Joseph Hill

Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Alberta, Canada, research on Africa and the Middle East, Islam and gender, formerly lived in Cairo.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Good. Let's talk about Marwan Barghouti.

Imprisoned for 25 years.
An inter-Parliamentary Union report found he was not given a fair trial.

Nelson Mandela: “What is happening to Barghouti is exactly the same as what happened to me."

Free Marwan.

https://t.co/EoTcJkttRd

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

If those were Arabs invading & rampaging through a Jewish town, those pics would be all over mainstream media with the captions "TERRORISTS SAVAGES"...

But those are Jewish Israelis invading a Palestinian town, so there is NOT even a passing mention of them in any Western media!

[B'Tselem בצלם بتسيلم @btselem]

Systematic violence and human rights violations are not exceptions to Israel's apartheid regime and occupation, they are integral to it. Israel is using unbridled violence in all the territories under its control, as well as in Lebanon and Iran.

Since October 2023, this policy has escalated:

In Gaza: tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, millions forcibly displaced, entire neighborhoods and infrastructure systematically destroyed

In the West Bank: about 1,082 Palestinians killed, including 239 children and teenagers; 61 communities with at least 4,161 members forcibly displaced and another 15 partially so, with at least 454 members displaced

In Israeli prisons: thousands of Palestinians subjected to systemic torture, violence and humiliation, in inhumane conditions

Under Israel's apartheid regime, Palestinian lives are treated as expendable and millions across the Middle East are at risk.

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

If Israel was created in Alaska, no Palestinians or Arabs would've objected!

The issue is NOT Jewish statehood, the issue is building a state on top of OUR land, stealing OUR homes, properties, assets, farms, culture, & olive trees then caging us in concentration camps!

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

"It brings me no pleasure to compare what Israel is doing to what the Nazis did, but how can we not? When you have things like ghettos, starvation, concentration camps and planned systematic extermination of people"

Jewish journalist @kthalps

CC: LBC @lewis_goodall @hasanthehun

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

I just heard the @BBC radio say that the Israeli army was attacking Hezbollah targets yesterday & they also platformed someone bloviating about how Iran is ‘occupying’ Lebanon.

As a frontline journalist on the ground for the last 18 months, I would like to reiterate that I have not see any Iranian occupation bases in Lebanon. I have not seen any children killed here by Iranian bombs. I haven’t seen the IRGC massacring entire families on a daily basis. The IRGC has not shot at me or killed dozens of my colleagues in targeted attacks. Iran has not been systematically murdering healthcare workers (over 130) in Lebanon.

Israel has violently invaded and occupied Lebanon. The flag flying over the base in Al Khiam is an Israeli flag, not an Iranian flag. (Photo below)

The Lebanese Ministry of Health yesterday reported that 3,613 civilians have been killed and 11,072 have been wounded in Israeli attacks since March 2nd.

[Yuen Pau Woo @yuenpauwoo]

It is stunning that the government cannot confidently say that it isn’t antisemitic to criticize Israel for documented violations of international law.

The newly established council on rights and inclusion will get nowhere unless we get this clarity.

[Itay Epshtain @EpshtainItay]

On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a war of aggression against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and came to occupy the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, territory intended to form part of a future Palestinian State.

Within weeks, a young legal adviser at Israel's Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, set out the legal consequences with remarkable clarity. In a memorandum I recovered during archival research in 2019, he affirmed the applicability of the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention to the newly occupied territories, and recalled the prohibition on annexation.

Two months later, writing to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Meron advised that the establishment of civilian settlements in the occupied territories would be, in his words, in "contravention of explicit provisions" of international humanitarian law.

History has a habit of leaving breadcrumbs. Meron would later become President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and decades later advised the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on atrocity crimes committed by Netanyahu and others in Gaza. The legal position he articulated in 1967 has not changed. What has changed is that nearly six decades later, the warnings were ignored, the occupation entrenched and metastasized into unlawful presence, and the consequences are before us all.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

This is so true. Practically all the assholes I know support Israel. And all the compassionate, justice minded people I know have empathy for the Palestinians and are bothered by their suffering.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Rubio: "Israel's made clear they have no interest in governing Gaza, they have no interest in occupying Gaza long term (Oct. 5, 2025)

Netanyahu: "We are now in control of 60% of Gaza. We were at 50%. Now we've moved to 60%. My directive is to move to 70%" (May 28, 2026)

[Shaun King @shaunking]

If 9 Jewish paramedics were killed ANYWHERE in the world it would be called terrorism.

And we’d never hear the end of it.

Israel slaughtered 9 paramedics in 72 hours, most of which we’ve seen on film, and we only hear their names on Twitter.

