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Winter in Gaza
The most urgent task, to end genocide, requires truthful coverage about Israel’s war crimes.
Nov 12, 2025
On Saturday, 8 November, 2025, Dan Perry wrote in The Jerusalem Post about Israel's projected lifting of the media blockade on Gaza. Perry laments that Israeli censorship has left all reporting of the atrocity in the hands of Palestinians, who refuse to be silent. To date, Israel has assassinated over 240 Palestinian journalists.
Perry writes, "The High Court ruled last week that the government must consider allowing foreign journalists into Gaza but also granted a one-month extension due to the still-unclear situation in the Strip." He asserts that Israel had and has no motive for excluding foreign journalists save concern for their own protection.
He makes two appeals. First, the duplicitous demand that Israel should use the one-month reprieve to cover up the evidence of atrocities: "Soon, journalists and photographers will enter Gaza… They will find terrible sights. Hence, Israel’s urgent task: to document retrospectively, to finally prepare explanations, to show… that Hamas operated from hospitals, schools, and refugee camps." In other words, bury the truth with the bodies.
Secondly, that since in this conflict Israel did absolutely nothing that it could have wished to hide, it should learn not to impose absolute media blackouts so likely to arouse suspicion.
Our own hearts cannot escape the howling winter unless we take, far more seriously, the hell of winter and despair to which we continue to subject Palestinians living in Gaza.
I sense a cold, hard winter within the souls of people in league with Dan Perry’s perspective.
Now, a cold, hard winter approaches Gaza. What do Palestinians in Gaza face, as temperatures drop and winter storms arrive
Turkish news agency Anadolu Ajansi reports: "Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to endure hunger under a new starvation policy engineered by Israel, which allows only non-essential goods to enter the enclave while blocking essential food and medical supplies… shelves stacked with non-essential consumer goods disguise a suffocating humanitarian crisis deliberately engineered by Israel to starve Palestinians.”
“I haven’t found eggs, chicken, or cheese since food supplies started entering the Gaza Strip,” Aya Abu Qamar, a mother of three from Gaza City, told Anadolu. “All I see are chocolate, snacks, and instant coffee. These aren’t our daily needs,” she added. “We’re looking for something to keep our children alive.”
On November 5, 2025 the Norwegian Refugee Council sounded this alarm about Israeli restrictions cruelly holding back winter supplies. NRC's director for the region, Angelita Caredda, insists, “More than three weeks into the ceasefire, Gaza should be receiving a surge of shelter materials, but only a fraction of what is needed has entered."
The report states:
Millions of shelter and non-food items are stuck in Jordan, Egypt, and Israel awaiting approvals, leaving around 260,000 Palestinian families, equal to nearly 1.5 million people, exposed to worsening conditions. Since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October, Israeli authorities have rejected twenty-three requests from nine aid agencies to bring in urgently needed shelter supplies such as tents, sealing and framing kits, bedding, kitchen sets, and blankets, amounting to nearly 4,000 pallets. Humanitarian organisations warn that the window to scale up winterisation assistance is closing rapidly.
The report notes how, despite the ceasefire, Israel has continued its mechanized slaughter and its choke hold on aid.
In Israel's +972 Magazine, Muhammad Shehada reports: "With the so-called ‘Yellow Line,’ Israel has divided the Strip in two: West Gaza, encompassing 42 percent of the enclave, where Hamas remains in control and over 2 million people are crammed in; and East Gaza, encompassing 58 percent of the territory, which has been fully depopulated of civilians and is controlled by the Israeli army and four proxy gangs." This last, a reference to four Israel Defense Forces-backed militias put forward by Israel as Hamas' legitimate replacement.
If ever tallied, the number of corpses buried under Gaza’s flattened buildings may raise the death toll of this genocide into six figures.
The United Nations estimates that the amount of rubble in Gaza could build 13 Giza pyramids.
"The sheer scale of the challenge is staggering," writes Paul Adams for the BBC: "The UN estimates the cost of damage at £53bn ($70bn). Almost 300,000 houses and apartments have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN's satellite centre Unosat…The Gaza Strip is littered with 60 million tonnes of rubble, mixed in with dangerous unexploded bombs and dead bodies."
No one knows how many corpses are rotting beneath the rubble. These mountains of rubble loom over Israelis working, in advance of global journalism's return, to create their counternarratives, but also over surviving Gazans who, amid unrelenting misery, struggle to provide for their surviving loved ones.
