Bombing
Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
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Israel says it will pursue Gazan Palestinians on Lebanese, Turkish and Qatari territory
Israeli security service director’s threat on Israeli national TV
The director of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, has said that the Israeli government intends to pursue Palestinian resistance activists outside Palestine – specifically threatening Turkey and Qatar.
Speaking to Kan, Israel’s national broadcaster, and reported by Israeli paper Haaretz, Ronen Bar compared the 7 October kibbutz raid to the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes, saying:
This is our Munich. Everywhere – in Gaza, in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, in Turkey, and in Qatar. It will take us a few years, but we will be there to do it… we are drawing our lessons from the events and are already passing them on to other arenas, not just in the Gaza Strip…
the scope of threats facing the State of Israel is unprecedented in the past year, even before these
events. Even in this case, the main thing is hidden from the eye. There are many things brewing beneath the surface.
As well as constituting an open threat to the sovereignty of three nations, Bar’s comments are exposed as a farce by the fact that Israel knew what Hamas was planning at least a year before the kibbutz raid and did nothing – and that a growing mountain of evidence now shows that the bulk of Israeli casualties during the raid were caused by the Israeli military firing on buildings and vehicles that contained Israeli citizens, and at people on foot that pilots and tank commanders did not pause to identify before destroying.
Despite the mounting evidence, UK and western media have refused to cover the fact of Israeli ‘friendly fire’ under the military’s ‘Hannibal doctrine‘, as it would fatally undermine Israel’s attempts to justify its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
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Video: Hotovely claims Mowasi is ‘shelter’ for Gazans – just as footage reveals wasteland
Reality of Israel’s propaganda as it claims 1km-wide strip of land in southern Gaza is a safe haven for Palestinians to justify its bombing of the rest of the south
Far-right Israeli ambassador to the UK Tsipi Hotovely has claimed ‘Mowasi’ is a safe haven for the two million-plus Palestinians it has driven into southern Gaza – telling them it was safe in the south as it bombed thousands into oblivion in the north, flattened most buildings and targeted schools and hospitals.
More than a million were driven into the south – and Israel is bombing them there too. But as its disastrous propaganda efforts collapse around their ears and the truth that Israeli forces killed many of the Israelis who died in the kibbutz raid gains traction, Israeli spin-merchants clearly feel the need to somehow justify the fact that Israel is now driving the Palestinians of Gaza into an even tinier area.
There is no ‘Mowasi’ in Gaza, but there is al-Mawasi – a 1km-wide strip of land hard against the coastline of southern Gaza. But as Hotovely claimed ‘Mowasi’ is a safe place for more than two million people, half of them children, Sky cut to footage of the area – and revealed a wasteland:
Journalist Rami Jarrah, who spotted the Sky clip, went on to expose more of the propaganda – and the tininess of al Mawasi – in a short Twitter thread:
Palestinians are going out of their way to expose Israel’s fabricated safe havens that are just bustling with aid organisations.
Israel wants 2.2 million Gazans to build sand castles in the desert & disturbingly close to the Egyptian border
I wonder why?pic.twitter.com/RuNUa4QiND— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) December 4, 2023
See this tiny strip labelled 'Humanitarian Zone'?
That's Mowasi, that's where Israel wants 2.2 Million Gazans to fit, with no water, shelter or electricity.
They really mean it when they call Palestinians "Human Animals" pic.twitter.com/ihq4DmAUEM— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) December 4, 2023
Israeli ministers and advisers have been exposed planning the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, either killing its Palestinian residents or driving them into a new, permanent ‘tent city’ refugee camp in the Egyptian desert. But that is not yet the narrative that Israeli is presenting to the wider world, so ‘Mowasi’ is the interim.
And the farce of the claim has been exposed within seconds, as the gross incompetence of the Israeli propaganda machine came back to bite the apartheid-mongers yet again.
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Video: Israeli soldiers say they shot at kibbutz houses, burned bodies
Propaganda video praising women tankers gives away ‘panic’ of IDF soldiers shooting regardless of civilians
An Israeli propaganda video praising the role of women tankers in fighting Hamas during the 7 October kibbutz raid has confirmed already-existing reports in Israeli media – and admissions by senior government advisers – that many of the deaths among Israeli civilians were caused by Israeli Defence Force (IDF) bullets.
