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 vicious and sustained campaign mounted
against Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation
of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, by
Israel and the U.S. now includes the German, Italian, French, Austrian
and Czech foreign ministers demanding her resignation. This campaign is
part of an effort by industrial nations to at once sustain the genocide
in Gaza — nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the
sham ceasefire took effect — and silence all those who demand the
international community abide by the rule of law.
The latest assault on Francesca, part of a
concerted effort to discredit international bodies such as the U.N., is
based on a deliberately truncated video of a talk Francesca gave in
Doha on February 7 that distorts and misconstrues her words. But truth,
of course, is irrelevant. The goal is to silence her and all who stand
up for Palestinian rights.
Francesca was placed by the Trump
administration on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list of the U.S.
Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money
laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days
after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy
of genocide,” which documented the global corporations that make
billions of dollars from the genocide in Gaza and occupation of
Palestinians.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control list —
weaponized by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in
violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to U.N. officials — bans
her from entering the U.S. It prohibits any financial institution from
having her as a client. A bank that engages in financial transactions
with Francesca is banned from operating in dollars, faces
multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment
systems. This has cut her off from global banking, leaving her unable to
use credit cards or book a hotel in her name. Her assets in the U.S.
are frozen. It has seen her medical insurance refuse to reimburse her
for medical expenses. It has resulted in institutions, including U.S.
universities, human rights groups and NGOs that once collaborated with
her severing ties, fearing onerous U.S. penalties. The sanctions
followed those imposed in February and June of last year on The
International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Khan along with two
judges for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
By making Francesca, who receives frequent
death threats, the lightening rod, these governments seek to deflect
attention from the ongoing slaughter and humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
They seek to mask Israel’s system of apartheid and unlawful occupation
of historic Palestine. They seek to hide, most of all, their complicity
with their continuing weapons shipments that fuel Israel’s genocide.
The pace of the genocide has slowed, but
it has not stopped. Israel has seized 60 percent of Gaza and blocks most
humanitarian aid, including fuel, food and medicine. At the same time,
Israel is accelerating its seizure of the occupied West Bank, where more
than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed and tens of thousands have
been displaced from their homes since October 2023.
The campaign against Francesca presages a
terrifying world where Western industrial nations exploit and prey upon
the weak, where the law is whatever powerful nations say it is, where
those who dare to speak the truth and stand up for the rule of law are
relentlessly persecuted, where genocide is another tool in the arsenal
to crush the aspirations and rights of the vulnerable. This is a fight
we must win. If we lose, if we let voices like Francesca’s be silenced,
we will usher in an age of blood and terror.
The Chris Hedges Report is a
reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work,
consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The US ambassador also said that at some point, Iran may experience the ‘second kick of a mule,’ referring to another US attack
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, February 16, 2026 at 7:08 pm ET | Iran
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on Monday
that the US and Israel are “absolutely aligned” on the need to “deal”
with Iran as Washington continues building up its forces in the Middle
East to prepare for a potential attack on the Islamic Republic.
Huckabee made the comments when addressing
the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in
Jerusalem, where he cast doubt on the idea that the US and Iran could
reach a diplomatic deal and said that another US attack on the country
is likely.
“At some point, the United States has to
say, enough is enough,” Huckabee said, according to Haaretz. “Either
Iran makes a radical change in direction, or it experiences what we call
in the South the second kick of a mule. There is no education in the
second kick. If you didn’t learn the first time, you won’t learn the
second.”
The US and Iran are set to hold a second
round of talks in Geneva on Tuesday. Israel wants any deal to involve
restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missiles, a demand designed to collapse
diplomacy since Tehran’s missiles are its only form of deterrence.
According to Iranian officials,
the US has dropped the demand for an agreement that includes missiles,
but President Trump and other Trump administration officials continue to
push the issue. Huckabee said that the US and Israel have agreed that
Iran cannot “continue building vast surpluses of ballistic missiles.”
President Trump has repeatedly threatened
to attack Iran if a deal isn’t reached, echoing threats he made in the
lead-up to the 12-day US-Israeli war against Iran that was launched in
June 2025, just days before another round of negotiations between
Washington and Tehran were scheduled to be held.
An empty warehouse is seen in Chester, New
York on February 8, 2026. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
proposes a facility at a warehouse roughly two hours from New York City,
but many locals and officials have objected to the plan.
(Photo by Matthew Hoen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start
as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours,” wrote talk show
host Thom Hartmann recently. “History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s
shouting.”
President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration
agenda has supercharged opposition in cities where he has deployed
federal agents to conduct raids, and communities in states including New
York and Missouri are already working to block the next step the
Department of Homeland Security plans to take in its push for mass deportations: acquiring massive warehouses across the country to use as immigrant detention centers.
