teachers
Video: thousands gather for Gaza at Columbia as professor condemns uni’s ‘day of shame’
History professor Christopher Brown describes scandal of university president setting riot police on peaceful anti-genocide demo and condemns craven congressional testimony
Thousands have again gathered on the lawns of Columbia University in New York, despite the attempted repression of the university’s management and the New York police – where they heard speeches from faculty members as well as students against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the authorities’ attempts to silence them:
Despite the state’s aggression, which has included the use of riot police and state troops in various locations – and the shameful demonisation of peace protesters by politicians and pro-Israel lobby groups willing to collude in Israel’s war crimes, mirroring the tactics used in the UK – the protest movement is growing and the US public is increasingly aware and condemning of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children.
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US unis even arresting TEACHERS as Israel lobby group demands anti-Palestine crackdown
Students and teachers targeted by police as ADL demands government breaks student anti-genocide protest movement
At least one US university has called in police to arrest faculty members as well as students, as the so-called ‘Anti-defamation League’ (ADL) demanded a crackdown on the spreading anti-genocide protest movement among US students.
NYPD officers took NYU teachers as well as students away from a demo against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as demonstrations spread to universities around the country. Columbia University, also in New York, has seen further student arrests as a sit-in demo by students against Israel’s slaughter of innocents continues undeterred.
In a tactic reminiscent of the recent rigged stunt in the UK by the Israel-linked, so-called ‘Campaign against Antisemitism’ (CAA), the ADL has claimed Jewish students are unsafe and demanded the immediate suspension of anyone who dares protest against mass murder:
Innocent women and children in Gaza are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands by Israel – and Palestinian students have been attacked, leaving at least one paralysed, by morons whipped up by the Islamophobic speech of politicians and pro-Israel lobbyists – but it seems we are meant to treat the feelings of the friends of genocide and apartheid as more important, on both sides of the Atlantic.
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”What Do You Mean School Holidays Is Still 2 Week’s Off!” Scream Nation’s Teachers
Australian school teachers have let out a collective scream, upon the realisation that the World’s longest term still has a week and a half to go.
”Oh, dear God please end this term,” cried Launceston Primary school teacher Mary Chalk. ”The kids are ratty, they’re all sugared up from Easter and quite frankly I’m not paid enough for this.”
”An 11 week term! What genius thought this one up.”
It’s not just Teachers upset, parents aren’t happy with school holidays and Easter not lining up this year as well.
”Bloody bureaucrats, don’t they realise that a lot of people just go away for the whole Easter/school holidays.” said Father of two Ivar Jeep. ”I mean, this weekend we only got a couple of days down at the shack, wasn’t even worth bringing down the boat.”
”And we’ve gotta do it all again in two weeks time.”
”Should’ve just left the boat there.”
The education department could not be reached for comment, they were already on holidays.
Mark Williamson
@MWChatShow
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The Over-50s Turning to Teaching
At the age of 55, Deepak Swaroop left his global role as a senior partner at an accounting firm to embark on a new path as a startup founder. Lacking the change and fulfillment he was hoping to find in this world, he then dabbled in retirement, only to feel unsatisfied by his new activities of golf, walks and trips to the library.
He’d read about Lucy Kellaway, the Financial Times editor who left journalism to become a trainee teacher and went on to found Now Teach, an organization that helps people change careers and become teachers, in 2017. After sitting in on lessons at five different schools, his mind was made up: He would retrain as a high school math teacher.
Deepak Swaroop now teaches high school math. Courtesy of Now Teach
Three years on, Swaroop feels energized and inspired — even if he is now earning a fraction of what he used to.
“Money wasn’t really the make or break for this option,” says London-based Swaroop. “I was keen to do something which had a purpose, so I could contribute back to society in a way. My view was that I don’t think I can contribute a lot of money to charity, but I can definitely contribute my time.”
