The news offers an answer to a mystery that had puzzled the Air Force community since April, when Green was removed from his position as the top enlisted leader of AFSOC “due to a loss of confidence in his ability to fulfill his duties,” according to a press release put out at the time. The Air Force did not publicly elaborate on the reasons for his removal, leaving service members and observers to speculate.

The upcoming February 10, 2026, hearing follows a formal investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the service’s criminal investigative agency responsible for probing serious offenses. It will determine whether Green faces a general court-martial, and an Air Force spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that Green has already been formally charged. According to a notice the Air Force quietly posted on its website Wednesday, without issuing a press release or broader disclosures to the force, Green faces charges of “indecent recording” and “obstruction of justice” in addition to “possession, viewing, and producing child pornography.”

Cases involving senior military leaders are rare, and criminal allegations of this magnitude draw scrutiny of former leaders’ decisions, particularly in opaque military environments where Green directly led some of the Air Force’s most lethal warfighters.

As command chief of AFSOC, Green held one of the most powerful positions within one of the Air Force’s most sensitive major commands. He advised commanding officers on enlisted troop matters, including discipline and readiness within special operations units. AFSOC encompasses several major personnel wings across bases such as Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico; Royal Air Force Mildenhall, United Kingdom; and Kadena Air Base, Japan.

Green’s position placed him at the top of the enlisted structure for the major command, giving him significant influence over special operations culture. According to the Air Force, the term “Air Commando” honors a lineage of Air Force units performing unconventional, combat-oriented operations, reflecting the elite mission and ethos over which Green had authority. In 2023, he became the 11th command chief of AFSOC, overseeing about 22,000 total force and civilian Air Commandos worldwide.

The Air Force spokesperson confirmed Green was still on active duty, working a desk job as a special assistant at the 96th Test Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He could not be reached individually for comment.

The child sexual abuse material allegations against him violate multiple articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which govern legal conduct for military personnel, as well as several federal and state criminal statutes. The alleged offenses occurred at Hurlburt Field, Florida, home of Air Force special operations.

Related

Newly Released Data Reveals Air Force Suicide Crisis After Years of Concealment

Green joined the Air Force in 1995 and spent much of his career in C-130 maintenance, a career field The Intercept previously covered for rampant hazing, troop abuses, and suicides. Interviews with former maintainers often cite inappropriate sexual conduct or conversation by senior leadership while on duty. His rise from the operational maintenance ranks to a top enlisted leadership role underscores the range of his authority and the reach of his influence over enlisted personnel in the Air Force.

While Green was under investigation, members of the Air Force were left in the dark about why he was removed, with some taking to Air Force social media pages to question whether the removal was a political move under the Trump administration, for which there is currently no evidence.

At the preliminary hearing, conducted under Article 32 of the UCMJ, a hearing officer will review evidence and evaluate witnesses, allowing the accused to be represented by counsel, and recommend whether the case should proceed. AFSOC said no further court documents or updates will be made public before the hearing.

The post Ousted Air Force Special Ops Command Chief Faces Child Sexual Abuse Material Charges 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.

Related

Trump Frees Ex-President of Honduras, Right-Wing “Narco-Dictator” Convicted of Drug Trafficking

“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.

Related

What Happens When a Barrio 18 Soldier Tries to Leave the Gang

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.

“We will advocate relentlessly for programs like the F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft as well as nuclear force recapitalization through the Sentinel program and the B-21,” Wilsbach wrote in a memo dated November 3, referring to planned upgrades to nuclear missiles and stealth bombers.

Experts who spoke to The Intercept said the language signals a doctrinal pivot, prioritizing displays of strength and the buildup of nuclear weaponry over internal repair — an approach that may appeal politically to the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but does little to ease the fatigue and distrust spreading among airmen.

“This memo of unity and warfighting spirit reflects current Department of War and Pete Hegseth language, but that language is also inadequate because it assumes U.S. military capability is the best in the world and getting better, a dangerous and flawed assumption,” said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon analyst who exposed the politicization of intelligence before the Iraq War.

The Sentinel program Wilsbach referenced is intended to modernize the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, with new missiles, hardened silos, and updated command-and-control infrastructure across missile fields in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. It’s the Air Force’s planned replacement for aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile systems. The B-21 Raider is the next-generation stealth bomber designed to replace older strategic bombers like the B-2 and B-1, delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads.

Critics say framing these nuclear modernization efforts as “recapitalization” obscures the ethical and strategic implications of expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities amid declining morale and retention.

“The chief of staff’s emphasis on weaponry is disheartening. His description of nuclear weapon ‘recapitalization’ is an abomination of the English language. You don’t ‘recapitalize’ genocidal weaponry. Both the Sentinel missile program and the B-21 bomber are unnecessary systems that could cost as much as $500 billion over the next 20 years,” said William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and military historian.

John Gilbert, a member of the Scientists Working Group at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, noted “a very significant omission” in Wilsbach’s rhetoric.

“He basically ignored the U.S. Air Force’s role in maintaining our national intercontinental ballistic missile force as a day-to-day ready-to-launch deterrent,” meaning that it’s not supposed to be used for offensive purposes, said Gilbert, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with decades of experience in strategic missile operations, inspections and arms control.

In a statement to The Intercept, an Air Force spokesperson denied that the memo reflected a change in strategy. “The Air Force will organize, train and equip its forces in support of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy,” the spokesperson wrote.

Wilsbach has long been a proponent of bolstering U.S. nuclear capabilities. While leading Air Combat Command, he pushed to restore Pacific basing — including Tinian’s North Field, the Enola Gay’s departure point — to support nuclear-capable B-2 bombers. The effort underscores how current planning focuses on rapid strike and deterrence against China and other adversaries.

“Our main purpose has never changed: We fly and fix to fight and win our nation’s wars,” Wilsbach said during a speech at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to senior Air Force leaders on November 18. He reinforced his message by referencing Operation Midnight Hammer, the controversial June airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities involving about 125 aircraft, including seven B-2 stealth bombers in a 36-hour global mission.

“It is our core responsibility as airmen to stay ready, be credible and capable every single day,” he said.

When he became chief of staff, Wilsbach made his first base visit to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the headquarters of Air Force Global Strike Command and the center of the Air Force’s nuclear mission, suggesting that his initial focus was on the nuclear enterprise.

Analysts who spoke to The Intercept framed Wilsbach’s focus as part of a broader departure from the military’s stated apolitical role, aligning service culture with partisan priorities rather than institutional needs.

Wilsbach’s rhetoric “echoes the Trump administration’s emphasis on warrior culture and lethality,” said Astore, who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. “What stands out is that the chief of staff does not mention the Air Force’s core values, integrity, service, and excellence, or the oath to support and defend the Constitution. He doesn’t address operations tempo, stress, or the rising suicides among maintainers. Instead, he reduces complex issues to jargon about ‘combat power’ and ‘full-spectrum readiness.’ He ends with ‘Fight’s on,’ but never explains who we are fighting or why.”

For five Air Force veterans and active-duty members, the rhetoric comes at the expense of addressing manpower shortages, aging aircraft, and a mental health and morale crisis within the Air Force. Many of the Air Force’s core aircraft date back to the Cold War, including KC-135 tankers and B-52H bombers that are more than 60 years old, and F-15C/D fighters first fielded in the 1970s. Their age demands costly maintenance and contributes to significant environmental harm through chronic fluid leaks and poor fuel efficiency.

Related

Newly Released Data Reveals Air Force Suicide Crisis After Years of Concealment

“The Air Force keeps repeating the same cycle. Leaders like this are too focused on pleasing Hegseth and his obsession with lethality and ‘warrior culture’ to deal with what is killing their people,” said retired Air Force Master Sergeant Wes Bryant, pointing to a previous story from The Intercept that revealed a suicide crisis within the Air Force. The previous story, published days before the memo was released, highlighted how the force failed to comply with a congressional mandate to release detailed death data.

The current leadership’s approach is “disgusting,” added Bryant, a defense and national security analyst who formerly worked at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

Adding to the stress is that weapons troops, who load bombs and missiles onto aircraft, are expected to load missiles without knowing target configurations — and with the knowledge that objecting would carry serious consequences.

“We simply follow orders. Now, on the bomber side of things, I can confidently say we are not informed about what an operation entails beyond loading configurations,” said an active-duty source with direct experience training new weapons troops at tech school.

Service members throughout the U.S. military carry out lawful orders without being briefed on strategic intent, but for weapons loaders, the consequences are stark due to the lethality of the munitions they are ordered to prepare. That arsenal includes Joint Direct Attack Munitions, used in strikes that have produced high civilian death tolls; cluster munitions, which scatter bomblets that often fail to detonate and later kill civilians; and, in some units, nuclear warheads — weapons whose potential consequences exceed anything a loader or pilot is ever told.

“If people don’t follow these orders, there are going to be consequences,” said former weapons troop Alan Roach.

At the top, even the naming of new airframes signals political alignment within the Air Force, Astore said. “The new F-47, yet another expensive fighter program, was apparently numbered ‘47’ to flatter President Trump,” he said.

In remarks praising Wilsbach, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said he “understands the criticality of current readiness on a personal level,” adding, “We must be ready at a moment’s notice to meet the most challenging adversary that we’ve seen in generations. That means our systems need to work — fly, fix, fight.”

But “‘Readiness’ to fight is not the Air Force’s first responsibility,” Astore said. “The first responsibility is to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. We are guided by the law of the land, not the beauty of our weapons or a warrior’s urge to use them.”

Update: December 8, 2025, 9:56 a.m. ET

This story has been updated with a statement from the Air Force sent after publication.

The post New Air Force Chief Boosts Nuclear Buildup, Moving Away From Deterrence, Experts Warn 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.”

Related

Trump’s Gaza Ceasefire Deal Is Already Failing Palestinians

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.

Related

Gazans Reflect on Surviving to See a Ceasefire: “Sometimes We Envy the Martyrs”

“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.

“It’s not about them,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “It’s just about the opportunity that Michiganders need and deserve — to elect a Democrat who is pretty clear on what our ideals ought to be.”

Echoing the same promises he made when he ran unsuccessfully for governor seven years ago — providing universal health care, getting money out of politics, and supporting the working class — El-Sayed entered the race as the progressive darling and quickly snatched up the endorsement of his longtime ally Sen. Bernie Sanders. He’s been hailed as Michigan’s analog to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. And he has an inarguably stronger edge now than when he lost his last statewide race to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2018.

Despite the positivity, El-Sayed has entered a tough contest for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination. He’s up against Rep. Haley Stevens, a fourth-term congresswoman who has been endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Mallory McMorrow, the state Senate majority whip. While Stevens has the establishment backing — and the attendant American Israel Public Affairs Committee cash — McMorrow is competing with El-Sayed to claim the progressive mantle.

All three major Democratic candidates so far have largely shied away from openly attacking each other. All three have vowed to build a better economy and stand up against the Trump administration. But on some key issues like health care and foreign policy, the candidates split. El-Sayed wrote the book on Medicare for All. McMorrow supports creating a public option. Stevens, who last week opposed the government funding bill that put ACA benefits in limbo, supports expanding the Affordable Care Act.

But perhaps their largest divide relies on a hinge point in the looming 2026 midterms: the state of Israel and its genocide in Gaza.

El-Sayed was the first of the Michigan Senate candidates to call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide. McMorrow at first avoided the term, then started using it last month, as the Trump administration closed in on a ceasefire deal. And while some pundits are eager to argue that foreign killings are not kitchen-table issues, the genocide was a defining force for voters in parts of southeast Michigan last year, where some lifelong Democrats opted not to vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris over their ire at their party’s complicity in Israel’s violence.

“I think Gaza was a Rorschach test on your values,” El-Sayed said in an interview at a local cafe in the bustling college town of Ann Arbor. “Do you actually believe the things that you say you believe?”

“The Democratic Party is somewhat in flux on some of the issues that will be key in Michigan,” said Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson, a political science professor at Wayne State University, putting it lightly.

“Given the size of the Arab American population in the state, the situation in Gaza will be an issue in the Democratic primary, and Democratic voters, the polls show, have moved very dramatically in the last year or so away from support for Netanyahu,” Sarbaugh-Thompson said.

As the world watched two years of genocide unfold in Gaza, the party convulsed, sending politicians scrambling to adapt to their constituents’ plummeting opinions of the state of Israel.

McMorrow appears to be among them. In late August, she updated her campaign site to include a statement on Israel’s assault on Palestine, according to archived versions of the webpage, which made no mention of Gaza as late as August 19. Her site currently calls for Hamas to return the remains of hostages and disarm, and for Israel to allow the flow of humanitarian aid and stop its ceasefire violations. Her campaign did not answer questions about what prompted the change.

“My view on this is we have completely lost the humanity of this issue,” McMorrow said at a campaign event on October 5, when she first began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. “It is talked about as like a third-rail litmus test without acknowledging these are human beings. They’re people. And our position should be that there is no individual life that is worth more than another individual life.”

In public, McMorrow has disavowed AIPAC and sworn she would not take the Israel lobby’s contributions. On a recorded McMorrow donor call obtained by Drop Site News, her campaign manager says that the campaign has been open to “every organization” that wants to discuss Israel policy, and supporter and former local official Rob Kalman says that McMorrow has privately produced an “AIPAC position paper.”

Related

Facing Voter Pressure, Swing-State Democrat Swears Off AIPAC Cash

AIPAC, which claims that siding with Israel is “good policy and good politics,” asks candidates to privately share their positions on Israel before they hand out an endorsement. Drop Site reported that candidates go through a “series of litmus tests” that include support for the Taylor Force Act, which has halted U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority; a willingness to say that “all options are on the table” when it comes to Iran; support for outlawing boycotts of Israel; and opposition to any conditions on aid to Israel.

A spokesperson for McMorrow denied to Drop Site that Kalman spoke for the campaign. The McMorrow campaign did not respond to questions about the reported donor call when reached by The Intercept.

Stevens, meanwhile, has received $678,000 from the AIPAC PAC so far this year, according to FEC filings. Arguably, AIPAC kept Stevens in the House in a recent race. In a previous House primary bid against Andy Levin, a progressive Jewish congressman who advocated for Palestinian rights, the Israel lobby spent over $4 million in favor of Stevens — $3.8 million of it from the United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC. (On Tuesday, Levin endorsed El-Sayed.)

Earlier this year, McMorrow publicly asked the Israel lobby to stay out of the race altogether. El-Sayed, for his part, said: “Have at it.”

“I’ve been very consistent about my principles and my values, and I think in a lot of ways, the community has come to understand,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “I lead with principle, and I’m willing to say hard things to people when I disagree with them.”

In the 2024 presidential primary, El-Sayed supported the Uncommitted Movement, which criticized the Biden administration and Democratic Party’s complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza, but he ultimately endorsed Kamala Harris in the general election.

Trump ended up winning 42 percent of the vote in the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan; Harris trailed behind by about 6 percentage points. Jill Stein — who took a firm pro-Palestine stance in her campaign — received a whopping 18 percent, compared to 0.8 percent statewide.

Sarbaugh-Thompson anticipates the genocide in Gaza will be a contentious issue in this race even if it becomes less prominent in the national picture, given Michigan’s sizable Arab population of over 300,000 people. Nationwide, a Gallup poll found in July that Americans’ approval of Israel’s campaign reached 32 percent — the lowest rating since Gallup began polling on the question in November 2023.

Asked about her stance on Israel and Palestine, Stevens’s campaign referred The Intercept to an X post calling for food aid to enter Gaza and for Hamas to return the hostages. The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether Stevens will recognize the conflict as a genocide. Her campaign site does not include a section on her stance on Israel, nor on her priorities overall.

“There is a word for annihilating 60,000-plus people, which is almost certainly an underestimate, 18,500 of them children,” El-Sayed said. “The idea that it’s a litmus test to use the actual word for the thing says everything you need to know about where the Democratic Party is.”

Still, he did not criticize any of his opponents by name.

The Midwestern niceness for now reflects savvy politics, according to David Dulio, a professor of political science at Oakland University in southeast Michigan. He praised the strategy, noting that now is the time to focus on building war chests and fostering connections. But the contest could get tense quickly.

“Michigan is going to be front and center on the national stage,” Dulio said, pointing out that with the open Senate seat and 13 House races, the state could help determine the balance of power in both chambers of Congress next year. All of its state executive branch roles will be open too.

But to Adrian Hemond, a Michigan political strategist and CEO of campaign consulting firm Grassroots Midwest, El-Sayed and McMorrow are only hurting themselves by not criticizing each other.

