The US military has begun moving aid ashore in Gaza, as the UN says truck convoys by land remain the most efficient way of getting aid in

Israel on Friday attacked South Africa’s case against it in the international court of justice as an “obscene exploitation” of the genocide convention, claiming it aimed not to protect Palestinian civilians but to defend Hamas militants.

Israel’s representatives told the court their country was fighting a war of self-defence it “did not want and did not start”. They said Israel had made “extraordinary” efforts to protect civilians, and had complied with orders from the court to let more aid into Gaza.

Samantha Power says barely 100 trucks of aid a day enter Gaza, far less than 600 needed to address threat of famine

Humanitarian assistance has begun to arrive in Gaza along a US-made pier, but the US aid chief said the new sea corridor could not be a substitute for land crossings, and warned that deliveries of food and fuel entering Gaza had slowed to “dangerously low levels”.

The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, confirmed on Friday that truckloads of humanitarian aid, including food from the United Arab Emirates, sent by ship from Cyprus, had been unloaded on the Gaza coast and handed over to the control of the UN.

War in Gaza, the Russian offensive in Kharkiv, protests in Georgia, the Northern lights and the Cannes Film Festival: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Bodies of Amit Buskila and Itzhak Gelerenter also recovered from Gaza as Israel says 129 hostages remain in captivity

The bodies of three hostages kidnapped by Hamas, including the German-Israeli Shani Louk, have been retrieved from Gaza by the Israeli military, it announced.

The other two hostages were identified as Amit Buskila, 28, and Itzhak Gelerenter, 56, according to the military spokesperson Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, who said the three victims were taken to Gaza after being killed by Hamas at the Nova music festival.

We can only address the politics of Israel/Palestine by recognising the suffering of both Jewish and Palestinian people, writes Lynne Segal. Plus a letter from Ron Mendel

It is indeed a tragic time for Jewish people, as Dave Rich argues (The 7 October Hamas attack opened a space – and antisemitism filled it. British Jews are living with the consequences, 16 May). He rightly insists on the extreme dangers of historic and continuing antisemitism, today rising and falling with the extremities of conflict in Israel/Palestine. Yet he fails to address the specific grief of thousands of Jews, observant and secular, who have like me worked for decades for peace, and an end to occupation and land grabs in Israel/Palestine.

Rich’s article was published the day after Nakba day: commemorating the catastrophe of 700,000 Palestinians forcibly dispossessed of their homes and sent into exile to enable the establishment of Israel in 1948. Jewish criticisms of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians have always existed, but they tend to be immediately dismissed to allow only one narrative to be heard.

New York University professor Nikhil Singh interviews the political scientist and longtime critic of Israel after his speech at Columbia University

How do the messages and slogans adopted by social movements matter? In the 1960s, one of the simplest and most powerful slogans of the African American civil rights movement was: “Freedom now!” With that slogan, the movement indicated that Black demands exceeded a narrow reading of legal rights and protections. At the same time, it tapped into one of the most powerful keywords in the American political lexicon in a way that was immediately legible to a large, popular audience.

The occasion for the conversation below was a speech that the political scientist Norman Finkelstein gave at the Columbia University encampment protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. Finkelstein challenged students to think of the kind of messaging that might broaden their audience and build their movement. He questioned the slogan “Palestine will be free, from the river to sea” as mostly ineffective for these purposes, due to how it inflames fears among Israel’s supporters and gives fuel to arguments that pro-Palestinian protests on US university campuses are antisemitic and even “genocidal”.

Israel is appearing at international court of justice after South Africa asked it to urgently order end to assault on Rafah

Yemen’s Houthis said they downed a US MQ9 drone on Thursday evening over the south-eastern province of Maareb, the group’s military spokesperson said on Friday.

According to Reuters, the Iran-aligned group said they would release images and videos to support their claim and added that they had targeted the drone using a locally made surface to air missile.

One of the first foreign photographers in Gaza, Sean Sutton – who was travelling with UK-Med – met Palestinians on the streets of the destroyed city of Khan Younis, in hospitals and in the Israeli-designated ‘humanitarian zone’

Lawyers urge international court of justice to issue urgent measures over assault on Gaza’s southernmost city

South Africa has asked the international court of justice (ICJ) to urgently order Israel to end its assault on Rafah, halt its military campaign across Gaza, and allow international investigators and journalists into the territory.