Finding a new purpose in the classroom
Swaroop is one of the 850 people who have left careers like finance, IT, medicine, science, engineering and more to retrain as teachers through Now Teach, which relies on both government funding and corporate donors. Now Teach helps them gain a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, which typically takes one to two years depending on whether it’s done in a full- or part-time capacity. Now Teachers are also encouraged to apply for the many scholarships and bursaries on offer.
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Teacher vacancies in England have doubled since before Covid, and the government is well short of its target to recruit new trainees, as the Guardian reports, fueled by a lack of pay increases and failure to improve the heavy workload and long hours, plus more attractive opportunities abroad.
But Now Teach, and second-career teachers like Swaroop, are playing a pivotal role in helping fill the country’s teacher shortage. The organization has hit on a winning formula by focusing on an otherwise overlooked segment of the employment market: the over 50s. The average age of Now Teach teachers, the organization confirmed, is 49, with the oldest being 70. Countries like Australia are also looking to midlife career changers to meet shortages of math, science and technology teachers.
As Now Teach CEO Graihagh Crawshaw-Sadler acknowledges, many will have taken a pay cut to pursue this new path, but they’ve reached a point in their life where their priority is satisfaction over salary.
Now Teach CEO Graihagh Crawshaw-Sadler. Courtesy of Now Teach
“It’s not about the money, it’s about what this opportunity is affording them in terms of motivation, and knowing that they’re having an impact on young people,” says Crawshaw-Sadler. “We’ve got an awful lot of people who perhaps would have been looking to take early retirement, who are doing this instead. And then a large number who actually realized they’ve got a significant number of years left working. They’ve done what they want to in their current career, and it’s time to do something different. People are living and working longer, and they reach a point where they’ve given a lot to a particular profession, and they want to kind of make the next five to 15 years really count.”
This later life ambition is something Swaroop certainly relates to. “I just want to get into the classroom and teach,” he says. “I don’t have an objective of becoming a head of school. Previously, I would actively try to move up the ladder. That is being replaced by my desire to be more committed to my teaching.”
“I have had students write to me that I have helped them realize their potential and what path to take in the future. That is more valuable to me than money.”
Making schools more diverse
Originally from New Delhi, India, Swaroop is also proud to enrich the cultural diversity of his school, which, up until a few years ago, had a predominantly white teaching staff despite its highly multicultural student body. This reflects Now Teach’s success in attracting ethnic minority recruits at a higher rate than the national average and helping to close the representation gap between pupils and teachers. Thirty-two percent of its new trainees come from an ethnic minority, versus 19 percent of this year’s overall national cohort of trainee teachers and the overall national teacher rate of 21 percent, with 36 percent of pupils across the country being from an ethnic minority, according to figures shared by Now Teach. This equalizing effect also extends to gender: 44 percent of Now Teach’s intake this year were men, versus 30 percent nationally.
Indeed, Swaroop has often felt like the odd one out on the teaching staff. “My head of department is a 31-year-old man. He treats me with respect and shares things with me, but ultimately, I’m a junior teacher,” he says. “Initially, I would admit I found it challenging to be around such a young group of fellow teachers, who would think differently and would have different aspirations from me.”
Accepting that your age doesn’t match your seniority when you become a second career teacher doesn’t come easily, acknowledges Now Teach’s Crawshaw-Sadler.
“That’s the balance our Now Teach-ers have to find — being a novice, at the same time as being incredibly experienced. That’s one of the things we often focus on in the coaching support our trainees have with us, on how to tread that line and have the greatest impact, whilst also learning a brand new craft,” she says.
Beverly Melbourne retrained as a teacher in 2022. Courtesy of Now Teach
A healthy dose of humility, and adopting the view that people can lead multiple lives in one lifetime, has kept 56-year-old Beverly Melbourne grounded in her transition from government education policy advisor to high school English teacher.
Like Swaroop, Melbourne read about Now Teach in the Financial Times, and was ready to do a job where she could see and experience the impact of her actions. She retrained in 2022, and now, aged 56, is in her first year on the job.
She believes her colleagues and students appreciate the different perspective she brings based on her life experience.
