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[Novara Media @novaramedia]

A massive general strike called by grassroots trade unions in support of Gaza is underway throughout Italy, with many sectors including railways, ports, local public transport, schools and public services taking part.

Workers downed tools at midnight on Sunday 21 September and the strike is expected to last until Monday at 11pm.

The USB (Unione Sindacale di Base) union, which launched the action, called for “the immediate break-off of relations with the terrorist state of Israel, which is the concrete way in which Italy can, and must, react to the genocide that is taking place”.

The USB says there are more than 60 demonstrations planned on Monday, calling the numbers “unprecedented in Italy”. Actions are taking place in Rome, Milan, Bologna, Naples and Genoa, with more demos including sit-ins planned in Turin, Florence, Ancona, Bari and Palermo.

According to local media, queues formed at the ports of Genoa and Livorno as pro-Palestinian protesters restricted access. In Rome, regional train services were cancelled or severely delayed, while in Milan the M4 metro line was closed. In Bologna, students have reportedly halted lessons at the city’s university by blocking entry to lecture halls.

The Union of Basic Trade Unions said: “On 22 September everyone will be able to take to the streets to break all collaboration with the state of Israel, to defend Gaza and stop the genocide, to say no to the race for rearmament and war, alongside the Global Sumud Flotilla that has started in these hours. Let's block everything, with Palestine in our hearts.”

The Global Sumud Flotilla, which includes Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Novara Media’s Kieran Andrieu, is currently en route to Gaza to attempt to break Israel’s illegal siege on the territory, carrying essential aid including baby formula and flour.

[The Hind Rajab Foundation @HindRFoundation]

🚨 The #HindRajabFoundation filed a criminal complaint in Prague/Czech Republic against Israeli soldier Roei Haimatan of the Givati Brigade.
He is accused of genocide, war crimes & crimes against humanity in Gaza, including forced displacement of civilians.
More info ⬇️
https://t.co/Y7YmLGdM4Q

[Norman Finkelstein @normfinkelstein]

A Comment on the New UN Report on Gaza

I devote a chapter of my forthcoming book, Gaza’s Gravediggers, to the point that describing the situation in Gaza as a “war” rather than a “genocide” egregiously distorts what is happening there. In a postscript to this chapter, reprinted below, I comment on the new UN report that found Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

In September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry released a new report in which it found that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.[1] It reached this conclusion after extensively documenting (from UN sources and respected human rights organizations) that Israel had willfully committed acts defined by Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention—Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group—“with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”[2] The report explicitly addressed Israel’s contention that it was engaged in a “war of self-defense” against Hamas.[3] It found that, on the contrary, if not this or that “discrete” or “individual” incident but, instead, the “totality” or “overall factual situation” of the Israeli assault was scrutinized[4]—the absolute number of Gazans, and proportion of civilians versus combatants, killed and injured; [5] the systematic targeting of civilians along evacuation routes and in safe zones;[6] the systematic targeting of homes, vital infrastructure, and healthcare facilities (as well as medical personnel);[7] the systematic denial of basic necessities (food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine) to the civilian population and use of “starvation as a method of warfare”;[8] the systematic targeting of children, including “toddlers,” in the head and chest,[9] as well as the targeting of Gaza’s only IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinic;[10] the systematic targeting of cultural, educational, and religious sites;[11] the systematic resort to sexual and gender-based violence, including “many cases of rape”;[12] etc.—then it was impossible to reconcile the “overall factual situation” with a defensive “war” against Hamas. The report thus eschewed the terminology of the laws of war. There was, for example, no mention of “disproportionate” attacks anywhere in it. A disproportionate attack presupposes that a legitimate military site was targeted but an excessive number of civilians were killed. The report found, however, that, overwhelmingly, it was Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure that was targeted. Indeed, the massive death and destruction was proportionate to Israel’s genocidal goal. Further to this point, the report only occasionally paused to examine an Israeli claim that it was targeting Hamas in this or that attack:[13] in the grand scheme of things, beside the magnitude of death and destruction visited on Gaza, the lethal incidents in which a Hamas militant might have been present amounted to a trifle and an irrelevance.[14] The report’s upshot was that the quantity (gross numbers) and quality (selection of targets) of the Israeli attack couldn’t be squared with the paradigm of a war: “[T]here was no military necessity to justify the pattern of conduct.”[15] It was palpably not Hamas but the entirety of Gaza’s population that was being targeted; indeed, the “war” aspect of the hostilities was, all told, a fiction.[16] The body of this chapter expounded that the laws of war and genocide frameworks are mutually antithetical. The Commission’s latest report confirmed this: as it concluded that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, it dispensed with the language and investigative modus operandi of a “war” situation.

