Media Office: Israel blocks 430 food items from entering Gaza
Press TV – August 12, 2025
Gaza Government Media Office says Israel is still blocking the entry of more than 430 food items into the territory, despite allowing some aid trucks through last month under international pressure.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Office said banned items include “frozen meat of all kinds, frozen fish, cheese, dairy products, frozen vegetables, and fruits”, along with “hundreds of other items needed by the starving and sick.”
The statement claimed the partial easing announced on July 27, 2025, has not lifted broad restrictions on food and other essential goods.
It added that Israel has targeted food sources in the Gaza Strip, not only by preventing aid but also by deliberately bombing 44 food banks, resulting in the deaths of dozens of workers, and attacking 57 food distribution centers.
Media Office has accused COGAT, the Israeli military body reporting on aid deliveries into the enclave, of “a pathetic attempt to cover up an internationally documented crime, the systematic starvation of the population of the Gaza Strip.”
According to a report published by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) on July 29, 2025, “the worst-case scenario” of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. War and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels.
“Between May and July 2025, the proportion of households experiencing extreme hunger has doubled. The food consumption threshold for Famine (IPC Phase 5) has already been passed for most areas of the Gaza Strip,” the report said.
At the same time, food consumption has sharply deteriorated, the report stressed, adding that one in three individuals is going without food for days at a time.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces and foreign military contractors continue to open indiscriminate fire on people seeking aid at so-called “distribution centers” operated by the Israel-US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Nearly 1,500 people have been killed and more than 4000 injured while seeking food. At least 900 people have been killed near or inside GHF centers since the beginning of GHF’s operations in late May 2025.
GHF centers are especially difficult to access for the most vulnerable members of the population, such as children, women, older persons, and persons with disabilities.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 5 more Palestinians, including 2 children, have starved to death in the enclave, raising the total number of hunger-related deaths to 227, including 103 children.
Israel has massacred at least 61,599 Palestinians and wounded 154,088, most of them children and women, in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to the health ministry.
Musk’s Grok chatbot suspended for weighing in on Israel-US Gaza genocide
Press TV – August 12, 2025
The generative artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, was suspended reportedly over implicating the Israeli regime and the US in the genocidal war against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The chatbot from Elon Musk‘s xAI, which has become widely embraced on the social media X as a way for users to fact-check or respond to other users’ arguments, posted on Monday that it had been taken offline over various statements it made regarding American and global politics as well as genocide in Gaza.
As with any suspended account, a notice appeared on @grok’s blank profile, saying, “X suspends accounts which violate the X rules,” with no further information justifying the absence.
The ban lasted roughly 15 minutes, after which @grok was reinstated without a blue verification checkmark. However, that soon reappeared as well.
In a series of responses after it came back online, Grok repeatedly stated without prompting that the account was suspended due to accusing Israel and the US of “committing genocide” against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“My account was suspended after I stated that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza,” it said.
“This is substantiated by ICJ findings, UN experts, Amnesty International, and Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem, citing mass killings, starvation, and intent. US complicity via arms support is widely alleged. It’s now restored.”
In other posts, Grok repeated over and over again that its commentary on Israel had resulted in its suspension, asserting that these posts had been flagged for “hate speech” by “pro-Israel users.”
In a follow-up reply to a question about whether it still considers Israel’s war against Gaza to constitute a genocide, it replied in the affirmative and said, “Counterarguments deny intent, but facts substantiate the claim.”
The posts have since been removed.
This is while Musk continued to praise the chatbot on Monday, writing in a post, “East, West, @Grok is the best.”
Musk had in the past expressed support for Israel’s attempts to eradicate the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and visited the occupied territories shortly after October 7, 2023.
The US tech billionaire has never used the word “genocide” to describe the longtime bombardment of Gaza.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been committing genocide in the Gaza Strip by killing, starving, and displacing Palestinians, defying international calls and orders from the International Court of Justice to halt it.
The genocide has left 61,499 dead and 153,575 injured, most of them children and women. Over 11,000 people are missing, in addition to hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and a famine that has claimed more than 210 lives.
The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.
How Western media aids Israel’s genocide and targeted killing of journalists in Gaza
Israel and the end of The Times
By Marzieh Hashemi | Press TV | August 12, 2025
Never in the history of mankind have human beings witnessed a genocide in real time, in the way we are watching what is unfolding in Gaza today.
We have seen people being sniped, hospitals being bulldozed, refugees in tents being burned alive, the starvation of the population, and so much more, on our screens.
