Across the United States, Australia, and the UK, Palestine solidarity activists took action on April 15 as part of global call to strike for Gaza
Protesters blockade the entrance to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago (Photo: Dissenters)
April 15 marked yet another global day of solidarity with Palestine, in which activists across the globe in countries such as the United States, Australia, and the UK took action for Gaza. Activists were responding to a global call to strike for Gaza, which originated within Palestinian civil society.
In the United States, the global strike for Gaza also coincided with the day that taxes are due in the country (Tax Day). Activists used this as an opportunity to highlight how much of taxpayer money goes to the weapons industry.
In several cities, activists strategically targeted sectors of the war machine, including the offices of Lockheed Martin in Arlington, Virginia, the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. Activists who occupied the Arlington office highlighted that Lockheed Martin receives billions of dollars in taxpayer money each year, which is used to produce the arms that Israel uses to kill Palestinians.
🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨 Palestine solidarity activists SHUT DOWN war profiteers Lockheed Martin to say NO MORE TAX DOLLARS FOR GENOCIDE! Lockheed Martin receives $4.7 billion in tax dollars PER YEAR to make the F-16s and F-35s that bomb Palestinians. The people say NO MORE! pic.twitter.com/CeVik3pFTK
— Claudia Jones School for Political Education (@ClaudiaJonesEdu) April 15, 2024
While activists occupied the building, protesters outside marched up to the office doors, staging a rally and shouting at employees inside the building to quit their jobs.
For Tax Day, protesters march in Arlington, VA against defense contractors that receive billions in U.S. tax dollars for war.
Activists marched on Lockheed Martin, the weapons manufacturer that made the F-35 stealth fighter used by Israel to bomb the Iranian embassy in Damascus. pic.twitter.com/GWYebadIkQ
Activists also blockaded the entrance to a facility belonging to Boeing, another massive weapons manufacturer that supplies Israel, in St. Charles, Missouri.
BREAKING: Organizers from St. Louis + Chicago in coordination with @a15action have blockaded the Boeing facility in St. Charles, MO.
This facility produces missiles and bombs sent directly to Israel at the hands of the US government❌ pic.twitter.com/ehuqFD9Uha
A facility of weapons manufacturer Pratt and Whitney was also targeted in Connecticut, where organizers blocked the entrance to the factory to impede production.
Activists shut down Pratt and Whitney's facility in CT for an A15 action in response to the manufacturer supplying Israel w/ military aircrafts for the illegal occupation beginning in 1947, & they’re currently sustaining the Israeli Air Force's fleet of F100-PW-229 engines. 🌹🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/J5fKDlTZ3i
On the same day, several activists blockaded the road going to the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, blocking Terminals 1 through 3. Over 40 protesters were arrested after taking this action, who have as of now all been released.
BREAKING: Organizers are blockading the road entering O’Hare Airport in Chicago‼️‼️
Several bridge blockades took place in the Bay Area. Protesters first stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, holding banners that read “Stop the world for Gaza” and “End the siege on Gaza now!”
BREAKING: Protestors have shut down the Golden Gate Bridge this morning. Folks in Marin County advised to go the long way…Richmond-San Rafael Bridge down to the Bay Bridge. pic.twitter.com/pukbwMMp8a
Protesters later took further action and shut down the Interstate 880 in Oakland. Altogether, the California Highway Patrol announced the arrests of 38 people.
In London, activists with Palestine Action targeted the office of BNY Mellon, demanding that the bank divest with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons company. BNY Mellon offices in Manchester were also targeted.
BREAKING: Palestine Action target BNY Mellon’s London office during the global economic blockade for a Free Palestine.
BREAKING: Once again, offices of major Elbit investors BNY Mellon disrupted in Manchester this morning as part of the @a15 global day of action. We will not rest while genocide profiteers walk free in our cities! All colonisers must fall! Shut Elbit Down! @_YFFP_@GMF_Palestinepic.twitter.com/7usrFXQ5Zn
In Adelaide, Australia, pro-Palestine activists occupied the office of Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s office. Activists said this action had been undertaken to “protest the government’s ongoing complicity in, and facilitation of, the genocide occurring in Gaza—a genocide which has been enabled by international forces, like Australia, to continue for over six months.”
