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.
The strategy is being overseen by
Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, who has long called for the
US to prepare to fight a “limited nuclear war”
The Pentagon is reportedly drafting a new
nuclear strategy that’s expected to emphasize the use of tactical
nuclear weapons to give the president more “options” in a potential
nuclear conflict.
The strategy, first reported by NBC News,
is being drafted by the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, who
has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional
capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.”
The idea would be to shift the US nuclear
strategy away from the focus on using strategic nuclear weapons to wipe
out an adversary’s nuclear capabilities and focus more on the
possibility of using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons in a “regional”
conflict.
Elbridge
Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, during a Senate Armed
Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on March 3, 2026. (Photo
by Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect)
“If you actually want extended deterrence
to be credible, you have to provide the nation’s political leadership
with nuclear capabilities that common sense indicates you could actually
use,” a source told NBC. “Otherwise you’re reducing our leadership’s options to extreme choices that the adversary won’t find credible.”
While the potential strategy would be
carried out in the name of deterrence and preventing war, arms control
advocates have strongly warned against the idea of developing more
tactical nuclear weapons to prepare for a potential limited nuclear
conflict over concerns that it would make nuclear war much more likely
and that any nuclear exchange would likely lead to a global catastrophe.
“Without a firm rejection of the option to
use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, by building and fielding more
tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signaling its intention
to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a
conflict,” the Arms Control Association said in response to the NBC report.
The ACA said that it “strongly opposes the
administration’s decision to build more tactical nuclear weapons to
supplement the options that exist” and pointed to the fact that the US
already has at least two types of tactical nuclear weapons, including
B61-12 gravity bombs, which are deployed in Europe, and the W76-2
low-yield warhead for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic
missile.
The ACA said the US Navy is also
“acquiring a new nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N)
that may be available at the end of the decade for possible use in
conflict with China.”
Breaking Defensereported
that Colby announced on August 5 that the Pentagon was reviewing the US
nuclear posture and repeatedly emphasized the term “options” in a
speech he delivered that has not been made public.
Colby has been one of the leading voices
in Washington’s policy circles advocating for the US to prepare for
limited nuclear war. In a 2015 paper for the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS) titled “A Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2030,”
Colby said the US “should make a special effort to develop the
platforms and weapons, doctrine, planning capacity, and other
capabilities needed to fight a limited nuclear war more effectively than
plausible adversaries.”
He said that the ideal US nuclear force is
“one that is not only highly survivable and able to issue a devastating
blow against any adversary under any scenario but that is also capable
of conducting effective limited nuclear operations in a controlled
fashion while maintaining the ability to escalate to full-scale war if
necessary.”
Colby made a similar argument in a 2018 piece written in Foreign Affairs titled “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War,”
published just a few months after he left the first Trump
administration, where he led the development of the 2018 National
Defense Strategy.
“Washington’s task is clear. It must
demonstrate to Moscow and Beijing that any attempt to use force against
US friends and allies would likely fail and would certainly result in
costs and risks well out of proportion to whatever they might gain,”
Colby wrote. “This requires conventional military power, but it also
means having the right strategy and weapons to fight a limited nuclear
war and come out on top.”
What happened in the Nablus-area town of Tell lays bare a land war designed to make Palestinian permanence impossible.
Mohammad al-Ayoubi, The Cradle, AUG 4, 2026
Photo Credit: The Cradle
In the Palestinian town of Tell, southwest of Nablus, residents attempted to repel an armed settler assault. Their response was quickly used to justify collective punishment. The army sealed the roads while settlers attacked homes and property, each advancing the same campaign of dispossession. The assault on Tell exposed a campaign already underway across the occupied West Bank.
Abdullah Abu Rahma, director of popular action at the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, tells The Cradle that the violence belongs to a plan unfolding according to a set timetable:
“It is true that attacks have increased markedly in recent days in terms of the number of martyrs, the demolition of property, and restrictions on movement, but they fall within a broader plan drawn up years ago. The events in Tell gave [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s government the political and media pretext to accelerate what had already been planned, exploiting them as justification before its domestic audience to create the impression that its actions against the Palestinians are warranted.”
The figures bear out the scale of that campaign. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 11,074 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers during the first half of 2026. Of these, 3,488 were carried out by settlers, including assaults on villages, arson, shootings, land seizures, and the establishment of settlement outposts. The commission says settler attacks killed 17 Palestinians during that period.
