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The Gratuitous Barbarity of Trump’s So-Called ‘Board of Peace’

Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.

It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law.

In the fantasy being pushed by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jared Kushner, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.

Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Jan 23, 2026, Common Dreams

At the opening ceremony for Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Jared Kushner unveiled glossy images of his vision for a “new Gaza”: shining apartment towers, luxury developments, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. There were no Palestinians at the ceremony—and none on the Board of Peace itself. In Kushner’s fantasy, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.

But how, exactly, are Palestinians to be “demilitarized” and pacified to make way for this Riviera of the Middle East? The assassination of Gaza’s Khan Younis police chief in a drive-by shooting this January offers a chilling clue. It was not an isolated act of lawlessness, but an ominous signal of what lies ahead. As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly—and thoroughly discredited—playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace.

Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic.

That strategy was laid bare on January 12th, 2026, when Lieutenant-Colonel Mahmoud al-Astal, the police chief of Khan Younis in Gaza, was assassinated by a death squad based in the Israeli-occupied part of Gaza beyond the “yellow line.” A militia leader known as Abu Safin immediately took credit for the killing, which he said was ordered by Shin Beit, Israel’s anti-Palestinian spy agency.

Another Israeli-backed militia, reputedly linked to ISIS, killed a well-known Gaza journalist, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, in October. That militia’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was disowned by his family for running a pro-Israel death squad and was killed on November 4th, reportedly by one of his own gang.

These Israeli-run death squad operations follow a similar pattern to the targeted killings of Iraqi civil society leaders as resistance grew to the hostile US military occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. But as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, these targeted killings are likely to grow into a much more systematic and widespread use of death squads and military “kill or capture” night raids in the next phase of Trump’s “peace” plan.

President Trump has announced that the so-called “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza will be under the command of US Major General Jasper Jeffers, who was, until recently, the head of US Special Operations Command. Jeffers is a veteran of “special operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US occupation responded to widespread armed resistance with death squad operations, thousands of airstrikes, and night raids by special operations forces that peaked at over a thousand night raids per month in Afghanistan by 2011.

But like Israel’s Palestinian death squads during the first stage of Trump’s “peace” plan, the US mass killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq began on a smaller scale.

For an article in the New Statesman, published on March 15, 2004, British journalist Stephen Grey investigated the assassination of Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, the director of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights and the fourth professor from al-Mustansariya University to be killed. Professor al-Mayah was dragged out of his car on his way to work, shot 20 times and left dead in the street. A senior US military spokesman blamed his death on “the guerrillas,” and told Grey, “Silencing urban professionals… works against everything we’re trying to do here.”

On further investigation, Grey discovered that it was forces within the occupation government, not the resistance, that killed Professor Al-Mayah. An Iraqi police officer eventually told him, “Dr. Abdul-Latif was becoming more and more popular because he spoke for people on the street here… There are political parties in this city who are systematically killing people. They are politicians that are backed by the Americans and who arrived in Iraq from exile with a list of their enemies. I’ve seen these lists. They are killing people one by one.”

A few months later, retired Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the US war in El Salvador and the Iran-Contra scandal, arrived in Iraq to oversee the recruitment and training of new Special Police Commandos (SPC), who were then unleashed as death squads in Mosul, Baghdad and other cities, under command of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Steven Casteel, who ran the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the US invasion, was the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Latin America, where it worked with the Los Pepes death squad to hunt down and kill Pepe Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel.

In Iraq, Steele and Casteel both reported directly to US Ambassador John Negroponte, another veteran of US covert operations in Vietnam and Latin America.

Just as John Negroponte, James Steele and Steven Casteel brought the methods they learned and used in Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq, Jasper Jeffers brings his training and experience from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza, and will clearly bring other special operations and CIA officers with similar backgrounds into the leadership of the so-called International Stabilization Force (ISF).

The ISF, as described in Trump’s “Peace Plan,” is supposed to be an international force that would provide security, support a new Palestinian police force, and oversee the demilitarization and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip. But the Arab and Muslim countries that originally showed an interest in contributing forces to the ISF all changed their minds once they understood that this would not be a peacekeeping mission, but a force to hunt down and “disarm” Hamas and impose a new form of foreign occupation in Gaza.

Turkey wants to send troops, but so far, Israel has objected, and the other countries that have expressed interest, such as Indonesia, say there is no clear mandate or rules of engagement. And what Muslim country will send forces to Gaza while Israel controls over half of the territory and moves the “Yellow Line” even deeper into Gaza?

Even if some Arab and Muslim countries are persuaded to join the ISF, the most difficult and politically explosive job of actually destroying Hamas will most likely be in the hands of the US and Israeli Special Ops commanders, the mercenaries they bring in and the death squads they recruit.

We can expect to see General Jeffers and his team provide more training and direction to Palestinians already collaborating with Israel in death squad operations, and try to recruit more militia members from current and former Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and from the Palestinian diaspora.

CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) officers with experience in death squad operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to oversee these operations from the shadows, using the same “disguised, quiet, media-free approach” that senior US military officers hailed as a success in Central America as they adapted it to the “war on terror” and the “war on drugs.”

For political reasons, Jeffers will probably use JSOC officers mainly for training and planning, and employ private military contractors to conduct night raids and other combat operations. Along with the huge expansion of US and allied special operations forces in recent US wars, there has been a proliferation of for-profit military contractors that employ former special operations officers from US and allied countries as unaccountable mercenaries.

These privatized forces have already been deployed in Gaza, notably by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its food distribution sites became death traps for desperate, hungry people forced to risk their lives just to try to feed their families. Israeli forces and mercenaries killed at least a thousand people at and around these sites.

The tens of thousands of Americans and others who took part in night raids in Iraq or Afghanistan and special operations in other US wars have created a huge pool of experienced assassins and shock troops that Jeffers can draw on, with for-profit military and “security” firms serving as cut-outs to shield decision-makers from accountability. More routine functions, such as manning checkpoints, can be delegated to other ISF forces, military police veterans and less specialized mercenaries.

The appointment of General Jeffers to command Trump’s ISF, and Israel’s formation and deployment of Palestinian death squads during the first phase of Trump’s phony peace plan, should be all the red flags the world needs to see what is coming—and to categorically reject Trump’s obscene plan before it goes any farther.

Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.

Tony Blair’s role in Trump’s plan is further evidence that the plan has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with the Western imperialism that keeps rearing its ugly head around the world, and which has bedevilled Palestine for more than a century.

Appointing Blair to any role in governing Gaza ignores not only his role in US and British aggression against Iraq, but also his lead role in the U.K. and EU’s decision, in 2003, to abandon earlier efforts to bring Palestinian factions together in the interest of Palestinian unity. Instead, they adopted a militarized, “counterinsurgency” strategy toward Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups. Blair’s failed policy helped pave the way for Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and for the endless, US-backed Israeli violence against Gaza ever since.

It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law. But the savage methods used by US special operations forces and US-trained death squads to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq only fueled broader resistance, which ultimately drove U.S occupation forces out of both countries.

The same tactics will lead to the same failure in Gaza. But unleashing such horrific violence on the already desperate, starving, unhoused, captive people of Gaza is a policy of such gratuitous barbarity and injustice that it should compel the whole world to come together to put a stop to it.

January 25, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Kushner Reveals Dystopic Plan to Build Data Centers on Ruins of Gaza Genocide.

