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.
There are growing fears that Israel may be
creating the conditions for local atrocities in Gaza “reminiscent of
the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” according to a report by the Israeli
daily newspaper Haaretz.
During the 1982 massacre, Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalangist forces slaughtered up to 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians as Israeli troops surrounded the Beirut refugee camps and oversaw the killing.
In a report publish on Wednesday Haaretz warned that the Israeli army is expanding its use of mercenaries, criminal gangs and drug dealers to commit “war crimes” on Israel’s behalf in Gaza.
Based on testimony from Israeli soldiers,
UN reports and satellite imagery, the investigation found that
increasingly well-armed collaborator militias have expelled Palestinians from their homes and carried out operations across Gaza.
Israel has trained at least five militia
groups, and potentially a sixth, operating from heavily fortified bases
inside Israeli-occupied areas of the enclave.
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One Israeli soldier described how the
state, army and Shin Bet intelligence service send armed and “trained
militias to commit war crimes, and I’m the one who has to protect them
during their operations so they don’t get hurt”.
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, while the International Criminal Court
has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against
humanity.
At least one militia armed and supported by Israel had links to the Islamic State group. Its leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was killed by Hamas in December 2025.
Many Palestinians celebrated Abu Shabab’s
death, while his own family had renounced him as a traitor for
collaborating with Israel.
“But the militia project he came to
symbolize continues to evolve and expand – particularly since the
October 2025 ceasefire was announced,” Haaretz reported.
Another militia leader, Shawqi Abu Nasira, openly acknowledged his collaboration with Israel in a video posted online.
“I made the decision to liberate the land from Hamas. If people say that makes me a collaborator, then I’m a collaborator.”
The vast majority of Palestinians view collaboration with Israel as treason and betrayal, regardless of their position on Hamas.
‘They entered every structure, looted
everything they could get their hands on, came out with piles of stuff –
and then burned down the house’
– Unnamed Israeli soldier
Israel has also built infrastructure for
the gangs amid Gaza’s widespread destruction. Near a militia base in
Shujaiya, Israeli forces levelled a large Palestinian cemetery and
replaced it with an extensive training ground.
The relationship between the gangs and the
Israeli military has become increasingly intertwined. Fighters roam
freely around Israeli army outposts, according to soldiers who spoke to
Haaretz.
“The gunmen stage displays of force, film
them and upload the footage to their Facebook pages for propaganda and
recruitment purposes,” the investigation said.
Israel supplies the gangs with weapons and provides artillery and drone support during their operations.
‘Reminiscent of Sabra and Shatila ‘
The mercenaries also serve another purpose. They attack Palestinians struggling to survive Israel’s genocide, drive families from their homes, loot their belongings and burn their houses.
Israeli ministers have repeatedly called
for making life in Gaza unbearable as part of efforts to ethnically
cleanse the enclave and replace its Palestinian population with Jewish
settlers.
In one account, Israeli soldiers said the mercenaries arrived in pickup trucks before “they just ran and shot at people”.
“They entered every structure, looted
everything they could get their hands on, came out with piles of stuff –
and then burned down the house,” one unnamed Israeli soldier said.
Boys
fly a kite against the backdrop of smoke rising from the Gath shelter
for displaced Palestinians, after an Israeli air strike in Gaza, on 31
January (AFP/Bashar Taleb)
Reports that Israel has used local gangs
to outsource parts of its strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza are not
new. Their activities have been documented for more than a year.
The soldiers’ testimony, however, provides
further evidence that the mercenaries now function as an “operational
arm” of the Israeli army and Shin Bet.
Israel continues to arm criminal gangs
while demanding that Hamas disarm and opposing the formation of any
independent Palestinian security force in Gaza. The arrangement allows
Israel to use the militias against anyone it labels a Hamas member while
unleashing them against ordinary Palestinians.
Hamas sources told Haaretz that they would
not surrender their “defensive weapons” while the militias remain armed
and receive Israeli support, because the groups would seek to target
them.
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Treasury
Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to members of the media outside the
White House in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026. [AP Photo/Jacquelyn
Martin]
The Trump administration on Monday
launched what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called an “economic
D-Day” against Iran—a campaign of secondary sanctions aimed at every
country, bank and company that trades with Tehran, above all China,
which took roughly nine-tenths of Iran’s oil exports before the US
blockade choked them off.
Six months of US and Israeli bombardment,
which killed at least 3,468 people in Iran by June 10, has not brought
down the government in Tehran, and most shipping still avoids the Strait
of Hormuz. The administration is now carrying the war into the world
economy, on a course that leads to confrontation with China.
The campaign Bessent announced at a
Washington press conference Monday adds shipping, gold, digital assets,
aviation and technology to the sectors covered by US secondary
sanctions, which already reach Iran’s oil and banks.
Among the nearly 60 companies, people and
ships sanctioned Monday are trading and logistics firms in China and
Hong Kong and entities in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia,
Switzerland, Britain, France, Greece, Syria, Ukraine and the Marshall
Islands, according to Al Jazeera’s tally of the Treasury list.
