News and Views 31st July 

Palestinian Statehood

• UK to recognise Palestinian state in September. Keir Starmer has announced that the UK will recognise Palestine as a state in September unless Israel meets a series of conditions, including ending the “appalling” situation in Gaza. A third of cabinet members, including Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting, have been pressuring Starmer to recognise Palestine in recent weeks. Both Israel and the US have accused Starmer of rewarding Hamas – others, for his failure to impose any conditions on the terrorist group. Read also.
• Other nations to follow suit. In The Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons calls it “the darkest day in British foreign policy since the invasion of Iraq.” Melanie Philips says it’s a “surrender to evil in the guise of a human rights lawyer” (the Prime Minister). 81 countries recognised Palestinian statehood in the year it declared independence (1988), and various other countries (Mexico, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand) have done so in the years since. Meanwhile, Ireland gave recognition in 2004 and Spain and France this year. Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Portugal, Andorra and San Marino issued a statement just this week, indicating their intent to also recognise Palestinian statehood.
• Arab world tells Hamas to end its rule of Gaza. In an unprecedented move, at a three-day conference at the United Nations this week, with the goal of recognising Palestinian statehood, all 22 members of the Arab League, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey – along with 14 other countries, including Britain and France – have signed a declaration condemning for the first time Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and calling on the Palestinian terror group to disarm and end its rule of Gaza. In the words of Richard Kemp, “… during this war, most Arab countries have been … against Hamas since the start. They recognise the dangers posed to their own countries by Hamas, a proxy of Iran and offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, both of which represent existential threats to them.” Some believe this rare display of regional unity by Arab states could isolate Hamas and either force the movement into exile or force it to comply.

Israel and Media Bias

• Media’s misrepresenting Gazan child's condition as starvation. A photo of an apparently starving child in Gaza was published by scores of news outlets worldwide last week, as irrefutable evidence that Israel was starving the Palestinian population of Gaza. Footage of the emaciated toddler appeared in The Guardian, BBC News, The New York Times, The Daily Mail, NBC News, The Times,  and numerous other media outlets. But the reports left out a crucial fact – gleaned from a  medical report issued in May 2025 – that Mohammed suffers from a “muscular disorder”, which “requires ongoing physical therapy and specialised nutrition”. Further, photos clearly show that Mohammed’s mother and three-year-old brother appear “healthy and fed” – yet journalists chose only to use photos in which the brother is not visible at all.
• The media reports also falsely claim that Mohammed’s father was killed while going out to collect food, presumably to underline the Gaza hunger tragedy narrative. To date, only one or two media outlets have ‘appended’ its patently false narrative, and even these have offered no apology for their misinformation. In any case, the lie had already been established, worldwide. This is not to deny, of course, that a great many in Gaza are suffering from genuine hunger. 
• BBC reporters instructed to blame Israel for Gaza hunger. Despite the BBC being publicly funded and legally obligated to remain impartial, a leaked internal email from a BBC executive editor reveals that the Corporation has issued prescriptive instructions to staff on how to cover the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The Spectator says the memo amounts to “a top-down editorial diktat that discards impartiality, elevates one side of a deeply contested narrative, and imposes a specific anti-Israel legal-political framing as settled fact.” The email explicitly favours a particular explanation of suffering in Gaza: one that blames the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, while glossing over the role of Hamas.

