Category World News

London, United Kingdom – Jeremy Corbyn, an independent leftist lawmaker after losing Labour’s leadership post five years ago, is building a new political party.

In his words, it will be “a real alternative” to the main groups on the political spectrum in the United Kingdom.

Zarah Sultana, one of Labour’s youngest lawmakers until July 3 when she quit the ruling party, said she will co-lead the new project.

The party has no name yet but has political observers talking.

The pollster YouGov reported last week that 18 percent of Britons would consider voting for a Corbyn-led party.

The new movement comes as Prime Minister Keir Starmer steers Labour towards the political centre. This shift helped Labour regain ground with swing voters and business leaders, but some traditional Labour supporters feel snubbed.

What do we know about the new left-wing party, and can it survive in a system that for decades has centred on two main parties? Is this the beginning of a viable alternative or the start of another schism?

Here’s what you should know:

Why is this movement being organised now?

The ruling Labour and Conservative opposition parties have for years represented the centre left and right of politics – and dominated government.

But amid a more heated political climate, the Reform UK party, which represents a harder right, is rising.

Meanwhile, Starmer’s Labour lacks a vocal leftist grouping. The new party could fill that void.

At the same time, Israel’s war on Gaza has become a flashpoint. Corbyn and Sultana, fierce critics of Israel’s actions in the Palestinian enclave, demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to UK arms sales to Israel. They see Labour’s cautious positioning as a moral and political betrayal.

In a post on X, Sultana accused Labour of failing to improve voters’ lives while accusing the “political establishment” of smearing “people of conscience trying to stop a genocide in Gaza as terrorists”. Corbyn has argued that the government refuses “to deliver the change people expected and deserved”.

Gaza is central to the development of the new party, said former Labour Councillor Amna Abdullatif, who is among several people who have quit Labour over its stance.

“It’s not just the horrors we’re witnessing. It’s the silence, the silencing and the disciplinary action used to shut down debate.”

Abdullatif believes that overall in UK politics, “right-wing narratives dominate precisely when the country desperately needs genuine change and hope.”

Corbyn has promised his party will tout a peace-focused foreign policy.

Political historian Jeremy Nuttall said that since Corbyn relinquished the Labour leadership after a general election loss in 2019, Starmer has created a “deliberate and explicit distance” between himself and the left.

A new party is emerging thanks to the “particularly difficult economic situation constraining public spending commitments … as well as the particular silence of the Gaza issue”, he said.

A party of principle or personality?

Corbyn has suggested the party should be rooted in community activism and boosted by grassroots energy. He has refrained from talking about its leadership.

Peter Dorey, professor of British politics at Cardiff University, said Corbyn enjoys a “cult following among a few younger left-wing voters and political activists” but among the broader electorate is seen as “indecisive and not someone who would make a good prime minister”.

He added that Corbyn is not considered “charismatic” in the way that the telegenic Reform leader Nigel Farage is to many voters.

Reform has consolidated its identity around immigration and populism while the left remains ideologically broader and more internally divided, offering multiple issues but no single focal point, Dorey said.

Critics believe Labour’s economic policies are shaped by the interests of business leaders and global bond markets as opposed to meeting the material needs of the people. On immigration, Labour is accused by some of trying to compete with anti-immigrant Reform. Starmer recently upset many by saying Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” in reference to immigration.

Abdullatif believes the Corbyn-Sultana initiative could work if it tackles “Labour’s mistakes” head-on and takes time to develop.

“Grassroots movements are showing that people-led politics can work. Antiracism movements, community organising and local campaigns have been building real solidarity networks whilst demonstrating that politics can be centred on justice and human dignity,” she said.

Where do the Greens fit in?

The Green Party seems ready to work with the new party.

Zack Polanski, now running to lead the Greens, posted on X: “Anyone who wants to take on the Tories, Reform and this failing Labour government is a friend of mine.”

Some pollsters suggested a Corbyn-Sultana party could win 10 percent of a national vote, halving Green support and pulling 3 points from Labour, veteran political pundit John Curtice noted.

In The Times, Curtice wrote: “Much of Corbynista Britain has already left Labour for the Greens” while Green voters are “overwhelmingly on the left on economic issues and mostly take a liberal stance on so-called culture-war issues”.

Although Curtice warned that polling on the party should be viewed with caution, “we know nothing about the hypothetical party’s policies or how well a Corbyn-Sultana leadership could work.”

Can it win seats?

