The operator tells the employee at Stewart Detention Center that there are no ambulances available.

“It’s already out — on the last patient y’all called us with,” the operator says.

“Is there any way you can get one from another county?” the caller asks.

“I can try,” the operator says. “I can’t make any promises, but I can try.”

The call was one of dozens from the ICE detention facility seeking help with medical emergencies during the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, a sustained period of high call volume from the jail not seen since 2018.

Emergency calls were made to 911 at least 15 times a month from Stewart Detention Center for six months in a row as of November 1.

Like the call concerning a detainee’s head trauma from April 1, emergency dispatch records show that the ambulance service in Stewart County, Georgia, where the detention center is located, has had to seek help outside the county more than any time in at least five years — including three instances in November alone.

The burden on rural Stewart County’s health care system is “unsustainable,” said Dr. Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention.

“People are going to die if they don’t get medical care,” said Zeidan. “All it takes is one person who needs a life-saving intervention and doesn’t have access to it.”

This continuous barrage of calls for help with acute medical needs reflects increased detainee populations without changes to medical staffing and capacities, experts told The Intercept. Shifting detainee populations, they said, may also be exacerbating the situation: Older immigrants and those with disabilities or severe health issues used to be more frequently let out on bond as their cases were resolved, but ICE’s mass deportation push has led to an increase in their detention.

With the number of people in immigration detention ballooning nationwide, health care behind bars has become an issue in local and state politics. In Washington state, for instance, legislators passed a law last year giving state-level authorities more oversight of detention facilities. A recent court ruling granted state health department officials access to a privately operated ICE detention center to do health inspections. (A spokesperson from Georgia’s health department did not answer questions about the high volume and types of calls at Stewart.)

911 calls from Stewart included several for “head trauma,” such as one case where an inmate was “beating his head against the wall” and another following a fight.

Impacts of the situation are hard to measure in the absence of comprehensive, detailed data, but they extend both to Stewart’s detainee population — which has increased from about 1,500 to about 1,900 during the Trump administration — and to the surrounding, rural county. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

The data on 911 calls represent what Dr. Marc Stern, a consultant on health care for the incarcerated, called “a red flag.”

Illness and Injuries

Data obtained by The Intercept through open records requests shows that the top four reasons for 911 calls since the onset of the second Trump administration have been chest pains and seizures, with the same number of calls, followed by stomach pains and head injuries.

Neither written call records nor recordings of the calls themselves offer much insight into the causes of injuries. One cause of head traumas, though, could be fights between detainees, said Amilcar Valencia, the executive director of El Refugio, a Georgia-based organization that works with people held at Stewart and their families and loved ones.

“It’s not a secret that Stewart detention center is overcrowded,” he said. “This creates tension.”

Issues such as access to phones for calls to attorneys or loved ones can lead to fights, he said.

Another issue may be self-harm, suggested testimony from Rodney Scott, a Liberian-born Georgia resident of four decades who has been detained in Stewart since January. One day in September, Scott, who is a double amputee and suffers high blood pressure and other health issues, said he saw a fellow detainee climb about 20 stairs across a hall from him and jump over a railing, landing several stories below.

“He hit his head,” Scott said. “It was shocking to see someone risk his life like that.”

He doesn’t know what happened to the man.

On another day, about a month earlier, Scott saw a man try to kill himself with razors.

“He went in, cut himself with blades, after breakfast,” Scott said. “There was a pool of blood,” he said. “It looked like a murder scene.”

In addition to interpersonal tensions, large numbers of detainees in crowded conditions can strain a facility’s medical capacities.

“There’s a mismatch between the number of people and health workers,” said Joseph Nwadiuko, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who researches the immigration detention system. “People are becoming sicker than what the system can handle. The complexity of patients is above and beyond what Stewart is prepared for.”

CoreCivic, the company that operates Stewart, is currently advertising to hire a psychiatrist, a dental assistant, and two licensed practical nurses at the detention center.

In response to a request for comment, Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, said, “We are grateful to the emergency responders who provide medical assistance when deemed necessary by the health care professionals at SDC, however, we have no control over the local EMS staffing levels, and their decisions to refer calls to outside jurisdictions.”

The company did not respond to questions about medical staffing at Stewart.

“A Lack of Accountability”

The situation at hand also potentially impacts the residents of Stewart County, a sprawling tract of about 450 square miles in southwest Georgia. About 28 percent of the county’s nearly 5,000 residents, two-thirds of whom are Black, live below the poverty line.

The county has two ambulances, and there are no hospitals. The nearest facilities equipped to handle calls coming from the ICE detention center are in neighboring counties about 45 minutes to the east or nearly an hour north. County Manager Mac Moye, though, was nonplussed when presented with the data on the sustained high volume of 911 calls from the detention center.

“We are in a very rural, poor county, with very low population density,” he said. “We’ve always had slow responses compared to, let’s say, Columbus” — the city of 200,000 nearly 45 miles north where one of the nearest hospitals is located.

“We run two ambulances; most surrounding counties have one,” he continued. “We have more money, because of Stewart” — the detention center.

The ICE facility paid nearly $600,000 in fees in fiscal year 2022, the latest year for which data is available, or about 13 percent of the county’s general fund of $4.4 million.

Moye, who worked at the detention center before taking his current job, also called into question whether 911 calls were always made for legitimate reasons. The county manager did not comment on whether his own constituents are increasingly more at risk in situations like the one on April 1, when no ambulance was available to answer a call from the detention center.

“It’s still faster than if we had one ambulance,” he said. “We wish we would never have to call another county, and deal with every call on our own.”

As for the conditions facing detainees, particularly given the types of emergencies the detention center calls 911 about, Moye said, “It’s difficult to comment on what’s happening over there, because we don’t have any control over it.”

That points to a larger problem reflected in the increased calls.

“Obviously, a prison is a prison — it’s blind to the rest of the world,” said Nwadiuko, the Penn professor. “There’s a moral hazard for conditions that don’t occur elsewhere, a lack of accountability.”

“Do No Harm”?

“Seizures, chest pains — are they preventable? Why is it happening?” said Stern, the doctor who consults on carceral health care, commenting on the high volume and types of calls. “Could mean that access or the quality of care is poor. It’s a red flag if the number is high or increasing, and it indicates that investigation is required.”

In September, Democratic Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons expressing concern over the 14 deaths in ICE custody this year, including Jesus Molina-Veya, whose June 7 death at Stewart has been reported as a suicide.

The letter sought answers to a series of detailed questions by October 31 about the care Stewart and other ICE detention centers are providing to detainees. Warnock and Ossoff’s offices said they have not received a reply. Ossoff also released an investigation in October called “Medical Neglect and Denial of Adequate Food or Water in U.S. Immigration Detention” that included information gathered at Stewart.

Zeidan, the Emory professor, noted that there’s little information about what happens to ICE detainees once they reach a hospital.

“What happens after detainees are admitted?” Zeidan said. “Are they discharged? Are they getting comprehensive, follow-up care?”

Nwadiuko echoed the concern.

“Are doctors and hospitals using good judgment regarding when going back to a detention facility doesn’t mean ‘a safe discharge’?” he said. “We have an oath: ‘Do no harm.’ That may conflict with an institution’s desire to minimize a detainee’s time outside the gates of the detention center.”

Update: December 15, 2025
This story has been updated to include a statement from CoreCivic received after publication.

The post ICE Prison’s 911 Calls Overwhelm a Rural Georgia Emergency System appeared first on The Intercept.

At first glance, the photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage outside New York’s City Hall suggest nothing other than a joyous public celebration. Taken on December 17, 1964, just one week after the civil rights leader had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. is seen formally receiving King as though he were a visiting head of state. Later that day, Wagner awarded the city’s Medallion of Honor to King, praising him as “a great American who has returned home after a great triumph abroad.”

But a few details about the photographs — published here for the first time — make clear that the person behind the camera harbored a far less flattering impression of King. That’s because the prints are held in the New York City Municipal Archives files of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, the New York Police Department’s former political intelligence unit, where I found them while researching for my new book, “Police Against the Movement.”

On their face, the images are mundane. King emerges from a car, greeted by two men in suits. In another, King stands with family and confidants, including his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King; his mother, Alberta Williams King; and his friend and adviser Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington. In a third shot, Coretta shakes hands with Wagner.

One thing unites the images: None of the 14 individuals who appear at close range betray the slightest hint of recognition that their picture is being taken; no one looks directly at the camera. Their lack of acknowledgment suggests that they may not have realized they were being photographed — certainly not by police. But their placement in the Bureau of Special Services “Red Squad” files make the NYPD’s sentiments clear. (These files were first discovered by city archivists in a Queens warehouse in 2016, more than three decades after the landmark Handschu federal court settlement mandated they be made available to the activist subjects of NYPD surveillance, and two years after a lawsuit by historian Johanna Fernandez called for their release. Today, the NYPD “Red Squad” files represent the most significant collection of publicly accessible police intelligence records in the United States.)

For the NYPD, Wagner’s public flattery of King mattered much less than the unfavorable comments made just one month earlier by the nation’s premier law enforcement official, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Speaking to a group of reporters in November 1964, Hoover condemned Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country,” skewering the civil rights leader for his suggestion that the Bureau only reluctantly investigated segregationist attacks on civil rights activists. Hoover’s comments may seem quaint in our current era — in which politicians launch profanity-laced fusillades at their opponents and the president of the United States posts AI-generated videos depicting him as a fighter pilot bombarding No Kings protesters with raw sewage — but that insult succeeded in further delegitimizing King and the civil rights movement in the eyes of law enforcement officials. Wagner might have overtly praised King, but police in New York covertly surveilled him. They could care less what their mayor thought, because they worshipped the FBI director as the nation’s top cop.

Just as Donald Trump demonizes leftist organizers today as domestic terrorists, both federal officials and local police in the South and North condemned civil rights activists as rioters and insurrectionists. Just as Trump falsely disparaged Zohran Mamdani as a communist in recent months (before opting not to repeat the charges in a surprisingly friendly meeting with the mayor-elect in the Oval Office), Southern officials slandered King as a communist. And just as Trump’s Justice Department is indicting his political enemies on legally specious mortgage fraud charges, state officials in Alabama unsuccessfully indicted King on felony criminal charges for income tax perjury in 1960.

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But the NYPD — nor any other local police department — did not need to wait for encouragement from the feds to spy on King and his allies. A common misperception is that local police were content with physically assaulting protesters while leaving the sophisticated work of surveillance and slander to Hoover’s FBI. But police were far more experienced in spying on and sabotaging activists than we have acknowledged — so much so that the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program against “Black extremists,” launched in August 1967, should be recognized for federalizing efforts that local police departments had already undertaken to disrupt the civil rights movement.

Long before Hoover denounced King as a liar, the NYPD issued a surveillance report on the civil rights leader’s visit to Harlem in 1958, with other memos to follow in the early 1960s. Rank-and-file organizers supporting King received unwanted attention as well. As they prepared for the March on Washington — now widely celebrated across the political spectrum as a shining moment for democracy thanks to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — attendees were monitored by the NYPD, as they were by the police departments of Birmingham, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

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Police agencies did not limit themselves to surveilling civil rights activists. They also deployed the weaponry of deception and disruption in hopes of crippling the movement. When Herb Callender, a Congress of Racial Equality chapter leader, confronted police violence with street protests in New York in 1964, BOSS dispatched the undercover spy Ray Wood to infiltrate the Bronx organizer’s inner circle. Wood ultimately coaxed his newfound activist friends into a ludicrous scheme to perform a citizens’ arrest on Wagner, the mayor, at City Hall — which got Callendar arrested and landed him in the Bellevue psych ward.

Then, in December 1964, just three days before BOSS photographed King, Wood made contact with associates of the tiny Black Liberation Front collective. In short order, he encouraged three activists loosely connected with the group to join him in an outlandish plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Wood prodded the men for weeks and talked one of them into taking into his possession a box of dynamite purchased with department funds, which triggered the activists’ swift arrest. Glowing headlines detailing Wood’s efforts appeared on front pages across the country, and coverage included a photograph of Wood receiving a promotion for the work, his face carefully turned away to protect his identity. At that point, the FBI assumed control of the case, and federal prosecutors indicted the men on felony charges. All three were convicted on the basis of nothing more than Wood’s word and the box of dynamite, and each served time in federal prison.

The prosecution of these activists was a watershed moment where the feds and NYPD recast the broadly tolerated liberal civil rights movement that they secretly spied on into the dangerous radical extremist movement they publicly indicted on felony charges — all of which clearly anticipated not only COINTELPRO, but also today’s coordinated local–federal attacks on so-called antifa activists and domestic terrorists.

These surveillance tactics are of more than just historical significance. Local police continue to deploy weapons of political espionage against movements for justice to this day. In Trump’s first term, police in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago surveilled the same racial justice activists disparaged by the president.

There’s little reason to think that such investigations will cease. Protesters against ICE and Israel’s war on Gaza draw continued law enforcement monitoring — not least of all in New York, where the outgoing mayor has echoed the president’s criticisms of protests against ICE as attacks on law enforcement, and local organizers have increased their calls for the NYPD to disband its Strategic Response Group, a secretive unit that continues the work of BOSS by attending protests and conducting surveillance.

Words matter. Federal authorities who vocally attack protesters telegraph to law enforcement agents that they would be mistaken to not monitor and probe activists. Insults and slander give way to surveillance and invasions of privacy, which in turn lay the foundation for harassment by public officials, and in some cases result in criminal proceedings.

Time will tell which actions the federal government will take against the activists that they have recently branded as terrorists. But we can’t lose sight of the actions of the local law enforcement agencies that look to the feds for guidance — and we must recognize that the untruthful words of a president, no matter how far-fetched, have real-life consequences for the activists on the receiving end.

The post Newly Unveiled Photos of MLK Jr. Show Depth of NYPD’s Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

What the students didn’t know at the time was that the University of Houston had contracted with Dataminr, an artificial intelligence company with a troubling record on constitutional rights, to gather open-source intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. Using an AI tool known as “First Alert,” Dataminr was scraping students’ social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.

This is the first detailed reporting on how a U.S. university used the AI technology to surveil its own students. It’s just one example of how public universities worked with private partners to surveil student protests, revealing how corporate involvement in higher education can be leveraged against students’ free expression.

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This is the final installment in an investigative series on the draconian surveillance practices that universities across the country employed to crack down on the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments and student protests. More than 20,000 pages of documentation covering communications from April and May 2024, which The Intercept obtained via public records requests, reveal a systematic pattern of surveillance by U.S. universities in response to their students’ dissent. Public universities in California tapped emergency response funds for natural disasters to quell protests; in Ohio and South Carolina, schools received briefings from intelligence-sharing fusion centers; and at the University of Connecticut, student participation in a protest sent administrators into a frenzy over what a local military weapons manufacturer would think.

The series traces how universities, as self-proclaimed safe havens of free speech, exacerbated the preexisting power imbalance between institutions with billion-dollar endowments and a nonviolent student movement by cracking down on the latter. It offers a preview of the crackdown to come under the Trump administration as the president re-entered office and demanded concessions from U.S. universities in an attempt to limit pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses.

“Universities have a duty of care for their students and the local community,” Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. “Surveillance systems are a direct affront to that duty for both. It creates an unsafe environment, chills speech, and destroys trust between students, faculty, and the administration.”

At the University of Houston, the encampment was treated as an unsafe environment. University communications officials using Dataminr forwarded the alerts — which consist of an incident location and an excerpt of the scraped text — directly to the campus police. One alert sent by Dataminr to a University of Houston communications official identified a potential pro-Palestine incident based on chat logs it scraped from a semi-private Telegram channel called “Ghosts of Palestine.”

“University of Houston students rise up for Gaza, demanding an end to Genocide,” the chat stated. First Alert flagged it as an incident of concern and forwarded the information to university officials.

According to Dataminr’s marketing materials, First Alert is designed for use by first responders, sending incident reports to help law enforcement officials gather situational awareness. But instead of relying on officers to collect the intelligence themselves, First Alert relies on Dataminr’s advanced algorithm to gather massive amounts of data and make decisions. In short, Dataminr’s powerful algorithm gathers intelligence, selects what it views to be important, and then forwards it to the paying client.

A follow-up public records request sent to the University of Houston returned records of more than 900 First Alert emails in the inbox of a university administrator, only in April 2024.

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The AI company has been implicated in a number of scandals, including the domestic surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and abortion rights protesters in 2023. The Intercept reported in April that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine demonstrations in LA. First Alert is one, but not the only, service that Dataminr offers. For newsrooms to corporate giants, Dataminr’s powerful algorithms power intelligence gathering and threat response for those willing to pay.

“It’s concerning enough when you see evidence of university officials scrolling through individual student social media, that’s going to chill people’s speech,” said Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But it’s a whole other level of concern when you start contracting with these companies that are using some kind of algorithm to analyze, at scale, people’s speech online.”

The University of Houston and Dataminr did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While the University of Houston leaned on Dataminr to gather intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine, it is just one example of the open-source intelligence practices used by universities in the spring of 2024. From screenshots of students’ Instagram posts to the use of on-campus surveillance cameras, the documents obtained by The Intercept illustrate how the broadening net of on-campus intelligence gathering swept up constitutionally protected speech in the name of “social listening.”

University communications officials were often left to do the heavy lifting of hunting down activists’ social media accounts to map out planned demonstrations. Posts by local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters of upcoming demonstrations were frequently captured by administrators and forwarded on. In other cases, university administrators relied on in-person intelligence gathering.

One set of communication in the documents suggests that at one point, University of Connecticut administrators were watching the students in the on-campus encampment sleep. “They are just beginning to wake up. It’s still very quiet. Just a couple of police cars nearby,” a UConn administrator wrote to other officials that April.

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U.S. universities, faced with the largest student protest movement in decades, used open-source intelligence to monitor the student-led movement for Palestine and to inform whether or not they would negotiate, and eventually, how they would clear the encampments. Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, situated the development as part of the broader corporatization of U.S. higher education.

“ Institutions that are supposed to be for the public good are these corporate products that make them into vehicles for wealth extraction via data products,” Tucker told The Intercept. “Universities are becoming more like for-profit branding machines, and at the same time, digital capitalism is exploding.”

At UConn, the relationship between the corporate world and higher education led to a brief panic among university administrators. After protesters, including members of UConn’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a campus group called Unchained, blocked access to a military aircraft manufacturing facility about 25 miles from campus, administrators went into a frenzy over what the military contractor would think.

