The Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Agenda Continues To Roll Forward
Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 03, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-agenda?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=204779474&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
As both US and Israeli leaders openly contemplate attacking Iran again, it’s easy for the world to miss the fact that the genocidal alliance has also dramatically reinvigorated its ethnic cleansing agendas in Gaza.
The Adelson-owned pro-Netanyahu outlet Israel Hayom reports that in the coming weeks the so-called “Board of Peace” overseeing life in the Gaza Strip is planning to relocate Palestinians to “humanitarian shelters” that are not under Hamas control.
Israel Hayom reports that an area near the destroyed city of Rafah is the first location where such camps will be set up. This is noteworthy because one year ago defense minister Israel Katz stated that there was a plan to construct a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where “the emigration plan” for the Palestinians would then be implemented, adding that Benjamin Netanyahu was working on finding foreign nations to accept the population of Gaza.
It’s hard to ignore the similarities. Both accounts even state that the plan is to police the displaced Palestinians using an international force. The 2026 Israel Hayom report states that the camps will be overseen by “multinational forces under the Board of Peace’s management”, and Israel Katz stated in 2025 that Israel is seeking international partners to manage the zone.
So to be clear, in July of last year Israeli officials were publicly stating that they were going to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah to house the Palestinians under international supervision while working to relocate them from their homeland to other countries, and in July of this year we learn that we will soon see Palestinians in Gaza relocated to “humanitarian shelters” near Rafah overseen by international forces.
So it sounds like the same plan. If it is, then it’s a plan for ethnic cleansing.
Israel has already expanded its control over Gaza from 53 percent to 70 percent of the Strip, concentrating the survivors of the genocide into a mere 30 percent of the Palestinian territory. And now, according to Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen, the plan is to expand control to 100 percent.
Israel National News quotes Cohen as saying during a recent radio interview that “our control of the territory will only continue to expand until we reach 100%,” adding, “two months ago we controlled 53% of the Strip, about a month ago around 60%, and today we’re approaching 70% of the Strip’s area.”
This comes amid other reports we discussed recently which strongly indicate that the Trumpanyahu administration is renewing its push to remove all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The other day we learned from the Israeli press that Israel’s national security agencies had been instructed to rebrand the ethnic cleansing plan as a “plan for free movement” in order to mitigate international resistance to the agenda. A few days before that, we learned that Israel’s new national security chief had convened a meeting with officials from the IDF and Shin Bet to discuss the plan to displace the Palestinians of Gaza to other countries.
Again, Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza have always been about ethnic cleansing from the very beginning. Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
The goal has always been to remove the Palestinians from Gaza so their territory can be taken from them. This was never anything other than a blatant Israeli land grab. They’ve been framing it as a “war” so that after they seize and colonize Gaza they can say “the Arabs fought a war and lost, they deserved to lose territory” like they always do, but it was never actually a war.
Calling the Gaza genocide a “war” is like seeing a man beating up a toddler and calling it a “fight”. It’s one of the world’s most sophisticated military forces raining explosives on an area packed full of children with the backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, opposed only by a few thousand guys running around in sandals with homemade rockets and ancient Kalashnikovs.
That’s not a war. It’s an ethnic cleansing operation. That’s all this has ever been.
Starmer Lied: Britain Is Cutting £11 Billion from Frontline Defence
The new Defence Investment Plan delivers almost nothing for our armed forces in the near term
Ian Proud, The Peacemonger, Jul 02, 2026
The United Kingdom is in effect going to spend up to £11 billion less per year on the day-to-day running of its armed forces under Keir Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan — and that’s before we even take inflation into account.
Despite the apparent uplift in spending toward 2.7% of GDP by 2029, the UK will get no meaningful increase in front-line conventional capability or personnel.
Our armed forces are at their smallest size in two hundred years, and that situation is not going to change under this plan.
Spending on long-term nuclear capabilities — programmes that will not deliver anything usable until the 2030s and 2040s — is absorbing the great majority of the headline increase.
This comes at a time when the government claims Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO by the end of this decade.
At the heart of the problem is a foreign policy that wants to confront multiple adversaries while maintaining armed forces that simply do not have the mass or readiness to do so credibly.
Important to point out that I am the son of a former British soldier and I am incredibly proud of the armed forces and anyone who serves this country. I also served alongside the British Army in Helmand province in 2010 and worked with some truly remarkable people. I am not criticising the men and women who put on the uniform. I am criticising how badly led we are as a country.
Keir Starmer announced the UK’s long-awaited Defence Investment Plan yesterday, 30 June. To describe it as a damp squib would be generous. It is a document that confirms the continued stagnation of the UK armed forces and the deep sclerosis at the heart of defence procurement.
Do not believe the headlines and the spin.
This plan will not transform our hollowed-out forces.
The British Army is already at its smallest size since 1823. That will not change.
There are no new soldiers being recruited in any significant numbers. Money available for the day-to-day operation of the armed forces is not going up — in real terms it is under severe pressure.
Having crunched the numbers, it’s clear to me that yearly spending on the actual running of the armed forces has effectively declined by up to £11 billion per year under this plan, set against the government’s claim of a £15 billion per year increase by 2027…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The outgoing UK Prime Minister has declared a big increase in defence spending, yet we are getting no new troops and very little new conventional capability in the near term.
Why?
Because the great majority of the additional money is being directed into nuclear programmes and a procurement system that has repeatedly failed to deliver on time or on budget.
………………………………………………….. As I write, I understand that all of the Astute-class submarines are operationally unavailable.
……………………the largest cost increases and overruns have been in the nuclear and naval programmes.
………….As the National Audit Office reported in 2023, the combined costs of nuclear and naval programmes rose by £54.6 billion between 2022 and 2023, with the nuclear element increasing by £38.2 billion.
The three biggest programmes are the SSN-AUKUS attack submarines, the Dreadnought ballistic missile submarines, and the new Astraea nuclear warhead.
The first UK-built AUKUS submarines are not expected until the late 2030s.
We already have ballistic missile submarines maintaining Continuous At-Sea Deterrence.
We already have attack submarines, even if they cost too much, took too long to build, and don’t work.
We already have nuclear warheads. Do we really need a slightly flashier design folks? Serious question.
The plan is being presented as a response to current and near-term threats, while a war continues in Ukraine and with political leaders abandoning diplomacy.
……………………I have a clear alternative. We should cancel or significantly scale back the highest-risk and longest-lead nuclear programmes — particularly the new Astraea warhead and major elements of the SSN-AUKUS programme.
The savings should be redirected into fixing and sustaining the equipment we already possess, improving the availability of existing platforms, and beginning the serious work of rebuilding conventional force numbers and readiness for the core task of defending the United Kingdom and its immediate interests………………………….. https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/starmer-lied-britain-is-cutting-11?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=204491995&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The Pentagon’s Budget Redirected Would Exceed Our Wildest Dreams.
The actual cost of the U.S. military budget that Trump is asking for is $3 trillion.
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 1, 2026, https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-pentagons-budget-redirected-would-exceed-our-wildest-dreams/
Legacy “news” outlets have declared a national disaster emergency. It seems that we the people of the United States may be in imminent danger of having about 10% of the U.S. Congress give a damn about us, and — what’s worse — perhaps 5% give a damn about the other 96% of humanity too.
The panic seems misplaced, not only because Uncle Sam’s Oligarchs have still got 90% of our court jesters, the one emperor, and a majority of the Supremes, but also because the proposals for preschools, grocery stores, buses, and so forth hardly scratch the surface of the enormous pile of money dumped each and every year into a single criminal enterpr – er, I mean, government program. The actual cost of the U.S. military budget that Trump is asking for is $3 trillion. The point I am making here still works if you can’t be bothered with new facts and want to claim that the proposed military budget is half of that, but I think going with the most accurate facts we can find is always the best policy.
For some $3.7 trillion a year, the United States could have something that every other country in the World Cup has: healthcare as a human right free to all. That is, with only $0.7 trillion in new revenue each year (or the cost of a fairly mediocre war), everybody paying for health insurance could stop, everybody without health coverage could have it, and preventive care could begin to take over from emergency care. I don’t know how to calculate all the hours reclaimed from dealing with health insurance forms and so forth. But this would be a transformation of the U.S. government from principally a killing machine to principally a healthcare provider. Let’s look at some smaller proposals.
We could make college free for $75 billion a year, preschool for $35 billion, provide housing to everyone who lacks it for $29 billion a year. See those first three teeny tiny orange bars in the chart above. Can you image having those unbelievable things and still only be scratching the surface?
We could hire 100,000 people at $100,000 a year to work on what’s needed most. Total cost: $10 billion. We could end hunger on Earth for $93 billion a year. We could provide solar power to every house in the United States over 10 years for $120 billion each year. We could build 1,000 miles of high-speed rail each year for perhaps (depending how efficiently and where it’s done, of course) $200 billion. Or double or triple that for more efficiencies. It’s not as if we’re running our of money.
