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The Language of Extermination: NAZA, Artificial Intelligence and Gaza

18 October 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark AIM Extra, https://theaimn.net/the-language-of-extermination-naza-artificial-intelligence-and-gaza/

The 80-minute documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is chastening. It examines the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during its ferocious, unremitting war in Gaza, drawing upon the interviews of 24 anonymised military and intelligence personnel. The interviews were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with profiles and voices appropriately altered. The name of the documentary draws on a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi or collateral damage, an obscene term used when counting the estimated number of civilians who will perish in a military strike. Last month, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation lasting 25 minutes.

The interviewees focus on the terrifyingly relevant role played by artificial intelligence (AI) targeting systems used in guiding the bombing campaign launched in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. In Abraham’s words, “the Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with talked to us about how this mass killing is systemic: not by accident, but by design, actions of murder and policies that are based on the total dehumanization of Palestinians.” One of the interviewed subjects speaks of the goal being “quantity, not quality.” Another notes the conscious decision to target Hamas members, some even in the lower echelons, when they would be at home even if it meant killing family members and neighbours. In one recalled instance, the phone of a 12-year-old girl was hacked to learn when her father would arrive home. The subsequent strike killed her. The cold logic is revealed in the rhetorical question posed by one of the interviewees: “When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza,’ what do you mean if not executing people?’

Despite being placed in a “too hot to handle” category by prominent indie studios, the self-distributed documentary managed to pass the US$500,000 mark in the United States after two weeks of release. Eight days after premiering at New York’s IFC Center, it went on to earn US$125,000. A further 85 theatres across 30 cities across North America then showed the film. Michelle Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, was impressed by the drawing power of the production when attending Walter Reade Theater for a screening. The venue, seating 268, was at capacity. “This is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like ‘NAZA,’ win the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.”

Militaries specialise in euphemised killing.  A dedicated process of terminology and assessment sanitises and exsanguinates: death and murder become justifiable, necessary measures against an enemy bloated with wickedness and venality. In that process, mock tributes are paid to the canon of international law, notably international humanitarian law and doctrines of targeting. The more honest generals do us a favour by boasting about high casualty figures and mass mortality: they are not hiding matters and lurking behind worn ceremonies and the emperor’s non-existent clothes. Take the remarks of a former head of Israeli military intelligence made in a leaked audio: “For every one person [killed] on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die.” Those militaries with a heavily staffed legal department supposedly providing guidance in striking a target, largely to reassure the squeamish that they are not implicated in acts of murder, are always suspect. In that regard, the IDF provides a model example, always claiming to do things differently from other powers in the region, yet resorting to the selective language of exculpation.

The reception of the film in Israel has been markedly hysterical. This was to be expected: the film unmasks and discomfits. It demolishes shibboleths. The IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir vowed to use “every tool at our disposal” against the production. The Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar thought the film treasonous. Abraham and Szor were “willing to harm their homeland in order just to get applause from antisemites around the world.” The irate minister was keen to “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” he thundered in a social media post. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called upon the passing of legislation stripping the duo of their citizenship, a curious point given the existing provisions of Israel’s Citizenship Law. (Making German Jews stateless was a specialty of the Third Reich: that the Jewish state would consider this to its citizens is a distinct, bitter irony, yet sadly permissible in light of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2022 validating revocation for acts done in “breach of loyalty to the State of Israel”.)

Activists and members of the far-right party Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside the parents of Szor’s house, with a speaker calling for both directors to be executed and the homes of their families to be demolished (collective punishment remains a great inspiration for tribal sentiment).

The IDF has marshalled its own response in a document accusing the filmmakers of presenting “a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process.” The narrative of the documentary drew upon “substantial factual errors stemming from manipulative misrepresentations of reality.” Worth noting here is the lower register of critique that does not entirely repudiate the targeting practices of the IDF, dressed up in the apologetics of collateral damage. Concessions and confessions are always evident from those in and of power who resort to such dismissive language as “misrepresentative” and “disingenuous.”

Be that as it may, the agitated response is illuminating. The Lavender database, to take one objection, was apparently not one of targets, merely “a database that assists intelligence analysts.” This represents a distinction without a difference. The faith placed by militaries in the divinities of technology are hard to shake; there is nothing here to say that such analysts do not treat these data sets as unimpeachable. AI and religious deities serve to do the imagination for others; they discourage independent thinking and verification. Why bother when you have someone, or something else, doing it for you?

The response remains weak in claiming that the IDF believes itself “bound by and committed to international humanitarian law, its operational procedures are designed to implement those legal obligations, and it operates dedicated units and mechanisms to mitigate civilian harm.” The staggering death toll in Gaza, always sneered and jeered at by the Israeli authorities and their defenders, would suggest otherwise. NAZA serves to, as the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov points out, address a “state of denial” by “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”

October 23, 2026 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

Worried About Russian Meddling In UK Politics? Wait Till You See What Israel Is Up To

Burnham’s exclusive focus on Russian influence almost laughably beside the point. This furious finger-pointing at the Kremlin is designed with one purpose in mind only: to distract the British public from where the real external meddling in our politics is coming from.

October 16, 2026, Jonathan Cook Substack

Andy Burnham’s government is rolling out a new “Centre for Information Defence”. But the outside actors most aggressively undermining what little remains of British democracy are nowhere in its sights

Russia “interfered” in the 2016 Brexit vote by running some “anti-EU” articles on its RT channel and promoting a few internet trolls. Even MI5 has to admit that this activity had no tangible impact on the referendum campaign.

No matter. British prime minister Andy Burnham has once again revived the incendiary claim that Russian disinformation is an especial threat to British democracy. At the United Nations a few weeks ago he announced plans for a National Centre for Information Defence “to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks”.

For the new British prime minister, as for his predecessors, this is all about Moscow and the UK’s favourite bogeyman, Vladimir Putin. At the UN, Burnham promised British expertise to other European nations to protect them from Kremlin disinformation.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that another foreign actor is meddling even more aggressively in British politics – and neither Burnham nor MI5 have a word to say about it.

Any evidence of Russia disinformation-peddling in the UK pales in comparison to Israeli influence operations – and that’s just the ones we know about. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, noted that Russian disinformation was neither sophisticated nor successful. The same cannot be said for Israel’s handiwork.

Israel has been using “hasbara” trolls on social media platforms to manipulate public debates in Britain for years – the thrust of the accusation against Russia. But in Israel’s case, it goes much further than that.

This year the Israeli state massively increased its public diplomacy budget to $730 million to expand its influence operations. That includes flying even more politicians, clergy, academics and influencers to bombard them with pro-Israel propaganda they are then likely to spread back home. According to foreign minister Gideon Saar, Israeli advocacy should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors”.

