‘Backing Settler Terrorists Is Its Policy’: IDF Ignored Distress Calls Before Attack on European Diplomats

 

Israeli soldiers block the road to prevent Palestinian farmers from reaching their land during the olive harvest on October 17, 2026 in Abu Falah, West Bank.

(Photo by Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Getty Images)

“European diplomats got a glimpse of everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Jake Johnson

Oct 19, 2026

The Israeli military reportedly ignored repeated distress calls before masked settlers attacked a group of European diplomats with metal bars during a visit to the illegally occupied West Bank this past weekend, sparking international outrage.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “despite the warnings, security forces were not sent to the area to prevent the attack or intervene as it unfolded. The outlet noted that ”an activist who was in the area following reports of attacks on Palestinian olive pickers sent a report of the settlers’ attack to a phone in the brigade’s operations room used to receive messages from settlement security coordinators. The soldiers in the operations room did not recognize the sender’s number, so they ignored the message and did not relay it to forces in the field.“

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In the Saturday attack, settlers targeted diplomats from France, Belgium, and Poland, as well as Catholic representatives. Israeli authorities said Monday that they had arrested 10 suspects as part of an investigation into the incident, but critics expressed doubt that the Israeli government would hold the perpetrators to account given the general pattern of impunity for violent settlers.

“It was clear to me this had to come for Israel to save face,” Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group, wrote in response to the arrests. “They probably will be released shortly.”

The attack on diplomats came a day after Israeli settlers in the West Bank brutally attacked 63-year-old Heidi Levine, a photojournalist with The Washington Post and a US citizen. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement casting doubt on Levine’s account and news reports, and said the incident was under investigation.

Netanyahu’s office took a similar line following the Saturday attack on European diplomats, saying in a statement, “The more serious the accusation, the greater the demand for compelling evidence.”

France’s foreign affairs ministry denounced the attacks on diplomats as “acts of terror” and called on Israeli authorities to “arrest the perpetrators of this extremely serious assault and bring them to justice.” Bernard Baudoux, a French mayor who was attacked, said he was “struck with metal bars and kicked before being thrown to the ground.”

“We were finally able to get back to our vehicles,” Baudoux added.

Breaking the Silence, an Israeli anti-occupation group, said in a statement on Sunday that “European diplomats got a glimpse of everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The group added that the IDF “will always have a bureaucratic excuse” for not acting to prevent such attacks, “but the real reason is that backing settler terrorists is its policy.”

“This horrifying routine serves a purpose,” the group said. “Through daily terror and economic strangulation, it aims to drive Palestinians off their land. The ultimate goals: ethnic cleansing and annexation.”

The attacks also drew condemnation from lawmakers in the US, where Republicans and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman recently blocked legislation aimed at shining light on Israeli abuses in the West Bank.

“I condemn the brutal settler attacks on American photojournalist Heidi Levine, European diplomats, and Palestinian olive harvesters in the West Bank,” US Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “Prime Minister Netanyahu must act now to stop settler violence, protect civilians, and ensure those responsible are brought to justice. The impunity must end.”

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Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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‘The Government is Trembling’: Protests Erupt in France, Spreading to 140 Cities

“For years we’ve had climate, economy, and equality problems, but the government is not doing anything about it,” said one protester.

Brad Reed

Common Dreams, Oct 17, 2026

Protests erupted throughout France on Saturday, with demonstrators citing a wide variety of grievances, including inequality, the high cost of living, and poor conditions in the nation’s schools.

As reported by Agence France-Presse, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris and other cities to protest what they said was inaction by the French government on the biggest problems facing the country.

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“For years we’ve had climate, economy, and equality problems,” one protester identified as Agnes told AFP, “but the government is not doing anything about it.”

18-year-old student Kamil Alahyan told AFP that there are “so many reasons” to protest, including “the elections coming up in 2027, politicians who lie, the ultra-rich who’ve been taking more and more wealth over the past 10 years.”