We could do all of these things, exceeding the wildest nightmares of Republicans and corporate Democrats alike, and still maintain absolute faith in militarism. We’d only have to assume that the United States was remotely like the rest of the world, which spends a tiny fraction of what the United States does on war machinery. Or we could grow more enlightened than that and go a lot further. The process would, by stages, enlighten us in any case. Regardless, we would need to invest something in the transition to peaceful industries, and to compensate, assist, and retrain anyone wanting such measures. Just to ridiculously over-invest in that concern, let’s chalk up another $200 billion.
Now, the things one can do for safety while disarming are many and include ceasing to supply the world with weapons, as well as making disarmament agreements, providing disarmament incentives, and supporting the rule of law, cooperation, investment in unarmed civilian defense, truth and reconciliation commissions, and so on. One thing on that list is actual aid — not military “aid” but actual, no-strings, support for human and environmental needs. I think a healthy quarter trillion on that each year would produce rallies around the world celebrating the United States instead of burning its flag.
Even then, we’d be only a bit over $1 trillion total. We could think a little harder about what’s needed most. Or we could send a check for $5,696 to every person in the United States and call it a good day’s work. We’ve not, of course, counted here the widely understood economic advantages of spending money in these ways rather than on wars — but everyone would share in those benefits too.
Dream bigger.
What’s in Keir Starmer’s defence investment plan? Key points.
The ten-year military blueprint outlines billions in spending on special forces and hypersonic weaponry but leaves some major equipment programmes uncosted
More than £63 billion will be spent on the nuclear deterrent over four
years, including new warheads for the future Dreadnought-class submarines,
as well as 12 new F-35A aircraft that will be able to carry tactical
nuclear weapons, American B61-12 gravity bombs. The nuclear investment will
also include £26 billion over the next decade in Project Royal Oak, the
largest naval base upgrade for over 45 years. This will see
multi-billion-pound upgrades at Faslane, Portsmouth and Devonport.
Times 30th June 2026 https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/defence-investment-plan-keir-starmer-key-points-cgxtn69qf
War Crimes, War Powers and American Sovereignty: The USA + Israel = The Department of Forever War
While carrying a national debt approaching $40 Trillion, the Administration is increasing spending for its newly dedicated Department of War by 67% to upwards of $1.5 TRILLION per year. Simultaneously, with more than 42 million Americans unable to feed themselves, the administration is cutting federal food program
From war crimes and genocide abroad to moral, constitutional, and debt crises at home: Why Congress must reject the NDAA’s U.S.-Israel military and intelligence merger
June 30, 2026 Dennis Kucinich, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/30/war-crimes-war-powers-and-american-sovereignty-the-usa-israel-the-department-of-forever-war/
Against the horrific high- and low-tech butchery of Palestinians and Lebanese by Israeli ethno-nationalist psychopathic killers, this week there will be an effort in Congress to formally merge or integrate the military of Israel and the United States at the most advanced levels.
Section 219 (formerly Section 224) of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act of 2027, provides for an unprecedented unification. The nearly $4 billion in the NDAA for Israel’s offensive efforts pales next to Israel having direct access to determining use of $1.5 trillion in annual military resources of the United States.
Money can be appropriated one year and withdrawn the next. Institutional integration is permanent.
Section 219 creates permanent mechanisms through which military planning, intelligence sharing, weapons development, procurement, research, artificial intelligence, and strategic coordination become increasingly intertwined between the United States and Israel.
It is a proposal to embed another nation’s military establishment within the long-term planning and strategic architecture of the United States government.
Our own government – House, Senate and Administration – is in moral collapse, placing overwhelming emphasis on militarism instead of adequately funding America – housing, education, food, health, safety, and retirement security. Americans are standing at freeway exits, begging for food, while our tax dollars flow to weapons manufacturers.
While carrying a national debt approaching $40 Trillion, the Administration is increasing spending for its newly dedicated Department of War by 67% to upwards of $1.5 TRILLION per year. Simultaneously, with more than 42 million Americans unable to feed themselves, the administration is cutting federal food programs.
The practical implications extend far beyond dollars. With NDAA Section 219, Congress the legislation would create enduring institutional relationships affecting how those extraordinary military resources are developed, coordinated, and potentially employed.
No Congress has ever before considered legislation of this nature with any foreign nation.
If the Administration’s “America First” claim were to mean anything, it must first mean that America’s Constitution comes first. It must mean that American families, farmers, workers, veterans, and children come first. Section 219 turns that claim into a farce.
Section 219 of the NDAA would cause the United States to become dependent upon Israel making decisions about war, peace, military strategy, intelligence, and U. S. national security. This is the consequence of permanent institutional integration.
One week ago, a UN Commission of Inquiry determined that Israeli security forces deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children, sometimes as a game, torturing them, subjecting children to sexual violence resulting in “unprecedented death, injury and trauma.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the IDF has been instrumental in the deaths of as many as 800,000 Palestinians, including children, emergency health care workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and educators.
UN investigators and human rights observers have documented the killing of Palestinian children and have accused Israeli forces of deliberately targeting the children of Gaza.
These findings are reinforced by dehumanizing statements from Israeli political figures who have portrayed Palestinian children as future terrorists, so children are targets.
Essential civilian infrastructure has been devastated. Water systems, hospitals, schools, electrical networks, and sanitation facilities have been damaged or destroyed, eacerbating a man-made, humanitarian catastrophe.
In the occupied West Bank, armed “settlers” have been widely reported to have attacked Palestinian communities, burned homes, uprooted olive groves and other crops, destroyed property, and killed livestock, further displacing civilian populations.
Israel has used starvation as a weapon, setting food as a trap and, gunning down Gazans as they rush desperately to feed themselves and their children. Water supplies have been poisoned, wells filled with cement.
Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are testing ground sfor increasingly sophisticated military technologies, destroying entire villages with increasingly powerful munitions, and using precision, artificial intelligence-assisted targeting systems. Human rights organizations have raised serious concerns about the speed of targeting decisions, civilian casualty rates, and the implications of delegating life-and-death decisions to algorithmic systems.
White phosphorous and other weapons banned by international treaty are in use.
The conduct of the IDF has earned world-wide condemnation. Twenty-nine UN member states do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The Israel newspaper Haaretz recently reported that the ICC prosecutor is also seeking arrest warrants for Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “Gaza must be destroyed entirely.” and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Givr, who has said: “All of Lebanon must burn.” Will these be our new partners? If so, the fundamental question becomes: Who are WE?
What is to be lost further in an Israel-U.S. military merger?
If the U.S. combines our military capabilities with the twisted occupation and expansionist ethic of Israel’s use of military technology against civilian populations, will it be long before our own government militarizes the high -tech surveillance infrastructure already in place to use state violence against our own citizens who protest abuse of basic rights?
The First Amendment has already been taken down on college campuses, and in cities and states where Israel critics are sanctioned.
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials have trained in Israel. The lessons learned there have come to America in terms of deportation, detention, and in some cases, physical abuse, injury and death at the hands of ICE government agents.
Israel kills Arab children so they will not commit crimes in the future. Will Americans, as in the movie Minority Report be pitched into a dystopian world where predictive algorithms enable Israel-U.S. collaborators to hunt down, prosecute and even punish Americans for crimes not committed
As a Member of Congress, I questioned Benjamin Netanyahu during a hearing which took place prior to the 2003 Congressional vote on going to war against Iraq. He admitted he wanted not only Iraq to be attacked by the United States, but also Libya and Iran. It is widely known that the Israeli Prime Minister pushed President Trump into the disastrous war against Iran.
It is inevitable that as Israel’s aggression is maximally empowered, once placed inside the U.S. war-making establishment, the U.S. will be dragged into the Zionists’ expansionist designs on Iran, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. A greater Israel means a lesser United States. Congress, heavily influenced by the Israel lobby, is unable to reclaim its constitutionally based war power.
Since the merger is to be voted on, this week, before America celebrates the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, let us be reminded by Thomas Jefferson’s July 4, 1776 characterization of George III, King of Great Britain: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws….”
Our forefathers did not fight for freedom and for independence at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown, nor sacrifice American blood and treasure in battles in World War I and World War II to arrive at July 4, 2026, having willingly forfeited our sovereignty to a foreign nation, losing control of our future and putting in doubt “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”
Call your congressperson today and tell them to stand for America’s independence and vote for the Massie-Khanna Amendment to remove Section 219 from the NDAA
Europe and Russia Edge Toward Direct War as Nuclear Fears Grow
Ray McGovern and Peter Kuznick examine Europe’s accelerating military buildup, Putin’s warning that Russia is prepared for war, and why they fear diplomacy is giving way to a dangerous escalation between nuclear powers.
Peter Kuznick’s sobering warning: “We’re planning for our own annihilation and extinction as a species.”
