A mural of Hussam Abu Safiya painted on a bombed building in Gaza City. The senior doctor was detained by Israeli forces in December 2024. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Independent Israeli professor says Hussam Abu Safiya’s life will be at risk until he receives proper medical treatment
An independent professor who reviewed the medical records of a prominent Gaza doctor held in an Israeli prison without charge for nearly 23 months has raised serious concerns about his health.
Hussam Abu Safiya was detained at work on 27 December 2024 and later held in solitary confinement at Rakefet, a notorious underground prison.
During a visit by a lawyer from Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in the summer, the doctor told of harsh conditions, untreated medical problems and severe food shortages. Witnesses said he had become almost unrecognisable.
Nearly 700 days after his arrest, Israeli authorities have yet to bring any formal charges against Abu Safiya, who is the director of Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza.
He was classified as an “unlawful combatant” along with more than 375 medical workers – a designation Israel has used to justify prolonged detention without trial.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister. He asks who could possibly object to the IDF starving people to death, conducting forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing all Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He says they’ve got a genocide to do for Israel and to stop objecting.Ed Miliband claims that he and Andy Burnham have reformulated Blair’s triangulation strategy. Their new formulation entails acknowledging that they were wrong on Israel and Palestine but entails doing absolutely nothing about it and continuing exactly the same policies hoping that you’re too stupid to notice.
Ed Miliband promised a crackdown on companies involved in illegal settlements.
Companies with links to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank have won £10.7m worth of UK government contracts since Ed Miliband’s pledge to sanction businesses facilitating the settlements.
The foreign secretary said on 8 September that Andy Burnham’s government would “take action” against companies and individuals involved in settlement activities.
“To those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this: you will face the full force of UK sanctions,” he said, adding: “Settlements are illegal.”
The vast majority were signed with Heidelberg Materials, a German-headquartered firm. It has been granted 14 UK contracts worth £10.4m since Miliband announced sanctions.
“Britain cannot credibly claim that it is imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements while letting contracts continue through the back door,” said former Labour leader and Your Party MP Jeremy Corbyn.
“The fact that public money is still going to firms that could be targeted under the government’s own sanctions regime… is outrageous and frankly insulting to the public.”
Ed Miliband claims that he and Andy Burnham have reformulated Blair’s triangulation strategy. Their new formulation entails acknowledging that they were wrong on Israel and Palestine but entails doing absolutely nothing about it and continuing exactly the same policies hoping that you’re too stupid to notice.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister. He asks who could possibly object to the IDF starving people to death, conducting forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing all Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He says they’ve got a genocide to do for Israel and to stop objecting.
Palestinians inspect the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike at Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 7, 2026
BRITISH Jews have accused the Board of Deputies of denying Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in an open letter.
The statement, from groups including Jews Against Genocide Denial, Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Jewish Voice for Liberation, follows the Board’s attack on the Green Party and its leader Zack Polanski for its conference vote last month to declare zionism a form of racism.
The groups say the Board attacked the party to “hide its own racism” against Palestinians and to protect Israel from further censure.
The letter reads: “We abhor all antisemitism, all racism, all discrimination. We are all in agreement that the Green Party is an anti-racist party, and its motion, Zionism is Racism, is not antisemitic.
“Your allegations of institutional antisemitism against the Green Party are false, use antisemitism as a political weapon, and are therefore an abuse of Jews.”
It notes the motion’s main proposer has lost 56 members of her wider family in Gaza, and accuses the Board of failing to mention genocide or “any of the other institutional trappings of racism within Israel.”
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister. He asks who could possibly object to the IDF starving people to death, conducting forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing all Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He says they’ve got a genocide to do for Israel and to stop objecting.Ed Miliband claims that he and Andy Burnham have reformulated Blair’s triangulation strategy. Their new formulation entails acknowledging that they were wrong on Israel and Palestine but entails doing absolutely nothing about it and continuing exactly the same policies hoping that you’re too stupid to notice.
Activist Greta Thunberg speaks at the Cop31 UN Climate Summit in Antalya, Turkey, November 10, 2026
CLIMATE change threatens everything and everyone we love, prominent activist Greta Thunberg warned today after arriving in Turkey for the second day of this year’s United Nations climate talks.
The Conference of the Parties (Cop31) is taking place in in Antalya after a year of brutal heatwaves and concerns that governments don’t care about global warming.
Climate change is “threatening everything,” Ms Thunberg told reporters outside the event. “Everything and everyone we love is at stake.