Living in close, unhygienic quarters; sleeping without bedding under torn plastic sheeting; and having scarce access to water, thousands of people are in dire need of supplies to help winterize their living space and spare themselves the dread that their children or they themselves could die of hypothermia. The easiest and most obvious solution to their predicament stands enticingly near: the homes held by their genocidal oppressors.
In affluent countries, observers like Dan Perry may tremble for Israel's reputation, eager to rush in and conceal Israel's crimes, clothing them in self-righteous justifications. These are of course our crimes as well.
Our own hearts cannot escape the howling winter unless we take, far more seriously, the hell of winter and despair to which we continue to subject Palestinians living in Gaza.
There is no peace in Gaza. May there be no peace for us until we fix that.
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Trump Threatens to Sue BBC Over Jan. 6 Video Clip in Latest Attack on Press
In a letter to the British public broadcaster, Trump cited a memo from a Conservative Party-linked former BBC adviser who claimed the network displayed an "anti-Israel" bias, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Nov 10, 2025
The BBC in the United Kingdom is the latest target of US President Donald Trump's attempts to root out all unflattering portrayals of him from media coverage, with the president citing a memo penned by a former BBC adviser reported to have ties to the British Conservative Party.
Trump wrote to the BBC Monday, warning that he would file a lawsuit demanding $1 billion in damages unless the publicly funded broadcaster retracts a documentary film about him from last year, issues a formal apology, and pays him an amount that would “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.”
The president gave the network until Friday to act in regard to Trump's complaint about a section of the film Trump: A Second Chance? by the long-running current affairs series Panorama.
The film was broadcast days before the 2024 US election, and included excerpts from the speech Trump gave to his supporters on January 6, 2021 just before thousands of them proceeded to the US Capitol to try to stop the election results from being certified.
It spliced together three quotes from two sections of the speech that were made about 50 minutes apart, making it appear that Trump urged supporters to march with him to the Capitol and called for violence.
"We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you... and we fight. We fight like hell," Trump is shown saying in the edited footage.
In the unedited quote, Trump said, "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”
BBC chairman Samir Shah said the network's standards committee had discussed the editing of the clips earlier this year and had expressed concerns to the Panorama team. The film is no longer available online at the BBC's website.
"The furor over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity. It’s a power play... It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponized."
“We accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action," said Shah. "The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgment.”
Two top executives, director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, also resigned on Sunday under pressure over the documentary.
The uproar comes days after the right-wing Daily Telegraph published details from a memo by former BBC standards committee adviser Michael Prescott, "managing director at PR agency Hanover Communications, whose staff have gone on to work for the Conservative Party," according to Novara Media.
Prescott's memo took aim at the documentary as well as what he claimed was a pro-transgender bias in BBC news coverage and an anti-Israel bias in stories by the BBC's Arabic service.
According to the Guardian, Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who previously worked as a communications official for former Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, "amplified" the criticisms in Prescott's memo in key board meetings ahead of Davie's and Turness' resignations.
Deadline reported Monday that "insiders" at the BBC have alleged that Prescott's memo, the resignations, and Trump's threat of legal action all stem from a right-wing "coup" attempt at the broadcaster.
Journalists including Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News and Mikey Smith of The Mirror noted that while Panorama's editing of Trump's speech could be seen as misleading, the documentary wasn't responsible for accusations that the president incited violence on January 6, which pre-dated the film.
"To understand how insane it is that the BBC is being accused of ‘making it look like’ Trump was inciting violence with their bad edit, as opposed to Trump actually having incited violence, we know even his own kids that day were desperately trying to get him to call off the mob," said Hasan.
Others suggested the memo cited in Trump's letter to the broadcaster should be discredited entirely for its claim that the BBC has exhibited an anti-Israel bias—an allegation, said author and international relations professor Norrie MacQueen, that amounted to "an entirely new level" of George Orwell's "newspeak."
While the BBC "has been shaken by one of the smallest of its sins," wrote media analyst Faisal Hanif at Middle East Eye, "the greater one—its distortion of Palestinian reality—goes unpunished."
Hanif pointed to a report published in June by the Center for Media Monitoring, which showed that despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel since October 2023, the BBC "gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanizing victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs. 201 Israelis)."
The network also used "emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims" and shut down allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, as well as "making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements," even as Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.
"The furor over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity," wrote Hanif. "It’s a power play: the disciplining of a public broadcaster that still, nominally, answers to the public rather than the billionaire-owned media. It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponized."
