Protesters in London call for an ‘end to genocide’


_{Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters wave flags and hold placards outside the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office during an “End The Genocide, Hands Off Lebanon, Don’t Attack Iran” national demonstration in London}

_{Ultra-Orthodox Jews hold banners during a demonstration in support of Palestinians in Gaza in London}

Palestine Action remove busts of Israel’s first president from UK university

In a video posted by the group Palestine Action on X, two people wearing balaclavas and black t-shirts can be seen shattering a glass display with a hammer before removing the busts of Chaim Weizmann and placing them in black bags.

The pro-Palestinian protest network is best known for its attempts to disrupt and halt arms dealers that provide weapons to Israel.

Weizmann, born in what is Belarus today, was a chemist and an influential figure in procuring the Balfour Declaration, a public pledge by the United Kingdom declaring its aim to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

It is viewed as one of the main catalysts of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.

Weizmann moved to the UK in 1904 to lecture at the University of Manchester.

In a 1914 letter to the Manchester Guardian, now known as The Guardian newspaper, Weizmann wrote that “should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews out there – perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal”.

_{Chaim Weizmann, left, presiding over the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva in 1939}

Five people killed in Israeli drone attack at Burj refugee camp

Our colleagues on the ground in Gaza are reporting that at least five people were killed in an Israeli drone attack that targeted the entrance of the Burj refugee camp.

Additionally, our colleagues report that Israeli tanks are advancing and pushing deeper in northwestern Beit Lahiya. Many people are being displaced and seen evacuating the area.

UNRWA says lasting ceasefire needed for safety of Palestinian children

The UNRWA says inoculating children with the polio vaccine is “critical”, but the children will continue to “die and suffer” until there is a lasting and comprehensive ceasefire.

Earlier, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reported that one of the polio vaccination clinics was targeted in Gaza City with a sound bomb from an Israeli quadcopter.

Today @UNRWA, @WHO, @UNICEF & partners resumed the polio vaccination campaign in northern #GazaStrip

This polio campaign is critical, but while we protect children with vaccines, they will continue to die & suffer each day until there is a comprehensive & lasting ceasefire,… https://t.co/sVwUNQedIM

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) November 2, 2024

Four children wounded in attack on Gaza polio vaccination centre

The WHO said six people, including four children, were wounded in an Israeli attack on a polio vaccination centre.

“The Sheikh Radwan primary health care centre in northern Gaza was struck today while parents were bringing their children to the life-saving polio vaccination in an area where a humanitarian pause was agreed to allow vaccination to proceed,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X.

“Six people, including four children, were injured,” he added.

Israeli army says two soldiers killed in Gaza

The Israeli army says the soldiers were both killed in northern Gaza.

The area has been under relentless assault since Israel launched military operations focused in and around the Jabaliya refugee camp in early October. Officials in Gaza say more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during that time.

Israeli army says a total of 780 soldiers have been killed in its war on Gaza since last October.

Israeli forces detain 10 Palestinians in West Bank raid

Israeli forces arrested 10 Palestinians during their raid on al-Fawwar camp in the Hebron Governorate in southern occupied West Bank. The troops stormed the camp using sound bombs and tear gas, detaining 10 residents after breaking into their homes.

Sources said that Israeli forces surrounded the camp, closed its entrances and prevented anyone from entering or exiting the area.

Israeli raid on refugee camp in Hebron part of a ‘silent war’ on West Bank

This is one of at least a dozen Israeli raids into various areas across the occupied West Bank. Fawwar refugee camp in Hebron is a small camp with around 8,000 people. During the raid, Israeli forces rounded up men and youth and interrogated them before they took around 10 of them away to Israeli detention camps.

But this tactic of rounding up all the men, considering them, just by virtue of being male, to be a suspect, and subjecting them to interrogation, sometimes for hours, has become a trend that we increasingly see in the occupied West Bank.

The raids come in light of Israel’s legislation banning UNRWA. We saw an earlier raid two days ago in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, where Israeli forces damaged the UNRWA office, rendering it unusable.

This is just part of the overall trend of what the UN is calling a “silent war” in the occupied West Bank.

At least 46 Palestinians killed in West Bank last month

Palestine Information Center says that at least 46 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers across the occupied West Bank last month.