In the excerpt below, women soldiers say that:
- Soldiers at the scene were ‘panicked’ and wanted them to shoot at areas regardless whether there were civilians
- they shot at civilian houses where they could not have known whether there were civilians inside
- that burned bodies – most of whom were later claimed by Israel to be civilians – were killed the IDF and that the tank crews shot the burned bodies again to make sure no one lived
The woman tank commander says, perversely, in one moment that she refused an order to shoot where there might be civilians but two seconds later says that she immediately fired on a kibbutz house:
Israeli survivors of the raid told Israeli media soon afterwards that many if not most of the civilian deaths were caused by IDF fire. The videos were suppressed and never reported by the international ‘mainstream’ media, but are still in circulation.
BREAKING: ISRAELI DEFENSE CORRESPONDENT SAYS HAMAS TOOK CARE OF THE HOSTAGES
Alon Ben David said;
“They were not subjected to torture or ill-treatment. The food was scarce; there wasn't much food.”
He said Hamas tried to provide medications daily, though not always… pic.twitter.com/vdk42hYOsF— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) November 26, 2023
Israeli media reports have said hostages were well treated. UK media have mostly ignored
Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev, now a senior Netanyahu adviser, inadvertently admitted that the IDF weapons had been responsible for the hundreds of charred charred Israeli bodies – and that two hundred that Israel had thought were Israelis killed by the IDF were in fact Palestinian. A senior IDF pilot told an interviewer that the ‘Hannibal’ directive to kill Israelis as well as Palestinians to prevent hostage situations – supposedly a policy abandoned years ago – was something he and his colleagues trained in regularly for the last twenty years and that the events at the kibbutzim were a ‘mass Hannibal’.
Israeli soldiers and pilots also told Israeli media that they had destroyed homes with everyone inside, both Israeli and Palestinian. Now a propaganda video, intended to boast about Israeli military courage and to present Israel as progressive, has again confirmed that the IDF fired at people in the kibbutz without differentiating between Israelis and Palestinians and even put bullets into the burned to make sure they were dead – making a sick mockery of the Israeli regime’s claims of savagery used to justify its mass killing of civilians in Gaza.
The full 14-minute video can be viewed here.
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Newham independent Naqvi trounces Labour in by-election
Labour loses yet another council seat in London borough party fears is becoming ‘another Tower Hamlets’ – and party didn’t even bother to turn up at polling stations
Newham Independents candidate Sophia Naqvi has trounced Labour to win the Plaistow North by-election, giving the Independents their third councillor in the East End borough.
Naqvi won 1286 votes to Labour’s 750 after a clean and well-supported campaign by the independents that saw Labour barely able to muster canvassers for party-imposed candidate Aktharul Alam. Locals have told Skwawkbox that there were no party representatives in sight in at least two polling stations, suggesting Labour knew what was coming from the reactions it received on the doorstep.
Newham has seen a string of resignations of senior party officers over Keir Starmer’s assault on democracy – and this week saw Cllr Zuber Gulamussen and several party officers resign over Starmer’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. With Independent Group leader Mehmood Mirza already having hammered another imposed Labour candidate in May, Labour figures fear that Newham will become ‘another Tower Hamlets’ – the London borough that the party lost catastrophically to the Aspire group run by Lutfur Rahman, the former – and again current – mayor ousted after a racist smear campaign by the Labour right.
Based on tonight’s result, those fears appear to be coming true. Congratulations Sophia Naqvi and the Newham Independents.
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Video: Liverpool City Council supports ceasefire after ‘rebellion’
Cross-party agreement forces climbdown – watch Liverpool Community Independents leader Alan Gibbons’s speeches
Liverpool City Council voted on Wednesday evening – despite a ban imposed by the leadership on a speech by local Jewish woman Helen Marks – to call for a full and immediate ceasefire in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Council insiders have told us that the council’s Labour leadership folded in the face of a rebellion among many of the city’s Labour councillors – and the determination of the council’s smaller parties.
Liverpool Community Independents group leader Alan Gibbons – a former Labour councillor who was one of many to renounce the party last year over planned cuts to services for the city’s most vulnerable people – spoke to the assembled councillors in favour of a ceasefire call:
Gibbons then spoke outside the City Hall after the result, alongside Helen Marks, to assembled protesters who had gathered to pressure the council to call for a ceasefire:
This modicum of sanity in a small part of the Labour party had to be wrung from it by public outrage and the exposure of its attempts to quell freedom of speech.
Liverpool Community Independents group has announced that it will stand a candidate against Garston Labour MP Maria Eagle because of her support for Keir Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire.