“I’ve written policy, I’ve contributed to government speeches, I’ve done research. I can tell students how important it is to treat your colleagues well. I can tell them that soft skills are just as important as academic skills, because I’ve worked in meetings, created networks,” says Melbourne, who is based in the West Midlands region of the UK.
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“Those other skills are just as important to produce people that will be successful, not just for themselves, but for others as well.”
She too has left behind her ambitions to climb the corporate ladder, instead valuing the emotional reward of having a direct hand in a young person’s future.
“When you make a difference in education, the ripple effects are everywhere,” says Melbourne. “When we’re dead and gone, nobody’s going to remember what we got paid. They’re going to remember how we contributed to our family and to other individuals.”
The post The Over-50s Turning to Teaching appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
Exclusive: Streeting uses NHS privatisation announcement to tout IDF-linked health firm
Health privatisation enthusiast ‘Labour’ health spokesman namechecks Israeli military-linked firm as glowing example of private involvement in NHS – and visited firm in Israel on LFI-paid junket
Image by ‘The Agitator‘
As the death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza climbed above 30,000 this week according to observers EuroMed Monitor, Wes Streeting used an Israeli private health data company as his shining example of successful ‘entrepreneurialism’ – ie privatisation – in the NHS as ‘a source close to Mr Streeting’ briefed the media about his plans to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private corporate provision if Labour gets into government.
The ‘source’ told the i:
Labour will encourage the spread of new technologies so private sector “innovators” have a clearer route to get their product into the NHS…
The best example on the tech side of ‘opening the door to entrepreneurs’ is where you’ve got a company or innovator of a product which works really well on the NHS. There’s an example of some at home kidney tests made by Healthy.io which were first sold into the NHS in 2021
But the link – and the Labour trolling of those outraged by the Gaza slaughter – goes much further. Healthy.io is owned and run by Yonatan Adiri, former Chief Technology Officer for the whole of Israel and an adviser to then-Israeli PM Shimon Peres. Adiri’s interests are not limited to private healthcare tech. His published works include Terror in the Court: Counter-Terrorism and Judicial Power in the Israeli Case Study and Counter Terror Warfare: The Judicial Front (2008), written for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (2005).
Adiri’s interest in ‘counter-terror’ did not end in 2008. Just two months ago, shortly after the Hamas kibbutz raid, Adiri spoke to Bloomberg Technology ‘The importance of Intelligence in Israel-Hamas war’, comparing Hamas to ISIS and talking of the use of technology by intelligence services to defeat the Palestinian resistance organisation:
Skwawkbox did not find details of any involvement with Israeli spytech unit ‘Unite 8200’ – the cyberspy unit whose members reportedly paint an ‘X’ on their headsets for each Palestinian they help kill – in Adiri’s IDF service, but according to his bio page as a speaker for hire on allamericanspeakers.com, he remains a reserve captain in the ‘international operational negotiations unit’ and has acted as moderator at discussions held by the Israeli-government-sponsored Institute for National Security Studies on the use of drones and other technology for ‘national security’:
According to one article, Adiri acted for the IDF in negotiating a prisoner swap with Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.
Adiri also acted as senior national security ‘policy consultant’ for the Reut Institute, a right-wing Israeli think tank that now plays a key role in Israel’s attempts to counter the peaceful pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement.
And while Adiri may not have been a member of Unit 8200, he is – since at least March 2023 – an ‘industry mentor’ for the ‘LEAP’ initiative:
The LEAP website says that:
Leap was created in partnership with 8200bio, an organization of 8200 alumni working to promote the Israeli healthtech ecosystem. The program does strive to bring exceptional 8200 alumni into the healthtech domain, but the program is open to entrepreneurs of any background, according to the criteria described above.
