Middle East Press On: Hamas Leadership Crisis, Gaza, Board for Peace, Gaza's Kidney Patients, Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza, Palestine Solidarity Movement, New Age Islam's Selection, 20 January 2026
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
20 January 2026
Hamas admits leadership losses, moves into crisis mode
The Gaza Board for Peace is Humpty Dumpty diplomacy -Assembled for spectacle not for restoration
The two-stage killing of Palestinians in Gaza
Dying on Waiting Lists: Gaza’s Kidney Patients Face a Silent Death
‘Permits of Humiliation’: How Israel Strangles Christian Education in Jerusalem
Nikolai Mladenov – Who Is the New ‘High Representative’ for Gaza?
The Theatre of ‘Protection’ and Repression of the Palestine Solidarity Movement
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Hamas admits leadership losses, moves into crisis mode
By SALEM ALKETBI
JANUARY 19, 2026
The recent statement from the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades about the death of Mohammed Sinwar and the tribute to Abu marks more than just a delayed military update or another name added to the list of losses.
It is a political and security admission, full of consequences. In practice, it signals the end of one phase of Hamas leadership and the forced beginning of another. In this new phase, the movement focuses on avoiding collapse rather than leading a project or rebuilding its authority.
In ideological groups like this, the death of major symbolic figures is only admitted when hiding the loss becomes impossible. Hamas, which spent decades perfecting ambiguity and narrative control, did not choose transparency willingly. It had no choice. Silence stopped working as protection, and admitting the truth became less damaging than keeping up the pretense.
The real importance lies not just in Sinwar’s death (which many already knew about) or in Abu Obeida’s symbolism alone. It comes from the timing and the way the announcement was made. A new military spokesman delivered it, combining tributes to several leaders in one single message. This does not show smooth continuity. It reveals an emergency restructuring of the leadership story under heavy pressure.
This is where the new Hamas starts to appear. The movement is no longer run through a balance between its political wing and military arm, or through symbolic figures who both mobilize people and keep control. Decisions now stay within small military and security circles. The main goal is no longer taking the initiative or growing stronger. It is holding the ranks together and stopping further breakdown.
Hamas chain of command damaged by war
The war has steadily targeted Hamas’s structure: its organization, its sources of power, and its command chain. With less support from regional countries and changes in the wider world, the group now faces a harsh new reality: an exhausted organization with little political depth and no real protection. In such conditions, you do not rebuild leadership. You just try to manage the crisis.
This change inside Hamas cannot be separated from the way Israel has broken the deterrent image the movement relied on for so long in its words and actions. Israel has shown it can fight a long war across multiple fronts, mixing conventional battles with guerrilla tactics, while keeping operational superiority.
Even more important, this superiority came mainly from intelligence. Israel penetrated Hamas’s command structure, followed decision-making lines, and steadily eliminated both field commanders and symbolic figures. These targeted killings not only reduced fighting strength.
They destroyed the whole idea of deterrence. The movement went from one that built up threats to one now operating under constant pressure, forced to admit losses after losing the ability to hide them or use them for political gain.
Here, the analysis needs to go beyond counting losses and into the real issue. What is left of a movement that has lost its leaders, its story, and its ability to take action, leaving only damage control? In times of such open weakness, the question becomes unavoidable: are we seeing a movement trying to rebuild, or just an organization trying to hold on to whatever remains?
Hamas’s own history points to the latter. In 2006, it entered politics as a way to rise, then turned against the whole political process the moment it blocked its hold on power. Politics was never a matter of principle for Hamas; it was a tool used when convenient. Today’s talk of political change inside Hamas follows the same path. It comes from a much weaker position.
Hamas negotiates from exposure rather than strength or ambition. Gaz has become a place it can neither control nor govern freely. It has gone through military and geographical changes. Holding weapons fails to translate into governance, or even long-term survival. So any political shift is not a real strategy. It is simply an attempt to reduce the cost of staying alive under total siege.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-883814
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The Gaza Board for Peace is Humpty Dumpty diplomacy -Assembled for spectacle not for restoration
January 19, 2026
By Ranjan Solomon
The idea of constituting a “Board of Peace” for Gaa may sound benevolent, even urgent, to those watching the carnage from a distance. It appeals to the liberal imagination: technocrats around a table, former leaders with gravitas, global figures invoking reconciliation, reconstruction, and stability.