“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”

The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.

“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’” 

The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.

By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, January 22, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/kushner-reveals-dystopic-plan-to-build-data-centers-on-ruins-of-gaza-genocide/

White House Adviser Jared Kushner revealed a neocolonial plan to transform Gaza into a home for luxury tourist resorts and data centers at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.

The plan has been widely condemned by human rights advocates, who say it is an an attempt to erase Palestinians by building a capitalist dystopia on the ruins of Israel’s genocide.

At the signing ceremony for President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Kushner shared a set of slides depicting a colonialist fantasy of the Gaza Strip under a hypothetical “demilitarization” of Hamas — despite the group’s repeated refusal to disarm, saying it would leave them defenseless against further attacks by Israel or otherwise.

The slides show computer-generated photos of high rise buildings along the coast and rows of residential buildings elsewhere.

The presentation includes a blueprint of Gaza divided into sections, which Kushner says is the U.S.’s plan for “catastrophic success” in the event of demilitarization of Hamas. The blueprint, labelled as the “Master Plan,” shows the entirety of the coast — where Palestinians have long fished for sustenance — dedicated to “coastal tourism,” with a sea port and an airport. There are large swaths dedicated to “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities.”

Tellingly, numerous parts of the map located next to residential areas are dedicated to industry and “data centers.” Ruinous technology like AI, reports have said, are slated to be a major part of the White House’s plan for Gaza, with other slides in the pitch deck reported by The Wall Street Journal showing a transformation of the Strip into a “smart city” with “tech driven governance.”

Nowhere is there a designation for cultural sites, nor does the map seem to be built around keeping or restoring any parts of Gaza that retain Palestinian heritage or life. The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s razing of the territory, clear the rubble in which thousands of Palestinians’ bodies are thought to be trapped, and replace it with real estate opportunities for investors.

“Gaza, as President Trump has been saying, has amazing potential,” said Kushner.

At the signing ceremony, Trump said that Gaza, home to millions of Palestinians, is “a great location” that should be viewed as a “big real estate site,” and expressed his interest in the region as a “real estate person at heart.”

“I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property — what it could be for so many people, it’ll be so great, people that are living so poorly are gonna be living so well,” Trump said.

Kushner touted the White House’s goal of applying “free market economy principles” to the razing and redevelopment of Gaza. He also expressed a desire to replace the humanitarian aid system for Palestinians in the region using those principles.

Palestinians have strongly condemned the plan.

“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’” wrote Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa. “Palestinians will be pushed behind walls and gates, retrained in ‘technical schools’ to serve Israel’s supremacists ideology. The indigenous traditions and social fabric of this land will be obliterated utterly.”

“If the goal is truly peace, then the path is simple: end the occupation and help restore the rights that have been taken from Palestinians since 1948,” said Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer from Gaza. “We, the Palestinian people, are the ones who must determine our own future. Peace cannot be imposed while our land is occupied, our lives controlled, and our voices ignored.”

January 24, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

A Board of Peace built on the rubble of Gaza

22 January 2026 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/a-board-of-peace-built-on-the-rubble-of-gaza/

There are moments in politics when language becomes so detached from reality that it tips from cynicism into a farce. Appointing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” for Gaza is one such moment.

Netanyahu is not a neutral stakeholder. He is not a reluctant participant dragged into a tragic conflict. He is the leader who has overseen the systematic destruction of Gaza: tens of thousands of civilians killed, entire neighbourhoods erased, hospitals flattened, universities bombed, and a population deliberately deprived of food, water, shelter, and hope. He is also the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

That Israel has rejected those charges or dismissed them as political is beside the point. Courts exist precisely because perpetrators rarely accept responsibility for their own actions. The question is not whether Netanyahu agrees with the accusations – it is whether the facts on the ground support them.

They do.

International law defines genocide not by slogans or historical analogies, but by actions and intent. Killing members of a protected group. Causing serious bodily or mental harm. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s destruction, in whole or in part. Gaza today bears the unmistakable imprint of each of these elements.

Add to this the repeated, dehumanising rhetoric from senior Israeli officials – Palestinians described as “human animals”, Gaza spoken of as something to be “flattened”, “erased”, or emptied – and the claim that this is merely an unfortunate but lawful military campaign collapses under its own weight.

Legal processes move slowly. They always do. Genocide is almost never recognised as such while it is unfolding. Rwanda was denied until the machetes were put down. Srebrenica was minimised until the mass graves were opened. History shows that moral clarity arrives long before judicial finality.

Which is precisely why Netanyahu’s elevation to a “Board of Peace” is so grotesque. Peace is not brokered by those actively prosecuting a war of annihilation. Reconstruction is not overseen by those who created the ruins. And justice is not served by rehabilitating leaders while the bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.

Trump’s board is not a peace initiative. It is a branding exercise – one that launders responsibility, flattens moral distinctions, and asks the world to accept Orwellian doublespeak as diplomacy.

Calling this arrangement a farce is not rhetorical excess. It is an accurate description. When an alleged war criminal is recast as a peacemaker, language itself has been bombed into submission.

And Gaza, once again, is expected to pay the price.

January 24, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, politics international | Leave a comment

Welcome to the Peace IPO: Gaza, Rebranded as a Prospectus

In a February 2024 bull-session at Harvard, Kushner gazed at Gaza and saw—not a besieged enclave packed with families and memory – but “very valuable” waterfront property, and he floated the idea of moving civilians out so Israel could “clean it up.”  As you do.

21 January 2026 David Tyler, https://theaimn.net/welcome-to-the-peace-ipo-gaza-rebranded-as-a-prospectus/

Trump’s so‑called “Board of Peace” looks less like a new deal than Jared Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” 2019 plan re-branded. It’s as flash as a rat with a gold tooth in a new suit and a limited‑edition Speedmaster, but woefully vapid. It’s a real‑estate pitch pimped as an opportunity to the canny. Palestinians appear merely as background labour: extras, porters, shoeshine boys and waiters in a production where they’re expected to serve, not share.

While Israel’s Likud‑led far‑right coalition continues its military actions, attacks and land grabs that UN experts and human‑rights organisations describe as genocidal in effect.

The difference is not the logic. The difference is the volume. And a crass vulgarity meter off the scale. But nothing can distract from the monumental inhumanity and asinine stupidity of the whole project.

Not to mention calculated cruelty. In 2019, the sales pitch was polite. It spoke in the soothing language of workshops and investment frameworks; a $50 billion vision to “unlock” Palestinian potential, as if the West Bank and Gaza were a start-up stuck in beta because it hadn’t embraced enough deregulation.  Palestinians boycotted it because the plan put money in the driver’s seat and rights in the boot.

In 2026, the pitch is blunt: join the Board, bring capital, buy a seat at the table, said to be a US$1 billion buy-in for “permanent” membership, while the souls whose land is now an upscale reno, get “technocratic committees,” “transition governance,” and the home comforts of Israeli management.

Peace, in other words, has gone subscription-tier.

How we got this Frankenstein

The Frankenstein story begins with another colour-coded Excel spreadsheet. As so many other, modern horrors do.

Kushner’s original “Peace to Prosperity” treated Palestine as an underperforming asset. The cure was foreign capital, investment corridors, industrial parks, tax-free zones, economic carrots without a match-stick of political liberation.  The occupation, the siege, the “asymmetry” or inequality of power was left intact, politely ignored, like rust and dried blood, under a quick new paint-job.

