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British military trained in Israel amid Gaza genocide

Armed forces personnel have ‘studied on educational staff courses’ since October 2023, Ministry of Defence discloses

JOHN McEVOY, DECLASSIFIED UK, 26 November 2025

British military personnel trained in Israel amid the Gaza genocide, Declassified can reveal.

The information comes in response to a parliamentary question tabled by Zarah Sultana MP.

On 18 November, Sultana asked the Ministry of Defence “whether any British armed forces officers have studied or trained at Israeli military colleges since October 2023”.

Defence minister Al Carns responded earlier today, saying: “Fewer than five British Armed Forces personnel have studied on educational staff courses in Israel since October 2023”.

It remains unclear where the troops studied or which branches of the military they came from.

But the revelation exposes a new layer of British military collaboration with Israel amid what the UN commission of inquiry has described as a genocide.

Charlie Herbert, a retired British army general, told Declassified: “It is absolutely extraordinary to think that UK military personnel have been undertaking military education or training courses in Israel over the past two years.

“Given the credible allegations of war crimes against the political and military leadership of the IDF, all such exchanges should have immediately ceased.

“It does our armed forces a huge disservice to be associated with the IDF, given the conduct of the IDF in Gaza since late 2023 and to think that we are training in Israel only adds to the accusations of UK complicity in this genocide”…………………….

Military training

The disclosure about British military officers training in Israel comes after Declassified revealed how Israeli soldiers have trained in Britain over the past two years…………………………………………………………………….. https://www.declassifieduk.org/british-military-trained-in-israel-amid-gaza-genocide/

November 28, 2025 Posted by | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Israel accelerates production of Iron Dome with US aid money.

By Tzally Greenberg, Nov 21, 2025, https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2025/11/21/israel-accelerates-production-of-iron-dome-with-us-aid-money/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=c4-overmatch

JERUSALEM — Israel will accelerate production of Iron Dome components with “billions of dollars” of U.S. aid money, the Israeli Defense Ministry said Nov. 20.

The announcement comes amid a tense ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, as Hezbollah continues to arm and strengthen itself in Lebanon and Hamas declares that it has no intention of giving up weapons. Israel used Iron Dome interceptors to intercept thousands of rockets fired from these two fronts during the two-year “Iron Swords” war.

Government officials here did not specify the exact amount of the purchase, but its Defense Ministry noted that the it will be made from the special U.S. aid package approved by Congress in April 2024 under the Biden administration, totaling at $8.7 billion.

This is the second purchase of interceptors from Rafael by the Israeli Defense Ministry in the past year that from that pot of money.

Israeli officials have said Iron Dome interceptors caught thousands of rockets fired from Gaza and Lebanon.

Iron Dome is an air defense system that intercepts short- and medium-range rockets and missiles, mortars, drones, helicopters and more. The Israeli Air Force claims that since the defense system began its operational service in 2011 it has shown a 95% interception success rate.

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is the prime contractor for the Iron Dome defense system, collaborating with ELTA Systems – a division in Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and mPrest Systems.

November 24, 2025 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel Launches Major Attacks Across Gaza, Killing at Least 28 Palestinians, Including Many Children.

by Dave DeCamp | November 19, 2025  https://news.antiwar.com/2025/11/19/israel-launches-major-attacks-across-gaza-killing-at-least-24-palestinians-including-many-children/

The Israeli military launched strikes across Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 28 Palestinians, including 17 women and children, as it continues to violate the US-backed ceasefire deal.

The Israeli military claimed that its forces came under fire in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, but provided no evidence, and according to Israeli media, there were no casualties among IDF troops, and the attack occurred on the Israeli-occupied side of the yellow line. Hamas later denied that its fighters fired on Israeli troops, and called the claim “a weak and exposed attempt to justify their ongoing crimes and violations.” Following the alleged incident, the IDF unleashed strikes on Gaza City.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that one Israeli strike targeted the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs in southeastern Gaza City, killing at least 10 people, including two women and three children. Al Jazeera reported that a family of five in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood was wiped out by Israeli strikes.

In southern Gaza, WAFA reported that at least four Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes on the al-Mawasi tent camp on the coast. The news agency also said that an Israeli attack on a neighborhood of Khan Younis killed two children.

The Israeli escalation came two days after the UN Security Council passed a resolution affirming President Trump’s so-called “ceasefire deal” that places the Gaza Strip under the control of the US-led board. Since the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect on October 10, the Trump administration has backed Israel’s continued attacks on Palestinians.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said earlier in the day that since October 10, Israeli forces have killed 280 Palestinians and injured 670. The strikes on Wednesday bring the total death toll during the “ceasefire” to more than 300.

November 23, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Moved Gaza’s Yellow Line And Then Shelled Palestinians For Being On The Wrong Side.

Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 22, 2025

Drop Site News reports that the IDF quietly moved part of the “yellow line” which divides Gaza 300 meters forward, and then started shelling Palestinians for being on the “wrong side” of the line.

They just keep finding new ways to carve off more pieces of Gaza and murder more Palestinians.

❖

Haaretz has a disturbing story out about a 14 year-old Palestinian boy who was waiting for his school bus in the West Bank on a quiet street eating a cookie, when suddenly a bunch of IDF vehicles pulled up and a soldier shot him directly in the face with a teargas canister. Then they sped off.

The boy lost his right eye in the attack………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-moved-gazas-yellow-line-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=179610682&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

November 23, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Zionists Are Freaking Out About Losing Control Of The Narrative.

Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.

Caitlin Johnstone. Nov 19, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/zionists-are-freaking-out-about-losing?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=179311938&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.

“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.”

“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”

Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.

“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”

Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here.

It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them:

  • The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing.
  • Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing.
  • People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
  • People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.

Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.

I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable.

You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.

There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better.

Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today.

She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel.

“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”

“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”

Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong.

I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.

It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.

Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.

