The case of death is not at all the cause of the dead, it’s the cause of the living.
— Ghassan Kanafani, from the novel Men Under the Sun
My people are fearless and the gallows to each person among us is the instance that precedes the dawn of a new day for all of us … Prosecutor! Understand that when one of us enters the nation’s battle of destiny, he takes into consideration all possible results. But above all, he places his confidence in the determination of the people to win victory.
— Ghassan Kanafani, from the story “A Heroine from My Country”
They tell you this is a “conflict.” A “complex issue.” A tragedy happening “over there.”
They are lying.
What is happening in Gaza, in Palestine, is the logical, bloody conclusion of a global system of exploitation—a system sustained not by monsters, but by the convenient, daily complicity of those who benefit from it most: the citizen-consumers of the West.
This complicity is masked by a grand, soothing lie: the lie of democratic citizenship.
The state and its subjects have entered a symbiotic pact of bad faith. The theory goes like this: in a democracy, the citizen is sovereign. The government’s actions are an expression of the popular will. Therefore, the citizens are responsible. This is the idealistic shell. Let us crack it open and examine the actual, pathetic reality inside.
The state, functioning as the capitalist class’s executive committee, depends on this lie as its foundational fiction. It is the democratic alibi that launders imperial violence into policy. The weapons shipped to fuel genocide are stamped with the seal of “democratic principles,” their bloody purpose blessed by the hollow ritual of the ballot. This is the dictatorship of the elite, a regime of class power wearing the convincing mask of popular consent—a specific apparatus designed to vaporize the accountability of the capitalist and imperialist classes, dispersing it as a fine mist of collective guilt over the populace.
But why do the masses accept this lie?
Because it is an anesthetic.
Having already swallowed the primordial myth of capitalist democracy—that freedom is consumption and power is a ballot—this smaller lie of passive citizenship is the necessary sedative that numbs the pain of their own powerlessness and the horror conducted in their name.
Here we must be Kanafanian in our clarity. To be a “citizen” of the metropole is, in practice, to be a consumer. And the consumer’s paradise is built on the graveyards of the Global South. Your stability, your cheap energy, your endless stream of goods, is subsidized by the control and immiseration of others. To truly confront this would shatter the consumer’s world. The cognitive dissonance would be unbearable.
And so, the lie administers the necessary anesthetic. The recited alibis of impotence (“What power do I have?”) are the superstructure of a material bargain. This is the highest stage of false consciousness: the willed surrender of agency for the comforts of the labor aristocracy. It is a transaction: the consumer trades their revolutionary potential for moral oblivion, outsourcing conscience to the state and NGOs—the very managers of the crisis—who, in return, guarantee the sanctity of the shopping aisle.
This is the “citizenshipness” we are sold: a hollowed-out identity, a safety valve for dissent. Protest, write your representative, cast your vote—then return to your consumption. The system allows you to perform concerns without ever threatening the foundations of your comfort. It is a brilliant, cynical management of dissent.
Thus, the genocide and the ongoing Nakba in Palestine are not an aberration. It is the system working as intended. The bombs falling on Rafah, Occupied Palestine, are funded by the taxes of the Western citizenry. The diplomatic cover is provided in their name. Their silence—or more accurately, their fragmented, ineffective noise—is the permission slip.
The connection is not metaphorical; it is material. The luxury lifestyle and the genocide are two outputs of the same machine. One is the direct, concentrated violence of imperialism. The other is the diffuse, structural violence of an exploitative global order. They require each other.
To the real socialists among us, the conclusion is clear: Spontaneous protest is not enough. Moral outrage is not enough. The working classes of the imperial core have been bought off with crumbs from the colonial plunder. They will not achieve revolutionary consciousness on their own. The task falls to an organized political party—those who see through the lie—to break the hypnotic spell of consumer citizenship. To organize, not to plead. To expose the comfort, to make the machinery of complicity grind to a halt.
And to the Palestinians, the path is one of steadfast, rooted resistance. The Palestinian struggle is not a plea for Western sympathy. It is an anti-colonial/imperial war. It is the absolute negation of the lie. Every act of resistance, from the stone to the slogan, is a truth-telling, exposing the brutal reality that the capitalist West so desperately masks with its talk of “complexity” and “citizenship.”
The question is not whether the Western citizen is complicit. The question is whether they will continue to choose the convenience of the lie over the difficult truth of their own justice—a justice that is inextricably linked to the justice and liberation of Palestine. To end the genocide there, they must first kill the complacent consumer within themselves.
There is no other way.
AMY GOODMAN:Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.
According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.
Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.
Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.
The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.
Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.
FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.
I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.
What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?
AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.
On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.
KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …
This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.
If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.
AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.
Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.
And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.
Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.
So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.
And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.
This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.
DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.
But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.
These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.
And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.
What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.
AMY GOODMAN:I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.
I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?
AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.
And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.
The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.
And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.
We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.
And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.
But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.
Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.
The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?
Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?
AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.
There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.
Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.
There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.
And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?
How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.
AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.
But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.
And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.
But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.
And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.
There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.
But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.
This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.
AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.
You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.
And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.
But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.
I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.
In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.
And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.
Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.
We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.
This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.
As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.
But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.
Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Within hours of being named the Nobel Peace laureate for 2025, María Corina Machado called on President Trump to step up his military and economic campaign against her own country — Venezuela.
The curriculum vitae of the opposition leader hardly lines up with what one would typically associate with a Peace Maker. Nor would those who nominated her, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and recent US national security advisor Mike Waltz, both drivers of violent policies towards Venezuela.
“The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace, to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness,” said the Nobel Committee statement.
Let’s see if María Corina Machado passes that litmus test and is worthy to stand alongside last year’s winners, Nihon Hidankyo, representing the Japanese hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “honoured for their decades-long commitment to nuclear disarmament and their tireless witness against the horrors of nuclear war”.
Machado supports Israel, would move embassy Machado is a passionate Zionist and supporter of both the State of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu personally. She has not been silent on the genocide; indeed she has actively called for Israel to press ahead, saying Hamas “must be defeated at all costs, whatever form it takes”.
>If Machado achieves power in Venezuela, among her first long-promised acts will be the ending of Venezuela’s support for Palestine and the transfer of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The smiling face of Washington regime change The Council on American-Islamic Relations, US’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation, called Machado a supporter of anti-Muslim fascism and decried the award as “insulting and unacceptable”.
2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado . . . “It is really a disaster. It’s laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation,” warns a history professor. Image: Cristian Hernandez/ Anadolu Agency
Venezuelan activist Michelle Ellner wrote in the US progressive outlet Code Pink:
“She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatisation, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help ‘liberate’ Venezuela with bombs under the banner of ‘freedom.’
She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.”
Legitimising US escalation against Venezuela Ellner said she almost laughed at the absurdity of the choice, which I must admit was my own reaction. Yale professor of history Greg Grandin was similarly shocked.
“It is really a disaster. It’s laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation.”
What Grandin is referring to is the prize being used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration to legitimise escalating violence against Venezuela — an odd outcome for a peace prize.
Grandin, author of America, América: A New History of the New World says Machado “has consistently represented a more hardline in terms of economics, in terms of US relations. That intransigence has led her to rely on outside powers, notably the United States.
“They didn’t give it to Donald Trump, but they have given it to the next best thing as far as Marco Rubio is concerned — if he needs justification to escalate military operations against Venezuela.”
The Iron Lady wins a peace prize? Rubio has repeatedly referred to Machado as the “Venezuelan Iron Lady” — fair enough, as she bears greater resemblance to Margaret Thatcher than she does to Mother Teresa.
This illogicality brought back graffiti I read on a wall in the 1970s: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity”. Yet someone at the Nobel Committee had a brain explosion (fitting as Alfred Nobel invented dynamite) when they settled on Machado as the embodiment of Alfred Nobel’s ideal recipient — “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Machado, a recipient of generous US State Department funding and grants, including from the National Endowment for Democracy (the US’s prime soft power instrument of regime change) is praised for her courage in opposing the Maduro government, and in calling out a slide towards authoritarianism.
Conservatives could run a sound argument in terms of Machado as an anti-regime figure but it is ludicrous to suggest her hard-ball politics and close alliances with Trump would in any way qualify her for the peace prize. Others see her as an agent of the CIA, an agent of the Monroe Doctrine, and as a mouthpiece for a corrupt elite that wants to drive a violent antidemocratic regime change.
She has promised the US that she would privatise the country’s oil industry and open the door to US business.
“We’re grateful for what Trump is doing for peace,” the Nobel winner told the BBC. Trump’s recent actions include bombing boatloads of Venezuelans and Colombians — a violation of international law — as part of a pressure campaign on the Maduro government.
Machado says she told Trump “how grateful the Venezuelan people are for what he’s doing, not only in the Americas, but around the world for peace, for freedom, for democracy”. The dead and starving of Gaza bear witness to a counter narrative.
Rigged elections or rigged narratives? Peacemakers aren’t normally associated with coup d’etats but Machado most certainly was in 2002 when democratically elected President Hugo Chavez was briefly overthrown. Machado was banned from running for President in 2024 because of her calls for US intervention in overthrowing the government.
Central to both Machado’s prize and the US government’s regime change operation is the argument that the Maduro government won a “rigged election” in 2024 and is running a narco-trafficking government; charges accepted as virtually gospel in the mainstream media and dismissed as rubbish by some scholars and experts on the country.
Alfred de Zayas, a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order, cautions against the standard Western narrative that the Venezuelan elections “were rigged”.
The reality is that the Maduro government, like the Chavez government before it, enjoys popularity with the poor majority of the country. Delegitimising any elected government opposed to Washington is standard operating procedure by the great power.
Professor Zayas led a UN mission to Venezuela in 2017 and has visited the country a number of times since. He has spoken with NGOs, such as Fundalatin, Grupo Sures, Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, as well as people from all walks of life, including professors, church leaders and election officials.
“I gradually understood that the media mood in the West was only aiming for regime change and was deliberately distorting the situation in the country,” he said in an article in 2024.
I provide those thoughts not as proof definitive of the legitimacy of the elections but as stimulant to look beyond our tightly curated mainstream media. María Machado is Washington’s “guy” and that alone should set off alarm bells.
Michelle Ellner: “Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.”
“Beati pacifici quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God”. Matthew 5:9.
Amen to that.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
On 9 October, Tommy Robinson tweeted the following message to his audience after learning that a ‘knifeman’ had attacked two people on the street:
This post did nothing to diminish the accusation that Robinson doesn’t care about victims, and that he only covers crimes which promote his narrative. It especially didn’t help when the police reported that the alleged attacker is a white British male in his 30s.
A man has been charged with a number of offences following an incident near Bradford College on Thursday morning.
David Noutch, of no fixed abode, has been charged with a racially aggravated offence under the Public Order Act, racially aggravated assault, threatening with a bladed article in a public place and assault by beating.
He is also charged with two counts of assaulting a constable and causing criminal damage.
The 31-year-old, who self defines as white British, has been remanded in custody to appear at Leeds Magistrates’ Court this morning.
Noutch might yet be found innocent. Either way, it’s nothing for anyone to gloat about.
This is obviously a horrible incident, and it should never have been used as a ‘gotcha’ to attack Gary Neville. It’s especially ironic given that Neville’s criticism of the current wave of flag shagging is that it’s being used by far-right figures like Robinson to cynically spread division.
People criticised Tommy Robinson online:
Tommy Robinson stopped tweeting about this when he found out that he was a white man. pic.twitter.com/LwEs4GcKNA
Some people online have suggested Tommy Robinson deleted the offending tweet. At the time of writing, however, the post is still there.
If you’re wondering why he hasn’t deleted this embarrassing tweet, it’s because guys like this don’t feel embarrassment. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning – let alone tweet several hundred messages like this one.
It’s important to remember that Tommy Robinson isn’t posting to be correct; he’s posting to feed raw meat into the anger machine. This tweet got thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of views, and that’s good enough for him – even if it is now obviously misinformation.
A temporary ceasefire and release of some Palestinians in a prisoner exchange is not a “peace agreement” and it is far from what is needed — ending colonisation; freedom for the >10,000 political prisoners still in Israeli gulags (also tortured, nearly 100 have died under torture in the last two years); return of the millions of refugees; and accountability for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
That is why this global uprising (intifada) will not stop until freedom, justice, and equality are attained.
Here are brief answers I gave to questions about the agreement for Gaza:
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh during his visit to Aotearoa New Zealand last year . . . “what is needed — ending colonisation, freedom for the >10,000 political prisoners still in Israeli gulags , return of the millions of refugees, and accountability for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Image: David Robie/APR
1. How has life in the West Bank changed for you and your community during the past two years of conflict? The West Bank has been illegally occupied since 1967 (ICJ ruling) but it was not merely an occupation but intensive colonisation and ethnic cleansing. The attacks on our people accelerated in the last two years with over 60,000 made homeless in the West Bank and denial of freedom of movement (including hundreds of new gates installed in these two years separating the remaining concentration camps/ghettos of the West Bank ).
2. What is your assessment of the new peace deal that brought an end to the fighting in Gaza?
It is not a peace deal. It is an agreement to pause the genocide which will not work because the belligerent occupier — “Israel” — has not respected a single agreement it signed since its founding. Even the agreement to join the United Nations was conditional on respecting the UN Charter and UN resolutions issued before and after 1949.
This continued to even breaking the signed ceasefire agreement of last year. I have 0 percent confidence that this latest agreement would be respected even on the simple aspect of “pausing” the genocide and ethnic cleansing going on since 1948.
3. In your view, why did war drag on for two years despite multiple ceasefire attempts?
Simply put because colonisation can only be done with violence. And the war on our people has gone on not for two years but for 77 years without ending (sustained by Western government support). Israel as a colonisation entity is the active face of colonisation. The USA for example broke similar agreements for “pauses” in colonisation with natives in North America and broke every single one of them.
Israeli military occupation on the environment. Video: Greenpeace
4. What kind of humanitarian and environmental toll has the conflict taken on Palestinian society? It is now well documented from UN agencies, human rights groups (like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, even the Israeli group B’Tselem). In brief it is genocide, ecocide, scholasticide, medicide,
and veriticide. (More at: ongaza.org )
5. Why do you think it took the IDF so long to rescue all the hostages? The terrorist organisation that deceptively calls itself “IDF” (Israeli Defence Forces) was not interested in rescuing their captives (not “hostages”) and they only got people back via exchange of prisoners (not rescue).
The IGF (Israeli Genocide Forces) actually killed many of their own soldiers and civilians
on 7 October 2023 by activating the Hannibal directive to prevent their capture. The resistance was aiming to capture colonisers (living on stolen Palestinian lands) to exchange for some of the more than 11,000 political prisoners illegally held in Israeli jails. (Again see ongaza.org )
6. How significant was international involvement — particularly from the US — in reaching the final agreement?
This is the first genocide in human history that is not executed by one government. It is executed by a number of governments directly supporting and aiding (participating). This includes the USA, UK, France, Egypt, Germany, Australia etc. Many of these countries have governments dominated or highly influenced by the Zionist agenda.
Under the influence of a growing popular protest against the genocide around the world, some of those countries are trying to wiggle out from pressure in an effort to save
“Israel” from growing global isolation. Trump was blackmailed via videos/files collected by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghiseline Maxwell (Mossad agents). He is simply a narcissistic collaborator with genocide!
7. What concrete steps do you think are necessary now to turn this peace deal into a sustainable, lasting solution?
Again not a “peace deal”. What needs to be done is apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) on this rogue state that violates the international conventions (Geneva Convention, Conventions against Apartheid and Genocide). BDS was used against apartheid South Africa and needs to be applied here also. (For more: bdsmovement.net )
8. How do you see the Palestine Museum of Natural History contributing to rebuilding and healing efforts in the aftermath of war? Our institute (PIBS, palestinenature.org) which includes museums, a botanic garden, and many other sections is focused on “sustainable human and natural communities” Our motto is respect: for ourselves (empowerment), for others (regardless of religious or other background), and for nature.
Conflict, colonisations, oppression are obviously areas we challenge and work on in JOINT struggle with all people of various background.
9. Looking ahead, what gives you optimism—or concern—about the future relationship between Palestinians and Israelis?
What gives me optimism first and foremost is the heroic resilience and resistance (together making sumud) of our Palestinian people everywhere and the millions of other people mobilising for human rights and for justice (including the right of refugees to return and also environmental justice).
What gives me concern is the depth of depravity that greedy individuals in power go to destroying our planet and our people and profiting from colonisation and genocide.
About 8.5 million Palestinians are refugees and displaced people thanks to Zionism and Western collusion with it. A collusion intent on transforming Palestine from multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multireligious, and multilingual society to a racist Jewish state (monolithic).
Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Bedouin in cyberspace; a villager at home; professor, founder and (volunteer) director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, Occupied Palestine.
The bombs have indeed stopped, but our suffering continues. Our reality has not changed. We are still under siege.
Israel still has full control over our air, land and sea; it is still blocking sick and injured Palestinians from leaving and journalists, war crimes investigators and activists from going in.
It is still controlling what food, what medicine, and essential supplies enter.
The siege has lasted more than 18 years, shaping every moment of our lives. I have lived under this blockade since I was just three years old. What kind of peace is this, if it will continue to deny us the freedoms that everyone else has?
‘Deal’ overshadowed flotilla kidnap
The news of the ceasefire deal and “the peace plan” overshadowed another, much more important development.
Israel raided another freedom flotilla in international waters loaded with humanitarian aid for Gaza, kidnapping 145 people on board — a crime under international law. This came just days after Israel attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla, detaining more than 450 people who were trying to reach Gaza.
These flotillas carried more than just humanitarian aid. They carried the hope of freedom for the Palestinian people. They carried a vision of true peace — one where Palestinians are no longer besieged, occupied and dispossessed.
Many have criticised the freedom flotillas, arguing that they cannot make a difference since they are doomed to be intercepted.
I myself did not pay much attention to the movement. I was deeply disappointed, having lost hope in seeing an end to this war.
But that changed when Brazilian journalist Giovanna Vial interviewed me. Giovanna wrote an article about my story before setting sail with the Sumud Flotilla. She then made a post on social media saying: “for Sara, we sail”. Her words and her courage stirred something in me.
Afterwards, I kept my eyes on the flotilla news, following every update with hope. I told my relatives about it, shared it with my friends, and reminded anyone who would listen how extraordinary this movement was.
‘She became the light’
I kept wondering — how is it possible that, in a world so heavy with injustice, there are still people willing to abandon everything and put their lives in danger for people they had never met, for a place, most of them had never visited.
I stayed in touch with Giovanna.
“Until my last breath, I will never leave you alone,” she wrote to me while sailing towards Gaza. In the midst of so much darkness, she became the light.
This was the first time in two years I felt like we were heard. We were seen.
The Sumud Flotilla was by far the biggest in the movement’s history, but it was not about how many boats there were or how many people were on board or how much humanitarian aid they carried. It was about putting a spotlight on Gaza — about making sure the world could no longer look away.
“All Eyes on Gaza,” read one post on the official Instagram account of the flotilla. It stayed with me, I read it on a very heavy night when the deafening sound of bombs in Gaza City was relentless. It was just before I had to flee my home due to the brutal Israeli onslaught.
Israel stopped flotillas, aid
Israel stopped the flotillas. They abused and deported the participants. They seized the aid. They may have prevented them from reaching our shores, but they failed to erase the message they carried.
A message of peace. A message of freedom. A message we had been waiting to hear for two long, brutal years. The boats were captured, but the solidarity reached us.
I carry so much gratitude in my heart for every single human being who took part in the freedom flotillas. I wish I could reach each of them personally — to tell them how much their courage, their presence, and their solidarity meant to me, and to all of us in Gaza.
We will never forget them. We will carry their names, their faces, their voices in our hearts forever.
To those who sailed toward us: thank you. You reminded us that we are not alone.
And to the world: we are clinging to hope. We are still waiting — still needing — more flotillas to come. Come to us. Help us break free from this prison.
The bombing has stopped now, and I can only hope that this time it does not resume in a few weeks. But we still do not have peace.
Governments have failed us. But the people have not.
One day, I know, the freedom flotilla boats will reach the shore of Gaza and we will be free.
Sara Awad is an English literature student, writer, and storyteller based in Gaza. Passionate about capturing human experiences and social issues, Sara uses her words to shed light on stories often unheard. Her work explores themes of resilience, identity, and hope amid war. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Of 42 referendums, 17 voted to retain Māori Wards in Aotearoa New Zealand’s local elections yesterday, which suggests something about where we are at as a nation — but you already knew that right?
We all know that it’s only recently that we’ve been attempting to teach New Zealand history in our schools.
As a consequence few people understand it — and even less understand Te Tiriti, and our obligations to it — and things like “active protection” not being based on race, but being based on a constitutional foundation which protects the interests of our indigenous.
They are not just the same as some other minority.
There’s a special status to this and we would like to think we can independently maintain it in a so called “liberal democracy” but, as you know, the guardrails are shaky and under neoliberal attack.
We know Education Minister Erica Stanford is working with Atlas plants and one-eyed folk to dilute that effort, and we know history and social sciences are under attack under this government.
They pull the funding for the humanities. That’s the fact.
Not always equitable
While the electoral system may be formally equal (one person, one vote), it does not always lead to equitable outcomes for groups with distinct cultural, historical, and political status — such as Māori.
