st albans fox

The Israelis have an option to vote him out - which they will the Palestinians don’t seem to have a working mechanism for that - this seems to be a common theme across many parts of the world - even those countries which are supposed to be democratic!

You don’t think the Palestinians need new leadership to make peace (like Israel do ?) after all, Abbas has form for walking away from a good deal (2008). He’d likely do the same again.

It’s amazing that var is brought in to correct howlers and yet it manages to find howlers to give

Just ridiculous

Apparently progress is being made on the release of up to 50 hostages in exchange for women prisoners in Israeli jails (and their children who were presumably born whilst they were incarcerated) word is that ten hostages will be released each day through a five day ceasefire. I wonder if the hostages will all be Israeli? If so, you’d assume will all be children elderly and women (in that order). If they are then you’d wonder how Hamas can justify holding onto foreign nationals. I’m amazed that they haven’t been forced to release them already by Qatar. . Israel don’t actually know how many hostages there are - there seems to be 200 bodies from Oct 7 which remain unidentified. They were originally assumed to be civilians but about a week ago, Israel corrected the count down from 1400 to 1200 and said that these additional 200 are assumed to be from Hamas. The bodies are so badly charred that they are unable to be identified. I suppose they would be able to get make dna analysis to assess if they were indigenous to the region so that should be correct. but it wouldn’t be a shock to me if the number of hostages turn out to be 180/200.

farage - ugh

Bet it’s not ……..

who says that there is only one filbert .....................

There are still almost 300 seriously ill patients in there they can’t all be evacuated at this time - if the situation in n Gaza becomes stable under Israeli control then they may well try and move out the rest of the patients to Egypt via Israel. they won’t be able to explore beneath ground as much as they’d like for fear that booby trap explosives could be significant and potentially collapse some of the buildings I’m intrigued as to when they got hold of those hospital cctv images. You’d have expected the hospital authorities would have deleted them pretty quickly after the 7th. Is it Co incidence that they were shown once full search of the site was complete ? Have they had these for some time but didn’t want Hamas to be aware that they knew some hostages could be on site ref a rescue attempt ??

I actually believe that a sig majority of Palestinians and Israelis want to live within a peaceful two state solution. Sadly leadership on both sides is lacking in this respect and the hot heads have the loudest voices. There is a trust issue amongst the two populations but that can be resolved. Whilst the stakes are clearly much higher in the region, we aren’t that dissimilar here in respect of stuff like brexit. if Hamas are gone and netenyahu’s govt voted out then I think sig progress can be made. The only concern I would have is if trump is elected because I’m not sure he cares two hoots about the Palestinians

The outcome shouldn’t make a difference- the intention was clear Anyway - I hope your bowlers are on it Sunil the thought of smith and Warner holding the trophy ………ugh !

How come @StanSPand @Raj are unaware of the change from a new pitch to a used one ??.

Whilst I have no time for India’s antics pre semi final, I cannot find myself rooting for the Aussies under any circumstances

Democratic countries with investigations will reveal things that others will exploit no doubt we’ll see stuff on SM tomorrow which will say that Israel killed most of the people at the nova festival. EDIT: twitter is already covered with it - oct 7 false flag etc etc ….

I do wonder if we’ll see a change in the veracity of information coming out of Gaza as Hamas lose more and more control. that maybe goes for UN workers too to a degree. it seems pretty clear that Hamas have ruled with an iron fist which won’t allow any dissent whatsoever.

Quite frankly we’ve seen over the past few weeks that not much that comes from any source can be trusted !

They did this in n Gaza for a couple of weeks before they sent troops in I don’t think they’ll wait two weeks before moving into khan younis unless there is some movement on the hostages.

25% of the population of Israel are Arab/Palestinian with full civil rights. (Yes I know that there is evidence of racism from some Israeli Jews towards the Israeli Arabs but it is illegal to discriminate). if Israel did not allow the right of Jews to settle there then by now, the country could be approaching a Palestinian/Arab majority. and that is also relevant with Arafat’s demand for the right of return for Palestinians (and their offspring) who had left Israel in 1947/48 (for various reasons) - Israel would never accept that. Hanging his hat on this in past negotiations has never looked like a good call.

