Tag: Middle East

Fury’s father bloodied in clash with Usyk’s entourage | Boxing News

Tyson Fury’s and Oleksandr Usyk’s entourages clash at media event before Saturday’s boxing bout in Saudi Arabia.

Tyson Fury’s father appears to have head-butted a member of Oleksandr Usyk’s entourage in a bloody clash at a media day for Saturday’s undisputed world heavyweight title fight in Saudi Arabia.

John Fury, with a cut on his forehead and bloody streaks on his face, confirmed to Sky Sports television his involvement in an incident at the event on Monday in Riyadh attended by both fighters.

“[He] disrespected my son, the best heavyweight to ever wear a pair of boxing gloves,” he said.

“He was in my face, trying to be clever – coming into my space [with] ‘Usyk! Usyk!’” he added. “… I was only chanting my own son’s name. So then he went a step closer and a step closer. So at the end of it, I’m a warrior. That’s what we do. We’re fighting people.

“You come in the space, you’re going to get what’s coming.”

Sky reported Saudi authorities had decided to draw a line under the incident.

Ring of Fire set alight already

Billed as the “Ring of Fire”, the fight will unify Briton Fury’s WBC heavyweight championship with the WBA, IBF, WBO and IBO belts held by Ukrainian Usyk. Both are undefeated professionally.

“I didn’t see anything,” Sky quoted Tyson Fury as saying. “I was in the room doing interviews. But I’m not here for all that. I’m here to get the job done and go home and rest.”

The fight originally was to have been held on December 23. It was then set for February 17 before being rescheduled when Fury suffered a cut in sparring.

Usyk’s manager, Alexander Krassyuk, hoped the elder Fury would apologise.

“It would be nice if we hear some apologies from John because this was his behaviour,” he told Sky.

“We are the example for the whole world. … A new generation of kids are taking us as an example. What will they see from this?”

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Extermination, expulsion ‘identifiable strategies’ of Israel’s war in Gaza | Israel War on Gaza News

A human rights group calls on the United Kingdom to stop arming Israel as its campaign in the strip continues.

London, United Kingdom – Mass extermination and mass expulsion are “identifiable strategies” of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, a human rights group warns, as it calls on the United Kingdom to impose an arms embargo.

Restless Beings, which is based in the UK, decried Israel’s “policies of colonialist occupation” on Monday in a report that has won support from Afzal Khan, a member of the UK Parliament with the opposition Labour Party.

“Rather than meeting the stated intention of extracting hostages and dismantling Hamas, the most obvious findings in this report highlight destruction of places of refuge and accessibility of those who are displaced,” the seven authors of the study wrote, having reviewed the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza from early October until early February.

“In all of the 753 cases of civilian infrastructure attacks recorded in the report, civilian loss of life and the destruction of civilian society is clearly evidenced,” the report found.

 

The Israeli assault began on October 7, the day Hamas attacked southern Israel.

During the Palestinian group’s attacks, 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 were taken captive. Some hostages have since been released, others have died and dozens are still being held.

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children.

Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble, and the majority of Palestinians have been displaced, many of them multiple times.

Boys watch smoke billowing up from eastern Rafah during Israeli strikes [AFP]

Across 146 days monitored in the report, hospitals in Gaza were attacked on “65 percent” of those days, it found.

“The attacks on hospitals were systematic, moving north to south to render all health facilities non-operational by the middle of February, 2024. Roads around hospitals were attacked first to prevent patients from seeking medical assistance or evacuating,” it said.

“Just under half of Gaza’s hospitals and health facilities have been attacked multiple times by [the] Israeli army, either by air, sea, or ground attacks.”

Israel has long blockaded Gaza and imposed a total siege on October 9.

At the time, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s minister of defence, said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.”

In a comment that was widely condemned, he added: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

A looming ‘death sentence’

Gaza’s Ministry of Health warned on Monday that without an influx of fuel deliveries, the few hospitals that are still operating could collapse within hours.

Junaid Sultan, a vascular surgeon who volunteered in the southern area of Rafah, told Al Jazeera that hospitals would run out of electricity and water without the deliveries.

