The December 24 drone strike hit a dock that U.S. officials believe was used by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. No people were on the dock at the time of the attack and no one was killed, according to the official. The details of the strike, which were first reported by CNN, offer a clearer picture of an attack first disclosed by President Donald Trump in a series of vague statements over several days.

“Now we’re going after the land,” Trump said during a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro. “They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump then told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

On Monday, Trump provided more detail, explaining that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. Asked if the CIA had carried out the Christmas Eve attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that.”

The government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said they had been briefed on the CIA’s role in the attack.

A spokesperson writing from a CIA email and identified only as Ryan declined to comment on the Christmas Eve strike in an email to The Intercept.

“Days after it took place, the U.S. public is finally learning about a CIA airstrike on foreign soil for which there is no legal justification or congressional authorization. This is the lawless Trump administration in action,” Win Without War policy director Sam Ratner told The Intercept. “The only way forward is for Congress to stop Trump’s illegal strikes and hold those in the administration who have so flagrantly broken the law to account.”

The CIA regularly conducted drone strikes during the early years of the war on terror, beginning in Yemen in 2002 and in Pakistan in 2004. During the Obama administration, the U.S. military largely took over such attacks, and since then, the armed forces have conducted the overwhelming majority of drone strikes. Heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper drones have recently been spotted in the region as part of a ramp-up of U.S. forces.

The CIA also has a long tradition of fanning violence, fomenting regime change, and conducting acts of sabotage in Latin America. A 2023 analysis of the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries found the interventions caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties.”

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The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September, killing at least 107 civilians in 30 attacks. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat attack in a follow-up strike. That attack, Trump wrote at the time, killed “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Most boat attacks since have targeted members or affiliates of unspecified “designated terrorist organizations,” but the CIA dock attack specifically aimed to weaken the Venezuelan gang, according to the U.S. official.

The Trump administration has made outlandish claims about Tren de Aragua throughout 2025. Earlier this year, the administration claimed the gang had invaded the United States, which it cited as justification to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people the government says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the wartime law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

In September, Trump claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against and in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

The Trump administration also claims that another criminal organization, Cártel de los Soles, is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Maduro denies that he heads a cartel.

The Trump administration’s current campaign against Maduro is an extension of long-running efforts to topple the Venezuelan president which failed during Trump’s first term. Maduro and close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

Trump told Politico this month that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Experts say that regime change in Venezuela would be complex and problematic. A 2023 study by the RAND Corporation warned that “overt military intervention in Venezuela is likely to become messy very quickly and is likely to become protracted.”

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The U.S. intervened to oust governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times — about once every 28 months from 1898 to 1994 — including 17 cases of direct intervention by the U.S. armed forces, intelligence agencies, or locals employed by U.S. government agencies, according to ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes in the region during the Cold War alone, Foreign Affairs noted earlier this year, which included deposing nine governments that fell to military rulers in the 1960s, about one every 13 months.

In 1954, the U.S. helped overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military junta that jailed political opponents, igniting an almost two-decade long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ousted and led to the death of Salvador Allende, that country’s democratically elected president. A brutal, 17-year dictatorship marked by state torture, enforced disappearances, and killing followed, leaving a toll of more than 40,000 victims. In 1961, the U.S. also backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and fomented a coup in the Dominican Republic, which sparked years of unrest and U.S. election meddling. This, in turn, led to a 1965 invasion of the island nation by U.S. Marines. The U.S. also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. None of these interventions produced a stable, pro-American democracy and often, instead, installed authoritarian regimes that set off cycles of violence.

A 2025 study of all U.S.-led coups d’état and regime change operations from 1893 to 2011 found that that “while short-term strategic objectives were occasionally achieved, the majority of interventions resulted in regional instability, anti-American sentiment, and failed democratic transitions.” Earlier investigations have shown that foreign regime change schemes either fail to reduce or actually increase the likelihood of military disputes between interveners and targets; result in more human rights violations and declines in democracy; lead to a greater likelihood of civil war; and increase the chances of igniting an international armed conflict.

Even regime-change schemes that appeared successful at the time often sets off long-term blowback. The 1953 ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh fueled anti-American sentiment that contributed to the 1979 revolution and set in motion decades of turmoil and conflict. America’s “mission accomplished” moment, just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove autocrat Saddam Hussein from power devolved into a endless spiral of violence and suffering. That conflict — which eventually spilled into neighboring Syria — has killed more than half a million people directly, and three or four times that number due to indirect causes such as displacement, a lack of potable water, health care, and preventable diseases, according to calculations by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The costs to U.S. taxpayers are expected to exceed $2.89 trillion by 2050.

The post CIA Was Behind Venezuela Drone Strike, Source Says appeared first on The Intercept.

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday, seeming to reference a facility involved in the drug trade or boat building. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

Trump initially did not provide further details about the supposed attack on the “big plant,” which if true would be the first known U.S. attack on Venezuelan soil.

On Monday, Trump said that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

It was not clear what target was hit nor which U.S. government agencies were involved. Asked if the CIA had carried out the attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was but I don’t want to say who it was.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela.

“We don’t have any guidance for you,” CIA spokesperson Lauren Camp told The Intercept.

During a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro, Trump seemed to reference the strike. “I’m tremendously grateful for the work that you’re doing to stop drug trafficking in our region,” he said. “Now we’re going after the land. The land is actually easier.”

One U.S. official who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the target was a “facility,” but would not disclose its location or if it was actually attacked by the U.S., much less destroyed. The official cast some doubt on Trump’s initial public statement. “That announcement was misleading,” said the official without providing any clarification.

There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government.

The Pentagon did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the strike. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a request for comment on the U.S. official’s contention that Trump’s claim was “misleading.”

If a strike did occur on December 24, it was the night before Trump attacked Nigeria. The president will have made war in Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025, despite claiming to be a “peacemaker.”

The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September. U.S. forces have conducted almost 30 attacks that have killed more than 100 civilians.

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Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

During the summer, Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. In August, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials.

“Every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump claimed to Catsimatidis. The statement is untrue. Between May 2024 and April 2025, some 77,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses. If Trump’s claim were accurate, the 30 attacks would have saved almost 10 times the number of lives lost to overdoses in the U.S. in a single year.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles recently indicated that the boat strikes are specifically aimed at toppling Maduro. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles said.

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Upon entering office a second time, Trump renewed long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. (Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.)

Trump told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Since the summer, the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean and the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

Military contracting documents revealed by The Intercept show that the War Department has plans to feed a massive military presence in the Caribbean until almost to the end of Trump’s term in office — suggesting the recent influx of American troops to the region won’t end anytime soon.

In recent weeks, the War Department had specifically surged into the region air assets necessary for a sustained campaign of combat operations over hostile territory including F-35 fighters, EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets, KC-135 aerial refuelers, KC-46 tankers, HC-130J combat search and rescue planes, and HH-60W search and rescue helicopters.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before,” Trump confusingly announced on his Truth Social platform earlier this month, without explaining how a naval armada can surround a country that is not an island. “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” The White House did not respond to a request for clarification.

The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters last week.

One former U.S. official with continued ties to the defense establishment speculated that the U.S. might be involved in a sabotage campaign in Venezuela, referencing past U.S. efforts in Latin America, specifically plans and operations to overthrow Fidel Castro before and after the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He specifically mentioned the covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.

The full extent of U.S. covert warfare in Cuba may never be known, but in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon also began preparing top-secret plans. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff offered up a document titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” The top-secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to conduct false-flag operations to justify a U.S. invasion. These proposals included staging assassinations of Cubans living in the U.S.; developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area … and even in Washington”; a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”; faking a Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner filled with “college students”; and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters — and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.

Update: December 29, 2025, 2:59 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include more recent comments from President Donald Trump, and a response from a CIA spokesperson.

The post Did Trump Just Confess to Attacking Venezuela? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.

Africa Command conducted the strikes in northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, according to the War Department. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS terrorists were killed in the ISIS camps,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept.

Trump has spent the first year of his second term touting his efforts to end conflicts and claiming to be a “peacemaker” even as he has recently made war in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025.

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” wrote Trump. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”

Over two terms, the Trump administration has repeatedly killed noncombatants, from Somalia to Yemen. Most recently, the Trump administration has been killing civilians in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The military has carried out 29 known attacks at sea since September, killing at least 105 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists.

The War Department did not reply to questions about the numbers of enemy forces and civilians killed in the Christmas attack in Nigeria. “Specific details about the operation will not be released in order to ensure operational security,” said the Pentagon spokesperson.

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In November, Trump ordered the Defense Department to prepare for a military intervention in Nigeria to protect Christians from attack by Islamic militants. War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Thursday’s strikes in a post on social media, writing that the U.S. was “Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation.”

“U.S. Africa Command is working with Nigerian and regional partners to increase counterterrorism cooperation efforts related to on-going violence and threats against innocent lives,” said Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the chief of U.S. Africa Command.

The U.S. military has a long relationship with Nigeria and has played a role in airstrikes that have killed civilians. Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid — including weapons and equipment sales — to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, a Washington think tank. This includes the delivery of 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package, approved by the State Department in 2017, that also included bombs and rockets.

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Over that same period, hundreds of Nigerian airstrikes killed thousands of Nigerians. A 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. A subsequent Intercept investigation revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.

The post War on Christmas: Trump Announces Wave of Airstrikes Targeting ISIS Militants in Nigeria appeared first on The Intercept.

From the very beginning of the genocide, I barely left my room. Three waves of displacement defined my movements: the first, on October 17, 2023, took me to my sister Doaa’s house in Khan Younis for nearly a month and a half. The second led me to my other sister Tasneem’s home in Al-Zawayda for about a week. The third displacement brought me to Rafah, where I stayed from December 31, 2023, until May 6, 2024.

Returning after Israeli forces occupied Rafah felt miraculous — our house had somehow survived. Still, I remained confined to my room until the so-called end of the genocide on January 19. The brief second ceasefire allowed me to step out for the first time with my father on March 17.

We drove across Gaza in our beloved car, visiting every corner of our city and stopping to see all our relatives on my father’s side — my aunts, uncles, and cousins — before returning home at midnight, only for the genocide to resume two hours later. After that, the outside world became almost inaccessible once again; my only venture outside was to make a brief, necessary visit to the dentist on August 23.

During that relentless isolation, I turned inward, to writing, to studying, to memory, and to personal growth. Each became a quiet act of resistance, a way to resist suffocation, to exist when existence itself was under siege. I immersed myself completely, separating my world from the chaos beyond my walls. Reclaiming life became an internal struggle, a fight to preserve traces of normalcy in a reality determined to erase every trace of it.

On Friday, OCtober 17, my sisters arrived at our home: Doaa with her 1-year-old son, Hossam; and Tasneem with her children, Nour, 3 years old, and Ezz Aldin, a year and a half old. They stayed with us for a full week, which became one of the most beautiful and meaningful times I had had in years. I didn’t know at the time that these moments of peace and happiness wouldn’t last.

I especially cherished taking care of little Hossam, whom I had missed more than anyone. He is very attached to me and shows so much affection, and being with him reminded me of the warmth we had been deprived of for so long.

That gathering was only the second time our family had been together since the genocide separated us two years ago. That same week, my aunt arrived with her son and daughter and stayed overnight. We also invited my cousins Ahmed and Alaa — the only remaining members of their family, as the rest were martyred — and they spent the day with us.

But on October 19, as we were talking and catching up, the Israeli occupation launched airstrikes across the entire Gaza Strip, including in my neighborhood. Our neighbors’ house was bombed, and we were pushed apart again, despite apparently being under a “ceasefire.”

I tried to calm myself by holding on to one truth: My father, my mother, my brothers, and my sisters were safe. Nothing matters more than their safety — if they are well, everything else is too.

During a respite from Israel’s airstrikes, we spent the day at my maternal grandfather’s house. As soon as I stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by a flood of childhood memories. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year, but we were all longing for this reunion and the house was filled with laughter and hugs.

The day featured five carefully planned surprises organized by my Aunt Manar. She had moved to Egypt a year after the beginning of the genocide and hadn’t been able to return. My sisters and I were responsible for executing her plan. My aunt stayed in constant contact with us to make sure every detail was perfect.

Four of the surprises were for my cousins, the students: Mohammed (Tawjihi 2006), Malek (Tawjihi 2006), Yaman (Tawjihi 2007), and my sister Aya (Tawjihi 2007). The Tawjihi, or high school graduation, exams marked the culmination of 12 years of study. The 2006 and 2007 classes — students born in those years — had been delayed by the genocide, but despite the extraordinary circumstances, the Ministry of Education conducted online exams. Results for the 2006 generation were released, and after some time, the results for the 2007 generation were announced. The fifth surprise was for my sister Sojood, who was celebrating her graduation from the Islamic University with a degree in medicine.

Each gift package contained a variety of treats, carefully arranged on the table at my grandfather’s house. My grandfather’s wife also prepared popcorn, biscuits, tea, and other goodies.

We agreed we would all arrive together after the Asr prayer. The surprise went off perfectly, with each of our guests completely caught off guard by their packages of delicious food and treats. We captured their joy with photos and videos. We played graduation songs and my Aunt Manar joined us live via WhatsApp to witness the celebration.

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I realized that here in Gaza, we never stop striving to live, to move forward, to overcome the genocide imposed upon us by the Israeli occupation. We’ve survived in the face of the world’s silence and indifference. We truly are a people who deserve to live.

The next day, I finally met my close friend Lana, who had ranked first in the nation in the 2023 Tawjihi exams. Before the genocide, we had planned to celebrate together, but the attacks changed our plans. After two long years, we finally made our plan happen.

We’d spent countless hours talking online, but nothing can compare with face-to-face conversation. We agreed to meet in front of her house in Al-Zawayda, and from there we would find a ride to a newly opened restaurant called O2.

To our surprise, there were no cars available for hire. We were hesitant to use improvised local transport: donkey carts, horse-drawn wagons, and other options people had devised out of necessity. After a long wait, we finally found a car and rode together to the restaurant.

Once there, we ordered chicken calzones, vegetable pizza, Nutella crepes, Nutella luqaimat, and Pepsi, the only beverage available at the time due to the occupation’s tight control over imports. We were so absorbed in conversation that we barely touched the food. The waiter packaged it for us to take home.

After long playful arguments about who should pay, Lana surprised me — she’d already made arrangements for her cousin, who lives nearby, to cover the entire bill. I made her promise that next time she would let me pay.

Before leaving, we took photos together in the restaurant’s small photo corner, capturing the rare, happy reunion we’d been waiting for for two years.

By Maghrib, the evening prayer, it was time to return home. There was life in the streets, but I felt a nagging fear that it would all be ripped away again. With some difficulty, we found a small bus and made it back safely.

I realized how desperately I had needed this outing to start living my life again. After I posted an Instagram story about Lana and me, featuring moments from our day together, my friends — even those abroad — were envious that we’d had our first outing together, and they wanted to make their own plans with me.

I was interviewed about my experience as an exemplary student at the Islamic University of Gaza in October. I spoke in depth about my experience learning online in the midst of the genocide. I’m only 19, but I completed three years of academic work in just two years amid forced displacement, limited electricity and internet service, and the emotional toll wreaked by pain, grief, and loss. I also presented my creative output: 50 published articles, 30 poems, contributions to over 20 international platforms, and publishing a zine that collected together some of my works. My published work had reached readers all over the globe and major cities across them. It was my message to the Israeli occupation and the world that no matter what they do, they cannot kill our hope.

In late October, I spent the day with my childhood friend Aya Nasser. Our families had been close friends since long before we were born, and we grew up together. We also hadn’t seen each other in two years.

I traveled to her apartment after the Dhuhr prayer on difficult, unsafe streets without proper transportation. I eventually found a tuk-tuk for the rest of the journey and recorded a short video to calm my nerves.