The occupied West Bank is also being broken into ever smaller enclaves. As of December 2025, OCHA had documented 925 movement obstacles, including 89 permanently staffed checkpoints, 218 partial checkpoints, and 232 road gates.
An Oxfam analysis of UN data found that 1,244 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 2023 and the end of 2025. Nearly 46,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced over the same three years, compared with just over 13,000 during the previous 14 years combined.
For Dr Mohammad Halsa, a specialist in Israeli affairs, the violence cannot be understood as a chain of isolated reactions:
“It is one element of a comprehensive ideological agenda governing the ruling right, which views all Palestinian land as the exclusive property of Jews and considers the present moment the most suitable opportunity to move from ‘managing the conflict’ to ‘resolving it’ once and for all, thereby correcting a ‘historic mistake’ committed by Ben-Gurion in 1948 when several thousand Palestinians were allowed to remain.”
Tell and the anatomy of a land grab
Suleiman Bisharat, director of the Yabous Center, and Abu Rahma both reject the idea that Tell represents a sudden turn. They place it within a pattern of settlement violence that has intensified across the occupied West Bank since 2024.
Community activist Ahmad Ayyash goes further, telling The Cradle:
“What is happening is not ‘settler attacks under army protection,’ as it is portrayed, but attacks carried out in partnership with the army, not under its protection. The partnership between the two operates in a state of extremely close coordination. The settlers and the Israeli army are not separate actors, but two arms of the same project.”
For Ayyash, Tell may nevertheless prove significant as “a turning point in resisting attacks by settlers and the army, or the beginning of the use of new means to confront the occupation,” particularly as Palestinians face forms of violence that many communities had not previously experienced at this intensity.
Regarding one recent incident, Abu Rahma is equally direct, asserting that “what happened was self-defense, the videos show the dead were killed by army fire or by the settlers themselves, and that seizing the weapon was a fleeting moment rather than a planned act.”
Reuters reported that the confrontation began after armed settlers approached the village and that footage appeared to show a Palestinian seizing a rifle before being shot.
Erasing the resistance model
The ferocity of the Israeli response, Ayyash argues, was intended to ensure that Tell would not become a precedent for other Palestinian towns facing settler terror. The occupation could not allow a community’s defense of itself to be seen as a model capable of deterring future attacks.
“Even before 7 October, the occupation was trying to destroy the Palestinian model and the model of the resistance fighter, as previously occurred in the Nour Shams, Tulkarem, and Jenin camps, where the geography was altered, the environment sustaining the resistance was blown apart, and even memorials to the martyrs were destroyed.”
The collective punishment imposed on Tell carried a warning to other Palestinian communities: resisting settler incursions would bring the full weight of the occupation down upon them. Such resistance threatens the conditions under which settlement expansion has been allowed to proceed largely unchallenged.
Making Palestinian life impossible
Ayyash describes this process as demographic engineering, but its methods differ between Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In Gaza, he argues, the occupation has reordered daily life by controlling not only how much enters the strip, but also which goods are admitted or withheld.
Reporting in January 2026 documented shortages of beef, poultry, hygiene products, and other basic supplies caused by Israeli import restrictions. The effect reaches beyond hunger, reshaping how families obtain food and the conditions under which everyday life can continue.
In the occupied West Bank, Ayyash says, the same logic is being applied through systematic displacement. He dates the acceleration of the campaign to 2024, eight months after the war on Gaza began, and recalls advertising and media messages along bypass roads declaring, “There is no future in Palestine.”
Their purpose, he argues, was to convince Palestinians that a dignified life on their land was no longer possible and that they must look elsewhere.
The pressure has fallen especially heavily on Bedouin and herding communities. OCHA reported that settler attacks and related access restrictions displaced 6,200 Palestinians across 119 communities between January 2023 and June 2026, including more than 3,600 people from 46 communities that were completely emptied.
Ayyash says these pressures are now driving internal migration from isolated areas and villages near settlements toward Area A and the main urban centers.
Movement restrictions are compounded by settler raids, the theft of livestock and crops, and the destruction of roads and other infrastructure. This daily attrition cuts communities off from the resources needed to remain on their land. As those conditions deteriorate, targeted areas are emptied and opened to seizure.