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There was already plenty of evidence through the late 2010s, as I reported at the time, that Israel was helping to organise, stoke and amplify a campaign to smear its arch-critic, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite, in order to prevent him from reaching No 10 Downing Street.

Not least, Israel did so by advancing a new, bogus definition of Jew hatred through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Usefully, for Israel, that definition largely ignores hatred of Jews to focus instead on criticism of Israel.

That was the most blatant meddling possible in what remains of Britain’s democratic processes. UK politicians and media not only failed to oppose it, but actively sought to amplify the smears.

Civil war

This week the fanatically pro-Israel US lobby group the Anti-Defamation League revealed that it had been working with leading AI firms, which are increasingly being integrated into social media platforms, to suppress what it calls “antisemitism” – or what the rest of us would refer to as criticism of Israel.

CEO Jonathan Greenblatt observed: “We’ve had excellent collaboration with Silicon Valley.” The platforms, he said, would tackle content the ADL doesn’t like “right in the source code” – that is, before users can see it.

That is likely not only to remove criticism of Israeli atrocities and criticism of western governments, such as the UK’s, for colluding in Israel’s genocide but turn social media into a playground for bots and Israel apologists, giving them free reign to spread their propaganda without challenge.

We also know, thanks to the work of the French security services – maybe MI5 was too busy chasing Russian bots to notice – that an Israeli cyber agency called Blackcore targeted the SNP in May’s Scottish elections, as well as meddling in elections in France and New York.

Israeli tech firms, especially those dealing in spyware, intelligence and influence operations, are typically closely aligned with the Israeli state and its military. Most of the founders of tech start-ups are alumnae of the Israeli army’s 8200 intelligence unit.

Alongside the SNP, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and a leftwing French party headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon were targeted. Why? Because, unlike their political rivals, all had dared to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza

With echoes of what happened to Corbyn, Blackcore’s campaigns were designed to smear candidates. In the case of the French elections, fake accounts were created to accuse one candidate of rape and another of paedophilia.

A new documentary, NAZA, shows how Israel has paved the way in using AI in pioneering new ways to kill on a mass scale in Gaza. It selected banks of targets for assassination, often by murdering those “suspects” when they are in family compounds, slaughtering large numbers of bystanders in the process.

It is therefore hardly surprising that tech firms in Israel have been caught using AI in similarly innovative and indiscriminate ways online, to target western publics with disinformation.

In the summer it emerged that the Israeli government had created a website for a fake “scholarly” think-tank. In a short period of time, it produced prodigious quantities of AI-generated content on Israel, optimised for common search terms, that promoted Israeli talking points and constantly suggested criticism of Israel risked fuelling antisemitism.

It was set up not only to influence internet chatbots into echoing its pro-Israel disinformation but also to integrate its content into what experts call the “underlying training data”: that is, the unquestioned assumptions on which chatbots operate.

Back in May 2024 Meta identified fake Israel-based accounts, “posing as Jewish students, African Americans and other concerned citizens”, peddling pro-Israel content in the US and Canada in support of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Two months ago, Meta again found the same kind of dirty tricks emanating from Israel, this time targeting Britain, France and Australia among other countries. The AI-generated accounts posed “as local, civically-engaged brands, news sources, religious organizations, and political activists”.

Notably in the case of the UK and France, the influence campaigns were designed to stoke “anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim” sentiment. Israel has been critically involved in advancing Islamophobic content, fuelling fears of a supposed “Muslim takeover” of Europe to mobilise support for Israel as a bulwark in the Middle East against Islam, and thereby encourage sympathy for its genocidal attacks on Gaza.

As a consequence, the political landscape in Britain has been disfigured. Support for the far-right has been artificially inflated, polarising British society. The path is being paved towards deeper authoritarianism and the possibility of civil war.

Death knell

None of these dire outcomes, the death knell for what little remains of British democracy, is attracting even the mildest interest from the Burnham government or MI5. Instead, they are chasing what so far appears to have been far more marginal Russian output.

But it isn’t just the influence of Israel we should be worried about. The problem runs much deeper, with a host of other noxious outside actors trying to warp and disfigure British politics in ways that closely accord with Israel’s malign intent. Burnham’s Centre for Information Defence will do precisely nothing to tackle any of it.

Here are two other powerful external actors aligned with Israel in distorting British politics.

The billionaire class, a transnational elite that has no loyalty to Britain, interfere in our politics by making our political parties dependent on their donations. They use their money to buy influence with the main parties – which is why for decades it has made little difference whether we vote for the Conservatives or Labour. We get austerity either way, while the billionaires get permission for their forever wars, directing public wealth away from public services into the arms industries and resource grabs.

Jeremy Corbyn tried to break with this model by funding Labour with small donations from ordinary people instead of the billionaires. As a result, he was destroyed by a confected campaign run by the billionaires, in association with Israel and its trolls, to smear him as an antisemite.

Sir Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, went right back to begging for money from Big Business, got the billionaires behind him, and rolled on with the austerity programme.

Is Nigel Farage’s Reform different? Of course, not. Even before reaching power, he’s dependent on crypto-billionaires living in Thailand and Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the sometime US trillionaire Elon Musk is busy rallying Britain’s new blackshirts, led by serial fraudster Tommy Robinson, to chase after a few “illegal” migrants rather than identifying the real criminals tearing apart Britain: the super-rich like Musk.

The billionaires both wield and conceal their influence through their ownership of the corporate media. They use the media to aggressively promote their own causes – political and economic policies ensuring their further enrichment – by normalising the extreme ideology of neoliberal capitalism, with its promotion of endless resource extraction through forever wars and the fuelling of needless consumption.

The consequence is the destruction of the conditions for human life on the planet. The billionaires hope they can ride out the catastrophe in their bunkers, or cryogenically freeze their bodies until a point in the future when they can be uploaded to the cloud.

One of the media’s most important jobs is to use smear campaigns to destroy anyone, such as Corbyn and now Zack Polanski, who threatens the billionaires’ privileged position by offering a mildly socialist programme of wealth redistribution..

Vassal state

If the UK media wasn’t entirely captured by the billionaire class – serving as its PR division – then we might know more about the role of the United States in meddling in our politics.

The recent claims of a supposed “terrorist plot” outside RAF Fairford – really a US airforce base pretending to be a British base and one from which the US has waged an illegal war of aggression against Iran – should have reminded us that the Pentagon is largely in charge of UK foreign policy.

The US has some 15 major military bases on British soil, plus half a dozen smaller intelligence sites. As the rightwing US podcaster Tucker Carlson recently observed, the fact that Britain has foreign troops crawling all over it makes us little more than an occupied “vassal state”.