Of course, the plan didn’t just sideline Palestinians’ political agency, the elephant in the room. It shut them out. Local and global fat cats would use Palestinians as a labour pool and a “stability problem,” while sovereignty, restitution and justice sat outside, like poor, uninvited relatives at a wedding.

Then came the moment where the whole philosophy slipped its tie and revealed the raw instinct underneath it.

In a February 2024 bull-session at Harvard, Kushner gazed at Gaza and saw—not a besieged enclave packed with families and memory – but “very valuable” waterfront property, and he floated the idea of moving civilians out so Israel could “clean it up.”  As you do. That is not a diplomatic remark. It is a hard-nosed developer’s call. It is the real-estate gaze: people only get in the way, land is your opportunity.

Fast-forward to Trump’s “Board of Peace,” and you can see the same gaze. Formulated.

The language is a sales brochure parody. The White House frames the Board as part of a “Comprehensive Plan” and celebrates the creation of a Gaza administrative committee as a “vital step” in a multi-phase roadmap for “peace, stability, reconstruction, and prosperity.”  Al Jazeera notes a three-tier structure that puts Trump and pro-Israel officials at the top while Palestinians get to take out the garbage. The landowners are relegated to municipal duties.  ABC says invitation mail-outs are thick and fast. It worries that Trump is setting up as an alternative, $uperior, model to UN mechanisms.

Satire is writing itself by the time we get to the seat price. Bloomberg reports Trump wants nations to pay $1 billion for permanent membership, with renewable term options for non-paying participants.

This is not diplomacy. This is a club. It is peace by buy-in. A moral authority with an admission fee?

Why it could be proposed at all

Something this offensive to Gaza’s actual inhabitants only makes sense once Palestine is reclassified, from homeland to high-yield opportunity zone.

That reclassification didn’t happen overnight. It took decades of a broader architecture of policy and language to reduce Palestinian rights to “final status issues”; treat their political claims as a negotiating inconvenience, and normalise de facto control on the ground as an unchangeable reality.

Once you perform that trick; once you turn rights into “issues,” and a people into an “administrative challenge”, then the next step becomes conceivable: the coastline becomes an asset; the survivors become “human resources”; and peace becomes a portfolio strategy.

Trump’s political brand fits perfectly. He fuses branding with foreign policy. He doesn’t ask, “What is just?” He asks, “What sells?” He doesn’t ask, “What do people consent to?” He asks, “Who’s paying?”

CounterPunch repeatedly frames the Trump approach to “peace” as chaotic, self-interested statecraft where the prize is not justice but leverage, contracts, and strategic positioning; the kind of diplomacy that behaves like a market raid.

So the Board of Peace is not an aberration. It is the system, finally saying the quiet part out loud.

Satire interlude: Peace, now with equity options

There is, apparently, a new path to peace in Gaza: an Initial Public Offering.

The prospectus is glossy. The board is illustrious. Only one thing missing from the term sheet is the consent of the people who actually live there.

Trump, now moonlighting as Chair of Global Serenity LLC, has got up a committee that includes himself, Kushner, and Tony Blair: a trio whose track record is a museum of modern hubris. It’s less a diplomatic team than a support group for men who believe history is a distressed asset they were born to privatise.

The sales pitch is an elegantly simple Levantine Walz:

One. Label Gaza “valuable waterfront property”; a phrase typically intoned just before someone proposes a golf course over a mass grave.

Two. Announce that peace comes with tiers. A “permanent seat”? $1 billion, thank you. Peace, but make it premium.

Three. Invite governments and investors to bid for moral authority while Palestinians are quietly sidelined into the business plan as “local capacity.”

Kushner, once tasked with making peace by people who confused “son-in-law” with “diplomat,” returns as the visionary architect. The same man who dismissed political claims as obstacles and mused that Gazans could be moved out so someone could finally do something tasteful with the shoreline.

Having failed at “Peace to Prosperity,” he has now moved on to “Peace to Portfolio Diversification.”

What it really represents

Strip away the PR turd-polish and the Board of Peace represents three deeper trends:

Neoliberal occupation

Economic-first “solutions” that treat Palestinians as an economic population to be “developed” rather than a political people to be free. This was the Bahrain model: investment theatre without dismantling the structures that make normal economic life impossible.

Financialisation of justice

A $1 billion buy-in doesn’t just raise governance questions; it changes the moral architecture. It says legitimacy can be bought. It says peace is an asset class. It says the right to influence the future of Gaza belongs to whoever can wire the funds.

Erasure by technocracy

National claims, refugees, restitution, the right of return are all swept aside and replaced with “governance development,” “capacity building,” “administrative transition.” The jargon fog in which an occupied people are recoded as an admin problem consultants can solve.

The real genius is euphemism density. Layer upon layer. Occupation becomes “security architecture.” Siege becomes “border management.” External control becomes “oversight.” And the bombed-out landscape becomes “an opportunity corridor.”

What’s likely to happen next

Here the satire ends and the stakes bite. Legitimacy will be radioactive so long as Palestinians remain excluded from real sovereignty while the conditions of coercion persist. A structure unveiled about them, without them, is not peace, it’s administration.

Those positioned to profit will circle early. Reconstruction is always where politics, contracts, and influence meet. A pay-to-play architecture is an engraved invitation to opportunists and aligned states seeking leverage.

Civil society backlash will grow precisely because the moral inversion is so blatant: catastrophe monetised; rights treated as optional add-ons.

And the core problem, the one no amount of branding can fix, remains brutally simple:

If you build “peace” on the denial of self-determination, on the absence of accountability, and on the conversion of a people’s catastrophe into a capital project, you won’t get peace.

You’ll get a prospectus. You’ll get a boardroom. You’ll get a beachfront brochure printed on the ashes.

The Debt That Cannot Be Traded

The “Board of Peace” is a gamble that history can be treated as a distressed asset, and that a people’s identity can be diluted into a dividend. It assumes that if you make the brochure glossy enough, the ghosts of the past and the demands of the present will simply vanish into the “transition committees.”

But there is a flaw in the real-estate gaze: it mistakes silence for consent and rubble for a blank slate.

True peace is not a subscription service, and it certainly isn’t a premium tier accessible only to those with a billion dollars to burn. If we have learned anything from the century that birthed this Frankenstein, it is that human dignity is the one currency that cannot be devalued by an Excel spreadsheet. The “Board” may try to privatise the future, but they cannot buy the air, the memory, or the sheer, stubborn persistence of fifteen million people who refuse to be “extras” in their own story.

The old truth remains: you can build a boardroom on a shoreline, and you can print a prospectus on the ashes, but you cannot govern a people who haven’t been seen, only managed. In the end, the most “valuable property” in Gaza isn’t the waterfront; it is the unyielding agency of those who live there.

That is the debt that eventually comes due, and it is the only one that can’t be settled at a discount and the only one we keep turning away from at incalculable cost to our collective humanity.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES

January 22, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, secrets,lies and civil liberties | 1 Comment

A Cruel Truce: Israel’s Ongoing Demolition of Gaza

15 January 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/a-cruel-truce-israels-ongoing-demolition-of-gaza/

What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces go about their business making the Strip even more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring that that land will be vacated, either through force or massaged consent, to enable its eventual seizure.

