I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
Israeli attacks killed at least eight Palestinians across Gaza on Sunday as the Israeli military appears to be escalating its strikes ahead of Tuesday’s Knesset elections.
Israeli strikes on Sunday included the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza City, which killed at least three people and injured eight.
University sources told AFP that the campus and its surroundings were targeted twice by Israeli attacks and that the dead were employees of the university and that the wounded were students. The Palestinian news agency WAFAidentified the dead as Ashraf Dahlan, Shadi Abu Ataya, and Sami Baroud.
Mourners react during the funeral of three Palestinians who were killed in an Israeli strike, according to medics, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, October 25, 2026. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
“The global silence regarding attacks on students and universities serves as encouragement for the continuation of these crimes,” Gaza’s Education Ministry said in a statement on the attack. “This strike occurs at a time when the higher education sector is facing total annihilation, with 95 percent of the buildings belonging to academic institutions having been damaged as a result of the war.”
The ministry added that over the past six days, “10 students and educators have been killed by the occupation’s fire.”
Regarding other attacks in Gaza on Sunday, WAFA reported that one Palestinian was also killed by an Israeli drone attack in central Gaza and one was killed by Israeli fire in northern Gaza.
Two brothers — identified as Alaa Ahmed Abu Zayed and Nabil Ahmed Abu Zayed — were killed by an Israeli strike near a prison in the southern city of Khan Younis. Later in the day, another Palestinian was reported killed by an Israeli bombing in the Sheikh Nasser neighborhood east of Khan Younis, bringing Sunday’s death toll to at least eight.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said in its daily update, released about midday Gaza time, that IDF attacks killed at least four Palestinians and wounded 14. Since the so-called ceasefire deal was signed in October 2025, Israel has killed 1,551 people in Gaza, as it has constantly violated the agreement.
Brazil’s President and re-election candidate for the Workers’ Party (PT) Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (C) speaks next to Vice President Geraldo Alckmin (5nd R) after knowing the first results of the presidential run-off election, in Sao Paulo, Brazil on October 25, 2026.
(Photo by Miguel Schincariol / AFP via Getty Images)
“This shows that Trumpismo is waning, and it is our responsibility now to make sure that we kill the beast,” Pennsylvania Democratic House nominee Chris Rabb said.
In a historic comeback, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva triumphed in Sunday’s run-off election over right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President and convicted coup-plotter Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s victory comes despite the best efforts of US President Donald Trump and his Big Tech backers, as Trump’s administration openly intervened on behalf of Bolsonaro and Meta boosted pro-Bolsonaro over pro-Lula content on its social media platforms.
“Lula won, Brazil won, democracy won, the Americas won,” saidPennsylvania Democratic House nominee Chris Rabb from Lula’s campaign headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil, after the results were announced around 9:15 pm Brasilia time. “They declared victory for Lula da Silva for his fourth term against a raging fascist, rubber-stamped for Donald Trump.”
“These elections have represented a historic victory for the majority of the Brazilian people, who mobilized to defend democracy against the threat of fascism.”
Rabb noted that Lula’s victory marked an important turning point for the left in Latin America, as far-right parties hadwon every other national election in the region since the start of Trump’s second term. “This is the first victory for democracy in this hemisphere since Trump took office,” Rabb said.
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With 99.99% of the votes counted, Lula won by 51.79% to Bolsonario’s 48.21%, making him the first Brazilian candidate since the restoration of democracy in 1985 to win a second-round election after coming in second in the initial round.
“I would like to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time,” Lula said in his victory speech in São Paulo late Sunday. “And, in this second round, I want to thank the generosity of the Brazilian youth, who took to the streets to defend democracy.”
After finishing two percentage points behind Bolsonaro in the October 4 poll, Lula re-energized his campaign by finally shortening the Brazilian workweek from six to five days, as his supporters launched demonstrations against the far-right.
“These elections have represented a historic victory for the majority of the Brazilian people, who mobilized to defend democracy against the threat of fascism,” Francesca Emanuele, senior international policy associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), told Common Dreams from Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she was monitoring the elections. “It was the Brazilian people themselves (students, working-class, and middle-class Brazilians) who took to the streets and mobilized tirelessly from the very first day after the first round of voting to overturn the first-round results and secure Lula’s victory.”
Reginaldo Lopes, a federal deputy for Lula’s Workers’ Party, told The Guardian: “I feel incredible… This is Brazil telling the world that the extreme right is fascist, that the extreme right is against Black people, is against the poor, against the state, against gay people… We are going to reorganize the democratic forces [in this country.]”
