Israel isn’t leaving Lebanon and Syria may be next
Israel’s refusal to withdraw, Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm, and new strikes near the Golan Heights point to a conflict that is expanding, not endingPublished 5 Jul, 2026
By Farhad Ibragimov , 5 July 26, https://www.rt.com/news/642508-israel-isnt-leaving-lebanon/
Israel has no intention of leaving Lebanon. At least, it won’t do so now and on terms that would suit Beirut (not to mention Hezbollah and Tehran). Moreover, in parallel with the Lebanese campaign, West Jerusalem is reactivating operations in Syria: Israeli forces launched an artillery strike on the village of Abidin in the western part of Syria’s Daraa Governorate, and, according to regional sources, Israeli aircraft conducted flights over the rural areas of Daraa and Quneitra governorates near the Golan Heights.
At first glance, it appears that yet another breakthrough has occurred on the Lebanese front. The US, Israel, and Lebanon signed a trilateral framework agreement in Washington (although three agreements have already been reached in the past two months). US Secretary of State Marco Rubio presented it as a step toward the restoration of Lebanon’s sovereignty, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and the dismantling of its infrastructure. But upon careful examination of the agreement, it becomes clear that it cannot ensure lasting peace; it only creates a diplomatic pause during which each side will attempt to consolidate its own position.
This is a ‘framework’ agreement – and that says it all. It’s not a full-fledged peace treaty or a final settlement, but a set of principles that have yet to be transformed into a working mechanism. The agreement provides for the gradual restoration of control over the Lebanese army, the start of Hezbollah’s disarmament, and the eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops after the elimination of the threat to Israel. In other words, Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon is not immediate and unconditional, but is tied to a condition that is nearly impossible to fulfill quickly.
This is the crux of the matter. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly stated that Israel will not leave southern Lebanon as long as Hezbollah remains armed and poses a threat. This effectively means that Israel’s presence is not a temporary measure, but a permanent instrument of pressure. As long as Hezbollah exists, Israel remains in Lebanon; but as long as Israel remains, Hezbollah has a reason not to disarm. It becomes a vicious circle, in which each side justifies its actions by the actions of the other.
Lebanon finds itself in the most difficult position. Formally, Beirut has committed itself to regaining control over southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah is not simply an armed group that can be disarmed by administrative action. It is an independent military-political force that is firmly integrated into the Lebanese system; it has a social base, infrastructure, and external support. Therefore, the demand to disarm Hezbollah may sound good on paper, but in practice, instead of a peace mechanism it could become a pretext for a new internal crisis.
It is no coincidence that Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri, a staunch Hezbollah ally, has already criticized the agreement and stated that it will not be implemented. As expected, Hezbollah rejected the agreement, perceiving it as a form of capitulation. This is the biggest problem: the agreement was signed by three nations, but the main armed player – Hezbollah – which is directly responsible for stabilizing the situation in southern Lebanon, is not a party to the agreement.
At the same time, Israel is reopening the Syrian front. The attack on Abidin in Daraa Governorate is not a random incident. Southern Syria, Daraa, Quneitra, and the area near the Golan Heights have long been perceived by Israel as a potential threat. Following the weakening of the Syrian state and the shift in the regional balance of power, Israel has changed its defense strategy and is actively forming buffer zones around its borders. West Jerusalem explains its role in maintaining a security zone in southern Syria by the need to prevent attacks by armed groups.
This is why Syria is again becoming part of Israel’s overall strategy. Israel demonstrates that if it is forced to make concessions in Lebanon, it can still expand pressure along other perimeters – through Syria, the Golan Heights, Daraa, and Quneitra. This is a signal not only to Damascus, but also to Tehran and Hezbollah: Israel will not wait for the threat to fully materialize; it will act preemptively.
The ultimate goal of all these maneuvers in Lebanon and Syria is to ‘squeeze’ Iran. Having failed to achieve its objectives in 2025 and in the spring of 2026, Israel wants to take revenge presently. According to Tehran, the signed US-Iran memorandum specifically mentions the cessation of military operations, including in Lebanon, and the parties’ commitment to respect Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. For Tehran, this is an attempt to include Lebanon in a broader bargaining process with Washington and to demonstrate that the stabilization of the region is impossible without taking Iranian influence into account.
The situation is complex: The US attempts to portray the agreement as a diplomatic success even though the sides continue to exchange blows and the ceasefire could come to an end at any moment; Israel is given the chance to maintain a military presence in Lebanon until its conditions are fully met; Lebanon receives the promise of restored sovereignty – but with no means of immediate control over Hezbollah, this becomes largely impossible. Meanwhile, Iran attempts to integrate the Lebanese issue into its dialogue with Washington; and Syria is becoming an additional pressure point, playing the role of a ‘whipping boy’.
In such circumstances, peace remains elusive. This is merely a managed tactical pause before the next round of war. Israel will not leave Lebanon because the threat of Hezbollah persists; Hezbollah will not disarm because Israel remains; and Lebanon cannot fully control the south because state institutions are weaker than the Hezbollah movement on the ground. Apparently, the US is trying to freeze the conflict without resolving its main contradiction.
The strike on Abidin, Syria, shows that Israel is not thinking solely in terms of the Lebanese front. It is building a broader security belt from southern Lebanon to southern Syria. And while US President Donald Trump is telling the world about agreements, a completely different reality is taking shape on the ground: a reality of buffer zones, artillery strikes, air patrols, and the constant expectation of a new round of escalation.
Even if we assume that Trump genuinely seeks to end the war and reach a peace agreement with Iran, including in the context of the Lebanon crisis, he will find this extremely difficult to achieve; the stakes are too high, and in many ways, he was the one who raised them. Therefore, the framework agreement looks less like the beginning of peace and more like an attempt to legally formalize a temporary balance of power. And the longer this temporary balance is presented as a peace settlement, the greater the likelihood that Lebanon will once again become the arena of a major war and a bargaining chip in the struggle between the opposing sides.
As in Gaza, the Israel-Lebanon ‘peace’ agreement is designed to fail
Qassam Mijaddi, Mondoweiss,Thu, 02 Jul 2026 , https://www.sott.net/article/507264-As-in-Gaza-the-Israel-Lebanon-peace-agreement-is-designed-to-fail
Israel’s conditioning of its withdrawal from southern Lebanon on the disarmament of Hezbollah mirrors its strategy in Gaza:
Insist on terms that are impossible to implement to justify its constant state of war.
Israel has finally reached an agreement to end its war on Lebanon after ambassadors from both countries signed a “framework” agreement in Washington, D.C. last week that laid out conditions for Israel’s phased withdrawal from southern Lebanon. There’s just one problem: the party that signed the deal from the Lebanese side isn’t the same party doing the fighting, and the terms of the withdrawal are conditioned on the disarmament of the very party that wasn’t a part of the negotiations to begin with.
As a result, it’s hardly surprising that a section of the Lebanese political establishment regards the U.S.-brokered trilateral agreement with skepticism. The agreement ostensibly charts a pathway to ending Israel’s war, but conditioned on Hezbollah’s disarmament — and without it being a part of the agreement. Instead, the agreement calls on the Lebanese army to disarm the group, a feat which the Israeli army itself has been unable to achieve.
So the question becomes: whywould Israel insist on terms that make the entire agreement impossible to implement? The answer becomes clearer when considering Israel’s treatment of Gaza’s so-called “ceasefire.”
Israel has conditioned its withdrawal from Gaza on the total disarmament of Hamas and every other faction in Gaza. Such a condition, even if Hamas were willing to implement it, is practically impossible given the ubiquitous presence of arms in Gaza and the presence of Israeli-armed gangs. But as has been pointed out, the impracticality of these terms is a trap meant to ensure Israel’s continued occupation of most of the Strip.
When we examine the contents of the recent agreement between Israel and Lebanon, it’s hard not to reach the same conclusion.
What’s in the agreement?
The agreement stipulates the end of the state of war between Israel and Lebanon and the formation of a task force to begin the drafting of a comprehensive peace accord. But more immediately, the agreement introduces a particular framework for how Israel would withdraw from occupied Lebanese territory.
Israel’s withdrawal, which would ostensibly be accompanied by the redeployment of the Lebanese army in all of Lebanon’s territory, starting with two “pilot zones,” is all hinging on the Lebanese army disarming “non-government groups” — mainly Hezbollah — and dismantling their military infrastructure. In exchange, the agreement previews a package of U.S. economic aid to Lebanon aimed at reconstruction and boosting the country’s economy, and the creation of a special “security coordination team” between Israel and Lebanon, supervised by the U.S. This is the part of the agreement that is being publicly celebrated. But there is more.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, the agreement includes a secret security annex, as later confirmed to the media by sources close to the Lebanese government, that would give Israel “freedom of military action” within the area still occupied by Israel. According to the leaked information, the annex also ties Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory to the success of the disarmament process, rather than according to a fixed timetable.
The terms of the agreement — both the public part and the leaked annex — explain the polarized reaction from Lebanese political forces.
A recipe for internal bloodshed
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has hailed the U.S.-brokered framework as a “major diplomatic achievement” and a first step toward restoring Lebanon’s full sovereignty. The head of the right-wing Phalange party, Sami Gemayel, a prominent opponent of Hezbollah, called the agreement “an achievement” that “guarantees the monopoly of arms by the state.”
But other parts of the Lebanese political landscape, including allies with Hezbollah, blasted the agreement as unworkable. The speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, described the agreement as “dictations” by the U.S., while a leading member of the Lebanese Communist Party, Hanna Ghareeb, rejected it as “a step towards normalization” of relations with Israel. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and former head of the Progressive Socialist Party, slammed the agreement as “trilateral in form but unilateral in substance,” adding that it ignored the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel, which he argued weakens Lebanon’s position and legitimacy. Most importantly, the party directly concerned by the agreement, Hezbollah, categorically rejected it.
Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Naim Qassem,said that the agreement is a “concession over Lebanon’s sovereignty,” stressing that conditioning Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon on the disarmament of Hezbollah “crosses all red lines” and “legitimizes the occupation of Lebanese lands for many long years to come.” Qassem declared that Hezbollah did not recognize the agreement and considered it void, calling on the Lebanese state to back down.
Lebanese critics of the agreement have also warned that the stipulation calling on the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah directly is a recipe for internal conflict and would result in intra-Lebanese bloodshed.
Even Israeli critics have pointed out the fact that Hezbollah, which has remained intact as a fighting force in the face of Israel’s military pressure, would be put in a position to consolidate itself regardless of what Israel does: if Israel withdraws from Lebanon,Hezbollah will claim victory and use it as an argument to keep its arms,and if Israel does not withdraw,Hezbollah will claim that it needs to keep its arms to push Israel out.
In other words, since the agreement sidelines Hezbollah and makes the Lebanese state the main actor, implementing the agreement appears impossible without devolving into something resembling a civil war. The Lebanese state might give Israel all the security guarantees that it demands on paper, but neither Israel nor the Lebanese state has been able to wrest any such concessions from Hezbollah.
So while the rhetorical concessions made to Israel are politically significant (given that they are made by the Lebanese state), they have no apparent way of being implemented on the ground.
This discrepancy, then, might indicate that the entire agreement was designed to fail. This becomes easier to understand once we look at where Israel has tried such agreements elsewhere. And one doesn’t need to look very far.
The Gaza déjà vu
When the ceasefire agreement in Gaza was reached last October, it stipulated three phases for Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip, which was supposed to be accompanied by an increase in the entry of humanitarian aid and the start of reconstruction. Only the first phase was partially implemented, with Israel withdrawing its forces to the so-called “Yellow Line” that divided Gaza roughly in half. Israel has since conditioned its move to the second phase on the full disarmament of Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza — an almost identical arrangement to the Lebanon agreement. And just like in Lebanon, the Gaza ceasefire terms, as originally conceived in Trump’s 20-point plan, remained deliberately vague on what disarmament would look like, making it easy for Israel to claim at any time in the future that the conditions for disarmament haven’t been met.
During recent months, Israel has shifted toward pushing for a maximalist vision of disarmament, which first surfaced last March during direct talks between the head of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Nikolay Mladenov, and Palestinian factions in Gaza. In subsequent talks, Mladenov issued an ultimatum to Hamas and other Palestinian factions that Gaza must be fully disarmed as a precondition for Israeli withdrawal and the beginning of reconstruction, down to the last rifle and pistol.
Hamas leaders have since characterized Mladenov’s conditions as an almost verbatim repetition of Israel’s maximalist terms, regarding Mladenov as a biased and compromised actor.
Such a demand is impossible to meet due to the ubiquity of light personal weapons in Gaza, which are privately owned by families and clans, while several factions other than Hamas are also in possession of light weapons. Moreover, Gaza’s Israeli-backed militias are heavily armed and have vowed to destroy Hamas, meaning that any voluntary disarmament would leave the group vulnerable to its rivals and result in chaos and a security vacuum. For Israel, chaos and internal Palestinian strife would be a welcome consequence that allows it to maintain the occupation of Gaza indefinitely.
Even if Hamas were to attempt to comply with these terms, Israel could easily claim the inevitable continuation of light weapons possession in Gaza as evidence that Hamas has not fulfilled its end of the bargain.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces continue to demolish Palestinian homes and other structures in the part of Gaza that they directly control, which now comprises over 65% of the Strip, destroying any chance of Palestinians returning.
It’s almost as if, in both Lebanon and Gaza, the impossibility of implementing the agreements is the point: Israel uses the lack of disarmament as the pretext to continue occupying Lebanese and Palestinian territory, and it justifies its constant state of war with the need to disarm Hezbollah and Hamas.
For Netanyahu, who is months away from elections and whose chances of winning remain uncertain in the polls, continued war is a political necessity.
Gaza: How We’re Learning to see the AI-Driven Genocide
“Indeed, this is the first genocide in history where artificial intelligence has been deployed as a primary tool for slaughter and devastation. Furthermore, this genocide is backed by a dedicated propaganda apparatus designed to instantly rationalize every atrocity.“
June 28, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/28/gaza-how-were-learning-to-see-the-ai-driven-genocide/
People can be consciously aware of atrocities without experiencing the moral outrage those horrors warrant. This emotional detachment is particularly pronounced when atrocities target “those who are different,” occur in seemingly “remote” lands, or repeat so frequently that they dissolve into a familiar, predictable monotony. Psychological frameworks explain this affective insularity through cognitive biases like the “just-world fallacy,” which blocks empathy in otherwise deserving cases to protect one’s own psychological comfort. Alternatively, it manifests as victim-blaming to rationalize aligning with the oppressor, or as compliance with propaganda narratives designed to dehumanize victims and render them unworthy of concern.
The rendering of atrocities into something ordinary through repetitive exposure systematically erodes the human capacity for a fittingly shocked response. This was vividly demonstrated as Israeli forces systematically targeted hospitals across the Gaza Strip one after another, until such strikes became routine footnotes in daily news cycles. A similar desensitization occurred regarding the targeted attacks on United Nations facilities. Once an initial war crime is permitted to pass, its predictable repetition fosters a form of emotional conditioning among the public—even alongside the abstract knowledge that a grave violation is occurring. The global public has grown accustomed to watching high-rise residential blocks collapse in seconds under Israeli bombardment. Consequently, this recurring crime no longer registers as an anomaly, so long as it remains confined to Gaza.
This shift can be measured by comparing the fierce global condemnation that followed the May 15, 2021, destruction of Gaza City’s 11-story al-Jalaa Tower with the relative apathy with which the systematic destruction of Gaza’s remaining residential high-rises through a series of Israeli airstrikes was met in September 2025. Breaking free from this paralyzing sense of desensitisation is a profound challenge if our world is to avoid acclimatizing to atrocities in the twenty-first century.
Another critical dilemma is that our perception of the gravity of such brutality can be disrupted when they are executed through modern, highly sophisticated tools.
“Human horror is easily triggered by the primal image of a vicious killer in ragged clothes holding a blood-dripping blade over a helpless victim. Yet, that killer becomes entirely invisible when stationed in a distant control room, calmly orchestrating mass slaughter against innocent civilians in Gaza by pressing glowing buttons while sipping American coffee in front of a screen—a method inherently more efficient than a primitive blade.“
This dilemma deepens when the act of killing is fully outsourced to technology, such as unmanned drones or autonomous AI-driven targeting systems, both of which the Israeli occupation military relied upon to perpetrate genocidal atrocities in Gaza. While this modern machinery is faster, deadlier, and vastly more devastating than primitive butchery, it acts as a powerful buffer, inducing a profound emotional numbness toward the horrors being inflicted.
Modern brutality often wears friendly masks that shield the observer from immediate shock or revulsion. It does not slit children’s throats with knives; instead, it obliterates their bodies entirely. At times, children literally vaporize under the impact of advanced, multi-ton munitions dropped onto impoverished refugee camps. The viewer is ultimately presented with nothing but a massive crater, concealing the gruesome details of mass slaughter and vast destruction. Despite this, numerous Israeli officers and soldiers have refused to suppress their appetite for hunting humans, abusing captives, and indulging in primal cruelties—frequently filming their actions to boast about them on social media.
It is vital to recognize how this genocide has operated on a scale that completely caught contemporary generations off guard. Many believed that such staggering atrocities belonged strictly to a black-and-white past, assuming that fascism and war crimes would only reappear alongside the vintage, recognizable imagery of defunct regimes. The human psyche was unprepared to comprehend that a twenty-first-century genocide could be so highly organized, technologically advanced, and meticulously targeted.
“Indeed, this is the first genocide in history where artificial intelligence has been deployed as a primary tool for slaughter and devastation. Furthermore, this genocide is backed by a dedicated propaganda apparatus designed to instantly rationalize every atrocity.“
It deploys tightly woven narratives delivered by leaders, spokespersons, and commentators skilled in rhetorical evasion and body language, all working in tandem to divert global attention away from the killing fields of the Gaza Strip.
Awakening the human conscience to the reality of the horrific genocide perpetrated in the Gaza Strip for at least two years demands an unrelenting effort to expose its chapters, re-open its cases, and launch intensive, coordinated initiatives. These efforts must elevate field testimonies and documented facts from independent international reports into the active domain of human awareness. It is only fair to acknowledge that significant journalistic, creative, and grassroots efforts have been made worldwide in this regard, but the sheer duration of this genocide demands increasingly creative and unyielding approaches.
Consider the profound impact of reimagining the scenes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, total destruction, and manufactured starvation through diverse literary, artistic, and cinematic works. Such creative interventions can produce world-class, brilliant pieces, even if Hollywood and mainstream institutions maintain their traditional indifference toward Palestine. Imagine visual works depicting this modern genocide in stark black-and-white, a stylistic choice that emotionally and intellectually links Gaza to past mass killings and crimes against humanity already solidified in the global conscience. This framing positions Gaza’s horrors as a logical continuation of historical brutality, which they undeniably are. This approach has already been successfully championed by highly conscious grassroots movements. For instance, in the Basque Region of Spain, highly artistic public demonstrations have repeatedly linked the atrocities in Gaza to the horrors of Guernica, famously immortalized by Pablo Picasso in 1937. Such initiatives are indispensable to confronting and exposing the deep-seated tendency of genocide denial pushed by prominent global leaders and elites.