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Liverpool council bans Jewish woman from speaking on Gaza ceasefire
Read below for her full speech – and the council’s excuses for its attack on democracy and free speech
Helen Marks protesting for Gazans during October’s Labour conference (image rights S Walker)
Liverpool City Council has withdrawn Jewish resident Helen Marks’s speaking slot at tonight’s meeting of the council, where she had successfully applied to address the council to ask it to call for a ceasefire and peace deal in Gaza, where Israel has slaughtered around 15,000 people, half of them children, in a relentless campaign of bombing homes, hospitals and schools.
Ms Marks had been told by the council’s Principal Democratic Services Officer:
You will be able to speak for 3 minutes at the Council Meeting, would you be able to send me a statement as to what you are going to say to the meeting please?
We are also ticketing the meeting, so you will need to be sent a ticket via email for the meeting. You will be allowed 2 tickets if you need another one and I would also need the name of the person attending with you.
As requested, Ms Marks sent a draft of her planned speech. It reads:
My name is Helen Marks. I am secretary of Liverpool Friends of Palestine. I am from a Jewish family. My mother was brought up in mandate Palestine and my Polish Jewish father lost his parents, a brother, aunts , uncles and cousins in the holocaust.
I have asked to speak today to urge you to call for an immediate ceasefire . However, I want you to go further if a ceasefire is agreed and insist that it is accompanied by genuine peace talks to find a lasting solution to this endless cycle of violence.
When the holocaust took place during the 2nd World War most people in the world could justifiably say that they were unaware of what was taking place. They were also incredulous when they learned the facts. They couldn’t believe that any one or any country could behave in such a calculated, despicable way.
Fast forward to the current situation in Gaza. We have no such excuse. Every day we see on our TV screens Gaza being bombed and innocent men women and children being killed in the most calculated, brutal way ; thousands of body bags, children screaming for their mummy. An acronym has been coined. WCNSF Wounded Children No Surviving Family. There are now more than 33,000 Palestinian orphans living in Gaza.
I abhor the killing of innocent Israeli civilians at the hands of Hamas on the 7th October and feel especially sad that some were from a Kibbutz where the residents were critical of the injustices suffered by the Palestinians. However the Israeli response is disproportionate, inhumane and must be stopped.
How can this be happening in this day and age? Did all this violence start on October 7th or must we put it in context ?
Hajo Meyer, holocaust survivor, spent his adult years warning us that holocausts don’t just appear. They happen because of a process of dehumanising the other and that is what successive Israeli governments have been doing in relation to the Palestinians, never calling them Palestinians just Arabs, labelling them all as terrorists, calling them human animals. When I was in Hebron in 2008 I saw daubed on the doors of Palestinian houses “ Kill all Arabs” with a star of David alongside. In 2014, Justice Minister Ayalet Shaked said that the mothers of Palestinian martyrs should go ,as should their homes “ otherwise more little snakes will be raised”.
It is much easier to kill your enemy if you view them as sub human.
In 2022 Amnesty International published a report based on 4 yrs of research which concluded that Israel was an Apartheid state according to the legally accepted definition. This report was backed up by reports by Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem. They saw the expansion of illegal settlements, the theft of land for military purposes, the denial of planning permission for housing, the restricted access to water, the numerous checkpoints that denied free movement, the imprisonment of adults and young people under military not civil law and the killing of Palestinians without proper investigations. Over 160 Palestinians have since been killed in the West Bank following 7th October.
What is happening now in Gaza, like the recent bombing of a school in the Jabalia refugee camp killing 200 children and staff is not self defence or helping to root out Hamas. It must stop.
If you fail to call for an end to the occupation a lifting of the siege of Gaza, a solution to the over 6,000 refugees languishing in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine itself then the cycle of violence will continue.
There were ceasefires after 2008/9, 2012, 2014, 2018 but the Western Powers continued to protect Israel, pretend it did not have nuclear weapons, backed the false PR that it had the most moral army in the world and was the only democracy in the Middle East and rewarded it with prestigious hosting of events irrespective of its behaviour. And the US and UK continue to send it arms .
I am sure as councillors you will not mistakenly conflate this criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
I call on you to demand an immediate ceasefire that is followed by a clear programme that delivers justice for the Palestinians.