Like its partner 8200 Impact, 8200bio is run by former members of what 8200 Impact calls the ‘elite IDF Signal Intelligence and Cybersecurity unit’. Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in 2020 that:
Nor did Wes Streeting simply pull the name Healthy.io out of a hat without knowing the company’s links. In May 2022, according to right-wing pressure group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Streeting visited Israel on LFI’s dime – and LFI said ahead of the trip that:
Streeting will also visit Healthy.io, a tech provider for the NHS and Boots.
Right-wing libel-merchant and ‘dauphin of phone hacking‘ Lee Harpin, writing for Jewish News rather than the Jewish Chronicle that he cost so much money in damages for smearing left-wingers, confirmed that the visit went ahead. Streeting told the NHS Confederation last spring that he had been ‘blown away’ by his trip.
Keir Starmer employs a Unit 8200 alumnus, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor members’ social media.
Wes Streeting has come out as an avid NHS privatiser – which will surprise no one who has been watching. That he chose to garnish his promise to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private profit-taking by touting an Israeli – and Israeli military-linked – firm during Israel’s war crimes, mass slaughter of women, children, medics and teachers and the bombing of hospitals and schools, in Gaza makes the betrayal even worse.
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Video: Israeli govt spokesman lets slip that kibbutz victims killed by Israel, not Hamas
Former UK ambassador Regev gives away reality of burned bodies when he tries to cover for Israel’s over-estimate of Israeli death toll in 7 October incident
The former Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev – now an adviser to Israel’s extremist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – has inadvertently admitted that Israel was responsible for the deaths of those claimed by the apartheid regime as Israeli dead.
Challenged by MSNBC interviewer Mehdi Hasan about Israel’s revision of its claimed death toll from 1,400 to 1,200, Regev answered that two hundred bodies they had thought were ‘ours’ were in fact Hamas operatives:
But as French entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand has pointed out in a tweet highlighting the video clip, this means that for six weeks the Israelis believed that burned bodies in cars and houses were their own people – and that they were burned by Israel, since Hamas would not have had the inclination – and indeed did not have the means – to incinerate their own operatives during the raid:
So 200 burned bodies previously identified as Israelis were in fact Hamas… Which tends to confirm they were burned by Israeli fire (doubtful they self-immolated) and would therefore mean that Israel thought during a month they’d burned 200 of theirs.
Israeli survivors of the carnage of the raid have told media in their own country that the Hamas raiders were kind and polite, while Israel’s forces opened fire indiscriminately on the kibbutz homes and killed hundreds of Israelis – one survivor attributed her own husband’s death directly to it. Helicopter gunship pilots also reported the ‘dilemma’ of firing on cars without knowing whether they contained Israelis or Palestinians. The kibbutz’s security manager told Israeli journalists that soldiers had been ordered to fire on Israeli homes to ‘bring them down’ on hostages and raiders alike, to ensure Hamas fighters were killed. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli troops even called in an airstrike on their own facility – with Israeli troops inside as well as Hamas fighters.
None of this, despite being widely circulated internationally and supported by extensive evidence, has been reported by UK and other western media determined to present the 7 October incident as wilful and barbaric slaughter of innocents by Hamas. Claims of rape have ‘slipped away’, according to the Israeli press – and supposed video evidence has been proven to be false – and reports of murdered babies have been disproven by Israel’s own casualty lists. Yet continue to be repeated as fact by politicians and complicit ‘journalists’ and commentators.
The supposed murderousness of Hamas during the raid has been used by Israel and its supporters to justify their ‘maximum damage’ bombing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which is killing thousands upon thousands of civilians – around half of them children and another quarter women – and their bombing of schools, hospitals and homes.
But Regev’s accidental admission, as he tried to cover Israel’s barbarity and deception even toward its own, appears to put beyond any reasonable doubt of the truth of eyewitness and investigative reports that Israel’s response to the Hamas raid was in fact responsible for most if not all of the deaths surrounding the kibbutz. So much so that for weeks Israel didn’t even know that some of the people it immolated were not their own citizens. That homicidal action is now directed at the innocent civilians of Gaza, killing thousands and maiming and traumatising many thousands more.