The UK’s first-past-the-post system is unforgiving for small parties. Under this system, a candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins the seat – meaning that even if a new party gains significant national support, it can still walk away with few or no MPs unless that support is geographically concentrated.

But breakthroughs are possible.

Dorey estimated the new party might win five to seven seats, particularly when the issue of Gaza is a top concern. But in many constituencies, it will simply split the progressive vote and risk handing seats to Reform or the Tories.

A fragmented left that undermines its gains and gives oxygen to Farage would be Labour’s nightmare. Could that fear lead to change within the Labour party?

It’s unlikely, Dorey said. Labour’s leadership sees its biggest threat on the right, not the left. Unless the new party becomes a serious electoral force, it is unlikely to pull Starmer in a more “radical” direction, he said.

“If the new Corbyn-Sultana party fails electorally, which it almost certainly will, this will simply convince the Labour leadership that more radical left-wing policies are electorally unpopular. Starmer et al will continue to pursue centrist or only vaguely left-of-centre policies.”

Are we witnessing the end of the two-party era?

With Reform surging, the Greens growing and legacy party defections like Jake Berry, a former Conservative minister who recently joined Reform UK, the landscape is shifting.

For supporters of Corbyn and Sultana, Labour has become “Tory lite”, bereft of its socialist values while embracing neoliberalism at the expense of the people.

Whether the party will have staying power remains to be seen.

“It is what we call a flash in the pan – a dazzling flame or bright light which fades as quickly as it appeared,” Dorey said. “Or perhaps a better comparison is a distress flare, which briefly lights up the sky and attracts immediate attention but then fades and falls to the ground, leaving no trace.”

Abdullatif is more hopeful.

“It’s early days, and there’s crucial listening and learning ahead to ensure this becomes a movement that can grow rather than remain fragmented,” she said. “When political narratives shift to extremes, progressive movements must provide the rebalancing in this chaos, and this is needed now more than ever.”

On Friday, 30 fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) threw their weapons into a bonfire at a meeting in Sulaimaniyah, a city in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

After hiding out in Iraq’s Qandil Mountains for three decades, where they reportedly trained for combat and planned attacks against Turkiye, they were now renouncing their armed struggle.

The symbolic gesture is the first phase of disarming the PKK as part of a rejuvenated peace process with Turkiye, which could end a 40-year conflict that has killed some 40,000 people.

As the process unfolds, a question arises about how this may affect the broader region, including the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria.

Lack of transparency

In February, jailed PKK leader Abdulla Ocalan called on his fighters to fully disarm, saying the time for armed struggle was over and Kurds could now realise their rights through politics.

Senior PKK leaders heeded the call in April and agreed to a new peace process with Turkiye.

The success of the peace process largely hinges on reintegration and the political and cultural rights Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will confer on Kurds, according to Gonul Tol, an expert on Turkiye and the PKK with the Middle East Institute think tank.

While Erdogan and his far-right coalition partner, Devlet Bahceli, support the new process, the implementation remains shrouded in secrecy, say analysts.

They believe the government is wary of disclosing details to avoid public backlash from some nationalist quarters, who may see any concessions as rewarding the PKK for armed rebellion.

The process will likely entail a general amnesty for PKK fighters and giving Kurds the political and cultural rights they have long demanded, which would allow disarmed PKK fighters to return to Turkiye from northern Iraq, Sinan Ulgen, an expert on Turkiye and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, said.

Only senior leaders would continue to live abroad, without fear of being targeted.

However, he added, there has been no public discussion of how the government plans to reintegrate former PKK fighters into civilian life.

“The lack of transparency raises the question over how much public support there is for this initiative,” Ulgen told Al Jazeera.

According to Tol, Kurdish politicians are expecting Erdogan to make some political concessions to the Kurds through the recently established Turkish Parliamentary Committee.

Failure to do so, she warns, could collapse the peace process.

How Iraq’s Kurdish region factors in the process

The exact number of PKK fighters is unknown, but rough estimates suggest there are between 2,000 to 5,000 in the Qandil Mountains.

Since the 1990s, the PKK has reportedly plotted attacks against the Turkish state from these mountains with no real resistance from Iraqi authorities.

This dynamic continued after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which officially brought about an autonomous Kurdish region in the north.

Turkiye has on many occasions bombarded PKK positions in the mountains, often relying on jets, artillery and helicopters.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which governs the Kurdish autonomous region, has never interfered in the fighting, noted Nazli al-Tarzani, an independent Iraqi analyst.

