Israeli Attack on Flotilla Violated the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
James Marc Leas. May 02, 2026, https://cancelf35.substack.com/p/israeli-attack-on-flotilla-violated
On Thursday, April 29, Israeli military forces illegally attacked vessels of the Global Samud Flotilla (GSF) while they were sailing on the high seas. Israeli commandos unlawfully seized 21 boats and abducted 177 flotilla participants, according to Nicole Schellekens, a Belgian GSF land-support person.
On May 1, the BBC reported that Israel released all but two of the detained participants in Greece. Thiago Avila and Said Abu Keshek remain in Israeli custody, and Israel has stated that it is transporting them to its territory.
Schellekens passed on a report that 34 of the abductees were physically abused by Israeli commandos while protecting the two men. The 34 were hospitalized, and 4 of them remain in the hospital at Heraklion on the Island of Crete. See the video by Elly Van Reusel, a medical doctor on “Magic,” one of the 22 seized boats.
The GSF condemned Israel’s actions as an act of piracy and called for the immediate release those still held by Israel.
The flotilla was engaged in a legal and peaceful mission aimed at breaking the internationally condemned Israeli siege of Gaza—a siege that imposes collective punishment on Gaza’s civilian population. The mission seeks to end Israel’s illegal policy of starvation, a policy that stunts the physical and cognitive development of children.
The flotilla was necessary only because, after destroying farms and fishing boats, Israel restricted or closed all land routes for aid into Gaza, and governments worldwide have so far failed to use their legal and political powers to force an end to the illegal siege.
The U.S. government has gone further than any other nation in collaborating with Israel’s illegal assault on Gaza’s civilians—the US provides the funds, bombs, F-35 jets, and bulldozers, along with the diplomatic cover that grants the Israeli government impunity.
US states have done little. Rather than adopt human rights promoting purchasing and investment legislation, Vermont has gone so far as to train its Air National Guard with 115-decibel F-35 jets low over one of the state’s most densely populated cities, where political and military leaders knew the flights would cause suffering to working-class and ethnic minority children. This location was deliberately selected to prepare the unit to target civilians. It was foreseeable that the Trump Administration would call the Vermont F-35 unit up, first to bomb in Venezuela, and now poised to resume their bombing in Iran.
The Israeli Assault on the Flotilla Violated International Law
Although Israel is not a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the core provisions of the treaty are recognized as customary international law and are legally binding on all countries.
• Article 92 grants a vessel’s flag state exclusive jurisdiction, effectively making the vessel sovereign territory of that country. By boarding the flotilla’s vessels without permission, abducting passengers, and seizing the boats, Israeli commandos violated the sovereignty of each of the flag states.
• Article 87 guarantees freedom of navigation on the high seas. Freedom revoked by Israeli commandos.
• Article 110 specifically prohibits warship personnel from boarding a foreign ship on the high seas except under narrowly defined circumstances—none of which applied in this case.
• Article 88 reserves the high seas for peaceful purposes.
• Article 301 requires states to refrain from any threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Which includes the vessels of any state.
Israel violated all of these provisions.
nforcement of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
Previous violations of the law of the sea have led to enforcement actions, including:
• Ordering the prompt release of vessels
• Awarding compensation
• Banning the perpetrator from accessing ports
• Freezing the perpetrator’s assets
• Restricting trade with the perpetrator
• Banning the transfer of military goods to the perpetrator
• Establishing a tribunal to investigate and prosecute those responsible
Enforcement Action Is Needed Now
Similar enforcement actions must be taken in response to Israel’s gross violations of the Law of the Sea. If flag states fail to act, they effectively grant impunity to the Israeli perpetrators, invite further violations, and they encourage even more extreme illegal actions by Israel.
Demand that your government officials take enforcement action now.
Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one.
At least 2,842 Palestinians had ‘evaporated’ … [which] civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively ‘vaporise’ human bodies
Belen Fernandez 4 May 2026 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-making-palestinians-disappear-more-ways-one
Reports of missing children and ‘evaporated’ bodies reveal a widening pattern of erasure in Gaza, where entire families are killed, lost under rubble or reduced to biological traces
n 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “dozens of children go missing each week” in the Gaza Strip “against the backdrop of the postwar chaos” – a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year.
The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: “[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family’s tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out.” And then he was gone.
The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children “disappeared during the war”, with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.
Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned back in September that the true death toll might already have been more in the vicinity of 680,000.
Speaking of disappearances, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation revealed in February that at least 2,842 Palestinians had “evaporated” in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war – a phenomenon Gaza’s civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of US-manufactured thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively “vaporise” human bodies.
The gruesome tally was quickly eclipsed by the deranged US-Israeli war on Iran and wider regional catastrophe, which has monopolised the news for the past two months. But the topic remains as sinisterly relevant as ever.
In remarks to Al Jazeera at the time, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal outlined the process for determining the number of vaporised victims at homes targeted by Israeli strikes: “If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces – blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps.”
Vaporised bodies
Upon publication of these macabre findings, the Israeli military got its panties into a genocidal bunch and issued a huffy communique to allegedly set the record straight.
Rejecting Al Jazeera’s “false claim of the evaporation of Gazan bodies”, the army insisted that it “uses only lawful munitions” and that it “strikes military targets and objectives in accordance with international law and takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian property to the extent possible.”
It’s not clear, of course, why a military that has been accused of potentially killing nearly 700,000 people – and that wipes out entire families and neighbourhoods without so much as batting an eye – took such particular offence at the whole “evaporation” matter.
Granted, disappearing bodies into thin air is a pretty good way of hiding the true extent of mass slaughter.
And while the vaporisation of Palestinian bodies may not fit the official legal definition of enforced disappearance, it is quite literally exactly that.
According to the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “an enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law”.
In light of Israel’s explicit disappearing act in Gaza, however, a considerable expansion of that definition would seem to be in order.
And yet Israel is guilty of the traditional variety of enforced disappearance, as well. Last August, UN experts denounced reports that starving Palestinian civilians – including a child – were being forcibly disappeared from aid distribution sites run by the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Backed by Israel and the US, the foundation also specialised in massacring desperate folks who had gathered in search of food and other necessary items for survival.
Meanwhile, in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s enforced disappearances of medical personnel, journalists and all manner of other humans have flourished since the onset of the genocide – not that this hasn’t always been par for the course.
Global pattern
For its part, the US has had a hand in enforced disappearances in a whole lot of places around the world, including by aiding and abetting bloodthirsty right-wing regimes throughout Latin America during the Cold War.
Tens of thousands were disappeared in Argentina, Guatemala and beyond as the US and its buddies nobly went about making the hemisphere safe for capitalism.
In Mexico, more than 130,000 persons have been disappeared, the vast majority of them following the launch in 2006 of the US-backed “war on drugs”, which would be more aptly characterised as a war on the poor.
But from Mexico to the Middle East, the number of disappeared hardly conveys the extent of victimisation. The families of the missing are victims, too, condemned as they are to indefinite psychological limbo in the absence of concrete information regarding the fate of their loved ones – without which it is impossible to commence the grieving process or obtain the emotional closure that is necessary to move on with one’s life.