Poll What is driving Israel’s accelerated takeover of the West Bank? A long-planned annexation strategy Settler expansion backed by the army The absence of meaningful international pressure All of the above
19 votes, 1 days and 14 hours left
Two arms of the same project
Abu Rahma describes a division of labor between the state and the settler militias. The official apparatus supplies legislation, courts, police, and military force. Settlers receive funding, transport, and weapons, while their crimes are ignored or actively enabled.
A UN inquiry published in June found that Israeli authorities had facilitated settler violence through financial, military, and legal support, with security forces frequently accompanying or protecting settlers during attacks.
The state demolishes homes and chokes Palestinian movement with checkpoints. Settlers torch property and drive residents from their land. Resistance is met with arrest and fines. Step by step, the ground is cleared for annexation.
Halsa identifies two purposes behind this constant friction. The first is to terrorize Palestinians until they leave their land voluntarily. The second is to provoke them into defending themselves, allowing a far more violent response to be justified through an inverted account in which the attackers become the victims.
The commission’s 3,488 recorded settler attacks during the first half of 2026 amount to an average of more than 19 each day, although its methodology counts a wider range of violations than OCHA’s incident-based monitoring.
By 20 July, OCHA had recorded 18 Palestinian deaths linked to settler attacks, a figure that already exceeded the total for all of 2025. What was once treated as fringe violence has become a central method of territorial control.
Outposts without pretexts
Settlement expansion does not depend on Tell or any other single confrontation. Ayyash says the occupation uses every available opportunity to accelerate construction and seize land, but requires no particular pretext. Had the events in Tell not occurred, the outposts would have expanded for another stated reason, or without one.
In the wake of the confrontation, Netanyahu pledged to accelerate settlement construction in the area. Halsa warns that “every inch that is vacated creates room for a Zionist Talmudic foothold, and the hands of the clock do not move backward.”
Extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced plans for 763 housing units in Eli, a project expected to triple the settlement’s size. In July, Israel’s security cabinet also approved 1.3 billion shekels for 34 new West Bank settlements, including newly established sites and existing outposts slated for retroactive legalization.
An election fought over Palestinian blood
The escalation is also feeding an Israeli election campaign ahead of the vote scheduled for 27 October 2026. Halsa describes the political field as “wide open,” with ministers competing to adopt the most hardline position and turning Palestinian land and holy sites into campaign material.
Ayyash offers a more severe reading. He argues that extremism is embedded in the Israeli political mainstream and that Israeli society is aggressive and “enamored of killing and destruction,” invoking the racist maxim, “The only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Political currents compete for votes at the expense of Palestinian lives, each seeking to appear more violent toward Palestinians and more committed to settlement expansion than the next.
That contest leaves little room for the familiar claim that a meaningful Israeli camp remains committed to peace. Bisharat cautions, however, that elections are an accelerant rather than the root cause.
The electoral contest operates within an ideological horizon reaching back to 1948, when Jewish armed groups were deployed to empty Palestinian villages through arson and the killing of civilians.
Today’s settler militias perform a comparable function for the state. Their violence may be presented as spontaneous or unauthorized, but it advances policies that the government later formalizes through military orders, planning decisions, and annexation measures.
Annexation at wartime speed
Abu Rahma says the project was already established before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the regional war gave Israel the space to execute it at an unprecedented pace. Plans once expected to take 10 years are now being carried out in three or four, aided by an international community that has normalized crimes against Palestinians through silence and inaction.
That rush has also alarmed parts of Israel’s own security establishment. Nearly 600 former military, intelligence, police, and diplomatic officials warned US President Donald Trump that settler violence could produce consequences “even more catastrophic” than those of 7 October.
Yet electoral and ideological calculations continue to outweigh even the national security concerns raised by figures who spent their careers defending the occupation state.
Across the occupied West Bank, supposedly temporary measures are hardening into facts on the ground. Roads remain closed long after the army arrives, while settler outposts spread across village grazing land under military protection. Cut off from their land and neighboring communities, families are pushed toward urban centers.
Holding the ground
Despite the overwhelming imbalance of force, Palestinians remain the principal obstacle to this project. In Gaza and during the intifadas of 1987 and 2000, they demonstrated an ability to frustrate displacement plans, even at an immense human cost.