Gaza Conflict

• Why are there still women and children in Gaza? In a thought-provoking article, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neil states that women and children invariably leave warzones. Almost 8 million have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, most of them women and children. Around 7 million Syrians fled fighting over the past decade - mostly women and children. Yet in Gaza, women and children stay. The main reason, he claims, is that the UN declared that any ‘exodus of Palestinians’ from Gaza would only create another ‘intractable problem …. We must fervently do everything [we can]’ to avoid an ‘outflow’ from Gaza to neighbouring nations. O’Neill continues, “In most wars, humankind ‘fervently’ does everything it can to facilitate the fleeing of the innocent. Why is it ‘seeking refuge’ when Ukrainians are forced to flee their homeland by Russia, but ‘ethnic cleansing’ if Gazans were to flee as a consequence of this infernal war Hamas started?” Read more here.
• Two Israeli human rights groups decry Israeli ‘genocide’. Physicians for Human Rights Israel has issued a statement, stating that, “when examining all the factors together, we identify a clear pattern that indicates Israeli intent to kill Palestinians in Gaza. The systematic nature is the smoking gun.” Israeli left-wing human rights organization B'Tselem has similarly accused the Israeli government of executing a "coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip," characterizing it as a developing "genocidal regime."
• Response to global accusations of ‘genocide’. The Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, founded in April, says it has seen more than “400 scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies from two dozen countries” join within weeks of its launch; the group has issued calls to “End the genocide now!” President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Melanie O’Brien maintains Israel has no defence against the charge of genocide in Gaza. But among many people speaking in Israel's defence, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, herself a genocide scholar, is clear that “As someone committed to the study of international law and the accurate use of language in matters of life and death, this is not genocide.” Read her argument here.

World Events

• God moving among the Uyghurs of Central Asia. Kazakhstan sits in the heart of Central Asia, being the world's largest landlocked country. In the southeastern corner of the country, near the border with China, generations of Uyghurs have lived. Having been Muslims for almost a millennium, it's a mindset that's been ingrained into their mentality and lifestyle. In recent years, the Uyghurs in China have faced severe persecution, including mass detentions, surveillance, and cultural repression by the Chinese government. In recent years, also, however, more and more Uyghurs are discovering Christianity – some through personal transformation, others through the influence of outreach in rural villages.
• Kazakhstan: Jesus Christ appears to these people. One woman testified that Jesus appeared to her in a dream. At first, she didn't know who this "Jesus" was. Finding images online she realised that “He was like the man in my dream who was dressed in white and bright light was emanating from Him.” An evangelist, Gulbakhram, visits people's homes almost every day. “When I talk to people, the Holy Spirit is working and I'm grateful to God for this precious gift”, he shared. “I cannot express with words how happy I am." While there are roughly 300,000 Uyghurs living in Kazakhstan, only a very small minority have thus far turned to Christ. But, as one evangelist put it, “I can rejoice in the fact that they are coming to know God, slowly but methodically, and Jesus Christ appears to these people."

Persecution of Christians

• Islamic persecution of Christians in the Congo. Islamic State-backed rebels killed 38 worshippers at a Catholic prayer vigil in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo during the night last weekend (June 27) and five other people at a nearby village, according to reports. The rebels also looted and set ablaze area shops and businesses. (Read also)
• .... and in Nigeria. Fulani militias brutally massacred at least 32 people, including women, children and a baby, in the mainly Christian village of Jebu, in Nigeria’s Plateau State. A string of other attacks by Islamist hardliners have killed dozens of civilians, most of them predominantly Christian farmers, in the past couple of weeks.
• Other recent instances of the persecution of Christians – all by Islamists, incidentally – include:

Antisemitism

• Edinburgh Fringe venues cancel two Jewish shows. Jewish comedian Philip Simon has been cancelled by an Edinburgh Fringe venue. One reason cited was his attendance at a vigil held for people killed in the 2023 Hamas terror attacks. Yet Simon said the only opinion he had expressed on the Gaza conflict was a desire for peace and to see the hostages freed. Simon was due to host a Jew-O-Rama of Jewish comedic talents.
• Another Fringe venue cancelled  British Jewish comedian Rachel Creeger because it decided it didn’t feel safe having Jewish acts. This would have been the ninth run of Creeger’s show, The Ultimate Jewish Mother, at the Fringe, and the fifth at this venue. Creeger said: “Sadly, this is part of an ongoing problem faced by Jewish performers in this country. We are being cancelled and often silently boycotted.” Increasingly, even attending a comedy show as a Jew seems a risky business. Last year, comic Paul Currie infamously subjected Jewish audience members to verbal abuse.
• Other recent incidents of antisemitism or strong anti-Israel sentiment include: