The Met’s Refusal Is The Latest In A Pattern Of Dereliction: British Institutions, One By One, Are Declining To Act On Israel’s Crimes.
The Metropolitan Police has declined to investigate Britons accused of committing war crimes while serving with the Israeli military in Gaza.
Last April, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) filed an extensive, 240-page dossier to the Met’s War Crimes Team.
The report detailed the alleged involvement of the 10 British nationals, including dual citizens, in the “targeted killings of civilians and aid workers, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, attacks on hospitals and protected sites, and the forced transfer and displacement of civilians”.
Over 70 legal and human rights experts urged the Met’s War Crimes Team to investigate all suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed by Britons when the dossier was handed in.
In its recent decision letter, the Met Police accepted that international bodies have found that Israel’s actions in Gaza “could amount to war crimes” and identified at least four individuals of “particular interest.”
However, the War Crimes Team has refused to move beyond a scoping exercise, saying there was “no realistic prospect of conviction” and that an “effective investigation could not be conducted.”
Paul Heron, a solicitor at PILC, said: “We reject The Met’s conclusions”.
“By demanding evidence capable of securing a realistic prospect of conviction before even opening an investigation, the Police have applied the wrong legal test and set the bar far too high. British nationals and residents cannot be allowed to participate in atrocities abroad with impunity.”
The PILC maintains that the referral provided credible material warranting a full investigation.
We recently revealed that at least 2000 Britons served in Israel’s military during the Gaza genocide.
Meanwhile, Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state may also place British nationals serving in the Israeli army in breach of the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act.
The act prohibits citizens from fighting for a foreign state at war with another state at peace with the UK, but there is no sign of enforcement.
And what is absent is equally telling: The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) travel advice for Ukraine explicitly warns British nationals that fighting there “may amount to offences under UK legislation” and that they “could be prosecuted on your return”.
No equivalent warning appears in FCDO advice for Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
This exposes a glaring and systemic accountability gap, one the Foreign Office recently deepened by quietly shutting down its unit tracking Israeli breaches of international law.
The Met’s refusal is the latest in a pattern of dereliction: British institutions, one by one, declining to act on Israel’s crimes.
( Hamza Yusef, Declassified UK, 08.05.2026 )
The U.S. Have A Long History Of Kidnapping And Removing Foreign Leaders That Do Not Serve Washington’s Agenda.
While the United States actions in kidnapping a foreign head of state and placing him on trial on dubious charges may have shocked the world, it fits in with a long history of American imperial actions designed to remove leaders and movements that do not serve Washington’s agenda.
The Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro fits into a long history of United States kidnapping of foreign leaders.
On January 3, 2026, U.S. Special Forces entered Venezuela by air, captured Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, killing around 80 people in the process.
They were flown to the United States, where Maduro was put on trial on spurious drug trafficking and possession of firearms charges.
Despite President Trump himself declaring that “kidnapping” was an appropriate term for what happened, corporate media around the world have refrained from using the obvious word for what transpired, preferring to use “capturing” or “seizing”.
These terms reframe the incident and cast doubt on its illegality, helping to manufacture public consent for a grave breach of international law.
Indeed, managers at the BBC sent out a memo to its staff, instructing them in no uncertain terms to avoid using “kidnapped” when reporting on the news.
The actions against Maduro come exactly 36 years to the day after the United States abducted Panamanian president, Manuel Noriega.
Like Maduro, Noriega was charged with narcotics offences.
Unlike Maduro, however, there is little doubt of his guilt, as he was on the CIA payroll when these crimes took place.
The U.S. invaded Panama with 27,000 troops in December 1989, and shot their way to the presidential palace, killing hundreds of Panamanians in the process.
Noriega surrendered to the Americans on January 3, 1990, and spent the rest of his life in prison. He died in 2017.
Panama itself was carved out of Colombia by the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, so that the United States could directly control the Panama Canal, that was in the process of construction at the time.
Likewise, Haiti has consistently suffered at the hands of direct U.S. intervention.