Sunday’s victory did not come easily, as the Lula campaign complained of bus shortages in the key cities of Salvador and Sao Paulo, requesting that the Brazilian Supreme Court extend the voting by two hours. The court granted the request, so polls closed at 7 pm Brasilia time instead of 5 pm.
“Lula’s win is the first good news for the planet in a while!”
“Lula has won despite the unfair practices his campaign has faced from Meta, interference from the Trump administration, and severe disruptions to public transportation on election day in major cities (where up to 50% of bus fleets were reportedly out of service),” Emanuele told Common Dreams. “These disruptions disproportionately affected working-class voters, who rely heavily on public transportation and have historically been a key part of Lula’s electoral base.”
She continued: “Despite all these obstacles, Lula’s campaign managed to turn around a first-round result that, just a few weeks ago, had seemed extremely difficult to reverse. This is a major victory for the majority of the Brazilian people.”
Several advocates and lawmakers hailed the election results as a rebuke to the far-right and the Trump administration in particular.
“During his campaign, President Lula characterized 2026’s elections as a choice between ‘sovereignty or submission.’ Brazil has clearly chosen sovereignty,” the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who sent a delegation to observe both rounds of Brazil’s elections, wrote in a statement.
Progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) posted on social media: “People all across the world are fighting back against extremism. With Lula in Brazil, they just won. Authoritarian leaders always attack democracy because they stand no chance against the will of their people. Trump must respect the results and not undermine Brazil’s elections.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said: “Congratulations to Lula on his extraordinary reelection victory in the Brazilian presidential election. Lula has stood up for Brazilian workers & democracy—and will continue to do so in the next four years.”
“Lula’s hard-fought victory is an indictment on the right-wing wave sweeping through Latin America,” Joseph Bouchard, a journalist and researcher who focuses on Latin America, told Common Dreams. “Except for [ Salvadorian President Nayib] Bukele, the right across the region is still incredibly unpopular, and rightly seen as corrupt, autocratic, and uncommitted to fixing systemic issues. Lula shows there is still a fight for democracy worth having, while the region is plunged into its darkest, most regressive period since the Cold War. The entire region is populated by vassal states for US interests, who have declared states of exception to curtail rights, freedoms, and basic principles of social democracy, in the name of a failed and anti-human war on drugs.”
Lula’s victory also has planetary consequences, as he broughtdeforestation in the Amazon rainforest back down to record lows after it accelerated during the tenure of Jair Bolsonaro, who attacked environmental protections and Indigenous rights.
“Lula’s win is the first good news for the planet in a while!” wrote350.org and Third Act co-founder Bill McKibben. “I bet it shaves a tenth of a degree off how hot our Earth eventually gets, which will save millions of lives. Thank you Brazil!”
Lula still faces a fight ahead, as Bolsonaro announced it was “impossible to concede the election result” due to the extension of polling hours, even though his team had also sought an extension in parts of southeastern Brazil because of unfavorable weather.
Bouchard pointed out that “Lula will fight an uphill battle with a far-right Congress, inept Supreme Court, and constant outside pressure..”
“Trump’s silence on the result is worrisome, with Flavio not conceding and demanding an annulment,” he told Common Dreams. “Sadly, much of the corporate press has legitimated these claims, despite the right’s concerted efforts at destroying democracy. No matter how much the authoritarians try to tip the scales, the people can still prevail, if the left is willing to fight. This might prove to be a confidence boost to the demoralized and overpowered left all over the region, and may hopefully set the region back toward progress, hard fought after decades of dictatorship and neoliberal transitions.”
US-based Lula allies urged others in the US to defend Brazil’s democracy from Trump administration interference and to take their own stand against the far-right in the upcoming midterm elections.
The DSA wrote:
However, the fight continues—the thin margin of this victory indicates that continued struggle and mobilization will be crucial. As global capitalism fails to solve worsening problems of its own making, the capitalists turn to right-wing authoritarianism. Brazil’s left-wing coalition will face a right-wing Congress at home, a hostile Trump administration in the US, and hostile capitalists both [at] home and abroad in the years ahead. We of the DSA stand in solidarity with our comrades in the PT [Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores], PSOL [Brazil’s left-wing Socialism and Liberty Party], and Brazilian social movements in this fight for democratic self-determination.
This solidarity means recognizing our country’s role in the threat to Brazilian democracy. These elections were marred by interference from the US, whether by Trump’s politically motivated tariffs, or by manipulation of social media by US-based tech companies like Meta. They aimed to subvert Brazil’s democracy to favor its far-right allies grouped in the “Shield of the Americas,” and to get their hands on crucial natural resources, such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals as well as petroleum and iron ore, which Brazil possesses in abundance and which Lula has sworn to protect as national patrimony. The DSA categorically denounces these meddlesome, imperialist efforts. We fight for a working-class foreign policy—one which centers peace, multilateralism, and respects national self-determination, free from US interference.