A 19-year-old protester identified as Lola expressed a similar view in an interview published by The Guardian on Saturday.

“We are fighting because the cost of living is too harsh,” Lola said, “because the price of fuel is too high, because high school pupils are being violently attacked and hurt all over the country just for trying to protest and ask for more teachers and decent learning conditions.”

Student organizer Ryad Rani told AFP that “the government is trembling and it’s right to tremble because when the French people are angry, they never let up.”

Saturday’s demonstrations mark the expansion of a movement that began last month when students blockaded their schools to protest staffing shortages, dilapidated buildings, and a widely criticized university application system.

According to The New York Times, demonstrations took place in at least 140 cities across the country.

Some of the protests did turn violent in major cities including Lyon, Marseille, and Paris, AFP reported. A Saturday BBC report claimed that more than 270 protesters have been arrested nationwide.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused “ultra-left groups” of inciting violence at the demonstrations.

“To those who clearly want to use these acts of violence as a ‘warm-up’ ahead of the presidential election, let me be clear: we will not be intimidated,” Lecornu wrote in a social media post. “No one will impose their political agenda through violence.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader the left-wing France Unbowed party, slammed the media for focusing too much on the isolated incidents of violence and not reporting on the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the demonstrations.

“Crowds of people everywhere, calm and joyful everywhere when the police aren’t around,” Mélenchon wrote in a social media post that featured photos of peaceful marches from across the country, which he described as “images you won’t see in the official media.”

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US Considers Using ‘Mother of All Bombs’ Against Iran

The MOAB is the most powerful conventional US bomb and has been used only once, when it was dropped in Afghanistan in 2017

by Dave DeCamp | October 15, 2026 at 1:33 pm ET | Iran

The US military has drawn up new strike plans against Iran that include potentially using the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” according to a report from CNN.

The MOAB is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal and has been used only once before in a strike on a village in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province in 2017. The US said the strike killed dozens of ISIS-K fighters, and the now-defunct US-backed Afghan government said no civilians were killed because they evacuated due to the ISIS occupation. But since returning, the residents have dealt with environmental effects and the damage from the attack, which destroyed about 30 civilian homes.

The MOAB is about 30 feet long, and due to its size, it must be dropped from a C-130 cargo aircraft close to the intended target, meaning that any MOAB strike on Iran would be vulnerable to Iranian air defenses.

A MOAB is prepared for testing at the Eglin Air Force Armament Center on March 11, 2003 (Pentagon photo)

The CNN report said that the potential target of the MOAB includes Iranian energy infrastructure, with one source telling the outlet that President Trump ordered the military to develop additional strike packages against Iranian targets that include “a lot of energy infrastructure” and the potential use of a MOAB.

The other potential target is Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kolang Kouh. The US and Israel have alleged there may be nuclear activity underneath the mountain, allegations that Iranian officials have denied. The problem with a MOAB strike is that it is designed for a massive surface-level blast, not for penetrating underground like the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), the bunker-busting bomb that the US dropped on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, which is heavier than the MOAB but carries less explosive.

Sources speaking to CNN said a potential MOAB strike could be more of a psychological operation. “POTUS has unfortunately put himself in a situation where he is almost compelled to do something and, without the ammunition designed to penetrate that level … you have to look at psychological effects for which the MOAB is well-equipped,” a source familiar with the planning told the outlet.

Any MOAB strike could result in devastating civilian casualties since the bomb has the power to destroy nine city blocks. The CNN report said that some US officials have warned that dropping the massive bomb was unlikely to force Iran’s capitulation or achieve a strategic military victory.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

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Oppose the Trump administration’s drive to strip Ilhan Omar of citizenship!

Jacob Crosse, WSWS, 17 Oct

Homeland Security officers leave the Washington residence of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democratic-Minnesota, after a search, Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

On Monday, federal agents searched the Washington home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar and confiscated her phone, her personal computers, her notebooks and passport. The search, conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is the opening move in an effort by the Trump administration to strip a sitting member of Congress of her citizenship and deport her.