Bisharat asks whether Palestinians can continue reshuffling the political deck long enough to benefit from the international shift now troubling Israel. Support for the occupation state has declined, while public backing for the Palestinian cause has risen amid the war of extermination in Gaza. The question is whether that change can be converted into pressure on the governments still arming and protecting Tel Aviv.
Halsa argues that the minimum response must combine organized, peaceful popular action, including guard groups and community gatherings, with a sustained media and diplomatic campaign capable of exposing Israel’s version of events. Tell, he says, should immediately have been followed by press conferences laying out how the confrontation unfolded and documenting the army’s role.
He also calls for Palestinian efforts to build on dissent inside Israel, including the letter signed by nearly 600 former security officials, while exploiting contradictions within the occupation state. That requires converting the shift in western public opinion into influence over international decision-making, an outcome he says Israel deeply fears.
Tell has exposed how military power, settler violence, and state policy are being used to dispossess Palestinians without a formal annexation decree.
International organizations may continue counting the dead, displaced, checkpoints, attacks, and outposts. But documentation without consequence leaves the map to be redrawn while the reports accumulate.
The outcome will be decided on the ground, where Palestinian refusal to leave remains the main barrier to Israel’s West Bank endgame.
US Embassy in Havana [Photo: US Department of State]
Announcing a new round of sanctions
against Cuba on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that
President Donald Trump’s “resolve is ironclad: the United States will
not tolerate a rogue state harboring hostile foreign military,
intelligence, and terror operations just 90 miles from the American
homeland.”
The threat was issued against a country
whose electrical grid collapsed twice within 24 hours this week, whose
hospitals operate without reliable power and whose population is being
deprived of food, medicine and fuel by a deliberate US energy blockade.
On Thursday, United Nations human rights
rapporteurs condemned the US measures and warned of a “silent Gaza”
unfolding on the island, declaring that food “must never be used as an
instrument of political pressure,” and that measures knowingly depriving
a population of the means to survive strike at the most basic
guarantees of the right to life.
What the Trump administration is carrying
out is an undeclared war of extermination against nearly 10 million
people, criminal under international law and aimed at driving an entire
society back a century in order to turn it into a colony.
The sanctions announced Thursday target
five Cuban entities and eight individuals, including subsidiaries of the
military conglomerate GAESA, Revolutionary Armed Forces Minister Álvaro
López Miera, Chief of the General Staff Roberto Legrá Sotolongo and
Cuba’s military attachés to Russia and China.
They came one day after the New York Times
revealed that the CIA has secretly established a Cuba task force,
adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence
analysts, cyber-operations personnel and specialists in covert influence
operations. According to the officials speaking anonymously to the Times,
the task force seeks to create fissures among the Cuban political elite
in the hope of replacing “hard-liners” with leaders more amenable to
Trump’s demands.
The Times also revealed that the
Trump administration has revised the National Intelligence Priorities
Framework to designate Cuba a “Priority 1” target, alongside China, Iran
and Russia. This has led the National Security Agency, the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and others to dedicate more intelligence
collection assets, including satellites, toward the island.
The Times states plainly what
this is for: the intelligence “will help the U.S. military update its
options for potential military action against Cuba.”
These operations coincide with a sweeping
reorganization of the US military across the hemisphere. At midnight on
Monday, Southern Command retired Joint Task Force-Southern
Spear—responsible for 63 strikes on fishing boats accused of carrying
drugs in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that have killed 221 people
in eleven months—and replaced it with Joint Task Force-Western
Hemisphere.
SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis Donovan
announced that the new command, “the action arm of US Southern Command,”
would “apply total systemic friction on these networks,” operating
alongside “our 18 other nations” in the Americas Counter Cartel
Coalition. Its purpose is to extend joint strikes from international
waters onto the sovereign territory of Latin American states. Cuba will
figure among its principal targets, together with the coordination of
repression against social opposition throughout the region.
With the debacle in the war against Iran
and social anger mounting over ICE raids, healthcare cuts and the cost
of living, an operation against Cuba is being contemplated as an
“October surprise.” Some of Trump’s advisers believe the Cuban
government “could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the
United States in November,” according to the Times.