“Ok. The P&W CEO is pretty upset with us about it right now and is pressing [University President] Radenka [Maric] for action,” wrote Nathan Fuerst to Kimberly Beardsley-Carr, both high-level UConn administrators. “Can you see if UConn PD can proactively reach out? If we can determine that no UConn Students were arrested, that would be immensely helpful.”

Fuerst was referring to a contractor for the Israeli military called Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of the $235 billion company formerly known as Raytheon — and a major UConn donor. Both UConn and Pratt & Whitney denied that the request occurred, pointing out that the military contractor has no CEO. Fuerst, Beardsley-Carr, and Maric did not respond to requests for comment.

Beardsley-Carr, in her own email sent four minutes after Fuerst’s, repeated the request: “As you can see below, the President is getting pressure from the CEO of Pratt and Whitney.”

Whether the company made the request or if it was, as UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz told The Intercept, “a misunderstanding,” it’s clear from the communications that UConn administrators were concerned about what the weapons manufacturer would think — and sprang to action, gathering information on students because of it.

Pratt & Whitney has donated millions of dollars to various university initiatives, and in April 2024, the same month as the protest, it was announced that a building on campus would be rededicated as the “Pratt & Whitney Engineering Building.” A partnership between the school and the company received an honorable mention from the governor’s office, prompting a Pratt & Whitney program engineer to write in an email: “It’s wonderful! P&W and UCONN have done some great things together.”

After a flurry of emails over the Pratt & Whitney arrests, on April 25, the UConn administrators’ concerns were lifted. “Middletown PD provided me with the names of the 10 individuals arrested during the below incident. None of the arrestees are current students,” UConn Police Lieutenant Douglas Lussier wrote to Beardsley-Carr.

“You have no idea how happy you just made me,” Beardsley-Carr wrote back.

It’s not just UConn, but U.S. higher education as a whole that has a deep and long-standing relationship with military weapons manufacturers. Whether it is endowed professorships, “Lockheed Martin Days,” defense industry presence at career fairs, or private donations, the defense industry has a hold on U.S. higher education, especially at elite universities, which serve as training grounds for high-paying and influential careers.

“These universities are the epicenter, the home base, of the future generation of Americans, future policy makers,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. Policy Fellow. If universities “were so confident in Israel’s narrative and their narrative being the correct one,” Kenney-Shawa added, “they would let that debate in such important spaces play out.”

Some students who spoke with The Intercept emphasized that as a result of the surveillance they encountered during the protests, they have stepped up their digital security, using burner phones and limiting communication about potential demonstrations to secure messaging channels.

“ The campus is waiting and watching for these kinds of things,” said Kirk Wolff, a student at the University of Virginia who said he was threatened with expulsion for a one-man sit-in he staged on campus and expressed fear that university administrators would read his emails.

The surveillance had a “chilling effect,” in his experience, Wolff said. “ I had so many people tell me that they wanted to join me, that they agreed with me, and that they simply could not, because they were scared that the school would turn over their information.”

The University of Virginia did not respond to a request for comment on Wolff’s claims.

The surveillance detailed in this investigation took place under the Biden administration, before Trump returned to power and dragged the crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent into the open. Universities have since shared employee and student files with the Trump administration as it continues to investigate “anti-Semitic incidents on campus” — and use the findings as pretext to defund universities or even target students for illegal deportation.

Any open-source intelligence universities gathered could become fair game for federal law enforcement agencies as they work to punish those involved in the student-led movement for Palestine, Mir noted.

“A groundwork of surveillance has been built slowly on many college campuses for decades,” he said. “Now very plainly and publicly we have seen it weaponized against speech.”

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How Corporate Partnerships Powered University Surveillance of Palestine Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

Founded in the wake of 9/11 to facilitate information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, fusion centers like Ohio’s Statewide Terrorism Analysis and Crime Center, or STACC, have become yet another way for law enforcement agencies to surveil legally protected First Amendment activities. The 80 fusion centers across the U.S. work with the military, private sector, and other stakeholders to collect vast amounts of information on American citizens in a stated effort to prevent future terror attacks.

In Ohio, it seemed that the counterterrorism surveillance hub was also keeping close tabs on campus events.

It wasn’t just at Ohio State: An investigative series by The Intercept has found that fusion centers were actively involved in monitoring pro-Palestine demonstrations on at least five campuses across the country, as shown in more than 20,000 pages of documents obtained via public records requests exposing U.S. universities’ playbooks for cracking down on pro-Palestine student activism.

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As the documents make clear, not only did universities view the peaceful, student-led demonstrations as a security issue — warranting the outside police and technological surveillance interventions detailed in the rest of this series — but the network of law enforcement bodies responsible for counterterror surveillance operations framed the demonstrations in the same way.

After the Ohio fusion center’s tip-off to the upcoming demonstration, officials in the Ohio State University Police Department worked quickly to assemble an operations plan and shut down the demonstration. “The preferred course of action for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass and other building violations will be arrest and removal from the event space,” wrote then-campus chief of police Kimberly Spears-McNatt in an email to her officers just two hours after the initial warning from Ohio’s primary fusion center. OSUPD and the Ohio State Highway Patrol would go on to clear the encampment that same night, arresting 36 demonstrators.

Fusion centers were designed to facilitate the sharing of already collected intelligence between local, state, and federal agencies, but they have been used to target communities of color and to ever-widen the gray area of allowable surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long advocated against the country’s fusion center network, on the grounds that they conducted overreaching surveillance of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement to environmental activism in Oregon.

“Ohio State has an unwavering commitment to freedom of speech and expression. We do not discuss our security protocols in detail,” a spokesperson for Ohio State said in a statement to The Intercept. Officials at STACC didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

The proliferation of fusion centers has contributed to a scope creep that allows broader and more intricate mass surveillance, said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Between AI assessments of online speech, the swirl of reckless data sharing from fusion centers, and often opaque campus policies, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Mir said.

While the Trump administration has publicized its weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against pro-Palestine protesters — with high-profile attacks including attempts to illegally deport student activists — the documents obtained by The Intercept display its precedent under the Biden administration, when surveillance and repression were coordinated behind the scenes.

“ All of that was happening under Biden,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, “and what we’ve seen with the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025 and Project Esther is really just an acceleration of all of these tools of repression that were in place from before.”

Not only was the groundwork for the Trump administration’s descent into increasingly repressive and illegal tactics laid under Biden, but the investigation revealed that the framework for cracking down on student free speech was also in place before the pro-Palestine encampments.

Among other documentation, The Intercept obtained a copy of Clemson University Police Department’s 2023 Risk Analysis Report, which states: “CUPD participates in regular information and intelligence sharing and assessment with both federal and state partners and receives briefings and updates throughout the year and for specific events/incidents form [sic] the South Carolina Information and Intelligence Center (SCIIC)” — another fusion center.

The normalization of intelligence sharing between campus police departments and federal law enforcement agencies is widespread across U.S. universities, and as pro-Palestine demonstrations escalated across the country in 2024, U.S. universities would lean on their relationships with outside agencies and on intelligence sharing arrangements with not only other universities, but also the state and federal surveillance apparatus.

OSU was not the only university where fusion centers facilitated briefings, intelligence sharing, and, in some cases, directly involved federal law enforcement agencies. At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where the state tapped funds set aside for natural disasters and major emergencies to pay outside law enforcement officers to clear an occupied building, the university president noted that the partnership would allow them “to gather support from the local Fusion Center to assist with investigative measures.”

Cal Poly Humboldt had already made students’ devices a target for their surveillance, as then-President Tom Jackson confirmed in an email. The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall,” a university building that students occupied for eight days, Jackson wrote. With the help of the FBI – and warrants for the search and seizure of devices – the university could go a step further in punishing the involved students.

In one email exchange, Kyle Winn, a special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco Division, wrote to a sergeant at the university’s police department: “Per our conversation, attached are several different warrants sworn out containing language pertaining to electronic devices. Please utilize them as needed. See you guys next week.”

Cal Poly Humboldt said in a statement to The Intercept that it “remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

“The pro-Palestine movement really does face a crisis of repression,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow. “We are up against repressive forces that have always been there, but have never been this advanced. So it’s really important that we don’t underestimate them — the repressive forces that are arrayed against us.”

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In Mir’s view, university administrators should have been wary about unleashing federal surveillance at their schools due to fusion centers’ reputation for infringing on civil rights.

“Fusion centers have also come under fire for sharing dubious intelligence and escalating local police responses to BLM,” Mir said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “For universities to knowingly coordinate and feed more information into these systems to target students puts them in harm’s way and is a threat to their civil rights.”

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How Universities Used Counterterror Intelligence-Sharing Hubs to Surveil Pro-Palestine Students appeared first on The Intercept.

In California, the Law Enforcement Mutual Aid Fund sets aside $25 million annually to let law enforcement agencies work across jurisdictions to fight natural disasters and other major emergencies. In a briefing obtained by The Intercept, acceptable LEMA use cases are listed as fires, storms, flooding, earthquakes, natural or man-made disasters, and “other extra ordinary events requiring emergency law enforcement mutual aid on a case by case basis.”

Leadership at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — part of the California State University public school system — was able to tap these funds to bring outside law enforcement onto campus, The Intercept found in an investigative series on the university playbook for crushing pro-Palestine protests. Among more than 20,000 pages of documentation The Intercept obtained via public records requests, email after email from April and May 2024 show chiefs of police and administrators in California’s public universities asking outside law enforcement agencies to enter their campuses and clear encampments.

As “Gaza solidarity” encampments popped up across college campuses in April and May 2024, Jodi Lopez, staff services manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services, informed the leadership of at least 30 public universities — including Cal Poly Humboldt — that if they were to require mutual aid assistance, LEMA would be available to reimburse their expenses, attaching a flyer that detailed eligible costs.

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Cal Poly Humboldt students first entered and staged a peaceful sit-in at Siemens Hall on April 22. According to the documents obtained by The Intercept, leadership at the university was promptly in contact with local police departments about bringing the demonstration to an end. That day, police in riot gear attempted to enter the building and clear out the protesters, but students held them off. In an incident that would go viral on social media, a student could be seen on surveillance footage hitting officers on their helmets with an empty plastic water jug. The cops eventually withdrew from the building, marking the start of what would turn into an eight-day occupation.

Enlisting the help of Humboldt County’s Office of Emergency Services, the Eureka Police Department, and the University of California Police Department, Jackson’s email on April 25 requested assistance with “Reestablish[ing] control of university buildings and other property” and “eliminating the threat of domestic violent extremism and criminal behavior” on the part of the students — setting into motion the plan with which the cops ultimately cleared the hall. Ryan Derby, then head of the county OES, added in his mutual aid request that Cal Poly Humboldt would require the assistance of a total of 250 law enforcement officers, with “personnel for entry team trained in tactical room clearing and arrest and control.”

In a statement emailed to The Intercept, Cal Poly Humboldt spokesperson Aileen S. Yoo confirmed that the university “formally requested from the state Law Enforcement Officer support through the LEMA request process” and noted that “Cal Poly Humboldt remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

A Cal OES spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Intercept that “Local law enforcement who provided that support to Cal Poly Humboldt were reimbursed through the LEMA Fund program.” The statewide office “is committed to protecting Californians and supporting local partners in times of crisis, regardless of political views or affiliation,” the spokesperson wrote.

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If there were ever a social contract between students and administrators at U.S. universities that allowed for the operation of insulated, on-campus police departments thought to be better attuned to the needs of students, that contract was shattered when universities nationwide brought in outside law enforcement to crush the student-led movement for Palestine, argued civil liberties advocates who spoke with The Intercept. A year before the Trump administration would step up efforts to use police power against public protest, the Palestine solidarity encampments made universities a test case for the tolerance of dissent — one that universities overwhelmingly failed.

“ I don’t even know if we can talk about the trust that students have in their universities. But if there was any trust, you ruin it when you bring in outside police to harm your own students,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

As Jackson stated in his email, Cal Poly Humboldt’s budget was at stake. “Three large events and a dozen smaller events on campus have been canceled. Athletic events have been either canceled or moved off main campus,” he wrote. “If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

University and outside law enforcement would go on to arrest 25 students at Siemens Hall. Alongside over a dozen wildfires — including the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed more than 6,000 homes — the raid is currently listed on the LEMA website as an example of a case for which funding can be requested.

While it is far from a secret that outside law enforcement agencies were involved in the clearing of university pro-Palestine encampments, these terms of operation — and compensation — have never previously been reported on in detail. Communications between university officials and the outside agencies show that the process took shape in the smooth functioning of bureaucracy, with polite, breezy exchanges preceding violent crackdowns and raids.

As the pro-Palestine demonstrations continued, the practice of bringing outside law enforcement officers onto campus became increasingly normalized in the University of California system. On May 5, 2024, Lamine Secka, chief of police at UC San Diego, wrote to the California Highway Patrol: “Attached, please find a request for assistance to clear out a protest encampment on the UC San Diego campus.” CHP, acting with UCSD and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, would enter the campus in full riot gear on May 6, arresting dozens of student protesters. (It was not clear if LEMA funds covered that deployment, and UCSD did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

The presence of outside law enforcement officers on campus fundamentally alters the power dynamics of a protest, said Ahamed of Palestine Legal. “ These police officers who are trained in violent tactics, you bring them to campus and they’re deploying those tactics against students. That is really dangerous,” she said.

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In some cases, that meant radicalizing students who watched militarized police forces haul their classmates away. In others, it meant injuring peaceful protesters — especially at the University of California Los Angeles, according to students and faculty who spoke with The Intercept. At UCLA, university administrators tapped state emergency services funds to bring in outside law enforcement officers and arrest countless students, with many injured. UCLA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“They were showing us the level of militarization within these departments,” Dylan Kupsh, a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UCLA, told The Intercept. “Even since the encampment, they’ve been more and more present and bringing in other departments.”

In the face of this repression, said Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at Council on American-Islamic Relations, “This generation of college students is extraordinarily brave and principled. They’ve been willing to sacrifice education and career to stand on a very simple human value that genocide is wrong, that occupation is wrong, that apartheid is wrong.”

The pro-Palestine encampments presented university leaders with a publicity crisis, forcing them to choose between options ranging from letting the peaceful protests play out to quashing them with the full force of the police. Universities almost exclusively chose the latter. With encouragement from the state government, California public universities responded to the student protests less like dissent and more like a natural disaster.

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

With his brothers and a friend, Khalil set off on foot. On the walk over, the 26-year-old could hear intermittent shelling, but the promise of food, he felt, was worth the risk. “Hunger has become stronger than fear,” said Khalil, who agreed to speak on the condition that his last name not be published. 

When they arrived around 6:30 a.m., a huge crowd was gathering at the aid point in Netzarim. “People start heading there before sunrise because the lines get impossibly long,” Khalil said. Thousands had clearly gotten the same tip. The sheer amount of desperate, hungry people was overwhelming. Khalil said, “I hadn’t eaten properly in days. I was dizzy and weak.”

The distribution site was run by a new aid provider active in Gaza for only a few weeks. Khalil quickly noticed military presence. “We saw the Israeli soldiers in full military uniform standing next to their armored vehicles. We arrived knowing the place was dangerous. But, there was no clash, no threat to them,” Khalil said. (The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories bureau did not respond to written requests for comment for this article.) 

He stood in line with hundreds of others. There were children, women, and elderly men. “Some were barefoot, some had been waiting since the night before,” he recalled.

As his group inched closer to the point where they hoped they would be able to grab a parcel of items, gunshots rang out. Khalil ran for his life.

“They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians,” he said. “The bullets were chasing us as if we were targets on a shooting range, and not just hungry people. We scattered under a hail of bullets. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.”

Khalil survived that quest for food — alive to starve another day instead. But at least 36 Palestinians did not, and 207 more were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Since Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas in mid-March, more than 875 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food.

Reporting from inside Gaza over the last few months, The Intercept observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death. Amid the war, Israel has rendered Gaza inaccessible to the foreign press; American journalist Afeef Nessouli accessed the Strip by volunteering as an aid worker for a medical nonprofit and reporting in his off-hours.

Usually during war, the distribution of medical care and food to a besieged population would not be administered by any party waging war against it, much less by an illegally occupying military. And in most situations, aid operations would closely involve established organizations already active in the area.

But that’s not the case in Gaza. Israel has effectively banned the biggest and longest-running aid group in the region: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. And by gutting the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, a critical funding vehicle for aid groups including UNRWA, U.S. President Donald Trump has strangled international aid in Gaza.

Israel and the U.S. have instead rolled out a new scheme centered around a fledgling U.S.-based nonprofit that operates alongside the same Israeli military responsible for killing more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children in the last two years. 

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With a few small exceptions, all aid reaching Gaza since May has moved through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established in Delaware in February. The organization has received tens of millions from the U.S. to distribute aid in Gaza — and, reportedly, some $100 million from an unnamed country. GHF did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Since it started operations, the number of locations in Gaza where residents could receive aid has plummeted from around 400 to four sites.

“Sometimes only one hub is actually operating,” said Hanya Aljamal, the senior project coordinator at the aid group Action for Humanity, who is based in Deir al Balah. Sometimes, Aljamal said, the sites are closed for security reasons, other times for maintenance. Khalil corroborates this: “I went a few days ago and it wasn’t open.” He says now he checks the GHF’s Facebook page, which informs people of the schedule. Aljamal says she believes “they operate semi-daily for only two hours a day.”

Arriving in Gaza in late March just as Israel broke the ceasefire, The Intercept witnessed firsthand what happened to Gaza’s most vulnerable after the U.S. defunded USAID and UNRWA and turned those agencies’ work over to the Israeli military and GHF.

Famine has been a problem in Gaza since the early days of the war. But when Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire on January 19, 2025, access to goods became easier. “Meat, vegetables and chicken — and even snacks — were reachable, albeit at a slightly expensive price,” Aljamal said. “But we had options.” 

When the holy month of Ramadan began on February 28, it wasn’t hard to find a simple meal of rice or lentils for dinner, or labneh and za’atar for suhoor before fasting for the day. 

But on March 2, Israel cut off food imports to Gaza when it imposed a blockade. On March 18, Israel shattered the ceasefire when it restarted its campaign of airstrikes. Even after Eid, which marked the end of the Holy Month, one meal a day remained standard practice — if not a luxury. 

At the time, community kitchens like Shabab Gaza were running low on food. But they were still delivering what they could to areas the Israeli military referred to as “red zones”— swaths of land Israel has evacuated and banned aid from entering, such as Khan Yunis. By spring, 70 percent of Gaza was considered a “red zone.”

Shabab Gaza, “the youth of Gaza” in Arabic, was making meals of rice so people could break their fast at sundown. Inside a makeshift kitchen housed in a tent, the men, fasting themselves, worked in groups to cook the rice in vats. They packaged it quickly to deliver to the surrounding area, but neighbors also showed up with pots and pans, ready to grab the food for their families, or ready to eat themselves.