“[If] that fuel does not come in, that will be a death sentence to not only hundreds, but thousands of patients,” Sultan said.

Restless Beings found that much of Gaza’s population is also at risk of “starvation, forced displacement to a third country and of further attacks” as it blamed international governments for not recognising “the Israeli strategy” in Gaza.

It found that the patterns of Israel’s military operation indicate that it has breached the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which classify attacks on civilian infrastructure as a “war crime”.

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Israelis killing Palestinians ‘in cold blood’ in occupied West Bank | Occupied West Bank

On October 19, Sarah Mahamid watched helplessly from a window as Israeli security forces shot her younger brother.

Taha, 15, had been playing with a friend outside their house in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem.

The 19-year-old screamed as her brother fell to the ground.

Their father, Ibrahim, ran out of the front door to get his son, but a sniper shot him too.

“I remember hearing my father shout that Taha might be alive, … but I knew that Taha was martyred. I knew he was dead,” Sarah told Al Jazeera.

Taha was killed instantly. Ibrahim fought for his life for five months in intensive care until he also died.

Footage seen by Al Jazeera shows Taha and Ibrahim were both unarmed and posed no threat.

“My other brother ran after my father out the door to stop him. He saw that Taha was dead, and he saw my father get shot.

“It seemed like steam or smoke was rising from my father’s body as the bullets hit him.”

Taha Mahamid, left, and his father Ibrahim, right, were shot and killed outside their home by Israeli forces during a raid in Tulkarem [Courtesy of Sarah Mahamid]

Unlawful, random killings

Nearly 1,500 Palestinians have been unlawfully killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in the past 16 years – 98 percent of them civilians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Each of them, like Taha and Ibrahim, has a story and loved ones who mourn them.

The frequency of the killings have spiked in recent years with Israel killing 509 Palestinians in 2023. That is more than double the number recorded by OCHA in any previous year.

In the first three months of this year, 131 Palestinians were killed, a higher rate of killing than the previous year, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“Israel has a decades-long pattern of using lethal force against Palestinians, … but it seems that the Israeli government is taking even further steps in that regard,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director at HRW.

Israel says its operations in the West Bank are necessary for security reasons. It cites the same justification for its assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed 35,000 Palestinians in response to the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed 1,139 people.

The killings in the West Bank are carried out during home raids or during stops and harassment at Israeli checkpoints.

Some Palestinian children have even been killed on their way to school, according to HRW.

“[The Israelis] are firing at people who don’t pose an imminent threat to life. They are also firing at people who are fleeing and at people who are injured and lying on the ground. Some of these trends have existed before, but it appears these incidents are happening more frequently,” Shakir told Al Jazeera.

Shoot to kill

Israeli officials have for years backed a shoot-to-kill policy regardless of whether the Palestinians being shot posed a threat. Israel has even authorised its army to shoot at stone throwers and has handed out assault rifles to Israeli Jews living in illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Settlers killed 17-year-old Omar Abdel Ghani Hamid when they attacked his village in the West Bank on April 13. Omar was one of several young men who had confronted the settlers to stop them from beating up Palestinians and attacking their homes.

Omar’s father, Ahmed, said his son and his friends scared the settlers away even though they were not carrying weapons. However, one of the settlers returned with a pistol and shot Omar.

“The bullet went through the right side of his head and out the left. He died immediately. Thank God he didn’t suffer much pain,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed learned about Omar’s death via a WhatsApp group that all the villagers use to notify each other of settler attacks. Later that morning, his son was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Omar Abdel Ghani Hamid, 17, was killed by an Israeli settler in April [Courtesy of Ahmed Abdel Ghani Hamid]

Ahmed said he is searching for justice but Jewish Israelis are almost never held accountable by the Israeli authorities.

From 2017 to 2021, less than 1 percent of all legal complaints that Palestinians filed against Israeli soldiers, including for extrajudicial killings, led to prosecutions, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din said.

In that time, only three Israeli soldiers were convicted of killing Palestinians and were given lenient sentences. Others were ordered to complete “military community service” for killing Palestinians, it said.