Yet beneath this humanitarian vocabulary lies a deeply flawed premise. Gaza does not suffer from a deficit of ideas, administrators, or plans. It suffers from occupation, siege, apartheid, and genocide. No board – however well branded – can substitute justice with management. Besides the plan will be carried out by a pre-dominantly a set of colonialists – Western dominated down to the bone. The formation and, thus the formulae that might emanate from it, will be racially toned and tuned, imperialist, and be tilted in Israel’s favour – and the West as a whole. The very fact that Trump has brought a white western-dominated clique suggests that a permanent and just solution will be elusive. It is futile to expect more substance coming from a senile leader and a group of people who do not have a track record of justice.
The idea is already in distress. Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has publicly criticized the US over the composition of a newly announced Gaza governing body. The entire idea simply does not align with what Netanyahu wants, and/or does not want. Netanyahu does not want Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan in the group. Just as well, an objective analyst would surmise. The question is who gave Netanyahu any authority to veto names or even propose them.
Like most things Trump plans for, get to be non-starters. This Gaza initiative is a non-starter by its very looks. Literally speaking, Israel and the US – with the sneaky support of Europe – lost the Gaza war. Gaza might be in the rubble, but it exists. And the Palestinian resilience will not allow it to go uncontested. This is Palestinian land. Trump has no rights to form Boards and Trusts or anything he wishes for in territory that is not his in any remote sense. Neither does he have the cultural sense or the political touch. Those close to him have suggested that his knowledge to the existence of Gaza and Palestine- there is no ‘West Bank’ in his lectionary. Ot is not mere lack of geography. It is worse because it is laced with the conceit of inanity.
The very concept of a Board of Peace is compromised by its genealogy. Such boards have historically emerged not from solidarity with oppressed peoples but from imperial anxiety: the desire to stabilise a crisis without addressing its root causes. They are instruments of containment, not liberation. Gaza, like Iraq before it and Afghanistan after, is being reimagined as a “problem” to be administered once resistance has been crushed or neutralised. This is not peace-building. It is post-violence governance without accountability.
The names floated for such initiatives only deepen the crisis of legitimacy. Tony Blair’s involvement alone should disqualify the exercise. Blair’s legacy in the Middle East is not peace but devastation—from Iraq to his disastrous tenure as Quartet envoy, where he normalised Israeli settlement expansion while preaching economic “peace” to a people under military occupation. Blair does not lack experience; he lacks moral credibility. He represents precisely the model that has failed Palestine: diplomacy without justice, growth without freedom, and negotiations without consequences. Each member appointed by Trump is irrational. Without exception, none of them possess the qualifications for a politically sensitive task.
Equally hollow is the invocation of figures like Marco Rubio. Rubio is not a statesman of peace; he is a foot soldier of American exceptionalism and Israeli impunity. His public record reveals no engagement with Palestinian history, law, or suffering—only reflexive allegiance to Israeli militarism. To imagine Rubio contributing meaningfully to Gaza’s future is to mistake ideological rigidity for expertise. He is not neutral, not informed, and not trusted.
Jared Kushner’s name, meanwhile, exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire project. What does a real estate developer—whose primary intervention in the Palestinian question was to reduce it to land deals and luxury investments—know of dispossession, trauma, or decolonisation? Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan collapsed because it treated Palestinians as obstacles to be bought off rather than a people with rights. To resurrect such thinking under a new label is not innovation; it is insult.
This brings us to the central flaw of the Board of Peace concept: it assumes peace can be engineered externally, by elites who neither live the consequences nor bear the costs of failure. It reduces Gaza to a laboratory of governance experiments, rather than recognising it as a site of resistance, memory, and political agency. Palestinians are not stakeholders to be consulted after decisions are made. They are the authors of their own future.
Any credible peace process must begin with a non-negotiable precondition: Palestinians must lead it. Not as tokens, not as junior partners, but as architects. Gaza’s civil society—its doctors, teachers, lawyers, journalists, artists, and intellectuals—has survived conditions that would have destroyed most societies. These are not broken people awaiting instruction. They are among the most politically literate populations on earth, shaped by decades of struggle, debate, and sacrifice.
Beyond Gaza, the wider Palestinian intellectual and political tradition—spanning the diaspora, the West Bank, refugee camps, and exile—offers a reservoir of ideas on governance, accountability, resistance, and reconciliation. From Edward Said’s insistence on moral clarity to contemporary Palestinian scholars articulating decolonial futures, the intellectual groundwork for peace already exists. What has been absent is international willingness to listen without controlling.
Equally vital is the role of regional intellectuals and actors, not as proxies for Western power but as independent voices rooted in the histories of colonialism, partition, and resistance. Arab, Iranian, Turkish, African, Latin American, and Asian thinkers—many of whom understand occupation not as abstraction but lived experience—must be central to any genuine peace architecture. Peace cannot be monopolised by those whose geopolitical interests are aligned with the oppressor.
A real peace framework for Gaza would therefore look radically different from a boardroom exercise. It would begin with an unequivocal recognition of Israeli crimes under international law, including war crimes and genocide. It would insist on accountability, not reconciliation without truth. It would prioritise the right of return, the lifting of the siege, and Palestinian self-determination—not as end goals but as starting points. Peace is not the absence of bombs; it is the presence of justice.
The obsession with boards, envoys, and committees also reveals a deeper moral evasion. It allows the international community to appear active while avoiding the hard political decisions—sanctions, arms embargoes, diplomatic isolation—that real pressure requires. A Board of Peace becomes a substitute for courage. It manages outrage rather than confronting power.
There is also a danger that such a board, however framed, becomes a mechanism to sideline Palestinian resistance by rebranding it as extremism incompatible with peace. This is a familiar tactic: delegitimise resistance, sanitise occupation, and then invite the occupied to be grateful participants in their own containment. Any peace initiative that does not affirm the legitimacy of resistance to occupation is not neutral—it is complicit.
Gaza does not need a Board of Peace imposed from above. It needs the world to stop enabling its destruction and start respecting its people. Peace will not emerge from recycled elites who failed yesterday and remain unaccountable today. It will emerge from Palestinian leadership, regional solidarity, and a global commitment to justice over convenience.
Until then, a Board of Peace is not a solution. It is a distraction.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260119-the-gaza-board-for-peace-is-humpty-dumpty-diplomacy-assembled-for-spectacle-not-for-restoration/
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The two-stage killing of Palestinians in Gaza
DR. RAMZY BAROUD
January 19, 2026
A colleague, an editor at a widely read outlet that centred Gaza throughout the two-year genocide, recently voiced his frustration that the Strip is no longer a main focus in the news.
He hardly needed to say it. It is evident that Gaza has already been pushed to the margins of news coverage — not only by the mainstream Western media, long known for its structural bias in Israel’s favour, but also by outlets often described, accurately or not, as “pro-Palestine.”
At first glance, this retreat may appear routine. During the height of the genocide, Gaza demanded constant attention; after the genocide, less so. But this assumption collapses under scrutiny because the genocide in Gaza has not ended.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the so-called ceasefire was declared in October, despite repeated claims that large-scale massacres had ceased. These are not isolated incidents or “violations” — they are the continuation of the same lethal policies of the last two years.
Beyond the daily death toll lies devastation on an almost incomprehensible scale. More than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, with entire neighbourhoods erased, infrastructure pulverized and civilian life rendered nearly impossible.
To grasp the depth of Gaza’s crisis, one must confront a brutal reality: well over 1 million people remain displaced, living in tents and makeshift shelters that collapse under winter storms, floodwaters or strong winds. Infants have frozen to death. Families are swept from one temporary refuge to another, trapped in a cycle of exposure and fear.
Beneath Gaza’s ruins lie thousands of bodies still buried under rubble, unreachable due to Israel’s destruction of heavy machinery, roads and emergency services. Thousands more are believed to be buried in mass graves awaiting excavation and dignified burial.
Meanwhile, hundreds of bodies remain scattered in areas east of the so-called yellow line, a boundary claimed to separate military zones from Palestinian “safe areas.” Israel never respected this line. It was a fiction from the start, used to manufacture the appearance of restraint while violence continued everywhere.
From Israel’s perspective, the war has never truly stopped. Only Palestinians are expected to honour the ceasefire — compelled by fear that any response, however minimal, will be seized upon as justification for renewed mass killing, fully endorsed by the US and its Western allies.