The United States invaded the island nation in 1915, occupying it for 19 years, before installing a series of brutal dictatorships that repressed the population.
A glimmer of light in a long dark history occurred in 1990, when the country’s first democratic election brought populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power.
Aristide beat U.S.-backed candidate Marc Bazin (a former World Bank official) in a 68% to 14% landslide.
The U.S. refused to accept the results, and worked to depose Aristide, and Bazin eventually became president anyway.
Remarkably, Aristide’s political career was not over, and he was elected again in 2000.
He refused to accept Haiti’s role as a source of cheap labour for the U.S., and insisted on trying to build a just, equitable, and prosperous country.
Once again, this put him on a crash course with Washington, who, in February 2004, organised a coup against him.
U.S. personnel invaded Haiti and surrounded the presidential palace, abducting Aristide and plunging the country into another period of dictatorship, from which it has not emerged.
“During the night of 28 February, there was a coup d’état. One could say that it was terrorism disguised as diplomacy,” Aristide said, noting that heavily armed “foreign white men” pointed their guns at him, forced him to resign, and whisked him away to an enforced exile in the Central African Republic and South Africa.
In 2013, the United States downed the presidential plane of Bolivia’s Evo Morales over Austria, and demanded to board the aircraft, leading to a tense standoff that Vice-President Álvaro García Linera described as Morales being “kidnapped by imperialism.”
Morales was on his way back from Moscow, and U.S. officials believed that whistleblower Edward Snowden was aboard the jet.
Thus, rather than potentially allow Snowden to escape to freedom, Washington decided to spark a major diplomatic incident.
Morales was later allowed to return to his home country.
Snowden was not on board.
The same fate, however, will not befall American officials, thanks to a little-known act passed into law in 2002 by the Bush administration.
The Hague Invasion Act stipulates that if any American official or military serviceman is ever detained abroad by the International Criminal Court, the United States will invade the Netherlands (its NATO ally) in order to prevent them from facing trial.
Maduro is not the first Venezuelan official Washington has helped kidnap.
In 2002, the Bush administration planned and executed a coup d’état that briefly ousted Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, from power.
The U.S. government had been organising and financing the ringleaders of the coup for months, flying the key players back and forth to Washington, D.C. for meetings with top officials.
On the day of the coup, American Ambassador Charles Shapiro was at the mansion of local media magnate, Gustavo Cisneros, the headquarters of the coup.
Two U.S. warships entered Venezuelan waters, moving towards the remote island of La Orchila, where Chavez was helicoptered to.
Chavez himself stated that senior American personnel were present with him during his abduction.
Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration immediately endorsed the proceedings, describing them as a return to democracy.
Chavez was only saved the same fate as Maduro after millions of Venezuelans flocked into the streets, demanding a return of their president.
Their actions spurred loyal military units who retook the presidential palace, and the project fell apart.
After the coup, the United States quadrupled its funding to the coup leaders (including Maria Corina Machado) through vehicles such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
A further kidnapping of a Venezuelan official occurred in June 2020, when the United States downed the plane of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.
Saab was in Cabo Verde at the time, traveling back from a diplomatic mission to Iran, where he has been helping break American sanctions.
He was only released in 2023, after Venezuela negotiated a prisoner swap which included a number of CIA agents captured in Venezuela in the act of carrying out terror attacks against the country’s infrastructure.
( Alan MacLeod, 09.01.2026 ) .. mintpressnews.com
Israel Plans To Spend $730million On Propaganda.
Israel is preparing to spend nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars on its propaganda arm as it seeks to counter a worsening global image shaped by the genocide in Gaza and regional wars.
First reported by The Jerusalem Post, a total of $730million has been allocated to the national public diplomacy directorate, known by its Hebrew name Hasbara, which oversees Israeli propaganda.
The figure marks a sharp increase from the $150million set aside the previous year, which had already surged to roughly 20 times pre-2023 levels.
The scale of the spending points to an intensified effort to improve Israel’s international standing as negative perceptions grow, including in allied countries such as the United States.