In a court hearing, lawyers for South Africa expanded a written request for judges to issue an emergency order to stop the offensive into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

ICRC is denied access to prisoners in what is said to be breach of Geneva conventions but critics say UK plan may weaken rule of law

Red Cross officials are to hold talks with the UK over a Foreign Office plan to visit Palestinian detainees held by Israel. Critics say this bypasses a duty on Israel under the Geneva conventions to give the Red Cross access to detainees.

Israel has suspended the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from access to Palestinian detainees since the Hamas attack on 7 October, and says it will not rescind the policy until Hamas grants access to Israeli hostages.

In the wake of campus protests, some say proposals are part of of a broader effort to silence criticism of Israel

Against the backdrop of demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza on college campuses, the White House and Congress have announced a string of policies and commitments aimed at addressing what Joe Biden warned was a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States.

Antisemitism was on the rise in the US before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. But the ensuing war has exacerbated the problem, with the law enforcement officials recording a spike in threats against Jewish Americans.

US officials insist American troops will not step foot in Gaza despite building the pier; seven troops also wounded in friendly fire incident

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group says it has launched “more than 60” rockets at Israeli military positions in retaliation for overnight air strikes on the country’s east, AFP reports

Israel and Hamas ally Hezbollah have exchanged near-daily fire following the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, now in its eighth month.

Cannes film festival
Loosely based on fact, Magnus van Horn’s fictionalised true crime nightmare leaves you with a shiver of pure fear

Just in case you were thinking that this is an upbeat story of a sweet young seamstress winning BBC TV’s The Great British Sewing Bee, the needle in question is in fact a knitting needle for giving yourself an abortion in a public bath-house in post-first world war Copenhagen. This film from Poland-based Swedish director Magnus van Horn – making his Cannes competition debut – is a macabre and hypnotic horror, a fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s baby-killer case from 1921, shot in high-contrast expressionist monochrome and kept at an almost unbearable pitch of anxiety by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s nerve-abrading musical score.

I was unconvinced by Van Horn’s previous film, the social media satire Sweat, but this new one is horribly effective grand guignol, made with enormous technical flair, like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd without the bleak humour – there are touches of Lynch, Von Trier or even Tod Browning here. It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder. I actually found myself thinking of something further back to the Malthusian suicides in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too many.”

Israeli soldiers escorting convoy accused of doing nothing to stop widely condemned incident

Palestinian lorry drivers delivering aid to Gaza have described “barbaric” scenes after their vehicles were blocked and vandalised by Israeli settlers, preventing humanitarian supplies reaching the territory where much of the population face imminent starvation.

Drivers and contractors who were targeted on Monday at the Tarqumiya checkpoint in the occupied West Bank also said Israeli soldiers escorting the convoy did nothing to stop the attack.

Yoav Gallant, who Benjamin Netanyahu tried to fire in 2023, says he will not allow Israeli rule of Gaza

A long-festering split at the heart of Israel’s war cabinet has burst into the open with the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, challenging the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to come up with plans for the “day after” the war in Gaza, and saying he would not permit any solution where Israeli military or civil governance were in the territory.

Gallant’s comments, immediately backed by his fellow minister Benny Gantz, plunged Israel’s leadership into a highly public row, in the midst of the Gaza conflict, calling into question Gallant’s future in the Israeli government and Netanyahu’s fractious coalition.

Anger over Israel’s seizure of Palestinian side of crossing raises fears Cairo may downgrade relations

• Israel-Gaza war – live updates

Israel and Egypt are embroiled in a growing diplomatic row over the Rafah border crossing after Israel’s takeover of the Gaza side of the crossing, amid warnings Cairo may be planning to downgrade relations.

In recent days Egypt has announced it will no longer participate in allowing the transit of aid into Gaza and said it planned to join the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel at the UN’s top court.

A majority of Israel’s Jews today are not descended from Europe, but rather from Arab nations. To expect them to leave Israel is unprecedented, unrealistic and wrong

Though not a prevalent catchphrase in the student demonstrations, the slogan “Jews/Israelis go back to Europe” has garnered national, and even international, attention. This phrase, like the much more popular phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is troubling because it attempts to negate the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. The “Go back to Europe” chant also ignores the fact that the majority of Israelis today don’t come from European backgrounds.

