It’s a strange thing to watch a film, full of powerful images, and yet find that the visual that haunts you most is something you have not seen.

And Life Support, a new documentary largely shot and narrated by medics attempting to save lives in Gaza, is from the start a journey through unforgettable scenes. The international doctors who tell the story are the only outside witnesses able to get through Israel’s blockade, Life Support documents their attempts to assist Palestinian healthcare workers in impossible circumstances.

The images seared into my mind will, we can only continue to demand, become evidence for the war crimes and genocide investigations that must follow. They include; the Gaza strip before and after it was reduced to rubble, the feel of a shopping street full of people before it explodes, right in front of your eyes, in an Israeli blast. The sight of babies, emaciated and listless, clinging to survival after being inflicted with trauma wounds, or caked in the dust of collapsed buildings. The footage, reported in the international media, of newborn babies left to die and decompose while still attached to their incubators, after the medics caring for them were forced to leave Al-Nasr hospital by Israeli soldiers at gunpoint. This last story in particular I continue to find too devastating to comprehend.

But there is this testimony that stands out – not because it is the most violent experience in this film – but because it is one of the cruellest. But before the film gets there, it shows the evolving patterns in injuries and health crises that the population of Gaza have experienced.

Explosions

Dr Maynard, like all the doctors in the film, describes changes in the types of injuries they were seeing in the Palestinian population, over the two year period from October 2023, during which they were regularly visiting and administering healthcare.

At first, the doctors describe trauma from heavy explosions and drone strikes. This in itself is horrific.

Dr Tania Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor, breaks down in the film. In spite of her years’ experience of treating sick children, her anguish at the scale and horror of violence wrought on children in Gaza is raw and palpable.

“Because of the nature of the weapons used, the blasts were so powerful, a lot of children would end up with internal bleeding, internal damage to vital organs. So you see nothing on the outside. They look unscathed. But they are actually already dead,“ says Dr Haj-Hassan.

Starvation

The next phase of civilian suffering in Gaza worsens with malnutrition and starvation, as Israeli blockades target crucial food and medical supplies, surgically removing baby formula for example, even from the luggage of incoming medics attempting to bring it for sick babies on the ward.

Famine was declared in Gaza in 2025, and its effects have not only been confined to patients. Maynard also describes operating, in theatre, with doctors who would faint during surgery because they were so hungry. His colleagues, he says, would put their head between their legs, and then get back up and carry on.

Aid began to re-enter Gaza in 2025 - more on that shortly - and the numbers of people affected by acute malnutrition began to decline. But at the time of writing, a new UNICEF survey has found that 12.2 per cent – one in eight children – in Gaza were chronically malnourished, or stunted, reflecting, the aid organisation says, “the cumulative toll of more than two years of war.”

The numbers facing acute malnutrition are down to 1%, still an unacceptable number in a manmade crisis. But for all children, the damage through stunting to brain development and health can be permanent, even after the acute shortage of food declines.

As aid began to re-enter Gaza in 2025, another, new plague affecting Palestinian victims the doctors treat - bullet wounds.

Target Practice

Nick Maynard, a leading consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital, describes something I will never be able to unsee. The practice, by the Israeli military and its contractors, of what seems to me like the gamifying of shooting Palestinians. By targeting specific body parts in patterns that appear arbitrarily set.

When Israel re-opened aid supply facilities in February 2025, it was administered through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), run by the IDF and Israeli-hired contractors.

The GHF was quickly condemned by the United Nations for entangling “Israeli intelligence, US contractors and ambiguous non-governmental entities.” And its personnel were shooting people as they came seeking food. More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed while attempting to obtain aid, thought the only channel it was made available.

I remember when this happened. It was widely reported that these new, Israeli run GHF sites, which had the words “humanitarian” and “aid” in the title, were actually being used to spy on and kill Palestinians. At the time, I remember asking myself, from an international legal standpoint, how much more criminal could Israel’s conduct be at this point?

Then I heard Dr Maynard’s testimony in this film.

The difference in June, July 2025 was the numbers of gunshot wounds that we were seeing. I’d seen a handful of gunshot wounds on previous trips, mainly from quadcopters, but we were seeing lots of gunshot wounds from people who were reportedly shot at the GHF food distribution points by Israeli soldiers

One day they’ll see almost exclusively gunshot wounds to the head. Another day they’ll see gunshot wounds to the neck. Another day they’ll see gunshot wounds to the abdomen, or to the left arm or the right arm. It’s almost as if – this is the way my emergency department colleagues describe it whom I know very well – it’s almost like the Israeli soldiers are playing a game.