To clinch its case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, the Commission had to demonstrate not only that Israel willfully committed acts listed in Article II of the Convention, but also that the “intent” behind Israel’s commission of these acts was to physically destroy the Gazan population. The report found that from right after 7 October forward, senior Israeli officials repeatedly uttered genocidal statements;[17] that the Israeli security forces dispatched to Gaza understood these to be genocidal orders, weren’t subject to “any genuine investigations or prosecutions” for committing acts prohibited by the Convention, and that, on the contrary, Israeli officials were “encouraging , permitting and authorizing such criminal behavior to continue”;[18] that Israel’s genocidal intent could reasonably be inferred from the quantity and quality of the criminal acts committed by Israeli forces.[19] The report thus concludes that “Israeli political and military leaders possess the specific intent to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, based on their statements and the pattern of conduct of those under their command since 7 October 2023.”[20] A slightly more nuanced analysis would perhaps read like this:

Israel intentionally committed acts that perforce resulted in the destruction of the Gazan population. The inevitable massive death and destruction that Israel visited on Gaza traced back to primal vengeance, [21] Israel’s perceived need to restore the Arab world’s fear of it, [22] and its determination to “solve” the Gaza Question once and for all—an historical opportunity long coveted and then miraculously gifted on 7 October, that Israel was dead-set on exploiting, come what may, to the hilt. The genocide commenced immediately after Hamas’s attack—the initial public statements by senior Israeli officials perfectly, indeed eerily, foreshadowed what would unfold in the next two years—but it was necessarily calibrated to take account of the response abroad. If Israel didn’t outright nuke Gaza, that’s because, functioning as Israel must within the constraints, albeit feeble, imposed by the vicissitudes of international public opinion, it couldn’t. But even as Israel’s overarching objective was not to annihilate but rather to ethnically cleanse Gazans, [23] it was also prepared to kill off as many civilians and pulverize as much infrastructure as was politically feasible in order to “persuade” the population to leave or “persuade” the international community to take it in. This is not idle speculation, it’s a fait accompli: Israel has already committed genocide in Gaza. Absent external political constraints, and if Gazans prove unwilling or unable to leave, then Israel, its leadership as well as Israeli Jewish society en masse—this was a national project—won’t recoil at totally annihilating Gaza’s population. Far from it. If need be, Israel won’t just be “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” Gaza’s population, it will be positively gleeful and relish the prospect. Whereas Heinrich Himmler, cognizant at some level of his criminality, feigned anguish in his infamous Posen speech at the onerous burden placed by History on the shoulders of Germany to rid the world of the Jews, Israeli security forces danced the hora and then flaunted their foul deeds on social media. It was the giddiness of a child, magnifying glass in hand, burning ants.

____________________________________

1 Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Conference Room Paper of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (16 September 2025, A/HRC/60/CRP.3; https://t.co/jOI2ryJzDn).

2 The Commission did not find evidence of a fifth act defined by Article II of “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Legal Analysis, para. 16).

3 Ibid., para. 177.

4 Ibid., paras. 144, 158, 160, 254.

5 Ibid., paras. 180-86; see also ibid., paras. 48, 50. A classified Israeli intelligence report found that 83 percent of Gazans killed were civilians (ibid., paras. 21, 180).

6 Ibid., para. 182; see also ibid., paras. 49, 58-59.

7 Ibid., paras. 187, 204-8; see also ibid., paras. 87-90, 93-106. A military expert stated that “Israel is dropping [more bombs] in less than a week than what the United States was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area” (ibid., para. 22).

