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Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Belal Muhammad will walk out with Palestinian flag at UFC 315: ‘Nothing is going to stop me from doing it’
Belal Muhammad will walk to the octagon with the Palestinian flag on his back as he prepares to defend his welterweight title for the first time at UFC 315 in Montreal on May 10.
While he has carried the flag with him in previous fights, there was some question about whether or not he would be allowed after the flag was briefly removed from his UFC profile. The flag was later restored with Muhammad stating that it was just a mistake that the UFC quickly rectified.
“Yeah, 100 percent,” Muhammad told MMA Fighting about walking out with the Palestinian flag. “We’ve talked about it and they’ve accepted it. Nothing is going to stop me from doing it.”
Muhammad, whose parents hail from Palestine, has been very outspoken about the ongoing conflict there ever since fighting first occurred. He’s run fundraisers and shown his support for Palestine through interviews and social media.
He plans to do the same in the days leading up to his fight against Jack Della Maddalena.
“It’s hard, especially right now,” Muhammad said. “It’s been over two years now where they’re dying, they’re starving, the people over there are in so much pain. The world’s just watching it. The world’s just coming up with excuses for it. It’s wild.”
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Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
As much as defending the UFC title means to him, Muhammad promises he’s always going to be fighting for something bigger, especially with reports that people living in the Gaza strip have had no medicine, fuel or food transported there for the past 60 days.
Despite the harrowing conditions, Muhammad revealed previously that he still received messages of support and congratulations after he won his UFC title this past July. That has served as even more motivation for him ahead of the title fight at UFC 315.
“For me, it just makes me want to work that much harder for them,” Muhammad said. “It makes me go to the gym, run that extra mile, lift that extra weight. Because I can’t lose. There’s no way I’m going to let the people see me not get my hand raised. When they see me fight that day, they’re going to see that flag get raised When they see me win that day, they’re going to see that flag get raised. They’re going to see me get on the mic and talk about them. They’re going to see me get on the mic and be a voice for them.
“The only way I can be their voice is by continuing to win. I just have to keep continuing to work, keep continuing to push it and it’s all in god’s hands. God has a plan for everything and I’m hoping this finally comes to an end soon.”
As much as he’s focused on his upcoming fight, Muhammad says the people in Palestine are never far from his mind, which is why he’s spent just as much time trying to bring attention what’s happening there as he’s done building anticipation for his return on May 10.
That’s another reason why Muhammad was so adamant about carrying the flag with him to the octagon so he can continue to represent the people of Palestine on the biggest stage possible.
“Like I said, I’ve just been getting so many messages, people just wanting to know what’s happening there because they see me carrying that flag and what it means and what it means to me,” Muhammad said. “If you’re human, you want to know what’s going on there. If you’re human and you see it and you ignore it, you’re not really human. You don’t have a soul. If you can see kids starving, if you see kids dying, if you see all their suffering and you just turn your head away, look at yourself in the mirror and really ask yourself: What would you do if those people were from a different country? What would I do if those people weren’t Arab? What would I do if those people weren’t this color?
“Just so many people out here that are afraid to speak up, afraid to say something, afraid to do anything because they’re afraid of the consequences. There shouldn’t be consequences for being human.”
The Myth of Conquest: Why Gaza Will Never Be Subdued by Israel by Ramzy Baroud
To conquer a place is to fundamentally subdue its population. This must be clearly differentiated from ‘occupation’, a specific legal term that governs the relationship between a foreign “occupying power” and the occupied nation under international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When Israeli forces were ultimately compelled to redeploy from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a direct consequence of the persistent resistance of the Palestinian population there, the United Nations resolutely insisted that the Gaza Strip remained an occupied territory under international law.
This position stood in stark contradiction to that of Israel, which conveniently produced its own legal texts that designated Gaza a ‘hostile entity‘ – thus, not an occupied territory.
Let us try to understand what appears to be a confusing logic:
Israel proved incapable of sustaining its military occupation of Gaza, which began in June 1967. The paramount reason for Israel’s eventual redeployment was the enduring Palestinian Resistance, which rendered it impossible for Israel to normalize its military occupation and, crucially, to make it profitable – unlike the illegal settlements of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Between 1967 and the early 1970s, when Israel began investing in building illegal settlement blocks in the Strip, the Israeli military under the command of Ariel Sharon relentlessly strove to suppress Palestinians. He employed extreme violence, mass destruction, and ethnic cleansing tactics to subdue the Strip.