In a January 12 report, The New York Times found that Israel had razed over 2,500 buildings in the Strip since the ceasefire with Hamas commenced on October 10, 2025. These have been initiated on the Israeli side of the demarcated side known as the Yellow Line. The report, however, also notes the demolition of buildings on the side controlled by Hamas. “The scale of ongoing destruction is stark. Across eastern Gaza, in areas under Israeli control, satellite imagery reveals that entire blocks have been erased since the cease-fire, as well as swaths of farmland and agricultural greenhouses.”

The NYT quoted the grave words of Gaza-based political analyst Mohammed Al-Astal: “The Israeli military is destroying everything in front of it – homes, schools, factories and streets. There’s no security justification for what it’s doing.” A former Israeli official did not disagree. “This is absolute destruction,” assessed Shaul Arieli, commander of Israeli forces in Gaza in the 1990s. “It’s not selective, it’s everything.”

Under the thin covering of a cruel truce, Israel’s demolition campaign, according to the Palestinian National Initiative Movement, is intended to “deepen the humanitarian catastrophe and impose forced displacement and collective punishment on the people of Gaza.”

Justifications provided to the NYT were not reassuring, relying on that part of President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan affirming that, “All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapons production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt.” An Israeli military official denied a lack of discrimination in the destruction. At times, buildings collapsed because of the IDF’s detonation of explosives in tunnels underneath them. The air force had also been striking structures deemed a threat to Israeli soldiers, some of them being adjacent to the Yellow Line. It was also conceded that demolitions were taking place on both sides of the Yellow Line, though Israeli forces had not crossed the line in doing so.

This pattern is not a newly discovered one. The BBC took note of this in November last year when it revealed that “entire neighbourhoods controlled by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been levelled in less than a month, apparently through demolitions.” The broadcaster’s Verify unit had analysed satellite imagery showing “that the destruction of buildings in Gaza by the Israeli military has been continuing on a huge scale.” Many of the buildings destroyed showed no indication of being damaged prior to their razing, notably in such areas as eastern Khan Younis, around Abasan al-Kabira. Gardens, trees and a number of small orchards were also pulverised in the exercise.

Such actions should have been considered blatant violations of the ceasefire terms. Israeli officials, current and former, were having none of it. Ex-head of the National Security Doctrine Department, Eitan Shamir, suggested that the IDF had acted in accordance with the terms, seeing as they did not apply to areas of the Strip behind the Yellow Line. This gorgeous casuistry also found form in the cold language of an IDF spokesperson who explained that, in accordance with the agreement, “all terror infrastructure, including tunnels, is to be dismantled throughout Gaza. Israel is acting in response to threats, violations, and terror infrastructure.” The level of destruction permitted relies on the beholder’s definition of the threat posed.

In December, it was the turn of Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency, which found much the same thing. “Satellite images showed the latest demolitions took place between November 5 and December 13, with most concentrated in the Shujayea and the Tuffah neighbourhood.” The images also revealed demolitions in the southern city of Rafah and the levelling of agricultural facilities east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the destruction by an occupying power of real or personal property belonging either individually or collectively to private persons, or to a State, public authorities, or social or co-operative organisations, except in circumstances where it is absolutely necessary as part of military operations (Article 53).  

In an email to Al Jazeera in December, Adil Haque of Rutgers Law School was sceptical that the systematically destructive activities of the IDF had complied with the provisions of the Convention. “With a general ceasefire in place, and only a few sporadic exchanges of fire, it is not plausible that such significant destruction of civilian property has been rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.” Absolute necessity, he explained, had to “arise from military operations, that is, from combat or direct preparations for combat.”

In responding to the NYT report, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, summed up the grim state of affairs with characteristic sharpness. “The so called peace plan,” she fumed on social media, “is allowing Israel to ‘finish the job’: 450 killed; 2,500 structures destroyed; lifesaving aid blocked.” Less a peace plan, it would seem, than a state of ongoing, permitted violence falling just short of war.

January 20, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Founders of Deadly Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), ‘Shaping’ New US-Backed Administration for Gaza: Report

  Netanyahu’s top military advisor is among those central to the new executive committee, which is due to operate under Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’

News Desk, JAN 14, 2026, https://thecradle.co/articles/founders-of-deadly-ghf-shaping-new-us-backed-administration-for-gaza-report

Many of the figures emerging as key players in the new US-backed administration for Gaza were central to Washington’s Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the Financial Times (FT) reported.

The GHF was a deadly US-Israeli aid scheme introduced in May, which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of starving Palestinian aid seekers. 

According to the FT report, the Gaza executive committee set to be announced soon – which will operate directly under a Trump-led ‘Board of Peace’ – is being “shaped” by several people close to Israel. 

This includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief military advisor, Roman Gofman, and US-Israeli investor Michael Eisenberg, who has been advising the Israeli premier since the start of the ceasefire. 

Others involved are US-Israeli policymaker Aryeh Lightstone and Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneur Liran Tancman, who is Mossad-linked.

All four of these men were involved in the establishment of GHF. The deadly aid scheme resulted in the killing of around 2,000 Palestinians within half a year.

Under the pretext of humanitarian assistance, Palestinians were crammed into tight spaces and handed limited quantities of aid for months as Israeli troops and US contractors regularly opened fire at unarmed aid seekers.

The announcement of Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ was meant to take place this week, but has been delayed. According to reports, the executive committee that will operate under the board could be announced as early as Wednesday.

“Eighteen Palestinian officials have received invitations to join the committee that will replace Hamas,” sources told the New Arab. 

Ali Shaath, a former deputy planning minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA), has been designated to head the committee, while retired intelligence official Mohammed Nisman is expected to assume control over security.

According to the sources, the committee is scheduled to hold its meeting in Egypt’s capital on Thursday, the sources said.

The ‘Board of Peace,’ which will be announced later, is expected to include 15 world leaders from countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt.

Hamas has repeatedly vowed that it is ready to hand over governance to an independent body of technocratic Palestinians, as envisioned in the truce.

It rejects disarmament until an independent Palestinian state is formed, but has expressed openness to an initiative that would “freeze” its weapons for a period of time.

The group has stressed that the second phase of the ceasefire deal cannot commence until Israel halts all violations.

Israel has killed at least 442 Palestinians since the US-backed ‘ceasefire’ was reached in October last year, the Gaza Health Ministry reported. Over 1,200 have been injured.

Tel Aviv continues to indiscriminately target civilians, justifying the attacks under the pretext of alleged ‘security threats,’ while persisting in the violent pursuit of resistance leaders with no regard for the terms of the ceasefire agreement. The blockade on Gaza also remains in place, further deepening the humanitarian crisis.

Sources told Times of Israel in a report published on 11 January that the Israeli army has drawn up plans for a new assault in the Gaza Strip – aimed at expanding the areas under Tel Aviv’s control in violation of the ceasefire.

January 19, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, politics | Leave a comment

Trump names son-in-law, Rubio, Blair to Gaza ‘Board of Peace’

Jessica Gardner, Jan 17, 2026 , https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/trump-names-son-in-law-rubio-blair-to-gaza-board-of-peace-20260117-p5nuqb

Washington | United States President Donald Trump has named Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his Middle East fixer Steve Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and private equity baron Marc Rowan to a Board of Peace to oversee the rehabilitation of wartorn Gaza.