“At some point he’s going to have to really step out and differentiate himself, especially from Mallory McMorrow,” Hemond said of El-Sayed, and it should be “sooner rather than later.”

If both El-Sayed and McMorrow are still in the race come August, Hemond forecasts they will split the progressive vote — and Stevens will come out in front.

At the moment, the establishment pick appears to have a narrow lead in the race. A poll published this month by Rosetta Stone put McMorrow and Stevens head-to-head at 25 percent to 26 percent, respectively, and El-Sayed at 20 percent.

But of the three experts The Intercept interviewed for this story, all agreed that with the better part of a year to go until the primary, anything could happen. One piece of evidence? Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed rose to prominence seven years ago when he surged in the polls toward the end of his 2018 gubernatorial race against Whitmer. A year out from the election, he was virtually unknown and polling at 4 percent, but he walked away with 30 percent on primary day. That left him still behind Whitmer, who won with 52 percent of the vote, but ahead of Michigan businessman and now-U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar’s 18 percent.

“By the time we got into the thick of that race, there was a perception of inevitability about her winning the primary, and so even some people that might have considered a vote for Abdul El-Sayed just got on the Whitmer bandwagon because … it seemed like she was going to win,” said Hemond.

He noted the Michigan governor is a masterful communicator, making her a tougher opponent than Stevens, who is more of a “policy wonk.”

Around the same time in this race, El-Sayed was already head-to-head with Stevens. Whichever candidate prevails will likely go up against Mike Rogers, a former Army lieutenant and FBI special agent who served in the House from 2001 to 2015. Last year, Rogers ran against Elissa Slotkin — and lost by just a third of a percentage point.

El-Sayed’s hope is that he can get ahead by addressing an issue he sees as the core of Washington’s problems: money in politics. He is the only candidate in the race who has never taken funding from corporate PACs in his career, though McMorrow notes she has not taken any this cycle. In previous state-level races, McMorrow took nearly $80,000 from PACs including those associated with General Motors, DTE Energy, and Rock Holdings.

Beyond AIPAC, Stevens has received contributions this year from Fortune 500 corporations and unions including Ford Motor Company, General Motors, UnitedHealth, Walmart, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

A campaign spokesperson said Stevens has received grassroots support from across Michigan, and 93 percent of her donations are under $100. The spokesperson said Stevens supports campaign finance reform such as eliminating dark money from elections, reducing influence of super PACs, banning members of Congress and their spouses from trading individual stocks, and overturning the Citizens United decision, the infamous 2010 Supreme Court ruling that found limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions to be unconstitutional.

In the first nine months of 2025, Stevens’s campaign solidly outraised her opponents at $4.7 million. Of the two progressive candidates, McMorrow has a slight edge at $3.8 million compared to El-Sayed’s nearly $3.6 million.

Related

Insurgent Democratic Candidates Are Ready to Run on Shutdown Betrayal

The influence of corporate power is one of many problems that plagues Democrats as well as Republicans, leaving voters with the impression that neither major party offers an opportunity for meaningful change. While the opposition party usually benefits from backlash toward the party in power, a CNBC poll conducted in April found that the Democratic Party appears to have the lowest approval rating for either party going back to at least 1996, with just 22 percent of respondents saying they feel very or somewhat positive, compared to 36 percent for Republicans.

“The Democratic Party has an opportunity for redemption, and I think it’s going to be because its voters decide to rethink what the party is,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “I’m expecting that, you know, this race, it won’t just be we eked it out. I think if we succeed, it will be a phenomenon, and it’s going to be because we turned out voters that nobody saw coming.”

Among them could be Rich Perlberg, a 75-year-old retired local newspaper publisher and self-described moderate Republican who told The Intercept at El-Sayed’s campaign event that he was longtime friends with the Rogers family before MAGA politics drove a wedge between them.

“I knew [Rogers] was conservative and very politically minded, but I always thought he had a core of decency and principle. So I’ve been really disappointed with how he’s acted since he left Congress,” Perlberg said.

Rogers sharply criticized Trump’s “chaotic leadership style” after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot but has since aligned himself with the MAGA party and received the president’s endorsement for both of his Senate campaigns.

“Once he saw that Trump wasn’t going away, and apparently he’s still got designs on greater things, he changed his tune totally,” Perlberg said. “So he’s saying and doing things that I know, at least I hope in his heart, he doesn’t believe, but that’s almost worse.”

The Rogers campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

EL-SAYED’S TEAm has been eager to compare him to another Muslim insurgent who pushed ahead on a positive message and whose candidacy seemed to scare the Israel lobby. After Zohran Mamdani won a crowded Democratic primary for New York City mayor, El-Sayed’s campaign pushed out a campaign email celebrating Mamdani’s win — and drawing a few parallels.

“Another Muslim American public servant unapologetically standing up to corporate power — and prevailing, despite his campaign being originally called a ‘long shot,’” the email read. “As someone who knows firsthand what it means to be the candidate with a funny name and a bold vision for justice, I’m feeling this one in my bones.”

An outraged MAGA party leapt in the opposite direction. The National Republican Senatorial Committee used Mamdani’s victory to raise alarm about El-Sayed and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a progressive running for Senate in Minnesota.

Despite the parallels, El-Sayed notes he is not Mamdani, and Michigan is certainly not New York City.

Related

Kat Abughazaleh on the Right to Protest

While both areas shifted toward Trump in 2024 compared to previous cycles, New York City remains an overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold with a diverse electorate. This time last year, Michigan handed Trump 15 electoral votes. More than immigration, foreign policy, or any other hot-button issue, the economy was by far the largest deciding factor in the 2024 general election. An AP VoteCast poll found 41 percent of Michigan voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the nation.

Mamdani and El-Sayed’s races call for vastly different expectations — a hyperlocal agenda for a citywide executive compared to a federal legislator with broad national influence, including foreign policy.

But they have both relied on expanding the electorate by pushing economic issues and turning out voters who might not otherwise have connected with a candidate.

“My point has always been that if you talk about the future that young people see themselves in, they will show up,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “And there was a validation point in New York, and I think we’re going to build an even bigger one here in Michigan.”

The post Abdul El-Sayed Wants to Be the First Pro-Palestine Senator From Michigan appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, where universities lie in rubble and classrooms have been replaced by screens, education has refused to die. Amid the constant hum of drones and power outages, students and educators have fought to keep learning — and to restore their campuses for the next generation. 

Studying was “an escape,” amid the genocide, said Aseel, a student of English translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, “a small space of hope and achievement that gave me motivation to keep going.” 

Students and faculty at the Islamic University of Gaza, where I study English literature, described in interviews how they kept studying throughout two years of genocide by charging their laptops with solar energy, watching recorded lectures, and meeting in improvised study groups. The stopgap measures have allowed education to continue amid the most extreme conditions, but Gaza’s universities now need millions of dollars to rebuild the educational system. The Islamic University recently announced that it had begun initial renovations.

Samah, a 21-year-old translation student at the Islamic University, said studying online felt like “a desperate attempt to keep learning despite everything.”

“It was frustrating,” she said. “The internet was weak, and I’d lose time reconnecting. But after every exam I managed to pass, I felt an achievement — it gave me strength to continue.”

Israel’s destructive campaign often cuts off internet access entirely. “If I had the slides and books printed, I could study temporarily until power and the internet came back,” said Aseel. “We depended mainly on recorded lectures — they were comprehensive, but there was little engagement.” 

These measures were necessary in part because Israel has engaged in scholasticide, the intentional destruction of a society’s educational infrastructure. According to figures released by the European Training Foundation, by the spring of this year 95 percent of all school buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed — including every university. The Islamic University announced in November 2024 that extensive genocide damage had destroyed 16 of its buildings, the central library, and over 240,000 books, 8,000 periodicals, and more than 16,000 master’s and doctoral theses — an estimated $141.9 million value. 

“We lost equipped labs, classrooms, and office work materials — much of our physical resources vanished,” said Tawfiq, the former dean of the Faculty of Information Technology.

The university has developed a reconstruction plan requiring approximately $15 million for rebuilding campuses, purchasing equipment and furniture, and other student resources. According to a recent university announcement, limited renovations have begun on the Faculty of Medicine and other colleges. But for most of the necessary work, said Ismail, director of the engineering office, there is “no funding yet.”

Related

Gaza Students Found a Lifeline to U.S. Colleges. Then Trump Shut the Door.

Besides the destruction, the university waived tuition fees during the first year of the genocide — making it easier for students to continue learning but meaning the institution would miss out on its already limited revenue.

But the human toll was the most devastating. From 2023 to 2024, 56 academic and administrative employees at the Islamic University of Gaza were killed, according to the university’s public figures. Approximately 1,500 employees did not receive salaries in the same period. And 17,000 students dropped out of their studies due to the genocide.

Because the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted Gaza’s educators, the students and faculty interviewed for this story are being identified by their first names only for their safety.

When I graduated from high school in 2023, I was excited to major in English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. I was less than a month into my first year of university when Israel’s genocide made physical classrooms inaccessible.

Charging my laptop and phone added to the existing challenges of studying amid genocide — especially during winter, when solar energy wasn’t available — and internet outages were constant. When there was bombing or when Israel deliberately cut communications, everything stopped. You could study all day and night, but sometimes your exam gets ruined by an internet cut — all your effort gone in seconds.

We learned to adapt. Whenever I had electricity and internet, I downloaded all the lectures and materials in advance, so I could study offline later.

“Online learning was just a way to get through the courses,” said Hala, a student of Islamic law, who said she wants to use her law degree to fight for justice. “It lacked the soul: the early walks to class, the debates, the cafes, the sea road to university … that was real learning.”

For some students, the brutalities of genocide coincided with the typical mundanities of schooling. Mo’min, a web computing student, described his experience as a battle with both genocide and procrastination.

“Because nothing was mandatory, it was easy to delay things,” he admitted. “But I charged my phone early every morning, downloaded lectures, and followed along with the chapters.”

He said some professors “deserve to be saluted,” while others disappeared under the strain of genocide. Despite psychological exhaustion, faith kept him grounded. “I comforted myself with the Qur’an,” he said. “I learned to depend on myself — completely.”

“Education played a vital role in supporting the psychological and social endurance of students, faculty, and families alike,” said Sulaiman, a professor and specialist in educational foundations and administration. He stressed that professors worked hard to keep in touch with students under “extremely difficult circumstances.”

Related

Students and Teachers in Gaza: “Education Itself Is a Form of Defiance”

As Gaza rebuilds, professors are hoping to gradually reopen classrooms with essential furniture and equipment. They plan to prioritize laboratories and smart classrooms for hands-on training. And as soon as reconstruction allows, they hope for a full return to face-to-face education.

“The university’s future is tied to the country’s reconstruction,” Sulaiman said. “When Gaza rebuilds, the university will rise architecturally and become a leading institution. Curricula should also evolve to meet contemporary demands and develop students capable of thriving in modern life.”

The post Gaza’s Students Kept Studying Amid the Rubble. Now Universities Hope to Rebuild. appeared first on The Intercept.

One of Brown’s friends offered to stop by his townhouse before heading over. The door was unlocked. The lights were off. On speakerphone with the others, he searched the house, then stepped outside and looked through the window of Brown’s car. He found him sitting in the driver’s seat, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Everyone on the call heard the moment he realized what he was seeing. On the other end of the line, several friends fell to their knees sobbing.

Brown’s death was one of hundreds in the past decade that the Air Force has quietly logged and filed away as another isolated tragedy. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth obsesses over the supposed “softening” and “weakening” of American troops, the Pentagon is concealing the scale of a real threat to the lives of his military’s active-duty members: a suicide crisis killing hundreds of members of the U.S. Air Force.

Data The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act shows that of the 2,278 active-duty Air Force deaths between 2010 and 2023, 926 — about 41 percent — were suicides, overdoses, or preventable deaths from high-risk behavior in a decade when combat deaths were minimal.

This is the first published detailed breakdown of Air Force suicide data. The dataset obtained by The Intercept, formatted in an Excel spreadsheet, lists airmen’s deaths by unique markers known as Air Force Specialty Code and cause, including medical conditions, accidents, overdoses, and violent incidents. Gunshot wounds to the head and hangings appear frequently.

While it’s long been known that members of the U.S. Armed Forces often struggle with their mental health during or after service, the Department of Defense has historically been obstinate in its refusal to supply detailed data on suicides. In 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act mandated the Defense Department to report suicides by year, career field, and duty status, but neither the department nor the Air Force complied. Congress has done little to enforce thorough reporting.

The dataset obtained by The Intercept contradicts many of the Air Force’s previously released statistics and statements about mental health, resilience, and deployment readiness. It shows a troubling pattern of preventable deaths that leaders at the senior officer level or above minimized or ignored, often claiming that releasing detailed suicide information would pose a risk to national security. Speaking to The Intercept, current and former service members described a fear of bullying, hazing, and professional retaliation for seeking mental health treatment.

“That was always the fear going to mental health: ‘I’m going to get pulled off the flight line. Everyone’s going to look down on me,’” said former Sgt. Kaylah Ford, who was Brown’s girlfriend before his death. “It always had that negative stigma.”

Brown and Ford were both Air Force maintainers, the aircraft mechanics who keep the Air Force’s planes flying. Of the 926 airmen who died by suicide and other preventable measures, 306 were maintainers, according to The Intercept’s analysis. These troops represent the largest single career field in the Air Force, according to the Government Accountability Office, but they account for only a quarter of Air Force personnel — and a third of suicides and preventable deaths.

The Intercept reviewed the dataset line by line, identifying deaths likely to be suicides or overdoses and cross-checking them with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifications and medical classifications. Among maintainers, 250 were confirmed suicides, 45 were drug overdoses, and 11 were other preventable deaths with unclear intent, with causes including autoerotic asphyxiation. These causes of death — whether from outright suicide, drug use, or other life-risking behaviors — all point to deep psychological distress, according to Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, a clinical psychologist with 20 years of experience in suicide prevention research,

“Addiction and suicide are deeply intertwined,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Many people use substances to cope with emotional pain or stress because it works in the short term, but over time, dependence sets in, and the fallout spreads through their health, relationships, and sense of hope.”

The Intercept reviewed more than two decades of government-funded studies and GAO reports and interviewed 16 Air Force maintainers from multiple major commands for this investigation. The reporter of this story is a former Air Force maintainer.

“Aircraft maintenance is a grinder,” said former Air Force Capt. Chuck Lee, who served as a maintenance officer for nine years before transferring to the Army and has since retired. While most maintainers rarely see combat, the field is known for an unsustainable work tempo, with airmen often working 10- to 16-hour shifts for years in high-risk environments. The constant exposure to toxic chemicals and the deafening sound of fighter jets can cause chronic health problems, inflaming the work’s psychological toll.

The evidence points to structural failures and systemic negligence across Pentagon and Air Force leadership. During two major periods of restructuring — known as the 2013–14 sequestration and the 2019 readiness plan — the Air Force consolidated jobs, leaving fewer troops to maintain the fleet while flight demands remained the same. Both times, suicides increased.

Experts like Spencer-Thomas say that instability and uncertainty during such transitions can heighten suicide risk.

Now, another round of consolidation is coming. The Air Force plans to consolidate more than 50 aircraft maintenance specialties into seven starting in 2027, according to an Air Force memo made public earlier this year. A senior compliance leader with nearly two decades in the Air Force who requested anonymity for fear of professional reprisal called the move “do more with less on steroids,” raising concerns that the next wave of reforms could contribute to a rise in suicides.

“You know the phrase ‘Mission first, but people always’?” said Lee, referring to a common military slogan. “To the Air Force, maintainers are just a crowd of nameless, faceless people. Their job is to scurry about and get the planes ready. Leadership doesn’t care as long as the aircraft can fly. It’s just mission first.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said the service “takes a comprehensive, integrated approach to increase protective factors and decrease suicide risk,” citing peer support programs such as Wingman Guardian Connect, unit-level resilience programs that encourage Airmen and Guardians to reach out for support, and new post-suicide guidance for commanders. The spokesperson noted the guides were recognized as best practices by the Defense Department’s Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee and recommended for use across all services.

But the 16 Air Force maintainers unanimously agreed that the current protections are insufficient, and in some cases actively harmful.

“Mental health in the military is a joke if you don’t take it into your own hands,” said former Senior Airman Azhmere Dudley. “If I had gone through the proper chain of command and hadn’t just signed myself up for treatment, I would be screwed right now.”

Every maintainer who spoke to The Intercept said they had lost a friend or unit member to suicide, overdose, or a tragic accident before their first enlistment ended, often before age 22.