One day there were four young teenage boys who came in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles. I didn’t treat them, they were being treated by the urologists. But we all needed to discuss these patterns. And the clustering of injuries, the pattern of injuries, was so striking, that it was inconceivable that it could have been coincidence. The only thing we could assume is that it was a game of target by Israeli soldiers

It’s behaviour that I never would have believed would have been possible in this world were I not witnessing it with my own eyes.

These reports have been corroborated by other international doctors.

Chaos by Design

There are so many other details that will stay with me.

Dr James Smith, an ER Doctor, describing the conditions of treating patients in chaos and filth as hospitals came under constant attack.

“We were treating patients for the most part on the floor. We would often have upwards of 8, 10 patients on the floor. At times, we had to step over patients to reach other patients. Patients’ blood would be mixing on the floor. It was just horrific really.”

Dr Smith, who has been practising as an ER doctor for a decade, described the experience as “the most horrific things that I have ever experienced as an emergency doctor.”

Dr Smith had also just returned from Gaza earlier this week. He describes the gulf between the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the dwindling news coverage as the story becomes old news. On the day of our screening, the medical supply warehouse inside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex was again attacked by an Israeli drone strike.

Dr. Khaled Dawas Consultant Surgeon, Hon Associate Professor, Head of Regional Upper Gastrointestinal Service at University College London, described the tragedy of seeing patents through surgery, in spite of all these conditions, only for them to die anyway because of the lack of after care.

“The number of patients who had what we would deem as successful surgeries... We would do what we deemed appropriate. The number who died three or four days later, because they had no nutrition, because there were no antibiotics, because there was no one to pick up when things went wrong, and there was no way of being able to – as you do in intensive care – watch over them like a hawk for the first few days. That didn’t happen.”

Perspective

Testimonies like Life Support are not a substitute for hearing the stories of Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza, first hand. Like the also brilliant film Gaza: Doctors Under Attack which was released on Channel 4 last year, the fact of these stories is in itself a recognition that storytellers are having to do whatever it takes to get people’s attention. Celebrity Executive Producers; in this case, Melissa Barerra, Susan Sarandon, Paul Weller, Asif Kapadia, and more. Recognition from awards institutions like BAFTA, judges for which were in the audience this weekend. And British and North American trained professionals like the doctors in this film. Films like this raise a question why listening to Gazans themselves is not enough. They also answer that question by showing what the resources and endorsement of western filmmakers can do in garnering attention. A power dynamic which is in itself part of the power dynamic that must be critiqued.

That has not stopped the Israeli authorities attempting to smear these projects, often dismissing these intensely credible accounts as “fake news”. At the time when Gazans were being shot at the GHF ‘humanitarian’ centers in their hundreds, the US ambassador to Israel, who backed the GHF operation, went on the record saying their success was “phenomenal”.

The GHF has since ended its operations following the October 2025 ceasefire and the resumption of UN access.

Speaking of the US, this administration has a tendency to dehumanise - a classic hallmark of genocidal behaviour - in the past for example, describing populations living under challenging conditions as “shithole countries”, even when the US has played a significant part in creating those conditions itself. Hard to compute, or even imagine, but maybe detractors watching this are telling themselves, this is just how Palestinians live.

One of the doctors in Life Support says something that really drove home to me how fatal the deliberate targeting of healthcare infrastructure, and patients, by Israel has been. That for a society, and a healthcare system, this onslaught has in fact been unsurvivable.

“You are working with sometimes no electricity, no instruments, no clean instruments, no gauze, at one point we were running out of bandages. Those patients required multiple operations because infection seeds in,” said paediatric orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ana Jeelani.

“There is no advanced healthcare anywhere in the world that could deal with what’s happening in Gaza.”

*There are more screenings of Life Support - details here. Produced by William Parry, Pressure Cooker Arts, and directed by Daniele Rugo.

All this time, I thought Ali G was a thinly veiled fictional guise whose ‘comedy’ was cariacaturing black people - hardly an original, or new idea. And that Sasha Baron Cohen, the ‘comedian’ who created him, was “a Jewish, Cambridge graduate playing the “voice of youth” who speaks the language of black street culture.”

That’s how The Guardian described Baron Cohen in 2000. He was massive at the time – clad in beanie hat and a landing strip goatie that always reminded me of the pubic hair left behind after a bikini wax. When Da Ali G Show started airing on Channel 4, there were often couple of black women objectified, hyper sexualised, casually accessorising the frame. A year later he would start making the first of his many feature length movies.