“Every country has a defined timeline to
shut down activities we have identified,” Bessent said, without naming
them. China, India, Turkey, Iraq and the UAE are the most exposed,
experts told CNN.
Asked by reporters whether Chinese banks
would be hit, Bessent replied that “no one is above the reach of US
sanctions” and said to expect “a major announcement of a financial
institution being sanctioned by the end of this week.”
Bessent followed on CNBC on Thursday,
calling the campaign “a one-two punch” of blockade and sanctions and
saying that Washington was telling other governments, “You’re either
with us or against us.” He added, “Keep in mind that the Chinese get 50
percent… of their energy from inside the Gulf.”
Three days before the announcement, the Wall Street Journal’s
editorial board, in a lead editorial printed Saturday, made clear that
the central target is China. “After six months of war with Iran,
President Trump has a credibility problem,” it wrote. “No President has
yet climbed the Iran sanctions ladder with China, moving from the
isolated ‘teapot’ refineries that buy Iran’s oil to the Chinese
state-owned enterprises that support them. Nor has any President given
Dubai an ultimatum to shut down Iran’s illicit financial network and
meant it.”
The editorial’s final paragraph warned
that “Iran may lash out militarily in response, targeting Gulf energy
again, and the US will have to be ready with a firm response.”
The Washington Post’s editorial
board wrote Monday evening that delivering Bessent’s “zero-leakage
approach… will require picking a big fight with China, the largest buyer
of Iranian oil.” The editorial noted that US sanctions so far have
fallen on “independent refiners and intermediaries rather than major
Chinese banks or state-owned companies.”
The Post continued: “The Trump
team cannot help but describe its recalibrated approach in martial
terms… But D-Day evokes a military campaign with a clear objective: the
enemy’s unconditional surrender. Economic pressure rarely works that
way… That’s why containment is not really about regime change. Its
immediate goal is to make an already battered Iran weaker so that it’s
less capable of threatening its neighbors and developing nuclear
weapons.”
This is a testament to the deepening
political crisis triggered by the failure of US imperialism to achieve
its strategic objectives in its war against Iran.
The war was conceived as a means of
seizing the chokepoint of the world’s oil supply and gaining a decisive
advantage over China. Instead, the United States confronts a political
debacle, and it is China’s position that has been strengthened.
The sanctions campaign is an attempt to
recoup by economic force what could not be won by bombing, and it aims
that force at Beijing. Washington has paused the bombing since late July
but has not renounced it; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday
that “by no means are we foreclosing using kinetic strikes anywhere in
the Strait of Hormuz or around Iran.”
The war the sanctions are meant to salvage
began on February 28, when Washington and Tel Aviv started the bombing.
A cease-fire in April and a June 17 memorandum with Tehran lifted the
blockade and let Iran export oil until Washington broke the arrangement
in early July by sending ships through a route in the strait to which
Iran had not agreed. When Iran fired on the ships the US struck back,
and on July 8 Trump declared the cease-fire over. The blockade was
reimposed. On August 17, the day the memorandum expired, Trump said of
Oman, with which Iran is negotiating a shipping corridor, “If Oman gets
in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
To “sever every economic lifeline” of
Iran, as Bessent put it, means to sanction the Chinese refineries,
shipping companies and banks that buy and move its oil, and behind them
the Chinese state. Behind the refineries stands the largest
manufacturing economy in the world, whose trade in raw materials and
finished goods a “zero-leakage” sanctions regime would have to police.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin
Jian said at a briefing Tuesday that “China will do everything necessary
to firmly safeguard its rights and interests.” Asked by Bloomberg
whether China would change course, he said its cooperation with Iran
“should not be disrupted.” Beijing, the Financial Times reported Tuesday, has told Washington that any broad extension of the sanctions to Chinese companies will bring retaliation.
Asked on Monday why the sanctions were not
being imposed at once, Bessent replied: “Well, we are giving everyone
the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the
global financial system?”
Bessent’s statements are an admission of
the provocative character of US actions. Desperate to shore up its
geopolitical position, it is taking a series of increasingly reckless
and desperate steps, whose impact is to widen the global scope of the
war.
The Financial Times wrote in an
editorial Tuesday that the operation “seemed more like a series of
warning shots fired from far offshore,” and concluded that it “amounts
to another risky gamble on a road that, for both sides, ultimately has
to lead back to the negotiating table.”
However, the sequence Washington has
followed does not lead to a negotiating table. It leads to a widening
global conflagration, centrally targeting Russia and China.
Western media, by employing double
standards, censorship, deceptive language, amplifying Israeli lies and
dehumanizing Palestinians, facilitates the genocide in Gaza.
