Israel-Palestine conflict

US President Donald Trump links US aid to Netanyahu’s corruption trial in fiery post on his social media site.

United States President Donald Trump has launched a scathing attack on Israeli prosecutors over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial, calling it “insanity” and linking Washington’s financial support to the proceedings.

Posting on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, Trump lashed out at Israeli authorities for undermining Netanyahu’s ability to negotiate with the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza and manage mounting tensions with Iran.

“It is INSANITY doing what the out-of-control prosecutors are doing to Bibi Netanyahu,” Trump wrote, referring to the Israeli leader with his nickname and claiming his trial would obstruct peace efforts in the region.

“The United States of America spends billions of dollars a year … protecting and supporting Israel. We are not going to stand for this,” he added.

Netanyahu is set to take the stand on Monday for cross-examination in a long-running corruption case that began in 2020.

He faces charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – all of which he denies. His lawyers had requested a two-week delay in testimony, citing national security demands following Israel’s recent 12-day conflict with Iran. That appeal was rejected on Friday.

Members of Israel’s Knesset have accused Netanyahu of using the regional conflicts to secure an end to his corruption trial.

“[Netanyahu] is conditioning the future of Israel and our children on his trial,” Naama Lazimi, Knesset member from the Democrats Party, told The Times of Israel newspaper.

Karine Elharrar, Knesset member from Yesh Atid party, warned that Netanyahu is “acting against the Israeli public interest” by linking his legal fate with captive negotiations and regional normalisation agreements.

ICC arrest warrant

Netanyahu’s legal troubles include an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued last year for him and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

The charges include war crimes and crimes against humanity related to Israel’s war on Gaza, beginning in October 2023. Both leaders have called the arrest warrant “anti-Semitic”.

Trump’s comments come just days after he suggested a ceasefire deal with Hamas may be close.

Speaking to reporters, he claimed Netanyahu was engaged in negotiations with the Palestinian group, though no further details were provided.

Hamas has stated it would free remaining Israeli captives in Gaza as part of a deal to end the war, but has rejected Israeli demands for total disarmament.

Netanyahu responded to Trump’s defence with a post on X: “Thank you again, @realDonaldTrump. Together, we will make the Middle East Great Again!”

Calls for Netanyahu to resign

The political turmoil in Israel has deepened, with renewed calls for Netanyahu’s resignation. In a televised interview with Channel 12, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said it was time for Netanyahu to step aside.

“He has been in power for 20 years … that’s too much,” said Bennett. “He bears heavy responsibility for the divisions in Israeli society.”

Bennett, who has taken a break from politics, is reportedly eyeing a return, with polls suggesting he could challenge Netanyahu once more.

Thousands of fans chanted ‘free Palestine’ and waved Palestinian flags as the Irish trio performed in the UK.

Irish-language rap group Kneecap has performed at the Glastonbury Festival in front of tens of thousands of fans chanting “Free Palestine”, defying United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer who said he did not think it was “appropriate” for the band to appear.

The group’s Liam O’Hanna on Saturday also gave a “shout-out” to Palestine Action Group, which UK Interior Minister Yvette Cooper announced last week would become a banned group under the Terrorism Act of 2000.

“The prime minister of your country, not mine, said he didn’t want us to play, so f*** Keir Starmer,” said O’Hanna, who appeared on stage wearing his trademark Palestinian keffiyeh in front of the capacity crowd, including many people waving Palestinian flags.

“This situation can be quite stressful but it’s minimal compared to what the Palestinian people are [facing],” O’Hanna, who performs under the name Mo Chara, added, referring to the backlash the band has faced for its outspoken support of Palestinians in Gaza.

He is facing charges under the British Terrorism Act of supporting a proscribed organisation for allegedly waving a flag of Lebanon’s Hezbollah armed group at a concert in London in November last year.

O’Hanna has said he picked up a flag that was thrown onto the stage without knowing what it represented.

The rapper is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August.

“Glastonbury, I’m a free man!” he shouted as the trio took to the stage at Glastonbury’s West Holts field, which holds about 30,000 people.

The trio also thanked festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis for resisting pressure to cancel their appearance, including from Starmer.

Several Kneecap concerts have been cancelled since the band’s performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California in April, where they accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians, enabled by the United States government.

At least 56,412 Palestinians have been killed and 133,054 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Ireland’s people and government have been some of the most outspoken critics of the war, as well as Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population, which many people see as having parallels to the English occupation of Ireland.

The BBC, which broadcasts dozens of Glastonbury performances, did not show Kneecap’s set live, but said it planned to make it available online later.

The broadcaster said it would not be re-airing the live performance of British rap punk duo Bob Vylan who appeared on stage before Kneecap and led chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF [Israeli army]”.

A BBC spokesperson said the comments were “deeply offensive”, and that they would not be available to rewatch on BBC iPlayer.

The BBC also reported that UK Culture Minister Lisa Nandy spoke to the BBC director general, Tim Davie, seeking an “urgent explanation” after the chants were aired live.

According to the BBC, Avon and Somerset Police also said that they would be reviewing footage of both Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s sets to “determine whether any offences may have been committed that would require a criminal investigation”.

The bands were among about 4,000 performers across 120 stages to appear at this year’s festival, which also featured headliners including Neil Young, Charli XCX, Rod Stewart, Busta Rhymes, Olivia Rodrigo and Doechii, as well as a surprise appearance by Britpop band Pulp.

On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs. The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of 600 Iranians. This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called “the Middle East”. That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice president and two secretaries, told the world “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.

There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion. But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?

In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers. Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.

And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.

Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV. Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.

Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”. Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as the truth.

A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.

Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat —not a people, but a problem. The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.

Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order. Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission. It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.

And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.

But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.

This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.

Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.

But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war. After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment

The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed. They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.

At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance. And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.

Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.

They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli self-defence. The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.

The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war. And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.

Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.