November 22, 2025 Posted by | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

At Least 13 Palestinians, ‘Mostly Children,’ Killed by Israel in Lebanon Massacre

Despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces have killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in Lebanon.

Brett Wilkins, 19 Nov 25, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israeli-airstrikes-lebanon

A series of Israeli airstrikes on targets in southern Lebanon have killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100 others in recent days, including 13 people—mostly children, according to local officials—massacred Tuesday at a camp for Palestinian refugees.

Officials and residents said that the Israeli strike on Ain al-Hilweh near Sidon struck an area where children were playing soccer. Ain al-Hilweh is the largest camp in Lebanon housing refugees from the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing and terror campaign through which the modern Israeli state was founded—and their descendants.

The Israel Defense Forces said it targeted members of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas “operating in a training compound” in the camp.

Hamas rejected the IDF claim as “fabrication and lies.”

The strike was the deadliest IDF attack in Lebanon since Israeli troops shot and killed at least 24 people including 6 women and injured 134 others in January.

The IDF carried out subsequent attacks, including a Wednesday morning drone strike on a vehicle in Al-Tayri that reportedly killed two civilians including the town’s treasurer and wounded at least 10 university students. Israeli forces also bombed a residential area of the town of Tair Filsay in Tyre district. It is unknown if anyone was harmed in the strike.

Often overshadowed by its genocidal war on Gaza—which has left at least 249,600 people dead, maimed, or missing; millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened; and the coastal strip in ruins—Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Lebanon has killed more than 4,000 people since October 2023, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. This figure includes at least 790 women and 316 children. More than 16,600 others have been wounded. Upward of 1.2 million Lebanese were also forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks and invasion.

This, despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in its northern neighbor—which Israel has invaded or bombed numerous times since 1948, killing and wounding tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians.

Israeli forces also bombed the Qizan an-Najjar area, south of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing at least one Palestinian and wounding a mother and her child, according to local officials, who said at least 280 Palestinians have been killed and 650 others wounded in nearly 400 Israeli violations of the October ceasefire with Hamas.

November 22, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel’s unrelenting, underreported ethnic cleansing of West Bank Palestinians

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL  , 20 Nov 25

Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza is obvious to all with a moral conscious. Killing upwards of 100,000 Palestinians under 50,000 tons of US bombs obliterating Gaza’s 139 square miles is easy to process. Denying food, water, medicine causing degradation and death to the remaining 2,200,000 Palestinians reinforces that genocidal reality.

But many remain unaware of Israel’s relentless policy of ethnically cleansing the 3.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem annexed by Israel in 1967. Israel is positively gleeful about bringing the West Bank entirely into Greater Israel for Israelis only. In July the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic motion that the West Bank is “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people” and that “Israel has the natural, historical and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel.”

Folding the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Greater Israel, with or without (preferably without) those pesky Palestinians, has been the Israeli dream since that illegal 1967 annexation. A decade later Prime Minister Began initiated an inexorable settlement policy to implement that dream. Jewish settlement rose from just a few thousand in the late 70’s, to over half a million by the October, 2023 Hamas attack in Gaza.

The now two year Gaza genocide coincided with accelerated settlements, attacks on Palestinians, their homes, villages, harvests making life horrendous for the West Bank and East Jerusalem’s 3,300,000 Palestinians. Israeli settlement now approaches 750,000. With the world fixated on the horror perpetrated in Gaza, West Bank ethnic cleaning proceeds under the radar.

Israel pretends to oppose Israeli settler violence when in fact they both ignore an encourage it. Case in point is Zvi Sukkot, former head of settler terrorist organization The Revolt who had been marginalized by the Israeli government. Sukkot was arrested in 2010 for possible involvement in a mosque arson in the West Bank but released. By early 2023 he joined the Israeli Knesset. After the Hamas attack Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him chair of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samara (Israel’s name for the West Bank). The leap from heading up a terrorist group to heading up a governmental agency tasked with Palestinian removal tells you everything about Israel’s agenda for the West Bank.

 Is Israel determined to drive out West Bank Palestinians to fold that Palestinian land into Greater Israel? With America’s unrelenting support you can bank on it.

November 21, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

The Knesset and the ‘Post–9/11 Method’

On Monday, Nov. 10, the Knesset voted 39 to 16 in favor of a bill that will allow Israel to execute those it arrests as “terrorists”

The Zionist-nationalists who now determine Israel’s direction are on the way to passing a law that makes legal what is illegal according to the U.N. Charter, international law, and whatever else we count as the international framework that determines the conduct of nations.

November 18, 2025 By Patrick Lawrence ScheerPost

Maybe you saw the video that went public on Nov. 1 wherein Itamar Ben–Givr stands above a row of Palestinian prisoners lying face down with their heads in bags and their hands bound behind their backs. “Look at how they are today, the minimum of conditions,” the ultra–Zionist minister of national security in Bibi Netanyahu’s fanatic-filled cabinet, says as he turns to his entourage. “But there is another thing we need to do. The death penalty to terrorists.”

Those lying on their bellies were reportedly members of al–Nukhba, the special forces unit of al–Qassam, Hamas’s military wing. Ben–Givr, a militant settler who proves, time and again, utterly indifferent to international law, the laws of war, or any sort of accepted norms, wants the Zionist state to kill prisoners of war. This is what it comes down to. 

If you haven’t seen the video (and here is a version with good English subtitles), maybe you heard the outrage that subsequently echoed around the world (except in the United States). The footage of the vulgar Ben–Givr has been all over digital media — on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Al Jazeera put it out on “X.” I took the version linked here from CNN, one of the few mainstream American media to cover it.  