However, she said Iraq’s Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), may now try to exploit the peace process if it succeeds.

They could exaggerate their role in the process to attract voters in the upcoming national elections in November, she added.

“Things always heat up during an election cycle, and they could use the [disarmament] as a point-scoring exercise,” al-Tarzani told Al Jazeera.

The other scenario, said al-Tarzani, would see a resumption of conflict between Turkiye and the PKK in the Qandil Mountains.

She added that the KRG has strong commercial and economic ties with Turkiye and will likely remain quiet and in the peripheries if the peace process collapses and conflict resumes.

On top of that, she explained, the KRG cannot assist Turkiye with such a complicated military operation.

“They don’t have the capacity for a scheme of that scale, and it would be quite costly. Also, I don’t think Turkiye would want to outsource. They would want to call the shots,” she said.

The PKK’s incentives

The PKK has its own reasons to lay down arms and see through the peace process, analysts told Al Jazeera.

Salim Cevik, an expert on Turkiye and a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, noted that the group is militarily weak after being driven out of Turkiye in 2016.

During that period, the PKK in Turkiye was trying to carve out an autonomous region which would link up with its counterpart, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), in Syria.

At the time, Kurds from Syria and Turkiye were joining the fight against ISIL (ISIS) with US support, while expanding their control over majority-Kurdish and Arab regions in northern Syria.

But since March 10, the YPG has been negotiating its own deal with Syria’s new authorities – a close ally of Turkiye that came to power after toppling former President Bashar al-Assad in December.

Analysts previously told Al Jazeera that any agreement between Syria’s new authorities and the YPG would lead to some limited form of Kurdish autonomy in Syria, but with greater oversight and control from the central government.

“PKK expectations seem clear … that Turkiye will stop trying to undermine Kurdish autonomy in Syria [as part of the peace process],” said Cevik.

However, Tol said Turkiye still worries that PKK fighters could mobilise in Syria if the peace process suddenly collapses, referencing the close ties between the two Kurdish factions.

“The Turkish government must be thinking that they are going to have thousands of YPG fighters right on their border if this thing doesn’t work out,” she told Al Jazeera.

Splinters and national security

Although analysts believe disarmament should go smoothly, some PKK fighters could refuse to disarm if they are unhappy with the process or believe that Ocalan, who has been in Turkiye’s custody since 1999, is out of touch, said Ulgen.

“Turkiye is relying on Ocalan to steer the entire PKK conglomerate … whether they will all listen remains an open question,” Ulgen told Al Jazeera.

Their cooperation will hinge on how soon Turkiye will confer fundamental rights on Kurds, he added.

Burcu Ozcelik, a security expert on Turkiye and the PKK with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), believes a splinter is very unlikely.

She explained that Ocalan has remained influential in the ideological evolution of the group and that he has retained the loyalty of PKK fighters since he was captured.

In addition, she said, Turkiye appears to view the rejuvenated peace process, the disarmament of PKK fighters and their reintegration into civil life as imperative for national security.

She referenced Turkiye’s historical and increasingly truculent relationship with regional powers such as Iran and Israel.

Israel, in particular, appears to view Turkiye’s regional influence as a threat to its power and agenda in the region.

Turkiye may be concerned, said Burcu, that Israel may therefore attempt to instrumentalise Kurdish armed groups to thwart what they perceive to be Turkiye’s influence, regionally.

“In the aftermath of Assad’s fall in Syria, Israeli government officials were very vocal of the Kurds being a natural ally to Israel and that Israel should support Kurdish autonomy,” she told Al Jazeera.

This possibility is incentivising Turkish ministers to reach a deal with the PKK to thwart the possibility of foreign meddling.

Israeli settlers and security forces have intensified their killings, attacks and harassment of Palestinians in recent weeks in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the United Nations human rights office warns.

The violence also includes the demolitions of hundreds of homes and forced mass displacement of Palestinians as well as annexations of more land in violation of international law, Thameen Al-Kheetan, spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.

The UN body’s warning came as the Palestinian death toll in the West Bank inches closer to 1,000 since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israeli forces launched their genocidal campaign in Gaza, where more than 58,000 Palestinians have been killed.

At least 964 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank since that day, according to the UN. At least 2,907 home demolitions were also carried out by Israel during the same period.

The UN issued its warning on Tuesday on the heels of the killing of 20-year-old United States citizen Sayfollah Mussallet, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in Sinjil town, northeast of Ramallah, on Friday.