But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky. Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.

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

US president’s claim greeted with surprise as deaths spiral in Gaza and Israeli forces accused of more ‘war crimes’ for shooting starving people seeking food aid.

United States President Donald Trump said he believes a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas could be reached within a week.

Trump came out with the surprise comment while speaking to reporters on Friday, saying he was hopeful after speaking to some of the people involved in trying to get a truce.

“I think it’s close. I just spoke to some of the people involved,” Trump said.

“We think within the next week we’re going to get a ceasefire,” the president said, without revealing who he had been in contact with.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in Jordan, said Trump’s comment will be “welcome news” to the starved and bombed population of Gaza, but she also cautioned that there are “no negotiations at this moment happening anywhere in the region”.

“What we do know is that talk of a ceasefire increased exponentially after the ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Israel does not want to talk about ending the war. In fact, the Israeli prime minister would be risking a lot if he did,” Odeh said.

But, she added, there is an understanding, according to many reports, that Netanyahu would have to agree to some sort of ceasefire in exchange for normalisation deals with Arab states, which the Trump administration has promoted.

Hamas, on the other hand, requires that Israel stop its war on Gaza and for the Israeli military to withdraw from areas it seized in Gaza after breaking the last ceasefire in March.

“Hamas also wants US guarantees that negotiations would continue and that Israel wouldn’t break the ceasefire again if more time was needed for negotiations,” Odeh added.

Trump’s ceasefire prediction comes at a time of mounting killings by Israeli forces in Gaza and growing international condemnation of Israel’s war amid the latest revelation that soldiers said they were ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians seeking humanitarian aid in the territory.

Authorities in Gaza said the report by the Haaretz media outlet that Israeli commanders ordered the deliberate shooting of starving Palestinians was further proof of Israel’s “war crimes” in the war-torn territory.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz have rejected the report of commanders targeting civilians, Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported that almost 550 Palestinians have been killed near US- and Israel-backed aid distribution points in Gaza since late May.

“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday. “The search for food must never be a death sentence,” he said.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym MSF) branded the situation in Gaza as “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”.

A spokesperson for the office of Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said they had no information to share about a possible ceasefire breakthrough in Gaza.

Witkoff helped former US President Joe Biden’s aides broker a ceasefire and captive release agreement in Gaza shortly before Trump took office in January. But the truce was broken by Israel in March when it launched a wave of surprise bombing attacks across the territory.

Israeli officials said that only military action would result in the return of captives held in Gaza, and imposed a blockade on food, water, medicine and fuel entering the territory that led to widespread starvation among the 2.1 million population.

Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer is scheduled to visit Washington next week for talks with Trump administration officials on Gaza, Iran and a possible White House visit by Netanyahu, according to a source familiar with the matter.

A European Union (EU) summit in Brussels called for a ceasefire in Gaza, but not for sanctions against Israel.

Germany has led member states in blocking action throughout the war, as others express anger.

So what’s behind the EU’s position on Israel and Gaza?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests: 

Claudio Francavilla – Associate EU director at Human Rights Watch in Brussels

Lynn Boylan – Sinn Fein member of the European Parliament and chair of the European Parliament’s Delegation for relations with Palestine

Giorgia Gusciglio – Europe coordinator of campaigns for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement promoting economic pressure against Israel

Israeli soldiers have deliberately shot at unarmed Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza after being “ordered” to do so by their commanders, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports.

Israel ordered an investigation into possible war crimes over the allegations by some soldiers that it revealed on Friday, Haaretz said.

At least 549 Palestinians have been killed and 4,066 injured while waiting for food aid distributed at sites run by the Israeli-and United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the Gaza Government Media Office said on Thursday. The GHF has been a source of widespread criticism since its establishment in May.

According to the Haaretz report, which quoted unnamed Israeli soldiers, troops were told to fire at the crowds of Palestinians and use unnecessary lethal force against people who appeared to pose no threat.

“We fired machineguns from tanks and threw grenades,” one soldier told Haaretz. “There was one incident where a group of civilians was hit while advancing under the cover of fog.”

In another instance, a soldier said that where they were stationed in Gaza, between “one and five people were killed every day”.

“It’s a killing field,” that soldier said.

Method of ‘control’

According to Haaretz, the Military Advocate General has told the army’s General Staff’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism, which reviews incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war, to investigate suspected war crimes at these aid sites.

One of the authors of the report, Nir Hasson, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli directive to fire on civilians is part of a method to “control” the aid seekers.

“It’s actually a practice of … controlling the crowd by fire, like if you wanted the crowd to run off [from] a place, you shoot them at them, even though you know they are unarmed … You use fire to move people from one point to another,” he said from West Jerusalem.

While the journalist and his colleagues do not know the name of the commander who might have issued such a directive, Hasson said that he would likely hold a position high up in the army.

Despite this practice at these sites, most Israelis and the army’s troops still believe the war on Gaza is just, even while some cracks are emerging in this understanding, the journalist said.

“[There are] more and more people who are asking themselves if this war is necessary, but also what is the humanitarian price the Gazan population is [paying] for this war,” he said.

‘A death trap’

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said the Haaretz report is “shocking”.

“People in Gaza have said these distribution centres have now become a death trap for Palestinians,” Salhut said.

“Aid groups have said that Palestinians are left with no choice – to either starve to death, or die seeking the very little food that is offered in the distribution centres run by the GHF,” she added.

The GHF operates four food distribution sites in Gaza – one in the centre and three in south.

Since an Israeli blockade was lifted on the entry of humanitarian goods at the end of May, attacks on aid seekers in Gaza have increased.

On Friday, medics said six people were killed by gunfire as they tried to get food in southern Gaza.

But the GHF has come under intense condemnation by aid groups, including the United Nations, for its “weaponisation” of vital items.

On Friday, Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials, MSF, called the GHF’s aid distribution sites “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”.