Rabb concluded his message with a call to action, and a celebration: “This is a big deal for us in the United States. This shows that Trumpismo is waning, and it is our responsibility now to make sure that we kill the beast. That beast is injustice, it’s oligarchy, it’s neoliberalism. All of these things. Now it’s our turn, folks. November 3 is right around the corner, but right now I’m going to party with these Brazilians.”
Update: This piece has been updated with commentary from Joseph Bouchard.
“We have 48 persons, 48 birthdays, 48 lives and dreams. Each moment we remember them.”
Khitam Elian is speaking of her family, all 48 members killed in a single Israeli strike in November 2023 on a house in Nuseirat in an area of Gaza that was supposed to be safe. Her daughter Roba describes how she first saw the footage on social media without knowing what it was: “People were under the rubble and their legs were out… I wished that they would be strong only to realise later that this is my own family house, and those legs are my people’s.” The babies, she says, “were only four months when it happened… they were both killed.”
Channel 4’s Dispatches investigation, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, is built on testimony like this and represents a rare break with the silence and evasions that have characterised the British media’s coverage of Gaza. It is a direct exposure of Britain’s complicity in Israel’s war and the mechanisms used to conceal it.
Dispatches: Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed argues that UK support for Israel is shaped by strategic, diplomatic and economic interests. Israel is viewed as a key ally in the Middle East, while maintaining support for Israel helps preserve Britain’s close alignment with the United States.
The programme highlights the importance of the arms trade, particularly Britain’s role in the international F-35 fighter jet programme. In what is known as the “F-35 carve-out” successive governments have continued to allow UK-made components for the multinational F-35 supply chain even while other licences have been suspended. Around £360 million of these components have been supplied Israel’s F-35 fleet, its most significant combat aircraft, while British firms hold approximately $7.8 billion in ongoing F-35 contracts.
The programme’s central finding, based on previously unpublished internal government documents including legal assessments of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, is that the Foreign Office’s International Humanitarian Law Compliance Assessment Process (IHLCAP) was designed to ensure no war crimes could be found. Presented as a way to assess alleged Israeli war crimes, it allowed arms sales to continue.
Lawyer Dearbhla Minogue studied documents from the legal challenge brought by the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq against UK arms exports to Israel. She explained how the methodology was “essentially incapable of allowing any kind of finding of breach unless the perpetrator tells you they’ve breached IHL.”
Asked whether Israel could ever be found in breach, she replied, “Not unless they admit it themselves… If Israel either says nothing or says everything was fine then everything’s fine.”
Former Prime Minister David Cameron, brought back into government by Rishi Sunak as foreign secretary, was personally briefed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza could constitute a breach of international humanitarian law. When challenged in Parliament, Cameron resorted to evasions: “I’m not a lawyer… I can’t recall every single bit of paper that’s been put in front of me.” He dodged the question 10 times. Just two days after the World Central Kitchen aid convoy strike killed three British aid workers, he approved the continuation of UK arms exports to Israel.
Foreign Secretary David Cameron (left) holds a meeting with United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken on his visit to Washington [Photo by Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office /Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
Within the Foreign Office, hundreds of civil servants signed letters warning that the UK risked complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Officials told Dispatches they were discouraged from using terms such as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” and described an atmosphere of intimidation.
Former diplomat and whistleblower Mark Smith said he resigned after witnessing “illegal activity at the heart of government” and losing faith in a system that could be manipulated because “the nature of the assessment is such that it can kind of make it say whatever you want.” Pointing to Gaza’s devastation, he said, “They’ve destroyed the vast majority of all residential buildings in Gaza. I’ve never seen anything like it in my career, in my life.” When he challenged government policy, he said he was met with a “barrage” of demands to “delete these emails” because “you shouldn’t be asking this.”
The documentary features surgeons who volunteered in Gaza. Professor Nick Maynard described treating groups of young boys whose wounds followed strikingly similar patterns. “One day there was 19 young boys, all of whom had been shot in the head and neck and the head and neck only. Another day mainly in the abdomen, another day in the chest, and one day they were shot in the testicles.” The pattern was so consistent that “we could not believe it was coincidental” and appeared to indicate deliberate targeting.