The killing has merely slowed down. On Jan. 15 alone, Israeli attacks killed 16 Palestinians, including women and children, across Gaza, despite the absence of any military confrontation. But as long as the daily death toll remains below the psychological threshold of mass slaughter — below 100 bodies a day — Gaza quietly slips from the headlines.
Today, more than 2 million Palestinians are confined to roughly 45 percent of Gaza’s already tiny 365 sq. km area, with only trickles of aid entering, no reliable access to clean water and a health system that is barely functioning. Gaza’s economy has effectively been annihilated. Even fishermen are either blocked entirely from the sea or restricted to less than 1 km offshore, turning a centuries-old livelihood into a daily risk of death.
Education has been reduced to survival. Children study in tents or in partially destroyed buildings, as nearly every school and university in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombardment.
Israel has also not abandoned the rhetoric that laid the ideological groundwork for its genocide. Senior officials continue to articulate visions of permanent devastation and ethnic cleansing — language that strips Palestinians of humanity while framing destruction as policy, a strategic necessity.
But why is Israel determined to keep Gaza suspended on the edge of collapse? Why does it obstruct stabilization and delay movement to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement? The blunt answer is that Israel wants to preserve the option of ethnic cleansing. Senior officials have openly advocated permanent occupation, demographic engineering and the denial of any Palestinians returning to the destroyed areas east of the Yellow Line.
And the media? For its part, the Western media has begun rehabilitating Israel’s image, reinserting it into global narratives as if collective extermination never occurred. More troubling still, parts of the so-called pro-Palestine media appear to be moving on — as though genocide were a temporary assignment rather than an ongoing moral emergency.
One might attempt to justify this neglect by pointing to crises elsewhere — Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Greenland, for example. But that argument would only hold if Gaza had truly emerged from catastrophe, which it has not.
Israel has succeeded, to a dangerous degree, in systematically dehumanizing Palestinians through mass killing. Once violence reaches genocidal proportions, lesser — yet still deadly — violence becomes normalized. The slow death of survivors becomes background noise.
This is how Palestinians are killed twice: first through genocide and then through erasure — through silence, distraction and the gradual withdrawal of attention from their ongoing collective suffering.
Palestine and its people must remain at the centre of global moral and political solidarity. This is not an act of charity or an expression of ideological alignment. It is the bare minimum owed to a population the world has already failed — and continues to fail every single day.
Silence now is not neutrality; it is complicity.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2629876
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Dying on Waiting Lists: Gaza’s Kidney Patients Face a Silent Death
January 20, 2026
Warnings are mounting over a looming humanitarian catastrophe facing kidney failure patients in the Gaza Strip, as border closures and travel bans continue to block access to life-saving treatment. For hundreds of patients, medical waiting lists have become a daily race against pain, deterioration, and death.
Inside the dialysis unit at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, the crisis is painfully visible. Patients crowd the department beyond its capacity, while severe shortages of medicines and medical supplies threaten the continuity of dialysis sessions essential to keeping them alive.
According to Al-Jazeera correspondent Ashraf Abu Amra, dialysis units across Gaza are now operating under extreme pressure, with patient numbers far exceeding their ability to provide regular treatment. The result has been a rise in deaths in recent months, as missed or irregular sessions take a fatal toll.
The suffering is not only measured in statistics, but in the voices of patients themselves. One woman described nights without sleep due to relentless pain, saying the absence of medication leaves her body in constant agony, with no means of relief.
Another patient reduced her demands to the bare minimum: opening the crossings and allowing medicines into Gaza. With hospitals unable to meet basic needs, treatment inside the enclave has become dangerously inadequate.
A Health System on the Verge
Palestinian health authorities say around 30,000 patients and wounded individuals are currently awaiting permission to travel outside Gaza for treatment, after local medical capacity collapsed under prolonged siege and war damage.
One dialysis patient described a sharp drop in his haemoglobin levels due to the unavailability of treatment, warning that each day of delay brings him closer to irreversible harm.
Doctors at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital confirmed that essential medications—most critically the hormone erythropoietin—are in short supply. One physician warned that the lack of this drug has already led to one or two deaths per month among dialysis patients, as doctors lose the ability to regulate blood levels.
Calls to Open the Crossings
As conditions worsen, Palestinian health officials and humanitarian organizations have intensified calls on Israel to open all crossings, particularly Rafah, to allow patients to leave Gaza for urgent treatment before waiting becomes a death sentence.