You try to talk fairness to your average rightwing, under-educated Act voter and they will tell you about fairness based on their own victimhood and “equality” not “equity”.
While Māori are guaranteed representation through the Māori electoral roll at the national level — Māori seats in Parliament — Māori wards are the local government equivalent to me.
Without Māori wards, Māori communities often lack meaningful say in local decisions affecting their lands, resources, and wellbeing, especially given the legacy of colonisation and ongoing disparities.
Nobody at Hobson’s Pledge cares much about that because it does not effect them. Self interest is their bottom line.
Without dedicated representation, Māori voices are often sidelined or overruled as we all have seen, many times and here we go again — as Code Brown is rife in Auckland and celebrations begin with no real mandate after such a low turnout.
Code Brown will tell you otherwise that these results are all about the public voting for “doing a good job” and not “just a pretty face” but in reality it’s about disconnection and the cost of living crisis and double digit rates increases in 18 councils, and who bothers to vote?
Many new mayors
In 18 councils which gave ratepayers a double digit rate increase, 13 elected new mayors — just like that!
Overall, out of 66 mayoral races, 31 councils elected a new mayor
Māori wards ensure there are elected representatives directly accountable to Māori constituents, strengthening democracy, but we’ve seen the erosion of it under this government.
We have all seen how they are pushing all things Māori backwards in a dedicated ideological push to clear the way for foreign investment — and that’s the battle.
Act picked up 10 candidates — but much of that is about who votes, and rather than a swing to the right it’s about rates and low turnout.
Ratepayers tend to get out and vote more than renters, according to Code Brown as we stare at voter turnout in 2025 which appears significantly down compared to 2022 in major cities.
Auckland dropped from about 35.5 percent to about 23 percent. Wellington dropped from 45 percent to around 36 percent. Christchurch also dropped, though somewhat less sharply — and while that’s preliminary, it’s a statement.
Nationwide turnout drops
Overall, the nationwide turnout is looking lower — around 36 percent preliminary results for the 2025 local elections, and offical counts will be known on Friday, October 17.
So in the end, we need to vote out the central government which gave us upward pressure on rates with unaffordable water infrastructure reform — while trying to blame councils — attacked Māori on many fronts; and eroded progress towards a proper constitutional transformation .
After a recent byelection and now this result — there’s a message to people who do not vote . . . and it’s about the outcomes. You either vote or you get screwed.
I’m sure you already can see the need as some suggest voting should be compulsory like in Australia – and we all saw the gerrymandering by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith about enrolment dates.
Gerard Otto is a digital creator and independent commentator on politics and the media through his G News column and video reports. Republished with permission.
The Trump administration is planning to detain immigrants at a Georgia jail that became known for allegations that women detained there were subjected to non-consensual gynecological procedures, multiple sources told The Intercept.
An Immigrations and Customs Enforcement spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that the agency will be using the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, but the official could not say whether detentions there had already begun. Attorneys and advocates familiar with ICE’s operations in the statesaid the agency had started to temporarily detain people at the facility on Friday, citing communication with ICE officials in Georgia.
Irwin drew nationwide attention in the fall of 2020, when a number of detained women and a nurse-turned-whistleblower accused the facility of medical misconduct. After months of backlash, the Biden administration stopped detaining immigrant women there in 2021, and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations embarked on an 18-month investigation. Their 2022 report found that “female detainees appear to have been subjected to excessive, invasive, and often unnecessary gynecological procedures” and that there appeared to be “repeated failures” to secure informed consent for medical procedures for immigrant women detained at Irwin.
The allegations also set off court battles, brought both by detained women at Irwin and a doctor who worked at the facility. Fourteen women sued ICE and Irwin officials over the allegations in 2021, and at least 40 women testified to medical misconduct, including non-consensual gynecological procedures. After all the plaintiffs were released in 2021, a federal judge dismissed many of their claims in 2024 on procedural grounds. Early this year, the lawsuit was settled with no admission of liability.
A Georgia judge found last year that statements accusing a doctor at Irwin of performing “mass hysterectomies” were false in a defamation case against a news organization. The Senate report found the claims of mass hysterectomies could not be substantiated, but did underscore that other gynecological procedures on immigrant women appeared to have been conducted without proper consent.
The use of the facility set off alarms for immigration advocates and a former Department of Homeland Security civil rights official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“It’s inhumane. It’s so bad,” said the official, who previously investigated the conditions at Irwin. Using the facility to detain immigrants again, they added, “would be an absolute mistake.”
An immigration attorney and a person familiar with the developments told The Intercept that both women and men under ICE custody would be detained at the facility on a temporary basis for only 72 hours. The ICE spokesperson said the agency could not yet confirm those details.
ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not provide a statement by time of publication.
The Trump administration’s use of Irwin comes as the White House pressures ICE and its partner agencies to speed up arrests to support President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda. The increase in ICE-related arrests has overwhelmed the detention system.
The administration has, in recent months, expanded and signed new contracts with private prison operators to detain more immigrants caught in its dragnet. The Washington Post reported in September that ICE was looking to use Irwin again, along with other troubled facilities.
“This administration does not care about civil rights and they certainly don’t care about the conditions of these facilities,” said the former DHS official, who was among dozens of staff members removed from their positions this year by the Trump administration. “I think they’re just trying to round up as many people as they can and get rid of them without any due process and without any regard for conditions.”
Advocates and attorneys in the region are also deeply concerned.
“This shocking development is very much in line with this administration’s modus operandi of going to extreme lengths to dehumanize and brutalize migrants,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director at Project South, a civil rights group that played a major role in drawing attention to the conditions in ICE detention at Irwin. “We stand with migrant women who were subjected to medical abuse and other egregious human rights violations at Irwin.”
The facility, which is run by the private prison contractor LaSalle Corrections, has historically held local detainees, U.S. Marshals Service federal detainees, and people under ICE custody. After the Biden administration stopped detaining immigrants at Irwin in 2021, Irwin County and the USMS continued to detain people in their custody, according to a facility audit from earlier this year.
The Irwin County sheriff, the USMS, and LaSalle Corrections did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication. An Irwin facility employee, when reached by phone, referred all questions to ICE’s Atlanta office.
LaSalle Corrections, the prison contractor running Irwin, posted a number of jobs available at Irwin on Thursday.
The DHS Office of Inspector General, the agency’s watchdog, found in 2022 after its own investigation that medical care at Irwin, separate from gynecological procedures, was “inadequate.” Its findings regarding the allegations of nonconsensual gynecological procedures were not published, since they were taken on by another office within the OIG. DHS OIG did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.
After the Biden administration stopped detaining immigrant women at Irwin in 2021, ICE began detaining and transferring women to the Stewart Detention Center, another troubled Georgia facility. An Intercept investigation in 2022 found that women detained at Stewart alleged sexual assault by a nurse contractor working there.
“The survivors of [ICE detention at Irwin] still bear the scars, and given the DHS’s termination of nearly every oversight mechanism available to monitor and ameliorate violations of their own standards, it will be difficult for those affected to prevent or correct harms in yet another remote detention center,” said Sarah Owings, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney who represented immigrants detained at Irwin before they were transferred out in 2021. “Given Irwin’s history, I do not think it is a good idea to rekindle this contract.”
This brutal war on Palestinians has not just unleashed Israel’s demons. It has unmasked our own regimes, as they crack down on humanitarian activism. Jonathan Cook reflects on Israel’s war on Gaza as the fragile ceasefire takes hold.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Anniversaries are often a cause for celebration. But who could have imagined back in October 2023 that we would now be marking the two-year anniversary of a genocide, documented in the minutest detail on our phones every day for 24 months? A genocide that could have been stopped at any point, had the US and its allies made the call.
This is an anniversary so shameful that no one in power wants it remembered. Rather, they are actively encouraging us to forget the genocide is happening, even at its very height.
Israel’s relentless crimes against the people of Gaza barely register in our news any longer.
There is a horrifying lesson here, one that applies equally to Israel and its Western patrons. A genocide takes place — and is permitted to take place — only when a profound sickness has entered the collective soul of the perpetrators.
For the past 80 years, Western societies have grappled with — or, at least, thought they did — the roots of that sickness.
They wondered how a Holocaust could have taken place in their midst, in a Germany that was central to the modern, supposedly “civilised”, Western world.
They imagined — or pretended to — that their wickedness had been extirpated, their guilt cleansed, through the sponsorship of a “Jewish state”. That state, violently established in 1948 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, served as a European protectorate on the ruins of the Palestinian people’s homeland.
Desperate to control
The Middle East, let us note, just happened to be a region that the West was desperate to keep controlling, despite growing Arab demands to end more than a century of brutal Western colonialism.
Why? Because the region had recently emerged as the world’s oil spigot.
Israel’s very purpose — enshrined in the ideology of Zionism, or Jewish supremacism in the Middle East — was to act as a proxy for Western colonialism. It was a client state planted there to keep order on the West’s behalf, while the West pretended to withdraw from the region.
This big picture — the one Western politicians and media refuse to acknowledge — has been the context for events there ever since, including Israel’s current, genocidal endgame in Gaza.
Two years in, what should have been obvious from the start is becoming ever-harder to ignore: the genocide had nothing to do with Hamas’s one-day attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The genocide was never about “self-defence”. It was preordained by the ideological imperatives of Zionism.
Hamas’s break-out from Gaza — a prison camp into which Palestinians had been herded decades earlier, after their expulsion from their homeland — provided the pretext. It all too readily unleashed demons long lurking in the soul of the Israeli body politic.
And more importantly, it released similar demons — though better concealed — in the Western ruling class, as well as parts of their societies heavily conditioned to believe that the interests of the ruling class coincide with their own.
“History repeats itself,” as the saying goes, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”
The same could be said of “peace processes”. Thirty years ago, the West force-fed Palestinians the Oslo Accords with the promise of eventual statehood.
Oslo was the tragedy. It led to an ideological rupture in the Palestinian national movement; to a deepening geographic split between an imprisoned population in the occupied West Bank and an even more harshly imprisoned population in Gaza; to Israel’s increasing use of new technologies to confine, surveil and oppress both sets of Palestinians; and finally, to Hamas’s brief break-out from the Gaza prison camp, and Israel’s genocidal “response”.
Now, President Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” offers the farce: unapologetic gangsterism masquerading as a “solution” to the Gaza genocide. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — a war criminal who, alongside his US counterpart George W Bush, destroyed Iraq more than two decades ago — will issue diktats to the people of Gaza on Israel’s behalf.
Gaza, not just Hamas, faced an ultimatum: “Take the deal, or we will put you in concrete boots and sink you in the Mediterranean.”
Surrender document
Barely veiled by the threat was the likelihood that, even if Hamas felt compelled to sign up to this surrender document, Gaza’s people would end up in concrete boots all the same.
Gaza’s population has been so desperate for a respite from the slaughter that it would accept almost anything. But it is pure delusion for the rest of us to believe a state that has spent two years carrying out a genocide can be trusted either to respect a ceasefire or to honour the terms of a peace plan, even one so heavily skewed in its favour.
The farce of Trump’s peace plan — his “deal of the millennium” — was evident from the first of its 20 points: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.”
The document’s authors no more wonder what might have “radicalised” Gaza than Western capitals did when Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, broke out of the prison enclave with great violence on 7 October 2023.
Were the people of Gaza simply born radical, or did events turn them radical? Were they “radicalised” when Israel ethnically cleansed them from their original lands, in what is now the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, and dumped them in the tiny holding pen of Gaza?
Were they “radicalised” by being surveilled and oppressed in a dystopian, open-air prison, decade upon decade? Was it the experience of living for 17 years under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade that denied them the right to travel or trade, and forced their children on to a diet that left them malnourished?
Or maybe they were radicalised by the silence from Israel’s Western patrons, who supplied the weaponry and lapped up the rewards: the latest confinement technologies, field-tested by Israel on the people of Gaza.
Gaza most extreme
The truth ignored in the opening point of Trump’s “peace plan” is that it is entirely normal to be “radicalised” when you live in an extreme situation. And there are no places on the planet more extreme than Gaza.
It is not Gaza that needs “deradicalising”. It is the West and its Israeli client state.
The case for deradicalising Israel should hardly need stating. Poll after poll has shown Israelis are not just in favour of the annihilation their state is carrying out in Gaza; they believe their government needs to be even more aggressive, even more genocidal.
This past May, as Palestinian babies were shrivelling into dry husks from Israel’s blockade on food and aid, 64 percent of Israelis said they believed “there are no innocents” in Gaza, a place where around half of the population of two million people are children.
The figure would be even higher were it reporting only the views of Israeli Jews. The survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinians — survivors of mass expulsions in 1948 during Israel’s Western-sponsored creation. This much-oppressed minority has been utterly ignored throughout these past two years.
Another survey conducted earlier this year found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews favoured the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. More than half, 56 percent, also supported the forced expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel — even though that minority has kept its head bowed throughout the genocide, for fear of reaping a whirlwind should it speak up.
In addition, 47 percent of Israeli Jews approved of killing all the inhabitants of Gaza, even its children.
Netanyahu’s crimes
The crimes overseen by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is so often held up by outsiders as some kind of aberration, are entirely representative of wider public sentiment in Israel.
The genocidal fervour in Israeli society is an open secret. Soldiers flood social media platforms with videos celebrating their war crimes. Teenage Israelis make funny videos on TikTok endorsing the starvation of babies in Gaza. Israeli state TV broadcasts a child choir evangelising for Gaza’s annihilation.
Such views are not simply a response to the horrors that unfolded inside Israel on 7 October 2023. As polls have consistently shown, deep-seated racism towards Palestinians is decades old.
It is not former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant who started the trend of calling Palestinians “human animals”. Politicians and religious leaders have been depicting them as “cockroaches”, “dogs”, “snakes” and “donkeys” since Israel’s creation. It is this long process of dehumanisation that made the genocide possible.
In response to the outpouring of support in Israel for the extermination in Gaza, Orly Noy, a veteran Israeli journalist and activist, reached a painful conclusion last month on the +972 website: “What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.”
And she noted that this problem derives from an ideology with a reach far beyond Israel itself: “The Gaza holocaust was made possible by the embrace of the ethno-supremacist logic inherent to Zionism. Therefore it must be said clearly: Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”
As the genocide has unfolded week after week, month after month — ever-more divorced from any link to 7 October 2023 — and Western leaders have carried on justifying their inaction, a much deeper realisation is dawning.
Demon in the West
This is not just about a demon unleashed among Israelis. It is about a demon in the soul of the West. It is us — the power bloc that established Israel, arms Israel, funds Israel, indulges Israel, excuses Israel — that really needs deradicalising.
Germany underwent a process of “denazification” following the end of the Second World War — a process, it is now clear from the German state’s feverish repression of any public opposition to the genocide in Gaza, that was never completed.
A far deeper campaign of deradicalisation than the one Nazi Germany was subjected to, is now required in the West — one where normalising the murder of tens of thousands of children, live-streamed to our phones, can never be allowed to happen again.
A deradicalisation that would make it impossible to conceive of our own citizens travelling to Israel to help take part in the Gaza genocide, and then be welcomed back to their home countries with open arms.
A deradicalisation that would mean our governments could not contemplate silently abandoning their own citizens — citizens who joined an aid flotilla to try to break Israel’s illegal starvation-siege of Gaza — to the goons of Israel’s fascist police minister.
A deradicalisation that would make it inconceivable for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or other Western leaders, to host Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, who at the outset of the slaughter in Gaza offered the central rationale for the genocide, arguing that no one there — not even its one million children — were innocent.
A deradicalisation that would make it self-evident to Western governments that they must uphold the World Court’s ruling last year, not ignore it: that Israel must be forced to immediately end its decades-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that they must carry out the arrest of Netanyahu on suspicion of crimes against humanity, as specified by the International Criminal Court.
A deradicalisation that would make it preposterous for Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s Home Secretary, to call demonstrations against a two-year genocide “fundamentally un-British” — or to propose ending the long-held right to protest, but only when the injustice is so glaring, the crime so unconscionable, that it leads people to repeatedly protest.
Eroding right to protest
Mahmood justifies this near-death-knell erosion of the right to protest on the grounds that regular protests have a “cumulative impact”. She is right. They do: by exposing as a sham our government’s claim to stand for human rights, and to represent anything more than naked, might-is-right politics.
A deradicalisation is long overdue — and not just to halt the West’s crimes against the people of Gaza and the wider Middle East region.
Already, as our leaders normalise their crimes abroad, they are normalising related crimes at home. The first signs are in the designation of opposition to genocide as “hate”, and of practical efforts to stop the genocide as “terrorism”.
The intensifying campaign of demonisation will grow, as will the crackdown on fundamental and long-cherished rights.
Israel has declared war on the Palestinian people. And our leaders are slowly declaring war on us, whether it be those protesting the Gaza genocide, or those opposed to a consumption-driven West’s genocide of the planet.
We are being isolated, smeared and threatened. Now is the time to stand together before it is too late. Now is the time to find your voice.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
Three New Zealanders, who were detained in Israel, after taking part in an international flotilla heading to Gaza, claim they were treated like animals.
Rana Hamida, Youssef Sammour and Samuel Leason arrived at Auckland International Airport this afternoon, and were greeted by a crowd of supporters and loved ones.
Among the supporters were Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson and MP Ricardo Menéndez March.
Israel’s foreign ministry said the claims were “complete lies”, and the detainees rights were upheld, but Hamida and Sammour claimed conditions were harsh.
“We were there for almost a week, more or less, and we were treated like crap, to be honest,” Sammour said. “We were treated like animals.”
Hamida said: “It was a violation of what humanitarian law is.”
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson and Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March at Auckland Airport today. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Guards refused medicine
Sammour said one of their fellow prisoners was diabetic, but the guards refused to give him his insulin, but Hamida admitted the hardship they faced was just a fraction of that experienced by the occupants of Gaza.
People gathered at Auckland Airport to welcome home the New Zealanders who were on the flotilla to Gaza. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
The flotilla, a group of dozens of boats carrying 500 people — including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg — had been trying to break Israel’s blockade.
Leason’s father, Adi Leason, earlier told RNZ’s Midday Report he was “immensely proud” of his 18-year-old son.
Samuel Leason hugging his father Adi Leason. Image: Marika Khabazi/RNZ
“We’ve been going to mass every Sunday for 18 years with Samuel, and he must have been listening and taking something of that formation on board. It’s lovely to see a young man with a deep conscience caring so deeply about people who he will never meet and to put himself in harm’s way for them.”
Samuel Leason felt a mix of relief and anger upon returning to New Zealand. He said it was amazing to see his family again, but he felt frustrated that the New Zealand government did not do more to intervene.
The trio said they had not been discouraged and planned to mobilise more than ever.
The putrid smell emanating from breakfast turned Daniela’s stomach, which wailed internally from hunger and nausea. For months, she had lived mostly on bread and the pantry items she could cobble together from the commissary in her ICE detention facility. Pregnant and trapped at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, she felt the gnawing of hunger and isolation.
“This is not a place for me,” Daniela, whose name has been changed to protect her from retaliation from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in Spanish in a message to The Intercept.
She’d been having abdominal pain, and she caught Covid in early September. According to Amanda Heffernan, a nurse midwife and professor at Seattle University who reviewed Daniela’s medical records at her request, for roughly two months, Daniela never received a prenatal visit with an OB-GYN.
Pregnant people generally aren’t supposed to be held in immigration detention at all. Official guidance in place since 2021 directs ICE to avoid detaining pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women, unless their release is “prohibited by law” or in “exceptional circumstances.” In cases where the government determines that pregnant women must be detained, the guidelines impose strict obligations on detention facilities to monitor their conditions and ensure that facilities meet their mental and physical needs.
The Trump administration appears to be ignoring that directive, according to immigration experts, advocates, a pregnant detainee, and The Intercept’s analysis of congressional reports and letters. Taken together, the evidence indicates that the Department of Homeland Security is detaining pregnant women at alarming rates, in rapidly deteriorating detention conditions.
“This is the first time I’ve seen so many pregnant people in [ICE] detention,” said Tania Wolf, the Southeast advocacy manager at the National Immigration Project. Experts at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women’s Refugee Commission made similar observations.
“There are cases of people who clearly meet the criteria not to be detained, and that ICE has gone ahead and detained anyway,” said Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the ACLU National Prison Project. Zain Lakhani, the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said her group has noticed “a significant increase in the number of pregnant detainees, of pregnant women, postpartum and lactating women in detention,” in the months since President Donald Trump returned to office.
Hard numbers on the number of pregnant women in immigration detention are nearly impossible to find. The Trump administration has stopped publishing semiannual reports on the condition and number of pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women in immigration detention facilities. Congress used to require that DHS compile the reports, but as of the last funding bill, it had dropped the mandate.
“Right now, we don’t have functional transparency and oversight mechanisms for DHS and for immigration detention,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, policy attorney and strategist for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
“This is the first time I’ve seen so many pregnant people in [ICE] detention.”
That leaves the public unaware of how many people there are like Daniela, who said there were two other pregnant women in her unit at the detention facility. The Intercept was not able to speak with the women directly.
Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for GEO Group, the for-profit prison company that operates Northwest Detention Center and 19 other ICE detention facilities, told The Intercept that GEO provides “high-quality services,” including medical care, “governed by standards set by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and independently accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.” Ferreira also noted that at the center where Daniela was detained, ICE provides government-administered health care to detainees.