The air in your lungs rattles as the plane takes off, as if the jet were trying to steal your breath. If you try to speak on the tarmac while the jet is at full throttle, your phlegm crackles, and your loudest yells may as well be silent. Your insides feel like a plastic grocery bag filled to the brim with scrap meat and fish heads being jostled.

This is the experience of working on a flight line, the heart of every Air Force base, where planes park for service and between missions. Often tucked away behind fences and danger signs, the troops on the flight line rarely face the enemy up close or carry rifles in combat. By Hollywood or Hegseth’s standards, they would seem to have one of the safest roles in any branch.

The common assumption that combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder is the primary driver of military suicides would seemingly put maintainers at a lower risk. But their disproportionately high share of suicides and overdoses tells a different story. Nearly 55 percent of maintainer deaths between 2010 and 2023 were the result of suicide or overdose, more than deaths from car accidents, medical conditions, and workplace mishaps combined.

Maintainers face constant exposure to chemicals, irregular schedules, and extreme noise. Fighter jets can reach 195 decibels during takeoff — far above the Air Force’s hearing conservation limits of 85 decibels over eight hours on shift and the 140-decibel threshold for impulsive noise, which are brief bursts of sound powerful enough to cause instant hearing damage. Even with double hearing protection, vibrations can shake internal organs.

“For maintainers, working 12-hour shifts was the norm. Shifts could extend up to 16 hours with approval from the group commander or the first general officer in the chain, which was almost always granted,” Lee said. Unit leaders would assign the extended shifts to meet maintenance and flight goals, and maintainers had little choice but to comply. All other maintainers interviewed for this story agreed with Lee’s account.

Although double ear protection is meant to guard against extreme sounds, some fighter jets, namely F-16s, produce a high-pitched whine so intense it pierces the double ear protection. Maintainers describe it as feeling like the sound is piercing their skull from the mouth up and ripping off the top of their head. Researchers have also raised concerns about infrasound: low-frequency jet engine vibrations that may resonate with human tissue and contribute to fatigue or stress. Mostly studied outside the military, infrasound’s effects have received little research under real flightline conditions.

Every maintainer interviewed reported chronic health problems, including insomnia, headaches, digestive issues such as irritable bowel syndrome or constipation, memory lapses, attention deficits, depression, anxiety and, in rare cases, psychosis. Many of these symptoms mirror those seen in traumatic brain injuries or blast exposure.

“I am going through my disability claims, and part of it is anxiety with panic attacks. I get severe anxiety now that I did not have before,” said former Staff Sgt. Dallas Sharrah. He described a recent experience at a grocery store, where he exploded in anger at a shopper who bumped into his shopping cart with his small child inside. He said his anger was extreme and shockingly out of character, leaving him confused and embarrassed.

“Some days,” Sharrah said, “I don’t want to get out of bed because I don’t know how the day will go.”

Combined with chemical exposure and long shifts, maintainers are also exposed to toxic substances, including JP-8 jet fuel and chaff, which involves releasing clouds of tiny metallic strips from an aircraft to confuse enemy radar and protect the aircraft from detection or missile targeting. Inhaling chaff can be fatal, as the tiny metallic or fiberglass fibers can shred lung tissue, causing severe respiratory distress or hemorrhaging.

The Occupational JP-8 Exposure Neuroepidemiology Study, released in 2011, found that JP-8 can slow reaction times, cause chronic neurological impairment, sleep disturbances, irritability, and depression-like symptoms. A 2005 study, “Dermal Exposure to Jet Fuel (JP-8) in U.S. Air Force Personnel,” confirmed that JP-8 can be absorbed through the skin and detected in the bloodstream. All the maintainers who worked on the active flightline said they experienced near-constant exposure, with fuel sometimes pouring into their ears, mouth, or onto their skin for entire shifts.

Air Force enlistment contracts typically last four years, with an option to extend to six. Maintainers interviewed painted a picture of such intense suffering and mental anguish that, for some, suicide seemed more bearable than serving four years in that environment.

“We had an airman who tried to take his own life multiple times,” said former staff Sgt. Michael Hudson. “In one instance, he was found unconscious in his dorm after swallowing an entire bottle of Tylenol. A few months later, he was found walking along train tracks, saying he wanted to lay down in front of a train.”

From 2010 to 2023, active-duty maintainers had a suicide rate of 27.4 per 100,000 personnel, nearly twice the 14.2 per 100,000 among U.S. civilians — a 1.93 times higher risk. FOIA records show the most common methods were self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head and hanging. Other methods included sodium nitrite ingestion, helium inhalation, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

In the days before his death, Brown had been breaking under the weight of exhaustion and expectation, Ford told The Intercept. His squadron had switched his schedule three times in as many weeks, bouncing him from day to nights with little sleep between. He asked for help, or even a short break, but his leadership brushed him off. He was the reliable one.

“He was a perfectionist. He never made a mistake,” Ford said, Then he did: During a routine engine run, he left a flashlight inside the intake of a fighter jet and shredded the engine. It was the kind of error that ends a career.

“He blamed himself completely,” Ford said. “We all knew that would eat him alive.”

after dudley, the former senior airman, spoke up by questioning leadership about how personnel dealing with mental health conditions were treated, he soon found himself struggling too. Dudley said he often fell asleep in his car outside his unit at Nellis Air Force Base or dozed off behind the wheel, citing extreme fatigue from overnight shifts — known in Air Force parlance as “mids” — that he believes leadership had assigned as punishment.

Maintainers in good standing with unit leadership can often choose shifts that suit their lifestyle. Troops who are vocal or opinionated, however, may be assigned night duty for months or even years, despite Air Force policy limiting night shifts to three months.

“The flight chief purposely kept me on mids. There were crews willing to swap with me, but leadership refused. My doctor was baffled — there’s no waiver for a work schedule, yet they ignored medical guidance,” Dudley said. “I felt powerless to change it, even though it was affecting my health.”

Car crashes are a common cause of death among maintainers, often linked to sleep deprivation or alcohol-related incidents. Beyond the suicides, overdoses, and preventable deaths discussed in this story, there were another 251 maintainer deaths — 40 percent of which were listed as “multiple blunt force injuries” or “blunt trauma,” with at least 35 explicitly coded as traffic collisions, confirming that this is how the Air Force tracks vehicle and motorcycle crashes.

Dudley said he spent a year on the night mid shift and was later diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, which he attributes to prolonged disruption of his circadian rhythm.

Nine others interviewed for this article described a culture of retaliation for speaking up.

“You aren’t allowed to complain because others have it worse,” said Colby Abner, a former maintenance staff sergeant stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “So you learn to shove it down with either pure will or a vice. I’ve watched so many people lose themselves completely in addiction strictly because of the Air Force.”

In maintenance units, airmen are often pulled off duty when they seek care — a policy meant to prevent accidents but one that fuels stigma. It creates the perception that those who ask for help are trying to avoid work and are therefore lazy. Several maintainers said that after seeking care, they faced hazing, harassment, or other abuse from peers and supervisors, which only worsened their mental health. Ford said that, as the only Black female crew chief in her unit, she faced intense discrimination and isolation during her time in service.

Although Air Force policy imposes strict standards for confidentiality and what providers may disclose to commanders or supervisors, all maintainers interviewed by The Intercept said seeking care can unofficially ruin a career.

“It was widely understood that if you go to mental health, you are not going to advance. Your career is going to stagnate; you’re going to be ostracized,” said Micah Templin, a former Air Force weapons systems maintainer.

Spencer-Thomas, the psychologist, said it’s clear that environments like those described in this story could increase a person’s risk for suicide.

“The research on work environments is clear: long hours, lack of autonomy and toxic cultures of bullying or hazing all raise suicide risk,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Sleep deprivation is another major factor. The science is unequivocal. When people are denied rest, their brains cannot recover. Over time, that drives depression, cognitive decline and suicidal behavior.”

Ford recalled Brown’s extreme exhaustion in the week leading up to his suicide. She remembered him calling his mother, saying, “Mama, I’m tired. I’m just so tired.”

The Air Force does mandate mental health and suicide prevention trainings. But they’re widely seen as ineffective and performative, Abner said.

“They push out these mandated trainings that don’t do anything because no one takes them seriously,” Abner said. “They put resources in place but openly mock them when presenting them to people.”

Former Senior Airman Foy, who asked to have his first name withheld over the sensitivity of the subject, survived a suicide attempt in December 2019 while on leave with his family. He was rushed to the emergency room after taking pills and was hospitalized for seven days over the Christmas holiday. After treatment, he returned to work — where he said he faced intense ostracization and hazing, and the stigma followed him even after separating from the Air Force.

Foy said it seemed like people were avoiding him because he was seeking mental health treatment. When he needed support the most, “it seemed like people I was close with kept their distance.”

After 20 years on active duty, former maintainer Chris McGhee became an attorney focused on veteran advocacy. Among other misconduct, he said he’d witnessed two decades of hazing and abuse within the maintenance career field, he told The Intercept, and he has since dedicated his legal career to giving a voice to maintainers he said have had their “tongues snipped” to keep them silent.

“I was part of the abuse maintainers experience, and I share the blame for it,” McGhee said. “I’m speaking out now because silence only protects the system that’s hurting them.”

After years of frustration with ineffective military leadership and inspector general and GAO reports that, in his view, documented problems but didn’t provide solutions, McGhee turned to Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and pushed for intervention via the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. King sponsored Section 599: a mandate requiring the Defense Department to release a report on military suicides, including a breakdown by year and service-specific job code, by December 31, 2023.

When the bill passed, McGhee received a copy of the NDAA personally signed by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy, President Joe Biden, and King. King included a handwritten note: “To Chris — With thanks for the idea.”

The report came out on July 30, 2024. “Seven months late,” McGhee said, “it failed to comply with the law. It did not disaggregate suicides by year or by service-specific occupational codes, both explicit requirements of Section 599.”

King’s office took a victory lap anyway. “Requested by Senator King after working with a Maine constituent,” an office spokesperson wrote in a press release, the report “identifies key trends to help the Department of Defense (DoD) address suicide risk amongst higher risk job specialties and identify underlying cultural issues affecting the mental health of America’s service members.”

Emails, calls, and recorded meetings provided in full by McGhee and verified by The Intercept show King’s staff had not reviewed the report closely before issuing their praise.

“I think I got the report Friday night, just 24 hours before it went public,” Jeff Bennett II, a national security adviser and legislative aide to King, told McGhee in a phone call shared with The Intercept. “Sen. King read the report page by page, but he’s been focused not so much on the issue we raised.” King’s office knew the Defense Department did not follow the law as written, Bennett said in the recording, but considered it “a step in the right direction.”

The official who signed off on the report, Under Secretary Ashish Vazirani, had testified to Congress shortly before its release that negative news about military suicides could affect recruiting. In his testimony, Vazirani framed the findings within broader recruiting challenges, noting that many young Americans are unfamiliar with the military, distrust institutions, and face competing opportunities in a strong economy. He called for a “whole-of-government and whole-of-nation” effort to engage youth and promote service.

McGhee saw the report’s glowing reception as an example of Congress letting the military off the hook: celebrating the fact that it existed at all with little regard for its efficacy or compliance.

“If Congress will not enforce its own laws, if oversight is nothing but theater, then what exactly was I defending?” McGhee said. “This experience has left me feeling that two decades in uniform were wasted on a republic that no longer exists in practice.”

King’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Intercept.

A Pentagon spokesperson did not provide an explanation of why the Air Force violated the law and withheld the data from the public, despite repeated requests from The Intercept. They referred questions about the Defense Department’s report to congressional defense committees and added that “a FOIA request is the appropriate avenue for requesting historical suicide data.”

“The Air Force has a lot to hide because it’s embarrassing. The Air Force claimed they didn’t have that data and, you know, look how quickly The Intercept got it,” Lee said. “A lot of shady shit going on.”

A quarter-century of internal maintainer discussion, GAO reports, scientific studies, and death data shows that this mental health and preventable death crisis has been tracked by multiple government entities, including Congress, the Defense Department, the Department of the Air Force, and oversight committees. Senate Judiciary Committee investigators contacted McGhee and stated they were in the early stages of gathering data related to expert concerns about the Air Force maintenance community.

More than half of the maintainers interviewed for this article experienced suicidal thoughts while in service. Several were hospitalized for psychiatric care, and one former maintainer survived a suicide attempt. Many remain terrified of speaking out about their experiences, even years after leaving active duty, for fear of retaliation from former peers.

“These are people’s lives you’re dealing with. Just like in maintenance, where you’re a number to be traded and thrown away after use, I can see Congress viewing us the same way,” Dudley said.

As of publication, no lasting corrective measures have been implemented.

The Trump administration’s effort to shame military leaders over combat readiness and so-called “softness” within the ranks stands in sharp contrast to the reality many service members experience. And if historical trends are any indication, the planned consolidation of maintenance specialties could trigger another rise in suicides.

In Ford’s case, the weight of Brown’s death still haunts her. At one point, she recalled, he’d helped her when she was going through her own suicidal ideations.

“He saved my life once. I was on the side of the road, and he sat with me for two hours until I calmed down,” Ford said. “I just wish I could’ve saved his.”

As the administration informally reverts the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War, officials have echoed an old saying often repeated in military circles: “We are in the business of killing.”

What they don’t advertise is how that slogan applies to their own members.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

The post Newly Released Data Reveals Air Force Suicide Crisis After Years of Concealment appeared first on The Intercept.

Roughly 10 teenagers in New York, ages 14 to 17, received the fine in mid-October, said Meena Shah, managing director of the Legal Services Center at The Door, a New York City-based nonprofit that serves young people. At least one teenager in Michigan has received the fine too, according to the teen’s lawyer. New York Focus and The Intercept reviewed copies of the fine notices delivered in both New York and Michigan.

The fine is one of several new financial penalties for immigrants created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed in July. The federal government is issuing the fines under a section of the law titled “Inadmissible alien apprehension fee,” which is set at $5,000 and can be applied to people apprehended between official ports of entry. Homeland Security’s application of the fine hasn’t been previously reported.

Shah and Ana Raquel Devereaux, the attorney representing the teenager in Michigan, both said the kids are living in shelters overseen by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which takes custody of unaccompanied immigrant children while they wait to be released to an adult sponsor.

Devereaux, who works for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, pointed out that kids in government custody have no ability to work.

“It’s really about creating fear,” Devereaux said. “There’s no way that a child in this situation would be able to pay this, and the penalties are so severe.”

Minors in Texas and Pennsylvania have received the fines too, according to a staff member at a national nonprofit who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the nonprofit’s leadership fears being targeted by the Trump administration.

Related

ICE Targets Unaccompanied Immigrant Children, Offering $2,500 Payment for Deportation

The fine is one of several ways the Trump administration has sought in recent weeks to pressure minors who entered the U.S. alone to return to their home countries. Over Labor Day weekend, the government attempted to deport dozens of unaccompanied Guatemalan children who were in ORR custody; kids were loaded onto planes before a judge halted the plan. In early October, the government said it was offering $2,500 to unaccompanied minors 14 years and older who agree to leave the country.

The notices reviewed by New York Focus and The Intercept state that “Payment in full is due now” and list an array of potential consequences for failure to pay, including collection litigation and negative impacts on their immigration cases. Fines that aren’t paid in full will accrue interest, the notices say.

“They’re trying to pressure and coerce these young people into taking voluntary departure,” Shah said. “These are the stressors you’re putting very young kids under.”

Border Patrol teased the apprehension fee in a September 24 Facebook post, which included a megaphone emoji and said anyone 14 years or older could be fined. Money collected from the fines will be credited to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the text of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Other fees created by the new law include $100 to apply for asylum, plus $100 every year the application is pending; $550 for asylum-seekers to apply for a work permit; and $5,000 for anyone ordered removed in absentia and then arrested by ICE. Lack of clarity over exactly how and when to pay the $100 fees recently sparked panic among asylum-seekers in New York and a flood of misinformation and potential scams, New York Focus recently reported.

In response to questions about the $5,000 fee being applied to minors, the Department of Homeland Security referred New York Focus and The Intercept to a press release about a different fee of $1,000 for immigrants paroled into the U.S. The agency did not respond to follow-up questions.

Supporters of the fine argue that it will incentivize people to cross at legal entry points rather than traverse dangerous desert terrain and take up Customs and Border Protection resources. Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for restrictions on immigration, said he understood the argument that a teenager won’t be able to pay a $5,000 fine, but said their parents or relatives would then be on the hook. 

“This isn’t, you know, ‘We want to punish 14-year-old kids,’” Arthur said. “This is, ‘We want to discourage parents from paying smugglers to bring their kids to the United States.’”