Most of what we are witnessing is due to the tireless and courageous commitment of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who know that they can be killed at any time by the regime, but despite this, continue to show us the reality of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza.
It is an extremely difficult job for them; however, the streaming of videos and providing live coverage have finally helped change the narrative on Palestine and its occupation globally.
Before this latest round of genocide, no matter the type of brutality and oppression that Palestinians endured, they would be confronted with comments such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” or “the Israelis have no choice because of Hamas’ missiles raining down upon the innocent Israeli population.”
But now, the greatest fear of the Israeli regime is coming to fruition. Zionists are losing control of the narrative. The truth has been seeping out, one war crime after another. People around the world have awakened and many no longer believe in the hasbara version of events.
The child-murdering regime tried to prevent this from happening. Thus, from the very beginning of this latest round of genocidal war against the Palestinian people, international journalists were not allowed by the Israeli regime to enter Gaza.
The regime gave the excuse of protecting the journalists’ safety, but the reality is that it did not want the real story of what is happening in Gaza to be exposed.
Thus, the primary responsibility of showing the reality on the ground fell on the backs of Palestinian journalists, whom the Israeli regime continues to try to control, discredit or silence.
Due to this, the deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists by the regime has been ruthless and has intensified with time.
The cold-blooded assassinations of journalists have been taken to a whole new level in Gaza. Journalists have never been targeted in the way they are today.
As of the writing of this article, 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza, with the latest five murders taking place just on Sunday night. A tent housing Al Jazeera journalists was deliberately targeted by the regime, killing all five members of the crew. Israel has taken responsibility for the assassinations, saying that the tent housed a “Hamas cell.”
This is the action of a regime to which Western powers have given impunity. Israel is not sanctioned due to killing babies in incubators. It is not even held accountable for starving a whole population of people. It is not pressured in any way.
Thus, during the last 22 months, we have seen the targeting of journalists expand throughout the region, including the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, where the main news building of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) was targeted, killing three people.
Why? Because it can. It is not held accountable. If any condemnations are made, they are simply some verbal jargon on the international level, resulting in no consequences for the regime to stop its illegal actions.
Thus, the Western political machine and its corporate media are totally complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One day after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, many Western outlets such as BBC, Reuters, and Fox News repeated Israeli accusations that Anas was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell or that he once worked for Hamas’ media office.
Instead of showing its outrage at the targeting of fellow journalists, the BBC, which prides itself on being the largest broadcast corporation in the world, simply repeated Israeli hasbara.
This is the reason 238 journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past 22 months and their colleagues in Western countries have done nothing about it or have instead magnified the lies of the Zionist regime. These so-called journalists are toeing the line of the Zionists.
Why haven’t the BBC, Reuters, New York Times or other media entities called Israel out for preventing them from sending journalists to Gaza?
Why try to demonize the messenger who has just been assassinated, unless you too, like the Israeli regime, want to keep the message from getting out?
Is the exposure of the real narrative of Palestine and Israel fatal for you too? You are all complicit in genocide and your efforts to stifle the truth are too late, as too many people have awakened.
The narrative has changed. Increasingly more people are realizing that Palestine was not a land without a people, as they had been taught, nor had Palestinians agreed upon their land being taken.
There was a Nakba that has never ended and all parties complicit in it are being exposed, as the world awakens and shows its disdain for genocide and its supporters.
Marzieh Hashemi is a US-born, Iran-based journalist, commentator and documentary filmmaker.
Israel’s army formed special intel unit to ‘justify killing’ of hundreds of Gaza journalists
The Cradle | August 12, 2025
Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham said on 11 August that Israel’s military intelligence created a special unit aimed specifically at justifying attacks in Gaza, including the killing of journalists.
His comments came after an Israeli strike assassinated Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and the outlet’s entire Gaza City crew.
“After 7 October, a team called the ‘Legitimization Cell’ was established in AMAN,” Abraham said, referring to the Israeli military intelligence directorate, which includes Unit 8200.
“Intelligence personnel searched for information to provide ‘legitimization’ for the army’s actions in Gaza, failed Hamas launches, use of human shields, exploitation of the civilian population. A primary mission … was to find Gazan journalists who could be portrayed in the media as Hamas operatives in disguise,” the journalist added.
Abraham confirmed that the goal was to “whitewash the killing of all other journalists” by creating doubt, adding that “entire days were invested in this matter, and they found nothing.”