There were about 170 operational community kitchens before the crossings closed in early March. Just two months later, dozens had ceased operating.

The blockade halted the entry of vital goods for months, resulting in scarcity and price hikes. It was made worse by the resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas, which restricted access to domestic produce “because of new evacuation orders from the north, Rafah, and areas in Khan Yunis where new crops were cultivated,” Aljamal said.

At the market, produce was fresh but limited. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and sometimes potatoes were for sale, grown on the shards of Gazan farmland remaining. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that Israel has destroyed 83 percent of Gaza’s agricultural cropland and restricted access to some of what remains, rendering less than 5 percent of cropland “available for cultivation.”

“It used to be that three kilos of these onions were just $3,” an older woman said in her makeshift kitchen in eastern Khan Yunis. By April, an onion cost a dollar apiece. Flour became incredibly expensive, with a single bag selling for hundreds of dollars. Because nearly every bank branch and ATM remain inoperable in Gaza, people cannot find cash to pay for even a single bag of flour. They are reliant on an unregulated network of cash brokers to get money for daily life with commissions hovering around 40 percent.

Even domesticated chickens have been laying fewer eggs than usual, one international aid worker said. “Food isn’t available for them, neither are supplements or animal feed that provide stuff like calcium, which is essential to egg production,” the worker said. And like humans, chickens also experience stress. The Israeli military’s bombs and quadcopters are loud. 

As of July, OCHA reports that 100 percent of the population in Gaza was projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity. That includes 1 million people facing “emergency” levels of food insecurity, and 470,000 facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity. 

“I have lost nearly 37 kilos,” said Basel, one of the men at Shabab Gaza’s community kitchen. He showed pictures of himself from 2023, back when he used to weigh 247 pounds. Basel is bald with blue eyes, with a 6-foot, 2-inch frame. Now 165 pounds, he looks thin, his face gaunt. Several men showed pictures of this kind of transformation. They described the indignity of going hungry every day and how weakened they feel. 

“Look at what they are doing to us. We are so tired,” Basel explained. “By God, it has been almost two years, really we are so hungry,” he said.

Nessouli, the Intercept reporter, volunteered in Gaza with Glia, a medical nonprofit, from late March to early June. With other medical workers, he ate once per day — usually rice or lentils. Sometimes there would be tomatoes or peppers, occasionally canned tuna. During that time, he lost 12 pounds.

People begging for food at the market, rushing international aid workers’ cars on the seaside road, or even knocking on doors looking for flour became commonplace.

“Now we are reduced to one meal per day,” Aljamal, the aid worker, explained, which usually consists of “a variation of the same thing: lentils.” Lentils can take the form of soup or falafel, be steamed, or cooked into a gravy. But sometimes, Aljamal said, the sole meal of the day consists of “bread, plain bread.”

UNRWA was set up in 1949 to provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Originally, it was intended to provide jobs on public works projects and direct relief. It grew to offer education, health care, and social services to wide swaths of Palestinian society, even serving more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the diaspora. 

The Palestinian Authority has been a recipient of UNRWA’s services and support as it has governed the West Bank since 1993 and Gaza until the U.S.-monitored election of 2006, in which Hamas gained power.  

At its height, UNRWA employed over 30,000 staff, 99 percent of whom were Palestinian. Most of UNRWA’s funding came from European countries and the United States, but this largely disappeared after Israel accused UNRWA employees of participating in the October 7 attacks. (A U.N. investigation cleared most of the accused UNRWA workers but found that nine of the 13,000 people who worked for the organization in Gaza may have participated in the attacks.) 

USAID also once provided financial support to the Palestinian people for various development and humanitarian projects. Since 1994, the United States has steered more than $5.2 billion in aid to Palestinians. This funding dried up after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised in March to cut USAID’s foreign grants by 83 percent before shuttering it entirely on July 1. 

Ending USAID, a Cold War tool of soft power founded in 1961 as “an independent executive branch agency responsible for administering foreign aid and economic development assistance outside the US,” has been a signature policy of Trump’s second administration. For decades, the agency has played a key role in treating HIV/AIDS and in providing lifesaving care to LGBTQ+ people, including in Gaza. One study estimates the USAID cuts will result in the deaths of 14 million people by 2030.

Over the decades, most international aid to Gaza has been run through either UNRWA or USAID partners, though Qatar too has been a key funder, providing over $1 billion in reconstruction funds and stipends for poor Palestinians between 2014 and 2019. 

Much of the Strip’s economic activity has been reliant on aid infrastructure, with UNRWA specifically playing a critical role in the distribution of food even before the war began.

“UNRWA has been the backbone that held Gazan society together,” Aljamal said. “As a child I went to UNRWA schools and was offered the best possible education available with the smallest of resources. When me or any of my siblings got sick or needed medical attention, we rushed into subsidized UNRWA clinics that even provided us with the needed meds, too. When it comes to food, lots of refugee families relied on their three-month dry ration distributions,” which consisted of “flour, cooking oil, sugar, rice, lentils, chickpeas per family member for three months.”

For years, this program helped ensure food security in the region. “We often held great pride in the fact that wherever you went and however bad it had gotten, you wouldn’t possibly sleep without food,” she said.

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Community kitchens also played a critical role in aid distribution in Gaza. Glia’s head of mission, Moureen Kaki, a Palestinian American, moved from Texas to Gaza more than a year ago to help; she never left. She also volunteers at Shabab Gaza in Khan Yunis. 

Kaki, who switches breezily throughout her day between Palestinian Arabic and English with a slight Texas lilt in her voice, notes that when she arrived, community kitchens across Gaza were producing 250,000 meals a day, feeding about 800,000 people — about 45 percent of the Strip’s population. Back then, community kitchens were able to reliably source food via donations and USAID. But now, it is extremely difficult to operate.

Today, community kitchens still exist, but their capacity has dropped from 250,000 meals a day to about 25,000, Kaki says, because they simply cannot source supplies.

The current famine, she says, is “the worst I have seen, hands down.” 

World Central Kitchen — founded by chef José Andrés and one of the most recognized food distributors in Gaza, and whose workers were killed in a 2024 Israeli airstrike — ceased operations in May after it ran out of supplies; it resumed operations recently. Smaller mutual aid organizations like the Sameer Project have continued to churn out as many meals as they can, even after their camp coordinator Mosab Ali was killed. 

Shabab Gaza’s capacity dropped from 15,000 meals a day to 3,000 in June — and by July had to stop operations because rice became too expensive. The group hopes to resume as soon as possible.

As long-standing aid providers languish in Gaza, Israel and the United States have embraced a new approach: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

According to the New York Times, Israeli officials, military leaders, and businesspeople began discussing the concept of an Israeli-backed food distribution system in December 2023, and had brought a former CIA agent-turned-private security contractor on board by the summer of 2024. The new program was announced on May 19, 2025, as a U.S.-led initiative, with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee saying it was “wholly inaccurate” to characterize it as an Israeli plan. By June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the initiative had in fact originated in Israel. 

Unlike prior aid distribution systems, GHF planned to use a small number of distribution hubs in southern Gaza that would be secured by private U.S.-backed contractors, with the Israeli military keeping watch “at a distance.” The aid would be prepackaged, filled with a hygiene kit, medical supplies, and food rations. Each meal was budgeted to cost only around $1.30 each.

Soon after it launched, officials said the GHF system would attempt to screen people for involvement with Hamas by using facial recognition or biometric technology, violating a core tenet of addressing hunger: that no political litmus test can be imposed for access to human rights like food and water. 

The United Nations rejected the new U.S.-backed distribution plan and sayings that it did not meet its long-held principles of “impartiality, neutrality and independence.” The U.N. aid chief said the new system would force further displacement, expose people to harm, and restrict aid to one part of Gaza. Oxfam and 240 other nongovernmental organizations called for immediate action to end the Israeli distribution scheme.

In late June, Israeli soldiers corroborated what Palestinians had been claiming about the GHF aid distribution sites: Commanders explicitly ordered soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians. Massacres were a result of soldiers doing what they were told to do.

Video obtained by Afeef Nessouli

One video shows thousands of people crowded all around at GHF distribution site in Rafah, according to Al Jazeera. The phone camera pans to the left, and the sound of gunshots hitting a mound of earth about 200 meters in front of the crowd is piercing. The video shows sand kicking up in a whirl upward from the bullets as people crawl on their knees trying to dodge the gunfire. 

“Imagine if Toronto was starving,” Dorotea Gucciardo hypothesized at a press conference at the Canadian Parliament in June. Gucciardo is the director of Glia, the NGO Nessouli volunteered with in Gaza, and with whom he and reporter Steven Thrasher have also worked to deliver antiretroviral medication into Gaza since reporting on AIDS in the Strip in January. 

In this Canadian analogy, Gucciardo said, “The U.N. system would deploy over 1,300 distribution sites. The GHF model? Ten. In Montreal, the U.N. would open 850 sites, while GHF’s version? Six.”

“And in Gaza, the U.N. had a well-maintained system of 400 aid sites,” she said. “GHF has replaced those with only three.” 

Glia was founded in 2015 with a focus on providing low-cost medical supplies using 3D printing technology, beginning with a stethoscope design. Over the years, its services have expanded. Since 2017, the group has rotated doctors, nurses, and other personnel into Gaza to support local health care workers. 

Glia doctors operating in Gaza’s incredibly damaged health care system have been treating malnourished patients throughout the war. Since GHF began operating on May 26, “20 to 50 Palestinians have been killed per day at the aid distribution sites,” Gucciardo explains. They are treating an ever-rising number of malnourished patients injured waiting for food. “Everybody my medical team treats is skin and bones,” Gucciardo said. 

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Gucciardo called the switch to the GHF program an engineered starvation. “Aid is distributed by gunpoint by American mercenaries. It is inhumane, degrading, dangerous, and it violates every principle of humanitarian law,” she says.

The AP has reported that GHF contractors have shot live ammo at aid sites, allegations that GHF denies. GHF has also denied that multiple violent incidents have even occurred near their aid distribution sites, regularly blames outside agitators for the incidents it does acknowledge, and stated that “GHF remains focused on its mission: to safely, quickly and effectively feed as many people as possible, every day.”

When GHF’s original executive director, American veteran and entrepreneur Jake Wood, announced he was stepping down after just a couple of months, one reason he cited was because it was impossible to fulfill GHF’s “plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

“From the outset, they were placed in active red zones — especially in southern Gaza, in Rafah,” said Majed Jaber, a Palestinian volunteer emergency room doctor who has worked at several hospitals in the southern part of Gaza. 

“At Nasser and the Red Crescent hospitals, where I worked during those distributions, we regularly received 50 to 100 wounded people in a single day. Dozens arrived already dead or died shortly after,” he said. “Every other day, the number would spike. The injuries were horrific. Limbs blown off by high-caliber bullets. Vital organs pierced — hearts, aortas, lungs. We saw far too many headshots to ever call it random.” 

Tarek Loubani, a Canadian doctor in Gaza and the medical director of Glia, observed a similar pattern of wounds in those killed or injured at GHF distribution sites. “Today, I saw patients with gunshots to the head, gunshots to the neck … the gunshots to the head and neck are almost always targeted. Usually shot by snipers,” he said. 

When there are shots to other parts of the body, Loubani explained, it’s usually from “a machine gun being used to shoot on the crowd.” For its part, GHF acknowledges the dangerous proximity of the Israeli military to its distribution centers, writing on Facebook, “Our dear precious residents of Gaza, We ask you not to be near our centers between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m., for your safety, due to the possibility of the IDF conducting military operations in the area.”

Amal, a trans woman who lives in Gaza City, sent The Intercept a picture of her bandaged arm on WhatsApp in early June. Amal gave The Intercept a pseudonym for safety. 

“Do you see what happened to me?” Amal said in her voice note. Her voice was trembling and angry, but still soft. 

“Yesterday, I went to the GHF distribution point to pick up some aid to get a bag of flour,” she said. “I finally got a bag after a really hard time, I was exhausted. And then after all of that, thieves stole my bag and stabbed me with a knife.” 

Hunger is painful, Amal said. She complained of joint pain, stomach pain, and a lack of concentration. “I faint and fall,” said Amal, who stands 6 feet tall and weighs just 119 pounds. “I do not want anything, I only want to eat.” 

Despite the Trump administration axing thousands of USAID awards (and firing the accompanying officers who managed these funds), GHF does not seem to lack for funds. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the State Department is considering giving GHF an additional $500 million. Zeteo reported that GHF requested $30 million dollars from USAID.

The group’s social media accounts regularly publish accusations against international aid groups and journalists. GHF has denounced the U.N. and Oxfam for standing “by helplessly while their aid is looted,” and allege that The Associated Press’s “Middle East bureau has sadly devolved into a propaganda vehicle — amplifying unverified claims, omitting critical context, and publishing narratives that serve a designated terrorist group.” Its belligerent posts have a Trumpian quality, down to the use of all caps (“let’s go through the history of how we got here in the first place. … HAMAS IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION WITH AN ACTIVE PROPAGANDA ARM”) and are marked with denial of any problems with their approach (“Scenes like this prove the GHF model is working”).

On June 17, reports emerged that Israeli tanks had killed over 50 Palestinians as they were waiting for aid trucks in Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Strip. On July 16, over 20 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution site in southern Gaza. Most of the victims were reported to have died in a stampede. Many Palestinians in Gaza who have limited supplies refuse to go to the new aid sites. 

“We don’t go to GHF aid points because they’re death traps,” says E.S, a 28-year-old restrained to a walker because of complications due to his HIV status. “I can’t fight through the crowds because of my disability plus we all know the whole situation is messy,” he continues. “There is no line and there is no distribution method at all, they offload everything into a big arena, in fact, people have been comparing it to ‘Squid Game’ or ‘Hunger Games,’” E.S explains. “It becomes a battle because everyone is desperate for food.”

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The number of people reportedly killed by Israeli gunfire at GHF aid distribution sites continues to climb, as the people of Gaza face starvation. The Gaza Health Ministry has counted 1,021 people killed and another 6,511 wounded at GHF sites since the program was put in place, including at least 38 killed by Israeli fire this past weekend. A newborn baby died of malnutrition at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Saturday, and Palestinian journalists have been posting image after image of people dying of starvation.

More than 20 countries, including the U.K., France and Canada, released a statement Monday saying that “the suffering of civilians has reached new depths,” and calling for the war in Gaza to end now. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the statement continued. “We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.” 

On Monday morning, Israel also began a new military invasion of Deir al Balah, where Nessouli was based in June. As Israeli tanks moved into the dense area, packed with many thousands of displaced people, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a water desalination plant, killing five more people in the blast.

This story was supported with funding from the Pulitzer Center and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making. appeared first on The Intercept.

There is no longer as much fighting in the streets in this refugee camp outside Damascus, but it doesn’t feel like a new Syria here, where a diaspora community of Palestinians displaced over decades struggles to survive.

On paper, the prospects for Syria have vastly improved over the last six months. The country seems poised for an economic recovery after years of war and a half-century of rule by the Assad dynasty. On December 8, 2024 — “Day Zero,” as many call it in Syria — Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, forces chased Bashar al-Assad out of the country, ending an era of brutal dictatorship. In February, the European Union began easing sanctions against Syria, then lifted them entirely. Last month, in a surprise move prior to meeting in Saudi Arabia with Syrian Interim President Ahmed al-Shara, President Donald Trump announced his plan to lift U.S. sanctions that have been leveled against Syria since Jimmy Carter was president. Trump praised al-Shara — who fought against the United States in Iraq and was once imprisoned in Abu Ghraib — as a “young, attractive guy,” and a “tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”

News of the end of Syrian sanctions have been welcomed across the aisle in Washington and from Brussels to Ankara to Damascus. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani thanked the EU for its decision. Former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss said Trump’s decision was “the right move, which will aid desperately needed humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Syria.” The Economist’s article about the “euphoria” of the news is titled “One happy Damascus.”

People in Syria are certainly hopeful. A banker in Syria who spoke to Reuters described the lifting of sanctions as “too good to be true,” and a soap factory owner in Aleppo rushed to the square as soon as she heard the news. “These sanctions were imposed on Assad, but … now that Syria has been liberated, there will be a positive impact on industry, it’ll boost the economy and encourage people to return” she told AFP.

But what are the odds that what benefits investors will benefit the average person living in Syria?

After all, as United Nations Development recently warned, “nine out of 10 Syrians are living in poverty, and one in four is jobless.” The report ominously added that “40 to 50 per cent of children aged six to 15 are not attending school, and 5.4 million people have lost their jobs,” and $800 billion was lost during the war.

And then, there’s the issue of the people among Syria’s most marginalized residents: Palestinian refugees whose families have been impoverished for decades.

To understand what this period of enormous transition means for them, The Intercept spent a week in the Yarmouk refugee camp and observed the lives of three residents who lived or hailed from there in a loose, informal family: Salwa, a single young woman, barely out of adolescence herself, who is responsible for a brood of children she didn’t birth; Bilal, a young man who wants to build houses but can only find work dealing hash inconsistently; and Abu Tarek, an HTS soldier positioned to thrive in post-Assad Syria. All of their names have been altered to protect them from retaliation.

Salwa, 22, has lived in Syria her entire life. Her family is originally from Haifa, where she declares, “I will return the moment it is possible.” But she’s actually never been to Palestine. Home, for now, is a bombed-out building in Yarmouk, where she is sit al beit, or “lady of the house.”

It is her house, she explains, because she is the person supporting her family financially. After her parents left their daughters, Salwa found herself responsible for two younger sisters, ages 13 and 18. She also cares for a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old whose mom dropped them off a few months ago when she could no longer take care of them. (Why did their mother leave them? Maybe it is drugs, trauma, a man, or all three, Salwa says.)

Salwa wears a hijab, but only outside of her home. The only male guests who come over are related to her anyways, and they always ask, “Is everyone decent?” before entering. This evening, Salwa has sparked up a heater meant to be powered by gas. But now it’s fueled by burning plastic, with coals burning precariously on top for shai (tea). She has also set up a perilous bank of power strips, so everyone can charge their devices during the few hours of nightly state-supplied electricity. She then winds down with a nargileh (hookah) to her lips, as visitors come over to pass the time. They include her 25-year-old “uncle” Bilal, more like her big brother, and two friends including Heba, who has Down syndrome.

