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.
Palestinian groups condemn prison footage as humiliation and intimidation.
Israel’s
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir visits the site of a
rocket attack on March 1, 2026 in Tel Aviv, Israe[Erik Marmor/Getty
Images]
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar
Ben-Gvir has posted footage from a prison holding Palestinian women on
social media, boasting that he is responsible for the harsh conditions
imposed on them.
The video, posted on Ben-Gvir’s X account
on Sunday, shows him entering a section holding female prisoners and
confronting them about their complaints regarding detention conditions.
One prisoner tells him: “This is our third
day without showering. We are not receiving medical treatment, and our
clothes are not clean.”
Ben-Gvir responds: “The good conditions in
the prisons are over. This is the current situation, and I am directly
responsible for everything. I am pleased with these conditions.”
In a post accompanying the video, the
far-right minister wrote that the “whining” of prisoners over their
conditions would not influence him, arguing that Israeli captives held
in Gaza had not enjoyed adequate conditions.
“I’ll continue to lead a policy of the bare minimum of the minimum,” he said.
Palestinian groups condemn footage
Gaza’s Commission of Detainees and
Ex-Detainees Affairs condemned Ben-Gvir’s visit, saying the filming of
female prisoners amounted to intimidation and humiliation.
It said his entry into the women’s section
of the facility was “not an inspection visit”, but rather a “political
spectacle and public incitement against the female prisoners” aimed at
intimidating them and breaking their will in front of cameras.
The Palestinian agency said Ben-Gvir’s
remarks showed that conditions inside Israeli prisons were part of what
it described as a systematic policy of retaliation based on
“humiliation, torture, starvation and deprivation”.
An Israeli police officer outside Ofer military prison near Jerusalem, October 13, 2025 [Mahmoud Illean/AP Photo]
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society also
condemned the footage, telling Al Jazeera that Ben-Gvir’s filming and
publication of the women constituted “an assault on their human
dignity”.
It said hundreds of testimonies from
released detainees and prisoners had documented serious abuses inside
Israeli prisons and detention facilities.
Push for harsher conditions
Since becoming national security minister
in late 2022, Ben-Gvir has pushed for tougher conditions for Palestinian
prisoners, including reducing food and water supplies, restricting
family visits, limiting shower times and removing privileges inside
prison sections.
He has also overseen the transfer of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners between facilities.
Ben-Gvir has previously rejected efforts
to improve conditions for prisoners. In 2025, he publicly opposed an
Israeli court ruling requiring authorities to ensure Palestinian
prisoners received adequate food, insisting that harsh conditions should
continue.
According to the Commission of Detainees
and Ex-Detainees Affairs, about 9,400 Palestinians are currently being
held in Israeli prisons, including 88 women and more than 350 children.
Pretoria says that Israel’s
flouting of the ICJ’s orders undermines the court’s legitimacy and is
paving the way for the destruction of the Palestinian people
South Africa submitted a detailed dossier
to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 25 August, formally
accusing Israel of defying legally binding provisional measures
requiring it to prevent genocide and safeguard essential aid in Gaza.
“The Court’s orders are binding on Israel,
and the international community also has an obligation to protect the
Palestinian people from genocide, including to take all necessary action
to prevent and punish genocide,” South Africa’s Foreign Ministry said
in a statement.
Pretoria says Israel has failed to comply
with the ICJ’s three sets of legally binding provisional measures issued
in January, March, and May 2024.
Those measures included requirements
concerning the prevention of acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention,
the delivery of humanitarian assistance, the halting of an offensive
that destroyed the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, and the granting of
access to the strip for UN investigators.
“Regrettably, Israel has not complied with
the Orders. South Africa continues to pursue all avenues available to
it to seek Israel’s full and immediate compliance with the Court’s
Orders,” the statement added.
The dossier provided evidence of Israel’s
ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, including the killing of at
least 73,407 Palestinians and injuring of 174,335 more since October
2023.
The total dead and injured amounts to over 10 percent of Gaza’s entire population, the dossier noted.
Some estimates of the dead in Gaza are much higher, reaching the hundreds of thousands due to the indirect effects of Israel’s bombing and demolition campaign.