Maynard and other doctors later met then Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer but were barred from presenting photographic evidence. Surgeon Victoria Rose said, “We weren’t allowed to screen share” and that Starmer, “a very tiny figure at the back of the screen”, offered no response. Maynard’s conclusion? “There can be no question that our senior politicians know what’s going on and the fact they are ignoring it, I do believe amounts to complicity.”
Channel 4 deserves some credit for putting this material on British television, as it did in July 2025 with its screening of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack–after the BBC had commissioned and then suppressed it, functioning as an arm of the government’s cover-up.
However, the film closes by asking what happens when the law is “enforced for enemies but bent for allies.” It assumes there exists a body of international law and state institutions intended to restrain governments, and that Gaza represents a tragic departure from those principles. But the documentary’s own evidence points elsewhere. It shows that the IHLCAP process was structured to produce findings of “no violation” and that assessments were moved into political offices where experts could be sidelined. The law was not accidentally bent; it functioned as an instrument of state policy. Al-Haq’s challenge to UK arms exports failed, with judges insisting such decisions belonged to ministers. Likewise International Court of Justice rulings have been ignored with the backing of Britain and the United States.
The documentary’s political limitations are clearest in its treatment of Labour. It exposes Labour’s refusal to acknowledge genocide, its support for the “F-35 carve-out” and the fact that Keir Starmer’s administration approved £127.6 million of military export licences to Israel in the final three months of 2024, exceeding the total approved under the Conservatives during the preceding four years.
Yet it frames Labour’s persistence in supplying and licensing arms for Israel despite evidence of war crimes, legal concerns and public opposition as a gap between rhetoric and reality, asking whether its measures were “as meaningful as they say.”
The suggestion is that Labour has fallen short of its principles. The evidence presented points to a different conclusion: Labour’s support for Israel is a continuation of British imperial policy, pursued by governments of both parties.
PCS trade union General Secretary Fran Heathcote is presented as the voice of civil servants warning of British complicity in war crimes. She is allowed to describe their concerns without being pressed on what the union has actually done. Rather than mobilising its members to refuse cooperation, the union bureaucracy has confined opposition to letters, legal complaints and appeals to the very ministers implementing the policy.
The central political question–who can stop this, and how–is left unanswered. The global opposition to the war and mass protests appear only at the margins and the role that must be played by workers in opposing genocide is of course never considered, leaving the documentary trapped within the same political framework it set out to criticise.
Fascist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir speaks to the media near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, Friday, Oct. 23, 2026. [AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean]
The Israeli government sealed off the occupied West Bank on Friday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was preparing a military operation there of a kind “not carried out since” Israel’s conquest of the territory in 1967.
The Israeli government, in alliance with the Trump administration, is extending the Gaza genocide to the West Bank in step with the preparations for a renewed offensive against Iran. Both are part of one continuous operation to create a “new Middle East,” launched in October 2023 under Democratic President Joe Biden and continued under US President Donald Trump. The total subjugation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a corollary of the war plans of the Trump and Netanyahu governments.
Netanyahu ordered the lockdown four days before Israel’s national election on October 27, 11 days before the US midterm elections on November 3 and four days after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met him in Israel. The New York Times wrote Wednesday that US officials said Hegseth and Netanyahu discussed new strikes on Iran, to be launched after the US elections.
Just as the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas were seized upon by Netanyahu as the pretext to occupy Gaza and displace and exterminate its inhabitants, the Netanyahu government has seized on an attack on Israeli soldiers as its pretext for the offensive to annex the West Bank.
Two soldiers, Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were killed at a checkpoint outside Hebron, in the southern West Bank, on Friday morning. The Israeli army claimed that two Palestinians from Hebron opened fire on the checkpoint and that troops shot both men dead after a gunfight of about 20 minutes.
Netanyahu pledged to destroy the neighborhood the alleged gunmen came from. “First of all, we will act to destroy this place, to change it completely,” he said at the checkpoint, the Times of Israel reported Friday. The army would “implement the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps” and go “house to house,” Netanyahu said.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
The government was “considering a very extensive IDF [Israeli army] operation in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], such as has not been carried out since” the 1967 war, Netanyahu said Friday.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Friday: “Every clan neighborhood in Hebron from which the terrorists emerged today will be evacuated of its residents.” Katz added: “Just like in Gaza …”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote Friday: “There is no alternative to a comprehensive military campaign in Judea and Samaria to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, collect the weapons, and eliminate the terrorists, exactly as we did in Gaza …” The Palestinian Authority administers the Palestinian towns of the West Bank, and there is no evidence linking it to the gunmen.
By Friday evening the army was demolishing Palestinian buildings near Hebron, the Times of Israel reported that day, after Smotrich said he had ordered the immediate destruction of “a large swath of illegal Arab structures.” The army said that evening that it had “launched offensive counter-terrorism operations in the Hebron area.”