The immigration Gestapo has been deployed against an elected representative over paperwork filed when she was a child three weeks before an election in which she is all but certain to win a fifth term. The first Somali elected to Congress, Omar won her last two elections with 74 percent of the vote and her August primary with 81 percent.

The Trump administration is asserting the power to overturn the election and drive a political opponent out of Congress and out of the country. This is an attack on democratic rights that must be opposed by the entire working class.

To obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must persuade a judge that there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that evidence of it will be found. What is this supposed crime? Investigators working for Trump claim that Omar or her late father misstated her age by one year on the paperwork through which she became a citizen in 2000, when she was 17. Her father died in 2020. The same allegation was examined in 2019 and again under the Biden administration, and both reviews found insufficient evidence to proceed.

Denaturalization cases ordinarily proceed as civil lawsuits based on the government’s own records. Former immigration officials told Reuters that it is “extremely unusual for them to involve search warrants.” No raid was needed to read a 26-year-old immigration file. The administration is searching for a basis to impose the punishment Trump has repeatedly demanded, deportation.

On the evening of October 12, hours after the raid, Trump took the stage at a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio and delivered a fascist diatribe against Omar. “She’s a disaster,” he said. “She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military. All they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and she says, ‘I have a constitutional right.’” The crowd answered with chants of “deport.”

On the same day his administration raided her home, the president mocked the idea that a Somali-born member of Congress had constitutional rights at all.

Omar is a member of the Democratic Party, and the Socialist Equality Party has fundamental political differences with her politics. But she is being targeted for definite political reasons.

Omar came to the United States as a child refugee from the civil war in Somalia and has represented Minneapolis in Congress since 2019. She was an original member of the “Squad” of four “progressive” Democratic women first elected to Congress in 2018, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressely and Rashida Tlaib.

Omar and Tlaib are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration due to their characterization of Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide. Omar has also called Trump’s war against Iran an “unlawful operation” that “must end immediately.” In January, at a town hall in her district, she declared, “We must abolish ICE for good.”

The persecution of Omar is also bound up with a fascistic and racist campaign against Somali immigrants. At a cabinet meeting last December, Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage,” and said, “Their country stinks.” That month, ICE launched Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which spread across Minnesota and produced more than 3,000 ICE abductions, along with the murders of US citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

The administration has ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis and opened a review of naturalization cases from Somalia and 18 other countries for possible denaturalization. On October 8, four days before the raid on Omar’s home, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Minnesota “is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” and urged, “Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

The fusion of anti-immigrant agitation with the persecution of left-wing opposition has a long history in the United States. Between 1917 and 1921, as the United States entered the First World War and the ruling class reacted with fear to the Russian Revolution, the American state waged a war against democratic rights at home.

Victor Berger, the Socialist Party congressman from Milwaukee and himself an immigrant, was convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war. On November 10, 1919, the House voted 311 to 1 to bar him from his seat. His constituents elected him again, and on January 10, 1920, the House excluded him again, 330 to 6.

The anarchist Emma Goldman’s citizenship derived from her marriage to Jacob Kershner, and in 1908 the government revoked his naturalization. When it moved to deport her in 1919, officials ruled that the revocation of her husband’s citizenship had annulled hers as well. On December 21, 1919, Goldman and 248 others were put aboard the Buford, the “Soviet Ark,” and deported to Russia. J. Edgar Hoover, then 24, was on board to see them off.

This was part of a broader assault on all political opposition. Opponents of the war were jailed under the Espionage Act, socialist newspapers were barred from the mails, and the Immigration Act of 1918 authorized the deportation of immigrant anarchists, socialists and labor organizers. Joe Hill, singer, song writer and labor activist, was executed at the Sugar House Prison in Utah in 1915 after being framed for murder. Frank Little, like Hill a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), was brutally lynched by Pinkertons in Butte, Montana in 1917.