Heba immediately starts asking the men in the room questions about what what they like and dislike, sometimes teasing them. She flirts unabashedly. She enjoys listening to Shami Arabic music, and tonight she plays it loudly while showing off her dance moves. She says she loves to dance and makes everyone clap for her. The younger children jump up and down by her legs as she twirls with a sash around her waist.

A woman dancing in a room of men, related or not, wouldn’t have been appropriate during the more intense skirmishes in years past when groups of men in Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS might be too close to hear the music playing. The combat is done, but signs of those days of fighting are never far away. On one of the few walls still left standing of a partly destroyed building a few hundred feet away, graffiti reads la ilaha illAllah: “There is no God but God.” It’s a foundational Islamic declaration and common Arabic phrase said often in Syria. But these words are spray-painted in black and drawn inside a black circle —conveying that fighters and supporters of the Islamic State group are in the neighborhood. A few doors down is another ominous tag. It belongs to another Islamist militia, Jabhat al-Nusra, whose roots are from Al Qaeda. Over the last decade, Nusra rebranded to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel force that opposed and then pushed Assad’s regime out and took over the country.

The graffiti doesn’t faze Salwa. ISIS, she says, was an enemy to most people anywhere, but she “doesn’t mind an Islamist regime in theory.” That said, she thinks it is going to be tough to get Syrian women to stop wearing skirts.

It’s a welcome change from the Assad regime. “No group has suffered as badly during the war as we have in Yarmouk,” Salwa says. “Life is hell.” Women especially were not safe under Assad. She says she knows many girls who were harassed, raped, and even murdered. “If a soldier wanted you, even if you were married or he was married, he could do whatever he wanted … but,” she adds pointedly, “I am a girl who screams and fights.”

Until Assad was gone, she was afraid to speak of that violence — and prohibited even from posting pictures of the dilapidation she lived in, for fear of being disappeared.

Now, she says, it is fine to take pictures in Yarmouk. “I don’t feel afraid like I did before, 3adi [it’s OK].”

On another night, Salwa and a friend are cooking dinner in her makeshift kitchen, the kind of chore they enjoy doing together, like going to the market to find deals on baby formula. Salwa says she worked at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East for two months straight recently, where she cleaned, made coffee, and helped with odd jobs. She made the equivalent of about $500 in total, which was good money: about 10 times the average wage. But she hasn’t been able to get more work there, and with UNRWA’s future in doubt, she is trying to ration the money.

Sometimes her parents send her and her sisters some cash, but not much. And sometimes their cousins or aunties help them out, too. But day in and day out, it is Salwa who must feed at least six mouths, often more.

On this windy night in late January, when the cold air whips inside through the porous walls, Salwa decides to make waraq al anab, or stuffed grape leaves, and invite some family over. Her aunt is visiting from Lebanon with her cousin, and of course, her two sisters, two wards, and two friends from down the road are helping cook and enjoy the meal.

There is also supposed to be a guest of honor: Salwa’s cousin Abu Tarek, an HTS fighter — though he never showed up because he was working late.

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Salwa uses a plastic UNRWA sign as a tablecloth on the floor of the living room and starts piling plates and pita bread on top of the spread. Electricity and water are unstable, but fresh food is usually available. Her situation, she acknowledges, is much better than what is happening in Gaza. “Blockades are hell, those were the worst times,” she explains, thinking back to her childhood when food was harder to get. When conversation turns to Gaza, a visiting cousin says, “Thank God for this food.”

Though she’s happy Assad is gone, Salwa said they are still struggling to survive. She’s not feeling the optimism that others feel for Syria.

“I don’t actually have hope this country will be free,” Salwa explains. She says she lost hope in any leaders doing right by them — certainly not Donald Trump — and that she and the girls will probably remain scraping by. “Palestinians are always forgotten,” she said.

Yarmouk was founded in 1957, about a decade after the Nakba first pushed Palestinians off their land. At just 2.1 kilometers, Yarmouk was once home to approximately 160,000 people in 2011, according to UNWRA, “making it the largest Palestine Refugee community in Syria and an important commercial hub.” Long before it became a central site of the Syrian civil war with its refugee population held hostage as a pawn in battles between Syrian and foreign adversaries, it was a thriving place, sometimes referred to as a suburb of Damascus.

Before it was rubble, the camp was teeming with buildings, business, and schools inhabited by Palestinian families in exile. Unlike in Egypt, Lebanon, and occupied Palestine, a Syrian law “passed in 1956 that granted Palestinian refugees almost the same rights as Syrian nationals, particularly in the areas of employment, trade and military service.”

In 1963, the Ba’ath Party grabbed power in a military coup. “Palestinians in Yarmouk launched organisations to ‘resist’ the Israeli occupation of their homeland,” the BBC reported. “Thousands of youths joined newly established groups like Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Over the decades, young members of these groups died fighting, including when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.

In the 1980s, Yarmouk was the home of many Palestinian movements, including branches of the Yasser Arafat-led Fatah party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. “Hamas’s political leader Khaled Meshaal” also lived in Yarmouk, the BBC reported, “until he refused to endorse President Bashar al-Assad’s handling of the uprising against his rule.”

From the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Yarmouk was a hotly contested battle site within and beyond Syria. In July 2013, Yarmouk was cut off from United Nations aid, and its population dwindled to around 18,000 people. The blockade, The Guardian recounted in 2014, led to “acute shortages of food, medicines and other essentials.”

The Free Syrian Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have all fought in and around Yarmouk, thinning out its population, leveling most of its buildings, causing outbreaks of polio, and at times driving people to eat animal feed.

Meanwhile, the Assad regime and its proxy force, Hezbollah, also went to war against Yarmouk. In a 2014 report “Yarmouk under siege — a horror story of war crimes, starvation and death,” Amnesty International director of the Middle East and North Africa program Philip Luther wrote, “Civilians of Yarmouk are being treated like pawns in a deadly game in which they have no control.”

“Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialized in Yarmouk,” Luther wrote, with Amnesty accusing the Assad government of withholding food and electricity as war crimes.

A decade later, images of demolished Gaza are starting to look like Yarmouk — except Yarmouk has fewer people and life left in it. Even more of its structures are destroyed than in Gaza. In February 2025, the number of people in Yarmouk was approximately 15,300, with 80 percent being Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA.

“Brother, I am thinking of going back to the dark side and selling hashish,” Bilal says out loud to his cousin.

Bilal is a 25-year-old Palestinian Syrian. His teeth protrude when he smiles — and he smiles a lot. He is usually covered in dust and always wearing a baseball hat. His main line of work is repairing houses. Given the destruction of most of them in Yarmouk, there should be no shortage of work.

Yet even when he does work on houses, money is hard to come by. Sometimes he works a job and doesn’t get paid at all. 

And so Bilal sometimes sells hash. It doesn’t pay well, and it’s dangerous. But it’s easy work, and his friends had sources who could hook him up. The problem is that selling hashish is not lucrative or risk-free now that a theocratic group runs the government.

Bilal sleeps at his niece Salwa’s house as a means of protection for the girls. Just a few months before the fall of Assad, he explains, he and a Syrian friend, Oussama, had been imprisoned. It wasn’t for hash. “They accused us of killing Assef Shawkat,” Bilal says. At the time of his death, Shakwat was the Syrian intelligence chief and deputy defense minister; he also happened to be Assad’s brother-in-law. Shawkat was killed in July 2012 in a Damascus bomb attack allegedly organized by the Free Syrian Army coalition.

Incredibly, Bilal points out, he and Oussama were taken into custody and accused of having been 13-year-old assassins nearly 12 years later.

Then again, he notes, innocent boys and men from Sunni communities were routinely accused of terrorism under Assad on absurd charges. He and his friend say they were held in the notorious Mazzeh Jaweya prison, a military airport with Air Force intelligence barracks in Damascus. They remained in custody for several months before the revolution toppled the regime with shocking speed on December 8, 2024.

The night before Assad fled the country, Bilal says, he and his friend were among a group of prisoners moved to an execution room.

Military officers, he recalls, seemed panicked and were rushing to get rid of them that night for some reason. At the time, he didn’t know why. “I remember they moved us around 10 p.m. into the new room and we waited and waited,” he tells The Intercept.

Oussama, who stands around 6 feet tall with a heavy build, explains that as they were led to the chamber, he was “just preparing myself to die, really.” But by 4 a.m., both men were free. The Assad regime had fallen.

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As frightening as their experiences were at Mazzeh Jaweya, Bilal and Oussama say that there was a kind of incarceration which Syrians feared even more: the secret prisons hidden everywhere.

Even by the standards of their abduction, these black-site prisons made the young men feel like the regime and its army would justify a man’s abduction for any reason they drummed up — and no one would ever know where they had been disappeared.

One of those secret prisons, Bilal and Oussama believe, was in the basement of a house that a friend bought after the regime fell. Bilal has been helping on the repairs just a few kilometers from Yarmouk. The new owner said that the house’s basement had been used to detain people who passed through a military checkpoint up the road. He’d heard stories that it was cramped and that people could be held without charge — sometimes for months.

The Intercept accompanied Bilal and Oussama to the multi-level house, then down the stairs into the basement.

The heavy metal door, orange with rust, screeches when opened. At eye level, a small, rectangular slot with a sliding cover could allow a guard on the outside to peer in and bark orders.

Behind it, a corridor leads to several square rooms. The fetid air is thick with the smells of burned plastic, trash, and human waste. The floors are stained from an unknown liquid but had recently been cleaned. In one corner, a hole in the floor had served as a toilet. In three of the rooms, the walls are high; near the ceiling, ground-level windows are covered with wavy bars, preventing anyone from getting in or out. One dark room in the middle has no windows at all.

Bilal and Oussama leave the basement prison in silence and lock the door behind them.

“Yes, thank God the bastard fell,” Bilal exclaims, clearly shaken.

Still, he admits, he is also afraid of HTS. Shortly after he and Oussama exit the house, a hash dealer meets up with them to show them some product. The three boys roll up a few joints, sipped tea, and talk through the afternoon about money and how they could earn some. “This is harder than it used to be,” Bilal explains, pointing to the hashish. It wasn’t legal to be a dealer under Assad, but it is quite a different thing to be a dealer under a new Islamist regime. Despite any rosy outlooks from Western economists, Bilal says that “now the economy is worse than it used to be, and there is no work, no nothing. It is so frustrating.”

“It will be more dangerous to sell or even smoke hash now than it was before,” one of his friends agrees.

“The new regime is very strict, even though you can smoke with many of the guys who claim to be religious,” the other chimes in, laughing. “It isn’t forbidden in Islam, just looked down upon,” he clarifies.

A night later, a group of Alawites — a minority group of Syrians from which the Assads hailed — were raided in a neighborhood not too far away from where they’d been smoking. They were allegedly dealing hash.

Several were killed as HTS soldiers ambushed them; others were allegedly arrested.

In Yarmouk, the graffiti announcing the presence of groups like ISIS or Nusra were expressions of violent resistance to the Assad regime. But it’s a different piece of graffiti Syrians cite as the beginning of the revolution-turned-civil war. It’s known as the “Dara’a graffiti” incident. 

Dara’a is a small, largely agricultural community in southwestern Syria, near the borders of Jordan and Israel. In 2011, as Ahmed Masri, a Syrian man now living in the United States, told CNN, graffiti appeared in the town while he was a teenager: “At a school in town, someone had written on the wall: ‘It’s your turn now Doctor,’ referring to Assad, the ophthalmologist,” Masri said.

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“They needed to arrest someone,” Masri told CNN. “So they started to gather the names written on the walls, names students wrote years ago, and arrested those who were under 20 years old.” The boys were “held, beaten, had fingernails removed” and were “tortured for weeks.” Although eventually released, community support for them increased resistance — which in turn increased Assad’s punishment of Dara’a. 

Eventually, some of the boys joined the Free Syrian Army, which fought the Assadists.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported last year that there were “617,910 people whose death has been verified” over the 13 years since the Dara’a graffiti incident, an event often considered to have triggered the Syrian civil war.

The report was able to verify 507,567 of those “people since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution” by name and included more than “55,000 civilians who were killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”

During this same time, as Assad monopolized industry (and cut off aid and commerce to places like Yarmouk), dissidents were purged from official employment and pushed into the informal economy. This especially affected Palestinians, perceived to be at the margins of society anyway and aligned with resistance movements Assad found threatening. For people who had relied upon steady jobs in government or industry, the only available work was often only selling drugs, making crude weapons, or peddling to source black-market necessities, like food.

Climate change-fueled drought, which resulted in 80 or 90 percent reductions in water supply in different regions of Syria, led to more chaos and desperation — and allowed another weapon at Assad’s disposal in controlling the scarce water resources available to a thirsty, war-torn population.

By “Day Zero” last December, the relief from the House of Assad falling was palpable across Syria, after so many years of torture. And yet, for so many who lost so much, apart from the freedom from being tortured or disappeared, there has been little material change.

“When we would go out, it would be with hunting rifles, seizing weapons from Assad’s soldiers,” Abu Tarek recalls, between alternate sips from a cigarette and a cup of mint tea.

Abu Tarek is a 35-year-old Palestinian HTS fighter who grew up in Yarmouk. He wears HTS fatigues and a HTS cap backward; he has a thick beard and only one tooth. He smiles often, inserts the appreciation for God into nearly every sentence he speaks, and is never without a cigarette. He is both Bilal’s and Salwa’s cousin, and is visiting from Idlib, a city in northwestern Syria where he has been a rebel for years. Now he’s working with the new government.

The dinner Salwa was cooking in Yarmouk was supposed to be because Abu Tarek was in town and in his honor. But instead of coming over to eat with everyone, he was stuck at work planning the logistics of a forthcoming military camp.

“The operation” of taking down the Assad regime, he explains, “was planned by HTS for a long time but we were waiting for Day Zero to move.”

Abu Tarek had finished his mandatory service in Assad’s military around 13 years ago when the civil war began. “Seeing what happened in Dara’a, particularly the torture of children” led him to take up arms against the regime, he says. He and some of his Palestinian-Syrian friends in Yarmouk joined rebel groups that eventually fed into the Free Syrian Army. They would take the rifles and weapons they already had at home from their conscription to secretly ambush and kill Assad’s men, then steal their weapons to beef up their arsenal.

Eventually, Abu Tarek explains, the fighters he was working alongside with agreed that the Islamist militia called Jabhat al-Nusra seemed “cleaner and more organized” than the FSA. It has been important to Abu Tarek, a devout Muslim, that he fight for a Syria that would be governed by Sharia law because he believes that system would guarantee justice.

“It is the most important thing,” he says, “that Syria is guided by the law of God.”

When Abu Tarek’s son was just 18 days old, he took him to get vaccinated when a shell hit the clinic. His baby was pulled out of rubble but remained unresponsive. Abu Tarek was distraught and sure that his son had been killed. In grief, he found a shoebox that fit his tiny body, then read aloud prayers. He remembered looking down when his son miraculously took a breath. Abu Tarek bowed his head and immediately recited scriptures from the Quran to give thanks to the almighty who, to him, had just saved his baby’s life.

He lives with his wife and three children in a small apartment in Idlib, in Killi, a refugee camp built from the donations of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The buildings in his neighborhood sit atop a hill overlooking the city center and are a striking turquoise — as colorful as Yarmouk is gray.

Back when he lived in Yarmouk, the camp had been nearly destroyed by skirmishes between various rebel groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, as well by huge battles against the Assad regime. By 2017, an agreement was reached between rebels and Assad’s regime to evacuate fighters like him from Yarmouk to the rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest of Syria.

“We had to surrender and take buses up to the north,” he recalls. At the time, HTS controlled Idlib with around 30,000 fighters. He was drawn to the group because “HTS never treated Syrian-Palestinians differently.” HTS controlled border crossings with Turkey, along with swaths of land rich in petroleum, providing the group with significant income.

Since 2018, Abu Tarek and his family have stayed in Idlib, which is ruled as an Islamic caliphate. The roads are barely paved, and there are HTS soldiers everywhere. He has been lucky to rise the ranks, he says, because it has lifted him out of extremely dire conditions.

Areas within the Idlib province are still being developed, Abu Tarek explains, and, unlike under the Assad regime, it’s happening under a Sharia society. A new mall he frequents in Al-Dana has separate entrances for women and men, and restaurants with private areas where women in niqabs can eat without covering their face.

After Assad fled to Russia, Abu Tarek and other internally displaced people suddenly had new freedom to move about the country. He had been restricted to an area of about 50 kilometers during the latter part of the civil war, and it had been eight years since he had seen his parents.

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Abu Tarek believes, even as a Palestinian Syrian, that the most important thing right now to deal with is Syria. “One day God will open a path to liberate Palestine just like he did for us in Syria,” he said. Even as Israel illegally occupies large parts of Syria, Abu Tarek believes the new Syrian army could not engage Israel in a fresh war after coming out of a 13-year revolution. “It would be pure foolishness.” Al-Shara, the interim Syrian president who was also the leader of HTS, has “previously said that he does not want conflict with Israel.”

Now, Abu Tarek says, the biggest focus is building a country from scratch: “Bashar al-Assad’s regime drained the country of its wealth. Restoring it will not be a small task.

Having taken up arms on the winning side might work out well financially for Abu Tarek; so far, it has certainly worked out better for him than for Salwa or Bilal. Recently, he and his family have moved to an apartment in Damascus subsidized by the new government. He is being paid around $200 a month for directing logistics at a military training camp in the capital — about 10 times the average wage.

“The hope is for one united Syria,” he says, “governed by Islamic law, no more, no less, whatever Islam prescribes should apply to all of us on the same level. As for the economy,” he explains, “I know that our new leaders, God bless them, are working hard to solve the problems everyday people have right now.”

Is post-Assad Syria ascendant? Even as war spreads in the region — with Israeli and Iranian missiles crossing its skies — the consensus amongst western leaders seems to be that Syria’s future is prosperous and bright. But what about for its 25 million residents?

Things are certainly not very bright right now for the 2 million Alawites, the religious minority from which the Assads hailed. An ongoing series of mass killings of Alawites has occurred in Syria since December at the hands of the new government’s fighters. More than 1,300 people were killed in a spate of massacres in March alone. Many Alawites have fled to neighboring Lebanon. 

One Alawite man told The Intercept that al-Shara and “his terrorists want us dead, and they have now completely destroyed access to the economy for Alawites.” He believed there was no work for his people, and was sheltering in a mosque on the Lebanese border town of Massoudiyeh. Alawites need help so badly, he said, “We would take it from Israel even.”