Such a move would not be aimed at boosting
popularity for the Republican Party—only 15 percent of Americans
support a war against Cuba. It would provide the pretext to manipulate
or even cancel the 2026 elections and criminalize opposition.
The last time the CIA established a Cuba
task force was 1960. Its members oversaw the April 1961 Bay of Pigs
invasion, in which some 1,400 CIA-organized and financed exile
mercenaries landed on the island. The operation was crushed by Cuban
forces. When it failed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted Operation
Northwoods, a since-declassified proposal to stage false-flag terrorist
bombings in American cities and hijackings of US aircraft to manufacture
a pretext for invasion.
The Venezuelan precedent shows a more
recent example. In October 2025, Trump publicly confirmed he had
authorized the CIA to conduct covert and potentially lethal operations
inside Venezuela. Three months later, on January 3, US Special Forces
seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife without suffering a single
casualty—his location known, his defenses mapped, the political ground
prepared for Delcy Rodríguez and her brother to preside over a US
protectorate that has handed Washington control over Venezuelan oil,
finances and foreign policy.
Who infiltrated whom
On July 20 the State Department published a
100-page report, “Cuba: the capital of 21st century communism,” which
it has promoted on social media several times a week since. Its thesis
is that Havana has spent six decades infiltrating agents into American
social movements and the US state itself—that the civil rights movement,
the opposition to the Vietnam War, the protests following the police
murder of George Floyd and the present movements against ICE and the
Gaza genocide were, in substantial measure, directed from Cuba.
Rubio told Fox News last week that Cuba is
“a true superpower” of espionage and influence, and that of the recent
protest movement, “there’s nothing organic about it.”
This week’s revelations establish the real
direction of state penetration. American case officers,
cyber-operatives and influence specialists are actively being inserted
into Cuba, with satellites re-tasked overhead and military options under
preparation.
The historical record admits of no
ambiguity. Washington imposed its partial embargo in 1960, made
comprehensive in 1962. In March 1960 the CIA bombed the La Coubre
in Havana harbor, timing the charges in succession so that rescue
workers responding to the first blast would be caught by the second;
over 100 died. Cuban counterintelligence documented 638 separate schemes
to kill Castro. Luis Posada Carriles, trained by the CIA at Fort
Benning, organized the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73
aboard, including the national junior fencing team. Researchers place
the toll of US-directed and US-linked terrorism against Cuba since 1959
at more than 3,000 killed. Not one perpetrator has been prosecuted.
ince Trump’s declaration of a national
emergency over Cuba in January, US aggression has turned genocidal.
Washington has imposed an energy embargo threatening punitive tariffs
against any country selling the island oil, along with successive
sanctions packages freezing the assets of dozens of Cuban entities and
officials.
In May, the US Department of Justice
indicted the 94-year-old Raúl Castro on charges arising from the 1996
downing of two aircraft operated by CIA-linked provocateurs. Combined
with a military buildup in the Caribbean and now covert operations on
the ground, the indictment is a patently fabricated pretext to justify a
military attack.
Havana’s answer: a country for sale
Confronted with this onslaught, the Cuban government has appealed not to the working class but to the American ruling elite.
On May 14, it received CIA Director John
Ratcliffe in Havana, where he demanded “fundamental changes” in a
meeting with senior Cuban officials, including Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez
Castro, the former president’s grandson. Havana has since announced the
most radical economic restructuring since 1959—privatizations, the
stripping of labor protections and open-ended invitations to foreign
capital.
The character of these appeals is unmistakable. Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío told the New York Times
that Havana would not oppose a Trump-branded resort on Cayo Santa
María: “If he wants to do it peacefully, we see no specific reason to
exclude him… If it is the Trump administration, in principle, we have no
reason to refuse.”
Deputy Foreign Trade Minister Carlos Luis Jorge Méndez told The National:
“We want American businesspeople to know and understand that Cuba is a
country open to investment… in sectors ranging from mining and tourism
to real estate, banking and finance.”
The regime that survived 66 years of CIA
terror campaigns and provocations now negotiates the terms of its own
submission with the CIA’s director and offers the island back to the US
oligarchy that ran it as a casino and brothel under Batista.
This is the dead end of bourgeois
nationalism. Neither Havana nor the “left” governments of Mexico, Brazil
and Colombia—complicit throughout in the fuel blockade—will defend the
Cuban people.