ScheerPost Staff, June 29, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/29/europe-and-russia-edge-toward-direct-war-as-nuclear-fears-grow/
As Europe dramatically expands military spending and NATO leaders openly prepare for what they describe as a possible future conflict with Russia, questions are growing over whether the world is drifting toward a direct confrontation between nuclear powers.
On this week’s edition of The World This Week, Consortium News Editor Joe Lauria is joined by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and historian Peter Kuznick to examine the increasingly dangerous escalation surrounding the war in Ukraine. The discussion explores Vladimir Putin’s warning that Russia is prepared for war, Europe’s accelerating militarization, the role of NATO-backed drone attacks deep inside Russian territory, and the growing risk that a single miscalculation could trigger a wider conflict.
While McGovern argues that Moscow continues to exercise restraint despite mounting provocations, Kuznick warns that political pressure, expanding military commitments, and increasingly confrontational rhetoric on all sides are creating conditions in which diplomacy is being replaced by dangerous brinkmanship. Together they examine whether Europe’s leaders are pursuing a coherent long-term strategy—or whether escalating military spending, shrinking diplomacy, and domestic political pressures are moving the world toward an outcome that no one can control.
The conversation also explores the fragile U.S.–Iran ceasefire, shifting global power dynamics, and whether recent political developments in New York signal broader changes inside the Democratic Party. Throughout the discussion, the panel returns to a central warning: in an era of nuclear weapons, great-power confrontation carries risks unlike any previous conflict, making diplomacy more urgent than ever.
Much of this discussion is vital and deserves to be widely shared, but perhaps its most important takeaway—and one that should remain our constant watchword—is Peter Kuznick’s sobering warning: “We’re planning for our own annihilation and extinction as a species.”
The greatest danger isn’t simply the war itself—it’s the gradual normalization of confrontation between nuclear powers.
McGovern argues that despite increasingly provocative developments, Putin has consistently sought to avoid a direct military clash with NATO. Drawing on decades of following Soviet and Russian leadership, he contends that Moscow understands that striking targets inside NATO countries could trigger an uncontrollable escalation with nuclear powers. Instead, he believes Russia is attempting to achieve its objectives inside Ukraine while avoiding actions that would give Western governments justification for expanding the conflict.
Kuznick agrees that Putin has generally exercised restraint but warns that restraint alone may not guarantee stability. He notes that Russian infrastructure continues to come under attack, political pressure inside Russia is growing, and influential voices within the country have begun calling for stronger retaliation against European facilities supporting Ukraine’s military operations. While he does not believe Russia seeks a wider war, he cautions that prolonged escalation increases the chances of miscalculation by all sides.
One of the central themes running throughout the discussion is the collapse of diplomacy. Both guests argue that negotiations have steadily been displaced by military planning, larger defense budgets and increasingly confrontational political rhetoric. Rather than emphasizing diplomatic solutions, many European leaders now frame the conflict as a long-term military struggle requiring sustained increases in defense spending.
The discussion also examines the broader political consequences of Europe’s military buildup. Kuznick argues that dramatically expanding military expenditures inevitably comes at the expense of domestic priorities, including housing, education, healthcare and other social programs. Echoing President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex, he suggests that the diversion of public resources toward military production represents a significant political and economic transformation occurring across Europe.
Beyond Ukraine, the panel turns to the fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran. Although open hostilities have subsided, both McGovern and Kuznick describe the agreement as unstable, pointing to continued military exchanges and unresolved disputes that could quickly reignite a broader regional conflict. The discussion places these tensions within a larger international context in which several major geopolitical flashpoints—from Eastern Europe to the Middle East—remain active simultaneously.
Throughout the conversation, Kuznick and McGovern both invoke the lessons of the Cold War. McGovern references President John F. Kennedy’s warning “To force a choice on another nuclear power between humiliation and using nuclear weapons is a colossal failure of statesmanship.”
Kuznick likewise argues that many of today’s political leaders appear increasingly willing to normalize discussions of military confrontation between nuclear-armed states in ways that would have been considered reckless only a generation ago.
The panel also examines the political dynamics inside Europe itself. Rather than portraying European governments as unified, McGovern argues that many leaders pushing for expanded militarization face declining public support while confronting growing economic pressures at home. Kuznick similarly notes that opinion polls across several countries suggest many citizens remain skeptical of continued military escalation even as governments expand defense commitments.
Despite differences over Russia’s battlefield prospects and the likely trajectory of the war, both analysts ultimately agree on one fundamental point: diplomacy has become dangerously marginalized. They warn that history demonstrates how wars often expand not because governments deliberately seek global conflict, but because repeated cycles of retaliation, political pressure and strategic miscalculation gradually narrow the space for peaceful solutions.
The discussion concludes with a sobering assessment of the international moment. As Europe rearms, NATO prepares for additional military commitments, Russia continues its campaign in Ukraine and tensions remain high across the Middle East, McGovern and Kuznick argue that preventing direct confrontation between nuclear powers should remain the overriding priority. Whether today’s leaders are willing—or able—to reverse the current trajectory through diplomacy remains one of the defining questions of the international order.
The conversation offers a detailed examination of competing interpretations of the conflict, the strategic calculations shaping decisions in Moscow and Western capitals, and the broader implications of a world increasingly organized around military competition rather than negotiation. It is a reminder that while battlefield developments dominate headlines, the greatest danger may lie in the gradual normalization of permanent confrontation between nuclear-armed states.
Russia hearing the European clamour for war, announces it is ready
Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture Foundation, Mon, 29 Jun 2026, https://www.sott.net/article/507152-Russia-hearing-the-European-clamour-for-war-announces-it-is-ready
The de-escalation framework that unfolded in the U.S.-Iran Lucerne talks largely stayed true to the original Iranian 10-point plan. Meanwhile, President Trump and Vice-President Vance deliberately muddy the waters, claiming that Iran has already agreed to IAEA inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities (a claim repeatedly denied by Iran): Vance announced that the IAEA could have begun inspections this week. No – – the ‘Framework’ only refers to the possible IAEA supervision of the dilution to the 60% enriched stockpile subject to a final agreement with the U.S. having been reached.
Trump, writing on social media, later falsely asserted: “Iran has fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long into the future”. In fact, the IAEA are only inspecting the joint Iran-Russia power station in Bushier at Russia’s request, because Russia wants to ensure compliance on its involvement. In other words, it is a Russian request to satisfy its own IAEA compliance commitment.
Trump then warned Iran that he may have to “finish the job [militarily]” — (if he doesn’t get a very good deal) — which, he says, would take ” about a week”, and adds that Iran will be required to use any unfrozen Iranian funds to be held in ESCROW accounts (accounts controlled by the U.S.) to buy “corn and soybeans for their people, because right now their people are very hungry — and they’re buying exclusively from us”.
So, it’s pretty clear what’s ahead — Trump is reverting to his New York real-estate mode of negotiations. In the Art of the Deal, his 1987 book, ghost written by Tony Schwartz, the text advises the use of “extreme and unpredictable demands to create anxiety and force concessions from rivals”.
Thus, we are back to the General Kellogg playbook – – Kellogg advised Trump that the only thing that works with Putin or the Iranians is pressure — and then still more pressure.
Familiar Trumpian tactics. Show a little initial flexibility to tease out adversaries in order to pull them into negotiations; subsequent false claims of Iranian concessions and extreme demands are then used to increase pressure on Iran (whilst Trump appears tough to the angry neocon constituency and to his ‘base’ back home).
This style of pressure may work for New York real-estate deals, but will be ineffective with both Iran and Russia.
Such threats will be counterproductive with Iran, and place the U.S. on a collision course. “The Islamabad understanding was not the result of pressure and coercion, but rather the result of the resistance and authority of the Iranian nation”, Mr Qalibaf, the chief Iranian negotiator, retorted.
In practical terms, as Will Schryver, a shrewd observer of the U.S. military, notes, Iran has pressure points “more numerous and capable than the U.S. can bring to bear on the battlefield” —
“In my view, [Schryver says], a powerful U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region has become utterly untenable. They’re just trying to save face now. I do not believe, [he concludes] the U.S. military can mount even a 72-hour high-intensity operation at this point in time”.
“But I think they’ll try. Probably just Trump bluff, but it would not surprise me if they try to play one last card to gain the upper hand”. (Maybe after the midterms, and with the U.S. having rebuilt somewhat its munitions shortfall).
To which Iran likely will respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz again, and attacking, pari passu, regional (Gulf) infrastructure. Trump will be gaming the economy who first plays ‘Chicken’. A further military venture likely will only further erode American military standing.
Quite possibly, however, Trump may be prepared to cut his losses in Iran — the war anyway is a liability to his Midterm electoral calculus — by circling back to Ukraine and Russia. The Kiev Independentreleased a report yesterday, quoting a “senior Ukrainian official saying that Trump had privately given Zelensky the greenlight to act “more boldly” against Russia”.