“There is a culture where Israeli units know that they can carry out grave abuses without being held accountable for their abuses,” Shakir from HRW said.

‘Colonising our minds’

Army raids and extrajudicial killings are part of a broader attempt to keep Palestinians in the West Bank “afraid”, said Zaid Shuabi, analyst and activist with the Palestinian rights group Al-Haq.

But it has ultimately led to the formation of a new generation of armed groups, often established by young people who are fed up with the occupation’s transgressions.

Israel’s response to this new wave of resistance has been to target entire communities to crush the morale of Palestinians, Shuabi said.

“They want to reshape the Palestinian mind into thinking that we shouldn’t even dare to resist. And if we do, then we will pay a high price,” he told Al Jazeera.

“This is about intimidating us. They want to put us down … and to colonise our minds.”

Sarah believes that was the purpose behind the Israeli attack on her family. She said that while her father and brother bled to death on the street, Israeli soldiers entered her house.

The Israeli army then cut off the water and electricity to their home. At one point, one of the Israeli soldiers began beating Sarah’s other brother with the butt of his rifle, telling him to keep silent.

Moments before the soldiers left, Sarah mustered up the courage to ask why they terrorised her family.

“He said, ‘To scare you,’” Sarah told Al Jazeera. “I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what was wrong with them.

“They killed my brother and my father just to scare me.”

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How the US State Department shields Israel from sanctions | Israel War on Gaza

Inside the labyrinth of the State Department’s mechanisms that allow the flow of weapons to Israel, despite violations.

Over the years, the United States government has been creating special mechanisms to shield Israel from sanctions designed to punish countries for human rights abuses.

President Joe Biden has paused a weapons shipment to Israel and acknowledged that US weapons have been used by Israel to kill Palestinian civilians, but the US Department of State refused to declare if Israel had broken US or international laws in its war on Gaza.

Host Steve Clemons asks Guardian US investigative reporter Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Georgetown University human rights law expert Stephen Rickard about the structures in place that ultimately allow Israel to evade accountability.

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Egypt says it will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at ICJ | Gaza News

Egypt says it will formally join the case filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which accuses Israel of violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention in its war on the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Sunday that Cairo intended to join the case due to escalating Israeli aggression against Palestinian civilians.

“The submission … comes in light of the worsening severity and scope of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, and the continued perpetration of systematic practices against the Palestinian people, including direct targeting of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure in the Strip, and pushing Palestinians to flee,” the ministry said in a statement.

South Africa brought its case against Israel in January, accusing the country of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October, has surpassed 35,000, and most of the dead are women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.

Israel launched the assault after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel, killing at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli statistics.

The top United Nations court issued an interim ruling in January that found there was a plausible risk of genocide in the enclave and ordered Israel to take a series of provisional measures, including preventing any genocidal acts from taking place.

The court, which sits in The Hague, rejected a second South African application for emergency measures made in March over Israel’s threat to attack Rafah.

Egypt will join Turkey and Colombia in formally requesting to join the case against Israel. This month, Turkey said it would seek to join the case after the South American country asked the ICJ last month to allow it to join to ensure “the safety and, indeed, the very existence of the Palestinian people”.

Egypt said it is calling on Israel “to comply with its obligations as the occupying power and to implement the provisional measures issued by the ICJ, which require ensuring access to humanitarian and relief aid in a manner that meets the needs of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.

It also demands that Israeli forces do not commit any violations against the Palestinian people.

It will likely take years before the court will rule on the merits of the genocide case. While the ICJ’s rulings are binding and without appeal, the court has no way to enforce them.

Israel has repeatedly said it is acting in accordance with international law in Gaza. It has called South Africa’s genocide case baseless and accused Pretoria of acting as “the legal arm of Hamas”.

‘Diplomatic blow’

Alon Liel, former director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Al Jazeera that Egypt’s move was an “unbelievable diplomatic blow to Israel”.

“Egypt is the cornerstone of our standing in the Middle East,” he said. The connections that Israel has in the Middle East and North Africa today, including with Jordan, the UAE and Morocco, are all “a result of what Egypt did 40 years ago”, he said, referring to the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries.