Daniela, who is 27, immigrated to the United States in 2023 from Venezuela to seek asylum while pregnant with her first child, now a 2-year-old U.S. citizen. She missed her daughter while in ICE detention, she told The Intercept. They were kept apart for those two months.
“I have never left her alone,” Daniela said of her daughter.
Last week, after The Intercept made inquiries to DHS and GEO group, Daniela was released from ICE custody and reunited with her daughter.
“Detention is inherently dangerous and damaging for children and pregnant women,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., at a press conference in August. He was announcing a report his staff compiled over the summer, which found 14 credible accounts of pregnant women being mistreated within immigration detention.
Pregnant detainees, their partners, ICE officials, and their attorneys have reported pregnant women being denied adequate medical care, being forced to sleep on the floor, and being denied sufficient meals and snacks. Attorneys claimed their pregnant clients had waited “weeks” to see a doctor.
The partner of a woman in DHS custody told Senate staff that the woman was pregnant and had been left to bleed for days before facility staff would take her to the hospital. According to their report, once the woman arrived at the hospital, she was left alone in a room to miscarry without any water or medical assistance for 24 hours.
A Senate Judiciary Committee report released in May found similar allegations of abuse against pregnant women within two Louisiana detention facilities.
One of the women described in the report, who was roughly four months pregnant and had experienced bleeding, said she had not seen a doctor in months. Another woman detained at the facility, who was two months pregnant, alleged that she had not been seen by a doctor since her arrival. Many women told staffers about a pregnant woman who had miscarried while detained and was allegedly still bleeding while being deported.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin denied allegations of the mistreatment of pregnant women.
“There have been no miscarriages on removal flights since President Trump took office,” McLaughlin wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review. No pregnant woman has been forced to sleep on the floor. Meals are certified by dieticians, and they are given their prenatal vitamins. These smears about ICE mistreating and denying women medical care are contributing to our ICE officers facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”
Access to medical care is practically nonexistent within detention facilities, said Amanda Diaz, organizing director at Freedom for Immigrants, an immigrant-led advocacy organization that runs a national reporting hotline for people in detention.
“Medical care inside of detention facilities is insufficient in general. So, when we add in more specified procedures or medical care, that’s just completely inexistent,” said Diaz.
Diaz’s group runs a national detention hotline, and she said that in June, they received a call from a woman who was two months pregnant and said she was detained in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, another GEO Group facility.
The woman said she began experiencing abdominal pain and bleeding large blood clots. “The people around her in her pod and her cell started to call the nurse, and the medical care team, but they did not have a doctor present, nor did they have urgent medical staff there to respond,” said Diaz.
Diaz said the woman said she was forced to wait days to be seen at a hospital. Her organization has not been able to get in touch with the woman since her initial disclosure in June 2025.
Ferreira, the GEO Group spokesperson, said that people incarcerated at GEO Group facilities “are provided with access to teams of medical professionals including physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, and psychiatrists” as well as off-site specialists, emergency services, and hospitals.
In March, Homeland Security announced massive cuts to its civil rights and immigration oversight offices, which collected complaints about detention facilities and monitored conditions, leaving much of the agency’s conduct a black box. While the offices “haven’t been fully shut down,” according to Nathan-Pineau, “they’re essentially not functioning according to their mission.”
“They don’t want people to be able to report out what’s happening, what conditions are like, how they’re being mistreated,” said Nathan-Pineau.
In addition to allegations of inadequate medical care, experts also attest to poor food quality and inadequate nutrition within ICE facilities. “Food is usually expired or moldy or has maggots in them,” said Diaz.
“They don’t want people to be able to report how they’re being mistreated.”
Seven experts on immigration detention told The Intercept that the food quality within most ICE detention centers was extremely poor. “People report that they’re being fed maybe only once or twice a day, and that what they’re given is like a small sandwich or a burrito and like maybe a juice box, and that sometimes the food that they’re getting smells like it’s gone bad, or it might be expired,” said Nathan-Pineau. “I saw one report of a person who said they were given food that had visible mold on it.”
ICE facilities, which are often run by private contractors like the GEO Group, take “the lowest possible bid” they can get for a food contractor, said Heffernan, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on pregnancy and immigration detention.
Because of the low-quality meals available, one of the only options for people detained in immigration facilities is purchasing food from the commissary, often at exorbitant prices.
“It’s a giant exploitation machine for private companies because they make the telecommunications and commissary food really expensive,” she said. “In most detention centers around the country, people are working for like $1 a day and then the can of tuna fish is like $6. … It’s just a whole racket.”
McLaughlin also denied these allegations.
“Another day and another hoax about ICE facilities. These FALSE allegations about mistreatment and denying pregnant woman medical care are disgusting. Pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support, and accommodations aligned with community standards of care,” she wrote in a statement to The Intercept.
With transparency eroded, the massive ramp-up of the Trump administration’s deportation machine has almost certainly contributed to an uptick in pregnant women in immigration detention.
Lakhani pointed to the Trump administration’s immigration arrest quota of 3,000 people per day. “Given the commitments of the administration to ramping up immigration enforcement,” she said, she expects to see “an extreme escalation.”
Experts predict that the recent $45 billion cash infusion from the Big, Beautiful Bill for immigration detention facilities is going to make the situation worse. The funding change will give immigration enforcement a budget that is 62 percent larger than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons, making immigration detention the largest carceral network in the country.
The issues predate the second Trump administration, said Heffernan. “Neither recent Democratic nor Republican administrations actually take the well-being of detained pregnant folks into account in a very really way,” she said.
Diaz agreed that the lack of compliance preexisted the current administration. But, she wrote, “this problem is even worse now that ICE is emboldened to act with impunity and zero accountability.”
The federal government shutdown is stretching into a second week with no end in sight. As Democrats and Republicans in Congress face a politically charged funding impasse, nutrition experts warn that women and children reliant on federal food assistance funding are particularly vulnerable to imminently losing their grocery benefits.
In the midst of it all, America’s ability to track the real-world impacts of the shutdown on hunger is disappearing. Shortly before the shutdown, the Department of Agriculture moved to scrap the Household Food Security Report, the nation’s primary tool for tracking food insecurity, and in doing so, stripped away the very infrastructure needed to remedy rising hunger in America.
“If you want a functioning country where people are food-secure, this is the survey that gives you an indication of how food-secure people are. And that data shows us that food insecurity has gone up,” says Zia Mehrabi, a data scientist researching climate change and food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder. “So, actually, as a country, the government response to that should be, ‘How do we fix that?’ rather than say, ‘Oh … let’s cut the whole survey altogether.’”
If the shutdown continues into next week, the lapse in government funding could directly affect the nearly 7 million American pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and young children that rely on WIC, or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. The National WIC Association has warned that the program is days away from running out of money. The USDA told state agencies last week that they will not receive their quarterly allocation of money for WIC because of the lapse in federal funding, CNN reported.
On Tuesday, the White House stated that it would use revenue from some of President Donald Trump’s tariffs to pay for the WIC budget shortfall. Just how much funding would be provided, and how that would work, however, went unspecified. “While Democrats continue to vote to prolong the government shutdown, blocking funding for mothers and babies who rely on Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), USDA will utilize tariff revenue to fund WIC for the foreseeable future,” a USDA spokesperson told Grist. The representative did not provide clarification on the impacts of the shutdown on nutrition funding, nor did they provide further details about Trump’s proposed tariff revenue strategy. The White House declined Grist’s request for comment.
According to Mitch Jones, managing director of policy and litigation at Food & Water Watch, the president’s tariff move is “likely impossible” without an act of Congress to appropriate the funds. The nonprofit mapped where the most young children at risk of losing benefits live, finding that the shutdown will affect the highest proportion of kids in Puerto Rico, California, and New York.
“It is poor women and children who will feel the impacts first and worst,” said Jones.
In the U.S., food insecurity is not a problem of production. (America grows and imports more than enough food to feed its population.) Food insecurity is an economic and social condition. When low-income households are forced to decide between rent, utilities, gas, or groceries, research shows that food is almost always one of the first costs that people cut.
The 2023 Household Food Security Report found that 13.5 percent of American households, or roughly 47.4 million people, were struggling to afford enough food to meet basic nutritional needs. Nearly 14 million of them were children. The survey gathers data about economic status, food accessibility, and participation in federal and other food assistance from a nationally representative sample of roughly 30,000 U.S. households. That report, which contains the most recent data available, also revealed that not only had food insecurity overall risen from the year before, but that the number of food-insecure children had leapt by 3.2 percent in that same time period.
The idea for the survey came to a head during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when anti-hunger activists and policymakers ramped up discussions about tracking the economic levers that contribute to food insecurity on a large scale. It became evident that there was no relevant government data to enable their work, which sought to counter the Reagan administration’s move to shrink nutrition assistance funding based on a stagnating number of people using federal food benefits — a benchmark of national hunger. The government’s stance was in sharp contrast with soaring demand reported by food banks, and what activists and media coverage were capturing at the time.
In 1990, Congress passed legislation that mandated nutritional monitoring and research, which would serve as the formal basis for the creation of the annual food security survey carried out by the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, or ERS.
In the decades since, the data has been widely regarded as the federal government’s most accurate, reliable, and comprehensive way of measuring national food insecurity and Americans’ economic well-being. “I think that it is on the same level as the unemployment rate and the poverty rate. It’s one of those central measures,” said Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University who researches food insecurity, nutrition, and welfare policy.
When the USDA announced its termination of the survey on September 20, the agency called it “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous,” and claimed that it does “nothing more than fear monger.” Shortly after, roughly a dozen ERS staffers were placed on administrative leave.
Other federal datasets do capture some of the indicators recorded by the food security survey. But those reports are scarce and limited in their scope, according to Heflin. The Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey is one example — collected every other month, it asks fewer and much less detailed questions about food insecurity. Heflin says it’s a poor substitute for the annual report. She also strongly objects to the USDA’s claim about the purpose of the survey. “Clearly the person that wrote that announcement has never read the food security report,” said Heflin. “It is a very, very dry and clearly written report that just describes the statistics. There’s nothing about fear-mongering. [That’s] so far from the truth.”
The USDA’s press release also noted that trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained “virtually unchanged” despite substantive increases in SNAP spending — and evidence of rising food insecurity captured by earlier surveys.
“For 30 years, this study — initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments — failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder,” a USDA representative told Grist. When asked how USDA plans to track food insecurity in America moving forward, the spokesperson noted the agency “will continue to prioritize statutory requirements and where necessary, use the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available to it.”
Heflin warns that the loss of the report will have wide-reaching consequences. “It really leaves a huge hole in our understanding of who is food insecure, where food insecurity is most prevalent, and how changing economic conditions and policy conditions are impacting the American population,” said Heflin.
“I think of it as driving without your speedometer,” she said. “We’re not going to have accurate information to guide our reactions, both from a federal policy level and community level … We really are driving blind.”
The timing could not be worse. Food prices are at the highest they’ve been in five years, up 29 percent since 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. America’s public safety net is shrinking, too: Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” cut an estimated $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and tightened work requirements that reduce eligibility of who can qualify for the benefits.
“People are struggling to put food on their tables, and farmers are losing support, and food banks are being pushed beyond capacity,” said Jenique Jones, the executive director of the nonprofit WhyHunger. “Removing this data specifically — it silences the reality of hunger in America.”
Rising carbon levels also diminish the nutritional values of the food we eat, making it even harder for people to get the base nutrition they need.
“There’s really clear evidence that things like zinc, vitamin A, iron, these really important micronutrients that we are really dependent on, are going to go down with climate change,” said Mehrabi. “Climate change is putting up the price, and pushing down the nutritional content. So what do you think that’s going to do to low-income households that are trying to feed kids that need their micronutrients?”
All the while, the government shutdown has left thousands of workers across the nation bereft of income, in danger of falling behind on bills and over the “hunger cliff.” And without the national hunger dataset, Mehrabi warns that our ability to track the longer-term effects of government policy on food insecurity — or of the shutdown’s possible lapse in food assistance benefits — will be very difficult to do. As will efforts to combat what’s driving more and more Americans to struggle to afford food.
“The government wants to reduce accountability. This is the big picture of what’s happening right now. You’d be blind to think this is just the USDA, just one thing. This is a whole systematic attack,” he said. “There’s a story being told that this is going to make America great again. Actually, this is going to make America worse.”
Hooton wrongly suggested an out of date way of viewing international law justified Peters as he emphasised the horror endured by Israel and did not recount the genocide with at least 67,000 Palestinians killed, mostly women and children, unfolding as the mind conditioning of New Zealanders continued along the same path we’ve been sleeping under.
Hooton neglected to mention the failure of NZ First to include official advice in their cabinet paper, the secrecy and delay over the decision, and the words of the Israeli Finance Minister just this morning.
He also said in August 2025 that plans to build more than 3000 homes in a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
The so-called E1 project between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement has been frozen for decades amid fierce opposition internationally. Building there would effectively cut off the West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem, the planned capital for the state of Palestine.
Smotrich is not welcome in New Zealand — but travel bans is all Christopher Luxon’s coalition government will do as they bow low before the US and Israel — calling that “Sucking up” . . . “Independence”.
We suck up independently and clap ourselves – or at least Act do.
Japan threatens sanctions
As reported yesterday, Japan has threatened to sanction Israel if they mess with the possibility of Palestinian Statehood, but back in New Zealand we are busy festering over whether it is okay to protest outside a house — be it — an apartment block which houses a political party office and residential apartments in the same building or not.
Sticking points include a hefty 3 month prison sentence and $2000 fine but some say that this is all a distraction from our obligations to act against an unfolding genocide and from the dire state of the economy for those who are not wealthy and sorted.
Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’s negotiating team, has said the group has received guarantees from the US and mediators that an agreement on a first phase of a ceasefire agreement means the war in Gaza “has ended completely”.
We will see how Israel plays this — but levels of scepticism are sky high and many have no faith in Netanyahu because he had been offered the return of hostages a year ago and chose to ignore it.
Perhaps Israel will “behave while International Eyes” are on it but time will tell . . . whether spots have changed on the leopard.
In the meantime vote in your local elections — you only have one day to go — and when it comes to the next General Election – you know what to do.
This article is extracted from Gerard Otto’s Friday Morning Coffee column with permission. Matthew Hooton visited Israel and Palestine in 2017 as a guest of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. The Australian news site Crikey publishes a list of politicians and journalists who have travelled to Israel on junkets.
In the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire plan, Israel is required to withdraw to the agreed “yellow line” within 24 hours, after which a 72-hour period will begin for the handover of Israeli 48 captives (20 believed to be still alive) in exchange for 2000 Palestinian prisoners. Image: CC Al Jazeera
On the night Tahina Corcoran watched the state kill her husband at the Indiana State Prison, she rushed back to her car as fast as she could. It was around 1 a.m. on December 18, and she had already checked out of her hotel. “I knew before we headed to the prison for the execution that I would most likely want to get as far away from Michigan City as possible,” she said. She didn’t stop to talk to anyone. “I hated everybody there.”
She broke down when she got inside the car. Tahina’s 30-year-old son Justin, who also witnessed the execution, tried to comfort her. Then they started the two-hour trip back home. They didn’t discuss what they had seen. “I just kept thinking, ‘I gotta get me home, I gotta get me and my son home.’”
The following days were a blur. She was in shock and felt numb. She’d had the foresight to finish all her holiday preparations long before the execution. “Everything was wrapped, all the decorations were up, all the food was bought for Christmas dinner,” she recalled. So she focused on retrieving her husband’s remains, picking them up just before New Year’s. “And as I was carrying his box of ashes, I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this is our first actual car ride together.’”
Tahina, 48, had known Joseph Corcoran since middle school. Over his 26 years on death row, she actually married him twice: first about five years after he was sentenced to die, and again two months before his execution. Her two kids, now grown, had been raised to know Corcoran and why he was on death row. “They knew that, you know, Joe was sick and that he was in prison,” Tahina said. “And they just knew that their mommy was very happy with Joe, and Joe was always a part of our family.”
Corcoran was 22 years old when he shot his brother, James, and three other men in Fort Wayne. His lawyers would argue that his actions were driven by undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. From the start of his incarceration, Corcoran was convinced that prison guards were using an ultrasound machine to force him to speak. He repeatedly said he wished to drop his appeals and volunteer for execution. Although prosecutors accused him of faking his delusions, Tahina saw them firsthand. “He was very mentally ill,” she said. “And Joe believed that the only way that he could escape this torment and torture was by dying.”
Corcoran was the first person executed by the state of Indiana in 15 years. As in many places, the state’s execution chamber had remained dormant due to a lack of available drugs used to carry out lethal injection. But in June 2024, then-Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb made an announcement. “After years of effort, the Indiana Department of Correction has acquired a drug — pentobarbital — which can be used to carry out executions,” he said. Within months, at the state attorney general’s request, the Indiana Supreme Court had scheduled two execution dates: Corcoran on December 18, and Benjamin Ritchie on May 20, 2025.
Indiana’s new drug protocol — a single, massive dose of pentobarbital — was the same formula used by the federal government, which carried out 13 executions at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute during President Donald Trump’s first term. Death penalty states had adopted the one-drug method despite doubts over its efficacy and turned to compounding pharmacies to obtain it. But the results could be disturbing. Some people executed with the pentobarbital appeared to suffer on the gurney, and autopsies consistently showed pulmonary edema — fluid in the lungs that, according to experts, would feel like drowning.
“Joe knew that he was kind of a guinea pig,” Tahina said. He wanted an autopsy to be carried out after his death, she said, because he knew something could go wrong. He also allowed a journalist with the Indiana Capital Chronicle to be added to his personal witness list — a way to circumvent a state ban on media witnesses. But in the end, things seemed to go mostly according to plan. The curtains went up at 12:34 a.m. Corcoran was declared dead 10 minutes later. “After a brief movement of his left hand and fingers at about 12:37 a.m.,” the journalist reported, “Corcoran did not move again.”
But the execution of Benjamin Ritchie five months later did not go smoothly. Tahina was watching the livestream of a vigil outside the prison hosted by Death Penalty Action that night, when viewers received word that Ritchie had moved unexpectedly on the gurney. “He violently sat up — raised his shoulders — and twitched violently for about three seconds,” one defense attorney told reporters.
Tahina was horrified. But it wasn’t until she read additional coverage weeks later that she began to question what she had seen at her husband’s execution. One expert said that pentobarbital “should be really, really effective — really fast. No one should move.” This had not been the case with Corcoran. “You could see his hands twitching,” Tahina said. This echoed the initial news reports. But she also saw something other witnesses did not: “Joe tried to raise his head up.” Justin, who was sitting behind her, described the same thing. “To me, he tried to sit up, or at least it looked like it,” he said.
“How was I supposed to know that wasn’t normal?”
Tahina felt sick, then angry. “How was I supposed to know that wasn’t normal?”
She grew even more alarmed when she heard comments in the news from Indiana’s newly inaugurated Republican Gov. Mike Braun. His predecessor, Holcomb, had announced the state’s procurement of pentobarbital in June 2024 — six months before Corcoran’s execution. But Braun had since told reporters that the drugs only had “a 90-day shelf life” — and that the state had previously gotten “in a pickle” by purchasing pentobarbital that expired before it could be used.
Braun insisted that neither of the executions were carried out with expired pentobarbital. But Tahina didn’t believe him. His claims were confusing and contradictory. Shortly after Ritchie’s execution, Braun told reporters that the state had no more pentobarbital — and no plans to buy more. “We’ve got to address the broad issue of, what are other methods, the discussion of capital punishment in general,” he said. But just a few weeks later, his attorney general requested to schedule a third execution.
Today, Tahina has more questions than answers. “I want to know what happened,” she said. As Indiana prepares to kill again this week, she is furious at the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding executions — as well as the apathy of the public toward the people executed in their name.
But she is especially enraged at the thought that her husband’s execution will be swept under the rug. “All of those people — the governor, everybody — have moved on. No big deal. But it’s a big deal to me. And it’s a big deal to my family. And I want the public to know what really goes on.”
A printed photo of Tahina Corcoran posing with her husband Joseph Corcoran at the Indiana State Prison in October 2024.Photo: Liliana Segura
Just after midnight on Friday, October 10, barring any last-minute intervention, Indiana will execute 53-year-old Roy Ward by lethal injection. Despite the questions still swirling around the last two executions, the method will be the same as the one used to kill Corcoran and Ritchie. “No changes have been made to the execution protocol since Mr. Ritchie’s execution,” the Indiana attorney general’s office wrote in a federal court filing last month. Although there was a debrief and “verbal review” among members of the execution team, “a formal investigation or post-execution review was not conducted.”
Indiana’s revival of capital punishment is part of a wider resurgence across the country. The midnight execution will be the first of six executions in seven days, with death sentences subsequently set to be carried out in Florida, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, and Arizona. To date, 34 people have been executed in the U.S. this year alone, with 10 more executions scheduled before the end of 2025. While the vast majority have been killed by lethal injection, two have been killed using nitrogen gas and another two by firing squad.
Designed to resemble a medical procedure, lethal injection is still widely perceived as the most humane form of execution. But states have spent the past two decades retooling their formulas due to key drug shortages. As states have experimented with different drug combinations, manufacturers have been increasingly reluctant to supply products for lethal injection, prompting officials to seek out less reputable sources. To escape scrutiny, states have also passed legislation to make their drug sources secret — ostensibly to protect drug suppliers from anti-death penalty activists.