But apparently it’s way more layered than that. What I’ve just learned is that

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It’s hard to focus on structures right now. The heartbreak of Jason Arday – who was hounded by the right - is overwhelming.

The narcissism of Nathan Cofnas, the academic who prompted the witch-hunt against him. His response to Jason Arday’s moving vigil in London, was to re-characterise it as an ‘anti-Cofnas hate rally’.

Cofnas said he would possibly “be murdered” if he attended Trafalgar Square last night. There were no reports of violence or threats to kill. Could it be that someone whose so-called ‘scholarship’ essentialises race, had adopted racial stereotypes about the threatening nature of black people?

But this is when the structures of racism really matter.

We Need To Talk About Nathan Cofnas

There are plenty of fringe, narcissistic, racists on the internet. What makes Nathan Cofnas different is that he has been supported by no less high profile institutions than the University of Oxford, where he did his DPhil at Balliol College, the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, and Emmanuel College, where he was a College Research Associate, until his removal in 2024.

During this period, Cofnas had the support of the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. - the foundation created from the wealth of William Lever, who founded the company that became Unilever.

By the time Cofnas received this fellowship, his views were already well-known.

For example in 2019 he published “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” in the journal of Philosophical Pyschology

To explain Cofnas’s views, a bit of background.

During the eighteenth century, ‘scientists’ attempted to rank racial groups according to their supposed intelligence, using metrics like skull shape and measurement, and racist assumptions about their evolution.

Developments in genetics and other fields of biological inquiry later proved that there is in fact no such thing as biological race. There is more genetic variation within so-called ‘racial groups’, than there is between them. Pseudo-scientific racism was discredited, not because of ‘wokeness’, but because of actual science.

The first thing about Cofnas is that he joined a small but motivated group of people in academia who want to prove that there are in fact race differences in traits like intelligence. This group point to studies of hereditability, which examine adopted children and twins for example, and claim to show that not all differences in intelligence are due to environmental factors. Some differences - Cofnas argues -such as the so-called ‘Black-White IQ gap’, could have a genetic cause.

The second thing about Cofnas, which comes across equally clearly in his work, is his sense of victimhood and – ironically – oppression. He is angry more of his colleagues are not validating this line of inquiry. Scientists, he alleges, “claim to be absolutely committed to truth while at the same time advocating or tolerating varying degrees of suppression of controversial work.” They are suppressing that work because they too scared to research it, for fear of furthering racist agendas.

Emmanuel College eventually took disciplinary action against Cofnas. It found that his work was written in a “careless” and “reckless” manner, adopting a “confrontational and aggressive” tone. He sued the college in the Peterboroguh County Court, and lost.

He was also subject to separate disciplinary proceedings by the University, which found that his work was widely regarded as offensive but was protected by its regulations protecting free speech.

None of that changed Cofnas’ narrative of oppression. But like so many ‘victims of cancel-culture’, the reality is that he has had a surprising degree of support.

And even then, Leverhulme Trust stands out.

Unilever

The link between Cofnas and Leverhulme was brought to my attention by the investigative journalist – who publishes accessible, evidence-led explainers on power and history and shared a detail Instagram reel about this earlier this week.

William Lever was the archetypical British colonial. Born in Bolton, he began manufacturing soap in the 1880’s and by the time of his death in 1930, had built the company that would become Unilever into the largest company in Britain.

Soap had been revolutionised by a chemical discovery which used a base of palm kernel oil in its manufacturing. Africa had already long been a source of palm oil for Europe – during previous centuries it had been brought to Africas coasts by African traders who had prepared palm oil and kernels, and then sold it onwards to European merchants, who would ship it to the major centers for processing and manufacturing; Liverpool in England and Hamburg in Germany.

But Lever revolutionised the process. By extracting special privileges from Britain’s Colonial Office, he beat his rivals and competitors by setting up production plants at the source of palm oil, in African countries like Congo - where a handful of industrialists who controlled an area larger than the entire size of Belgium - Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Lever relied on land theft, coerced labor, and a monopoly enforced by the colonial regime to grow his profits, subjecting Africans to notoriously squalid conditions. The details make for horrific reading. But to Lever they made perfect sense, given his racial world-view: that “it would serve no useful purpose… for the white man to go and reverse the Divide Order under which intellect and mental power” ruled over “inferior nations”.

Journalists continue to report on how the political, economic, social, cultural and ecological impact of regimes like Lever’s have remained without repair, and continue to cause harm. Violence, kidnapping and looting continue to be alleged as a result of company practices and local authorities in Congo to this day. Historians often narrate the roots of this suffering, in the intimate relationship between capitalism, colonialism and racism.

