Well, not yet. But they will, so I might as well just put that.
Only not really, obviously, it's just a limited strategic operation. You know, like what Russia started two years ago in Ukraine. Except I doubt Labanon will have all of Western Europe and the US supplying them with arms and aid like Ukraine does.
Obviously I haven't even bothered looking into Israel's justifications for this, because we all know they will be bollocks, but feel free to provide a devil's advocate perspective if any of you know any better.
What's going to happen next? Is it all kicking off?
>>42565 There’s always something like that happening in Sudan; part of what makes things news is that they have to be things that don’t happen every day.
How are the Rohingya eskimos doing? I haven’t heard much from them in a while.
>Dozens of pro-Indy accounts go dark after Israeli strikes
>On 12 June 2025, dozens of anonymous X (formerly Twitter) accounts advocating Scottish independence abruptly went silent. Many had posted hundreds of times per week, often using pro-independence slogans, anti-UK messaging, and identity cues like “NHS nurse” or “Glaswegian socialist.”
>One tweet, which was viewed over a million times, stated, “the people robbing this country travel by private jet not by dinghy.” Another drew attention to Prince George receiving flying lessons at age 11, contrasting it with worsening poverty across the UK.
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/dozens-of-pro-indy-accounts-go-dark-after-israeli-strikes/
Am I the only person on the internet that isn't a bloody government agent?
It makes sense if you view it not as them giving a shit about the subject itself but the same tactic Adam Curtis talks about Steve Bannon and the Russians doing.
This is why I can't get my head around people still using Twitter or its variants as a source of information, or really anything other than a time wasting little game when you have a shit. Even that is probably too much for most normal people to handle.
I have been hardened by decades of exposure to the internet, starting when I was a wee lad sat giggling at the naughty and gruesome images we saw on Rotten, as a teen I was tempered in the fires of the most deviant filth the hentai and furry porn sites could show me, and as a young adult spent many a night shitposting on the chans until the small hours. Nothing shocks or surprises me any more, but the important thing is, I know to take anything and everything I read on the internet with a large helping of salt. It's a bit like if you gave an average person a gram of coke, they'd be off their tits, but if you give it to Ozzy Osbourne, he could hoof the bag and barely feel it.
Normal people do not have that resistance, and it is dangerous for them to be exposed.
Some people think we live in an era of unprecedented freedom of information, and in many ways we do, but it's just as hard to tell the facts from the propaganda as it was in the old days. There's still just as much disinformation out there. The only difference is that the state no longer has a monopoly on what kind of disinformation we hear.
You have to wonder how much of the big disruptive movements we saw disrupting things over recent years, from BLM and the Me Too crowd, to MAGA and the January 6th insurrectionists are actually organic, and how much of it is agitprop and psyop.
>>42578 >You have to wonder how much of the big disruptive movements we saw disrupting things over recent years, from BLM and the Me Too crowd, to MAGA and the January 6th insurrectionists are actually organic, and how much of it is agitprop and psyop.
They're all both. It's easier to widen a crack than create one. And when you start to wonder if they're astroturfed, you lose faith in all of them and stop acting.
>>42580 That's a little reductive, may as well go one step further and use the same method to show how OWS was just created as a distraction from the war in Iraq.
>>42571 Considering that ~1.6 million people are pro independence, "dozens" isn't very impressive. I'm not denying the accounts are bots, but the implication is unavoidably that Scottish independence is aided by Iranian astroturfing, rather than being a combination of longstanding, organic nationalism, good SNP tactics between 1999 and 2015, and the UK chronically breeding discontent through bad domestic policy.
The editor's note at the end only emphasises that state interference "includes crafting fake personas aligned with left-wing or anti-imperialist sentiment", as though you couldn't also find a dozen fake right-wing accounts. The omission is conspicuous.
It's only half related, but I think this country's going to a weird place. I can't help but draw a connection back to our "independent reviewer of state threat legislation" going out to a right-wing think thank and saying
>"If I was a foreign intelligence officer, of course I would ensure that the UK hated itself and its history," he says in the speech.
>"That the very definition of woman should be put into question, and that masculinity would be presented as toxic.
>"That white people should be ashamed and non-white people aggrieved. I would promote antisemitism within politics.
>"My intention would be to cause both immediate and long-term damage to the national security of the UK by exploiting the freedom and openness of the UK by providing funds, exploiting social media, and entryism."