The US recently announced a $4 billion upgrade of its UK bases, including establishing storage sites for its nuclear arsenal. The plan caused barely a ripple of interest among British politicians or the media .

Although our political and media class pretend the UK is an equal partner in a western defence alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the reality is very different. Nato takes its orders from the US, doing Washington’s bidding. That’s why Nato has been pivoting towards America’s biggest economic rival, China, which is, of course, nowhere near the North Atlantic.

When the US snaps its fingers, Britain stands to attention and hikes its spending on the war industries. Along with European governments, the UK is willing to drain its national coffers and scythe through public spending with yet more austerity cuts to support Washington’s military agenda for “full-spectrum global dominance”.

Hidden influence

Much of the US influence on British politics is carefully concealed from view, operating behind closed doors.

In the early 2010s, the US was desperately seeking a pretext to extradite Julian Assange from the UK and lock him up in a super-max jail, hiding him out of sight after his organisation Wikileaks revealed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was during this period that Starmer, as the director of public prosecutions, repeatedly jetted off to Washington for secret meetings with US officials.

We will never know what was discussed. Freedom of information requests discovered that his own officials destroyed all records of those meetings.

Once he became a politician, Starmer was recruited to the shadowy Trilateral Commission, originally founded in the 1970s by officials in Jimmy Carter’s administration to deal with the supposed problem of “an excess of democracy” in the US. The commission’s view was that voters were becoming dangerously less passive, at that time over the Vietnam war, and ways needed to be found to return them to docility.

A similar British-American Project cements ties between rising stars in British politics, business and journalism and Washington elites. The power imbalance between the two sides ensures up-and-coming British leaders are readily groomed into an Atlanticist worldview in which the UK is very much the junior partner.

There are a plethora of other “respected’ think-tanks and organisations whose chief role is to embed US policy ideas, especially those relating to foreign policy, in the thinking of British elites. They include the Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, The British-American Parliamentary Group, and BritishAmerican Business.

The US uses its financial muscle through these organisations and many others to manufacture consent for its extreme neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. The latest example are massive grants to organisations willing to export Trump’s MAGA ideology to the UK, masquerading as a “public education” initiative.

There is plenty of evidence to show that it was pressure from the Trump administration that led to the unprecedented decision by Starmer’s government to proscribe a civil disobedience group, Palestine Action, for the first time in Britain’s history as a terrorist organisation.

Palestine Action had incensed Israel by targeting its weapons factories on UK soil, highlighting another aspect of British collusion in the Gaza genocide, and had infuriated Trump personally by spraying one of his golf courses in Scotland with the words “Gaza is not 4 sale”.

In truth, the ways that the US meddles directly in British politics are so numerous it is virtually impossible to quantify them. Britain is little more than a colony of the US, receiving diktats on important foreign policy issues – especially regarding US and Israeli interests – that the UK is invariably too frightened to oppose.

Burnham is already rolling over to reverse the UK’s decision to honour a ruling from the International Court of Justice and other international tribunals that Britain has no claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and must return them to Mauritius. The UK has faced a temper tantrum from Trump on the matter because the US operates an illegal military base on one of the islands.

Disobedience by the UK is the exception, not the rule. Which makes Burnham’s exclusive focus on Russian influence almost laughably beside the point. This furious finger-pointing at the Kremlin is designed with one purpose in mind only: to distract the British public from where the real external meddling in our politics is coming from.

October 21, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics, UK | Leave a comment

America’s BFF Saudi Arabia likely won’t be forever

13 October 2026AIMN Editorial, ByWalt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, https://theaimn.net/americas-bff-saudi-arabia-likely-wont-be-forever/

A disastrous unintended consequence of Trump’s lost war on Iran is the impending destruction of its best Middle East ally: Saudi Arabia. Both Iran and now Ansah Allah (Houthis) in Yemen are pounding Saudi infrastructure and oil facilities, drastically degrading the Saudi economy. No oil revenue may signal the end of Saudi Arabia as an economic power. Saudi Arabia may wind up a failed state with its hated rulers fleeing for safe havens.

The head of Aramco, the Saudi oil company, advised it will take at least two years for oil production and delivery to return to normal. And that’s if no further damaging attacks occurs.

Back in 2015 Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) jumped into the Yemen civil war to prevent the Houthis from polishing off the Saudi backed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) which was a minority element with no chance of prevailing.

But even with hundreds of billions in US bombs, jets, intelligence, logistics that kept the killing going for 7 years, the Saudis gave up in futility in 2022. Over a quarter million Yemenis dead simply for Uncle Sam to protect its Saudi ally against the Houthis who controlled 80% of Yemen – including the capital – couldn’t stop the popular Houthis.

Last year the Houthis came to the aid of Gaza’s Palestinians undergoing genocide by Israel. When they disrupted Israeli Red Sea shipping, the US launched over a thousand air strikes costing over a billion dollars during a 7-week air campaign that failed miserably.

Having failed twice to deter the Houthis, the US stupidly greenlighted the Saudis to attack Yemen’s main airport in Saana last July 13, reigning the Yemen, Saudi war that ended 4 years ago. Big mistake. The results have been so devastating to Saudi Arabia that MBS called up Trump begging for US air strikes on Yemen. But bogged down in his lost war on Iran, Trump demurred squandering his dwindling drone and missile stockpile to bail outhe incompetent Saudis. He’s left his former BFF MBS to face Houthi attacks that cannot be stopped.

Wise foreign policy analysts foresee Saudi Arabia collapsing politically along with their collapsing oil gravy train. MBS may have slaughtered his last political opponent such as Kamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist MBS had chopped up in the Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018.

MBS may soon be MIA. Can’t come soon enough.

October 20, 2026 Posted by | politics international, Saudi Arabia, USA | Leave a comment

Caitlin Johnstone: Netanyahu’s Attack on Truth in ‘NAZA’

October 13, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/13/caitlin-johnstone-netanyahus-attack-on-truth-in-naza/

The 24 soldiers interviewed for the film are being prosecuted not because they told lies about Israel, but because they told the truth.

Israel is so evil that it’s actually illegal for Israelis to tell the truth about it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just ordered Israel’s military, its attorney general, and its security agency Shin Bet to investigate and prosecute the soldiers who anonymously shared their experiences in the Gaza Strip with the award-winning investigative documentary “NAZA.”

According to Haaretz, Netanyahu accused the soldiers of “serious information security offenses, criminal defamation and harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests,” adding that “there is concern that those involved in the defamatory film committed serious criminal offenses by exposing highly classified information and creating a breach in the information security of a highly sensitive intelligence unit.”