But I would add to that list, philanthropy. History’s most nefarious wrongdoers have funnelled parts of their fortune into trusts, which help launder their founder’s reputations and continue, in usually subtler ways, to advance a particular agenda today. And that agenda is often most visible in academia.

The Sacklers, who made their fortune from manufacturing and aggressively marketing addictive painkillers that helped create America’s opioid crisis, are a good example. Their philanthropic foundation funded a mulitutude of activity at Oxford; two galleries at the Ashmolean Museum, a university library, and several staff positions. Oxford cut ties with the family in 2023.

The Rhodes Scholarship, funded by the racist colonialist and exploitative diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, continues to bear his name today.

And Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier, convicted sex offender and all-round monster, used philanthropic donations to buy social legitimacy and fund research in evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, and physics. He was particularly interested, like Cofnas, in biological race. He wanted to start a ‘super race’ of humans impregnating multiple women with his DNA, and funded the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers who was conducting genetic research on elite Jamaican sprinters.

I called the Leverlhulme Trust this morning, and was surprised that this was, apparently, the first inquiry they had had about Nathan Cofnas. I asked why they were enabling research into biological race difference, and how that aligned with their values as a Trust founded by someone whose ideas were disturbingly aligned with Cofnas.

There is a terrifying circularity to this story. Cofnas, helped by funding from a Trust whose founder believed in the inferiority of black people, uses the language of modern day ‘science’ and ‘wokeness’ to advance his theory about the inferiority of black people.

Lever, whose exploits caused intergenerational violence against black bodies, created a legacy that helped Cofnas, campaign against the late Professor Ardy. Whatever the specific causation, we can all see that this campaign has had fatal consequences.

The irony is that Cofnas presents himself as someone attempting to save academia from taking a dangerous turn. But it’s his voice, exponentially amplified by the right-wing media in its witch hunt of the late Professor Arday, which is sinister.

When Cambridge held disciplinary hearings into Cofnas, he was supported by Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor whose work also attempts to rehabilitate previously discredited models of a biologically determined racial hierarchy.

Pinker wasted no time this week attempting to leverage the tragic death of Jason Arday to sell copies of his own recent book.

We live in a world where old school racist colonials, have been replaced by tech bros, populist leaders and eugenicists whose wealth would make even William Lever blush. That the ‘academics’ these groups fund are holding themselves out as victims is probably the least harmful of their extreme ideas. This week has been a warning of their power, the willingness with which the media will disseminate their ideas, and the structures, with pockets are ancient ideologies, that support them.

Not only did the man in question not have a degree, but he had left school at age 13, struggling with dyslexia and – at the time - unable to read or write. That he would later to go on to accumulate around 20 honorary doctorates and become a professor of creative writing is only one way, and in my view not the best one, of measuring his talent.

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Tomi Adeyemi will barely look at us.

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It was one of those cookie dough nuggets in the internet swirl of World Cup nonsense that was tasty, even though it was so wrong.

And like all junk food, it became more wrong the more I consumed. Norway’s last World Cup tournament had AI turning the Norwegians into crow mauled Vikings and the England team into muddy Ango-Saxons defending their honour against Nordic invaders. A Zionist influencer gloated: “it must piss off the race communist Left so badly that the greatest football player right now is also the blondest, whitest man on the planet.”

And then, the nail in the coffin,

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There was a lot I appreciated about Yesteryear—the literary sensation which I, like many readers, found impossible to avoid. I had this one on pre-order, waited impatiently to read it, and when it did arrive, devoured it in a day. I found the construct of Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel so genius. Modern tradwife ends up in historical trad-life? What better way to test the hypocrisy and dishonest romanticising of the “pioneer” lifestyle.

The novel, through protagonist Natalie Heller Mills—“I was perfect at being alive”—delivers a compulsively readable, unreliable narrator. A lot of readers are divided about her character: she is, like everyone else in this novel, unlikable. There are flaws and plot holes. What denomination of Christianity exactly does she belong to? What is actually motivating her to have all these children from whom she feels so distant? And as for the ending… a mess.

But I wonder if people are overlooking the point of this novel.

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It took me back to growing up in ‘80’s Wimbledon, when I used to dread sharing a District Line carriage with Chelsea fans. After a full day of drinking, they could be genuinely scary. The punters at this particular Accra Stamford Bridge had probably not spent much time on the London Underground. They loved Chelsea for one reason - Michael Essien, the Ghanaian midfielder who would, decades later, become one of the club’s star players in the 00’s.