>Mr Hall asks if it might be necessary to "bring forward a law, in the interests of national security, banning extremism or subversion".
( https://news.sky.com/story/britain-may-have-to-resort-to-anti-subversion-laws-watchdog-warns-13370652 )
Or - unsympathetically - if you're left of Sir Keir Starmer you could be a bastard subversive and a foreign agent. If you want Britain to combine the social progressiveness of our NATO ally California with the industrial interventionism of our NATO ally France, god forbid with the social protections of our new NATO ally Sweden, or worse still if you want Scotland to be an independent NATO ally, these views are quite possibly the result of foreign interference and don't speak to any flaws in British governance or society. We need new laws to deal with your sort. He does do a token nod to right-wingers liking Russia for pretending to be Christian, but the thrust of it is clearly to delegitimise left-liberal views and advocacy.
>>42578 You can't really put the genie back in the bottle. Our press and our MPs were dire to begin with and have since had their brains absolutely melted by Twitter. Not just mad conspiracies, either, but the fact that some random person can crop up and go "this you?" with some embarrassing detail like "the MP arguing against water nationalisation is married to a water company executive" or "This journalist presenting themselves as a pacifist suddenly won over to this one specific war has, in-fact, written pieces advocating every war we've been in since 1990". When you're used to being above the little people and talking down to them, having some impudent oik crop up talking back like that must be very annoying.
I suppose we could outsource our consensus reality to Japan, their leaders are still pre-digital.
>>42576 >>42583 Crickey - who knew that exposing an Iranian propaganda campaign would cause you two to get so flustered. Are you surprised that elements of the British left would end up getting played as useful idiots by Iran?
>>42584 I'm not sure Scottish Nationalists would like to be classified as "the British left", but the conclusion that they're "getting played as useful idiots" is precisely the conclusion the article has a disclaimer against at the bottom:
>Editor’s Note – This article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction. The focus is not on genuine activists or grassroots communities, but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit real political movements in the UK for strategic advantage.
>Importantly, the article does not equate support for independence with foreign manipulation. Rather, it highlights how state actors — in this case, Iran — often mimic the language and cultural markers of existing political groups in order to infiltrate and distort online debate.
>>42586 It's literally Iranian accounts both coming up with and amplifying indie talking points to further an Iranian agenda. Are you feeling a bit worried after sharing one of their tweets?
>>42583 For me, the giveaway that these were obviously inauthentic is that they were claiming to be lefties but somehow they were still on Twitter in 2025.
>>42589 You're not very civil are you, prick. I've notice it every time that anyone argues with you it immediately devolves into playground insults and you'll even go and sneer across multiple threads. It must be a lonely life.
>>42590 Woah, hang about. I'm not the poster you were going back-and-forth with, but even I can see you've been needling him and being intentionally obtuse for several posts now. Don't get all high and mighty because someone's tired of your bullshit, you big cry baby.
If "DEATH TO THE IDF" isn't on, how exactly are you supposed to deal with a villainously evil military force? I don't think a bunch of twisted twenty-somethings with 24/7 accesss to main battle tanks and air bursting artillery fires are interested in the marketplace of ideas, or "giving peace a chance". However, it's worth noting that even if a band had got up on a stage at Glastonbury and asked the IDF to do that, the rabidly pro-Israel mob in the media would still have called for them to be skinned alive, the BBC to be burnt to the ground, and all the other usual bollocks.
But why the Hell should they place nice with the IDF? Every day I listen to the World Service tell me that Israel's own Einsatzgruppen have conducted another cull of Palestinians trying find themselves some breakfast. Perhaps not in those exact words, of course, but that's what happens. Every. Single. Day. But due to, as best as I can tell, a profound and deep rooted anti-Arab racism, no one in power gives a monkeys. Has this government ever spoken out against what's happening in Gaza? They've very recently started, half-heartedly, criticising settlements in the West Bank. Why just today the honourable Wes Streeting has said "get your own house in order in terms of the conduct of your own citizens and the settlers in the West Bank". It's powerful stuff.