In the first 14 days of October the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs counted “at least 160” attacks by settlers tied to the olive harvest, UN News reported Wednesday. On Monday the agency said Israeli troops and settlers had killed five Palestinians in the West Bank and injured more than 240 in two weeks.
Settlers also staged provocative attacks on foreigners. On October 16 about 80 masked settlers carrying clubs charged a group of Palestinian olive pickers near the village of Abu Falah and beat Heidi Levine, a photojournalist working for the Washington Post, Al Jazeera reported October 20. On October 17 masked settlers attacked French, Belgian and Polish diplomats in the town of Taybeh and threw a French mayor, Bernard Baudoux, 78, to the ground, Al Jazeera reported the next day.
On Friday Netanyahu called West Bank settlers “heroic” and “an example to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel,” NBC News reported that day.
TEHRAN — Dutch military hackers sat inside Jared Kushner’s iPhone in 2018 and watched him log in to a Dubai bank account that had taken in hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a new book by journalist Matthew Cole.
The account was allegedly one of at least two through which Abu Dhabi and Riyadh gave Donald Trump’s son-in-law access to about $2 billion while he steered Middle East policy from the White House.
Cole’s excerpt, published October 22 in Vanity Fair, starts with a GRU operative who specialized in stolen bank data. The Dutch MIVD learned he was headed for Britain, got London’s permission to seize him on arrival, and gave him a choice between working for The Hague and facing espionage charges.
He chose The Hague. In late 2017, he opened a GRU server in Rostov, where the Dutch found screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone X.
The MIVD reverse-engineered the Russian break-in. By early 2018 its team could watch Kushner’s screen whenever he used the phone.
Dutch press reported they spent years inside the Cozy Bear hacking group and fed the Americans warnings. This time the target worked in the White House.
Alpha, Beta and a defense fund
On that screen, Cole writes, was a First Abu Dhabi Bank account that Kushner signed for but did not own.
It belonged to the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, a state-funded Emirati “charity” that Cole says doubled as cover for covert weapons purchases abroad.
Roughly $750 million in cash reportedly entered through Azerbaijan, a channel that Cole says was used to conceal the money’s origins in the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.
The ruling Arab families had initially floated a fund exceeding $10 billion to advance Trump’s foreign policy agenda, before settling on accounts for Kushner. “Jared was looking for shortcuts in his diplomacy,” one source told Cole.
A second account, Beta, allegedly held about $1 billion in Israel’s Central Bank by spring 2018. Netanyahu supposedly demanded notice of any transfer, relayed through Ambassador David Friedman, and much of the money later went to Cyprus.
A third deposit was reportedly earmarked for Israeli assistance to the UAE in countering Iran. Cole says the Dutch probably saw only Alpha.
In return for these financial commitments, Kushner backed Abu Dhabi and Riyadh’s regional demands from inside the White House and helped negotiate a secret defense pact committing Israeli military aid to provide military backing to the UAE.
Four senior Trump officials, among them two national security advisers, a chief of staff and a former CIA director, told Cole they knew of no presidential approval for Kushner to use a foreign government account.
A former Mueller prosecutor told him any promise made in return for the money could break bribery and foreign agent laws. House Oversight Democrats say Kushner must answer before the American people.
A marketplace, and Iran across the table
In 2018, The Intercept reported that Mohammed bin Salman bragged to Mohamed bin Zayed that Kushner was “in his pocket.”
Months after leaving office, Kushner took $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign fund for Affinity Partners, over a screening panel’s finding that its due diligence was “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Rep. Jamie Raskin has since put Affinity’s assets at $6.16 billion.
Cole’s account paints a stark picture of how Washington, Tel Aviv and the Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf operate behind closed doors.
Israel wanted “normalization” with the Arab states on its own terms. Mohamed bin Zayed and his Israeli allies wanted the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) blown up. Mohammed bin Salman wanted the crown.
Kushner, an unpaid White House adviser with signing rights on an Emirati account, sat at the center of all three demands. Trump pulled out of the Iran deal in May 2018, in the very months the Dutch say they were watching that account.
On the book’s account, the strategy against Iran and the wider Resistance ran on secret slush funds, dark money and a corruption so routine that one source told Cole the Arab rulers in the Persian Gulf spend a billion or two on such arrangements every year.
The reports in Cole’s book date from Trump’s first term. In the second, the money may no longer need hidden accounts, because it moves through deals in plain view.