Aya’s building contained many damaged apartments that were partially open to the air, which made me fear for my safety as I walked inside. Aya and her family greeted me warmly with hugs and kisses. She led me to her room, and we sat on her bed. We spent hours talking and sharing our experiences of the past two years. Our conversation felt healing in a way that sending messages back and forth could never replicate.

We drank cappuccinos, took photos, and discussed our shared love for documenting life’s precious moments. Later, Aya got dressed, and we went to a newly opened restaurant in Al-Nuseirat called Al-Asima, about 15 minutes from her home. The restaurant was elegant but sparsely occupied, probably because of its high prices. We sat on a couch and ordered chicken pizza, pineapple-melon juice, corn appetizers with mayonnaise, garlic sauce, ketchup, potatoes, peppers, and pickles.

Eating there felt like taking back life itself. For the past two years, this type of meal had been rare — either unavailable, prohibitively expensive, or too risky to reach. Our motto now was to enjoy life regardless of the cost. We laughed, spoke from the heart, and took photos and videos to preserve the moment.

As usual, we had playful debates over who should pay. We agreed to split the bill, but I seized the opportunity and paid for it myself. Afterward, we shopped at a nearby market before returning home.

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Only an hour later, the Israeli occupation broke the ceasefire, taking more than 100 lives. To this day, that was the last time I went out. After enduring two years of relentless genocide, I had allowed myself to hope — to live again, to laugh with friends, to savor fleeting moments of joy— only for death and destruction to strike once again. This is the reality of life in Gaza: Any effort you make to live an ordinary life might be cut off without warning, the smallest spark of happiness extinguished in a moment.

Even now, I refuse to give in to despair. I hold tightly to the moments that have reminded me of my life as it should be lived: laughing with my sisters, embracing my family, reconnecting with friends over a meal. These experiences are my refuge, proof that nothing in this world can outweigh family, friendship, and human connection.

As long as my loved ones remain safe, life moves forward and our spirit endures, no matter how fiercely the occupation seeks to erase us. They can try to steal our joy, but they can never take away our happy memories — or our will to live and be free.

The post Reuniting With Family in Gaza During the Break Between Bombings appeared first on The Intercept.

By early October, however, with the enactment of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan — which world leaders call a “ceasefire” or “peace plan,” despite ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza — such concern seemed to evaporate. Mounting international pressure was replaced with an eagerness from many governments, lawmakers, and institutions to return to the status quo.

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Exactly one week after the Gaza plan went into effect, EU parliamentarians tabled its proposals to sanction Israel over its human rights violations in Gaza. One month later, the German government, Israel’s second largest supplier of weapons, announced it would lift its arms embargo on its longtime ally; last week, Germany’s parliament approved a $3.5 billion deal to expand its missile defense systems to protect Israel. Earlier this month, Eurovision, the popular singing competition, cleared Israel to continue competing, despite pledges to boycott from Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland. The U.N. Security Council also authorized Trump’s plan, agreeing to help form a so-called International Stabilization Force.

In Congress, even as polls show most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, lawmakers and advocates behind the Block the Bombs to Israel Act in Congress have struggled to build on its summertime momentum, garnering only two new co-sponsors since Trump declared he had achieved peace.

What happened?

“Now that there is technically a ‘ceasefire’ in place, that alone has had a big immobilizing effect on activists, advocates, and — I think more importantly — just the general public,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka. Calls for a “ceasefire now” had a galvanizing effect for public pressure to end the killing — so the Gaza deal served as a release valve.

The Israeli military continues to violate the agreement, launching strikes into Gaza on a near-daily basis and continuing its partial, yet illegal blockade on humanitarian aid. The United States, for its part, has so far been unwilling to enforce the truce in any meaningful way beyond strongly worded letters.

Under the Gaza deal, gunfire and bombings have slowed but not ceased, with the Israeli military striking Gaza more than 350 times since, killing at least 394 people and wounding more than 1,000 others across the Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations. Israel continues to occupy 58 percent of the territory, establishing a largely imaginary yellow line within which the military demolishes buildings and civilian infrastructure and shoots Palestinians along the indefinite border — including two children, Fadi Abu Assi, 8, and Jumaa Abu Assi, 10, who were killed by an Israeli drone while gathering wood. The Israeli military also continues to launch daily attacks beyond the yellow line, including the assassination of Hamas commander Raed Saad on December 13, which drew the ire of the White House.

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In tandem with its ongoing strikes in Gaza, Israel launched a new military operation in the West Bank, raiding refugee camps, conducting mass arrests of Palestinian civilians, and killing unarmed individuals, including at least 14 children during confrontations with Israeli soldiers, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. One boy, 13-year-old Aysam Jihad Labib Naser, died of tear gas inhalation one month after Israeli soldiers attacked him and his family while they were picking olives.

Trump’s Gaza plan “has given a convenient excuse to members of Congress to look away from the situation,” said Josh Ruebner, policy director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. He supports the Block the Bombs bill, originally introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., in May, and acknowledged that it had stalled in recent months. “But the reality is that U.S. weapons are still being used on an almost daily basis by Israel to kill Palestinians.”

The Israeli government has allowed a trickle of aid into Gaza but continues to block most international and Palestinian aid groups from delivering supplies, a violation of both the 20-point plan and international law. Stuck at the border is $50 million worth of aid, such as food, maternal and newborn care supplies, much-needed treatments for malnutrition, and shelter goods.

On Friday, the global hunger monitor IPC declared Gaza is no longer experiencing famine, but warned the majority of Gazans still face “high levels of acute food insecurity.” Half a million people remain in “emergency” levels of acute malnutrition, risking death, the monitor said. Around 2,000 people are still experiencing famine conditions. Exacerbating the hunger crisis, winter storms blowing through the Strip have ripped through and flooded tent cities and war-torn homes where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. At least 13 people have died as a result of the weather, according to Gaza health officials. Among them is one-month-old Saeed Eseid Abdeen, who died last week due to hypothermia.

As attention and outrage have waned, Israel and its defenders have attempted to regain control of the narrative that they have struggled to wield over the last two years of genocide.

At the Jewish Federations of North America conference in November, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz blamed Israel’s losing public relations battle among young Americans on TikTok, which is “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

“And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews,” said Hurwitz during a panel discussion in which she also blamed the backlash against Israel on backfiring Holocaust education. “Because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage.”

Several weeks later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — speaking at a conference hosted by the Israeli news outlet Israel Haymon, owned by right-wing, pro-Israel, pro-annexationist megadonor Miriam Adelson — also blamed young Americans’ concerns over Gaza on TikTok and social media, dismissing livestreamed genocidal violence as “pure propaganda” and as “threat to democracy.”

Hurwitz and Clinton failed to mention how such dismissals of Israel’s atrocities have been powered by massive crackdowns on the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity advocates in the U.S. and abroad — and how legitimate concerns for the safety of Jewish people have been weaponized to crack down on pro-Palestine speech.

After the mass shooting at a Hannukah event in Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach, where two gunmen killed 15 people, mostly Jewish festival goers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized on the moment to tie the violence to Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood earlier this year following widespread anti-genocide protests in the country. In a CBS Mornings segment covering the shooting, Israel’s former special envoy for combatting antisemitism Noa Tishby advocated for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which considers criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic.

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Lawmakers in Australia’s New South Wales, where Bondi Beach is located, are now considering a ban on all protest for up to three months. In the United Kingdom, police agencies in London and Manchester responded last week to the Bondi Beach shooting by criminalizing the chant “globalize the intifada,” a call for popular resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, commonly misinterpreted to mean violence against Jewish people. The Trump administration, meanwhile, issued a travel ban on all Palestinian Authority passport holders, citing concern over “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.”

Despite the recent measures taken against the pro-Palestinian movement, Kenney-Shawa said he believes Israel and its backers will still fail in the long term to retake the narrative.

“They’re not going to be successful in restoring Israel to its former untouchability in U.S. politics — that train has left the station,” he said. “The Biden generation obviously grew up with all these myths about Israel and those myths were shattered by this generation who’s growing up with new facts about Israel, the reality of Israel.”

A growing body of polling shows Americans, mostly on the left but increasingly on the right, are beginning to reject the government’s special relationship with Israel — signaling a major role for such shifts in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

The Trump plan itself remains uncertain. Its second phase would see the disarmament of Hamas, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only give up its weapons if there is a path toward Palestinian statehood. Israeli officials, however, continue to reject calls for a Palestinian state. Instead, Netanyahu’s cabinet has been open about its stated policy of totally erasing Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of forming “Greater Israel.”

Whether the rising awareness will amount to material improvement for the people of Palestine is also unclear. Some protesters aim to make their efforts tangible by interrupting the global supply chain of weapons sent to Israel, as new campaigns by the Palestine Youth Movement have sprouted at docks and warehouses in Oakland and New Jersey. In the United Kingdom, imprisoned Palestine Action members are undergoing a weekslong hunger strike; among their demands is the closure of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit System’s factories in Britain. The Hind Rajab Foundation, meanwhile, continues to file legal complaints and investigation requests across the globe aiming to hold Israeli soldiers and commanders accountable for war crimes.

And in Congress, public pressure still seems to be having some influence on lawmakers. A recent resolution introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., which recognizes “the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza” and underlines the U.S. responsibility in upholding the Genocide Conventions, has drawn support from 20 other members of Congress — including Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who was elected with significant support by pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.

“I will not continue to willingly be part of that complicity,” Dexter said during her speech on the House floor to back the resolution. Dexter is one of several lawmakers who have altered their public stances on Israel after sustained protest from their constituents at town hall meetings and in front of their district offices.

“Public opinion has shifted in permanent and dramatic ways,” Ruebner, of the IMEU Policy Project, said. “People cannot unsee what they have seen over the past two years.”

The post International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened? appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats sponsoring the measures were able to peel off only two Republicans on the first vote and three on the second as the GOP rallied around the White House.

On Tuesday, Trump announced a partial blockade — considered an act of war in international law — against Venezuela after weeks of threatening military action.

The votes Wednesday may have been lawmakers’ last chance to push back on Trump before Congress’s end-of-year break. A vote on a bipartisan measure in the Senate blocking land strikes is pending.

The House voted 216-210 against the drug boats measure and 213-211 against the land strikes measure. Both would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization for further attacks.

The lead sponsor of the measure blocking an attack on Venezuela, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Trump seemed to be rushing headlong into a war without making the case for it.

“Americans do not want another Iraq. If we intensify hostilities in Venezuela, we have no idea what we’re walking into,” McGovern said. “At least George Bush had the decency to come to Congress for approval in 2002. Don’t the American people deserve that respect today?”

Bush in 2002 sought and received a formal authorization for his attack on Iraq. Without taking any similar steps, Trump has massed thousands of American service members in the Caribbean without formal approval.

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Rumors began to swirl in right-wing circles before the vote that Trump would use a Wednesday evening televised address to announce U.S. attacks targeted directly at Venezuela — strikes that could be salvos in a regime-change war against President Nicolás Maduro.

In the absence of outreach from the White House, Democrats forced votes to block unauthorized strikes on both the boats and Venezuelan land under the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law meant to limit the power of U.S. presidents to wage war without congressional approval.

Trans-Partisan or Not?

Earlier attempts in the Senate to stop both the drug boat strikes and an attack on Venezuela under the war powers law have failed on mostly party-line votes. Wednesday represented the first instance that representatives have faced similar questions, making it a key public test.

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The vote on a measure banning attacks on alleged drug boats came first. From the start, it was poised to earn less support from Republicans, whose base widely supports the strikes at sea. Few GOP lawmakers wavered despite renewed criticism of the Trump administration over a second attack, first reported by The Intercept, that killed the survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug boat on September 2.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., argued Wednesday that Trump has the legal authority to act against the “imminent threat” of illegal drugs.

“Every drug boat sunk is literally drugs not coming to the United States of America,” he said. “Democrats are putting forward a resolution to say the president cannot do anything about MS-13 or Tren de Aragua” — two Latin American gangs frequently invoked by drug war hawks — “and every other cartel. That is giving aid and comfort to narco-terrorism.”

The debate grew heated at one point, with Mast suggesting that Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., did not care about the nearly 200 overdoses in his district last year.

In response, Meeks noted that Venezuela is not a major source of the drug that has driven the overdose crisis, fentanyl. He also asked over and over again why Trump had pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking, as well as the founder of the darknet drug network Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht.

“I’m still waiting to hear why major drug dealers — two major drug dealers — were pardoned by the president of the United States. I’ll wait,” Meeks said at one point, taking a long pause. “Nothing?”

Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Don Bacon, R-Neb., were the only Republicans to vote in favor of halting the boat strikes. Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, who represent Texas districts near the southern border, broke with their party to vote against it.

Land Attack?

The other measure, blocking attacks on Venezuelan land without approval from Congress, seemed poised to draw more GOP support. Massie and Bacon co-sponsored the proposal.

The White House has failed to ask Congress for a declaration of war as the Constitution requires, Massie told his colleagues.

“Do we want a miniature Afghanistan in the Western hemisphere? If that cost is acceptable to this Congress, we should vote on it, as the voice of the people, and in accordance with our Constitution,” Massie said.

Advocates’ hope for a cross-partisan coalition between Democrats and MAGA Republicans opposed to regime-change wars was dashed, however, under pressure from GOP leaders who said the measures were nothing more than a swipe at Trump.

“This resolution reads as if Maduro wrote it himself. It gives a narco-terrorist dictator a free pass to keep trafficking drugs,” Mast said of McGovern’s measure. “Because it appears Democrats hate President Trump more than they love America.”

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Ultimately, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was the only other Republican who joined Massie and Bacon to vote in favor of the measure. Cuellar was the only Democrat to vote against it.

The votes came a day after Trump announced a blockade of Venezuela, which depends on trade using sanctioned oil tankers for a large share of its revenue.

Blockades are acts of war, according to the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning think tank.

“Trump was elected on a promise to end wars, not start them,” Matt Duss, the center’s executive vice-president, said in a statement. “Not only is he breaking that promise, his aggression toward Venezuela echoes the worst moments of American imperialist violence and domination in Latin America. We should be moving away from that history, not rebooting it.”

The post Congress Squanders Last Chance to Block Venezuela War Before Going on Vacation appeared first on The Intercept.

The total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

Two gunmen, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, carried out the shooting, which targeted a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and left 15 victims dead. People of conscience from all faiths have spoken out to condemn the slaughter, to express solidarity with Jewish communities, and to forcefully denounce antisemitism.

Netanyahu and his cheerleaders, meanwhile, have once again chosen the despicable path of weaponizing antisemitism to ensure and legitimize Palestinian suffering.

Netanyahu’s comments come as no surprise. They are just his latest vile affront to Jewish lives, using threats to our safety to guarantee that Palestinians can have none.

Beyond the clear fact that the Bondi shooters targeted Jews on a Jewish holiday — the very definition of an antisemitic attack — we currently know almost nothing about these men. The idea that their actions justify the continued oppression of Palestinians should be rejected outright.

That didn’t stop Netanyahu’s most ardent American supporters from jumping to reiterate his message.

The first New York Times opinion piece to be published in the massacre’s wake came from Israel apologist Bret Stephens, with a column titled “Bondi Beach is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” Stephens wrote that the shooting constitutes the “real-world consequences” of “literalists” responding to chants like “globalize the intifada,” “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary.”

The point is obvious: to make sure that Palestinians remain eternally in stateless subjugation and to give Israel a free hand to violate their rights — including by committing a genocide like the one unfolding in Gaza today.

It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.

There’s a profound irony here. Like many thousands of Jewish people around the world, I do feel less safe precisely because the Israeli government is carrying out a genocide in our names, associating Jewish identity with ethno-nationalist brutality. It is antisemitic to blame all Jews for Israel’s actions; it is therefore also antisemitic — and produces more antisemitism — for Israel to claim to act for all Jews.