“Humanizing the victims is an indispensable entry point; they must be given recognizable faces, familiar names, and stories to be told. This begins by invoking individuals like the child Hind Rajab, the academic and poet Refaat Alareer, or the abducted physician Hussam Abu Safiye, among countl“
We must unearth the latent human symbolism embedded within this landscape of tragedy and profound moral fortitude. We also need the symbolism of the place itself. The crowded sites of destruction and resilience throughout Gaza must move the human conscience through uncovering of stories currently buried beneath the rubble.”
Presenting these faces, names, and details with the dignity they deserve is capable of stirring a global sense of shared humanity and moral alignment with those targeted by this genocide—an atrocity the world has watched live on mobile screens for at least two full years. We must collectively internalize that the displaced, starving child is everyone’s child. The grandmother whose frail body was crushed beneath collapsing walls, left trapped until her final breath, is everyone’s grandmother. The same holds true for the mothers, the sick, and the disabled. It is no exaggeration to recognize that the victims are us. An assault on them is an assault on the very fabric of human life and dignity. The dismantling of international law and universal values means that every one of us is directly affected by these horrific violations, regardless of how they are spun by sophisticated propaganda or sustained through international complicity. Transforming an overwhelming statistical body of victims into deeply personal stories and recognizable symbols is an urgent necessity if we are to escape the trap of statistical reductionism, which reduces human beings to mere numbers devoid of feeling.
Awakening this human consciousness is the ultimate key to compelling individuals worldwide to honour their ethical commitments, translating empty slogans into concrete action. It is the catalyst needed to pressure the enablers of genocide and challenge those political discourses that insult public intelligence and moral decency. When these deeper human impulses are awakened, people will naturally discover their roles in confronting this pervasive injustice and aggression. This emotional awakening will pave the way for sustained mobilization, converting raw sentiment into tangible pressure, accountability, and justice—ensuring that the horrific genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza remains at the centre of global consciousness for generations to come.
The Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Agenda Continues To Roll Forward
Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 03, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-agenda?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=204779474&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
As both US and Israeli leaders openly contemplate attacking Iran again, it’s easy for the world to miss the fact that the genocidal alliance has also dramatically reinvigorated its ethnic cleansing agendas in Gaza.
The Adelson-owned pro-Netanyahu outlet Israel Hayom reports that in the coming weeks the so-called “Board of Peace” overseeing life in the Gaza Strip is planning to relocate Palestinians to “humanitarian shelters” that are not under Hamas control.
Israel Hayom reports that an area near the destroyed city of Rafah is the first location where such camps will be set up. This is noteworthy because one year ago defense minister Israel Katz stated that there was a plan to construct a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where “the emigration plan” for the Palestinians would then be implemented, adding that Benjamin Netanyahu was working on finding foreign nations to accept the population of Gaza.
It’s hard to ignore the similarities. Both accounts even state that the plan is to police the displaced Palestinians using an international force. The 2026 Israel Hayom report states that the camps will be overseen by “multinational forces under the Board of Peace’s management”, and Israel Katz stated in 2025 that Israel is seeking international partners to manage the zone.
So to be clear, in July of last year Israeli officials were publicly stating that they were going to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah to house the Palestinians under international supervision while working to relocate them from their homeland to other countries, and in July of this year we learn that we will soon see Palestinians in Gaza relocated to “humanitarian shelters” near Rafah overseen by international forces.
So it sounds like the same plan. If it is, then it’s a plan for ethnic cleansing.
Israel has already expanded its control over Gaza from 53 percent to 70 percent of the Strip, concentrating the survivors of the genocide into a mere 30 percent of the Palestinian territory. And now, according to Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen, the plan is to expand control to 100 percent.
Israel National News quotes Cohen as saying during a recent radio interview that “our control of the territory will only continue to expand until we reach 100%,” adding, “two months ago we controlled 53% of the Strip, about a month ago around 60%, and today we’re approaching 70% of the Strip’s area.”
This comes amid other reports we discussed recently which strongly indicate that the Trumpanyahu administration is renewing its push to remove all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The other day we learned from the Israeli press that Israel’s national security agencies had been instructed to rebrand the ethnic cleansing plan as a “plan for free movement” in order to mitigate international resistance to the agenda. A few days before that, we learned that Israel’s new national security chief had convened a meeting with officials from the IDF and Shin Bet to discuss the plan to displace the Palestinians of Gaza to other countries.
Again, Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza have always been about ethnic cleansing from the very beginning. Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
The goal has always been to remove the Palestinians from Gaza so their territory can be taken from them. This was never anything other than a blatant Israeli land grab. They’ve been framing it as a “war” so that after they seize and colonize Gaza they can say “the Arabs fought a war and lost, they deserved to lose territory” like they always do, but it was never actually a war.
Calling the Gaza genocide a “war” is like seeing a man beating up a toddler and calling it a “fight”. It’s one of the world’s most sophisticated military forces raining explosives on an area packed full of children with the backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, opposed only by a few thousand guys running around in sandals with homemade rockets and ancient Kalashnikovs.
That’s not a war. It’s an ethnic cleansing operation. That’s all this has ever been.
Israel Is An Apartheid State – And Its Weird Marriage Laws Show Us How
in 2018 the Israeli government passed a Nation-State Law declaring that Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, not to all citizens who live there.
Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group.
In Israel, “Jewish” is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the “nation” of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel.
July 1, 2026 , Jonathan Cook
Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own nationality. Why? Because a common national identity would sabotage Israel’s carefully veiled system of segregation
Israel’s supporters have gone apoplectic over a short post on X from the journalist Mehdi Hasan, highlighting Israel’s peculiar marriage laws.
Hasan asks: “Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel?”
Did you know that you can’t have a civil or secular marriage in Israel?
Michael A. Cohen (NOT TRUMP’S FORMER FIXER) @speechboy, 71Jun 28
Something like 40 countries have an official state religion. Israel is not one of them! In fact, that Israel defines itself as a Jewish state is not even a religious designation. That Mamdani continues to make this mistake and continues to focus on the world’s one Jewish Show more 4:24 AM · Jun 29, 2026
He’s not wrong. Israel has banned civil marriage. You can wed only in a ceremony strictly controlled by religious authorities. If you want a civil marriage, you have to travel to another country.
Why, you might reasonably wonder. Isn’t Israel a modern, secular, western-style liberal democracy? After all, that’s what our politicians and media keep telling us.
The most popular rejoinder to Hasan from Israel’s apologists – that the situation is no better in Saudi Arabia – is not quite the flex they seem to imagine. So Israel offers the same human rights protections as Saudi Arabia? Impressive.
Others have pointed out that Israel inherited the so-called “millet” system from the Ottoman empire, which gave the leaders of each confessional group across the Middle East autonomous control over their community’s religious affairs.
Doubtless, 150 years ago the system worked relatively well in reducing communal tensions in religiously diverse parts of a large empire. It prevented officials in Constantinople – modern-day Istanbul – from getting dragged deeply into the day-to-day affairs of its often distant subjects.
But 150 years ago, Britain sent children up chimneys to sweep them. The law was changed around that time to stop this abusive and dangerous practice.
Israel was established nearly eight decades ago, supposedly as a secular, western-style liberal democracy. It has had 78 years to change those archaic Ottoman marriage laws.
Why hasn’t it done so?
All the bluster decrying Hasan’s post is a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that Israel’s antiquated marriage laws survive because they are useful to Israel.
In fact, they are more than that. They are a core component of Israel’s version of apartheid – a racist system of segregation Israel has successfully shielded from the view of western publics with the help of western politicians and media.
‘Demographic threat’
Israel’s ban on civil marriage is central to its efforts to prevent what past racist societies, such as apartheid South Africa and the American Deep South, termed “miscegenation” – that is, sexual relations between different ethnic groups. You might remember that the Nazis had unpleasant views on this subject too.
Here is the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, opposing miscegenation in 2016:
“Preventing assimilation in the Jewish state is completely legitimate and not at all racist. You are assuming as a basis for the discussion that preventing intermarriage is wrong, while ignoring the fact that most [Jewish] girls who go with Arabs are poor girls who are being used.”
Former education minister Rafi Peretz called mixed marriages involving Jews a “second Holocaust”.
In Israel, such views are entirely mainstream. In 2018, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s current president and the former leader of an ostensible leftwing Israeli party, described mixed marriages among American Jews as a “plague” for which a “solution” had to be found – presumably by copying Israel’s approach.
In Israel, the chief concern is not about marriages between Jews and the Palestinians under occupation – which Israel and its supporters like to present, bogusly, as a straightforward “security” matter.
In the occupied territories, Israel uses far blunter methods than laws to prevent any kind of intimate relations developing between Jews and a captive Palestinian population. It prefers physical containment and violence.
Palestinians under occupation are forcibly separated from Israeli Jews. They are hemmed into their own tightly confined ghettoes by Israel’s network of steel and concrete barriers; by the Israeli army; by checkpoints; by separate, apartheid roads in the West Bank; and by Jewish militias living on stolen lands in so-called “settlements”.
There is little chance of interaction, let alone intermarriage, in such circumstances – except when Israeli soldiers or armed Jewish settlers come rampaging into Palestinian communities to destroy crops, kill livestock, poison wells, torch homes and cars, and beat up – and sometimes kill – the inhabitants.
Nonetheless, there is still a potential vulnerability in Israel’s system of segregation.
In 1948, Israel expelled 80 per cent of the Palestinian population from their homes and lands in an area that was henceforth to be called, not Palestine, but the “Jewish” state of Israel.
A few Palestinians remained, however, inside those borders – mostly from oversight or error. Despite covert efforts by Israel for several years after the 1948 war to force them out of the state, its officials soon came under international pressure to give these stranded Palestinians citizenship – even if in practice, as we shall see, this conferred on them very inferior rights.