Yet, at no juncture did he achieve his ultimate and comprehensive objectives of complete subjugation.
Subsequently, he invested in his infamous, but failed ‘Five Fingers‘ plan. At the time the head of the Israeli army Southern Command – which included Gaza – Sharon stubbornly believed that the only way to defeat the Gazans was by severing the contiguity of the Strip, thus hindering organized resistance.
In pursuing this aim, he sought to divide Gaza into so-called security zones where the main Israeli Jewish settlements would be built, fortified by massive military build up. This would be joined by Israeli military control of key routes and the blocking of most coastal access.
However, this plan never fully actualized, as creating these ‘fingers’ required that Palestinians on both sides of the ‘security zones’ would have to be pacified to some extent – a condition that reality on the ground never delivered.
What did actualize was the building of isolated settlement blocks: the largest was in the southwest of the Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt, known as the Gush Katif, followed by the northern settlements, and finally the central settlement of Netzarim.
Housing a few thousand settlers, and often requiring the presence of a far greater number of soldiers assigned to protect them, these so-called settlements were essentially fortified military towns. Due to the limited geography of Gaza (181 square miles or 365 square kilometers) and the stiff resistance, the settlements had limited space for expansion, thus remaining a costly colonial endeavor.
When the Israeli army emptied the last illegal settlement in Gaza in 2005, the soldiers snuck out of the Strip in the middle of the night. At their heels were thousands of Gazans who chased the soldiers until the last of them fled the dramatic scene.
That singular and powerful episode alone is more than sufficient to allow one to assert with unwavering certainty that Gaza was at no point truly conquered by Israel.
Though Israel withdrew its permanent military presence from the main population centers of the Strip, it continued to operate within so-called buffer zones, which were often significant incursions into Palestinian territory, far beyond the armistice line. It also imposed a hermetic siege against Gaza, which starkly explains why the majority of Gazans have never stepped a foot outside the Strip.
Israel’s control over airspace, territorial water, natural resources (mostly Mediterranean gas fields), and much more readily led the UN to its immediate conclusion: Gaza remains an occupied territory.
Unsurprisingly, Israel vehemently opposed this reality. Tel Aviv’s true desire is absolute control over Gaza, coupled with the convenient and self-serving designation of the territory as perpetually hostile. This twisted logic would grant the Israeli military an endlessly exploitable pretext to initiate devastating wars against the already besieged and impoverished Strip whenever it deemed convenient.
This brutal and cynical practice is chillingly known within Israel’s military lexicon as ‘mowing the grass‘ – a dehumanizing euphemism for the periodic and deliberate degradation of the military capabilities of the Palestinian Resistance in an attempt to ensure that Gaza can never effectively challenge its Israeli jailors or break free from its open-air prison.
October 7, 2023, ended that myth, where Al-Aqsa Flood Operation challenged Israel’s long-standing military doctrine. The so-called Gaza Envelope region, where the late Sharon’s Southern Command is based, was entirely seized by the youth of Gaza, who organized under the harshest of economic and military circumstances, to, in a shocking turn of events, defeat Israel.
While acknowledging the UN designation of Gaza as occupied territory, Palestinians understandably speak of and commemorate its ‘liberation’ in 2005. Their logic is clear: the Israeli military’s redeployment to the border region was a direct consequence of their resistance.
Israel’s current attempts to defeat the Palestinians in Gaza are failing for a fundamental reason rooted in history. When Israeli forces stealthily withdrew from the Strip two decades ago under the cover of night, Palestinian resistance fighters possessed rudimentary weaponry, closer to fireworks than effective military instruments. The landscape of resistance has fundamentally shifted since then.
This long-standing reality has been upended in recent months. All Israeli estimates suggest that tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed, wounded, or psychologically impaired since the start of the Gaza war. Since Israel failed to subdue the Gazans over the course of two relentless decades, it is not merely improbable, but an outright absurdity to expect that Israel will now succeed in subduing and conquering Gaza.