“With Egypt joining South Africa now in The Hague, it’s a real diplomatic punch. Israel would have to take it very seriously.

“Israel has to … listen to the world – not only to the Israeli public opinion asking now for revenge.

“We have to look overall in the wider picture, in the long-term security of Israel, not only in the next few weeks in Gaza.”

The latest legal development comes as Israel engaged in new battles with Hamas in northern Gaza and ordered tens of thousands more people to evacuate from the southern city of Rafah, which lies close to Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Israeli forces seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing on Tuesday, a day after Hamas said it had accepted an Egyptian-Qatari mediated ceasefire proposal, which Israel quickly rejected. The crossing had been the main entry point for aid into Gaza, but it has been closed since Israel took control of it.

Tanks and planes pounded several areas and at least four houses in Rafah overnight, killing 20 Palestinians and wounding several others, according to Palestinian health officials.

The city is crammed with more than one million displaced Palestinians living in dire conditions, and the international community has warned Israel that a full-scale Israeli ground assault would trigger a humanitarian catastrophe for civilians.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the Rafah offensive was needed to defeat Hamas.

About 110,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah in recent days, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

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Egypt deals ‘diplomatic blow’ to Israel by joining ICJ genocide case | Gaza

NewsFeed

Egypt says it will formally support South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Israel’s former foreign minister tells Al Jazeera it represents an ‘unbelievable diplomatic blow to Israel’.

Published On 12 May 2024

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Israel pounds northern Gaza, months after declaring Hamas dismantled | Gaza

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Israeli forces have launched a new offensive in northern Gaza, months after saying Hamas had been ‘dismantled’ there. Residential areas sheltering displaced Palestinians have been flattened and tanks have entered the Jabalia refugee camp, as Gaza’s death toll crosses 35,000 people.

Published On 12 May 2024

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UN chief urges ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Gaza as 35,000 Palestinians killed | Israel War on Gaza News

The United Nations’ Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has renewed his call for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip as Israeli forces have killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in the besieged territory since the attacks began in October, say officials.

In a video address to international donors gathered in Kuwait on Sunday, Guterres also called for “the unconditional release of all captives held by Hamas as well as an immediate surge in humanitarian aid” into Gaza.

“A ceasefire will only be the start,” he said in the video, cautioning that “it will be a long road back from the devastation and trauma of this war”.

As Guterres repeated his plea, Israeli forces hit multiple points in Gaza, displacing anew hundreds of thousands of refugees already fleeing the war. Israeli tanks rolled into Jabalia, while multiple strikes killed dozens of people in Beit Lahiya in the north and Rafah in the south.

Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that at least 12 bodies arrived at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the town of Beit Lahiya following what it described as the Israeli “carpet bombing”.

Emad Oudeh, resident of Beit Lahiya, told Al Jazeera they did not know where to go as Israeli attacks intensified. “We are shocked. We do not know what to do. We are physically and mentally worn out. We are on the verge of going insane.”

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said Israeli tanks have started “to go deeper” into the Jabalia refugee camp.

Jabalia is the biggest of Gaza’s eight refugee camps and is home to more than 100,000 people, most of them descendants of Palestinians who were driven from towns and villages in what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to the creation of the state of Israel.

“We have been hearing from eyewitnesses on the ground, in that very densely populated area, that military tanks are surrounding evacuation centres and residential buildings,” Abu Azzoum said.

Those fleeing Israeli bombardment also have to contend with an acute shortage of food and medical supplies in areas where they have taken shelter.

Mahmoud Basal of the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza said there were no more medical services or humanitarian aid being provided to displaced people in the northern part of the Strip.

“We have lost 80 percent of our capabilities and no one is responding to the appeals we make to international institutions,” the civil defence spokesman said in a statement.

Imad Abu Zayda, an emergency doctor in Jabalia, told Al Jazeera that most of the injured arriving at his hospital were women and children, describing the situation as dire.