Even today, Israel is extremely worried about a supposed threat from its third-class Palestinian “citizens” – officially termed “Israel’s Arabs”. Given a higher birth rate, their numbers have grown exponentially over eight decades. They now comprise a fifth of Israel’s population.
Israeli journalists, academics and politicians, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, regularly call the country’s Palestinian citizens a “demographic threat”, and endlessly worry about the “Palestinian womb”.
No state of all its citizens
But Israel faces a countervailing pressure. If it makes its treatment of Palestinian citizens too obviously racist and oppressive, some outsiders might start to realise it is not the secular western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.
You will hear the pro-Israel lobby in the West tell you that so-called “Israeli Arabs” have exactly the same rights as Israel’s Jewish population, guaranteed by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That is not even remotely true.
Adalah, a leading legal rights group in Israel, has a database showing more than 70 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jewish citizens and Palestinian citizens. These laws form the core of Israel’s apartheid system.
Israel’s Basic Laws, a sort of constitution, explicitly exclude any principle of civic equality. Every attempt by a Palestinian party in Israel to get a debate in the parliament on Israel becoming a “state of all its citizens” – that is, a liberal democracy – is barred from discussion. And in 2018 the Israeli government passed a Nation-State Law declaring that Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, not to all citizens who live there.
As with Palestinians under occupation, Israel has almost entirely confined its Palestinian citizens to their own segregated, underfunded, under-resourced communities (townships) on less then 3 per cent of the country’s territory.
A small minority of Palestinian citizens inside Israel live in segregated, deprived neighbourhoods of what are misleadingly termed “mixed” cities. Other Palestinian citizens, the most oppressed of all, live in communities inhabited by their families for centuries but which have been criminalised by an Israeli state that refuses to recognise them.
Many hundreds of Jewish rural communities, by contrast, operate effectively as exclusive membership clubs. They have the power to exclude Palestinian citizens – a right they take full advantage of.
Separate planning structures ensure massively overcrowded Palestinian communities inside Israel are unable to build new homes and expand. Palestinian children are schooled in a separate and much inferior education system.
For the who wish to dig deeper, I have written a lengthy essay setting out the details of Israel’s apartheid system here.
The ban on civil marriage inside Israel’s borders is not usually cited, even by critics, as an example of its apartheid system of rule. But the ban persists because it is the ideal way to conceal segregation under the veneer of equal treatment.
Israel’s Palestinian citizens must marry in ceremonies conducted by their religious community’s leaders: by Muslim clerics, or by various Christian churches, or by the Druze clergy.
It is the same for Jews in israel. They must be married by an Orthodox rabbi.
So everyone faces the same restrictions. But the point is this: the equality of treatment ensures very unequal outcomes. It is designed that way.
Fascist thugs
Inside Israel, intermarriage is only possible if one party can convert to their partner’s religion.
Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate makes it impossible for Palestinians under occupation to convert to Judaism in Israel, with the head of its conversion authority stating in 2016 that any such applicants are rejected “without review because of their ethnic origin”.
Meanwhile, Israel makes it almost as difficult for anyone else considered a non-Jew to convert to Judaism, most especially Palestinian citizens. Over decades, there have been only a handful of such cases.
In practice, this means that in any relationship between a Palestinian citizen of Israel and an Israeli Jew, it almost always falls to the Israeli Jew to convert to the religion of the Palestinian citizen, whether a Muslim, Christian or Druze. That entails the Jewish partner losing their Jewish status and the many consequential privileges inside Israel that derive from that status.
Israel has found this is a much better solution than apartheid South Africa’s, where blacks and whites were explicitly barred by law from marrying. Israel can achieve the same result more quietly.
Given the entirely segregated structure of Israeli society, and the strong social taboos among Israeli Jews on “miscegenation”, the number of intermarriages in Israel between Jews and Palestinian citizens barely reaches double digits each year.
There are even groups like Lehava – Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan – that go around beating up Palestinians caught anywhere near the Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem and terrorising any young Jewish women suspected of being romantically involved with a Palestinian. Lehava hold noisy and disruptive protests to shame the odd Jewish woman who converts and marries a Palestinian citizen.
All of this happens with a quiet wink from the authorities. The current police minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has long been a patron of the fascist, Jewish supremacist thugs of Lehava.
In the rare cases of a Jew converting and marrying a Palestinian citizen, the Palestinian partner faces innumerable legal and social obstacles to integrating into a Jewish community to which they do not belong.
Instead, the Jewish partner moves to a Palestinian community – an Israeli version of a township like Soweto – and educates their children inside the vastly inferior “Arab” school system. The former Jew loses most of the ethnic privileges they previously enjoyed inside the world’s only “Jewish” state.
Faced with this as their future, such couples often seize the opportunity for neither to convert and instead marry and live abroad.
Unwelcome guests
None of these difficulties are accidental. It is exactly how you would expect an apartheid system that prefers to obscure its apartheid character to structure its laws – and thereby help its lobby in the West, including the western political and media class, to claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
Israel learnt from the mistakes of the old South Africa. It mastered the modern arts of public relations – or at least it did until Benjamin Netanyahu tore up the script by erasing Gaza.
Inside Israel, the apartheid system extends far beyond marriage laws to touch all areas of life.
Here is another way Israel has obscured its apartheid system – again not in the occupied territories, but inside Israel itself.
The same system that denies Israelis the possibility of a civil or secular marriage also refuses to recognise that they have any kind of civil or secular identity, simply as Israelis. By law, everyone in Israel must belong to a confessional group, identified as a Jew, Muslim, Christian or Druze.
Which makes sense of another little-known fact about Israel: Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own – in this case, Israeli – nationality. Why? For the simple reason that, were Israelis to share a common national identity, it would be much harder for the Israeli state to operate its apartheid system.
Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group.
In Israel, “Jewish” is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the “nation” of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel.
Muslims and Christians are lumped together into a similarly artificial “Arab” nationality, while the Druze have their own, different nationality. The same Nation State Law makes clear that the state of Israel does not belong to these other, non-Jewish “nations”, despite their families having lived on the same lands for centuries. Palestinian citizens are nothing more than guests – and unwelcome ones at that.
This segregation carries through to Israel’s ID cards. These cards, which must be carried at all times, used to include a section that expressly showed the “nationality” of each Israeli. But this section attracted uncomfortable scrutiny during a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by a group of dissident Israelis seeking recognition of an Israeli nationality. Officials removed the category from the card. However, Israel’s population register still includes a nationality classification.
In addition to Jew, Arab and Druze, there are more than 120 other categories to deal with all the anomalies. I was just one such anomaly after I married a Palestinian Christian and entered a lengthy and difficult naturalisation process. My nationality was classed as “British”.
Why all this complexity? Why all this unique weirdness?
Because Israel needs to conceal its system of apartheid. The old South Africa simply said: one law for whites and another for blacks.
Israel knows this no longer plays well. So it has devised a convoluted, baffling system that few understand as a way to avoid attracting attention and criticism.
Special Jewish rights
So let’s end with just one example of how Israel’s apartheid system works in practice.
Notionally, Israel confers on all its citizens – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze – equal rights as citizens. But with a sleight of hand, it then undermines those equal rights by conferring superior “national” rights on one group only, Jews. If there is a conflict between a citizenship right and a Jewish “national” right, you’ve probably already guessed that the Jewish national right takes precedence.
Education is a good illustration. All Israeli citizens enjoy a right to have their children educated, because education is a citizenship right. But lots of veiled manoeuvres – like extra budgets for National Priority Areas, special subsidies for Jewish religious schools, funding from the diaspora, and bigger tax disbursements from central government for Jewish local authorities – mean Jewish schools are far better funded than “Arab” schools.
Education for Israel’s Palestinian citizens has been underfunded for eight decades. So even though Israel’s apologists will claim the funding gaps are slowly narrowing, the continuing shortfall simply compounds a decades-long historical injustice. Arab schools are so far behind they can never catch up without aggressive additional funding Israel clearly has no intention of ever providing them with.
There are massive shortages of classrooms and staff in dilapidated school buildings. Old books are often grossly outdated and poorly translated into Arabic by the state. Palestinian educational leaders have no input into the curriculum the community’s children are taught. There are strict controls by Jewish (usually racist) officials over what can be taught and who can teach. And on top of all this, huge cultural biases in qualifying tests make it far harder for Palestinian citizens to gain entry to universities in Israel.
There are many other problems in education. For example, nearly one in 10 Palestinian children in Israel live in historic communities built on lands that the Israeli state now wishes to “Judaise” – reserve for the Jewish population – and are therefore denied all recognition.
Treated like criminals, these children rarely have schools in their communities because no permanent buildings are allowed. What buildings there are cannot be connected to the electricity or water grids. Even children of kindergarten age must typically travel long distances – sometimes close to 60 km a day – to get to a licensed school.
The forms of discrimination in education alone are endless. But they do not stop there. The discrimination is replicated in all major facets of life for Israel’s more than 2 million Palestinian citizens through these conceptual and legal contortions over religion, citizenship and nationality.
None of this should be a surprise. It is exactly what you would expect in an apartheid state like Israel.
Revealed: Illegal West Bank settlements advertised at Israeli event in London
Despite denials from organisers, evidence gathered inside the event shows occupied Palestinian land was being marketed
DANIA AKKAD, 15 June 2026, https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-illegal-west-bank-settlements-advertised-at-israeli-event-in-london/
Properties from seven illegal settlements were advertised at the Great Israeli Real Estate Event on Sunday in London, days after more than 100 MPs and groups urged the UK government to ban it.
Organisers had told journalists last week that all exhibitors at the event “without exception” would only provide information about properties for sale within the Green Line – the internationally recognised border between Israel and Palestine.