The only force capable of halting this
crime is the international working class. Dockworkers, transport, oil
and logistics workers in the United States and internationally must
refuse to enforce the blockade and demand its immediate end, along with
the delivery of the fuel, food and medicine Cuba requires. The threat of
war against Cuba, the buildup of dictatorship at home and the
persecution of socialists are a single process and must be answered by
the industrial and political mobilization of workers everywhere against
war and fascism, on the basis of a socialist program.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry says the death
toll from the latest Israeli aggression against the country has risen to
4,335, IRNA reports.
According to a statement by the ministry,
carried by Lebanon’s Al Manar news network, at least 4,335 people have
been killed since the Israeli aggression began on March 2, 2026.
When we awaken from this trance and
understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our
greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an
international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable
manner.
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am local time,
our world changed forever when the US dropped the first atomic bomb used
in war over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
The immediate death toll was approximately 70,000 with ~140,000 to have
died by year’s end. Three days later, the US would drop a plutonium
bomb over the city of Nagasaki. The immediate death toll there was ~40,000 with ~70,000 to have died by year’s end with a combined total of ~210,000. Three weeks earlier, following the atomic bombing of New Mexico with the Trinity test,
the nuclear age was thrust upon mankind. The nuclear legacies from
victims and survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, and their
history lingers to this day. The legacy extends from the mining
for the nuclear materials and its impact on local communities to the
processing, testing, use, storage, and waste management, as well as the
impacts and risks of nuclear power to this day.
Amnesic of past history and events, the United States initiated a new arms race beginning in 2010 with then-President Barack Obama’s “grand bargain”
to garner favor with the Republican Congress to ratify the New START
Treaty. Following our lead, all of the remaining nine nuclear nations
are working to modernize their stockpiles as well.
With the advent of artificial intelligence programs already utilized by President Donald Trump’s Department of War and the race to bring this technology to war, we move ever closer to the brink of nuclear war,
either by intent, miscalculation, mistake, or cyber attack using
disruptive technologies. This fact was recognized by the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists, moving their Doomsday Clock forward this past January to 85 seconds to midnight.
In order to survive, we must awaken from
the myth of deterrence, realizing it for what it is, the greatest driver
of the arms race. The unexamined assumptions that these weapons must
exist is blatantly false. We know how to build these weapons, and we
know how to disassemble them. From a height of roughly 64,000 weapons in
1986 we have reduced global stockpiles to approximately 12,187 currently. We also know that even a “limited nuclear war” in a remote region of the world, for example, between India and Pakistan, using less than one half of 1% of global stockpiles, will result in a global nuclear famine. This could potentially result in up to 2 billion deaths on the planet due to the catastrophic climate change that would follow.
The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never
again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future
generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons.
When we awaken from this trance and
understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our
greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an
international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable
manner.
What is required in this race to save
ourselves is the political courage and will to do so. Thankfully, there
is hope both internationally and nationally. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
has been ratified by 75 nations and signed by 25 additional nations
representing a majority of the global population. Here at home the Back From the Brink grassroots movement currently has endorsing congressional resolutions. There are 70 members of Congress, who have endorsed House Resolution 317 and Senate Resolution 323.
The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never
again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future
generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons. We must
demand our elected officials endorse this campaign or move out of the
way for those who will.
It’s
been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late
wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should
serve the public good, not corporate profits.
It was clear to us
from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid
advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling
us what to think or do.
Many people said we wouldn’t last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong.
Together
with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an
independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and
corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To
inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
Building Common
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But
here’s the urgent message from me today. It’s never been this bad out
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Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Robert Dodge, MD, is a family physician
practicing in Ventura, California. He serves on the board of Physicians
for Social Responsibility Los Angeles (www.psr-la.org), and serves as
the cochair of the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons of National
Physicians for Social Responsibility (www.psr.org). Physicians for
Social Responsibility is the US Affiliate of the International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War who received the 1985 Nobel
Peace Prize and is a partner organization of ICAN, recipient of the
2017 Nobel Peace Prize. He also serves on the Back from the Brink
(www.preventnuclearwar.org) steering committee.