Pretoria highlighted Israel’s ongoing
atrocities against Palestinians, including arbitrary detentions,
widespread torture, sexual violence, and a threefold spike in
miscarriages among pregnant women due to Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s
critical health and other infrastructure.
The dossier noted that despite the alleged
ceasefire reached in October 2025 between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli
military has continued to kill an average of one Palestinian child per
day.
South Africa says that Israel’s ongoing
non-compliance directly threatens the court’s legitimacy while paving
the way for the destruction of the Palestinian people.
“Israel’s failure to comply with the
Provisional Measures Ordered by the Court undermines their protective
function and entails further destruction of the Palestinian group,” the
ministry’s statement warned.
Israeli leaders say they want to
ethnically cleanse Gaza of its roughly 2 million inhabitants to make way
for the annexation and Jewish settlement of the strip. To accomplish
this, they say they wish to make life in Gaza so dangerous and
unbearable that Palestinians “choose” to “voluntarily migrate” to third
countries.
US President Donald Trump shakes hands
with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, during a meeting with US oil companies
executives in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on
January 9, 2026.
(Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
“This is proof Trump put our service
members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies,” one
Democratic senator said. “Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for
private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty.”
President Donald Trumpannounced on Truth Social on Friday that his government had “secured majority US control” of Venezuelan oil reserves containing 65 billion barrels of oil.
The announcement followed on reporting from Axios that a deal was in the works, prompting criticisms that such a move would be “colonial” and calls for Congress to reject any such proposal.
“Let’s be clear: This isn’t a win,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote on social media
in response to the announcement. “This is proof Trump put our service
members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies.
Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross
dereliction of his constitutional duty.”
When US forces invaded
Caracas and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife
First Combatant Cilia Fores on January 3, Trump’s own words following
the invasion confirmed suspicions that he acted largely to gain access
to the country’s oil.
“These are some of the largest crimes of our lifetimes.”
“We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he said in a press conference following the attack.
Friday’s deal, which seems like an attempt to make good on that promise, was also announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, who provided more details.
Rodríguez stated that the deal will
involve private corporations developing 17 “strategic fields” with 65
billion barrels of proven reserves. She echoed Rubio’s $100 billion
investment claim and pledged that the projects would yield $209 billion
in tax revenues. According to the acting president, the announced
agreement “ushers in a new era of growth and prosperity.”
However, economist Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that the agreement was actually a bad deal for Venezuelans.
“President: According to your figures,
this agreement will generate tax revenues of just $3.22 per barrel of
Venezuelan oil. This represents 4.7% of the current price, and less than
half of the royalty rate contemplated in concessions granted by Juan
Vicente Gómez,” he wrote on social media, addressing the current
Venezuelan leader and referring to a Venezuelan dictator from the early
20th century.
Joseph Bouchard, a journalist and researcher who focuses on Latin America, agreed
with Rodriguez’s criticism of the deal, writing on social media that
“Trump [was] ‘generously’ buying billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil
at less than 5% its market price. He’s stealing their oil for his own
family and cronies’ profit. Guessing this may be used as a chip to
manipulate the midterms. These are some of the largest crimes of our
lifetimes.”
Francisco Rodriguez had earlier pointed
out that the deal violated the Venezuelan Constitution, which holds that
all minerals and hydrocarbons are “inalienable public domain,”
according to Venezuelanalysis. For the deal to go through, therefore,
Venezula would have to alter its Constitution.
Former head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth noted
on social media that “senior Venezuelan officials, all fearing arrest,
are hardly in a position to negotiate vigorously, making the whole thing
seems like one big military theft.”
Trump is under pressure to lower gas prices that have spiked due to the fallout of his war on Iran, which entered
its sixth month on Friday, and promised in his announcement, “This
Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly
increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for
all Americans, long into the future.”
However, The Associated Press pointed out:
“A significant drop in US gas prices tied to the agreement should not
be expected immediately. Experts have repeatedly warned that a
substantial boost in Venezuelan oil production will not happen quickly
as repairing and expanding infrastructure takes years and requires billions of dollars.”