But brochures circulated at the event which Jewish Anti-Zionist Action (JAZA) shared with Declassified and others posted online show companies touting properties for sale in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In one pamphlet, Harry Zahev Developers advertises apartments and private homes in Kfar Eldad and Teneh Omarim, illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank near Palestinian towns and communities.
“Bringing gardens and spaces where nature is your closest neighbour,” the pamphlet reads.
In another brochure, the Jerusalem Real Estate company offers the city’s “most sought-after Anglo neighborhoods” including French Hill and Ramat Eshkol, two settlement neighbourhoods in occupied east Jerusalem.
Neither company responded immediately to requests for comment on Monday. Declassified attempted to reach the event organisers, but could not find any contact details.
Other illegal Israel settlements featured in the promotional materials which JAZA collected include the West Bank settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev, and Givat Hamatos, a settlement currently under construction in East Jerusalem.
“Through these pamphlets and information we collected on the inside, we can prove that this event was selling properties in the occupied West Bank,” said Guy Zilberman, a JAZA activist who gained entry to the exhibition.
‘Crazy times’
Zilberman described his experience at the real estate show. “After passing through security, I was given a free tote bag and a booklet advertising the different real estate companies present at the fair that day,” he said.
At the stall for one developer, he said he was told the company had “properties they were selling in ‘Judea and Samaria’ that he thought would be perfect for me”.
The company representative “had all the booklets and papers for it but couldn’t get them out because the police had said in order for the event to go ahead they couldn’t advertise properties illegal under international law,” Zilberman said.
The man then told him these were “crazy times we live in” and asked for Zilberman’s contact details so he could follow up after the event.
He visited another stall and said he was given a leaflet advertising properties in Ma’ale Adumim, which is an illegal West Bank settlement.
After about an hour inside, Zilberman disrupted the event, calling for “sanctions now” and saying “don’t steal” in Hebrew.
“After disrupting the event, I was pulled out by my neck by security,” Zilberman said.
He noted that the Board of Deputies had said that the event was “an excuse to harass and intimidate members of the Jewish community”.
“I would invite the Board of Deputies to look at the documents here that clearly depict in writing that these properties in illegally occupied territories…have been advertised at this event,” he said.
The Board of Deputies did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
War Crimes, War Powers and American Sovereignty: The USA + Israel = The Department of Forever War
While carrying a national debt approaching $40 Trillion, the Administration is increasing spending for its newly dedicated Department of War by 67% to upwards of $1.5 TRILLION per year. Simultaneously, with more than 42 million Americans unable to feed themselves, the administration is cutting federal food program
From war crimes and genocide abroad to moral, constitutional, and debt crises at home: Why Congress must reject the NDAA’s U.S.-Israel military and intelligence merger
June 30, 2026 Dennis Kucinich, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/30/war-crimes-war-powers-and-american-sovereignty-the-usa-israel-the-department-of-forever-war/
Against the horrific high- and low-tech butchery of Palestinians and Lebanese by Israeli ethno-nationalist psychopathic killers, this week there will be an effort in Congress to formally merge or integrate the military of Israel and the United States at the most advanced levels.
Section 219 (formerly Section 224) of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act of 2027, provides for an unprecedented unification. The nearly $4 billion in the NDAA for Israel’s offensive efforts pales next to Israel having direct access to determining use of $1.5 trillion in annual military resources of the United States.
Money can be appropriated one year and withdrawn the next. Institutional integration is permanent.
Section 219 creates permanent mechanisms through which military planning, intelligence sharing, weapons development, procurement, research, artificial intelligence, and strategic coordination become increasingly intertwined between the United States and Israel.
It is a proposal to embed another nation’s military establishment within the long-term planning and strategic architecture of the United States government.
Our own government – House, Senate and Administration – is in moral collapse, placing overwhelming emphasis on militarism instead of adequately funding America – housing, education, food, health, safety, and retirement security. Americans are standing at freeway exits, begging for food, while our tax dollars flow to weapons manufacturers.
While carrying a national debt approaching $40 Trillion, the Administration is increasing spending for its newly dedicated Department of War by 67% to upwards of $1.5 TRILLION per year. Simultaneously, with more than 42 million Americans unable to feed themselves, the administration is cutting federal food programs.
The practical implications extend far beyond dollars. With NDAA Section 219, Congress the legislation would create enduring institutional relationships affecting how those extraordinary military resources are developed, coordinated, and potentially employed.
No Congress has ever before considered legislation of this nature with any foreign nation.
If the Administration’s “America First” claim were to mean anything, it must first mean that America’s Constitution comes first. It must mean that American families, farmers, workers, veterans, and children come first. Section 219 turns that claim into a farce.
Section 219 of the NDAA would cause the United States to become dependent upon Israel making decisions about war, peace, military strategy, intelligence, and U. S. national security. This is the consequence of permanent institutional integration.
One week ago, a UN Commission of Inquiry determined that Israeli security forces deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children, sometimes as a game, torturing them, subjecting children to sexual violence resulting in “unprecedented death, injury and trauma.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the IDF has been instrumental in the deaths of as many as 800,000 Palestinians, including children, emergency health care workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and educators.
UN investigators and human rights observers have documented the killing of Palestinian children and have accused Israeli forces of deliberately targeting the children of Gaza.
These findings are reinforced by dehumanizing statements from Israeli political figures who have portrayed Palestinian children as future terrorists, so children are targets.
Essential civilian infrastructure has been devastated. Water systems, hospitals, schools, electrical networks, and sanitation facilities have been damaged or destroyed, eacerbating a man-made, humanitarian catastrophe.
In the occupied West Bank, armed “settlers” have been widely reported to have attacked Palestinian communities, burned homes, uprooted olive groves and other crops, destroyed property, and killed livestock, further displacing civilian populations.
Israel has used starvation as a weapon, setting food as a trap and, gunning down Gazans as they rush desperately to feed themselves and their children. Water supplies have been poisoned, wells filled with cement.
Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are testing ground sfor increasingly sophisticated military technologies, destroying entire villages with increasingly powerful munitions, and using precision, artificial intelligence-assisted targeting systems. Human rights organizations have raised serious concerns about the speed of targeting decisions, civilian casualty rates, and the implications of delegating life-and-death decisions to algorithmic systems.
White phosphorous and other weapons banned by international treaty are in use.
The conduct of the IDF has earned world-wide condemnation. Twenty-nine UN member states do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The Israel newspaper Haaretz recently reported that the ICC prosecutor is also seeking arrest warrants for Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “Gaza must be destroyed entirely.” and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Givr, who has said: “All of Lebanon must burn.” Will these be our new partners? If so, the fundamental question becomes: Who are WE?
What is to be lost further in an Israel-U.S. military merger?
If the U.S. combines our military capabilities with the twisted occupation and expansionist ethic of Israel’s use of military technology against civilian populations, will it be long before our own government militarizes the high -tech surveillance infrastructure already in place to use state violence against our own citizens who protest abuse of basic rights?
The First Amendment has already been taken down on college campuses, and in cities and states where Israel critics are sanctioned.
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials have trained in Israel. The lessons learned there have come to America in terms of deportation, detention, and in some cases, physical abuse, injury and death at the hands of ICE government agents.
Israel kills Arab children so they will not commit crimes in the future. Will Americans, as in the movie Minority Report be pitched into a dystopian world where predictive algorithms enable Israel-U.S. collaborators to hunt down, prosecute and even punish Americans for crimes not committed
As a Member of Congress, I questioned Benjamin Netanyahu during a hearing which took place prior to the 2003 Congressional vote on going to war against Iraq. He admitted he wanted not only Iraq to be attacked by the United States, but also Libya and Iran. It is widely known that the Israeli Prime Minister pushed President Trump into the disastrous war against Iran.
It is inevitable that as Israel’s aggression is maximally empowered, once placed inside the U.S. war-making establishment, the U.S. will be dragged into the Zionists’ expansionist designs on Iran, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. A greater Israel means a lesser United States. Congress, heavily influenced by the Israel lobby, is unable to reclaim its constitutionally based war power.
Since the merger is to be voted on, this week, before America celebrates the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, let us be reminded by Thomas Jefferson’s July 4, 1776 characterization of George III, King of Great Britain: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws….”
Our forefathers did not fight for freedom and for independence at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown, nor sacrifice American blood and treasure in battles in World War I and World War II to arrive at July 4, 2026, having willingly forfeited our sovereignty to a foreign nation, losing control of our future and putting in doubt “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”
Call your congressperson today and tell them to stand for America’s independence and vote for the Massie-Khanna Amendment to remove Section 219 from the NDAA
We’re Expected To Remember October 7 But Never Ask Questions About It
The Israeli press are reporting that police documents on the security for the October 7 2023 Nova music festival were mysteriously deleted at some point in early January 2024. The Jerusalem Post reports that “it is unknown who removed them and whether copies still exist.”
A new article from the Israeli outlet YNet reports that the IDF had planned to kill an Israeli soldier who was captured by Hamas in 2006, with one document stating “Hannibal in effect.” The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli military protocol ensuring that extreme measures be taken to prevent Israelis from capture by Palestinian resistance groups, even if it means killing the Israelis.
Israel’s Channel 12 has shown footage of Israeli officers demanding that the Hannibal Directive be implemented on October 7 to prevent hostages from being taken by Hamas, with a senior officer saying “(Strike) Gaza. Break it all apart. Along with the soldiers who got abducted.”
Many Israeli soldiers and civilians are on record saying that Israeli forces fired upon their own people on October 7.
How many of the 1,195 people killed in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood were actually killed by Israeli forces? We don’t know, and we’re not allowed to know. Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley has argued that the number was in the hundreds.