Although a ceasefire agreement came into effect in October after nearly two years of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the reality for patients has not improved. Israeli airstrikes continue, withdrawal lines have shifted, and severe restrictions remain in place on the entry of medicines, medical equipment, and humanitarian aid.
Israel’s war on Gaza, launched in October 2023, killed more than 71,000 Palestinians and destroyed much of the enclave’s civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and clinics. Even after the ceasefire, Israel has continued to restrict movement and medical access, leaving Gaza’s most vulnerable—especially chronic patients—trapped in a system unable to sustain their lives.
For Gaza’s kidney patients, survival now depends not on medical breakthroughs, but on whether borders open before their bodies give out.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/dying-on-waiting-lists-gazas-kidney-patients-face-a-silent-death/
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‘Permits of Humiliation’: How Israel Strangles Christian Education in Jerusalem
January 20, 2026
By Fayha Shalash –
Christian schools in Jerusalem staged a week-long strike to protest what they described as systematic and deliberate restrictions imposed by Israel.
Israel has prevented more than 230 teachers from the West Bank from obtaining permits to enter Jerusalem and carry out their work as usual in these schools.
These restrictions are not limited to permits or to Christian schools alone. Israeli authorities have long obstructed education in the city through multiple mechanisms, most notably preventing the provision of new classrooms, conducting frequent raids on schools, arresting and searching students and teachers, closing some schools under various pretexts, and preventing the renovation of their buildings.
There are 15 Christian schools in Jerusalem, educating more than 12,000 students from the city. They are considered among the oldest and most prestigious schools.
Since 2002, when Israel erected the apartheid wall around Jerusalem, it has prevented Palestinians from the West Bank from entering the city except with a special permit. This permit is granted only to specific categories, such as certain patients, workers, or employees, and for a very limited period.
Deliberate Obstruction
More than 230 teachers from Bethlehem, who have been working in Christian schools in Jerusalem since before the construction of the apartheid wall, are now forced to obtain special permits to continue their work.
Richard Zananiri, principal of the Bishop’s School in Jerusalem, told us that they were surprised by Israel’s refusal to grant the necessary permits to a large number of teachers. This has disrupted the school year and forced Christian schools to close their doors in protest against this new and punitive Israeli measure.
The second semester was supposed to begin on January 10 at these schools, but the permit issue has disrupted classes due to the absence of many teachers who were denied entry permits to the city.
“I call them permits of humiliation. They are not a favour from Israel. Their purpose is humiliation. When they prevent dozens of teachers from reaching Jerusalem from the West Bank, they are disrupting the entire school year,” he added.
Some teachers were denied permits, while others received incomplete permits, meaning they are not valid for all days of the week. This significantly disrupts the school day.
“Some teachers received permits that prevent them from entering Jerusalem on Saturdays, when we are open, and others were barred from entering on Sundays and Fridays. Although these are holidays for our schools, we have many extracurricular activities that take place on those days and require the teachers’ presence,” he said.
The shortage of teaching staff in Jerusalem is another facet of the suffering, as these schools cannot do without teachers from the West Bank due to their extensive experience and the lack of alternatives from within Jerusalem.
After a week of classes being suspended in protest, Israel agreed to renew the permits for most of the teachers, but stated that 57 of them “didn’t pass the security check and their cases will be dealt with later,” leaving the door open to renewed pressure and future restrictions.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to be protecting the rights of minorities, on-the-ground policies continue to expose a pattern of restrictions and violations affecting the religious freedom of Christians and their historical presence in the city.
These practices include imposing restrictions on access to holy sites, especially during religious holidays, and repeated attacks by extremists on clergy and church property, in addition to real estate and tax policies targeting Christian endowments and institutions.
Israelization of Education
For decades, Israel has pursued policies aimed at undermining education in Jerusalem by imposing strict administrative and security restrictions on Palestinian schools, obstructing the work of educational institutions, and restricting the national curriculum while attempting to impose the Israeli curriculum as a replacement.
These policies include reducing licenses, imposing exorbitant fines, and burdening schools with taxes, creating an unsafe learning environment, and negatively impacting the fundamental right to education.