I was incredibly proud to be part of international movement A15.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have engaged heavily with the financial services industry | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Labour top brass including Keir Starmer gave Bloomberg ‘exclusive’ look at party’s financial plan at private meeting
Labour leader Keir Starmer, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, and four other senior party figures met with a major media and financial information conglomerate weeks after it donated £150,000 to the party – sparking concerns of “cash for access” from transparency campaigners.
The meeting between Labour and the Bloomberg group, which took place in Edinburgh on 8 December last year, was described as “suspicious” and “highly unusual” by two Labour sources.
The private roundtable event came shortly after the US business conglomerate, majority owned by American businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg, made its first donation to Labour in seven years. The donation was made by a Bloomberg subsidiary called Bloomberg Trading Facility Limited.
The party used the meeting to offer Bloomberg and others in attendance “an exclusive dive” into its flagship financial services policy document, which was published the following month, according to a social media post by a person involved in coordinating the event.
Labour did not deny that the meeting was connected to the donation, with a spokesperson telling openDemocracy: “It is standard practice for the Labour Party to meet with the private sector.” The party did not reply to openDemocracy’s query about whether Bloomberg was given exclusive access to the flagship financial services policy document. Bloomberg declined to comment for this story.
The Edinburgh event was facilitated by Sovereign Strategy, a lobbying firm that has represented Bloomberg for almost two decades, which promises to get its clients’ “messages heard at the highest levels of government”, according to the firm’s website.
Lobbyists often hold such events to introduce their clients to Labour frontbenchers so they can try to shape the party’s policy on issues relevant to their businesses.
But two Labour sources, who spoke to openDemocracy on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation for appearing critical of the party’s leadership, said the Edinburgh meeting was “highly unusual” and “suspicious” due to the sheer number of senior politicians present.
Starmer and Reeves were joined at the event by shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, shadow City minister Tulip Siddiq, as well as Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and Daniel Johnson MSP, the party’s business spokesperson in Holyrood.
Other comparable meetings are typically attended by only one or two shadow ministers. openDemocracy has analysed more than 200 meetings attended by Labour frontbenchers in the past year based on publicly available data and triangulation through multiple sources, and found the Edinburgh meeting involved far more senior figures than any other.
The meeting took place less than two weeks after Bloomberg Trading Facility Ltd, a subsidiary of Bloomberg LP, donated £150,000 to Labour – with the conglomerate becoming one of the party’s top corporate donors for all of 2023 in a single day, according to Electoral Commission records.
A Bloomberg company last made a cash donation to the Labour Party in late 2016, when it gave the party £60,000. The firm has since handed the Conservatives £260,000, most recently donating £100,000 in June 2022.
Simon Youel, the head of policy and advocacy at not-for-profit advocacy group Positive Money, told openDemocracy that voters should be worried by the timing of the meeting – which took place as Labour finalised a key document to set out its policy on the financial services sector.
“What is most concerning is that weeks after this meeting, Labour published a plan for financial services that reads like a love letter to Big Finance, with much in there that could have been written by the industry itself,” Youel said.
Labour spent months drafting its financial services report, bringing in a staffer from City consultancy Oliver Wyman to put it together. After its publication in January, Reeves and Siddiq threw a lavish, no-press-allowed reception in the City of London’s famed Guildhall to thank the industry for its contributions.
In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, a Sovereign Strategy staffer said the roundtable discussion had a focus on the “outlook for the financial services industry and an exclusive dive into Labour’s launch of the financial services review”.
Youel added: “Rachel Reeves herself has acknowledged New Labour’s errors in relying on an under-regulated financial sector to generate wealth, yet the party seems set on repeating the mistake of letting the City of London dictate policy-making, which inevitably the public will again be left paying the price for.”
In a video from the event, Starmer can be heard telling the attendees: “What you now see is a Labour Party that is fundamentally different to the Labour Party that fought the last general election. Unrecognisably different. And very obviously pro-business.”
The video, which Labour released on the day of the meeting, made no reference to who was at the event or what was discussed.
Bloomberg holds a unique position within the financial sector, providing hardware, software, data and advisory services to all manner of financial services institutions.