However, this straightforward and factual speech fell foul of the council’s City Solicitor Daniel Fenwick, who claimed that it would breach the so-called ‘IHRA definition’ of antisemitism – a definition that does not actually define, and which has been criticised by Jewish legal experts and even its author as a means of chilling free speech on and legitimate criticism of Israel. Fenwick wrote, withdrawing Marks’s permission to speak at the meeting:
Dear Ms Marks,
Council Public Speaking Rights
I write with regard to your request to speak at the above meeting and your draft statement which has been passed to me as the Council’s Monitoring Officer for assessment under the Council Procedure Rules (rule 12).
Unfortunately, the Council already had three speakers registered to speak for the Council meeting by the time you registered to speak. For completeness, whilst you emailed the Council on 7th November, the Council replied to you on the same day advising you how to make your request to speak after the publication of the agenda on 14th November. A third and final request to speak was received on 17th November at 9.46am and your request was received at 10.54am on that day. I am sorry this was not communicated earlier to you but, unfortunately, having check the times of the emails, this is the correct order in which they were received and as Monitoring Officer I have no authority to waive this rule..
I believe you have tickets for the public gallery and we look forward to seeing you at the meeting.Your Statement
Thank you for the draft of your statement. For completeness, I have reviewed your statement under the Council’s procedure rules and thought it would assist you if I gave you my views for future reference, if you had been able to speak at the meeting. As currently drafted, your statement could not accepted as it breaches the following rules on the acceptance of public statements:
12.8 The Monitoring Officer may reject a request to speak if:
…
12.8.3 it is defamatory, frivolous or offensiveIt is my view as the Council’s Monitoring Officer that whilst it is legitimate freedom of expression to criticise the Israeli government’s policies and actions in Gaza, there are significant elements of the statement’s content that risks a breach the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of Anti-Semitism, which was adopted by the Council as its definition of anti-Semitism in January 2018. Your statement is therefore likely to be offensive to the Jewish community and others in the city and beyond. For this reason, the Council cannot place itself at risk of breaching its own policies and potentially discriminating unlawfully against any person by making a decision to allow it to be read in its current form.
The statement if read out would further place the Council at risk of breaching its public sector equality duty under s.149 of the Equality Act 2010. The Council must have due regard to the achievement of this duty and, as one example, the statement as worded is also unlikely to foster good relations between Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and with those without those protected characteristics under the 2010 Act in Liverpool and beyond, noting the context of the horrific rise of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic attacks since 7 October.
Thank you for showing an interest in speaking at the Council meeting.
Skwawkbox wrote to Fenwick to ask him to be specific about why he was taking this action and exactly what in Marks’s speech he considered to breach the ‘definition’:
Mr Fenwick,
You contacted Jewish activist Helen Marks by email informing her that she would not be able to speak at tonight’s council meeting – despite, though your email did not acknowledge this, her having received confirmation of a 3-minute slot from the council’s Principal Democratic Services Officer. You claim there are too many speakers and that her speech might breach the IHRA ‘definition of anti-semitism’, but do not say why. I have seen the statement and it is self-evidently legitimate criticism of Israel for its actions and merely being offensive to someone is not a breach of the IHRA, which in any case has been criticised by legal experts and even its founder for its chilling effect on free speech.
Apologies for the short notice, but as the meeting takes place at 5pm I will be covering this imminently so ask for your response no later than 2pm on the following – as you have already made these deliberations before writing to Ms Marks, it should not be onerous to provide the information:
- Why are you denying a Jewish resident her right of democratic expression on a matter of obvious public importance concerning Israel and Gaza?
- What precisely in her planned statement do you think breaches the IHRA and why?
- Were you instructed or pressured by anyone inside or outside the council to withdraw permission?
He did not answer the questions, instead saying only that the council meeting will be livestreamed and directing the enquiry to the council’s communications team, who did not respond even well after the press deadline. Opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza are mounting a protest outside Liverpool’s City Hall before the 5pm council meeting.
Ms Marks, who was one of two Liverpool Jewish party members smeared by Labour officials in a widely-condemned 2019 BBC Panorama programme, told Skwawkbox that the council’s manoeuvres were ‘feeble but predictable’:
I was given permission to make a 3-minute statement at today’s council meeting but this permission was withdrawn for very feeble but predictable reasons. I was speaking in support of Alan Gibbon’s motion calling on councillors to vote for an immediate ceasefire. I have since sent all councillors the statement I would have read out.