“We should act to protect and benefit people, rather than constantly sacrificing the global majority and the very planet we are all living on for a fortunate few to keep making unimaginable profits and maintaining geopolitical power.”
Ms Thunberg is expected to join the talks for a few days. She said structural changes were needed worldwide to deal with the climate crisis because current political and economic systems “have become incompatible with human nature.”
The UN climate talks have long been criticised for making empty promises. Activists from 350.org, Climate Action Network and other campaign groups gathered outside the venue this morning, demanding that world leaders finally begin moving their countries away from fossil fuels.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsGreenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Protester holding a sign that read “make rich polluters pay”. Credit: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth
The amount of public funding pledged to help developing countries tackle climate change has dropped by more than 70% in 2026, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Developed countries are required under UN climate treaties to provide “climate finance” and have traditionally announced multi-year pledges to feed into their global commitments.
Most of these pledges expired in 2025 and, since then, the US has withdrawn from international climate efforts and many European aid budgets have been cut.
A civil-society tracker shows that only five nations have announced new multi-year pledges, including just one major donor – the UK.
Germany, France and Japan are among the key contributors that have so far failed to set out plans for new climate finance, while none is expected from the US.
As a result, the total amount of public climate finance pledged over the next few years amounts to just $11.7bn a year in spending, down from recent levels of around $40bn.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that global conflict, fiscal constraints and the rise of the far right are all making it harder for developed-country governments to pledge new funds.
As the COP31 summit in Turkey gets underway, developing countries are stressing their urgent need for new finance, after nations agreed to a new global target just two years ago.
Missing pledges
Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries are obliged to provide climate finance to help developing countries cut their emissions and prepare for climate disasters.
This financial assistance can be channelled through multilateral development banks, UN climate funds and investments “mobilised” from the private sector.
But a large chunk is also expected to come directly from the public coffers of developed countries – primarily their foreign-aid budgets. This public spending has made up roughly a third of climate finance flowing to developing countries in recent years.
The EU, the US and others agreed just two years ago that they would “take the lead” on scaling up annual climate finance from $100bn in the early 2020s to $300bn by 2035.
Donor countries have traditionally supported such goals by announcing multi-year targets that indicate how much they plan to spend on climate finance.
Nearly all of these pledges expired in 2025 – and hardly any major donors have announced new ones to replace them, covering the period out to 2030.
This lack of new commitments is captured in a tracker of old and new financial commitments by climate NGOs NRDC and E3G.
Carbon Brief analysis of this data, based on an annualised breakdown of targets, shows that developed countries had previously pledged around £42bn a year in public finance.
As the chart below shows, based on current pledges, this has fallen by around 71% to £11.8bn, on average, over the remainder of the 2020s.
Not all contributors announced public climate-finance pledges in advance for the pre-2026 period. Some did not hit their stated targets, while othersexceeded them.
While official data for 2025 is not yet available, bilateral public finance reached £43.9bn in 2024, broadly in line with the amount pledged by developed countries.
Big contributors
International climate finance has been consistently dominated by five nations – Japan, Germany, France, the US and the UK.
These countries – together with the EU – have provided around 90% of all the bilateral, public climate finance going to developing countries in recent years.
Of these key players, only the UK has announced a new pledge, committing £6bn ($8bn) of aid between 2026-27 and 2028-29, plus £6.7bn ($8.9bn) from outside its aid budget.
This accounts for half of all the annual funds pledged from 2026 onwards – averaging $5.7bn a year.
The European Commission makes up most of the remainder, with an average annual contribution of $4.5bn promised out to 2027.
Rather than a new pledge, this is due to the commission promising to spend €28bn ($31.8bn) over its 2021-2027 budget period. Its post-2027 contribution is currently being discussed as part of wider EU budget negotiations.
Canada has promised to spend CA$5.3bn ($4.1bn) by 2030, averaging $860m a year. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium have also pledged relatively small sums.
Overall, despite developed countries committing to scale up climate finance, these new pledges are either less ambitious – or only slightly more ambitious – than previous ones. This can be seen in the chart below.
The UK’s pledge appears more ambitious, but this is because the government has changed how it counts climate finance to include $8.9bn in “additional” public finance. When only the like-for-like aid components are compared, the new pledge amounts to a drop in ambition. (For more details, see the methodology.)
The most significant absence is the US, which committed to reaching $11.4bn in annual support by 2024 under the Biden administration.
Since president Donald Trump took power, the US has – for the second time – withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and shrunk its aid budget. It will not provide any official climate finance in the coming years.