As Netanyahu’s response to the Bondi massacre again makes clear, his interest is not in Jewish safety. Jewish fear, directed into anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim animus, is far more useful to his government’s project of ethnic cleansing.

In his Sunday statement, the Israeli prime minister said he had earlier this year told Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Australia, alongside nations including the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, moved to recognize Palestinian statehood in September at the United Nations; 159 countries now recognize Palestine.

On Monday, Albanese rightly rejected Netanyahu’s effort to link this recognition to the antisemitic attack. “I do not accept this connection,” Albanese said, calling the suggestion “an unfounded and dangerous shortcut.”

Stephens, for his part, begins his New York Times column by praising the bravery of local shopkeeper Ahmed al-Ahmed, who risked his own life to single-handedly disarm one of the Bondi attackers.

“That act of bravery not only saved lives,” Stephens wrote, “it also served as an essential reminder that humanity can always transcend cultural and religious boundaries.”

The columnist then spends the rest of the short article blaming, without grounds, the Palestinian solidarity movement for “Jewish blood.”

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Leaving aside the fact that Stephens knows next to nothing about the shooters, the extreme perniciousness of his conclusion goes beyond an issue of ignorance.

His message is of a piece with Netanyahu’s. He is saying that you cannot call for Palestinian liberation, or the end to Israel’s apartheid regime, without de facto calling for the killing of Jews.

The only option, according to this line of thinking, is to be silent and let Palestinian oppression continue. It’s a disgusting zero sum logic — not to mention an insult to the victims of antisemitism.

The post NY Times’ Bret Stephens Blames Palestine Freedom Movement for Bondi Beach Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.

The European Leadership Network, or ELNET, takes elected officials on networking trips to Israel, hosts events with members of European parliaments, and lobbies on foreign policy issues — much like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates in the U.S. Its co-founder, Raanan Eliaz, is a former AIPAC consultant and alumnus of the Israeli prime minister’s office. The group credits itself for key pro-Israel foreign policy decisions, including getting Germany to approve a $3.5 billion deal to purchase Israeli drones and rockets, the largest in Israel’s history. Since the October 7 attacks in Israel — and amid two years of genocide in Gaza — ELNET has broken fundraising records.

Funding ELNET’s work are more than 100 U.S. foundations, nonprofits, trusts, and charitable giving organizations that have poured at least $11 million into the group’s U.S. arm since 2022, an analysis by The Intercept found. This is the first major analysis of how U.S. donors are fueling the pro-Israel machine in Europe, exporting the same tactics that have for years helped AIPAC crush concern for Palestinians in the halls of power and advance unchecked support for Israel.

ELNET is smaller than AIPAC, but it operates in a smaller market, feeding a steady stream of pro-Israel material to European parliamentarians. While the U.S. gives more financial and military support to Israel than any country in the world, the European Union is Israel’s biggest trading partner — and holds critical sway over whether global political consensus stays on Israel’s side. Amid public outcry and cracks in European support over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ELNET sees its work as more essential than ever.

“ELNET states clearly that their role is to legitimize and deepen economic ties with Israel, at a time when international law tells us we should be sanctioning Israel and sever trade ties,” said European Parliament member Lynn Boylan, an Irish representative from the Sinn Féin party. “As an EU lawmaker, I am very concerned that U.S. groups are seemingly successfully able to determine EU policy on Israel.”

Friends of ELNET, the group’s U.S. nonprofit arm, transfers almost all of its revenue to ELNET’s chapters around the globe. It raised more than $9.1 million in 2023, the last year for which its tax forms are publicly available, up from $7 million in 2022 and more than double its revenue from 2018.

The U.S. arm is chaired by Larry Hochberg, a Chicago philanthropist and former AIPAC national director who sits on the board of the nonprofit group Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Its president is David Siegel, previously an Israeli diplomat, an AIPAC legislative writer, and an IDF officer. ELNET’s U.S. board members include donors who have given more than $170,000 to AIPAC; its super PAC, United Democracy Project; and the related pro-Israel group DMFI PAC since 2021. One of those board members, Jerry Rosenberg, is a member of AIPAC’s exclusive major-donor Minyan Club, according to his ELNET bio. European media have also reported on a handful of ELNET donors who have also supported President Donald Trump.

Top U.S. donors to Friends of ELNET include the William Davidson Foundation, founded by the late Michigan businessman, which has given $800,000 to the group since 2022; the Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, founded by the couple to work toward “ensuring the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” which gave just under half a million dollars in 2023; and the Ocean State Job Lot Charitable Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the northeastern chain of discount retail stores, which gave $445,000 in 2022. Representatives for the foundations did not respond to requests for comment.

Other major donors include the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the family foundation for ELNET U.S. board member Joseph Feinberg; the National Philanthropic Trust; and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation, each of which have given $675,000, $560,000, and $430,000 respectively since 2022. Jewish Federations in Palm Beach, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco have given $443,000 altogether since 2022.

Those dollars have powered ELNET in its advocacy to transfer two drones to the IDF, cut off funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and push a EU resolution affirming Israel’s right to self-defense and calling for the eradication of Hamas.

Boylan, who chairs the European Parliament Delegation for relations with Palestine, told The Intercept that she was alarmed by the role U.S. donors are playing in lobbying European governments to back Israel.

“While it is not surprising that U.S. donors are funneling millions to influence EU policy on Israel, this demonstrates just how much European institutions are out of touch with their own citizens on the genocide in Gaza,” Boylan said.

“As more U.S. politicians refuse to accept money from warmongering groups like AIPAC, U.S donors appear to be increasingly sending more donations abroad in an attempt to curry support for the Israeli military across Europe,” said Beth Miller, political director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action. “It’s shameful that so many here in the U.S. play a key role in the ongoing apartheid and genocide against Palestinians.”

Many of the U.S. institutions directed funds to Friends of ELNET through donor-advised funds, or DAFs, which let donors make tax-exempt contributions through an intermediary and give them the choice to remain anonymous. DAFs aren’t allowed to contribute to lobbying efforts, but there are many ways around that prohibition, said Bella DeVaan, associate director of the charity reform initiative at the progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies.

“It’s a way to rinse your name off of any kind of donation that could be perceived as controversial or something that you just want to keep anonymous publicly,” DeVaan said. DAFs also confer significant benefits for donors looking to reduce their tax burden.

The National Philanthropic Trust, the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, and the Jewish Federation of Atlanta all directed money to ELNET through DAFs. That’s not uncommon: A July report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that donors disproportionately use DAFs more than other funding sources for political giving.

“When you involve the sort of shell-game capacity of DAFs, it can become really difficult to trace direct impact,” DeVaan said. “That can really manifest in a lot of political consequences that I think the average taxpayer would not like to know that they’re subsidizing, because of the tax breaks that charitable givers get for their gifts.”

DeVaan said it was concerning that donors are using DAFs to support international lobbying efforts. Critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have called on institutions to clarify ethical guidelines around DAF distributions amid concerns about funding groups linked to the Israeli military. Pro-Israel advocates have also criticized DAF distributions to Palestine solidarity groups.

“No matter what kind of lobbying it is, at home or abroad, these implications are really concerning. For every gift an ultra-rich person gives to charity, the average taxpayer is chipping in an estimated 74 cents on the dollar,” said DeVaan. “Do we want to give people a tax break to amplify their influence around the world? I don’t think most people would agree with that.”

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Many of the same groups funneling money to ELNET’s U.S. nonprofit arm have also given to other pro-Israel organizations. Six foundations that have given more than $570,000 to Friends of ELNET since 2022 have given $344,800 to AIPAC over the same period. Donors to Friends of ELNET have also given more than $37.8 million to AIPAC’s educational arm, the American Israel Education Foundation, which sponsors trips to Israel for members of Congress. Michael Leffell, an investment firm founder and AIPAC donor whose foundation gave $50,000 to Friends of ELNET in 2017, has given $1.5 million to United Democracy Project since 2022. More than 50 ELNET donors have given $11.6 million to the Central Fund of Israel and $8.9 million to the Jewish National Fund since 2022 — both of which fund Israeli settler groups in the West Bank, where settlers have ramped up attacks on Palestinians since the October 7 attacks.

Friends of ELNET did not respond to a request for comment.

Thousands of Europeans protest each week to pressure their officials to stop the genocide in Gaza. “Their concerns are ignored in favour of organisations specifically established to defend Israel at all costs,” said Boylan.

“Aligning With the U.S. in Support of Israel”

After October 7, ELNET set to work arranging screenings of the attacks in European parliaments and embarking on a campaign that would rapidly elevate the group’s profile in the next two years. The group has arranged meetings between members and families of Israeli hostages, taken some 300 policymakers and opinion leaders on trips to Israel, and celebrated what it describes as its successful influence on European policy.

“Europe aligning with the U.S. in support of Israel is a monumental achievement and a reflection of ELNET’s critical work,” the group wrote in an October 2023 fundraising appeal to support “emergency solidarity missions” to Israel from European countries including France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy. “ELNET’s priority is to ensure that the unprecedented European military and diplomatic support for Israel remains strong for the duration of the war until Hamas is eradicated.”

Among its accomplishments since October 7, ELNET has pointed to its work to get European countries to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which defines criticisms of Israel as antisemitic, push European states to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters and ban certain protests, and secure the historic defense deal between Israel and Germany.

In its latest annual report from 2023, ELNET highlighted its work to pass the defense deal for Germany to purchase the Arrow 3 missile defense system, developed by Israel and the U.S. “ELNET arranged for German political leaders and officials to meet with Israeli officials and thus advance the requisite research and dialogue to consummate this historic deal,” the group wrote.

Eleven days after the October 7 attacks, ELNET brought a group of survivors to speak to members of the European Parliament, a lawmaking body for the EU. The next day, the European Parliament passed a resolution that called for a “humanitarian pause” in Gaza and for Hamas to be “eliminated.”

“Each ELNET office served as a conduit of factual and credible information to parliamentarians and policymakers across Europe by providing firsthand information about what happened on October 7,” the report read. “The day after ELNET brought Israeli survivors to speak at the European Parliament, an unprecedented resolution was passed backing Israel’s right to self-defense and calling for the elimination of Hamas.”

The group boasts a network of thousands of European and Israeli officials in its orbit and has chapters around the world including the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and offices for Central and Eastern Europe and the EU & NATO. Friends of ELNET sends millions to ELNET’s global chapters each year — climbing from $2.4 million in 2020 to more than $6 million in 2023.

Varying financial reporting requirements across Europe make it difficult to account completely for ELNET’s global financial portfolio. Friends of ELNET conducts much of the fundraising for the group’s global chapters, but it’s not clear how much funding those chapters raise on their own. ELNET Germany recently announced it was launching its own Friends of ELNET Germany chapter. A 2023 filing with the transparency body for the EU lists Friends of ELNET as the only source of funding for ELNET’s chapter registered in Brussels. ELNET’s chapters for the EU & NATO and Germany did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaking to The Intercept, Boylan raised concerns about ELNET’s work to expand Israel’s arms industry ties to the Israeli military.

“It is also concerning that an organization who holds ‘strategic dialogues’ chaired by individuals formerly in IDF leadership positions are allowed to have any role in determining EU policy,” Boylan said, referring to former chairs of an ELNET forum that organizes “high-level strategic dialogues” between Europe and Israel. She said she would follow up with the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Parliament, about U.S. donors backing ELNET’s work pushing pro-Israel policies in Europe.

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Critics and journalists have also raised questions about how much money ELNET has received from the Israeli government, which reimbursed ELNET for a lobbying event last month at the French Parliament, the French outlet Mediapart reported. Elnet’s leadership and board members also have ties to the Israeli government and include two former advisers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Before Friends of ELNET launched in 2012, ELNET received funding from the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, which has long been active in policing criticism of Israel on college campuses. StandWithUs transferred just under $1 million in assets to Friends of ELNET to launch the nonprofit in 2012.

While ELNET leaders have pointed to AIPAC as a model, Eliaz, Elnet’s co-founder, envisioned something with a much lower profile that didn’t carry strings attached to well-known U.S. donors. Since he left the group in 2017, ELNET’s U.S. support has almost doubled.

ELNET’s policy goals from its last annual report include continuing to expand the IHRA definition of antisemitism, working to “counter Israel’s delegitimization at the UN,” opposing the International Criminal Court investigation of Israel, and continuing its campaign against UNRWA, which Israel shut down in January.

“Judeo-Christian Civilization”

ELNET’s communications signal that it’s looking for ways to exploit a growing rift between the U.S. and Europe under Trump to Israel’s advantage, including seizing on the wave of anti-immigrant political parties in Europe.

In a February newsletter, a truncated version of which was posted to the Times of Israel as a blog, ELNET-Israel CEO Emmanuel Navon, previously a senior fellow at a right-wing Israeli think tank, wrote that a “widening gap” between the U.S. and Europe on Israel made ELNET’s job harder. But it wasn’t all bad news: The tension also afforded a new “diplomatic opportunity for Israel in Europe” amid the rise of “European parties with Trumpian sympathies and pro-Israel credentials.” Navon stepped down as ELNET-Israel CEO in March, but he still works closely with the group and supports Elnet’s work in France. He did not respond to a request for comment.

In his newsletter, Navon referenced a February speech by Vice President JD Vance to the Munich Security Conference in which the latter lambasted European leaders on issues from free speech to migration.

“As a non-partisan and apolitical NGO, ELNET cannot and must not take a public stance on government policies. But it should be aware of the current Zeitgeist and of its potential for Israel’s relations with Europe,” Navon wrote, including expanding markets for Israel’s defense industry. Then, he quoted Vance, who had asked: “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?”

“This is a question to which Israel has a clear answer,” Navon wrote. “The core values of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilization, of which Israel is a pillar. It turns out that more and more European voters agree with that answer.”

The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.

The post Meet the U.S. Donors Funding ELNET, the AIPAC of Europe appeared first on The Intercept.

Mentions of democracy are noticeably absent, however, from Anduril’s recent announcement of a new joint venture with a state-run bomb maker from an authoritarian monarchy that is facilitating a genocide.

Anduril is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100.

The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril’s “Omen” drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership, according to a press release, “the first in a series of autonomous systems envisioned under the joint venture.” The Omen drone was described as a “personal project” of Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey, a longtime Trump ally and fundraiser.

EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech “militia-style” militant groups.

The UAE has been eager to sell its weapons around the world, both to generate profit and to exert political influence. This most recently and brutally includes Sudan, where the Emirates supply the Rapid Support Forces, an anti-government militia. Weapons furnished by the UAE have been instrumental in the ongoing civil war, now widely described as having descended into an RSF-perpetrated genocide. In October, video imagery emerged from Sudan showing RSF soldiers indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in Darfur. Reports of rape, torture, and other atrocities at the hands of the RSF are now widespread, and a current “low estimate” of people murdered by the RSF during its recent takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher is 60,000, according to a recent report by The Guardian. The Trump administration determined in January that the RSF’s massacres constituted a genocide, echoing assessments by the Biden administration and human rights observers.

The RSF has been able to rapidly overtake the Sudanese army with the help of weapons from Anduril’s new partner. An April investigation by France 24 found EDGE subsidiary International Golden Group funneled tens of thousands of mortar rounds into Sudan for use by the RSF.

Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Intercept mortars were among “three weapons systems that went into the hands of RSF that changed the course of the war.”

Raymonds, whose office at Yale previously partnered with the State Department to monitor atrocities in the Sudanese civil war, described Anduril’s joint venture as “mind-boggling” given the role Emirati drones and other weapons have played in facilitating the RSF’s genocide. “You have a DIA and [State Department] assessment that in a just world will trigger Leahy Act and shut this thing down from day one,” Raymonds said, referring to legislation that nominally prohibits the provision of assistance to foreign militaries that have committed major human rights violations.