Israel itself is acutely aware of this inherent paradox, hence its immediate and brutal choice: the perpetration of a genocide, a horrific act intended to pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of the remaining survivors. The former has been executed with devastating efficiency, a stain on the conscience of a world that largely stood by in silence. The latter, however, remains an unachievable fantasy, predicated on the delusional notion that Gazans would willingly choose to abandon their ancestral homeland.
Gaza has never been conquered and never will be. Under the unyielding tenets of international law, it remains an occupied territory, regardless of any eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces to the border – a withdrawal that Netanyahu’s destructive and futile war cannot indefinitely postpone. When this inevitable redeployment occurs, the relationship between Gaza and Israel will be irrevocably transformed, a powerful testament to the enduring resilience and indomitable spirit of the Palestinian people.
Grief turns to fear in Kashmir as Indian forces crack down after attack
GUREE, Indian-administered Kashmir — The armored vehicles came at dusk as families were preparing dinner. Two days earlier, gunmen had killed 26 people, most of them tourists, in a remote Himalayan meadow. Now hundreds of Indian soldiers descended on this tiny village, hunting for suspects.
They encircled the home of Adil Hussain Thoker, one of the militants accused of carrying out the attack, forcing villagers into the surrounding rice fields as darkness fell. At midnight, a thunderous blast ruptured the silence — “the earth shook beneath our feet,” recalled one local, speaking like others in this story on the condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety. The two-story brick and wood house was reduced to rubble.
Indian officials say they are carrying out controlled demolitions of homes where explosives have been found. Thoker’s family members vehemently deny the charge and say they haven’t seen or heard from Adil since 2018.
“What happened in Pahalgam is gruesome, and no sane person would endorse such an act,” said a young boy in Guree, referring to the deadly militant attack on April 22. “But why punish civilians?”
That question encapsulates a familiar dread in Kashmir, where people have long felt trapped between India and Pakistan — which each administer different parts of the Muslim-majority territory but claim full ownership — and between militancy and militarization.
Kashmiris say they are cornered by a cruel paradox: forced to publicly condemn the violence even as they are made to bear the cost. In the face of an intensifying Indian security crackdown, grief for the dead is hardening into fear.
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No group has claimed responsibility for the attack in Pahalgam. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told reporters Wednesday that militants had “cross-border linkages,” a reference to archrival Pakistan. Islamabad has condemned the killings and rejected claims of involvement.
“Kashmiris now and then have always realized that they are the biggest victim — both of the terrorism and the militarization,” said Anuradha Bhasin, managing editor of the Kashmir Times. “Yet they are always put on the dock and asked to prove their innocence.”
A ‘people’s peace movement’
As news broke of the attack, the deadliest on Indian civilians in more than a decade, political leaders here issued swift condemnations. Mosques held prayers for the victims. Local associations organized peace marches and candlelight vigils.
Storefronts shuttered, traffic fell silent and schools were closed. Kashmir’s leading newspapers printed black front pages. Unlike during past strikes and shutdowns that targeted the Indian government, the outcry this time was directed at the attackers.
“There seems to be an emergence of a spontaneous, genuine people’s peace movement,” said Haseeb Drabu, a former Kashmiri finance minister.
There has been little room for open dissent since 2019, when the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status, jailed scores of activists and journalists, and imposed a months-long communications blackout — sealing the valley off from the world.
In the years since, rights groups have documented widespread abuses by Indian security forces, including arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings. The Indian government denies the allegations.
Many Kashmiris saw the attack in Pahalgam as a calculated assault on the region’s identity. An editorial in the Greater Kashmir newspaper said it threatened to “unravel years of progress,” especially when it came to the resurgent tourism industry, touted by the Indian government as symbolic of a new, more peaceful era.
“Tourism has been pushed as a political solution in the absence of adequate security arrangements,” said Nitasha Kaul, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Westminster. “Those in charge have displayed a callous complacency that suggests they bought into their own superficial rhetoric of ‘normalcy.’”