US immigration
and Customs Enforcement documents that were provided to Republican Gov.
Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire—one of the states where ICE aims to
acquire a building and retrofit it to house at least 1,000 people at a
time—show that the administration plans to spend $38.3 billion on its mass detention plan.
It would buy 16 buildings across the
country to use as “regional processing centers” that could hold
1,000-1,500 people. Another eight detention centers would hold as many
as 10,000 people at a time, with the detainees awaiting deportation.
The Washington Postreported that a review of state budget data showed that the amount of money the White House intends to pour into the project over the next several months is larger than the total annual spending of 22 US states.
“Thirty-eight billion dollars,” said
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). “That’s what Trump is spending to turn
warehouses into human holding facilities. Not on schools. Not on healthcare. Not on veterans. On warehousing humans.”
Moulton also condemned ICE’s claim that
the new network of detention facilities will ensure the “safe and humane
civil detention” of immigrants.
At least six people died in ICE detention centers in January, and one of the deaths, that of Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, was ruled a homicide.
Medical neglect and abusive treatment—including some that amounts to torture—has been reported at multiple facilities.
ICE has already spent more than $690 million purchasing at least eight warehouses in Maryland, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in recent weeks. Documents
posted on Ayotte’s website show the agency is pursuing additional
acquisitions in New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and Georgia.
Communities are already rallying against the plan and questioning whether the small towns ICE has selected have sufficient water and sewer infrastructure to support thousands of people detained in a warehouse.
In New York, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) said
last week that 25,000 people in his district have signed a petition
opposing the use of a local warehouse to house immigrants and pointed to
the “major corruption and graft” evident in the plan to purchase and run the warehouses.
“The site in my district that’s proposed
is owned by one of Trump’s multibillionaire donors, who would directly
financially benefit from this site,” said Ryan, referring to former
Trump adviser Carl Icahn.
As Common Dreamsreported Friday, private prison firm GEO Group raked in a record $254 million in profits last year as it secured contracts with the Trump administration to build new ICE facilities across the US.
ICE has attempted to make purchases in Oklahoma City; Kansas City, Missouri; and in Virginia, but those plans have fallen through, with the Kansas City Council passing
a five-year ban on new nonmunicipal detention centers after the public
learned that DHS was the potential buyer of a warehouse in the city.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has also
joined his constituents in speaking out against ICE’s $100 million
purchase of a warehouse in his state to house at least 1,000 people at a
time.
“This administration is spitting in the
face of communities from Minneapolis to Maryland and wasting our tax
dollars. We won’t back down,” said Van Hollen late last month.
The details of the administration’s planned conversion of warehouses were reported less than two weeks after Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insiderrevealed
that a US Navy contract originally valued at $10 billion “has ballooned
to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald
Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda” and to help build “a sprawling
network of migrant detention centers across the US.”
At Common Dreams last week, talk show host and author Thom Hartmannwrote that the warehouses Trump plans to use to hold people—purchased by an agency whose own data shows
it has largely been detaining people with no criminal records—are best
described as concentration camps like those used in Nazi Germany.
“By the end of his first year, [Adolf]
Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration
camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons,
castles, and other buildings,” wrote Hartmann. “By comparison, today
ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across
America,” with hopes to “more than double both numbers in the coming
months.”
“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t
start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started
as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem.
And that’s exactly what ICE is building now,” he continued. “History
isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”
Thousands of Western nationals joined the Israeli military in its genocidal war on Gaza that killed over 72,000 Palestinians.
At
least 12,135 soldiers enlisted in the Israeli military hold United
States passports [File: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via
Getty Images]
Thousands of Western nationals joined the
Israeli military amid its genocidal war in Gaza, raising questions over
international legal accountability for foreign nationals implicated in
alleged war crimes against Palestinians.
More than 50,000 soldiers in the Israeli
military hold at least one other citizenship, with a majority of them
holding US or European passports, information obtained by the Israeli
NGO Hatzlacha through Israel’s Freedom of Information Law has revealed.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal
war on Gaza has killed at least 72,061 people in military actions that
have been dubbed war crimes and crimes against humanity by rights
groups.
Rights organisations around the world have
been trying to identify and prosecute foreign nationals, many of whom
have posted videos of their abuse on social media, for their involvement
in war crimes, particularly in Gaza.
So, what does the first such data reveal
about the Israeli military? And what could be the legal implications for
dual-national soldiers?
An
Israeli soldier pushes a Palestinian man while military bulldozers
demolish three Palestinian-owned houses in Shuqba village, west of
Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on January 21, 2026 [Zain
Jaafar/AFP]
Which foreign nationals enlist most in the Israeli military?