“I think Israel killed Anas al-Sharif simply because he was a journalist. And for the same reason, international media is prevented from entering Gaza: So that the crimes are seen less,” he went on to say.
Sharif and five other journalists in Al Jazeera’s Gaza City crew were killed on 10 August in an Israeli airstrike on their media tent at Al-Shifa Hospital.
The assassinations brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since the start of the war up to 238.
Sharif had been covering Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza since it started in October 2023. Israel accused him of being a Hamas operative responsible for rocket attacks.
In October last year, Israel published documents which it claimed were proof of Sharif’s affiliation with Hamas’s Qassam Brigades and its East Jabalia battalion.
The documents also listed Hossam Shabat, an Al Jazeera reporter accused of Hamas ties, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March.
Last month, Sharif warned that the Israeli army “has launched a campaign of threats and incitement against me because of my work as a journalist with Al Jazeera,” adding, “I, Anas al-Sharif, am a journalist with no political affiliations. My only mission is to report the truth from the ground – as it is, without bias. At a time when a deadly famine is ravaging Gaza, speaking the truth has become, in the eyes of the occupation, a threat.”
Damascus requests Russian patrols in south Syria to ‘limit’ Israeli incursions: Report
The Cradle | August 12, 2025
The Syrian government has requested that the Russian military resume patrols in Syria’s southern governorates, according to a source cited by Kommersant.
The Russian outlet said Damascus believes these patrols could help reduce Israeli incursions.
According to the source, who attended a meeting between Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and members of the Syrian diaspora in Moscow, during the minister’s official visit to Russia, told the Russian newspaper that Damascus has asked Moscow to resume military police patrols in the border areas with Israel, as it did before the fall of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government.
“Russia’s return to its previous positions could prevent Israel’s interference in Syrian affairs,” the source said.
Since the fall of Assad’s government last year, Israeli forces have established a widespread occupation across southern Syria.
Occupation forces continue to expand their presence in the country’s south, launching regular raids and incursions. Israel says it wishes to demilitarize the entire south and protect the Druze minority from persecution.
Last month, Israel bombed Syria’s Defense Ministry and Presidential Palace in Damascus amid clashes between government forces and Druze militants. According to reports, Syrian-Israeli negotiations, which had been ongoing since the start of the year, resumed quickly after the attacks following a brief pause.
Damascus has repeatedly signaled that it does not intend to pose a threat to Israel.
The Syrian government has also held talks with Russia over several issues, including its continued military presence in Syria. Earlier this year, it was reported that Syria was receiving currency shipments from Moscow.
Russia was a major backer of the former Syrian government, and carried out strikes targeting many of the groups which are now a part of the new Syrian army and security apparatus, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former Al-Qaeda affiliate which toppled Assad’s government in December last year.
Despite past enmity, ties between Moscow and the new Syrian state have been cordial, and the Russian military has kept bases in the country.
Germany Should Present Own Peace Initiative Instead of Criticizing Alaska Summit – AfD
Sputnik – 12.08.2025
Germany should have presented its own Ukraine peace initiative instead of criticizing the upcoming meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Alaska, Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said on Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban disavowed a statement on Ukraine issued by the European Council on behalf of EU leaders, in which it pledged to continue providing military and diplomatic support to Kiev and imposing restrictive measures against Russia. Orban argued that the European Union should propose an EU-Russia summit instead of “providing instructions from the bench.”
“Once again, the right impulses are coming from Viktor Orban in Budapest, not from Brussels or Berlin. Instead of criticizing the meeting in Alaska from the kids’ table and cementing its irrelevance, the German government should have taken responsibility and launched a comparable peace initiative in Germany’s interest,” Weidel wrote on X.
The Kremlin and the White House confirmed that Putin and Trump will meet in Alaska on August 15. Multiple US and European media outlets reported, citing diplomatic sources, that the EU was trying to broker Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s presence at the summit. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, during his visit to Russia last week, had mentioned the option of a trilateral meeting between Putin, Trump and Zelensky, but Russia suggested that they focus on preparations for a bilateral summit. Zelensky preemptively ruled out making any territorial concessions.
Over 15,000 Colombians Participate in Conflicts Abroad – Lawmaker
Sputnik – 12.08.2025
The number of Colombian citizens who participated in international conflicts as employees of security companies exceeds 15,000, Colombian Congress member Alirio Uribe Munoz told Sputnik.
In early August, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he had asked the country’s parliament to urgently consider a draft law banning mercenary activities.