That was then, this is now: On Monday, Nov. 10, the Knesset voted 39 to 16 in favor of a bill that will allow Israel to execute those it arrests as “terrorists” — so long, this is to say, they are Palestinians and not Israeli settlers, who have been on an escalated rampage of terror in the West Bank for many months. “Any person who intentionally or through recklessness causes the death of an Israeli citizen, when motivated by racism, hatred, or intent to harm Israel, shall face the death penalty,” the bill reads in part. It disallows any reconsideration of a death sentence once it is imposed. 

This vote was on the legislation’s first reading, of which there are to be three per Israeli parliamentary procedure. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government support the bill, according to The Times of Israel and Haaretz.  Gal Hirsch, a former IDF military commander and the man who oversaw all the negotiations that led to the recent release of captives on both sides, told Haaretz the bill is “a tool in the toolbox that allows us to fight terror.”

The media coverage was yet more extensive this time — although not, once again, in the United States — and I found it better than one might expect. The BBC had it, reporting that the bill covers “people Israel deems terrorists.” Reuters referred to “Palestinian militants” instead of “terrorists.” These are modest steps in the right direction — away from the Zionist state’s account of what it is doing, this is to say. Al Jazeera also covered the vote, as to be expected. Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish wire service, reported that Ayman Odeh, an Arab member of the Knesset, got into an altercation with Ben–Givr that nearly came to fisticuffs. I wish it had, to be honest.   

Anadolu then quoted Ben–Givr as bragging on social media: “Jewish Power is making history. We promised and delivered.” Jewish Power, Otzma Yehudit in Hebrew, is the party Ben–Givr heads, which counts the infamous Meir Kahane, madman of all Zionist madmen, among its inspirations.

On the NGO side, I was pleased to see Amnesty International step forward boldly. “There is no sugarcoating this,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty’s senior research director, stated. “A majority of 39 Israeli Knesset members approved in a first reading a bill that effectively mandates courts to impose the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians.” The headline on this report was just as good: “Israel must immediately halt legislation of discriminatory death penalty bill.”

Apartheid Israel will not halt anything, of course; the more indecent the proposition the more certainly this is so. And here we go. On Thursday and Friday, Nov. 13 and 14, the IDF made mass arrests in the West Bank, all arrestees  detained as “terrorists.” The Times of Israel puts the number at 50, The Jerusalem Post 40. Just to complete the picture, on Thursday a pack of Israeli settlers descended on a mosque 18 km southwest of Nablus — this just before morning prayers were to begin — and, after scrawling racist graffiti on its walls and burning copies of the Quran, attempted to set the mosque ablaze. 

Take a sec, as I did, to consider these events side-by-side, with the law now pending in the Knesset in mind. What are we in for here, 40 or more mass executions at some point not far down the road? And how many after that? And Israeli settlers will go on their terrorizing way?

I am right with Amnesty and all others condemning the racism implicit in  legislation that makes the repulsive Ben–Givr so pleased. But I don’t quite get the reasoning. Would the Knesset bill be OK if it also extended to settler violence and, so, wasn’t discriminatory? Not sure I understand the point here. 

No, I see a larger matter at issue in this bill. It is this: The Zionist-nationalists who now determine Israel’s direction are on the way to passing a law that makes legal what is illegal according to the U.N. Charter, international law, and whatever else we count as the international framework that determines the conduct of nations. The Knesset and the Netanyahu regime, in other words, implicitly argue that Israeli law supersedes what the jurists of international law may count as beyond the boundaries of legality. 

We are going to make it legal to execute prisoners so long as we call them terrorists, and all we have to do to make this legal is say it is legal by ruling on our own conduct: This is the Israeli position, fairly stated.

This, the consecration of lawlessness in national law, tips us into another line of inquiry altogether. To put the case very simply, where does the Zionist state get off attempting this stunt? The bitter truth is that the United States, world leader in lawlessness for a long time now, has licensed the Israelis to go unabashedly down this road. We should be clear about this for the sake of our integrity: What the Israelis are about to do is nothing the Americans have not already done. 

The most obvious case in point is the bundle of secret memoranda Justice Department attorneys wrote to construct the legality of the kidnappings, the detentions without charge, the torture, the offshore “black sites,” Guantánimo — the whole horrific schmear — after the 9/11 attacks. The commander-in-chief was acting legally in a time of war. The Geneva Conventions did not apply because all those people fighting on their own soil against American soldiers were “unlawful combatants,” and the United States had no obligation under the laws of war to afford them legal protections. The waterboarding, the beatings, the electrodes, the rectal feedings and all that wasn’t torture: It was “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which even got an acronym, EITs. The black sites were OK because they were beyond U.S. borders and the U.N. Convention Against Torture therefore did not apply.

The extent to which these lawyers twisted law and logic into pretzels was truly diabolic, as readers may recall. And the worst of these despicable punks, well-deserving to be named, was John Yoo, who drafted a number of the memos that “authorized” the CIA to torture human beings. Yoo is now 58 and holds an endowed chair as a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. I suppose it follows naturally, given what the late-phase imperium counts important.  

Yoo and his colleagues at Justice had a job to do, making lawlessness lawful, and they got it done, at least at home and on paper. My argument is very simple: What goes around keeps going around. There is a straight line, I mean to say, between Washington’s post–9/11 abuses of international law and the vote in the Knesset last Monday. 

Four years ago, a very fine correspondent named Vincent Bevins published a book called The Jakarta Method (Public Affairs, 2021), in which he made the case that the CIA–sponsored mass killings following the 1965 coup that brought Suharto to power in Indonesia reflected the modus operandi of the United States the whole of the Cold War. The book got all sorts of awards and across-the-board accolades, all deserved.

I’m looking for a similar name, a name for how the United States has conducted its business during the two dozen years since the 9/11 attacks. There must be one, surely, or there ought to be one in any case, because there is a method to all the madness, lawlessness its defining principle, and Israel is the nation most eagerly — or baldly, better put — adopting it. 