At least 12,135 soldiers enlisted in the
Israeli military hold United States passports, topping the list by a
huge margin. That is in addition to 1,207 soldiers who possess another
passport in addition to their US and Israeli ones.
The data – shared with Al Jazeera by
Israeli lawyer Elad Man, who serves as the legal counsel for Hatzlacha –
shows that 6,127 French nationals serve in the Israeli military.
The Israeli military, which shared such
data for the first time, noted that soldiers holding multiple
citizenships are counted more than once in the breakdown.
The numbers show service members enlisted in the military as of March 2025, 17 months into Israel’s devastating war in Gaza.
Russia stands at third, with 5,067 nationals serving in the Israeli military, followed by 3,901 Ukrainians and 1,668 Germans.
The
aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford sails in formation with the guided
missile destroyers USS Winston Churchill, USS Mitscher, USS Mahan, USS
Bainbridge and USS Forrest Sherman in the Atlantic Ocean, Nov. 12, 2024.
[Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jacob Mattingly ]
The US military is preparing for
“sustained, weeks-long operations” against Iran if US President Donald
Trump orders an attack, Reuters reported Friday, citing US officials.
The planned campaign would mark a far larger US assault on Iran than
anything previously carried out.
In a sustained campaign, the US military
could hit “Iranian state and security facilities, not just nuclear
infrastructure,” one of the officials said. The United States “fully
expected Iran to retaliate, leading to back-and-forth strikes and
reprisals over a period of time.”
Such a war could entail massive loss of
life and have incalculable global consequences. It would be illegal
under international law and take place in defiance of the popular will,
with 85 percent of the American population opposed to a war against
Iran, according to a YouGov poll.
Last June, the US launched “Midnight
Hammer” in coordination with a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign that
together killed over one thousand Iranians. Iran staged a limited
retaliatory strike on a US base in Qatar. What is now being planned is
qualitatively different—an air and missile campaign targeting the
Iranian state itself, with the expectation of extended back-and-forth
combat.
The buildup takes place just weeks after
the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest and newest aircraft carrier,
took part in the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on
January 3. The Ford, which has been at sea for more than 200 days, has
now been ordered from the Caribbean to the Middle East, where it will
join the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group already in the region. The
same carrier used in the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela is
being redeployed to wage war against Iran.
Trump, speaking to troops at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina on Friday, said it had “been difficult to make a deal”
with Iran. “Sometimes you have to have fear,” he declared. “That’s the
only thing that really will get the situation taken care of.” Asked if
he wanted regime change, Trump responded: “Seems like that would be the
best thing that could happen.”
The Ford strike group includes the
guided-missile cruiser Normandy and destroyers Thomas Hudner, Ramage,
Carney and Roosevelt. The carrier holds more than 75 military aircraft,
including F-18 Super Hornet fighters and E-2 Hawkeye early warning
aircraft.
Satellite imagery analyzed by Reuters
shows a massive buildup at US bases across the Middle East. At Al-Udeid
air base in Qatar, the largest US facility in the region, Patriot
missiles have been placed in mobile HEMTT truck launchers, giving them
rapid mobility in case of an Iranian attack. The base houses an RC-135
reconnaissance aircraft, 18 KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft, and
seven C-17 transport planes.
At Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan,
images from February 2 show 17 F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers, eight
A-10 Thunderbolt close air support aircraft, and four EA-18G Growler
electronic warfare jets—where none had been visible weeks earlier.
Additional forces have been deployed to Prince Sultan air base in Saudi
Arabia, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Dukhan base in Oman.
Approximately 112 C-17 Globemaster cargo planes have reportedly arrived
or made their way toward the Gulf region.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have warned
they could retaliate against any US military base in the region. The US
maintains bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the
United Arab Emirates, Oman, Turkey and on Diego Garcia. Ali Shamkhani,
an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warned: “We will respond
decisively to any adventurism—our military readiness is high.”
The military buildup coincides with the
Munich Security Conference, whose organizers titled their annual report
“Under Destruction.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the
conference by declaring: “This order, as flawed as it has been even in
its heyday, no longer exists.” He warned that “a divide has opened up
between Europe and the United States.”
But while European leaders condemned
Trump’s tariffs and threats against allies, they have fully supported
the US posture toward Iran. On January 29, the EU unanimously designated
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization—all 27 member
states voting in lockstep with Washington’s escalation.