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Neither Anduril nor EDGE Group responded to a request for comment. A November press release from both companies noted “EDGE and Anduril will work closely with U.S. and UAE authorities to ensure full compliance with applicable laws and regulations including trade compliance rules and regulations.”

A 2024 report by Human Rights Watch noted the use of drone-delivered thermobaric bombs sold by EDGE. In October, The Guardian reported the RSF’s use of armored personnel carriers manufactured by an EDGE subsidiary. In 2024, a United Nations panel of experts deemed the UAE’s backing of the RSF as “credible,” and this year a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers issued a statement criticizing “[f]oreign backers of the RSF and SAF–including the United Arab Emirates.” The Wall Street Journal reported in October that both the State Department’s intelligence office and the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed the UAE was supplying the RSF with a wide array of weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. The UAE has repeatedly denied this support despite ample evidence.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has tracked the flow of arms into Sudan, told The Intercept that EDGE Group’s products have exacerbated the horror of the ongoing war. “The rapid support forces, which we found responsible for crimes against humanity across Sudan, has made widespread use of armored vehicles made by Nimr, a subsidiary of Edge Group,” he said. “The name of Adasi, another subsidiary of Edge Group which specializes in drone technology, appeared on crates of Serbian-made 120mm munitions that the RSF has been using and which equip some of their quadcopter attack drones.” Nan Tian, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, added that the Nimr vehicles are armed with “a gun that is made by KNDS which is a French-German arms maker. KNDS has a military partnership with EDGE Group.”

Raymonds argued that “not since Operation Cyclone,” the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, “has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences.”

EDGE was launched at a 2019 inauguration ceremony overseen by Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and consists of over 30 subsidiaries spanning bombs, drones, ammunition, and various military and intelligence software systems. EDGE’s chair of the board, Faisal Al Bannai, is a businessman and adviser to the prince.

EDGE isn’t the only Emirati weapons company, but the conglomerate represents the bulk of the country’s arms industry by volume and illustrates the amorality of its export policy, according to Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher with the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, which has advocated for an arms embargo against the UAE. “As a state-owned company, they will be used as an agent of Emirati state policy,” he said. “Arms supplies to allies and proxies across the Middle East, North, and East Africa has been for quite a while a major facet of Emirati state policy.” This has manifested beyond furnishing arms to the RSF, with the UAE arming militaries in Libya, Somalia, and the ongoing genocidal war in Tigray. “There’s very few conflicts in the in the wider region that the UAE haven’t had a hand in, and very often a rather malign hand.”

Reports of EDGE wares winding up in the hands of armed proxies stretches back over a decade.

A 2013 report by the United Nations Security Council found International Golden Group facilitated the import of hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition into Libya in violation of a global arms embargo.

In 2019, a report by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism found UAE-backed combatants in the ongoing Yemeni civil war armed with pistols manufactured by Caracal, an EDGE subsidiary.

As in Sudan, a nominal civil war waged within the Tigray region of Ethiopia was exacerbated by foreign entanglement and a flood of outside weaponry. In 2023, Gerjon’s Aircraft Finds, an aviation analysis Substack, published imagery indicating the import of guided bombs manufactured by Al Tariq, another EDGE subsidiary, for use by the Ethiopian Air Force, responsible for widespread civilian death during the Tigray war.

Anduril, most recently valued by private investors at over $30 billion, has a wide array of weapons in the U.S. and with its allies, including Australia and Taiwan. It works closely with the Department of Defense and has operated surveillance towers along the U.S.–Mexico border for nearly a decade. Its business has surged as it has cast its products as a vital tool in a tech arms race between the West and China, matching the company’s rhetoric positioning it as a lethal bulwark against autocracy.

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Luckey has long cast his company as a defender of democracy. “Soldiers who defend western values should all be superheroes with superpowers,” he tweeted in 2019. In an interview that year, Luckey explained backing democratic allies against “rogue nations” around the world: “I like working with the British,” he said. “Everyone’s a little bit different but more or less we all believe in western values and democracy and universal human rights.”

Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm similarly advanced the company’s moral case for an arms race on human rights grounds, describing China in a 2024 interview as the world’s “greatest evil,” denouncing the Chinese state’s “basic approach to human rights.” Grimm added that “I think they’re conducting an ongoing genocide with their Uyghur population, I think their approach to free speech, to political speech, to religious freedom, are fundamentally antithetical to how the West values human life and how we think about human rights.”

“The fact of Anduril saying they’re an arsenal of democracy and partnering with EDGE Group, it’s obviously ridiculous,” said Perlo-Freeman, “but it’s part of the broader picture of Western democracies treating the UAE as a valued partner and ally and shielding them from consequences.”

The post Anduril Partners With UAE Bomb Maker Accused of Arming Sudan’s Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

The capture comes after three months of U.S. military attacks on boats in the region, which have killed at least 87 civilians.

The U.S. government has not yet explained its justification for capturing the Venezuelan vessel.

The two government sources said the operation was led by the U.S. Coast Guard. “We would refer you to the White House for questions,” Lt. Krystal Wolfe, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told The Intercept in response to questions.

“We don’t have a comment,” said a Pentagon spokeswoman, who also referred questions to the White House.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the U.S. once bought much of Venezuela’s oil, that trade was halted in 2019 when the first Trump administration imposed sanctions on the country’s state-owned oil company. While shipments to the United States resumed in 2023, most of Venezuela’s oil is now exported to China. The U.S. has also imposed financial sanctions on the Venezuelan government.

“Congress and the international community should consider this as an illegal act of war, in the legal sense as well as for the surge in poverty and violence it could cause,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “The Trump administration’s indiscriminate sanctions have increased hunger across the population but have failed to topple the government. It appears they’re now aiming to further tighten the economic noose, regardless of its impact on civilians, in pursuit of their regime change goal.”

The capture comes as the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean since the summer — the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

As part of a campaign of airstrikes on boats, the Trump administration has secretly declared that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with 24 cartels, gangs, and armed groups including Cártel de los Soles, which the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Experts and insiders see this as part of a plan for regime change in Venezuela that stretches back to Trump’s first term. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, denies that he heads a cartel.

Since the attacks began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

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Trump has pursued an abrasive and interventionist foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere during his second term. “[W]e will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” reads the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy. It harkens back to President Theodore Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-20th-century “Big Stick” corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

President James Monroe’s 1823 announcement warned the nations of Europe that the United States would not permit the establishment of new colonies in the Americas. Roosevelt’s more muscular decree held that Washington had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries across the Americas. In the first quarter of the 20th century, that Roosevelt corollary would be used to justify U.S. occupations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

What’s been called the “Donroe Doctrine” began to take shape with threats to seize the Panama Canal, acquire Greenland, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Trump administration also claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States, allowing the government to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

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More recently, Trump even claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of the gang on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against the United States and that it is in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

Trump also renewed long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.

Trump recently told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other,” before launching into a confusing ramble that devolved into insults about former President Joe Biden’s IQ, a tirade about Politico, and, in response to a follow-up question about his goals regarding Venezuela, his ownership of the Doral Country Club in Miami, Florida.

The post U.S. Realizes It Can Seize Boats After All appeared first on The Intercept.

Ten residents from four working-class neighborhoods controlled by MS-13, including volunteer election workers and local journalists, told The Intercept they saw firsthand gang members giving residents an ultimatum to vote for the Trump-endorsed conservative candidate or face consequences. Six other sources with knowledge of the intimidation — including government officials, human rights investigators, and people with direct personal contact with gangs — corroborated their testimony. Gang members drove voters to the polls in MS-13-controlled mototaxi businesses, three sources said, and threatened to kill street-level activists for the left-leaning Liberty and Refoundation, or LIBRE, party if they were seen bringing supporters to the polls. Two witnesses told The Intercept they saw members of MS-13 checking people’s ballots inside polling sites, as did a caller to the national emergency help line.

“A lot of people for LIBRE didn’t go to vote because the gangsters had threatened to kill them,” a resident of San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, told The Intercept. Mareros, as the gang members are known, intimidated voters into casting their ballots for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, known as Papi a la Órden or “Daddy at your service.” Multiple residents of San Pedro Sula alleged they were also directed to vote for a mayoral candidate from the centrist Liberal Party.

Miroslava Cerpas, the leader of the Honduran national emergency call system, provided The Intercept with four audio files of 911 calls in which callers reported that gang members had threatened to murder residents if they voted for LIBRE. A lead investigator for an internationally recognized Honduran human rights NGO, who spoke anonymously with The Intercept to disclose sensitive information from a soon-to-be published report on the election, said they are investigating gang intimidation in Tegucigalpa and the Sula Valley “based on direct contact with victims of threats by gangs.”

“People linked to MS-13 were working to take people to the voting stations to vote for Asfura, telling them if they didn’t vote, there would be consequences,” the investigator told The Intercept. They said they received six complaints from three colonias in the capital of Tegucigalpa and three in the Sula Valley, where voters said members of MS-13 had threatened to kill those who openly voted for the ruling left LIBRE party or brought party representatives to the polls. The three people in the Sula Valley, the investigator said, received an audio file on WhatsApp in which a voice warns that those who vote for LIBRE “have three days to leave the area,” and “If you don’t follow the order, we’re going to kill your families, even your dogs. We don’t want absolutely anyone to vote for LIBRE. We’re going to be sending people to monitor who is going to vote and who followed the order. Whoever tries to challenge the order, you know what will happen.”

The MS-13 interference took place as the U.S. president, who has obsessed over the gang since his first term, extended an interventionist hand over the elections. On November 28, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if voters didn’t elect Asfura while simultaneously announcing a pardon for Asfura’s ally and fellow party member Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras convicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking and weapons charges last year.

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“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.”

The election remains undecided over a week after the fact: Asfura holds a narrow lead over centrist Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, while Rixi Moncada, the LIBRE party candidate, remains in a distant third. As people await the final results, one San Pedro Sula resident said, “there’s been a tense calm.”

It’s unlikely the MS-13 interference led to LIBRE’s loss, since the ruling party had already suffered a significant drop in popularity after a lack of change, continued violence, and corruption scandals under four years of President Xiomara Castro. But the LIBRE government pointed to a raft of other electoral irregularities, and a preliminary European Union electoral mission report recognized that the election was carried out amid “intimidation, defamation campaigns, institutional weakness, and disinformation,” though it ignored LIBRE’s accusations of “fraud.” The Honduran attorney general announced their own investigation into irregularities in the election last week, and on Monday, two representatives for the National Electoral Council informed Hondurans that the electronic voting system wasn’t updated for over 48 hours over the weekend, while results are still being finalized.

“There is clear and resounding evidence that this electoral process was coerced by organized crime groups,” said Cerpas, who is a member of the LIBRE party, “pushing the people to vote for Nasry Asfura and intimidating anyone who wanted to vote for Rixi Moncada.”

Gerardo Torres, the vice chancellor of foreign relations for the LIBRE government, told The Intercept via phone that manipulation of elections by maras is a well-established practice — but that the timing of the threats was alarming given Trump’s simultaneous pardoning of Hernández and endorsement of Asfura. “When, a day before the elections, the president of the United States announces the liberation of Hernández, and then automatically there is a surge in activity and intimidation by MS-13,” Torres said, it suggests that the gang members see the return of the former president as “an opportunity to change their situation and launch a coordinated offensive.”

“It would seem like the U.S. is favoring, for ideological reasons, a narco-state to prevent the left from returning to power,” he said.

The White House, Asfura, and the National Party did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

All witnesses who alleged election interference have been granted anonymity to protect them from targeting by MS-13.

“They Control These Colonias”

Bumping over potholed dirt roads on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula the day before the presidential election, a motorcycle taxi driver informed their passenger of MS-13’s latest ultimatum: The mototaxis “were strictly prohibited from bringing people from LIBRE to the voting stations on election day,” recalled the passenger. “Only people for the National Party or the Liberal Party — but for LIBRE, no one, no one, not even flags were allowed.”

Gangs like MS-13 “control the whole area of Cortés,” the passenger said, referring to their home department. “Total subjugation.”

The gang members closely monitor the movements of those within their territories, in many cases by co-opting or controlling mototaxi services to keep track of who comes and goes. Three other sources in San Pedro Sula and one in Tegucigalpa confirmed MS-13’s co-optation of mototaxis in the area; another source with direct, yearslong contact with gang members on the north coast of Honduras confirmed that MS-13 was pushing residents in their territories of San Pedro Sula to vote for Asfura by the same means. When members of MS-13 passed through Cortés warning that those who voted for LIBRE “had three days to leave,” the mototaxi passenger said, residents surrounded by years of killings, massacres, and disappearances by the gang knew what might await them if they defied.

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MS-13 was formed in the 1980s in Los Angeles, California, among refugees of the Salvadoran civil war who the George H.W. Bush administration then deported en masse to Central America. In the ’90s, local gangs of displaced urban Hondurans morphed with the Salvadoran franchise. Over the years, the Mara Salvatrucha, which MS stands for, evolved into a sophisticated criminal enterprise: first as street-level drug dealers, then extortionists, assassins for hire, and cocaine transporters who have been documented working in league with high-level traffickers and state officials for at least two decades.

If Honduras has been a home turf of gangs, the country is also an anchor for U.S. power in the region, hosting the second-largest U.S. military base in Latin America and a laboratory for radical experiments in libertarian far-right “private cities.” In 2009, the Honduran military carried out a coup under the passive watch of U.S. authorities, ousting then-President Manuel Zelaya, a centrist and husband of current President Xiomara Castro. The homicide rate skyrocketed, turning the country into the world’s most violent, per U.S. State Department rankings, by the 2010s.

The chaos gave rise to ex-president Hernández, whom U.S. prosecutors later accused of turning Honduras into a “cocaine superhighway” as he directed the country’s military, police, and judiciary to protect drug traffickers. Last week, Hernández was released from a West Virginia prison after a pardon from Trump, and on Monday, the Honduran attorney general announced an international warrant for his arrest.

As Honduran voters processed the latest cycle of U.S. influence over their politics, the more immediate menace at the polls extended to the local level. “Gangsters were going from house to house to tell people to vote for Papi [Asfura] and el Pollo,” said a San Pedro Sula resident who volunteered at a voting booth on election day, referring to the city’s mayor, Roberto Contreras of the Liberal Party. Two other sources in the city, and one government source in Tegucigalpa, also said gang members were backing Contreras.

“The team of Mayor Roberto Contreras categorically rejects any insinuation of pacts with criminal structures,” said a representative for the mayor in a statement to The Intercept. “Any narrative that tries to tie [support for Contreras] with Maras or gangs lacks base, and looks to distract attention from the principal message: the population went to vote freely, without pressure and with the hope of a better future.”

Gang intimidation of voters isn’t new in Honduras, where, within territories zealously guarded and warred over by heavily armed gangs, even the threat for residents to vote for certain candidates is enough to steer an election in their district. “Remember that they control these colonias,” said one of the San Pedro Sula residents. “And given the fact that they have a lot of presence, they tell the people that they’re going to vote for so-and-so, and the majority follow the orders.”

The human rights lawyer Victor Fernández, who ran for mayor of San Pedro Sula as an independent candidate but didn’t get on the general election ballot, said he and his supporters also experienced intimidation from MS-13 during his campaign. After his own race was over, he said he continued to see indications of gang intervention in the presidential campaign for months leading up to election day.

“Both before and during the elections on November 30, gangsters operating here in the Sula Valley exercised their pressure over the election,” he said, explaining this conclusion was drawn from “recurring” testimonies with residents of multiple neighborhoods. “The great violent proposal that people have confirmed is that gang members told them they couldn’t go vote for LIBRE, and that whoever did so would have to confront [the gang] structure.”

“Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden”

Minutes after submitting a highly publicized complaint to the Public Ministry on Monday, Cerpas, of the National Emergency call system, told The Intercept that her office received 892 verified complaints of electoral violations on election day. “In those calls,” she said, “there was a significant group of reports regarding intimidation and threats by criminal groups.”

Four audio recordings of residents calling the emergency hotline, which Cerpas shared with The Intercept, reflect the wider accusation that mareros used murderous intimidation tactics to prevent people from voting for LIBRE and vote, instead, for Asfura.

In one of the files, a woman calling from Tegucigalpa tells the operator that members of MS-13 had “threatened to kill” anyone who voted for LIBRE while posing as election observers at the voting center. “They’re outside the voting center, they’re outside and inside,” she says, referring to members of MS-13, her voice trembling. “I entered, and they told me, ‘If you vote for LIBRE, we’ll kill you and your whole fucking family.’”

For days before the election, a resident from a rural region of the country, whose time in a maximum-security prison called La Tolva put him in yearslong proximity to gang members, had received messages from friends and family members living in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. They all reported a variation of the same story: Gang members on mototaxis informing everyone in their colonias, “Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden.” (“We’re going to vote for” Asfura.)

A former mid-level bureaucrat for the LIBRE government told The Intercept that, during the lead-up to the election, “LIBRE activists who promoted the vote … were intimidated by members of gangs so that they would cease pushing for the vote for LIBRE.” The former official didn’t specify the gangs, though they said the intimidation took place in three separate neighborhoods.

“All day, the muchachos [gang members] were going around and taking photos of the coordinators,” read messages from local organizers shared with The Intercept. The gang members “said that they needed to close themselves in their houses.”

Testimony at Hernández’s trial indicated that members of MS-13 were subcontracted as early as 2004 through the corrupt, U.S.-allied police commander Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla to provide security for caravans of cocaine alongside soldiers. Evidence presented in the trial of Midence Oquelí Martínez Turcios, a former Honduran soldier and longtime congressional deputy for the Liberal Party who was convicted of drug trafficking charges last week, revealed that he trained sicarios for MS-13 to carry out high-level assassinations on behalf of the drug trafficking clan known as the Cachiros. Testifying at Hernández’s 2024 trial, the imprisoned Cachiros leader claimed to have paid $250,000 in protection money to the former president.

Trump wiped away Hernández’s conviction, calling it political theater, but he sees MS-13’s sicarios in a different light. To Trump, the gangsters are human “animals,” their gang a “menace” that “violated our borders” in an “infestation” — justifying militarized crackdowns on caravans of Hondurans fleeing violence under Hernández and the categorization of the gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Announcing the designation in February, a White House press release reads: “MS-13 uses public displays of violence to obtain and control territory and manipulate the electoral process in El Salvador.”

“It’s known that MS-13 will do vote buying,” the investigator examining voter intimidation said. “This is a recurring practice. But we used to think this was just to influence the mayors, not the presidency.”

In El Salvador, gangs like MS-13 have intervened in favor of another Trump ally, Nayib Bukele, whose government has been embroiled by scandal over alleged collusion with MS-13 and other gangs — meaning that the in Honduras wasn’t the first time that the same candidate Trump endorsed was promoted by a gang he now designates a terrorist organization.

For Cerpas, the coincidence of that voter intimidation with Hernández’s release is cause for alarm. “The people in Honduras are afraid,” she said, “because organized crime has been emboldened by the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández.”

Correction: December 10, 2025

This story previously stated that Victor Fernández lost a primary race for mayor of San Pedro Sula. He collected signatures for the general election but electoral authorities rejected his candidacy, which prevented him from appearing on the ballot.

The post MS-13 and Trump Backed the Same Presidential Candidate in Honduras appeared first on The Intercept.

This past July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.

The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.

However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.

YouTube declined to provide evidence to support this claim, stating that the company doesn’t discuss how it detects influence operations. Inlakesh remains unable to make new Google accounts, preventing him from sharing his video journalism on the largest English language video platform.

Inlakesh, now a freelance journalist, acknowledged that from 2019 to 2021 he worked from the London office of the Iranian state-owned media organization Press TV, which is under U.S. sanctions. Even so, Inlakesh said that should not have led to the erasure of his entire YouTube account, the vast majority of which was his own independent content that was posted before or after his time at Press TV.

A public Google document from the month Inlakesh’s account was deleted notes that the company had recently closed more than 30 accounts it alleged were linked to Iran that had posted content critical of Israel and its war on Gaza. The company did not respond when asked specifically if Inlakesh’s account was among those mentioned in the document.

Inlakesh said he felt like he was targeted not due to his former employer but because of his journalism about Palestine, especially amid the increasingly common trend of pro-Israeli censorship among Big Tech companies.

“What are the implications of this, not just for me, but for other journalists?” Inlakesh told The Intercept. “To do this and not to provide me with any information — you’re basically saying I’m a foreign agent of Iran for working with an outlet; that’s the implication. You have to provide some evidence for that. Where’s your documentation?”

Misdirection and Lack of Answers

Over the past couple years, YouTube and Google’s explanations given for the terminations of Inlakesh’s accounts have been inconsistent and vague.

YouTube first accused Inlakesh of “severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.” When a Google employee, Marc Cohen, noticed Inlakesh’s public outcry about his account termination in February 2024, he decided to get involved. Cohen filed a support ticket on Google’s internal issue tracker system, “the Buganizer,” asking why a journalist’s account was deleted. Failing to get an answer internally, Cohen went public with his questions that March. After drawing the attention of the YouTube team on Twitter, he said he eventually received an internal response from Google which claimed that Inlakesh’s account had been terminated owing to “scam, deceptive or spam content.”

Cohen, who resigned from Google later that year over its support of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, said had he not gotten involved, Inlakesh would have been left with even less information.

“They get away with that because they’re Google,” Cohen said. “What are you going to do? Go hire a lawyer and sue Google? You have no choice.”

When Inlakesh’s Gmail account was deleted this year, Google said his account had been “used to impersonate someone or misrepresent yourself,” which Google said is a violation of its policies. Inlakesh appealed three times but was given no response.

Only after The Intercept’s inquiry into Inlakesh’s case did Google shift its response to alleged Iranian influence.

“This creator’s channel was terminated in February 2024 as part of our ongoing investigations into coordinated influence operations backed by the Iranian state,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Intercept. The termination of his channel meant all other accounts associated with Inlakesh, including his backup account, were also deleted, YouTube said.

When The Intercept asked YouTube to elaborate on the reason behind the account deletions, such as which specific content may have flagged the account as being linked to an Iranian state influence operation, a YouTube spokesperson replied that YouTube doesn’t “disclose specifics of how we detect coordinated influence operations,” and instead referred The Intercept to Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s quarterly bulletins. TAG is a team within Google that describes itself as working “to counter government-backed hacking and attacks against Google and our users.”

Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s bulletin from when Inlakesh’s account was first terminated states that in February 2024, a total of 37 YouTube channels were deleted as a result of an “investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to Iran.” Four of these accounts, the document notes, were sharing content which “was critical of the Israeli government and its actions in the ongoing Israel-Gaza war” and had “shared content depicting alleged cyber attacks targeting Israeli organizations.” Google said in the document that the other 33 terminated YouTube channels had shown content “supportive of Iran, Yemen, and Palestine and critical of the US and Israel.”

A Pattern of Censorship

Google has a long-standing and well-documented practice of censoring Palestinian content or content critical of the Israeli government, in addition to evidence of human rights abuses in other conflicts. Such censorship has only exacerbated during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza,

The company deploys various methods to censor content, such as teams of experts who manually review content, automated systems that flag content, reviews of U.S. sanction and foreign terror organization lists, as well as takedown requests from governments.

For the past decade, Israel’s Cyber Unit has openly run operations to convince companies to delete Palestine-related content from platforms such as YouTube.

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Israeli Group Claims It’s Working With Big Tech Insiders to Censor “Inflammatory” Wartime Content

Among U.S. allies, Israel had the highest percentage of requests resulting in takedowns on Google platforms, with a nearly 90 percent takedown rate, according to Google’s data since 2011. This rate outpaces countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Google’s home country, the United States. Absent from Google’s public reports, however, are takedown requests made by individual users, a route often weaponized by the Israeli cyber unit and internally by pro-Israel employees.

The scale of content deleted specifically due to U.S. sanctions is also difficult to quantify since such decisions happen without transparency. A recent investigation by The Intercept revealed that YouTube quietly deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights organizations due to the Trump administration’s sanctions against the groups for assisting the International Criminal Court’s war crimes case against Israeli officials. The terminated pages accounted for at least 700 videos erased, many of which spotlighted alleged human rights abuses by the Israeli government.

Dia Kayyali, a technology and human rights consultant, said that in the past several years, as Big Tech platforms have relied more on automated systems that are fed U.S. sanction and terror lists, rights groups have seen an increase in the number of journalists within the Middle East and North Africa region who have had their content related to Palestine removed from YouTube, even when the content they post does not violate the company’s policies. The same could have happened with Inlakesh’s account, Kayyali said.

“And that’s part of the problem with automation — because it just does a really bad job of parsing content — content that could be graphic, anything that has any reference to Hamas,” Kayyali said. Hamas is included within the U.S. foreign terror organization list and Iran remains one of the most sanctioned countries by the U.S. government.

Google and other Big Tech platforms rely heavily on U.S. sanction lists in part to avoid potential liability from the State Department. But such caution is not always warranted, said Mohsen Farshneshani, principal attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based Sanctions Law Center.

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Multinational corporations like Google tend to lean toward “overcompliance” with sanction regulations, often deleting content even when it legally is not required to do so, harming journalists and human rights groups, said Farshneshani.

Under U.S. law, in the Berman Amendment to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, informational materials — in this case, reporting and journalism — are exempt from being subject to sanctions.

Such a carveout should have protected Inlakesh’s page from being deleted, Farshneshani said. Google likely could have taken down specific videos that raised concern, or demonetized specific videos or the entire account, he said. (Inlakesh said that years before terminating his videos and account, YouTube had demonetized some of his content depicting Israeli military violence.)

“Deleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of U.S. entities,” Farshneshani said. “The exemption is meant for situations like this. And if these companies are to uphold their part of the bargain as brokers of information for the greater global community, they would do the extra leg work to make sure the stuff stays up.”

State-Sponsored Media

While YouTube and Google have not stated whether Inlakesh’s history with Press TV played a factor in the deletion, the Iranian state-funded outlet has long been under Google’s scrutiny. In 2013, Google temporarily deleted Press TV’s YouTube account before permanently deleting the channel in 2019 along with its Gmail account amid the first Trump administration’s sanctions campaign against Iran. The Biden administration in 2021 seized and censored dozens of websites tied to Iran, and in 2023 placed sanctions on Press TV due to Iran’s violent crackdown on anti-government protesters after the in-custody death of Mahsa Amini.

Press TV also has been accused by rights groups and journalists for filming and airing propaganda videos in which individuals detained by Iran are coerced to “confess” to alleged crimes in recorded interviews, as a part of the government’s attempts to justify their imprisonment or execution.

Press TV did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Out of the many videos on his YouTube account, Inlakesh recalled only two being associated with his work for Press TV: a documentary critical of the 2020 Trump deal on Israel–Palestine and a short clip about Republicans’ Islamophobic attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in 2019. The rest either predate or postdate his stint at Press TV.

Press TV’s U.K. YouTube channel at times appears listed as an “associated channel” in archival versions of Inlakesh’s personal YouTube page. A YouTube spokesperson stated that YouTube uses “various signals to determine the relationship between channels linked by ownership for enforcement purposes,” but did not clarify what the specific signals were.

Inlakesh maintained that he had editorial independence while at Press TV and was never directed to post to his personal YouTube page.

Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she understood Google’s need to moderate content, but questioned why it deleted Inlakesh’s account rather than using its policy of labeling state-sponsored content, a system that itself has been plagued with problems. “More labels, more warnings, less censorship,” York said.

“The political climate around Palestine has made it such that a lot of the Silicon Valley-based social media platforms don’t seem particularly willing to ensure that Palestinian content can stay up,” she said.

Killing the Narrative

Inlakesh said he lost several documentaries about Israel and Palestine that were hosted exclusively on YouTube. However, what he lamented most was the loss of footage of his independent coverage from the West Bank, including livestreams that document alleged Israeli military abuses and were not backed up elsewhere.

One such video, he said, was a livestream from a protest at the major Israeli settlement of Beit El on February 11, 2020, against President Donald Trump’s lopsided annexation plan for Israel and Palestine.

Through the haze of tear gas, Inlakesh filmed Israeli soldiers camped out at a nearby hill, aiming their guns at the crowd of mostly children throwing rocks.

“And then you see the children drop,” Inlakesh recalled, followed by the bang of a gunshot. Paramedics rushed over to retrieve the children as Inlakesh followed behind. In all, Inlakesh said he filmed Israeli military gunfire hit three Palestinian children, a likely war crime violation, leaving them with wounds to the arms, legs and torso.

“You’re killing part of the narrative,” Inlakesh said. “You’re actively taking away the public’s ability to assess what happened at a critical moment during the history of the conflict.”

The post A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent. appeared first on The Intercept.

He was one of around 130,000 Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank with permits from the Israeli authorities to cross the separation wall into Israeli territory as a laborer. With his lawful employment inside the Green Line, which separates the West Bank from Israel, he was able to go back and forth from his hometown of Iraq Burin, near Nablus in the north, to whichever Israeli city offered work.

Before the Covid pandemic, the 51-year-old Qaddous’s work in Israel sustained his wife and five children.

His brother Qusai said Arafat’s living conditions worsened over the years, as work opportunities dried up during the pandemic, his family’s needs grew, and the West Bank’s economy tanked.

“My brother risked his life because he needed to provide for his family.”

“There are hardly any jobs in the West Bank,” Qusai said, “and prices of food and goods are extremely high.”

Things got even worse after October 7, 2023: Israel indefinitely paused Palestinian workers’ permits after Hamas’s attack, and Qaddous lost his permit. So when an opportunity presented itself — a job in Taybeh, inside Israel — he took a chance.

“My brother risked his life because he needed to provide for his family at a time when the economic situation was difficult,” Qusai said.

The decision to cross the wall would prove deadly for Qaddous.

On April 26, 2024, Qaddous drove to the barrier. Capped with barbed wire, the wall is over 8 meters tall and runs more than 200 kilometers. Qaddous hoped to jump over it and catch a ride from East Jerusalem to Taybeh. He chose a section of the barrier that separates the Palestinian side of the town of Al-Ram from the Israeli section.

Qaddous paid some local Palestinian men 600 shekels, or $186. The men provided the ladder for getting up the wall, a rope for getting down the other side, and transport to the job site. The men served as lookouts throughout the crossing.

Qaddous climbed the ladder, then mayhem broke out. The lookouts spotted an Israeli police jeep. Qaddous fell to the ground.

“The fall did not kill him immediately,” Qusai said. “Israeli police spotted him as he lay on the ground with a serious head injury and prevented an ambulance from reaching him. He bled out. When they were sure he was dead, they allowed paramedics to take his body.”

Shooting Workers

Forty-four Palestinian workers have died trying to cross the wall since October 2023, when Israeli authorities revoked almost all permits, according to the Palestinian Workers’ Union. The deaths, along with serious injuries inflicted by authorities, happened while workers were being chased by Israeli police, beaten, shot at, or fell after jumping off the separation barrier.

The injuries have been growing more serious. Palestinians are increasingly being shot by Israel’s border police, especially in the legs, following an order from far-right Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to the Israeli news outlet Walla. Since the start of 2025, at least 106 Palestinians have been shot in the legs by border police at the Israeli separation wall near Jerusalem — including one this week who was shot in the leg when Israeli forces opened fire, according to the Red Crescent.