Netanyahu’s accusations of “defamation” are contradicted by his other accusation of “exposing highly classified information.” The 24 soldiers interviewed for the film are being prosecuted not because they told lies about Israel, but because they told the truth. The prime minister is claiming the truth causes “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests” because Israel is a state that can only exist on a foundation of endless lies.

If Israel considers the truth a national security threat, then Israel should not exist.

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” This quote by the American writer PC Hodgell certainly applies to an apartheid state which assassinates Palestinian journalists, bans the foreign press from witnessing its atrocities in Gaza, constantly attacks press outlets that report on its abuses, spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on foreign propaganda and prosecutes soldiers who tell the truth about its war crimes.

It also applies to the U.S. empire, which prosecutes whistleblowers, imprisons journalists for exposing U.S. war crimes, shrouds its actions in a veil of government secrecy, exerts extensive control over the flow of information via Silicon Valley and manipulates the minds of the public using the most sophisticated propaganda system ever devised.

It also applies to abusive relationships that would collapse if the community could see what was happening, or if the victim fully understood what was being done to them.

It also applies to marriages where one spouse isn’t being truthful about who they are and what they do in secret.

It also applies to worldviews that would crumble if contradicting facts were heard and deeply listened to with courage and intellectual honesty.

It also applies to the psychological constructs we hold within ourselves that were built when we were too young to understand the traumas we were experiencing and the maladaptive coping habits we were subconsciously forming to deal with them.

It also applies to the ego itself, which dissolves when sufficient attention and clarity has been brought to its mechanisms through rigorous self-inquiry.

At all levels, human dysfunction is held in place by untruth and dispelled by truth. The lies we hold onto as individuals, as communities, and as a society are what allows suffering and abuse to continue at whatever scale you’re looking at.

Humanity’s collective quest is to become a truth-driven species with a truth-based relationship with reality, because if you’re not dealing with reality as it actually is then you’re not able to respond to your challenges with wisdom and efficacy. We move in this direction by seeing through the mental narratives and perceiving reality as it is actually happening: as individuals, as a society and as a species.

Tell the truth uncompromisingly, come what may. Let all that would crumble under untruth do so as swiftly as possible. May all be revealed. Let us face the ever-expanding light of truth with heroic courage.

October 18, 2026 Posted by | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Iran fortifying nuclear sites; warns of land incursions into Gulf states if the US launches new strikes – report

i24NEWS, October 13, 2026, https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/iran-eastern-states/artc-iran-fortifying-nuclear-sites-warns-of-land-incursions-into-gulf-states-if-the-us-launches-new-strikes-report

Iran is fortifying its defenses, rallying loyalists and threatening a wider, harsher response against the US and its Gulf allies as it prepares for potential American attacks after the midterms, The Wall Street Journal reported. Iranian officials warned publicly and privately that Tehran will respond with further escalation across the Middle East if the US launches new strikes.

People familiar with the warnings said some officials hinted that Iranian forces could conduct land incursions into neighboring countries. Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said Sunday that Tehran could target the United Arab Emirates, as well as data centers and internet cables across the region.

Tehran also warned Arab officials it could strike Saudi oil facilities, some of the people said.

The US military is also gearing up. A third aircraft carrier strike group and another Marine expeditionary unit are heading to the Middle East.

President Donald Trump ruled out an attack before the Nov. 3 midterms last week, but has publicly mulled hitting the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site, and US officials said the military is preparing a range of options for new strikes.

At home, Iran is preparing the public for renewed war. Satellite images analyzed by the Institute for Science and International Security showed Iran built makeshift dirt mounds last month around its Pickaxe Mountain and Natanz nuclear sites to impede any ground raid.

Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, who oversees contingency plans, said Iran’s airports, seaports and power plants “have prepared for wartime conditions.” Billboards in Tehran also advertise civilian courses in firing shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles.

Separately, IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi had previously told Bloomberg Television that “there are some indications that there is movement around this construction site,” referring to Pickaxe Mountain, but added: “We don’t have any concrete information as to activities that may be taking place there,” Ynet reported, citing Bloomberg.

October 18, 2026 Posted by | Iran, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A Shadow of Fear Hangs Over Gazans Amid Israeli Defense Minister’s Threats

October 11, 2026 By Dalia Abu Ramadan, https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/11/a-shadow-of-fear-hangs-over-gazans-amid-israeli-defense-ministers-threats/

This article was originally published by Truthout

Israel Katz says Israel will forcibly displace 1 million Gazans if “even one Israeli soldier” is abducted.

We are about to close out three years and enter another since Israel invaded Gaza, but we are not leaving the war behind to begin a new life. We are entering yet another year without knowing when this war will end — or whether it will end at all.

The fear remains. The destruction remains. The threats remain. It feels as though each passing year does not bring us closer to an end, but closer to the possibility of another war.

Despite everything we are living through in Gaza, we understand what it means to live one day at a time — to hold on to every simple moment we can still have. Imagine planning for another morning, perhaps for the simplest of things: going out with the friends you still have, or taking your family to the sea in the morning, amid all this destruction, simply to experience a moment that feels like life.

Then, as you are planning that ordinary morning, you hear a statement from Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who said on September 22: “If even one Israeli soldier or civilian is abducted, the city of Gaza — with its homes and terrorist towers — will be evacuated southward of its one million residents.” 

Words like these are enough not only to disrupt your day, but to shake your entire future. The first question we asked ourselves was: Where would we go? Is there anywhere left for us to go?

“Everyone is talking about how the possibility of an Israeli soldier being captured has become impossible, that it will not happen, and that it could be an excuse to provoke people in Gaza and pave the way for the war to return,” Haneen Salem, a photographer in Gaza City, told me. “I am certain something will happen. No one knows what, but there is a shadow of fear hanging over Gaza’s civilians.”

Even my father said, “Expect it to happen at any moment,” warning that we could be forcibly displaced yet again, especially because we are living through another difficult period in Gaza. The intensity of Israeli bombardment had increased in the weeks leading up to Katz’s statement, and warplanes had not stopped flying overhead at night.

We are being asked to imagine another war while we are still living inside the aftermath of the one that was supposed to have ended.

The so-called ceasefire took effect at noon local time on October 10, 2025. A year has passed since that announcement, but the war has not ended. It is true that the intensity of the escalation and displacement has eased compared to the height of Israel’s war, but the bombardment and destruction have continued. So, what does it mean to hear threats of the war returning with the same ferocity when we have not even begun to recover from what has already happened?

When the “ceasefire” was announced, I believed the war would end as the wars of 2021, 2014, and previous years had ended — with a clear conclusion, a moment when we would know that the war was truly over. I expected that, immediately after the announcement, we would begin clearing the rubble, rebuilding what had been destroyed and slowly putting our lives back together.

But that did not happen.

