A pro-Palestine legal advocacy group has called on the BBC to dismiss board member Robbie Gibb over his links to the Jewish Chronicle, which has been embroiled in a scandal of fake Gaza stories.

Gibb, who was the sole owner and director of the Jewish Chronicle until recently, has been at the heart of the scandal.

The BBC has also faced questions about the link between Gibb, who is a member of its governing board, and the Jewish Chronicle.

Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the Guardian who has previously investigated the Jewish Chronicle’s ownership, called into question Gibb's position on the BBC’s editorial standards committee.

“I can’t see how he can possibly sit on that committee and portray himself as a beacon of impartiality, sitting in judgment on BBC journalists,” Rusbridger told LBC radio.

A pro-Palestine legal advocacy group has called on the BBC to dismiss board member Robbie Gibb over his links to the Jewish Chronicle, which has been embroiled in a scandal of fake Gaza stories.

Gibb, who was the sole owner and director of the Jewish Chronicle until recently, has been at the heart of the scandal.

The BBC has also faced questions about the link between Gibb, who is a member of its governing board, and the Jewish Chronicle.

Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the Guardian who has previously investigated the Jewish Chronicle’s ownership, called into question Gibb's position on the BBC’s editorial standards committee.

“I can’t see how he can possibly sit on that committee and portray himself as a beacon of impartiality, sitting in judgment on BBC journalists,” Rusbridger told LBC radio.

The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Thursday that designates products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as originating from “Israel”.

This bill, titled the "Anti-BDS Labeling Act," solidifies a Trump-era policy that critics argue undermines Palestinians' UN-recognised territorial claims and champions Israel’s annexation efforts while directly targeting the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, sending a clear message against those advocating for Palestinian human rights.

The bill, sponsored by Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney of New York, passed with a vote of 231 to 189 and received support from 16 Democrats, including some of the party’s most pro-Israel members. It mandates that products from the occupied West Bank and Gaza no longer be labelled together but separately, effectively erasing the recognition of their unified identity. Products would read either "West Bank" or "Gaza" rather than "West Bank and Gaza".

Britain’s best-known Jewish newspaper has found itself thrust into the centre of an embarrassing and long-overdue storm over its involvement with the shadowy manoeuvrings of pro-Israel lobby groups. According to the research of journalist and academic Brian Cathcart, in the five years to 2023, the paper broke the code an astonishing 41 times. The Chronicle has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases.

Notably, many of the JC’s press-code violations and libel settlements related to its false allegations against either Palestinian solidarity organisations or members of the Labour left. The Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and his allies, stoking fears among prominent sections of the Jewish community. It began that campaign early on, when Corbyn first emerged as a candidate for the leadership.

In 2019, Stephen Pollard, Wallis Simons’s predecessor as editor of the JC, was open about his paper’s crucial role against Corbyn: “There’s certainly been a huge need for the journalism that the JC does in especially looking at the antisemitism in the Labour Party and elsewhere.”

The four columnists who quit the JC on the weekend all actively contributed to fomenting a political climate in which Corbyn’s leadership could be depicted as an existential threat to British Jews. There is already plenty of evidence that, during Corbyn’s time as Labour leader, Israeli officials were actively meddling in British politics to stop him from reaching power.

Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But his schedule did not include having his phone infiltrated by Pegasus, the phone hacking software made by Israel’s NSO Group.

For many years, he had been vocally critical of the UAE, where he previously lived. The UAE designated his organization, the Cordoba Foundation — which works to promote dialogue and rapprochement between Islam and the West — as a terrorist group in 2014. In response, the organization issued a statement calling the country a “despotic regime seeking to silence any form of dissent.” He made similar declarations about the UAE over the following years.

Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked.

Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges.

The 581-page labor violation charge, filed with California’s Public Employment Relations Board, largely focuses on the universities’ crackdowns on the student-led Palestine solidarity protests and encampments, in which school officials called on police to arrest hundreds of students, faculty, and staff members in May and June.

In some instances, police beat demonstrators with batons, fired rubber bullets and pepper ball munitions, and sprayed chemical agents. In the aftermath of the crackdown, faculty and staff have faced punishment for their role in the protests, from suspensions to firings.

Anna Markowitz, a UCLA faculty association member, said the school’s crackdown had one goal: “to end Palestine solidarity activism on campus.”

“In this ULP charge, we are saying that this illegal suppression of speech cannot stand, whether about Palestine or about other issues that students and faculty may raise in the future,” she said.

After 350 days of continuous bombardment, the central blood bank affiliated with Al-Shifa Hospital was destroyed, making it nearly impossible to meet the urgent blood needs of the wounded and ill Palestinians.

Compounding this crisis, the widespread hunger gripping the region means that even those willing to donate blood are unable to do so due to malnutrition.

According to the UN July report titled, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024”, every resident of Gaza is suffering from severe food insecurity.

This crisis is most acute in the northern areas, where people are so under-nourished that they are unable to donate blood.

The destruction of Al-Shifa’s blood bank has led to severe shortages, leaving the wounded and those with chronic illness facing the risk of death due to a lack of blood.

Behind the scenes: The banking correspondence authorization will end on Oct. 31 and the U.S. and many of its allies are concerned Smotrich is not going to extend it, U.S. officials said.

During a meeting in recent weeks of treasury and finance officials from the governments of the G7 countries, the U.S. raised its concerns about Smotrich and the Palestinian banks, an official from one of the G7 countries said.

The G7 official said the U.S. warned that if the Palestinian banks are cut off from Israeli banks it could significantly destabilize the West Bank and create a violent escalation that would spill over into Israel.

The West Bank would turn into a "cash economy" that could benefit terrorist organizations that largely use cash to operate, the G7 official said.

Israeli settlers attacked two Palestinian schools yesterday in the village of Al-Jab’a in Bethlehem, in the southern occupied West Bank.

Local sources reported that a group of settlers hurled stones at Al-Jab’a Boys’ Primary School and Al-Tawafuq Mixed Secondary School, southwest of Bethlehem, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

The students were left in a state of panic and were sent home early, according to the agency.

The village of Al-Jab’a has been subjected to ongoing settler violence, including attacks on residents and property, the burning and cutting down of trees and the confiscation and bulldozing of large areas of land.

Palestinians assert that Israeli authorities are lenient towards settler attacks as part of an official effort to intensify settlement expansion in the occupied territories.

A shocking video has surfaced showing Israeli soldiers throwing the bodies of Palestinian men from buildings during an assault on the town of Qabatiya, north of the West Bank, on Thursday.

Palestinians shared the footage on social media, showing Israeli occupation soldiers mutilating the bodies of three Palestinians killed in Qabatiya before throwing them from the roof of a house that morning.

The video captures three Israeli soldiers climbing onto the roof, holding the bodies, and throwing them one by one from the top.