Sir Vincent Fean is a former British diplomat and ambassador with 39 years of experience. He served as Consul-General in Jerusalem (2010-14), Ambassador to Libya (2006-10), and High Commissioner to Malta.  

An Arabist, he has engaged in senior policy-making, government affairs and negotiation in Whitehall, the Middle East and Western Europe.

He is now Vice-Chair of the Balfour Project (www.balfourproject.org), a UK charity raising awareness of Britain’s historic responsibilities in Palestine and Israel, advocating for lasting peace with justice, security and equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Palestine Deep Dive and Double Down News host an emergency event, Gaza Frontline, hearing from four Palestinians from Gaza on Nov 8th at the Frontline Club, London.

The discussion is chaired by investigative journalist Matt Kennard, co-founder of Declassified UK.

For a month now, Israel, a nuclear-armed military superpower, has conducted its biggest and harshest bombardments against the captive population of the Gaza Strip, leaving nowhere safe. Now under “complete siege”, Palestinians are not only killed from direct bombardment, crushed under the rubble, but suffer an imposed starvation, dehydration and a collapsed medical system.

A considerable number of respected human rights organisations and experts have expressed concern that Palestinians are at grave risk of genocide by Israel. More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardments, including over 4,000 children.

Since October 7th, Israel has also reportedly ramped up its oppression of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Jerusalem, killing Palestinians daily and committing other human rights violations such as arresting and detaining Palestinians without trial and committing torture.

Despite Israel continuing to commit atrocities in front of our eyes, Western governments refuse to call for an immediate ceasefire and a lifting of the siege to restore electricity, fuel, water, food and to provide urgent humanitarian relief.

Right now, as their families remain under blockade and bombardment, it has never been more urgent to hear Palestinians in their own words present both the facts on the ground and what must be done to end this ongoing crisis once and for all.

Panel:

Matt Kennard (chair) is co-founder and chief investigator at Declassified UK, a news outlet investigating British foreign policy. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) in London, UK. He has worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times in Washington, DC, New York, and London. He is the author of two acclaimed books: Irregular Army (2012) and The Racket (2015). His new book Silent Coup is out now.

Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist from Gaza and the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, a collective which trains the next generation of Palestinian writers to publish their stories in English. Ahmed obtained a Chevening Scholarship to pursue a Master’s degree in international journalism from Leeds University before serving as advocacy and outreach officer for the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. His writings have been published in many publications including The Washington Post, The New Arab and Arab News. He has appeared live in interviews across the Western media, speaking on channels such as Sky News, the BBC and MSNBC.

Dr. Shahd Abusalama is a Palestinian academic born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, northern Gaza, currently based in London, UK. She recently got a Ph.D. from Sheffield Hallam University which explores the historical representations of Gaza and its refugees in documentary films, and is to be published by Bloomsbury next year, under the title, "Between Reality and Documentary". Dr. Abusalama is also an artist, activist, and the author of Palestine from My Eyes blog which was published as a book in ltaly in 2013. She is also a co-founder of Hawiyya Dance Company which showcases Palestine’s folkloric Dabke and music to UK audiences and beyond to amplify anti-colonial and anti-racist causes.

Dr. Mohammed Seyam is a medical doctor from Gaza, currently in London pursuing his MSc in Global Healthcare Management at UCL. He is a global diabetes advocate and educator, a Young Leader at the International Diabetes Federation, and the MENA chapter lead at T1International. Mohammed’s work focuses on access to health and health delivery, especially in Non-Communicable diseases.

Saleem Lubbad is a full-time physicist working on the development of Nuclear Fusion Energy He was Oxford University’s first Gaza scholar. Saleem is also an Arabic language poet, writer, voice-over artist and TV presenter. His interests span Arabic literature, modern science and technology, the history of science and Islamic architecture. Saleem has worked on various museum curation and media production projects, produced and presented a science show for Al-Araby TV, and often pens columns for several newspapers in the Middle East.

As hostilities entered the thirteenth day, Israel's relentless bombardments on Gaza continued, resulting in an additional 307 Palestinians killed in the past 24 hours (as of 17:00), according to the United Nations.

This brings the cumulative fatality toll in the Gaza Strip to 3,785, including at least 1,524 children, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Hundreds of additional fatalities are believed to be trapped under the rubble.