Exploiting Venezuela’s oil reserves would also exacerbate the climate crisis, which just this summer intensified a deadly heatwave in Europe and is supercharging an El Niño that could contribute to a significant increase in food prices in 2026 and 2027.
It’s
been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late
wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should
serve the public good, not corporate profits.
It was clear to us
from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid
advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling
us what to think or do.
Many people said we wouldn’t last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong.
Together
with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an
independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and
corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To
inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
Building Common
Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on
the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry
destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent
billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their
favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work.
But
here’s the urgent message from me today. It’s never been this bad out
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More than 7,250 people have been pulled
from the rubble of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran since the war began on
February 28, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.
Pirhossein Kolivand, head of the Iranian
branch of the humanitarian agency, said rescuers had to operate under
extremely difficult conditions, including during air strikes.
Kolivand added that the Iranian Red
Crescent would not remain silent in the face of what he described as war
crimes and violations of humanitarian law.
He said evidence of attacks on
humanitarian infrastructure had been sent to international legal bodies
and that the appropriate legal channels would be pursued.
As pressure mounts to disarm and
incorporate it into a reconstructed Palestinian order, the movement
needs strategic patience to preserve its independence and resistance
identity
Hamas fighters secure the area as Egyptian
workers and Red Cross officials search for the remains of the last
Israeli captive, in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, on 8
December 2025 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP)
Some moments in the history of liberation movements require courage to act; others require equal courage to wait.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on 7 October 2023, was a daring decision that shattered assumptions that had governed the Palestinian question for years.
It brought Palestine back to the centre of world politics, exposed the illusion that it could be managed or bypassed, and confronted Israel and its western supporters with a conflict they had convinced themselves could be contained indefinitely.
Nothing that followed can justify transferring responsibility for Gaza’s destruction from those who destroyed it to those who resisted them.
Responsibility
for the devastation of Gaza, the killing of its civilians and the ruin
of its homes, hospitals, universities and schools belongs to those who
carried it out. Criticism of Palestinian strategy must never become a
mechanism for absolving the perpetrators and their supporters.
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The scale of that sacrifice demands a harder look at how it is being managed politically.
Hamas today faces perhaps the most
difficult transition in its history. The movement that entered Al-Aqsa
Flood as an armed resistance organisation now confronts enormous
pressure to emerge from the war disarmed, removed from governing Gaza,
integrated into a reconstructed Palestinian political system and
dependent upon arrangements designed principally by the US and Israel with the tacit support of regional mediators.
Tactical flexibility is indispensable to
any resistance movement, but it must serve a coherent strategy rather
than gradually displace it.
Four developments should concern anyone
who believes the resistance must preserve its independence: the
political trajectory signalled by Hamas’s 2017 document, the handling of
postwar negotiations, the mounting pressure for disarmament and the
movement’s re-engagement with its old Fatah-aligned rivals.
A political wager
Hamas’s 2017 Document
of General Principles and Policies, issued well before Al-Aqsa Flood,
was widely understood as an effort to present a more pragmatic face to
the world. It accepted a sovereign Palestinian state along the 4 June
1967 lines as a formula of national consensus, while refusing to
recognise the legitimacy of the Zionist state and maintaining the right
of resistance.
The position had a long pedigree. As early as 2009, Khaled Meshaal, then the head of Hamas’s political bureau, told
the New York Times that his group “had accepted a Palestinian state on
the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem, the dismantling of
settlements and the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] based on a
long-term truce”.
The document represented a political wager: that moderation would break the movement’s isolation and open doors in Europe and beyond.
Hamas should study Fatah’s experience and
refuse ever to surrender a strategic position in exchange for a promise
of future reciprocity
European figures discussed
whether it justified engagement. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair
after leaving his post as the envoy for the Middle East Quartet – which
includes the US, EU, UN and Russia – courted Hamas’s leadership, and later acknowledged
that the boycott imposed after the movement won the 2006 elections had
been a mistake. Yet the broader political opening never came.
Therein lies the lesson: a liberation
movement should distinguish between flexibility exchanged for concrete
political gains and concessions offered in anticipation of western
acceptance. The real danger is a process in which each concession
becomes the starting point for the next.