Its computer systems, Bloomberg Terminals, are used by banks, institutional investors and financial analysts all over the world to access high-level investment data and place financial transactions. The company also has a news division and TV channel that employ over 2700 journalists in 120 countries, according to its website. Its eponymous billionaire founder and majority owner, Michael Bloomberg, is a fixture in US politics and one of the richest people in the world. He was mayor of New York City for 12 years, before running for President as recently as 2020.
Youel said that access to frontbench politicians could give Bloomberg a “value-add” for its clients, raising “serious concerns around cash for access in our democracy”.
The roundtable was also attended by investment manager Baillie Gifford, Aegon Asset Management and NatWest Group. For several months in 2022, NatWest provided a member of staff to Jonathan Reynolds’ office, valued at £13,800.
A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Donations from corporate entities are declared in line with Electoral Commission rules. Labour is proud to engage with the financial services sector as we develop policies to grow our economy after 14 years of Tory chaos and decline.”
Scottish Labour refused to provide any additional details about the meeting, with a spokesperson saying only that the party “meets with a range of stakeholders to discuss a range of issues”.
They added: “Boosting economic growth is at the heart of our plans to deliver a fairer and more prosperous Scotland, and we are working in partnership with both businesses and trade unions to deliver that.”
Partnership with business Lobbyist Sovereign Strategy has in recent months strengthened its links to the Labour Party, which is widely expected to win this year’s general election.
Keir Starmer is featured in a brochure published by the lobbying firm in September 2022. The Labour leader is pictured posing for a photo alongside Sovereign chairman Alan Donnelly, a former Labour MEP, in front of a display bearing Bloomberg’s branding.
The brochure goes on to quote a senior Bloomberg executive as saying that the firm has “expanded our influence with key decision-makers”.
Sovereign Strategy also donated £5,000 to deputy leader Angela Rayner “for campaigning activities” last month, according to the register of members’ financial interests. Just over a week after the donation from Sovereign to Rayner, Starmer met with Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire co-founder of Bloomberg, to discuss “Labour’s partnership with business”, .
This donation appears to be a breach of the Public Affairs Code set out by the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA), a trade body representing UK lobbyists including Sovereign Strategy. A breach of the code could result in a member being reprimanded or their membership of the organisation being suspended.
Section 8 of the code – a set of rules on the proper lobbying of governments – states that PRCA members must not “make any award of payment in money or in kind… to any MP”. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on Rayner’s part.
A spokesperson for Sovereign told openDemocracy the donation was made by the company’s chairman in a personal capacity, but was unwilling to provide any further details. A Labour source, however, confirmed the donation was from the company and made by its company bank account.
The PRCA said it was reviewing the information openDemocracy provided.
In January this year, a senior account manager at Sovereign who was involved in organising the Edinburgh roundtable joined the executive committee of Labour Business, an affiliate of the party that focuses on fostering links between Labour and the business community, in January.
The Sovereign staffer in question previously worked for the Labour Party for a number of years in the business relations and endorsements team.
They are one of a large number of former Labour staffers to have left their positions at the party to join Westminster consultancies and lobbying firms the past 18 months, as firms look to beef-up their Labour bona fides in anticipation of a Conservative wipeout at the next election.
Steve Goodrich, the head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, told openDemocracy: “Parties should scrupulously avoid the perception that they’re offering privileged political access in return for cash.
“The next general election looks set to be the most expensive in modern times so it’s crucial that politicians of all stripes avoid stumbling into quid pro quos in the rush for funds.
“Until we reduce the cost of politics, cases like these will continue to undermine public trust in our democracy, which is already perilously low.”
The UK government has reclassified nearly £500m of aid for war-torn and impoverished countries as “climate finance”, in a bid to meet its international commitments under the Paris Agreement.
A freedom-of-information (FOI) request by Carbon Brief reveals how, after the reclassification, money for humanitarian work in nations including Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia is now being double-counted as climate finance to help the UK hit its goal.
The projects being double-counted include work to provide food and basic necessities that have no explicit link to climate action, Carbon Brief’s analysis reveals. Some of their internal reports even state clearly that they are not climate-finance projects.
This is part of a wider revision of climate-finance accounting, introduced by the government in 2023 to ensure the UK achieves its £11.6bn target.