Chris Hedges ScheerPost
The Western media manufactures consent for genocide. It normalizes Israel’s decades-long military occupation and apartheid. It erases Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. It perpetuates the fallacy of Israeli victimhood. It betrays, discredits and demonizes the work of Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, at least 220 of whom have been killed by Israel between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025. It supinely accepts draconian Israeli censorship. It acquiesces with tepid letters of protest at Israel’s refusal to allow foreign reporters in Gaza — an effort by Israel to mask its war crimes. It amplifies Israeli lies, from beheaded babies to widespread sexual assault of Israeli women on Oct. 7, to obfuscate the truth.
When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide,
it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami.
Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or
“clashes” distort and falsify reality.
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” George Orwell warned.
Terms such as “genocide,” “atrocity,”
“ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territories” magically disappear from
media reports on Palestinians, whose resistance is routinely described as “savage” and “barbaric.” New York Times reporters are instructed by
editors to avoid terms such as “Palestine,” “genocide,” “carnage,”
“refugee camp,” “slaughter” and “massacre,” when referencing
Palestinians.
The media slavishly regurgitates what Israel feeds it. Saturation bombing becomes “surgical air strikes.” Israel’s weaponization of famine becomes a “food shortage.” The killing of unarmed civilians — including children — becomes “clashes.” The hilltop fortress-like compounds of Jewish colonists becomes “neighborhoods.” Extrajudicial assassination of a journalist or a doctor becomes “died.”
Genocide, referred to as the “Israel-Hamas war” is justified as
“self-defense,” part of the mantra of Israel’s “right to defend
itself.” When schools, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, mosques, churches
and other civilian targets are obliterated, they are labeled “Hamas command centers” or targeted because Hamas is “using civilians as human shields” — something Israel does routinely, when the army binds detained Palestinians and forces them to enter potentially booby-trapped buildings and tunnels ahead of Israeli troops.
When Israelis are held by Hamas, they are “hostages,” even if they serve in the military. When Palestinians — including children — are held without charges or trial and disappeared into Israeli detention centers, where torture is “widespread” and “systematic,” they are “prisoners.”
Missile attacks on tent cities or
hospitals are blamed on Palestinian armed groups firing errant rockets.
If Israel acknowledges the attacks — which very rarely happens — they
are described as a “tragic mistake.”
Civil institutions in Gaza are characterized as “Hamas-run” to cast doubt on the veracity of what they report. The New York Times routinely qualifies announcements
from the Gaza Health Ministry by noting it “does not distinguish
between civilians and combatants,” masking the slaughter of tens of
thousands of civilians.
The result is some of the most convoluted writing in the history of journalism, including the
Nov. 5, 2023 New York Times headline that reads: “Explosions Gazans Say
Was Airstrike Leaves Many Casualties in Dense Neighborhood.”
“When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed in
a “double tap” strike — designed to kill first responders arriving to
treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how
did Western news agencies respond?” I asked in my column The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists.
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.
“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.
The camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital.
“When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif and three other journalists were killed on Aug. 10 in their media tent near Al Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?” I asked.
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.
The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”
Mainstream media failed to describe
Israel’s repeated breaches of the ceasefire with the language of
violation. Instead, the coverage followed the same patterns of
rationalizing Israel’s attacks and uncritically parroting Israel’s
claims to justify its actions. As Palestinians continued to be killed —
during a ‘ceasefire’ — and the flow of aid did not reach the level of
need or what was agreed to, Western media framed these flagrant
violations as ‘tests’ or ‘challenges’ to a ‘shaky ceasefire.’ As leading
human rights organizations like Amnesty International warned that the
genocide was, in fact, not over, legacy media continued to frame it as a
war with a ‘fragile ceasefire.’
Words matter. Words justify actions. If
there is no genocide, if Israel is defending itself in a war, the U.S.
and Israel’s European allies have the right to provide tens of billions
of dollars in military aid. If this is a war begun by Hamas on Oct. 7
then it is possible to lament the obliteration of Gaza and mass
slaughter by Israel as the regrettable result of the Hamas attack.
This corruption of language is designed, as Orwell noted, to defend the indefensible:
Things like the continuance of British
rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the
atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which
are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with
the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to
consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned,
the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along
the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of
the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements.
Adam Johnson in “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,”
examined over 12,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington
Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press,
along with 5,000 TV segments aired on CNN and MSNBC. His carefully
researched book is a damning indictment of the “liberal” media’s
justification of the genocide.
CNN and The New York Times instructed their editors and journalists that attacks could only be attributed to Israel after confirmation from the IDF and GPS coordinates. Johnson quotes a source at CNN:
Whether it’s in the newsroom or in the
field, we couldn’t credit anything to Israel unless we were held to this
impossibly high bar of having to call it an “explosion,” until we
geolocated the site of the explosion, sent the coordinates to the
Israelis and asked them for comment.
You can see an interview with Johnson about his book at The Electronic Intifada here.
CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review to
the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to airing. The CNN bureau, like
all news bureaus in Israel, is required to abide by restrictions imposed
by Israeli military censors.