A $2 billion Emirati investment was tied to the Trump family’s USD1 stablecoin. Steve Witkoff met Tahnoon Bin Zayed on a yacht off Sardinia, and months later the White House moved to ease AI chip exports to Tahnoon’s G42.
David Sacks, the administration’s AI and crypto czar, received an ethics waiver to join those talks despite earlier fund ties to Persian Gulf investors. Tahnoon is the same man who chaired First Abu Dhabi Bank when, Cole says, the Alpha account was filling up.
What has emerged is a marketplace where Saudi and Emirati money, Israeli strategic interests and a president’s son-in-law met behind closed doors and conspired.
That same son-in-law is now a White House envoy deeply involved in Washington’s regional misadventures, including the war on Iran. Tehran has every reason to ask who he really works for.
The Trump administration and the Israeli government are deepening their plans for a massive attack on Iran in a matter of weeks. The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing US officials, that the American and Israeli militaries “have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections,” and that the targets “would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal.”
President Donald Trump, right, poses for a photo with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before he boards Air Force One at Ben Gurion International Airport, Oct. 13, 2025, near Tel Aviv, as Israel’s President Isaac Herzog watches at left. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
Taking place as US President Donald Trump’s approval rating hits a record low, the November 3 midterm elections are expected to reflect widespread popular opposition to the wars being waged by American imperialism and the affordability crisis they have triggered. Both parties, however, are plotting to flout the election results. Trump is actively preparing to attack Iran, while the Democrats are agitating for an escalation of war with Russia.
The Times reported that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth discussed the new strikes with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Israel this week, and that American and Israeli warplanes have been flying over Iraq to rehearse the strikes. The United States “is assembling a massive arsenal that will be fully in place by early November,” the Times wrote, including “three aircraft carriers, thousands of Marines, fighter jets and Special Operations forces.” The US military “prefers to conduct attacks under the cover of night,” the Times added, “and there will be increasing hours of darkness over Iran early next month.”
Some US planners, according to the Times, believe “an intensive three-day campaign could cause enough economic damage to change the Iranian position.” The Times reported, citing people it described as briefed on the planning, that the two militaries are also preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear program, possibly including the underground site at Pickaxe Mountain. Trump said in an interview with the right-wing cable channel Newsmax on October 15: “Now we’re looking at Pickaxe Mountain. We may have to go there.”
The Financial Times reported Wednesday, under the headline “Netanyahu made plans to restart Iran strikes earlier this month,” that Israel’s military had planned to open several days of strikes on Iran on the weekend of October 10, against nuclear facilities, power plants and other civilian infrastructure, in an operation more intense than the US-Israeli air war launched in February. The strikes did not go ahead, the Financial Times reported, because Trump was against reopening the bombing until the midterms were over. The New York Times gave a similar account: The two militaries “came close to striking Iran early this month,” with their air forces “on the highest state of alert,” before Trump “decided at the last minute to postpone the attack.”Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
Netanyahu is campaigning in the Israeli election of October 27 on the platform of overthrowing the Iranian government. On September 3 he told an audience of Israeli military commanders: “I am convinced that we can remove this threat once and for all—that is, to overthrow this regime. That is the central task that still lies ahead of us, but it is close.”
The Times of Israel, an English-language Israeli news site, reported October 14 that Channel 12, an Israeli television news station, had learned that Netanyahu pushed Trump to restart the bombing before the Israeli vote, and that Trump told him he could “go ahead and prepare.” Five days earlier the Times of Israel reported, again citing Channel 12, that Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, had warned US military commanders that a strike could force Israel to postpone its election.
The war being prepared by Trump and Netanyahu has already cost thousands of lives. US and Israeli warplanes first struck Iran on February 28, and the Times on Wednesday called the February-to-April bombardment the war’s “first phase.” The Qatar-based network Al Jazeera, compiling official figures, put the dead in Iran at 3,527 as of August 28. The toll on the American side, by the US military’s count through September 28, was 19 dead and 861 wounded.
The Times acknowledged Wednesday that the first phase of the war “drove up energy prices and inflation around the world” and “severely strained the Pentagon’s supply of missile interceptors.” Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, traded at $112 a barrel Thursday. The motorists’ association AAA put the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline at $4.27 on Thursday, up from $2.98 on February 26, two days before the bombing began.
The Houthi militia of Yemen, which is allied with Iran, has stepped up its attacks on Saudi Arabia, and on Wednesday the State Department told its non-emergency staff in the kingdom to leave with their families. Strikes this week on the airport in Dammam and on the Shaybah oil field killed at least three people.