Here we go again, roundabout time — “Trump says he doesn’t really believe Putin will do anything without pressure”, the Ukrainian official added.
Simpliciusspeculates:
“Trump has clearly been frustrated by his inability to settle any of the conflicts he had promised easily. And recently, on the heels of the Iranian memorandum saga, he even admitted that he would now be “turning his attention” back to Ukraine.
“As such, it’s plausible that Trump would have given secret encouragement to the Europeans to ‘shape the battlefield’ in order to “soften” Russia up ahead of whatever next Trump might have planned”.
If this is true (and it probably is), the Europeans are playing with matches and risk lighting a conflagration.
The E3 leaders, Starmer, Merz and Macron, met on 7 June with Zelensky to promise both unwavering support and — in the context of pledging further pressure on Russia —
“underlining the urgent need to scale up the production of interceptors; deep strike capabilities and anti-ballistic missile co-development — and further to support the future sustainability of the Ukrainian Armed Forces”.
In short, the Europeans intend to ratchet up deep strikes into Moscow and St Petersburg, which will likely kill and unsettle their inhabitants.
The E3 carefully planned how to stage-manage the upcoming G7 summit, the EU summit, with Zelensky showcased at both events, promising to increase the pressure on “President Putin to agree to an immediate and complete ceasefire, taking the current contact line for its start-point”. European leaders also pledged to co-ordinate ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara (7-8 July) to achieve increased pledges of military support for Ukraine.
The E3 states are explicitly gearing up with new missiles to strike deeper, and more destructively, into Russia. The British government, for example, has announced that —
“the UK project to develop low-cost advanced long-range strike weapons for Ukraine has reached a significant milestone, with three British-designed systems successfully flight tested. The ground-launched strike weapons reportedly are capable of hitting targets more than 500km distant, at a speed of 600 km/h – whilst carrying a 225 kg warhead”.
According to the Financial Times, Trump was “hugely impressed and enthusiastic” with Ukraine’s recent campaign of long-range strikes on targets deep inside Russia at last week’s G7 summit. At the summit, Trump also agreed to increase sanctions on Russian energy.
It is clear that the E3 had been plotting a major psy-op to convince Trump that Ukraine was not on the back-foot against Russia (as Trump may have been briefed); but rather had regained the front foot, and that the U.S. should support the European agenda to force a Russian capitulation agenda (ceasefire, borders unchanged, reparations paid by Russia and war-crimes trials for Russian officials indicted with crimes, etc).
These developments have brought two major developments out of Russia:
Firstly, senior Kremlin aides, notably Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s spokesman, have been saying over the past three days the ‘spirit’ of the Anchorage summit, and its concomitant understandings, “have effectively collapsed” — “The U.S. abandoned them”. Moscow no longer expects those commitments to be honoured and is focused solely on securing its own “victory” through military means.
Foreign Minister Lavrov went further, describing the Alaska meeting as an American “ploy” designed to buy time for Ukraine to rebuild and rearm its military — essentially likening them to the Minsk Accords that similarly were mounted as a deceit.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said:
“We also see Washington’s line moving closer to the most rabid anti-Russian policies pursued by the U.S.’s closest European allies – namely, the UK and France”.
This represents a huge strategic shift. Russia no longer seeks a relationship with Washington, though contact with DC will continue.
The second development stems from President Putin’s address at the St George’s Hall to military cadets on 23 June. Putin, in summary, told the young officers that the West manufactures a Russia threat, then accuses Russia of creating that very threat. This, said Putin, is a historically repeated pattern going back to 1941.
Putin implied that a threshold had now been crossed: He stated that whilst, until recently, NATO countries had limited themselves to supporting the Kiev regime to wage war on Russia, the West today is openly talking about preparing for a war against Russia, and is building up their military offensive budgets. German Chancellor Mertz has been quite vocal in this regard, Putin said.
Russia’s response, he said, is focused on modernising its nuclear triad and its Army, and strengthening the combat capability of the Aerospace Forces and the Navy. The explicit mention of the nuclear triad in direct proximity to the discussion of Western preparation for war against Russia was certainly a pointed message to Trump and the Europeans.
Russia has heard the European clamour for war. It has now made the strategic decision in response to prepare for war in Europe.
Netanyahu’s War on Humanity: Ethnically Cleansing the Palestinian West Bank
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism.
June 29, 2026, H. Scott Prosterman Informed Comment, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/29/netanyahus-war-on-humanity-ethnically-cleansing-the-palestinian-west-bank/
Since October 7, 18 new settlements and eight new army bases have been constructed on what was Palestinian family homes for generations. When Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest government took power in 2022, it accelerated a far-right campaign to ethnically cleanse the northern areas of the West Bank. The first step was to balkanize the formal Palestinian holdings in the 1994 Oslo Accords. That was augmented by roadblocks and IDF outposts. Now, a settler project decades in the making is taking root in the northern West Bank, as the IDF turns a blind eye to the flagrant violations of human rights and international law.
Netanyahu at the least ignored intelligence warnings about the Gaza buildup to October 7, 2023, because of his dedication to splitting the Palestinians by propping up Hamas in Gaza. October 7 prompted the Likud and IDF to treat the West Bank as a war front with tanks and armed drones. Avi Bluth, the Israeli Central Command chief is directing this atrocity in collaboration with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Defense Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The grand design is to blow up the Oslo Accords, and ethnically cleanse the West Bank one sector at a time, in preparation for annexation. A collateral casualty of October 7 was the 2023 repeal of the Disengagement Law, and the provocative reintroduction of settlements into populated Palestinian areas. And they’re being repopulated and expanded at warp speed to create new, intractable “facts on the ground.” The Homesh and Sa-Nur settlements have already been repopulated. Others are on track for quick restoration.
Since the 2005 when Israel relinquished four isolated settlements in the area in an effort to consolidate Jewish demographics, the Likud government has aimed to reclaim that land. The occupation on steroids has claimed 18 new sites that further disrups what remains of the land where 720,000 Palestinians live. Israel has prosecuted a brutal campaign of intimidation and expropriation against the native Palestinians since October 7; accompanied by new military outposts to protect the new settlements and new roads on stolen land. That includes 14 new settlements, which encircle ancient towns and villages such as Jenin and Tulkarm, where no Israelis have ever lived in modern times.
Though Area A of the West Bank is off limits to Israelis under the Oslo agreement, the settlers backed by Likud and the IDF are building new structures faster than ever. One village targeted is Beit Imrin, where a settler was killed last May in an ATV accident of his own making, but was declared a Palestinian terrorist incident by the IDF and police. The village has since been sacked in various settler raids. That also prompted a violent pogrom in 20 more Palestinian towns, burning cars and homes including with people inside.
The website +972 has chronicled these events since 2021, before the current Likud government took hold. This includes the incidents at the Masafer Yatta village, which was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land. Not surprisingly, the uber-Zionist propaganda machine has gone into overdrive in attempt to discredit the film by Likud in Israel, and Republicans in the US. The Siamese twin criminal alliance between Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald Trump has been analyzed in these pages numerous times since 2019.
B’Tselem is the Israeli information center dedicated to human rights in the West Bank. It advocates for “human rights, liberty and equality” guarantees for Jews, Palestinians, and all people “living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” It also facilitates legal counsel for people ensnared by the Likud-IDF pogrom machine, and whatever protections can still be affected. They noted on “X” this week that, “Since October 2023, settler violence and military raids have forcibly displaced at least 4,635 Palestinians in the West Bank. Entire communities have been driven out of their homes in 62 cases, with another 15 communities partially displaced.”
These are pogroms, the same dynamic used to drive Jews from their homes in the Pale of Settlement and other parts of Europe since the Crusades. It’s tragic and maddening that Israel under Likud has resorted to the same brutality, which ultimately led to the creation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. And all with the blessing of the Republican Party and US Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Prof. Juan Cole pointed out that, “Ultimately, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians, including the Christians.” That doesn’t sit well with Huckabee and his fellow Christian Nationalists, who have been promoting the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza for Christian settlements, leading to fissures in the Likud-US Evangelical alliance. But that alliance is predicated upon the myth that the Palestinian people don’t warrant recognition as an ethnic group with valid claims to their historic homeland.
The area between Nablus and Jenin has been targeted for new settlements and IDF bases because it is the largest, contiguous area of Palestinian territory remaining. Residents of the Homesh and Yuval settlements candidly say their goal is to break it up. Lost on the settlers and the government is the enormous costs involved in securing the area for settlement expansion. This adds to the financial and security burden of a military already stretched thin among operations in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza; and was done without any input or assessment from the Israeli Central Command. This campaign has brought horrors to the daily lives of Palestinians in the form of settler and military raids, roadblocks, restricted access to their own land, uprooting trees and destroying infrastructure, as depicted in the film No Other Land. One especially grotesque act was done by the settlers of Sa-Nur, when they ordered residents of Asasa to dig up a fresh grave of an elderly man and move him soon after he was buried.
