Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
Settler violence v Palestinian steadfastness
Farmers in the West Bank are cut off from their olive groves by laws to defend and extend illegal Israeli settlements – when they do go to harvest, they are attacked, sometimes by the army too. JENNY KASSMAN reports on the deteriorating situation
Palestinian demonstrators gather
during a protest against expansion of Israeli
settlements in the West Bank village of Beita as
Israeli soldiers take position, March 2020
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
The long-term effects of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange mean that the impact of war lasts well beyond a ceasefire
GHASSAN MANSOUR and his wife Zohaira (not their real names) were delighted when they received their permit from the Israeli Civil Administration allowing them their yearly four-day access to their grove to harvest olives.
If this year’s figures bore any resemblance to those for 2020, their application was one of the lucky 27 per cent granted in the occupied West Bank.
The permit did not apply to all their land. Some years ago, acres of land on which the Palestinian couple and their family used to cultivate wheat and sesame had been expropriated by the nearby illegal Jewish settlement of Har Brakha to form a barren cordon around the settlement.
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David Lammy is now calling Israel’s escalation of the Gaza genocide morally unjustifiable — but what is truly unjustifiable is for Lammy to say this while directly arming and providing surveillance information for the genocide, writes NUVPREET KALRA
Meanwhile, Israel kills 35 in ‘significant and broad military operation’ in West Bank