By redefining existing funds pegged for development banks, investment in foreign businesses and humanitarian aid as “climate finance”, the government expects to add £1.72bn to its total.
Experts tell Carbon Brief it is “problematic” and “unjust” to relabel existing funds as climate finance rather than providing new money. One says the UK could meet its target, at least in part, by “double counting development and climate finance”.
The chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group at UN climate talks says the UK’s actions are a “clear deviation from the path to climate justice”.
‘Moving the goalposts’
The UK government has committed to spending £11.6bn on international climate finance (ICF) between 2021-22 and 2025-26. This is the nation’s contribution to climate action in developing countries, which it is obliged to provide under the Paris Agreement.
Developed countries, such as the UK, have committed to sending “new and additional” climate finance to developing countries. This is generally interpreted as spending extra money on top of existing foreign aid.
The UK government itself has described the £11.6bn goal as “dedicated ring-fenced funding that is distinguishable from non-climate [aid]”.
However, reports began to emerge in 2023 that the government was not on track to meet its target.
Experts attributed this to the government cutting its overall foreign aid budget. In November 2020, the government suspended a target to give 0.7% of national income as overseas aid – reducing it to 0.5% as a “temporary measure”.
The government is also spending more of the remaining funds on supporting refugees within the UK. The latest figures show that in 2023, the UK spent more of its aid budget on supporting asylum seekers and refugees in the country than on overseas projects.
In order to remain on track for the £11.6bn goal, development minister Andrew Mitchell announced in October 2023 that the government was changing the way it calculated ICF spending.
This immediately sparked concerns that the government was inflating its climate-finance figures without providing any new aid money for developing countries. Mitchell provided limited details of how the government was getting its target back on track.
More information came in a report released in February by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI). It concluded that, by “moving the goalposts”, the government had reclassified £1.72bn of spending as climate finance between 2021-22 and 2025-26.
This figure includes four tranches of funding that had not previously been considered ICF:
£746m from assuming that a share of the “core” funding the UK gives to the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) will be assigned to climate-related projects.
£497m from automatically labelling 30% of the humanitarian aid spent in the 10% of countries that are most vulnerable to climate change as ICF.
An estimated £266m from defining more payments into British International Investment (BII), the UK’s overseas development finance institution, as ICF.
£215m from civil servants “scrubbing” the aid portfolio – namely, going back over existing projects and adding any climate-relevant funding they had previously missed.
The figures cited by ICAI are based on unpublished government analysis, which Carbon Brief has now obtained via FOI.
The analysis includes the annual contributions each of these sources are expected to provide over the period from 2021-22 to 2025-26, which can be seen in the coloured sections of the chart below.
Annual UK ICF spending, £bn, by financial year for the period 2011/12 to 2025/26. The grey area indicates ICF spending under the original accounting methodology used until October 2023. Beyond 2022/23 the figures are forecasts, with the light grey area indicating the upper bound and the darker grey indicating the lower bound. The coloured areas indicate the funding newly reclassified as counting towards ICF, following methodology changes introduced in October 2023. For multilateral development bank contributions, Carbon Brief understands that the UK will pledge £495m to the World Bank in 2025/26, and the remaining contributions that make up the £746m total are spread evenly across the 2011/12-2025/26 period. Source: UK government.
As the chart indicates, even with the methodology changes, the £11.6bn target is still “backloaded”, with a significant uptick in ICF spending required beyond 2023-24 to meet it.
ICAI notes that, since the government cut its aid spending from the UN-backed benchmark of 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI), “serious concerns remain over whether the heavily backloaded spending plan can be delivered”.
Core funding
The largest tranche of redefined ICF – some £740m – comes from the government starting to assume that a share of its “core” MDB funding counts as climate finance.
This is money that the UK government already hands to these organisations to distribute according to their own priorities, primarily through loans. None of this money has previously been counted by the UK government as ICF, even though some went towards climate action.
MDBs, including the World Bank, the African Development Bank (AfDB) and others have placed a growing emphasis on climate change in recent years. The World Bank, for example, has a target of spending 35% of its finance on climate-related projects.
Following the reclassification, the UK government will simply assume that 35% of the money it gives to the World Bank – some £495m of £1.4bn total due in 2025/26 – counts as ICF.