“Israel must immediately stop these killings, harassment and home demolitions across the occupied Palestinian territory,” Al-Kheetan said in a separate statement published on the OHCHR website.

“As the occupying power, Israel must take all feasible measures to ensure public order and safety in the West Bank.”

Since January, there have been 757 settler attacks on Palestinians or their properties, which is a 13 percent increase over the same period last year, the OHCHR said.

In January, Israel also launched a major military operation called “Iron Wall”, forcibly displacing 30,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, the agency added.

The OHCHR also accused Israeli forces of firing “live ammunition at unarmed Palestinians”, including those trying to go back to their homes in the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.

The intensity of violence by settlers and Israeli forces has so alarmed Palestinians that many, including residents in the Old City of Hebron, have been forced to turn their homes into cages, putting up barbed wire on their windows to protect themselves.

Hebron resident Areej Jabari told Al Jazeera that despite the protective wire, her family still feels unsafe.

“Barbed wire can’t protect from all the wire that settlers throw at us and from bullets and tear gas often fired by Israeli forces,” she said.

Parts of Hebron, where about 35,000 Palestinians and 700 Israeli settlers live, are under Israeli military control.

Jabari said that when she tried to document one of the attacks, Israeli forces broke into her residence, broke the glass windows, and seized her camera and its memory card.

The OHCHR said Israeli forces have often used unnecessary or disproportionate force, including lethal force, against Palestinians “who did not pose an imminent threat to life”.

The youngest of the victims has been two-year-old Laila al-Khatib, who was shot in the head by Israeli forces in January while she was inside her house in Ash-Shuhada village in Jenin governorate.

On July 3, 61-year-old Walid Bdeir was shot and killed by Israeli forces, reportedly while he was cycling home from prayers and passing through the outskirts of the Nur Shams camp.

In June, the UN said it recorded the highest monthly injury toll of Palestinians in more than two decades with 96 Palestinians injured in Israeli settler attacks.

Al-Kheetan said Israel is obligated as an occupying force to protect Palestinians from settler attacks. He called for an “independent and transparent” investigation into the killings.

“Those responsible must be held to account,” Al-Kheetan said.

On Monday, top church leaders and diplomats from more than 20 countries also called on Israeli settlers to be held accountable during a visit to the predominantly Christian town of Taybeh after recent attacks in the West Bank village.

Sue Parfitt is an 83-year-old retired priest who was arrested for protesting in solidarity with Palestine Action, a group designated as a terrorist organisation by the UK government.

On May 15, a pro-Palestinian demonstration was held in Berlin to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. What unfolded that day was not only a case of police violence, but a coordinated effort by German authorities, the media, and politicians to turn fiction into fact in order to further criminalise Palestinian protest.

According to a public statement issued by the Berlin police , a demonstrator had violently assaulted one of their officers, resulting in serious injury and hospitalisation. The police claimed the officer was dragged into the crowd, deliberately attacked, knocked to the ground, and then trampled or kicked by protesters. The message was clear: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators are violent, irrational, and dangerous.

But this entire story is a lie.

Video evidence, meticulously analysed by Forensis, an independent research agency founded and led by members of Forensic Architecture, has unequivocally disproven every single one of the Berlin police’s claims. The footage shows an officer with the number BE24111 written on the back of his uniform jacket advancing into the crowd with colleagues to arrest a protester. As they push people around, BE24111 starts punching protesters in the head and kicking them. He appears to injure himself during this violent fit and retreats with his colleagues.

There is no violent mob. No one is dragging him into the crowd. No one knocks him to the ground. No one kicks him. On the contrary, the footage shows demonstrators actively distancing themselves and shielding one another from BE24111’s assault. It was the officer, not the crowd, who carried out violence.

Despite the truth being uncovered, the damage has already been done.

The Berlin Police’s false narrative was quickly amplified by media outlets and government officials, unleashing a wave of fearmongering and political opportunism. A police union representative appeared on Welt TV channel and described the demonstrators as a “gang of murderers” who “would have killed the officer if they could have”.

The tabloid BILD ran a headline reading: “Jew haters kick police officers”  and quoted Stephan Weh of the German Police Union as saying, “when a colleague is dragged into a crowd and trampled, losing consciousness multiple times, we have to say it’s pure luck that he survived the night […] This madness must end before one of our colleagues loses his life at such a gathering.”