The Palestinian refugee crisis was dramatically escalated recently, when the IDF dismantled the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams. That involved bulldozing homes and infrastructure, where refugees from the 1947 Nakba have been living since 1953, and resulted in 32,000 Palestinians being displaced from their homes – the largest displacement since 1967. The IDF then bi-sected the Jenin camp with a new military road wide enough for two tanks to escalate the intimidation and inconvenience.
Haaretz reports that, “Most movement restrictions currently imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank are being carried out without required legal approvals, violating IDF protocols.” The IDF is breaching its own codes to meet with the Likud political agenda. IDF legal adviser Cobi Marcus addressed that in a letter to Commander Bluth, describing it as “anarchy,” and an ongoing pattern. But this has been going on since 1967, and escalating dramatically in recent years, as noted in Red Pepper Media: “Between 1967 and 2022, Israeli settlers stole roughly seven per cent of all the land in the West Bank. From 2022 to 2024, they doubled that to 14 per cent, stealing as much land in two years as over the previous 55. Activists on the ground estimate the number has likely tripled by 2026.” This has disrupted farming and grazing practices, and brought greater costs for Palestinian farmers and shepherds.
An ongoing characteristic of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank is the targeting of civilians area for punishment, rather than just military targets. Destruction of civilian infrastructure has been a violation of International Law since the 1949 Geneva Convention, but Israel acts as if they have some exemption. Israel targets civilians because, “they assume that Palestinian children will grow up to be terrorists,” as writer Hugh Curran noted. Recent airstrikes in Lebanon have killed 3,800 people and wounded over 11,000. The IDF has also destroyed 17 Lebanese hospitals and bombed 68 more, along with 100 schools, according to the World Health Organization.
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism. The pervasiveness and embrace of this pathology has prompted many Jews to divorce their Judaism from Zionism. This form of Zionism supports of a corrupt prime minister, whose government depends on the inclusion of a criminal sector to maintain power and standing. There’s nothing spiritual or righteous about that.
H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan
All of our submarines are missing
Five nuclear-powered hunter-killers are
out of action leaving the Arctic front door wide open to Russia. None of
the Royal Navy’s attack submarines are currently at sea. A fleet of
nuclear-powered hunter-killers all tied up alongside or in dock, every one
of them, is a serious matter.
This is not the first time it’s happened
and last time it did, the Ministry of Defence trotted out the tired mantra
“we continue to meet all our operational tasks”. We do not. The
excellent Navy Lookout website has set out the position boat-by-boat. HMS
Audacious is only now leaving dry dock in Devonport in Plymouth; HMS Anson,
the only attack boat to have been to sea recently, is alongside after a
curtailed deployment to Australia; HMS Astute is undergoing a multi-year
refit; and Ambush and Artful have not sailed in years. The site described
the overall posture as “a disaster”.
Telegraph 27th June 2026, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/27/royal-navy-attack-submarines-absent-harbour-nuclear-missing/
Obliterating Gaza’s Children: The Damning UN Report
SCHEERPOST, June 27, 2026, Dan Steinbock Informed Comment
From Gaza and beyond, Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children. It is in line with the new Obliteration Doctrine and the topic of a new UN report.
When I was working on The Fall of Israel (2024) and particularly The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), what I found most repulsive was the targeting of children in the Gaza Strip.
By late 2024, the testimonies of health professionals on location indicated that the deaths of many children in Gaza were not just collateral damage, but outcomes of deliberate, targeted actions.
The testimony of Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a young American trauma and general surgeon who had volunteered in Palestine including the European Hospital in Khan Younis, was particularly compelling.
“I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones,” Sidhwa said. “But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.”
The statement of Dr. Sidhwa, who subsequently became one of the endorsers of my book, The Obliteration Doctrine, was supported by dozens of other remarkable and courageous medical volunteers in Gaza. And these testimonies, in turn, have been supported by many reports of multiple international NGOs and multilateral organizations.
So, the latest report of the UN Independent International Commission is hardly new. Nonetheless, it is among the most consequential documents to emerge from the Gaza war. Its conclusion is stark: Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, actions that the Commission argues constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The Commission’s findings
The Commission’s report concludes that the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not incidental collateral damage but part of a recurring pattern of conduct. In line with the Genocide Convention, it argues that such actions are a key indicator of genocidal intent because they strike at the future existence of the Palestinian people.
According to the inquiry, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed between October 2023 and October 2025, representing roughly 30 percent of all fatalities, while over 44,000 were injured. Even since the October 2025 ceasefire, at least 265 children have been killed by Israeli military fire, and 400 more injured, many of them with “catastrophic” wounds.
Children and the logic of genocide
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I showed that modern warfare in Gaza evolved beyond traditional military objectives toward the destruction of the social foundations of Palestinian existence. The Commission’s findings reinforce this interpretation.
Historically, genocide scholars have emphasized that attacks on children occupy a unique place in genocidal campaigns. The 1948 Genocide Convention identifies not only direct killing but also the infliction of conditions calculated to destroy a protected group. In Gaza, famine served the same genocidal function as starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.
Children embody demographic continuity, cultural reproduction, and collective future. Consequently, systematic violence against children has appeared repeatedly in cases later recognized as genocide, from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda.
The Commission explicitly states that targeting children attacks “the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and determine their future.” Its findings connect killings to broader patterns: destruction of schools, hospitals, pediatric facilities, neonatal care units, food systems, and water infrastructure.
That’s the ultimate objective: the genocide and ecocide of Palestine, its culture and children. Israel’s devastation of Lebanon follows in the footprints.
From an empirical perspective, the cumulative effect is measurable. Public-health research consistently demonstrates that childhood exposure to mass violence produces lifelong deficits in physical health, educational attainment, psychological resilience, and economic productivity.
Israel did not triumph in Gaza. Moral darkness did.
Human cost beyond death statistics……………………………………………………………………
Hind Rajab, the voice that refuses to disappear…………………………………………………………………………….
High technology and moral decay……………………………………………………………….
The cost to Israeli society and soldiers………………………………………………………
If Gaza becomes the new norm
The broader international implications may be even more alarming. If the deliberate targeting of children becomes normalized, the consequences extend far, far beyond the Middle East.
International humanitarian law depends fundamentally on protecting civilians, especially children. If powerful states can openly disregard these norms without meaningful accountability, the deterrent effect of international law weakens everywhere.
Empirical evidence suggests that impunity encourages repetition. The failures to prevent atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur contributed to future violations by signaling weak enforcement. Conversely, successful accountability mechanisms have historically reduced recurrence.
The risks include greater regional radicalization, transnational terrorism, refugee flows, intensified great-power rivalry, erosion of international institutions, and the spread of increasingly unrestricted warfare.
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I warned repeatedly that what happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. The Strip became a laboratory for new forms of warfare later exported elsewhere.
The Commission’s findings raise precisely that concern. If the systematic destruction of children, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure becomes accepted in one conflict, future belligerents may invoke the precedent.
The ultimate question raised by the report is therefore not only what happened to Gaza’s children. It is whether the international community is willing to preserve the principle that children remain beyond the reach of war itself.
For if that principle fails in Gaza, it will not survive elsewhere.
Dan Steinbock is the author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, . He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/27/obliterating-gazas-children-the-damning-un-report/
Senior U.S. Diplomats, Journalists, Academics and Secretaries of Defense Say: the U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine
it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine.
it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine.
The Ukraine Papers, by Donald A. Smith, PhD, 27 June 26
It took some years for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about the war in Vietnam. Thanks to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and thanks to the antiwar movement, Americans eventually learned about the injustices and failures of that war.
Likewise, it took several years after the starts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about those wars as well.
Americans are just now starting to realize that they’ve been lied to about the war in Ukraine. (The propaganda effort has been quite effective, with the New York Times, in particular, acting as a mouthpiece for the government’s position.) More and more mainstream publications are exposing the lies, and a majority of Americans now oppose further arming of Ukraine.
This essay is a summary of what the U.S. government has been hiding about the war in Ukraine, with links to sources for further information.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, U.S. military actions since 9/11 directly killed over 900,000 people, with an additional 3.5 million people dying from indirect effects. The wars cost Americans at least $8 trillion and displaced over 38 million people from their homes. The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military, if you count all expenditures.
If we go back to the 1960s, the number killed by U.S. wars includes the several million killed in the Vietnam war, the approximately 1 million killed by U.S. support for Indonesian military’s attacks on left wing groups, and the hundreds of thousands, at least, killed in proxy wars and government overthrows in Latin America.
The wars, overthrows, and associated sanctions caused mass migrations worldwide — particularly in Europe and at the southern U.S. border — and destabilized politics. The Lancet medical journal reported that between 1971 and 2021, US and EU sanctions killed over half a million people annually. Yet almost nobody (except for whistleblowers) was held accountable for these disasters; indeed, many of the same people are in Congress or work for the government or the weapons industry.