It will use a similar approach for its funding of other MDBs, with these changes adding a total of £740m to the amount of the UK’s aid spending that is classified as ICF.
This move will not result in the UK providing any new funds for climate action, as it was already planning on distributing this money. In fact, the government has cut its spending on MDBs in recent years, due to the overall cut in the UK’s foreign aid budget.
Humanitarian aid
The second-largest tranche of newly reclassified climate finance is from projects in climate-vulnerable countries, an additional £497m of which is being counted as ICF.
The government dataset obtained by Carbon Brief via FOI reveals the 28 humanitarian projects and five more general, country-specific funds that will contribute to this additional £497m.
The projects are based in some of the poorest and most war-torn countries in the world – Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
They largely focus on essential provisions, such as food and basic infrastructure.
Prior to the recent changes, these programmes would have contributed just £47.5m to ICF, according to the government data released to Carbon Brief.
By automatically counting 30% of their spend as ICF, this figure has now multiplied more than 10 times. The chart below shows, in red, these additional ICF funds.
Annual UK ICF spending, £m, sourced from humanitarian aid projects for the 10% most climate-vulnerable countries, as defined by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative. Blue columns indicate the ICF spending that was expected from these projects prior to the methodology change, and red columns indicate ICF spending from these projects after the change. Source: UK government.
For the 23 of the 28 projects with documentation available online, Carbon Brief assessed the relevant sections of their “business case and summary” documents for evidence that they were related to climate action.
Many of the project documents reference climate change and say they will provide climate benefits. For example, all four projects in Somalia, a nation that has faced devastating drought and floods in recent years, mention the importance of climate resilience in their work.
However, some of the projects explicitly state that they are not intended to provide climate-finance.
The summary document for the Assurance and Learning Programme (ALP) in Afghanistan, published in 2021, states: “The programme will not be eligible for ICF nor will it monitor ICF funded programmes.”
Another project, titled Yemen: Access, Logistics, Liaison, and Accountability, will provide “few opportunities” to address climate change, according to the summary document. A further four project documents do not contain any reference to climate change.
Despite this, following the government’s reclassification, these seven projects will collectively contribute £166.9m of UK climate finance in the coming years.
Euan Ritchie, a senior development finance policy advisor at the thinktank Development Initiatives, says blanket approaches to assigning climate finance are “problematic”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Just because humanitarian aid is going to a country that is vulnerable to climate change doesn’t mean it addresses that vulnerability. And these projects have already been screened for their climate focus.”
“So what rationale is there for bumping it up to 30%? Were officials wrong the first time?”
Fatuma Hussein, a programme manager at the thinktank Power Shift Africa, tells Carbon Brief such an approach is “unfair and unjust” as it “risks conflating” the “distinct needs” of climate aid and other humanitarian objectives.
In its guidance for categorising what counts as climate finance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committeerecommends scoring many humanitarian projects “zero”, indicating programmes that “generally do not qualify” as climate aid.
More private investment
The third-largest tranche of reclassified development aid relates to state-backed private sector investment under British International Investment (BII).
The UK government will also now count more of its payments into BII as climate finance, amounting to around an extra £266m by 2025-26. Unlike aid spending, these are investments in the private sector and are expected to yield a financial return for the UK.
Previously, the government counted a fixed 30% of BII spending as climate finance. It now intends to include a higher percentage to reflect a growing focus on climate investments.
The new approach to BII investments assesses the share of each project that should count towards UK climate finance case-by-case, rather than using a blanket 30% share.
It will record 100% of investments in a programme covering the Philippines, Indonesia and other parts of south-east Asia as ICF, as part of the government’s “Indo-Pacific tilt”. Investments in other regions also contribute a higher share of ICF – rising as high as 46% in 2022-23.
The chart below shows the extra BII investment money (red) that now counts as ICF.
Annual UK ICF spending, £m, from British International Investment (BII) contributions. Blue columns indicate the ICF spending that was expected from BII prior to the methodology change and red columns indicate ICF spending from BII after the change. Source: UK government.
The figure above shows that the government expects private sector investment via BII to play an increasingly large role in its climate finance in the future.