Instead, it felt as though the war continued in another form, behind the scenes — a reality visible only to the people of Gaza who have been living through its consequences every day. Today, we still have not recovered. Even the most basic medical necessities remain unavailable, the siege is tightening, and the consequences of the war continue to surround every part of our lives.

The collapse of the Al-Sadah building in Tal al-Hawa is one example of what this unfinished recovery looks like. The building had been home to approximately 80 displaced Palestinians. In the early hours of September 16, it collapsed, with parts of the structure also falling onto nearby buildings and tents that were sheltering other displaced families. Rescue teams initially estimated that around 100 people, including at least 50 children, were trapped beneath the rubble. After rescue operations ended, Civil Defense teams confirmed that 21 people had been killed, including 12 children and five women, while 45 injured people were taken to hospitals.


With rubble left uncleared and too little being done to address the dangers left behind by the destruction, many partially damaged buildings across Gaza have been left standing in a fragile state, at risk of collapsing at any moment.

The Al-Sadah building had sustained structural damage from Israeli bombardment during the war and was struck several times in 2024 and again in March 2025. Civil defense teams had warned residents not to return to the building. Yet some had no other choice but to live there. With tents and homes unavailable, displaced Palestinians have been forced to shelter in cracked and damaged buildings, despite the risk that they could collapse around them.

But the danger does not end when people are pulled from the rubble. Those who survive still face a health system struggling to meet even the most basic needs. As World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on September 24, “Essential medicines, diagnostics, equipment and fuel remain in critically short supply.”

These shortages are not limited to life-saving medicines and hospital equipment; they reach into the most ordinary forms of care, turning even a visit to the dentist into a struggle.

It may be one of the most basic forms of health care, but anyone who has experienced severe tooth pain knows how unbearable it can be — especially as poor nutrition and the effects of prolonged hunger have taken a toll on people’s dental health.

“Getting dental supplies and materials into Gaza has become extremely difficult,” dentist Dr. Ghalib Zimmo told me. “And when they do enter, they are prohibitively expensive. The cost of dental materials has risen to 10 times what it was before the war.”

The consequences are painful. “Many patients come to us needing root canal treatment, which can involve unbearable pain,” Dr. Ghalib said. “But because of the cost, they choose to have the tooth extracted instead of treating it.”

“Before the war, a root canal cost around $40,” he explained. “Now, it can cost as much as $250.”

Imagine how deeply exhausted we have become. We search for medicine, and it is not there. We search for wheelchairs for those who have lost limbs in the war, and they are not there. We search for the simplest things that make life possible, and they are not there.

Fear has become part of the way we respond to every sound. Sometimes, when we hear a sudden noise, we immediately think it is the sound of a missile just before it strikes. We can even find ourselves startled by the sound of a chair moving.

We are living with a trauma that no one can truly feel the way we do. Three years of relentless bombardment have left their mark on us. We search for life itself, and we cannot find it.

October 16, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

War puts Iran’s nuclear ambiguity under scrutiny

A revisionist argument is emerging in Tehran over Iran’s nuclear strategy:
that its longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity failed its most important
test when it did not deter the United States and Israel from attacking, and
should now be reconsidered. Nezamoddin Mousavi, a former conservative
lawmaker with longstanding ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC), gave unusually explicit expression to that argument this week,
declaring that “nuclear ambiguity did not prevent war” and raising the
prospect of revisiting Iran’s nuclear doctrine and even its membership in
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Iran International 10th Oct 2026,
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202610106118

October 15, 2026 Posted by | Iran, politics | Leave a comment

Huckabee aide suppressed, doctored US cables to whitewash Israeli crimes: Report

Reports on slain Palestinian US citizens and rampant settler violence were buried or rewritten to praise Netanyahu instead

News Desk, OCT 8, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/huckabee-aide-suppressed-doctored-us-cables-to-whitewash-israeli-crimes-report

A senior aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been blocking and rewriting embassy reports to Washington to whitewash Israeli crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the New York Times reported on 8 October.

David Milstein, who joined the US embassy in Jerusalem in April 2025 and serves as a de facto chief of staff to Huckabee, oversees much of the mission’s work on the West Bank and Gaza. 

According to a dozen people who deal with him in Jerusalem and Washington, he has used that role to repeatedly suppress or doctor cables on illegal Israeli settlement expansion, settler attacks, the killings of Palestinian US citizens, and deadly aid distribution in Gaza. 

Among the reports Milstein buried was a March embassy review of the killings of nine Palestinian US citizens by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank over four years. The latest, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, was shot dead by a settler in February as he tried to stop the theft of his village’s livestock.

The review was compiled after 30 members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio for answers. It found that most investigations had gone nowhere, some had been closed, and not one person had been charged.

Rather than send it, Milstein pushed for a reply assuring lawmakers that Israel was handling the cases properly. The State Department letter that reached Van Hollen on 4 May withheld the findings, pointing instead to the embassy’s wartime focus on security cooperation with Israel.

“If you don’t get accountability, you endanger more American citizens,” Van Hollen said.

In the summer of 2025, Palestinians seeking food were being shot dead en masse at the sites of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli scheme that turned aid distribution into a death trap and killed at least 1,400 aid seekers.

As the killing went on, embassy diplomats warned Washington that the operation risked further mass casualties; however, Milstein rewrote the cable to hail it as a success, erasing the dead from the record entirely.

In April – after senior Israeli commanders warned that surging Israeli settler attacks across the occupied West Bank could spark a new Palestinian uprising – Milstein blocked staff reports relaying the warning, and Washington instead received a cable under his name crediting Netanyahu with cracking down on the violence.

In February, when Israel revoked long-standing legal barriers to Israeli land purchases in the occupied West Bank, a move condemned internationally as fast-tracking annexation, the embassy told Washington the policy served settlers’ “humanitarian needs,” without explaining further.

Milstein also reportedly subjected colleagues to loyalty tests, demanding to know whether they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” four officials said, leaving staff afraid to speak. 

Under his watch, some stopped writing reports altogether rather than see them censored, and cables on Palestinian affairs dwindled from several a week to a handful a month. 

October 14, 2026 Posted by | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Gaza genocide permanently diminished the power of pro-Israel propaganda

Since October 7 and the Gaza genocide, U.S. opinions on Israel and Palestine have drastically shifted. The power of Zionist propaganda has been permanently weakened, and the U.S.-Israel relationship is in a more precarious position than ever before.

Mondoweiss, by Michael Arria, October 6, 2026

For nearly 40 years, Gallup has been asking Americans a series of questions about the Middle East and U.S. policy in the region.

One of those frequent questions is, “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?“

In 2003, just 16% of Democrats said that they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis. When the annual survey was carried out this past February, that number had ballooned to 65%.