The very few Palestinians who appear on CNN and other legacy media outlets, are routinelyasked —
usually before they are even permitted on air — if they “condemn”
Hamas. Guests who express even tepid criticism of Israel are asked whether Israel “has a right to exist.”
No one is ever asked if they condemn Zionism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide or Israel’s 100 year war on
Palestine. Nor are they asked if the Palestinians have a right to
defend themselves — which under international law they do, including with weapons.
Our domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon. This makes them not only propagandists, but accomplices to genocide.
Those who protest the genocide, including students on university campuses — many of whom are
Jewish — are smeared as “Hamas supporters” and “antisemites.”
Journalists ferret out Zionist students, usually found esconced in
campus Hillel houses, who claim to be “fearful for their safety,” because of the protests. The media pays little attention to the rise in anti-Muslim bigotry or the repression meted out to student protestors, which includes not only police brutality and 3,000 detainments and arrests, but suspensions, probations, expulsions, withholding of diplomas and the firing of sympathetic faculty.
Slogans which call for Palestinian
liberation — including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be
free” — along with the Palestinian flag, have been criminalized.
The message is clear: Jewish lives matter. Palestinian lives do not.
“The reports of UN agencies, of respected
human rights monitors, of medical journals, and of professional medical
personnel, are generally treated with respect and given prominence in
the mainstream media,” writes the historian Rashid Khalidi in the
introduction to Robin Anderson’s book, “The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza:”
Not in this war: instead, if such sources
are cited at all, equal media treatment is given to the outrageous
slanders and calumnies against these organizations and individuals,
smears that are produced in profusion by Israel’s legion of professional
propagandists and its myriad of defenders in the US. Besides smearing
critics of Israel’s genocide as supporters of Hamas or terrorist
sympathizers, the main weapon in their arsenal of defamation is their
systematic and outrageous misuse of the deadly accusation of
antisemitism.
The massive defections of readers and
viewers from mainstream media to social media platforms that do not
filter news through the Israel lobby, the U.S. government or
corporations, are a stark indicator of the media’s bankruptcy. The
response to these defections has been “platformicide”
— the use of algorithms, shadow banning, restriction of live streaming
capabilities and the closing of accounts by social media giants such as
Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok, to dramatically reduce the
reach of reporting on Palestine.
This censorship is part of a coordinated effort to hide the horror of the genocide from the public.
By constantly referencing Oct. 7, the
Western media decontextualizes the genocide. It ignores Israel’s 19-year
siege of Gaza. Oct. 7 is characterized in the Western media as “unprovoked.” Israel’s massacres of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza in the winter of 2008 and 2009, along with its attacks on Gaza in 2012, 2014 and during the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 are ignored.
The 1948 Nakba — when European Zionists seized more than
78 percent of historic Palestine, violently expelled 750,000
Palestinians, destroyed more than 530 Palestinian villages and killed
15,000 Palestinians — is rarely referenced. Seventy percent of those
driven from their homes in 1948 were forced into Gaza.
The Zionist project is predicated on fostering historical amnesia.
“Once Hamas was established as a brutal,
terrorist group whose members gleefully tortured, dismembered, and
beheaded babies without conscience, no further explanation was needed,”
writes Anderson in her book. “The media simply avoided reporting
Israel’s history of violence and as a result, establishment media also
avoided the conditions of everyday life for Palestinians.”
The fiction that there is currently a ceasefire in Gaza — Israel has killed at
least 1,286 Palestinians and injured 4,257 since it supposedly went
into effect — has become the excuse used by Western media to turn its
back on Gaza. This genocide denial has characterized the coverage since
its inception. It masks not only Israel’s crimes, but Israel’s stated
intention to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians from Gaza. It
effectively neuters international law. And it makes a mockery of the
profession of journalism.
When the last act of ethnic cleansing
happens, Western media will, I am sure, continue to bombard us with
Israeli agitprop, euphemisms and clichés.
It will justify the genocide until the end.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There
is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for
ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism,
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
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Relatives grieve over the bodies of
Palestinians, killed in an Israeli drone strike targeting a beachfront
cafe in the port area west of Gaza City, during funeral proceedings at
Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on August 19, 2026. [Ali
Jadallah – Anadolu Agency]
The Israeli army has killed more than
21,500 children and targeted 1,244 out of 1,275 mosques in Gaza since
the start of its military campaign in October 2023, the Government Media
Office in the Gaza Strip said in a statement released on Monday.
The office reported that the Israeli
occupation army continues to commit “the most heinous crimes against
humanity” and violates international humanitarian law and international
conventions.
The statement highlighted that Israeli
forces are “systematically and intentionally targeting defenseless
civilians and their inhabited homes, disregarding all international and
UN calls” to halt the aggressions.
“The occupation continues to shed the
blood of innocents, specifically children, as the number of child
martyrs since the start of the genocidal war has exceeded 21,500, a
catastrophic toll reflecting the brutality of this organised crime,” the
office stated.
