On World Cancer Day, patients in Gaza face a double and merciless threat: cancer itself and a devastated healthcare system.

Thousands now face an uncertain future after hospitals were damaged and the only specialised cancer centre stopped operating. Border crossings remain closed, preventing patients from travelling for treatment.

Gaza’s health situation is no longer a temporary crisis. It has become a daily tragedy.

Patients are trapped between severe physical pain and the absence of essential medicines. Hospitals lack early-diagnosis tools and proper monitoring, turning treatable cancers into life-threatening cases.

Gaza — the grim health reality

The Palestinian Ministry of Health, in a statement seen by Kanari, says around 11,000 cancer patients in Gaza are now deprived of specialised treatment and proper diagnosis. Conditions worsened after specialised hospitals were rendered inoperable and the Gaza Cancer Center was destroyed, pushing the health system close to total collapse.

More than 4,000 patients with referrals for treatment abroad have been waiting over two years for crossings to open. Their health continues to deteriorate while they wait.

A 64% shortage of cancer medicines, alongside the absence of MRI and mammography machines, has sharply increased delayed diagnoses and mortality risks.

Humanitarian and social impact

The cancer crisis in Gaza extends far beyond physical suffering.

Patients and families live under immense psychological pressure, caught between fear of death and the inability to access or afford treatment. Harsh living conditions intensify that burden. The wider community also suffers. Cancers easily treatable elsewhere become prolonged battles in Gaza, draining families emotionally and financially.

International silence deepens patients’ sense of abandonment, worsening an already profound humanitarian trauma.

Urgent international appeal

The Palestinian Ministry of Health has called for immediate international action to allow patients to travel for treatment, ensure the entry of vital medicines, and rebuild cancer care facilities.

The ministry warned that continued inaction amounts to a slow death sentence for thousands, cautioning that Gaza faces an unprecedented health and humanitarian catastrophe unless urgent intervention occurs.

Featured image via Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

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The government had originally planned to withhold documents that it said would undermine national security and international relations. Starmer set out this position in PMQs on Wednesday lunchtime.

However, a significant number of Labour MPs threatened to support a motion tabled by the Conservatives calling for the release of all material related to Mandelson’s appointment, forcing the government to agree a compromise before a planned vote in the evening.

Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, who is widely seen as a leading candidate to succeed Starmer in Downing Street, played a leading role from the Labour backbenches in forcing the government to change its position.

In frantic scenes in the House of Commons this afternoon, the government tabled a further amendment, saying that documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment that are redacted on security grounds will be referred to the intelligence and security committee.

While the government avoided a Labour rebellion, the events represent a significant blow to the authority of the Prime Minister, whose judgment is being called into question over his original decision to appoint Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.

Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, who played an instrumental role in the decision to bring Mandelson into government, is also facing intense Labour MP pressure.

However, a statement by the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday night further complicated the next steps, with Scotland Yard saying it has asked Downing Street not to publish documents that could undermine its own criminal investigation into the former ambassador.

Starmer sacked Mandelson in September after details about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein started to emerge.

Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords amid the growing scandal over his links to Epstein, while the government has said it will use legislation to strip him of his peer title.

Starmer announced earlier today that he had agreed with the King to remove Mandelson from the Privy Council, accusing his former ambassador in Washington of betraying his country.

The PM admitted to MPs that he was aware of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein when he gave him the senior diplomatic role, but said that Mandelson “lied” to him about the depth and extent of that relationship. 

His admission that he was aware of the relationship at the time of the appointment caused consternation among Labour MPs.

One Labour MP described PMQs as “brutal” for Starmer, describing the mood among Labour backbenchers to PoliticsHome as: “It wasn’t pity. But there was no willing him the [PM] on.”

Speaking during a debate following PMQs, Labour MP and former police officer Matt Bishop said that the trust built by the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls strategy “risks being profoundly undermined when we appear unwilling to apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to those closest to power as we demand elsewhere”. 

He later added: “If we are not fully transparent about how we vetted the ex-US ambassador in the face of such scandal, how on earth can we expect victims to come forward in future.”

Emily Thornberry, chair of the foreign affairs committee, asked if pressure had been put on the Foreign Office to process the vetting of Mandelson quickly.

Additional reporting by Adam Payne

Israel is always the victim — in its own eyes. That applies to the groups that support it too, like the avowedly Zionist ‘Board of Deputies’ (BOD). So, naturally, as far as the BOD is concerned today’s exoneration by a jury of six anti-genocide Palestine Action activists is not justice. It’s a slight to the BOD and other Israel supporters.

It’s ‘antisemitism’, in other words.

In a statement, the BOD described the verdicts as “troubling”. It then said that “respect [for] the judicial process” is “important”. And it then made clear that it has no respect for the judicial process by implying the acquittals don’t mean, under British law, that the accused are innocent of the serious charges against them. Therefore they are still guilty and deserving of punishment they should not be “able to evade”.

Evade by means of being found not guilty. The fiends.

BOD releases a statement after Palestine Action activists’ acquittal

This was the BOD’s nonsense in full:

To be clear: none of the defendants has been found to have injured police sergeant Evans.

And, since it’s certain neither the BOD nor the UK corporate media are ever going to refer to it, video evidence proved that police and security guards lied about pretty much everything that happened. And the accusers were not even able to come up with convincing lies even though the police left the Israeli arms-maker in charge of the video evidence for a whole year.