Israel’s occupation has shaped the West Bank’s economy for nearly six decades, creating a structure in which Palestinians are largely prevented from building a self-sustaining economy and instead pushed into dependency on work in Israel itself or in its illegal settlements.

Before the Gaza genocide got underway in October 2023, almost 20 percent all Palestinian laborers worked in Israel and or its illegal West Bank settlements — mostly in construction and agriculture. That number nosedived to 4 percent immediately after the Hamas-led attack on Israel set off an Israeli onslaught.

Before October 2023, around a quarter million Palestinians, with and without permits, used to commute daily from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including 19,000 from Gaza, according to Shaher Saad, the secretary-general of the Palestinian Workers’ Union.

Today, fewer than 15,000 Palestinian laborers with permits travel to Israel for work with permits. The drastic reduction cut off a vital liquidity lifeline that provided them with wages 4 to 10 times higher than what they would earn in the occupied territories, where unemployment is more than 50 percent nationally — about 80 percent in Gaza and 35 percent in the West Bank.

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Additionally, since October 2023, Israel has staunched the flow of tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority, the home-rule Palestinian government in the West Bank. Israel has withheld and delayed transfers of the revenues back to the Palestinians in contravention of the Oslo Accords, the diplomatic agreement that established the PA and set the stage for a two-state solution whose prospects have all but vanished.

With public salaries hit by the withheld tax revenue and cash running increasingly short, about 40,000 Palestinians with no permits continue to cross into Israel illegally, despite the increased risk of the Israeli crackdown, according to Saad.

For years, Israel has regarded Palestinians — many of whom work in low-skilled positions — as a pool of cheap labor.

Bringing them into the Israeli labor market was presented as a way to boost Palestinian living standards, on the assumption that hardship breeds resistance. Economic gains and financial reliance on Israel, on the other hand, would deter Palestinians from challenging the status quo, helping maintain Israeli dominance.

At the same time, however, Palestinian workers were far from equal in the workforce. With no guaranteed sick leave, no pension, delayed or denied benefits, and with work permits tied to a specific employer, a structure was created wherein any worker can easily be replaced by the thousands desperate for permits. Palestinian laborers were cheap and disposable. And their mistreatment has worsened since October 7, according to Mohammad Blidi, who heads the workers’ union in Tulkarem, a Palestinian city near the separation wall in the northern West Bank.

“As an occupying power, Israel is legally obliged to provide work for Palestinians, and to respect international labor laws,” Blidi said. “What is happening in reality is far from it. On a daily basis, Palestinian workers are subject to humiliation and beatings.”

Laborers From Gaza

On the day of the October 7 attacks, Israel detained thousands of Palestinian workers from Gaza who were in working on permits inside Israel. Although they had the necessary Israeli-issued permission, they were held for a month at least, many beaten and interrogated.

That the detained workers were legally in Israel, with permits and the attendant security vetting, according to Blidi, suggests they were detained mainly because they had come from Gaza.

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The arrests were carried out “secretly and illegally,” according to Gisha, an Israeli group that advocates for Palestinians’ right of movement. There was no legal basis for moving the workers into detention centers, the group said, and they were effectively disappeared, with Israel refusing to disclose the workers’ identities and whereabouts.

Many of the workers described being mistreated in detention — left without food, water, medication, a mattress, or toilet access. They endured harsh violence and psychological abuse, reporting torture and degrading treatment. Israeli soldiers seized all cash and mobile phones from the workers, and two died in Israeli custody.

In one case, a 40-year-old Palestinian man from Gaza City who worked in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on the day of the attack had to flee to Hebron when news came out that laborers from Gaza were being targeted by Israeli police.

Since he could not go back to Gaza, he hunkered down with several other workers in the southern West Bank city awaiting his fate, the man, who requested anonymity for fear of his safety, said in an interview. Then he received word that his pregnant wife and four of his children — two boys and two girls — had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Only one child survived, but the boy’s leg was seriously injured and he lost an eye in the attack.

Just two days into mourning, the worker was awakened by a loud explosion in the pre-dawn hours. Israeli soldiers blew up the door to the house he was staying in and detained him, along with the others.

“They tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us before beating us,” he recalled. “They took us to the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba and from there to another prison that they didn’t disclose. For nine days, we endured tortuous interrogations. Every day, they asked different questions about Gaza. I told them I’m just a worker.”

He was once again transferred to another prison for a day — and in the dead of night, he and several other workers were dumped at the border with Gaza. They all entered the Strip by foot.

“I was in the south and couldn’t go back to Gaza City,” he said. “I couldn’t bury my wife and children. I couldn’t say goodbye to them.”

It took 20 days for him to be reunited with his son. They moved into a tattered tent that flooded with the recent winter storms.

He said that, working in Israel, he had been able to save over $10,000.

“It’s all gone now,” the man said. “I only have four shekels” — about $1 — “in my pocket. I used to be able to work and provide for my family. But now, there is no life.”

The post Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers appeared first on The Intercept.

On World AIDS Day 2025, humanity should be celebrating that there is a new shot available which offers six months of protection against the transmission of HIV, the virus which has already infected approximately 40 million living people and taken the lives of 44 million more.

Instead, public health workers are reeling from how President Donald Trump has helped HIV to circulate in more humans this year than last. The lethal ways the current U.S. health policy is harming the health and wealth of LGBTQ+ people worldwide will be felt for years, if not decades.

That’s because on the first day of his second term, Trump issued a stop-work order for all foreign aid and several orders that jeopardized the health outcomes of minority groups within the U.S.

The cuts were far-reaching yet highly specific. They reduced resources for short- and long-term health research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, universities, and community groups in the U.S. and around the world. Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, the administration curtailed or ended funding for programs like the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR.

These cuts disparately harmed several distinct but often overlapping populations: LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, sex workers, and people living with HIV/AIDS. They were swift, halting scientific trials and critical services within days (or even mere hours) of their posting on January 20, 2025. And they were significant, contributing to acute medical crises, hunger, homelessness, or even death.

In the U.S., cuts to federal spending resulted in the cancellation of over $125 million in National Institutes of Health grants for LGBTQ-focused health research.

Across the globe, cuts to USAID are disrupting life-saving services and forced community organizations to close across the globe. In South Africa, transgender people immediately lost access to gender-affirming care, leading to forced detransitioning, body dysmorphia, depression, and even suicide. In Lebanon, USAID cuts are causing job losses among humanitarian aid workers, impacting medical care and disrupting development programs. In Uganda, people living with HIV have lost access to condoms, lubricants, medication, and even to the food that USAID once provided to people living with the virus (as those who are starving simply cannot take antiretroviral medication).

While there are lethal exceptions, often, the effects of these cuts are unfolding gradually over time. HIV is a slow-acting virus, and the deadliness of halting its prevention and treatment now will take years or even more than a decade to manifest.

But it’s possible to take a toll of the damage nearly 11 months later today on World AIDS Day, to better understand the damage done and the suffering and death still to come. By early 2025, Politico reported that the administration canceled 86 percent of all USAID awards. One analysis found that 71 percent of HIV-related activities globally were terminated, including several HIV treatment awards and most HIV prevention programs. Overall, there has been a huge drop in the number of people starting antiretroviral medication and a decrease in viral load testing, which is crucial for monitoring the virus and preventing transmission. Without the infrastructure of monitoring, documentation, and care, HIV is transmitting unchecked in the dark.

And it’s also possible to get a pattern of HIV’s rise by talking to people doing the work on the ground (or who recently returned from it), people living with HIV, and people who are both. In the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Trump’s cuts are not merely harming these populations by reducing or eliminating services they receive; it is also harming them by taking away their jobs.

For instance, at one large university hospital we visited in the Midwestern United States, every single trans Black outreach worker — who had been integral in addressing high rates of HIV among Black LGBTQ+ Americans — had lost their job by May. In Europe, we found HIV nongovernmental organizations struggling not just with cuts from USAID, but cuts also dictated from Brussels and their own governments, as EU countries shifted money away from immigrants and foreign aid and toward NATO and Frontex, the ICE of the European Union.

In Lebanon, the executive director of an organization that helps some 600 people per month access HIV services and other care — including financial aid or case management for queer people experiencing violence — said they can no longer plan beyond eight months.

At a clinic in Uganda for “key populations” (the euphemism for LGBTQ+ people in a country where “aggravated homosexuality” is a capital offense), a medical assistant said the staff was cut from 15 to just four. When told that staff at a similar organization in South Africa had also been reduced to just four people — but from an original staff of 86 — one of the workers in Uganda could only laugh: “Wow, I thought we had it bad.”

The immediate consequences of the cuts are more economic than medical. For many, the cuts created an acute crisis of employment.

Research has long shown that people who identify as LGBTQ+ and/or living with HIV are prone to living in poverty. Often, the only work in the formal economy accessible to LGBTQ people — and trans women in particular — is to work in HIV prevention. Workers typically began as clients, then became volunteers, then stick with it for their career. These people often lack university or even secondary-school educations, and their jobs in HIV prevention are key to their economic and physical well-being, with salaries serving as lifelines for their families and economic engines in their communities.

And when the stop-work order came, they fell off an economic cliff that brought financial danger much faster than HIV ever could. This was true in every country where we reported.

In the United States, the cuts created a crisis of LGBTQ+ employment with a stark racial divide. In the same way DOGE’s cuts to the federal workforce overall disproportionately impacted Black women’s employment, the domestic health cuts particularly affected LGBTQ+ workers of color. Whereas the stop-work order led to job losses for Black and Latinx queer and trans Americans who worked directly with the public, the same has not always true for their supervisors who, in our findings and in scientific research about primary investigators and recipients of government health grants, were overwhelmingly white. Many of this latter group relied on data collected by Black and brown colleagues — in the U.S. and around the world — to do their work. But when those Black and brown colleagues lose their jobs, the white researchers were often able to take the data and pivot to other research projects or jobs.

This racialized LGBTQ+ employment crisis for front-line Black and brown workers is global. For instance, in Uganda, some health care workers who avoided layoffs had their salaries reduced by more than 50 percent, while other laid-off workers still go to their jobs just in exchange for food. In South Africa, one person at the Johannesburg HIV-prevention organization where staff was cut from 86 to just four people said, “If you go on Grindr,” a gay hookup app, “you will see many of my former colleagues offering services.” These HIV prevention workers had turned to for sex work — as there were no other jobs available to them.

Gutting the funding of HIV prevention globally harms workers in the short term, and humanity in the long run, by undermining a novel chance to curb or even end AIDS. In early 2025, trials were completed in some countries for lenacapavir, an injectable drug that can prevent HIV transmission for six months. Often hailed as a “breakthrough” medication, the potential benefits of lenacapavir were profound: If given to enough people for a period of time, it could diminish or potentially eradicate HIV. At the 13th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in July, the World Health Organization recommended widespread use of lenacapavir as soon as possible.

Tragically, right as it was ready to begin rolling out, the Trump administration “decimated the infrastructure of global HIV prevention programs by its destruction of USAID,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. Despite the administration backing some small rollouts of the drug (about 500 doses of lenacapavir were delivered each to Zambia and Eswatini, which have a combined population of about 24 million people), Gonsalves described Trump’s “support for Lenacapivir” as “a hollow promise to millions who are at risk of HIV infection around the globe,” and “a drop in the bucket for a drug that can be manufactured by generic companies for $40 a year. We need the programs and services that Trump cut put back in place” — and for workers to be hired back to distribute this new drug to their peers.

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Over the last year, there has been an enormous decrease in those peer educators in Europe, Africa, and North America. USAID cuts took away money from their outreach in sex work “hotspots,” gay saunas, immigration processing centers, prisons, cruising grounds, food banks, and the many places where HIV lodges itself by people society has largely abandoned.

In Uganda, we witnessed an illustration of what USAID could be doing, what it’s no longer funding, and how people fighting HIV could be fighting it more effectively (without expending more human resources).

On November 21, the group Universal Love Alliance created a free STI clinic at a sex work motel in Kampala, where it gave condoms and lubricants to 200 sex workers, and tested 86 people for HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and urinary tract infections. People with urinary tract infections and syphilis were given antibiotics on the spot. There were three positive HIV cases detected (who were all enrolled into treatment immediately), six inconclusive cases (who were scheduled for follow-ups), and 77 negative cases.

Of those 77, about 60 began daily PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, and left with a 30-day supply of daily HIV prevention medication.

But the encounter revealed three warning signs.

First, most of the 15 people working were volunteers and were filling in for people who used to be paid to do this work.

Second, some of the boxes of supplies were marked “USAID: From the American People.” These were the last of their kind from a vanishing supply which will not be replaced. Universal Love Alliance is able to get antiretroviral drugs from a hospital for free, but it is buying all of its other supplies (including PrEP) with private donations, which limits how often it can offer such free clinics (at a time when such clinics funded by USAID and the CDC has ended).

And finally, while giving dozens of sex workers 30 pills PrEp is a good thing, if the team had been able to provide lenacapivr instead, “the six-month injectable PrEP, you could have potentially improved patient outcomes, increased adherence, and reduced the burden of HIV prevention,” Ahabwe Lenard, one of the lab technicians pointed out. With lenacapivr, Lenard and his colleagues would only have to try to find the people they’d treated again in 180 days instead of 30 — just two times a year, instead of 12 — which would free up everyone’s time and money (in a very poor country) while further reducing HIV.

But the benefits of this new drug will not be felt if it’s not available and if there aren’t trusted community health outreach workers to explain and administer it.

On World AIDS Day, it’s clear whose lives, employment, and health have been most affected by Trump’s budget cuts.

But make no mistake: Viruses travel, and Trump’s stop-work order has put the entire human race at higher risk for HIV and AIDS.

This essay is part of the series Global Stop Work Order, which will feature reporting about how the Trump administration’s cuts are affecting LGBTQ+ health and HIV/AIDS in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The series is supported by a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Grant and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time appeared first on The Intercept.

The template agreement, which references the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — but also applies funding to fight malaria, tuberculosis, and other pathogens — would require countries that receive global health assistance to share a broad range of health care and pathogen data for the next 25 years.

The model document would also require foreign governments to provide the United States with “any data access or information needed to monitor compliance” with the Helms Amendment, which prevents U.S. federal funds from being used to provide abortion care abroad. This stipulation would give the United States broad authority to collect data on abortion care and policy for decades to come.

“The [agreement] is just another example of the Trump Administration’s playbook for using its power and influence to further its anti-choice agenda and undermine critical national public health responses,” wrote Melissa Cockroft, global lead on abortion for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, in a statement to The Intercept.

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The document was developed in line with the State Department’s new “America First Global Health Strategy,” which seeks to broadly eliminate multilateral cooperation on international health care initiatives, like the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system being negotiated by the World Health Organization, in favor of direct agreements between the United States and other countries.

After the government shutdown brought negotiations to a screeching halt, the department has renewed its efforts to reach bilateral global health agreements with dozens of countries, primarily in Africa, identified in its America First Global Health Strategy. The State Department is supposed to complete the deals by the end of the year.

Global health experts who spoke to The Intercept cautioned that these agreements appear to be highly unbalanced, giving the Trump administration sweeping authority to extract data on a number of issues, including on abortion, raising significant concerns about misuse at a time when the Trump administration is looking to limit access to abortion globally.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Collecting data itself isn’t an unusual function of a global health initiative, said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization focused on HIV prevention.

PEPFAR, in particular, “has always been very data rich, lots of data collected and analyzed, but in a very collaborative nature between governments, civil society, and the United States government … and there’s always been great clarity on why we’re collecting this data,” he said.

However, Warren also noted that the section around “any data access” necessary to monitor compliance with the anti-abortion Helms Amendment — which gives broad discretion to the United States to request access to abortion-related data for decades — goes far beyond that scope.