Moreover, the U.S. government lied about almost all the wars — in particular, about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also about the war in Yugoslavia, as documented in Harper’s Magazine, here (Chapter 3), and here. In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the U.S. supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA, and U.S. propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the U.S. intervention. Likewise, The U.S. backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia.
The United States withdrew from the following arms treaties: Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Strategic Arms Reduction (START II)Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran deal, Open Skies Treaty, and Conventional Armed Forces Treaty (Russia withdrew after alleged NATO non-compliance)
So, it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, claims by President Biden and others that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked” are greatly exaggerated.
Read what these diplomats, secretaries of Defense, journalists, academics, politicians, and others have to say:
Here the author gives quotations from 30 highly regarded people – certainly not pro Russian propagandists ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Ambassador Jack Matlock (referenced above) said in a 2024 interview: “Why don’t we understand that trying to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and put military bases there would be, in their case, absolutely unacceptable and worthy of defense?” Matlock said the U.S. backed the 2014 coup, and “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.” Finally, Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-Nazis — we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.” And Matlock wrote: “I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”
See this for dozens of mainstream news articles about the presence Nazis in Ukraine and U.S. support for them.
Evidence of U.S. involvement in the coup is overwhelming. The Cato Institute (not a radical Marxist outfit!) wrote America’ Ukraine Hypocrisy which includes:
The extent of the Obama administration’ meddling in Ukraine’ politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria] Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post-Yanukovych government… Both the Obama administration and most of the American news media portrayed the Euromaidan Revolution as a spontaneous, popular uprising against a corrupt and brutal government… It was a grotesque distortion to portray the events in Ukraine as a purely indigenous, popular uprising.
The 2019 RAND Corporation study Overextending and Unbalancing Russia examines “cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress — overextend and unbalance — Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” It includes the paragraph:
“Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in US military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages.”
The highlighted words indicate that the authors were quite aware that US provocations would cause Russia to respond militarily.
The New Yorker’s Is the F.B.I. Truly Biased Against Trump? contains a telling paragraph on the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress information about exactly what happened in Ukraine:
According to [FBI agent] Buma’s statement, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he was told to terminate relations with one of his most valuable sources in that field, Dynamo. The order came from both his supervisors and the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and, per Buma, superiors told him that the shutdown of Dynamo was based on “highly classified information from the National Security Agency” which he could not access. They also said that it was part of a broader effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many “sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters.”
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia wanted desperately to be integrated into the West and, up to the end of 2021, pleaded with D.C. to come to an equitable peace in Ukraine, but the U.S. wanted to weaken Russia, and NATO needed an enemy to justify its existence. The expansion of NATO — which violated multiple verbal promises given to Soviet leaders — provoked the war that is now touted as showing the need for NATO.
According to the LA Times’s Russia feels threatened by NATO. There’s history behind that, “some of Russia’s security concerns are real. Offering to discuss them doesn’t qualify as appeasement; Thirty years ago, Russia had a buffer zone of satellite states to its west. Now it has only the unimpressive presence of Belarus.”
From 2018, in Medium’s American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian Front Line: “Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it will allow the sale of some lethal weapons to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank missile….Butusov identified the [Nazi] Azov Battalion as a recipient of the PSRL-1 [grenade launcher] systems.”
Right before the Russian invasion, in January of 2022, Yahoo News reported: CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades. After the invasion, in March of 2022, Yahoo News reported: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion..
In November of 2023, the Washington Post exposed that “Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said…. The extent of the CIA’s involvement with Ukraine’s security services has not previously been disclosed.” Foreign Policy’s essay of July 11, 2025 mentions the “CIA’s decade of covert support for Ukraine.” ABC News also has an article about CIA involevment in Ukraine since 2015.
Likewise, a New York Times article The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, dated February 25, 2024, revealed that the CIA had been coordinating with Ukrainian intelligence since at least 2014 and that the Ukrainians had been launching assasinations and other kinetic actions in Crimea and Russia. As Mark Episkopos writes in Responsible Statecraft, CIA in Ukraine: Why is this not seen as provocation?: “An explosive new NYT report shows how Washington needlessly fed into Russia’s worst fears and precipitated the invasion, justified or not.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
These facts and opinions do not justify Russia’s brutal invasion, but they certainly give the lie to statements by President Biden and others that the invasion was “unprovoked.” Even the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 was provoked: it occurred after, and partially in response to, the U.S.-backed overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.
And the facts expose stunning hyprocrisy. The U.S. launched numerous unjustified wars, proxy wars, bombings and coups far from U.S. borders; surrounded Russia and China with pro-US allies and military bases (about 800 worldwide); exited multiple arms treaties; and increased military spending to about $1 trillion a year despite $34 trillion in debt and dire domestic needs. Yet we accuse Russia and China of being the aggressors.
Both sides can be at fault in a conflict. The U.S. too has blood on its hands.
Finally, the facts are strong reasons why the U.S. should not be arming Ukraine to the teeth, pushing it to fight to the last Ukrainian and risking a nuclear war. Instead, it should push for a negotiated end to the war. https://theukrainepapers.org/senior-US-diplomats-academics-journalists-and-secretaries-of-defense-say-the-US-provoked-Russia-in-Ukraine.html
Edge of Armageddon: why does one of the world’s top thinkers believe we’re nearing nuclear apocalypse?
Putin is so terrified of Ukraine becoming a member of Nato: that would enable the west to place nukes in the country
“With Nato weapons, Ukrainians bombed St Petersburg and they tried to bomb Moscow. So a country with nuclear weapons is being ‘bombed’ by the British. Not the British pushing the button, but the bombs come from Britain, as well as from Germany and France, with less from the US.”
In a chilling new book, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli says we’re back on the brink – and this time, leaders chronically lack the nous of Kennedy and Khrushchev. So why is he against rearming?
Stuart Jeffries, Thu 25 Jun 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/25/armageddon-physicist-carlo-rovelli-nuclear-apocalypse
Should European members of Nato be rearming in the face of the Russian threat? And if not, I ask Carlo Rovelli, why not? The Italian theoretical physicist seems a good person to answer these questions since his timely new book, 85 Seconds to Midnight, is subtitled A Physicist’s Argument against Rearmament.
Rovelli, 70, brown eyed, genial, with enviably luxuriant grey locks, removes his glasses before answering. “The idea of the Russian military being a threat to Europe is ridiculous. Russia can’t even get to Kyiv! A few years ago, Russia had 4% of the world’s military spending and Nato had 40%.”
At the same time, though, Russia has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, making it the planet’s biggest stockpiler. “So we cannot take Russia down,” says Rovelli, “because it would react.” Of the three nuclear superpowers – Russia, US and China – only China has resolved not to be a first-use nuclear state. Russia, like the US, reserves the right to respond to conventional attacks with nuclear strikes.
The real problem, Rovelli suggests, is mutual fear. “We are trapped in a lack of reciprocal trust. We sleepwalk through these patterns of everybody becoming more armed, more aggressive.” He cites what happened a few weeks ago in St Petersburg. “With Nato weapons, Ukrainians bombed St Petersburg and they tried to bomb Moscow. So a country with nuclear weapons is being ‘bombed’ by the British. Not the British pushing the button, but the bombs come from Britain, as well as from Germany and France, with less from the US.”
Why was this so frightening for Rovelli? “It’s the first time a [superpower] with nuclear weapons has been actually bombed. There was a situation in which if you have nuclear weapons, you don’t get invaded. You don’t get bombed. No more.”
Rovelli invites me to consider what that bombing looks like from the Kremlin’s perspective. Moscow has long feared western aggression, he argues. A key moment came in 1962 when Americans placed nuclear missiles in Turkey. That, he argues, prompted then Soviet premier Khrushchev to put nuclear weapons in Cuba, the US’s back yard.
True, the Cuban missile crisis was de-escalated by Khrushchev and US president Kennedy, but Russian fear of western invasion persists. That’s why, Rovelli suggests, Putin is so terrified of Ukraine becoming a member of Nato: that would enable the west to place nukes in the country. Hence, Rovelli argues, Putin embarking on his full-blown invasion four years ago.
Rovelli believes this Russian aggression has caused a whirlwind of fears and clamours for rearmament in western Europe. “You have the French government saying French people should be ready again to sacrifice their children; the British government saying we should be ready for war because it might happen; the German government saying all this anti-war sentiment in schools is not good and we should change education, make war more acceptable. This is motivated by the idea that Russia is invading Europe. It’s nonsense.”
But isn’t it sometimes right to be fearful? Indeed, isn’t the lesson of the second world war that western European countries should have rearmed sooner to counter a demagogue bent on expansion? “I think everybody should read Mein Kampf,” he replies, referring to Adolf Hitler’s 1925 autobiography and manifesto. “Mein Kampf does not say, ‘We are German, we are the strongest, we are going to run the world, we are great, we are white, we are Aryans, whatever.’ It says, ‘We are weak. And the only way we have to survive is to become stronger and overcome the others.’ So what fuelled the violence of nazism was fear.”