I’m ok with that if it’s before 1944 (and I’d be happy to stand with the kids in the orphanage). I can’t equate Hamas with the nazis. (Yet). They may say stuff but the nazis actually murdered millions and millions of people in cold blood for being Jewish, gay, Romany and other groups. Over the next few weeks we’ll see just how disgusting hamas can be. If they continue to treat their own population with contempt and call them martyrs who are dying for the cause then hopefully those who currently defend them will see them for what they are. There is no chance that they can see off the Israelis unless the Americans withdraw support - so why are they not negotiating a withdrawal of their fighters to Iran where they would be welcomed ?? And then the civilian population of Gaza will no longer be in the danger that they currently are? Sadly we know the answer to that

I deliberately avoided posting about specific incidents because all this does is raise the temperature - no one can be certain about what they’ve seen reported and even what video evidence they’ve even seen on SM I’m pointing out huge inconsistencies in the msm reporting when we should be able to trust journos at this level doing their homework and challenging - if I can discover this within five mins of reading the bbc article then why can’t the bbc journo who posts it ??? fwiw, the calendar thing was ridiculous and no way would the senior Israeli guy have invented that - he was fed some guff by someone and could even have been a case of Chinese whispers.

how are we supposed to know what’s going on (outside of the fighting) with such a lack of clarity ? I mean if this pretty straightforward issue is so foggy, can we believe anything ?? from this mornings bbc live feed 5911:59 UN says Gaza hasn't received any fuel since Israel allowed two daily deliveries Yesterday Israel’s wear cabinet said it would allow two fuel trucks a day into the Gaza Strip – but Gaza’s UN agency for Palestinian refugees says that as yet, none have arrived. UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma spoke to the BBC earlier and said “We urgently need fuel for the humanitarian operations across the Gaza Strip.” “None of the trucks that have been coming in since 21 October had fuel on them”, Touma said, “We need At least 120,000 litres of fuel every single day if UNRWA and other humanitarian aid organizations are to continue delivering assistance to people in need across the Gaza strip.” Touma says that they need to distribute aid to 80,000 people in shelters that the agency manages, and added: “UNRWA should not be pushed in the corner begging for fuel.” BUT From Reuters on Thursday ISMAILIA, Egypt Nov 15 (Reuters) - The first truck carrying fuel into Gaza since the start of Israel's warwith Hamas crossed from Egypt on Wednesday to deliver diesel to the United Nations, though it will do little to alleviate shortages that have hampered relief efforts. The delivery was made possible by Israel giving its approval for 24,000 litres (6,340 gallons) of diesel fuel for U.N. aid distribution trucks From le monde late last night Late Friday, a Palestinian border official said the first shipment of 17,000 liters of fuel had entered through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The official said it was "for the telecommunications company" Paltel, to ease a Gaza-wide communications blackout after the firm ran out of fuel on Thursday.

What action are the club able to take against wolves? Players need to be protected by officials - a good ref would have noticed what was happening in the game and made comments in passing to wolves players not to do anything stupid - I’ve even seen that happen in kids football when a player is so good that he’s embarrassing others. Keane against Haaland is the most high profile instance I can remember over the past thirty years where a player went out to hurt another - although that was from before the game started! I don’t think Keane got nearly enough stick over the years for that from the media - he never apologised for it and maybe he shouldn’t be doing the job he is on that basis.

people have managed to keep their phones charged - seems odd if you just accept the basic media coverage but there is some electricity available all over Gaza via solar. That’s not enough to drive full hospital services and sanitation systems/ water pumps. Also they’re widely using car batteries. . Israel cut off mobile comms on at least a couple of occasions since the war started. These were for less than one day (apart from the weekend that they entered Gaza when it was two days). So it seems that these were timed for strategic military reasons. The other outages were usually caused by a lack of power at the comms providers. these have generally been for less than 12 hours when they’ve occurred but over the last few days as emergency fuel has become more and more sparse, the outages have become prolonged. this wasn’t the point of my original post in any case - I was saying that Israel had destroyed many buildings that would not have been specifically used by Hamas in order to protect their forces on entry through Gaza to reach Gaza city. and this was done over a period of weeks so highly likely that all occupants of these buildings would, have been warned to leave.

They’ve been taken into shifa for a short visit but I don’t believe any journos would be embedded on the front line in Gaza city. I can’t see any army willing to compromise the safety of its own soldiers in that environment by having to ‘babysit’ journos

They are under intense pressure to show something - a few Kalashnikovs and grenades in a building and a car outside full of weapons is a start. They were very keen to get news broadcasters in to show them what they’d found. I agree it seems amateurish though - presentation doesn’t seem to be a strength - the news conference the other evening relating to what they’d found at ranitisi wasn’t done too professionally. they could well be hiding things - but not in the way you mean. They’re responding to the Americans though - their agreement to ship in sig qtys of fuel every two days and allow the mobile network to come back without any obvious progress on the hostages seems interesting. Could be that these are demands made by Hamas ahead of a release/swap of some kind.