[Joseph Hill @nebedaay]

@MarkJCarney He’s mocking you, saying you admitted that this is all legitimate self-defense. Don’t let him make a fool out of you. Every “statement of concern” says “People expect me to say something, but carry on. I’m too cowardly to take action.” https://t.co/YaJ7zjIiIZ

[יצחק הרצוג Isaac Herzog @Isaac_Herzog]

In my call with Prime Minister @MarkJCarney of Canada, I expressed my deep alarm over the rise in antisemitic violence in Canada. I called on Prime Minister Carney and his government to address the fear and sense of abandonment felt by our sisters and brothers in the Canadian Jewish community before it’s too late.

In our discussion, we agreed that Israel has the right to self-defense. I reiterated that we are acting to protect our people against the threat of terror from Iran and its terror proxies in the region, including Hezbollah in Lebanon. I also underlined the importance of implementing UN Security Council Resolution 2803 in Gaza, including the vital condition that Hamas is disarmed and a new government is established in Gaza.

[Joseph Hill @nebedaay]

We need more world leaders to issue statements of mild concern for the humanitarian issues being faced by populations in the Middle East.

Even better, unite to force Israel to stop its crimes against humanity. Arms embargo, BDS, trials for all genocidal criminals.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This is Tyre in South Lebanon today.

Israel is leveling entire civilian neighborhoods in one of the most intense bombardments yet.

One of humanity’s oldest cities.

Is being systematically wiped out.

And not a peep from the complicit international community, of course.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This is Tyre in South Lebanon today.

Israel is leveling entire civilian neighborhoods in one of the most intense bombardments yet.

One of humanity’s oldest cities.

Is being systematically wiped out.

And not a peep from the complicit international community, of course.

[Shafiur Rahman @shafiur]

Ko Tinmaung, a Toronto-based Rohingya activist, has been released after more than 96 hours in Israeli detention following Israel’s hijacking of the Global Sumud Flotilla and the abduction of its civilian participants.

His testimony is horrifying.

He says he was beaten in a dark room by more than five people, kicked, punched, tasered in multiple places, and handcuffed so tightly that the restraints cut into his wrists and restricted blood flow. He says he still needs treatment for concussion-like injuries.

He also says he witnessed other detainees with broken ribs, head wounds, blood from their ears, eye injuries, broken noses and broken teeth. Most gravely, he alleges sexual assaults, including people being tasered on their genitals.

Tinmaung’s testimony also exposes the racial dimension of Israeli violence. He says he was mocked as “Ahmed”, assaulted further, laughed at because of his skin colour, and treated as if his passport had no value because he was brown.

This was a civilian-led humanitarian mission carrying food, aid and basic supplies to Gaza. So where is Canada? Where are the human rights organisations? Where are the global leadership councils, the moral authorities, the professional defenders of accountability?

Silence now is not neutrality. It is complicity.

(Video courtesy https://t.co/WdpDXCJTFR)

[Joseph Hill @nebedaay]

@MarkJCarney As you know, he already knows and doesn't care. He believes everyone in Gaza is guilty, along with everyone who supports them.

Israel will only stop its crimes when the world unites to force it to stop. The world needs action, not more polite words of concern.

[Hala Jaber @HalaJaber]

Israel killed Umm Hisham & her two sons, Hisham & Hussam, today in Tyre, south Lebanon.

A mother & her children wiped out together when their home was bombed.

The family was of Palestinian origin.

The two men were not fighters. They were farmers, men who worked the land for a living.

[Zara Zhar @Boudicca61AD]

'Tantura. Remember Tantura'

The night of 22–23 May 1948 was warm and still—the kind of evening the village fishermen prayed for. It was the calm before the storm. Tantura slept under a thin moon when the first mortar shells tore the sky open. The Jewish death squads from the Alexandroni Brigade had arrived to execute what Plan Dalet ordered: empty the coast village by village, and burn it to the ground so that no Arab would remain between Yaffa and Haifa. Tantura had only a few military-aged men, a handful of old, rusty rifles, and the sea at its back. That was enough for the Zionists to label it a “stronghold” and sentence it to death.

When the first shells fell—a white flash, a roar—the village of Tantura woke up to hell. Children screamed in rooms suddenly blown open to the sky. Mothers ran barefoot over broken glass, clutching their infants close. Old men stumbled out in their nightshirts with hands raised, crying “Peace! Peace!” in Arabic and broken Hebrew. The answer was bullets. The Alexandroni Brigade swept through the lanes like a pack of half-starved wolves, kicking in doors and shooting anything that moved. A fourteen-year-old boy was shot in his bed; his mother found him with his arms still wrapped around his little sister, both soaked in the same blood. Some men and young boys were executed inside their own homes, while the Jewish militants trampled over their bodies to loot cupboards for gold, silver, or any bounty worth a shekel. By morning, the resistance was over.