Premier League allegiances can seem random. But the World Cup is easier to grasp on an identity level, and it can feel profound. Last tournament in 2022, I was filming in Morocco when the nation beat Portugal to make it to the semi-finals for the first time. Working on a BBC project was good money for most of our Moroccan crew, but on match days, they literally refused to work. I really appreciated the fact that pride, loyalty and hope trumped everything. I witnessed Moroccan victories in Rabat, Marrakesh and a small town in a remote part of the Sahara. The atmosphere was the same everywhere: electric.

So yes, even I, who would be the biggest fraud ever if I pretended to be a football fan 99.9% of the time, have plenty of things to support during World Cup season. Here are my top 8.

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Part One, The Amazon

Miss Rose, an Arawak woman in this community in the richly rain forested Amazon region of Guyana, beams as she tells me this - a radiant smile that strains joyfully against full cheeks - all while offering me a plate of pineapple.

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I will never forget my first exclusive after I moved from newspaper journalism to TV news. I had managed to persuade a former Isis operator, who recruited terrorists in the UK, to talk to me. Earning his trust and setting up a conversation that was legally and ethically responsible took months of work. The resulting interview was powerful. He confessed to the devastating harm he had caused, while also being very real about the root causes of radicalisation. My cameraman – a hardened veteran – was so moved filming it, that he cried.

Then I showed it to my editor.

“We can’t run that,” he said.

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There was little memorable about this “launch”, which as a social affairs editor for Sky News I was sent to cover, only to discover a pitiful gathering of a few blokes at a pub near Luton. The thing that does stand out in my memory is what Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, said to me.

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The problem was not predominantly Muslims or black people… yet. Instead their hate-filled gaze was turned towards Jews.

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Donald Trump’s response to the shooting in Washington DC on Saturday reiterates his only coherent narrative – an obsession with being a Great Man of History. He was “honoured” to be a target, he said, because “when you look at the people… whether it was an attempt or a successful attempt, they’re very impactful people. Just take a look at the names.”

For once, I agree with the US President. He will be remembered as a big name, but not necessarily in the way he intended.

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In some ways I am the cliché of a city girl. You will find me at a desk, writing furiously longhand or attacking a laptop. I literally don’t like to get my hands dirty (soft, dry skin, cuts and burns easily) and will put on rubber gloves to wash up even two dishes.

My identities – ancestral, intellectual and spiritual - have honestly never featured the word “soil”. Even when I think about the climate crisis, or the impact of white supremacy on our planet, I tend to think about ocean plastics, sea levels, fossil fuels, the destruction of forests and trees. I love organic food but frankly even I – and I realise I am better off than many – cannot always afford it. A £3 tomato is a treat, not my main ingredient. Sometimes I think about growing tomatoes myself, but I live in a flat, and realistically my main achievement during covid was learning to keep my house plants alive.

And yet – I know this is literal, and obvious – we are all rooted in a soil-based existence. For example, I grew up with fruit trees, waiting patiently for the apple and pear windfalls to drop so we could make them into crumbles and pies. From a young age I noticed how no shop apple could ever compete with my garden. The first time I travelled to my ancestral village in Ghana, the first thing I noticed was the soil. It’s red, and it smelled, to me, like home. As a child I wondered, how could I receive memories, from lives I have not even lived, from the soil?

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Hungarians have had enough of the far-right autocrat, a prime minister who has wrecked their status in the European Union, driven a racist and xenophobic narrative, clamped down on free speech and civil society. Their message seems to be if another term of that is what ‘saving western civilization’ looks like, they don’t want it.

When Trump threatened the annihilation of Iran earlier this month, claiming “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the horrified reactions understandably centred on the genocidal implications of his words. Trump suggested the indiscriminate destruction of a people, along with their country, culture and way of life.

But there was an older theme to his words, more easily missed.

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This is how the seemingly deranged speech Netanyahu gave this week has been reported. I use the word “deranged” advisedly given the current particularly high bar of unhinged Israeli messaging. It’s only a week after since Netanyahu’s social media responded to rumours had been killed by an Iranian air strike with the infamous proof of life video, showing off his hands in a coffee shop.

The video – which was at the very least deepfake presenting – became an instant hit. Grok said it was made by AI. An identical proof of life quickly replaced him with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But this latest intervention is revealing.

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I wouldn’t exactly say I’m proud of my manosphere track record, it’s just a fact. I have been lurking in Red Pill communities for years.

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