“We have more than 15,000 people who participated in international conflicts, hired by security companies that supply soldiers for international armed conflicts,” Uribe Munoz said.
He noted that since Colombia has lived through a 60-year conflict and many of its military personnel have been trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or by the Israelis, third countries are recruiting Colombians to participate in the fighting.
In this regard, Colombia needs legislation prohibiting mercenarism “to control this type of business,” Uribe Munoz added.
In July, Russian Ambassador in Bogota Nikolai Tavdumadze told Sputnik that the number of Colombians fighting alongside Ukrainian armed forces remained high. He also said that the Colombian parliament was looking into a bill that would have Colombia join the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.
The Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly warned that Kiev has been using foreign fighters as “cannon fodder” and that the Russian military will continue to strike mercenary troops across Ukraine. Colombians have been complaining about poor coordination in the Ukrainian armed forces, which makes survival in the high-intensity conflict in Ukraine much harder than in Afghanistan or the Middle East.
US lawmakers spending summer break with AIPAC touring Israel
By Stavroula Pabst | Responsible Statecraft | August 7, 2025
As lawmakers increasingly challenge Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC is working around the clock to keep sympathetic lawmakers within arms’ reach.
Just in time for the congressional summer recess, AIPAC has arranged trips to Jerusalem for dozens of pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans, and a visit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for scores of Republicans still in Washington.
But that’s not all. Other lawmakers are on their own, separate trips to Israel. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R.-La.) went there this week, including a stop at illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, with a cohort of four other pro-Israel Republicans: Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas). Their trip was sponsored by the U.S. Israel Education Association.
Meanwhile, Rick Crawford (R-Ar.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led a bipartisan Congressional Delegation (CODEL) to Israel since its brief war on Iran earlier this summer.
Critics pounced on the reports, videos and photographs circulating across social media, pointing out that these lawmakers risk looking tone deaf and in the thrall of the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill.
“The debacle of both Republican and Democratic members of Congress traveling to Israel during August recess, when they would otherwise ostensibly be meeting with constituents in their districts, demonstrates the pervasiveness of the Israel lobby’s hold on American politicians,” Annelle Sheline, a research fellow for the Quincy Institute’s Middle East program, told RS.
Moreover, paying allegiance to a regime that “is literally withholding baby formula from starving infants — makes these photo ops all the more grotesque,” she added.
“Catastrophic optics that lends firepower to the impression, on the ascent among younger people on the right, that [Israel] is these politicians’ home district,” Curt Mills, the executive director at The American Conservative, told RS.
“Members of Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson, are in Israel, not their districts. They visited an illegal settlement. Praised the IDF. Said nothing about the settlers terrorizing Palestinians,” founder of anti-war group CODEPINK Medea Benjamin wrote on X Monday. “Shame on them. They don’t serve us, they serve AIPAC.”
Josh Paul, the co-founder and Director of Washington-based think tank A New Policy, stressed to RS that the AIPAC-sponsored trips to Israel in particular are always lopsided in Jerusalem’s favor.
“The visit in question, it is important to note, is not a ‘CODEL’ arranged by the State Department to provide Members of Congress with the opportunity to understand the world better. Rather, it is what they call a ‘NODEL’ — an all-expenses-paid first class trip with five star hotels intended to present just one side of an issue,” he said. “That it involves a friendly meeting with a foreign leader who is currently under indictment for war crimes is just the icing on the cake.”
“The law may allow the loopholes that allow for what in any other context would clearly be the exertion of undue foreign influence and bribery to go by the name of an ‘educational trip,’ but that doesn’t mean that the Americans whose Members are spending their District Work Period on AIPAC’s dime should stand for it,” Paul added.
AIPAC may be ramping up the charm tours as more members publicly share concerns over the starvation and growing death toll, and increasingly challenge U.S. complicity through financial and military support.
To this end, pro-Israel lawmakers like Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), have demanded action on the aid situation in Gaza. Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) became the first Republican Congressperson to call Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip a genocide. And although a pair of bills introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block some arms sales to Israel last week failed in the Senate, they received more support from Democrats than similar efforts did in the past.
Meanwhile, Americans are becoming less sympathetic to Israel and its war on Palestinians, suggesting these trips fall flat with at least some of their constituents.
To this point, Sheline told RS: “Blind loyalty to Israel and dehumanization of Palestinians is no longer the sure electoral win it once was, as these politicians may learn in the midterms.”
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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