Scandalously, despite the verdicts, the CPS has demanded that the humanitarian defendants — after a year and a half as political prisoners — must not simply walk free. Five of them have been put back on bail — and one, Sam Corner, has been denied bail and put back in prison.

Of course we must never forget that Israel and its lobby are always the victim. Even when they’re slaughtering innocent Palestinians and making up bollocks in court to imprison people trying to stop them.

Featured image via FiltonActionists

Almost 400 medicines are vulnerable to shortages in the UK, according to a new list produced by NHS England and Medicines UK. Among the drugs on the list are treatments for blood clots, stroke, and several cancers.

The medicines were identified as at-risk because they have either a single supplier, or no supplier at all. Often, drug companies stop producing specific medicines because they no longer see them as commercially viable.

Having identified this vulnerability, NHS England and its partner organisations are taking steps to mitigate the problem. They’re calling the initiative ‘Project Revive’, providing incentives for drug companies to manufacture the medicines on the list.

Whilst undoubtedly an important step towards ensuring the resilience of the medical supply system in the UK, this is a treatment for a symptom, rather than a cure.

We’re in this mess in the first place because we treat drug manufacture as a commercial market, where companies can compete, patent, price gouge, and drop drugs when they stop making money. That commercialisation of healthcare costs lives.

NHS shortage of ‘products of critical priority’

In total, NHS England identified 378 drugs on its list of vulnerable medicines. Of these, around 80 no longer have a supplier at all, meaning that the currently existing supply is all that remains.

The medicines on the list include bendamustine, a chemotherapy drug used for several cancers; flupentixol, which is used for schizophrenia; and urokinase, a treatment for pulmonary embolism. The prices that the UK pays for these drugs could soar if demand starts to outpace supply.

NHS England produced its list alongside Medicines UK, a trade body representing manufacturers of generic medicines. Mark Samuels, Medicines UK’s chief executive, said:

The list includes products of critical priority and the ambition is to target those medicines representing the most serious risk to supply resilience, which could lead to shortages affecting patient care.

Drugs which have faced shortages across the UK in recent years include estradiol, an element of hormone replacement therapy; lisdexamfetamine, an ADHD medication; and Creon, which is used to treat cystic fibrosis.

Project Revive

However, NHS England, Medicines UK, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) plan to tackle the problem of shortages through ‘Project Revive’. This scheme will provide incentives like fast-tracked license approvals to enable manufacturers to supply the 378 drugs on the list.

The pilot of Project Revive will run for 12 months. Then, in 2027, coordinators plan to instate a long-term iteration of the same scheme. Samuels explained that:

We have long stated that medicine shortages cannot be solved in isolation, and this project shows what can be achieved by working together. By working with NHS England and MHRA, we hope that this new model provides more certainty to enable companies to produce and supply medicines for use in the NHS.

Fiona Bride, interim chief commercial officer for NHS England, echoed that sentiment:

Ensuring a resilient and stable supply of medicines is fundamental to delivering patient care, with pharmaceuticals being the most common healthcare intervention in the NHS, and this collaborative pilot initiative aims to strengthen that supply chain by incentivising more companies to become NHS suppliers, or deepen existing partnerships.

Treating the symptom

The news of Project Revive comes after medicine pricing issues hit the headlines last year. Several of the world’s biggest drug manufacturers announced that they were ditching their UK projects.

Critics from within the industry blamed uncompetitive prices for new medicines, low levels of government investment, and Trump’s tariffs adding to supply prices.

Then, in September 2025, science minister Patrick Vallance argued that the NHS would have to pay higher prices for medicines to prevent pharmaceutical investors from abandoning the UK.

This is a problem inherent to introducing a profit motive to any aspect of healthcare, all across the world. Treating medicine as a capitalist exercise creates a host of problems for patients, who should always have been the center of the issue.

Meanwhile, the global pharmaceutical industry has raked in profits at higher margins than practically any other sector.

Profit over patients

As NHS England showed in the Project Revive research, drug companies can cease supply of individual medicines if their profits aren’t high enough. This can leave patients without crucial medications that they need.

Likewise, manufacturers can also raise their prices artificially if they aren’t faced with competition from other companies, or if other countries are willing to pay higher prices. Patents and intellectual property rights for individual drugs can also allow companies to create artificial scarcity.

Even beyond this, the profit motive causes problems with the development of new medicines. Companies aim to develop medicines in profitable sectors, particularly cancer and rare diseases. This, in turn, sees less-profitable diseases neglected in terms of research and development.

Likewise, even the idea of curing a disease can be anathema to a profit motive. In a choice between being paid once to cure a patient, or being paid again and again to treat a disease without curing it, the latter is the profitable choice. For example, one damning Goldman Sachs report stated that:

The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies…. While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

Project Revive looks like an important step towards strengthening the UK’s drug supply chain. However, it’s a band-aid on a problem which will take far more work to heal.

In the UK, we fear the loss of socialised healthcare through the NHS, but the private sector already has its hooks in the system at every level.

There’s no easy fix for the problem of private profiteering in medicine. Capitalism itself is an enemy of good healthcare. It sounds glib, we know, but it’s also true. Failing to recognise that fact will mean that we’re trapped in a cycle of treating the symptoms, whilst neglecting their cause.

Featured image via the Canary