Another notable absence is Australia, which is jointly hosting the upcoming COP31 summit, alongside Turkey. Josie Lee, policy and advocacy lead at Oxfam Australia, tells Carbon Brief:
“If Australia fails to announce a climate-finance pledge as president of negotiations, it would send a problematic message to those resisting action on climate change that might serve to embolden their agenda.”
Japan is the largest overall contributor of public climate finance, but it has not traditionally announced targets for this type of spending. Instead, the government set out overall goals that also bundle in finance “mobilised” from the private sector.
As a result, its public-finance ambitions have not been included in this analysis.
So far, the Japanese government has not announced any new multi-year climate-finance pledges, from either the public or the private sector.
European cuts
Europe provides the majority of international climate finance, but European governments have massively cut their aid spending in recent years, citing economic strain and defence spending needs.
Germany and France, the two largest European climate-finance contributors, both pledged to reach €6bn ($6.8bn) per year by 2025. Neither has committed to anything beyond that.
Both nations have slashed their aid budgets in recent years, including funding for climate programmes. Germany missed its 2025 climate-finance goal due to these cuts.
Dr Anja Carolin Gebel, a senior policy advisor at Germanwatch, tells Carbon Brief that this issue has become more politically fraught since the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won the 2025 election and began leading a coalition government:
“The issue of climate change – and, subsequently, climate finance – has taken a back seat in the current government coalition.”
There has also been a political shift in France, Gaïa Febvre, international policy coordinator at Réseau Action Climat, tells Carbon Brief. She adds:
“The upcoming presidential election and the growing influence of the far right are likely to make new international financial commitments politically more difficult.”
Other significant European donors are also undergoing political turmoil.
Spain’s centre-left government has triggered a snap election for the end of November, making a new climate-finance pledge during COP31 less likely.
Following a narrow election win, a centre-left bloc in Sweden is still in the process of trying to form a new coalition government.
Some nations have signalled that their climate finance will continue flowing, even though they have not officially set out specific new pledges.
The Dutch government, for example, has said it will provide “at least” €300m ($334m) of specific climate funding annually out to 2031. However, it has also indicated that its total public climate finance is likely to be considerably higher in both 2026 and 2027.
To highlight the lack of new pledges, developing countries are championing a “climate-finance work programme” at COP31, which could provide a space to discuss scaling up public climate finance from developed countries.
In response, the EU has stressed that its member states are the “largest providers” of public climate finance and called on developing countries to submit overdue plans for cutting emissions. The EU and its member states provided a record €32.3bn ($40bn) in 2025.
Against this backdrop, EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra recently told Bloomberg that “any conversation on new fresh money is dead in the water”.
Joe Thwaites, international climate finance director at NRDC, who runs the commitment tracker, tells Carbon Brief that “developed countries would be wise to show how they are continuing to lead on climate finance”. He says:
“The lack of new announcements is making the finance negotiations tougher than they need to be. The debate around the climate-finance work programme is arising because developing countries have little clarity about how much public climate finance there will be in coming years.”
Only the 23 “developed” countries that are obliged to provide climate finance are considered in this analysis, plus the EU. This includes western Europe, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Japan and Norway both provide substantial sums of climate finance, but have not announced specific public-finance pledges and therefore are not included.
Carbon Brief converted multi-year pledges into single years, with 2025 used as the baseline “pre-2026” year. Some countries committed to reaching a certain amount “by 2025”, in which case that value is used. Others said they would provide a total amount over several years, in which case the average value per year is used. Belgium, Switzerland and the US only set initial targets as far as 2024, so their 2024 values were used instead of 2025.
These values were compared with the average annual contribution for the remainder of the 2020s, based on the new pledges from the UK, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Some climate finance has been committed by the Netherlands, but this is not expected to be its total contribution. The EU, Portugal and Greece have earlier pledges that extend into the latter half of the 2020s, although the latter two make very small contributions.
NRDC and E3G include all the UK’s newly pledged public finance in their tracker, including $8.9bn in “additional” public finance, which covers “equity, debt, guarantees, insurance and export credit” to mobilise private finance.
In previous Carbon Brief analysis comparing the UK’s new climate-finance target to its old one, this funding was not included. This is because the government did not previously count these funds towards its climate-finance goals, instead focusing exclusively on aid spending.
This analysis does not include pledges that some countries, including Germany and France, have made to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). However, these pledges would not substantially change the main finding, shifting the overall reduction from 71% to 70%.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Palestinians inspect the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike at Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 7, 2026