Conflict in Gaza is an “Israeli terrorism creation Factory”: UN investigator | Dawn News English

The UN Commission of Inquiry accuses Israel of war crimes in Gaza, especially against healthcare, and condemns Palestinian groups for hostage abuse, urging immediate accountability and humanitarian compliance.

Israel-Hamas war: Pro-Palestinian protesters hold symbolic 'die-in' outside UK PM's office

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a symbolic 'die-in' in front of the British Prime Minister's office on November 2, ahead of a demonstration by several thousands at the U.S Embassy in London and next week's U.S. presidential election. Banging drums and holding placards and dolls in bloodied white shrouds to represent children killed in Gaza by Israeli strikes, the crowd reached 10 Downing Street where some lay still on the ground playing dead to make the UK leadership and the public "take notice of these people dying".

It's Bisan from Gaza and Will the U.S. Election Bring Relief or More Suffering?

As the U.S. faces a tight presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Bisan Owda takes us inside Gaza to hear what people there really think about the election. With over 43,000 Palestinians killed by Israel – most of them women and children – many Gazans doubt that either candidate will bring any real change. “They are killing us while the world is watching,” a man says. Another adds, “They all cheer for Israel.” Despite the rising death toll and a conflict that’s spreading across the Middle East, both candidates remain steadfast in their support for Israel. While the election is expected to have a global impact, people in Gaza are left wondering: Will it bring relief – or just more suffering?

UN special rapporteur says sanctions must be imposed on Israel

Francesca Albanese says there is nothing that prevents a UN member state from abiding by international law, and states individually have an obligation not to aid or assist a state “which is committing atrocities day in and day out”.

“They have to stop those who are still transferring weapons [to Israel]… and also buying or purchasing military and security services from Israel must stop,” she told Al Jazeera.

Albanese said any trade with Israel must be “interrupted”, adding that diplomatic and political sanctions must also be applied.

“Whoever is not taking these steps is either responsible or completely indifferent to the plight of millions of Palestinians,” she noted.

‘Complete hijacking of rules, mechanisms by a group of states’

The UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory has questioned the so-called international rules-based order amid the ongoing war on Gaza.

“I am very allergic to the international rules-based order. There is no order any more,” Albanese said.

“There are rules, there are mechanisms and there is just chaos. There is a complete hijacking of the rules and the mechanisms by a group of states who expect… to rule the world according to their own rules. And this is chaos, and this is not respectful of multilateralism.”

No members of Israeli army held accountable for killing of journalists

The UN is marking the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists.

Its focus has been Israel’s war on Gaza. The UN says the conflict has seen the “highest number of killings of journalists in any war in decades”.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says:

Summary for Nov 2nd

Humanitarian situation in Lebanon worse than during 2006 war, UN says

The UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA) said that “the humanitarian situation in Lebanon has reached levels that exceed the severity” of the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, with many more now killed and displaced.

The statement came as the Lebanese Health Ministry updated the death toll from Israeli attacks on the country to at least 2,968 people. Another 13,319 have been wounded.

The Lebanese government says some 1.2 million people have been displaced, while the International Organization for Migration said its count shows at least 842,648 people have been forced to flee their homes.

The 2006 war killed 1,191 people in Lebanon, while more than 900,000 fled their homes, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The situation has escalated anew, due to Israel’s forced displacement orders for the residents of eastern Baalbek and southern Nabatieh, OCHA said. The toll on the population has been exacerbated by the destruction of critical infrastructure, including healthcare, it added.

_{Soldiers stand near a damaged building in the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on November 2}

Israeli attacks killed 85 on-duty medics in Lebanon over two months, UN says

The UN’s humanitarian agency, citing figures from the WHO, said there had been 36 Israeli attacks on healthcare facilities since the escalation with Hezbollah in September. It said 85 health workers have been killed and 51 others wounded while they were on duty between September 17 and October 31.

It said medical first responders continued to operate in “highly dangerous situations”, noting that Israeli attacks had killed at least six of them in southern Lebanon on October 31.

Israel says it killed 2 Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, PIJ fighter in Gaza

The Israeli military said it has killed two “key” Hezbollah fighters in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam. It named them as Farouk Amin Alashi, a Hezbollah commander in Khiam, and Yosef Ahmed Nun, platoon commander in the elite Radwan force in the southern town.