“We are operating with minimum facilities. No light due to the lack of fuel and there’s no medical supplement available as Israel has expanded their operation in the area. We have no oxygen to give to patients,” he said.

A Palestinian woman who was forced to flee Jabalia after the Israeli military called on residents to evacuate, in Gaza City in northern Gaza [Mahmoud Issa/Reuters]

‘No safe place in Gaza’

In central Gaza, the civil defence department reported at least two fatalities, a father and son, both doctors, in an Israeli strike in Deir el-Balah on Sunday.

Further south in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city along the border with Egypt, the Kuwaiti hospital said it received the bodies of 18 people killed in Israeli strikes over the past 24 hours.

Israeli military vehicles roll near the boundary with the Gaza Strip as its forces expand their operation in the besieged Palestinian territory [Menahem Kahana/AFP]

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, gave a similar estimate of “around 300,000 people” who have fled Rafah over the past week, decrying in a post on X the “forced and inhumane displacement of Palestinians” who have “nowhere safe to go” in Gaza.

Palestinians in Rafah, many of them displaced by the fighting elsewhere in the territory, piled water tanks, mattresses and other belongings onto vehicles and prepared to flee again.

“The artillery shelling didn’t stop at all” for several days, said Mohammed Hamad, 24, who has left eastern Rafah for the city’s west. “There is no safe place in Gaza where we can take refuge.”

Residents were told to go to the “humanitarian zone” of al-Mawasi, on the coast northwest of Rafah, though aid groups have warned it was not ready for an influx of people.

EU chief Charles Michel, however, said on social media that Rafah civilians were being ordered to “unsafe zones”, denouncing it as “unacceptable”.

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How US Big Tech supports Israel’s AI-powered genocide and apartheid | Opinions

Shortly after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a statement on social media, extending sympathy to Israelis without mentioning the Palestinians. Other tech executives – including from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – offered their gushing support for Israel as well.

Since then, they have remained largely silent as the Israeli army has massacred close to 35,000 Palestinians, including more than 14,500 children, destroyed hundreds of schools and all universities and devastated Palestinian homes, healthcare infrastructure, mosques and heritage sites.

To execute this shocking level of destruction, the Israeli military has been assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) programs designed to produce targets with little human oversight. It is not clear to what extent foreign tech giants are directly involved in these projects, but we can say with certainty that they supply much of the core infrastructure required to build them, including advanced computer chips, software and cloud computing.

Amid this AI-assisted genocide, Big Tech in the United States is quietly continuing business as usual with Israel. Intel has announced a $25bn investment in a chip plant located in Israel, while Microsoft has launched a new Azure cloud region in the country.

None of this should come as a surprise. For decades, Silicon Valley has been supporting the Israeli apartheid regime, supplying the advanced technology and investment needed to power its economy and occupy Palestine.

Just as they did in 20th-century South Africa, today’s largest US-based technology corporations see an opportunity to profit from Israeli apartheid – a by-product of US-driven digital colonialism.

AI-assisted genocide

Big Tech has been complicit in Israel’s occupation, dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most well-known one is its support for pervasive Israeli surveillance of the occupied Indigenous population.

In March 2021, Google, along with Amazon, signed a $1.2bn contract for cloud computing services for the Israeli government and defence establishment. The two companies provide Israel with the capacity to store, process and analyse data, including facial recognition, emotion recognition, biometrics and demographic information in what is known as Project Nimbus.

The deal received considerable attention in the mainstream media after Google and Amazon workers demanded an end to the contract by launching the campaign No Tech for Apartheid. Anticipating this response, Google and Amazon signed a contract with Israel guaranteeing the continuation of services in the event of a boycott campaign. To date, they have held firm and continue to supply Israel with cloud computing services.

Details around Nimbus are concealed from the public, but Google employees have raised fears that it may be servicing Israel’s AI-infused military massacres. These concerns were amplified by reports that the Israeli army is using a new AI-powered system, such as “Lavender” and “The Gospel” to decide on targets for its bombardment of Gaza. According to one former Israeli intelligence official, The Gospel facilitates a “mass assassination factory” where “emphasis is on quantity, not quality”.