In the case of Israel’s “evaporation” of Palestinians in Gaza, it’s hard to say whether the knowledge that your loved one has been vaporised is concrete enough to enable eventual closure. After all, there’s nothing very concrete about being forcibly vanished without a trace.
Indeed, Al Jazeera quotes Palestinian father Rafiq Badran on the almost inconceivable psychological torment that attends Israel’s sinister new spin on the theme of enforced disappearance: “Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”
Now, with regional war raging as the arms industry rakes in big bucks, it has become even easier for global audiences to tune out the unique plight of the Palestinians – which means that the genocide is effectively being disappeared from the spotlight, as well.
In the end, of course, the Israeli goal is nothing less than to forcibly disappear the very idea of a Palestinian people. But unfortunately for Israel, its blood-drenched legacy will not be so easily concealed.
The West’s bubble of illusion about Israel – and about itself – is finally being burst
The anti-racist left are demonised as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.
Jonathan Cook, May 2026, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/west-bubble-illusion-israel-about-itself-finally-being-burst
The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy
or decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.
On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.
Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.
A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.
A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.
It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the US and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.
On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.
Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.
The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria.
Drunk on power
Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.
Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up?
Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?
Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?
The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.
In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, said the quiet part out loud. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies – apart from one.
Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”
That special relationship requires the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, to shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.
So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes – citing the need for cuts – rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.
If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media.
For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.
Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.
Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.
Israel declares “yellow lines” in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalise its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.
Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.
Which western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine?
Media bias
An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel – rather than Russia – carrying them out.
Comparing the coverage of the most “serious” establishment British news outlets – the BBC, the Guardian and Sky – with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes.
Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 percent of Al Jazeera’s. As Newscord noted: “Half the time, BBC readers aren’t told who killed the person in the story.”
That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline: “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”.
In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl – the sole survivor of an earlier attack – who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too.
In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel’s attacks used the convoluted passive – rather than active – voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel’s culpability and savagery.
The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” health ministry – even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its capacity to count the dead.
The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports.
Genocidal intent
Similarly, the BBC and the Guardian made the decision to humanise Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state.
The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 – more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited.
Contrast that with the media’s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor’s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs trained for that very purpose.
There has been a flood of accounts from Palestinians held captive by Israel of their systematic rape and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers and medics. Little of this is making headway in the western media.
Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved – that is, an accurate – light.
For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down.
It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities.
Starkly, in Israel’s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.
Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy – all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand.
An old story
This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel’s violent creation on the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled”.
The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for western publics, one where our own crimes – and those of our allies – remain invisible to us.
Note in this regard the UK government’s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreignfinancial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight.
Predictably, Keir Starmer’s government rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.
That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers from pro-Israel lobbyists.
The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel’s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon – in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire.
Israeli soldiers have told local media that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist”, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages.
That fits with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonise the occupied lands in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.
Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel’s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon.
Responding to these videos with a rare “mainstream” report on the campaign of destruction, the Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described – absurdly – by the paper as “bittersweet”.
Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only levelling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has levelled almost every building in Gaza, too.
But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age.
Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another – even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and western leaders were extolling Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East.
Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being livestreamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.
Vilify the messenger
If the message inhering in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalised – as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media – then a different strategy is required: villify the messenger.
This is the political task of our times.
The anti-racist left are demonised as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.
Last month, Starmer’s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing “cumulative disruption” – that is, repeat protests like those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked.
This week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest.
Britons who try to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israel’s factories of death located in the UK or by holding placards in support of this kind of direct action, continue to be treated as “terrorists”, even after a court ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is unlawful.
With juries often proving reluctant to convict, the British state is openly trying to sway verdicts in its favour. Juries are blocked from learning about the reasons for the targeting of Israeli weapons factories – the accused’s main defence. Judges instruct juries to convict.
Members of the public who silently hold signs outside court are arrested for reminding juries of a long-established right in law to defy such instructions, follow their consciences and acquit – a police abuse contravening hundreds of years of legal precedent, and one the courts appear increasingly ready to condone.
There are gags, being dutifully obeyed by the media, on other secret malpractices designed to help the British government secure the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know because Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has used parliamentary privilege to draw attention to them.
It was telling this week that, in the current repeat trial of six Palestine Action defendants, five of them dispensed with their barristers for the closing speeches. They noted, darkly, that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions made by the court”.
Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and let more reliable judges decide these political show trials alone.
Welcome to the rapid unravelling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights – needed chiefly, it seems, to protect a far-off country that, according to the International Court of Justice, commits the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.
Painful lesson
But, of course, the British government – like the US, German and French governments – isn’t hollowing out its liberal democracy just to protect Israel. It is being forced to such extremes out of desperation.
The West can no longer sustain the bubble of illusion – about its moral or civilisational superiority – in a world of diminishing resources, a world where western elites are willing to cause planetary immolation to protect the fossil-fuel profits on which they have grown obese.
The agenda of the Epstein class is ever more transparent at home, and ever more under challenge abroad. The genocide in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, have exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy.
It is no surprise that a US empire on its last legs – an empire built on the control of fossil fuels – has chosen as the hill to die on the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s largest oil spigot.
Israel was, indeed, implanted in the region eight decades ago as a highly militarised client state whose primary job was to project western – that is, US – power into the oil-rich Middle East.
The US shielded Israel from scrutiny over its oppression of the Palestinians and the theft of their homeland.
In return, “plucky” Israel helped the US construct a self-serving narrative that required the containment and overthrow of secular nationalist governments in the Middle East while protecting backward-looking monarchies that cosplayed opposition to Israel as they secretly colluded with it.
The region’s resulting states, embattled and divided, were ripe for control. They lacked the kind of accountable governments that would need to be responsive to their publics and might ally to protect the region’s interests from western colonial interference.
Now, Iran is stress-testing this decades-old system to destruction. It is forcing the Gulf states to choose: will they continue to serve the US, even though it has shown it cannot protect them, or ally with Iran as it emerges as a new great power, levying fees to pass through the strait?
The West is quickly learning that cheap drones can elude even its most sophisticated detection systems, and that a few mines and gunboats can choke off much of the fuel the global economy depends on.
The bubble of illusion has finally burst. The West is getting its long-overdue comeuppance. The lesson will be painful indeed.
Iranian proposal rejected by Trump would open strait before nuclear talks, Iran official says
By Reuters, May 2, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iranian-proposal-rejected-by-trump-would-open-strait-before-nuclear-talks-iran-2026-05-02/
May 2 (Reuters) – An Iranian proposal so far rejected by U.S. President Donald Trump would open shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and end the U.S. blockade of Iran while leaving talks on Iran’s nuclear programme for later, a senior Iranian official said on Saturday.
Four weeks since the United States and Israel suspended their bombing campaign against Iran, no deal has been reached to end a war that has caused the biggest disruption ever to global energy supplies.
Iran has been blocking nearly all shipping from the Gulf apart from its own for more than two months. Last month the U.S. imposed its own blockade of ships from Iranian ports.