There are many reasons for this dramatic shift.

2003 was the year that the United States launched its war on Iraq, spurred by government lies and a post-9/11 bloodlust that permeated a sizable chunk of U.S. society. 2026 also saw the United States launch a war in the Middle East, but this one is broadly unpopular with the population, which has naturally grown skeptical of foreign conflict after 20-plus years of disastrous Forever Wars.

The tireless work of Palestine activists has also increased support for the cause, as Americans have developed a deeper understanding of Israeli apartheid and occupation. These efforts found particular resonance during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as many activists stressed the connections between liberation at home and abroad.

However, the biggest reason for the jump is obviously the Gaza genocide and U.S. support for it. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began three years ago, conservative estimates say 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 175,000 have been injured. More than 1,400 have been killed and nearly 5,000 injured since the Trump administration declared a “ceasefire” on October 10, 2025.

Those Gallup results are just a small part of a vast trove of polling showing that Americans have completely flipped on the issue, and although Democratic voters have soured on Israel at a higher rate, the shift is certainly not limited to one political party.

Here’s some more:

  • A Pew report from this past spring found that 60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% in 2025. The country is viewed unfavorably by 41% of Republicans, but that number is 57% among Republicans aged 18-49.
  • In addition to Democrats, the aforementioned Gallup poll shows that Independents sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis, 41% to 30%, for the first time since the analytics company began conducting the surveys.
  • A recent Marquette Law School poll found that favorability toward Israel has been steadily declining for the last 20 months.

……………………………………………………………………………. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/10/the-gaza-genocide-permanently-diminished-the-power-of-pro-israel-propaganda/

October 13, 2026 Posted by | Israel, public opinion, USA | Leave a comment

Walt Zlotow – Fanatical US Iran war supporters must stop fantasy Iran attacked US 47 years ago

Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glen Ellyn IL 8 Oct 26, https://theaimn.net/fanatical-us-iran-war-supporters-need-to-stop-fantasising/

During my 75 years following US justifications for waging senseless war, I’ve never heard anything as bizarre as that supporting the current senseless war on Iran.

Trump’s war defenders claim Iran has been waging war on America for 47 years beginning with the US embassy hostage takeover in November 1979. During the intervening 47 years, Iran has killed thousands of US miliary personnel in the Middle East. They condemn all preceding presidents beginning with Jimmy Carter for not defending against Iran’s dastardly war on America. They praise Trump for finally confronting Iran head on in a war of existential threat to our homeland.

This narrative is repeated endlessly on conservative media, even the floor of Congress. In arguing against a War Powers Resolution to end Trump’s deranged Iran war that may crash the world economy, Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy said, “We didn’t start this war, we did not. But we will finish it. Democrats were right to call the conflict a war of choice, but the choice was made by Iran’s regime decades ago — not by Trump. It’s a war of choice that was begun by a radical, lunatic band of terrorists that took over a beautiful nation 47 years ago. This regime that we are fighting does not care about our partisan politics, don’t care who you voted for, who you pray to, or where you live. They want to kill all of us. And they don’t just say it, they actually do it. And they’ve been doing it for 47 years.”

Somehow, Sen. Sheehy missed that it was President Trump repeatedly threatening to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization; indeed, even before the United Nations General Assenbly. It was Trump who sucker punched Iran with bombs while negotiating peace in June 2025, and again in all out war on February 28 this year. After twice being deceived with bombs, Iran fought back ferociously, essentially defeating the most murderous, duplicitous regime on earth.

In truth, it’s America that has been at war with Iran for decades and a lot longer that 47 years. One must go back 73 years to Operation Ajax, America’s first Iran regime change operation, which toppled the legitimate Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 to retain British, US control of Iranian oil. Once deposed, the US installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to serve US interests in perpetuity. For the Iranian people it meant the Shah’s brutal rule enabled by the US military and CIA which killed upwards of 10,000 anti Shah dissidents.

After twenty-six years the Iranian people forced the Shah to flee in February 1979, allowing the transition from monarchy to an Islamic Republic.

Had President Carter not allowed America’s three decade puppet ruler to seek refuge in the US, there would likely never been the November 4, 1979 takeover of the US embassy by 500 students resulting in taking 66 US hostages for 444 days.

Shortly thereafter the new Iranian government made 3 reasonable demands of the US, that if granted, would likely have promptly returned the hostages.

Most important was return of the Shah, a mass murderer, to face justice in Iran. Second, a US apology for the ’53 US coup that overturned Mosaddegh and installed the Shah’s brutal rule. Third, return of the $20 billion the Shah stole and the US seized after the revolution.

Besides quick return of the 66 hostages, there would have been no failed April 1980 rescue mission that killed 8 service members.

But the hard liners in the Carter administration led by National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski would have none of that, setting off 47 years of endless US machinations in behest of every US administration and Israel to complete the second Iranian regime change in 73 years.

No, Iran has never attacked the US or been at war with the US…until President Trump bombed an Iranian school, killing over a hundred little girls on the first day of his deranged, criminal war to depose the Iranian regime at the behest of Israel.

Instead of diplomacy, common sense, peace, Trump gives us war, death, economic decline, possible global economic collapse. And he justifies this madness with the fantasy that the victim has been the aggressor for 47 years.

October 13, 2026 Posted by | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Could Collapse Soon—Leaked CIA Report Says!

Lee Camp, Oct 07, 2026, https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/leaked-cia-report-says-israel-headed

Dropsite News is reporting that a classified CIA report warns that Israel is at a high risk of civil war and state collapse. Many factors have come together to create a perfect storm crashing down on the apartheid state. (Apparently, committing long-term genocide really takes a toll.)

Some of the problems they’re facing include:

  • A completely corrupt political establishment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying desperately to hang on to power because he knows losing the October 27th election could mean prison time.
  • Soaring military spending. Not a surprise considering they’ve dropped the equivalent of sixteen Hiroshima atomic bombs on Gaza. (Yes, that’s accurate.)
  • A heavily armed populace that is almost completely riddled with psychological trauma. Every Israeli (except the ultra-orthodox) is forced into the military, which means that every Israeli within a certain age range is somehow part of the genocide in Gaza.
  • A struggling economy with average households bearing the brunt of the costs of Israel’s multiple wars. Food prices have reached record highs.
  • Ever-growing fury among non-Jewish Israelis, who make up 20% of the population.
  • Growing global isolation as a dwindling number of people around the world support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and their other belligerent attacks on neighboring countries like Lebanon and Iran.
  • Collapse of support even within the US. A record 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. And for the first time since polling began, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.
  • An ultra-orthodox community that is exempt from the military and therefore hated by other Israelis.
  • Israel may be facing its “South Africa moment” when global popular culture fully turns against it. The Macklemore catastrophe showed that the world sides with those who speak up for Palestinians, and even hugely popular artists like Ed Sheeran, who claim they love and support everyone, can’t actually hide from accountability.
  • Furthermore, as Dropsite makes clear, this leaked CIA report is no collection of fanciful imaginings.