Since Israel began its war on Gaza in October 2023, at least 56,331 people have been killed, with 132,632 wounded in Israeli attacks, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported.

In Gaza, if civilians are not killed by bombings or attacks, they’re killed by diseases caused by hazardous waste.Al Jazeera’s digital investigation team, Sanad, captures just how widespread waste sites are across Gaza, highlighting an environmental and health risk brought on by the war.

Two babies died of starvation in Gaza due to Israel’s continuing blockade of vital aid. The deaths come as the US approved $30 million in funding for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get food from its aid centres.

Catholic pontiff says international rules have been ‘replaced by the presumed right to overpower others’.

Pope Leo XIV has lamented what he described as the rise of blunt power over the rules of international law as conflicts rage around the world and global institutions continue to fail to end abuses and war crimes.

“It is disheartening to see today that the strength of international law and humanitarian law no longer seems binding, replaced by the presumed right to overpower others,” the pontiff said in a social media post on Thursday.

“This is unworthy and shameful for humanity and for the leaders of nations.”

Leo did not elaborate on his remarks, but his statement comes amid growing calls for ending the Israeli assault on Gaza, which leading rights advocates and United Nations experts have described as a genocide.

Israel has faced growing accusations of violating international humanitarian law, a set of rules meant to protect civilians in conflict, during its conflict with Palestinians.

Backed by the United States, the Israeli military has levelled large parts of Gaza, displaced nearly its entire population and killed at least 56,156 in the territory, according to health officials.

Earlier this month, former US Department of State spokesperson Matthew Miller, who spearheaded Washington’s defence of Israel’s conduct during the Joe Biden administration, acknowledged that the Israeli military has “without a doubt” committed war crimes in Gaza.

Israel stands in defiance of several international resolutions, including rulings by the International Criminal Court, the top UN tribunal, against the Israeli blockade and killings in Gaza.

Last year, the ICJ also declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory – East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza – unlawful and called for its end “as rapidly as possible”.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over possible war crimes in Gaza, including using starvation as a weapon of war.

But most members of the ICC, especially in Europe, have maintained their deep trade and military ties to Israel despite the charges.

After succeeding the late Pope Francis in May, becoming the first pontiff from the US, Leo pleaded for an end to the war on Gaza.

“Ceasefire now,” Leo, the top spiritual authority for about 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, said in May.

“From the Gaza Strip, we hear rising ever more insistently to the heavens, the cries of mothers and fathers who clutch the lifeless bodies of their children, and who are continually forced to move about in search of a little food and water and safer shelter from bombardments.”

As the war in Gaza continues, deadly conflicts and reports of abuses in Sudan and Ukraine have also persisted.

UN humanitarian agency stresses need for fuel, medical supplies and water in Palestinian territory besieged by Israel.

The United Nations humanitarian agency (OCHA) has warned that preventable diseases in Gaza are on the rise and killing civilians due to the lack of desperately needed medicine and clean water.

OCHA in a statement on Thursday said that in the past two weeks, “more than 19,000 cases of acute watery diarrhoea have been recorded, alongside over 200 cases each of acute jaundice syndrome and bloody diarrhoea “.

“These outbreaks are directly linked to the lack of clean water and sanitation in Gaza, underscoring the urgent need for fuel, medical supplies, and water, sanitation and hygiene items to prevent further collapse of the public health system,” the agency added.

Israel’s blockade on fuel entry into Gaza has paralysed the territory’s desalination plants and water system.

The Israeli military has destroyed much of Gaza, displaced nearly the entire population of the territory and placed a suffocating siege on the enclave. Besides the dire humanitarian conditions, the Israeli military continues to kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza daily.

Leading rights groups and UN experts have described the Israeli campaign as a genocide.

OCHA said on Thursday that more than 20 people were killed and about 70 others were injured after a strike on Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.

Medical sources told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israeli attacks killed at least 71 people across Gaza on Thursday.

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023, at least 56,259 people have been killed, and 132,458 others have been wounded, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

After a more than two-month blockade of essential goods entering Gaza, the Israeli government announced it was allowing aid to re-enter the enclave in May.

However, due to Israeli restrictions, the amount of aid entering has been minimal, with aid agencies referring to it as a “drop in the ocean”.

Much of the aid allowed in has been through the United States and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has been condemned by aid agencies as a “weaponisation” of humanitarian goods.

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a video message that the army was being asked to draft a new plan to deliver aid to Gaza after unverified footage showed masked men on top of aid trucks in northern Gaza.

While Israel has claimed the men were Hamas members, Palestinian clan leaders with no affiliation with the group said the masked men were protecting the truck from being looted.

Multiple UN officials have refuted Israel’s claims that Hamas steals humanitarian aid. Last month, Israeli officials acknowledged arming criminal gangs linked to looting the assistance in order to rival Hamas.

GoFundMe has been accused of blocking “millions of dollars” of life-saving aid from reaching Gaza.

Charity leaders, activists and desperate Palestinians in Gaza have condemned the crowdfunding website for shutting down or blocking withdrawals for Palestine-related fundraising pages – and have accused bosses of having “blood on their hands”.

Despite questions from Al Jazeera, the company has not revealed the amount of money raised on its platform for Gaza that has been frozen in its system or has been refunded to donors.

But it has told Al Jazeera that more than $300m has been raised on the platform for both Palestinians and Israelis since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023 and the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Hala Sabbah, the founder of mutual aid group The Sameer Project, said that in September, more than $250,000 of donations to her organisation was refunded.

The London-based NGO-sector worker described the closure of her GoFundMe page as a “disaster” for her group’s efforts to provide emergency aid in the enclave.

The Sameer Project runs a camp for displaced people in Deir el-Balah, providing healthcare and essentials to its residents – paid for by money that, until now, had been raised through GoFundMe, totalling more than $1m. It also funds food, water, shelter and clothing for people across Gaza.