Fatah travelled
down that road decades earlier, with each concession presented as the
gateway to the next diplomatic breakthrough: recognition was to produce
reciprocity, negotiation to deliver statehood and security cooperation
to build confidence, while Oslo itself was supposed to be transitional.
Instead, the transitional became permanent
as settlements expanded, the occupation deepened and sovereignty
receded, leaving Fatah today a shadow of its past.
Hamas should study that experience and
refuse ever to surrender a strategic position in exchange for a promise
of future reciprocity. Western approval is not a Palestinian national
objective.
Squandered leverage
The second concern is more immediate.
Negotiations are a contest over interests conducted through bargaining
power, yet since the war entered its diplomatic phase, Hamas has
repeatedly appeared willing to relinquish leverage before securing
reciprocal, enforceable gains.
The release of the Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander in May 2025 was presented as a goodwill
gesture intended to reopen diplomatic space, but goodwill has value in
negotiation only when the other side treats it as something to
reciprocate.
The larger test came with US President Donald Trump‘s Gaza initiative in September 2025. In its initial response,
Hamas agreed to release the Israeli captives, living and dead, under
the exchange formula, and accepted the transfer of Gaza’s administration
to an independent Palestinian technocratic body.
As the world fixates on Hamas, who will disarm the Israeli settlers storming West Bank villages?
On the broader future of Gaza and
fundamental Palestinian rights, however, it insisted that such questions
belonged within a comprehensive national framework.
I had argued for precisely this approach days before the movement issued its response on 3 October 2025.
Once the captives were exchanged and that
undertaking fulfilled, Hamas should have considered stepping back from
direct negotiation over the larger questions, since a resistance
leadership does not have to conduct every negotiation itself.
It could have entrusted the bargaining to
experienced independent Palestinian negotiators versed in international
law, diplomacy, American politics, Israeli negotiating practice, maps
and security arrangements, while itself defining the objectives and the
red lines.
One of the tragedies of the Palestinian
negotiating experience since the 1980s has been the repeated confusion
of revolutionary legitimacy with negotiating competence, which was among
Fatah’s costliest mistakes under Yasser Arafat.
The record of Oslo makes the asymmetry
plain. Israel fielded specialised teams, serving generals and the
seasoned foreign ministry lawyer Joel Singer; as Mahmoud Abbas himself
later acknowledged,
the Palestinians were negotiating against “an experienced, capable
delegation” without comparable expertise of their own. Negotiation is a
profession, and recognising that a movement lacks it costs far less than
pretending otherwise.
The Vietnamese understood this well. Throughout the long Paris talks, Hanoi treated
diplomacy as one instrument within a larger political and military
strategy: the Politburo set the objectives and the permissible
concessions, while veteran negotiators such as Le Duc Tho conducted the
bargaining.
When the talks moved beyond positions the leadership was prepared to accept, the negotiators were instructed
to return to the earlier agreement as the basis for settlement. The art
lay in knowing what could be traded, what had to be preserved and when
compromise served the wider goal.
More than weapons
These questions have become urgent because
Hamas has moved from discussing governance to entertaining formulas
concerning its weapons.
Recent proposals
would see them stored or transferred as part of a demilitarisation
arrangement tied to Israeli withdrawal, an approach Israel has rejected
while insisting on complete disarmament first. Are Palestinians really
expected to hand over their weapons while the tanks are still at the
border?
The pattern is familiar from the Oslo
years: a Palestinian concession enters the diplomatic record, Israel
rejects the arrangement as insufficient, and the next negotiation begins
from the concession rather than from the position that preceded it. The
reward for an unreciprocated concession is usually another demand.
Disarmament therefore goes to the identity
and strategic purpose of the movement itself. Restraint can itself be a
form of resistance, and Hamas need not return to governing Gaza:
relinquishing direct administration might even free the movement from
the contradiction between governing a besieged population and
functioning as a resistance organisation. Leaving government and
abandoning resistance are entirely different propositions.
The greater danger is that a movement
exhausted by war and subjected to extraordinary pressure from mediators
and international powers could be transformed, incrementally, into
merely another Palestinian faction seeking a place in an electoral order
whose parameters others have designed.