So when a situation is created wherein the representatives of the people can't even condem the illegal settlement of the West Bank, and instead quietly tell Israel to not be so mean about it :'( , it's not wonder violence, and violent rhetoric, becomes the only option. It's also worth noting what a creaking facade liberal democracy is becoming in the face of all this. Palestinian Action are labelled unabummers despite having inflicted no terror, and now the government and vast swathes of the media are brought to bear on anyone who speaks out against. Of course, no pro-Israel type will ever tell you the "correct" way to stand against their favourite charnel house creator. Becuase people tried boycotts and got called evil, they tried peaceful marches and the same thing happened, and now a lot people are fed up to the back teeth and just want the IDF dead; well who knew that people start lashing out once they're backed into a corner?
I know this is a bit all over the place, but I needed to have my monthly-moan ITT or I was going to go mental. And for the record I'm actual a certified liberal democracy enjoyer, it's the fact a lot of the ruling-class and their media toadies really aren't that's the problem. And, and, I'm not actually suprised by this, before one of you smart arses has a pop at me. I'm just confronted by how readily they cast it aside.
>>42600 >Palestinian Action are labelled unabummers despite having inflicted no terror
How would you characterise their actions at Brize Norton? It's not like all they did was daub a bit of paint on the bodysides of some planes akin to Extinction Rebellion smearing corporate HQs in black.
>>42601 Not that poster but I'd say they broke and entered on to private/military property and vandalised some of the planes and equipment there as an act of direct protest against our own governments support for an ongoing genocide.
That's still not in any way shape or form "TERROR". Who is being terrorised by their actions?
>>42600 It's important to note that, if the proscription goes ahead, not only are PA legally unabummers, so will you be if you keep defending their actions. It's supporting a unabummer organisation. >>42601 whatever you think of PA, do you agree with the government that 42600 should be charged as a unabummer for his post?
I have heard that the leadership of Palestine Action are also big supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the top directors really are just using Palestine as an excuse to target British military assets. I got this off 4chan’s /k/ board, which is very pro-Ukraine but also suspiciously seems to quite like Israel. And you’d think 4chan would all be edgy Putin-lovers, so perhaps I shouldn’t trust anything /k/ says, not even when I agree with it. But if it is true, that definitely changes how I would feel about Palestine Action as a group.
>>42601 It's vandalism, it's, and this appears to be a word Palestine Action and their supporters want to avoid, but nevertheless, sabotage. It's the same as when they smash up an arms company. It's violence, yes, but it's not terror. The idea that PA are to be listed alongside Islamic State and the Wagner Group is utterly insane. It's worth mentioning that Palestine Action only emerged in 2020 after years of anyone who opposed Israel in any non-violent and non-confrontational manner being told to "fuck off", in effect. BDS, marches, waving a Palestinian flag are all slammed as unacceptable, so what do you think is going to happen while the political elite of whole of the, allegedly, enlightened west nods along to the barbaric abuse of Gaza and it's populace?
>>42603 George Monbiot too. I wonder if we'll get to share a cell?
>>42604 PA was formed long before the Russo-Ukraine war. While it wouldn't suprise me if they have that faintly bemusing attitude of backing anyone who gets up the nose of the Anglo-Saxons that some left-wingers have, I don't see much merit to this idea. As far as I can tell the kind of businesses that PA target have little to nothing to do with Ukraine anyway. Banning arms exports to Israel would be a fine way to prove if PA are Russian stooges or not.
I have now looked a little further into whether Palestine Action really are pro-Russia or not. One founder, 47-year-old Richard Barnard, has nothing online that I could find showing any support for Russia or against Ukraine, but then he does have quite a common name.
The other founder, Huda Ammori, has no such problems with name prevalence, and the Daily Mail chose to describe her like this in their aims to discredit her, so they must be really stuck.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jun/30/bbc-should-have-pulled-live-stream-bob-vylan-glastonbury-anti-idf-chants I'm sure all our institutional free-speech defenders who might not agree with it but will defend your right to say it will be out in droves over this. Some will surely even say it's political correctness gone mad for the police to be investigating a man saying words at a concert when they should be out catching murderers, rapists, and murdering rapists.
Naturally, I condemn everything Bob Vylan and Kneecap have ever said, even if it seems that the main thing Kneecap actually said was "fuck Keir Starmer" and they're mostly being mentioned because they were the designated villain before the show and the BBC didn't broadcast them, so most people will have no clue what they actually said except what's implied.
Could it be that the last decade of political correctness, identity politics, woke liberal, diversity washing, trans BIPOC people of pronoun, radical queering was really, all of it, the entire time, just laying the ground works to make it impossible to coherently criticise Israel/support Palestine?