The Gaza Media Office also warned of an
ongoing targeting of places of worship across the enclave. Out of 1,275
mosques in Gaza, Israeli forces have targeted 1,244, with 1,077 of them
completely destroyed.
The office condemned these actions “in the
strongest terms” and held Israel, as well the silent international
community, responsible for the continuation of the genocide and the
deliberate targeting of civilians, children, and religious sites.
Following is my August update/analysis of what is happening in Palestine/Israel. We are experiencing the violent culmination of the Zionist project after 130 years of colonizing and Judaizing Palestine. As usual, my “update” rapidly veers into analysis. This is important. Palestinian national rights will not be restored - indeed, the Palestinian people will not be restored to its land - and a just, inclusive post-colonial polity and society will not arise unless we have a strategy of decolonization. And that is lacking today: no Palestinian-articulated political program, no political organization or sustained and focused movement, no leadership and no strategy - all of which you have heard from me ad nauseam. (There actually is a one-state political program I write about in my book Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestinewhich has been formulated by the Palestinian-led One Democratic State Campaign, but it has yet to gain traction.) But my inclination towards analysis, I feel — and I certainly feel in this update — is bloodless; it does not capture the human suffering, injustice or sense of despair the Palestinians are experiencing. There are many accounts of what is happening on the ground, of course, which is why I feel my grounded, action-oriented analysis is filling a crucial gap. But I am there, and in updates like this one I feel I am not conveying the scale of the suffering and the urgency of the situation as I am experiencing it. I don’t say so - which I should have - but this update was spurred not only by the crisis we are facing politically and on the ground as Zionism reaches its culmination, the settlement of Palestine (Judaization), the displacement, marginalization and killing of the Palestinians (de-Arabization), the brutal breaking of all resistance (pacification) and, finally, normaiization, a process disrupted by Gaza and the Iran War but by means ended. Rather it is motivated by a phone call from a friend and comrade, Abu Hassan of Beit Ummar, in which he broke down into uncontrollable sobbing. This strong man, a farmer who has spent his entire life resisting, has reached an end-point. His town, Beit Ummar, has for decades been under pressure from the surrounding settlements in the Etzion Bloc between Bethlehem and Hebron, but has been occupied by the Israeli army and settlers for months. Abu Hassan has lost all his land and has been forced to seek casual labor in Israel, although as a grandfather with health issues he has found it hard to find work. Since October 7th, however, he and more than 120,000 other Palestinians have been locked out of the Israeli economy, banned from entering - and have been replaced permanently by cheaper foreign workers from China, Thailand, India, Sri Lanks, Rumania and (informally) by African refugees who have been trapped in Israel for years. That means he hasn’t had any income for the past almost three years, with little prospect of EVER having an income again. Nor have his three grown sons, one a computer engineer, another a hotel manager (hotels in the West Bank are closed), another a worker, and their families. Like the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, Abu Hassan and his family are facing hunger. The night before my update the Israeli army had invaded his home for the second time in a couple months and destroyed whatever they had not destroyed in their previous visit. They go house to house with no purpose but to terrorize the popu𝐉𝐞𝐟𝐟 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐉𝐞𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐦
Following is my August update/analysis of what is happening in Palestine/Israel. We are experiencing the violent culmination of the Zionist project after 130 years of colonizing and Judaizing Palestine. As usual, my “update” rapidly veers into analysis. This is important. Palestinian national rights will not be restored - indeed, the Palestinian people will not be restored to its land - and a just, inclusive post-colonial polity and society will not arise unless we have a strategy of decolonization. And that is lacking today: no Palestinian-articulated political program, no political organization or sustained and focused movement, no leadership and no strategy - all of which you have heard from me ad nauseam. (There actually is a one-state political program I write about in my book Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestinewhich has been formulated by the Palestinian-led One Democratic State Campaign, but it has yet to gain traction.) But my inclination towards analysis, I feel — and I certainly feel in this update — is bloodless; it does not capture the human suffering, injustice or sense of despair the Palestinians are experiencing. There are many accounts of what is happening on the ground, of course, which is why I feel my grounded, action-oriented analysis is filling a crucial gap. But I am there, and in updates like this one I feel I am not conveying the scale of the suffering and the urgency of the situation as I am experiencing it. I don’t say so - which I should have - but this update was spurred not only by the crisis we are facing politically and on the ground as Zionism reaches its culmination, the settlement of Palestine (Judaization), the displacement, marginalization and killing of the Palestinians (de-Arabization), the brutal breaking of all resistance (pacification) and, finally, normaiization, a process disrupted by Gaza and the Iran War but by means ended. Rather it is motivated by a phone call from a friend and comrade, Abu Hassan of Beit Ummar, in which he broke down into uncontrollable sobbing. This strong man, a farmer who has spent his entire life resisting, has reached an end-point. His town, Beit Ummar, has for decades been under pressure from the surrounding settlements in the Etzion Bloc between