“The part about Helms and requiring compliance information on that for 25 years, along with everything else, does raise some concerns about what [the administration] is doing with this,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and CEO of Global Health Council. “Is there a larger play at foot to use data to monitor countries’ regulatory moves around liberalizing restrictions on abortion?”

While it’s unclear exactly how the Trump administration plans to use this data, Cockroft said the model agreement is concerning against the larger backdrop of its anti-abortion agenda.

In January, President Donald Trump reinstated the global gag rule, a policy that prevents foreign organizations that receive global health assistance from providing information, referrals, or services related to abortion care or advocating for abortion access.

“We know the Trump administration is seeking at all costs to restrict abortion access globally,” said Cockroft. “Requests from the Trump administration in the MoU for ‘any data’ for compliance monitoring are very concerning, as it is unclear how exactly the data will be used and to what ends.”

Dunn-Georgiou told The Intercept that the administration is also in the process of expanding the rule, potentially to encompass all non-military foreign assistance, U.S.-based nonprofits, and foreign governments, massively expanding its scope and impact.

While there’s no public information on how exactly these final agreements will differ from the template produced by the Trump administration, most recipient countries, particularly in Africa, don’t have much negotiating power to change the terms to their benefit.

“People are getting sick. Medicine is hard to find. I’ve even heard of condom shortages in some countries because the prevention funding for HIV has been stalled,” said Dunn-Georgiou. “Many countries are feeling so squeezed for funding that they will take the deal.”

The post Trump Wants to Make African Countries Share Abortion Data to Get AIDS Funding appeared first on The Intercept.

I was never that into cocaine — preferring the euphoria promised by MDMA or the relaxation offered by cannabis — but back in 2015, a cocaine-serving lounge bar, Route 36, in La Paz, Bolivia, was the talk of the backpacking circuit, and the scarcely-believable novelty of the place was alluring.

At Route 36, bags of cocaine are served on silver platters, and a friend and I got incredibly high that night. Too high, perhaps, though it was all undeniably good fun. But as soon as my first-person dispatch for Vice from the lively dusk-till-dawn session went viral, I feared that I perhaps shouldn’t have glorified the use of a moreish drug that typically leaves a trail of violent destruction in its wake.

As the years passed, however — with cocaine becoming both unprecedentedly popular and increasingly affordable despite the billions spent on the war on drugs to avoid these exact outcomes — I’ve come to realize that accepting that adults take cocaine, and legally regulating the drug, is the only sensible path forward. Establishments like Route 36, the world’s first cocaine bar, might just represent a more enlightened, peaceful future for us all.

After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine’s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate, harming the local Indigenous people for whom coca holds unique spiritual and nutritional value, and killing anything that tries to grow in the contaminated soil. Consumers and traffickers of cocaine have been imprisoned en masse, helping to create a prison–industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.

The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor — in many places, it’s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia, Mexico, and most recently Brazil, where a police raid on a cartel-controlled favela in Rio led to more than 130 deaths in one night in late October. “This was a slaughter, not an operation,” one bereaved mother told The Guardian. “They came here to kill.”

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In the international waters around the U.S., the “legally indefensible” and “barbarian” campaign the Trump administration is waging against boats suspected of trafficking drugs from Latin America has killed at least 83 people in 21 extrajudicial airstrikes.

Such boats, if some of them are indeed carrying drugs, would mostly be ferrying a popular white powder which many people appear to have an insatiable appetite for. As President Donald Trump acknowledged in 1990 before becoming a politician, legalizing drugs is the only way to end the war on drugs. After all, people want to sniff cocaine. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war,” Trump said in 1990.

Cocaine was first extracted from the coca leaf in 1855 by a young German chemist, Friedrich Gaedcke. A few decades later, it was identified as a highly effective local anesthetic. Cocaine was then vaunted as a “nerve food” wonder drug by pharmaceutical companies and psychologist Sigmund Freud, who initially claimed it was a panacea for depression. Then, it was widely used as both a medicine and as a recreational drug.

Pope Leo XIII was such a fan of one cocaine-infused tonic wine as a mental fortifier, “when prayer was insufficient,” that he awarded its creator a Vatican gold medal. President Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, and Queen Victoria were also partial.

In 1886, Coca-Cola launched as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage” flavored by the cocaine-containing coca leaves.

But as the invigorating drug’s addictive nature became impossible to ignore, there was a backlash. Coca-Cola removed the cocaine from its recipe in 1903, though it still derives its distinctive taste from the bitter leaves (thanks to its ongoing effective monopoly over coca imports to the U.S.).

Next, in 1914, the U.S. passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which heavily regulated cocaine and stymied its use outside of medicine — where it had become long essential for ear, throat, and, perhaps ironically, nose surgery.

The U.S. then set about creating a sprawling drug control regime to assert its geopolitical control in Latin America, protect pharmaceutical interests, and promote a heathen culture in which alcohol and cigarettes are OK, but every other drug is bad. In 1961, the United Nations placed cocaine and coca under strict international control — along with heroin and cannabis — and required governments to criminalize non-medical use.

Prohibition coincided with increased interest in cocaine. After decades of negligible use, it was rediscovered by countercultural elites in the late 1960s, just as Colombian traffickers were perfecting their methods. Cocaine hit Miami in the early-1970s, and the rest is history.

“When cocaine came to town, it was so ridiculously profitable,” Roben Farzad, author of “Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami,” told PBS. “It made people do such crazy things in the name of money and power and blood lust that you had something approximating a failed state by 1981 in Miami.”

Today, cocaine is one of the world’s most reliable commodities. It’s a multibillion-dollar market serving around 50 million global consumers. Production in the Andes is at a record high. Purity is the highest it’s ever been. Cocaine is cheaper, stronger, and more accessible than at any point in history. From bankers to bricklayers, everyone is at it — and the interests of cartels all over the world are enmeshed with the legal economies.

This state of affairs represents a totemic, catastrophic policy failure. It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws — by funneling untold riches to violent criminals — are more harmful than the drugs themselves, as research increasingly shows.

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“We’re losing badly the war on drugs,” Trump said more than three decades ago. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.” Instead, taxes on legal profits on the sales of drugs like cocaine could be spent to educate the public on the dangers of drug misuse, the future president recommended. “What I’d like to do maybe by bringing it up is cause enough controversy that you get into a dialogue on the issue of drugs so people will start to realize that this is the only answer; there is no other answer,” he added.

Fast forward 35 years, and Trump is waging his illegal, extrajudicial campaign on boats carrying suspected drug traffickers. If history tells us anything, the cartels will simply switch to other methods — over air or land — to get the lucrative cocaine into the U.S., after the Coast Guard seized a record 510,000 pounds over the last fiscal year.

That means that 2 million pounds of cocaine likely made it into the country by sea hidden in shipments of bananas and corn, or in stealthy narco-subs, since it has been estimated that interdiction efforts only capture a fraction of illegal drugs imported. Port staff, border guards, and law enforcement officers are no doubt being corrupted to an extent we will never be able to comprehend. The tentacles of the illegal drug trade will always penetrate the legal economy because there’s just so much money at stake — more than any other illegal commodity industry.

That’s why the cocaine business continues to infect even quaint corners of the world, as cartels continually shift their operations away from enforcement hotspots to evade detection. Spare a thought for Saõ Miguel in the Azores, a tropical paradise that suffered an explosion in problematic cocaine use when half a ton washed up on its shores in 2001; or the degeneration of Cape Verde into a narco-state thanks to gangs seeking new smuggling routes.

In the Amazon, land defenders who object to the razing of their land for secret coca plantations are killed. Ecuador, once one of South America’s safest countries, is the latest state to be rocked by an explosion of prison massacres, political assassinations, and street bombings; the homicide rate has increased sixfold in just five years. Even Scandinavian gangs are killing over the cocaine trade, in the once peaceful countries of northern Europe.

So what would happen if cocaine was legalized? Organized crime groups would be deprived of a uniquely profitable income stream. The purity of the drug would also not be at the whims of these criminal groups, as batches contaminated with fentanyl regularly kill people who use cocaine. Others may celebrate that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which has 93 offices across 69 countries, would lose much of their raison d’être. And, depending on whether there would be an amnesty and reconciliation process for the criminal groups who control the cocaine trade, there would be a new class of legal cocaine merchants.

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Undoubtedly, there will be concerns that cocaine legalization could increase use. But it is already available for delivery faster than a pizza in many major cities across the world, and regulation — as even Trump noted — would help bring people who are addicted into closer contact with essential health services. This policy overhaul could also potentially reduce the thousands of deaths from cocaine misuse each year. There would be controls over public usage, as outlined in nonprofit Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s book “How to Regulate Stimulants,” as well as plain packaging, and a huge remit for drug education and harm reduction services.

At Route 36 — which under any regulated system would not be permitted to serve cocktails, since cocaine enables one to drink extraordinary amounts of alcohol — I was already asking myself about the morality of taking cocaine. I resolved in 2018 never to take it again, at least until I could ensure it was from an ethical source, but the reality is that the growing market is not going to magically disappear. Legalization is the only way to change the story of cocaine, from field to nose, being written in other people’s blood. The real immorality would be the continuation of the failed status quo.

The post Legalizing Cocaine Is the Only Way to End the Drug War appeared first on The Intercept.

Al-Shaghnobi’s Gaza Civil Defense force team pulled two dead young girls from the bombed house and kept digging, crawling under collapsed floors. “We don’t go under unless someone is alive,” he told The Intercept. “Otherwise, we dig from above — ceiling by ceiling.” What followed was a descent into something dreamlike and horrifying.

“We walked 12 meters under the rubble,” he said. “Every meter, the air grew less. I crawled past legs, arms, the body of a child hugging his dead mother. I felt the ground shake from bombings above.”

From deep inside the wreckage, the team heard a young girl calling, “I’m here. I’m here.”

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The Civil Defense force is an emergency and rescue operations group administered by the Palestinian Minister of Interior. After two years of Israeli genocide, it has an estimated 900 personnel and has lost roughly 90% of its operating capacity, Civil Defense workers told The Intercept. In the absence of heavy equipment, the civil defense teams use simple tools like hammers, axes, and shovels. Without excavators or heavy equipment, a single recovery can take days.

Local civil defense workers estimate there are still 10,000 bodies buried under the rubble.

“What motivates us,” al-Shaghnobi said, “is that when you hear a voice — even one — you know there is life. That’s enough to make you risk your life to recover this alive soul.”

By the time al-Shaghnobi finally reached Malak, she was unconscious with no pulse. Her eyes open, her legs blue, she had passed away.

“I tried to wake her up, but it was too late,” al-Shaghnobi said. “I was in a moment of utter stillness, and I could hear nothing but my own breath.”

24-year-old al-Shaghnobi has already spent seven years working for Gaza’s Civil Defense force. Like many of his colleagues, he eats and sleeps at his workplace. His family’s home in the Tal Al-Hawa area of western Gaza City was destroyed in the final days of the war, and his family remains displaced in the south.

“People think the ceasefire means we can breathe,” he said. “But for us, the end of the war is the beginning of the real war: pulling out the dead.”

Al-Shaghnobi believes his aunt’s corpse is among the 10,000 bodies that remain unrecovered. Large regions like Shujayaa and parts of Rafah are still inaccessible. Israeli forces are stationed there, marking the areas “yellow zones.” Civil defense crews cannot reach them.

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“We barely recovered some bodies during this ceasefire,” al-Shaghnobi said. “We have no machinery. Some areas, we know there are hundreds under the rubble, we simply can’t go.”

Alaa Khammash, 25, said he feels terrible when his Civil Defense team is unable to rescue someone.

“When I am dispatched on a mission, I feel a responsibility to finish it completely. I cannot simply stop midway,” he said. It can take 10 to 12 hours to retrieve a single body if it’s under a collapsed ceiling or wall. “Sometimes we can’t recover the body since it needs heavy equipment.”

The years of genocide have left al-Shaghnobi feeling numb.

“In the beginning of the war, we couldn’t look at the bodies,” al-Shaghnobi said. “We would close our eyes when retrieving them. By the middle of the war, we were wrapping them in white shrouds like it was daily routine. By the end of the war, my emotions became more defeated. The accumulation of pressure made it difficult to touch the bodies.”

“Bodies are found in various states: decomposed, non-decomposed, burnt, or even evaporated, sometimes just a skull or a skeleton,” he added, “The body’s texture is soft and smooth when found.”

Civil defense team members wear a special uniform, gloves, and masks because of the smell of the decaying bodies. The bodies decompose rapidly when they’re in the sun, Khammash said. “This occurs when a body lies exposed outdoors, subject to sun and air. Slow decomposition happens when the body is under a roof or shielded from air and sunlight.”

The smell can make al-Shaghnobi lose his appetite for days. For six months, he has struggled with digestive issues. Once, during Ramadan, “I was fasting,” al-Shaghnobi said, “We pulled a body that had been under rubble for a year in Al-Shifa hospital. It was half-decomposed. The smell hit me, my vision blurred, I nearly collapsed.”

“We identify locations of martyrs during the day based on blood stains, bones, and skulls,” al-Shaghnobi explained. “We rely on families of the martyrs. … They call our team, often providing the equipment at their own personal expense to honor and bury their loved ones.”

Without DNA tests, the workers identify bodies from clothes, shoes, rings, watches, metal implants, IDs, and gold teeth. The unknown bodies — often only skulls or skeletons — go to a cemetery for the unnamed.

After retrieving bodies, the Civil Defense workers write a detailed paper describing the area, angle, building, height measurement, and burial location, all written on the shroud so families can potentially identify the body later.

Sometimes, families insist on seeing the remains to believe their loved one is gone. “People accept death more easily,” al-Shaghnobi explained, “when they see the body.”

“I moved my friend from one grave to another,” he said, recalling a reburial. “He was just a skull. I kept thinking — this is the end of every person. Bones.”

Recovering a person’s body entails a strange emotional paradox, said 27-year-old Mohammad Azzam.

“It feels good because you found them,” he said, “but bad because they are decomposed. A feeling I cannot explain.”

Families often wait nearby, and when the team brings out the body, their reactions are marked by intense, overwhelming grief.

“When we find someone, they’re usually half-decomposed,” Azzam said. “The face is unrecognizable. Only a shoe, a wallet, a bracelet tells you who they were.”

The workers navigate these traumatic moments while living through the horrors of genocide in their own families and homes. Khammash, like al-Shaghnobi, now lives at work: His house in eastern Gaza City sits dangerously close to the Israeli military presence.

At work one day, Khammash said he got a dreaded call from a friend: “They told me my brother had been injured in the south, near the American aid distribution point, and taken to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. I called a friend of mine who works as a nurse there, and he told me my brother had died.”

It was unbearable. “My brother was not only my sibling — he was my closest friend, only a year younger than me,” he told The Intercept. “We shared everything, understood each other without speaking. We went everywhere together. That kind of loss never leaves you, and the separation is the hardest pain.”

“Death is certain,” Khammash said. “As Allah said: Every soul shall taste death. And as Muslims, we understand that what comes after is far better than what we endure here.”

During the ceasefire, the rescue teams receive constant calls: A neighbor reports a smell, a family begs for help to retrieve their loved one, a building is collapsing, a limb has surfaced through the rubble, flies gathering in a corner reveal what lies beneath.

Khammash has begun to feel death as a presence, not an event. “It surrounds us,” he said. “Maybe we are the next ones. We accept Allah’s plan, but still — inside us — we love life.”

One of the hardest missions Khammash has had under the ceasefire was in a bombed tower in the al-Rimal neighborhood. A woman was alive somewhere under the collapsed top floor, calling out, but the rescuers couldn’t locate her.

“It was pitch black,” he recalled. “I kept moving my light, trying to understand where her voice was coming from.”

Suddenly, she was beneath him. “I had put my foot next to her head without realizing. We took her out alive.”

The longest recovery Khammash ever worked took a full day — pulling out Marah al-Haddad, a girl buried beneath several floors in al-Daraj area a month ago.