These measures are part of a broader, systematic policy targeting the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem and seeking to weaken national identity by striking at one of its most important pillars: education.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/permits-of-humiliation-how-israel-strangles-christian-education-in-jerusalem/
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Nikolai Mladenov – Who Is The New ‘High Representative’ for Gaza?
January 20, 2026
Nikolai Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat appointed to head the so-called Board of Peace, has a challenging task to fulfil in the newly launched phase two of the US-brokered fragile ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. But who is he?
Mladenov, 53, will serve as High Representative for Gaza, linking the Board of Peace with the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) which will be led by Dr. Ali Sha’ath, a former Palestinian deputy minister in the Palestinian Authority.
He “will support the Board’s oversight of all aspects of Gaza’s governance, reconstruction, and development, while ensuring coordination across civilian and security pillars,” the White House said in a statement.
Mladenov served as Bulgaria’s Minister of Defence from July 2009 to 2010 and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2010 to 2013. Prior to those portfolios, Mladenov was a member of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009.
Role within UN
He then entered into roles within the United Nations. In 2013, he was appointed as Special Representative for Iraq and Head of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). From 2015 to 2020, Mladenov served as UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
That role is largely seen as symbolic but ineffective, according to a CNN report, citing previous diplomats who have condemned the ongoing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but which has had little impact.
The report further notes that in an interview with the New York Times in late 2020, Mladenov was aware of how little relevance the position seemed to hold. He however, “shuttled back and forth between key players,” namely Hamas in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, and the Israelis, the report said, upholding his mandate and presenting a monthly report to the UN Security Council in New York.
Even though he rarely made the headlines during his time in Jerusalem, he played a role in calming down “repeated escalations” between Hamas and Israel, the CNN report said.
Following his mission within the UN, Mladenov, who holds a master’s degree in War Studies and International Relations, undertook academic, diplomatic training, and advisory roles. Until his current position, he was based in the UAE, where he headed the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy.
‘Trust of All Sides’
According to a senior Israeli official cited by CNN, Mladenov “has managed to earn the full trust of all sides, which is extremely rare.”
He is “a fair player who understands the sensitivities of all parties,” the official added.
The Times of Israel touts him as having “solid expertise” in regional dynamics. The paper cited retired Israeli diplomat Alon Bar as saying it was a “distinct pleasure” working with him and that he “was able to create a relationship of trust with the political echelon in Israel, including Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
Palestinians Cautious
There is hesitation, however, on the Palestinian side as to his role at a time when Israel continues to violate the ceasefire launched in October and still restricts the entry of essential relief aid, such as shelters, into the enclave.
While Xavier Abu Eid, a political analyst who formerly worked with the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department as an adviser, acknowledged his professionalism to CNN, he stated that Mladenov leaned too heavily towards the Israeli side.
Eid said Mladenov “cared about Palestinians, but he cared more about Israelis,” according to CNN.
The report also noted Mladenov’s approach suited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in that his establishment of ties with Hamas could be at the expense of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told CNN that with the PA having authority in the West Bank, and another committee overseeing Gaza, “the issue for us, now that we have two interim authorities, is how to really link the two for us to achieve a two-state solution.”
Ties to the UAE
Other Palestinians are concerned about his ties to the UAE and his championing of the Abraham Accords, which led to Israel normalizing relations with the UAE in 2020.
Praising Trump for his “bold leadership”, Mladenov has said that he is “honoured to have been nominated to take on responsibilities with the Board of Peace and as High Representative for Gaza.”
He said the NCAG’s appointed chairman, Ali Shaath, and his team “are the first critical element of what is needed to bring peace to Gaza.”
“As we enter phase two of the ceasefire, our focus is on advising, support and guiding NCAG in delivering immediate humanitarian relief, restoring essential services, and ensuring that all weapons in Gaza are under the control of a single, legitimate authority,” he said on X.
Mladenov added that this “is necessary in order to move towards reconstruction and paving a sustainable path to lasting peace and prosperity for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
Pressing Needs
Three months into the fragile ceasefire, Mladenov’s role will be critical with the second phase calling for full Israeli withdrawal, deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF), and disarmament of the Palestinian Resistance. These are all areas that have yet to be concluded.
Despite the US-brokered ceasefire that came into effect in October last year, Israel has killed 464 Palestinians and injured 712 others.