“The writers of this are Israel experts,” a source in the intelligence community noted, “this isn’t a fantastical what-if—with the upcoming election and the fissures in Israel, we should take seriously their conclusion that Israel is one spark away from real internal conflict.”

The genocidal apartheid ethnostate is a powder keg, just one fiery ember away from a truly bloody civil war or even collapse. The propaganda that upheld Israel for decades has shattered into 1,000 pieces. The military dominance that defended the apartheid state while it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people has been proven weak and fragmented. And the United States, which has served as Israel’s guarantor and enforcer since its inception, is wobbly and unhinged like every late-stage empire.

For all these reasons, Israel may be on the cusp of collapse and even the CIA knows it.

October 13, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

How much longer can the world absorb the Iran shock?

 The war that was intended to deliver a swift overthrow of the Iranian
regime is now in its eighth month, with no end in sight. So, what might
happen next?

My preliminary conclusion is that one should never
underestimate human stupidity or human ingenuity. So far it is a rough draw
between the two. How long will this last?

That is the question. In a
devastating analysis, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago
describes the war on Iran as “The Mother of All Strategic Blunders”.
Among other things, he notes, the US went into the war on the false claim
that Iran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon; it thought air
power alone would produce regime change, which has never worked; it had no
contingency plan for dealing with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.


It has also failed to achieve any of its four principal objectives —
regime change, ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability, ending its
long-range missile capability and ending its support for Hamas, Hizbollah
and the Houthis.

The closure of the strait has done significant damage to
the international economy and may do much more; and the US alliance
structure (in the Gulf and elsewhere) has been damaged. All this, moreover,
is only about half of the full charge sheet.

But the economic damage has
been surprisingly modest. As Johannes Urpelainen of the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies noted in August, “Many experts
initially thought that this supply disruption would send oil prices to USD
200 per barrel, causing massive inflation and a global recession. Instead,
oil prices peaked at USD 126 per barrel in April 2026.”

First, the energy
transition has reduced the global economy’s dependence on oil. Second,
supply chains have proven resilient and adaptive. Third, producers outside
the Middle East have acted fast to produce more oil and natural gas.
Finally, drawdowns of global oil inventories have filled the remaining gap.

 FT 7th Oct 2026, https://www.ft.com/content/37e12a42-d473-4b1b-8fc5-4ea5f06d3bfb

October 11, 2026 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Israel is rewriting the Palestinian curriculum in East Jerusalem to erase Palestinian identity

Now, these tens of thousands of Palestinian children, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied the city in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools.

Nearly 38 percent of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem now study the Israeli curriculum, while the rest of the students’ textbooks are being censored line by line, stripping mention of Jerusalem, prisoners, the Nakba, and freedom fighters.

By Aseel Mafarjeh Mondoweiss, October 5, 2026

Sally Assi, 34, recalled watching her 11-year-old daughter, Aline, a third-grader at Nour al-Huda School in the town of Beit Hanina in occupied East Jerusalem, arrange her drawing supplies before asking her, “Do you know why we draw Jerusalem?”

“Because it’s beautiful… right?” Aline answered.

Assi smiled, but her question to her daughter wasn’t really about drawing. “Jerusalem isn’t just walls and the Dome of the Rock,” Assi told Mondoweiss. “Jerusalem, to our generation and the generations before us, is a living history. It has cities, people, prisoners, stories, dreams.”

What Assi is describing from her kitchen in the town of Betunia, adjacent to Ramallah, is not an isolated worry among Palestinian parents whose children attend schools in East Jerusalem, under the control of the Israeli Ministry of Education. It is the front line of a rapid, Israeli-driven transformation of Palestinian education in the occupied city, where the Israeli curriculum has become mandatory for every first- and seventh-grade class as of this school year, affecting well over a third of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem.

Now, these tens of thousands of Palestinian children, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied the city in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools. In addition, the remaining two-thirds of the Palestinian student body have been subjected to invasive Israeli alterations to the existing Palestinian curriculum, which has included the wholesale deletion of phrases, images, and symbols that denote Palestinian national identity, most significantly references to the Nakba of 1948 and altered phrasings around themes such as Jerusalem, prisoners, and Palestinian heritage.

It’s this quiet encroachment on Palestinian textbooks, as much as the wholesale replacement, that worries Assi most. “We don’t want our children to learn hatred, and we don’t want them to carry pain without meaning,” she said in an indirect reference to Israeli claims that Palestinian textbooks teach children to “hate.”

“But we want them to know the truth,” she added.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A trajectory decades in the making

Israeli affairs analyst Esmat Mansour says this shift didn’t begin this year, nor was it imposed by sudden decree. It’s a trajectory that has accumulated for decades, starting with early attempts to impose the Israeli curriculum after the 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem, which was blocked by parent and teacher resistance, keeping the Jordanian curriculum in place for years.

“When the Palestinian Authority was established, the Palestinian curriculum became the city’s reference text,” Mansour told Mondoweiss. “But it never entered classrooms without passing through Israeli review. Books were revised before approval, so the cover stayed Palestinian while the content was reshaped from within. Today, that has escalated into something bolder: direct expansion of the Israeli curriculum itself, not as a marginal alternative but as a primary track competing for the city’s children”.

That pattern of internal revision is exactly what Hebrew University researcher Samira Alian documented in a recent academic study 

What Assi is describing, in her kitchen in the town of Betunia, is not an isolated worry among Palestinian parents whose children attend schools under the control of the Israeli Ministry of Education. It is the front line of a rapid, Israeli-driven transformation of Palestinian education in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Israeli curriculum has become mandatory for every first- and seventh-grade class as of this school year.

Now, thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem, for the first time since Israel illegally annexed and occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, are using the Israeli curriculum, as part of an effort to “Israelize” the schools.

It’s this quiet encroachment, as much as the wholesale replacement, that worries Assi most. “We don’t want our children to learn hatred, and we don’t want them to carry pain without meaning — but we want them to know the truth.”

A conflict that moved inside the classroom

In East Jerusalem, the fight over education is now no longer about the number of schools or classroom seats alone. It has moved into the classroom itself, into the book students open each morning, the terms their eyes land on, the images they study, the history they’re taught, and the narrative that will shape how they understand themselves in their city for years to come.