For the more than 400,000 thousand Palestinians in Syria, the forecast is mixed. For those who joined HTS to take up arms against Assad, like Abu Tarek, they may stand a chance of enjoying the spoils of war and key roles in forging the nation’s new government. For those like Bilal and Oussama, who have few work prospects except for dealing hash and day laboring, their odds seem dim. For many of the 160,000 Palestinians of Yarmouk, now scattered across Syria, who depended on UNRWA as an economic engine, prospects seem precarious at best, especially as U.S. funding for UNRWA has been frozen since the Biden administration.

In Yarmouk, life goes on much as it has. People pass between bombed-out walls to share what little they have. Salwa cooks for her ragtag brood.

“Lifting the sanctions on Syria is a very good thing of course,” Salwa says in a voice memo. “But for Syria to raise Trump’s voice and so on, I do not like this at all,” she adds, because Trump had “imposed sanctions on us during his term, he is the one who imposed the wars on us, and to raise his picture in Arab countries as if this didn’t happen, I do not like this at all.”

“Even if they rebuild all of Syria,” she says, “Yarmouk will remain destroyed.”

The post Palestinian Refugees in Syria See Little Hope — Even After Assad appeared first on The Intercept.

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Rita Murad, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel and student at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, was arrested by Israeli authorities in November 2023 after sharing three Instagram stories on the morning of October 7. The images included a picture of a bulldozer breaking through the border fence in Gaza and a quote: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?” She was suspended from university and faced up to five years in prison.

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a “ChatGPT-like” arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas’s bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians within Israel and east Jerusalem for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp or sharing images from Gaza on their Instagram stories.

When the New York Times covered Murad’s saga last year, the journalist Jesse Baron wrote that, in the U.S., “There is certainly no way to charge people with a crime for their reaction to a terrorist attack. In Israel, the situation is completely different.”

Soon, that may no longer be the case.

Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military’s policies in Gaza. There is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, taken from his Columbia University residence and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. There is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts disappeared from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes officers allegedly for co-authoring an op-ed calling on university administrators to heed student protesters’ demands. And there is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia philosophy student arrested by ICE agents outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was scheduled for his naturalization interview.

In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed, in part, within the U.S. immigration system.

Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative emerges from long-standing collaborations between tech companies and increasingly right-wing governments eager for their wares. The AI industry’s business model hinges on unfettered access to troves of data, which makes less-then-democratic contexts, where state surveillance is unconstrained by judicial, legislative, or public oversight, particularly lucrative proving grounds for new products. The effects of these technologies have been most punitive on the borders of the U.S. or the European Union, like migrant detention centers in Texas or Greece. But now the inevitable is happening: They are becoming popular domestic policing tools.

Israel was one early test site. As Israeli authorities expanded their surveillance powers to clamp down on rising rates of Palestinian terrorism in the early 2010s, U.S. technology firms flocked to the region. In exchange for first digital and then automated surveillance systems, Israel’s security apparatus offered CEOs troves of the information economy’s most prized commodity: data. IBM and Microsoft provided software used to monitor West Bank border crossings. Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli security forces. Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems. The result was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible security threats. Increasingly, right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint.

With time and in partnership with many of the same companies, the U.S. security state built its own surveillance capacities to scale.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley preached a mantra of globalization and integration. It was antithetical to the far-right’s nationalistic agenda, but it was good for business in an economy that hinged on the skilled and unskilled labor of foreigners. So when Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from five Muslim countries and subjecting those approved for visas to extra screening in January 2017, tech executives and their employees dissented.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, joined demonstrations at the San Francisco airport to protest Trump’s travel ban. Mark Zuckerberg cited his grandparents, Jewish refugees from Poland, as grounds for his opposition to the policy. Sam Altman also called on industry leaders to take a stand. “The precedent of invalidating already-issued visas and green cards should be extremely troubling for immigrants of any country,” he wrote on his personal blog. “We must object, or our inaction will send a message that the administration can continue to take away our rights.”

Many tech workers spent the first Trump presidency protesting these more sinister entailments of a data-driven economy. Over the following year, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon employees would stage walkouts and circulate petitions demanding an end to contracts with the national security state. The pressure yielded image restoration campaigns. Google dropped a bid for a $10 million Defense Department contract. Microsoft promised their software and services would not be used to separate families at the border.

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But the so-called tech resistance belied an inconvenient truth. Silicon Valley firms supplied the software and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump’s policies. Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in 2015, becoming the bread and butter of ICE’s surveillance capacities by mining personal data from thousands of sources for government authorities, converting it into searchable databases, and mapping connections between individuals and organizations. By 2017, conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were becoming essential too, signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens’ and residents’ personal information.

Even as some firms pledged to steer clear of contracts with the U.S. security state, they continued working abroad, and especially in Israel and Palestine. Investigative reporting over the last year has brought more recent exchanges to light. Deals between U.S. companies and the Israeli military ramped up after October 7, according to leaked documents from Google and Microsoft. Intelligence agencies relied on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to host surveillance data and used Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to cull through and operationalize much of it, often playing direct roles in operations — from arrest raids to airstrikes — across the region.

These contracts gave U.S. technology conglomerates the chance to refine military and homeland security systems abroad until Trump’s reelection signaled they could do so with little pushback at home. OpenAI changed its terms of use last year to allow militaries and security forces to deploy their systems for “national security purposes.” Google did the same this February, removing language saying it wouldn’t use its AI for weapons and surveillance from its “public ethos policy.” Meta also announced U.S. contractors could use its AI models for “national security” purposes.

Technology firms are committed to churning out high-risk products at a rapid pace. Which is why privacy experts say their products can turbocharge the U.S. surveillance state at a time when constitutional protections are eroding.

“It’s going to give the government the impression that certain forms of surveillance are now worth deploying when before they would have been too resource intensive,” Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, offered over the phone last week. “Now that you have large language models, you know, the government may say why not store thousands of hours of conversations just to run an AI tool through them and decide who you don’t want in your country.” 

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The parts are all in place. According to recent reports, Palantir is building ICE an “immigrationOS” that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders — including what they look like, where they live, and where they travel — and monitor their location in real time. ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants’ social media accounts, and to track down and detain “antisemites” and “terrorists,” according to a recent announcement by the State Department. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a speech at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix earlier this month, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

 

It is important to remember that many of the propriety technologies private companies are offering the U.S. surveillance state are flawed. Content moderation algorithms deployed by Meta often flag innocuous content as incendiary, especially Arabic language posts. OpenAI’s large language model are notorious for generating hallucinatory statements and mistranslating phrases from foreign languages into English. Stories of error abound in recent raids and arrests, from ICE officials mistaking Mahmoud Khalil for a student visa holder to citizens, lawful residents, and tourists with no criminal record being rounded up and deported.

But where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically. We see this in Israel and Palestine, as well as other contexts marked by relatively unchecked government surveillance. The algorithms embraced by Israel’s security forces remain rudimentary. But officials have used them to justify increasingly draconian policies. The Haifa-based human rights organization Adalah says there are hundreds of Palestinians with no criminal record or affiliation with militant groups held behind bars because right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to search their phones and social media pages and label what they said, shared, or liked online as “incitement to terrorism” or “support of terrorism.”

Now we hear similar stories in American cities, where First Amendment protections and due process are disintegrating. The effects were nicely distilled by Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian Ph.D. student at Columbia who self-deported after ICE officials showed up at her door and cancelled her legal status. From refuge in Canada, she told the New York Times she was fearful of the U.S. expanded algorithmic arsenal. “I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare,” Srinivasan said, “where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety.”

It is frightening to think that all this happened in Trump’s first 100 days in office. But corporate CEOs have been working with militaries and security agencies to sediment this status quo for years now. The visible human cost of these exchanges may spawn the opposition needed to head off more repression. But for now, the groundwork is laid for the U.S. surveillance state to finally operate at scale.

The post U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home. appeared first on The Intercept.

A Discovery Channel program on scuba diving he’d watched made him especially worried about contracting decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends. Though Miller’s eyes, nose, and mouth would be covered by a respirator mask, he feared that air would enter his ears and prolong his death — or worse, keep him alive but unable to function. To avoid that risk, he said he asked some prison guards whether he could put tissues in his ears to block them. The guards told him it was above their pay grade and to take it up with the people in charge.

Miller, 59, had been forced to consider the possibility that things could go wrong. Research on killing humans with nitrogen gas — by pumping it through a hose into an industrial respirator mask — was extremely limited, and state officials refused to disclose how they developed the novel method. Alabama is the first and only state to use nitrogen for executions, and had done so just once before. Witnesses described the man, Kenneth Smith, writhing in “seizure-like movements” for two minutes, despite state officials promising he’d lose consciousness “seconds” after the gas started flowing and die after about five minutes. Even the son of the victim was startled by what he saw, telling the New York Times that it conflicted with what state officials had told him to expect. “With all that struggling and jerking and trying to get off that table, more or less, it’s just something I don’t ever want to see again,” he said. Afterwards, Alabama officials offered to help other states adopt execution by nitrogen. 

Leading up to Smith’s execution, one doctor had warned there was a chance the method might not kill him and would inflict such significant brain damage that he’d be left in a vegetative state. 

Miller insisted he’d rather die. “I don’t want to be a vegetable,” Miller told me several times in a thick Southern drawl as we sat across from one another in the dilapidated visitation room at Holman Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Atmore that houses Alabama’s death row and execution chamber. 

Miller didn’t have anything to worry about, state lawyers had said. Smith, they wrote in court documents, reacted so violently because he held his breath.

Miller said he had no plans to fight his execution. All he asked was that the state hold up its end of the bargain and give him a quick and peaceful death. Over the summer, he’d agreed to a settlement with the state to help ensure that would happen. The terms were confidential. 

Miller had faced execution before, and survived. 

Almost exactly two years ago, he sat in the same visitation room with his family and lawyers and said what he thought would be his final goodbyes. But he left the execution chamber alive after his executioners failed to establish an IV line for lethal drugs, despite poking him all over his body and hoisting the gurney vertically into the air to suspend him for 20 minutes. He was one of six people in the U.S., and one of three people in Alabama, to survive their execution during the modern death penalty era.

“It’s like déjà vu,” Miller said as he waited again for the state to execute him. Four family members and two lawyers had come to visit. He told me he was irritated that the state was putting them through another execution, and hoped they’d do it right this time. 

His visitors reassured him that everything would be OK. Miller’s brother, who worked as an EMT and firefighter for decades, had plenty of experience wearing a respirator and also witnessing death. “You’ll be just fine,” he told Miller. We all nodded in agreement. 

I would join two of Miller’s lawyers, his brother, sister, and sister-in-law to witness the execution. As we exited the prison around 4:40 p.m., a message brightly painted on an overhang to “Have a great day!” seemed to taunt us. We then loaded ourselves into a white corrections van that took us to a trailer, where we waited for the execution to begin. There, we sat passing the time with inconsequential conversation. Halloween decorations, Taylor Swift, and lawn maintenance were brief distractions from the reality that we were about to watch Miller die. 

If, as the state had suggested, all that Miller needed to do for a quick and painless execution was to not fight it — to willingly breathe in the lethal gas — then Alabama’s second nitrogen execution should have gone smoothly. Instead, once the nitrogen started flowing, we watched from the witness room as Miller thrashed and jerked on the gurney, shaking and pulling at his restraints. On the other side of the glass, John Muench, Miller’s spiritual adviser, stood inside the execution chamber feet away from Miller as he gasped for air.

Muench, who is also a physician, told me he’d seen plenty of death but said Miller’s looked more anguished than most. “We don’t see people jerking around like that while they’re dying normally,” he said. “His face was twisted and he looked like he was suffering.”

In the years leading up to his execution, Miller was adamant: He didn’t remember committing the crimes that had landed him in this situation in the first place. 

Like the majority of people on death row, Miller endured years of childhood trauma. He also came from a family with a long history of mental illness, according to a 2013 appeal that contained a detailed account of his upbringing. Miller’s great-grandmother once tried to kill her children and was committed to Bryce Hospital, Alabama’s psychiatric facility. Her son, Miller’s grandfather, was admitted to Bryce five times for illnesses such as paranoid type schizophrenic reaction and manic depressive psychosis. Of his sons, three had a history of severe mental illness. One of Miller’s uncles was in prison for murder. 

Miller’s father, Ivan, suffered from paranoia, and always thought that people were plotting against him or trying to harm him — including his own wife, who he thought tried to poison him. Ivan also heaped physical and psychological abuse onto Miller, who he claimed was not his child and called “little red headed bastard.” Family members say that Ivan regularly hit Miller and threatened him with knives and guns, sometimes even shooting bullets into the floors. On one occasion, Miller’s father threatened to take him and his brother out to the woods and see if God would intervene before he killed them. 

Despite Ivan’s abuse, Miller grew up to be a rule-follower and a hard worker. He avoided drugs and alcohol and held several jobs. Ivan, however, still bullied his son, telling him that he wasn’t masculine and calling him gay. Then in July 1999, his family began to notice that something about Miller seemed off. They would later say that Miller, then 34, talked to himself and daydreamed more frequently. Around this time, he also started suffering from constant headaches and ringing in his ears. 

On August 5, 1999, Miller drove to work at Ferguson Enterprises, a plumbing and HVAC supply wholesaler, in Pelham, a small city just south of Birmingham. When Miller’s boss, Johnny Cobb, walked into the building, Miller was holding a pistol. “I am sick and tired of people telling rumors on me,” said Miller, according to Cobb, who Miller told to leave the building. When Cobb returned, he saw that two of his employees, Scott Yancy and Lee Holdbrooks, had been shot to death. 

Miller then drove to a previous job at Post Airgas and asked for Terry Jarvis. “Terry you’ve been spreading all kinds of rumors around about me,” Miller said before shooting Jarvis several times, killing him, according to David Adderhold, the store manager, who then pleaded with Miller to spare him. Miller obliged and instructed him to leave.

Police stopped Miller as he drove south on I-65 and arrested him without incident. His pistol, the murder weapon, sat on the passenger seat. When police subsequently interrogated him at the Pelham police station, Miller asked, “I’m being charged with something? … I don’t understand what you’re saying,” according to his appeal. He later said he thought his co-workers had started a rumor he was gay. 

There was no question that Miller had committed the murders.

Still, the state’s psychologist who evaluated Miller said that he had no memory of the shootings and there was a chance that he may have lost touch with reality and dissociated.

Despite this possibility, Miller’s court-appointed lawyers failed to mount a defense during his trial and did little to convince the jury to spare his life because he was mentally ill. Still, some jurors thought he should’ve been shown mercy. He was sentenced to death by a vote of 10–2. (Alabama and Florida are the only states that don’t require all jurors to agree to send someone to death row. Approximately 6 out of every 10 prisoners on death row in Alabama were sentenced to death by a split jury, according to a 2023 report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.)

Later, Miller’s appellate lawyers would argue that his death sentence was unconstitutional. They retained a psychologist who concluded that Miller suffered from PTSD with dissociative features, a common diagnosis for people who have experienced significant trauma. Like the state’s expert, she concluded that Miller was experiencing a dissociative episode at the time of the shooting. 

Even as he waited to be executed, Miller didn’t recall what he had done. After I sat down with him on the morning of his execution, I asked him what he wanted the world to know.

“I didn’t do anything to be in here,” he told me. “If the judicial system had done its job, I would not have been convicted.” 

He elaborated, quickly darting in and out of thoughts and names that were difficult to follow. I asked if he was referring to the shooting. Miller said he didn’t remember it.

During the rest of our conversation, Miller would at times cup his left ear toward me to signal that he was having trouble hearing. His ears had been ringing since he was a kid, which he thought was from his dad hitting him in the head. He’d devised his own methods for tuning it out, like playing video games on his tablet inside his cell. “I try to go blank,” he said.

Miller recounted returning to his cell after his first execution was called off. The other men on death row were eager to talk with him about what he had just experienced. 

“They asked me what it’s like. I told them you lay there and they stab you,” he recalled nonchalantly. Miller told me that after the failed execution, he just wanted to go to sleep. The experience was not as remarkable as it might have seemed, he said — his father had threatened him with death so often that he was used to it.

Miller’s brother Jeff Carr, who was sitting next to me in the visitation room, said he was stunned when he found out that Miller was in jail for three murders.

Jeff and his wife Sandra Carr later told me that they thought the death penalty was appropriate for certain people, but that Miller wasn’t one of them. They remembered seeing an unfamiliar look in his eyes after he was arrested, like he had snapped. “That was not the Alan we knew,” Sandra said. “What he told his mother was, ‘They said, I did this, but I don’t remember it.’”

About 90 minutes after we last saw Miller, prison guards dressed pristinely in sky blue and navy uniforms came to get us from the trailer where we’d been waiting for the execution to start. They led us single-file through a red door and down a cinder-block hallway affixed with a monitor that would alert us in the event of a nitrogen leak. A piece of black tape covered the manufacturer’s name — the state’s attempt to prevent us from knowing whose products were entwined with this new way of killing. We filed into the witness room along with media witnesses, staring ahead into a glass window covered by a curtain. A white license plate hung above the window, instructing us to “STAY SEATED AND QUIET.”

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Minutes later, Brandon McKenzie, the prison guard who leads Alabama’s execution team, pulled the blue hospital curtain open, revealing Miller, who was lying strapped to the gurney and tightly enveloped in a white sheet. A blue-rimmed respirator mask covered Miller’s entire face, from his forehead down to his chin. A strip of black tape had also been placed to conceal the mask manufacturer’s name. A hose that ran from the wall behind Miller was connected to a valve on his right side. The setup looked cheap and improvised, like a scene from a low-budget horror movie. 

After Holman warden Terry Raybon read the execution warrant, McKenzie unscrewed the cap to another valve on the left side of Miller’s respirator. The witness room filled with the sound of hissing gas, making it difficult to hear Miller as Raybon held the microphone up to the mask for his last words. “I didn’t do anything to be in here,” Miller said. Some of his words were inaudible, but he mentioned someone not doing their job and asked his sister, Cheryl, to take care of his brother Richard. At one point, Raybon pulled the microphone away from Miller before he was finished talking and had to stick it up to his face again. 

Once Miller finished speaking, Raybon opened the door behind them and disappeared from the execution chamber. McKenzie, the captain of the execution team, remained in the room, checking the mask and feeling its seal around Miller’s face — a step that is supposed to determine whether the mask is tight enough to keep out oxygen. A pulse oximeter monitoring Miller’s oxygen levels was clipped to his ear. After some time, McKenzie then called Miller’s spiritual adviser over to the gurney, who laid one of his hands on Miller’s left leg. It’s unclear when the nitrogen gas started, but I saw Miller’s stomach rise and fall like he was breathing normally. It did not appear that he was attempting to hold his breath. For a second, it seemed as if he might die peacefully after all. 

