Jonathan Whittall

Jonathan Whittall is a humanitarian affairs expert and political analyst from South Africa with over 20 years of experience in conflicts. He was a sen...ior UN official in Palestine between 2022 and 2025. Prior to this he worked for 14 years with Doctors without Borders (MSF). He has now established KEYS Initiative, a political affairs organisation based in Beirut. He is a visiting researcher at the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit University.

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Israel has created an environment of impunity for attacks on healthcare that has spread well beyond Gaza’s borders.

Palestinians mourn medics, killed by Israeli forces

The strategy used to depopulate Gaza – displacement, destruction and fragmentation – is now being deployed on Lebanon.

Smoke rises following an air strike on a building.

Years of US and Israeli pressure pushed Tehran from calibrated restraint to open regional confrontation.

Thick black smoke billows into the air above the Jebel Ali port.

Israel suggests those seeking to enforce international law on Gaza will meet the fate of a destroyed Iranian warship.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry shared this image on X mocking the Hague Group meeting organised by South Africa, comparing its expected outcome to the destruction of an Iranian naval vessel.[ Israel Foreign Ministry/X]

Gaza has exposed the limits of US power and opened space for new centres of global diplomacy.

South Africa's Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola and the delegation stand as judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hear a request for emergency measures by South Africa, who asked the court to order Israel to stop its military actions in Gaza and to desist from what South Africa says are genocidal acts committed against Palestinians during the war with Hamas in Gaza, in The Hague, Netherlands, January 11, 2024

It is tapping into a well-known colonial strategy of isolating and fragmenting an occupied population.

Palestinians walk among piles of rubble in the northern Gaza Strip November 19, 2025. [Mahmoud Issa/Reuters]

MSF aims always to work with the agreement of all parties to a conflict.

The staff of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, demonstrates in Geneva on November 3, 2015, one month after the US bombing of their charity-run hospital in Kunduz in Afghanistan [File: Reuters/Denis Balibouse]

No humanitarian assistance can relieve Palestinian suffering, only the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid can.

An injured Palestinian woman is evacuated during clashes with Israeli police near Damascus Gate on Laylat al-Qadr during the holy month of Ramadan, in Jerusalem's Old City on May 8, 2021 [Reuters/Ronen Zvulun]

The UNSC is allowing cities to be flattened and civilians mercilessly killed under the guise of ‘fighting terror’.

Jonathan Whittall

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We dug up medics in Gaza. A year later, international law remains buried

Destroy, displace, dismantle: Israel’s Gaza doctrine comes to Lebanon

The end of Iran’s strategic patience

Israel puts a target on the back of the rules-based order

The age of unipolar diplomacy is coming to an end

How the US-Israeli ‘peace plan’ will partition Gaza

Will we talk to the Taliban? Why not, we always have

The disease of settler colonialism and apartheid

Starving, bombing civilians in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’

Jonathan Whittall

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