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Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tries to Bash Israel for Electoral Gain on Monday
After nearly nine years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s foreign policy has drifted into a kind of high school debating club — where policy positions on foreign affairs are usually taken on the fly, and solely for domestic consumption.
Where Israel is concerned, the end result has been an increasingly alienated Jewish community.
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 terror attack, the Canadian government sounded the right notes, with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland calling “for the [Israeli] hostages who were seized in this vile, horrific attack to be released immediately.”
Not surprisingly, the terrorists didn’t comply with her polite request.
And the sympathy and goodwill for Israel quickly dissipated once the Jewish State began its inevitable and necessary military response.
By mid-October 2023, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly and her Parliamentary Secretary Rob Oliphant were gullibly parroting talking points from Hamas’ Ministry of Health, which claimed that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, killing 500 people.
Days later, in a weekend press release that got lost in the news cycle, Defense Minister Bill Blair grudgingly accepted the facts: that the initial story was a lie, and the “hospital bombing” was in fact a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in a parking lot.
Neither Joly nor Oliphant ever apologized.
In March 2024, the socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) — on whose support the minority Liberals have relied to avoid a non-confidence vote and early election — put forward a motion that sought to recognize Palestinian statehood and reinstate funding to UNRWA, which had been paused due to some of its employees’ involvement with Hamas and the October 7 massacre.
In a last minute compromise, UNRWA got their money (the “pause” was removed before Canada ever missed a payment), and the aspiring State of Palestine had to make do without Canadian recognition.
But it was the Trudeau government’s decision to cease the further authorization of arms exports to Israel that was seen by many so-called progressives as the prize in the negotiations.
The gesture was mostly symbolic, as Canada’s military exports to Israel — which totaled C$21.3 million in 2022 (US $15.7 million) — are a rounding error and a shade more than the C$18.1 million (US$13.3 million) the country sent to Algeria that year.
Even tiny Qatar, which has provided both safe haven and hard cash to Hamas for years, bought more than twice the value of weapons than the Israelis.
And the military exports to all of Canada’s other non-US trading partners are dwarfed in magnitude by the C$1.15 billion (US$ 847.5 million) that Canada sent to Saudi Arabia, which represented more than half of 2022 military exports outside of the US.
When the Saudis were fighting a brutal war with the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist group, Trudeau’s Liberals resisted calls for an arms embargo.
Saudi Arabia is by no means perfect, but in a choice between supporting a steadfast Middle East ally or giving moral quarter to an unapologetically anti-Western death cult, there was no question about which side to support.
Yet selling a nominal amount of weapons to Israel, which was fighting an existential war against Iranian-backed terrorists on multiple fronts, while trying to exert leverage to free civilian hostages, was somehow beyond the pale.
One could be forgiven for thinking that this shameful episode ended matters, but domestic politics have taken some additional turns against the Liberals, and they’ve decided to dust off the old Israeli punching bag.
In June, the Liberals lost a close by-election in a Toronto-area riding they had held since 1993, in which roughly 15% of the voters are Jewish. According to one exit poll, nearly two thirds of those Jewish voters chose the Conservative candidate.
Last week, the NDP decided they were not going to continue to support Trudeau’s government after all — not that they were going to bring down the government and call an actual election. But they were no longer guaranteeing a rubber stamp and would henceforth start the conversation about every confidence vote with a very firmly Canadian “maybe.”
On Monday, the Liberals will face a by-election in another “safe” Montreal-area riding that they have held since its creation in 2015.
According to current polls, they’re in a tight race, but trailing the separatist Bloc Quebecois and only one percentage point ahead of the NDP, whose candidate has circulated a pamphlet featuring a Palestinian flag and a caption in French saying “I’m voting for Craig Sauvé to stop the genocide in Gaza.”
With Trudeau’s own national polling numbers badly lagging those of the opposition Conservatives, it was time yet again to do something — not of global import, which the country is powerless to achieve — but at least good enough for an Ottawa press conference in both of Canada’s official languages.
Enter Foreign Affairs Minister Joly, who is Trudeau’s fifth cabinet minister in the role, and his fourth in the last six years.
Joly failed up to her current role after a disastrous tenure in her first job as the nation’s Heritage Minister, before taking on less prominent roles in multiple cabinet shuffles.
A few days before the Palestinian statehood vote, she and Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks, who is Jewish, posed for a cringe-worthy photo in which they held hands with Palestinian Authority strongman Mahmoud Abbas.
With another by-election embarrassment looming, the last symbolic arms embargo was suddenly not good enough and another was apparently warranted.
And while selling much larger quantities of weapons to Saudi Arabia and Qatar is just good business, Israel is apparently such a menace that Canada now needed to ban ammunition exports to the United States from Quebec because they would eventually find their way to Israel.
The decision will, of course, have no impact on Israel’s war effort whatsoever: ammunition is fungible, and if the Americans want the Israelis to have it, then they will have it.
But it felt like yet another slap in the face for Canadian Jews and a cynical ploy to capture NDP votes from the anti-Israel left.
Whether any of this rescues Trudeau’s government from another electoral embarrassment remains to be seen. Regardless of what happens on Monday, the only cold comfort for Canadian Jews is that their government’s hostility toward the Jewish State is blunted only by their country’s irrelevance.
Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.
The post Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tries to Bash Israel for Electoral Gain on Monday first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.
Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.
“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”
GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’
Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.
“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.
“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.
“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.
After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”
RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL
Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.
“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”
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Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.
People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.
“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”
Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.
On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.
Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.
On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.
“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.
Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.
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Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.