Then suddenly, Miller started jerking and shaking, struggling against the restraints. While this was happening, he gasped for air and his eyes were open, staring at the ceiling and darting back and forth. This went on for about two minutes before Miller stopped moving. 

Then, for the next five or six minutes, Miller periodically gasped for breath. Some of the gasps were so large that his head lifted off the gurney. His left hand turned blue. 

At 6:32 p.m., about 15 minutes after the gas began to flow, a guard closed the curtain to the execution chamber. Minutes later, a guard unlocked the witness room and told us to exit. 

I again climbed into the van with Miller’s lawyers and family, and we were dropped off in front of Holman. Earlier, an employee told us not to loiter in the parking lot. He apparently meant what he’d said, watching us closely as we walked back to our cars. 

Afterwards, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm gave a press conference. Asked about Miller’s violent reaction to the gas, Hamm assured reporters that everything had gone according to plan. “There’s going to be involuntary body movements as the body is depleted of oxygen. So that was nothing we did not expect,” he said. 

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall gave a similar statement. “Tonight, despite misinformation campaigns by political activists, out-of-state lawyers, and biased media, the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” he wrote. Notably, Marshall was not present for the execution. Still, he said it “progressed as planned. After Miller appeared to lose consciousness, his body took some agonal breaths and made slight movements associated with the dying process.”

I emailed my own observations to ADOC and asked whether the agency stood by these statements but did not receive a response.

About 10 days after the execution, Jeff and Sandra Carr, Miller’s brother and sister-in-law, told me the past week had been an emotional rollercoaster. They said they’d been trying to keep it together by sticking to their normal routines, like going to the gym at 5:30 most mornings, a regimen we’d discussed in the prison trailer while waiting to be taken to the execution chamber. 

Having made the eight-hour round trip drive from their home in north Alabama to Atmore two years ago when the state first attempted to execute Miller, they’d known some of what to expect in those final days with him. Jeff said he tried to be strong for his brother and compartmentalize his feelings, even as Miller was worried about them witnessing this next attempt at executing him. “He didn’t want us, I guess, having to watch what was fixing to happen. But you know, we were going to be there,” Jeff said. 

When we discussed what happened that night, Sandra told me that Gov. Kay Ivey and Marshall should have been there to observe the execution for themselves. “If you’re going to sign somebody’s death warrant, you need to be there to witness it and see how it goes,” she said. 

Sandra added, “Nobody should have to witness something like that.” 

I described what I saw to Gail Van Norman, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Washington. She told me that Miller’s reaction was “entirely predictable” and sounded consistent with the reactions of animals suffocated with nitrogen during scientific studies. 

“Yeah, he was awake,” she said. “The textbook says that when you do this to a mammal, they’re going to suffocate, they’re going to know it’s happening. They’re going to try to escape it. They’re going to struggle, they’re going to shake, they’re going to lose their coordination, and they’re going to die a horrible death.” That’s why, Van Norman explained, the American Veterinary Medical Association says that most mammals should not be euthanized with nitrogen. 

It didn’t matter that Miller wanted to cooperate, she said, because nobody actually knows if humans are capable of breathing deeply while being suffocated by nitrogen gas. “Even if they’re capable of it, and they do breathe deeply, I have no reason to believe that it will go any differently,” Van Norman told me. “You’ll still see the gasping, you’ll still see shaking, jerking, discoordination.” 

Miller’s reactions might have looked even worse if he weren’t bound to the gurney and was allowed to roam free, she said. “He’d probably be clawing at the doors and pounding at the windows, trying to get out but he can’t because they’ve tied him down to a gurney, so the only actions left to him are to jerk and grimace and lift his head up and try to do those things.”

Van Norman’s comments reminded me of how intensely Miller had flailed and pulled at his restraints, as if his body would have leapt from the gurney were it not strapped down.

Marshall’s assessment that Miller had lost consciousness had no scientific basis, Van Norman quipped. She explained that it would’ve been impossible for him to tell because new scientific research on consciousness has shown that there’s actually no way to determine whether someone is unconscious. “Somebody who says that is just saying it off the top of their head or out of wishful thinking, or because they haven’t read the literature,” she said.

Van Norman’s explanation defied everything legislators had promised about execution by nitrogen gas. Alabama lawmakers adopted it as a method in 2018 amid national drug shortages and legal challenges over the constitutionality of the way it carried out lethal injections. State Sen. Trip Pittman, who had sponsored the nitrogen legislation, billed the method as “more humane.” (I sent Pittman, who is no longer in office, an email asking whether he stood by that statement following Miller’s execution, but he never answered.)

There was hardly any science to support the assertion. Former Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian came up with the idea to execute prisoners with nitrogen after watching a BBC documentary called “How to Kill a Human Being,” which followed a British Parliament member turned journalist in his quest for the perfect execution method. “The process is quick and painless,” Christian told reporters in 2015. “It’s foolproof.” (Christian also did not answer my email asking whether he still believed that.) 

The method, which is scientifically known as nitrogen hypoxia, is supposed to starve the brain of oxygen by replacing it with nitrogen: a colorless, odorless gas that comprises 78 percent of Earth’s atmosphere but is deadly when inhaled on its own. Nitrogen poisoning has killed nearly 100 people since 1992 in accidents at industrial plants, laboratories, and medical facilities. 

Despite authorizing nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, Oklahoma officials have said they will continue to carry out lethal injections and have no plans to pivot to nitrogen. Mississippi, which approved the method in 2017, has yet to use it either.

In Alabama, death row prisoners were given the option to choose whether they wanted to be executed by the gas over a 30-day period in 2018. But the prisoners and their lawyers say that the state did not make them aware of this choice until five days before the deadline and did not give them enough time to gather information about the method. 

Alabama has refused to publicly release details about how it created its protocol. Legal documents show that officials relied on state employees to test the method, but there’s no record of ADOC testing how a human would react to nitrogen flowing into the mask. The department instead conducted an experiment placing the mask on top of a sheet and towel and measuring oxygen levels. 

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Even with limited testing, the state’s expert Dr. Joseph Antognini, a retired anesthesiologist who routinely testifies on behalf of states defending their execution methods, said in court that the system would render Kenneth Smith, the first man executed by nitrogen in January, unconscious within 30 to 40 seconds after the nitrogen began. Antognini did not return my request for comment about the discrepancy between his prediction and what witnesses saw during both nitrogen executions.

Other experts were much less optimistic. Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist and director of the Hypoxia Lab at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a recent court filing that there is little scientific research on what happens when humans are forced to breathe in large volumes of nitrogen, but that quickly starving someone of oxygen is likely to cause a feeling of “impending doom.”

Bickler, who has conducted his own research on the effects of nitrogen hypoxia, submitted an affidavit for Miller’s lawyers as they argued that the nitrogen method violated his Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. In it, he wrote that “any form of execution by nitrogen hypoxia is cruel and inhumane” and warned that Miller’s asthma “would likely prolong the death process.”

Despite these warnings, Marshall, the attorney general, has offered to help other states execute people with nitrogen gas. 

“To my colleagues across the country, many of which were watching last night, Alabama has done it,” Marshall said after Smith’s execution early this year. “And now so can you. And we stand ready to assist you in implementing this method in your states.”

Legislators in Ohio, Louisiana, and Nebraska took Marshall’s lead, introducing bills to authorize the method. In a letter to Nebraska Sen. Loren Lippincott, the sponsor of the state’s bill, Marshall championed the use of nitrogen to execute prisoners, calling media accounts of Smith’s execution “sensational.” Nitrogen, he told the Nebraska lawmaker, was not subject to the drug supply issues that made it difficult to carry out lethal injections and it would be more difficult to fight in court. “Adopting nitrogen hypoxia and allowing condemned killers to elect this method of execution will either expose their litigation games for what they have been, or it will provide them the humane death that they have claimed to be pursuing,” Marshall wrote.

Even with Marshall’s fervent support, the Nebraska bill did not make it out of committee. 

Meanwhile, Louisiana passed legislation authorizing nitrogen executions during a special session on criminal justice called by Gov. Jeff Landry a month after he took office. The state hasn’t killed a prisoner since 2010, but Landry has made it a priority to restart executions. Rep. Nicholas Muscarello, a Republican who drafted the bill, told me shortly after its passage that he was inspired by Alabama’s adoption of nitrogen executions. In the process of introducing his bill, Muscarello said he received a letter from Marshall that “basically supported the form of execution.” He initially agreed to share the letter but later said he was unable to find it.

Calling the death penalty a “tough issue,” Muscarello said he had done his own research on Smith’s execution by nitrogen asphyxiation but did not have an opinion on witness accounts. “I just looked at the legality of it and it was ruled constitutional,” he said. “I’m a lawyer, I wasn’t gonna get drawn into the emotional debate, I wanted to keep them focused on the legal debate.”

As Alabama officials plan to execute a third person, Carey Dale Grayson, by nitrogen in November, his lawyers have alleged that the method “carries an unacceptable risk of conscious suffocation” and violates the Constitution. They’ll argue their case in a federal hearing this week. 

Their expert, Dr. Brian McAlary, a Virginia anesthesiologist, reviewed Smith’s autopsy, which showed that his lungs were filled with fluid and blood when he died. The finding, he said, was consistent with the condition of someone’s lungs after they’ve been strangled or smothered with a plastic bag. In an affidavit, McAlary concluded that “the risk of undue agony attending this protocol is a medical certainty.”

Grayson’s lawyers had unsuccessfully asked to film Miller’s execution to settle questions over prisoners’ reactions to the gas. Marshall, the attorney general, said there was no need to do so because the media, the same group he called “biased,” would be there to provide an accounting. Hamm, the commissioner, opposed the request, stating that a recording “would severely undermine the solemnity of the occasion.”

Muench, the spiritual adviser and physician who stood next to Miller as he thrashed on the gurney, offered a solution: “I’m sure there’s video of people being waterboarded in this world and my guess is it would look very similar.”

ADOC wouldn’t let Muench join Miller inside the execution chamber until he signed a form acknowledging that he understood the risks of being in a confined space with nitrogen gas and would stand three feet away from the respirator mask after the execution began. 

When it came time to pray with Miller, a guard motioned for Muench to walk forward to the gurney. It was Muench’s understanding that he’d have five minutes with Miller before the gas started flowing. Muench read a psalm and laid a hand on Miller to comfort him. Then, as Muench was reading the second passage they’d agreed on, the Sermon on the Mount, Miller’s head jerked up. 

He said Miller was gray and ashen and his face was twisted.

“I knew suddenly this isn’t going like we planned, and his knees started shaking at that point,” Muench recalled when we spoke after the execution. 

As Miller writhed on the gurney, Muench said it was obvious that the nitrogen gas had been turned on early. “I’m sure he was suffering certainly at the beginning of it, when he was gasping for oxygen,” Muench said. “When he lifted his head up and I could see him, he was definitely gasping.” 

He couldn’t see into the witness rooms on either side of him but saw into another room behind him where men and women dressed in suits and dresses sat. Presumably, they were state officials who had earlier piled out of a black sprinter van into the prison to watch the execution. 

Watching Miller shaking on the gurney, Muench wanted to intervene. “I didn’t feel like there would be anything possible that I could do, but I very much felt, when he started jerking, that we need — we should stop this at some point.”

The post “Agony” and “Suffering” as Alabama Experiments With Nitrogen Executions appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everything’s quiet until it’s not,” Arab al-Aramshe resident Kareem Suidan told me while we walked through the village in late July. Three months earlier, the apparent calm had been broken when Hezbollah targeted an Israeli command center inside the village, killing one soldier and injuring 16 other people, including four civilians. In the wake of the April 17 drone strike, the targeted building was described in news reports as a “community center,” but according to Suidan and the aftermath of the bombing that I observed, the building was in fact a school.

“It’s an academy for the children, but the soldiers were inside,” the 33-year-old Suidan said. The kids “go there to learn, for activities, and the soldiers during the war go to sleep there.” For the village’s Arab community, the school is incredibly important, as it allows a degree of autonomy relative to sending their children to schools in nearby kibbutzim.

While the Israeli government ordered residents of this and other nearby villages to evacuate last October, Suidan estimates nearly 70 percent of Arab al-Aramshe’s residents have returned as the war drags on. Yet the military has not changed course, continuing to station soldiers in the villages that dot the country’s northern border, putting civilians in harm’s way.

Those risks have intensified over the past week, as Israel accused Hezbollah of bombing the occupied Golan Heights in a strike that killed 12 children and retaliated by assassinating a Hezbollah commander in a targeted strike outside Beirut. The assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday added even more fuel to an already volatile situation.

The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to questions from The Intercept.

The IDF’s practice of embedding its troops among civilians in the north mirrors the alleged “human shields” policy for which it has repeatedly condemned Hamas. “Israel’s engagement with the issue of human shields is double-edged,” said Tamara Kharroub, deputy executive director of Arab Center Washington D.C. “While Israel routinely uses civilians as human shields in its military operations, it employs this very accusation as a primary element in its propaganda operations and in justifying the killing of civilians.”

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Though international law dictates that schools and hospitals have special status as safe havens for civilians, if a military force stations its troops or other military infrastructure inside of the school or hospital, it can then be declared a legitimate military target. This is the pretext Israel has used to destroy Gaza’s health infrastructure in the wake of October 7, claiming, for example, that Gaza’s largest hospital was actually a Hamas command center. The military has also claimed to find weapons in a school building where civilians were sheltered and has released propaganda footage displaying weapons inside of schools in Gaza. Meanwhile, rights groups have documented the IDF’s use of human shields in the besieged enclave — sometimes quite literally. In June, for instance, Israeli troops detained a family in front of their tanks to protect their soldiers from gunfire.

Whether Israel’s decision to station its troops alongside civilians in the north is willful negligence or a conscious decision to create a strategic advantage in its fight against Hezbollah isn’t known. Either way, the fighting in Israel’s north varies significantly from its war on Gaza. Compared to Gaza, the mountainous north is sparsely populated, meaning Israel has ample opportunity to install troops and outposts far away from civilian infrastructure.

“It is evident,” Kharroub said, “that Israel exploits civilians by any means necessary for its goals of expansionism, domination, and ethnic cleansing.”

A Short-Lived Evacuation

Fearing Hezbollah would launch an invasion in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel immediately ordered an evacuation in the north, a district with a population of 1.2 million people, the majority of whom are Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the vast majority live in Nazareth in the center of the region or along the coast, there are dozens of villages that line the Israel–Lebanon border, some within 1 kilometer. About 60,000 residents of those villages were displaced because of the war. Many of them fled to Akka and Haifa, two coastal cities located outside of the evacuation zone but still within 40 kilometers of Lebanon, and others left to live with family in other parts of the country. Yet when they realized there wasn’t an end in sight to the fighting, they started to return.

Families with school-age children who had been forced out of school by the war had been struggling to find suitable replacements for their children. Members of Israel’s Druze and Arab minorities longed for the communities and families they had built in their villages. And then there was the cost of displacement. While Israel offered financial compensation to families who had left home, it was hardly enough, local residents told The Intercept. “We don’t really use much [money], but with children, it’s not enough. And if you have to rent a house somewhere, a place to live, and then to send children to school, I don’t think it’s enough,” said one woman who lives in Mattat, an Israeli settlement just 3 kilometers from Lebanon that was built on the depopulated Palestinian villages of Dayr al-Qassim and Al-Mansura.

“It’s crazy to stay in a motel for six months or seven months. It’s crazy. And they don’t pay you very much money, even if you do leave,” Suidan said. “We [had] a war here in 2006. I think this is worse. It’s dangerous. I mean, Lebanon is right there. You can see it.”

Unlike southern Israel, which is fortified with abundant bomb shelters in case of rocket attacks by Hamas, communities like Arab al-Aramshe have few shelters — hardly enough to protect the village’s 1,100 residents during a time of war. Even after the April strike, which killed a deputy company commander, the IDF maintained its presence in the village. In late July, IDF vehicles were still inside the village, and the military had erected a holding pool for firefighters to use in combating the wildfires caused by Hezbollah strikes. Thousands of acres have been burned since October 7 due to falling debris and missile impacts.

All the while, Israel continues to call up reservists to fight against Hezbollah. The group’s military capabilities have greatly expanded since its last confrontation with Israel in 2006, which lasted only 34 days but left much of Southern Lebanon in ruins. While Israel has criticized Hezbollah for targeting civilians in recent months, including when it killed two Israeli civilians driving in the occupied Golan Heights, the casualty counts tell a different story. Since October 7, 450 have been killed in Lebanon, including at least 100 civilians; in Israel, 23 civilians and 17 soldiers have been killed in the fighting.

Military Buildup

Driving along Route 6 to the north, Israel’s military buildup since October 7 is obvious. Tanks and armored vehicles stream into the Galilee, a mountainous region in the northern part of the country, alongside a steady flow of civilian traffic. Signs reading “No pictures” are ubiquitous. The Israel Defense Forces have installed checkpoints along highways in the north with two soldiers typically stationed at each. While the soldiers aren’t authorized to speak with journalists, many of them spoke to me informally. They shared their reluctance to fight in a war with Hezbollah and hoped that tensions would soon deescalate.

Much of the new military infrastructure — which includes bunkers, concrete walls, sniper towers, and rocket launchers — was installed along the so-called Blue Line: a U.N.-designated line demarcating Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory in 2000. In a video from October 17 that Suidan shared with The Intercept, Israeli tanks standing just feet from homes in Arab al-Aramsha shoot into Lebanon. In the towns of Shlomi and Sasa, both located within 5 kilometers of the border, military outposts line the hilltops along with infrastructure for Israel’s Iron Dome, the country’s missile defense system.

The area’s staunchly Zionist residents view their presence in the north as a way to assert their claim to the land. In the Israeli settlement of Shlomi, just 3 kilometers from the Blue Line, a 77-year-old man named Amitai told me he had no intention of leaving. “What can I do? It’s my land. I don’t go to any other place. No better than this place for me,” he said. “Maybe Hezbollah can kill me, but you cannot make me afraid.” (He and his wife Golani gave me only their first names.)

Amitai and Golani, who invited me into their home to share coffee and pastries, both said that they hadn’t left Israel since their births in 1948 and 1951, respectively. Amitai later said that he had visited Jordan and Syria, but according to him, “they are Israel too.”

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Israel Is Banking on U.S. Support for a Wider War Against the Axis of Resistance

While many Israelis view their war against Hamas as existential, few share the same opinion on escalating tensions with Hezbollah. “I don’t think we can win,” said Rafael, a resident of Mattat who asked to be identified by only his first name. “There is no winning. We occupied Lebanon in the first war, and it was horrible. Nothing good happened there.”