It’s unclear how many immigrants have received the $5,000 fine. Several attorneys who work with unaccompanied minors in New York and other states told New York Focus they’d heard about the fines secondhand but hadn’t seen any cases personally. All of the cases New York Focus and The Intercept were able to verify involved teenagers in ORR custody, but advocates said they had heard of minors outside of federal custody receiving the fines.

Under Trump, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border and entering ORR custody has plummeted. In September, about 2,000 kids were in ORR custody on average, down from more than 6,000 last October. 

Theo Liebmann, a law professor at Hofstra University who runs a legal clinic for immigrant youth, said unaccompanied kids in ORR custody are particularly vulnerable because they often don’t have lawyers, having recently arrived in the U.S. 

Liebmann, who doesn’t have any clients who have received the fine, said it appeared to be an effort to “go after the kids who are especially defenseless and won’t be able to understand how to look at this threat, how real this threat is, and what they can do in response.”

The post DHS Is Billing Unaccompanied Immigrant Kids $5,000 appeared first on The Intercept.

When I heard that the latest round of ceasefire negotiations was happening, I felt nothing. I had zero interest in these talks. Countless times I’d followed the news and put my hopes into the idea that the politicians would decide it was time to stop the massacre of my people. Countless times I’d been disappointed.

On October 9, 2025, at 2 a.m., it was quiet outside my family’s tent, where we’ve lived since Israel drove us from our home in Gaza City. I was reading the latest news like a child searching for even the smallest hope of going back home.

“This is a great day for the world,” the U.S. president said when the first phase of a ceasefire agreement was announced. “This is a wonderful day, a wonderful day for everybody.”

It has taken two years of unrelenting genocide for us to finally hear this. I keep wondering: Is it real? Might our suffering actually end soon?

This partial ceasefire deal comes amid the most horrific phase the Gaza Strip has witnessed since the war began. Gaza City has been under a rapidly advancing Israeli occupation, putting the roughly 200,000 people who remain there into unimaginable circumstances. According to the latest reports, Israel has displaced nearly 900,000 people from the city.

I became one of them just one month ago. It feels like a whole year. I left everything behind and fled to the south, where Israel has said it would be safer, but bombs still rain down around us. Now, the thought of returning home again brings life back into me. It brings peace even for a rare moment.

Related

“Food Has Become a Memory”: My Hunger Diary in Gaza

“Will we go back home? Can I play with my cousins again?” my 5-year-old brother asked our mother. Even the youngest among us are clinging to the promise of starting our lives again, lives that have been on hold since 2023.

I hope Israel hasn’t destroyed my home, as it is my last remaining hope.

If the war really does come to an end, it could protect families from having to sleep with their children in the streets of Gaza, with no safe shelter to prevent them. It could shield us from the harshness of the approaching winter storms. It could end our starvation and allow us to access medicine to treat illnesses.

A true end to the war could protect us from the overwhelming absence of peace, comfort, and dignity we have suffered throughout these two brutal years. 

My heart pounded as I followed the news last night. It was “the final minutes,” all the channels reported. Everyone was ready to sign. I watched my people finally smile — finally feel a moment of comfort — after two long years of sadness and grief. 

Why did it take two full years? Were they waiting for us to suffer even more? Children, women, and men have been killed in this genocide. Generations are growing up and being born amid these unfathomable horrors. This war has shaped new identities — minds and hearts forged in pain, loss, and resilience.

Now, Israel expects us to feel grateful for obtaining our basic rights to life and liberty — as if they were favors, not ordinary human rights.

In the tent camps where I am now displaced, the word “ceasefire” feels empty. The last round of ceasefire negotiations began with enthusiasm. It ended with my family displaced in a tent. 

The suffering is far beyond what any agreement can fix. I’ve only lived in a tent for one month, and already I feel suffocated. Some have been here for two years. A ceasefire cannot rebuild their homes, or restore their peace and stability.

“I have no home. I’ll stay in this tent,” said Abu Ihsan, a young man who recently became our neighbor in shared displacement.

And for the families of the martyrs, a ceasefire will not bring their loved ones back. A daughter has lost her mother; a wife, her husband; a friend, their lifelong companion. The fighting may stop, but their grief has only just begun. People post photos and beg their loved ones to come back. Who will have the heart to tell them the truth?

Ceasefire doesn’t mean the end of our suffering. It is simply a step toward justice after endless days and nights filled with fear and violence against us in Gaza. It doesn’t bring back the schools, universities, hospitals, streets, or homes that Israel bombed. It cannot heal the trauma we carry from those long nights of pain and terror. The sounds of drones and explosions will forever echo in our minds. A ceasefire cannot erase that.

As ceasefire headlines fill the news, we are told to be hopeful. Is our hope fragile, or truly impossible? After Israel broke the last ceasefire in March, fear filled our hearts. We told each other to balance our enthusiasm, as we’re dealing with Israel, and the word “Israel” carried the weight of broken promises. 

Yet we are chasing every chance to reclaim our peace. This ceasefire might offer us a moment to begin healing from the pain we have carried for so long.

I cannot wait to see my people happy again — to hear children laugh, to watch students return to their schools. I long to see cafes filled with friends, tables full of food, and faces free of pain.

I have waited two long years to document this news: I have survived this genocide. I am alive, and I write in hope for better days ahead. 

Gaza breathes, again.

The post I Have Hope for This Ceasefire, But It Can’t Undo Two Years of Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

The first bombs of the current genocide fell during Tasneem’s final weeks of pregnancy. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, she was 25 years old, seven months pregnant, and eagerly awaiting her second child.

In Gaza, Tasneem had already lived her whole young life under Israeli surveillance, confinement, and violence. But as the bombs rained down on October 7 — in what Israel claimed was retaliation for the nearly 1,200 Israelis killed that day, but has since become a two-year-long genocide, killing at least 66,000 Palestinians  — it was clear her child’s generation would be born into a new level of horror.

There were no calm nurses by the time Tasneem went into labor with her son, Ezz Aldin. The hospital was overcrowded with no steady electricity. Tasneem labored for hours in the barely functioning hospital, and when she gave birth, there was no food to help her recover. Diapers were nearly impossible to find. Weakened and hungry, she breastfed her son. It was December 25, 2023.

Related

Israel Just Bombed the Building Next Door. Will We Be Next?

Bombs are still falling on Gaza, despite a pending peace deal. As the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, moves into its third year of trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza, many Palestinian women still push to bring the next generation into the world. They give birth not in hospitals with clean beds and available staff, but in overcrowded, collapsing clinics, under drones and bombs, amid the deadliest genocide Gaza has seen in decades. 

This is the story of my sisters, and of other Palestinian women who brought children into a world that was falling apart.

Doaa wasn’t pregnant when the first bombs dropped. Like everyone else, she was trying to survive. When her home was bombed on January 14, 2024, the windows shattered, the walls cracked, and the air was filled with smoke and dust. Though she wasn’t physically harmed, the emotional toll was enormous. A few weeks later, amid her family’s displacement — from a small flat, to a tent, to a tiny apartment — she found out she was pregnant. Living with a child growing inside her, under constant fear of sudden death, the sounds of nearby strikes would jolt her awake at night.

When her labor began — on October 28, 2024, just over a year into the genocide — she was rushed to an already overwhelmed hospital. She clung to the thin mattress through waves of pain, until her son Hossam was born: small, fragile, but alive. No special food awaited her. No clothes. No comfort. Still, she held him close, nursing him through hunger and fear.

Related

“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

The World Health Organization reports that 10 percent of Gaza’s population and up to 20 percent of pregnant women suffer moderate to severe malnutrition. Over 5,100 children were admitted to malnutrition programs in July alone, including 800 in critical condition. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, 25 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women are malnourished. Mothers face shortages of nutritious food essential for recovery and breastfeeding, as iron-rich foods, fresh fruit, and vegetables are nearly impossible to find.

“What have these children done to deserve being born in these conditions of genocide and famine? Why can the world not see them?” asked my friend’s aunt, who gave birth on October 6, 2024. A single pack of diapers cost $600 at the time. Today, it’s 400 shekels, or about $120 — still impossibly out of reach. Most have to make do with a plastic bag tied up with string.

Her baby, Layan, had to drink formula. Many babies born in Gaza under the genocide do. Their mothers — starving, dehydrated, terrified — can’t make breast milk. When formula is available, it’s at inflated prices: 200 shekels per can. Most of the time, it simply isn’t there.

Layan is now a year old. From the age of nine months, children are supposed to start eating soft food: mashed rice, boiled zucchini, fruit, grapes, melon, yogurt. But there’s nothing. Nothing to feed him. Nothing to grow on.

Dana was born in a tent by the sea, to a mother suffering from severe malnutrition. The family had been forced to leave their home in Khan Younis, and Dana’s mother had gone days without proper food.

“They told her mother she might give birth to a child with disabilities because of her lack of vitamins,” said Aya, Dana’s cousin.

The pregnancy was grueling. “I could barely get out of bed; there was hardly any food,” Dana’s mother recalled. Every day was a struggle against fatigue, hunger, and uncertainty. Her body weak, her mind anxious, she carried on, driven by hope for her baby. And against all odds, Dana arrived healthy — a small miracle in a world that seemed to offer none.

But the tents where displaced Palestinians reside are not fit places for children. Flies, mosquitoes, rats; the insects bite, sting, infect. A mosquito bite on a baby’s cheek swells for a week. Medical care is nearly impossible to find.

And the sewage system? A two-meter-deep pit in the ground, uncovered. There have been cases of children falling in.

In the heat, small bodies burn with fever. Skin diseases — itching, peeling, red blotches that blister — spread quickly. There are no creams. No medicine. Their immune systems are too weak to fight anything off.

“We had nothing but each other,” Dana’s mother said. Relatives, neighbors, and small acts of kindness became their lifeline, helping them prepare for the birth and supporting them through the first fragile days.

Now, Dana is thriving. But some babies don’t survive the winter. The tents freeze, and so do they.

As Noor rushed to the hospital in labor, her family’s car jolted violently from a nearby explosion. Her husband’s voice cracked as he called for calm, but the fear was thick in the air. The ambulance had been delayed, so they drove themselves through streets scattered with debris and silence broken only by distant blasts. Upon arriving, the hospital was overwhelmed — hallways packed with patients, no beds available. 

Nurses found a corner in a busy corridor where Noor could lie down. The lights flickered, and the generator’s low drone filled the room. There was no privacy, no quiet. Doctors worked quickly, hands steady despite their exhaustion. Noor’s contractions came one after another. Sweat dripped down her face. Finally, a girl was born: her cries faint but still a signal of life. Noor held her daughter close without food, clean clothes, or diapers. The room smelled of fear and hope tangled together, as a new life began amid ruin.

Since the genocide began, official reports estimate that over 3,000 babies have been born in Gaza’s collapsing hospitals. Many arrive too soon, or with health complications caused by malnutrition and inadequate medical care. Many others suffer from disabilities linked to poor prenatal conditions and genocide-related trauma. In the first month of the genocide, United Nations agencies reported that there were about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day, and 15 percent of them likely to face complications that require medical care.

Related

“Food Has Become a Memory”: My Hunger Diary in Gaza

Neonatal mortality has risen sharply: Miscarriage rates have tripled and stillbirths surged beyond prewar levels. For the first half of 2025, the U.N. Population Fund reported that among 17,000 births, 20 newborns died within 24 hours, and 33 percent of babies — 5,560 infants — were premature, underweight, or required NICU care. These figures are not just statistics; they are a record of lives that began in crisis.

Birth in Gaza often means sharing incubators, giving birth without anesthesia during power outages, and risking infection because water and sanitation systems are destroyed.

And clothes? Even before the genocide, baby clothes were expensive. Now they’re nearly impossible to find. If you’re lucky, you might come across a scrap of fabric shaped like clothing — but it’s rough, stiff, and anything but comfortable on a newborn’s skin.

Tasneem had hoped, in those early days, that a ceasefire might come before her son arrived. In her final weeks of pregnancy, she held onto the idea that she would give birth in normal conditions — at home surrounded by family, rather than rubble. But the days passed, the bombing grew heavier, and that hope was crushed.

With the support of her family, Dana is growing strong. “She is healthy and happy, thanks to our care and attention,” her mother says. The early hardships have left their mark; subtle signs in her development that remind the family of the struggle before her birth. But the family remains steadfast and says they make sure Dana has milk, diapers, and everything she needs.

None of these mothers had what they needed. What they did have was determination: stubborn, unbreakable, quietly defiant. Each of them carried a life inside them while the world fell apart around them. Each gave birth with explosions in the background, fear in their lungs, and courage in their hands.

To be pregnant in Gaza today is to give life with death knocking at the door. It is to feel your baby kick while warplanes circle overhead. It is to count the seconds between explosions and pray the next one doesn’t find you. It is to bring life into a world that feels like it’s ending — and to do it anyway.

In Gaza, where the Israeli government is explicitly seeking to eliminate the existence of Palestinian people, the birth of every child is an act of resistance. These women, sustaining life amid bombs and shortages, rewrite the meaning of courage and resilience. Their strength is not demonstrated in grand speeches or headlines, but in the small moments: steady hands breastfeeding a hungry baby, a newborn’s fragile cry cutting through the sound of bombardment, a family’s silent promise to protect life. They carry the future in their arms, embodying the determination of a people who refuse to disappear. 

Despite the violence, the hunger, and the fear, life continues — because in Gaza, to live is to resist.

Correction: October 8, 2025
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Tasneem was awaiting the birth of her third child. She was pregnant with her second child.

The post Mothers in Gaza Give Life to the Next Generation of Palestinians Despite Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

In partnership with

The Federal Communications Commission this week advanced a proposal for censorship that received far less attention than chair Brendan Carr’s “mafioso” approach to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. But it will likely result in a communication crackdown that does more harm to a far more vulnerable population — denying incarcerated people one of the few tools available to expose abuse in America’s most secretive institutions.

At a meeting on Tuesday, the FCC agreed to move forward with a proposal to allow prisons to jam contraband cellphones. Cellphone jammers are otherwise illegal devices that disrupt cellphone signals and effectively disable phones within range of the jammer.

The commission was answering the call from Arkansas officials, who invited Carr to tour a state prison where officials claimed incarcerated individuals used contraband cellphones to coordinate violent criminal activities. After the September 5 tour with the state’s Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sen. Tom Cotton, Carr announced his plans for a crackdown, claiming, without data, that “the worst possible offenders” use contraband cellphones to coordinate violence outside prison walls.

As a person who has been incarcerated for over 25 years, and has had extensive exposure to contraband cellphones — including using them to expose horrific conditions and force reform — I can attest that these accusations were exaggerated and preposterous.

While there may be isolated incidents where incarcerated individuals have used contraband cellphones to commit crimes, my experience tells me they’re far more often used to connect with loved ones or to hold rogue prison officials accountable. In my opinion, it is the latter that’s driving this FCC push, not public safety.

Related

Jimmy Kimmel Wasn’t the Biggest Corporate Media Capitulation to Trump This Week

Carr and Cotton doubled down on their claims of chaos in an op-ed for the New York Post this week. It included a couple anecdotes — tragic, of course — but no evidence that contraband phones are frequently used to coordinate violence or that those responsible for the cited offenses couldn’t have used other means to commit their crimes.

Historically, prison officials have had little trouble convincing lawmakers that crackdowns on incarcerated people’s communications are needed to protect the public’s safety. Like in the outside world, where officials invoke “national security” to silence their critics, the majority of these campaigns have really been about shielding prison officials from accountability. 

This deceptive tactic is again on display.

Contraband cellphones have become a reliable tool for incarcerated journalists to report accurate news events and expose the harsh realities within correctional facilities.

This is the focus of the documentary “The Alabama Solution,” premiering October 10 on HBO. The film highlights the unchecked culture of violence and abuse of power within the Alabama Department of Corrections.

It shows how disturbing video footage of forced labor, drug-related violence, prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and staff assaults were captured via contraband cellphone and released to the media. This footage fueled a class action lawsuit against the state of Alabama over its prisons’ system of slave labor as well as the ongoing Department of Justice investigation over abuses in Alabama’s prisons, including horrific assaults by corrections officers.

In the throes of the Covid pandemic, I used a contraband cellphone as a last-ditch effort to report Texas prison officials’ alarmingly inadequate response to the virus, which was causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of incarcerated individuals and staff members. 

That video footage was incorporated into a local ABC News documentary called “No Way Out.” That reporting embarrassed prison officials so badly it compelled them to implement and follow the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Those changes could not have happened without contraband cellphones. 

Fearmongering to thwart attempts to hold prison officials accountable is not a new phenomenon. This same deceptive trick was used in the 1990s to restrict incarcerated individuals’ rights to file lawsuits against prison officials. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PLRA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, created insurmountable hurdles for incarcerated people to file, win, or settle a successful civil rights lawsuit. 