Bethlehem and Hebron, but has been occupied by the Israeli army and settlers for months. Abu Hassan has lost all his land and has been forced to seek casual labor in Israel, although as a grandfather with health issues he has found it hard to find work. Since October 7th, however, he and more than 120,000 other Palestinians have been locked out of the Israeli economy, banned from entering - and have been replaced permanently by cheaper foreign workers from China, Thailand, India, Sri Lanks, Rumania and (informally) by African refugees who have been trapped in Israel for years. That means he hasn’t had any income for the past almost three years, with little prospect of EVER having an income again. Nor have his three grown sons, one a computer engineer, another a hotel manager (hotels in the West Bank are closed), another a worker, and their families. Like the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, Abu Hassan and his family are facing hunger. The night before my update the Israeli army had invaded his home for the second time in a couple months and destroyed whatever they had not destroyed in their previous visit. They go house to house with no purpose but to terrorize the population - or “asserting a presence,” as the army puts it. What broke him, however, was their brutal treatment of his severely paralyzed and retarded daughter, since the family was forced to leave the house during the “search.” The soldiers moved her roughly from her special bed to a couch, proceeded to upturn the bed and all the medical equipment surrounding it, went through and scattered her medicines – and then left. Her special diapers were scattered and rendered unusable, some of the medicine bottles were smashed – and into that small detail that he had no money whatsoever to replace them simply shattered him. The Israeli government is withholding $5 billion dollars in tax monies owed to the Palestinian Authority, causing the virtual breakdown of the Palestinian medical system. If you can’t pay, you don’t get medicines and treatment. This was the human background to my update, which I do not convey as well as others, painfully aware that unless the colonization of Palestine is ended politically, these tragedies, only a pinpoint of which are ever known, will continue forever. Still, if you look at the ICAHD website, a rich trove of information, analysis, resources and, yes, human stories out of our focus on home demolitions, the human dimension does emerge. I wish, though, that I could better convey the suffering, the terror, the micro-humiliations, the helplessness, the suppressed anger, the pervasive injustice that is Abu Hassan’s life. It has a political purpose, of course: fostering paralyzing despair and passiveness, key to pacification. Jabotinsky talked about it in his seminal 1923 essay on Zionist colonialism, “The Iron Wall,” Sharon often referred to it s a touchstone of his reconquest of the West Bank. But it is tangible and suffocating. I wish I could communicate it better, alongside my political analysis.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTojfC3QjtAlation - or “asserting a presence,” as the army puts it. What broke him, however, was their brutal treatment of his severely paralyzed and retarded daughter, since the family was forced to leave the house during the “search.” The soldiers moved her roughly from her special bed to a couch, proceeded to upturn the bed and all the medical equipment surrounding it, went through and scattered her medicines – and then left. Her special diapers were scattered and rendered unusable, some of the medicine bottles were smashed – and into that small detail that he had no money whatsoever to replace them simply shattered him. The Israeli government is withholding $5 billion dollars in tax monies owed to the Palestinian Authority, causing the virtual breakdown of the Palestinian medical system. If you can’t pay, you don’t get medicines and treatment. This was the human background to my update, which I do not convey as well as others, painfully aware that unless the colonization of Palestine is ended politically, these tragedies, only a pinpoint of which are ever known, will continue forever. Still, if you look at the ICAHD website, a rich trove of information, analysis, resources and, yes, human stories out of our focus on home demolitions, the human dimension does emerge. I wish, though, that I could better convey the suffering, the terror, the micro-humiliations, the helplessness, the suppressed anger, the pervasive injustice that is Abu Hassan’s life. It has a political purpose, of course: fostering paralyzing despair and passiveness, key to pacification. Jabotinsky talked about it in his seminal 1923 essay on Zionist colonialism, “The Iron Wall,” Sharon often referred to it s a touchstone of his reconquest of the West Bank. But it is tangible and suffocating. I wish I could communicate it better, alongside my political analysis.
Click on the link to see Halper's insightful video:
Migrants being loaded into US Air Force C-17s, January 2025 [Photo: White House]
A US deportation flight carrying 20 people
landed shortly before 1 p.m. local time Thursday at Roberts
International Airport outside Monrovia, Liberia. The reported
nationalities of those aboard included Venezuelans, Cubans and
Colombians, according to Reuters.
Five men refused to leave the plane. The New York Times
reported that American federal agents forced them off, and that all
five were eventually returned to the aircraft. A video verified by the Times
shows deportees sitting on the tarmac beside the plane, surrounded by
roughly 20 agents. The Liberian government has not clarified their
status.
This is the first flight under an
agreement permitting Washington to transfer up to 1,200 people to
Liberia over the next year. Liberia is the 26th country to receive them.
Some 23,000 people have already been sent abroad under at least 35
bilateral arrangements, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.
The three nationalities named in
Thursday’s flight are not incidental. Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba today
face three of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in the Western
Hemisphere that have been greatly worsened by the recolonization drive
by US imperialism.