Abdul Wahid Wani, leader of an association of pony handlers that helps tourists explore the local scenery on horseback, was among the first on the scene after last week’s attack. The carnage he saw is still with him, he said, recalling a newlywed forced to mourn her husband on their honeymoon.
He called for “severe punishment so that generations to come will learn from it.” But, he added, “those who are not at fault should not be entangled in the oppressive punishment.”
Yet there are already signs of “collective punishment,” Bhasin said. Thoker’s former residence was among nine homes destroyed by Indian security forces, and at least 2,000 people have been detained, according to local reports. At least 60 house raids have been carried out — some trailed by television cameras — and new military checkpoints have been set up across the region. The gunmen accused of carrying out the attack have so far eluded capture.
A statement from police in Srinagar, the largest city in Indian-administered Kashmir, said officers were working to “dismantle terror-supporting infrastructure” by seizing weapons, documents and digital evidence.
“Punish the guilty, show them no mercy but don’t let innocent people become collateral damage,” Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, posted Sunday on X.
Kashmiris “felt the need to convey a message to the entire world that Kashmir does not endorse civilian killings, but now they can’t protest their own pain,” said Gowhar Geelani, the author of “Kashmir: Rage and Reason.”
Calls for revenge
The Pahalgam attack has set off a wave of anger on Indian news channels and social media — sometimes directed not just at Kashmiris, but at Muslims more broadly.
“Kashmir should be flattened like Gaza,” the Stop Hindu Hate Advocacy Network posted on X. On the night of the attack, Arnab Goswami, an influential right-wing anchor, headlined his segment with the hashtag #WeWantRevenge, declaring that April 22 was for Indians what Oct. 7, 2023, was for Israelis.
Activists have reported attacks on Kashmiri students in Nagpur and Chandigarh; in Uttarakhand, a Hindu nationalist group posted a video last week warning that “if we see any Kashmiri Muslim in the state after 10 a.m. tomorrow, we will give them the right treatment.”
On the outskirts of New Delhi, a Kashmiri college student quickly created a WhatsApp group for more than 100 classmates so they could share updates on revenge attacks and discuss whether it was safe to remain in the country.
“Most of us would have left right after the attack had our end-of-year exams not been this week,” said Sameer, a member of the group, speaking on the condition that he be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisals. “We are scared, but we also can’t afford to ruin our careers.”
The region is now bracing for India’s next move, fearing a military response against Pakistan could bring the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of war.
Officials in New Delhi have reported multiple violations along the Line of Control, the heavily militarized border that separates Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and that has been largely calm since a tenuous ceasefire was struck in 2021.
Both countries have shut land crossings, slashed embassy staff and ordered hundreds of their citizens to return home. India has suspended its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a key water-sharing arrangement with Pakistan, while Islamabad has withdrawn from the Simla Agreement — a 1972 framework for resolving disputes bilaterally.
It was yet another chapter in an “endless cycle” of “India versus Pakistan and Hindu versus Muslim narratives,” said Kaul. “But in order to find any long-term solution, the focus of attention should be Kashmiri lives affected by the unresolved conflict.”
Mehrotra reported from New Delhi.
“The masters of the universe are Jews,” former US Senator declares in Israel
Ex-GOP Senator and Republican Jewish Coalition chair Norm Coleman proclaimed with a straight face that Jews control the world during a Jerusalem conference featuring a speech by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Former US Senator Norm Coleman has raised eyebrows by declaring that “the masters of the universe are Jews” at a major Zionist lobby event in Jerusalem. In an address to a summit hosted by the Adelson-funded Jewish News Syndicate on April 27, Coleman pointed to various major technology firms founded by Jews, suggesting the shared religion of the companies’ creators should translate into a greater zeal for censoring criticism of Israel.
“And when you think about it, the Masters of the Universe are Jews! We’ve got Altman at OpenAI, we’ve got [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg, we’ve got [Google founder] Sergey Brin, we’ve got a group across the board. Jan Koum, y’know, founded WhatsApp. It’s us.”
The remarks came as Coleman lamented that pro-Israel propagandists are “losing the digital war” in battle for the hearts and minds of younger generations, and called for more stringent censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.