Early procedural dismissals under the PLRA also deny outside journalists, whose access to prisons and the people who live there is extremely limited, the benefit of examining court files to find evidence of wrongdoing.

Prison officials in the ’90s exaggerated the number of frivolous lawsuits incarcerated individuals filed against prison officials in the same fashion they are currently overstating the usage of contraband cellphones to coordinate violent crimes. There’s no evidence-based data to support either accusation. And while the powerless face baseless censorship and retribution, the powerful actually commit the offenses we’re accused of in plain sight and with impunity. For example, the current president files more frivolous lawsuits than practically any prisoner, and the secretary of defense uses encrypted messaging to evade public records laws. 

There are a number of root causes of violence among incarcerated people: trauma, mental illness, addiction, depression, poor living conditions, abuse by prison staff, lack of coping skills, and so on. Contraband cellphones rank extremely low on the list — and yet, that’s the issue the government chooses to address, not the severe shortcomings in prisons’ efforts to promote personal growth, emotional management, and problem solving.

Regulations that rob incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and human rights violations and hold prison officials accountable hurt more people and cause more negative societal consequences than they prevent. Just ask those whose lives were saved or drastically improved by reporting only made possible with the use of contraband cellphones.

Give journalists meaningful access to prisons and prison records, give incarcerated people the tools to communicate with the outside world and document abuses without censorship and retaliation, and I’ll never use a contraband cellphone again. Or better yet, don’t commit those abuses at all. 

The post The Latest FCC Censorship Push No One Is Talking About Targets Incarcerated People appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly the entire population of El Guayabo, approximately 400 to 500 dirt-poor lime pickers living on communal land in the west Mexican state of Michoacán, fled hastily in mid-July to escape combat between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, and the Caballeros Templarios. When I went before dawn on July 30 with local human rights defenders to help displaced residents recover some of their belongings, the windows in every house were shattered by gunfire, roofs were blown open by bombs dropped from internet-bought drones, and everyone walked nervously, scanning the ground for landmines. Scattered everywhere were thousands of dull bronze shell-casings: .50 caliber rounds for sniper rifles and machine guns, 5.56 rounds for AR-15s and similar rifles, and 7.62×39 shells used for AK-47-style rifles.

Putting a stop “to every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States,” as President Donald Trump put it to the United Nations last week, has become his self-proclaimed mission. His administration designated CJNG and Carteles Unidos — an umbrella of armed groups that includes the Templarios — as foreign terrorist organizations in January, allowing the U.S. government to crack down on any individual or group who provides them with “material support” or “expert advice and assistance.” During the first weeks of Trump’s administration, as a Washington Post investigation recently revealed, DEA agents pushed for “targeted killings of cartel leadership and attacks on infrastructure” in Mexico but faced pushback from some administration insiders. And in late July, Trump secretly signed a directive authorizing the Pentagon to use unilateral military force against Latin American drug cartels.

Since then, Trump says the U.S. has launched airstrikes against at least three alleged drug boats in international waters near Venezuela, killing 17 people. On Thursday, The Intercept obtained a leaked document circulated to congressional committees in which Trump declares the U.S. engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels. While the administration’s public ire has focused on Venezuela, sources within the Pentagon’s Northern Command have said they would have plans for potential strikes against Mexican cartels, too, “ready by mid-September.” 

If the U.S. military does confront the cartels in Mexico, it will find itself facing battle with its own weapons. An investigation by The Intercept traced the bullets that littered the ground in El Guayabo to at least two U.S. firearms manufacturers, one of which operates a massive factory owned by the U.S. military. The Intercept gathered 123 shell casings, some of whose numbered headstamps corresponded to the now-defunct St. Louis Ammunition Plant and Lake City Ammunition — a commercial ammunition factory in Independence, Missouri, operated by Winchester and owned by the U.S. Army.

This investigation is the first of its kind to document the cartels’ use of ammunition from the U.S. Army-owned factory in enforcing mass displacement in Mexico. While past work has focused on the factory’s ties to mass shootings in the U.S. and the deaths of U.S. citizens, The Intercept’s investigation analyzes U.S.-made shells collected directly from the scene where some of Mexico’s poorest residents fled for their lives to escape ferocious gun battles between paramilitary groups — the same ones the Trump administration now classifies as terrorists.

“The United States is perfectly capable of breaking down criminal groups involved in the drug trade,” said Julio Franco, a human rights advocate at the Apatzingán Observatory for Human Security, “simply by closing off the pipeline of weaponry produced in the U.S. and used by Mexican criminal groups.”

Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite. Trump plans to slash over two-thirds of the weapons investigators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives charged with ensuring guns sold by U.S. suppliers don’t end up in the hands of Latin American cartels and gangs, incinerating the already understaffed bureaucratic safeguards designed to stop the cartel weaponry pipeline.

The ATF, the U.S. Army, and the White House did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. A representative for the Pentagon said they didn’t have responses to The Intercept’s questions, citing the government shutdown.

Experts estimate that around 200,000 military-grade assault weapons and machine guns are trafficked every year from U.S. gunshops to Mexican criminal groups, moving south across the border with little to no scrutiny. This unchecked flow of weapons, longtime weapons experts told The Intercept, represents a massive missed opportunity in the country’s stated mission to kneecap the cartels.

In villages like El Guayabo, this neglect fuels warfare while driving mass displacement. The Ibero-American University and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights registered 28,900 newly displaced people in at least 72 mass displacement events in Mexico last year, according to a report released in June. At least 392,000 people have been displaced since the U.S.-backed drug war was revamped in 2006, though experts estimate that to be a significant undercount. Franco estimated that several thousand have been displaced in El Guayabo since 2021, though the lack of recognition or authoritative studies means that figure too is likely an undercount.

Franco was in El Guayabo on July 30 with The Intercept and Carmen Zepeda, a teacher, humanitarian activist, and Apatzingán councilwoman for Morena, the dominant political party in Mexico. As one of the leading advocates for the victims of enforced displacement in Michoacán, Zepeda pointed to a growing list of villages where thousands have fled armed conflict: Acatlán, Loma de los Hoyos, el Mirador, el Manzo, Las Bateas, Llano Grande, El Tepetate, La Alberca, San José de Chila, El Alcalde, and El Guayabo — all in the municipality of Apatzingán.

“There’s a war in this municipality,” said Zepeda. “And this war is being carried out with bullets from the United States.”

The man taking the video growls at the bodies, two skinny young men, one with his mouth frozen open, sprawled out dead in the mud. “Just so you sons-of-bitches see, so you don’t keep coming to El Guayabo you motherfuckers, we warned you, you thought it was a game,” the man shouts in Spanish, out of breath, as he assesses the carnage under a soft, steady rain. Flanking the bodies are the steaming carcasses of two blown-up monstruos, the homemade armored vehicles used by cartels. “So you motherfuckers see how you’ll fucking end up, your mouth full of flies. Fucking Templas all the way.” A photo of the same monster under the same rainy sky shows five men in civilian and military clothing with bulletproof vests and assault weapons. Scattered on the ground alongside the bodies lay the dull bronze spent ammunition.

This was the aftermath of a brutal gunfight in El Guayabo on July 24, filmed by a sicario and uploaded to Telegram, six days before The Intercept made the trip to the village. When we walked along a dirt road at dawn, the bodies of the dead men, identified as 27-year-old Gustavo Javier Salazar and 24-year-old Victor Manuel de Jesús Pérez Ortíz, were gone. An official at the General State Prosecutor’s office in Apatzingán, who identified the men and requested anonymity to disclose the information, later said prosecutors seized 7.62×39 and .50 caliber ammunition, though they didn’t find the 5.56 rounds The Intercept later discovered.

The ammunition, according to residents as well as videos uploaded to social media and Telegram channels, was used by gunmen pertaining to the Caballeros Templarios, an armed wing of the Carteles Unidos, one of Trump’s designated FTOs. Fighting alongside the CJNG were sicarios for the Viagras, a paramilitary gang from Michoacán who, for years, were allied with the Templarios and Cárteles Unidos before switching sides to join the Jaliscos. 

Related

A U.S.-Mexico Pledge to End Disappearances Fails to Grapple With the Complicity of the State

Journalists and researchers have long criticized the concept of “cartels” as a misleading term pushed by the U.S. Justice Department in the 1980s to build cases while justifying U.S.-sponsored militarization — overstating the power of violent but unstable gangs by painting them as unified hegemons who threaten governments, rather than parasitic power brokers operating parallel to them.

Yet no one doubts the violence committed by Carteles Unidos, sometimes referred to as “R5,” and the CJNG, two sprawling paramilitary coalitions benefiting from shifting and at times overlapping protection agreements from Mexican security forces. Earlier this year, a volunteer group dedicated to finding disappeared people discovered a CJNG-run “extermination site,” a training camp operating in clear view of authorities where hundreds of victims were incinerated in homemade “crematoriums.” Both armed groups have been implicated in widespread massacres, disappearances, enforced recruitment, and the use of landmines and child soldiers — acts that, if the Mexican government recognized the violence as armed conflict, would constitute war crimes.

When El Guayabo’s population fled at dawn, according to multiple residents, gunmen for the Jaliscos shot sporadic potshots at villagers escaping on motorcycles. And then, one displaced resident said, “the rancho was completely empty.”

Tierra Caliente, the muggy shear of mountains that encompasses western Guerrero, the southern end of Mexico State, and the southern lime plantations of Michoacán, has been known for decades as a refuge for organized crime networks. The “Hot Land,” as its name translates in English, is notorious for wars between shifting alliances of government forces, cartels, and “self-defense” groups — which have intensified since the first major operation of the U.S.-backed drug war was launched in Michoacán in 2006. El Guayabo is just one of a string of villages in the region’s expanse of lime plantations convulsed by years of warfare.

For the first half of 2025, the campesinos in El Guayabo and nearby El Alcalde barricaded themselves in their homes while listening to the devilish rattle of gunfire in the darkness outside. Some families fled one by one in a slow trickle, their nerves shot from suffering abuse at the hands of armed groups while waiting for the next gun battle; others, trying to hold on, escaped in mass displacement episodes. Some people fled from El Alcalde to El Guayabo. Sleeping was close to impossible, one resident said, as they listened to the firefights while “waiting for sunrise to see if the government would show up.”

Related

U.S. Military Training in Mexico Increased as Human Rights Waned, New Database Reveals

Government forces — well-equipped, well-trained, supported by U.S.-supplied Black Hawk helicopters, and frequently benefiting from close relationships to U.S. security agencies — have long exerted overwhelming military superiority over cartel gunmen when engaging them in direct clashes. But on most mornings, residents said, their hopes went unanswered. In February, the military installed an Inter-Institutional Operations Base, a multiagency outpost hosting soldiers for the military and National Guard known as a “BOI.” But firefights only intensified in the months after their arrival.

On July 16, as the gun battles reached a fever pitch, the entire population of El Guayabo fled.

One displaced resident, who, like all desplazados interviewed for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, remembers the helpless terror of waiting inside flimsy homes while listening to the cacophony of automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons less than a mile away. The houses — made from concrete, wooden walls, and thin metal roofs — were hardly reassuring shelters against a bomb or bullet.

“Imagine how we felt being in a house with sheet metal,” they said. “It was all so terrible, we were so afraid.”

No one went unscathed by the violence. The constant stress of listening for the devilish hornet’s whine of drones gave children anxiety. A woman heard a drone and dove under a mattress with her crying grandchildren seconds before a shrapnel-laden bomb exploded on a nearby roof. Over a dozen residents told me that soldiers who were stationed in El Alcalde, less than half a mile away, almost never intervened in a month of hourslong firefights. 

They had spent weeks listening to nearby gunbattles, but by mid-July, the proximity of the fighting became unbearable.

“They’ve made it down,” a man says in a video shared on Telegram from July 16, referring to the fact that armed groups had descended from the hills, fighting in the semi-forested lime plantations and homes surrounding the village.

“It got uglier then, so we all decided to get out at the same time,” an El Guayabo resident told The Intercept.

When they returned at the end of the month, a man in his 50s, whose wooden home was riddled with gunfire, broke down in tears after seeing several of his chickens had died because he was unable to return to feed them. Some had been able to go back during the dawn hours to feed their animals, though they couldn’t stay long. “No one sleeps here anymore,” a resident said.

A man walked me through his house to where his corrugated metal roof was blown up by a bomb dropped from a drone, his windows and the windshield of his truck shot out too. The ground, Zepeda recalled, was “carpeted with bullets manufactured in the United States.”

The sicarios never lacked for ways to replenish their ammunition. Armed groups now turn to “WhatsApp and Telegram groups dedicated to firearms transactions operate much like online marketplaces,” said Romain Le Cour, a gun violence investigator and senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “Similar to Amazon.”

Bullets for the same military-grade assault weapons lined up on the walls of gun stores in Texas, Missouri, or Illinois, could, within days, end up on the floor of a devastated living room in a rural, war-torn village like El Guayabo.

Pressed into the back of the dull bronze .50 caliber shell was a simple headstamp: LC19. The shell was one of hundreds scattered in the street before a devastated home, whose owner invited us inside as they examined the discarded military uniforms, the broken windows, and the cartridges scattered among stuffed animals and childhood school photos knocked off the wall.

“LC” is the marking for Lake City Ammunition in Independence, Missouri: built by Remington in 1941, run by Winchester, and owned by the U.S. Army. “19” is for the year it was manufactured. Thanks to the war on terror, according to its own government website, the factory’s modernization efforts brought its annual production capacity to 1.6 billion rounds a year, making one of the largest ammunition factories in the world.

The headstamps of the ammunition in El Guayabo corresponded to the photos of munitions from the Lake City factory available on the websites of gun brokers and enthusiasts, as well as a New York Times investigation from 2023. According to Bloomberg, the Pentagon has shipped hundreds of thousands of Lake City rounds to the Mexican military.

Jim Yurgealitis, a weapons expert and retired senior special agent with over two decades of experience conducting and participating in weapons trafficking investigations for the ATF, confirmed for The Intercept that the .50 bullets with the headstamps LC19, LC22, and LC23 were all produced at Lake City Ammunition. 

Yurgealitis said that the round labeled “FC 5.56 18” may have come from Federal Cartridge, an ammunition manufacturer that operated Lake City in 2018, though he couldn’t say whether it was produced at the Army plant or at Federal’s private facility in Minnesota. Yurgealitis also confirmed that a 5.56 shell with a NATO insignia above the headstamp “LC24” came from Lake City.

Though munitions from Serbia, Sweden, and possibly South Africa were scattered among the destruction in El Guayabo, Yurgealitis, who reviewed a full list of the ammunition The Intercept discovered, pointed out that “none of the ammunition on that list hasn’t been available on the U.S. commercial market at least at some point.” 

Lake City did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Neither Winchester, the operator of Lake City; Olin, Winchester’s parent company; nor Federal Ammunition responded to The Intercept’s formal media requests. The Intercept was unable to contact a media representative for Federal through two customer support numbers.

Coveted by gun enthusiasts for their military quality and armor-piercing capacities, bullets from Lake City, whose operations are overseen by the U.S. Army’s Joint Munitions Command, have also been used by mass shooters. In 2015, the ATF sought to ban the production of “green-tip” armor-piercing rounds — the Times investigation pointed to Lake City’s production of 5.56 green-tip rounds for AR-15s — but immediate pushback from gun enthusiasts and Second Amendment hard-liners in Congress led the agency to abandon the effort. The factory has a colossal production capacity — churning out over a billion-and-a-half rounds a year — thanks to the post-9/11 symbiosis between the U.S. government and private ammunition manufacturers, who keep machines running, ready to meet wartime demands. Lake City’s government ownership means the company enjoys minimal transparency, while Winchester, valued at over $500 million last month, profits.

Related

Inside Mexico’s Historic Lawsuit Targeting U.S. Gun Companies

In 2021, the Mexican government filed a historic lawsuit against seven U.S. firearms manufacturers and a wholesaler, seeking $10 billion in damages for allowing assault weapons to end up in the hands of cartels. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck the case down in June, on the basis that the companies can’t be held accountable if their weapons are misused. A second lawsuit filed against five Arizona gun stores in 2022 is still working its way through the courts.

For the lawyer David Pucino, an anti-gun violence advocate at the Giffords Center who helped write an amicus brief to support the lawsuit, the already weak regulatory framework will only be made worse by Trump’s planned ATF cuts. 

“It’s essentially catastrophic,” Pucino said. He added that changes could bring about “a massive rise in the vector of trafficked guns,” which will have ramifications for years to come.