Trump said on Friday he was “not satisfied” with Iran’s latest proposal, without spelling out in detail which elements he opposes.
“They’re asking for things that I can’t agree to,” he told reporters at the White House.
Washington has repeatedly said it will not end the war without a deal that prevents Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, the primary aim Trump cited when he launched the strikes in February in the midst of nuclear talks. Iran says its nuclear programme is peaceful.
Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential diplomacy, the senior Iranian official said Tehran believed its latest proposal to shelve nuclear talks for a later stage was a significant shift aimed at facilitating an agreement.
Under the proposal, the war would end with a guarantee that Israel and the United States would not attack again. Iran would open the strait, and the United States would lift its blockade.
Future talks would then be held on curbs to Iran’s nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions, with Iran demanding Washington recognise its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, even if it agrees to suspend it.
“Under this framework, negotiations over the more complicated nuclear issue have been moved to the final stage to create a more conducive atmosphere,” the official said.
Reuters and other news organisations already reported over the past week that Tehran was proposing to reopen the strait before nuclear issues were resolved; the official confirmed that this new timeline had now been spelled out in a formal proposal conveyed to the United States through mediators.
New outrage after Israel demolishes convent in Yaroun, southern Lebanon.
“They destroy homes and places of worship, and no one stops them,” lamented the parish priest of the village.
L’OLJ / 3 May 2026, https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1505569/new-outrage-after-israel-demolishes-convent-in-yaroun-southern-lebanon.html
Two weeks after the uproar over the desecration of a statue of Jesus Christ in a village in southern Lebanon, Israeli forces demolished a convent in Yaroun (Bint Jbeil district) on Friday, sparking a new wave of international indignation.
“Let American Christians speak up!!! America can’t stay silent and must stop funding Israel to commit such atrocities!!!” wrote former U.S. lawmaker and far-right figure Marjorie Taylor Greene on Saturday, sharing a post showing the extent of the destruction suffered by the convent and the Sisters of the Holy Savior school.
“The Israeli army razed the convent and the Sisters of the Holy Savior school in Yaroun, Lebanon, yesterday. By what right? What does this have to do with disarming Hezbollah? Israel, wake up—your leaders have lost their way,” responded European Parliament member Nathalie Loiseau, former French minister and a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s allied Horizons party.
According to information obtained on Friday by our correspondent in southern Lebanon from Father Charbel Naddaf, priest of the Yaroun parish, the Israelis did indeed carry out the demolition of the convent and its associated school on Friday, denouncing “a flagrant violation of international law.
According to information obtained on Friday by our correspondent in southern Lebanon from Father Charbel Naddaf, priest of the Yaroun parish, the Israelis did indeed carry out the demolition of the convent and its associated school on Friday, denouncing “a flagrant violation of international law.”
Father Naddaf believes that Tel Aviv’s goal is to “empty the area of its inhabitants and prevent their return,” something the Israeli army manages to accomplish “in the absence of any deterrent.” “They destroy houses and places of worship, and no one stops them,” he lamented, calling on Lebanese authorities and the international community to intervene.
“Violation of all human values”
An Israeli soldier had already caused an international outcry by vandalizing a statue of Jesus Christ in the Christian village of Debel, forcing the Israeli government to announce sanctions against the soldiers involved in this desecration, under the weight of public outcry.
During the previous Israeli ground offensive in southern Lebanon launched during the autumn 2024 war, Israeli soldiers filmed themselves desecrating a monastery in Deir Mimas (Marjeyoun), as well as a statue of Saint George in Yaroun. Several places of worship, including mosques and churches, had already been affected by Israeli bombings, including the same monastery in Yaroun, which was badly damaged.
In response to yet another such incident, the Metropolitan of Zahlé and the Bekaa of the Melkite Greek Catholics, Ibrahim Mikail Ibrahim, condemned in a statement the “crime of destruction” that targeted the monastery and the Sisters of the Holy Savior school, saying that “what happened is not a mere passing aggression, but a blatant and unacceptable violation of all human values and international law, as well as a direct attack on the educational and spiritual mission of the Church.”
Metropolitan Ibrahim stated that “the destruction of this religious and educational place constitutes an aggravated crime against humanity and the land, and respects neither the sanctity of holy places nor that of scientific institutions,” emphasizing that targeting a monastery and a school is tantamount to attacking “childhood, knowledge, and the hope for a better future.” “I call on the international community to assume its responsibilities and not content itself with timid positions that do not measure up to the seriousness of the tragedy,” he insisted.
The “buffer zone” that Israel wants to establish in southern Lebanon stretches as far as eight to ten kilometers from the Blue Line and encompasses dozens of villages, most of which are occupied and where all homes and other civilian buildings are systematically destroyed. In addition to this invasion, the Israeli army continues to bomb, despite the existing truce, villages and towns in the south of the country.
Israel’s war on water-depriving Palestinians in Gaza of water for at least nearly two decades, if not longer
It’s part of Israel’s multi-layered manufactured misery in Gaza, long before October 2023
Eva Karene Bartlett, May 01, 2026, https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/israels-war-on-water-depriving-palestinians?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=196084075&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email EXCELLENT ILLUSTRATIONS ON ORIGINAL.
When I lived in Gaza, I documented Israel’s systematic destruction of wells & cisterns in the formerly-rich agricultual land in eastern & northern Gaza, also noting:
“(Following the Israeli December 2008/January 2009 war on Gaza) A UNDP survey following the attacks found that nearly 14,000 dunums of irrigation networks and pipelines have been destroyed, along with 250 wells and 327 water pumps completely damaged, and another 53 wells partially damaged by Israeli bombing and bulldozing. Water has been further contaminated by chemical agents used by the Israeli army during its war on Gaza…”
Palestinian farmers often had to resort to trying to irrigate their land by carting jugs of wateron donkey carts over land rutted by Israeli tanks and bulldozers (which routinely invaded to tear up farmland and destroy crops).
On top of depriving Palestinians of their ability to collect water, Israel cut off the natural flow of water to Gaza.
On top of this, Israel ensured Gaza’s coastal waters remained polluted by sewage, never allowing Palestinians to properly maintain and treat sewage, pumping into the sea being the only option to avoid having sewage flood the streets (as happened many times).
Back in 2014 when I wrote an indepth overview of the many sadistic policies Israel employed to ensure Gaza was unliveable back then, I noted:
“Damage to the coastal aquifer from over-extraction will be reversible in 2020 if no action is taken now, a 2012 UN report notes. At the moment, 95% of water in Gaza is undrinkable according to WHO standards.”