Did Israel deliberately leave its people undefended from an impending Hamas attack in order to advance pre-existing agendas? We don’t know, and we’re not allowed to know, but there are mountains of evidence indicating that they did.
Ask why there’s been so much violence in the middle east these last three years and you’ll be told it’s because of October 7.
Ask why October 7 happened and you’ll be called an antisemite.
Ask what specifically transpired on that day and you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist.
It’s just so crazy how often apologists for Israel and the western empire will cite October 7 as the spark that set off all these wars of far-reaching consequence, but it’s taboo to talk about exactly what happened on that day, and it’s taboo to talk about how Israel’s abuses provoked the attack.
The official mainstream position on October 7 is that Hamas killed 1,195 Israelis for no reason other than because they are evil and wanted to kill Jews, and that anyone who suggests it may have happened for actual material reasons is an antisemitic monster. Whenever anyone spouts the official mainstream position on October 7 at me I just want to make “goo goo ga ga” baby noises at them until they shut up and go away, because such people are not thinking like adults.
Everyone who’s been watching Israel’s behavior since October 7 now understands why Palestinian resistance fighters carried out October 7 in the first place. We’re expected to avert our eyes from the glaring plot holes in the official narrative and never suggest that Israel’s horrific abuses of the Palestinians may have played some role in giving rise to the attack, but after watching a live-streamed genocide month after month after horrifying month, we all know October 7 was just Israel reaping what it sowed.
And we know there is no evil these freaks are not capable of.
Iran trumps US on Hormuz
| US President Donald Trump’s innate inability to empathise with others and lack of intelligence to foresee consequences are likely to hand Iran a long-term financial advantage and incidentally, but more importantly, threaten the treaty that has been the most productive of peace and prosperity in recent history – the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. |
Crispin Hull,June 30, 2026, https://www.crispinhull.com.au/2026/06/30/iran-trumps-us-on-hormuz/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_source_platform=mailpoet&utm_campaign=crispin-hull-column
The tit-for-tat breaches of the US-Iran 60-day ceasefire in the past few days certainly point that way. Let me explain.
Of 193 members of the UN, 44 are landlocked. The other 149 have coastlines linking each of their coastlines to the other 148 countries’ coastlines such that they can as a practical matter drive to those other nations by boat or ship with no natural barrier or no requirement to use easily blocked roads or railways.
The UN convention took eight years to negotiate in the 1970s. It was a triumph of diplomacy and law over the assertion of power and force. It resulted in one of the greatest trade-offs in history between powerful nations, on one hand, and less powerful nations, on the other.
In short, before the convention, powerful trading nations saw their economic interests in both the unfettered exploitation of the resources of the oceans and in having freedom of navigation across the oceans to help free trade, but ultimately they were willing to forgo the former in order to secure the latter.
The trade-off was enormous. Rich, powerful nations thought that freedom of navigation across the world’s oceans was so important for trade and hence prosperity that they were willing to grant poor and less powerful nations significant exclusive rights to their adjacent oceans in return for that freedom.
The question posed by the negotiators was how to achieve peace and greater prosperity. The answer was negotiation and compromise.
Each nation, even the militarily and economically weak, got the exclusive rights to all the ocean’s resources, particularly fishing and mining, up to 200 nautical miles from their shore and the total sovereign rights of territorial waters up to 12 nautical miles from their shore.
n return vessels from any nation, especially militarily strong and rich trading nations could sail anywhere on the oceans, but if they came within 12 nautical miles of another nation’s shores they had to inform that nation of their passage, and make their passage expeditious – no more lingering with menace close to other nations’ shores (gunboat diplomacy).
The arrangement facilitated trade and made the passage of warships less threatening. Good all round.
Before that, the three-nautical-mile limit was the general unwritten rule. Within that limit, nation states could do whatever they liked with their ocean and beyond that foreign vessels could do whatever they liked – from fishing to playing wargames.
Three nautical miles was of practical importance. In the nineteenth century that was the limit of a cannon shot. It meant that a ship outside that limit could not hit land and that land-based artillery could not hit a ship.
But It also meant that the nations either side of major choke points in world navigational routes – especially Gibraltar, Malacca and Hormuz – which did not have at least a little strip of international waters in the middle had to permit free passage of all vessels.
The latest US-Iran talks and spats over Hormuz, now puts this arrangement in jeopardy. At its narrowest Hormuz is less that 24 nautical miles wide. It means that the territorial waters of Iran to the north and Oman to the south overlap in the middle. It means any ship travelling through has to identify itself to either Iran or Oman and travel expeditiously, or it could be prevented from passage.
Under the ceasefire agreement Iran agreed to allow free passage, but the agreement was vaguely worded. Vessels seeking passage opted to travel as close to the Omani side as possible. Iran read that as a breach of the ceasefire and fired on those vessels. The US retaliated by hitting Iranian targets on the coastline.
It is clear that Iran wants to come to some arrangement with Oman to charge vessels fees in the future in return for passage rather than allowing Oman to let its side of the Strait be used for free safe passage. Whether those fees are characterised as fees for services or a toll, they will still be contrary to the convention. And once one nation starts, others will surely follow.
With drones and rockets we now have the reverse of the 19th century position. Instead of a nation worrying about ship-based weapons firing on its land, ships now have to worry about land-based weapons firing upon ships.
It puts Iran in the box seat. With that threat in place Iran can insist on payment of a fee before guaranteeing safe passage. Iran can just use the insurance system to enforce payment. Without insurance no ship-owner will transit, and without guarantee of safe passage no insurer will grant insurance to a vessel.
All very foreseeable. But it would require thinking in a way that strategists usually think – asking the question: what would I do if I were in the enemy’s position? How would I react if I were the enemy? But Trump is incapable of viewing anything from any perspective but his own.
Arguably, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has done more in the past 40 years to prevent hostilities and to create the certainty for shipping that generates trade and prosperity than all the force and threat of force that any single nation can muster.
But Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have always preferred force to negotiation.
From the start, they asked the wrong question and got the wrong answer. Netanyahu, facing an election this October, asked how could he stay in power after the Hamas-inspired attack on Israel in October 2023 so he does not have to face questions about how he allowed such a lapse of security? Trump asked, having torn up the well-negotiated Obama deal with Iran to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons, how can he ensure Iran does not get those weapons.
The wrong answer they got was: war. In Netanyahu’s case it was genocidal war. If only they chose negotiation and the rule of law rather than force, the world would not be facing an even stronger Iran and an indefinite economic threat to the world that its stranglehold over Hormuz now gives it.
If the world had insisted that Israel follow the 1947 UN resolution that called for the termination of the British Mandate and the partition of historic Palestine into independent, democratic Arab and Jewish states with guaranteed rights for all citizens, there would now be peace in the Middle East.
Trump has always preferred force and the threat of force over the rule of law – domestically and internationally. What he does at home is for the Americans to worry about. After all, they voted him into office. But there is little or no redress for those affected by what he does in the world – usually foolishly and impetuously.
That is why Australia should use whatever tools it has to steer international affairs towards the rule of law and negotiation and away from the use of force.
Jeffrey Sachs: The Greater Israel Project is Collapsing
June 27, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/27/jeffrey-sachs-the-greater-israel-project-is-collapsing/
For further reading, the interview references the article “Stop ‘Greater Israel’ to Make Peace”: In which Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares argue that the ideology of “Greater Israel” has become the driving force behind decades of conflict across the Middle East, describing it as an expansionist doctrine that continues to fuel war rather than security.
Sachs and Fares argue that lasting peace in the Middle East requires rejecting the ideology of “Greater Israel,” which they contend has driven decades of conflict in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and, most recently, Iran. The authors claim that Israeli expansionism—backed by both secular nationalists and religious extremists, and enabled by unwavering U.S. political support—has repeatedly fueled wars that have devastated the region while ultimately undermining Israel’s own security and international standing. They maintain that the recent U.S.-Iran ceasefire demonstrates diplomacy is more effective than military force and argue that a durable peace depends on ending the war in Gaza, halting Israeli occupation and expansion, withdrawing from neighboring territories, and establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 borders.
The authors highlight what they characterize as increasingly hardline rhetoric among Israel’s leadership, writing that the ideology is rooted in “secular hardliners like Netanyahu who say that Israel must control all the land from the river to the sea to be safe, and damn the eight million Palestinians in the way.” They also point to statements by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has declared there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and vowed that Israel “won’t commit suicide to make them happy” by relinquishing military control of the West Bank, Gaza, or occupied territory in Lebanon and Syria. Sachs and Fares contend that these views help explain continued military action despite diplomatic breakthroughs, arguing that “Greater Israel” advocates view peace itself as a setback. As evidence, they note that “even after the deal was sealed, Israel has continued to bomb Lebanon,” arguing that the ideology remains a major obstacle to a lasting regional peace.
Click the Image Below [on original]to Read the Full Article
Netanyahu’s War on Humanity: Ethnically Cleansing the Palestinian West Bank
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism.
June 29, 2026, H. Scott Prosterman Informed Comment, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/29/netanyahus-war-on-humanity-ethnically-cleansing-the-palestinian-west-bank/
Since October 7, 18 new settlements and eight new army bases have been constructed on what was Palestinian family homes for generations. When Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest government took power in 2022, it accelerated a far-right campaign to ethnically cleanse the northern areas of the West Bank. The first step was to balkanize the formal Palestinian holdings in the 1994 Oslo Accords. That was augmented by roadblocks and IDF outposts. Now, a settler project decades in the making is taking root in the northern West Bank, as the IDF turns a blind eye to the flagrant violations of human rights and international law.