After the events of September 2001 John Whitbeck, the international lawyer living in Paris, published an essay on the meaning and instrumentalized use of the word “terrorism” that has been republished many times since in many places. And after two dozen years it is still superbly pertinent. The Floutist, the Substack newsletter I co-edit, reprinted it last year under the headline, “‘Terrorism,’ this insidious word.” That version of Whitbeck’s piece is here. It begins:

The greatest threat to world peace and civil society today is clearly “terrorism” — not the behavior to which the word is applied but the word itself. Since the word “terrorism” (like the behavior to which the word is applied) can never be eradicated, it is imperative to expose it for what it is — a word.

No nation has made more profligate use of this term than the United States. Its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, FTOs, runs to several pages; President Trump has added 19 names to it so far this year and proposes to add more. Drug traffickers are terrorists; Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, is a terrorist with a $50 million bounty on his head; antifa protesters are terrorists; the immigrant population in the United States, legal and illegal, is infested with terrorists; so are those demonstrating against Israel’s brutalities in Gaza and the West Bank. Label some organization or someone a “terrorist” and all manner of extra-legal behavior is excused. I cannot say the Israelis learned the power of this word from the Americans, but it is from the Americans they have learned how effectively to use it — which is to say, incessantly. 

So much of what “the Jewish state” is doing in its Zionist-nationalist phase derives from what the Americans have “legitimized” by doing it first. This is the point we ought not miss.  

The Israeli military’s attacks on the Gaza aid flotillas this last summer — drones, fire bombs, eventually the boarding of these vessels and the arrests of their crew and passengers, all of this in international waters: It is sheer piracy on the open seas. Do you think the Israelis would have dared these breaches of law had the Americans not set the bar when it seized the cargo of four Iranian vessels en route to Venezuela four years ago? At the moment the Trump regime is in legal contortions worthy of John Yoo to justify its extrajudicial executions of fishermen sailing in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific — claiming they are, but what else, “narco-terrorists.”

The U.S. imperium entered an era of desperation after 9/11, and in this condition it has led the world back to a state of lawlessness — flagrantly this time, with an assumption of collective impunity shared among the Western powers and their appendages — that humanity thought it had superseded after the 1945 victories. So has it licensed by its own example others to ignore international law and the institutions created by common effort to define and enforce it. 

Israel is not alone in partaking aggressively of this march to chaos. There are terrorists, terrorists, terrorists everywhere, to listen to the Europeans tell of it. The European Union now debates how it will structure the theft of €140 billion, about $163 billion, from Russia’s frozen assets to keep the war going in Ukraine. No, there are others. But the Israelis are first in adopting — at last I have a name for it — let’s call it “the post–9/11 Method.” https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/18/patrick-lawrence-the-knesset-and-the-post-9-11-method/

November 21, 2025 Posted by | Israel, Legal, USA | Leave a comment

‘We lose many patients’: Inside Gaza’s last hospitals

“Hospitals have become targets for the Israeli occupation and the Israeli army. Many hospitals have been destroyed… Doctors, nurses, and medical teams have been kidnapped from hospital premises.”

by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi November 18, 2025 / The Real News Network

Since October 2023, at least 34 hospitals in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. In that same time, as the humanitarian need for urgent medical care in the Gaza Strip dramatically increased, Israeli forces detained at least 405 Palestinian healthcare workers, according to NGO Healthcare Workers Watch. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN takes you inside one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals………….https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/18/we-lose-many-patients-inside-gazas-last-hospitals/

November 21, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Eva Bartlett: “Israel was born of violence”

The Trump plan will absolutely no bring peace to Gaza. We’ve already seen how Israel immediately violated the so-called ceasefire on a daily basis over the past month. Israel addition ally has not allowed in the needed amount of humanitarian aid and did not agree to fully withdraw from Gaza. It’s goals of full occupation of all Palestinian land, and beyond, have not changed.

Algeria Resistance, le 

Mohsen Abdelmoumen:  You are a very courageous and committed journalist who has always supported the Palestinian cause. The world needs just voices like yours. What can you tell us about your long stays in Gaza and the occupied West Bank?

Eva Bartlett: I went to the West Bank in 2007 to witness with my own eyes how Palestinians the daily tragedies, injustices and realities of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. Over the course of 8 months, I was witness to some of the ugliest aspects of life under Israeli rule: brutal attacks by armed illegal Jewish colonists and by Israeli soldiers on Palestinian children, women, elderly; the widespread humiliating military checkpoints cutting through Palestinian land and making movement nearly impossible; raids and weeks-long lock-downs on Palestinian towns and cities, in which the Israeli army ransacks and destroys homes and usually abducts one or more member of the family, including children. There are currently over 400 Palestinian children in Zionist prisons.

I detailed this in an overview of my time there, which included: witnessing land being stolen and quickly annexed by the illegal Jewish colonists; coming under attack multiple times by the illegal colonists; documenting the aftermath of Israeli army invasions into cities and towns, as well as the terror of being there during the invasions; documenting non-violent Palestinian protesters being attacked by very violent Israeli soldiers, systematically targeted with of live ammunition, rubber-coated metal bullets, and volleys of tear gas.

During my time in the West Bank I was detained at a protest against a Jewish-only highway in the West Bank; arrested by the Israelis at a road-block removal action, held handcuffed & shackled for two days in an Israeli prison in one of their illegal colonies; and later was finally deported and banned from returning to occupied Palestine.

However, in 2008, I joined the Free Gaza movement in sailing from Cyprus to Gaza, where I stayed for the next 1.5 years, returning again in 2011 for another 1.5 years between the period of mid 2011 to March 2013.

During this time, Israel committed two major wars on Gaza: in December 2008/January 2009, for 3 weeks, and in November 2012.

In the first, I rode in Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances, both in hopes of deterring Israeli attacks against the medics and also to document the injured and martyred civilians killed by Israeli bombing or sniping.