It accused Alashi of being “responsible for the execution of many anti-tank and anti-tank missile fire plans towards the settlements of the Galilee Finger, and Metula in particular” and said Nun had issued “anti-tank fire” towards Israeli settlements and forces in the Galilee region.

In Gaza, the Israeli military said it killed Rafat Ebrahim Mahmoud Akadih, who it said was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighter who had served as “assistant to the head of the Nukhaba of the Khan Younis Brigade” and “raided Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7”.

Israel says about 10 rockets fired from Lebanon

The Israeli military said about 10 rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israeli territory after air raid sirens were sounded in the Haifa Bay and Galilee areas. In a statement on Telegram, the military said some of the rockets were intercepted while the rest fell into open areas.

What we know about Israel’s kidnapping in Lebanon’s Batroun

Fighting on the ground in southern Lebanon continues

Over the last few hours and into the overnight, Israel struck several targets across southern Lebanon, keeping the pressure on Hezbollah.

It said two of those strikes killed senior Hezbollah commanders. Hezbollah hasn’t confirmed that as of yet.

The fighting on the ground is still continuing. Israel hasn’t changed its strategy; it’s still coming to border areas, it’s trying to clear villages near the Blue Line and the border area, and what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing is widespread destruction taking place.

“Widespread destruction” is the term that UNIFIL, the UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, actually use.

All those air strikes are still coming in Khiam particularly, but also Kfar Kila and Aadaysit and in other parts of southern Lebanon.

Bangladeshi worker killed in air attack in Lebanon

Bangladesh’s ambassador to Lebanon, Javed Tanveer Khan, has said in a statement that Mohammad Nizam, 31, was killed on Saturday afternoon during a raid as he stopped at a coffee shop on the way to work in Beirut.

The Foreign Ministry estimates that between 70,000 and 100,000 of its nationals are working in Lebanon, many as labourers or domestic workers.

Dhaka’s government, with the UN’s International Organization for Migration, organised the first flight to bring Bangladeshi citizens home from Beirut last month.

However, Nizam’s older brother, Mohammad Jalaluddin, told the AFP news agency that his brother had not been among the estimated 1,800 Bangladeshis registered for an evacuation flight home.

“We want to bury him in our ancestral home, and are now waiting for the government’s response,” Jalaluddin told AFP.

More than half of Britons say Israel committing war crimes in Gaza: Poll

The survey, commissioned by Action for Humanity and conducted by the YouGov pollster, found that more than half of Britons across the political spectrum believe that Israel’s actions in the war on Gaza constitute war crimes.

The figure comes up to three in five among supporters of the Labour Party, which currently holds power in the United Kingdom, the poll found.

Some 76 percent of Labour voters also continue to back an end to arms transfers to Israel, it showed. Meanwhile, the total number of Britons that would oppose a ban is lower than one in five, compared with three in five that would support one.

“The majority of people rightly feel the government are not doing enough to stop war crimes from happening. The overwhelming majority of the public demands that the UK government immediately cease all arms transfers to Israel, not just 10%, and take all actions to bring about a sustainable ceasefire,” said Charles Lawley, the director of communications and advocacy at Action for Humanity.

“We believe that, unless the UK government stops ignoring the public, they will at best be impotent in the atrocities being committed in Gaza and Lebanon [and] at worst be complicit in them,” he added.

Over 100 staff accuse BBC of bias in coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/2/over-100-staff-accuse-bbc-of-bias-in-its-coverage-of-israels-war-in-gaza

The BBC has been accused by more than 100 of its staff of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza and criticised its lack of “accurate evidence-based journalism”.

A letter sent to the broadcaster’s director general, Tim Davie, and CEO Deborah Turness on Friday said: “Basic journalistic tenets have been lacking when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions.”

First reported by The Independent newspaper on Friday, the signatories included more than 100 anonymous BBC staff and some 200 from the media industry, as well as historians, actors, academics and politicians.

"The consequences of inadequate coverage are significant. Every television report, article and radio interview that has failed to robustly challenge Israeli claims has systematically dehumanised Palestinians,” the letter said.