Today, all death penalty states hide the sources of their lethal injection drugs. But Indiana stands apart for its secrecy. It is the only active death penalty state that prohibits media witnesses from attending executions. While other states offer a designated media area on prison grounds, along with a chance to hear from witnesses, the Indiana Department of Correction provides a parking lot across the street and a brief statement delivered by email.
Indiana is the only active death penalty state that prohibits media witnesses from attending executions.
Until recently, there was almost no publicly available information about the drugs used by the Indiana Department of Correction. This changed in late September with a series of state disclosures to Ward’s attorneys as part of federal litigation challenging his execution. Death penalty attorneys had spent months asking for records pertaining to the acquisition, storage, and destruction of the drugs. According to the state, “the pentobarbital arrived in a sealed cardboard box with a Styrofoam container inside.” The package contained the drug vials along with “inventory slips and certificates of analysis.” At the prison, the pentobarbital is put in “a safe behind three levels of locks,” the state wrote. “Three Indiana State Prison employees have the ability to unlock the safe.”
But the biggest revelation was that, according to the state, the Indiana Department of Correction does not rely on compounded pentobarbital as previously suspected but instead uses manufactured pentobarbital, procured from an unnamed pharmacy, to carry out executions. Although the source of the drugs remains secret, the presiding judge privately reviewed photographs, labeled “Highly Sensitive Documents,” and concluded that the evidence supported the state’s claims.
This was especially surprising in light of the 90-day shelf life invoked by the governor earlier this year, which strongly hinted at compounded pentobarbital, since compounded drugs are known to degrade faster than manufactured drugs. And it only deepened confusion over why Indiana has apparently destroyed at least three unused doses of pentobarbital, as revealed in records previously released through separate litigation. The heavily redacted documents include Drug Enforcement Administration forms documenting the destruction of the drugs through dubious means. One dose was destroyed by fire in June at a penitentiary three hours south of Michigan City. Another two doses were destroyed in July at the Indiana State Prison. The method of destruction reads “Poured in kitty litter.”
“Our biggest concern was that compounded pentobarbital was going to be used,” said Indiana defense attorney Joanna Green, who represents Ward. “We know now that it’s not.” Ward’s legal team has since dropped their remaining federal challenges, filing a joint motion requiring the state to show that it complied with its own protocol when executing Ward. “There are still a lot of questions about how Indiana obtains manufactured pentobarbital,” Green said. “And there are still significant questions about what happened in the previous two executions.”
Not long after Ritchie’s execution, Tahina got a message via Facebook from a woman in Canada named Colleen Villeneuve. Tahina had been responding to cruel comments about Ritchie and the woman wanted to say thank you. She introduced herself as Ritchie’s girlfriend.
“Nobody wants to be connected with somebody through these circumstances,” Villeneuve told me. But the two women quickly bonded. For people whose loved ones are executed by the state, the experience can be crushingly isolating. “It’s not the same as when anyone else dies,” Villeneuve said. “You have to deal with not only them being killed, but you have a whole army of people who talk bad about the person.”
Villeneuve had not witnessed Ritchie’s execution. She was at her hotel a few miles away when she heard the first reports from outside the prison about his violent movement on the gurney. Another lawyer sent her a text message saying the execution had gone quickly — “and that’s what I focused on.”
Villeneuve had first written to Richie six years earlier. Before that, “I’d never been to a prison, I’d never talked to anyone that was in prison.” But she stumbled upon a documentary on YouTube starring famed British journalist Trevor McDonald, who gained rare access to the penitentiary in Michigan City. Among those interviewed was Ritchie, a tattooed 30-something who talked bluntly about his life and his crime with a mix of self-reflection and bravado.
Ritchie was 20 years old when he shot a police officer during a botched robbery. Although he disputed the state’s version of events — prosecutors said he ambushed his victim, while Ritchie said he fired while running away — he did not deny his guilt. He was a “stupid kid,” he said. “I would do things without thinking about ’em.”
Villeneuve was struck by Ritchie. “He just didn’t fit, you know, the Ted Bundy type” she imagined to be on death row. Instead, she saw a man acting “full of himself,” trying to be tough for the cameras. On a whim, she wrote to Ritchie, who replied with “the most ridiculous letter,” trying to “make himself sound cool and available.” Nevertheless, the two kept writing. A year later, Villeneuve went to visit Ritchie for the first time.
The closer Villeneuve became to Ritchie, the less he resembled the swaggering convict he tried to portray in the documentary. She found him to be a funny, compassionate man who would do anything for his cat, Cletus, a black and white shorthair whom he’d raised as part of the prison’s cat therapy program. She was also confronted with his painful family history. As his lawyers would explain in his clemency petition, Ritchie’s childhood was filled with trauma and neglect that shaped his early life. When he was 10 years old, Ritchie was sent to a psychiatric facility, where he “attempted suicide and told hospital staff he felt like ‘everyone would be better off if I were dead.’”
Ritchie seemed determined to help Villeneuve raise her own daughter, Shiloh, with the love he’d lacked growing up. In a letter asking for clemency, Villeneuve wrote that he had been “instrumental with her growth. … Shiloh enjoys nothing more than to tell Benjamin about a test she aced or a new move she learned in kick-boxing.” In the days leading up to his execution, Shiloh shared videos he sent via a contraband cellphone on TikTok.
An undated photo of Benjamin Ritchie posing in his death row cell with his cat, Cletus, at the Indiana State Prison.Photo: Colleen Villeneuve
Ritchie had never really dwelled on the state’s plan to kill him. “He didn’t think they were ever going to,” Villeneuve said. In the documentary, he pointed out that “a lot of us are getting off death row” — and the odds were indeed in his favor. Until Corcoran’s execution last December, only 20 of the 97 people sentenced to die in Indiana’s “modern” death penalty era had died at the hands of the state. The majority have been removed from death row due to reversals by appellate courts, commutations, or deals reached with prosecutors.
Villeneuve was less optimistic about Ritchie’s chances of surviving death row. Still, in retrospect, she said she was in denial too. She and Ritchie did not discuss any end-of-life preparations “I honestly didn’t think we were going to get to that,” she said.
The last time she saw him was on video, right before they came to take him away, she said. What came next is contained in affidavits filed by witnesses. Witnesses were led into a small room well after midnight. The curtains went up at 12:35 a.m. A couple minutes in, Ritchie suddenly raised up his torso from the gurney, pushing hard against the restraints before collapsing back down. One witness gasped and grabbed one of his attorneys by the arm. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said, bowing her head. When she looked back up, he was gone.
In August I went to see Tahina at her home in a rural suburb about an hour from Fort Wayne. Corcoran’s paintings hung throughout the house; on her refrigerator was a handwritten letter from Corcoran listing songs he liked. “Remember me when you listen,” it said. In the living room, a blue urn holding Corcoran’s ashes were displayed in a large wooden cabinet.
Tahina had shared Corcoran’s private autopsy report, giving me permission to send it to two different experts. But both said that the reports did not contain sufficient detail to draw any firm conclusions about whether his execution had been botched. Although it noted congestion in Corcoran’s organs — one potential sign of pulmonary edema — his lungs were not as heavy as those seen in other autopsies of people killed by lethal injection.
Tahina found the lack of clarity frustrating. She was still trying to make sense of her husband’s death. Yet much of the visit centered on his life. She showed me the top she wore to his execution — a gray sweatshirt stamped with a pink palmprint reading “Joseph Corcoran touched this heart” — along with a scrapbook stuffed with photos, handmade greeting cards, and newspaper clippings. There were pages of wedding pictures; she had the request Corcoran submitted seeking permission to marry her in 2004 and the index cards with the handwritten script from their ceremony 20 years later.
Tahina had asked her son Justin to join us, along with Corcoran’s spiritual adviser, Rev. David Leitzel, who knew Corcoran’s family from his church. Whereas Tahina’s early recollections of Corcoran were of a school crush on a boy who dressed like Wally Cleaver from “Leave It to Beaver,” Leitzel remembered a child who seemed slightly out of step with his peers. “If I pull up pictures, you’ll be hard pressed to find one of Joe smiling,” he said.
Conversations about Corcoran were haunted by the death of his parents. They were murdered in 1992, five years before Corcoran committed the killings that sent him to death row. Corcoran was tried as a juvenile for his parents’ murders but acquitted. Many believed he did it. Although Tahina didn’t, she also questioned why he never received the help he clearly needed afterward. If he’d been properly diagnosed and medicated, she said, he might have been able to live a normal life outside prison.
Instead, like many condemned people with mental illness, Corcoran’s delusions worsened during his decades on death row. Tahina read one of his later letters aloud, in which he chronicled a “typical day.” It began with a harrowing account of trying to sleep, which he could only do by conjuring violent images of killing prison officers. “That is the nonsense the people who man the ultrasound surveillance devices put me through whenever I try to sleep,” he wrote. The mind control technology dictated his thoughts, speech, and muscles, he wrote, causing pain and involuntary movement throughout his body. “That is why people around me think I have Tourettes.”
Leitzel was disturbed by the letter. He had never heard Corcoran talk that way. Tahina said Corcoran probably hid his delusions from Leitzel because he felt ashamed. But the two also shared many of the same positive impressions of Corcoran. He was highly intelligent, had a sense of humor, and was deeply devout. To Tahina, he was the closest thing there was to a soulmate. “He could always make me smile.”
Throughout my visit to their home, Justin had mostly listened. He had not wanted to attend the execution. But he had gone to support his mother. When it came time to describe what he saw, he spoke quietly and deliberately. “It’s been almost a year and I’m still having nightmares,” he said.
The days before were a blur. He remembered sharing Corcoran’s last meal with him, which was served several days before the execution. The warden brought several pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which they ate as a family. It was then that the warden ran down the logistics of what would happen on the night of the execution.
The vans had picked them up from their hotel around 10 p.m. They arrived at the prison, went through security, and were taken to a building toward the back of the sprawling penitentiary. It was after 12:30 a.m. when they were led to the witness chamber, a cramped room with two rows of chairs facing a small window. The lights were lowered. At 12:34 a.m. the blinds were raised. Corcoran was strapped down to the gurney, with Leitzel by his side.
Tahina stood in front of a living room window to recreate the scene. “I had a full view of my husband’s body,” she said. But she could not hear anything in the chamber. Nor could she tell when the drugs were actually delivered. But she was firm that Corcoran moved. “He went like this,” she said, straining her head forward. “And tried to raise up.”
“Yeah,” Justin said. “He looked like he was trying to look,” he said, turning his own head to the side.
“And then he literally tried to raise the top part of his body,” Tahina said. She went over to the couch and laid down with her arms out, acting out what she had seen.
Although he was standing beside him in the death chamber, Leitzel did not see Corcoran move. But he conceded that his eyes were closed in prayer the whole time. He also said something startling. Looking out from the death chamber, he could not see the witnesses at all. He realized that the window between the rooms was made up of one-way glass. Corcoran had always told Tahina that her face was the last thing he wanted to see before he died. But in the end, he could not see her at all.
Tahina, meanwhile, cannot escape the images from that night. “Once you see it you can’t unsee it,” she said. “So I try to keep my mind scrambled, I try to keep everything busy, busy, busy in my head all the time.” If she doesn’t, she said, taking a deep breath, “All I can see is my husband strapped down on that gurney.”
Miko Vergun, a plaintiff in the landmark 2015 federal youth climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States,which questioned the constitutionality of 50 years of government support for fossil fuels,wasn’t surprised on the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term when he issued three executive orders meant to clear the way for the drilling of more oil and gas and the mining of more coal in the name of energy security. She was nevertheless “disheartened” that her government planned to redouble its support of fossil fuels even in light of the harm climate change was causing.
Then three months later, she learned that the U.S. Supreme Court would not reconsider its 2020 dismissal of Juliana — after a decade, her case was over. “After Juliana, truthfully, I had given up hope,” she told Grist.
The Juliana case was the first in a series of lawsuits brought by the nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust on behalf of youth plaintiffs. In August 2023, they won their case against Montana, which argued for a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment,” and now the state must consider greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts in its permitting process. In 2024, the state of Hawaiʻi settled a case brought by Our Children’s Trust, agreeing to decarbonize its transportation system and reach zero emissions by 2045.
In spring of this year, Our Children’s Trust invited Vergun to join another lawsuit — challenging the constitutionality of Trump’s three executive orders, “Unleashing American Energy,” “Declaring a National Energy Emergency” and “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.”
Vergun had her doubts. “It’s really easy to take a nihilistic view, especially in these uncertain times,” she told Grist. “But I woke up one day, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to join.’”
In September, after the initial court proceedings, Vergun, her lawyers, and 21 other plaintiffs, ages 7 to 25, met in a Missoula, Montana, courthouse for the evidentiary hearing in a new case, Lighthiser v. Trump. The hearing was a sort of mini-trial in which both sides were given a chance to present their arguments and to question witnesses. The testimony was both emblematic of Our Children’s Trust’s approach and indicative of their evolving strategy.
A protester holds a sign with a quote from Eva Lighthiser, the lead plaintiff in Lighthiser v. Trump.
Photo by Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images
On the first day of the hearing, gray fog cloaked downtown Missoula, but the young plaintiffs bubbled with excitement as they strode toward the red-brick courthouse through a pathway festooned with marigolds. About 100 supporters carrying signs cheered as they entered the courthouse and filed up to the second floor. Once everyone settled into the long wooden rows facing the judge’s bench, Julia Olson, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, rose for her opening statement. “This case asks a fundamental question,” she said. “Does the United States Constitution guard against abuses of power by executive order that deprive children and youth of their fundamental rights to life and to their liberties?”
It’s a question that, according to Mary Wood, professor of law at the University of Oregon, distinguishes the legal strategy in Lighthiser from Juliana. The earlier case asked the court to order the government to prepare and implement a plan to fix climate change. This time, plaintiffs are seeking a narrower remedy — an injunction to stop implementation of the three specific executive orders. “It’s a discrete request in the here and now designed to prevent further, ongoing harm,” Wood said.
But it wasn’t a difference the government lawyers conceded. “Here we are back again, attempting to deal with fundamentally the same legal claim all over again,” Department of Justice attorney Michael Sawyer said in his opening argument. The plaintiffs, he said, want the courts to “step in and exercise general supervision over the nation’s energy policy.”
Since the defendants declined to call any witnesses, Our Children’s Trust had two days to make their case. They began with young plaintiffs. First Olson called to the stand Joseph Lee of Fullerton, California, a wiry 19-year-old with long bangs and glasses wearing a dark suit and sneakers. He raised his right hand and became the first youth in history to testify in a federal youth climate case against the U.S. — something that Our Children’s Trust had been working toward for more than a decade. Sitting in the witness stand, Lee recounted growing up near an oil refinery and developing asthma; how heat, humidity, and wildfire smoke made it feel like his lungs were filled with water; how he has been hospitalized multiple times, once even surgically intubated during a heat wave. “I’m not sure if I can go on,” he said.
Olson asked him: “Will stopping the EOs end climate change?”
“No,” he replied. “But it will stop it from getting worse.”
In cross-examination, DOJ attorney Erik Van de Stouwe noted the lack of air conditioning in Lee’s dorm at UC San Diego and how that must aggravate his asthma. “But you didn’t take legal action against the State of California, right?
“To categorize the years of struggles I’ve had into a mere issue of air conditioning is something that’s hurtful,” Lee replied.
The second witness, Jorja M., 17, told the court about grabbing her stuffed animals when a wildfire threatened her home in Livingston, Montana. She testified about a 2022 flood that crept up to the door of her family’s vet clinic, “even though we are not on a floodplain.” She described black coal dust from trains coating her home and irritating her nose, throat, and lungs. The coal came from Colstrip, a plant that was scheduled to close and will now remain open following the Trump executive orders.
As the government’s attorney Miranda Jensen approached the witness stand, Jorja shifted nervously in her seat. “You testified that you have three horses, right?” Jensen asked.
“Yes,” Jorja answered.
“And you’re aware that raising horses contributes to global warming?”
“I am aware of that, yes.”
“Are you concerned by the emissions that your horses contribute to the problem?”
Gasps of exasperation arose from the audience.
“I think that having three horses has minimal emissions,” Jorja said.
After answering more questions, Jorja returned to her seat in the gallery and caught eyes with Avery McRae, the next plaintiff to testify. They smiled knowingly at each other.
After she was sworn in as the next witness, Olson asked McRae, 20, to describe struggling to care for her horse and other farm animals during wildfires and heat waves that have been plaguing Oregon. McRae remembered “coughing” and “feeling awful.” As she continued on with her testimony, McRae described moving to Florida for college, only to walk right into a different sort of climate disaster: In her first three years, she had to evacuate for three massive hurricanes. “The whole campus was inundated with sea water,” she said, her voice calm but tinged with anger. She had to pay for an Airbnb, huddle in a closet during a tornado warning, and fly home to attend class on Zoom for five weeks.
In the cross-examination, the government lawyer clarified which climate disasters happened before Trump signed the executive orders and which happened after.
Olson had a chance to redirect.
“Are you bringing this case to remedy past injuries?” she asked.
Avery answered, “No.”
“Are you asking the court to provide the remedy of stopping the EOs?”
“Yes.”
With those testimonies, Our Children’s Trust had begun to lay out its basic argument — that its clients are suffering from climate change and Trump’s executive orders will make it worse, a violation of their constitutional rights to life and liberty. Their legal strategy for the rest of the hearing depended heavily on what Wood, the professor at the University of Oregon, called “an all-star cast” of fact witnesses.
The afternoon testimony opened with Steve Running, a white-haired man in a gray suit who joked he might be the oldest person in the courtroom. Running, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, testified that science has established that the burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, which warm the planet and harm the plaintiffs. “Every additional tonne of CO2 matters to the whole world and definitely matters to these plaintiffs,” he said. When asked if the executive orders would make the youth’s injuries worse, Running answered, “Unquestionably.”
Excitement was palpable in the courtroom as Olson called John Podesta to the stand. Podesta was an adviser for former president Joe Biden on clean energy and climate policy when Juliana was in pretrial motions. He and the Biden administration took the position that the argument in Juliana was too broad to implement, so his appearance here was striking.
Olson asked Podesta to explain how executive orders were created and administered. Then she said: “Mr. Podesta, is it fair to say that if an executive order is enjoined, that [government officials] could ensure implementation of that court-ordered injunction?” she asked.
“It would be incumbent on every agent of the federal government who has taken an oath of office to abide by that order, up to and including the president,” he answered. In cross-examination, Sawyer, of the DOJ, worked to get to the heart of the government’s defense — that the plaintiffs are asking the court to weigh into a policy debate. “President Biden also issued day one executive orders, right?” he asked.
Podesta nodded. “Yes.”
Sawyer led Podesta through a series of questions about Biden’s executive order, which compelled the executive branch agencies to take actions geared toward addressing climate change — and which one of Trump’s orders revoked. Sawyer’s main point was to make the case that signing executive orders that revoke a prior administration’s policies and establish new ones is just something that presidents do.
When court recessed for the day, the young plaintiffs chatted warmly with the experts as they exited, thanking them for their support. All the experts had testified for free. On the second day of the hearing, dawn broke brightly, the sun rising over the golden hills surrounding Missoula. In the court room, the young plaintiffs stood in the rows of wooden benches, chatting and laughing quietly as the lawyers hustled to take their seats. The witnesses included an energy economist, a pediatrician, and one more young person.
In her closing arguments, Olson attempted again to draw distinctions between Lighthiser and Juliana, and underscore the injuries that her clients are experiencing, which, she argues, are being worsened by the government’s actions. The judge jumped in. “What is it that you want me to do?”
“The remedy is a simple one,” Olson answered. “It’s enjoining the government from implementing the three executive orders and the specific provisions within them that we have alleged are infringing the plaintiffs’ rights.” The judge expressed concern that a ruling in their favor would lead to an ongoing judicial monitoring of the administration’s actions.
“Your Honor, it’s not about policy choices,” Olson countered. “The Supreme Court has said, in case after case after case, that the fundamental rights to life and liberty don’t get put to a vote. If policymakers could decide to threaten children’s lives, then the Bill of Rights would mean nothing.”
In the government’s closing arguments, Sawyer said the judge was correct to be concerned about wading into a policy issue that should be addressed by Congress and the executive branch. Linking government actions to the rights to life and liberty is, he warned, “a one-way ratchet for safety-ism.”
Judge Christensen has not indicated when he will rule on the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, which would put the executive orders on hold until there is a trial to decide the case. The defendants have also filed a motion to dismiss that is before the court.
According to Mat Dos Santos, co-director of Our Children’s Trust, all the youth climate cases, including Lighthiser, aim to place bumpers on government action — like in a bowling alley — so governments are nudged into taking greenhouse gases and kid’s lives and health into account whenever they set policies.
The key question facing the judge, according to Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, is whether there is a constitutional basis for the court to act. Striking down executive orders “can be done in a proper case if there is a legal basis for it,” Gerrard said.
Miko Vergun, for one, is still hopeful. “I’m just waiting for good news, to be honest,” she said.
New Zealand advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has “cautiously welcomed” the Gaza ceasefire and proposed exchange of hostages between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas.