As a consequence, I witnessed and took testimony on some of Israel’s worst war crimes at the time: its use of White Phosphorous against civilians; its holding civilians hostages without food or medicine; Israeli sniper fire of medics I accompanied and of our ambulance, during “ceasefire hours”; Israeli soldiers’ deliberate sniping to kill Palestinian children, including an infant; the forced exodus of Palestinians from their homes to schools which were then bombed by the Israeli army; the deliberate precision drone striking of civilians, including a child during “ceasefire” hours; the wanton destruction of homes and the racist hate graffiti left behind in homes occupied by the Israeli army.

A dear medic I had accompanied during one terrifying evening in the was killed from by a dart bomb fired at his ambulance the next day.

During 2012 Israeli war on Gaza, I reported from Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, seeing more of Israel’s deliberate murder of civilians, especially children.

Lesser discussed is Israel’s top-down policy of shooting on farmers and fishers (fishers subject to shelling and heavy-powered water cannon attacks), maiming, killing or abducting them, intentionally depriving them of access to land and sea. This exasperated the already dire effects of the strangling siege (full lockdown) of Gaza Israel imposed around 2007, banning almost all basic items needed to exist, including medicines, fertilizers, cooking gas, even diapers and seeds.

The illegal and immoral siege on Gaza was made worse by the lack of electricity (In 2006, Zionist warplanes bombed Gaza’s sole power plant, which then provided roughly half of the Strip’s energy needs) causing power outages varying from 14-18 hours per day, on average.

The electricity shortage dangerously impacted the health, sanitation, water, education, and industrial sectors. Hospital life-support equipment, operation rooms, ICUs, dialysis machines, refrigerators for plasma and medicines, and even simple hygienic laundering services were all affected.

From my experiences in the Strip, including meetings with the different water, sanitation, health and agriculture officials, I learned that the current 80% dependence on food aid could be reversed, unemployment rates lowered, and a decent quality of life possible if, and only if, the blockade was lifted, exports and freedom of movement allowed, and Israeli attacks on farmers and fishers halted.

All of this and more are detailed in my 2014 overview of life in the Gaza Strip.

I provide all these details to counter the cl aims that the violence we’ve seen Israel commit during the past two years is a result of the Hamas actions in October 2023.  Israel was born of violence and its violence has never been about “self-defense” but rather a means of ethnic cleansing and occupation.

The Zionist entity of Israel is currently committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Why in your opinion does it enjoy total impunity? And how do you explain the unconditional support of the United States and the West for this criminal and genocidal entity?

The impunity Israel enjoys—in spite of the countless crimes it has committed against Palestinians since inception (and prior), as well as committing crimes against Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere—is because Israel has always been a colonial outpost in West Asia, serving the agendas of its Western founders and backers, primarily the UK and US.

If any of the US’ enemies—especially Russia, China, or Iran—committed a minute fraction of the crimes Israel daily commits, the international laws and institutions which ignore Israel’s crimes suddenly apply. They exist not to provide any justice, but as more tools of the West. 

Do you think that the Trump plan conceived by Jared Kushner, Ron Dermer, and Steve Witkof will bring peace to Gaza?

The Trump plan will absolutely no bring peace to Gaza. We’ve already seen how Israel immediately violated the so-called ceasefire on a daily basis over the past month. Israel addition ally has not allowed in the needed amount of humanitarian aid and did not agree to fully withdraw from Gaza. It’s goals of full occupation of all Palestinian land, and beyond, have not changed.

You know Syria very well, having lived there for a long time. How do you explain that a notorious terrorist leader serving the Americans and Israelis became president of Syria?

“…………The overthrow of Syria’s elected president, Bashar al-Assad, and installing of one of the worst al-Qaeda terrorists, Abu Mohammad al- Joolani—now rebranded as Ahmed al-Sharaa—was a combination of betrayal from elements of high ranking members of the Syrian army and leadership, betraying Assad and the Syrian people……………….”

You have been living in Russia and have covered Russia’s special operation in Donbass. In your opinion, what are Western countries seeking to achieve in their war against Russia? Where are their limits? Don’t you think there is a risk of nuclear conflict?

I’ve been covering Ukraine’s war on the Donbass since 2019 when I first visited. In 2021, I moved to Russia. Throughout 2022, I spent much of that year in the Donbass. It was a very bloody year of Donbass residents under Ukrainian fire, especially in completely civilian, non-military, districts, including the very center of Donetsk.

If you followed Ukraine’s war on the Donbass prior to 2022, you could even see some Western media coverage of it, and Western media coverage of the rise of “the far right” (Nazis) in Ukraine following the Maidan coup in 2014.

However, as they with Syria, Western media serves to whitewash Ukraine’s crimes and vilify Russia.

The West is using Ukraine as a means of trying to weaken Russia, which is why the West orchestrated the coup in Ukraine. NATO had decades ago pledged it would not expand eastward toward Russia but continued to do exactly that, including via Ukraine.

No one in their right mind believes Ukraine, or Ukraine & the collective West, will win in a war against Russia. Yet, the West continues to back Ukraine.

As for the limits of those countries continuing to push war with Russia, it’s difficult to say what or if they have limits.  What is abundantly clear is that their alleged concern for Ukraine and Ukrainians is meaningless. Otherwise they would not have orchestrated the series of events which brought us to today.

Most honest analysts have noted Russia’s considerable restraint since commencing its Special Military Operation in 2022. Yet, Russia has also made clear it will not tolerate nuclear provocations and that it will end very badly for all should the West try.

You also know Venezuela very well. We saw the Nobel Prize awarded to far-right activist Corina Machado. Don’t you think there is once again a risk of a coup against President Maduro?

The US regime’s actions around Venezuela since Trump declared a war against supposed “narco terrorists” (which is extremely ironic given the US’ history of drug running), has been to bomb and extrajudicially assassinate at least 21 people, most Venezuelans, without evidence or trial.

Fast forward to the present, on October 31 The Trump Administration reportedly gave the green light for the imminent bombing of military targets in Venezuela, with strikes possible within hours or days.