The ATF is already a neglected institution whose budget allocations haven’t corresponded to the sheer scale of weapons trafficking, said Cecilia Farfán, the head of the North American Observatory for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime who has investigated weapons flows from the U.S. to Latin America. In 2023, for example, there were at least 78,000 gun dealers in the U.S. Before the cuts, the ATF only has 800 investigators charged with investigating reports of straw purchase buyers. 

“They don’t have a lot of resources,” Farfán said. “They haven’t seen themselves as an agency that can collaborate with other institutions; they work with very little.”

The ATF’s work has fallen short in the past. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, ATF agents in Arizona allowed cartel straw buyers to purchase nearly 2,000 assault weapons under the pretext of tracking them to their sources.

The ATF did not respond to The Intercept’s phone calls.

One former investigator for the ATF emphasized that the agency has a “very vital role in terms of their monitoring of the gun industry” but that “they’re already overwhelmingly understaffed compared to the amount of (gun brokers) out there. … Some gun stores get one inspection a year, some get an inspection every five years.”

Pucino agreed that the soon-to-be-slashed ATF inspectors are “essential” for tracing the flow of these kinds of munitions to criminal groups, helping educate gun brokers so they can better recognize — and report — straw-man buyers for trafficking networks. Without inspectors, he said, it’s close to impossible to recover guns once they make it out of shops.

“There are extremists who want no gun laws at all and an industry that wants to maximize profits,” Pucino said. “The suffering of Mexican people is not a consideration for those who are establishing policies.”

If you only follow Trump’s tweets, you could be forgiven for believing the U.S. has long been at the precipice of war with Mexico. “They are now designated as terrorist organizations,” he said of the cartels in January. “Mexico probably doesn’t want that.”

Yet the erratic saber-rattling has coincided with a quiet consolidation of security coordination between the two countries. Less than 24 hours after the Trump administration’s first controversial strike on a boat in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico City. “There’s no other government that’s cooperating as much with us in the fight against crime as Mexico,” he said. (Last month, a Reuters investigation revealed how the CIA for years secretly coordinated with elite Mexican military units.)

In September, Mexican and U.S. authorities unveiled “Mission Firewall: United Against Firearms Trafficking Initiative,” a “historic” plan to intensify crackdowns on southbound weapons trafficking. 

Related

The U.S. Is Organizing a $5 Million Gun Sale to Mexican Forces Accused of Murder and Kidnapping

The Trump administration promised to intensify inspections at the border, while the Mexican government will expand the usage of a surveillance tool called “eTrace,” a ballistic tracking technology that has been available to the Mexican government since at least 2008. “We’ve never achieved something like this,” Sheinbaum said. 

The official at the General State Prosecutor’s Office in Apatzingán told The Intercept before the announcement that questions regarding ongoing investigations into weapons trafficking networks and displacement are managed by federal investigators. 

“We work with the U.S., but we just do training and workshops with U.S. agencies in Morelia (the capital of Michoacán),” the official said. “The people who coordinate directly with U.S. agencies are the federal prosecutors.”

When I went to the office of the General Prosecutors for the Republic, a prosecutor declined to comment on the basis of “secrecy.” 

Related

“Narco Prince” Sentenced to Life as Trump Ramps Up U.S.–Mexico Drug War

In February, after Trump announced punishing tariffs, and again in August, after the directive regarding the use of unilateral military force in Mexico was revealed, Sheinbaum’s administration carried out two highly publicized, but legally contested, mass extraditions of 55 narcos to the United States. Targeting individual drug traffickers has long been discredited as a policy for reducing violence, one that runs the risk, instead, of exacerbating warfare. But it remains at the heart of the Bicentennial Framework, a tough-on-crime plan the two countries share. The framework’s implementation has coincided with the growth of enforced displacement and enforced disappearances — and the most violent period in the country’s history since the Mexican Revolution. 

In El Guayabo, soldiers arrived with an Ocelot armored vehicle and a Humvee on July 30 and installed a BOI, the same kind of outpost erected in El Alcalde in March. Residents said the soldiers did, on several occasions, engage the sicarios in early August, a period when the combat between armed groups receded into the mountains above the village. 

Despite the lull in fighting, residents couldn’t shake the fear that they would be abandoned to the whims of conflict yet again. They were well aware of the selective policing that’s typified the government’s response to war in Tierra Caliente: Security forces leave once media and political attention drifts away, opening the way for the return of criminal groups — who the government won’t confront in time, if at all, to prevent mass displacement episodes.

“It’s important to remember,” the official from the General State Prosecutor’s Office told me, “that what happened in El Guayabo is an isolated act.”

When I went on July 30, the residents who had returned were packed into family members’ homes or living week by week in overpriced hotels or rentals. Unable to tend to their lime fields, they’re out of work. “My parents can’t even get their medicine anymore,” one man complained. Though around half returned with the deployment of a contingent of soldiers to the village, the others stayed away. 

“The people are still afraid, because [the armed groups] are in the ranch just above us,” one resident from El Guayabo told me. In the weeks after they returned, every now and then, they could still hear gunfire in the hills.

Correction: October 2, 2025, 8:11 p.m. ET

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified a rights group as the Observatory for Citizen Security of Apatzingán. It is the Observatory for Human Security of Apatzingán.

The post Trump Calls Cartel Members “Terrorists.” They’re Armed With Bullets From a U.S. Army Factory. appeared first on The Intercept.

“The feeling is, ‘shave your beard or get out.’ People are associating not shaving with laziness. It’s not laziness, it’s my constitutionally protected religious right,” said a practicing Hanafi Muslim service member currently on active duty.

The service member, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said he renounced his citizenship in his country of origin in the Middle East to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, believing the branch would uphold the constitutional freedoms its members swear to defend.

“Before joining, I had a shaving waiver assigned to me because of my faith. I never shaved during basic training or tech school, and now it feels like I’m going to be kicked out,” the Hanafi practitioner said. “I’ve personally helped four other Muslims enlist in the military and promised their religious freedoms would be protected. Now it doesn’t feel that way, and that matters to me.”

In years past, federal courts have repeatedly found that service members who grow beards have a right to keep them on grounds of religious freedom.

Related

Trump and Hegseth Gathered U.S. Military Leaders for an “Embarrassing” Rant

Hegseth’s attempt to eliminate beard waivers — among his latest attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion — targets service members on the grounds of race as well as religion. Many Black men in the armed forces are granted medical shaving waivers for painful skin irritation from pseudofolliculitis barbae, or severe razor bumps. The condition can be painful or itchy and, if chronic, may cause hyperpigmentation or permanent scarring.

“Our hair is not the same texture as our coworkers, so it makes sense why shaving would irritate many Black men’s faces,” said former Senior Airman Azhmere Dudley. “I was asked about shaving waivers on multiple occasions, even though the razor bumps were clearly visible. Leadership never really cared to know me or understand me.”

In a speech delivered in Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday, Hegseth addressed his beard policy with comments seen as patronizing to members of pagan communities, particularly practitioners of Norse paganism.

“If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave. We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans. But unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refuse to call BS and enforce standards or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards,” Hegseth said.

These religions have been at the center of grooming standard debates in recent years, as their non-Abrahamic traditions can be unfamiliar to those outside the communities.

During basic military training, the Air Force holds weekly religious services including Wicca, Shingon Buddhism, various Christian denominations including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Islamic practices, Judaism, and other faiths.

Calling out the Norse religion in particular “is a bit undermining,” said a senior non-commissioned officer serving on active duty who openly practices a sub-sect of paganism associated with Nordic traditions and sports a large beard. “I feel like that’s singling people out. Why not say it for Muslims or Christians as well?”

“There are people like ourselves that practice paganism to the fullest extent possible, and it’s kind of a low blow to be called fake,” the source said. “Imagery is just as important as conviction.”

The pagan source said military service members already give up many of the freedoms civilians enjoy. He said that he had to have his beard waiver approved by a high-level official in the Air Force, and called the process “fairly difficult.”

Critics argue that routing approvals to the Pentagon level for routine waivers is an inefficient use of resources and taxpayer funds, since such waivers are typically handled at the base or unit level. Some waivers are even medically necessary.

The move also sets the United States further apart from several of its allies. Many allied nations with military forces allow beards within the ranks, including the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany. Unofficial strategic partners, such as India, also permit beards.

While chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense concerns apply to the safety and well-being of all American service members, Hegseth’s comments this week raise questions about whether the return to previous grooming standards is driven by science or by discrimination wrapped in Department of War bureaucracy.

“I feel he’s trying to build the army he envisions in his head. And as a white Christian nationalist, that obviously would mean no BIPOC, women or separate religious beliefs,” said Dudley, who noted that this was his personal assessment, and not a confirmed characterization of Hegseth.

The post Hegseth Attack on “Beardos” Targets Troops on Race and Religion, Military Sources Say appeared first on The Intercept.

“Last thing I heard from him was, ‘I think I’m just going to give up. I’m never getting out of here,’” his niece, Kirandeep Kaur, told The Intercept. She calls him almost every day, but she said he doesn’t talk much anymore. He’s lost over 20 pounds, his family said, and he fears he will die in detention.

The government’s argument to deport Singh appears to be built on sloppy research. The Department of Homeland Security misclassified him, his lawyer argues, as “subject to removal,” dug up his 25-year-old theft conviction, and, when an immigration judge found that Singh had done his time, pointed to a forgery case — which doesn’t seem to exist.

Singh represents one example in a growing trend of legal, document-bearing immigrants caught up in the Trump administration’s weaponized deportation system — and he’s one of the rare few relatively well-positioned to fight it. His gas stations gave him a lucrative business portfolio: sixteen of them, plus a distribution center and an oil-supplying truck company, which earn him a yearly income in the hundreds of thousands. So when an immigration judge found that he should be released on a $10,000 bond on August 25, his family was able to post it. But the Trump administration is using a dated mechanism called an automatic stay to override his immigration judge’s decisions, keep him locked up, and push for deportation. 

His removal proceeding is scheduled for Monday, September 29.

“Paramjit Singh, a criminal illegal alien from history with a previous conviction for larceny, is being held in ICE custody,” wrote DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin in a statement to The Intercept. McLaughlin did not respond when asked to clarify if she was referring to Singh’s past theft conviction, DHS’s claim that he had a forgery conviction, or an additional criminal allegation.

Singh’s family has tried and failed to have him released on humanitarian grounds, to treat his growing brain tumor. In response to queries about his condition, McLaughlin said: “This is the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

The last time Singh entered the United States, his tumor was under control, and he didn’t expect to have any issues at the port of entry. He had been in and out of the country on yearly trips to India throughout the three decades he’s held a lawful permanent resident green card. He was returning from one such visit on July 30, when he was pulled into an immigration room at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

The grounds for his detention were laid out in smudged black ink on a “Notice to Appear” document: a 25-year-old Class D felony for theft on three counts. Singh was found guilty in 2000 for using a collect call payphone to speak to relatives in India without paying for it, and he was sentenced to 10 days probation with a year and a half in jail suspended. He’d completed his term decades ago.

The notice to appear acknowledged Singh was a green card holder, but it classified him as “admitted to the United States but subject to removal,” citing his felony theft charge. It called him “an alien who has been convicted of, or who admits having committed … a crime involving moral turpitude (other than a purely political offense) or an attempt or conspiracy to commit such a crime.”

Luis Angeles, Singh’s immigration attorney, said the government was using “legal and unethical tactics at every turn.” The theft case wasn’t an aggravated felony, Angeles said, so it should not have affected Singh’s immigration status. 

“My client already paid his debt to society,” Angeles told The Intercept. “And he has never committed any other crimes.”

Related

ICE Contractor Locked a Mother and Her Baby in a Hotel Room for Five Days

Singh spent five days at the airport. Then ICE called and told his family that he’d been transferred to the Clay County Detention Center in Indiana. They were hopeful it was just a misunderstanding — but then communication was cut off, and the family was unaware of where he was moved. They eventually tracked him down at Kenton County Detention Center in Kentucky. A month later, a $3,000 medical bill arrived from an ER in Chicago.

Singh has a kind of brain tumor called a pituitary adenoma, which is non-cancerous but causes hormonal imbalances. He’d had it operated on in 2021, but now it was back, causing progressive vision loss — and, compounding with other heart conditions, placing him at risk for heart failure and sudden cardiac death.

Singh’s family was unaware of any medical care in the jail that could help. Kaur tried to find out by calling jail staff and local officials — but she said she was met with empty promises and dismissiveness.

Kenton County Jailer Marc Fields and Clay County’s ICE officials did not reply to a request for comment.

The family applied with the ICE Chicago field office for humanitarian parole, which can be used to grant people temporary status in the U.S. under emergency conditions — though the practice has been severely curtailed under the Trump administration. They filed support letters from Singh’s employees, family, friends, and business partners to attest that he was not dangerous or a flight risk. Singh’s doctor wrote that his conditions “were not compatible with prolonged confinement, and his ongoing care cannot be appropriately managed in a custodial setting.” 

A deportation officer at the Chicago field office told the family they were reviewing the case, then eventually stopped replying to emails.

The family’s next recourse was a bond hearing. They hoped an immigration judge would see an upstanding figure in his community with a rapidly worsening brain tumor and understand that he wasn’t a flight risk.

The judge did, ordering him to be released on a $10,000 bond. 

“We saw the happiness on his face when the judge granted him a bond,” said Kaur, who’d been able to see her uncle via iPad. “His eyes were wide open.”

It was a rare victory: Only 31 percent of cases heard during the first nine months of 2023 received bond, according to the most recent data available from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The higher the bond, the harder it is for a person to get out of detention. The median bond in 2023 was $7,000, which isn’t easy to come by in a short amount of time for many people.

But Singh’s family was ready to pay. Before they could, though, government lawyers filed an automatic stay — which kept Singh locked up.

“When we called him later in the evening telling him that, hey, DHS, put a hold on it, he broke into tears,” Kaur said.

Automatic stays allow DHS to effectively ignore immigration court orders — and their use is becoming a pattern, said Suchita Mathur, senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council. 

“It basically says, when an immigration judge has found that you’re not a danger or a fight risk and that you’re eligible for bond, and yet, the agency that’s prosecuting you has the unilateral authority to file a one-page piece of paper and keep you in detention,” Mathur said. “It was intended to be used in really extreme cases, and instead, ICE is using it just everywhere.”

Once the stay is invoked, the order to release gets put on hold until the Board of Immigration Appeals resolves it. That can take months. 

After the automatic stay, DHS filed an appeal and issued the September 29 date for preliminary removal proceedings.

The government is arguing in its appeal that Singh shouldn’t be eligible for a bond because of another purported conviction on his record, this time for forgery in Illinois in 2008.

The lawyer representing DHS did not provide any documentation to substantiate the claim, nor a case number or even a jurisdiction. Singh’s family had never heard of such a case — and Singh had never lived in Illinois. They scrambled to get answers.

The family hired a private investigation firm, which found no record of a 2008 criminal forgery conviction in Singh’s name across all jurisdictions in Illinois. The firm’s representatives went to Kenton and Clay County officials, and said the local officials had “suggested” a recent larceny conviction could have triggered Singh’s detention — but the officials didn’t have any documentation of larceny charges against him, either.

The Illinois State Police sent the private investigators a statement, reviewed by The Intercept, saying their records “failed to reveal any criminal conviction record for the subject.”

McLaughlin made clear that Singh, an entrepreneur and a fixture of the Fort Wayne community, was, in the eyes of the DHS, an “illegal alien.”

Related

The Evidence Linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to MS-13: A Chicago Bulls Hat and a Hoodie

“Politicians and activists can cry wolf all they want, but it won’t deter this administration from keeping these criminals and lawbreakers off American streets—and now thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we will have plenty of bed space to do so,” she wrote, referring to the sprawling federal spending package Donald Trump signed on July 4. “If illegal aliens don’t want to end up in detention, they should use the CBP Home app to receive $1,000 and a free flight home.”

Angeles, Singh’s lawyer, has filed a motion to allow Singh’s release on bond to go forward on the grounds that the government hasn’t provided proof of his forgery conviction.

Time is running out for Singh and his family. They hope to prevail in the upcoming removal proceedings. But in a county jail overcrowded with ICE detainees, Singh is afraid he won’t live much longer.

Kaur recalled that her father, Singh’s brother, warned him not to leave the United States to visit India because of the shaky immigration situation under Trump. But Singh didn’t think he was the type of person who would be targeted. 