Meanwhile, recent reports have revealed that Google is working directly with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, despite the ongoing genocide. The company also allows Israeli forces to use its Google Photos facial recognition service to scan the faces of Palestinians across Gaza for its dystopian “hit list”.

Silicon Valley and apartheid surveillance

Yet AI-assisted genocide is just the tip of the iceberg. For decades, American tech corporations and investors have been quietly aiding and abetting Israel’s system of digital apartheid. One of the most egregious examples is IBM, which was also the major supplier of computers for the South African apartheid regime’s national population registry and the upgraded passport system used to sort people by race and enforce segregation.

According to Who Profits, an independent research centre dedicated to exposing commercial involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land and population, “IBM designed and operates the Eitan System of the Israeli Population, Immigration and Border Authority [PIBA]… where personal information on the occupied Palestinian and Syrian people collected by Israel, is stored and managed.” The system contains information collected through Israel’s national population database and at the border and major checkpoints.

PIBA is also a part of Israel’s permit system which requires Palestinians over the age of 16 to carry “smart” cards, containing their photograph, address, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers. Much like in apartheid South Africa’s passport system, the cards double as permits which determine Palestinian rights to cross through Israeli checkpoints for any purpose, including work, family reunification, religious rituals or travelling abroad.

Microsoft for its part has supplied cloud computing space for the Israeli army’s “Almunasseq” app used for issuing permits to Palestinians in the occupied territories. In the past, it also held a stake in surveillance firm AnyVision (renamed Oosto) which provides real-time facial recognition services to Israeli authorities. Other companies, such as Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Dell, supply technology to service Israeli military and carceral authorities.

Building Israel’s tech superiority

Apart from assisting the Israeli surveillance apparatus, Silicon Valley also provides critical support to the Israeli business sector, helping it maintain and develop a high-tech modern economy.

For example, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all launched major cloud computing centres in Israel, offering businesses infrastructure critical to data-driven products and services. Intel is the largest private employer in the country, having commenced operations in 1974.

Along with hundreds of other multinationals, Microsoft hosts its own research and development (R&D) centre in Israel, and it launched a chip development centre in Haifa. Nvidia, the trillion-dollar chip behemoth powering the AI revolution, has also announced it is expanding its already large R&D operations in Israel. The list goes on.

Venture capitalists are also critical to growing Israel’s local tech sector, which houses 10 percent of the world’s unicorns (companies worth at least $1bn), accounts for 14 percent of jobs and generates about 20 percent of the country’s GDP. Since 2019, $32bn has been invested in Israeli companies, with 51 percent led or co-led by US-based investors.

Social media companies have also lent a helping hand to Israeli apartheid and occupation. In 2022, an outside report commissioned by Meta found that Facebook and Instagram’s speech policies showed bias against Palestinians. These longstanding practices of blatant censorship against Palestinians are continuing into the present.

In December, Human Rights Watch reported that Meta continues to crack down on pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram. Of 1,050 cases reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content supportive of Palestine that was censored or suppressed – despite allowing a substantial amount of pro-Palestine content – and one removal in support of Israel. The company is even considering censoring the word “Zionist”.

Other organisations stand accused of censoring pro-Palestine voices, including X (formerly Twitter), YouTube and even China-owned TikTok. Western governments, including the US and the European Union, have been pressuring Big Social Media companies to review and censor content deemed “terrorist” or supportive of Palestine.

Big Tech censorship extends beyond everyday users. Political organisations like Hamas are banned by Big Social Media giants. Meanwhile, the Israeli military, government and other organs of Israeli state terror post freely, with widespread support.

Digital colonialism

It is no surprise that US-based Big Tech companies are partnering with and investing in Israel, supporting its genocidal and apartheid activities.

Big Tech corporations are modern-day East India companies; they are an extension of American imperial power. They colonise the global digital economy and reinforce the divide between the North and the South. As a result, the US profits from the ownership of digital infrastructure and knowledge and the extraction of resources from the Global South.

Digital colonialism is hardwired into Big Tech’s DNA. Its close relationship with the Israeli army is not only lucrative, but it serves the broader geopolitical interests of the American Empire, from which it benefits.