Sabbah said she was “treated like scum” by GoFundMe, despite her group’s pages raising about $44,000 for it in transaction fees.

“Our GoFundMe page had daily updates with complete cost breakdowns of every single initiative we did – everything was well-documented, with receipts,” she said.

“This information – including all transfers – was forwarded to GoFundMe, yet they still chose to shut us down.”

GoFundMe notifies page organisers that there will be a “review” process after they launch fundraisers related to Palestine – or “the conflict in the Middle East”, as it is phrased by the company’s compliance team in emails seen by Al Jazeera. The company claims this is part of its “standard verification process”, but critics say it appears to inordinately restrict Gaza-related pages rather than those for other causes, such as Israel or Ukraine.

GoFundMe has refused to disclose figures that show how many Israel or Ukraine fundraisers have been closed compared with those for Gaza.

Intrusive reviews

Social media has been flooded with Palestinian advocates speaking out about their pages being shut down. Fundraisers for Israel and Ukraine appear to face little of the same scrutiny. And when they do, media campaigns can quickly force GoFundMe to act. One Ukraine fundraiser that was shut down in March 2022 was reinstated the next month after media coverage of the case.

The company’s long and intrusive review process often results in Gaza fundraisers being shut down and money refunded to donors or pages being “paused”, preventing funds from being accessed by account holders until the review is concluded.

One United States-based fundraiser for the Sulala animal shelter in Gaza says it had about $50,000 dollars refunded to donors when its first page was closed. The team behind the fundraiser then created another page without specifically mentioning Gaza or Palestine, which was not flagged by GoFundMe, placed under review or paused, and ran for months uninterrupted.

In the case of The Sameer Project, GoFundMe’s compliance team said it was concerned about how funds were being distributed, and said that the documentation Sabbah had provided was not “accurate, complete or clear”. An email to Sabbah added that there were “material discrepancies” between the information shared and how funds were distributed to beneficiaries.

Before shutting the page down, the compliance team asked for personal information about who was receiving funds, evidence of bank transfer statements and details about partner organisations, which Sabbah says The Sameer Project provided.

“We spent weeks fighting back, and they completely ignored us – even denying us access to our donor lists,” Sabbah told Al Jazeera.

“People can raise funds to help the Israeli military…  and their pages don’t get closed. But we try to raise money for diapers and lifesaving medication, and we get scrutinised and shut down.”

“We have children in our camp on the verge of death. The company has blood on its hands.”

The mutual aid group – named after Sabbah’s Gaza-based uncle who died in January – says it has provided more than 800,000 litres (211,330 gallons) of water, $100,000 in cash aid, 850 tents and medical treatment for 749 children across the enclave.

It transfers money to intermediaries via makeshift exchange sites and by sending money directly to doctors or pharmacies.

Crowdfunding websites have for months been one of the only feasible ways to help those trapped in Gaza.

Famine is creeping further into the enclave, humanitarian aid is being blocked for long periods, civilian infrastructure lies in ruin and banks and ATMs have either been destroyed or have halted operations.

Sabbah slammed GoFundMe for not justifying shutting her page down despite the huge amount of money the company made from the group’s pages in”payment processing fees”. It charges 30 cents per donation and a 2.9 percent cut of the total raised.

There are no banking services left in Gaza, but there are exchange offices – often people using POS (point of service) cash machines charging exorbitant interest rates – and the option to swap cryptocurrency for physical currency, amid critical shortages of the latter.

Without regular aid flowing into the enclave, most charities rely on sending money via these limited routes to intermediaries who will distribute essentials and medical supplies.

Some tinned food, tents and health products are on sale in Gaza markets. But cash is scarce, stocks are extremely limited, and most people cannot afford to pay. Since breaking the ceasefire agreement with Hamas brokered in January, Israel resumed bombing and re-established a blockade on humanitarian aid lasting months.

Now, aid is only reaching the enclave through the heavily criticised US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Hundreds of desperate Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli forces at GHF aid collection sites.

‘Treated like animals’

Both still trapped in Gaza, Mostafa Abuthaher and his brother Yahya Fraij, aged 30, have twice created GoFundMe pages, and on both occasions, the company closed them down.

Yahya lost his home and three of his cousins to Israel’s onslaught, and now his family survives with only a makeshift tent near the beach in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza.

His wife gave birth to their six-month-old daughter during the war. Yahya told Al Jazeera that she has experienced nothing but suffering during her short life – and he has had to protect her from extreme cold and the trauma of Israeli bombardment.

“My daughter and I face death almost every day,” he said. “And now we have nothing – not even a tent. The war has taken everything from us.

“We’ve been treated like animals and insulted by the world for the last 20 months.”

The brothers had raised more than $12,000 to support their families until their first page was suddenly shut down. The company blocked them from withdrawing nearly $5,000.

In an email exchange with GoFundMe, a compliance officer said Mostafa’s page breached the company’s terms of service for “prohibited conduct”, which covers fundraisers that are “fraudulent, misleading, inaccurate, dishonest or impossible”.

He was asked to send a photo ID, provide his location and explain why his page description had changed so often and how the funds would be used. Then his page was closed, after which he expressed astonishment and accused the platform of bias.

The brothers say that many people in Gaza have set up GoFundMe pages because of the platform’s size and reputation, and then found themselves “trapped” once their pages began the often ill-fated verification process. Critics of GoFundMe say campaigns fundraising for Israel appear to be able to avoid similar interventions from its compliance team.

Other fundraisers on the website state they aim to raise funding for “equipment” that supports the Israeli military, or “training” and travel for new recruits.

A page raising money for gun sights and other equipment to “safeguard”  the Kishorit kibbutz in the north of Israel appeared to breach the website’s terms of service, but was active for nearly a year before no longer becoming accessible.

The terms of service prohibit fundraising for “weapons meant for use in conflict or by an armed group”.