The total death toll since Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza in October 2023 has risen to 71,548, with 171,353 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry figures.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/nikolai-mladenov-who-is-the-new-high-representative-for-gaza/
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The Theatre of ‘Protection’ and Repression of the Palestine Solidarity Movement
January 19, 2026
By Andrew Meyer
With grief and shock over the horrific attack on Bondi Beach still raw, influential figures in British politics wasted no time turning tragedy into political leverage. Almost immediately, the violence was seized upon as a pretext to revive a long-standing agenda – recasting the international movement against Israeli colonization and apartheid as an existential threat.
Bondi became the latest entry point in a familiar relay, where tragedy is converted into accusation, accusation into the criminalization of language, and language into guilt by association. Muslim presence is rendered suspect by default while the wider movement for Palestinian rights is disciplined as extremism by proximity. The question shifts accordingly – no longer concerning what happened in Sydney, or how violence might actually be prevented, but how far surveillance, restriction, and silencing can be expanded in the name of “safety.” Crucially, this grammar does not remain at the level of commentary. It travels through briefings, hearings, and police practice until it hardens into a domestic method.
Unsurprisingly, no one raced faster to operationalize this method than Dave Rich, Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust. Conceding in his recent Guardian op-ed that the world had “yet to discover the detailed motivations of the Bondi attackers,” he transformed this ignorance into indictment, stretching to implicate the global Palestine solidarity movement itself. The absurdity is worth quoting:
“Like it or not, it seems [the pro-Palestine movement] has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted. Shooting Jews celebrating Hanukkah is the most extreme manifestation of this hatred. But in sentiment, in the message it sends Jews, it is little different from the ‘Free Palestine’ graffiti scrawled on a Hanukkah menorah in north London…”
This is the hinge on which a wider operation turns, coming to bear significantly not only on the Palestine solidarity movement, but also on any political action which challenges the state’s position. The supposed violence endorsed or committed by such groups is not discovered, but produced, manufactured through strategically narrowed definitions that allow speech to be reclassified as crime. Once this manoeuvre is conceded, evidence becomes secondary. The state’s task is no longer to demonstrate harm, but to assert the authority to decide what words mean. From there, enforcement follows automatically.
For Rich, Keir Starmer and others throughout the UK government, this logic now centres on phrases such as “globalise the intifada.” Downing Street has insisted “there is no other interpretation” of the phrase other than a call to attack Jewish communities worldwide. Once meaning is declared settled, inquiry becomes unnecessary, because only enforcement can follow.
This is a well-rehearsed semantic trap with devastating consequences. Language is ripped from its historical and political context, while disparate political currents across the Middle East–along with international movements to challenge injustice there–are collapsed into a single amorphous menace. This is not an analytical failure but calculated dehumanisation that strips people of history, antecedents, and political being until only a threat remains.
Edward Said captured this logic with unusual precision, arguing:
“[T]he main thing is to isolate your enemy from time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake. Thus, if you can show that…Moslems, Palestinian’s and Arabs, generally speaking, have no reality except that which…confirms their terrorist essence as…Moslems, Palestinians, and Arabs, you can go on to attack them and their ‘terrorist’ states generally, and avoid all questions about your own behaviour or about your share in their present fate.”
With the proper level of Islamophobia in place, terms like intifada can be emptied of linguistic and political meaning and recast as symbols of terror. The prefabricated spectre of Islamic terrorism erases the evidentiary burden and allows smearing of the pro-Palestine movement to appear as analysis. Rich and Starmer will bank on the likelihood that most of the public will not recognize the complexity these terms carry, nor distinguish between them — a public primed to hear Arabic never as meaning, only as peril. “Intifada” becomes “jihad,” becomes “sharia” in a single, sinister blur.
But these terms do not belong to the state, nor its police forces. Intifada has long been part of the Palestinian struggle, but it also carries meaning in broader Arabic usage. The Dictionary of Palestinian Political Terms, published by the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA), glosses “intifada” as a “civil uprising” while also noting its literal sense of “shaking off” — a reminder that no single English rendering can carry the term’s full political and cultural weight. Denijal Jegić shows that the word is derived from the verb which translates to “shudder,” “shiver,” or “tremble,” used to describe the shaking off of everything from dust to colonial oppression.
