It's time to create the Hand-wringing Award.
Who can 'bemoan' the most, do the least and yet go on providing weapons and support for the horror they claim they're bemoaning?
First up, Germany? Or what about Yvette Cooper? She does terrific hand-wringing.
Any others?
*Danger to the life of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Please share as much as possible!*
New information received from Adv. Nasser Odeh, the attorney for Dr. Abu Safiya, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who visited Dr. Abu Safiya at the "Rakefet" underground detention facility at Nitzan Prison, indicates a severe deterioration in his condition, to the point of an immediate threat to his life. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and his attorney are demanding his immediate transfer from the facility and an urgent visit by a judge to assess his condition firsthand—before it is too late.
Following new information received from a visit conducted by Adv. Nasser Odeh on July 2nd at the "Rakefet" facility in Nitzan Prison:
According to Adv. Odeh's affidavit, Dr. Abu Safiya arrived at the visit handcuffed and shackled, accompanied by masked prison guards. Fresh and severe injuries were visible on his head, around his eyes, on his ears, and on his neck, to the extent that his attorney had difficulty recognizing him. During the visit, Dr. Abu Safiya struggled to breathe and speak continuously; he appeared extremely weak, had difficulty sitting without falling over, and on several occasions leaned backward in a manner that raised concerns that he was about to lose consciousness. According to Adv. Odeh, he appeared terrified and in severe distress, and struggled to express himself for fear of retaliation. It is the attorney's direct and immediate impression that Dr. Abu Safiya is in immediate danger of death.
Dr. Abu Safiya told his attorney that shortly after the hearing (on June 10, 2026) regarding his appeal to the Supreme Court against the extension of his detention order, while he was held in isolation at Ganot Prison, four or five prison guards entered his cell and beat him all over his body, according to him with a hammer and batons. He added that since his transfer on June 24, 2026, to the "Rakefet" facility, he has been subjected to violence and beatings on a daily basis, and has lost consciousness several times, all without receiving adequate medical treatment. He told his attorney that he fears for his life, stating: "This is the last time you will see me... They brought me here to kill me. I am not imagining it. I see it. This is the end."
Following the visit, Adv. Odeh urgently contacted the Israel Prison Service (IPS) demanding an end to the abuse of Dr. Abu Safiya, his immediate transfer to another detention facility, and that he be granted urgent medical examination and treatment due to the real concern for his life.
Furthermore, Physicians for Human Rights has urgently appealed to the Attorney General, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the Chair of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, the National Public Defender, and the Commissioner of the Israel Prison Service, demanding an immediate visit to Dr. Abu Safiya by an official entity outside the IPS, and to allow him an independent medical examination, due to the serious concern for his life.
Despite the High Court of Justice ruling this June against his release, Physicians for Human Rights reiterates its demand to release Dr. Abu Safiya and all other doctors held without charges or trial.
It should be noted that the "Rakefet" facility is an underground interrogation and detention facility at Nitzan Prison, regarding which severe testimonies and allegations of violence and abuse against detainees have been published in the past.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel warns that given Dr. Abu Safiya's health condition and the information provided by his attorney, any delay in intervention could put his life in real danger.
*Danger to life.*
*He must be removed from there! Today.*
(Translation from Hebrew by Gemini)
🚨URGENT: Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s life is in immediate danger, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and his lawyer warned Saturday, after a prison visit revealed the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital bearing fresh, severe injuries to his head, eyes, ears, and neck, so disfigured his own attorney initially struggled to recognize him.
🔹Attorney Nasser Odeh, who saw Abu Safiya Thursday at the underground Rakefet interrogation facility in Nitzan Prison, said he arrived shackled hand and foot, escorted by masked guards, struggling to breathe and speak, unable to sit upright, and repeatedly on the verge of losing consciousness.
🔹Abu Safiya told him that after his Supreme Court appeal was heard June 10, four or five guards entered his solitary cell at Ganot Prison and beat him with a hammer and batons, and that since his June 24 transfer to Rakefet he has been beaten daily, losing consciousness several times without receiving medical treatment.
🔹“This is the last time you will see me,” he told his lawyer. “They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving. This is the end.”
🔹PHRI notes the escalation in torture began directly after Abu Safiya challenged his detention in court. He has been held without charge since December 27, 2024, under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law.
🔹The group has appealed to Israel’s attorney general and prison service demanding his immediate transfer, an independent medical examination, and an urgent judicial visit “before it is too late.”
Photo: Amnesty International
BREAKING (bones)
Why does "Bring Them Home" exist only for some hostages?
Because in Apartheid Israel, where only Jewish lives matter, brutalising the Palestinians isn't an anomaly - it is the system. And the silence around it is the exact measure of our collective hypocrisy.
How will you continue your day after hearing that a father in Gaza, trapped beneath the rubble, begged rescuers not to save him?
Not because he had lost hope in life, but because he could hear his daughters’ final breaths beneath the debris. Their tiny hands were holding his in the darkness, as if pleading with him one last time. He was the father who had always been their safe refuge, yet this time he was powerless to pull them from the dust and shattered concrete.
Only his head was visible above the wreckage. He looked into the eyes of the rescuers, his own eyes exhausted by fear and helplessness, and said:
“Leave me… my daughters are here… I do not want to come out alone.”
What heart can bear such a scene? What language can describe the agony of a father who realizes he is losing his daughters one by one, while still holding their hands until they grow cold, unable to offer rescue or even one final embrace?
How will your day go on after knowing this story? How will you sit at your table in peace, or laugh at something trivial, knowing that somewhere there was a father whose last wish was not to survive alone?
And the question that continues to haunt the human conscience remains:
How much pain must the world witness before it finally hears the cry of a single father there?
Today’s ruling to uphold the UK government's proscription of Palestine Action is a travesty of justice.
One by one, the very foundations of our democracy are being destroyed — all to oil the wheels of British complicity in genocide.
Our government has participated in the mass murder of Palestinians. That is the real crime, and we must bring about justice.
Awful and extremely disappointing decision on Palestine Action today. The conduct of the judiciary on this and Filton case is chilling. The extent to which our establishment will protect Israel's genocide is dystopian.
The Starmer government is relentlessly authoritian, cruel, parochial, captured, corrupt and rightly despised. A stain on British politics and the Labour Party.
This little girl waited for a long time at a charitable food kitchen in Gaza City. She was unable to obtain any food for her younger siblings and her injured mother. Her father was killed in the war.
IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]
Where to find the words anymore?
What to say when Israel continues to behave like this?
And no condemnation at all from the UK Government. They carry on business as usual as if Israel aren't carrying out genocides in both Gaza and Lebanon.
https://t.co/BcZpVtquhH
@LizaRosen0000 I wonder if there's a living Jewish writer for children who's quite popular with children for one kind of book, but who has also written about his relatives during World War 2.
CNN breakdown 🇮🇱 execution law:
‘Execution the default’
‘No right of appeal’
‘Executed in 90 days’
‘For Palestinians 🇵🇸 only’
‘Discriminatory’
‘Military courts in West Bank🇵🇸’
‘96% conviction rate through torture’
And still Starmer is silent
Ban 🇮🇱 money from 🇬🇧 politics now.
Israel has pushed ground forces into multiple areas of southern Lebanon
They've displaced huge numbers of civilians...
Yet it barely registers internationally.
Russia did the same in Ukraine and the world responded with sanctions, outrage and coordinated pressure
The double standards are UNFORGIVABLE.
Why isn't anyone in the political class discussing how monstrous and unbelievably unacceptable it is that an 'assassination list' exists. It's really beginning to piss me off. How are we out here normalising the murders of diplomats. Hello? Anybody?