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Israel plans to install Blair as ‘coordinator’ to ‘legitimise’ war on Gaza
Former PM accused of lies and war crimes that led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths would add ‘greater legitimacy’ to genocide in Gaza, says Times of Israel
Israel plans to install Tony Blair as ‘humanitarian coordinator’ in Gaza in what it hopes will,
provid[e] its war effort with greater legitimacy
according to the Times of Israel, quoting the Ynet news outlet and ‘unnamed senior officials’. The Israeli government has already been in touch with Blair and discussions have been underway for weeks, with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu hoping,
to leverage Blair’s experience as former envoy to the region for the Middle East Quartet to temper international concerns over the civilian cost of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
International concerns are about the mass murder of Gazan civilians, including over five thousand children – but the Netanyahu regime appears to think that a PR exercise and a new coat of Blair-coloured paint will be enough to let Israel get on with its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza – which leaked intelligence ministry plans show it hopes will lead to clearing all of Gaza’s population that survives the mass bombing permanently into a permanent ‘tent city’ in the desert of southern Egypt.
The paper claims that the emphasis of the appointment will be “providing medical treatment and medicines, and on the possibility of evacuating the wounded and sick from the Strip” – but with no mention of actually ending the slaughter.
Shortly after the 7 October incident in southern Israel Blair – who has an office in Israel – issued a statement that claiming it meant that “decades of conventional western diplomacy around the Israel/Palestinian issue will need to be fundamentally re-thought“, apparently already justifying Israel’s onslaught and attempting to pre-empt international outrage at the mass murder of civilians:
As the full nature of the barbarity and disgusting savagery of Hamas’ attack on Israel becomes clear, which the perpetrators know full well will result not only in grief and tragedy for Israelis but also for the people of Gaza, it becomes clear also that decades of conventional western diplomacy around the Israeli/Palestinian issue will need to be fundamentally re-thought.
Tony Blair
However, eye-witnesses have attributed many, even most, of the Israeli deaths at the kibbutz to indiscriminate Israeli gunfire and shelling. No evidence has been provided for the more lurid Israeli claims of atrocities, with US president Joe Biden’s office being forced to admit he had not seen pictures he had claimed to see of mutilated babies and raped women. Israeli media recently admitted that claims of rape of Israeli women had evaporated.
A video circulated by supporters of Israel, which had been subtitled to suggest that it showed a Hamas operative threatening a woman with rape, has been shown by a Reuters fact check to say no such thing – in fact, the operative was telling another to leave the woman behind because she is female. Israeli survivors of the IDF onslaught – as well as at least one of the hostages so far released by Hamas – have commented on how kindly and politely they were treated by the Hamas fighters.
The plan exposes yet again the arrogance and contempt of the Israeli regime and the UK political establishment. Blair is widely despised as a war criminal because of his role in the 2003 Iraq invasion – and the lies about non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that he and his team told to justify it – that led to at the least several hundred thousand civilian deaths, with some believing the death toll to be as high as a million.
War criminals appointing war criminals, to legitimise war crime, about sums up the diseased national and international political order – and will do nothing to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza who are being murdered in their thousands in their homes, schools and hospitals to drive them out of their homeland.
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Starmer orders MPs to vote against SNP ceasefire motion
Cowardly regime hides behind Scotland to whip MPs to vote down motion to save Palestinian civilian lives
Keir Starmer has hidden behind the excuse of Scotland to order Labour MPs to vote against next Wednesday’s SNP amendment to the King’s Speech calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s wanton slaughter of civilians in Gaza.
Starmer’s craven and counter-factual opposition to a ceasefire to spare the thousands of women, children and other vulnerable people being killed by Israel’s targeted, mass bombing of homes, schools, hospitals, refugee camps and other vital civilian facilities is already on the record – but his party ‘whips’ have been given a script to use with MPs considering voting for the ceasefire amendment – one that uses Labour’s electoral fortunes in Scotland as an excuse.
Which is utter nonsense when Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has already come out in support of a ceasefire.