“A majority or Gen Z have an unfavorable impression of Israel. And, my friends, I think the reason for that is that we’re losing the digital war. They’re getting their information from TikTok, and… and we’re losing that war.”
As numerous polls show young Americans are increasingly skeptical of Israel – with a recent survey showing 71% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans under age 49 now hold an unfavorable view of Israel – establishment politicians have consistently blamed TikTok’s algorithm for the decline in enthusiasm for genocide. In February, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Warner, revealed that the bill forcing China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok was motivated by the visibility of pro-Palestine content on the app.
For Coleman, though, it appears this wasn’t enough. “We have to figure out a way to win the digital battle,” he told summit attendees. “We’ve got to get our digital sneakers on, so that the truth can prevail over the lies. And when we do that, the future of Israel will be stronger because a majority of all Americans will support Israel. We’ll make that happen, we have to make it happen. Thank you, Baruch hashem.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage directly after Coleman’s speech, highlighting Tel Aviv’s interest in the event, which was billed as the “Inaugural JNS Policy Summit to address Israel’s pressing strategic issues.”
An archetypal neoconservative, Coleman started off as an anti-war activist who once worked as a roadie for Jethro Tull, and was suspended from Hofstra University for leading a sit-in. “I went to Woodstock, and I inhaled!” he boasted at the JNS summit. After first taking office as a member of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, Coleman wound up narrowly losing his Senate seat to Al Franken in 2008 as a Republican.
In addition to serving as the national chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition and founder of the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, Coleman now works as a top lobbyist for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
UN rights chief demands world act to stop Israel’s Gaza ‘catastrophe’
The UN rights chief called on countries to halt a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, where a total Israeli blockade on aid is pushing the Palestinian territory towards a collapse of critical life-saving support.
“As the complete blockade of assistance essential for survival enters its ninth week, there must be concerted international efforts to stop this humanitarian catastrophe from reaching a new, unseen level,” Volker Turk said in a statement.
Israel strictly controls all inflows of international aid vital for the 2.4 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
For the latest updates on the Israel-Palestine conflict, visit our dedicated page.
It halted aid deliveries to Gaza on March 2, days before the collapse of a ceasefire that had significantly reduced hostilities after 15 months of war.
Supplies are dwindling and the UN’s World Food Program last Friday said it had sent out its “last remaining food stocks.”
The UN rights office cautioned that Gaza bakeries had now stopped working as flour and fuel had run out, while the remaining stocks of food were being rapidly depleted.
‘War crime’
“Any use of starvation of the civilian population as a method of war constitutes a war crime, and so do all forms of collective punishment,” Turk stressed in the statement.
The UN rights chief also warned that a reported Israeli plan to declare the Rafah governorate in the far south of Gaza as a new “humanitarian zone” would require Palestinians to move there to receive food and other aid.
“Such a plan will almost certainly mean large parts of Gaza and those who cannot easily move, including people with disabilities, those who are sick or injured, and women supporting entire families, will be forced to go without food,” he said.
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Turk also decried that Israel was continuing to strike locations in Gaza where civilians were sheltering.
Between March 18 and April 27, the UN rights office said it had recorded 259 attacks on residential buildings and 99 on tents of internally displaced people, most of them resulting in fatalities.
Forty of the attacks on tent dwellings reportedly took place in al-Mawasi, where the Israeli army has repeatedly told civilians to seek refuge, it pointed out.
Turk warned that such “incidents reflect the pattern we have seen during this escalation, of attacks that raise grave concerns of violations of the principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions.”
“Each of these incidents must be fully investigated,” he insisted, stressing that “intentionally directing attacks against civilians not taking a direct part in hostilities would constitute a war crime.”
The rights chief also highlighted continued targeting of “civilian objects indispensable to the survival of the population,” like water trucks and excavators needed to remove debris to allow aid to reach those in need.
The rights office warned that the cumulative impact of Israeli forces conduct in Gaza appeared to be inflicting “conditions of life increasingly incompatible with (Palestinians’) continued existence as a group in Gaza.”
“Third States have clear obligations under international law to ensure that such conduct stops immediately, and they must act accordingly,” Turk insisted.
“They also must search for and bring to justice all perpetrators of crimes under international law.”
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