Netanyahu at the least ignored intelligence warnings about the Gaza buildup to October 7, 2023, because of his dedication to splitting the Palestinians by propping up Hamas in Gaza. October 7 prompted the Likud and IDF to treat the West Bank as a war front with tanks and armed drones. Avi Bluth, the Israeli Central Command chief is directing this atrocity in collaboration with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Defense Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The grand design is to blow up the Oslo Accords, and ethnically cleanse the West Bank one sector at a time, in preparation for annexation. A collateral casualty of October 7 was the 2023 repeal of the Disengagement Law, and the provocative reintroduction of settlements into populated Palestinian areas. And they’re being repopulated and expanded at warp speed to create new, intractable “facts on the ground.” The Homesh and Sa-Nur settlements have already been repopulated. Others are on track for quick restoration.
Since the 2005 when Israel relinquished four isolated settlements in the area in an effort to consolidate Jewish demographics, the Likud government has aimed to reclaim that land. The occupation on steroids has claimed 18 new sites that further disrups what remains of the land where 720,000 Palestinians live. Israel has prosecuted a brutal campaign of intimidation and expropriation against the native Palestinians since October 7; accompanied by new military outposts to protect the new settlements and new roads on stolen land. That includes 14 new settlements, which encircle ancient towns and villages such as Jenin and Tulkarm, where no Israelis have ever lived in modern times.
Though Area A of the West Bank is off limits to Israelis under the Oslo agreement, the settlers backed by Likud and the IDF are building new structures faster than ever. One village targeted is Beit Imrin, where a settler was killed last May in an ATV accident of his own making, but was declared a Palestinian terrorist incident by the IDF and police. The village has since been sacked in various settler raids. That also prompted a violent pogrom in 20 more Palestinian towns, burning cars and homes including with people inside.
The website +972 has chronicled these events since 2021, before the current Likud government took hold. This includes the incidents at the Masafer Yatta village, which was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land. Not surprisingly, the uber-Zionist propaganda machine has gone into overdrive in attempt to discredit the film by Likud in Israel, and Republicans in the US. The Siamese twin criminal alliance between Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald Trump has been analyzed in these pages numerous times since 2019.
B’Tselem is the Israeli information center dedicated to human rights in the West Bank. It advocates for “human rights, liberty and equality” guarantees for Jews, Palestinians, and all people “living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” It also facilitates legal counsel for people ensnared by the Likud-IDF pogrom machine, and whatever protections can still be affected. They noted on “X” this week that, “Since October 2023, settler violence and military raids have forcibly displaced at least 4,635 Palestinians in the West Bank. Entire communities have been driven out of their homes in 62 cases, with another 15 communities partially displaced.”
These are pogroms, the same dynamic used to drive Jews from their homes in the Pale of Settlement and other parts of Europe since the Crusades. It’s tragic and maddening that Israel under Likud has resorted to the same brutality, which ultimately led to the creation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. And all with the blessing of the Republican Party and US Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Prof. Juan Cole pointed out that, “Ultimately, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians, including the Christians.” That doesn’t sit well with Huckabee and his fellow Christian Nationalists, who have been promoting the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza for Christian settlements, leading to fissures in the Likud-US Evangelical alliance. But that alliance is predicated upon the myth that the Palestinian people don’t warrant recognition as an ethnic group with valid claims to their historic homeland.
The area between Nablus and Jenin has been targeted for new settlements and IDF bases because it is the largest, contiguous area of Palestinian territory remaining. Residents of the Homesh and Yuval settlements candidly say their goal is to break it up. Lost on the settlers and the government is the enormous costs involved in securing the area for settlement expansion. This adds to the financial and security burden of a military already stretched thin among operations in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza; and was done without any input or assessment from the Israeli Central Command. This campaign has brought horrors to the daily lives of Palestinians in the form of settler and military raids, roadblocks, restricted access to their own land, uprooting trees and destroying infrastructure, as depicted in the film No Other Land. One especially grotesque act was done by the settlers of Sa-Nur, when they ordered residents of Asasa to dig up a fresh grave of an elderly man and move him soon after he was buried.
The Palestinian refugee crisis was dramatically escalated recently, when the IDF dismantled the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams. That involved bulldozing homes and infrastructure, where refugees from the 1947 Nakba have been living since 1953, and resulted in 32,000 Palestinians being displaced from their homes – the largest displacement since 1967. The IDF then bi-sected the Jenin camp with a new military road wide enough for two tanks to escalate the intimidation and inconvenience.
Haaretz reports that, “Most movement restrictions currently imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank are being carried out without required legal approvals, violating IDF protocols.” The IDF is breaching its own codes to meet with the Likud political agenda. IDF legal adviser Cobi Marcus addressed that in a letter to Commander Bluth, describing it as “anarchy,” and an ongoing pattern. But this has been going on since 1967, and escalating dramatically in recent years, as noted in Red Pepper Media: “Between 1967 and 2022, Israeli settlers stole roughly seven per cent of all the land in the West Bank. From 2022 to 2024, they doubled that to 14 per cent, stealing as much land in two years as over the previous 55. Activists on the ground estimate the number has likely tripled by 2026.” This has disrupted farming and grazing practices, and brought greater costs for Palestinian farmers and shepherds.
An ongoing characteristic of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank is the targeting of civilians area for punishment, rather than just military targets. Destruction of civilian infrastructure has been a violation of International Law since the 1949 Geneva Convention, but Israel acts as if they have some exemption. Israel targets civilians because, “they assume that Palestinian children will grow up to be terrorists,” as writer Hugh Curran noted. Recent airstrikes in Lebanon have killed 3,800 people and wounded over 11,000. The IDF has also destroyed 17 Lebanese hospitals and bombed 68 more, along with 100 schools, according to the World Health Organization.
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism. The pervasiveness and embrace of this pathology has prompted many Jews to divorce their Judaism from Zionism. This form of Zionism supports of a corrupt prime minister, whose government depends on the inclusion of a criminal sector to maintain power and standing. There’s nothing spiritual or righteous about that.
H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan
They’re Still Pushing The Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza
Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 29, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/theyre-still-pushing-the-ethnic-cleansing?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=204102630&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Israel is still pushing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They keep trying different angles and rebranding it under different names, but the end goal has remained the same since October 2023: the removal of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
From The Times of Israel:
“Israel is seeking to revive its moribund plan for the voluntary migration of Gazans out of the Strip, and has rebranded it in an effort to soften the blanket international opposition to it, Channel 13 news reports, citing unnamed Israeli officials.
“Security agencies have in recent days been told to abandon the “voluntary migration” title due to the global opposition, and it will from now on be officially referred to as a ‘plan for free movement,’ the report says.
“The network cites officials familiar with ties with countries that could potentially receive Gazans as voicing optimism that the terminology change will persuade them to drop their current refusal to cooperate with the plan, and recruit other countries.
“A senior Israeli official is quoted as saying Jerusalem wants as many Gazans as possible to leave the Strip, viewing this as contributing to any future plan implemented in the territory.”
From the early months of the Gaza holocaust, Israel apologists had been referring to the ethnic cleansing agenda as a plan for the “voluntary migration” of Gaza’s inhabitants. This framing conveniently ignored the fact that you cannot destroy a populated area and deliberately make it uninhabitable and then say the inhabitants of that area are leaving “voluntarily”.
According to a Haaretz report that was published last week, Israel’s new National Security Council chief convened a meeting of top national security officials to discuss the issue of “encouraging the voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
And now they’re rebranding the initiative as “a plan of free movement”, which is just so fucking Israeli. They never stop doing the evil thing, they just play around with the words people say about it, like how Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced last year that it was going to stop referring to its propaganda operations as “hasbara” due to the public revulsion that has developed around that label. They never say “It’s time to stop doing the things that cause people to hate us,” they just say “It’s time for a rebrand.”
And to be clear, the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza is already well underway. Israel now controls more than 60 percent of Gaza, and the IDF has been instructed to expand it to 70 percent. The survivors of the genocide have already been shifted and concentrated into a steadily shrinking thirty some-odd percent of the Strip, while Israel attempts diplomatic maneuvers to persuade foreign states to take them in.
Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza have always been about ethnic cleansing, from the very beginning. Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
They had these plans locked and loaded and ready to go because the elimination of Palestinians from the Palestinian territories has always been the goal.
Israel has been scheming to purge the Palestinians from the enclave and relocate them to other countries for generations. There’s a 1970 article from Life Magazine talking about how the Israelis see relocating Palestinians from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula as the only viable path to peace, adding that “The problem is that the people of Gaza don’t want to go.”
historian Benny Morris writes that the agenda to “transfer” Palestinians to other countries has existed for as long as modern Zionism:
“The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.
“As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country … The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.’”
So Israel was founded on the premise that the country’s previous inhabitants need to be eliminated in some way.
That’s all this has ever been about.
It was never about October 7.
It was never about Hamas.
It was never about hostages.
It was never about terrorism.
It was never about self-defense.
It was never about any of the countless excuses the hasbarists and imperial spinmeisters have offered up over the last three years to justify Israel’s monstrous abuses.
It was only ever about eliminating Palestinians because of their ethnicity and replacing them with Jews.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Obliterating Gaza’s Children: The Damning UN Report
SCHEERPOST, June 27, 2026, Dan Steinbock Informed Comment
From Gaza and beyond, Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children. It is in line with the new Obliteration Doctrine and the topic of a new UN report.
When I was working on The Fall of Israel (2024) and particularly The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), what I found most repulsive was the targeting of children in the Gaza Strip.
By late 2024, the testimonies of health professionals on location indicated that the deaths of many children in Gaza were not just collateral damage, but outcomes of deliberate, targeted actions.
The testimony of Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a young American trauma and general surgeon who had volunteered in Palestine including the European Hospital in Khan Younis, was particularly compelling.