The US is also accused of plotting a false flag attack on US naval ships to incriminate Venezuela, as another pretext for US belligerence against the country.

Rec all that in 2019, the US orchestrated power outages (sabotage) in Venezuela in an attempt to create chaos and public dissatisfaction against President Maduro. I was there at the time and everywhere I went I saw massive support for Maduro and against US intervention. Since then, the support has only grown, the people ready to defend their country.

Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen

Who is Eva Bartlett?

Eva Karene Bartlett is an American Canadian independent journalist who lives in Russia since 2021. She has an extensive experience in Syria (1.5 years & 15 visits from 2014-2021) and in the Gaza Strip, where she lived a cumulative three years (from late 2008 to early 2013), as well as 8 months in the West Bank.

She has also reported from the Donbass (since 2019, during 1/2 of 2022) and Venezuela.

In Gaza, she documented the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli war crimes and attacks on Gaza while riding in ambulances and reporting from hospitals.

In 2017, she was short-listed for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. The award rightly was given to the amazing journalist, the late Robert Parry [see his work on Consortium News].

In March 2017, she was awarded “International Journalism Award for International Reporting” granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club (founded in 1951). Co-recipients included: John Pilger and political analyst Thierry Meyssan.

She was also the first recipient of the Serena Shim award. Since April 2014, she has visited Syria 15 times, the last times being from March to late September, 2020 and during the presidential elections in May 2021.

November 18, 2025 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

IDF Kills Two 15-Year-Old Boys in the West Bank, Israeli Settlers Torch Mosque

by Dave DeCamp | November 13, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/11/13/idf-kills-two-15-year-old-boys-in-the-west-bank-israeli-settlers-torch-mosque/

The Israeli military killed two 15-year-old boys in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday, according to the Palestinian Authority, as Jewish settlers in the territory continued their attacks on Palestinian communities.

The PA said the two boys, Bilal Bahaa Ali Baaran and Muhammad Mahmud Abu Ayash, were killed “by bullets from the occupation this afternoon, Thursday, near Beit Omar, north of Hebron.”

The Israeli military said that it killed two Palestinians, whom it claimed were on their way to “carry out a terror attack,” but offered no evidence to back up the claim or any other details about the slaying. Earlier this year, the IDF expanded its “open fire” policy in the West Bank, which led to an increase in the killing of civilians.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that three Palestinians, including a 14-year-old, were wounded by Israeli military gunfire in the town of Eizariya, southeast of Jerusalem.

Also on Thursday, Jewish settlers set fire to a mosque in the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya, near Salfit in the northern West Bank. Al Jazeera reported that the settlers sprayed racist, anti-Palestinian graffiti, and photos of the scene show burned Qurans.

There’s been a surge in settler attacks in the West Bank, coinciding with the start of the olive harvesting season, as Palestinian olive farmers are frequently targeted. The UN recorded a total of 266 settler attacks in October, the highest in a single month since it began recording in 2006, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“Since 2006, OCHA has documented over 9,600 such attacks. About 1,500 of them took place just this year, roughly 15% of the total,” OCHA said earlier this month.

The surge in violence in the West Bank came after a de-escalation in Gaza as a result of the US-brokered ceasefire deal, which Israel has repeatedly violated by launching attacks and killing more than 240 Palestinians since the truce went into effect, according to numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry.

November 18, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

One month in, the ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza exists only in name


Noor Alyacoubi, Mondoweiss, Thu, 13 Nov 2025

Palestinians hoped the Gaza ceasefire with Israel would offer a chance to recover from two years of genocide, but a month later, Israel continues to strike with impunity, the economic crisis remains, and nutritious food is nearly impossible to find.

When the ceasefire was declared in mid-October 2025, many in Gaza believed it might finally signal a return to peace — an end to the explosions, the airstrikes, and the constant buzzing of the Zannana (unmanned reconnaissance aircraft) overhead.

But the reality on the ground has been very different.

Almost every morning, the sounds of Israeli bombing can still be heard. Breaking news headlines continue to report rising numbers of martyrs and injured civilians. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, since the so-called end of the war, over 236 civilians have been killed and nearly 600 have been wounded. Israeli tanks continue to block access to large parts of the territory, restricting civilian movement through what is referred to as “the yellow line,” preventing thousands from returning to their homes. Surveillance drones still hover above. Bombs still fall — only now under the label of a “ceasefire.”

According to the Government Media office, Israel shot at civilians 88 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 12 times, bombed Gaza 124 times, and demolished people’s properties on 52 occasions. It added that Israel also detained 23 Palestinians from Gaza over the past month.

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities continue to issue public threats about resuming full-scale military operations in Gaza. These threats, combined with ongoing violence, have raised a serious question among Palestinians: Is there really a ceasefire? And if there is, why are we still suffering? Why are we still deprived of food, medicine, and safety? Why are we still hungry?

and debris surround their shelters in Gaza City • November 5, 2025A life of displacement and debt

For the past 24 months, 29-year-old Raheel has lived in constant displacement — evacuating, relocating, and returning again and again, crossing Gaza from north to south and back. Her most recent displacement brought her to Al-Nusairat Camp in central Gaza, designated by Israeli authorities as a “safe zone.” There, she, her husband, and her in-laws lived in a single tent. For nearly 20 days, that fragile patch of fabric was their only shelter.

Their departure from Gaza City was not voluntary — it was a desperate decision taken under fire. As Israeli ground forces advanced and bombing intensified across the city in a systematic campaign to seize control, Raheel and her husband were forced to flee.

“We didn’t have the money to leave,” she recalled. “But we couldn’t afford to stay either.”

With no stable income, they borrowed what little they could — from some dear friends — and joined the hundreds of thousands of displaced people heading south in search of safety.

But safety was temporary.