Neither Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer nor House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has made any significant statement warning about the Trump administration’s plans to attack Iran after the elections. The Democrats are demanding an escalation of war against Russia. Jeffries told the House on September 16, during the debate on a bill authorizing tariffs on countries that purchase Russian oil and gas: “Many of us wonder why the President has been so reluctant to aggressively confront the bully of Eastern Europe.” He added that “you have to confront the bully, not appease the bully.”
Schumer said on October 17, after Trump waived new sanctions on Russia: “Trump is aiding and abetting a dictator who has helped Iran target US troops in the Middle East.” Schumer and Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had said on March 13 that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has been one of the prime beneficiaries of President Trump’s poorly conceived and executed war against Iran,” and that “Russia is reportedly providing Iran intelligence to target and kill U.S. service members.”
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said of the waiver on Fox News Sunday on October 18 that if Trump is “giving that money to Russia … they’re using it to provide support for Iran. In the Iranian US war that’s going on right now, you don’t give money to an adversary.”
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said on ABC’s This Week on September 27: “We can’t leave the Strait in the hands of the Iranians. They can’t be allowed to get a nuclear weapon.” Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said on CNN on September 30 that Hegseth “needs to distract from the fact that he’s losing a war,” and that if Hegseth needed a new office at the Pentagon, it should be for “figuring out how to win this war in Iran.”
On January 22, five weeks before the US bombing of Iran began, 149 House Democrats voted for the $839 billion military appropriations bill. On September 16, 58 House Democrats voted for the Russia sanctions bill, since signed by Trump, which also extends sanctions on Iran through 2031.
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Western media commemorate the Israelis killed three years ago, while largely ignoring the genocide that began the same day
A girl looks at the temporary tents of displaced Palestinians, alongside destroyed buildings, in Gaza City on 7 October 2026 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP)
Just after 4pm local time on 7 October 2023, Al Jazeera’s Youmna El Sayed stood on a rooftop to update her audience on the latest from Gaza City, which was already under bombardment following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel early that same morning.
Live on air, as she was about to answer a question from a news anchor, we heard the sound of a missile scream down from the sky before thumping into a tower block with a horrible boom, the orange flash of an explosion appearing over her shoulder.
Sayed cried out in shock and ducked from view, but as so many brave Palestinian journalists would do over the next three years, she tried to continue reporting.
“We have just witnessed live what an Israeli air raid looks like on a populated area of Gaza City,” said the anchor, Cyril Vanier. “What we believe is a residential building.”
That initial strike on Palestine Tower, which indeed was a mixed-use residential and office building, was what the Israelis call a “roof knock” – a warning that a building is about to be destroyed, giving people an absurdly short time to escape.
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Minutes later, the rockets intended to obliterate the tower arrived, and about 80 apartments – homes that would have had family photos on the walls, toys on the floor and dishes in the sink – were instantly reduced to a painful memory.
Vanier’s words were a portent of what was to come, because what we witnessed in that viral moment has since been repeated daily.
Israel’s campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people had begun. The genocide started on 7 October.
‘Wicked city’
In fact, it started just hours after Hamas and other groups launched their dawn attack. By 8:24am, the Times of Israel reported that Israeli strikes were under way.
The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya was struck a short while after, killing two people, including a member of staff. This set in motion what would become a pattern of attacking medical facilities, doctors, patients and employees: over the next three years, more than 1,700 healthcare workers were killed, many in targeted attacks.
Journalist Mohammad al-Salhi was shot dead by Israeli forces in al-Bureij on 7 October, and ambulances were hit outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and in Jabalia, where two paramedics lost their lives and several others were wounded.
The industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinian children also began on 7 October. Just after 8pm, with the attack on Gaza ongoing for 12 hours, the Israelis hit a three-storey building in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, where three generations of the al-Dos family lived. Fifteen family members, including seven children, were killed. Adam al-Dos, 18 months old, was the youngest.
The entries on Gaza were so fleeting and by-the-numbers that all they did was underline the disparity. They reeked of afterthought
Children were also killed in other strikes that day. By 9pm, a provisional death toll of 232 Palestinians was reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians were not shy about making their intentions immediately clear, with intent a key component of legally determining that a genocide has been committed.
“We will take mighty vengeance for this black day,” Netanyahu said in a televised address. “We will take revenge for all the young people who lost their lives … We will turn Gaza into a deserted island.”
Yoav Gallant, then the defence minister, vowed to “change reality on the ground in Gaza for the next 50 years”, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reportedly told a cabinet meeting that Israel must “be cruel now and not think too much about the hostages”. An army general made the sinister promise that Hamas had “opened the gates of hell on the Gaza Strip”.