Sabbah added that there is no guarantee that money from similar pages to fundraise for “equipment” or “security” won’t be used to buy weapons, at a time when the Israeli government is actively arming its citizens.

Double standards?

Al Jazeera sent several questions to GoFundMe, asking how many Gaza-related fundraisers there are, how much they had raised, the number listed as “transfers paused and the total removed or taken down. We also asked the company to provide like-for-like figures for Israel and Ukraine.

At the time of writing, GoFundMe refused to provide the specific information and data we requested. A spokesperson said: “GoFundMe has helped raise and deliver over $300m from donors in more than 215 countries and jurisdictions to support individuals and organisations helping those in both Gaza and Israel.

“Any suggestion of double standards is wholly without merit, baseless, and contrary to the values that guide our platform.

“Any decision to remove a fundraiser from the platform is never taken lightly and is informed explicitly by our Terms of Service. Taking action like this is difficult, but it protects our ability to support people who are fundraising to help others.”

Amr Shabaik, the legal director at the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera that the fundamental issue with platforms like GoFundMe was the “imbalanced application of rules” – behaviour consistent with other forms of digital censorship since October 7.

“Algorithmic discrimination and targeting, looking for certain descriptors and categories – like Gaza or Palestine specifically in the last 18 months – means some pages are subjected to an unfair and high level of scrutiny that other fundraisers are not,” he said.

“All platforms have their rules and regulations, but they’re applying them disproportionately and unfairly towards Palestinians.”

“There is a clear indication of a double standard. If you are actively preventing lifesaving aid – intentionally or unintentionally -– from reaching Gaza, it’s tough to say you’re not supporting a genocide.”

Shabaik points to studies undertaken by Human Rights Watch (HRW), The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media and Palestine Legal that detail platforms’ inordinate targeting of pro-Palestine pages or accounts.

HRW says that between October and November 2023, 1,049 pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram were taken down by the platform’s owner, Meta. Palestine Legal says that between October 7 and December 31, 2023, the organisation received 1,037 requests for legal support from people “targeted for their Palestine advocacy”. The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media documented more than 1,639 “censorship violations” in its 2023 annual report, including content removal and suspensions.

Last December, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Freelance Journalists’ Union said that GoFundMe prevented $6,000 of funding from reaching the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate after its fundraiser was shut down. This is despite the organisation being based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, not in Gaza.

One union delegate, using the name “Arv” as he wanted to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera the money would have provided protective helmets, press vests and other safety apparatus for journalists reporting in the territory. He added that GoFundMe said the fundraiser was shut down due to a lack of compliance with unspecified “laws and regulations”.

In December, a union spokesperson said on its Twitter page: “Over the course of the fundraiser, we received a dozen requests for further information from GoFundMe, all of which were answered as thoroughly and in as timely a manner as possible, given the ongoing war.”

Arv added that the union had been pushed to explore the use of other fundraising platforms because of the difficulty of working with GoFundMe.

“Current GoFundMe users should do the same before they too are caught in such Kafkaesque circumstances,” he said.

The GoFundMe compliance team asked for business information, such as bank accounts, and even after informing the union the information had been accepted, the page was still closed down.

GoFundMe boasts that it is the world’s number one crowdfunding platform, but it only allows fundraisers to be created in 20 nations (not including Israel, Ukraine or Palestine) – meaning people in Gaza are reliant on intermediaries thousands of miles away if they want to receive donations.

All those interviewed for this story and other campaigners have endorsed a boycott of the platform. Sabbah says she has since begun using the Australian crowdfunding website Chuffed, which reviewed her documentation and swiftly permitted her to withdraw, allowing her to continue her group’s work in Gaza.

The platform says it advocates on behalf of campaigners to sort out verification issues with its payment providers to prevent pages from being frozen or refunded.

Chuffed general manager Jennie Smith said: “We’ve been helping campaigners migrate from GoFundMe to Chuffed by the thousands over the last year and have seen firsthand the devastation the shutting down of their GoFundMe campaigns causes.”

Yahya described life for his family in his makeshift tent. He walks miles every day to get water and wraps up his baby daughter for the cold winter nights, fearing they may not wake up in the morning.

He says his family may have escaped the enclave if GoFundMe had allowed him to withdraw the money he raised.

“I try not to think about losing our money,” Yahya said. “If I kept thinking about how terrible everything is, I wouldn’t be alive now!

“But it makes you feel like everyone is conspiring against us. They are leaving us to die slowly.”

Last Thursday, just days after he had ordered strikes upon Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood outside Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital and spoke of his outrage that the building had been hit in an Iranian counterstrike.

“They’re targeting civilians because they’re a criminal regime. They’re the arch-terrorists of the world,” he said of the Iranian government.

Similar accusations were levelled by other Israeli leaders, including the president, Isaac Herzog, and opposition leader Yair Lapid, during the conflict with Iran, which ended with a ceasefire brokered by United States President Donald Trump on Monday.

However, what was missing from these leaders was an acknowledgement that Israel itself has attacked almost every hospital in Gaza, where more than 56,000 people have been killed, or that the Strip’s healthcare system has been pushed to near total collapse.

It was an omission noticeable in much of the Israeli press reporting on the Beersheba hospital attack, with few mentions of the parallels between it and Israel’s own attacks on hospitals in Gaza. Instead, much of the Israeli media has supported these attacks, either seeking to downplay them, or justifying them by regularly claiming that Hamas command centres lie under the hospitals, an accusation Israel has never been able to prove.

Weaponising suffering

According to analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, a media ecosystem exists in Israel that, with a few exceptions, both amplifies its leaders’ calls for war while simultaneously reinforcing their claims of victimhood, all while shielding the Israeli public from seeing the suffering Israeli forces are inflicting on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

One Israeli journalist, Haaretz’s media correspondent Ido David Cohen, wrote this month that “reporters and editors at Israel’s major news outlets have admitted more than once, especially in private conversations, that their employers haven’t allowed them to present the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the suffering of the population there”.