Do read the full overview:
-on how Israel has been deliberately starving Gaza since the 2000s, including by drastically limiting imports; shooting on farmers & fishers; destroying agricultural land and stealing or destroying fishing boats
-on the 2008/9 & 2012 Israeli wars on Gaza, which I documented real time from on the ground & in ambulances in northern Gaza
-on Israel attempting to quash popular unarmed resistance by firing live ammunition at protesters (long before the 2018 Great Marches)
-on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s sole power plant and crippling of their electricity, meaning we went without electricity for 14-18 hours on good days, 20 or more hours on bad days (which were the majority), and how this impacted sanitation, hospitals and personal lives
-on the Israeli bombings not reported by Western media, and not during Israel’s sociopathical wars on Gaza…and the sonic booms campaigns were terrorized the population, the sound very much like actual bombs, in relentless campaigns
-on how these, and more, contributed to stunted growth in children and other malnutrion related diseases, as well as anaemia in women, rampant diabetes, and other food and preventable water related diseases – https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/observations-from-occupied-palestine-in-gaza/
This was all 10 or 15 years prior to October 2023. Zionist propagandists’ justifications for their savagery are simply empty talking points
Israeli violence against Palestinians echoes Holocaust – ex-Mossad chief
Ongoing attacks in the West Bank pose an “existential threat” to the Jewish state, Tamir Pardo has said
28 Apr, 2026 https://www.rt.com/news/639222-israel-violence-palestinians-holocaust/
Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank echoes attacks on Jews during the Holocaust and poses an “existential threat” to Israel, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo has said.
Israeli settlers live in communities built in the West Bank, a territory Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War and which Palestinians seek as part of a future state. Successive Israeli governments have backed or tolerated the settlements for security, political, and religious reasons.
Pardo spoke to local media on Monday while touring Palestinian villages that have come under settler attacks in recent months.
”My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century,” Pardo said. “What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish.”
His comments come amid a surge in settler violence across the West Bank, with groups carrying out repeated raids on Palestinian communities, torching homes and vehicles, vandalizing property and assaulting residents, according to witnesses and human rights organizations. In the latest incident, two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old schoolboy, were killed last week after gunmen opened fire near a school.
Attacks occur on a near-daily basis and intensified during the US-Israeli war on Iran between February 28 and April 8, rights groups said. Yesh Din recorded 378 incidents over that period, in which eight Palestinians were killed and around 200 injured.
Pardo said the settlers behind the attacks, and the Israeli government’s failure to stop them, were creating the conditions for a future October 7-style assault from the West Bank, referring to the 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the attack. More than 72,000 Palestinians were killed and over 172,000 injured in Israeli airstrikes and ground offensives, according to Palestinian health authorities.
The former Mossad chief warned that the violence unfolding in the West Bank could lead to a similar event, albeit in a different and potentially more severe form given the region’s complexity, adding that Israel was “sowing the seeds” for such an outcome.
Iranian Group Submits Evidence of US-Israeli War Crimes to International Criminal Court.
“All cases of attacks on civilians are being legally pursued based on the Geneva Conventions,” said the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
Jake Johnson, Apr 26, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-us-war-crimes
The head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society said Saturday that his organization has submitted evidence of US-Israeli war crimes to the International Criminal Court and other global bodies, seeking accountability for massive attacks on civilian infrastructure and other violations.
“The ICC prosecutor announced that the documents provided by the IRCS are accepted as official evidence,” said Pir-Hossein Koulivand, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society. “All cases of attacks on civilians are being legally pursued based on the Geneva Conventions.”
The IRCS estimates that US and Israeli airstrikes have destroyed more than 132,000 civilian structures throughout Iran, including hospitals, apartment buildings, universities, research facilities, and bridges. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants if the country’s leadership does not succumb to his administration’s demands in negotiations to end the war.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the founding chief prosecutor of the ICC, said earlier this month that Trump could be indicted if he follows through on his threats.
“My suggestion: You read the indictment of the Russians, change the name, and it is very similar,” said Ocampo, referring to ICC arrest warrants issued against senior Russian officials in 2024 for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
In a series of social media posts on Saturday, the IRCS provided video footage and photographic evidence of what the group described as war crimes committed by the US and Israeli militaries.
“Among the most bitter war crimes of America and Israel in Iran is the attack on the home of 19-month-old Helma in Tabriz, in which four members of her family were martyred,” the IRCS wrote Saturday. “The only survivor of this family is Helma.”
The ICC is tasked with investigating and prosecuting individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other grave violations of international law. Iran is not currently a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC—so the court does not have jurisdiction over war crimes committed on Iranian territory.
Human rights organizations and advocates have implored Iran to grant the ICC jurisdiction to pursue justice for war crimes committed during the illegal US-Israeli assault that began on February 28. On the first day of the war, the US bombed an elementary school in southern Iran.
“From the killing of over 150 students and teachers to strikes on hospitals full of newborns, every day more and more evidence emerges pointing to the commission of grave war crimes in Iran since the start of the war,” said Omar Shakir, executive director of DAWN. “Victims deserve justice. The mechanisms exist, and the US has no veto over them.”
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote earlier this month that “the Iranian government could join the court now and grant it retroactive jurisdiction, similar to what Ukraine did to allow prosecution of Russian war crimes.”
Last month, the IRCS formally requested that the ICC initiate “an investigation into war crimes arising from attacks by the United States of America and the Israeli regime against civilian objects.”
“According to field reports from relief workers, operational documentation, and data recorded by the Iranian Red Crescent Society, a wide range of residential areas, medical facilities, schools, humanitarian facilities, vital urban infrastructure, and public places were directly or indiscriminately targeted during the recent military attacks,” the group wrote in a letter to the ICC’s top prosecutor.
Israel: The most dangerous nation on Earth
By George Grundy | 22 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/israel-the-most-dangerous-nation-on-earth,20955
Israel’s escalating actions and influence over U.S. policy are framed as the trigger for a global crisis, with Australia set to bear the economic fallout, writes George Grundy.een enough to say it with absolute certainty: the Israeli army is the most depraved army’ ~ Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
“The [IDF] is the most moral army in the world” ~ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘I have seen enough to say it with absolute certainty: the Israeli army is the most depraved army’ ~ Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence over U.S. President Donald Trump may be the defining reason why America made the catastrophic decision to go to war with Iran, which is why the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, which in turn explains why Australia seems poised to experience an unprecedented oil shock.
Many economists forecast that our economy is about to grind to a halt, perhaps for months, so Australians must be clear-eyed about the role Israel has played in this disaster.
The prevailing view in Western politics, media and society has, for many decades, been that the Middle East is a “tough neighbourhood” (implicitly absolving Israel of blame for its occasional bouts of brutality), and an assumption that the “only democracy in the region” was committed to peace and, ultimately, a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
This was and remains an absolute fiction. Even the most casual glance at a map showing the shrinking landmass of Gaza and the West Bank (particularly since 1967) makes clear that the two-state solution was a lie, a fig-leaf allowing successive Israeli governments to expand territory and further immiserate the hapless Palestinians.
Yet what was an ongoing and immoral delusion moved from disaster to catastrophe, following the atrocious attack by Hamas in October 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu appears to have viewed the atrocity as an opportunity to implement the long-held Zionist goal of establishing a “Greater Israel”, the first stage of which was to be the complete obliteration of Gaza.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has attempted to walk a fine line in his relations with Israel, recognising a Palestinian state but risking significant political damage by inviting Israel’s President to our shores.