At least 7000 Palestinians are being held in detention without trial by Israel while about 20 Israeli soldiers are held by Hamas.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said the deal was a reprieve from Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.
“It’s been two years of mass bombing and starvation. It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century,” he said in a statement.
“The real tragedy is that the main elements of this ceasefire deal were already agreed to nine months ago in January. Israel was forced to let Palestinians return to Gaza City, and lower the intensity of its attacks.
“Within a few weeks, the Israelis scuttled the agreement, shut off all food and intensified their attacks and are now ethnically re-cleansing Gaza City.
“Expulsion is still the Israeli government’s aim. Netanyahu must be disappointed that Trump is no longer advocating for removal of Palestinians from Gaza, but Netanyahu usually gets his way with Trump in the end.”
Called on support
Nazal said PSNA especially noted that the Hamas acceptance statement called on countries supporting the deal — New Zealand included — to make sure Israel abided by the few specific conditions imposed on the Zionist state in the agreement.
“Israel has broken every peace deal it has ever signed on Palestine, right from occupying more than half of what was allocated by the United Nations as a Palestinian state in 1948,” Nazzal said.
“In the 1993 Oslo peace deal, which the US also brokered, there was meant to be a Palestinian state within five years. Israel made sure this never happened.
“This time, there is no mention of the Occupied West Bank. Nothing about return of refugees. There is no commitment in the Trump deal for a Palestinian state, for Winston Peters to eventually recognise.
“There’s just a vague pathway with no timelines and it’s all conditional on Israeli approval,” Nazzal said.
“So we have a message for Winston Peters, who is demanding PSNA and other protesters applaud the Trump deal as ‘case solved’.
“Ceasefire or not, our campaign to isolate the apartheid state of Israel will continue to grow until all Palestinians are liberated.”
Two years ago, Israel suffered what was perhaps the most jarring day in its modern history. The events of October 7, 2023, weren’t just a military failure or an intelligence lapse — they were a national humiliation. Police stations were stormed and overrun. Military posts were taken. Soldiers and officers, including from elite units, were killed or captured. The Gaza Division of the Israeli army, a symbol of Israel’s long-standing dominance over the Strip, fell into chaos.
Israel invoked the Hannibal Doctrine — a policy that allows military forces to prevent the capture of soldiers even at the cost of their lives, by opening fire on both Hamas and the kidnapped Israelis. That day, it wasn’t theory — it was execution.
In the fog of panic, Israeli fire turned on its own, and the thin line between protecting society and sacrificing civilians for strategic ends evaporated.
But October 7 was just the opening act. What followed was a war unlike anything Israel had fought in fifty years — brutal, relentless, and devastating in scale and ambition. Gaza was not merely targeted; it was systematically dismantled. What began as retaliation became something else entirely: an erasure.
The illusion of military supremacy
Two years into the war, one fact is undeniable: Israel, backed by some of the most powerful military alliances in the world, has failed to conquer a territory smaller than half of New York City. 365 square kilometers — that’s all Gaza is. Yet despite overwhelming force, technological advantage, and political cover, the Israeli army has been unable to fully occupy it.
This failure is especially glaring given the scale of destruction. Over 200,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza — the equivalent of 20 nuclear bombs without radiation. That’s not metaphor. That’s the measure of how far Israel was willing to go and is not willing to stop yet: flattening entire towns, turning hospitals, schools, mosques, residential towers, universities, even cemeteries into rubble.
Gaza has endured more concentrated bombing than any territory since the Second World War.
Indeed, what Gaza has endured over the past two years dwarfs even some of the most infamous wartime bombardments of the twentieth century. In February 1945, Allied forces dropped roughly 3,900 tons of explosives on Dresden in a three-day firestorm that killed an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 people and obliterated much of the city. Where Dresden became a symbol of wartime excess, Gaza is witnessing destruction on a scale so vast it makes Dresden look like a prelude.
And unlike Dresden, Gaza’s devastation has been broadcast live, in real time, to a world that cannot claim it did not know.
But Israel was never alone and had every advantage and complicity: real-time intelligence from the United States and Britain, precision munitions from Germany, satellite targeting, drone supremacy, complete air dominance. And still, two years on, it cannot claim control over this tiny strip of land.
The problem was never firepower. It was urban warfare — a terrain where bombs are blunt tools and conquest requires something far more difficult: boots on the ground, close-quarters control, and the ability to hold territory without hemorrhaging soldiers or sparking endless insurgency.
The Israeli army, trained for dominance but not for urban occupation, found itself caught in a repetitive, grinding cycle: enter, level, retreat, repeat.
Neighborhoods were captured and declared “secured,” only to be abandoned and recontested days later. Troops rotated in and out of ruined zones, unable to maintain sustained presence. For every area leveled, resistance either moved underground or regrouped elsewhere. The war turned into a grim spectacle of destruction without achievement.
This revealed a contradiction at the heart of Israel’s military doctrine: it can destroy almost anything, but it cannot hold what it destroys. Air supremacy means nothing when the battlefield is a bombed-out maze. Gaza’s density, devastation, and defiance turned every advantage into a liability.
So while the Strip lies in ruins, it is not conquered. And that truth — buried under declarations of “strategic success” — is the defeat Israel cannot admit.
The real objective: Not security—territory
Israel’s war was not, as officially claimed, about eliminating Hamas or rescuing hostages. That narrative collapsed quickly under the weight of Israel’s own actions. From the beginning, hostage negotiations were treated as peripheral. Every time progress was made on potential ceasefires, it was Netanyahu’s office that pulled the plug — because every hostage released made the war harder to justify. Every ceasefire threatened to slow the campaign just enough for the world to ask uncomfortable questions.
This was never about hostages. It was about Gaza. More specifically: it was about removing Gaza as an obstacle to territorial ambition.
Netanyahu, cornered by political instability, corruption trials, and a fragile coalition held together by the far-right, saw in October 7 a chance to do what had always been unspoken: clear Gaza. Not of Hamas, but of Palestinians. Permanently. Not by announcement, but by attrition — bombing, starvation, siege, trauma.
Gaza’s civilian population wasn’t collateral damage. It was the target.
Destroying Gaza wasn’t a means to defeat an enemy. It was a means to reshape a demographic reality. This wasn’t defense. It was a conquest dressed up as security.
When the mask falls
In war, the first casualty is truth. But in this war, truth didn’t die quietly — it was dragged into the open, exposed by the very actors trying to hide it. Israeli soldiers live streamed brutality. Government officials made genocidal statements on public platforms. Civilian infrastructure was not accidentally struck — it was deliberately annihilated.
At first, the world made excuses. Israel had been attacked and was “entitled to defend itself”. But over time, the scale, duration, and clarity of its actions stripped away any remaining ambiguity. When every hospital (38 in total) becomes a target, when entire neighborhoods are turned to rubble, when starvation is used as a weapon — it becomes impossible to speak of “defence” without insulting reason.
And so the global tide turned. Governments hesitated, but people didn’t. From Berlin to Boston, from Sydney to Cape Town, millions marched — not for Hamas, but for the principle that no state, however victimised, has the right to massacre an entire population in response.
Israel didn’t just lose global support. It lost the moral framing that had shielded, or it had hid behind, it for decades.
It had positioned itself as a democracy surrounded by enemies. But democracies don’t bomb refugee camps, don’t livestream the deaths of children, don’t cut off water to two million people and don’t hold hostages’ lives hostage to political calculus.
Israel’s loss over the last two years hasn’t been military — it’s been existential. The myth of invincibility is broken. The image of moral exceptionalism, cultivated so carefully for decades, has shattered. Netanyahu, once a master manipulator of global opinion, now finds himself isolated, distrusted, even among allies.
What October 7 exposed was the weakness of Israel in the one arena it believed itself untouchable: control. It wasn’t just a border breach. It was a rupture of the entire apparatus that had kept Gaza contained for years. Fences, drones, AI, intelligence, surveillance — all of it failed.
And when the mask of control slipped, the response wasn’t strategic — it was criminally vengeful. It was rage mixed with blood thirst. But rage isn’t a strategy, rage destroys. And over two years, rage has destroyed Gaza — and with it, Israel’s future.
Netanyahu’s calculus: Eternal war
The war served Netanyahu well—at least at first. It silenced his critics. It unified a fractured public. It postponed trials. It gave him relevance again. But the deeper logic was more disturbing: war is the only environment where his political survival is guaranteed.
Peace, by contrast, is a threat. Peace requires compromise. Peace requires vision. Netanyahu offers neither.
Each time a ceasefire neared, his government collapsed it. Each time hostages were close to freedom, the process was torpedoed. To free the hostages would be to end the war. To end the war would be to lose power. This is the twisted loop that has defined Israel’s leadership for two years. Hostages weren’t bargaining chips — they were leverage. They were the excuse for ongoing brutality.
And the world saw it. Every broken deal, every last-minute sabotage, made it harder to pretend this was about security. By the end of the second year, no serious government believed Netanyahu was acting in good faith. Even allies began to distance themselves, not out of principle — but out of shame. What’s remarkable isn’t that Israel committed war crimes — it’s that it did so while assuming the world would look away.
For decades, that assumption held. But this time was different.
Technology turned every phone into a witness. Every child pulled from rubble was broadcast in real time. Every lie was challenged within seconds. The world saw the crimes as they happened — and watched as Israel confirmed them with its own footage.
No state can withstand that level of exposure and retain legitimacy.
Even in the US, the last bastion of unconditional support, the consensus cracked. Young people rejected the old narratives. Jewish voices joined Palestinian ones. The streets filled with dissent, not just from the fringe but from the center. Israel’s status as a protected partner is no longer guaranteed.
In Europe, traditional guilt-driven loyalty gave way to disgust. Governments clung to old alliances, but the public broke ranks. Supporting Israel was no longer an expression of Western solidarity — it became a political liability.
Ceasefire, but not peace
Now, with pressure mounting, ceasefire talks are back — this time in Egypt, under the bizarre influence of Donald Trump, whose re-entry into international politics has added a surreal dimension to an already surreal conflict. But few believe the talks will produce anything lasting. Netanyahu has built his power on conflict. He has no incentive to end it.
Even if a deal is signed, it’s unlikely to hold. The machinery of occupation, the logic of dispossession, the appetite for dominance — it remains intact. This war may pause. But the ideology that fueled it still governs Israel.
And that’s the real crisis: not the bombs, not the destruction, not even the deaths — but the belief that this can go on forever.
Israel may declare victory over Hamas. It may claim strategic success in degrading enemy capabilities. But that’s not what the world sees.
What the world sees is a nation that responded to horror with horror. A nation that lost its soul in pursuit of a war it could never truly win. A nation that allowed vengeance to become policy, and policy to become annihilation.
Two years later, Gaza lies in ruins. But so does Israel’s credibility. So does the illusion of a “moral army.” So does the narrative of self-defence that once made its case persuasive to the world.
Hamas lit the match. But Israel poured the fuel, struck the steel, and claimed the fire was purification.
In the end, what remains isn’t security. It’s ash.
Elijah J Magnier is a veteran war zone correspondent and political analyst with over 35 years of experience covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He specialises in real-time reporting of politics, strategic and military planning, terrorism and counter-terrorism; his strong analytical skills complement his reporting. His in-depth experience, extensive contacts and thorough political knowledge of complex political situations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria provide his writings with insights balancing the routine misreporting and propaganda in the Western press. He also comments on Al Jazeera.
As U.S. President Donald Trump surely intended, his “20-point Gaza plan” succeeded in upstaging calls by many other world leaders at the UN General Assembly for concrete, coordinated UN-led measures to force Israel to end its criminal genocide in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine.
Trump’s White House meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyah on September 29 coincided with the last day of the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, where Trump had met with eight Arab and Muslim leaders at the UN and won their support for a proposed plan for Gaza. In a textbook bait-and-switch, Trump then allowed the Israelis to significantly alter his plan before he unveiled it to the world at his meeting with Netanyahu, but pretended it was the same plan that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and other countries had endorsed.
Trump’s plan is based on cornering Hamas into a series of steps it hasn’t agreed to: freeing all the Israeli prisoners in Gaza without a full Israeli withdrawal; surrendering its weapons and its role in Palestinian politics; and handing Gaza over to a new phase of Israeli occupation. Gaza would be governed by a “board” headed by Trump and former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, who not only invaded Iraq alongside the U.S. in 2003, but at the same time masterminded a dirty war against Hamas that led to the isolation and blockade of Gaza, and ultimately to the current crisis.
Under Trump’s plan, Israel would agree to end its genocidal assault on Gaza and partially withdraw its forces, but nothing in his plan would prevent it relaunching the genocide once the Israeli prisoners in Gaza were safely back in Israel. It would also retain control of Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt, allowing it to keep restricting the entry of food, medicine and rebuilding materials.
In response to Trump’s proposal, Hamas agreed to release all its Israeli prisoners in return for an Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners, but only after a permanent Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Gaza. Prime minister Netanyahu said publicly that Israel will not withdraw its forces from Gaza until Hamas and other Palestinian forces have been removed from power and disarmed, while Hamas insists it will not disarm until the occupation of Palestine ends and its fighters can hand over their weapons to the new armed forces of the sovereign nation of Palestine.
Hamas also responded that it has no authority to act as the sole negotiator in talks on the future of Palestine. It said Palestine must be governed by Palestinians, not Trump or Blair, and that its future must be negotiated between representatives of all Palestinian factions.
So Trump’s plan is rife with conditions that one side or the other won’t agree to, and it seems unlikely to end the genocide. But in any case, it is clearly designed to perpetuate, not to end, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. As the Progressive International said in a statement on October 7:
Far from paving a path to peace, it offers a blueprint for the further colonisation and subjugation of the Palestinian people — the culmination of decades of dispossession and destruction that reached its dark zenith in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The current negotiations may collapse quickly or drag on for weeks or months, but the UN and the world’s governments should not sit idly by as passive observers. The UN should urgently prepare to take the concrete steps that leaders from around the world called for at the General Assembly in September, to give force to UN General Assembly resolutions calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the unrestricted restoration of life-saving humanitarian aid, and a final end to the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In July 2025, the UN General Assembly organized a “High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.” The conference was chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, and its goal was “not only to reaffirm international consensus on the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine but to catalyze concrete, timebound and coordinated international action toward the implementation of the two-State solution.”
The conference produced a lengthy “New York Declaration,” which was endorsed by the General Assembly in a resolution on September 12, by a vote of 142 to 10, with 12 abstentions.
But this was a plan for the “day after,” which, by itself, failed to bring that day any closer, because it deliberately avoided taking the “concrete, timebound and coordinated international action” that the conference’s mandate had explicitly called for.
The declaration was based on the deliberations of 8 working groups, co-chaired by representatives of 15 different countries, the Arab League and the European Union, which each drew up plans for the aftermath of a hypothetical permanent ceasefire in Gaza, with topics like “Humanitarian Action and Reconstruction” and “Security for Israelis and Palestinians.”
Three roundtables at the July conference, chaired by former Irish president Mary Robinson, former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad of Jordan, agreed that the General Assembly’s first step should be the international recognition of the state of Palestine.
UN recognition requires the approval of both the General Assembly and the UN Security Council. However, with such a large majority of countries supporting recognition, and the United States abusing its veto to sideline the Security Council, the General Assembly can call an Emergency Special Session (ESS) to act alone under the “Uniting for Peace” principle, to officially recognize Palestine and welcome it as a full UN member.
Instead, while several Western countries finally recognized Palestine, bringing the total number who have recognized its independent statehood to 157, the declaration was endorsed in a regular session of the General Assembly that lacked the power to grant formal UN recognition.
But the most serious omission from the July 2025 conference and the September 12 resolution was that they failed to take concrete, coordinated UN action to impose a ceasefire in Gaza, the vital first step to get to the “day after” that the working groups at the conference were tasked with planning for. Trump took advantage of that omission to propose an end to the genocide in Gaza on terms that would perpetuate the Israeli occupation instead of ending it.
It was entirely predictable that Israel would reject and ignore the New York Declaration, and prime minister Netanyahu did just that in his General Assembly speech on September 26. But after most of the delegates walked out and left Netanyahu ranting to a nearly empty hall, the Hague Group of countries led by Colombia and South Africa hosted a meeting with representatives of 34 countries to plan the coordinated, concrete action the UN must now take to end the genocide and the occupation.
As Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez Parilla told the General Assembly in his speech the next day, it should convene an Emergency Special Session “without further delay” to take concrete measures for Palestine, including a binding resolution on full UN membership.
If the General Assembly is serious about ending the genocide and the occupation, the Emergency Special Session must also debate and vote on a UN-led arms embargo, economic boycott and other concrete measures designed to force Israel to comply with international law, international court rulings and UN resolutions on Palestine.
The UN Human Rights Office in Geneva already has a database of 158 Israeli and multinational corporations that are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation, so an international boycott of those companies could take effect immediately.
Israel is a small country, dependent on trade and economic relations with countries all over the world. If the large majority of countries that voted for the New York Declaration are ready to back their words and their votes with coordinated action, a UN-led trade boycott, divestment campaign and arms embargo can put enormous pressure on Israel to end its genocide in Gaza and its illegal occupation of Palestine. With full participation by enough countries, these steps could quickly make Israel’s position untenable.
Many speakers at the 2025 General Assembly called passionately for this kind of decisive action to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza and end the occupation. King Abdullah of Jordan asked, “How long will we be satisfied with condemnation after condemnation without concrete action?”
President Lula said that Brazil already has an arms embargo against Israel and has cut off all trade with its illegal settlements; Turkiye severed all trade links with Israel in August; Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof called for an arms embargo and the suspension of the EU’s trade agreement with Israel; and Chadian prime minister Allah-Maye Halina declared, “Our duty from this moment on is to transform this strong declaration into concrete acts and make the Palestinian people’s hope a reality.”
The Hague Group of countries was formed by the Progressive International to support South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice and war crimes cases against Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court. In a meeting at Bogota in Colombia in July, twelve of those countries committed to an arms embargo and other concrete measures against the Israeli occupation. In his speech to the General Assembly on September 23, Colombian president Gustavo Petro called for an Emergency Special Session on Palestine and for a UN peacekeeping force to “defend Palestine.”
A previous Emergency Special Session in September 2024 demanded that Israel must end its post-1967 occupation of Palestine within a year. Israel’s refusal to even begin to do so, and its defiant escalation of its genocide in Gaza, increasing repression in the other occupied territories and attacks on other countries provide all the grounds the General Assembly should need to take the concrete, coordinated measures that many countries are calling for.
Tragically, instead of applying the diplomatic and economic pressure it will take to secure a ceasefire and end the occupation, France, Saudi Arabia and their partners instead relied on dangling carrots in front of Israel, such as regional economic integration and recognition by Arab and Muslim countries, to try to seduce or bribe Israel into complying with international law and UN resolutions.
This was never going to work. The toothless New York Declaration, and now Trump’s new occupation plan for Gaza, have wasted irreplaceable, precious lost time for the besieged, starved, bombed people of Gaza, as more of them are killed, maimed and starved to death every day. The UN General Assembly must follow up on these flawed initiatives with decisive UN-led action to actually end the genocide and the occupation, by imposing economic sanctions, an arms embargo and other measures to diplomatically and economically isolate Israel.
There is nothing to prevent the UN General Assembly from quickly convening a new meeting of its Emergency Special Session on Palestine. The ESS can finally take the “concrete, time-bound, coordinated international action” that the French- and Saudi-led initiative promised but failed to deliver – what Malaysian foreign minister Mohamad Hasan described to the General Assembly as “concrete action against the occupying force.”
Across the world, ordinary people are rising up to demand that their governments take action, while flotillas of activists set sail to breach the blockade of Gaza that their governments have failed to challenge.
The Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly, meeting under the Uniting for Peace principle, can debate and pass binding resolutions on UN recognition of Palestine, a UN-led international arms embargo, economic boycott and disinvestment campaign, war crimes prosecutions, and other measures to diplomatically isolate Israel.
By responding to calls of conscience from their own people, voting for these measures at the UN and acting quickly to enforce them, the governments of the world have the collective power to end this genocide and the brutal, illegal occupation of Palestine that it is part of. Now they must use it.
The father of Samuel Leason — one of the three from New Zealand held by Israel — told RNZ his son, Rana Hamida and Youssef Sammour had been released.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed the three New Zealanders detained by Israel have been released.
An MFAT spokesperson said on Wednesday morning that the trio were on board buses containing other deportees which have now crossed into Jordan.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAT) said on Tuesday night it did not respond to non-urgent queries after hours, and would respond on Wednesday morning.
Initially in disbelief
Adi Leason said he was initially in disbelief when his son Samuel called him late on Tuesday night. He said it was a quick call and it was fantastic to hear the teenager’s voice.
“It was little taste, just a little moment where the connection’s made and you don’t know … someone’s okay until they tell you themselves. And Samuel’s told us in no uncertain terms — he’s back.”
Leason said his son sounded surprisingly good.
“He sounded really buoyant and hopeful and he just kept saying, ‘I’ve got so many stories dad, I’ve got so many stories.’
“He said he’d been incarcerated in a cage with Nelson Mandela’s grandson, and they’d become buddies.”
Leason said he understood the flotilla participants had spent time in a big hall, “kinda being paraded and berated by the authorities”.
“Then the other times when they were crammed in … Samuel mentioned 11 crammed into a cell at one time.”