Former UN correspondent for Al Jazeera and speechwriter for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Mark Seddon, is joined by:

Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, where he is also an Endowed Professor in the study of Modern Genocide.

Chris Doyle, Director of the Council for Arabic-British Understanding

Karim Ali, a Palestinian advocate and co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds, Palestine's first para-cycling team. His family originate from Haifa and Sabareen

On UN World Mental Health Day, Palestine Deep Dive presents: Palestine’s Mental Health Crisis: Personal and Collective Trauma Under Israeli Occupation

Dr Samah Jabr is the Director of the Mental Health Unit of Palestine’s Ministry of Health in the West Bank and is a trained psychiatrist.

Her practice goes beyond clinical consultation and training, but also addresses the wider Palestinian community's suffering from the ills of Israel's oppressive occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism.

According to Dr Jabr: “The Israeli occupation is not only a political issue, but indeed a mental health problem. The injustice, daily humiliations, and trauma each and every Palestinian experiences have caused a repetitive injury, both to the individual and collective minds of my people. In Palestine, abuse and trauma are ongoing, enduring, and they affect every aspect of Palestinian life. Individual personalities are impacted, as is the value system of the community as a whole.”

Palestine has an overwhelmingly young population. In previous shows we’ve focused on Gaza’s child mental health crisis; 80% of Gaza’s children now report living with depression, grief and fear according to Save the Children. Join us this time as we Deep Dive into Palestine’s Mental Health Crisis as a whole at this tumultuous moment.

Picking up from where we left off in our June show “Defending the Right to Boycott: Confronting the UK’s Anti-BDS Bill”, (covered here in Al Jazeera) we’ll be learning whether the UK government has indeed been paying attention to British-Palestinians who have been voicing their deep concerns about the moral and legal legitimacy of this Bill, or whether they have attempted to erase them from the discussion altogether, as some reporters have recently claimed.

We’ll also be taking a closer look at the trade union conferences just kicking off in the UK, as well as the upcoming party conferences to assess what the trajectory for advocacy around Palestinian rights in the UK at a time when it has never been more urgent to make space for Palestinians to be heard and lead from the front in discussions which affect them most.

This summer marks 17 years of Israel’s hermetic siege and blockade of Gaza, the longest siege of the 21st century.

Israel has been placing Palestinians under a suffocating blockade, which constitutes an unprecedented form of collective punishment in a stark violation of international humanitarian law, say Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

The 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza today have endured rounds of Israel’s lethal aerial assaults delivered with world-leading industrialised military technology on an imprisoned population, leaving 80% of Gaza’s one million children living with depression, grief and fear according to Save the Children.

In 2012, the United Nations projected Gaza would be unliveable by 2020. Today in 2023, Palestinians continue to endure a crisis manufactured by Israel’s blockade, with spiralling unemployment, where 98% of water is undrinkable, where electricity blackouts continue daily and where a majority of the population are forced to rely on international organisations and aid for humanitarian relief.

By any rational judgement, Gaza today is indeed unliveable and yet Palestinians must endure it.

We hear from young Palestinians living in Gaza today who demand for their humanity to be recognised by the international community. For this show, we collaborate with We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project in the Gaza Strip.

It tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for their human rights. 

Hamza M. Salha

Fatima Elzahraa Shaat

Roaa Aladdin Missmeh

We speak exclusively to the “godfather of human rights” Kenneth Roth on how the international community should be responding to the realities on the ground in Palestine and Israel today.

Kenneth Roth is an American attorney, human rights activist and writer. He was the executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022.

Writing for Deutsche Welle earlier this year, Roth asserts that after 56 years the pretence of Israel’s occupation being a temporary fixture can no longer be upheld, and what we actually witness today is a “one-state reality”, whereby Israel controls all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River while subjecting Palestinians to an apartheid system of domination and control.

“After more than five decades of occupation and 30 years of the ‘peace process,’ it is no longer tenable to regard the repression of Israel’s occupation as a mere temporary phenomenon to be cured by a ‘peace process’ without end. The ‘peace process’ is moribund. While governments speak of a two-state solution, what we have today is a ‘one-state reality.’ Indeed, the main people still invoking the two-state solution seem to be Western officials desperately trying to avoid coming to terms with the unceasing nature of Israeli oppression.”