The formation of the board, which will be chaired by Trump, was one of the 20-steps in a peace plan that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the terror group Hamas agreed to in September 2025, which led to the longest enduring ceasefire in the two-year conflict.

A White House statement released on Friday afternoon (Saturday AEDT) named the seven-member executive board, which also includes former British prime minister Sir Tony Blair, World Bank president Ajay Banga and US national security adviser Robert Gabriel.

There are no women on the board, nor are there any Palestinian representatives or leaders from Arab nations.

Each board member will “oversee a defined portfolio critical to Gaza’s stabilisation and long-term success,” the White House said. These responsibilities included governance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilisation.

Trump has also appointed Major General Jasper Jeffers to command an International Stabilisation Force to “establish security, preserve peace, and establish a durable terror-free environment”.

Trump has previously relied on Witkoff and Kushner as on-the-ground sherpas of his unorthodox style of foreign policy. Witkoff, a former real estate developer, has also been heavily involved in negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

The two men, as well as Blair and Rowan, the chief executive of $US908 billion ($1.4 trillion) investment giant Apollo Global Management, will also join a Gaza Executive Board responsible for supporting governance and service delivery.

Other members of that board include Turkish Foreign Minster Hakan Fidan, Qatari diplomat Ali Al-Thawadi, Egyptian intelligence official Hassan Rashad and United Arab Emirates Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem Al-Hashimy.

Trump earned praise for his role in persuading Netanyahu to end his military campaign in Gaza, which was sparked by the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by the terror group Hamas, which killed 1200 Israelis and took 250 hostages. Israel’s two-year retaliation led to the death of over 70,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians.

The ceasefire led to the return of all living hostages and almost all the remains of those hostages who had been killed.

Witkoff said in a post on social media platform X on Wednesday that the White House was moving into the second phase of Trump’s peace plan, which will include establishing a transitional Palestinian governing committee and beginning the complicated tasks of disarming Hamas and reconstruction.

The United Nations has estimated reconstruction will cost over $US50 billion. This process is expected to take years, and little money has been pledged so far.

Trump’s 20-point plan — which was approved by the U.N. Security Council — lays out an ambitious vision for ending Hamas’ rule in Gaza. If successful, it would see the rebuilding of a demilitarized Gaza under international supervision, the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world, and the creation of a possible pathway to Palestinian independence.

But if the deal stalls, Gaza could be trapped in an unstable limbo for years to come, with Hamas remaining in control of parts of the territory, Israel’s army enforcing an open-ended occupation, and its residents stuck homeless, unemployed, unable to travel abroad and dependent on international aid to stay alive.

The ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, although Israeli fire has killed more than 450 Palestinians since then, according to Gaza health officials. Palestinian militants, meanwhile, continue to hold the remains of the last hostage — an Israeli police officer killed in the Hamas-led attack that triggered the war.

Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people has struggled to keep cold weather and storms at bay while facing shortages of humanitarian aid and a lack of more substantial temporary housing, which is badly needed during the winter months.

January 17, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Genocide in Gaza, Apartheid in the Palestinian West Bank: UN Report.

Juan Cole, 01/08/2026, https://www.juancole.com/2026/01/genocide-apartheid-palestinian.html

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The UN Office of Human Rights, headed by Volker Türk, on Wednesday issued an extensive report on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank in which it for the first time described Israeli policies there as Apartheid. The executive summary says, “The report warns that Israel is violating international law requiring States to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”

Türk told the UN, “There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank. Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives – every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”

“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.” He is referring to racial discrimination in Apartheid South Africa from the late 1940s through the early 1990s.

He concluded, “Every negative trend documented in the report has not only continued but accelerated. And every day this is allowed to continue, the consequences worsen for Palestinians.”

The report ( PDF here) stresses how drastically the human rights situation for Palestinians in the West Bank has deteriorated since 2022:

* Palestinians in the West bank live under a different and harsher set of laws than do the Israeli squatters who have flooded into the territory

* Palestinians therefore have less access to resources, including land and water, than do the squatters

* The report notes that the International Court of Justice in the Hague found in 2024 that “the systemic discrimination against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, together with the restrictions of movement imposed on Palestinians through checkpoints, as well as limited access to roads, natural resources, land and basic social facilities, amounted to a situation of racial segregation.” The ICJ noted then that the situation verged on Apartheid and would be properly so characterized if the Israelis did not take immediate ameliorating steps (they did not). The ICJ, indeed, ruled the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories it seized in 1967 to now be illegal, since it had departed so extensively from International Humanitarian Law in its rule of these people. Moreover, IHL had envisioned occupations to be short and to endure only during an active war, not to stretch into decades.

* Palestinians’ land and homes are routinely taken away from them by the Israeli authorities or are arbitrarily and lawlessly encroached on by the Israeli squatters. In Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas Governorates, some 32,000 people were recently expelled by Israeli troops from the refugee camps in which they had lived. The report adds, “Thousands of Palestinians have also been evicted from their homes across the West Bank, which may amount to unlawful transfer, a war crime.” That is, the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute forbid transferring people in militarily occupied territories out of their homes. When the Nazis occupied Poland they expelled a lot of Poles from it in hopes of replacing them with Germans, and these laws were designed prevent a repeat of such policies. The IHRA people can jump up and down all they like, but the Nazi plan for Poland and the Zionist plan for Gaza and the West Bank are very similar.

* Palestinians face “criminal prosecution in military courts during which their due process and fair trial rights are systematically violated.” This treatment is only accorded Palestinians. Israeli squatters on the West Bank who do get into trouble with the law are tried in Israeli civil courts as though they were living in Israel.

* The UN says, “The report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe the separation, segregation and subordination are intended to be permanent, to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians. ‘Acts committed with the intention to maintain such a policy amount to a violation of Article 3 of ICERD (the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination), which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid,’ it finds.”

* Israeli troops and squatters sometimes just shoot down innocent Palestinians. They don’t treat Israelis that way, an obvious sign of discrimination. The High Commission on Human Rights, the report says,”has consistently documented patterns of unlawful killings of Palestinians, including apparent extra- judicial executions by the ISF [the Israeli military], with almost complete impunity.” Elsewhere the report notes, “ISF [Israeli Security Forces] have killed 2,321 Palestinians (1,760 men, 65 women, 496 children) in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in the absence of hostilities there, and injured thousands more, in many instances causing life-long injuries and disabilities. In the same period, 205 Israelis (including 148 men, 32 women, 25 children) have been killed in the occupied West Bank,” In the old days, the Israelis maintained a ten to one ration of Palestinians killed to Israelis. The report doesn’t say so, but that ratio has been raised to 100 to one or 1000 to one in some cases.

* The Israelis have demolished the infrastructure of water for the Palestinian West Bank, and then confiscated the water. They make the Palestinians buy back their own water from an Israeli corporation.

January 12, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

As Israel bans aid orgs in Gaza, notorious mercenary firm seeks “Targeter”

the Israeli government is using the absurdly onerous new registration standards as cover to ban virtually every credible international aid organization from entering Gaza.

Max Blumenthal·December 31, 2025, https://thegrayzone.com/2025/12/31/israel-aid-gaza-mercenary-targeter/

Are Israel and the Trump admin planning to revive the dystopian Gaza Humanitarian Foundation scheme that spawned famine and death under cover of humanitarian aid?