All of these statements, and more, were made on 7 October. It is clear that the genocide began that morning.
Hierarchy of suffering
Why, then, did much of the western media this month mark the anniversary with wall-to-wall reporting of Israeli commemorations – and only the paltriest of mentions for Palestinians?
Why did the BBC run a live blog with pages of stories humanising Israelis killed three years ago, while Palestinians continue to be massacred? Why did the Guardian?
To be clear, it’s not the fact that there was coverage. It’s the immense scale and prominence of it: a scale that amounted to tens of thousands of words and hours of television, yet found little room for Gaza.
This highlights the hierarchy of suffering that western media has applied to the events of the last three years. It’s more than a hierarchy of suffering: it’s a hierarchy of peoples.
Why Gaza’s genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history
The BBC’s blog was headlined “Israeli families mourn 7 October victims as memorials held around world”. Its lead image was a girl placing a candle at a fountain in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, where photos of victims of the attack on Israel sat alongside photos of Israeli soldiers killed while committing genocide in Gaza.
The pages featured dozens of images of Israeli commemorations; of people weeping, embracing and bowing their heads in remembrance, as they should, because they deserve to heal and to remember their loved ones like anyone else.
The point, though, is that with the genocide ongoing, there were only a handful of Palestinians briefly featured, all of them currently living through hell – and not a single blog post was reserved for the Palestinians killed by Israel on 7 October 2023 itself.
The entries on Gaza were so fleeting and by-the-numbers that all they did was underline the disparity. They reeked of afterthought, or of an attempt to see off criticism.
There was no space for the seven Dos children, who were wiped from mainstream media memory as 7 October victims because they were Palestinian.
Taboo subject
The Guardian’s live blog, headlined “World leaders pay tribute to victims as Israel marks three years since 7 October attack by Hamas – as it happened”, was more of the same. Palestinians were featured, but as footnotes drowned out by Israel’s mourning.
In the US, NBC’s live updates, which focused on how Israel was marking the anniversary with memorials “at homes, roadsides, kibbutzim and a music festival site”, gave more room than others to Palestinians – but in doing so, exposed another dichotomy.
It communicated, or at least implied, to the reader that the Israelis killed three years ago were more important than the Palestinians it rightly pointed out were still being killed. Even on the anniversary itself, at least five Palestinians were killed, including a 17-year-old boy and a rescue worker responding to a previous strike.
The fact is, talking about the Palestinians killed on 7 October is a taboo – one fiercely policed by pro-Israel lobbying groups and the western media and political classes.
The opening line of a BBC report on an anniversary march in London to demand an end to the genocide said that organisers were “ignoring a request by the Metropolitan Police” for it to be called off. Police, it continued, were worried that the march, organised by the University of London coalition, would distress Jewish students and staff.
It then quoted the Union of Jewish Students as saying that the protest was “provocative, deliberate and must be condemned”.
The BBC only briefly – without naming or, it appears, interviewing anyone – mentioned that protest organisers said they wanted to denounce genocide and fight for a free Palestine.
Over on the Guardian, a statement from the Board of Deputies of British Jews was published in full, calling the protesters, some of whom were Jewish, a “small and extremist minority of British society”. The UK’s defence secretary, Wes Streeting, was featured labelling the march “shameful”. Not a single marcher was quoted.
Media manipulation
The strength of the taboo was also demonstrated by the hysterical reactions from the pro-Israel lobby, along with right-wing and centrist politicians, to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement on the day, to which the media hungrily responded.
News stories in the US were not framed around what Mamdani actually said. Instead, they centred on the absurd response to it. It’s worth noting that his statement began not with Gaza, but with a condemnation of the Hamas-led attacks, which he called “horrific war crimes” that were “profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers”.
But that wasn’t enough. Mamdani’s transgression, it seems, was that he went on to condemn the genocide, pointing out how many people were killed and underscoring the fact that despite the “so-called ceasefire”, the slaughter continues.
Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people began on 7 October 2023. It continues. And Palestinian lives are as important as Israeli lives
The New York Times, CNN and Politico all centred their stories around the three paragraphs in which the mayor focused on Palestinians.
Mamdani “draws anger”, the New York Times headline said. For CNN, he drew “ire”. And in the telling of Politico’s headline, he was subject to “bipartisan backlash”.
Those three stories, from some of the most esteemed outlets in the US, collectively provide a pitch-perfect example of media manipulation in action at the highest levels.
Here are the facts: Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people began on 7 October 2023. It continues. And Palestinian lives are as important as Israeli lives.
That’s the simple truth, whether the western media wants to tell it or not.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