The lesson of that period is that the attack on immigrants and the attack on left-wing politics form a single operation. Opposition to war and exploitation is branded the work of foreigners, and foreign birth is made grounds for silencing it.

In the current situation, the stakes extend far beyond one Democratic Party congresswoman. Some 26 million naturalized citizens live in the United States, according to the Congressional Research Service. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse counted at least 105 civil denaturalization suits in the first seven months of 2026, including 50 in July alone. In the entire period from 2008 through 2025, it counted 125.

The attack on Omar is also part of a conspiracy against the elections themselves. On October 15, the Justice Department sued California to block the counting of mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it claims are likely noncitizens. A similar claim of nearly 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s rolls collapsed when the state’s review did not establish a single one.

The aim is not to purge the rolls of a handful of ineligible voters. The administration is laying the basis for declaring the results of the November 3 election fraudulent, for throwing out ballots in states it does not control, and for treating any outcome it rejects as the product of “alien” voting.

The response of the Democratic Party establishment is virtual silence. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Democrat and fellow “Squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not have so much as a press release on her congressional web site denouncing the fascistic campaign against Omar. While Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram is filled with daily updates on the congresswoman’s’ efforts to freeze her eggs, there is nothing about ICE and the Trump administration’s attempt to denaturalize and deport her colleague.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, an ardent supporter of the genocide in Gaza, has said nothing during the more than five days since Omar’s home was raided.

The Democrats’ sharpest attacks on Trump are reserved for his policy toward Russia, not for his assault on democratic rights. What they fear is not dictatorship, but a movement of the working class they cannot control. A party that answers the persecution of one of its own office-holders with nothing more than a mildly worded press release will not defend the rights of workers.

Trump is the personification of a financial oligarchy that confronts a deepening economic and geo-political crisis. It is waging an escalating global war and faces growing resistance from the working class at home. The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of billionaires is incompatible with democratic forms of rule, and the ruling class is turning to dictatorship. As was the case a century ago, the scapegoating of immigrants serves to divide the working class and prepare repression against every form of opposition.

The defense of the democratic rights is a class question. Native-born and immigrant workers must unite in rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood to oppose the raids, deportations and denaturalizations. This fight must be connected to the struggle against war, the capitalist oligarchy and the system that give rise to them.

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How Israeli firm’s ‘zero-click’ malware attack poses global security risk

A new ‘zero-click’ hack uses ads to target victims without any action needed on their part. 7 mins

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Al Jazeera Media Network has condemned the spyware attacks targeting a number of its staff [File: Naseem Zeitoon/Reuters]

By Federica Marsi

Published On 16 Oct 2026

Just visiting a page or refreshing an app can be enough to fall victim to a malware attack in which your personal data is stolen from a laptop or phone, researchers have found. You are not even required to “click” on anything.

An Israeli spyware firm has been found to be behind the first-known instance of “zero-click” targeted advertising in which fraudsters or spies can steal private data and send it to external servers, with Al Jazeera journalists among the victims.

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In June 2025, 45 devices used by Al Jazeera staff – including several who reported on sensitive subjects – were targeted with spyware which installed itself without the need to open or download any files.

An investigation by the Canada-based academic research unit Citizen Lab, prompted by Al Jazeera’s initial internal probe into the issue, discovered that the Israeli company Candiru was behind the attacks.

Analysts say the findings are “incredibly concerning”, as they confirm the existence of a new global security threat. “We knew we were headed in this direction and now it is out in the public,” Remesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, US, told Al Jazeera.

“This is the next level, because people are being microtargeted,” he said. “This is the point we’ve come to when it comes to surveillance.”

How ‘zero-click’ malware works

Al Jazeera’s in-house technology team first discovered unusual patterns on devices used by some journalists in 2024. Analysis of network logs provided to the Citizen Lab by Al Jazeera in 2025 provided a clear temporal signature of how the attack was executed.