The Public Prosecutor’s Office stated it was “an attack on the organs of the rule of law” and launched a formal investigation into the incident under charges of “dangerous bodily harm” and a “serious breach of the peace”. The very people assaulted by police may now face criminal prosecution based on events that never happened.

Germany’s Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt also seized the moment, declaring in the Bundestag: “An officer at an anti-Israel demo in Berlin was dragged into a crowd by aggressive demonstrators and seriously injured… The police need the best possible equipment and appropriate powers. We will make this clear in the law.”

The state is not just spinning falsehoods; it is also bent on using them to legislate repression. This is part of its overall strategy to criminalise pro-Palestinian activism, protest and speech under the guise of fighting extremism.

On June 10, less than a month after the incident, the State Office of the Protection of the Constitution, a state security agency, released its 2024 report, in which it categorised multiple pro-Palestinian organisations as “extremist” groups, including Jewish Voice for a Just Peace, BDS, and Palestine Speaks. This categorisation will likely result in more intense surveillance, potential police raids on group members, and even bans on organisational activities.

Other groups have already been proscribed. In May 2024, Palestine Solidarity Duisburg association was banned and its website shut down by the Interior Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia state. Previous to that, in November 2023, the federal government banned the pro-Palestinian group, Samidoun.

The state has come after not just groups but also individuals. In April, three European Union nationals and one US citizen were threatened with deportation for their pro-Palestinian activism. A year earlier, Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a UK-based Palestinian surgeon, was barred from entering the country to speak at an event.

My husband and I were placed on a black list after we were supposed to speak at the same event. For a year now, we have been subject to interrogation, harassment, and invasive searches every time we travel outside the country.

Various “symbols” of pro-Palestinian solidarity have also been suppressed. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was officially banned by a Berlin judge in August 2024, for allegedly expressing support for terrorism. Then, in an even more chilling move, the city of Berlin banned all Arabic-language chants at demonstrations in April of this year, effectively criminalising an entire language and silencing entire communities, particularly the Palestinian one, which is the largest in Europe.

Meanwhile, police brutality at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany has become disturbingly routine. Protesters are regularly kettled, beaten, and arrested without cause or explanation. What once might have seemed exceptional is now standard operating procedure.

The fight to end German complicity in genocide is being violently suppressed, both in the streets and in the courts. State-sponsored censorship, racialised policing, and violent erosion of civil liberties are carried out under the false banner of public safety.

While the German state continues to claim that it is “atoning for its past” by cracking down on anti-genocide protests, in Gaza, the genocide is raging at full force. Bombings continue, little children are starving to death, and aid seekers are massacred at aid distribution zones. The Israeli military is pushing forward with plans to create a large concentration camp for Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip in preparation for their ethnic cleansing.

Acting to stop this horror has never been more urgent.

In these dark times, those who stay silent about the German state’s lies and repression must consider carefully what they are acquiescing to. Today, it may be the pro-Palestinian activists and people of conscience who are criminalised, but tomorrow it will be others. German democracy is collapsing, and state repression will not stop at a racialised community of protesters.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Varvara Tupkalenko’s two sons played with miniature cars like typical boys. Now, plastic guns dominate their living room in Kalynove, a village 15km (9 miles) from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

Andrii, eight, and Maksym, six, once enjoyed playground games, but they now explore abandoned trenches and burned-out armoured vehicles on the village’s outskirts.

“They’re kids afflicted by war,” Tupkalenko said.

Europe’s largest land conflict since World War II is transforming devastated Ukrainian frontier communities like Kalynove, inflicting both visible and invisible wounds on their youngest residents.

These hidden traumas extend beyond anxiety and fear to more profound effects, including poverty, depression and stunted emotional development, according to a February report by the NGO Save the Children.

“This is how a lost generation becomes a reality,” the report said. “The longer the conflict continues, the more likely it is that these children will grow up without the opportunities and resources necessary to recover and normalise their lives.”

When the Reuters news agency first visited Kalynove in late March, the boys were among six children remaining in the shrapnel-scarred village, whose landscape of open fields and gentle hills bears witness to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Now they are the last children remaining after the others fled with their families, their mother said.

Although a Ukrainian counteroffensive in late 2022 pushed Russian forces back from the village perimeter, both armies continue exchanging fire just 20km (12 miles) away, leaving the Tupkalenkos struggling to preserve any semblance of normal childhood.

Military games dominate the boys’ play, including setting up pretend checkpoints to inspect fellow villagers. Their wooden fort features cloth netting – protection, they explain, from drones.