Manyobservers have expressed concerns about the government leaning more on private investment through BII to boost its ICF spending.
A report last year by the parliamentary international development committee criticised BII’s investment in, among other things, fossil fuels and “high-net-worth individuals”.
BII prioritises loans and projects in middle-income nations where there is money to be made, rather than the nations that are most in need of climate finance.
ICAI highlighted this in its review of the UK’s climate finance commitments earlier this year, stating that private investment “is not always the most appropriate, realistic or preferred form of climate finance in the poorest and most fragile contexts”.
Not new, not additional
Developing countries will require trillions of dollars of investment in the coming years to meet their climate goals.
To help achieve this, developed countries, such as the UK, are expected to provide finance under the UN climate system that is “new and additional”. Discussions around a new climate finance goal will take centre stage this year at the COP29 climate summit in Baku.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that the UK government’s changes to its ICF undermine the notion that it is providing new, “ring-fenced” funding. Regarding the “arbitrary” labelling of humanitarian funds as ICF, Ritchie says:
“If the UK is counting a fixed share of projects as ICF it can no longer claim that ICF is distinguishable from non-climate [aid].”
Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at the international development network Bond, tells Carbon Brief:
“The change of definition means they will be able to reach the target by spending less money than they would have done otherwise through double counting development and climate finance.”
Development NGOs say the best way for the UK to scale up its climate finance would be to return its foreign aid budget to 0.7% of GNI. However, with an election looming, neither the ruling Conservatives nor their Labour challengers have indicated a willingness to do this.
There will be considerable pressure on developed countries in the coming months to commit to providing plentiful, high-quality climate finance in the run up to COP29.
Evans Njewa, the chair of the LDC group, to which nearly all of the UK’s humanitarian aid ICF recipients belong, tells Carbon Brief:
“Reclassifying existing donor aid as climate finance is a clear deviation from the path to climate justice, and closing the finance gap cannot be achieved this way.”
Climate-finance reporting has been described as a “wild west”, with countries announcing figures based on vastly different definitions. This has led to nations counting money for coal, hotels and films in their totals, as there is no binding international standard to guide them.
The UK government noted last year that its changes are in line with other countries’ methods. But experts point out that the UK was previously viewed as setting a high standard for other countries to reach.
In contrast, the new approach “risks breeding cynicism and mistrust because you are going to find programmes that have very little to do with climate change, but end up being reported in the pot as climate finance”, Rabinowitz says.
Hussein agrees, telling Carbon Brief:
“This not only highlights the disparity between western countries’ rhetoric on climate finance and their actual financial commitments to developing countries but also risks undermining trust that underpins global climate action.”
She argues that nations should agree on common definitions and accounting methodologies for climate finance to ensure that governments cannot backslide as the UK has.
Responding to Carbon Brief’s questions about the government’s methodology changes, a spokesperson from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said:
“Since 2011, UK funding has helped more than 100 million people cope with the effects of climate change, given 70 million people access to clean energy and reduced or avoided over 86m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
“The UK remains on track to meet the £11.6bn international climate finance commitment.”
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Following news of the Iranian attack on Israel and the involvement of UK aircraft in Israel’s defence, Green Party co-leader, Carla Denyer, has urged the UK not to be dragged into a Middle East war. She said:
“The Green Party condemns Iran’s attacks against Israel, which were targeted on civilian as well as military targets. This represents a concerning escalation of the current conflict in the Middle East. We call on all parties now to find ways to de-escalate this conflict, which risks spreading across the region.
“We are concerned by the use of British aircraft in the night’s events. We question why Britain should be involved in this confrontation, where there is a risk that we could become embroiled in a regional war. The record of Afghanistan and Iraq suggests that involvement in such conflict brings great risks, especially when the military and strategic objectives are unclear.”
Denyer also questioned at what level the decision to engage UK defence forces was made:
“I am deeply concerned about how this decision to deepen our involvement was made and in what further action the government proposes to involve UK armed forces. Britain’s military involvement must be scrutinised and debated by parliament. We should not allow ourselves to be dragged into a Middle East war.
A crowd of starving Palestinians, including children, waits to receive food distributed by charity organizations amid Israel’s blockade at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza on March 27, 2024. (Photo by Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has proven deadly for children in Gaza.”