Fellow New Zealanders
He said Samuel confirmed that he was with fellow New Zealanders, Rana Hamida and Youssef Sammour, “that they were together, that they were free”.
Leason said his son was hoping to be back in the county by the end of the week.
Earlier, Leason said he thought the New Zealanders and Australians were being kept together.
“And they are being put up in a hotel at their — just to stress this — at their own expense … so, no cost to the taxpayer.”
He understood the New Zealanders’ passports had been returned to them, but their other personal belongings had not.
“We don’t know the exact details on that. Their passports are in their possession which is going to speed up the ability to book flights and get home as soon as possible.”
A welcome home celebration was being planned for Saturday, Leason said.
Relieved ordeal is over
Meanwhile, the partner of a New Zealand doctor detained by Israel is relieved the ordeal is over after confirmation of her release.
New Zealand-born Bianca Webb-Pullman was part of the aid flotilla to Gaza and was counted officially as Australian because she was using an Australian passport.
She and other participants are now in Jordan.
Stephen Rowe said it had been a sleepless week.
“It was terrible, there was no way we could really contact her, we were left completely in the dark.
“And of course we were aware of reports coming out of conditions in the prison and how bad they were, so yeah, it was incredibly worrying.”
He said he was “extremely relieved” last night to learn of her release and said Webb-Pullman had since managed to call her mother.
‘Obviously shaken’
“She’s obviously shaken . . . But as far as I know, she’s okay.”
Rowe said he planned to fly to Melbourne to meet Webb-Pullman at the end of the week.
“It’s been just a horrible experience but that part of it is over and I know that she and the rest of the people on the flotilla don’t really want this to be about them.
“They really want this to be much more about the people of Gaza and ending their suffering.
“I know that the reason Bianca was on the flotilla was that she’d just finally had enough.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Mahmoud Farajalah, a 26-year-old Palestinian living in Brussels, died after taking his life in a detention center near the Zaventem airport, sparking angry protests and a hunger strike among other detainees.
A prominent face on the daily Palestinian solidarity demonstrations outside the Bourse, a major city square, Farajalah was arrested three months ago after one such protest and placed in immigration detention, according to activists.
“He was such an incredible person, the kindest and the most thoughtful person who I ever met in that center.”
Farajalah’s mother had recently died in Gaza, but he had been denied permission to leave the detention facility to mourn her, according four sources with knowledge of the situation, including Anas Hamam, a Moroccan detainee who had met Farajalah in the “127 Bis” detention center but was transferred to another facility a month ago.
How Farajalah’s mother passed remains unclear.
Hamam told The Intercept by phone, “He was such an incredible person, the kindest and the most thoughtful person who I ever met in that center.”
Around eight Palestinians are thought to have been held in Belgium’s detention camps, according to activists. Many were arrested by plainclothes police officers after Bourse demonstrations.
Last week, Amnesty International called for an investigation into Belgium’s harsh crackdowns on the protesters. Riot police had used tear gas and water cannons on demonstrators in Brussels against Israel’s interdiction of an aid flotilla to Gaza last week.
Belgium’s migration and asylum service confirmed Farajalah’s death, but spokesperson Dominique Ernould declined any further comment citing confidentiality and the privacy of the family.
“The situation is calm in the center,” Ernould said. “The necessary support is being provided to the center’s residents and staff members.”
Asylum Denied
Two sources, including Hamam and a pro-Palestine activist who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said that Farajalah had recently had an asylum claim turned down.
“He didn’t have papers,” the activist said. “Belgium denied him access to international protection.”
As word of Farajalah’s death spread, Palestine solidarity organizers called for a protest of “fire, rage, noise” outside the detention center on Saturday.
“He had lost his mother,” organizers wrote on an Instagram post. “He had asked to be released so he could mourn. He had written. He had pleaded. The administration ignored him. The system crushed him. Silence killed him.”
A group calling itself “Getting the Voice Out” sent The Intercept a statement saying that other detainees in the facility were outraged by the death.
“They are starting a hunger strike at the center and have made a flag with his name on it,” the statement said. “They tell us, ‘Today it’s Mahmoud, tomorrow it’s someone else. Security is laughing at us. We have to do something.’”
Activists and a former detainee at “127 Bis” said people held there were routinely denied phone calls and internet access, among other charges.
Ernould, the migration authority spokesperson, denied claims by activists and Palestinian detainees — one of whom has talked to The Intercept — of mistreatment in the detention camps.
“Residents in closed centers are not mistreated,” she said. “They receive all the necessary care: medical and psychological. Residents have the option of receiving phone calls or making phone calls to their loved ones and families outside the facility.”
New Zealanders deserve to know how the country’s foreign policy is made, writes John Hobbs.
ANALYSIS:By John Hobbs
The New Zealand government remains unwilling to support Palestinian statehood recognition at the United Nations General Assembly.
This is a disgraceful position which gives support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and seriously undermines our standing. Of the 193 states of the UN, 157 have now provided statehood recognition. New Zealand is not one of them.
The purpose of this opinion piece is to highlight the troubling lack of transparency in how the government deliberates on its foreign policy choices.
Government decisions and calculations on foreign policy are being made behind closed doors with limited public scrutiny, unlike other areas of policy, where at least a modicum of transparency occurs.
The government has, over the past two years, exceeded itself in obscuring the process it goes through, without explaining its approach to the question of Palestine.
New Zealand still inconceivably lauds the impossible goal of a two-state solution, the hallmark of successive governments’ foreign policy positions on the question of Palestine, but does everything to not bring about its realisation.
To try to understand the basis for New Zealand’s approach to Gaza and the risks generated by the government’s lack of direct action against Israel, I placed an Official Information Request (OIA) with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Winston Peters. I requested copies of advice that had been received on New Zealand’s obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.
Plausible case against Israel
My initial OIA request was placed in January 2024, after the International Court of Justice had determined there was a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. At that point, about 27,000 people in Gaza had been killed, mainly women and children. My request was denied.
I put the same OIA request to the minister in June 2025. By this time, nearly 63,000 people had been killed by Israel. At the time of my second request there was abundant evidence reported by UN agencies of Israel’s tactics. Again, my request for information was denied.
I appealed the refusal by the minister of foreign affairs to the Office of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman reviewed the case and accepted that the minister of foreign affairs was within his right to refuse to provide the material.
The basis for the decision was that the advice given to the minister was subject to legal professional privilege, and that the right to protect legally privileged advice was not outweighed by the public interest in gaining access to that advice.
The refusal by the minister and the Ombudsman to make the advice available is deeply worrying. Although I am not questioning the importance of protecting legal professional privilege, I cannot imagine an example that could be more pressing in terms of “public interest” than the complicity of nation states in genocide.
Indeed, the threshold of legal professional privilege was never meant to be absolute. Parliament, in designing the OIA regime, had this in mind when it deemed that legal professional privilege could, under exceptional circumstances, be outweighed by the public interest.
The Office of the Ombudsman has ruled in the past that legal professional privilege is not an absolute; it accepted that legal advice received by the Ministry of Health on embryo research had to be released, for example, as it was in the public interest to do so, even though it was legally privileged.
Puzzling statement
The Ombudsman concludes his response to my request with the puzzling statement that the “general public interest in accountability and transparency in government decision-making on this issue is best reflected in the decisions made after considering the legal advice, rather than what is contained in the legal advice.”
The point I was trying to clarify is whether the government is acting in a manner that reflects the advice it has received. If it has received advice that New Zealand must take particular steps to fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and the government has chosen to ignore that advice, then surely New Zealanders have a right to know.
The content of the advice is extremely relevant: it would identify any contradictions between the advice the government received and its actions. Through public access to such information, governments can be held to account for the decisions they make.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, concluded on September 16 that Israeli authorities and security forces committed four out of the five underlying acts of genocide. Illegal settlers have been let loose in the West Bank under the protection of the Israeli army to harass and kill local Palestinians and occupy further areas of Palestinian land.
At the UN General Assembly, the New Zealand government took a stance that is squarely in support of the Israeli genocide, also supported by the United States. International law clearly forbids the act of genocide, in Gaza as much as anywhere else, including the attacks on Palestinian civilians living under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In 2015-16, New Zealand co-sponsored a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the illegality of Israel’s actions in the Occupied West Bank, with the intention of supporting a Palestinian state. New Zealand’s recent posture at the General Assembly undermines this principled precedent.
That New Zealand could not bring itself to offer the olive branch of statehood recognition is morally repugnant and severely damages our standing in the international community. The New Zealand public has the right to demand transparency in its government’s decision-making.
The advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to the minister cannot be hidden behind the veil of legal professional privilege.
John Hobbs is a doctoral student at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Oct. 6, 2025.Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Donald Trump teased a dangerous escalation on Monday afternoon, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces to U.S. cities, should pesky judges and state leaders continue to thwart his ambitions to assault and occupy blue states.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
His comments make clear the shape of Trump’s authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to American cities.
Trump noted that he did not see an immediate need to invoke the federal law. His comments, though, make clear the shape of his authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to liberal American cities after a federal judge blocked him from sending troops to Portland, Oregon.
Like so many of the Trump regime’s power grabs, the threat is both shocking and predictable.
He Badly Wants to Use It
Trump’s interest in the Insurrection Act is hardly new. He toyed with invoking the law in his first term.
He was itching to use it to send in the military to crush the 2020 George Floyd uprisings but faced opposition at the time from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. No such problem for the president with loyalist goon Pete Hegseth in the so-called secretary of war position.
And Trump allies called on the president to invoke the law to illegally hold onto power after the 2020 election. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to use the Insurrection Act to suppress unrest and dissent.
In his second term, Trump’s aides and advisers have been clearly setting up a justification for invoking the law — softening up MAGA adherents to accept yet another shockingly dictatorial move from the president.
It’s no accident, after all, that members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”
Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”
Ripe for Abuse
Then there is the law itself, which could not be better tailored for abuse by exactly the kind of brazen authoritarian like Trump. Legal experts have long warned that the two-century-old statute is dangerously broad and in desperate need of updating for the exact reasons it’s such an appealing tool for Trump.
First, the law gives extraordinary discretion to the president alone to declare a domestic “insurrection” is underway and deploy U.S. military forces against the American people. And it’s one of the few key exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal military forces from engaging in civilian law enforcement operations.
If there is “a reason” we have an Insurrection Act, as Trump said on Monday, then it is a historic one, with little bearing on current conditions. With its roots in the 1792 Militia Act and first enacted in 1807, the Insurrection Act “has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse,” wrote Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice.
The language of the law is vague — a gift to a president with dictatorial aims. It grants the federal executive power to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
“Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act defines ‘insurrection,’ ‘rebellion,’ ‘domestic violence,’ or any of the other key terms used in setting forth the prerequisites for deployment,” noted Nunn. “Absent statutory guidance, the Supreme Court decided early on that this question is for the president alone to decide.”
“Create the Pretext”
Concern that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to take control of Democratic-led cities is by no means far-fetched. Our cities are already occupied by a federal army of thugs — ICE — directed to kidnap and cage our neighbors atop regular police violence. And Trump has already federalized and deployed National Guard troops in Los Angeles and Washington, overreaches that are already facing their own legal challenges.
Things can, of course, get much worse. Invoking the Insurrection Act would not, however, be a flip switch moving us from a functional democracy into fascism; rather, it would be an expansion of already existent fascist action, and another tool that the president can use to continue to crackdown on dissent.
It’s tempting to urge protesters to avoid giving Trump a pretext for escalation. That would be a grave mistake.
In the face of such a threat, it is tempting to urge protesters to be placid, to avoid giving the Trump administration pretext for further escalation. That would be a grave mistake.
Even Pritzker’s statement recognized that it is the president’s regime that will “create the pretext,” regardless of how peaceful the protesters are.
By ruling that the administration’s notion of a grave threat to federal agents was unmoored from reality, Immergut, the federal judge, was saying that Trump cannot ignore facts on the ground.
Trump’s flirtations with the Insurrection Act on Monday, though, made clear that he wholly intends to do so.
The first bombs of the current genocide fell during Tasneem’s final weeks of pregnancy. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, she was 25 years old, seven months pregnant, and eagerly awaiting her third child.
In Gaza, Tasneem had already lived her whole young life under Israeli surveillance, confinement, and violence. But as the bombs rained down on October 7 — in what Israel claimed was retaliation for the nearly 1,200 Israelis killed that day, but has since become a two-year-long genocide, killing at least 66,000 Palestinians — it was clear her child’s generation would be born into a new level of horror.
There were no calm nurses by the time Tasneem went into labor with her son, Ezz Aldin. The hospital was overcrowded with no steady electricity. Tasneem labored for hours in the barely functioning hospital, and when she gave birth, there was no food to help her recover. Diapers were nearly impossible to find. Weakened and hungry, she breastfed her son. It was December 25, 2023.
Bombs are still falling on Gaza, despite a pending peace deal. As the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, moves into its third year of trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza, many Palestinian women still push to bring the next generation into the world. They give birth not in hospitals with clean beds and available staff, but in overcrowded, collapsing clinics, under drones and bombs, amid the deadliest genocide Gaza has seen in decades.
This is the story of my sisters, and of other Palestinian women who brought children into a world that was falling apart.
Doaa wasn’t pregnant when the first bombs dropped. Like everyone else, she was trying to survive. When her home was bombed on January 14, 2024, the windows shattered, the walls cracked, and the air was filled with smoke and dust. Though she wasn’t physically harmed, the emotional toll was enormous. A few weeks later, amid her family’s displacement — from a small flat, to a tent, to a tiny apartment — she found out she was pregnant. Living with a child growing inside her, under constant fear of sudden death, the sounds of nearby strikes would jolt her awake at night.
When her labor began — on October 28, 2024, just over a year into the genocide — she was rushed to an already overwhelmed hospital. She clung to the thin mattress through waves of pain, until her son Hossam was born: small, fragile, but alive. No special food awaited her. No clothes. No comfort. Still, she held him close, nursing him through hunger and fear.
The World Health Organization reports that 10 percent of Gaza’s population and up to 20 percent of pregnant women suffer moderate to severe malnutrition. Over 5,100 children were admitted to malnutrition programs in July alone, including 800 in critical condition. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, 25 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women are malnourished. Mothers face shortages of nutritious food essential for recovery and breastfeeding, as iron-rich foods, fresh fruit, and vegetables are nearly impossible to find.
“What have these children done to deserve being born in these conditions of genocide and famine? Why can the world not see them?” asked my friend’s aunt, who gave birth on October 6, 2024. A single pack of diapers cost $600 at the time. Today, it’s 400 shekels, or about $120 — still impossibly out of reach. Most have to make do with a plastic bag tied up with string.
Her baby, Layan, had to drink formula. Many babies born in Gaza under the genocide do. Their mothers — starving, dehydrated, terrified — can’t make breast milk. When formula is available, it’s at inflated prices: 200 shekels per can. Most of the time, it simply isn’t there.
“What have these children done to deserve being born in these conditions of genocide and famine?”
Layan is now a year old. From the age of nine months, children are supposed to start eating soft food: mashed rice, boiled zucchini, fruit, grapes, melon, yogurt. But there’s nothing. Nothing to feed him. Nothing to grow on.
Dana was born in a tent by the sea, to a mother suffering from severe malnutrition. The family had been forced to leave their home in Khan Younis, and Dana’s mother had gone days without proper food.
“They told her mother she might give birth to a child with disabilities because of her lack of vitamins,” said Aya, Dana’s cousin.
The pregnancy was grueling. “I could barely get out of bed; there was hardly any food,” Dana’s mother recalled. Every day was a struggle against fatigue, hunger, and uncertainty. Her body weak, her mind anxious, she carried on, driven by hope for her baby. And against all odds, Dana arrived healthy — a small miracle in a world that seemed to offer none.
But the tents where displaced Palestinians reside are not fit places for children. Flies, mosquitoes, rats; the insects bite, sting, infect. A mosquito bite on a baby’s cheek swells for a week. Medical care is nearly impossible to find.
And the sewage system? A two-meter-deep pit in the ground, uncovered. There have been cases of children falling in.
In the heat, small bodies burn with fever. Skin diseases — itching, peeling, red blotches that blister — spread quickly. There are no creams. No medicine. Their immune systems are too weak to fight anything off.
“We had nothing but each other,” Dana’s mother said. Relatives, neighbors, and small acts of kindness became their lifeline, helping them prepare for the birth and supporting them through the first fragile days.
Now, Dana is thriving. But some babies don’t survive the winter. The tents freeze, and so do they.
As Noor rushed to the hospital in labor, her family’s car jolted violently from a nearby explosion. Her husband’s voice cracked as he called for calm, but the fear was thick in the air. The ambulance had been delayed, so they drove themselves through streets scattered with debris and silence broken only by distant blasts. Upon arriving, the hospital was overwhelmed — hallways packed with patients, no beds available.
Nurses found a corner in a busy corridor where Noor could lie down. The lights flickered, and the generator’s low drone filled the room. There was no privacy, no quiet. Doctors worked quickly, hands steady despite their exhaustion. Noor’s contractions came one after another. Sweat dripped down her face. Finally, a girl was born: her cries faint but still a signal of life. Noor held her daughter close without food, clean clothes, or diapers. The room smelled of fear and hope tangled together, as a new life began amid ruin.
Since the genocide began, official reports estimate that over 3,000 babies have been born in Gaza’s collapsing hospitals. Many arrive too soon, or with health complications caused by malnutrition and inadequate medical care. Many others suffer from disabilities linked to poor prenatal conditions and genocide-related trauma. In the first month of the genocide, United Nations agencies reported that there were about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day, and 15 percent of them likely to face complications that require medical care.
Neonatal mortality has risen sharply: Miscarriage rates have tripled and stillbirths surged beyond prewar levels. For the first half of 2025, the U.N. Population Fund reported that among 17,000 births, 20 newborns died within 24 hours, and 33 percent of babies — 5,560 infants — were premature, underweight, or required NICU care. These figures are not just statistics; they are a record of lives that began in crisis.
Birth in Gaza often means sharing incubators, giving birth without anesthesia during power outages, and risking infection because water and sanitation systems are destroyed.
And clothes? Even before the genocide, baby clothes were expensive. Now they’re nearly impossible to find. If you’re lucky, you might come across a scrap of fabric shaped like clothing — but it’s rough, stiff, and anything but comfortable on a newborn’s skin.
Tasneem had hoped, in those early days, that a ceasefire might come before her son arrived. In her final weeks of pregnancy, she held onto the idea that she would give birth in normal conditions — at home surrounded by family, rather than rubble. But the days passed, the bombing grew heavier, and that hope was crushed.
With the support of her family, Dana is growing strong. “She is healthy and happy, thanks to our care and attention,” her mother says. The early hardships have left their mark; subtle signs in her development that remind the family of the struggle before her birth. But the family remains steadfast and says they make sure Dana has milk, diapers, and everything she needs.
None of these mothers had what they needed. What they did have was determination: stubborn, unbreakable, quietly defiant. Each of them carried a life inside them while the world fell apart around them. Each gave birth with explosions in the background, fear in their lungs, and courage in their hands.
To be pregnant in Gaza today is to give life with death knocking at the door.
To be pregnant in Gaza today is to give life with death knocking at the door. It is to feel your baby kick while warplanes circle overhead. It is to count the seconds between explosions and pray the next one doesn’t find you. It is to bring life into a world that feels like it’s ending — and to do it anyway.
In Gaza, where the Israeli government is explicitly seeking to eliminate the existence of Palestinian people, the birth of every child is an act of resistance. These women, sustaining life amid bombs and shortages, rewrite the meaning of courage and resilience. Their strength is not demonstrated in grand speeches or headlines, but in the small moments: steady hands breastfeeding a hungry baby, a newborn’s fragile cry cutting through the sound of bombardment, a family’s silent promise to protect life. They carry the future in their arms, embodying the determination of a people who refuse to disappear.
Despite the violence, the hunger, and the fear, life continues — because in Gaza, to live is to resist.
Rio de Janeiro is approaching a crisis where policing and killing may become indistinguishable. A new proposed law would reward police officers with cash bonuses for every suspect they kill.
Supporters argue this is an effective step to combat organised crime, but critics describe it as a state-sanctioned execution.
Rio de Janeiro police bill: bonuses for deadly bullets
To many residents of Rio de Janeiro’s poorest communities, living in the shadow of both drug gangs and police raids, it feels like something out of a dystopian movie. Imagine waking up in a community knowing that your life or your child’s life might be worth money to someone with a badge and a gun.
The people sworn to protect you are now given financial incentives to treat the streets like a hunting ground.
Giving bonuses to police for killings is not only outright brutal but also undermines public security by creating a financial incentive for officers to shoot rather than arrest suspects.
Rewarding lethal force and encouraging abuse of power
The bill (6027/2025) risks turning the fight against crime into a deadly competition, a real Squid Game, where the scorecard is written in blood. Rather than incentivising arrests or prosecutions, it rewards lethal force.
It won’t be the wealthy in gated communities who’ll suffer. It won’t be the politicians drafting this bill protected by bodyguards, living behind marbled walls. It’ll be the young man or woman walking home from work, the child playing soccer in an alley. Undoubtfully, mistakes will be made, because under this law “mistakes” might mean bonuses.
On 24 January, Jeronimo Gomes da Silva, 44, a resident of Complexo do Alemão, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, reported that a grenade was thrown from a drone into his home. He said:
They threw a grenade from a drone onto my balcony, destroying my house. My family and I almost died here.