President Donald Trump calls his Gaza
agreement a “major milestone” toward peace. For Palestinians living
beneath Israeli aircraft and beside an ever-advancing military boundary,
that triumphal language bears little resemblance to reality. Israel
killed 18 Palestinians on Sunday in one of the deadliest days since the
supposed ceasefire began, while survivors described attacks striking the
enclave from north to south. Gaza health authorities say at least 1,230
Palestinians—most of them civilians—have been killed since the
Trump-backed agreement was reached in October.
Nor has the ceasefire produced the
promised Israeli withdrawal. Israeli forces have instead expanded their
control from 53 percent of Gaza to as much as 70 percent, pushing more
families from their homes and confining nearly two million people to an
increasingly narrow strip of devastated coastline. Israeli officials now
insist that no withdrawal will begin until Hamas has completely
disarmed and its tunnels have been destroyed, while omitting the
continuing attacks and territorial seizures that Palestinian factions
say violate the agreement.
Reuters reporters Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Dawoud Abu Alkas document
the chasm between the diplomatic spectacle and Gaza’s grim reality:
civilians killed under the banner of peace, military occupation
expanding beneath the language of withdrawal, and displaced families
watching Israel’s “yellow line” move steadily closer to their tents. As
one Palestinian woman told Reuters, “Our entire life is gone, our entire
future is gone, our children’s future is gone.” In Gaza, the peace
being celebrated in Washington looks increasingly like war conducted
under a new name.Israel Escalates Gaza Attacks as Trump Celebrates a
‘Historic’ Ceasefire Deal
What a stark contrast—and a reminder that
Israel is not on board with any meaningful ceasefire. Much like
Washington’s other wars fought on Israel’s behalf, the Trump
administration’s plan appears focused on disarming Israel’s opponents
while imposing few visible restraints on the Israeli military.
On Monday, Nikolay Mladenov, Trump’s Gaza
envoy to the so-called Board of Peace, held what the board described as a
“constructive and detailed” meeting with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. The board declared that its unquestioned objective
was the “complete decommissioning of weapons” in Gaza and a transition
to civilian government.
But Palestinians experienced a very
different reality. “It was as if the war has resumed,” Gaza resident Aya
Mohammad Zaki told Reuters, describing attacks occurring nearly every
hour across northern, central and southern Gaza. Among those killed
Sunday were a couple and their child in an Israeli strike on a Gaza City
apartment. While Trump’s board discusses disarming Gaza, Israeli bombs
continue falling on Palestinian families.
According to Drop Site News,
Israeli attacks have killed at least 34 Palestinians and wounded 134
across Gaza since President Donald Trump announced what he called a
“historic agreement” and Hamas conditionally accepted the ceasefire
plan’s second phase. Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that 19 Palestinians were killed and 35 injured during the latest 24-hour period.
The ministry says the recorded toll since
October 7, 2023, has reached 73,375 Palestinians killed and 174,220
wounded. Since October 11, the first full day of the nominal ceasefire,
Israeli forces have reportedly killed at least 1,250 Palestinians and
injured 4,110, while recovery crews have retrieved another 804 bodies
from beneath the rubble.
A ceasefire is supposed to mean safety.
For displaced Palestinians sheltering beside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in
Deir al-Balah, it brought another night of terror, destruction and
forced flight.
Footage reported by Drop Site contributor
Abdel Qader Sabbah documents the aftermath of an Israeli strike that
destroyed a central medical warehouse containing essential dialysis
supplies and shredded nearby tents. Families who had gone to sleep
believing conditions might finally improve awoke to evacuation orders,
fled barefoot and returned to find their shelter, food, water and
bedding buried beneath the wreckage.
“We went to sleep under a ceasefire… thinking that the situation would get better.”
Washington calls this peace while
Israel continues bombing homes, destroying medical supplies, displacing
families and expanding the territory under its military control.
Palestinians are being asked to surrender their weapons and trust a
political process that has yet to protect them from Israeli attacks—or
require Israel to surrender anything in return.
A ceasefire cannot be measured by
statements from Trump’s Board of Peace, meetings with Netanyahu or
promises of some future withdrawal. It must be measured by whether
Palestinians can sleep without being bombed, receive medical treatment,
return home and live without an occupying army steadily closing in
around them. By that standard, Gaza does not have peace. It has an
occupation and a continuing war concealed beneath the language of
diplomacy.
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