Rafael was hesitant to speak about military activity in Mattat, where the IDF recently had an outpost. He said that after a foreign journalist visited the kibbutz in June to write on the impact of the war on Israeli civilians, the military ordered residents to evacuate, fearing that the journalist might expose their location and draw Hezbollah strikes on the area.

“So we like not to tell how many people are here,” said Rafael. “We don’t even know.” The now-empty outpost is located only feet away from houses that have, according to Rafael, been periodically inhabited throughout the war. 

The post Israel Accuses Hamas of Using “Human Shields” While IDF Embeds Among Civilians at Lebanon Border appeared first on The Intercept.

This investigation, conducted by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, is part of the Gaza Project, a collaboration involving 50 journalists from 13 organizations coordinated by Forbidden Stories

The clock had not yet struck midnight on October 9, when Said Al-Taweel fell into a deep sleep in his office in al-Ghefari Tower, Gaza City’s tallest building. Alaa Abu Mohsen, Al-Taweel’s colleague, heard him snoring.

It was the early days of Israel’s war on Gaza, and Al-Taweel wasn’t getting much sleep. Neither, for that matter, was Abu Mohsen.

Al-Taweel, the 37-year-old editor-in-chief of Khamsa News Agency, had been more or less living in his high-rise office, working constantly, late into the night, to cover the Israeli onslaught.

More than an hour after Al-Taweel drifted off to sleep, sometime after 1 a.m., word began to spread that Haji Tower, another high-rise near the al-Ghefari building, was going to be attacked by the Israelis. Haji Tower is home to local and international media offices, including Agence France-Presse. The rush of people leaving the 12-story tower came after an Israeli military officer spoke by phone to at least four people to order the evacuation of Haji Tower, according to the accounts of two direct recipients of warnings as well as video of a call.

As people streaming from the building scrambled to get into their cars and flee, several of the journalists in the area instead drew nearer to Haji Tower. They wanted to get the story: An Israeli attack on a building known to house so many reporters would resonate internationally.

Abu Mohsen had by then drifted off to sleep himself and, when he awoke, he didn’t see Al-Taweel, he later recalled. He glanced at his phone. He had missed two calls from Al-Taweel. “I’ll see him downstairs,” Abu Mohsen thought to himself, resolving to go down to check things out at street level.

Though many Israeli attacks come unannounced, the military also sometimes issues warnings before striking buildings where civilians could be present. In the early hours of October 10, such a warning was issued, but what unfolded nonetheless proved tragic.

When the airstrike finally came, it did not hit al-Ghefari nor Haji Tower. Instead, it destroyed a third structure: a six-story residential building called Babel that lay directly on the road between the two towers. As Babel collapsed into rubble, at least nine people were killed, including three journalists who had moved into the building’s vicinity to report on Haji Tower from a safe distance.

“The bodies of the journalists flew into the air from the intensity of the bombing,” said Mansour Khalaf, the owner of Babel, who witnessed the attack from the street.

In a written statement, the Israeli military said that, on October 10, a “facility” used by a senior Hamas member was targeted “in the area in question.” It had issued “a warning to residents of the building and the area to evacuate,” the military spokesperson said. “Any claim that the IDF led people to evacuate to a strike zone is baseless and absurd.” The statement said that the case is being investigated.

International humanitarian law encourages armed forces to provide advance warnings prior to an attack when circumstances permit, but the warnings must be “effective.” In the Babel building attack, the call contained false information.

The following minute-by-minute account of the airstrike — based on analysis of videos, audio recordings, and photographs from the attack and its aftermath — is part of the monthslong investigation by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. The investigation is being published in partnership with The Intercept as part of the Gaza Project, a collaboration of 50 journalists from 13 media organizations coordinated by Forbidden Stories to investigate attacks on journalists in Gaza.

ARIJ collected more than 25 interviews, including with family members of the deceased and nearly 20 eyewitnesses to the strike.

The resulting findings tell the intertwined story of three structures in Gaza City — two towers housing media offices and one squat apartment building — that shows how a purportedly cautionary series of phone conversations led three journalists to their deaths. They were among the journalists killed early in the war. The violence meted out by the Israeli assault has resulted in the deaths of 1 in every 10 journalists in the Gaza Strip.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow, For Sure I’m Coming Back Home”

Said Al-Taweel’s world had dramatically changed in recent days. It had been more than two years since Israel’s last major assault on the Gaza Strip, and life in Rafah, where he lived, had settled into its normal patterns, albeit under an occupation and a constant, baseline siege.

Three days before the Gaza City airstrike, Al-Taweel had visited with relatives gifting them knafeh, a syrupy Palestinian pastry, which was shared with neighbors.

Fatima al Akar, Al-Taweel’s wife, thinks of knafeh as a dessert for happy occasions. In retrospect, she said, the sweet took on a different hue that day: “It was like he was saying goodbye.”

The next morning, al Akar and Al-Taweel woke up early and sent three of their children to school. Five-month-old Lujain stayed at home. Then a roar suddenly echoed across the sky.

“Oh God, the thunder,” al Akar recalled saying. Al-Taweel, she said, thought it sounded like rockets.

Unbeknownst to them, it was the start of Hamas and other militants’ attacks against Israeli border towns, resulting in the killing of more than 1,100 Israelis and taking over 200 hostages.

Once Al-Taweel learned what was going on, he expected Israel to strike back hard. He asked al Akar to pull the children from school and prepare a bag of clothing and documents, in case they needed to flee.

Al-Taweel himself had work to do. He headed 22 miles north to Gaza City, where Khamsa News is based. His wife urged him to return home. “Bokra, bokra, rasmy mrawah,” he told her on October 9. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, for sure I’m coming back home.”

Al-Taweel wasn’t alone. The journalists congregating in al-Ghefari Tower, in western Gaza, started work early. The central gathering place was in Palestinian Media Group’s offices on the 16th floor; it had a panoramic view of Gaza, according to Mohammed Skaik, a journalist at PMG.

Just down the street, a little over 300 meters away, was another hub of journalistic activity: Haji Tower, where AFP occupies the top two floors and Palestinian outlets like Al-Najah TV and Ain Media are also based.

Al-Taweel and his colleagues spent two days chronicling the war. On October 8, the Israeli barrage against Gaza had begun in earnest, with the military announcing that some 130 targets had been struck. Al-Taweel went about covering the onslaught, posting to his well-read Facebook page.

After the warning about Haji Tower from the Israeli military reached Al-Taweel, he put on a flak jacket and hurried toward the building. Skaik chose to remain in the office, aiming his camera at the tower awaiting the strike.

Al-Taweel alerted some colleagues of the evacuation order, including the journalists Mohammed Sobh and Hisham Nwajha of the Khabar Agency, so they could cover the bombing. They headed in the direction of Haji Tower along with Samer al Za’aneen, another journalist based in al-Ghefari Tower that night who said he went because an attack on an international news agency like AFP would be a big story.

At 2:12 a.m., on their way out of al-Ghefari Tower, Sobh and Nwajha took a selfie in the elevator, with Sobh’s tripod, camera, and huge lens in between them.

Sobh had been sleeping in the Khabar Agency’s office in al-Ghefari Tower since October 7, his wife, Hanadi Qarmout, said. She had grown accustomed to him staying at the office during Israel’s wars. On October 9, Sobh returned home to see his wife and their 9-year-old son.

The night of the bombing, Qarmout was getting increasingly worried about her husband. “Don’t go up on the roof, don’t go down,” she told him. “Take care of yourself.” He reassured her that he would take the photos from the office.

Siham Nadal, Nwajha’s wife, had begged him not to leave Rafah for Gaza City, mentioning their 3-year-old twins, Ilan and Rakan, to convince him to stay. He would not, however, be deterred.

On the night of the strike against Babel, Nwajha called Nadal. 

“I love you very much,” he said. “I’m heading down to cover the bombing of the Haji Tower.” 

Then he sent her a selfie, the last photo she received from him, and likely the last he ever took.

“Which Tower Do You Want to Bomb So We Can Evacuate It?”

It’s unclear how many warning calls Israel issued on the night of the attack.

According to several eyewitnesses, sometime after 1 a.m., a local resident received a call from a man identifying himself as an Israeli officer. The caller said Haji Tower should be evacuated because it was about to be bombed.

Rushdi Adeeb, a resident of the Babel building, heard a commotion outside about this time and rushed downstairs to find a man talking with the Israeli officer on speakerphone. (It’s unclear whether the officer on the line was the same one who had spoken to the local resident; in these situations, phones are often passed around between people in attendance.) Adeeb said the officer was giving evacuation orders for Haji Tower — and that the officer acknowledged the target was occupied by some media offices.

Three people who heard the call confirmed to ARIJ and The Intercept that the officer specified Haji Tower as a target. One of the eyewitnesses heard it on speakerphone, and the other two heard it directly from the Israeli officer.

At 2:06 a.m., an elderly man held the phone with an Israeli officer at the other end of the line, then passed the phone to Manhal Sheheibar, a neighborhood resident and owner of a car sales company.

“Haji building? No, I don’t know anybody there,” Sheheibar says in a video of his conversation with the officer as recorded in a video obtained by ARIJ and The Intercept. Sheheibar then pauses and listens, and then blurts out a response: “What? In five minutes? Ten minutes, then, 10 minutes.”

Sheheibar said in a later interview that the speaker on the other end of the line was speaking in Arabic.

Mohammed Abu Safia, a journalist, also spoke to an Israeli officer — it’s unclear if it’s the same one — sometime after 2 a.m. Abu Safia had been asleep on the seventh floor of Haji Tower when he was aroused by screaming at street level. Abu Safia went down and found a man on a cellphone refusing to go into Haji Tower and warn people of an impending attack.

Abu Safia then took the phone from the man.

“Which tower do you want to bomb so we can evacuate it?” Abu Safia recalled telling the officer at the other end of the line. The officer, according to Abu Safia, said Haji Tower was targeted for bombing.

Abu Safia said, “I told him: ‘How much time do I have to check who is in the tower, who evacuated or not?’”

The officer said the beleaguered journalist had five minutes to evacuate and, like the man on the phone before him, Abu Safia refused to go into the tower under threat of attack. Abu Safia said, “I told him: ‘I want at least 15 to 20 minutes to go into the building, check it floor by floor, and evacuate myself. Stay with me on the line if you agree to this.’”

The officer then agreed, telling Abu Safia he had 20 minutes to evacuate the building.

With the officer still on the line, Abu Safia searched Haji Tower and found no one inside. The officer, according to Abu Safia, said he and others should evacuate to the beach.

“They Thought They Were In a Safe Place”

Late on the evening of October 9, eight journalists were gathered in the office of Agence France-Presse in Haji Tower. Yahya Hassouna, a videographer at the agency, was busy editing footage when the building’s doorman arrived with urgent news: There had apparently been a call from the Israeli military to evacuate the building.

No one knew why the Haji Tower would be targeted. “We were all in shock,” Hassouna said. “What was the reason?”

It was nearly 2 a.m. when AFP journalist Adel Zaanoun called Jerusalem bureau chief Marc Jourdier. “Don’t waste a minute and evacuate,” Jourdier recalled telling Hassouna. “I’m calling the army and getting back to you ASAP.” After a quick call, Jourdier sent Haji Tower’s coordinates to the Israeli military on WhatsApp at 2:03 a.m.

“We know that when the Israeli army threatens a tower, it will be bombed. We’ve learnt that through our coverage of wars.”

Inside the AFP’s Haji Tower office, staff gathered cameras, tripods, press vests, and helmets. Within a few minutes, they made their way out of the building. “We know that when the Israeli army threatens a tower, it will be bombed, whether after 15 minutes, an hour or 30 minutes,” Hassouna said. “We’ve learnt that through our coverage of wars.”

As the journalists were leaving the building, Jourdier received a response from an Israeli military official: “We’re checking to see what we can do. But right now I recommend you to follow the instructions you got.”

The AFP journalists headed towards al-Ghefari Tower, except for Hassouna, who chose to stay closer to Haji Tower for clearer pictures of the expected strike. He stood near Al-Taweel, Sobh, and Nwajha, whom he recognized as fellow journalists but did not personally know.

“They thought they were in a safe place,” said Hassouna.

Video: Agence France-Presse (AFP)

Video footage shows Sobh and Nwajha walking between al-Ghefari Tower and Babel, passing by as another journalist recounts an evacuation call.

At 2:19 am, Al-Taweel posted a video to his Facebook page. “The evacuation of Haji building after getting warnings that it will be bombed,” he wrote. “The whole area was evacuated in preparation for the strike on Haji Tower.”

Hassouna had been standing near the three journalists, but he decided to step back a few meters away.

At 2:24 a.m., Jourdier shared a message on an internal AFP chat, saying he spoke with a senior Israeli military spokesperson who advised that the staff should head toward Roots Hotel, a few minutes away from Al-Ghefari and Haji towers, near the beach.

“It’s Not Haji!”

Mansour Khalaf stood in front of his house, across the street from Babel, about 130 meters away from Haji Tower. Khalaf, the owner of Babel, saw the three journalists taking up positions and pointing their cameras at Haji Tower.

Everyone was waiting for the moment of the strike.

At 2:25 a.m, the airstrike began — but the target was not Haji Tower. Instead, the strike hit the Babel building, the very place where journalists had gathered for a better vantage point of Haji.

ARIJ and The Intercept obtained three videos showing the strikes: one from the live feed of the AFP camera in Haji, another from PMG offices on the 16th floor of al-Ghefari Tower, and a third filmed from the street by another journalist.

As the explosions started, an AFP video coordinator monitoring the agency’s live feed messaged a group chat of colleagues: “Strike just hit v close to the office.”

Video: Hassan Madhoun (Palestinian Media Group), Agence France-Presse (AFP)

In one of the videos, filmed in the dark, a person can be heard screaming: “Said was killed.” In some of the first images of the aftermath, Al-Taweel is lying prone, a few meters from where he had been standing, his press vest soaked with blood. Nearby, Sobh is also dead, the blast having rendered his head unrecognizable. Nwajha was injured and taken to the hospital in critical condition; he was pronounced dead a few hours later. At least six others, including Babel residents and a family member of the building’s owner, were killed in the strike.

Bystanders quickly realized what happened. “It’s not Haji, man. It’s not Haji,” a man is heard saying in one of the videos, the anguish clear in his voice.

“When the ambulances came,” said Adeeb, the Babel resident, “I looked up and saw the Babel building leveled to the ground, and I looked at the Haji Tower and saw it was still standing.”

At 2:32 am., Jourdier, the AFP Jerusalem bureau chief, shared new information with the AFP chat group that he had just heard from the Israeli military spokesperson: “We managed to stop the strike thanks to your call,” the spokesperson had told him.

Videos from the day of the strike show that Haji’s structure suffered no damage aside from a broken glass panel at the entrance.

Hassouna, the AFP videographer, told ARIJ and The Intercept that in wars, journalists’ lives are frequently in danger. “Usually they know where to stand and what to film,” he said. After the October 10 attack, he added, “we ended up afraid of dying every minute.”

The post Israel Falsely Warned It Would Bomb a Media Office. The Actual Airstrike Killed Journalists on a Nearby Street. appeared first on The Intercept.

As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.

Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.

According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”

But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.

Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades. 

The world’s attention has been on the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 36,000 people — including more than 15,000 children — and prompted accusations of genocide from U.N. officials and at the International Court of Justice. In the name of eliminating Hamas in retaliation for the attacks in October, the Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip continues.

But Israel has also transformed its tactics in the West Bank. Since June of last year, and with increasing regularity during the Gaza offensive, the Israel Defense Forces have shown a new willingness to use air power in the West Bank, regardless of the collateral damage to children and other civilians caught in the blasts.

An open-source Intercept investigation documented at least 37 Israeli airstrikes, drone strikes, and attacks by helicopter gunships in the West Bank since June 2023, which have killed 55 Palestinians, according to the United Nations. Most attacks struck densely populated urban areas and refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus, all in the northern part of the West Bank. 

The Israeli military repeatedly stated on social media that the strikes were carried out to kill terrorists. But this investigation identified a different pattern: Nearly half of the people killed in the strikes were children.

Some of the children killed were throwing homemade explosives at Israeli troops, or were close to armed men when they were killed. Many were unarmed and uninvolved in any confrontations. Their ages ranged from 11 to 17.

The database of attacks was compiled using information published by news outlets, the Negotiations Affairs Department of the State of Palestine, and the Israeli military. The determination of whether children were killed in the process is based on publicly available information and documentation gathered by Defense for Children International-Palestine. The Israeli military did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the findings of this investigation.

Many of these strikes are part of a broader Israeli campaign of targeted killings: assassinations of individuals by Israeli forces that, despite the name, often kill people who happen to be near the target at the time of the strike. Targeted killings, and these aerial attacks more broadly, are considered by some experts to be likely violations of international law.

“One of the things this says, which is not particularly surprising, is that the Israeli military is far more concerned about protecting the lives of its soldiers than it is with protecting the lives of civilians who may be killed when they drop bombs from the sky,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program and senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

The airstrikes began last June.

Ashraf Morad Mahmoud Al-Sa’di, 15, was killed by a drone strike — the first fatal strike documented in the West Bank since the Second Intifada — alongside two young Palestinian men in agricultural lands close to the Al-Jalameh military checkpoint, near the wall between Israel and the occupied territories. According to documentation collected by DCI-P, Al-Sa’di and the two men opened fire at Israeli military vehicles, and were later killed by a drone strike in their car.

After October 7, however, the pace of the airstrikes accelerated. Eight children, ages 11 to 17, were among over a dozen people killed in a series of drone, helicopter, and plane attacks on Jenin and the Nur Shams refugee camp late that month. In November, four children, ages 12 to 16, were killed over the course of seven drone strikes across the West Bank. On December 12, a strike killed a 17-year-old who was standing near three armed men.

Some of the children killed in the first months of airstrikes were described as armed or throwing homemade explosives at Israeli soldiers carrying out raids into the West Bank, according to DCI-P documentation. In other cases, what the children were doing in the moments before their death is unclear and could not be confirmed by DCI-P.

But in the waning days of 2023, two children — unarmed, uninvolved — were also targeted and killed by an Israeli drone strike.

The strike took place on December 27, during an Israeli raid on Nur Shams camp, one of 48 raids across the West Bank that day. While the Israeli forces destroyed parts of a kindergarten building, Palestinian fighters confronted them. In the words of the Israeli Air Force, “A terrorist squad was identified that threw explosives at the forces, and an Air Force aircraft attacked the squad.” Six people were killed, and another six were injured. 