“I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones,” Sidhwa said. “But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die.”
The statement of Dr. Sidhwa, who subsequently became one of the endorsers of my book, The Obliteration Doctrine, was supported by dozens of other remarkable and courageous medical volunteers in Gaza. And these testimonies, in turn, have been supported by many reports of multiple international NGOs and multilateral organizations.
So, the latest report of the UN Independent International Commission is hardly new. Nonetheless, it is among the most consequential documents to emerge from the Gaza war. Its conclusion is stark: Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, actions that the Commission argues constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The Commission’s findings
The Commission’s report concludes that the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children is not incidental collateral damage but part of a recurring pattern of conduct. In line with the Genocide Convention, it argues that such actions are a key indicator of genocidal intent because they strike at the future existence of the Palestinian people.
According to the inquiry, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed between October 2023 and October 2025, representing roughly 30 percent of all fatalities, while over 44,000 were injured. Even since the October 2025 ceasefire, at least 265 children have been killed by Israeli military fire, and 400 more injured, many of them with “catastrophic” wounds.
Children and the logic of genocide
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I showed that modern warfare in Gaza evolved beyond traditional military objectives toward the destruction of the social foundations of Palestinian existence. The Commission’s findings reinforce this interpretation.
Historically, genocide scholars have emphasized that attacks on children occupy a unique place in genocidal campaigns. The 1948 Genocide Convention identifies not only direct killing but also the infliction of conditions calculated to destroy a protected group. In Gaza, famine served the same genocidal function as starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.
Children embody demographic continuity, cultural reproduction, and collective future. Consequently, systematic violence against children has appeared repeatedly in cases later recognized as genocide, from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda.
The Commission explicitly states that targeting children attacks “the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and determine their future.” Its findings connect killings to broader patterns: destruction of schools, hospitals, pediatric facilities, neonatal care units, food systems, and water infrastructure.
That’s the ultimate objective: the genocide and ecocide of Palestine, its culture and children. Israel’s devastation of Lebanon follows in the footprints.
From an empirical perspective, the cumulative effect is measurable. Public-health research consistently demonstrates that childhood exposure to mass violence produces lifelong deficits in physical health, educational attainment, psychological resilience, and economic productivity.
Israel did not triumph in Gaza. Moral darkness did.
Human cost beyond death statistics……………………………………………………………………
Hind Rajab, the voice that refuses to disappear…………………………………………………………………………….
High technology and moral decay……………………………………………………………….
The cost to Israeli society and soldiers………………………………………………………
If Gaza becomes the new norm
The broader international implications may be even more alarming. If the deliberate targeting of children becomes normalized, the consequences extend far, far beyond the Middle East.
International humanitarian law depends fundamentally on protecting civilians, especially children. If powerful states can openly disregard these norms without meaningful accountability, the deterrent effect of international law weakens everywhere.
Empirical evidence suggests that impunity encourages repetition. The failures to prevent atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur contributed to future violations by signaling weak enforcement. Conversely, successful accountability mechanisms have historically reduced recurrence.
The risks include greater regional radicalization, transnational terrorism, refugee flows, intensified great-power rivalry, erosion of international institutions, and the spread of increasingly unrestricted warfare.
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I warned repeatedly that what happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. The Strip became a laboratory for new forms of warfare later exported elsewhere.
The Commission’s findings raise precisely that concern. If the systematic destruction of children, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure becomes accepted in one conflict, future belligerents may invoke the precedent.
The ultimate question raised by the report is therefore not only what happened to Gaza’s children. It is whether the international community is willing to preserve the principle that children remain beyond the reach of war itself.
For if that principle fails in Gaza, it will not survive elsewhere.
Dan Steinbock is the author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, . He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/27/obliterating-gazas-children-the-damning-un-report/
Iran deal grants access to nuclear inspectors, IAEA chief says
By Reuters, June 26, 2026, Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus and David Dolan,
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-deal-grants-access-nuclear-inspectors-iaea-chief-says-2026-06-26/
TOKYO, June 26 (Reuters) – The interim U.S.-Iran peace accord gives U.N. nuclear inspectors access to Iran, the watchdog’s top official said on Friday, after Tehran indicated key sites would remain off-limits until a final deal with Washington was reached and sanctions lifted.
The U.S. and Iran last week signed a memorandum of understanding paving the way for 60 days of talks to resolve thornier issues, including those related to Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran’s deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi said on Wednesday there were no plans to grant access to inspectors.
But International Atomic Energy Agency boss Rafael Grossi said on Friday that inspections had to happen.
“There is an agreement and to comply with that agreement, the IAEA will have to have access and inspect,” he told a press conference in Japan. “We hope to be there soon.”
U.N. inspectors have already held an initial exchange with Iranian officials to discuss technical issues, Grossi said. The first goal of any visit to Iran would be to check whether IAEA seals on previously inspected material remained intact and whether any material was missing, he said.
“Intentions are not enough. We have to have a very strong verification system in place,” he said.
Iran has not informed the watchdog how much of its enriched uranium survived U.S. and Israeli attacks or where it is.
The IAEA estimates Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to up to 60% before the conflict began. If enriched further, that would be enough for 10 nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.
The IAEA Faces a New Nuclear Puzzle Inside Iran
By RFE/RL staff – Jun 26, 2026, https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-IAEA-Faces-a-New-Nuclear-Puzzle-Inside-Iran.html
- Experts say effective IAEA inspections require broad access to verify Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, enrichment activities, and nuclear infrastructure.
- A key challenge will be locating Iran’s roughly 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and ensuring it is properly downblended and cannot be re-enriched.
- Former officials argue that restoring the IAEA’s “continuity of knowledge” after recent military strikes and restricted access will be one of the agency’s toughest tasks.
Amid an ongoing row between Washington and Tehran over whether international monitors can verify Iranian compliance with its nuclear nonproliferation commitments, former officials have told RFE/RL that the scale, scope, and degree of access are crucial to the success of inspections.
Details on those have yet to be determined, though Raffael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the UN body “will be working on the modalities — dates, procedures, places — very soon.”
That doesn’t mean, according to experts, that the organization hasn’t already drawn up a wish list for any eventual inspections
They almost certainly have a plan for when they go back in, what the priorities are, where they would want to go first, second, third,” Laura Rockwood, a former IAEA negotiator on Iran, told RFE/RL.
“The key thing is to find out where in particular the enriched uranium is…. I’d be willing to bet you that they have in place a plan for the day they need to go back in,” added Rockwood, who took part in high-level negotiations on Iran during a 28-year career at the IAEA before retiring in 2013.
Downblending Uranium
While US President Donald Trump has said that Iran has agreed to the highest level of nuclear inspections and Iran says it has no plans to allow the inspections, point No. 8 of the US-Iranian memorandum of understanding (MOU) states the two sides have agreed on a “minimum methodology” that Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU) will be “downblended on site under the supervision of the IAEA.”
But the details of this could also prove contentious.
“If IAEA inspectors were able to measure and characterize both the high and low enriched material before the downblending, then simple arithmetic gives a good sense of what the product is. They’d then want to measure to confirm and seal that product for future accountability,” Matthew Sharp, who served as director for Iran nuclear issues on the US National Security Council (NSC) from 2021-2022, told RFE/RL.
“If, on the other hand, Iran does the downblending itself and then provides the product to inspectors, it would be much more difficult to know how much HEU Iran started with, which could create uncertainties as to whether all of the 60 percent or other enriched material had been downblended or if some remained out of our awareness,” said Sharp, now a senior nuclear fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies.
Right now, the location of Iran’s roughly 450 kilograms of HEU is unclear. After the US and Israeli air strikes, it could be buried under rubble in a bunker beneath a mountain, or the Iranian authorities may have moved some or all of it elsewhere to hide it.
But if it can be successfully located and downblended, the next step is stopping Iran from re-enriching it again at a later date.
Monitoring Enrichment
The MOU says the two parties agreed “to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal.”
Experts told RFE/RL that verifying this must include a role for the IAEA.
“Any suspension on uranium enrichment is relatively meaningless if it cannot be verified and if the IAEA does not have the access to ensure that there are no covert nuclear activities related to enrichment going on elsewhere in the country,” said Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association.
“The level of access, the provision of information to the International Atomic Energy Agency, how quickly Iran has to comply with IAEA requests for access — all of that is going to be crucial,” she told RFE/RL.
“Once the enrichment level is low, below 5 percent, it’s much safer to ship out that material. It could be stored under an international fuel bank in Kazakhstan,” Davenport added.
The idea of shipping the downblended uranium out of Iran is something US officials appear keen on. At a recent background call with reporters, one official said dilution within Iran was “the floor” but that “we will push for more than that.”
A senior US official said Washington would rely heavily on the UN nuclear watchdog and US technical teams for verification. “We’re not in the trusting business,” the official said.
The IAEA has previously verified Iran’s compliance with its commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it ratified in 1970, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Lessons From The Past
Experts say many lessons have been learned from these experiences. They point to the importance of the IAEA’s Model Additional Protocol, which provides additional tools for verification.
Rockwood, now a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, was the principal author of the protocol.
Under the additional protocol, instead of just routinely being limited to nuclear material and nuclear facilities, we have access to information and locations concerning the entire nuclear fuel cycle, including the production of centrifuges,” she said. “So, if you know roughly how many centrifuges they are capable of making, you want to know where they are, and we can ask for that kind of access with an additional protocol.”
Iran signed the Additional Protocol in 2003 but has not sent an official letter to the IAEA that would bring it into force.
Iran provisionally implemented its provisions between 2003 and 2006 and for a period under the JCPOA. However, noted Rockwood, “there were lots of indications of noncompliance by Iran” during this time.
This, she said, could be expected to continue — with added complications.
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