Albanese’s clinging to established international dogma, whilst a betrayal of his past beliefs, might be acceptable in earlier times, but global tectonic plates are shifting at a pace unmatched since perhaps 1945.
Australians of all political persuasions should rightly consider whether Israel is indeed a moral player on the world stage and whether our country should continue to align itself with a regime that has:
- Used snipers to deliberately target infants and children in Gaza, killing thousands and creating the largest group of childhood amputees in modern history. Israel has subsequently blocked the distribution of prosthetic limbs for survivors.
- Dropped bombs on civilians sheltering in tents, burning people alive. An Australian doctor said she delivered a baby by C-section from a nine-month pregnant woman with no head, following an Israeli strike. In late 2023, the IDF forced staff out of a Gaza hospital at gunpoint and left newborn babies to starve and die. Every hospital in the territory has now been destroyed.
- Killed at least 80,000 in Gaza (the true number is probably much higher), targeting children, medical and power facilities, schools, mosques, hospitals and ambulances, water purification, journalists and civic leaders, whilst stopping nearly all aid and medicine from entering — actions clearly aimed at devastating every aspect of civil society and starving the population. A genocide, in other words.
- Attacked and killed UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Used banned white phosphorous and cluster munitions while destroying countless villages, and carried out clear acts of ethnic cleansing that have left over a million people displaced, including around 370,000 children. Oxfam has stated that Israeli tactics used in Gaza are now being exported to Lebanon, a nation now suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises on Earth.
- Tortured and murdered Palestinian children. The IDF buried captured Palestinian children alive in mass graves, after tying their hands behind their backs. An 18-month-old Palestinian child recently taken into custody by the IDF was returned with cigarette burns on its legs, having been tortured to get a confession from its father.
- Institutionalised the practice of “double tap” attacks, whereby an initial bombing is followed by subsequent attacks on the same location, killing first responders and medics. Just last week, Israel carried out a “quadruple tap” in southern Lebanon, killing those trying to help the injured over and over again.
- Trained and used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees and prisoners (according to B’Tselem and EuroMed Human Rights Monitor). In fact, sexual torture of Palestinians is so widespread that it has been described as “organised state policy”. One UN report highlighted the use of rape with bottles, metal rods and knives.
This is far from an exhaustive list. There is much, much more, often filled with unimaginable horror and moral degeneracy. As defined by Australian law, Israel is a terrorist state and carries out war crimes and grave violations of international humanitarian law almost daily.
Recently, Israel passed a law allowing capital punishment for Palestinians found guilty of “terrorism-related” crimes (which, given how Israel practices law against Palestinians, could mean nearly anything). The law only applies to Palestinians — an Israeli convicted of the same crime is not subject to it, and judgment will be carried out by martial law, with no due process, clemency or appeal process.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proudly posted a video of the proposed execution chamber in which convicted Palestinians will be hanged. Armed Israeli forces have begun the practice of putting numbers on the hands of displaced Palestinians in the West Bank.
As the IDF has advanced across southern Lebanon, they have explicitly warned Christian and Druze leaders not to harbour Shiite Muslims in their homes — Jewish troops forcing one particular religious group of people out of Lebanese society, potentially searching for them in their attics. Anyone with a knowledge of history should see the historical resonance of these monstrous practices.
Race-based execution laws, genocidal destruction, institutionalised rape, pogroms in the West Bank, military expansion in nearly all directions. A network of at least 16 torture camps, where thousands are held, often without charge. Were it not such a forbidden comparison, we might spot similarities to another fascist regime in the 1930s.
Those making the connection are hardly from the fringe. Almost half of Britons in one poll said they believed Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews. Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, signed a letter describing settler violence in the West Bank as ‘Jewish terrorism’.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer recently said:
“If there were Nuremberg trials, right, where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court, President Trump, along with President Netanyahu and many of their advisors, would be hanged.”
Imagine this horror was being carried out by any nation on Earth not named Israel. Ask yourself what poses the greater threat — Iran, which until Trump tore up the JCPOA agreement was clearly not developing a nuclear bomb, or Israel, wildly attacking everyone in sight, led by a genuine maniac and possessors of the world’s only undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Far from operating the most moral army in the world, overwhelming evidence shows that Israel is now an entirely rogue state, raping, starving, torturing and murdering its prisoners, bombing its neighbours indiscriminately, annexing nearby territory and goading its patron, America, into actions that could easily lead us to a new world war.
Israel is hardly shy about its intentions. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently gave a speech in which he said, “There will be expansion in Gaza that will extend our borders. In Lebanon, to the Litani, in Syria, Mount Hermon, parts of the north, south, and east.” This would represent a “Greater Israel” plan, stretching (one might say) from the river (Litani) to the (Mediterranean) sea.
Such is the insanity of the time in which we live that voicing this same expression in Queensland will land you in prison, while it is so widely used by Israeli politicians that it’s literally in the Twitter (X) bio of the Prime Minister’s son.
Yet, despite heartening protests in Tel Aviv, poll after poll shows that a majority of Israelis support this endless militarism. Young Israelis are more right-wing, religious and conservative than their elders. An eventual end to Netanyahu’s appalling leadership seems unlikely to reform Israeli society.
An unprecedented oil shock is nearly at Australia’s shores. It’s likely to be the most devastating event for this country since the Second World War and when it arrives, Australians should remember that the crisis originated in the White House situation room on 11 February, when Netanyahu finally convinced a gullible American president to carry out his decades-long wish for an attack on Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a violent extremist, a fugitive from justice at the International Criminal Court, who cannot enter even the commercial airspace of many countries for fear of arrest. It was Netanyahu who convinced Trump to catastrophically withdraw from the JCPOA, Israel that is primarily responsible for the catastrophe currently re-shaping our world and Israel who will be culpable, should a worldwide famine ensue.
Israel is the single greatest threat to world peace today. The past comfy assumptions about global partnerships are gone. Australia should join the growing list of nations that want nothing to do with this belligerent, fascistic country.
Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
1 May 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Dr Dan Steinbock
Lebanon accuses Israel of committing ecocide in country since 2023. It is an extension of Israel’s destruction of Gaza – and its obliteration doctrine.
Israeli military aggression has “reshaped both the physical and ecological landscape” of southern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese report (which does not consider the impacts of Israel’s latest barrage of attacks this spring).
In her foreword, Lebanon’s minister for the environment Tamara el Zein notes: “The scale and intentionality of the damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide, with consequences that extend far beyond immediate destruction.”
Obliteration ecocide in Lebanon
Released by the country’s National Council for Scientific Research and presented by the environment ministry, the report accuses Israel of “ecocide” during the 2023–2024 war and subsequent escalations. It frames environmental destruction not as incidental “collateral damage” but as systematic transformation of ecosystems.
Key findings are damning. They include:
- 5,000 hectares of forest destroyed
- Massive agricultural losses ($118m direct infrastructure damage; much larger indirect losses)
- Soil contamination (including high phosphorus levels)
- Air pollution from repeated strike cycles
- Destruction of orchards and irrigation systems
Minister el Zein characterizes this as “intentional ecological destruction” affecting food systems, public health, and long-term viability of southern Lebanon’s rural economy.