“They’re just holding people who’re not giving anything to this country, who’re being wrong to this country, people who are a flight risk, people who are harming others,” Kaur recalled her uncle saying before his flight. “I’ve built my house in this country, and I’m planning to live here forever. They’re not going to do anything to me. I’m a person of this country.”

The post He Has a Green Card and a Brain Tumor. DHS Wants to Deport Him for Forgery With No Proof. appeared first on The Intercept.

Authoritarianism does not begin with prisons or torture chambers. It begins with suspicion — when loyalty is measured not by what you believe but by whom you are willing to expose. In East Germany, the Stasi turned neighbors into watchmen. In Chile under Pinochet, a whisper in a café could summon the police. In Iraq under Saddam, cousins betrayed cousins, sons betrayed fathers. And in Syria, where I grew up, even the walls were said to have ears. Everywhere, the pattern was the same: a society taught to police itself.

That is why what followed the killing of Charlie Kirk unsettled me almost as much as the killing itself. Within hours, social media filled with denunciations. A website called “Charlie’s Murderers” appeared overnight, cataloging associates of the accused as if complicity were contagious. People justified their callouts as civic duty. They tagged employers, immigration authorities, and universities not only to “expose” others, but also to prove their own loyalty to the nation.

It was not the first time. After October 7, for example, social media became a battlefield of callouts. Screenshots of old posts circulated, and employers were flooded with demands to fire staff for their statements on Palestine and Israel.

Related

Hegseth Leads Push to Punish Military Service Members Over Charlie Kirk Comments

The ferocity after Kirk’s death felt different. Although Kirk was an inflammatory figure at the center of America’s increasingly volatile political divide, watching someone lose their life in such a tragic and public way was deeply disturbing. When violence becomes an acceptable response to speech, we cross a dangerous line — one that should concern all of us, regardless of our place on the political spectrum. But the rush to police speech concerning Kirk’s legacy seemed less like a debate over politics and violence, and more like a performance: a race to see who could denounce the fastest, the loudest, the most ruthlessly. It was loyalty theater, staged in real time on the digital square.

Beneath it was something darker: the logic of informant culture taking root. The belief that proving one’s patriotism and moral clarity is achieved by snitching on someone else.

Informant Culture

In Syria, I learned this logic as a child. Each time our teacher left the classroom, she reminded us that she had an areef: a class sheriff who would be her eyes and ears in her absence, recording the names of anyone who misbehaved. To be chosen as the areef was an honor. It meant you were trusted, elevated above your peers. And to prove you deserved it, you snitched — even on your closest friends. Often, we never knew who the areef was. The only way to avoid punishment was to assume that anyone — and everyone — might be watching you.

The punishments that followed were meant to show us what awaited. The guilty were dragged to the podium and slapped across the face, returning to their desks trembling with humiliation and pain. The ruler’s hiss before striking an open palm was enough to send shivers down the spine, followed by the slow burn spreading across the hands. To ease the sting, we pressed our palms against the cold metal poles that held our wooden desks together.

Later, we realized that more often than not, there was no areef at all. But the illusion of being watched and the memory of punishment were enough to keep us quiet. Better silent than sorry was the first lesson of survival, and it didn’t end at the classroom door.

Surveillance as Loyalty

In Syria, the surveillance state — 11 intelligence branches strong — was built on ordinary people. To be loyal was to be the eyes and ears of the regime. Anyone could be an informant, even your sibling. Families warned their children not to repeat what they heard at home. The walls, we were told, really did have ears.

To preserve the illusion of free speech, the Syrian government allowed television comedies to satirize surveillance. In one famous sketch, an officer desperate to win a car as the prize for “best report” spent his days trying to coax his neighbors and relatives into speaking. All of them, following the same lesson we had learned in school, stayed silent. Finally, in desperation, he recorded his father criticizing a minister. Racked with guilt, the officer confessed to his wife, sobbing that he had betrayed his own father just to prove his loyalty to the regime. She stroked his shoulder and urged him to keep talking, to unburden himself — while secretly pressing record on her own device.

The sketch didn’t convey the magnitude of how such reports were being recorded. But real life did. When former President Bashar al-Assad fell and the basements of the intelligence branches were pried open, millions of pages of reports spilled out. They told not just the story of surveillance, but also of complicity: neighbors informing on neighbors for a car, a promotion, a favor. A society so corroded from within that betrayal had come to feel like the highest form of loyalty. That is how informant culture worked in Syria. It produced not protection, but paralysis.

The consequences endured even after Assad was overthrown. The security apparatus may have been dismantled, but Syrians still carried the habits of survival. In recent months, as violence shook and threatened what little stability the country had, it was met with silence. After years of dictatorship, even when democracy could finally be achieved, people remained quiet.

The United States Is Not Syria

The United States is not Syria. To be called out on social media, to lose your job, is not to vanish into a prison cell. But the logic that underpins both systems is disturbingly familiar. In both cases, informing is dressed up as patriotism. To snitch is to protect.

Related

Searching for Justice and the Missing in the New Syria

I saw where that logic leads. I lived it. And I know how quickly a society that teaches its citizens to inform on one another becomes a society that retreats into silence. In that silence, authoritarianism does not merely survive, it thrives. That is the danger now facing America. Not that it will become Syria overnight, but that the habits of suspicion, the reflex to inform, and the fear of speaking freely will take root. And once they do, they are hard to unlearn.

A society taught to mistrust itself will always be ready for its next strongman.

The post Far-Right Demands for Informants About Charlie Kirk Comments Remind Me of Syria appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, new beginnings never come without a price. Displacement by Israeli bombing and ground invasion forces families to leave behind entire lives: a familiar corner of home, the smell of morning coffee, a notebook holding stories of interrupted lives. These losses are emotional, ripping away the daily artifacts that help remind people who they are.

They are also financial. The cost of Nozoh, or displacement, often exceeds what families can afford. Basic necessities become out of reach — or the cost of leaving itself is too high.

When the Israeli military attacks residential areas in Gaza, the government’s press operation highlights evacuation orders that it has issued in the places to be bombed. Western mainstream media outlets repeat these claims, perpetuating the simplistic idea that any civilian residents have had ample opportunity to flee. Even if that were always true, it would overlook the complications families face during Nozoh — and how the financial burden can force them to stay in place, waiting for the shelling to start.

A rough breakdown of minimal expenses for a family relocating from northern Gaza to the south illustrates the scale of the challenge.

Transportation costs come to around 6,000 – 8,000 shekels — about $1,800 – 2,400 in U.S. dollars. A basic tent will cost 3,500 shekels. Food to survive the first few days will be 500 shekels or more. Renting an empty plot of land with no facilities will amount to 500 shekels. 1,500 shekels will be needed to set up a primitive bathroom. Nails, wood, or materials to build makeshift shelters will cost 500 shekels or more. 

Altogether, even the lowest estimate comes to a total of at least 10,000 shekels — approximately $3,000 — just to cover the initial phase of displacement. With Gaza’s economy destroyed by Israel’s relentless genocide, leaving most people with little to no income, these costs are out of reach for many Palestinians.

“Before the genocide, life was simple,” said my friend Sundus, a 20-year-old English translation student at the Islamic University of Gaza. She recalled her family home overlooking the sea, in the Shati neighborhood of Northern Gaza.

“We didn’t need to go out because our house had the most beautiful sea view anyone could dream of,” Sundus said. “My sisters and I would sit on the lower balcony, watching the waves. Hani and Aboud, my brother’s children, would join us to play, filling the day with life.”

Amid a rain of Israeli bombs in early November 2023, Hani and Aboud were trapped under the rubble after a round of shelling. At 5 and 7 years old, her brother’s children were killed by Israeli missiles. 

Related

Trauma and Terror in the North of Gaza

Sundus’s family left for Al-Shifa on November 7. “We hardly had anything,” she told me, “just a small mat, and it rained on our tent. On November 9, we heard Israeli forces were approaching Al-Shifa. We took what we could and went south. We walked 10 kilometers to Khan Younis, then moved to Rafah, living in tents all winter. Even after the ceasefire, returning home didn’t bring comfort.”

Sundus and her family returned to Shati earlier this year. “Everything had been destroyed,” Sundus said. “On September 13, 2025, our home was bombed again. We cleaned it, organized it, and stayed, because we couldn’t afford to leave.”

Since October 2023, Gaza has faced repeated waves of sudden displacement due to Israeli military evacuation orders. On October 13 of that year, residents of northern Gaza, including Gaza City, were told to move south within 24 hours. Similar orders followed in neighborhoods such as Shujaiya, Beit Hanoun, Deir al-Balah, and Zeitoun, with some civilian shelters targeted, forcing thousands of families south quickly, often with nowhere suitable to stay. 

The Israeli occupation claims that the South is a safe area, but this is false. The South, like any area in Gaza, is subjected to daily shelling and destruction. Many Gazans fled there hoping to find safety, to discover it offers no refuge. Open spaces fill quickly with incoming families, streets are crowded with tents, and essential resources rapidly run out. Residents travel long distances seeking safety, yet protection is never guaranteed.

The dangers are immediate and severe. Early on Wednesday, I was trying to sleep, having trouble because of the constant sound of Zenana, or drones, and helicopters. At 1:34 a.m., explosions hit the residential Al-Ain Jalout Tower. The whole area shook, highlighting once again that the South is not safe.

Related

In Gaza, Famine Is the Weapon — and So Is Aid

In recent months, major attacks have targeted southern Gaza, including airstrikes on humanitarian teams and hospitals, as well as repeated strikes on displacement camps, making the places people have fled to as dangerous as the places they left.

“It pains us to leave, and we did so only under coercion, exhausted and unwilling,” said the journalist Waad AboZaher. “God bears witness to our patience and perseverance.”

Life under displacement means long queues for bread and water, laundry piled high on weary shoulders, and children falling asleep exhausted — not from play, but from running to survive. Overcrowded tents with thin walls let in cold and fear, while grief is held in and tears swallowed beneath thin blankets. Survival requires constant adaptation: sharing tight spaces with strangers, smiling while breaking inside, caring for children with exhausted hands, and navigating basic necessities like water, food, and safety.

“If my grandchildren ask me about Gaza, I will tell them its people endured, stayed on their land, loved their country despite everything, and those who left did so reluctantly,” said Abdullah Shershara, a lawyer in Gaza City. “They tried to stay until the last moment; when hope failed, they tried again. When both stranger and kin abandoned them, they left under compulsion, not choice. Who would believe that a ruined patch of land could make people weep as they leave? Who would think a demolished building is embraced before the final departure?”

For those who cannot afford the costs of relocation, the only choice is to face danger and bombardment while staying in place. Nozoh is a slow-moving death, weighing heavily on bodies, minds, and hearts alike.

For AboZaher, a silence follows displacement. “We feel an overwhelming desire to cry,” she said, “but no one can.”

My friends and their families are all in the north. I speak with them daily, trying to keep up with their situations. The shelling never stops. Israeli occupation attacks people during movement, during displacement, and even after they flee to supposedly safer areas.

Many of my friends and their families have no internet at all. I think about them constantly, my heart heavy with worry, and I pray for them without stopping. Uncertainty, fear, and helplessness make survival feel fragile. Every message is a lifeline, every silence a source of anxiety.

At 4:28 a.m., my friend Sundus sent me a devastating WhatsApp message:

“Good morning, my sister Taqwa—they hit our house. My brother and his wife were killed.”

The occupation watches and controls us. Yet I feel it is my duty as a friend to document this life, to tell the world we are here. We are not numbers. We have dreams, ambitions beyond all limits, but the occupation insists on killing those dreams.

That is why I am writing this. To record my friends’ stories on the page. In Arabic, we often say: We are the dead who walk with living bodies. Now I ask: Why are we dying while we are still alive?

The post Israel Gives Evacuation Orders Before a Bombing. Many Gazan Families Can’t Afford to Leave. appeared first on The Intercept.

Multibillionaire investor George Soros is not funding a network of militant left-wing activists. That fact has not stopped President Donald Trump from spending the days since Charlie Kirk’s killing calling to press charges against the liberal philanthropist under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act for allegedly bankrolling “violent” leftist protests across the country. 

This absurd idea is among an array of repressive proposals, ranging from the illegal to the unconstitutional, that Trump and his acolytes have pulled from a cartoonishly blatant playbook of fascist scapegoating — conspiracies of Jewish dark money and all. The Trump administration will likely fail to bring successful prosecutions against the disparate liberal and leftist individuals and organizations they see as a well-funded criminal network. But we are long past the point of pretending the administration will be bound by law, or tethered to factual reality, when it comes to achieving its broader authoritarian goals.

Trump announced on Wednesday night, for example, that he was designating antifa a “major terrorist organization.” The proclamation, posted on Truth Social, is senseless in a number of ways. 

Related

Trump Wants to Label Antifa a Terror Group. His Real Target Might Be a Lot Bigger.

Firstly, as has been stated ad nauseam, there is no such organization as “antifa” — an abbreviation of “anti-fascist” — which is a set of practices and militant tactics, deployed by activists for nearly a century. There are groups who come together under the “antifa” banner, but there is zero centralized leadership or membership structure. Secondly, the U.S. has no statutes under which groups are designated domestic terror organizations.

Some might recall Trump’s very similar announcement during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, when he took pains to target left-wing activists and discredit the Black-led movement. At the time, his tweet did not call into being a non-existent domestic terror statute against a non-existent organization. 

It should not be overlooked that since Trump’s first term, all significant efforts to collectively prosecute social justice movements have failed.

On Trump’s 2017 Inauguration Day, over 200 anti-fascist “J20” protesters were mass-arrested and hit with hefty felony riot charges based on no more than presence at the protest; the charges were later dismissed or dropped en masse. Just last week, a judge in Fulton County, Georgia, announced that he was dismissing overreaching RICO charges against 61 participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement. The prosecutors’ two-year effort to frame the protest movement as a criminal conspiracy collapsed.

Having reported directly on both the J20 and Stop Cop City cases, I saw firsthand the toll a lengthy prosecutorial process can take on defendants, their supporters, and the entire targeted movement. Prosecutions need not lead to convictions to ruin lives and decimate social movement capacities; federal investigations do not need to have factual basis for their targets to be harassed and intimidated; First Amendment-protected speech can still get you fired. Fear spreads, cowardice abounds, and the real risks of state and state-sanctioned persecution hang over targeted communities.

The Atlanta RICO case may have been, as political scientist Joseph Brown told The Guardian, “probably the highest-profile failure of using conspiracy charges to indict a protest movement,” but even malicious prosecutions drain movement resources, both material and emotional, while directly keeping defendants from movement work.

What these cases nonetheless made clear is that collective persecution must be met with collective defense. None of the J20 or Atlanta defendants collaborated with prosecutors or took deals that entailed throwing other movement participants under the bus. Without compliant targets, the meritless cases fell apart.

Related

Trump’s Cult of Power Cancels Free Speech

We are today in a very different moment than in Trump’s first term, when the president first attempted to frame antifa as a catch-all boogeyman. Trump’s lawless speech acts are now taken as marching orders by his loyalists in government, law enforcement, and the judiciary.

We have seen the readiness with which institutions will sacrifice their employees and affiliates to appease the president. For failing to sufficiently tow the regime line on canonizing Kirk, ABC pulled comedian Jimmy Kimmel from the air, and the Washington Post fired columnist Karen Attiah. Dozens of workers — including teachers, airline workers, professors, and post office employees — have been fired or placed on leave for online comments deemed wrongspeak about Kirk or his murder. Meanwhile, university administrations nationwide, from Columbia to the University of California, Berkeley, continue to model genuflection and complicity in firing, censuring, and expelling scholars and students for protesting Israel’s genocide.

Trump and his followers’ paranoid projections about a Soros-funded radical left fostered in the Marxist laboratories of U.S. higher education and represented by the Democratic Party are laughably delusional. The tragedy, though, is that while Trump’s chaotic and maximalist crackdown strategy aims to target centrist liberals alongside leftist activists as an imagined whole, there’s little promise that establishment liberal figures and organizations will act with the integrity and solidarity it takes to rebuff such attacks. To neglect to do so would be a grave mistake, morally and strategically, when clear lessons of collective defense are there to be learned. 

Trump’s conspiracy about a networked, well-funded greater left is a fiction; a united front against fascism shouldn’t be.

Correction: September 19, 2025, 1:12 p.m. ET.

This story previously referred to Trump’s first Inauguration Day in 2016. He was elected in 2016 and inaugurated in January 2017.

The post Trump’s Idea of the Criminal Left Is a Fiction. A Coordinated Defense Against His Fascism Shouldn’t Be. appeared first on The Intercept.