Andrew Whitley is founder & executive director of Geo-Political Advisory Services (GPAS) & Chair of the Balfour Project. Andrew has had an expansive career first as a journalist for the BBC & Financial Times, before serving as the New York Director of UNRWA & then as Policy Director & interim Chief Executive of The Elders.

UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Work Agency) was established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to help and protect Palestinian refugees expelled during the Nakba in 1947-8 and today it is in dire financial crisis.

“The financial crisis facing UNRWA is deep and complex. It has been suffering from these issues for many years, but this year is the most dangerous. UNRWA will have no funds to serve Palestinian refugees after August,” Adnan Abu Hasna, the UNRWA representative in Gaza, told Mondoweiss earlier this month.

Today, over six million Palestinian refugees are registered with the agency, relying on it for essential services including education, food, healthcare and jobs.

Abu Hasna warned that all UNRWA services will be stopped by the beginning of September if they do not get the necessary funds. This will apply to all UNRWA programs, not only in Gaza, but in all the areas the agency works, including Gaza and the West Bank inside Palestine, as well as refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. 

“Nearly half a million students in our schools are dependent on our services. We provide food to nearly 1.2 million Palestine refugees,” he told Al Jazeera.

“In a place like Gaza, any shaking of our programmes or our activities or services will threaten the stability and even the social fabric, as refugees are dependent on our cash assistance programme on education and health.” UNRWA runs 22 medical centres and 278 schools in Gaza, alongside several programs in human rights education, university scholarships, vocational training, and teacher training. 

Israel’s military occupation has morphed the entire occupied Palestinian territory into an open-air prison, where Palestinians are constantly confined, surveilled and disciplined, UN Special Rapporteur for the oPt Francesca Albanese demonstrates in a new report to the Human Rights Council.

While the report finds that since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians, including children as young as 12, have been arrested and detained under Israeli military rules, Albanese notes that Israel’s “carceral regime” haunts Palestinian life even outside of prisons.

With blockades, walls, segregated infrastructure, checkpoints, settlements encircling Palestinian towns and villages, hundreds of bureaucratic permits and a web of digital surveillance, Palestinians are confined to a carceral continuum across strictly controlled enclaves.

Join us as we learn more about the nature of Israel’s carceral regime and its relationship to international law with three leading human rights experts:

Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

Sahar Francis, Palestinian human rights defender, lawyer and the General Director of the Palestinian human rights organisation Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

Nery Ramati, Israeli human rights attorney defending Palestinian children. He was a partner in Gaby Lasky and Partners Law Office, a leading human rights office in Israel, specialising in freedom of expression and protest. 

With Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visiting China earlier this month to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first Arab President to visit China since the China-Arab States Summit of Riyadh in December 2022, commentators have suggested China may well be placing more importance on Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine as a foreign policy issue.

On May 24th, Chinese Ambassador Geng Shuang addressed the UN and strongly condemned Israel’s "illegal expansion of [Israeli Jewish] settlements”, its “unilateral action” and its “provocations” in Jerusalem, as well as raising the issue of “the plight of the Palestinian refugees”.

This comes off the back of China’s successful brokering of a landmark deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran on 6th April, soon after which China's new Foreign Minister, Qin Gang, reportedly consulted with Palestinian and Israeli officials on "steps to resume peace talks". Given the United States’ long-standing and overt support for Israel, something which has angered Palestinians who feel that this proves the US can never be an honest broker in any efforts to bring about a just and lasting resolution to the region, is China looking to take advantage of this situation and what could increased Chinese influence mean for the Palestinians?

We’ll be unpacking: how China’s Belt and Road Initiative incorporates Israel and Palestine; whether accusations of human rights abuses against the Chinese government, particularly its treatment of the Uyghur minority, will affect its relationship with Palestine; the nature of China’s vision for peace in Palestine and Israel; and what a broader shift in the global balance of power could mean for the region and for Palestinians in particular?

Ian Williams is President of the Foreign Press Association, New York & Columnist for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Mark Seddon was speechwriter for former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon & Al Jazeera Television’s first UN correspondent in New York.