“When the ceasefire was declared, I didn’t feel relief,” Raheel said. “I felt panic. I couldn’t think of anything but the debts we were carrying. We could barely afford the going, how would we afford now the coming back?”

Like many others, she and her family had to borrow again — this time to return to what remained of Gaza City. The pressure of surviving displacement was replaced by the pressure of returning to ruin. Just before they made it back, Raheel received the news that their home in eastern Gaza had been destroyed……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.sott.net/article/502968-One-month-in-the-ceasefire-in-Gaza-exists-only-in-name

November 16, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, weapons and war | 1 Comment

The Member States Complicit in Genocide (w/ Francesca Albanese) | The Chris Hedges Report

Scheerpost, By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, November 13, 2025

After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are — according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese — either directly or indirectly involved in Israel’s economic proliferation.

In her latest report, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime,” Albanese details the role 63 nations played in supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. She chronicles how countries like the United States, which directly funds and arms Israel, are a part of a vast global economic web. This network includes dozens of other countries that contribute with seemingly minor components, such as warplane wheels.

Rejection of this system is imperative, Albanese says. These same technologies used to destroy the lives of Palestinians will inevitably be turned against the citizens of Israel’s funders.

“Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go,” Albanese warns.

“Every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.”

Transcript

Chris Hedges

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, in her latest report, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime,” calls out the role 63 nations have in sustaining the Israeli genocide. Albanese, who because of sanctions imposed on her by the Trump administration, had to address the UN General Assembly from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, slams what she calls “decades of moral and political failure.”

“Through unlawful actions and deliberate omissions, too many states have harmed, founded and shielded Israel’s militarized apartheid, allowing its settler colonial enterprise to metastasize into genocide, the ultimate crime against the indigenous people of Palestine,” she told the UN.

The genocide, she notes, has diplomatic protection in international “fora meant to preserve peace,” military ties ranging from weapons sales to joint trainings that “fed the genocidal machinery,” the unchallenged weaponization of aid, and trade with entities like the European Union, which had sanctioned Russia over Ukraine yet continued doing business with Israel.

The 24-page report details how the “live-streamed atrocity” is facilitated by third states. She excoriates the United States for providing “diplomatic cover” for Israel, using its veto power at the UN Security Council seven times and controlling ceasefire negotiations. Other Western nations, the report noted, collaborate with abstentions, delays and watered-down draft resolutions, providing Israel with weapons, “even as the evidence of genocide … mounted.”

The report chastised the US Congress for passing a $26.4bn arms package for Israel, although Israel was at the time threatening to invade Rafah in defiance of the Biden administration’s demand that Rafah be spared.

The report also condemns Germany, the second-largest arms exporter to Israel during the genocide, for weapons shipments that include everything from “frigates to torpedoes,” as well as the United Kingdom, which has allegedly flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza since war broke out in October 2023.

At the same time, Arab states have not severed ties with Israel. Egypt, for example, maintained “significant security and economic relations with Israel, including energy cooperation and the closing of the Rafah crossing” during the war.

The Gaza genocide, the report states, “exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest.” Her report coincides with the ceasefire that isn’t. Over 300 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel since the ceasefire was announced two weeks ago……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/13/the-member-states-complicit-in-genocide-w-francesca-albanese-the-chris-hedges-report/

November 15, 2025 Posted by | Israel, politics international | Leave a comment

US-Led ‘Coordination Center’ Replaces Israel as ‘Overseer’ of Gaza Aid Deliveries

Israel has continued to restrict aid deliveries into Gaza in violation of the ceasefire deal

by Dave DeCamp | November 9, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/11/09/us-led-coordination-center-replaces-israel-as-overseer-of-gaza-aid-deliveries/


The US military-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) that was recently established in southern Israel has replaced Israel as the “overseer” of Gaza aid deliveries, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

Since the ceasefire deal was supposed to be implemented on October 10, Israel has violated it by continuing to restrict aid deliveries entering Gaza. “Israel is blocking the Trump plan’s humanitarian clauses,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told the Post.

Egeland said it was “very good news” that the US is more engaged in aid deliveries, though it remains unclear whether the restrictions will be lifted. “Our appeal is make the plan a reality,” he said. “Of course, the credibility of the United States is at stake here.”

One of the biggest impediments to aid deliveries is that Israel has only allowed trucks to enter Gaza through two border crossings, with most deliveries going through the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza. “We need full access. We need everything to be moving fast. We are in a race against time. The winter months are coming. People are still suffering from hunger, and the needs are overwhelming,” Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the UN’s World Food Program, said last week.

There have been no direct aid deliveries to northern Gaza, where people need food the most, and, according to the Post report, many of the trucks allowed to enter Gaza carry commercial goods that few Palestinians can afford to purchase.

The Post report said the responsibility for Gaza aid was being shifted to the CMCC from the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit of the Israeli Defense Ministry that oversees Israeli-occupied and controlled territory.

In response to the report, COGAT characterized the shift differently, saying the “Americans will be integrated into the formulation and implementation of coordination, supervision, and control mechanisms in the context of humanitarian aid, in full cooperation with the Israeli security services.”

An unnamed Israeli official said that the “Americans will take the lead in engaging with the international community on humanitarian matters. … It should be emphasized that this does not constitute a transfer of authority or responsibility from COGAT to the Americans.”

While the US leads the CMCC, where about 200 US troops have been deployed, the Post report said more than 40 other countries and organizations are also involved. The CMCC is also supposed to oversee an international force that may be deployed to Gaza under the ceasefire deal, but it remains unclear whether it will come together, as countries willing to participate want more clarity about exactly what their troops will be doing.

In the meantime, Israeli troops continue to occupy more than 50% of Gaza’s territroy and continue to carry out attacks against Palestinians. Since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10, at least 241 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

November 12, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s 20 point plan to end the war in Gaza is the usual Israeli ultimatum: surrender or be murdered.