“I am not running to defund the police,” Zohran Mamdani said in late July, after visiting with the family of the slain police officer Didarul Islam. It was consistent with the stance he’s maintained throughout the New York City mayoral race. His campaign has remained focused on his signature issue—the city’s affordability crisis—and he has not run, in either his successful Democratic primary or the upcoming general election, on a platform of defunding the police.

This fact has not stopped Mamdani’s opponents, chiefly former Governor Andrew Cuomo (whom Mamdani defeated in the primary) and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (for whom the Trump administration has reportedly dangled job opportunities as incentives to leave the race) from dredging up his past support for the defund movement. In 2020, at the height of the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, Mamdani posted to social media that the NYPD was “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” and that we needed to “#DefundtheNYPD.” At the time, he was running for his current seat in the New York State Assembly. 

That he no longer supports defunding the police is not surprising; it has never been a popular position. Even in 2020, when the fervor around Floyd’s murder was its highest, support for reducing police funding only stood at twenty-five percent of the public nationwide; that dropped to fifteen percent by the next year. It would not be savvy to run on such a platform at this time. 

Mamdani’s opponents understand that defund is toxic, which is why they want to tie the mayoral frontrunner to his previous stance. As the Cuomo and Adams campaigns struggle to gain momentum, while Mamdani continues to max out his campaign contributions, they need Mamdani to appear too extreme for the general public. Cuomo has called Mamdani’s previously expressed views around policing “dangerous, literally dangerous.” Mamdani, backing away from those views, has called himself “a candidate who is not fixed in time.”

Related

Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats How Not to Take the Bait

It would be easy to become cynical about Mamdani’s backtracking, to see it as simply another example of a U.S. politician muting voices of dissent to gain foothold within electoral politics. And it is that. Mamdani should not have to back off from his previous — and well-founded — position to make himself electable. Police budgets are the only consistent growth areas in many local budgets, and their constant inflation does siphon resources from other important areas of civic life, while also creating a police state that terrorizes non-white, poor, and queer citizens. Reducing police budgets and allocating those dollars elsewhere is a modest request. Mamdani should be free to say as much. 

He is not, though, if his goal is to be elected mayor, since there is still no wide-reaching support for defunding the police as a policy. But if you look at his actual platform (not what Cuomo and Adams would have you believe is his platform), you’ll find that his goals for public safety still align with the goals of defunding the police—just without the defund part.

While his detailed platform does say “Police have a critical role to play” with respect to public safety, his proposals do not mention much of a role. There are sections on mental health, gun violence, hate violence, and victims’ services that outline things like violence interrupters, restorative justice models in schools, creating crisis residences, and other interventions that do not involve the police at all. The need to bolster those resources has been a major part of the message of the defund movement from the start: police are tasked with solving social problems that they are not equipped to handle, so instead of increasing their budgets and the purview of their duties, allocate those resources to more effective ideas. This model has shown significant results in places like Baltimore and Chicago, which have in the past year experienced historic drops in violent crime. It’s also been conveniently overlooked by the defund movement’s critics.

The rhetoric may not be there, but the substance of what the defund the police movement is after is alive in the Mamdani campaign. It would be nice if he were in position to run explicitly on that message, but he’s not in the world as currently constructed. However, even on this, I’m not ready to give myself fully over to cynicism. Think of one of Mamdani’s other controversial positions—his unwavering support of Palestinians, and an end to the genocide and apartheid to which Israel has subjected them for nearly eighty years. Even five years ago, holding such a position publicly might have barred him from getting elected to any office; now, it is a major factor in his appeal. 

That would not have happened without the decades of movement building that preceded this moment, and that is the main takeaway here for the defund movement: Present Mamdani may not be able to run a successful campaign now by calling for defunding the police, but push hard enough, and a future Mamdani absolutely will. 

The post Zohran Mamdani Won’t Defund the Police. The Movement Can Grow With Him Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

Farahi was taken to a detention center in Miami and then put on a government plane to Texas, bound for a different detention facility. Later, he was moved again, this time to Torrance County Detention Center: a bleak, privately run complex in the remote deserts of New Mexico, where recent reports describe sewage backups and a lack of clean drinking water. He’s been locked up there ever since.

Farahi, 50, is one of thousands who have been swept up by ICE since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. But this wasn’t the first time the U.S. government had backed him into a corner. Nearly 20 years earlier, in the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. officials tried to use the threat of deportation as leverage to turn him into an informant against his own community.

He refused. He wasn’t deported, and he never became an informant. For years after, he lived in the shadow of the immigration system, checking in with authorities, complying with every rule. Now, his lawyers argue, his detention is less about process than punishment. “Mr. Farahi’s detention appears to be purely punitive,” they wrote in a recent habeas petition in federal court in New Mexico.

Farahi’s story stretches across two decades of American security policy, linking the FBI’s post-9/11 informant machine to today’s immigration dragnet. His treatment has long raised questions about whether the FBI weaponized immigration enforcement as a tool of coercion and what it means when saying no to the government results in a life sentence in limbo.

“We Want You to Work With Us”

Farahi’s fight with the government began in November 2004. As he walked home from evening prayers in North Miami Beach, he saw two men waiting outside his apartment. They introduced themselves as FBI agents.

The country was still in the grip of post-9/11 panic, and the agents wanted information about two men who had attended Farahi’s mosque: José Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber” accused of plotting to set off a crude radioactive device, and Adnan El Shukrijumah, a Saudi national who became a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda after leaving the U.S.

Farahi said he’d talk, but only in the open. He wanted his congregation to know why he was speaking to the FBI. The federal agents wanted something very different: secrecy.

“We want you to work with us,” they told him. “We’ll give you residency. We’ll give you money to go to school.”

“I can’t,” he told them. To him, becoming an informant would have meant betraying his faith community. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” Farahi said to me years ago, when I first asked him about his encounter with the FBI. “That’s where the problem is.”

The agents left, but the pressure never did. In 2007, at a routine asylum hearing, ICE agents gave Farahi an ultimatum: Drop his asylum claim and agree to be deported, or face federal terrorism charges. The subtext was clear: There was another way out — become an informant.

A Policy of Coercion

I first wrote about Farahi’s case in 2009, when it was one of the earliest public examples of the FBI using immigration to recruit Muslim informants. At the time, the FBI denied the practice outright. As other journalists uncovered similar cases, the FBI continued to deny. 

Years later, FBI agent Terry Albury leaked internal documents to The Intercept, confirming what Farahi’s case had suggested: using immigration as leverage wasn’t a rogue practice, but rather had been codified in the pages of the FBI’s internal policy manuals. 

FBI agents were even tasked under official policy with helping deport informants who were “no longer suitable for use” — an acknowledgment that the policy goal wasn’t transactional so much as coercive. 

Related

When Informants Are No Longer Useful, the FBI Can Help Deport Them

For years, FBI agents and their informants probed and surveilled Farahi, always coming up short on evidence. The FBI recruited a con man named Mohammed Agbareia to work as an informant in Florida and tasked him with befriending Farahi. “Farahi was a person of interest,” Agbareia later told me. 

While working for the FBI, Agbareia was bilking Muslim communities nationwide using a stranded-traveler scam — calling mosques and claiming he was on his way, something had happened, just needed some money to get there — but FBI agents allowed his scams to continue and protected him from deportation, because he was useful for spying on Muslims like Farahi.

The unrelenting investigations of Farahi never yielded charges. Farahi has never been credibly accused of terrorism, much less indicted. The government’s ongoing suspicion appears to stem, in part, from a single FBI report from 2007 alleging that Farahi was a Muslim Brotherhood recruiter — based entirely on the claims of a source in Trinidad who offered no evidence.

His actual record consists only of a 2003 case for driving on a suspended license.

In 2020, an immigration court judge denied Farahi’s asylum claim but ruled that he could not be deported to Iran, his country of citizenship. As a Sunni Muslim, Farahi faces likely religious persecution in majority-Shia Iran, the judge determined.

The ruling left Farahi in immigration limbo. Under a so-called “withholding of removal” order, he could not be sent to Iran, but he also had no legal status. He could remain in the U.S. on the condition that he check in with immigration officials every six months. He complied, without fail, for years.

The Crackdown

Then came Trump’s immigration crackdown. Detention has ballooned to record levels, with more than 60,000 people now held in immigration detention, compared to a high of fewer than 40,000 under former President Joe Biden. 

The Trump administration has implemented sweeping new tools: expedited removals, raids in sanctuary cities, and deportation flights to third countries — even where individuals lack ties. ICE has struck deals with Uganda, Eswatini, Rwanda, and South Sudan to accept deportees, while others were dropped at El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, built for gang crackdowns and now housing migrants under a U.S. agreement to pay El Salvador $6 million.

Related

ICE Said They Were Being Flown to Louisiana. Their Flight Landed in Africa.

Lawyers for men deported to Eswatini say they were delivered into prisons without due process, just as happened in El Salvador — signs of how the U.S. government’s deportation practices are outsourcing indefinite confinement to countries with poor human rights records. 

Farahi is now trapped in this sprawling, multinational system of deportation and detention. After three decades in the U.S., he’s facing the greatest risk of being forced out. Where to? For months, no one would say. “He hasn’t been told where they would send him, if anywhere,” his lawyer, Kenia Garcia, told me.

This week, that silence broke. ICE told Farahi they were asking Kuwait to take him. Farahi grew up there, but he was never a citizen, and he knows Kuwait could simply send him on to Iran — the very danger he fled when he arrived in the U.S. at 19 years old.

ICE declined an invitation to comment on Farahi’s case.

What began for Farahi with a knock on his door in 2004 has ended with another in 2025, and what began as a counterterrorism strategy has evolved into a system that wields detention and deportation not as tools of security, but as punishments in their own right.

The post This Imam Refused to Be an FBI Informant. Now ICE Wants to Deport Him. appeared first on The Intercept.

Help for Gaza is now supposed to fall from the sky. Planes from Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates drop parachuted bundles of food and supplies meant to save lives when all other options are lost. They then crash into streets, rooftops, and tents, turning hope into panic. 

Every airdrop shows the cost of survival here, where daily life is threatened not by just hunger or lack of medicine, but also the very help meant to reach starving people.

This is the new reality of aid delivery in Gaza. As Israel’s siege approaches the two-year mark, on-the-ground access to food and other crucial supplies is mostly controlled by the Israel-backed and U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid sites have become shooting grounds where the Israeli army kills hungry civilians. On July 27, Israel announced the start of airdrops for humanitarian aid, promising “safe corridors” and relief from the crushing blockade. 

The aid has itself become a weapon in the literal sense: At least 124 people have been struck by falling aid packages since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, and 23 of them killed. The Intercept spoke to more than 10 people who were injured by or witnessed injuries from falling aid packages for this story.

“When those packages fall, they sound like bombs,” said Mariam, a 21-year-old witness to one of the first drops, recalling her father’s trembling voice. “We don’t know if they will save us or crush us.”

Related

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Head Boasts Success as Palestinians Starve

Sometimes the crates land on fragile rooftops, shattering tin and wood, sending splinters flying into narrow alleyways. Other times, they slam into flimsy tents: those last fragile sanctuaries for families uprooted by relentless bombardment. The cries that follow are not always relief; often they are pain — sharp and sudden.

In the Zawayda area, a prominent Gaza nurse Adi Nahid Qaran condemned the aerial drops, calling them “humiliation disguised as aid.” 

“This is not humanitarian help,” he said in a video posted shortly before his death. “If they can fly planes to drop aid, they could open the land crossings and let trucks bring real help.” 

Just days later, on August 4, Qaran was killed after being hit by a falling aid crate during an airdrop operation in Zawayda.

On a suffocating Sunday afternoon in Zawayda, I watched as one of these supposed lifelines from the sky turned into a nightmare on the ground. International airdrops landed in my crowded neighborhood, not an organized distribution zone. The sky opened, parachutes drifted down, and within seconds our community became a battlefield.

From my window overlooking the street, I heard the cries, the chaos, the neighbors shouting.

My friend Maimouna, a third-year multimedia student at the Islamic University of Gaza, was taking her online university exam when the silence of her room shattered.

“I was solving my exam questions, and suddenly I heard screaming, shouting, and gunfire everywhere,” she told me. “I couldn’t focus, the page froze, the questions stopped loading. I was shouting at my family, asking what was happening.”

From her backyard, she saw two massive bundles of aid — known locally as mishtah — fall into her neighborhood. One landed right behind her room, another by her uncle’s house.

“Strangers suddenly appeared in our yard,” she said. “They came with knives, screaming. My uncle’s brother-in-law was stabbed in the shoulder. Thank God it wasn’t worse.”

Her family managed to keep one box and gave another to displaced neighbors, while others were taken by force.

“It was pure terror,” she said. “My grandmother and father were sitting by the fire when a package dropped behind my room. I screamed: ‘Yamma! Yaba! Come quickly!’ My mother didn’t believe me at first. And all the while the exam kept running on the computer screen as if nothing was happening. The timer was moving, but I wasn’t Maimouna anymore. I wasn’t a student. I was just terrified.”

From my window, I could hear neighbors shouting to each other in panic.

“Cover the kids! Don’t let them near!” cried one woman.

“The mishtah is ours, we saw it first!” shouted a young man before others pushed him aside.

Another neighbor whispered in disbelief: “This is not aid. This is madness from the sky.”

These aerial drops are only a symptom of the deeper crisis: the siege itself. They are but a patchwork fix for a blockade starving Gaza’s people of essentials: food, medicine, fuel.

While governments and militaries parade their “humanitarian gestures,” thousands remain trapped, waiting for permission to receive more than mere scraps from the sky. Six thousand aid trucks stand idle outside Gaza, blocked by checkpoints.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has criticized the airdrops, with its commissioner-general noting that airborne aid delivery costs are “one hundred times higher” than land convoys. UNRWA has called to open land crossings immediately to prevent further loss of life and provide aid safely and effectively.

For Marah, a young woman in her 20s, the airdrop became a source of trauma when it struck her elderly father.

A man in his late 60s, fragile with age, sat quietly outside their home when the sky opened. A massive mishtah came tearing downward, its parachute tangled, its weight unstoppable.

“It fell right on my father,” Marah said, her voice shaking. “He’s an old man, he couldn’t run. He screamed and collapsed to the ground. For a moment, I thought I had lost him.”

Neighbors came rushing. Some tried to lift the heavy box off his back, while others lunged at it like wolves, clawing and pulling at the ropes to tear it open.

“I was screaming at them: ‘Please, help my father first!’” she recalled, tears in her eyes. “But many didn’t even look at him. They were ripping at the box while he was still pinned under it.”

The scene, she said, was not one of aid but of savagery. “Men were shoving each other, their eyes wild with hunger. Some had knives, some had sticks. They were like predators circling prey. And my father was under that box, gasping for breath, while they fought over rice and flour.”

Eventually, a few men managed to drag the box aside, pulling her father free. His body was bruised, his back and legs swollen, his spirit broken. Since then, he refuses to sit outside.

“He tells me every day, ‘The sky is not safe. The sky will fall on me again.’ He doesn’t believe this is aid. He says it is punishment. And honestly, I cannot disagree.”

Marah’s voice grew heavy as she finished her story. “We needed food, yes. But not like this. Not at the cost of my father’s life. Not at the cost of our dignity.”

My brother Mazen almost became a victim of the very aid that was supposed to save lives. Walking home on Sunday, he saw a massive aid bundle plummet at terrifying speed, smashing into a tree just meters away.

“It felt like death could fall on you at any moment,” he said. “I was walking, minding my own business, and suddenly this giant package exploded beside me. If it had landed differently, I wouldn’t be here.”

But what came after was just as frightening. Dozens rushed to the site, fighting with knives, fists, and even bullets.

These airdrops, far from easing hardship, have caused civilian casualties, injuries, and destruction of precious shelters, the Gaza Ministry of Interior said in a warning issued on August 6. Families already stripped of everything now face new dangers from the very aid meant to sustain them.

Related

“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

International humanitarian organizations voiced sharp concern. A Doctors Without Borders representative called the airdrops “a futile initiative that smacks of cynicism.” They insisted these aerial deliveries fail to meet Gaza’s urgent and growing needs.

As reported by Al Jazeera, a box of humanitarian supplies fell on a child, Muhannad Zakaria Eid, in the Nuseirat refugee camp located in central Gaza and killed him. If the airdrops continue unchanged, more deaths are sure to follow.

From my window, I heard a neighbor mutter bitterly: “You see your neighbors turning into enemies in front of you. The siege made people desperate, but now they’re stabbing each other over rice and flour. This is not aid — this is another weapon against us.”

Another man, his voice trembling, said, “I swear, this thing could crush a child any moment. Who will be responsible then?”

The post Airdropped Aid Is Crushing Starving People in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.