Another slogan heard at rallies calls for ending the “75-year occupation”, pointing not to the occupation of the West Bank or Gaza, which dates back to 1967, but rather to the date when Israel was founded as a modern nation.

Jo-Ann Mort is co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel? She writes frequently about Israel for US, UK and Israeli publications.

Fossil Free Books’ statement also demands that the book festival sponsor stops investing in ‘companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide’

More than 200 authors including Naomi Klein, Sally Rooney and George Monbiot have signed a statement by Fossil Free Books (FFB), which puts increased pressure on investment management firm Baillie Gifford, sponsors of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. In addition to the reiteration of its previous demands that the company ceases its investments in the fossil fuel industry, the group is asking that Baillie Gifford also divests “from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”, as it believes that “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked”.

Literary organisations that accept sponsorship from Baillie Gifford “can expect escalation, including the expansion of boycotts, increased author withdrawal of labour, and increased disruption until Baillie Gifford divests,” the statement reads.

British surgeon Dr Omar El-Taji has been in Gaza for more than a week with medical nonprofit Fajr Scientific, working in one of Gaza’s largest remaining hospitals as Israel’s invasion of Rafah deepens. The European hospital, which was founded by Unrwa with a grant from the EU, has limited resources and fewer local staff to deal with high numbers of patients being admitted with devastating injuries. ‘These people have gone through this for six to seven months now, they cannot go through this any more,’ says El-Taji, who is currently living at the hospital after the medical team’s safe house was evacuated. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has so far rejected US pressure to hold off on a full-scale attack, claiming Rafah is the last stronghold of Hamas and that Israel can only achieve its war aims by killing militants and leaders in the city

• Israeli tanks reach residential areas as IDF pushes further into Rafah

Будет! Russian ransomware rascals riled a Roman Catholic healthcare organization.

The post FBI/CISA Warning: ‘Black Basta’ Ransomware Gang vs. Ascension Health appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Weakening liberal democracies and weakening the NATO alliance are conjoined in the hybrid war that Russia is conducting against Ukraine.

The post NATO Draws a Cyber Red Line in Tensions With Russia appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Source: www.theguardian.com – Author: Anna Isaac and Dan Sabbagh The IT company targeted in a Chinese hack that accessed the data of hundreds of thousands of Ministry of Defence staff failed to report the breach for months, the Guardian can reveal. The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, told MPs on Tuesday that Shared Services Connected […]

La entrada MoD contractor hacked by China failed to report breach for months – Source: www.theguardian.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

South Africa's case against Israel over allegations of genocide before the international court of justice has raised a central question of international law: what is genocide and how do you prove it? It is one of three genocide cases being considered by the UN's world court, but since the genocide convention was approved in 1948, only three instances have been legally recognised as genocide. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks back on these historical cases to find out why the crime is so much harder to prove than other atrocities, and what bearing this has on South Africa's case against Israel and future cases

• What is the genocide convention and how might it apply to the UK and Israel?

• ‘Famine is setting in’: UN court orders Israel to unblock Gaza food aid

War of the words: Fancy Bear actions are “intolerable and unacceptable,” complains German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock.

The post Germany Warns Russia: Hacking Will Have Consequences appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma.

Details from his biography.

Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change.

The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the year 2070. These jets, which are wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones in the air littoral, present enormous opportunity costs for the service as a whole. In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000—so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed—for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”

Ironically, the first service to respond decisively to the new contestation of the air littoral has been the U.S. Army. Its soldiers are directly threatened by lethal drones, as the Tower 22 attack demonstrated all too clearly. Quite unexpectedly, last month the Army cancelled its future reconnaissance helicopter ­ which has already cost the service $2 billion—because fielding a costly manned reconnaissance aircraft no longer makes sense. Today, the same mission can be performed by far less expensive drones—without putting any pilots at risk. The Army also decided to retire its aging Shadow and Raven legacy drones, whose declining survivability and capabilities have rendered them obsolete, and announced a new rapid buy of 600 Coyote counter-drone drones in order to help protect its troops.