Reports have also emerged of agents from Rio de Janeiro’s military police BOPE (Special Operations Battalion) entering a home in Complexo do Alemão and robbing a family, an incident that highlights abuse of power.
Speaking with Brasil de Fato, Jacqueline Muniz, an anthropologist, political scientist, and specialist in public security, warned that this bill could have far-reaching effects, particularly in how it blurs the line between policing and organised crime. She explained:
The police start organising organised crime itself, so they don’t just get close to the crime, they become partners, associates, okay? If you kill people who know about organised crime, you’re sabotaging the investigation itself and the production of intelligence that would serve to identify how organised crime works, who’s who within organised crime. You’re rigging the police for partisan purposes, for all sorts of rigging.
This ends up revealing corruption schemes, a logic of partnership with crime, right? It reveals, therefore, that death doesn’t result from a high-risk action, but rather becomes a commodity. It’s as if the state has militarised its police force and even cheapened the lives of police officers.
The price of a life
Brazilian authorities have claimed the policy would boost morale in a force stretched thin by violence and underfunding, while sending a tough message to cartels and militias that dominate Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.
But the cost of this action is crystal clear: human lives, particularly those of young, poor, and Black men who already make up a disproportionate number of victims in police confrontations.
Every year, Brazilian police are responsible for more than 6,000 deaths, many of them young Black men. Black Brazilians are about three times more likely to die in confrontations with the police compared to white Brazilians.
In 2024, Rio’s military police and civil police killed 703 people, almost two per day. At least 86% were Black. Between January and August this year, they’ve killed 470 people.
When the state decides that some lives are worth less, that some deaths are worth cash, it tells an entire class of people: you are disposable.
International groups, including Human Rights Watch, have condemned the bill warning it’d encourage extrajudicial killings, deepen mistrust between communities and the state, and establish a cycle of violence that has already scarred Brazil for decades.
Injustice reigns and scars are visible. Families who have lost sons in police raids hardly ever see accountability. Courts rarely prosecute officers involved in questionable shootings. Adding financial rewards only makes justice more elusive.
Crime comes from inequality: police violence entrenches it
Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil, stand at a crossroads. One path leads to more violence, more mistrust, more broken families, and the other demands courage and will, investing in education, creating real opportunities in the favelas, reforming police systems, and addressing poverty as the root of the crime.
Crime in Rio isn’t born from lack of policing, but from inequality.
The easy solution are bullets, the hard road is building a society where police do not need to be blackmailed to protect, where children don’t grow up expecting to die young, where safety comes from justice, not from fear.
Policies like this reduce people to targets, strip away humanity until all that’s left is a number: one more ‘suspect’ eliminated, one more ‘bonus’ earned.
For Muniz, the debate around public security goes beyond policing strategies and touches the core of Brazil’s democracy. She argued that real reform can only happen when armed institutions are brought under civilian control and when elected governments are able to exercise their authority without challenge.
She warned:
If we want to play democracy, we must do it for real. The first dimension of democracy to guarantee legitimately elected governments, whether left or right, is the control of the sword. Something that has become out of control in Brazil.
A call to conscience for Rio de Janeiro
The world should not look away because what’s happening in Rio de Janeiro isn’t just Brazil’s problem, it’s a stark warning. Any society that starts placing a bounty on its own people, edges closer to societal collapse.
This bill is not protection, nor justice. This is blood money, and history will not forgive those who turned human lives into a pay-per-kill system.
In the end, this issue isn’t about crime rates or police bonuses, it’s about what kind of world we choose to build, one where life is valuable, or one where death has a price. Unless another path is chosen, the streets of Rio may soon resemble a game where survival itself is the prize.
There can be no peace without justice, yet this simple truth still hasn’t penetrated at UKgov and USgov levels. Or is it ignored because it squelches the West’s lawless policies in the Middle East?
Statehood means self-determination with no outside interference. In Palestine’s case international law and relevant UN resolutions must finally be implemented and no longer contemptuously waved aside. Justice must be done and seen to be done. A UN commission of inquiry now confirms what many already knew – that Israel seeks to establish permanent control over Gaza and a Jewish majority in the occupied West Bank. UKGov and others therefore must persuade the UN General Assembly to use the tools available to circumvent the US veto and intervene militarily with a protection force, sending the Israeli war machine, and its settler thugs, back behind the internationally recognised ‘Green Line’ border.
A reformed Palestinian Authority must be allowed to govern its territories with whatever help they choose, possibly under UN supervision. None of that is acknowledged although it’s the Palestinians’ inalienable right.
Starmer et al. insist that Hamas, who were democratically elected under the scrutiny of international observers, shall play no part in future governance without explaining how they can legally interfere and dictate who may (and may not) rule the Palestinian state. That is a matter entirely for the Palestinians. They would do better to sanction Netanyahu’s party, Likud, for its decades-long war crimes, crimes against humanity, and now genocide.
Then there’s the question of Israel’s brazen failure since inception to honour its obligations under the UN Charter and its frequently stated refusal to allow Palestinian statehood to become a reality.
Now the three most loathsome and discredited creatures on the planet are trying to force on us a one-sided “eternal peace” plan that’s short on detail, ignores international law, bypasses the United Nations, lacks any kind of authorisation from the global community, reeks of sleaze, reads more like a plunder plan and refuses to answer questions. And they claim the Arab nations are ‘on board’. Starmer, having just announced he recognises the Palestinian state, tells the Labour Conference he backs the plan…. but backs what exactly? How does any of it respect Palestinian rights to self-determination or the rights of the Palestinian Authority to run things?
As for Tony Blair becoming Gaza’s governor, he’s a notorious warmonger and pro-Israel freak who should be behind bars and caused Palestinians much anguish on previous occasions he meddled in the Middle East. Trump shamelessly advertises his complicity in the ongoing genocide by threatening the government in Gaza to accept this abomination of a scheme or he’ll give Israel the OK (and presumably the weapons) to carry on with its extermination programme – which it is doing anyway.
This vile trio are not aiming to deliver justice for the Palestinians, whose land this is. Theirs is a private club that’s in it for greed and self-aggrandisement. How legally valid is any of that? And is the international community really going to sit back and allow such a preposterous scheme to go ahead with Blair in charge? If so the world is hurtling towards hell with brake failure.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is beginning to target unaccompanied immigrant children, pressuring them to accept cash payment in exchange for agreeing to be deported, according to a government memo to immigrant aid groups obtained by The Intercept.
The operation — which immigration rights advocates said was called “Freaky Friday,” though ICE denied the name — is a part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation campaign. With deportation continuing apace amid the federal government shutdown, advocates speculated that the latest scheme to pay off immigrant children was deliberately timed by ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to minimize public attention.
“The idea that masked men would now go to 14-year-olds and ask them to waive their rights to return to the countries that they fled is shocking.”
The memo said immigrant children 14 years or older would receive $2,500 in exchange for agreeing to be deported.
“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will provide a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500 U.S. Dollars to unaccompanied alien children, 14 years of age and older, who have elected to voluntarily depart the United States as of the date of this notice and moving forward,” said the memo, which was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that holds children in immigration custody.
Alarmed by word of the new operation, immigrant rights advocates began to widely circulate information about the plan in private email chains earlier this week.
“The idea that immigration enforcement agents can coerce children into waiving their rights and protections under this memo to meet President Trump’s political goals is cruel,” said Bilal Askaryar, director of communications at Acacia Center for Justice, which represents and advocates for unaccompanied immigrant children. “Americans have been shocked by the tactics that ICE is using in communities across the country, and the idea that masked men would now go to 14-year-olds and ask them to waive their rights to return to the countries that they fled is shocking.”
The government memo stipulated that children who elected to take the payment, must arrange to meet with an ICE officer. In order to waive their right to a removal hearing so that they can receive the payment, the child themself would have to sign a form to change their status with the U.S. government.
“If the child agrees to the stipend, DHS will issue a l-210 addendum declaration for the child to sign,” the memo says.
In a statement to The Intercept that was subsequently posted online, an ICE spokesperson confirmed that the agency would begin to target unaccompanied minors for deportation, calling the plan “voluntary.”
The agency said ICE and DHS “are offering a strictly voluntary option to return home to their families” and that financial support would only be provided at the approval of an immigration judge.
ICE told The Intercept the “voluntary option” would initially be offered to 17-year-old unaccompanied children.
The plan had been privately relayed to immigrant advocates earlier this week by what they said were sources inside the government. The advocates had gotten word that ICE was expected to target children aged 14 or older and was considering lowering the range to children as young as 10. For children who decline ICE’s offer, advocates said they had heard from sources that ICE agents would threaten the children as well as their relatives in the U.S. with detention.
The ICE spokesperson said, “Any payment to support a return home would be provided after an immigration judge grants the request and the individual arrives in their country of origin.”
According to emails sent by advocates, ICE agents are expected to track down and visit the children who arrived in the U.S. without their parents. Many live in shelters, with relatives, or with host families.
In the plan, according to advocates, agents would first target children who are currently in federal immigration detention, followed by those who have already been released from custody.
According to advocates, as soon as unaccompanied immigrant children turned 18, they would be detained by ICE. Immigrant children in federal government custody are held by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.
By Friday afternoon, immigrant rights organizations and attorneys who were mobilizing against the operation began to receive emails and texts from the government about the deportation plan. Advocates have urged immigrants, especially children, not to sign any documents that attempt to threaten or incentivize children to waive their rights without first seeking legal advice.
In its statement to The Intercept, ICE declined to say whether children would be threatened with detention.
The Trump administration has shown a willingness to lock up unaccompanied children. Over Labor Day weekend, the government targeted 300 Guatemalan children for deportation, with agents hastily rounding up 76 of the children from their caregivers’ homes in the middle of the night and boarding many of them onto planes. A federal judge blocked their deportation hours before takeoff.
Many unaccompanied immigrant children also lack legal representation, largely due to budget cuts by the Trump administration.
In February, the Trump administration began to track the whereabouts of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. with the intent to deport them, according to a Reuters report. Then, in March, the administration cut a federally funded program that provided legal representation for minors in their immigration cases. The program supported more than 26,000 children, according to the University of California, Los Angeles, Latino Policy and Politics Institute.
From 2023 to 2024, the U.S. government received referrals for 93,356 unaccompanied children entering the country, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador, according to government data.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is beginning to target unaccompanied immigrant children, pressuring them to accept cash payment in exchange for agreeing to be deported, according to a government memo to immigrant aid groups obtained by The Intercept.
The operation — which immigration rights advocates said was called “Freaky Friday,” though ICE denied the name — is a part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation campaign. With deportation continuing apace amid the federal government shutdown, advocates speculated that the latest scheme to pay off immigrant children was deliberately timed by ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to minimize public attention.
“The idea that masked men would now go to 14-year-olds and ask them to waive their rights to return to the countries that they fled is shocking.”
The memo said immigrant children 14 years or older would receive $2,500 in exchange for agreeing to be deported.
“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will provide a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500 U.S. Dollars to unaccompanied alien children, 14 years of age and older, who have elected to voluntarily depart the United States as of the date of this notice and moving forward,” said the memo, which the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that holds children in immigration custody, sent to service providers Friday.
Before receiving the government’s memo, immigrant rights advocates got word of the impending policy change and became alarmed. They began to widely circulate information about the plan in private email chains earlier this week.
“Voluntary departure has always been available,” said Melissa Adamson, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law who reviewed the government memo. “What children need is legal counsel to safely understand the risks or benefits of this option — not the government essentially enticing them into giving up their rights for a cash incentive.”
The government memo stipulated that children who elected to take the payment, must arrange to meet with an ICE officer. In order to waive their right to a removal hearing so that they can receive the payment, the child themself would have to sign a form to change their status with the U.S. government.
“If the child agrees to the stipend, DHS will issue a l-210 addendum declaration for the child to sign,” the memo says.
In a statement to The Intercept that was subsequently posted online, an ICE spokesperson confirmed that the agency would begin to target unaccompanied minors for deportation, calling the plan “voluntary.”
The agency said ICE and DHS “are offering a strictly voluntary option to return home to their families” and that financial support would only be provided at the approval of an immigration judge.
ICE told The Intercept the “voluntary option” would initially be offered to 17-year-old unaccompanied children.
“The idea that immigration enforcement agents can coerce children into waiving their rights and protections under this memo to meet President Trump’s political goals is cruel,” said Bilal Askaryar, director of communications at Acacia Center for Justice, which represents and advocates for unaccompanied immigrant children. “Americans have been shocked by the tactics that ICE is using in communities across the country, and the idea that masked men would now go to 14-year-olds and ask them to waive their rights to return to the countries that they fled is shocking.”
Advocates Alarmed
The plan had been privately relayed to immigrant advocates earlier this week by what they said were sources inside the government.
The advocates had gotten word that ICE was expected to target children aged 14 or older and was considering lowering the range to children as young as 10. For children who decline ICE’s offer, advocates said they had heard from sources that ICE agents would threaten the children as well as their relatives in the U.S. with detention.
The ICE spokesperson said, “Any payment to support a return home would be provided after an immigration judge grants the request and the individual arrives in their country of origin.”
According to emails sent by advocates, ICE agents are expected to track down and visit the children who arrived in the U.S. without their parents. Many live in shelters, with relatives, or with host families.
In the plan, according to advocates, agents would first target children who are currently in federal immigration detention, followed by those who have already been released from custody.
As soon as unaccompanied immigrant children turned 18, according to advocates, they would be detained by ICE. Immigrant children in federal government custody are held by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.
By Friday afternoon, immigrant rights organizations and attorneys who were mobilizing against the operation began to receive emails and texts from the government about the deportation plan. Advocates have urged immigrants, especially children, not to sign any documents that attempt to threaten or incentivize children to waive their rights without first seeking legal advice.
In its statement to The Intercept, ICE declined to say whether children would be threatened with detention.
The Trump administration has shown a willingness to lock up unaccompanied children. Over Labor Day weekend, the government targeted 300 Guatemalan children for deportation, with agents hastily rounding up 76 of the children from their caregivers’ homes in the middle of the night and boarding many of them onto planes. A federal judge blocked their deportation hours before takeoff.
Many unaccompanied immigrant children also lack legal representation, largely due to budget cuts by the Trump administration.
In February, the Trump administration began to track the whereabouts of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. with the intent to deport them, according to a Reuters report. Then, in March, the administration cut a federally funded program that provided legal representation for minors in their immigration cases. The program supported more than 26,000 children, according to the University of California, Los Angeles, Latino Policy and Politics Institute.
From 2023 to 2024, the U.S. government received referrals for 93,356 unaccompanied children entering the country, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador, according to government data.
Update: October 3, 2025, 6:20 p.m. ET This story has been updated to include a quote from Melissa Adamson, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.
Speaking at the 2025 Green Party Conference, Zack Polanski has called on the government to reverse the proscription of Palestine Action:
.@ZackPolanski: “The proscription of Palestine Action must be withdrawn & every parliamentarian who failed to vote against it needs to hang their heads in shame”
A reminder that 385 MPs voted to ban PA & every LibDem, Plaid & SNP MP abstained. Only 22 MPs voted against) pic.twitter.com/BSe193oo28
Polanski was addressing Green Party members at the 2025 conference:
Loud applause for @ZackPolanski at the Green Party Conference:
“You cannot be an effective environmentalist without talking about the deep inequality in our society.” pic.twitter.com/ZOtNd78A43
WATCH: Green leader Zack Polanski declares “migrants and refugees are welcome here” in his conference speech
“The [threat] is from a politics that tries to divide us and points the finger at each other, instead of at billionaires… this is a nation of neighbours” pic.twitter.com/m7XUU8OlQI
In the video relating to Palestine Action, Polanski said:
We cannot talk about stopping genocide without talking about the draconian crackdown on the right to protest happening against those taking action for Palestine, using terrorist legislation to arrest hundreds and hundreds of protesters for simply holding up a sign.
The proscription of Palestine action must be withdrawn, and every parliamentarian – every… Labour, Tory, Reform, even Lib Dem, who failed to vote against it – need to hang their heads in shame.
This country has a proud tradition of protecting civil liberties. But once again, a Labour government… is cracking down on our rights – from terrorist proscriptions against protesters; to banning journalists from their conference; to diving into a rushed, evidence-free plan for digital IDs that will only discriminate, mainly against minorities.
The alarm bells of authoritarianism are ringing loud and clear.
Since the proscription, the police have been forced to arrest peaceful protesters en masse using terror legislation. Many of these protesters are older people and/or disabled:
Disruption to the start of the Labour conference, as police arrest protestors under the Terrorism Act for holding signs which say:
#UK: A disabled Royal Air Force veteran has been arrested by London police after displaying a sign that read “I am against genocide” in support of Palestine Action.
The arrest took place during a protest against the UK government’s ban on the activist group, with the… pic.twitter.com/PB80UMqwcg
When leading legal figures, from the United Nations, Amnesty International to a former Director of Public Prosecutions, as well as voices from across the political spectrum – including the overwhelming majority of Labour Party members – have condemned the ban as authoritarian, this alarming attempt to prevent judicial scrutiny of her extreme and unprecedented decision will spark further outcry.
Just over 100 people had been arrested when the High Court warned of “a recipe for chaos” in the criminal courts if the legality of the ban was not determined authoritatively through a Judicial Review as soon as possible. Now that number has soared to over 1,600 people, with thousands more due to risk arrest in a series of mass actions starting on Sunday, it would be reckless in the extreme for the new Home Secretary to continue these delaying tactics.
This monumental waste of taxpayers’ money is pushing an already overburdened court system towards collapse as thousands of ordinary people – priests, pensioners, retired healthcare workers and teachers – are dragged through the courts for holding signs saying they oppose Israel’s genocide and the ban on Palestine Action, in entirely pointless prosecutions which may be unlawful.
Today, the Metropolitan Police wrote to us to ask that we postpone Saturday’s mass protest in Trafalgar Square, citing “significant pressure on policing”.
Chair of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 21, 2025.Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
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The Federal Communications Commission this week advanced a proposal for censorship that received far less attention than chair Brendan Carr’s “mafioso” approach to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. But it will likely result in a communication crackdown that does more harm to a far more vulnerable population — denying incarcerated people one of the few tools available to expose abuse in America’s most secretive institutions.
At a meeting on Tuesday, the FCC agreed to move forward with a proposal to allow prisons to jam contraband cellphones. Cellphone jammers are otherwise illegal devices that disrupt cellphone signals and effectively disable phones within range of the jammer.
The commission was answering the call from Arkansas officials, who invited Carr to tour a state prison where officials claimed incarcerated individuals used contraband cellphones to coordinate violent criminal activities. After the September 5 tour with the state’s Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sen. Tom Cotton, Carr announced his plans for a crackdown, claiming, without data, that “the worst possible offenders” use contraband cellphones to coordinate violence outside prison walls.
As a person who has been incarcerated for over 25 years, and has had extensive exposure to contraband cellphones — including using them to expose horrific conditions and force reform — I can attest that these accusations were exaggerated and preposterous.
While there may be isolated incidents where incarcerated individuals have used contraband cellphones to commit crimes, my experience tells me they’re far more often used to connect with loved ones or to hold rogue prison officials accountable. In my opinion, it is the latter that’s driving this FCC push, not public safety.
Carr and Cotton doubled down on their claims of chaos in an op-ed for the New York Post this week. It included a couple anecdotes — tragic, of course — but no evidence that contraband phones are frequently used to coordinate violence or that those responsible for the cited offenses couldn’t have used other means to commit their crimes.
Historically, prison officials have had little trouble convincing lawmakers that crackdowns on incarcerated people’s communications are needed to protect the public’s safety. Like in the outside world, where officials invoke “national security” to silence their critics, the majority of these campaigns have really been about shielding prison officials from accountability.
This deceptive tactic is again on display.
Contraband cellphones have become a reliable tool for incarcerated journalists to report accurate news events and expose the harsh realities within correctional facilities.
This is the focus of the documentary “The Alabama Solution,” premiering October 10 on HBO. The film highlights the unchecked culture of violence and abuse of power within the Alabama Department of Corrections.
It shows how disturbing video footage of forced labor, drug-related violence, prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and staff assaults were captured via contraband cellphone and released to the media. This footage fueled a class action lawsuit against the state of Alabama over its prisons’ system of slave labor as well as the ongoing Department of Justice investigation over abuses in Alabama’s prisons, including horrific assaults by corrections officers.
In the throes of the Covid pandemic, I used a contraband cellphone as a last-ditch effort to report Texas prison officials’ alarmingly inadequate response to the virus, which was causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of incarcerated individuals and staff members.
That video footage was incorporated into a local ABC News documentary called “No Way Out.” That reporting embarrassed prison officials so badly it compelled them to implement and follow the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those changes could not have happened without contraband cellphones.
Fearmongering to thwart attempts to hold prison officials accountable is not a new phenomenon. This same deceptive trick was used in the 1990s to restrict incarcerated individuals’ rights to file lawsuits against prison officials. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PLRA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, created insurmountable hurdles for incarcerated people to file, win, or settle a successful civil rights lawsuit.
Early procedural dismissals under the PLRA also deny outside journalists, whose access to prisons and the people who live there is extremely limited, the benefit of examining court files to find evidence of wrongdoing.
The current president files more frivolous lawsuits than practically any prisoner.