Meanings are contested, and multiple interpretations can be argued in good faith. What cannot be substantiated is the claim the intifada merely incites violence against Jews. That assertion is a calculated smear, sustained only through repetition rather than evidence. More troubling still is what this manoeuvre trains the public to accept – that Muslim presence itself constitutes risk. Once that training is complete, the move from op-ed to institution is seamless. “Threat” no longer needs to be demonstrated, only named and policed.
While many in the British public have long understood this Islamophobic foundation, the current rhetorical architecture matters profoundly in the current time of Israeli genocide. It reappears, almost intact, whenever state repression requires the disciplining of on-the-ground politics seeking to challenge its allies.
This dynamic was on full display during the Home Affairs Committee hearing on January 6, 2026, ostensibly convened to examine West Midlands Police’s decision to restrict Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from traveling to Birmingham for a match against Aston Villa. The evidentiary question should have been straightforward: what behaviour was anticipated, and from whom? Instead, the panel — filled with members of Conservative Friends of Israel, Labour Friends of Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the wife of the government’s adviser on antisemitism — repeatedly drifted toward the more profitable morality play, instead asking if the police treated Israeli fans as a “problem” in themselves.
This displacement was remarkable given the facts. In the case of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, the question of “risk” should not be speculative, symbolic, nor difficult, as the record of the traveling fan base is not a matter of interpretation. The facts surrounding these supporters — especially those who travel to away matches — are crystal clear. Countless videos are widely available, showing thousands of the club’s supporters singing songs such as “We will win, we will win, let the Israeli army win, f— the Arabs” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.”
Just one month after the situation in Birmingham, the Union of European Football Associations handed down a €20,000 fine and a one-match ban for traveling fans after “racist and/or discriminatory behaviour” during the team’s game against German side Stuttgart. A peer review commissioned by the police force summarized a Dutch police briefing describing the Tel Aviv contingent as “well organized,” “militaristic”, and “prepared to confront and fight officers,” alongside reports of attacks on Muslim taxi drivers, Palestinian flags being torn down and burned, and racist chanting. Regardless of what one thinks about the current situation in historic Palestine, the club’s fans are a documented threat to the communities they travel to.
However, with this reality unable to match the pre-fabricated mission of the committee, the question was necessarily muddied. The evidence session routinely drifted elsewhere, toward insinuations about why the police had engaged with Muslim communities ahead of its decision and whether those engagements represented “community reassurance” or capitulation. MP Joani Reid asked directly, without presenting a shred of evidence, “Why did you decide to consult with…four or five mosques, institutions, and organizations in the area that have well-documented…incidences [sic] of antisemitism and extremism?”
Mike O’Hara, the Assistant Chief Constable, noted that engagement with all local communities is a tactic for assessing risk regardless of the question at hand. But Reid’s Islamophobic reflex here is no mistake. It presents the assumption that Muslim presence in any chain of engagement is itself suspect, while Israeli far-right football politics can be handled as an unfortunate “perception problem” rather than what the facts show — an organized traveling cohort with a track record of targeting racialized locals and generating exactly the kind of public disorder the state claims, in every other context, to prevent.
In other words, the committee displaced the evidentiary question — from what Maccabi supporters do, to what Muslims in Birmingham and their allies in the Palestine solidarity movement supposedly are. This should be of no surprise, as a bad-faith discourse that insists there is “no other interpretation” of certain language will, with perfect consistency, insist there is no innocent interpretation of Muslim civic presence either.
Given this, it is no surprise that Reid circled back to the Bondi Beach and Manchester synagogue tragedies, as if these events have any bearing on the issue of banning football fans. Having collapsed everything into one undifferentiated threat, she could then perform the final reversal — the claim that Muslims are the beneficiaries of state indulgence, and Jews the abandoned minority. As she drowned in an inch of water, Reid could only offer that she finds it “hard to believe that this approach would have been taken had it been any other minority group.”
This is the level of conclusory statement we can expect when following the vacuous logic of Rich, Starmer, Reid, and the rest. What remains then is not a debate about a word, or even about a football match, but the steady installation of a governing reflex where Muslim life is rendered legible as threat, solidarity with Palestine as extremism, and immense state repression as “protection.”
The international community should understand the institutional motivations for this repression and not mistake these developments for a parochial culture war.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-theatre-of-protection-and-repression-of-the-palestine-solidarity-movement/
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