“The Israeli media … sees its job as not to educate, it’s to shape and mould a public that is ready to support war and aggression,” journalist Orly Noy told Al Jazeera from West Jerusalem. “It genuinely sees itself as having a special role in this.”

“I’ve seen [interviews with] people who lived near areas where Iranian missiles had hit,” Noy added. “They were given a lot of space to talk and explain the impact, but as soon as they started to criticise the war, they were shut down, quite rudely.”

Last September, a complaint brought by three Israeli civil society organisations against Channel 14, one of Israel’s most watched television networks, cited 265 quotes from hosts they claimed encouraged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide. Among them, concerning Gaza, were the phrases “it really needs to be total annihilation” and “there are no innocents.”

A few months earlier, in April, the channel was again criticised within the Israeli media, this time for a live counter labelled “the terrorists we eliminated”, which made no distinction between civilians and fighters killed, the media monitoring magazine 7th Eye pointed out.

Analysts and observers described how Israel’s media and politicians have weaponised the horrors of the past suffering of the Jewish people and have moulded it into a narrative of victimhood that can be aimed at any geopolitical opponent that circumstances allow – with Iran looming large among them.

“It isn’t just this war,” Noy, an editor with the Hebrew-language Local Call website, said. “The Israeli media is in the business of justifying every war, of telling people that this war is essential for their very existence. It’s an ecosystem. Whatever the authority is, it is absolutely right. There is no margin for doubt, with no room for criticism from the inside. To see it, you have to be on the outside.”

“The world has allowed Israel to act as some kind of crazy bully to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants,” Noy added. “They can send their troops into Syria and Lebanon, never mind Gaza, with impunity. Israel is fine. Israel is bulletproof. And why wouldn’t they think that? The world allows it, then people are shocked when Iran strikes back.”

The Israeli media largely serves as a tool to manufacture consent for Israel’s actions against the Palestinians and in neighbouring countries, while shielding the Israeli public from the suffering its victims endure.

Exceptions do exist. Israeli titles such as Noy’s Local Call and +972 Magazine often feature coverage highly critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, and have conducted in-depth investigations into Israel’s actions, uncovering scandals that are only reported on months later by the international media. Joint reporting from Local Call and +972 Magazine has revealed that the Israeli military was using an AI system to generate bombing target lists based on predicted civilian casualties. Another report found that the Israeli military had falsely declared entire Gaza neighbourhoods as evacuated, which then led to the bombing of civilian homes in areas that were still inhabited.

A more famous example is the liberal daily Haaretz, which regularly criticises Israel’s actions in Gaza. Haaretz has faced a government boycott over its coverage of the war.

“It’s not new,” Dina Matar, professor of political communication and Arab media at SOAS University of London, said. “Israeli media has long been pushing the idea that they [Israel] are the victims while calling for actions that will allow them to present greater victimhood [such as attacking Iran]. They often use emotive language to describe a strike on an Israeli hospital that they’ll never use to describe an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza.”

Take Israeli media coverage of the siege of northern Gaza’s last remaining functioning healthcare facility, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, in December.

While descriptions of the attacks on the hospital from United Nations special rapporteurs spoke of their “horror” at the strikes, those in the Israeli press, in outlets such as Ynet or The Times of Israel, instead focused almost exclusively upon the Israeli military’s claims of the numbers of “terrorists” seized.

Among those seized from the hospital were medical staff, including the director of Kamal Adwan, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, who has since been tortured in an Israeli military prison, his lawyer previously told Al Jazeera.

In contrast, Israeli coverage of the Soroka Hospital attack in Beersheba almost universally framed the hit as a “direct strike” and foregrounded the experience of the evacuated patients and healthcare workers.

In this environment, Matar said, Netanyahu’s representation of Israel as home to a “subjugated people” reinforced a view that Israelis have long been encouraged to hold of themselves, even amid the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.

“No one questions what Netanyahu is saying because the implications of his speech make sense as part of this larger historical narrative; one that doesn’t allow for any other [narrative], such as the Nakba or the suffering in Gaza,” the academic said.

This doctor in Gaza has tried to save children torn to shreds by Israeli bombs and bullets at GHF aid sites. Speaking to Al Jazeera, she asked how the world can stand by and let the killing of starving people continue?

Granada, Spain – Sometimes there have been as few as two or three people, sometimes as many as 15.

But no matter the number, every morning for the past few weeks at the Jose Hurtado primary school in the Spanish city of Granada, a group of parents have dropped off their kids, then silently gathered nearby behind two simple but powerful pro-Gaza banners: “No more dead children” and “Against Genocide.”

“It started when a fictional video, set in 2040, came through one of our parents’ WhatsApp groups, about how Gaza was destroyed. And in it children ask their mums and dads – what did you do during the genocide?” Mar Domech, who helped the protest get started, told Al Jazeera.

“I began saying – instead of re-sending the video, let’s actually do something, a bit like during the pandemic when people used to applaud hospital staff at eight every night. And the 15 minutes before the kids went into class and the 15 minutes just after suited the majority of us parents the best.”

The protest format is simple. A single line of demonstrators hold up two long banners next to a tall school wall and make sure they keep out of the way of passers-by.

There is no shouting or chanting. But that these are clearly school parents caring about children dying – many of them of the ages of their own children – gives their show of support extra resonance. The school’s location on a busy arterial street near central Granada means their message reaches a wide audience.

“We don’t want to upset anybody, but we just can’t look away when so many children are dying and the laws need to be upheld,” said Domech. “What’s happening there is genocide and we have to oppose this, whoever the victims are.”

After almost two years of Israeli attacks, Gaza is home to the highest number of child amputees per capita. More than 17,000 children have been killed. And according to Save the Children, more than 930,000 children in Gaza – nearly every single child – are now at risk of famine.