Prison officials in the ’90s exaggerated the number of frivolous lawsuits incarcerated individuals filed against prison officials in the same fashion they are currently overstating the usage of contraband cellphones to coordinate violent crimes. There’s no evidence-based data to support either accusation. And while the powerless face baseless censorship and retribution, the powerful actually commit the offenses we’re accused of in plain sight and with impunity. For example, the current president files more frivolous lawsuits than practically any prisoner, and the secretary of defense uses encrypted messaging to evade public records laws.
There are a number of root causes of violence among incarcerated people: trauma, mental illness, addiction, depression, poor living conditions, abuse by prison staff, lack of coping skills, and so on. Contraband cellphones rank extremely low on the list — and yet, that’s the issue the government chooses to address, not the severe shortcomings in prisons’ efforts to promote personal growth, emotional management, and problem solving.
Regulations that rob incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and human rights violations and hold prison officials accountable hurt more people and cause more negative societal consequences than they prevent. Just ask those whose lives were saved or drastically improved by reporting only made possible with the use of contraband cellphones.
Give journalists meaningful access to prisons and prison records, give incarcerated people the tools to communicate with the outside world and document abuses without censorship and retaliation, and I’ll never use a contraband cellphone again. Or better yet, don’t commit those abuses at all.
EL GUAYABO, Michoacán, Mexico — The armored vehicle, or what now remained of it, lay abandoned in the road where a landmine had blown it up. The bodies of the vehicle’s occupants, cartel sicarios who had been killed as they tried to flee, were nowhere to be found when we examined the incinerated wreckage several days later. Neither, though, were most residents of the surrounding village, who had fled en masse to escape the same fate.
Nearly the entire population of El Guayabo, approximately 400 to 500 dirt-poor lime pickers living on communal land in the west Mexican state of Michoacán, fled hastily in mid-July to escape combat between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, and the Caballeros Templarios. When I went before dawn on July 30 with local human rights defenders to help displaced residents recover some of their belongings, the windows in every house were shattered by gunfire, roofs were blown open by bombs dropped from internet-bought drones, and everyone walked nervously, scanning the ground for landmines. Scattered everywhere were thousands of dull bronze shell-casings: .50 caliber rounds for sniper rifles and machine guns, 5.56 rounds for AR-15s and similar rifles, and 7.62×39 shells used for AK-47-style rifles.
Putting a stop “to every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States,” as President Donald Trump put it to the United Nations last week, has become his self-proclaimed mission. His administration designated CJNG and Carteles Unidos — an umbrella of armed groups that includes the Templarios — as foreign terrorist organizations in January, allowing the U.S. government to crack down on any individual or group who provides them with “material support” or “expert advice and assistance.” During the first weeks of Trump’s administration, as a Washington Post investigation recently revealed, DEA agents pushed for “targeted killings of cartel leadership and attacks on infrastructure” in Mexico but faced pushback from some administration insiders. And in late July, Trump secretly signed a directive authorizing the Pentagon to use unilateral military force against Latin American drug cartels.
Since then, Trump says the U.S. has launched airstrikes against at least three alleged drug boats in international waters near Venezuela, killing 17 people. On Thursday, The Intercept obtained a leaked document circulated to congressional committees in which Trump declares the U.S. engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels. While the administration’s public ire has focused on Venezuela, sources within the Pentagon’s Northern Command have said they would have plans for potential strikes against Mexican cartels, too, “ready by mid-September.”
If the U.S. military does confront the cartels in Mexico, it will find itself facing battle with its own weapons. An investigation by The Intercept traced the bullets that littered the ground in El Guayabo to at least two U.S. firearms manufacturers, one of which operates a massive factory owned by the U.S. military. The Intercept gathered 123 shell casings, some of whose numbered headstamps corresponded to the now-defunct St. Louis Ammunition Plant and Lake City Ammunition — a commercial ammunition factory in Independence, Missouri, operated by Winchester and owned by the U.S. Army.
This investigation documents the cartels’ use of ammunition from the U.S. Army-owned factory in enforcing mass displacement in Mexico.
This investigation is the first of its kind to document the cartels’ use of ammunition from the U.S. Army-owned factory in enforcing mass displacement in Mexico. While past work has focused on the factory’s ties to mass shootings in the U.S. and the deaths of U.S. citizens, The Intercept’s investigation analyzes U.S.-made shells collected directly from the scene where some of Mexico’s poorest residents fled for their lives to escape ferocious gun battles between paramilitary groups — the same ones the Trump administration now classifies as terrorists.
“The United States is perfectly capable of breaking down criminal groups involved in the drug trade,” said Julio Franco, a human rights advocate at the Apatzingán Observatory for Citizen Security, “simply by closing off the pipeline of weaponry produced in the U.S. and used by Mexican criminal groups.”
Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite. Trump plans to slash over two-thirds of the weapons investigators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives charged with ensuring guns sold by U.S. suppliers don’t end up in the hands of Latin American cartels and gangs, incinerating the already understaffed bureaucratic safeguards designed to stop the cartel weaponry pipeline.
The ATF, the U.S. Army, and the White House did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. A representative for the Pentagon said they didn’t have responses to The Intercept’s questions, citing the government shutdown.
Experts estimate that around 200,000 military-grade assault weapons and machine guns are trafficked every year from U.S. gunshops to Mexican criminal groups, moving south across the border with little to no scrutiny. This unchecked flow of weapons, longtime weaponsexperts told The Intercept, represents a massive missed opportunity in the country’s stated mission to kneecap the cartels.
In villages like El Guayabo, this neglect fuels warfare while driving mass displacement. The Ibero-American University and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights registered 28,900 newly displaced people in at least 72 mass displacement events in Mexico last year, according to a report released in June. At least 392,000 people have been displaced since the U.S.-backed drug war was revamped in 2006, though experts estimate that to be a significant undercount. Franco estimated that several thousand have been displaced in El Guayabo since 2021, though the lack of recognition or authoritative studies means that figure too is likely an undercount.
Franco was in El Guayabo on July 30 with The Intercept and Carmen Zepeda, a teacher, humanitarian activist, and Apatzingán councilwoman for Morena, the dominant political party in Mexico. As one of the leading advocates for the victims of enforced displacement in Michoacán, Zepeda pointed to a growing list of villages where thousands have fled armed conflict: Acatlán, Loma de los Hoyos, el Mirador, el Manzo, Las Bateas, Llano Grande, El Tepetate, La Alberca, San José de Chila, El Alcalde, and El Guayabo — all in the municipality of Apatzingán.
“There’s a war in this municipality,” said Zepeda. “And this war is being carried out with bullets from the United States.”
A blown-up vehicle in El Guayabo on July 30,2025.Photo: Jared Olson/The Intercept
The man takingthe video growls at the bodies, two skinny young men, one with his mouth frozen open, sprawled out dead in the mud. “Just so you sons-of-bitches see, so you don’t keep coming to El Guayabo you motherfuckers, we warned you, you thought it was a game,” the man shouts in Spanish, out of breath, as he assesses the carnage under a soft, steady rain. Flanking the bodies are the steaming carcasses of two blown-up monstruos, the homemade armored vehicles used by cartels. “So you motherfuckers see how you’ll fucking end up, your mouth full of flies. Fucking Templas all the way.” A photo of the same monster under the same rainy sky shows five men in civilian and military clothing with bulletproof vests and assault weapons. Scattered on the ground alongside the bodies lay the dull bronze spent ammunition.
This was the aftermath of a brutal gunfight in El Guayabo on July 24, filmed by a sicario and uploaded to Telegram, six days before The Intercept made the trip to the village. When we walked along a dirt road at dawn, the bodies of the dead men, identified as 27-year-old Gustavo Javier Salazar and 24-year-old Victor Manuel de Jesús Pérez Ortíz, were gone. An official at the General State Prosecutor’s office in Apatzingán, who identified the men and requested anonymity to disclose the information, later said prosecutors seized 7.62×39 and .50 caliber ammunition, though they didn’t find the 5.56 rounds The Intercept later discovered.
The ammunition, according to residents as well as videos uploaded to social media and Telegram channels, was used by gunmen pertaining to the Caballeros Templarios, an armed wing of the Carteles Unidos, one of Trump’s designated FTOs. Fighting alongside the CJNG were sicarios for the Viagras, a paramilitary gang from Michoacán who, for years, were allied with the Templarios and Cárteles Unidos before switching sides to join the Jaliscos.
Journalists and researchers have long criticized the concept of “cartels” as a misleading term pushed by the U.S. Justice Department in the 1980s to build cases while justifying U.S.-sponsored militarization — overstating the power of violent but unstable gangs by painting them as unified hegemons who threaten governments, rather than parasitic power brokers operating parallel to them.
Yet no one doubts the violence committed by Carteles Unidos, sometimes referred to as “R5,” and the CJNG, two sprawling paramilitary coalitions benefiting from shifting and at times overlapping protection agreements from Mexican security forces. Earlier this year, a volunteer group dedicated to finding disappeared people discovered a CJNG-run “extermination site,” a training camp operating in clear view of authorities where hundreds of victims were incinerated in homemade “crematoriums.” Both armed groups have been implicated in widespread massacres, disappearances, enforcedrecruitment, and the use of landmines and child soldiers — acts that, if the Mexican government recognized the violence as armed conflict, would constitute war crimes.
When El Guayabo’s population fled at dawn, according to multiple residents, gunmen for the Jaliscos shot sporadic potshots at villagers escaping on motorcycles. And then, one displaced resident said, “the rancho was completely empty.”
Tierra Caliente, the muggy shear of mountains that encompasses western Guerrero, the southern end of Mexico State, and the southern lime plantations of Michoacán, has been known for decades as a refuge for organized crime networks. The “Hot Land,” as its name translates in English, is notorious for wars between shifting alliances of government forces, cartels, and “self-defense” groups — which have intensified since the first major operation of the U.S.-backed drug war was launched in Michoacán in 2006. El Guayabo is just one of a string of villages in the region’s expanse of lime plantations convulsed by years of warfare.
For the first half of 2025, the campesinos in El Guayabo and nearby El Alcalde barricaded themselves in their homes while listening to the devilish rattle of gunfire in the darkness outside. Some families fled one by one in a slow trickle, their nerves shot from suffering abuse at the hands of armed groups while waiting for the next gun battle; others, trying to hold on, escaped in mass displacement episodes. Some people fled from El Alcalde to El Guayabo. Sleeping was close to impossible, one resident said, as they listened to the firefights while “waiting for sunrise to see if the government would show up.”
Government forces — well-equipped, well-trained, supported by U.S.-supplied Black Hawk helicopters, and frequently benefiting from close relationships to U.S. security agencies — have long exerted overwhelming military superiority over cartel gunmen when engaging them in direct clashes. But on most mornings, residents said, their hopes went unanswered. In February, the military installed an Inter-Institutional Operations Base, a multiagency outpost hosting soldiers for the military and National Guard known as a “BOI.” But firefights only intensified in the months after their arrival.
On July 16, as the gun battles reached a fever pitch, the entire population of El Guayabo fled.
One displaced resident, who, like all desplazados interviewed for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, remembers the helpless terror of waiting inside flimsy homes while listening to the cacophony of automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons less than a mile away. The houses — made from concrete, wooden walls, and thin metal roofs — were hardly reassuring shelters against a bomb or bullet.
“Imagine how we felt being in a house with sheet metal,” they said. “It was all so terrible, we were so afraid.”
No one went unscathed by the violence. The constant stress of listening for the devilish hornet’s whine of drones gave children anxiety. A woman heard a drone and dove under a mattress with her crying grandchildren seconds before a shrapnel-laden bomb exploded on a nearby roof. Over a dozen residents told me that soldiers who were stationed in El Alcalde, less than half a mile away, almost never intervened in a month of hourslong firefights.
They had spent weeks listening to nearby gunbattles, but by mid-July, the proximity of the fighting became unbearable.
“They’ve made it down,” a man says in a video shared on Telegram from July 16, referring to the fact that armed groups had descended from the hills, fighting in the semi-forested lime plantations and homes surrounding the village.
“It got uglier then, so we all decided to get out at the same time,” an El Guayabo resident told The Intercept.
“No one sleeps here anymore.”
When they returned at the end of the month, a man in his 50s, whose wooden home was riddled with gunfire, broke down in tears after seeing several of his chickens had died because he was unable to return to feed them. Some had been able to go back during the dawn hours to feed their animals, though they couldn’t stay long. “No one sleeps here anymore,” a resident said.
A man walked me through his house to where his corrugated metal roof was blown up by a bomb dropped from a drone, his windows and the windshield of his truck shot out too. The ground, Zepeda recalled, was “carpeted with bullets manufactured in the United States.”
The sicarios never lacked for ways to replenish their ammunition. Armed groups now turn to “WhatsApp and Telegram groups dedicated to firearms transactions operate much like online marketplaces,” said Romain Le Cour, a gun violence investigator and senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “Similar to Amazon.”
Bullets for the same military-grade assault weapons lined up on the walls of gun stores in Texas, Missouri, or Illinois, could, within days, end up on the floor of a devastated living room in a rural, war-torn village like El Guayabo.
Bullets and an old school photo on the floor of a displaced El Guayabo resident’s house on July 30, 2025.Photo: Jared Olson/The Intercept
Pressed into the back of the dull bronze .50 caliber shell was a simple headstamp: LC19. The shell was one of hundreds scattered in the street before a devastated home, whose owner invited us inside as they examined the discarded military uniforms, the broken windows, and the cartridges scattered among stuffed animals and childhood school photos knocked off the wall.
“LC” is the marking for Lake City Ammunition in Independence, Missouri: built by Remington in 1941, run by Winchester, and owned by the U.S. Army. “19” is for the year it was manufactured. Thanks to the war on terror, according to its own government website, the factory’s modernization efforts brought its annual production capacity to 1.6 billion rounds a year, making one of the largest ammunition factories in the world.
The headstamps of the ammunition in El Guayabo corresponded to the photos of munitions from the Lake City factory available on the websites of gun brokers and enthusiasts, as well as a New York Times investigation from 2023. According to Bloomberg, the Pentagon has shipped hundreds of thousands of Lake City rounds to the Mexican military.
Jim Yurgealitis, a weapons expert and retired senior special agent with over two decades of experience conducting and participating in weapons trafficking investigations for the ATF, confirmed for The Intercept that the .50 bullets with the headstamps LC19, LC22, and LC23 were all produced at Lake City Ammunition.
Yurgealitis said that the round labeled “FC 5.56 18” may have come from Federal Cartridge, an ammunition manufacturer that operated Lake City in 2018, though he couldn’t say whether it was produced at the Army plant or at Federal’s private facility in Minnesota. Yurgealitis also confirmed that a 5.56 shell with a NATO insignia above the headstamp “LC24” came from Lake City.
Though munitions from Serbia, Sweden, and possibly South Africa were scattered among the destruction in El Guayabo, Yurgealitis, who reviewed a full list of the ammunition The Intercept discovered, pointed out that “none of the ammunition on that list hasn’t been available on the U.S. commercial market at least at some point.”
Lake City did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Neither Winchester, the operator of Lake City; Olin, Winchester’s parent company; nor Federal Ammunition responded to The Intercept’s formal media requests. The Intercept was unable to contact a media representative for Federal through two customer support numbers.
Coveted by gun enthusiasts for their military quality and armor-piercing capacities, bullets from Lake City, whose operations are overseen by the U.S. Army’s Joint Munitions Command, have also been used by mass shooters. In 2015, the ATF sought to ban the production of “green-tip” armor-piercing rounds — the Times investigation pointed to Lake City’s production of 5.56 green-tip rounds for AR-15s — but immediate pushback from gun enthusiasts and Second Amendment hard-liners in Congress led the agency to abandon the effort. The factory has a colossal production capacity — churning out over a billion-and-a-half rounds a year — thanks to the post-9/11 symbiosis between the U.S. government and private ammunition manufacturers, who keep machines running, ready to meet wartime demands. Lake City’s government ownership means the company enjoys minimal transparency, while Winchester, valued at over $500 million last month,profits.
In 2021, the Mexican government filed a historic lawsuit against seven U.S. firearms manufacturers and a wholesaler, seeking $10 billion in damages for allowing assault weapons to end up in the hands of cartels. TheU.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck the casedown in June, on the basis that the companies can’t be held accountable if their weapons are misused. A second lawsuit filed against five Arizona gun stores in 2022 is still working its way through the courts.
For the lawyer David Pucino, an anti-gun violence advocate at the Giffords Center who helped write an amicus brief to support the lawsuit, the already weak regulatory framework will only be made worse by Trump’s planned ATF cuts.
“It’s essentially catastrophic,” Pucino said. He added that changes could bring about “a massive rise in the vector of trafficked guns,” which will have ramifications for years to come.
The ATF is already a neglected institution whose budget allocations haven’t corresponded to the sheer scale of weapons trafficking, said Cecilia Farfán, the head of the North American Observatory for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime who has investigated weapons flows from the U.S. to Latin America. In 2023, for example, there were at least 78,000 gun dealers in the U.S. Before the cuts, the ATF only has 800 investigators charged with investigating reports of straw purchase buyers.
“They don’t have a lot of resources,” Farfán said. “They haven’t seen themselves as an agency that can collaborate with other institutions; they work with very little.”
The ATF did not respond to The Intercept’s phone calls.
One former investigator for the ATF emphasized that the agency has a “very vital role in terms of their monitoring of the gun industry” but that “they’re already overwhelmingly understaffed compared to the amount of (gun brokers) out there. … Some gun stores get one inspection a year, some get an inspection every five years.”
Pucino agreed that the soon-to-be-slashed ATF inspectors are “essential” for tracing the flow of these kinds of munitions to criminal groups, helping educate gun brokers so they can better recognize — and report — straw-man buyers for trafficking networks. Without inspectors, he said, it’s close to impossible to recover guns once they make it out of shops.
“There are extremists who want no gun laws at all and an industry that wants to maximize profits,” Pucino said. “The suffering of Mexican people is not a consideration for those who are establishing policies.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico City on Sept. 3, 2025.Photo: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty Images
If you only follow Trump’s tweets, you could be forgiven for believing the U.S. has long been at the precipice of war with Mexico. “They are now designated as terrorist organizations,” he said of the cartels in January. “Mexico probably doesn’t want that.”
Yet the erratic saber-rattling has coincided with a quiet consolidation of security coordination between the two countries. Less than 24 hours after the Trump administration’s first controversial strike on a boat in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico City. “There’s no other government that’s cooperating as much with us in the fight against crime as Mexico,” he said. (Last month, a Reuters investigation revealed how the CIA for years secretly coordinated with elite Mexican military units.)
In September, Mexican and U.S. authorities unveiled “Mission Firewall: United Against Firearms Trafficking Initiative,” a “historic” plan to intensify crackdowns on southbound weapons trafficking.
The Trump administration promised to intensify inspections at the border, while the Mexican government will expand the usage of a surveillance tool called “eTrace,” a ballistic tracking technology that has been available to the Mexican government since at least 2008. “We’ve never achieved something like this,” Sheinbaum said.
The official at the General State Prosecutor’s Office in Apatzingán told The Intercept before the announcement that questions regarding ongoing investigations into weapons trafficking networks and displacement are managed by federal investigators.
“We work with the U.S., but we just do training and workshops with U.S. agencies in Morelia (the capital of Michoacán),” the official said. “The people who coordinate directly with U.S. agencies are the federal prosecutors.”
When I went to the office of the General Prosecutors for the Republic, a prosecutor declined to comment on the basis of “secrecy.”
In February, after Trump announced punishing tariffs, and again in August, after the directive regarding the use of unilateral military force in Mexico was revealed, Sheinbaum’s administration carried out two highly publicized, but legally contested, mass extraditions of 55 narcos to the United States. Targeting individual drug traffickers has long been discredited as a policy for reducing violence, one that runs the risk, instead, of exacerbating warfare. But it remainsat the heart of the Bicentennial Framework, a tough-on-crime plan the two countries share. The framework’s implementation has coincided with the growth of enforced displacement and enforceddisappearances — and the most violent period in the country’s history since the Mexican Revolution.
In El Guayabo, soldiers arrived with an Ocelot armored vehicle and a Humvee on July 30 and installed a BOI, the same kind of outpost erected in El Alcalde in March. Residents said the soldiers did, on several occasions, engage the sicarios in early August, a period when the combat between armed groups receded into the mountains above the village.
Despite the lull in fighting, residents couldn’t shake the fear that they would be abandoned to the whims of conflict yet again. They were well aware of the selective policing that’s typified the government’s response to war in Tierra Caliente: Security forces leave once media and political attention drifts away, opening the way for the return of criminal groups — who the government won’t confront in time, if at all, to prevent mass displacement episodes.
“It’s important to remember,” the official from the General State Prosecutor’s Office told me, “that what happened in El Guayabo is an isolated act.”
When I went on July 30, the residents who had returned were packed into family members’ homes or living week by week in overpriced hotels or rentals. Unable to tend to their lime fields, they’re out of work. “My parents can’t even get their medicine anymore,” one man complained. Though around half returned with the deployment of a contingent of soldiers to the village, the others stayed away.
“The people are still afraid, because [the armed groups] are in the ranch just above us,” one resident from El Guayabo told me. In the weeks after they returned, every now and then, they could still hear gunfire in the hills.
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