Malicious advertisements were bought by Discover-Tech, an Israeli company presenting itself as a legitimate advertising firm, but which actually operates as a facilitator for mercenary spyware partners.

Its advertisement network identified Al Jazeera staff, then quietly redirected them to an infected server belonging to Candiru. The spyware firm was blacklisted by the US government in 2021, when Citizen Lab found it was responsible for the illegal hacking and surveillance of at least 100 activists, journalists and political activists across 10 countries.

Al Jazeera Media Network has condemned the targeting of its staff members’ devices and called for those responsible to be held accountable.

Cybersecurity analyst and author Eddy Willems said the advertisements used automatically infect devices the moment they pop up on the screen, but there is an important technical nuance. “Executing code inside the browser does not automatically give an attacker full control over the computer,” Willems told Al Jazeera.

“To escape the browser’s isolated environment – the ‘sandbox’ – the attacker may need a second vulnerability,” Willems said, adding that an advanced spyware operation can combine several vulnerabilities.

“The attacker attempts to exploit vulnerabilities to bypass security boundaries. This is precisely what makes this type of attack so dangerous,” the analyst said.

Once the device is infected, the malicious software is designed to collect a wide range of sensitive data, including files, documents, and browser data such as cookies, bookmarks, and saved credentials.

It can also capture keystrokes, take screenshots, record microphone and webcam input, and extract emails and messages from popular communication platforms. To avoid triggering security mechanisms, the spyware often uses encrypted communication channels and breaks up stolen data into smaller chunks sent over time.

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Advertising: A new global security threat?

Analysts say Citizen Lab’s findings point to the escalation of an existing threat, which expands the scale and reach of traditional cyberattacks and makes them much harder to detect.

While “zero-click” attacks are not completely new, the findings outline a new technique through which online advertisements are used as a route to infection.

Stephen O’Shaughnessy, a lecturer in cybersecurity at the TU Dublin Blanchardstown campus in Ireland, explained that when a user opens a website or app, an automated auction sells the advertisement space in a fraction of a second. That auction shares data about the victim, including the device ID, IP address, rough location and the app or site they are on.

“Discover-Tech posed as an ordinary advertiser, used that data to find their target and win the auction for that person’s screen,” O’Shaughnessy told Al Jazeera. “Anyone with a phone or browser that shows ads can be reached, without the attacker needing their phone number or email.”

“Because no message or link is involved, there is almost nothing for the victim to notice,” he added.

Discover-Tech appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors maintained by Google and advertising industry association IAB Europe, and has served advertisements via major networks such as Google, Yandex and Beeswax.

In its report, Citizen Lab said this illustrates the structural flaws in the online advertising system, which essentially failed to detect or prevent the abuse.

Discover-Tech advertisements have popped up on devices used by personnel in national-security-sensitive networks around the world, including those of various ministries of defence, armed forces, national cyber agencies, intergovernmental organisations and media outlets, Citizen Lab found.

The research unit said these advertisements have also appeared on networks used by the United Nations, NATO, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union’s General Secretariat.

‘Almost nobody was watching’

Government networks have also been targeted in at least 24 countries, including the United States, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Australia, Russia, Mexico and Israel itself. Networks of media organisations have also been targeted, mainly in Australia, Denmark and Sweden, according to Citizen Lab.

In a separate report, New York-based advertising security firm Confiant said its own investigations had found that some of Discover-Tech’s advertisements also appeared in critical networks used by the Pentagon, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Criminal Court.

O’Shaughnessy said infection has not been confirmed there – only profiling of users. “But that alone is concerning, he said. “The ad system was built to send code from strangers to billions of screens with pinpoint targeting. Almost nobody was watching it from a security angle.”

