Human Rights Violations

Under cover of darkness on 9 June 2025, the Madleen—a modest British-flagged aid ship carrying baby formula, rice, and medical supplies—found itself surrounded by Israeli naval forces some 100-160 km off Gaza’s coast. The activists onboard, including Greta Thunberg and French MEP Rima Hassan, had hoped to draw attention to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. Instead, they got an up-close demonstration of Israel’s naval blockade enforcement. Footage shows the group—calm but determined—raising their hands as Israeli commandos boarded, their life jackets serving as unintentional symbols of how perilous compassion has become in these waters. ...

Meet the key players Benjamin Netanyahu – Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, now in his sixth term, is a master of political survival. His current tenure is propped up by far-right allies, a necessity given his ongoing corruption trials (fraud, bribery, and breach of trust). His primary objectives are maintaining power, weakening the judiciary to shield himself from legal accountability, and balancing the demands of his extremist coalition partners while attempting to project an image of statesmanship to the outside world. ...

The urgency of the mission In the pre-dawn stillness of June 1st, 2025, a modest vessel slipped out of Catania’s port in Sicily, its silhouette sharp against the Mediterranean blue. The Madleen, neither a warship nor a tanker, carried no tourists, no cargo of luxury—only defiance. Her destination: Gaza. Her mission: to challenge Israel’s suffocating blockade, now in its 18th year and increasingly lethal. This departure comes not as an isolated gesture, but as a direct riposte to last month’s drone attack on the humanitarian ship Conscience—a strike that occurred brazenly in international waters, just one more entry in Israel’s growing rap sheet of maritime belligerence. ...

In September 2023, the Israeli Ministry of Defence released a promotional video for its Iron Sting precision mortar system. The footage—taken from a drone—shows a building in Gaza being obliterated. It isn’t merely a military demonstration; it’s a sales pitch. The message? Our weapons work. And they work because we’ve used them—on real people, in real places, with very real consequences. At arms fairs like DSEI in London, the phrase “combat-proven” is more than sales patter; it’s a mark of credibility. The battlefield doubles as showroom. And the uncomfortable question is this: Is it morally, legally, or politically justifiable to turn war zones into testing grounds for profit? ...

As Israel’s slaughter in Gaza grinds on—now in its twentieth month, with over 45,000 dead, most of them women and children, and nearly every hospital, school, and home reduced to rubble—one might expect Europe, that self-proclaimed bastion of human rights, to muster more than a few limp statements of concern. Instead, the European Union has perfected the art of hand-wringing paralysis, offering little more than performative sympathy while continuing to arm, fund, and politically shield Israel. It is a masterclass in moral evasion, dressed up as diplomacy. ...

Let’s talk about the time the United Nations—guardian of international human rights, global peacekeeper, moral compass for the post-war world—shared biometric data of Rohingya refugees with the government they were fleeing from. Yes, you read that right. Without informed consent. The very people who fled genocidal violence in Myanmar, who put their trust in the UN for protection, were quietly catalogued and handed back—data-first—under the noble banner of “registration”. Cue the press statement: “Statement on refugee registration and data collection in Bangladesh.” It reads like a lesson in passive voice and bureaucratic shoulder-shrugging. There’s talk of “ensuring safeguards” and “technical protocols” and “cooperation with the host government”. What’s not mentioned: how collecting biometric data without proper, informed consent, then sharing it with the regime accused of ethnic cleansing, might be—how do we put this gently—a catastrophic breach of trust and human rights. ...