The failure of more parents to join their show of solidarity is treated with a mixture of disappointment, resilience and not a little wry humour by the dozen or so “regulars”, like when they recall when two plainclothes police officers arrived to check their IDs.

It just so happened that day only two pro-Palestine parents were present, but, as Domech recalled with a laugh, thanks to the police turning up, it seemed like the number of protesters had abruptly doubled.

In any case, the limited response has done nothing to stop their determination to continue.

One woman passes by most days and stops to take a photo to send to a friend in Palestine. Some of the cars or tourists on buses going up to the nearby medieval Alhambra monument honk and wave in support.

The morale boosts are important, as well as the parents’ conviction that even this relatively tiny but tenacious protest matters.

“I couldn’t stand the idea of simply being an onlooker any more, what’s going on is so atrocious,” said Alberto, another parent. “I’m just pleased that we’ve kept going, too. I’m studying for civil service exams so time-wise I can be flexible, but it’s not straightforward to do this every day when you’re working or have other commitments. However, I think it’s fundamental we do it.”

Spain is among a small group of European nations that has consistently shown support for Palestine and criticised Israeli actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Together with Ireland and Norway, in May 2024, Spain recognised the Palestinian state and last year it expressed support for the genocide case against Israel submitted by South Africa in the International Court of Justice.

After the European Union’s latest report on Gaza was published this week,  Spain was the one country that called directly for suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, while its foreign minister demanded an arms embargo.

As for the Granada school gates protest, “We’ll go on with it once term restarts in September”, said Domech, “although hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary”.

In this episode of Centre Stage, our guest is Dr Gabor Mate, a retired physician, author and Holocaust survivor who has written extensively on trauma and child development, as well as Israel and Palestine.

Mate talks about the colonial foundations of Zionism, how living under it has traumatised Palestinians and the ways mainstream media distorts the realities on the ground in Gaza.

Phil Lavelle is a TV news correspondent at Al Jazeera.

Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has bold plans for New York City. He wants to establish city-owned grocery stores, build more homes, make buses free and freeze rents for subsidised tenants.

But in the lead-up to the Democratic primary on Tuesday, his opponents and media outlets seemed more concerned by his views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. He is a defender of Palestinian rights who has decried Israeli abuses and echoed the assessment of rights groups that Israel’s assault on Gaza is a genocide.

Mamdani did not back down from his positions, and he won, edging out former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who had more institutional support and was backed by record spending.

Mamdani’s supporters say his victory could be an inflection point in United States politics that shows the electoral viability of left-wing policies and support for Palestinian rights.

“It’s monumental,” said Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for the progressive group Justice Democrats.

“The sky is the limit for true progressives who are willing to unite the working class against billionaires and corporate super PACs while still refusing to compromise on issues as large as a genocide.”

While the official results are not yet final, Mamdani leads Cuomo by more than seven percentage points with nearly every vote counted, all but securing the nomination.

His lead is expected to grow with subsequent rounds of counting in the city’s ranked-choice voting system.

Cuomo has conceded defeat, and Mamdani has declared victory, putting him on the path to be the next mayor of the largest city in the US.

New York is overwhelmingly Democratic, so as the party’s nominee, he is likely to comfortably prevail in the general election in November — an outcome that seemed impossible when he was polling at 1 percent in February.

‘He refused to back down’

Savvy with digital media, charismatic and approachable, Mamdani — a 33-year-old state legislator — started to grow his base with viral videos and grassroots campaigning on the streets of New York.

After the presidential election in November of last year, Mamdani spoke to Donald Trump’s supporters and non-voters, who voiced frustration with status quo politics. He then presented them with his own platform. In a video segment he filmed, some of them said they would back him for mayor.

Mamdani’s supporters say he also excelled in amassing an army of thousands of volunteers, who knocked on doors to spread the word about his campaign.

Heba Gowayed, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), said many young people were drawn to Mamdani and got involved in his campaign because of his opposition to Israeli policies.

“The fact that he refused to back down from his position on Palestine is huge,” Gowayed told Al Jazeera. “In an atmosphere where we’ve been told that holding that position is politically disqualifying, it was a movement that not only insisted on this position but was, in a sense, predicated on it.”

She added that, if Mamdani had flipped to appease critics, he would have lost the support and enthusiasm that put him over the finish line. But Mamdani’s support for Palestinian “likely bolstered his campaign”, she said.

Mamdani faced seemingly insurmountable odds in his campaign for the Democratic nomination. Not only did he lack funding early on, but his name recognition was also low. Few voters seemed to know who he was, compared with the candidate he was running against: Cuomo, a former governor from a political dynasty in New York.

Cuomo’s father had also served as governor, and in the lead-up to Tuesday’s race, he had amassed endorsements from key figures in the national Democratic Party, including former President Bill Clinton and lawmaker Jim Clyburn.

Mamdani, meanwhile, was endorsed by the local branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

That is what makes Mamdani’s win stunning for his supporters. It appeared to be a David and Goliath battle, a clash of the old guard and the new.

“The old guard personified was beaten by a democratic socialist, a young, pro-Palestinian brown Muslim kid who had 1 percent name recognition as of February,” Gowayed said. “It is absolutely phenomenal and remarkable.”

Born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent, Mamdani has been serving in the state assembly since 2021.

Many viewed the face-off between Cuomo and Mamdani as a reflection of the years-long arm-wrestling between progressives and centrists in the Democratic Party. The debate over Palestinian rights and the US’s unquestioning support for Israel has been a core issue in that fight.

Cuomo’s focus on Israel

As a state legislator, Mamdani had been vocal in his opposition to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 56,077 Palestinians. He even led a hunger strike outside the White House in November 2023 to demand an end to the war.

But as he launched his campaign for mayor, his focus was on local issues.

Still, Cuomo — who resigned as governor in 2021 over sexual harassment allegations — tried to make Mamdani’s position on Israel and Palestine a central issue in the campaign.