The analyst said the risk remains low for most people as these attacks are expensive and aimed at specific targets. “For individuals at high risk, like journalists and officials, the best first defence is to install an ad blocker, switch off their advertising ID through their phone’s privacy settings, keep everything updated, and turn on Lockdown Mode or Android’s Advanced Protection,” he said.

Precautions also need to be taken within the industry and at government level. “To combat this, the ad industry needs to properly vet who’s buying ads,” O’Shaughnessy said, while “regulators need to stop personal data being sprayed out to thousands of unknown bidders in every auction.”

Candiru spyware: Malicious ads targeted NATO, UN and Al Jazeera

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Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Office Slams Trump Deportation Plot as ‘Authoritarian Move to Silence an Opponent’

 

US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) poses for a portrait in her office on Capitol Hill on December 10, 2025.

(Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“To Trump, no American value or principle is too important to be shredded for his own personal gain.”

Brad Reed

Oct 15, 2026

https://trinitymedia.ai/player/trinity-player.php?pageURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Filhan-omar-deportation-plot&contentHash=414a55449d2c7226c8a722f070628b7a16760d477c2a6e0e0319e0bf74ce329e&unitId=2900021701&userId=6030dba3-2fe8-4ff2-ac34-bd5b144f205c&isLegacyBrowser=false&version=20261015_5179fdb9eca6023f601eb595e091c7a8317b7ae7&useBunnyCDN=0&themeId=478&isMobile=0&unitType=tts-player&integrationType=web

The office of Rep. Ilhan Omar slammed the Trump administration on Thursday over its reported plot to have the Minnesota Democrat stripped of her US citizenship.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the raid on Omar’s home carried out earlier this week by Department of Homeland Security agents was part of and effort to build “a case to strip her of her US citizenship and ultimately deport her.”

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“The multipronged effort is focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the US from Somalia decades ago,” the Journal explained. “Investigators are focused both on the congresswoman and actions of her deceased father.”

Omar spokesperson Jackie Rogers responded to the report by accusing President Donald Trump of engaging in “desperate attempt to justify his extraordinary abuse of power.”

“This is politically motivated and an escalation of Trump’s personal vendetta against her lasting over a decade,” Rogers told HuffPost. “He has lied about her family, about her immigration history, and about her love of this country.”

Rogers also accused Trump of acting like a dictator by singling out a member of the opposition party for punishment.

“This isn’t a legitimate law enforcement action,” said Rogers, “it is an authoritarian move to silence an opponent right before an election where he and his party will be rejected by Americans in historic proportions… To Trump, no American value or principle is too important to be shredded for his own personal gain.”

Author John Ganz on Thursday published an analysis of the reported Omar deportation plot, which he said is “undoubtedly driven by racial and religious animus” and also “a serious assault on the constitutional order being carried out through the executive branch’s legal and bureaucratic machinery.”

Ganz argued that a serious attempt to strip Omar of her citizenship and remove her from the country would be a major escalation from the Trump administration toward establishing an outright totalitarian state.

“Authoritarian governments suppress political opposition and deprive their subjects of particular rights,” Ganz explained. “Totalitarian movements aspire to something much more radical: the destruction of the independent political and juridical personhood. They attack not merely the liberties of particular citizens they seek to repress, but the concept of citizenship itself—and then, ultimately, the concept of shared humanity.”

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ICC took no steps to withdraw Netanyahu arrest warrant, deputy prosecutor says

Nazhat Shameem Khan says case remains active and work is continuing ‘unabated’ despite US sanctions

 

Deputy Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Nazhat Shameem Khan attends a hearing in The Hague, on 9 December 2025 (AFP/file photo)

MEE staff

Published date: 22 September 2026 15:59 BST | Last update:3 weeks 2 days ago

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has taken no steps to withdraw arrest warrants or related applications concerning Israeli officials, despite mounting pressure and sanctions from the United States, Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan has said.

“The case is still proceeding,” Khan told CNN in a weekend interview.

