children to the building’s pillars and played ‘sleeping bunnies’ with a five-metre parachute, painted with the words ‘BAE, stop arming Israel’.

“BAE Systems, Europe’s largest arms company, supplies the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) with key components of fighter jets, munitions, armoured vehicles and missile launching kits. Activists say BAE has made as much as £300m selling weapons components to Israel since 2016.

“Many of those parts are for the F-35, the Lockheed Martin-designed plane that is Israel’s most advanced fighter jet. The IDF is deploying F-35s in its airstrikes on Gaza, which have killed at least 14,500 people and devastated infrastructure in the Strip, and uses the jets to support invading troops.”

[feckcops]

[feckcops]

Palestinian journalists are risking their lives to counteract the ‘Israeli narrative’

“Reporters working in Gaza told Novara Media they are living and working in constant fear of death. ‘I’m under huge psychological pressure, as I feel I could be killed at any moment,’ said freelancer Rakan Abdelrahman. Last month, three of Abdelrahman’s colleagues were killed while trying to film a building in Gaza which was about to be bombed. Wearing jackets and helmets that clearly identified them as press, the men set up hundreds of metres from the stated target, only for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to instead strike a different building, much nearer to where they were standing.

“Last week, the IDF told Reuters and Agence France Presse it could not guarantee the safety of their journalists in Gaza, leading the news agencies to release a joint statement describing the situation on the ground as ‘dire’. ‘The IDF’s unwillingness to give assurances about the safety of our staff threatens their ability to deliver the news about this conflict without fear of being injured or killed,’ the statement said.

“In its letter to the news agencies, the IDF claimed Hamas is deliberately putting military operations “in the vicinity of journalists and civilians”. But several journalists who spoke to Novara Media said they believe they are being deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. ‘There were threats to several places where I was present, including Hiji Tower and Al-Tabbaa Tower’, said Abed Elhakeem Abo Riash, who has worked as a freelance journalist in Gaza for 14 years. ‘These towers all house the offices of journalists and foreign agencies.’

“Last week, Abo Riash was told to evacuate a residential tower by Israeli forces. He struggled to carry all of his equipment – which included his sleeping gear, two cameras, a laptop and a first aid kit – down from the 14th floor, and feared he would not make it out in time. ‘I was very afraid. The army has mercy on no one,’ he said.”