Tech corporations’s support for Israel exposes their fake image as companies espousing antiracism and human rights. In reality, they are complicit in Israeli crimes, much like other organs of American imperialism. What we are witnessing is US-Israeli apartheid, colonial conquest and genocide, powered by American tech giants.

But just as the US and other Western governments are feeling the heat of legal action taken against them for the role they are playing in the genocide in Gaza, so are Western companies. US tech giants bear clear responsibility for what is happening in Palestine. They are on the wrong side of history, just as they were in apartheid South Africa. With enough popular pressure, Big Tech collaborators will find their day in court soon.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

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Thousands protest against Israel’s participation in Eurovision final | Israel War on Gaza News

Thousands of people have protested in the Swedish city of Malmo against Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, with Israel’s war on Gaza casting a shadow over the final of the glitzy contest.

On Saturday, a large crowd of protesters gathered on the central square of the Swedish host city before marching towards the contest venue, waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Eurovision united by genocide” – a twist on the contest’s official slogan “united by music”.

A protester told Al Jazeera that it was unfair that a country that is “committing genocide” was allowed to take part in the event, and he said that demonstrators were upset by the confiscation of Palestinian flags and scarves by the authorities.

“Here in Malmo a lot of people are from Palestine and many of their families are getting hurt [in Gaza and Palestine] and they just feel angry about the situation and how the Swedish government and the city has handled this situation,” he said.

“So there is a lot of frustration and a lot of anger.”

Reporting from Malmo, Al Jazeera’s Paul Rhys said that the protests over the past few days have been relatively peaceful, but as the final got under way, several protesters were taken away by the police.

“Quite a few demonstrators kind of got in here [the Malmo arena] in secret and started protesting with Palestinian flags. They were boxed in by the police and taken away one by one,” he said.

Police estimated that between 6,000 and 8,000 people joined the demonstrations in Malmo on Saturday.

Meanwhile, inside the auditorium French singer Slimane halted his rehearsal act earlier on Saturday to say it had been a childhood dream of his to sing for peace.

“We need to be united by music,” Slimane said, referring to the official Eurovision slogan.

The final, the culmination of the festival of catchy songs, gaudy costumes and tongue-in-cheek kitsch, kicks off at 19:00 GMT.

Police remove pro-Palestinian protesters in front of the Malmo Arena in Malmo, Sweden [Tobias Schwarz/AFP]

Pro-Palestinian protesters have complained of double standards as the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises the contest,

banned Russia from Eurovision in 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine.

Eurovision organisers, who have always billed the annual event as non-political, resisted calls to exclude Israel and in March, the EBU confirmed that Israel’s contestant Eden Golan would take part.

Golan’s song is an adaptation of an earlier version named, October Rain, which she modified after organisers deemed it too political because of its apparent allusions to the Hamas-led October 7 attack.

On Thursday, some booing was heard from the crowd before, during and after his performance in the semifinals, but there was also applause and Israeli flags being waved.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also wished Golan good luck and said she had “already won” by enduring protests that he called a “horrible wave of anti-Semitism”.

Dutch contestant disqualified

Earlier on Saturday, the contest was also rattled earlier by the disqualification of Dutch contestant Joost Klein.

“Swedish police have investigated a complaint made by a female member of the production crew after an incident following his performance in Thursday night’s semi-final,” the European Broadcasting Union, which oversees the event, said in a statement.

“While the legal process takes its course, it would not be appropriate for him to continue in the contest.”

Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS said the incident had involved Klein being filmed directly after coming off stage “against clearly made agreements”.

According to an AVROTROS statement, Klein then repeatedly indicated he did not want to be filmed after which he made a “threatening movement” toward the camera, but did not touch the camerawoman.

“We stand for good manners – let there be no misunderstanding about that – but in our view, an exclusion order is not proportional to this incident,” AVROTROS said.

Klein had already courted controversy at Thursday’s news conference when he repeatedly covered his face with a Dutch flag, seemingly signifying he did not agree with being placed next to Israel’s contestant, Golan.

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