International reporting on the same dossier highlights an estimated total damage burden of over $25 billion when recovery costs and economic losses are included. The figure is a combined total from the assessments by the Lebanese report and the World Bank Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) 2025.
This framing aligns with a growing legal discourse around “ecocide” as a potential international crime, particularly where environmental damage is widespread, long-term, and strategically embedded in military operations.
It is also aligned with UN reporting on the broader Israel–Lebanon escalation confirming extensive infrastructure destruction, civilian displacement, and strikes affecting residential areas.
As the ecocide of Gaza has gone effectively unpunished by the international community, the Netanyahu government is extending the environmental devastation into Lebanon and the proximate region.
Obliteration doctrine in Gaza
In The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), related commentaries and excerpts, I define this doctrine as the lethal mix of scorched earth policy, collective punishment and civilian victimization, coupled with massive indiscriminate bombardment and systematic use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The concept is vital because it connects the dots between military strategies, aerial bombardment, lethal deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. As Professor William Schabas, a leading scholar of genocide, notes, “the Obliteration Doctrine” “adds a new term to the lexicon on genocide, notably in the application of international law and its judicial mechanisms.”
Modern warfare in Gaza is no longer just counterinsurgency but systems-level destruction of the environmental and infrastructural substrate of life—water, soil, agriculture, energy, and urban continuity.
This interpretation overlaps with empirical reporting on Gaza’s environmental collapse:
Satellite analysis shows 38–48% of tree cover and farmland destroyed
Severe contamination of soil and groundwater
Large-scale destruction of greenhouses and irrigation systems
Air pollution from sustained bombardment and debris burning
These patterns are described in independent investigations as producing conditions of near-uninhabitability in many parts of Gaza.
Warfare is no longer bounded by battlefield geography. It becomes the restructuring—or “obliteration”—of ecological systems that sustain civilian life.
Ecocide here is not merely destruction of nature, but destruction of life-support systems as purposeful strategy. It is another word for cultural genocide.
Lebanon and the Gaza template
The Lebanese report and international commentary suggest strong structural parallels between Gaza and southern Lebanon operations:…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://theaimn.net/obliteration-ecocide-from-gaza-to-lebanon-and-beyond/
Settler pogroms in Palestine are part of Israel’s illegal expansion policy
Armed colonists burn, beat, and kill with near-total impunity – because their violence serves a larger system of land theft and expulsion
Eva Karene Bartlett, Apr 30, 2026
Almost daily, there are updates on brutal attacks by armed settlers – really, colonists – against Palestinians. The colonists shoot or ferociously beat—sometimes to the point of muder—Palestinian civilians, male and female, young and old, including entire families.
These attacks have been occurring for decades. I’ve written about them many times, including what I saw in different regions of the West Bank during my eight months there in 2007. Back then, the violence of the colonists was already horrific. Now, the attacks are exponentially more frequent. The end goal is clear – drive the Palestinians permanently off their own land.
While many rightly note the increase of such attacks since 2023, and even more so following the Israeli-US attack on Iran, the drastic increase in colonist attacks began in 2021 and has continued to increase up to the present.
In November 2021, the Israeli publication Haaretz noted a 150% rise in settler attacks from 2019. A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report posted in September 2023 likewise showed an increase in attacks from 2021 and throughout 2022. It noted, “Three settler related incidents per day occurred on average in the first eight months of 2023 compared to an average of two per day in 2022 and one per day the year before. This is the highest daily average of settler-related incidents affecting Palestinians since the UN started recording this data in 2006.”
The independent human rights organization and legal center Adalah reported in October 2023 on new regulations passed by the Israeli Knesset enabling still more Jewish Israelis to acquire and carry guns, an initiative put forth by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir. This is on top of the fact that illegal Jewish colonists have already carried and used guns against Palestinian civilians for decades.
Adalah noted, “By labeling Palestinians as ‘enemies’, Ben-Gvir, who does not conceal his racist views towards Palestinians, seeks to legitimize the blanket impunity granted to both Israel’s armed forces and ruthless Jewish-Israeli vigilantes for killing and injuring Palestinians.”
Arson crimes committed by colonists in recent months include setting fire to homes and vehicles in the southern community of Susiya; to homes in the Jenin region; setting fire to and burning the emergency room of a Palestinian Medical Relief clinic in the Nablus area; torching homes and vehicles in Tayasir village east of Tubas (and slashing open the forehead of a Palestinian resident) – to list just a handful of cases. Back in 2014, colonists kidnapped and deliberately burned a young teenager alive. In 2015, they firebombed a Palestinian home and burned to death a year-old infant inside.
In February, The Cradle reported that Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, downgraded attacks by Israeli colonists against Palestinian civilians from ‘terror attacks’ to ‘serious incidents’, meaning most crimes, including the arson attacks, are only recorded as “serious incidents.”
In March, swarms of Israeli colonists raided Palestinian villages near an illegal colony between Nablus and Jenin, setting homes, vehicles, and property ablaze, according to Palestinians from the region who also said Israeli forces prevented the entry of firefighters and ambulances.
“Israeli forces’ jeeps came with the settlers. Israeli forces chased people and opend fire on them to ensure they couldn’t fight off the settlers,” an older resident testified.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The 2021 Haaretz article also cited a senior Israeli security figure saying, “These are not attacks by bored children. You have to call things by their name. In some of the cases it’s simply Jewish terrorism.”
Complete impunity
In April 2026, Haaretz, published an article about how Palestinians who were being endlessly abused by illegal, armed, Jewish settlers’ violent incursions filed a complaint against the colonists, including with video footage of their car. He was detained and released the same day.
The next time the same Palestinians called the police when the same colonists invaded their land, the Israeli police arrested them under the pretext of allegedly “throwing stones” at the colonists. One of the Palestinians was beaten by Israeli soldiers who extinguished cigarettes on his wrist. He was interrogated about having the audacity to film the invading colonists.
Palestinian Christian human rights advocate Ihab Hassan, in an April 2026 post about Israeli colonist attacks, noted, “If a Palestinian tries to defend his home from these terrorists, he will be killed or imprisoned for life. If settlers shoot and kill Palestinians in their own homes, nothing will happen to them. What should we call a system that punishes victims and grants criminals full impunity based on religion, race, and nationality?”
Indeed, in April, Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem reported on an Israeli colonist invasion of a Palestinian village “as part of ongoing efforts to take it over,” noting, “Residents who tried to fend them off with stones came under heavy fire from a settler on military reserve duty who joined his friends as reinforcement. One of the bullets fatally hit Ali Hamadneh, 23, in the back while he was running away and posed no danger, as is evident in footage of the incident.”
B’Tselem noted that the Israeli army spokesperson later claimed that a reservist soldier carried out a “suspect-arrest procedure that included firing in the air and then firing at one of the stone-throwers.”