We were all worried about right wing dogwhistles about how you can't call a gay evangelist christian korean youtuber wog a gay evangelist christian korean youtuber wog any more, but we didn't have our eyes on the ball, and we never realised what was going on. Before we knew it, we found ourselves gagged from calling a fascist a fascist because they would cry that they were offended, and we would be the thought criminal unperson for saying hate speech at them.
This seems to be the real time realisation of many self-described lefties recently, that I've been saying for the better part of the last decade.
>>42611 Fundamentally: No. This is the point >>42609 is making. Right-wing "pro free speech" types either have nothing to say, or explain why this doesn't count as free speech. The BBC and the institutions of this country aren't pro-Israel because the woke censorship rules demand it, they're pro-Israel because they're pro-Israel.
>Israel's defence minister says he has instructed its military to prepare a plan to move all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp in the south of the territory, Israeli media reports say.
>Israel Katz told journalists on Monday he wanted to establish a "humanitarian city" on the ruins of the city of Rafah to initially house about 600,000 Palestinians - and eventually the whole 2.1 million population.
>He said the goal was to bring people inside after security screening to ensure they were not Hamas operatives, and that they would not be allowed to leave.
Yeah, I dunno, that sounds a lot like... No, that sounds exactly like a concentration camp to me.
>>42634 They’re really taking full advantage of the “if you compare your enemies to the Nazis, you automatically lose the argument” rule. If this humanitarian city results in a lot of body lice, and the Palestinians need to be herded into delousing chambers, I hope they don’t go.
The blatant fucking dishonesty of that shit though. Neytanhatu would come out wearing an SS uniform and Hitler tache and still play the "it's anti-semitic to compare me to a nazi!" card with a straight face.
>The UK will recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel takes "substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza", Sir Keir Starmer has said.
>The PM said Israel must also meet other conditions, including agreeing to a ceasefire and allowing the United Nations to restart the supply of aid, or the UK would take the step at September's UN General Assembly.
This would be a massive step in terms of international diplomacy, but in terms of actually stopping the violence, it will probably achieve close to nothing.
In other news, I have been doing some research into man-made famines.
The Holodomor, in Ukraine in 1933, killed around 10-15% of the Ukrainian population.
The even more egregious famine in Kazakhstan a couple of years earlier killed around 40% of Kazakhs.
The Ethiopian famine in 1985 killed about 20% of Ethiopians.
A 15% death rate in Gaza would equate to around 300,000 Palestinians. Currently, about 60,000 have died in total, and the deaths from starvation are just a few hundred officially so far. Of course, this number is expected to skyrocket. But if you want to know how far those numbers need to go to do Stalin numbers, there's your answer. If 6,500 people starve to death in Gaza, that would be proportionate with the 1998 Sudan famine. So it's too early for big pronouncements so far, and if we're lucky, we won't have the nightmare numbers of famous famines.
>>42671 >This would be a massive step in terms of international diplomacy
Except nothing will happen. From a man like Starmer, the words "substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza", mean zilch. The slightest crumb offered by Netenyahu's PR bods will allow Starmer to drop Palestinian recognition like a red hot stone.
I'll confess I'm likely the high-pessimist regarding this situation. It's my, publically unspoken, view that Palestine is simply doomed. Gaza is a ruinous, occupied, waste. While the determination of it's people is astonishing to behold, I do not think Israel will ever permit it to function as anything close to the society it once was. The West Bank meanwhile is slowly being annexed in the same way it was pre-war. However, it is clearer than ever that the nearly 700,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jeruselem are going nowhere. The "internation community" can barely muster the will to even condem a genocide of death squads, starvation and aerial obliteration in Gaza, so what chance is there anyone will make moves against Israel over their illegal settlements? They're positively humane in comparison to the slaughter in Gaza. Until we give the ICJ a battalion of SPARTAN II super soldiers to enforce international law, no one's doing fuck all about it.
>>42671 >Israel continues killing Gazans
>the UK begins acknowledging a Palestinian state which is now devoid of Palestinian people
or
>Israel does a ceasefire
>Palestinian statehood therefore does not need to be recognised, meaning in future the events of the last couple of years can happen again
It's a bad ultimatum. Why not "ceasefire AND we recognise Palestine as a state". Why can we only recognise it if it's currently being raped?