Israel has been widely accused of genocide in the Gaza Strip, where its forces have killed and injured more than 250,000 Palestinians since October 2023 and starved 2.3 million people. The country has also been accused of creating an apartheid system in the occupied West Bank. Israel has additionally drawn criticism for belligerent acts in Syria, Lebanon, Qatar and most recently the wars on Iran.
Earlier this year, Israel faced intensifying scrutiny over links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who has been suspected of ties to Mossad.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, while Israel confronts genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.
In the US, Israel’s closest ally, Israel has been accused of drawing Washington into the war with Iran, which triggered global economic disruption.
( Elis Gjevori, 01.05.2026 ) .. middleeasteye.net
Bush’s “War On Terror” Cost Millions Of Lives, Mass Displacement Of People, And Normalised Racism And Hatred For Muslims, Refugees And Minorities.
Twenty-five years ago, George W Bush persuaded European leaders to back his “war on terror”.
That disastrous project cost millions of lives and caused mass displacement of people from across the Middle East.
It normalised racism and hatred for Muslims, refugees and racialised minorities in the U.S. and Europe.
I fear Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, with its calls to defend white, western, Christian civilisation against supposedly contaminating racialised migrants, and the standing ovation he received from European elites, may mark a chilling sequel.
Rubio’s language of a shared and superior American and European civilisation differs from that of his bosses, Donald Trump and JD Vance.
His tone is more emollient but his outreach is conspiratorial.
Rubio talks of migration and identity and civilisational anxiety, rather than terrorism and hard security threats as Bush once did.
In his Munich speech, Rubio flattered Europeans about the continent’s colonial past.
He denied preaching a message of xenophobia or hate, and instead framed his call to defend national borders as entirely respectable, dutiful and a “fundamental act of sovereignty”.
Judging by the applause Rubio received in Munich, I fear that too many European leaders have already signalled their readiness to play along, either because they share Trump’s worldview or because it feels geopolitically expedient to do so.
When I hear Trump, Rubio and their European acolytes, I wonder why so few of the EU’s political elite dare to say out loud that we have heard this stigmatising language of exclusion before, and we know where it can lead.
( Shada Islam, 19.02.2026 ) .. theguardian.com
Palestinian Journalists Detained In Israeli Prisons Have Been Beaten, Starved And Raped.
Almost 60 Palestinian journalists detained in Israeli prisons since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack have been beaten, starved and subjected to sexual violence, including rape, a report alleges.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reviewed dozens of testimonies, photographs and medical records documenting what it describes as serious abuses by Israeli soldiers and prison guards against Palestinian reporters.
The report draws on in-depth interviews from 59 Palestinian journalists.
Of those interviewed, 58 reported being subjected to what they described as torture while in Israeli custody.
“While conditions varied at different facilities, the methods those interviewed recounted, physical assaults, forced stress positions, sensory deprivation, sexual violence, and medical neglect, were strikingly consistent,” the report states.
Journalist Sami al-Sai, who has reported for the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera Mubasher and the local broadcaster Al-Fajer TV, said he was taken to a small cell in Megiddo prison, and soldiers removed his trousers and underwear, and penetrated him with batons and other objects.
“I did not speak to anyone inside the prison about what happened, except for two senior detainees who have been imprisoned for 25 years,” Sai said.
In December 2025, German journalist Anne Liedtke, detained onboard a Gaza-bound flotilla, alleged Israeli soldiers raped her while in custody.
Italian journalist Vincenzo Fullone and Australian activist Surya McEwen made similar accusations.
In early 2025, leaked surveillance footage from Sde Teiman detention camp appeared to show soldiers sexually assaulting detainees, triggering a national scandal.
The footage was aired by Israeli journalist Guy Peleg, who has since reported facing threats and harassment.
A recent report by Physicians for Human Rights Israel documented 94 Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody since 7 October 2023.
( Lorenzo Tondo, 19.02.2026 ) .. theguardian.com
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