“She was alive when we reached her,” he said. “She had been breathing dust and explosives. My colleague Abdullah Al-Majdalawi and I kept calling, ‘Where are you, Marah?’ And she answered, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’”

“When she saw us, hope came back to her face,” he said. “To bring someone back from death — this is what keeps us going.”

The post Gaza’s Civil Defense Forces Keep Digging for 10,000 Missing Bodies appeared first on The Intercept.

If Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a site of tension in your family for the last two Thanksgiving holidays, this year should be no different. The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter turkey dinner, but when we look at the harrowing status quo for Palestinians in Gaza today, there is no peace to be thankful for — especially not on a day that marks the remembrance of this country’s own genocide against Indigenous Americans.

To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones’ support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human.

I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It’s painful, and I don’t have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over.

Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my part, I’ll be thinking instead of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. He escaped in 2024 after Israel bombed his home, killing two of his immediate family members, including his mother. His surviving family are still there, living in tents. He hasn’t heard from them in over two weeks.

It is for families like my student’s that we cannot simply take it easy this Thanksgiving because of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza.

Unending Destruction

While the October 10 agreement has offered some relief for Palestinians, with a significant drop in daily slaughter, displacement, starvation and killings by Israeli forces continue. Instead of relentless, Israel’s bombings over the last 45 days have been simply ongoing and regular. Israel has killed 345 Palestinians in Gaza, including 120 children, while demolishing over 1,500 structures.

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At the same time, only a fraction of the aid trucks which were supposed to enter Gaza daily under the ceasefire agreement have been permitted entry by Israeli forces. Mass, enforced hunger continues in the Strip, where 50 million tons of rubble sits atop well over 10,000 unrecovered bodies.

In the face of such totalizing and unending destruction, it’s hard to find much solace in the fact that the support for the Palestinian cause has grown internationally; that nearly all major international human rights organizations have recognized Israel’s actions as genocidal; that a major wave of nation-states, including France, Canada, and Britain, moved this year to recognize the state of Palestine. The dead, displaced, and occupied can do little with declarations that carry no concrete consequences.

“What we need is a justice plan,” Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian writer and poet, told a U.N. meeting this week. “It is time to stop accepting the illusion of peace processes that only entrench injustices.”

With the state of the world as it stands, it feels unlikely that Israeli leaders will be held accountable for their war crimes any time soon. Justice for Palestine is hard to imagine, but we can continue to apply pressure in ways that have already seen paradigms shift. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election was a genuine victory against the perverse weaponization of antisemitism against Israel’s critics. Now New Yorkers must push our next mayor to uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity and international law.

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And there is more those of us living in safety can do. We can send funds and share resources, as so many already do. And we can continue heading and supporting Palestinians’ call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli institutions complicit in occupation and apartheid.

Activist sometimes say, “Solidarity begins at home.” Yet not everyone can choose their home. If you have the great fortune of spending the holidays with loved ones who share your commitments to justice and liberation, I hope your time together is full of joy. Most of the time, though, solidarity actually begins anywhere but home. So if you choose to spend time with your family knowing that it will be fraught, I wish you luck. The weekend will pass, and there’s urgent work to be done.

The post Keep Talking About Gaza at Your Thanksgiving Table appeared first on The Intercept.

As gossip, official leaks, and RUMINT (a portmanteau of rumor and intelligence) about a coming war with Venezuela reign in Washington, Defense Department contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept offer one of the most concrete indications of the Pentagon’s plans for operations in the Caribbean Sea over the next three years.

The contracting documents earmark food supplies for almost every branch of the U.S. military, including the Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. They detail an effort by the Defense Logistics Agency, or DLA, to source “Fresh Bread & Bakery products to Department of Defense (‘DoD’, or ‘Troop’) customers in the Puerto Rico Zone.” One spreadsheet outlining supplies for “Puerto Rico Troops” notes tens of thousands of pounds of baked goods are scheduled for delivery from November 15 of this year to November 11, 2028.

Foodstuff set to feed the troops include individually wrapped honey buns, vanilla cupcakes, sweet rolls, hamburger rolls, and flour tortillas.

The Pentagon has built up a force of 15,000 troops in the Caribbean since the summer — the largest naval flotilla in the Caribbean since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

The surge of combat power comes as the U.S. has conducted more than 20 strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing more than 80 civilians. As part of that effort, the Trump administration has secretly declared that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with 24 cartels, gangs, and armed groups including Cártel de los Soles, which the U.S. claims is “headed by Nicolas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Experts and insiders see this as part of a plan for regime change in Venezuela that stretches back to Trump’s first term. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, denies that he heads a cartel.

Mark Cancian, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Intercept that the documents suggest the outsized American military presence in the Caribbean could continue for years.

“The procurement’s length of time and the level of effort seemed to point to these operations continuing at the current level for several years,” said Cancian, who previously worked on defense procurement at the Office of Management and Budget. “That’s significant because it means that the Navy will maintain a large presence in the Caribbean that is far larger than what it has been in recent years. It further implies that the Navy will be involved in these counter-drug operations.”

The Pentagon has tried to keep the details of its military buildup in the region under wraps, failing to answer questions from The Intercept about troop levels, the bulking up of bases, and warships being surged into the Caribbean. “For operational security reasons, we do not release itemized operational details of asset, unit, and troop movements and locations,” said a spokesperson for Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the region. “Information released is published via official communication web sites and social media accounts, or shared with reporters via news releases and updates.”

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The Trump administration has deployed at least 13 warships, five support vessels and a nuclear submarine — including the Ford, which is the largest vessel of its kind — to the region since August. This ramp-up includes three guided-missile destroyers: the USS Jason Dunham, the USS Gravely, and the USS Stockdale. Adm. Alvin Holsey, the outgoing SOUTHCOM commander, recently visited the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, which has been operating in the Caribbean for months. The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group includes the Iwo Jima; amphibious transport dock ships; and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, a unit especially skilled in amphibious landings.

One DLA document lists as recipients of the food an array of U.S. naval vessels known to be involved in ongoing buildup of troops and vessels including the Iwo Jima, Fort Lauderdale, San Antonio, Jason Dunham, Gravely, and Stockdale, as well as the special operations mothership MV Ocean Trader, which makes periodic appearances at hot spots around the world. The list also mentions the USS Truxtun, a guided missile destroyer not previously reported as part of the Caribbean naval buildup.

As the troops have flooded into the region, the quantities of food and costs listed in the contracting documents have mushroomed.

The initial contracting documents, released in August, included cost estimates and an estimated deliverable quantity of food linked to three locations in Puerto Rico. These were revised in September and October. Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, who analyzed the documents for The Intercept, noted that the final amendment, released on October 9, included a cost estimate that increased 40 percent from the original request. The amount of food, measured in pounds, also skyrocketed 450 percent, she observed. And the number of locations in Puerto Rico jumped from three to 16.

“Those specific ships will be rotated in the months ahead, but they are likely a placeholder for the level of effort,” Cancian added. “As these ships leave, the assumption is that others will replace them. One of the questions we hope the new National Defense Strategy answers is whether this larger Caribbean deployment is long term. This food order seems to imply that it is, though the regional logistical command may just be preparing for a higher level of demand, without being sure whether the new strategy will dictate that.”

Another former defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to his current job with a military contractor, said that the documents raise significant questions that the Defense Department would rather not address. “People will ask whether this means escalation from the strikes on smugglers into a Venezuelan campaign, whatever that eventually looks like,” said the former official who has significant experience in military logistics, procurement, and supply chains.

Other locations in Puerto Rico named in the DLA documents include Muñiz Air National Guard Base within Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport; Fort Buchanan, a U.S. Army installation near San Juan; and Roosevelt Roads naval base. The latter, a Cold War-era facility previously dormant since 2004, is listed as hosting Marines. The base, roughly 500 miles from Venezuela, began receiving Marine Corps aircraft and roughly 4,500 Marines in early November.

A September 4 amendment noted “the Delivery Schedule will include one (1) additional customer. They are as follows: DoDAAC – M20179, Customer – USS Hiroshima.” The Hiroshima is a fictional warship that exists only in the “Star Trek” universe. But Homestead, of the National Priorities Project, pointed out that the Defense Activity Address Code M20179 corresponds with the 22nd MEU, according to a Fiscal Year 2026 Marine Corps logistics document.

Troops from the 22nd MEU are currently conducting training exercises in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean island nation only miles from Venezuela. Maduro called the drills “irresponsible” and said the neighboring country was “allowing their waters and land to be used to gravely threaten the peace of the Caribbean.” Members of the unit have also conducted reconnaissance and surveillance training at Camp Santiago in Puerto Rico.

For months, the 22nd MEU has failed to respond to The Intercept’s questions about its operations in the region. The unit also did not respond to recent repeated requests for comment about its use of Defense Activity Address Code M20179 and the potential for food deliveries into late 2028 for troops in and around Puerto Rico.

The DLA documents are also no anomaly. Other recent contracting documents detail “food catering services for 22d MEU personnel located at José Aponte de la Torre Airport, Puerto Rico, from 15 September to 31 December 2025.” The Defense Logistics Agency is also looking into a separate “potential six-month contract for full-service food support to visiting U.S. Navy Ships” in Puerto Rico. That deal would include foods from beef steak, chicken cutlets, and lasagna to chocolate pudding, brownie mix, and chocolate chip cookie dough, not to mention breakfast burritos with bacon, egg, and cheese.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the campaign of attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific is called Operation Southern Spear. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and Southern Command, “this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” he wrote on X. Southern Spear kicked off earlier this year as part of the Navy’s next-generation effort to use small robot interceptor boats and vertical take-off and landing drones to conduct counternarcotics operations.

Trump recently teased the possibility of holding talks with Maduro; Maduro said he is open to face-to-face talks with Trump.

The Pentagon has reportedly presented Trump with various options for attacking Venezuela, according to two government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose information from classified briefings. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to a request for comment.

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Trump has also publicly spoken of moving the sea attacks to land, confirmed that he secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, threatened future attacks on Venezuelan territory, and said he has not ruled out an invasion of Venezuela by U.S. troops. Asked if the U.S. was going to war against Venezuela, Trump nonetheless replied: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” But when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, Trump replied: “I would say yeah. I think so.”

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers did not reply to questions from The Intercept about plans to attack Venezuela, the options for strikes presented to Trump, and the contracting documents which indicate the U.S. will have a major troop presence in the Caribbean into late 2028.

“These documents suggest that the Trump administration plans to maintain a significantly increased military presence in the Caribbean through the remainder of President Trump’s term in office. With ongoing military strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the potential for escalation between the U.S. and Venezuela in particular is high, even if the administration isn’t seeking it,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending, told The Intercept.

The post U.S. Military Documents Indicate Plans to Keep Troops in Caribbean Through 2028 appeared first on The Intercept.

Another way of measuring GHF’s achievements is by counting the hundreds of Palestinians killed while trying to access such aid and the hundreds more who died of starvation-related conditions amid famine when GHF was the only organization allowed to deliver aid.

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Since May, when Israel ousted long-standing aid providers and made GHF the lone distributor in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and American subcontractors have killed nearly 3,000 Palestinians seeking aid, according to a September tally by Gaza health officials. The vast majority were killed at GHF sites. Doctors Without Borders dubbed the GHF distribution points as “sites of orchestrated killing” after its medical teams cared for nearly 900 patients wounded at the four GHF hubs.

In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared a famine in Gaza City. GHF did not expand its operations beyond its four distribution sites. Within the famine’s first month, at least 175 Palestinians died of starvation, a likely undercount.

“The GHF model is one of the worst ‘aid’ — and I use ‘aid’ in quotes — models that’s been tried in the 21st century, if not longer than that,” said Anastasia Moran, advocacy director at MedGlobal, a Chicago-based medical aid organization that has teams inside Gaza. “On every dimension, on every indicator, I’d consider it a failure.”

Since March, Israel’s government has blockaded the entire Gaza strip in violation of international law, creating famine conditions across the territory. The Israeli government, with funding from the U.S. government, appointed the newly formed GHF to oversee all aid distribution in the territory in May. The Swiss-based organization was first run by Jake Wood, a former American sniper turned aid worker, who quit within two weeks after stating the foundation did not adhere to basic humanitarian principles of neutrality. GHF’s chair is Johnnie Moore, an evangelical minister and former religious adviser to the Trump administration.

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Built on the Israeli misinformation campaign claiming Hamas was seizing and controlling most aid in Gaza, debunked by both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the GHF model cut out the United Nations and all international NGOs, insisting it could deliver enough food to slow the worsening starvation conditions. The U.N. previously operated 400 aid sites throughout Gaza.

Rather than maintain the existing model of bringing food and supplies to individuals with most need by delivering goods directly to communities, GHF established four distribution sites. The foundation also hired two American logistics and security firms — UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, led by a Green Beret veteran and former CIA officer, respectively — to oversee distribution. The result was the funneling of thousands of desperate people who traveled long distances into aid sites where long lines often devolved into stampedes. Gunfire from Israeli soldiers, or private American contractors, largely former U.S. special forces, was a near-daily reality. While some of those who survived the deadly queues managed to bring home boxes of food, the supplies failed to slow the famine conditions across Gaza which only worsened. The food provided by GHF was widely criticized by nutritional experts and aid groups as inadequate to prevent hunger and difficult to prepare (most items needed water to boil, itself a scarce resource in the territory).

The model amounted to simply another tool of war by the occupying Israeli forces.

“The GHF is a symptom, it’s not the problem,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director of peace and security. “The GHF is only relevant because people weren’t allowed access to food in ways that were safe and humane. In this way, the GHF is an entity occupying negative space, and the negative space is the deadly siege that the government of Israel has imposed for most of this year.”

The Israeli government continues to block aid into Gaza in violation of the recent ceasefire agreement. While the U.N. has been able to deliver some aid into the territory, Israel continues to restrict major NGOs from delivering aid, blocking more than 100 aid delivery requests in the first month after the ceasefire started on October 10, according to the U.N.

Oxfam, for instance, has $2.5 million worth of goods, including food and supplies to make water safe to drink, waiting inside a warehouse in Jordan, Paul said. Similarly, MedGlobal has said its shipments of medical goods are being prevented from entering Gaza.

While it wrapped its operations in Gaza, GHF said Monday it would not forgo its NGO status and pledged to “maintain readiness to reconstitute if new humanitarian needs are identified.” The foundation added that it is working to expand its model with the the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a base in southern Israel operated primarily by the U.S. military, meant to oversee aid distribution and the rebuilding of Gaza. The joint command base, or CMCC, is seen as the precursor to the eventual Trump-led Board of Peace that will govern Gaza’s rebuilding. The plan to form the Board of Peace, a key part of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, was codified into international law last week in a controversial U.N. Security Council vote and excludes Palestinian voices from the process. The plan ignored a previous U.N. resolution that called for the end of Israel’s occupation and creating a path to Palestinian statehood.

Aid groups are concerned that the GHF’s tactics would be replicated by the Board of Peace in Gaza and in other conflict zones across the world. They fear it normalizes private logistics and security firms managing humanitarian aid to turn a profit. In June, an American contractor group comprised of American military veterans airdropped supplies in South Sudan. And in Gaza, UG Solutions, an American contractor group that guarded GHF sites, inked a new deal with lobbyists tied to Trump. The group said it intends to remain in the region to continue its work. Among U.S. plans leaked in recent weeks includes the construction of Israeli-controlled, fenced “alternative safe communities” — essentially camps — within Gaza where displaced Palestinians would be moved into housing with access to aid.

“My biggest fear,” Moran said, “would be if anyone looked at GHF and thought this is a model that should be tried elsewhere.”

Update: November 25, 2025, 12:34 p.m. ET
The story was updated to include more information on the food supplies provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

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