In Venezuela, the confirmed death toll from the June 24 earthquakes stands at 6,438, with 86,358 injured. The site Venezuelareporta.org
counts 41,334 still missing. In Colombia, the August 10 earthquake has
killed 319, with 4,611 injured and 290 missing. In both countries,
thousands of buildings collapsed and thousands more were structurally
compromised—revealing that entire cities were built to engineering codes
wholly inadequate to meet the known seismic risk.
In Cuba, UN officials have described the
effects of the US economic and fuel blockade as a “silent Gaza.” In
2025, registered deaths reached double the births, even as millions have
migrated in recent years. Infant mortality rose 148 percent between
2018 and 2025, from 4.0 to 9.9 per thousand.
These are not separate disasters.
Venezuela’s economy was strangled by 15 years of US sanctions before
Washington invaded outright on January 3, abducted the president and
impounded its oil revenues. Colombia absorbed over $10 billion in US
military aid across a quarter century of Plan Colombia, financing an
ongoing civil war before helping install the President Abelardo de la
Espriella, a lawyer associated with fascist paramilitaries. Cuba has
been blockaded for six decades, and the Trump administration has cut off
its oil supply and sanctioned investors across multiple sectors this
year.
US imperialism manufactured the conditions
that drove millions from these countries and caused the current
devastation. It is now deporting those who escaped to US soil to one of
the ten poorest countries in the world.
Liberia: the disposal ground
Liberia is not a random destination. It
was founded in 1822 by freed American slaves and became a de facto US
colony within decades—rich in minerals and heavily exploited by American
capital after the Second World War and throughout the Cold War. When
Cold War support ended, the country collapsed into civil war; the
1989–2003 conflicts alone killed some 300,000 people.
Its health system never recovered from the
2014–15 Ebola epidemic, and the US State Department currently maintains
a Level 2 travel advisory for Liberia, citing crime, civil unrest and
health infrastructure concerns.
The arrangement is completely venal.
Following Liberia’s October 2025 agreement to accept Kilmar Abrego
Garcia, who continues to fight his deportation in the US, Washington
extended Liberian business and tourism visas from 12 to 36 months and
signed a $124 million health sector memorandum. Reuters reports $5
million allocated for Liberian “immigration management.”
The conditions awaiting deportees across
Africa follow a consistent pattern of indefinite confinement. In Congo,
deportees told the Associated Press they were held behind locked gates,
forbidden to leave alone, and permitted outside roughly once a week
under IOM escort. In Equatorial Guinea, the AP found deportees confined
in a hotel owned by the family of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema
Mbasogo, barred from leaving, given uneven access to medical care, and
subjected to repeated pressure to return to the countries they had
fled—of at least 32 people held there, 25 had been sent home by May. An
international coalition sued Ghana in June on behalf of 27 deportees,
alleging that most were rapidly returned to their home countries in
defiance of US protection orders, some having been held under armed
guard.
Thousands of miles from any court with
jurisdiction over their captivity, this amounts to indefinite
imprisonment without charge, trial, or sentence—cruel and unusual
punishment by any honest definition, permitted only because US law
pretends immigration detention is “civil” rather than punitive.
The apparatus of disappearances
Third-country deportation flights are the end point of a machinery being built across the United States. Politico
reports that in the past year, judges have ruled against ICE’s
detention tactics more than 16,000 times, roughly two-thirds of those
cases stemming from a single two-page memo reinterpreting a 1996 statute
to permit the detention of people who had lived in the country for
years.
Third-country deportation exists precisely
to circumvent the courts. When a judge rules a person cannot be
returned home because they face persecution or torture, they are
stationed 7,000 kilometers away instead, where no US court has
jurisdiction and no one is watching.
The precedent was set much earlier.
Beginning February 4, 2025, the administration flew Venezuelan detainees
to Guantánamo Bay—the site built expressly to hold prisoners where US
constitutional protections were said not to apply. In March 2025, 238
Venezuelans were flown to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, 137 of them under
the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, in open defiance of a federal court order
to turn the planes around. They were imprisoned without charge, trial
or sentence on allegations of Tren de Aragua membership that rested in
many cases on nothing more than tattoos. Held incommunicado for four
months, they were released only in a July 2025 prisoner exchange.
Asked in April 2025 about sending US
citizens to the same prison, Trump told El Salvador’s Bukele that
“homegrowns are next,” adding that he would need “five more places.” In
other words, what is being tested on migrants—detention without charges,
imprisonment abroad, defiance of the courts—is being prepared for
citizens and political opponents.
These agreements are being challenged in U.T. v. Bondi, which contests whether the contracted third countries provide the “full and fair” asylum procedures US law requires.
Deportation flights continue to Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba
While Washington opens new routes to third
countries, the flights going directly to Venezuela, Cuba and Colombia
carry their own lethal consequences. On June 24, a flight carrying 146
Venezuelans deported from the United States landed hours before the
earthquakes. Venezuelan authorities locked them inside the Hotel
Sanitario Negra Hipólita in La Llanada—as they had thousands of others
arriving on more than 160 flights coordinated between Washington and
Caracas since 2025. When the building collapsed that evening, 134 of
them died.