The whips have been told – after cynically asking MPs how they’re doing given the public pressure to back a ceasefire – to tell them that voting for the SNP amendment will ‘totally undermine’ Labour’s position in Scotland and that they’d have to vote against it if Labour were in government.
Labour isn’t in government, as if that makes any difference to the rights and wrongs of a ceasefire – though Starmer is admitting through this line that a Labour King’s speech would be as poisonous and murderous as the Tory one. Scottish voters, like the rest of the UK public, overwhelmingly want a ceasefire. And Sarwar’s position makes the claim it would damage the party in Scotland palpably nonsensical.
But such is the shamelessness, hollowness and cowardice of Starmer and his toxic regime that even though they have no proper, sane argument to make against calling for an end to the mass murder of innocent civilians, they are resorting to blatant nonsense to try to head off the rebellion among MPs with sizeable Muslim (or just decent and humane) constituency populations.
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Breaking: Hussain resigns from front bench over Gaza
“I want to be able to strongly advocate for a ceasefire, as called for by the UN General Secretary”, says former New Deal shadow minister
Bradford East Labour MP Imran Hussain has dramatically resigned from Keir Starmer’s front bench tonight over Starmer’s refusal to support a ceasefire in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Announcing the news, Hussain tweeted:
I want to be able to strongly advocate for a ceasefire, as called for by the UN General Secretary. In order to be fully free to do so, I have tonight stepped down from Labour’s Frontbench.
His resignation letter to Starmer states:
…over recent weeks, it has become clear that my view on the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza differs substantially from the position you have adopted.
As I write, more than 1,400 Israeli and over 10,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the last month. This shocking number of fatalities is set to grow as indiscriminate attacks and the siege of Gaza continues. Yesterday, the United Nations Secretary-General warned that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children· and stated that a humanitarian ceasefire becomes “more urgent with every passing hour.”
Given the crisis unfolding, I wish to be a strong advocate for the humanitarian ceasefire advocated by the UN General Secretary, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other UN humanitarian bodies, by numerous governments, and by leading humanitarian organisations like Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty International. It is clear that I cannot sufficiently, in all good conscience, do this from the frontbench given its current position.
A ceasefire is essential to ending the bloodshed, to ensuring that enough aid can pass into Gaza and reach those most in need, and to help ensure the safe return of the Israeli hostages.
As I made clear to the Foreign Secretary on Tuesday 24 October 2023, the situation in Gaza is now beyond that of a humanitarian catastrophe. The cutting of food, water, power and medicine to Palestinians in Gaza is an act of collective punishment that violates international law and is a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Like many others, I was therefore deeply troubled by the comments you made during an LBC interview on 11 October 2023 where you appeared to endorse such actions by the Israeli military. Whilst I appreciate your subsequent statements to clarify your comments and the increased emphasis being placed on addressing the desperate situation in Gaza, and whilst we both want to end the bloodshed, I believe the party needs to go further and call for a ceasefire.
I have unequivocally condemned Hamas’s attacks of 07 October and I firmly agree that every country has the right to defend itself. This however can never become a right to deliberately violate international law on protecting civilians or to commit war crimes. It has always been my view, which I’ve made clear repeatedly in Parliament, that human rights are universal and that it is our duty to call out all those who violate international law and commit war crimes.
I will therefore continue to press from the backbenches for a humanitarian ceasefire to protect civilians in line with the demands of the UN Secretary-General and, beyond that, for the realisation of a lasting resolution that will deliver peace for Israelis and Palestinians as part of a two-state solution.
Keir Starmer has consistently claimed that Israel has a ‘right’ to take the actions that have been described by the UN and human rights agencies as ‘textbook genocide’ and other war crimes – and has refused to call for a ceasefire, despite the United Nations’ call for an end to the mass murder of children and civilians, the bombing of hospitals and the Israeli regime’s killing of dozens of medics, teachers and aid workers.
Five or six other front-benchers are said to be close to resignation and will face increased pressure to do so now.
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