Earlier this month, the former governor suggested that calling out Israeli abuses contributes to attacks against Jewish Americans. The target of his message appeared to be Mamdani.

“Hate foments hate. The anti-Israel rhetoric of ‘genocide,’ ‘war criminals,’ and ‘murderers’ must stop. It is spreading like a cancer through the body politic,” Cuomo said in a social media post after a fire attack injured 15 people at a pro-Israel rally in Colorado.

The former governor is part of the defence team representing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes charges in Gaza, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

When Mamdani and some of his fellow candidates, including City Comptroller Brad Lander, campaigned jointly against Cuomo, the former governor invoked Israel.

“How does … a Brad Lander support Zohran Mamdani, support his positions on Israel, support his statements on Israel?” Cuomo said.

Lander, who is Jewish, went on to cross-endorse Mamdani, and the two candidates encouraged their supporters to rank them both highly on their ballots.

A pro-Cuomo election group, known as a super PAC, has also focused on Mamdani’s positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Dubbed Fix the City, the super PAC received $500,000 from pro-Israel billionaire and Trump supporter Bill Ackman. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another staunch Israel supporter, contributed a whopping $8m to the group.

Media outlets also scrutinised Mamdani’s view on Israel. He was repeatedly asked about foreign policy, including whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state and whether he would visit Israel as mayor.

‘A turning point’

Beth Miller, the political director of the advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Action, said Cuomo miscalculated by trying to make the race about Mamdani’s views on the Middle East conflict.

The Democratic base has been increasingly moving away from unconditional support for Israel, especially amid the atrocities in Gaza. A Pew Research Center survey in April showed that 69 percent of Democratic respondents indicated unfavourable views towards Israel.

“Cuomo is part of an old dinosaur way of thinking about politics,” Miller told Al Jazeera.

JVP Action endorsed Mamdani at the outset of his campaign. Miller said that, while his campaign was rooted in making New York affordable, his progressive politics are based on upholding the humanity of all people, including Palestinians.

“Cuomo was counting on the idea that Zohran’s support for Palestinian rights would be a liability for him, but what last night showed was that that’s not true,” Miller said.

“And in fact, what I witnessed and what I saw was that his support for Palestinian rights was an asset to his campaign. It mobilised young voters. It mobilised a lot of progressive Jewish voters and Muslim voters and many, many others.”

In recent years, pro-Israel groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), have poured record amounts of money into Democratic primaries to defeat progressives.

In the last election cycle, they managed to help oust two Democratic Congress members who were critical of Israel: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.

Progressive advocates say they hope that Mamdani’s win will help turn the tide in their favour.

“We are finally seeing a turning point,” said Andrabi of Justice Democrats. “AIPAC likes to say supporting Israel is good policy and good politics. I think what has become extremely clear at this point is that supporting apartheid Israel is bad policy and bad politics.”

At least four Palestinians, including a teenager, have been killed in the occupied West Bank, where soldiers have been carrying out deadly raids for months and settlers have been violently rampaging against civilians unchecked, backed by the military.

The teenager was shot by Israeli forces, while the other three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli settler attack on the town of Kafr Malek, northeast of Ramallah. Seven others were injured in the settler attack.

Dozens of Israeli settlers attacked the town, burning vehicles and homes as residents of neighbouring villages attempted to confront them, local sources said. Israeli troops provided protection for the settlers and fired live rounds.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said it treated at least five wounded Palestinians who suffered gunshot wounds, with some in serious condition.

Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh said the settlers were acting “under the protection of the Israeli army”.

“We call on the international community to urgently intervene to protect our Palestinian people,” he added, in a message on X.

In the other deadly incident, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that Israeli troops shot dead a 15-year-old Palestinian boy during a raid on al-Yamoun, a town west of Jenin.

The ministry identified the teenager as Rayan Tamer Houshieh and said he succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the neck.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said that its teams had handled “a very critical case” in al-Yamoun, involving a teenager, before pronouncing him dead.

The al-Yamoun incident marked the second time a teenager has been reported killed in the occupied territory in two days.

On Monday, the Health Ministry said that Israeli fire killed a 13-year-old, identified as Ammar Hamayel, in Kafr Malek.

The occupied West Bank is home to more than 3 million Palestinians who live under harsh Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority governing in limited areas cut off from each other by a myriad of Israeli checkpoints.

Israel has so far built more than 100 settlements across the West Bank, which are home to about 500,000 settlers – Israeli citizens living illegally on private Palestinian land in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Daily Israeli raids

Although Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has garnered more attention, Palestinian suffering in the occupied West Bank has been acute, with hundreds of deaths, thousands of people displaced, house demolitions and significant destruction since October 7, 2023.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Palestine has expressed alarm at the “wave of renewed violence” by Israeli settlers and armed forces in the West Bank earlier this year.

“Israel must immediately and completely cease all settlement activities and evacuate all settlers, stop the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, and prevent and punish attacks by its security forces and settlers,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said.

Separately, earlier on Wednesday, a 66-year-old woman was shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces during a raid on the Shu’fat refugee camp, north of occupied East Jerusalem, according to several local media reports.

The Jerusalem governorate identified the woman as Zahriya Joudeh al-Obaid.

Her husband, Joudah Al-Obeidi, a 67-year-old resident of the camp, said his wife was standing on the roof of their home when Israeli forces stormed the area. He confirmed that police shot her in the head, and that she had posed no threat.

Like other refugee camps in Israeli-occupied areas, Shu’fat has seen repeated Israeli raids that often result in deaths, injuries and arrests.

In the northern West Bank, large-scale military incursions into Jenin and its refugee camp, as well as Tulkarem and the Nur Shams refugee camp, have resulted in widespread destruction and displacement of at least 40,000 people, according to UN figures.

Since Israeli forces launched its latest operation in Jenin 156 days ago, at least 40 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Wafa news agency.