In its bid to continue the genocide in Gaza, Israel has banned 37 international aid organizations from entering the decimated, militarily occupied coastal enclave. This leaves only five humanitarian groups still able to operate inside Gaza.

At the same time, one of the US mercenary firms responsible for securing the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites which were present during the worst periods of famine in Gaza, when at least 3000 Palestinian civilians were gunned down while seeking aid, has posted an ad soliciting former special forces soldiers for offensive operations.

UG Solutions, the scandal-stained private mercenary firm, announced this December that it was hiring an “experienced Targeter to support intelligence-driven operations through the identification, development, validation, and maintenance of operational targets.” The targeter will be expected to “Develop, validate, and maintain operational target packages in accordance with approved targeting processes.”

Anthony Aguilar, the retired United States Army Lt. Col and former Green Beret who blew the whistle on UG Solutions’ human rights abuses in Gaza, told me he believes that Israel’s ban on the 37 international aid organizations signals the return of UG Solutions as part of a restructured version of the Israeli-controlled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation scheme.

While it’s unclear where the UG Solutions targeter position will be deployed, if they are being hired for upcoming operations in Gaza, Aguilar says “this shows that the US, though paramilitary contractors, is now going to either directly target, or feed target data to the IDF.”

To set the stage for its blanket ban on international aid organizations, Israel’s intel-tied Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has demanded that all staffers of aid NGOs prove they do not support calls to boycott Israel, that they do not support armed struggle or oppose Israel’s existence as an exclusivist Jewish state, and that they do not “actively advance delegitimization activities against the State of Israel.”

Aid staffers must also demonstrate that they have never questioned the established history of the Holocaust or challenged official Israeli narratives about October 7 – including, presumably, that Palestinians committed “mass rape” or beheaded babies.

Israel has also demanded that Doctors Without Borders provide COGAT occupation administrators with the personal data of its staff and donors, an unprecedented move by a belligerent in a conflict which few, if any, aid groups could ever honor.

It seems obvious that the Israeli government is using the absurdly onerous new registration standards as cover to ban virtually every credible international aid organization from entering Gaza. In doing so, the apartheid entity seemingly seeks to deprive Palestinians living inside the yellow occupation line of sustenance, forcing them to leave Gaza, or to move into one of the high-tech, concentration camp-like “smart cities” mapped out in the dystopian new “Project Sunrise” proposal marketed by Trump cronies Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

And it is there that they would be “secured” by a mercenary outfit like UG Solutions – and targeted if they dared to resist.

Below is a list of all the aid orgs banned by Israel from operating in Gaza:

1. Accion contra el Hambre – Action Against Hunger
2. Action Aid
3. Alianza por la Solidaridad
4. Artsen zonder Grenzen (Medecins Sans Frontieres Nederland)
5. Campaign for the Children of Palestine (CCP Japan)
6. CARE
7. DanChurchAid
8. Danish Refugee Council
9. Handicap International – Humanity and Inclusion
10. Japan International Volunteer center
11. Medecins Du Monde (FRANCE)
12. Medecins du Monde Switzerland
13. Medecins Sans Frontières Belgium
14. Medecins Sans Frontieres France
15. Medicos del Mundo (Spain)
16. Mercy Corps
17. MSF Spain – Doctors Without Borders Spain
18. NORWEGIAN REFUGEE COUNCIL
19. Oxfam Novib
20. Premiere Urgence Internationale
21. Terre des hommes Lausanne
22. The International Rescue Committee (IRC)
23. WeWorld-GVC
24. World Vision International
25. Relief International
26. Fondazione AVSI
27. Movement for Peace – MPDL
28. American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
29. Medico International
30. PSAS – The Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden
31. Defense for Children International
32. Medical Aid for Palestinians – UK
33. Caritas Internationalis
34. Caritas Jerusalem
35. Near East council churches
36. OXFAM Quebec
37. War Child holland

January 5, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Bans Dozens of Aid Groups from Operating in Gaza, Including Doctors Without Borders.

Other groups that are being banned include the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Catholic charity Caritas, and Oxfam

by Dave DeCamp | December 30, 2025 , https://news.antiwar.com/2025/12/30/israel-bans-dozens-of-aid-groups-from-operating-in-gaza-including-doctors-without-borders/

Starting on January 1, Israel will ban 37 international aid groups and charities from operating in Gaza in its latest effort to add to the misery for the Palestinian civilians living in flimsy tents and bombed-out buildings in the Strip.

The groups being banned include several prominent international aid organizations: Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Catholic charity Caritas, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Oxfam. The NGOs will also be barred from working in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel will stop the groups from operating in Gaza for failing to comply with its stringent new requirements, which include handing over information about their Palestinian employees. The new Israeli rules also include vague ideological requirements that can disqualify any NGO that “promotes delegitimization campaigns” against Israel, or if it, or any officeholder, has called for a boycott of Israel.

An Israeli official claimed, without providing evidence, that an investigation revealed “employees of certain organizations were involved in terrorist activity… in particular, Doctors Without Borders.” The action against MSF is seen in part as an Israeli reaction to the organization’s criticism of Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Strip.

In a statement warning of the consequences of banning it from Gaza, MSF said that it has served hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza this year.

“If Israeli authorities revoke MSF’s access to Gaza in 2026, a large portion of people in Gaza will lose access to critical medical care, water, and lifesaving support,” the group said. “MSF’s activities serve nearly half a million people in Gaza through our vital support to the destroyed health system. MSF continues to seek constructive engagement with Israeli authorities to continue its activities.”

Israel’s move to ban the NGOs comes as Israel continues to violate the US-backed ceasefire deal by continuing to launch attacks on Palestinians and maintaining restrictions on aid and shelter materials entering the Strip.

January 2, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel’s Ceasefire Violations in Gaza Continue to Pile Up

By International Middle East Media Center, December 29, 2025 , https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/29/israels-ceasefire-violations-in-gaza-continue-to-pile-up/


Israeli occupation forces continued to breach the ceasefire agreement on Friday and Saturday, carrying out new airstrikes, artillery fire, and machine‑gun attacks across several areas of the Gaza Strip.

The renewed violations come as casualty figures climb and rescue teams warn they are unable to reach many of the dead and wounded.

On Saturday, the body of the child Atta Ma’moun Mai was recovered after he fell into a deep water well near the al‑Sudaniyya junction in the Gaza Strip.

On Friday evening, a Palestinian man, Odai al‑Maqadma, died after being shot by Israeli forces east of Gaza City.

Witnesses said troops opened machine‑gun fire toward him as he sat near the gate of Hafsa School. He was struck in the head and rushed to hospital in critical condition, where doctors later pronounced him dead.

Air, Naval, and Artillery Fire Across Multiple Regions

Israeli naval vessels opened fire on Saturday morning toward the coastline west of Gaza City, forcing fishermen and nearby residents to take cover.

At the same time, the Israeli occupation army continued demolishing buildings east of the Zeitoun and Tuffah neighborhoods, as well as in the Maghazi and Nuseirat refugee camps in central Gaza.

Further south, airstrikes, and bursts of machine‑gun fire were reported in the eastern areas of Khan Younis, where thousands of displaced families remain in makeshift shelters.