In March, after an Israeli colonist ran over a five year old Palestinian child, seriously injuring her, police then detained three solidarity activists, not arresting the colonist who had hit the girl……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/settler-pogroms-in-palestine-are?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=195969004&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
‘Spring 2026’ Flotilla Sets Sail From Sicily To Break Gaza Blockade.
April 28, 2026 , https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/04/27/362011/
The “Spring 2026 mission,” part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, set sail on Sunday from the Italian island of Sicily, aiming to break the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
According to flotilla sources, the vessels had arrived in Sicily on 23 April after departing from Barcelona on 12 April. They were later joined by additional boats and activists from across Italy, particularly through the ports of Syracuse and Augusta.
The number of participating vessels rose to 65 boats at the Augusta marina before completing final departure procedures. The flotilla then began sailing gradually into the Mediterranean Sea in coordinated stages during the afternoon.
While at sea, the flotilla was joined by a vessel affiliated with Greenpeace, which expressed support for the mission.
As the boats departed the port, activists chanted “Free Palestine” and lit flares, bidding farewell to one another with the phrase “See you in Gaza.”
Turkish activist Ali Deniz, who joined the flotilla from Barcelona, described the atmosphere as highly energized. “There is great enthusiasm here, just as we saw in Spain,” he said, expressing confidence that the flotilla would reach Gaza’s port and meet children there.
Italian activist Martina said the Palestinian people continue to demonstrate strong resilience, adding that participants see their role as serving the Palestinians.
She criticized governments for failing to act, noting that activists decided to mobilize independently with a large number of vessels.
German activist Tom, one of the youngest participants at 19, said his motivation stemmed from what he described as his country’s complicity in what is happening in Palestine.
He stressed that injustice and human rights violations are unacceptable, adding that he believes a genocide is unfolding in plain sight, which compelled him to take action.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Says It Won’t Give Up Nuclear Assets In Rare Public Statement
By Sara Dorn, Forbes Staff. Sara Dorn is a Forbes news reporter who covers politics. Apr 30, 2026, https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/04/30/irans-supreme-leader-says-it-wont-give-up-nuclear-assets-in-rare-public-statement/
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei vowed Thursday not to give up the country’s “nuclear and missile capabilities” in a rare statement Thursday—making clear Iran rejects the U.S.’s key demand to end the war.
Key Facts
An anchor on Iranian TV read the statement from Khamenei, who has not appeared or spoken in public since he took over for his father, who was killed in the initial wave of U.S. strikes in February.
Khamenei said Iran would maintain ownership of “all national assets,” including “nuclear and missile technologies,” according to an English translation of his statement published in Iranian state media.
Khamenei vowed Iran would “end the hostile misuse” of the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf region and criticized U.S. military action in the key waterway as a “humiliating failure.”
Khamenei has not appeared or spoken in public since he took over for his father, who was killed in the initial wave of U.S. strikes in February.
Giving up its nuclear weapons and allowing free passage through the Strait of Hormuz are key provisions for the U.S. in agreeing to permanently end the conflict.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has vowed to maintain its naval blockade of vessels coming to and from Iran, telling Axios on Wednesday the maneuver is “somewhat more effective than the bombing” and is “choking” Iran’s economy.
Shortly after Khamenei released his statement, the White House tweeted a previous quote from Trump that said “there will never be a deal unless [Iran] agrees that there will be no nuclear weapons.”
What To Watch For
The Pentagon has prepared plans for new strikes against Iran in an effort to force Iran back to the negotiating table, Axios reported Wednesday, citing two unnamed sources. One of the plans reportedly involves the U.S. taking control over part of the Strait of Hormuz and reopening it to commercial shipping traffic—an operation that could involve ground troops. Trump is expected to receive a briefing on the plan Thursday. He would not comment on any potential military action when he spoke to Axios Wednesday.
Tangent
Global oil prices have skyrocketed since the start of the Iran war, reaching a four-year high of more than $120 a barrel on Thursday. U.S. gas prices also increased 27 cents in the past week, to $4.30 a gallon.
Key Background
The dispute over the Strait of Hormuz has brought negotiations between Iran and the U.S. to a standstill, though the ceasefire between the two countries that took effect on April 30 remains in place. Iran reportedly presented the U.S. with a new plan to reopen the strait on Sunday, contingent on delaying nuclear talks, The New York Times reported, citing three unnamed Iranian officials. The plan would allow Iran to continue tolling ships for passage through the strait. The U.S. hasn’t publicly responded, but officials have repeatedly said Iran must agree to give up its stockpile of enriched uranium and agree to end its nuclear program as part of a deal for a lasting ceasefire.
Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon before this war. But you can see why it would develop one now
Simon Tisdall, 26 Apr 26, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/26/iran-nuclear-weapon-war-develop-one-now
If lawless aggression by ‘might is right’ nuclear-armed powers spreads unchecked, what other option do middle-ranking countries have?
With every bomb dropped, ship seized and blood-curdling threat of annihilation, Donald Trump increases Iran’s incentive to reject his “grand bargain” peace deal and sprint instead to acquire nuclear weapons for future self-defence. Justifying his declaration of war on 28 February, Trump claimed that Iran – and primarily its nuclear programme – posed an “imminent threat”. But Iran does not possess nukes. The US and Israel do.
US intelligence chiefs and UN inspectors agree there’s no firm evidence that the regime, while developing its technical capabilities and keeping political options open, has built, or ever tried to build, a nuclear weapon since at least 2003, when a covert scheme was exposed. But after Trump’s second unprovoked attack in a year, and his vow to bomb Iranian civilisation back to the “stone ages”, that is very likely to change.
It’s increasingly difficult to argue with the view, attributed to the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals now running Iran, that nukes are the only sure way of deterring future onslaughts. The US and Israel have twice struck without warning, in the middle of diplomatic negotiations. Even if a peace deal were agreed, Iranians know the ever-vengeful Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be trusted. The US-Israel axis could sustain its aggression for years to come.
Trump’s focus on “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear programme is as woefully wide of the mark as any misdirected US Tomahawk cruise missile. Indigenous nuclear knowhow cannot be easily bombed away, no matter how many scientists Israel kills. And in any case, Tehran does not necessarily need to reconstitute the capacity and skills required to build nuclear weapons at home. It may be able to buy them off the shelf abroad.
North Korea, a longtime ally, would be the most likely source, while help from Vladimir Putin’s Russia (already collaborating on nuclear energy projects) cannot be entirely ruled out. Kim Jong-un, Pyongyang’s dictator, has steered clear of the war so far. But just as he covertly sent troops to assist Putin in Ukraine, he could yet secretly step in to arm Tehran. On nuclear proliferation, Kim has form.
Iran has joined a growing number of non-nuclear armed countries that have suffered grievously at the hands of domineering nuclear powers. In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its nukes in return for what turned out, when Russia first attacked it in 2014, to be valueless western security assurances. Iraq’s regime, lacking a nuclear deterrent, succumbed to US invasion in 2003. Would Trump have attacked Venezuela in January had it been nuclear-armed?