“We have taken no steps to try and withdraw any of those arrest warrant applications or the arrest warrants themselves, and the team continues to investigate in that situation.”

The ICC issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza since October 2023.

Since then, the US has imposed sanctions on most of the court’s leadership, including the former chief prosecutor Karim Khan, the two deputy prosecutors, and nine judges including the court’s president.

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Israel has also taken steps to challenge the warrants at the ICC. Two appeals remain in progress, including one challenging the court’s jurisdiction over Israeli nationals because Israel is not a member of the court.

Meanwhile, Middle East Eye has reported that the prosecutor’s office had pursued further cases against senior Israeli officials over the past two years.

In May, MEE reported that the prosecutor’s office had filed a confidential application seeking arrest for Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich over alleged crimes committed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The charges included forced displacement as both a war crime and crime against humanity, transferring Israel’s civilian population into occupied territory as a war crime, and persecution and apartheid as crimes against humanity.

An evidence review had also been held to consider two further applications, including one targeting National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

‘We have trials in court’

Khan’s comments came amid an escalating campaign by the administration of US President Donald Trump against the Hague-based court.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in July that Washington would use every tool at its disposal to “dismantle the ICC – brick by brick, if necessary”, while urging member states to withdraw their support for the institution.

In other press statements, Rubio also described the court as a “stupid organisation” run by “lunatics and crazies”, and warned that it would face consequences for attempting to exercise jurisdiction over American nationals.

Trump’s ‘sweeping’ ICC sanctions over Netanyahu arrest warrant are imminent: Reports

Read More »

Khan said the court remained grounded in the Rome Statute, its founding treaty, which was adopted through the sovereign decisions of its member states after decades of negotiations.

“The work of the court continues unabated,” she said.

“We have trials in court. We have a trial scheduled for November of this year and one for next year. We have, in the course of the last year, seen convictions in two major trials, and we continue to conduct our investigations and our prosecutions, and appear in court on a regular basis, regardless of these events.”

Established in 2002, the ICC is the only permanent international court with the jurisdiction to prosecute senior officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.

In addition to the Palestine investigation, the court has more than a dozen active situations, including Ukraine, Darfur, Libya and Afghanistan.

Khan acknowledged that the court and its staff were operating under considerable pressure.

“The nature of the work that we do means that we inevitably will face pressure of all sorts to try and toe a political line, for instance, or to take a different position on the charging of accused persons, or to follow a path in investigation and prosecution,” she said.

“So, indeed, we do feel pressure, but, as I’ve said, the dedication of our staff is extraordinary, and they continue to do their work.”

Washington sanctioned Khan and fellow Deputy Prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang in August 2025, alongside two ICC judges. The sanctions froze any US-based assets they held and prohibited American individuals and companies from providing them with funds, goods or services.

Describing the personal consequences, Khan said sanctioned officials could lose access to banks and have their credit cards revoked, while financial transactions in Europe could be restricted to the Single Euro Payments Area.

‘We do feel pressure, but, as I’ve said, the dedication of our staff is extraordinary, and they continue to do their work’

– Nazhat Khan, ICC deputy prosecutor

Other service providers, including health insurance companies, might also sever ties, she said, while family members could be prevented from entering the US.

“I was never given any reasons for the sanctioning,” Khan said. “However, I believe it was because I am a deputy prosecutor at the Office of the Prosecutor.”

The Trump administration is now reportedly preparing broader sanctions against the ICC as an institution, potentially cutting it off from dollar transactions and hitting its access to banking, insurance and technology services.

Despite the pressure, Khan said she remained hopeful about the future of international law.

“The work that we do for victims, the fact that we continue to hear their voices stridently, with so much sincerity – they believe in this court,” she said.

“For them, this provides an avenue of justice that may not necessarily be provided in many courts around the world.

“Every single member of this court works for humanity,” she added, “and there can be nothing better than that.”

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