The Israeli Airforce also fired missile near the eastern graveyard of the Al-Bureij refugee camp, in central Gaza.

Humanitarian workers say these attacks have made it nearly impossible to deliver aid or recover bodies from destroyed neighborhoods, despite the declared ceasefire.

Casualty Toll Continues to Rise

The overall death toll from the genocide in Gaza has reached 71,266 Palestinians killed and 171,219 injured since 7 October 2023.

Medical teams reported that in the past 48 hours alone, hospitals received 29 bodies—including 4 newly killed individuals and 25 bodies recovered from rubble—along with 8 wounded. Many more victims remain trapped under collapsed buildings and in streets that rescue crews cannot safely access.

Civil‑defense teams say they are unable to reach large sections of Gaza City, central Gaza, and Khan Younis because Israeli forces continue to fire toward access routes and because many roads remain destroyed.

13-year-old Alaa suffered multiple injuries after surviving an Israeli attack in Gaza. While she recovered in the hospital, Israeli forces shot and killed her father as he was seeking humanitarian aid. pic.twitter.com/95RLrpFXwY— Defense for Children (@DCIPalestine) December 27, 2025

“Ceasefire Period” Still Marked by Killings and Destruction

Since the “ceasefire” announced on 11 October 2025, at least 410 Palestinians have been killed and 1,134 injured, while 649 bodies have been recovered from various locations. Dozens more remain under the rubble or in areas where rescue teams cannot operate.

Medical authorities also confirmed that 292 additional fatalities were recently added to the cumulative death toll after their documentation was completed by the official casualty verification committee between 19 and 26 December 2025..

A “Ceasefire” Undermined by Ongoing Military Violations

A review of field reports, hospital data, and eyewitness accounts shows a consistent pattern of Israeli military activity that contradicts the ceasefire’s terms. Violations documented over the past week include:

  • Ground fire targeting civilians and rescue workers in eastern Gaza City and Khan Younis.
  • Airstrikes and demolitions in Zeitoun, Tuffah, Maghazi, and Nuseirat.
  • Naval fire along Gaza’s western coastline.
  • Obstruction of rescue efforts, leaving victims under rubble.

As Israel pushes the ceasefire ‘yellow line’ deeper into Gaza amid complete mediator silence, systematic detonation of entire blocks is now underway. pic.twitter.com/Avvp5JgTX1— Israel Genocide Tracker (@trackingisrael) December 27, 2025

Humanitarian organizations say the pattern amounts to a “ceasefire in name only,” with Israeli forces maintaining operational pressure across multiple fronts while restricting the movement of civilians and emergency crews.

Humanitarian Conditions Remain in Freefall

Despite the ceasefire, Gaza’s humanitarian situation remains catastrophic. Hospitals are overwhelmed, morgues are full, and thousands of families remain displaced in areas still exposed to fire.

Gaza’s Civil Defense said it is facing “extremely harsh humanitarian conditions,” reporting continuous distress calls from displaced families as the winter storm intensifies.

The agency noted that many worn‑out tents did not withstand the intense winds, leading to their tearing or being completely uprooted, leaving families exposed in the open.

Aid agencies warn that without a genuine halt to military activity, the death toll will continue to rise—not only from direct attacks but from untreated injuries, lack of medical access, and the collapse of essential services.

January 1, 2026 Posted by | Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Kushner, Witkoff draft $112B proposal to develop Gaza into ‘smart city’ with luxury resorts.

by Shane Galvin, 22 Dec 25, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kushner-witkoff-draft-112b-proposal-to-develop-gaza-into-smart-city-with-luxury-resorts-and-us-footing-60b/ar-AA1SK9NI?ocid=BingNewsVerp

Trump administration reps have just revealed a grandiose $112 billion plan to rebuild war-torn Gaza into a futuristic international destination dubbed “Project Sunrise.”

The 10-year development plan, drafted by first son-in-law Jared Kushner, US special envoy Steve Witkoff, and two top White House aides, is currently courting investor countries with a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation detailing the bold plan to renovate burning rubble into beach resorts.

Gaza would see the development of luxury hotels, high speed rail and AI-optimized smart grid features that would revolutionize the small slice of the coveted Mediterranean coastline into a bustling metropolis, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Gaza’s destruction has been profound, but we believe what lies ahead is not just restoration — it’s a chance to develop a gateway of prosperity in the Middle East with state-of-the-art infrastructure, urban design, and technology,” the executive summary slide read, according to the outlet.

The total $112 billion cost would be spread out over 10 years, with the US agreeing to “anchor” up to $60 billion in grants and guarantees on debts by raising industry funds.

“Reimagining Gaza as a ‘smart city’ with tech-driven governance and services,” one slide from the PowerPoint presentation beamed.

The ambitious proposal — developed within the last 45 days by Kushner, Witkoff, and White House aides consulted Israeli security experts about the path forward — further called for establishing a “Chief Digital Office and an innovation lab to define standards and guide policymaking.”

The presentation does not go into detail about which countries or companies would be investing in the rebuilding fund, according to WSJ.

Though the plan mapped out distinct phases of construction, it did not provide details for housing the 2 million Palestinians who would be displaced during the massive construction necessary.

There is an estimated 68 million tons of rubble in Gaza after thousands of Israeli airstrikes leveled cities during the two-year war in Gaza.

US officials who have knowledge of the proposal are skeptical that it will come to fruition because a condition would be Hamas agreeing to disarm, the Journal reported.

Witkoff, meanwhile, met Saturday in Miami with high-level delegations from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar to discuss implementation for the second phase of the Gaza cease-fire plan.

December 29, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Israel Is Preparing for a Permanent Presence in Gaza, Satellite Images Reveal

Since the ceasefire, Israel has constructed at least 13 new military outposts inside Gaza, consolidated existing military infrastructure, built roads, and destroyed more Palestinian property.

Forensic Architecture and Drop Site News. Dec 21, 2025

Since the so-called ceasefire came into effect in Gaza on October 10, Israel has been consolidating its control of over 50% of Gaza and—according to new research by Forensic Architecture—physically altering the geography of the land. Through a combination of the construction of military infrastructure alongside the destruction of existing buildings, Israel appears to be laying the groundwork to establish a permanent presence in the majority of the Gaza Strip.

Israel has constructed at least 13 new military outposts inside Gaza since the ceasefire—primarily located along the yellow line, in eastern Khan Younis, and near the border with Israel, according to analysis of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture.

“Israel is doing what it always does, and what it historically has done best: establish ‘facts on the ground,’ incrementally rather than spectacularly, and make them permanent once those with influence to force it to reverse course either lose interest, decide that the cost of confronting Israel is not worth the price, or come out in open support of Israeli violations. Israel is in no rush and prepared to play the long game,” Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and a former UN official who worked as a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, told Drop Site after reviewing a summary of the Forensic Architecture findings.

