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‘If these words reach you … Israel has succeeded in killing me’: the last words of a journalist killed in Gaza

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Written by Anas al-Sharif Anas al-Sharif
Published: 12 August 2025 12 August 2025

Anas al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera reporter, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Sunday night. This is the message he had prepared for his family, and his call for the world not to forget Gaza

I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification – so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.

Read Anas al-Sharif's full statement at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/11/anas-al-sharif-al-jazeera-journalist-killed-gaza-israeli-airstrike

Joe Biden is complicit in Gaza’s starvation. Blood is on his hands

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Written by Mohamad Bazzi Mohamad Bazzi
Published: 10 August 2025 10 August 2025

At several points during his presidency, Biden could have stopped starvation from spreading in Gaza, if his administration had listened to warnings from the UN and aid groups and used them as an impetus to limit unconditional US military support for Israel. Biden’s record is not only shocking for the multiple missed opportunities he had to change course, but for his callousness toward the suffering of Palestinians.

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In February 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, warned of the speed and scale of Israel’s mass starvation campaign. “We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely,” he told the Guardian, echoing reports by UN agencies and humanitarian groups showing that Israel was deliberately blocking foodand other aid from entering Gaza, and using starvation as a weapon – a war crime under international law.

With such detailed warnings, the Biden administration and Israel’s other western supporters could not claim that they didn’t know the severity of hunger in Gaza, and the extent of Israel’s policy of intentionally starvingPalestinians. As the alarms of imminent famine intensified in the spring of 2024, Biden could have acted by pressuring the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to allow more food into Gaza and enforcing US laws which ban weapons shipments to US allies that obstruct humanitarian aid.

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Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/09/biden-complicit-gaza-starvation

‘A deadly scheme’: Palestinians face indiscriminate gunfire at food sites

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Written by Manisha Ganguly | The Guardian Manisha Ganguly | The Guardian
Published: 09 August 2025 09 August 2025

A Guardian investigation analysing visual evidence, bullets, medical data and patterns of injuries from two hospitals, as well as interviews with medical organisations and surgeons, across approximately 50 days of food distribution, appears to show a sustained Israeli pattern of firing on Palestinians seeking food.

According to the UN, at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed since 27 May while seeking food, with 859 killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 514 along the routes of food convoys.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/09/a-deadly-scheme-palestinians-face-indiscriminate-gunfire-at-food-sites

A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians

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Written by Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham
Published: 06 August 2025 06 August 2025

Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe

According to three Unit 8200 sources, the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Thanks to the control it exerts over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long intercepted phone calls in the occupied territories. But the indiscriminate new system allows intelligence officers to play back the content of cellular calls made by Palestinians, capturing the conversations of a much larger pool of ordinary civilians.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloud

And at: https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveillance-cloud-azure/

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump

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Written by Rashid Khalidi Rashid Khalidi
Published: 01 August 2025 01 August 2025

The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

Dear Acting President Shipman,

I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion. 

These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.

Read the full letter at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/01/columbia-historian-rashid-khalidi-open-letter

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