With the start of the 2026-2027 school year, that shift entered a more decisive phase: the Israeli curriculum has been imposed ………………………………………….. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/10/israel-is-rewriting-the-palestinian-curriculum-in-east-jerusalem-to-erase-palestinian-identity/

October 11, 2026 Posted by | Education, Israel | Leave a comment

‘NAZA’ Exposes Gaza’s Killing Machine—and the People Who Want It Hidden

October 5, 2026, Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/05/naza-exposes-gazas-killing-machine-and-the-people-who-want-it-hidden/

Israel’s leaders have threatened the filmmakers. The documentary’s deeper challenge is to a society that treats technical expertise as an escape from moral responsibility.

A government confident in its account of a war should be able to withstand a documentary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to NAZA has been to threaten the citizenship of people who expose what Israeli soldiers say happened in Gaza.

According to Reuters, Netanyahu pledged to pursue legislation allowing citizenship revocation for those who defame Israeli soldiers, alongside sharply increased financial penalties. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA draws on anonymous military and intelligence testimony alleging that civilian deaths were routinely incorporated into targeting decisions. Netanyahu and the military reject those allegations.

The threat raises an obvious question: If the testimony is false, why reach for the power to strip people of their citizenship?

The film’s significance extends beyond Netanyahu. In his October 2 essay for +972 Magazine, Israeli academic Sebastian Ben Daniel argues that NAZA challenges the comforting assumption that responsibility for Gaza’s destruction belongs exclusively to Israel’s openly extremist politicians and settlers.

His focus is on the prestigious institutions that make military violence possible: intelligence units, the Air Force and the professional culture connecting military service to Israel’s technology industry. The people operating that machinery can consider themselves educated, reasonable and politically opposed to the far right while participating in its devastating consequences.

That is a challenge Americans should recognize. We, too, have learned to discuss war through the reassuring vocabulary of expertise: intelligence assessments, precision weapons, operational requirements. The language sounds clean because it removes the people underneath the bombs.

NAZA confronts liberal Israel with an accusation it cannot comfortably assign to Netanyahu and the far right: The destruction of Gaza depends on prestigious institutions staffed by educated, secular professionals who consider themselves the extremists’ opposite. Political moderation does not erase responsibility, and expressions of anguish cannot redeem participation in mass killing. Ben Daniel also describes liberal media commentators attacking a film they have not watched and questioning anonymous testimony—the same kind of sourcing routinely accepted when it serves the military’s narrative. That selective skepticism protects the institutions under scrutiny while shifting attention away from the Palestinians whose lives those institutions have destroyed.

A targeting system does not bury a child. People authorize an attack, carry it out and defend its consequences. Dividing those actions among departments cannot make responsibility disappear.

For some viewers, the testimony has brought historical questions of obedience and accountability into immediate focus. Reporting for Vulture, Rachel Corbett quoted attendee Roland Lewis: “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nuremberg trials.”

That comparison is an audience member’s reaction, not a judicial finding. Its force lies in the question it raises: How much moral shelter can anyone claim from a chain of command?

Palestinians should not have to wait for Israeli testimony to make their suffering credible. Their reporting, their photographs and their accounts of families destroyed deserve attention on their own terms.

What NAZA can do is confront another audience with testimony from inside the institutions whose assurances it has accepted. The obligation that follows belongs to viewers, journalists and governments—including Washington, whose support for Israel demands scrutiny alongside the conduct of the Israeli military.

Watching a documentary is a beginning. Accountability requires following the chain of responsibility beyond the screen.

This commentary draws on Sebastian Ben Daniel’s essay in +972 Magazine, Rachel Corbett’s reporting in Vulture and Reuters’ coverage of threats against the filmmakers. Readers can read them here Vulture, MS NOW and +972 Magazine.

October 9, 2026 Posted by | Israel, media, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Israel to divide central West Bank with settler-only highway

The move is expected to further fragment and isolate the central metropolitan West Bank governorate, which has already been fragmented by Israeli settlements, military outposts, checkpoints and gates.

Aseel Saleh, October 2 2026, https://breakthroughnews.org/2026/10/02/israel-to-divide-central-west-bank-with-settler-only-highway/

In late September, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu’s government intends to adjust access to key routes in the central West Bank. It plans to reopen Route 463 to settler-only traffic in the governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh.

Yisrael Gantz, the leader of the Yesha Council (an umbrella organization representing Israeli municipal councils across Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley) confirmed that plans to reopen the road received preliminary approval and funding.

Preparations are also underway by the Israeli military to complete “the security, legal, and logistical” steps required to reopen the route (also known as Wallerstein Road).

History of the road


The road was paved in 1994 under the directions of Pinchas Wallerstein, a founder of the settlement movement, to connect the illegal settlements of Beit El (north-east of Ramallah and Al-Bireh) and Dolev (north-west of Jerusalem).

However, following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, the Israeli army barred Israeli people from using the road for security reasons. They also placed a locked iron gate on its end near Ein Qiniya village, northwest of Ramallah.

Why has the reopening of the route raised concerns among Palestinians in the West Bank?

Experts argue that Israel’s move will impact not only the governorate itself, but the entire occupied West Bank because of its central location, major metropolitan status, and role as a commercial hub.

To understand the repercussions of the route reopening, BreakThrough News spoke with Jamal Jumaa, a Palestinian activist, expert on Israeli settlement and apartheid-related issues, and coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop the Wall).

Aside from dividing the governorate’s northern and southern halves, Jumaa noted that reopening the road is dangerous because it will block the center of Ramallah and Al-Bireh from two-thirds of its villages, which are situated to the west.

The prominent Palestinian activist added that when Israel builds such roads for settler traffic, it fences them off on both sides and prohibits the use of adjacent lands. The Israeli authorities consider those lands a buffer zone, citing the security of the settlers as their reason. 

“This entails setting up military towers and checkpoints. The road will cut off continuously inhabited Palestinian villages north-west and south-west of Ramallah. Therefore, we are talking about the establishment of roughly four military checkpoints along the road,” he continued.

Jumaa pointed out that the road will complicate the life of Palestinians by restricting their access to vital healthcare and education facilities, including the Istishari Arab Hospital, Birzeit University, and the Arab American University.

He also noted that the intended reopening of the road “is part of dividing and dividing more Palestinians from each other.”

On the political level, Jumaa suggested that the road “hits the heart of the West Bank, which gives a clear signal to the Palestinian Authority that it has no sovereignty over anything.”

It is worth noting that since its establishment, the Palestinian Authority has designated Ramallah and Al-Bireh as a de facto administrative capital. Yet, this has not prevented the Israeli authorities from fragmenting and isolating the governorate by establishing illegal settlements, military outposts, checkpoints, and gates.

October 9, 2026 Posted by | Israel, politics | Leave a comment

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