Fatah’s transformation came about exactly
that way. A concession was justified as tactical, another was required
to preserve the political process, and another was demanded to
demonstrate seriousness, until an organisation established to liberate
Palestine became the governing component of an authority operating under
occupation.
The movement’s re-engagement with its old rivals in Fatah’s orbit belongs to the same set of concerns. In August, Hamas met
officials from the Democratic Reform bloc of the former Gaza security
chief Mohammed Dahlan, in contacts a Hamas official confirmed to Al
Jazeera, ahead of Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for
November.
Weeks earlier, a senior aide had said
that Dahlan intervened in the disarmament negotiations through direct
contacts with the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Political circumstances change, and old
adversaries meet. Yet Hamas should ask what purpose these returns are
designed to serve, and why the very powers now pressing for its
disarmament appear so comfortable with them.
Strategic patience
Defenders of the present course will ask
what the alternative is, and the answer is strategic patience: a
movement under immense pressure does not have to resolve every question
immediately. Hamas can fulfil the limited agreements it has made while
declining to negotiate away questions that belong to the Palestinian
people as a whole, using the intervening period to reorganise while the
environment becomes clearer.
The region has changed since 2023 in ways in which the consequences are still unfolding. A growing number of analysts argue that the confrontation involving Iran, Israel and the US may leave Tehran strategically stronger than many anticipated. Washington and Tel Aviv, meanwhile, have expended enormous military, political and diplomatic capital.
Gaza itself remains under a fragile
ceasefire, with the sequencing of Israeli withdrawal and disarmament
unresolved. Why should Hamas negotiate as though today’s balance of
power were permanent?
There is a time to fight, a time to negotiate and a time simply to hold one’s position
Elections are a legitimate instrument of
popular representation, and Palestinian institutions desperately need
renewal after years of stagnation and eroded democratic legitimacy.
Taking part in them is one thing; allowing them to redefine the
movement’s relationship to resistance is another. Hamas needs to state
clearly what it now considers its strategic constants, and how armed,
popular, political, legal and diplomatic forms of resistance fit within
them. Such questions cannot be answered through piecemeal agreements
negotiated under pressure.
There is a time to fight, a time to
negotiate and a time simply to hold one’s position, which is sometimes
nothing more than the refusal to make irreversible concessions under
temporary pressure.
Al-Aqsa Flood came at an almost
unimaginable human cost to Gaza, and that cost must never be used to
delegitimise Palestinian resistance or shift responsibility from those
who devastated the Strip. Neither does the magnitude of Palestinian
sacrifice exempt Palestinian leaders from strategic accountability: a
resistance movement has to protect the political value of the sacrifices
made in the name of its cause.
Hamas can leave the government of Gaza,
contest elections under the right conditions and negotiate when
circumstances require, without allowing tactical concessions made under
extraordinary pressure to redefine its principles. Where its own
negotiating capacity is inadequate, it should have the confidence to
entrust the bargaining to professionals while retaining the authority to
set the red lines.
The gravest danger facing Hamas now lies
beyond the battlefield. Having survived one of the most destructive wars
in modern history, it could gradually concede at the negotiating table
what its adversaries failed to attain by force.
What Israel could not extinguish through military might and genocide should not be surrendered through the fine print of an agreement concocted in Washington.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the
Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University.
Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades
(1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human
rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of
several studies and books. He can be contacted at:
nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
The United States Air Force emblem appears on a circular surface in Walnut Creek, California, April 18, 2023.
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The United States Air Force has issued
multiple charges against a decorated airman over his public statements
earlier this summer calling for the impeachment of President Donald
Trump.
Watson’s arrest at the U.S. Capitol in early July
occurred during a protest involving multiple organizations and speakers
who were critical of the White House’s decision to start a war in Iran
without congressional authorization and other military actions. Watson
held a sign at that event that read, “impeach, convict, remove.”
“When the president of the United States
orders military action against foreign countries — absent an emergency
scenario where American interests are under imminent dire threats, as
was done with Venezuela, Cuba and Iran — that’s an unconstitutional
usurpation of Congress’s authority and a violation of the War Powers
Clause,” Watson said at the event.
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.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
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