Eva Karene Bartlett, Nov 07, 2025, https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/trumps-20-point-plan-to-end-the-war?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=178183468&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Given that the US is bankrolling Israel’s genocide and has made no effort whatsoever to stop Israel from bombing, starving, and sniping Palestinian civilians for the past two years, skeptics of Trump’s “20 point proposal to end the war in Gaza” published on September 29 can be forgiven for doubting that it will end the genocide, much less that it will be a just proposal for Palestinians.

Recall that earlier this year, while Israel continued its ongoing genocide of Gaza, Donald Trump callously boasted about the US desire to own Gaza.

He described Gaza as a “big real estate site” and a new “Riviera,” and said, “We’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back.”

Recall also that in September, Israel attempted to assassinate Hamas’ negotiating team in Qatar.

The 20 points can be read in full at this link, but it’s worth mentioning some of the most important key takeaways from the plan:

  • Fighting would stop immediately and the Israeli captives would be released within 72 hours once both parties agree.
  • Israel will free 250 prisoners serving life sentences along with 1,700 Palestinians from Gaza detained after 7 October [Note: Israels imprisons nearly 11,000 Palestinians (as of early August 2025), including more than 450 children and 49 women. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has abducted over 2,300 Palestinians from Gaza, including numerous doctors. From October 2023 to early August 2025, 76 prisoners have died in prison, most having been tortured. Three doctors from Gaza were tortured to death, including by raping].

  • Israel will withdraw and refrain from annexing the territory.
  • “Security” will be provided by regional and international forces, who will also help train Palestinian police, while aid will be delivered to Gaza at agreed levels. The US will oversee dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis if the Palestinian Authority (PA) implements “reforms” according to US-Israeli demands.
  • Gaza will be administered by a temporary technocratic government, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body headed and chaired by Trump and Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others.
  • No forced displacement from Gaza, and reconstruction of the Strip as a “de-radicalized terror-free zone” will begin.

  • All ‘military operations’ will be halted during this period for a phased withdrawal of Israeli forces. Hamas members who commit to ‘peace’ will be granted amnesty, while those who do not will be offered safe passage to third countries.
  • Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.
  • Aid will be delivered to Gaza at agreed levels, through the United Nations and other international institutions. [Note: In May 2025, Israel imposed the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as a sole replacement for the UN;s aid distribution, claiming Hamas hinders the humanitarian mission of the foundation. This claim was not true and not proven.]

Unfair, unjust, unrealistic proposal

While lauded in legacy media and by Western leaders, Trump’s proposal is an insincere plan not for peace but which really amounts to a surrender ultimatum to Hamas.

Shortly after its announcement, Netanyahu said that the Israeli army will not withdraw from the Gaza Strip. “No way, that’s not happening.”

He also said, “If Hamas refuses [the proposal], Trump will give Israel full backing to complete the military operation and eliminate them.”

The US has already given Israel full backing to commit its genocide in Gaza, so in that regard Netanyahu is correct. But for any who thought he would abide by Trump’s proposal to pull out of Gaza, there was never a chance of that.

On October 3, 2025, Hamas agreed to the release of all Israeli hostages, but did not accept the proposal unconditionally, with other elements to be negotiated.

Trump responded by saying,

“After negotiations, Israel has agreed to the initial withdrawal line, which we have shown to, and shared with, Hamas. When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be immediately effective, the Hostages and Prisoner Exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next phase of withdrawal…”

He urged Israel to “immediately stop bombing Gaza” to allow for the safe release of hostages.

The important nuances written out of legacy media reporting on the proposal include:

  • Hamas does not accept that the affairs of Gaza, as a part of Palestine, be managed by any non-Palestinian party.
  • The entry of foreign forces or a foreign administration into the Gaza Strip is an issue that is not acceptable to Palestinians.
  • Israel has no intention to fully withdraw from Gaza.
  • Demanding the dissolution of Hamas is to deny the Palestinian people their right to political self-determination.

Further, Trump’s proposal to appoint Former Prime Minister Tony Blair to chair a board overseeing Gaza’s transition is not acceptable to Palestinians, nor to people who opposed the invasion and slaughter of Iraqis.

Enabling continued genocide and Israeli expansion

The Trump proposal doesn’t consider what Palestinians want. It speaks of peace, but in reality proposes a full surrender to an occupying power and giving control to foreign decision makers and forces. Trump and Netanyahu want Hamas to capitulate, drop their weapons, and hand over control to the US and Israel, in the name of “peace”.

In addition to the above points, it must be stressed that Israel never honours ceasefires or its word, instead violating the ceasefires immediately, resulting in the slaughter or more Palestinians (and Lebanese).

Case in point, just hours after President Trump ordered Israel to stop bombing Gaza, Israeli bombing killed a 3-month-old baby and 14 other members from her family in Gaza City, leaving 20 more people buried beneath the rubble.

Israeli bombing that day killed 70 Palestinians, the majority of them children.


The Government Media Office in Gaza reported 131 Israeli air and artillery strikes across on October 4th and 5th, killing 94 civilians. The Israeli bombing continues.

Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman in recent interview noted,

“This is a peace plan that was never discussed with the Palestinians who have to have something to say about peace. Either they benefit from peace or they don’t. There’s no benefit to them in this plan…It is the same old demands from Israel: exile yourself, leave or be killed. This is an exercise in colonial rule.”

Indeed, the proposal comes at a time when global condemnation is high of the Israeli genocide and starvation campaign in Gaza. Pitching such a proposal gives the veneer of Trump trying to stop the killing, but in reality, he gives Netanyahu carte blanche to continue killing.

Over the past month since parts of the proposal were enacted, Israel has continued violating the ceasefire with more bombing. On October 29, it was reported that Israel says it has “resumed enforcing ceasefire”. In the 24 hours prior, at the last 104 people were killed in strikes across Gaza, including at least 46 children.

November 8, 2025 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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