Labour’s betrayal of Palestinian civilians continues even in a city whose people have shown strong solidarity with those Gazan women and children facing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
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Video: Israeli reserve colonel says Oct 7 killings were ‘mass Hannibal’ directive by IDF, not Hamas
Israeli media interview supports eyewitness accounts and inadvertent admission by Netanyahu spokesman that Israeli military, not Hamas, responsible for most deaths at Kibbutz Be’eri
A candid interview with a senior Israeli Defence Force (IDF) reserve pilot corroborates reports from eyewitnesses that Israeli forces were responsible for most deaths in the 7 October kibbutz raid – and not Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
The ‘Hannibal directive’, an instruction to the military to kill both hostages and raiders to prevent hostages being taken into captivity, was officially repealed in 2008, but Colonel Nof Erez said that he and his fellow pilots have been practising it for the past twenty years – and that the carnage at Kibbutz Be’eri was a ‘mass Hannibal’, with helicopter gunships shooting indiscriminately at cars leaving the area, without knowing whether they contained hostages or not.
Erez, speaking to Israeli media outlet Haaretz and translated by Asian news magazine The Cradle, said that the absence of any Israeli forces on the ground at the time ruled out any chance of ground coordination of the air assault – meaning that the helicopters would have been shooting at any target that moved:
Speaking with Haaretz, Israeli reserve pilot Col. Nof Erez describes Israeli army's response to Oct. 7 as "MASS HANNIBAL."
The Hannibal Directive orders the army to kill their own to prevent them being taken captive. pic.twitter.com/5IrERAAtVl— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) November 20, 2023
Survivors of the slaughter have said that they were treated well by the Hamas raiders, but that Israeli forces fired indiscriminately – with one eyewitness reporting that her husband had been killed by Israeli bullets – and the kibbutz security head said that houses had been shelled to bring them down on their occupants and kill them and the Hamas fighters.
And last week former Israeli ambassador Mark Regev, now a key Netanyahu adviser, inadvertently admitted that the many charred bodies had been burned by Israeli weapons – as long suspected by military experts and commentators who knew that Hamas does not have weapons that will do it – when he said that two hundred bodies had been thought to be Israeli but were in fact Palestinians.
Western media and politicians remain stubbornly silent on these facts, allowing the Israeli regime to continue to deceive the UK and US public with lurid and entirely unevidenced tales – what has been put forward as supposed evidence has rapidly fallen apart – of rapes and beheadings to justify Israel’s war crimes and mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
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Video: BBC does actual journalism to expose IDF Al Shifa claims
IDF’s ‘evidence’ of Hamas presence at Al Shifa hospital falls even further apart under BBC analysis
The BBC has done its job of scrutinising ‘evidence’ claimed by the Israeli military (IDF) to show the presence of a Hamas base at the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza – and the Israeli claims fell even further apart under even that rudimentary scrutiny.
The IDF had already been widely and rightly derided for the feebleness of its attempts to persuade the world that it had found evidence of a Hamas base, after it pointed to a calendar claiming it showed the names of Hamas fighters when it showed only the days of the week in Arabic – and deleted a video showing a supposed ‘Hamas laptop’ was in fact an IDF machine, then released another version with the laptop blurred out.
But the BBC’s analysis:
- showed that the supposedly ‘one take’ video put out by the IDF had in fact been edited
- showed that weapons ‘found’ near an MRI machine in the hospital had in fact been multiplied between the IDF’s video shoot and the BBC being allowed in to film
- noted that the IDF claimed the additional weapons had been found ‘throughout the day’ – but the regime did not explain why they appeared in a location that supposedly showed a weapons stash ‘as found’
- concluded that the IDF had yet to provide any believable evidence to support its attempt to justify its slaughter of civilians in Gazan hospitals by demonstrating a significant Hamas presence:
The BBC did not mention the nonsense of the fact that stashing a pile of metal weapons next to an MRI machine – which would have been in use until fuel ran out in the last few weeks – would also be disastrous, because even a metal bracelet would be pulled into the machine’s magnets, but the point still stands.
Every time Israel has provided ‘evidence’, it has collapsed and been rightly ridiculed – but the wilful collusion of western governments (and in this country the so-called ‘opposition’) has enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Al Shifa hospital is now in the middle of a forced and probably deadly evacuation, after the IDF destroyed the hospital’s last oxygen reserves to force doctors to comply who had been refusing for the sake of their desperately-ill patients.
Now if only the BBC would continue to hold governments to account – including the UK government’s continuing assault on the poor, vulnerable and disabled and all of our human and civic rights – as well.
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