The analysis also shows that, between October 10 and December 2, 2025, Israel has:

  • Accelerated the growth and infrastructure development of 48 existing military outposts inside Gaza.
  • Expanded a network of roads connecting military outposts inside Gaza to the Israeli road network, bases and settlements outside of Gaza.
  • Continued construction that began in September 2025 of a new road in Khan Younis, re-routing the Magen Oz corridor to run within Israel’s area of control.
  • Engaged in the systematic demolition and destruction of Palestinian property, particularly in eastern Khan Younis, targeting areas which haven’t already been destroyed. New military outposts and roads have emerged across this area.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-israel-building-military-outposts-roads-permanent-presence-yellow-line

December 28, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, politics international | Leave a comment

One excavator, 10,000 bodies, a sea of rubble: inside Gaza’s effort to retrieve and bury its dead

Under the relative calm of a ceasefire, Civil Defense crews in Gaza are undertaking the monumental feat of recovering thousands of bodies still trapped under the rubble.

By Tareq S. Hajjaj  December 25, 2025 https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/one-excavator-10000-bodies-a-sea-of-rubble-inside-gazas-effort-to-retrieve-and-bury-its-dead/

Fatima Salem waits outside anxiously, as rescue crews dig through the rubble of her family’s home in Gaza City on December 15th. With bated breath, she clings to the hope that all 60 of her family members – brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren – who were buried under the rubble after an Israeli airstrike targeted their building, will be rescued. 

But this was not a typical rescue operation, and Fatima was not waiting for signs of life. She knew everyone was dead. That’s because the airstrike on her family’s home happened almost exactly two years ago, on December 19, 2023, just two months into the genocide. 

The 60 members of the Salem family are some of an estimated 10,000 Palestinians whose bodies remain trapped under the extensive rubble across the Gaza Strip. Due to two years of active Israeli bombardment, the targeting and killing of civil defense crews, and the lack of heavy duty machinery required to excavate the tons of concrete rubble, rescue missions in Gaza have been largely stalled. 

But on December 15, the Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip announced the start of a long recovery process of bodies that have remained under the rubble for two years. The operations are focused only on the areas in the Gaza Strip not actively being occupied by the Israeli military, which accounts for roughly half of the territory. 

The first rescue mission was for the Salem family in Gaza City. 

“Here I lost every person dear to me; they are the closest people to me—my brothers and sisters and their families. I lost everyone in this place,” Fatima Salem cried. When she heard about the rescue mission, she rushed to the scene of the destroyed building, where the souls of her relatives had remained trapped for two years. 

She said that her family was targeted on December 19, 2023, after they fled from northern Gaza to Gaza City due to the intensification of shelling and fighting in their residential area. They found refuge in a building whose residents had evacuated, and gathered there with their children and families. No one who was in the building at the time of the bombing survived. 

“I want to see them, to embrace them, to bid them farewell,” she said as she stood before rows of  bones and skulls wrapped in white plastic shrouds, laid out on the ground in front of her. Some have been identified by their present surviving relatives, while others have not yet been identified.

Omar Suleiman, a member of the forensic department at the Civil Defense, was working at the scene of the Salem family. He described a painstaking process of trying to identify and record the identities of the deceased, saying that crews are documenting descriptions of the condition of the bodies in terms of form, height, and the level of decomposition they have reached, along with preserving a DNA sample when possible.

According to videos published by the Civil Defense on its Telegram channel, what is recovered from the remains of the martyrs is sometimes only bones, not always complete skulls, but rather bones from the chest and the feet, making identification a difficult matter.

According to Suleiman, the level of decomposition in the bodies was very high, which made it difficult for families to identify them. The lack of tools and technology for advanced DNA testing has also made the identification process more difficult. He said that crews were working “with very limited tools and under difficult and exhausting conditions.”

Civil Defense crews say they recovered all the bodies from the building, all belonging to the martyrs of the Salem family, in addition to 17 more bodies buried in the vicinity around the building. After two years, Fatima Salem was finally able to bid farewell. 

Thousands of bodies, limited resources

In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, on December 20, recovery operations began in areas of the city, starting with the martyrs of the Abu Hilal family. They were killed on August 13, 2025. 

Huda Abu Hilal, in her 20s, was the sole survivor of a strike that targeted her family’s home on August 13, 2025. Though she was inside the building at the time, just before the airstrike, Huda’s mom had asked her to go downstairs for something. At that moment, the home was bombed, and everyone except Huda was killed. 

“All my family was killed except me—my mother and father, my sisters, and their children—all of them were martyred,” she told Mondoweiss, adding that because her neighborhood remained under an evacuation order after the bombing, crews were not able to access her home to rescue her family. 

At the site, Samah Hamad, head of the forensic department of the Civil Defense, described the challenge ahead for crews. 

He said that in Khan Younis alone, there are 75 destroyed buildings with hundreds of bodies buried under the rubble that need to be recovered. Many of the buildings, he said, are located in the area behind the ‘yellow line’ that are inaccessible to Palestinian crews. But even in the areas that they can access, the rescue mission is slow moving. 

Hamad notes that the slowdown in these operations is due to the fact that all crews in the Gaza Strip are working with very limited equipment, as only one large excavator is being used in multiple cities and areas in the Strip. 

For the past two months since the ceasefire was announced, Huda said she would pass by the rubble of the home often, even if just to recite a prayer for her family still trapped beneath the rubble, hoping that they would be rescued soon.

“Now I can honor my martyred family by burying them, and we can move them to graves and make visiting them a habit,” Huda said.

December 28, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, PERSONAL STORIES | Leave a comment

Israel’s biggest con trick: Hiding the true numbers it has killed in Gaza

10 December 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-10/israel-con-numbers-killed-gaza/

Israel has penned us all into a ‘debate’, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire – not the genocide it is waging by other means

The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a “debate” in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.

It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)

Or even that these “debates” always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.

No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.

The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.

These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on.

Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been.

How long would your elderly parents survive in this hellscape?

How well would your diabetic child fare, or your sister with asthma, or your brother with cancer?

How well would you cope with catching pneumonia, or even a common cold, if you hadn’t had more than one small meal a day for months on end?

How would your wife deal with a difficult childbirth if there were no anaesthetics, or no hospital nearby, or a barely functioning hospital overwhelmed with victims from Israel’s latest bombing run.

And what would be the chances of your baby surviving if its mother could produce no milk from her starvation diet? And if you could not give the baby formula feed because Israel was blocking supplies from entry into the enclave? And if, anyway, the contaminated water supply could not be mixed into the formula powder?

None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.

According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.

The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.

The reality is likely to be even worse. That is without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been left with horrific injuries and psychological trauma.

Israel’s war planners know exactly how this direct-to-indirect ratio works. Which is why they chose to destroy nearly every home in Gaza, to bomb the power, sanitation and water facilities, to level the hospitals, and to block aid month after month.

They knew this would be the way Israel could carry out a genocide while offering its allies – western governments and its army of lobbyists – a “get out of jail card” for their active complicity.

Donald Trump’s so-called “ceasefire” is just another layer of deception in this endless game of smoke and mirrors. The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, reports that less than a quarter of aid trucks are getting into Gaza, past Israel’s continuing starvation blockade, despite Israeli commitments agreed as part of the “ceasefire”. Apparently, this doesn’t register as a gross ceasefire violation. It goes unnoticed.

Unicef reports further that in October alone, at the start of the “ceasefire”, nearly 18,000 new mothers and babies had to be hospitalised in Gaza from acute malnutrition.

The genocide isn’t over. Israel may have slowed the rate of direct killings it is committing by bombing Gaza, but the indirect killings continue unabated. And so does the Israeli-engineered “debate” in the West, one designed to obscure and excuse the mass murder of Gaza’s population.

December 12, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

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