If the acknowledged nuclear weapons states honoured their 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT) obligation to reduce and ultimately eliminate their nukes, others might feel less need of a nuclear shield. But they persistently break their word. Increasingly, the US and Russia abuse their dominant position – abuses that the NPT was specifically designed to prevent. Israel (unlike Iran) never signed the treaty.
Trump’s alarmingly irrational, impulsive and threatening behaviour creates uncertainty and insecurity by itself. But his militarism also fuels global nuclear weapons proliferation. The US is spending billions modernising its arsenal. Russia, North Korea, France and the UK are doing likewise, while China is rapidly, hugely expanding its forces. Yet Trump has refused to renew a series of cold war arms control treaties.
He trashed Barack Obama’s European-backed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, a foolish decision that has led directly to today’s confrontation. On the first day of the war, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was targeted and killed. His binding fatwa expressly forbidding development of an Iranian bomb probably died with him.
Regarding Iran, Trump and Netanyahu labour under two fundamental misconceptions. Even if some form of cold peace is eventually established, Iranians will neither forgive nor forget atrocities such as the Minab school massacre, the wanton destruction visited on their country, and Washington’s diplomatic betrayals – whether or not the current regime remains in power. The “Iran threat” will persist. Second, Tehran still has options over which the US and Israel, despite military superiority, have no control.
Sanctioned, ostracised North Korea offers a possible template for Tehran. The Pyongyang regime originally developed its own atomic weapons using hidden market technology obtained from Pakistan. The Kim dynasty later made nuclear-related transfers to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. It currently sells ballistic missiles to, among others, Iran and Russia.
It’s speculation at this point, but who’s to say Kim will not provide Iran with complete nuclear warheads? Or if that is too risky, he could supply highly enriched uranium, warhead designs and expertise in return for oil, suggested Mark Fitzpatrick, an International Institute for Strategic Studies non-proliferation expert and former senior US diplomat. If Kim did so, who would know and who could stop him?
Kim has grown increasingly emboldened since the failure of Trump’s embarrassing first-term charm offensive. Ignoring White House signals about renewed contacts when Trump visits Beijing next month, the North Korean leader ostentatiously test-fires new missiles, taunts South Korea and Japan, and stresses closer ties with China, Russia and Belarus. Speaking in March, he said US aggression in Iran “proved” North Korea was right to develop a nuclear deterrent. Tehran has surely heard that message.
If Kim is wrong, then why exactly does Trump treat North Korea so differently from Iran? After all, both countries menace their neighbours and embrace anti-western alliances, both are authoritarian regimes oppressing their citizens, and the North Korean nuclear threat is demonstrably genuine. The reason for the double standard seems obvious. Even Trump is not stupid enough to attack a nuclear-armed state.
The way Trump’s and Putin’s bellicose behaviour is legitimising arguments favouring the possession of nuclear weapons is prospectively disastrous for global non-proliferation efforts. If Iran does seek to acquire nukes to defend itself, will Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey follow? And that’s just in the Middle East. Like Ukraine, the Iran war also provides cover and precedent for other nuclear weapons states if they, too, decide to attack non-nuclear-armed countries. Might China follow suit in Taiwan? Given Iran’s fate, should Taipei rush to acquire nukes? Should Japan and South Korea?
Little wonder that an air of gloom hangs over the five-yearly NPT review conference, which opens in New York on Monday. Its challenges include ubiquitous nuclear weapons modernisation and expansion programmes; the collapse of arms control diplomacy; resumed nuclear testing; and what the Arms Control Association calls “rising nuclear dangers” and proliferation risks. “The idea of ‘global zero’, or a world without nuclear weapons, is seen to be steadily eroding,” a House of Commons Library research briefing warned this month.
This is no made-up story with which to scare the children. It’s real. Since invading Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. So far, fortunately, it has not. In recent weeks, as Trump flailed in Iran, there was a flurry of reports, later denied, that the US, too, might resort to nukes. Sabre-rattling or not, such threats are becoming way too familiar. If a just and reasonable negotiated path can be found out of the present morass, Iran and similarly vulnerable middle-ranking countries may be persuaded to continue to forego nuclear weapons. But if lawless aggression by domineering “might is right” nuclear-armed powers spreads unchecked, the old cold war nightmare of mutually assured destruction will become today’s waking reality.
- Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Israel Kills Journalist in Lebanon After “Hunting” Down Her and a Colleague
April 25, 2026, By Sharon Zhang, https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/25/israel-kills-journalist-in-lebanon-after-hunting-down-her-and-a-colleague/
Israel targeted the slain journalist’s colleague with three strikes, including one on an ambulance she was in.
Israeli forces killed journalist Amal Khalil and wounded her colleague, Zeinab Faraj, on Wednesday, firing multiple strikes on the journalists in southern Lebanon in Israel’s latest attack on journalists covering its violence across the region.
Khalil and Faraj were taking cover in a nearby house after an Israeli strike near their car, while they were out reporting on an Israeli strike on another vehicle. While at the house, Khalil reached out to family and Lebanese officials, notifying them of her location, but Israeli forces bombed the house, collapsing it.
Rescuers pulled Faraj from the wreckage, but Israeli forces fired at emergency workers trying to reach Khalil, delaying her rescue, according to Lebanese officials. Khalil’s body was only recovered hours later from the rubble.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces also fired, for a third time, on the ambulance transporting Faraj to the hospital, Lebanese media reported, in an incident described by critics as the Israeli forces “hunting her down.” Faraj underwent surgery at the hospital and was brought to stable condition.
Khalil was a veteran reporter for the Al-Akhbar newspaper. The left-wing journalist was raised under Israeli occupation in the 1980s in southern Lebanon, and was driven by a desire to chronicle daily life in south Lebanon under constant threat of Israeli invasion and bombardment.
“On a personal level, resistance means everything to me,” Khalil said in an interview, translated from Arabic, with The Public Source last year. “Through my work, I have tried to be in solidarity with these people — the people of the land.”
Khalil was also an animal lover, and devoted her free time to rescuing and sheltering stray cats in her family home in Baysariyyeh, in southern Lebanon.
“This was a blatant murder. This was a targeted assassination,” said independent Lebanon journalist Courtney Bonneau. “The Israeli army committed multiple flagrant war crimes this afternoon, during this incident.”
Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said in a statement that the strikes on the journalists were war crimes.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned Israel’s targeting of the journalists as a “brutal and recurring crime.” “Khalil, an unarmed civilian journalist, remained trapped under the rubble for more than seven hours while the Red Cross was prevented from reaching her,” said Sara Qudah, Middle East and North Africa regional director for CPJ, in a statement.
The multiple strikes on the journalists are seemingly part of a practice by Israel to strike the same or similar locations multiple times in order to kill targets and then attack the people who come to rescue them.
Just a week before the killing of Khalil, Israeli forces carried out a “quadruple-tap” attack on Mayfadoun, in southern Lebanon. Israel struck the city, then struck three more times as successive waves of paramedics arrived on the scene. In all, the attacks killed four medics and wounded six others, The Guardian reported last week.
1 This Month
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- September 2026 (194)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (375)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 