8 Ibid., paras. 190-203; see also ibid., paras. 48, 85-86, 96, 100, 104, 110-126. The report noted that “The denial of entry for special infant milk, resulting in the starvation of new-born and young infants, is especially powerful evidence of an intention to destroy the population” (ibid., para. 190).

9 Ibid., 214-19; see also ibid., paras. 28, 30, 32, 46, 56 (“toddlers” at paras. 28, 215). The report observed that “The targeting of children is relevant to infer the genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities because … the extensive and deliberate targeting of Palestinian children shows that the military operations were not conducted solely to defeat Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, nor can they legitimately contribute to the other stated goals of defending the state of Israel and securing the release of Israeli hostages (ibid., para. 218). On a related note, the Commissioner General of UNRWA stated that “10 children lost one or both legs in the war every day,” and another UN organization reported that “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history” (ibid., paras. 53, 214).

10 Ibid., para. 207; see also ibid., paras. 57, 79, 151-54.

11 Ibid., paras. 188-89; see also ibid., paras. 91-92, 146.

12 Ibid., paras. 209-213; see also ibid., paras. 65-71 (“many cases” at para. 66), 73, 80. The report states that “the nature and scale of these acts [of sexual and gender-based violence] do not support and cannot justify Israel’s claims that its military operations were conducted in self-defense, to defeat Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, or to secure the release of Israeli hostages” (ibid., para. 212).

13 Ibid., paras. 35-44, 95, 103, 118, 185. Incidentally, in just one single instance did the Israeli alibi hold up, if only in part.

14 Israel’s critics fixated on to its use of AI to liquidate alleged Hamas militants as they returned home, killing many family members. See Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing in Gaza,” +972 Magazine (3 April 2024). But this too was largely an irrelevance and a distraction: long before AI came along, Israel routinely killed many civilians as it targeted alleged Hamas militants in densely populated civilian neighborhoods; of the more than 200,000 Gazan homes damaged or destroyed since 7 October, it’s implausible that AI was implicated in more than a tiny fraction of the attacks; harping on the use of AI to track down alleged Hamas militants obscured the crux that, overwhelmingly, Israel wasn’t even targeting Hamas but instead the entire civilian population. The criminality wasn’t that Israel committed disproportionate attacks, in which an excessive number of civilians were killed when targeting Hamas, but that it was committing genocide as it targeted not Hamas but the Gazan people.

15 Legal Analysis, para. 179.

16 One indicative juxtaposition is that, during the period March-August 2025, 50 Israelis versus 12,000 Gazans, 11,000 of them civilians, were killed. A global ratio of 1:240 or combatant ratio of 1:20 betokens at minimum a slaughter or extermination not a war. The figure of Hamas militants killed can itself be misleading: most of them almost certainly died not on the battlefield but alongside Gazan civilians in the course of Israel’s genocidal assault. For the numerical data, see International Crisis Group, The World’s Shame in Gaza (2 September 2025), and ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), “Gaza after Two Years” (17 September 2025).

17 Legal Analysis, paras. 221-33; see also paras. 162-176.

18 Ibid., paras. 163, 184, 232, 237, 242.

19 “Considering the evidence in totality, the Commission has found that Israeli authorities were aware of the high probability that their military operations, the imposition of a total siege, including the blocking of humanitarian aid in Gaza, and the destruction of housing and of health systems and facilities would lead to the physical destruction of Palestinians, in whole or in part in Gaza. Importantly, in relation to the blocking of humanitarian aid, Israeli authorities were put on notice by the International Court of Justice, the Security Council and various human rights experts and groups. . . . The Commission therefore finds that Israeli authorities knowingly and deliberately inflicted such conditions of life to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza”; “[T]he Commission finds that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn based on the pattern of conduct of the Israeli authorities” (ibid., paras. 144, 220).

20 Ibid., para. 238.

21 “[V]engeance is a great value. There is vengeance for what they did to us. . . . [I]n 100 years they will know that you don’t mess with the Jews”—senior Israeli security forces officer (ibid, para. 173).