The Munich conference withdrew its
invitation to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with Germany’s
foreign ministry declaring his participation inappropriate. In his
place, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah overthrown in
1979, was given a platform. Pahlavi called for “humanitarian
intervention” and an “equalizing factor”—that is, US military strikes to
“neutralize the regime’s instrument of repression.” He told the
conference that “help is on the way” from Trump and positioned himself
as the leader of a post-regime transition.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
Democratic Socialists of America
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Munich Security
Conference on the subject of “The Rise of Populism.” In her entire
appearance at the conference, she did not say a single word about
Trump’s preparations for war against Iran—the most significant military
escalation of his presidency.
What she did say is revealing. She warned
that Trump is “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire
world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianisms, of
authoritarians… where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to
bully around our own allies there.”
This is not opposition to war; rather
Ocasio-Cortez condemned Trump as being insufficiently aggressive against
“Putin”—i.e., being insufficiently committed to the war in Ukraine.
The Democrats have been silent as the
administration amasses approximately 50,000 troops and the largest
concentration of military firepower in the Middle East since the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Their earlier statements on Iran amounted to
endorsements of regime change in response to the emergence of localized
protests against the government last month. Senator Mark Warner declared
on January 11, “The Iranian regime is awful, and I stand with the
Iranian people.” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that month, “The Iranian
government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators is horrific.”
Far from opposing the war buildup, the
Democrats have actively funded it. On January 30, the Senate passed the
Consolidated Appropriations Act by a vote of 71 to 29, including $839
billion for the Pentagon—an $8.4 billion increase over the military’s
own budget request. Twenty-three Democrats voted for the bill, including
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Minority Whip Dick Durbin and
Vice Chair Mark Warner. In the House, the bill passed 341 to 88, with
149 Democrats voting yes and only 64 voting no. Republicans on the House
Appropriations Committee hailed the legislation as “America First,
Fully Funded.”
In the space of weeks, the Trump
administration has kidnapped the president of Venezuela, threatened to
annex Greenland, backed the Israeli genocide in Gaza and is now
preparing a sustained bombing campaign against a country of 88 million
people. Each of these operations targets nations whose resources
Washington seeks to control as part of its escalating confrontation with
China—Venezuela’s oil, Iran’s oil and natural gas and the Strait of
Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily.
The working class cannot entrust the fight
against imperialist war to any faction of the political establishment.
The same administration threatening to devastate Iran is attacking
immigrants, gutting social programs, and constructing a police state at
home. Opposition to war must come from the independent mobilization of
the international working class against the capitalist system that
produces war, inequality and dictatorship.
Israeli forces have killed at least 10 Palestinians in new attacks across Gaza in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.
The number of Israeli violations of the US-brokered “ceasefire” now
stands at 1,620, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.
Earlier, the Israeli military launched several attacks
on southern Lebanon, targeting what it called warehouses used by
Hezbollah.
Israel’s genocidal war
on Gaza has killed at least 72,061 people and wounded 171,715 since
October 2023. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the
October 7, 2023, attacks, and about 250 were taken captive.
A campaign of ethnic cleansing and
‘tectonic’ new legal measures are killing the two-state solution to
which other governments pay lip serviceThu 12 Feb 2026 20.05 CET
Protecting archaeological sites.
Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone
doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank,
Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the
idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with
the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
While the world’s attention was fixed upon
the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their
campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there
since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been
driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of
infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.
With Israel heading to elections in
months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a
hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground
dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes.
They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on
purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A
and B.
The White House has reiterated
Donald Trump’s opposition to annexation, but talks with Mr Netanyahu in
Washington on Wednesday focused on Iran. To the extent that the US
president thinks about Palestinians at all, he thinks about Gaza. Yet
this cannot be treated separately from the West Bank.
Arab and Islamic states central to his peace plan have warned that the
new measures will “inflame violence, deepen the conflict and endanger
regional stability and security”.
The declaration of a ceasefire in Gaza –
which has not stopped the Israeli military killing Palestinians there
either – has reduced the political pressure on other governments to act.
There are no signs that the outrage at last Sunday’s decision will
translate into action. The UK “strongly condemns” the measures. The EU
said that sanctions were “still on the table” but is clearly in no hurry
to act. Within Israel, only a handful dissent.
Hunger and desperation endure in Gaza
while the Trump administration promotes fantastical visions of a
glittering skyline. Israel has demolished the East Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa),
the UN body which supports millions of Palestinian refugees, and is
booting out NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, from across
occupied Palestine.
In 2024, the UN’s international court of justice ruled that Israel should end its illegal occupation as quickly as possible. Last year international outrage over Gaza forced multiple governments, including the UK, to recognise a Palestinian state,
dragged by their publics. Those symbolic announcements look
increasingly hollow. Real action cannot wait, for Israel’s government
will not.