The Israeli government is starving children to death in the Gaza Strip with its deliberate and systematic obstruction of food aid, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Tuesday, citing firsthand accounts from doctors and families in the besieged enclave.
At least 32 people, including 28 children, have died of malnutrition and dehydration so far in northern Gaza, which is facing famine conditions due to Israel’s illegal blockade.
HRW’s new report builds on its December assessment that Israel was “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” in Gaza, with disastrous consequences for the territory’s civilian population.
“The Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has proven deadly for children in Gaza,” said Omar Shakir, HRW’s Israel and Palestine director. “Israel needs to end this war crime, stop this suffering, and allow humanitarian aid to reach all of Gaza unhindered.”
For its new report, HRW interviewed doctors who have treated malnourished patients and family members of children who have starved to death in recent weeks. The group also reviewed photographs and video footage showing emaciated children who have died of malnutrition.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of the pediatrics unit of a northern Gaza hospital targeted by Israeli forces, said that 26 children in his facility alone have died from starvation-related health complications. Safiya told HRW that at least 16 of the children were under five months old, and one of them was just two days old.
The mother, he said, “had no milk to give him.”
“Israel’s allies like the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany need to press for full-throttle aid delivery by immediately suspending their arms transfers.”
Already badly hindered by Israel’s siege, aid deliveries to Gaza have been further disrupted by Israeli attacks on humanitarian workers and convoys. Israeli forces’ killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers last week led several aid groups to suspend their operations in Gaza.
While Israel agreed in the wake of the deadly attack—and in the face of massive international pressure—to reopen a key border crossing in northern Gaza, aid groups say far more is needed to prevent mass starvation.
“Governments outraged by the Israeli government starving civilians in Gaza should not be looking for band-aid solutions to this humanitarian crisis,” Shakir said Tuesday. “Israel’s announcement that it will increase aid shows that outside pressure works. Israel’s allies like the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany need to press for full-throttle aid delivery by immediately suspending their arms transfers.”
Israel’s six-month war on Gaza has been catastrophic for the territory’s children. According to one recent analysis, over 2% of Gaza’s child population—nearly 26,000 kids—has been killed or wounded during the assault, with at least 1,000 children losing one or both of their legs.
The war has also taken a devastating psychological toll on Gaza’s kids, many of whom have been displaced repeatedly and seen family members maimed or killed by Israeli bombs.
“The emotional distress of dodging bombs and bullets, losing loved ones, being forced to flee through streets littered with debris and corpses, and waking up every morning not knowing if they will be able to eat has also left parents and caregivers increasingly unable to cope,” Save the Children said last month.
Speaking to HRW, the father of newborn twin girls said that one of his babies died of malnutrition at northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital eight days after she was born.
“He said that he struggled to feed his family prior to the girls’ birth, but that they only had bread to eat, without meat or protein,” the human rights organization noted in its new report. “He said that after the twins’ birth, his wife could not produce milk to breastfeed the girls and that store-bought milk was scarce.”
One mother of a 6-year-old boy with cystic fibrosis told HRW that “because of the Israeli blockade, she struggled to obtain the necessary medication and provide adequate nourishment.”
“By mid-January, Fadi’s health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer walk, prompting his hospitalization,” HRW said. Late last month, the boy was evacuated from Kamal Adwan Hospital to receive treatment at a facility in Cairo.
Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director, said Tuesday that Israeli officials upholding the blockade that is starving children in Gaza “are committing war crimes.”
“Governments should impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against responsible officials,” said Fakih.
But the U.S., Israel’s top ally and arms supplier, is refusing to take concrete action even as damning evidence of Israeli war crimes mounts.
Asked during a Monday press briefing “how many Palestinian citizens should be killed, whether by fire or starvation, so you can seriously intervene,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that “we do not want to see a single Palestinian killed.”
“And that is why we have made clear that Israel needs to do more to improve its deconfliction and coordination measures,” Miller said, brushing off the idea of imposing strict conditions on U.S. military aid. The Biden administration is currently pressing Congress to sign off on an $18 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
Earlier in Monday’s briefing, Miller said the U.S. has “not yet at this time concluded that Israel has violated international humanitarian law.”