Today’s Middle Eastern conflict has a similar basis, Rovelli contends. “What fuels the aggressiveness of Israel is fear. What fuels the aggressiveness of Hamas is fear. They are going to destroy us in Gaza unless we are aggressive. To answer fear with fear, to escalate, seems to me disgusting.”
But isn’t this naive? Putin isn’t just acting out of fear, surely, but is prompted by some warped sense of historical destiny to claim Ukraine. “That’s obviously nonsense. You create these narratives that fuel tribal ideology. And that’s exactly what we don’t want. I don’t think anybody has any natural historical right to anything.”
Why should we listen to what theoretical physicists have to say about rearmament? Yes, Rovelli is the go-to guy to explain loop gravity, the theoretical framework that merges quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He is also a great populariser of difficult ideas in such books as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. But when it comes to war and realpolitik, theoretical physicists have often proved themselves utter boobs.
“We physicists,” Rovelli concedes, “did create this thing [nuclear weapons]. It is our poisoned gift to humankind. But historically, the voices of scientists – raising awareness about the nuclear risk – have been effective.” It was thanks to the wisdom of scientists and other intellectuals, he argues, that Gorbachev and Reagan were convinced to sign the now defunct 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start).
Equally true, though, is that theoretical physicists have been disastrous for humanity. Rovelli cites his countryman Enrico Fermi who in 1934 found a way to shatter atomic nuclei – giving humanity a new source of energy. “But the gift is too great,” writes Rovelli. “A small bit of uranium can release energy to demolish cities, burn alive millions of human beings and destroy civilisation itself.”
Consider too what happened in Copenhagen in 1941 when two great theoretical physicists, the Dane Niels Bohr and the German Werner Heisenberg, met. Bohr, who soon after the meeting was spirited to the US, came away from the meeting convinced that Nazi Germany was making a nuclear bomb to win the war.
Rovelli takes up the story: “Once in the US, Bohr said, ‘Look, this is a sketch given to me by Heisenberg of an atomic bomb.’ And it was definitely not. It was a sketch of a peaceful nuclear reactor. One of the outcomes of that was that the Manhattan Project was motivated by a belief that Nazi Germany was close to having nuclear bombs, which was completely unfounded.”
The unintended consequence, as Rovelli puts it in his book, was “the burning alive of 200,000 men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. Not, as some have argued, to end the war more quickly but as an immense demonstration of US power – or as he puts it: “The scream of the gorilla beating its chest and telling the forest that it is the strongest.”
Surely there were other and possibly better rationales to dropping nuclear weapons on Japan than that? I remind Rovelli of a conversation at Princeton he had with his friend and mentor, the late relativity theorist John Wheeler, who worked on the Manhattan Project. Wheeler believed bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified to spare the enormous number of American lives that would be lost in a mainland invasion.
“John was one of the people I admire most, and half of my thinking is based on what he did,” recalls Rovelli with a sad chuckle. “He was the one who first recognised my work.” But when Wheeler invited the young Rovelli to Princeton, the pair fell to talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I found the argument he used – it’s OK to kill many hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to save the lives of a few American boys – disgusting. Not a few American boys in America living a life – but sent there to conquer an island which is not American. Japan had already lost the war.”
Rovelli’s early years help explain his revulsion for rearmament. He was jailed as a student for refusing the draft in Italy. “I’m Italian and we remember fascism grew with the idea that war is beautiful. War is what makes us great. War is fantastic.”
Let’s talk about Iran, I suggest. Isn’t it entitled to have nuclear weapons if Israel and the US do? “I don’t think we should think in terms of absolute right,” says Rovelli. “We have to live together, so we have to find compromises. If Iran did not feel under threat, it probably wouldn’t feel the need to go nuclear.”
The title of Rovelli’s book comes from the 2026 edition of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to nuclear catastrophe. For Rovelli, the stupidity of our leaders has increased that risk. He thinks that everybody – from Trump, Putin and Netanyahu to the leaders of Nato and Iran – lacks the good sense shown by Khrushchev, Kennedy, Gorbachev and Reagan each of whom, he believes, helped pull humanity back from Armageddon.
As we finish, Rovelli asks me: “What politician has the courage to say, ‘Rather than making my own country stronger, I want to make humankind better’?’” Perhaps it’s not just my shortcomings but the nature of humanity’s plight in 2026 that no one comes to mind.
85 Seconds to Midnight by Carlo Rovelli is published by Penguin (£9.99). To order your copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
UN Experts Condemn US Attack on Iran Nuclear Facilities
June, 27, 2026 – https://www.tasnimnews.ir/en/news/2026/06/27/3626914/un-experts-condemn-us-attack-on-iran-nuclear-facilities
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The United Nations experts on June 26 unequivocally condemned the US military attack against three nuclear facilities in Iran last year.
“These attacks violate the most fundamental rules of world order since 1945 – the prohibition on the aggressive use of military force and the duties to respect sovereignty and not to coercively intervene in another country,” the experts said.
“The responsible US political and military leaders may also be liable for the international crime of aggression,” they added, according to the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“The attacks also seriously threatened human rights, including the rights to life, security of the person, health, a clean environment and self-determination of the people of Iran,” they said.
The US launched 75 munitions by air and sea against the facilities at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, causing extensive damage.
Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations prohibits the threat or use of force against any state, except in self-defense or if the Security Council approves. Self-defense is only available in response to an actual or imminent armed attack by another country.
“Iran has not attacked the US or Israel with a nuclear weapon. There is no evidence whatsoever that Iran intends to imminently attack the US or Israel with a nuclear weapon.”
“Preventive” or “anticipatory” self-defense against speculative future threats, such as nuclear proliferation or terrorism, has not been permitted by international law since the United Nations Charter was adopted 80 years ago.
Accepting preventive self-defense would unleash a catastrophic era of ‘might is right’, where powerful countries could bomb others to advance their security or foreign policy interests. This would fuel corrosive suspicion, ‘arms races’ and destabilizing ‘balance of power’ alliances – precisely what the post-1945 order, out of the ashes of a world war, aimed to avoid,” they said. “It would further destabilize the Middle East region and increase the risk to human rights everywhere.”
The experts affirmed the view of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that nuclear facilities must never be attacked as doing so could cause the release of radioactive material with devastating impacts on the environment and human rights, including the rights to life, personal security, health, protection against arbitrary displacement and the rights of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. International humanitarian law generally prohibits attacks on nuclear facilities.
“We urge all parties to refrain from further uses of force and to commit to the peaceful settlement of international disputes in accordance with the United Nations Charter, including through the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the IAEA and with respect for the human rights of all people,” they said. “The timing of the strikes undermined peaceful diplomatic efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as well as peace and security in the region and beyond,” the experts noted.
“In a world experiencing deep economic crisis, and as members of an international community that is committed to peace, we believe that financial resources mobilized for military aggression should be utilized to foster peace-making and development,” they said.
“These attacks by the US, a permanent member of the Security Council responsible for maintaining international peace and security, normalizes violent aggression and ‘gunboat diplomacy’ as a tool of statecraft and severely undermines the international rule of law,” the experts warned.
At a time of crisis for multilateralism, all countries should oppose such lawlessness and pressure the U.S. and Israel to respect the universal rules of humanity, they emphasized.
UK Tests Long-Range Missile for Ukraine
by Kyle Anzalone | Jun 22, 2026, https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/uk-tests-long-range-missile-for-ukraine/
The UK tested a missile with a range of 300 miles, with plans to send the munitions to Ukraine. The platform will allow Ukraine to deliver 500-pound warheads to Moscow.
The missiles tested by the UK military last week were developed under Project Brakestop. The goal of the project is to design a long-range weapon that can be produced for under half a million dollars and within 20 months.
UK Armed Forces Minister Louise Sandher-Jones said the new missiles will “complement” the Storm Shadow cruise missiles London sends to Kiev. “The UK stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine, and we will continue to provide the support it needs to defend itself against Russian aggression,” she added. “Project Brakestop shows what happens when we combine that commitment with the talent and ingenuity of British industry.”
The range of the missiles will allow Ukraine to target the Russian capital.
Ukraine has increased the large-scale drone strikes targeting Moscow and other Russian cities in recent months. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would respond by “massive group strikes” against Ukrainian targets on a “on a regular basis.”
Russia reported downing over 300 Ukrainian drones overnight Sunday, including 80 in the Moscow region. While Moscow often does not discuss strikes that cause damage in Moscow, videos on social media appear. to show damage caused by Ukrainian attacks.
UN report finds Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children
by Stephanie Tran | Jun 23, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/un-report-finds-israel-deliberately-targets-palestinian-children/
A UN Commission of Inquiry has found Israeli forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, their actions amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza. Stephanie Tran reports.