>>42671 It's probably not your intent, but your numbers give a general impression that what's happening is fairly typical and doesn't amount to much, by comparing to historical examples of famines (where we know the final result) rather than ongoing famines in 2025, which give the opposite impression: that what is happening is anomalous and very bad indeed.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-400-not-crisis-but-murder >Around the world there are eleven places where more people are at serious risk of hunger than in Gaza, but what this wider view of global famine reveals is not that Gaza is “normal”, but precisely the opposite. Being the result of deliberate policy by a powerful state, commonly regarded as belonging to the exclusive club of “advanced economies”, the mass starvation in Gaza in the summer of 2025 is quite unlike that anywhere else in the world.
>Across the hunger hot spots of the world in 2025, what is the percentage of the population that is at risk? In Nigeria - mainly in the North - it is one sixth of the population. In Myanmar and the DRC it is roughly a quarter of the population. In Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan and Haiti - the places most commonly cited in arguments about the application of “special standards” to Israel - the share of the population at risk is between 49 and 57 percent. In Gaza, the share is 100 percent. The risk of famine is total.
>A condition of total, all-inclusive starvation is highly unusual. No doubt, the reality on the ground continues to exhibit gradations of inequality and hierarchy not captured by the UN statistics. But this finding points once again to the exceptional circumstance of Gaza, which are those of a siege, a prison or a ghetto.
Obviously the distinction can be captured in the word risk, maybe Israel will back down in the face of Sir Kier Starmer's paper-rattling... but if they don't, things get even uglier than they already are very quickly.
It's perfectly fair to criticise Israel for the effects that the war is having on medical services in Gaza, but presenting a bunch of chronically ill people as victims of famine is pure disinformation. It's clearly not accidental at this point - there are multiple, verifiable instances where terminally ill people were represented as victims of famine. You don't have to like Israel to care about the truth, if only because distortions and lies play into the hands of propagandists on both sides.
>>42675 I'm reminded of the jokes during arguments about COVID numbers. You can't count all the deaths on the titanic or in 9/11 or whatever because many of them also had "preexisting conditions", there's no risk to healthy people...
I suppose Gaza has an elegant closed loop to it: you can't call that a famine death, she was already suffering malnutrition!
What an absolutely tone-deaf response. Taking the social media post at face value (and it's not clear to me at all why that account deserves that benefit of the doubt), we can say that hypercatabolism of this severity in a diabetic person can be due to a chronic lack of insulin, but that treating them would also involve an amino acid (protein) supplement and a managed diet, which is equally difficult in a famine. If they are indeed diabetic, we are very likely looking at someone who is both affected by lack of medical care and is dying due to famine, because recovery from that state even with a steady supply of insulin would be extremely "touch-and-go".
Even if it were the case that al-Hasanat could have miraculously recovered with insulin and whatever nutritional supplements were available (which would have to come from healthcare infrastructure which has been deliberately targeted) and then on a continued diet of grains and lentils from GHF food boxes (provided he could access them), you can find plenty of evidence of victims of famine if you want to go and find them. It is completely unsurprising that his case would be confused with the other cases of starvation that are certainly happening.
The "distortion" of someone taking a picture and either failing to mention or not being aware of the complications of diabetes amidst a blockade that includes medical supplies and food is so trivial as to be non-existent. To latch onto one case and present it as propaganda when there is rife evidence of both death by starvation and death by insufficient medical care is itself only done to create confusion and doubt around the issue. The truth matters, but without context can become a lie of omission.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165517 >[O]ne in three people is now going without food for days at a time, the IPC said. Hospitals are also overwhelmed and have treated more than 20,000 children for acute malnutrition since April. At least 16 children under five have died from hunger-related causes since mid-July.
>The alert follows a May 2025 IPC analysis that projected catastrophic levels of food insecurity for the entire population by September. According to the platform’s experts, at least half a million people are expected to be in IPC Phase 5 – catastrophe – which is marked by starvation, destitution and death.
https://archive.is/oDolQ >Dr. al-Farra said the number of children dying of malnutrition had risen sharply in recent days. He described harrowing scenes of people too exhausted to walk. Many of the children he sees have no pre-existing medical conditions, he said, giving the example of Siwar Barbaq, who was born healthy and now, at 11 months old, should weigh about 20 pounds but is under nine pounds.
>The Gaza ministry of health has reported more than 40 hunger-related deaths this month, including 16 children, and 111 since the beginning of the war, 81 of them children. The data could not be independently verified.