22 “The fact that 50,000 have already been killed in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations. . . . They need a Nakba from time to time to feel the price”—head of Israel’s Military Intelligence (ibid., para. 175).

23 The report mistakenly infers that Israel’s intention was to “trap Palestinians in Gaza, creating such conditions that would prohibit them from escaping and ultimately lead to their destruction” (ibid., para. 201).

https://t.co/sBzeS0n9yS

[Mad Nomad @abdhata]

@CautiousPels @GVert036790 @asimbawe you mean he usually doesn’t drink water?

[Kay | Snapchat & IG Ads @KayRMFC]

There’ll never be a better club anthem 🤍

[ELIJAH SCHÄFFER @ElijahSchaffer]

Just kindly remember who you’re dealing with

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

So the UK announces it’s going to recognize Palestinian statehood and immediately afterwards ISIS calls on Muslims in the UK to attack Christians and Jews in retaliation for “Israel’s war on Gaza.”

I’m sorry but only total idiots can’t see who and what ISIS actually is by now

[Zhang Yong 张勇 @zhangyong02]

Michael Jordan is from Jordan

[Madrid Zone @theMadridZone]

Abderrahim Ouhida is a young survivor of the 2023 Morocco earthquake in which he lost his parents, his grandfather and 2 of his siblings.

Immediately after the earthquake, he was seen crying while wearing a Real Madrid jersey on TV.

The club saw it, invited him to Madrid, helped him move to the city and study there, signed him for the football academy, and this week, he got every player from the squad to sign his jersey, as well as president Florentino Perez.

Today, he will kick off Real Madrid vs Espanyol. 🤍

[The Onion @TheOnion]

Trump Spends Entire U.K. Trip Trying To Figure Out Where He Knows Prince Andrew From https://t.co/W6tLkbx37C

[AJ+ @ajplus]

“She was known as Palestine. She forevermore will be known as Palestine.”

Benedict Cumberbatch recited this poem by iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

[حيدر | Haydar @chronicalihere]

Obama dropped a bomb every 8 minutes for 8 years straight. He dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone on 6 different countries. He droned hospitals, weddings, and the funerals for those killed in the weddings. He has no moral conscience to be commentating on war crimes.

Obama not only gave Israel the largest military aid deal in history of $38 billion, but he also facilitated Israel's bombardment of Gaza on multiple occasions.

One of his first acts as president was suppressing the UNHRC's Goldstone Report that documented Israeli war crimes in 2009. This is the length his administration went to protect Israel's public image— threatening an international judge.

In 2014, the last time witnessed any bombardment remotely comparable to such a scale as this genocide; Obama publicly, unapologetically, justified Israel's brutal bombing campaign in Gaza despite the alarming death toll then.

[Karim Benzema @Benzema]

Ready... #CR7 #KB9 !!! @realmadrid @ChampionsLeague

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

Just took a trip down to my county courthouse to check out this supposed “arrest record” for myself.

I knew something wasn’t right for a multitude of reasons:

1. The zip code on that address is a Ft Bragg zip code not a Sanford one.

2. Duke Lane doesn’t exist.

3. Arrest notices use the full docket number. The one in that picture is missing the last 3 numbers.

And just as I suspected, every last one of these pieces of shit is lying through their teeth.

And yes, I can prove it. 🧵

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

I went through and screenshot all the messages GHF is using to smear Anthony Aguilar.

🧵

1. GHF started operating in Gaza on May 28, 2025. All the messages of praise for GHF are from the first couple days.

That red box quote is literally from Day 1.

[Jake Shields @jakeshieldsajj]

You voted for America first but you are getting Israel first

[Mad Nomad @abdhata]

@Kababu1017 @kayzeeh2 @WendyLIR @Honeyfarsafi if you hadn’t replied i would’ve completely forgotten i met a fatherless insignificant online

[Mad Nomad @abdhata]

@Kababu1017 @kayzeeh2 @WendyLIR @Honeyfarsafi you are exhibiting fatherless behavior nugu

[Edwin @EdwinRMFC]

This is what we call UCL heritage