In a report released today, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel found that Palestinian children had been subjected to targeted killing, starvation, torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention and repeated displacement.
The Commission found that “much of the harm suffered by Palestinian children was not incidental but
“intended to destroy the existence of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”
It said the “sheer number” of cases it investigated showing children were directly targeted by Israeli forces constituted “a key element” in demonstrating genocidal intent from Israeli authorities.
Last year, the Commission found that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The report also makes reference to its 2024 findings on “violations and abuses against Israeli children committed by the military wing of Hamas”. It found that “Israeli children were subjected to physical and emotional mistreatment on 7 October 2023.” 40 children were killed in the attack and hundreds injured, with many children losing one or both parents.
“Many children witnessed the killings of their parents and siblings and were also filmed for propaganda purposes by Palestinian armed groups.”
‘Children deliberately targeted’
The Commission found that Israeli security forces have directly targeted Palestinian children with the intention to kill them.
“Israeli security forces have consistently, directly and intentionally targeted individual children across Gaza during evacuations, in shelters and designated safe zones, at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites and after the ceasefire agreement in and around the so-called ‘yellow line’.”
The report found that children had been targeted “from newborns to adolescents” and that in some cases children were shot while holding white flags.
The Commission said evidence including precision gunfire, injury patterns and the use of sniper rifles, drones and quadcopters capable of visually identifying targets indicated deliberate targeting.
Since 7 October 2023, more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, representing 30% of the total deaths.
Speaking to MWM, Commissioner Chris Sidoti said the documented deaths represented only a portion of children killed during the genocide.
“We have seen over 20,000 children killed directly as a result of the violence,” he said.
“Israeli security forces have consistently, directly and intentionally targeted individual children across Gaza during evacuations, in shelters and designated safe zones, at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites and after the ceasefire agreement in and around the so-called ‘yellow line’.”
“That does not include children who have not been identified, those who are buried under the rubble, those whose bodies have not been identified, those who have simply disappeared and are counted as missing.”
Sidoti said the figures also excluded children who had died from disease, starvation and the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.
“There are tens of thousands more children who have died as a consequence of this fighting,” he said.
He said some children had been deliberately targeted by snipers and drones.
“We know of snipers and of quadcopters that have killed children, deliberately targeting the children, not killing anybody else around them.”
The report found that children had been targeted “from newborns to adolescents” and that in some cases children were shot while holding white flags.
The Commission said evidence including precision gunfire, injury patterns and the use of sniper rifles, drones and quadcopters capable of visually identifying targets indicated deliberate targeting.
Since 7 October 2023, more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, representing 30% of the total deaths.
Speaking to MWM, Commissioner Chris Sidoti said the documented deaths represented only a portion of children killed during the genocide.
Sexual violence against children
The Commission found that sexual and gender-based violence was being used “in the context of detention and arrests as a method of warfare and intimidation against Palestinian children”.
“Sexual violence against Palestinian children in Israeli detention is not exceptional but a systematic, state-enabled assault on their bodies and their dignity and deliberately meted out to cause humiliation,” the report states.
The Commission documented cases of forced public nudity, sexual assault, genital violence and sexual threats against children in detention.
Sidoti said some forms of abuse amounted to torture.
“Sexual violence itself is common, but it is not always used for the purposes of torture,” he said.
“A part of the sexual violence that we saw involved the stripping of children in public, their humiliation, and what, under Australian law and international law, constitutes child abuse.”
The Commission concluded that sexual violence against Palestinian children constituted both war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It further found that sexual violence “constitutes part of the genocidal act of causing serious bodily and mental harm.”
“Such deliberate violence was intended not only to cause immediate and long-term harm to the individual children, but
“to target and destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza, because children embody the group’s biological continuity and collective survival.”
Deliberate starvation and healthcare destruction
The Commission concluded that Israel had committed the war crime of wilful killing and the crime against humanity of extermination by intentionally using starvation as a method of warfare and depriving children of essential medical care.
The report found that Israel has “intentionally inflicted these conditions of life, in particular on Palestinian infants, children and young persons in Gaza”.
Attacks on hospitals, neonatal wards and maternity services, combined with shortages of fuel, medicine and medical equipment, have caused the deaths of newborns and seriously harmed pregnant women and infants.
Sidoti said the findings reinforced the Commission’s previous conclusions that Israeli actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.
“Our findings in relation to children confirmed those findings,” he told MWM.
He pointed to attacks on hospitals, neonatal and paediatric services and the destruction of medical equipment.
“All of these things indicate an intent that children should die, and that means for us reinforcement of our findings in relation to genocide“
Destruction of schools
The Commission concluded “Israeli security forces have intentionally directed attacks against educational facilities, resulting in the denial of Palestinian children’s right to education for present and future generations.”
More than 97% of schools in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed.
“The destruction of the education system has been an attack on the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people as a whole,” the report states.
The Commission found that the collapse of education and healthcare systems had caused
“Irreversible learning loss, neural developmental delays and diminished future opportunities.“
The report also documents Israeli soldiers filming themselves destroying children’s toys, playground equipment and personal belongings.
“The confidence of the Israeli soldiers to film themselves in this manner and post the evidence online is a clear reflection of the lack of accountability,” the report states.
Detention, torture and abuse
The Commission found that Palestinian children held by Israeli authorities had experienced prolonged blindfolding, forced stripping, severe beatings, deprivation of food and water, sleep deprivation and denial of medical treatment.
It found a pattern of “severe and deliberate mistreatment” particularly affecting Palestinian boys.
Children were subjected to prolonged kneeling on hard surfaces, attacks targeting their heads, faces and genitals, threats involving dogs and detention alongside adult prisoners.
The Commission concluded that the treatment of detained children constituted the crimes against humanity of torture and other inhumane acts causing serious suffering.
Sidoti said the number of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities remained unclear.
Sidoti said the number of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities remained unclear.
West Bank settler violence and killings
The Commission also examined Israeli military operations and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
It found evidence that Palestinian children had been deliberately shot, denied medical treatment and subjected to violence by settlers.
“The Commission has identified a pattern of targeting of Palestinian children in the West Bank, mirroring Israeli practices in Gaza including deliberate shooting of children, particularly of boys. Israeli soldiers target boys, labelled as “terrorists”, on the basis of their male and Palestinian identity, with lethal force.”
The report describes cases in which wounded children were left bleeding while soldiers prevented ambulances from reaching them.
The Commission concluded that Israeli authorities had failed to protect Palestinian children from settler violence.
It concluded that settler violence functioned
“not as a deviation from state policy but as a means of implementing it”
“Both the State of Israel and violent settler groups share and collaborate in the same strategic objectives: the entrenchment of Israeli settlement on Palestinian land, annexation of Palestinian territory and the displacement of Palestinian people from their land.”
Chain of command and accountability
Sidoti said the Commission had found responsibility extended beyond individual soldiers.
“We have made that finding that there is a clear chain of command and it does go right to the top,” he said.
“It is not just individual soldiers who are responsible for individual war crimes. … There is a chain of command that means that those at the top have issued clear orders as to the nature of this campaign, the objectives the military are to achieve.”
“Our conclusion on the basis of the evidence that we collected is that that constitutes a genocidal purpose.”
Sidoti said growing international attention had shifted from expressions of concern to discussions about concrete measures by individual states.
“The responsibilities under international law now fall on individual governments and groups of governments to decide what action to take and take it.”
He said governments, including Australia, should consider measures directed not only at individuals but also at institutions.
“We need to address questions of institutions now, and not just individuals who are committing war crimes. That means the Israeli Defense Forces as an institution, the Israeli government as an institution, and the settlements themselves, right across the West Bank, as organized violators of international law” he said.
Israel declines to respond
Sidoti said Israeli authorities had been provided with a draft copy of the report before publication.
“Our procedures require that we give all of our reports to the Israeli authorities in draft form before they’re finalised,” he said.
“The Israeli authorities had a draft of this report two or three weeks ago, and they had an opportunity to comment to us.”
According to Sidoti, Israeli authorities did not provide formal comments to the Commission.
“They did not do so, but instead … they prepared an 18-page rebuttal which they distributed to some diplomatic missions here in Geneva.”
The Commission called on states to ensure accountability for crimes committed against Palestinian children and urged the international community to “employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent the commission of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
MWM asked Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade whether Australia intends to take any action in response to the Commission’s findings.
They have not provided a response.
The Commission of Inquiry on OPT, including East Jerusalem, and Israel will be holding a livestreamed press conference at 9:30 PM (AEST) to discuss the findings of the report.
1 This Month
26 September – International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
PLEASE OPPOSE HR 8255 AND S.3639 – bills would accelerate satellite deployment, with no environmental review or safeguards – https://ncstd5li.quorum.us/campaign/169331/
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