Yaakov Potash

Support and provisioning @alfonica. Passionate about tech, #Apple #ACMT qualified

[Luana @LuanaGoriss]

Have fun.

[Heidi Bachram @HeidiBachram]

This is Mahmoud Al-Abyari. He was just sanctioned by the US Treasury for being a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and linked to Hamas fundraising. Yet he lives happily in leafy Willesden Green in a million pound house. When are we going to act on these ppl? @ShabanaMahmood

[Daily Mail @DailyMail]

London-based Muslim Brotherhood member, 74, accused of living double life as terror financier by funnelling cash to Hamas through two sham charities https://t.co/G4BQuxCPxO

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

I’m glad you’ve left this up (tho that’s probably because of your serial incompetence rather than intentional). It illustrates that you’ve taken the phrase ‘useful idiots’ to hitherto unexplored heights. Congrats.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

🧻 Humanity uses about 42 million tons of toilet paper every year.

That’s about 184 billion rolls or 22 billion kilometers of toilet paper that if spread out would cover or an area of 2.2 million square kilometers.

The productions requires:
• 712 million trees
• 1,165 millions tons of water
• 78 million tons of oil

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The pipers and drummers march out of Edinburgh Castle and down the Royal Mile after the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Absolutely glorious.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

A Green Party councillor has been charged with assaulting five people including three police officers.

Siobhan Harper-Nunes, a councillor for Birmingham city council, was arrested on suspicion of assault on Thursday after West Midlands Police were called following reports of disorder in the Edgbaston area of the city.

The 66-year-old, who has represented the Ladywood ward since May, was charged on Friday with assaulting three police officers, a member of police staff and a member of the public.

🔗https://t.co/3q1PkPqNrp

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza” alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last Palestinian.

Now, stand fast the fact that the only really high rate of Gazan deaths happened in the first months of the war and dropped to barely registering after the ceasefire (see graph below). One might suggest that had Israel been intent on wiping out everyone indiscriminately, they would have maintained their rate of killing.

But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?

At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll of just over 73,000.

The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed, including both civilians and combatants.

The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed. That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group must be the only reasonable inference available.

In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared, evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected population counted against genocide.

Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.

Start with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible population.

Israel then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with 448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers, ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before entering Gaza.

A third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found children missed during earlier rounds.

The combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7 million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached again and again.

These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the campaigns could not have happened.

UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from 37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.

It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in Gaza from paralysis.

That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease that could disable or kill them.

A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.

The birth figures deepen the problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not yet been published.

Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before 7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.

Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or desirable.

However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000 live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as civilians, of course.

Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.

No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically useful.

Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality. Every Palestinian death becomes proof of genocide, while every Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public relations.

The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.

Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.

That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not genocide.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Bottom line: they’ve spent three years shrieking about genocide, backed by academic fraud. Now it’s collapsing, they’re throwing smoke to cover tracks.

The Lancet papers claiming hundreds of thousands dead, the IPC and UN panels loaded with anti-Israel activists claiming famine (now conclusively disproven) and genocide, made-up testimony and faked x-rays by doctors taken to Gaza by a charity connected to an actual terror group, the staged vids, AI images and beheaded doll photos put out by Hamas themselves… all bullshit. All of it. The “Gaza genocide” is the greatest hoax of all time, enabled by social media, antisemitism, and gullibility.

Now we know that the population of Gaza *increased* since the war began and a comparatively tiny proportion of non-combatants died. What you are seeing now from people like Mehdi is nothing but rhetorical sleight of hand to keep the hoax going, even as it falls apart.

[Jake Wallis Simons @JakeWSimons]

So poignant to see the old-fashioned decency of Laurence Goldman, a Jewish Oxford professor, contrast with the narcissistic madness of today’s academy.
Great interview by @Mr_Andrew_Fox on @The_Brink_. Link in first reply

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

Jason Arday has cancelled a series of events promoting his forthcoming memoir.

A bookshop event and a conference speech featuring the former Cambridge University professor have been quietly called off.

His memoir, titled Great and Unfortunate Things, is expected to hit American shelves on Tuesday and British bookshops on Aug 27.

🔗 https://t.co/Di0n8tOdmF

[Canary Mission @canarymission]

"They need to be neutralized ... it is time for us to escalate"

Michigan doctor and activist Nidal Jboor called to "take down" what he described as "Jewish supremacists, Christian supremacists and Christian Evangelicals" at the People's Conference for Palestine.

[Rory Cowan @1rorycowan]

Numerous Irish political groups, feminist organisations, and various Irish human rights groups faced public backlash and accusations of initial silence or delayed condemnation regarding the sexual violence committed by Hamas during the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel. And they deserved that backlash. They took a side in the conflict, and they showed their bias against Jewish men and women. I, for one, will be very careful about what causes and campaigns I’ll support (if any) in future, that are backed by nearly all Irish human rights groups or Irish feminist groups.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Elliot just genocided the genocide allegation against Israel. Destroyed it in whole, never mind in part.

[Queen Bee @KingBobIIV]

Jason Arday pictured alongside Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805.

Arday is widely credited with devising the entire British battle plan after Nelson reportedly became confused about which way the French were coming from.

He then personally commanded 17 ships simultaneously, sank 34 French and Spanish vessels, captured another 11, and swam between HMS Victory and the enemy fleet several times because the rowing boats were “taking too long.”

When Nelson was fatally wounded, Arday removed the musket ball with his teeth, briefly resuscitated him, finished commanding the battle, and then carried Nelson back to England on his shoulders.

Nelson's famous signal, “England expects that every man will do his duty,” was apparently Jason's idea, although early drafts reportedly read: “Don’t worry lads, Jason’s here.”

Historians now believe Britain would never have achieved naval supremacy without him.

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

WATCH: James O’Brien ‘Feels Like a Mug’ After Backing Arday https://t.co/Bs5o4DhDLS

[The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome @TheMossadIL]

Unfortunately for Bob Vylan, gravity still works.

[FactsForPeace @Facts_For_Peace]

“I Used To Hate Jews…Ask Me Why”

[LBC @LBC]

Watch robber caught red-handed trying to steal ultra-rare £250,000 Richard Mille after police spot him stalking Mayfair victim

https://t.co/I8t82yuW8R

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

The vast majority of England's rivers, lakes and coastal waters are polluted by sewage - according to a new survey by the Environment Agency.

Its research found just 14% are in good ecological health - while not a single body of water is safe from toxic chemicals.

Campaigners said England's rivers were some of the filthiest in Europe - despite repeated Government promises to clean them up.