"The BBC is punished for the wrong things. It loses its leaders over an editing error, while escaping accountability for its editorial failures on Gaza," Hanif continued. "The Trump documentary might have been misedited, but the story of Gaza has been mistold for far longer. If the BBC still believes in its own motto—'Nation shall speak peace unto nation'—then peace must begin with honesty."
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Bari Weiss' CBS News Spiked Interview Question on Trump Crypto ‘Corruption’
"According to the standard set by the Trump FCC, Trump's efforts to control the interview content "could qualify as news distortion and deserve an investigation," according to a spokesperson for the only Democratic FCC commissioner.
Nov 04, 2025
As its new right-wing leadership comes under scrutiny, CBS News was found to have edited out a section from the extended online version of Sunday's "60 Minutes" interview with President Donald Trump in which he was interrogated about potential "corruption" stemming from his family's extraordinary cryptocurrency profits during his second term.
In the first half of 2025, the Trump family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets, according to Reuters, and the volatile digital currencies now make up the majority of Trump's personal net worth. His administration, meanwhile, has sought to aggressively deregulate the assets, leading to allegations of self-dealing.
Near the end of his appearance on "60 Minutes," anchor Norah O'Donnell asked Trump about his decision last month to pardon Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2023. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's pardon came "following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company,” by helping to facilitate an Emirati fund's $2 billion purchase of a stablecoin owned by World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by the Trump family.
A clip of the extended interview, posted to CBS's website and YouTube channel, showed O'Donnell laying out the crimes for which Zhao was convicted. Trump responded: "I don't know who he is... I heard it was a Biden witch hunt."
"In 2025... Binance, helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin," O'Donnell continued. "And then you pardoned [Zhao]. How do you address the appearance of pay for play?"
Trump then reiterated: "My sons are into it... I'm proud of them for doing that. I'm focused on this. I know nothing about the guy, other than I hear he was a victim of weaponization by government."
He was then shown launching into a lengthy defense of crypto, which he said was a "massive industry" that former President Joe Biden campaigned against, before going "all-in" on it at the very end of the election to win votes.
"I want to make crypto great for America," Trump was shown saying. "Right now, we're number one by a long shot. I wanna keep it that way. The same way we're number one with AI, we're number one with crypto. And I wanna keep it that way."
But a full transcript of the interview, later released on the CBS website, shows that the segment was heavily edited to omit much of Trump's response to O'Donnell's grilling. The version that appeared online did not include several instances in which he interrupted O'Donnell and pushed her to drop the line of questioning.
Rather than dropping the question after Trump's dodge, as the video posted online seemed to portray, O'Donnell persisted, asking Trump again: "So, not concerned about the appearance of corruption with this?”
Trump delivered a hesitant response: "I can't say, because—I can't say—I'm not concerned. I don't—I'd rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it. You just came to me and you said, "Can I ask another question?" And I said, yeah. This is the question—."
O'Donnell interjected: "And you answered," to which Trump replied: "I don’t mind. Did I let you do it? I could’ve walked away. I didn’t have to answer this question. I’m proud to answer the question.”
He then concluded the interview by reiterating that America is "number one in crypto" and that "it's a massive industry."
It was not the only portion of the interview that Trump suggested the network could drop. In another moment—which was included in the extended video, but did not make air—Trump bragged that "'60 Minutes' paid me a lotta money," referencing CBS's widely criticized decision to settle a $16 million lawsuit with Trump over its editing of an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris as she ran for president in 2024.
"You don't have to put this on, because I don't wanna embarrass you, and I'm sure you're not—you have a great—I think you have a great, new leader," which likely referred to Bari Weiss, the "anti-woke" editor-in-chief installed by pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison after his purchase of CBS parent company Paramount.
As Deadline reported back in October, CBS Evening News was the only major news network program that did not mention Trump's pardon of Zhao at the time that it happened.
Jonathan Uriarte, the spokesperson for the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote on social media that "according to the standard set by the Trump FCC, Trump's efforts to control the content of his 60 Minutes interview "could qualify as news distortion and deserve an investigation."
He was referencing FCC Chair Brendan Carr's claims that he could strip away the broadcast licenses of outlets for what he called "distorted" news coverage, which has in practice meant coverage critical of Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) chimed in as well, saying: "Maybe I should file a complaint with the FCC against the Trump White House for editing his unhinged '60 Minutes' interview. It will use the exact same language Trump lodged against Vice President Harris."
But others did not let CBS off the hook.
"Insane this isn't a bigger story or scandal," said Mehdi Hasan, founder of the media company Zeteo. "Just amazing that CBS could do this after paying Trump millions to settle his frivolous lawsuit complaining that they... did exactly this."
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