By the first pale light of dawn, the shooting stopped. Forty or fifty village guards lay soaked in blood where they fell. The remaining men—fathers, brothers, young boys—were dragged from their houses, their hands bound tightly with wire. Women wailed the names of their husbands, fathers, and sons until their voices cracked. Children trying to run to their fathers were violently beaten back with rifle butts.

The women…The Jewish soldiers could not resist. In the documentary Tantura, their voices drop to whispers even now, more than half a century after the shame should have burned them alive. One man, his eyes wet, admitted: “After we finished the men… some of us took the pretty girls behind the dunes. We told the others to hold the families back. There was crying, terrible crying. We did what we wanted. Then we shot them too so there would be no witnesses.” Another soldier interrupted him, angry and defensive: “It was war. They would have done the same to our sisters.”

The enemy's terror squads marched the men in groups toward the beach. Some were forced to dig shallow graves in the sand. Then the shooting started. This was not the chaotic fire of battle; it was calm and methodical. They shot them in bursts of three and five. When the magazines ran dry, the Alexandroni henchmen reloaded without hurry—the way ungodly men reload when they know no one will ever stop them. When ammunition ran low, they used bayonets. A survivor hidden inside a barrel heard the wet sounds and the soldiers’ heavy breathing. Years later, one of them, still proud and gleeful, recounted on camera: “I stuck one Arab after another Arab. You push hard and twist; it comes out easier.” The sand drank the blood of the martyrs so fast it looked black. Bodies toppled forward, some remaining on their knees with foreheads pressed to the earth, as if in one final, permanent prostration.

One man tried to run; a bullet took off the back of his skull, scattering his brains across the sand. Another, wounded in the stomach, crawled toward the waves, leaving a deep red furrow behind him until a Jewish militant stepped forward and ended his life with a pistol shot to the temple. From his hiding place, one survivor counted more than three hundred shots before the silence came.

Some men were taken to the low wall by the cemetery and lined up in rows. They were shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, their blood running toward the ocean and turning the hushed, calm waves crimson.

The women, holding babies tightly to their breasts, were forced to watch alongside small children while the enemy laughed and took photographs. Then, they were driven out. Barefoot, bleeding, raped, and battered, they were forced to flee toward Fureidis with babies in their arms. Behind them, the village burned to the ground. Black smoke rose against the morning sky, carrying the heavy scent of burning wood and burning flesh for miles.

By noon, the bulldozers arrived. Houses that had stood for centuries were flattened in minutes. The mosque was dynamited. The bodies in the sand were covered with a thin layer of earth and lime. Within weeks, Kibbutz Nahsholim and the resort beach called Dor were built on top of the graves. Jewish children from Europe, fresh from the death camps, planted lawns and palm trees over the bones of Tantura’s sons and daughters. A parking lot sealed the largest pit. Sunbathers now spread their towels where the blood once soaked the sand.

That was Tantura.

A whole village murdered and erased in less than a day so that a racist colonial project could claim a few more kilometres of stolen coastline. The men who gave the orders went on to become ministers and generals in the state that calls itself Israel. The Jewish terrorists who pulled the triggers lived long lives, later bragging and laughing on tape about what “had to be done.”

One of the wretched henchmen was later filmed standing at the water’s edge in Tantura, staring at the waves as though he could still hear the chorus of mourning rising behind him. He whispered, almost to himself: “I can’t swim here anymore. The sea… it remembers.”

And the sea does remember. Every seventh wave, stronger than the rest, rolls in and back, rolls in and back, washing the sand as if trying, decade after decade, to uncover the truth buried beneath. The survivors and their children carry the memory in exile, while the world pretends it never happened.

There is no “two sides” to this massacre. There is no “complexity” to lining civilians against a wall and shooting them so you can take their homes and colonize their land.

Tantura was not a battle. It was an execution. It was ethnic cleansing with the ocean and heavens as witnesses.

And the waves still break on that shore, washing over the bones, whispering the names the Jewish murder squads tried to bury:

Tantura. Remember Tantura.

[Joseph Hill @nebedaay]

@CanadianPM Well-worded statement. Now make the unprecedented move of taking well-acted action. Words without actions train everyone to assume the words mean nothing.

[Global Sumud Flotilla @gbsumudflotilla]

At least 15 cases of sexual assaults, including rape.

Shot with rubber bullets at close range.

Tens of people’s bones broken.

While the world’s eye is trained on the suffering of our participants, we cannot emphasize enough that this is a mere glimpse of the brutality israel imposes daily on Palestinian hostages.

Don’t let up. Statements of condemnation are not enough. This moment must be seized by people worldwide to apply the necessary pressure to end this colonial violence. Pressure officials. Escalate boycott and divestment tactics. Organize direct action.

“Please, if this can be a lightning rod moment, let it be that … join us wherever you are and rise up so that we can end this occupation, end this colonialism, end this violence.”

Free Palestine NOW.