Oswadeliz Núñez, whose son Daniel died there, told El País:
“They were locked in those rooms, under key. The night of the
earthquake I wrote to the numbers on the Vuelta a la Patria page and
nobody answered me.” Daniel had been stopped while driving in
Jacksonville. “I fixed up his room as nicely as I could, but he never
arrived. I received the little box with his ashes.”
The deportation flights have since resumed
through an airport in eastern Venezuela while Maiquetía remains
disabled, with two landing in August.
Colombia’s experience follows the same
pattern. The country accepted 475 deportation flights from the United
States between 2020 and 2024. When former President Gustavo Petro
briefly suspended them last year after migrants arrived in chains, the
pause lasted only days before Washington forced their resumption—and
there has been no announcement suggesting they will be discontinued
after the earthquake.
Whether a deportee is flown to Caracas,
Bogotá, Havana or Monrovia, the underlying principle is the same and it
is indefensible: workers are being forcibly removed from places where
they had built lives and sent to places where their safety cannot be
guaranteed. This reality is summed up by the 20 agents surrounding five
men who refused to get off the plane, on a tarmac in a country none of
them had chosen or to which they had the slightest connection.
The right of workers to live and work
where they choose, without fear of persecution or deportation, is not a
concession to be granted by any government. It requires the independent
political mobilization of the international working class on a socialist
program that abolishes the outmoded capitalist nation-state system.
Former Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie
Johnson listens as former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks about
Chicago’s weekend of gun violence during a news conference at the
Chicago Police Department 6th District station August 6, 2018 in
Chicago, Illinois.
(Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)
The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations.
We’ve been hearing a lot of panicky
warnings lately after Democratic primary voters chose socialists and
other leftists instead of “moderates” in several major elections. The
alarm bells got louder this month after Michigan’s progressive Senate
candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens—who was, the New York Timesreported, “the moderate establishment-backed candidate.”
The soothing “moderate” label routinely
goes to candidates like Stevens who’ve supported continual arming of
Israel. She “benefited from about $62 million in advertising spending
from half a dozen outside groups,” the Times noted. “Over half of that
sum came from the super PAC arm of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, the country’s most influential pro-Israel group.”
The Democratic base is fed up with a
system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large
corporations. In the real world, the so-called “moderates” are aligned
with a status quo that continues to inflict widespread suffering and
preventable death at home and abroad.
To hear timeworn party strategists like
James Carville and Paul Begala tell it, leftwing candidates are duping
the Democratic electorate. As this month began, Carville threatened to leave the party. Begala made headlines by declaring, “I don’t like the socialists. I can’t stand them.”
But last month, a CNN poll
found that “about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults
identify as democratic socialists.” At a time when defeating the
fascistic Republican Party is imperative, any strategist’s prescription that would denigrate or seek to exclude them amounts to political malpractice.
Treating so many Democratic voters like
interlopers to be scolded might play well with corporate donors. But
it’s a feeble swim against the political current. Polling shows that the
younger Democratic voters are, the more favorable they’re apt to be
toward socialism.
“Younger adults are more likely to be in groups on the left, while
older adults tend to cluster in more conservative groups,” the Pew
Research Center noted.
Drawing on the results of its new public opinion survey, Global Strategy Group just reported that “socialist Democrats skew younger, with 57 percent of them being between the ages of 18 and 44.” Another poll, released
a month ago by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research,
found that two-thirds of young people “said that their political views
have changed in some way in recent years”—and “youth whose views did
shift were almost twice as likely to become more liberal/progressive
instead of more conservative.”
As socialists and others on the left prevail in many high-profile races, the refrains of condemnation coming from some of the Democratic Party
establishment are potshots in a losing battle. By definition, young
voters are the future of the party. Its prospects for winning elections
are diminished to the extent that younger voters are made to feel
unwelcome, or even vilified.
To the ears of many young Democratic
voters, derision about how they cast their ballots is coming from
out-of-touch party elders who treat crucial problems as abstractions or
matters worthy only of lip service. Millions of Americans in early
adulthood are facing financial stress with bleak outlooks for jobs and
careers. College tuitions are often prohibitive, and college debt can be
debilitating. Rents and mortgages are high. Everyday expenses are worse
than a challenge. The climate crisis is real.
Such realities cast a shadow over the
future. The last thing those voters want is arrogant leadership that
refuses to grasp the urgency of this political moment.
![Relatives grieve over the bodies of Palestinians, killed in an Israeli drone strike targeting a beachfront cafe in the port area west of Gaza City, during funeral proceedings at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on August 19, 2026. [Ali Jadallah - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/AA-20260819-42247213-42247186-FUNERAL_CEREMONY_FOR_THOSE_KILLED_IN_AN_ISRAELI_ATTACK_ON_A_CAFE_IN_GAZA_CITY.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