Hamza Ahmad Mostafa Hmaid, 16, and Ahmad Abdulrahman Issa Saleh, 17, were among the dead. Hmaid and Saleh had not been a part of the group confronting Israeli soldiers, DCI-P reported.

They would not be the last unarmed, uninvolved children to die from an Israeli missile strike. On January 7, Wadea Yaser Hasan Asous, 17, was killed by a drone-fired missile near Jenin. Israeli forces were withdrawing after a raid when a group of Palestinians confronted them with explosives, according to documentation gathered by DCI-P. After the Israeli vehicles left the area, an Israeli drone fired on a different group of Palestinians, including Asous, who were sitting around a fire near an all-night cafe. Seven Palestinians, including four brothers, were killed in the attack. 

Later in January, a drone strike during a raid on the Tulkarem refugee camp killed three Palestinian boys, all aged 17. The boys were walking near an armed young man, according to DCI-P, but were themselves unarmed and were not participating in confrontations. Seven other people, including three paramedics, were injured in the raid.

The airstrikes have not let up. In the February strike on the white Mazda, 16-year-old Jaradat was fatally injured. On a single night in March, five individuals were killed in drone strikes in Jenin and Tulkarem. 

A total of six children have been killed this year to date in aerial attacks in the West Bank, as documented by DCI-P. In the latest attack, on June 6, an IDF helicopter carried out strikes during a raid in Jenin. The gunship’s missiles did not kill, but Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinians, including one child, in the raid. 

Bombs and missiles don’t only kill; they also maim those nearby. After an airstrike on Jenin last fall that sent roughly 20 people to the hospital, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, published an account of the scene. “Patients had lost their limbs, lost their legs,” said Dr. Elma Wong, an anesthetist with the group. “Lots of shrapnel injuries, which meant a piece of metal [went] into the chest, into the abdomen, into the head.” Two patients didn’t survive.

Israel’s reintroduction of air attacks in the West Bank comes alongside the intensification of land incursions, also called raids. In the year before October 2023, Israeli forces launched an average of 600 raids per month in the occupied territories. In the months since, raids have ratcheted up to over 1,000 per month. Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank killed 507 Palestinians — including 121 children — in 2023, according to DCI-P, making last year the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005, when the U.N. started recording casualties.

The Israeli military last regularly used air power in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, which lasted from September 2000 to February 2005, often in pursuit of assassinations, or targeted killings.

“The marriage of combat helicopters with special ground forces has become our ‘dream team’ for targeted killing operations,” remarked an Israeli general in 2003. By January 2005, media and defense sources reported over 550 attacks by the IAF on Palestinian targets.

These targeted killings weren’t only deadly for those targeted. According to B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based human rights nonprofit, targeted assassinations killed 103 Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. Just over 75 percent of those killed were the targets; the rest were collateral damage.

At the time, the U.S. government vocally opposed these killings, referring to them explicitly as assassinations. “The United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations,” said U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk in July 2001, on Israeli broadcast television.

Today, as the targeted killings continue, the State Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the current U.S. position on such killings or on the Israeli forces’ use of air power in the West Bank.

In 2006, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that targeted killings in the West Bank and Gaza had to be investigated after the fact to determine whether the killings met proportionality and targeting norms, but recent scholarship has questioned the “composition, objectivity, and independence” of the committees carrying out these investigations. “The doubt with Israel is that there has been so much impunity for Israeli violations, that nobody trusts such a process,” Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, told The Intercept. 

Several factors have contributed to this new wave of airstrikes in the West Bank. In part, they’re the result of an evolution in military tactics by both Israeli and Palestinian combatants.

This campaign marks Israel’s first use of armed drones in the West Bank since the Second Intifada — and the first time the IDF is announcing its use of drone strikes in the West Bank as they happen on social media. The IDF used drones to assassinate militants in Gaza in the intervening years, according to leaked documents, but until 2022, the government actively censored mentions of their use in the Israeli press.

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Palestinian fighters’ have adopted more ambush tactics and deployed more improvised explosive devices in response to Israeli military raids in the West Bank in recent years, which Munayyer said could account for the new prominence of air power. In years past, “there were tactical ways in which the military could go into even densely populated refugee camps, conduct raids, and be able to do that with an acceptable degree of risk to their troops,” he said. “With the introduction of ambushes and improvised explosives as developed tactics, that started to change.” 

Other researchers trace the recent surge in West Bank airstrikes to the failure of the Palestinian Authority — the government that has partial control over the West Bank, which is distinct from Gaza’s elected Hamas leadership — to tamp down on militant activity in the West Bank. After a January strike in Balata refugee camp, Seth J. Frantzman, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and analyst at the Jerusalem Post, wrote that “increased activity from groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad have led Israel to be more aggressive in its campaigns.”

Israel has declared that the law of armed conflict governs its use of lethal force in the West Bank, whether that force comes from the barrel of a gun or the blast of a bomb.

In the same 2006 ruling that called for investigations of targeted strikes, Israel’s Supreme Court determined that the international laws of war applied to Israel’s actions in the West Bank, since Israel and Palestinian militant groups were in continuous armed conflict in the occupied territories.

But many experts say that international human rights law applies instead of — or in addition to — the laws of armed conflict. In this view, which casts Israeli forces in the role of law enforcement officers, rather than combatants in a war, the use of force is only allowable as a last resort to protect the life of an officer or others from immediate serious injury or death. 

Ido Rosenzweig — director of cyber, belligerencies, and terrorism Research at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions at Israel’s Haifa University — said that he believed a law enforcement situation could escalate into an armed conflict situation on the spot, changing the legal paradigm in real time. “Targeted killing on its own is not illegal,” he said. “It has to be done according to laws of armed conflict.”

Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, said that the dominant view is that humanitarian law applies in conjunction with international human rights law in the West Bank. “Israel’s international human rights law obligations apply extraterritorially in occupied territory, even though Israel rejects that,” Saul said.

Israel has obligations under the Geneva Conventions as an occupying power and under international human rights law to not use lethal force in policing situations, said Brian Castner, senior crisis adviser and weapons investigator at Amnesty International, unless it is used as a last resort to protect the life of the officer or others from immediate serious injury or death. “This is a very high standard, as spelled out in the UN Basic Principles on Policing,” Castner said. 

Another expert said the strikes are likely a violation of international law. Öykü Irmakkesen, a legal consultant at Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre in Jerusalem, commented in writing that the law enforcement regime under international human rights law governs all operations of the Israeli security forces. “It is thus extremely unlikely that the air and drone strikes targeting individuals are in compliance with Israel’s obligations under international law,” she commented.

In the middle of the night last November, an explosion rocked the center of the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. The camp is a densely packed place, built in 1950 to shelter 5,000 refugees. It now houses approximately 30,000 people.

The homes in Balata are so close together that most of them receive no direct sunlight, said Ibrahim, a camp resident and staff member of a community center who asked to only be identified by his first name. 

The Israeli drone strike targeted a building in the center of the camp that functioned as the local headquarters for Fatah, the political party that exercises partial control over the West Bank (and has fought armed conflicts of its own against Hamas). The building was destroyed, and five people died, including 14-year-old Mohammad Musa Mohammad Msaimi. 

“People woke up with a shock,” Ibrahim said, and emerged from their rooms to find that seven or eight of the homes near the targeted building were damaged to the point that they were deemed unsuitable for habitation. The inhabitants of the damaged homes were forced to move in with family members or rent elsewhere in the camp. 

Repairing a home or renting a new one is out of reach for most residents of Balata. The economic situation there was difficult before October 7, with unemployment rates at 17 percent. But it has only worsened since. The camp’s residents who previously worked on the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice lines are now blocked from doing so, after Israel indefinitely paused Palestinian workers’ permits in the wake of the October 7 attacks. “It’s a complete closure,” said Ibrahim. 

The displacement and destruction Ibrahim described in Balata is playing out across the West Bank. “The new level of violence by the Israeli army in the West Bank, specifically targeting refugee camps, has resulted in a large amount of internal displacement,” said Aseel Baidoun, acting director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians. “The camps are becoming more and more uninhabitable.”

While largely unseen compared to physical damage, air and drone strikes have a devastating psychological effect. A psychosocial specialist from Nablus, who requested to remain anonymous for security reasons, grapples with the increase in violence personally and professionally. Every morning, her son asks the same questions: “Is everything normal? Are we going to school?” The answer to those questions depends on if there was a strike, a raid, or any other events in Nablus overnight. 

At the nonprofit where she works, the need for psychosocial and financial support has increased significantly. The nonprofit provides sessions with social workers and psychologists to disadvantaged families in Nablus. It used to serve around 70 families. Since October 7, their work has ballooned to serve over 100 beneficiaries. She’s seen new behavioral issues in children and an increase in attachment issues across generations. 

For older generations, the strikes are a reminder of previous conflicts. “A lot of people are used to that from the First Intifada and the Second Intifada,” she said. For children, it’s a different story. “It’s a new thing for the new generation. It’s unexpected and very scary for them.” 

Community-based organizations in Tulkarem and Jenin have reported an increased demand for mental health and psychosocial support services, said Baidoun of Medical Aid for Palestinians. “The almost weekly attacks, invasions, airstrikes, and bombings are having a huge negative impact on people’s mental health.” 

The post Israel’s New Air War in the West Bank: Nearly Half of the Dead are Children appeared first on The Intercept.

The alleged plot coincided with growing concern about far-right political violence in America. But the FBI quickly realized it had a problem: A key informant in the case, a career snitch with a long rap sheet, had helped to orchestrate the kidnapping plot. During the undercover sting, the FBI ignored crimes that the informant, Stephen Robeson, appeared to have committed, including fraud and illegal possession of a sniper rifle.

The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Those cases too raised questions about whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents and informants.

For the FBI, the stakes in the Whitmer case were high. If defense lawyers learned of Robeson’s role in the kidnapping plot, the FBI agents feared, they’d be accused of entrapment. The collapse of the case, built over nearly a year using as many as a dozen informants, two undercover agents, and bureau field offices in at least four states, would have been a public relations coup for right-wing politicians and news media. Both groups have used the problematic investigation as evidence that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against conservatives — despite a decadeslong public record proving the opposite — and as fuel for conspiracy theories that the January 6 Capitol riot was engineered by the FBI.

But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward, using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.

The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.

The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado.

The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.

Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.

So on December 10, 2020, agents called Robeson into the FBI’s office in Milwaukee in an apparent attempt to silence him. In an extraordinary five-hour conversation, which FBI agents recorded, one of Robeson’s handlers told him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.

The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “double agent” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.

“We know we have power, right?” an FBI agent told Robeson during this meeting. “We know we have leverage. We’re not going to bullshit you.”

Robeson’s role as an informant in the Whitmer kidnapping plot was supposed to be a tightly held secret. FBI agents had written the charging documents to conceal his identity.

But the FBI’s paperwork was sloppy. Supporters of the 14 defendants began to piece together clues from details like the FBI’s descriptions of passengers in a car that had been driven near Whitmer’s vacation home in Antrim County, Michigan. The clues appeared to point to Robeson as a snitch — or, in the FBI’s terminology, a confidential human source. After the October 2020 arrests, a panicked Robeson started calling targets of the FBI investigation and denying that he was an informant.

“So when you call, your intentions are to keep some of the heat off of you, right?” an FBI agent asked Robeson during the December 2020 meeting. “To point people in the other direction?”

“Anywhere but me,” Robeson answered. “Not at anyone specific, just away from me.”

Robeson was talking to Henrik “Hank” Impola and Jayson Chambers, two of the lead FBI agents in the Michigan case. Chambers, who previously played in a rock band that “bases all of its music on the fact that Christians are in a spiritual war,” was the registered owner of a private intelligence company whose purported CEO ran a Twitter account known for right-wing trolling and that appeared to tweet about the Michigan case before it was announced.

The two agents started up a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Robeson. Chambers assured him they had done all they could to conceal his role as an informant. Impola, meanwhile, said they needed to come up with a plausible cover story.

“Robey’s Idea From Day One”

From the start of the investigation, the FBI knew that Robeson, like many paid informants, had credibility problems. Robeson has been in and out of the criminal justice system since the early ’80s, charged with having sex with a minor, writing bad checks, bail jumping, and many other offenses. Robeson also acknowledged to the agents that he was previously a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. “I can’t blame what I did on anybody else,” Robeson told FBI agents of his criminal record. “I’m doing what I hope is better now.”

Sexual misconduct is a repeated claim in allegations involving Robeson, and his handlers at the FBI knew this. A local police report in the FBI’s files describes how a 17-year-old claimed Robeson coerced her to have sex in return for a promise to put her pictures in a calendar. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge.

More recently, according to an internal FBI report, a woman who lived in Robeson’s garage in Wisconsin told federal agents that Robeson pressured her for sex because he said she wasn’t contributing enough to the household. “I would not call it rape,” the woman said, though she acknowledged to federal agents that she did not believe she had a choice. The woman also told FBI agents that Robeson sold marijuana and prescription drugs out of his house, according to internal bureau documents. She reported that she suspected he was selling firearms as well. (The Intercept is not publishing these reports because they contain identifying information about alleged sex crime victims.)

Robeson’s career as a government cooperator appears to have coincided with his career as a criminal. In 1985, he testified that a member of a violent motorcycle gang with whom he had shared a jail cell confessed to him that he had “hit a girl on top of the head” before her body was found in a burned-out bar, which was allegedly set ablaze for insurance money. More recently, in the mid-2000s, Robeson helped police set up a Wisconsin farmer, who wanted to harm a romantic rival, in a murder-for-hire scheme.

Defense lawyers say the FBI used a nondisclosure agreement with Robeson — which they claim was never turned over as evidence in the Whitmer cases — to prevent Robeson from talking publicly about his work as an informant. As Special Agent Chambers reminded Robeson in their recorded meeting: “So when you get asked, ‘Why did you have to go to the FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ You don’t have to talk about what we’re talking about here.”

Federal agents were particularly troubled by messages Robeson had sent to Barry Croft Jr., a primary target in the investigation, that alluded to using violence against elected officials. Croft’s lawyer could use those messages to suggest that the kidnapping plot had been Robeson’s idea, not Croft’s, the agents feared.

“This is something that we’re all going to have to overcome,” Impola told Robeson, adding a few minutes later: “It quickly becomes, from a defense strategy, ‘Well, this was Robey’s idea from day one.’”

“I Let the FBI Know”

In the spring of 2020, as the United States grappled with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a “stay home, stay safe” order in Michigan that barred “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Covid-19 skeptics, along with many Republicans, were enraged. On April 17, Trump weighed in with a tweet: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Two weeks later, as many as 1,000 protesters attended a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing in what a state senator later described as a “dress rehearsal” for January 6. The so-called American Patriot Rally was organized by Ryan Kelly, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for taking part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many of the protesters inside the Michigan Capitol were armed, including an FBI informant and former Army sergeant named Dan Chappel. The FBI had hired Chappel to infiltrate a ragtag group of gun enthusiasts he’d met through Facebook who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. “I let the FBI know that there was talks of storming the Capitol,” Chappel, known to the militia group as “Big Dan,” later testified.

About 10 members of the Wolverine Watchmen were with Chappel at the state Capitol, unaware that he was working for the FBI. Although he informed the FBI in advance that the Wolverine Watchmen planned to storm the Capitol that day, federal agents did not try to stop them, Chappel later testified. FBI agents knew the militia members had discussed the locations of police officers at the Capitol and how to start “the boogaloo,” code for a civil war. (A year after arrests were made in the Whitmer kidnapping plot, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed in a podcast interview that law enforcement perceived violence at the Capitol as a real threat. “There was a plan for mass execution that day,” Nessel said.)

The April rally in Lansing was so successful that the same organizers held another, on June 18, 2020. The protesters, including Chappel and other members of the Wolverine Watchmen, milled about outside the Capitol that day, showing off their firearms and military cosplay for the news cameras.

That’s where Chappel first met Adam Fox, who lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop and liked to work out, smoke marijuana, and rant on social media. A stout man with a beard, Fox had already met Robeson, who was the Wisconsin chapter president of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had started working for the FBI as an informant in October 2019, according to the bureau.

Robeson had come to the FBI’s attention in part through a secret program known as Operation Bronze Griffon — first revealed publicly in 2022 to Republican House investigators by a whistleblower who misspelled it as Bronze Griffin — through which Facebook provides user activity information to federal agents without a search warrant or subpoena. According to an FBI report obtained by The Intercept, agents received a Bronze Griffon lead on Robeson for posting “possibly violent rhetoric in support of the militia movement and the Boogaloo concept.” The FBI recruited Robeson to be an informant, and he told agents that he knew of fellow militia members who had spoken about attacking law enforcement officials.

Once on the FBI payroll, Robeson organized and led several militia planning meetings, including one in Dublin, Ohio, that Fox and Croft attended on June 6, 2020.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox at the Michigan Capitol would bridge two federal investigations, known internally as Operation Cold Snap and Operation Kessel Run, and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox would bridge two federal investigation and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

The informants went to great lengths to position Fox as a leader. Robeson suggested that Fox launch a Michigan chapter of the Patriot Three Percenters. On June 21, 2020, just three days after Fox met Chappel, a third FBI informant, Jenny Plunk, created a private Facebook group called “Michigan Patriot III%ers.” (The FBI classifies Three Percenters as a domestic terrorism threat.)

The Facebook group’s first members were Plunk and Robeson, both on the FBI’s payroll, and Fox and his girlfriend, Amanda Keller. Plunk lived in Tennessee, where, according to her FBI cover story, she led a small militia. While Plunk and Robeson administered the Facebook group, Fox invited several Wolverine Watchmen and other gun enthusiasts to join, bringing the group’s membership roster to 28. Although the FBI’s informants had created the Facebook group for Fox, Robeson announced in a welcome message that Fox was the “C.O.” — a military acronym for “commanding officer.”

Robeson often spoke in the vernacular of a soldier. He never served in the military, but he was so gung-ho that he had obtained forged paperwork that made it appear he’d been a Marine, according to FBI reports. Using military lingo, Robeson posted an invitation to the new Facebook group for a weekend tactical training session in Cambria, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Madison.

More than 30 people attended that weekend event in July 2020, including Fox, his girlfriend, and a few members of the Wolverine Watchmen. At the time, Robeson was running scams related to a fake charity he called Race to Unite Races, whose mission was “to bridge the racial divide.” Internal FBI reports indicate that Robeson used proceeds from the fake charity to buy supplies to build a shooting range to train in close-quarters combat, known as a “kill house.”

Videos from the FBI files show the attendees shooting at targets in the kill house. Robeson, a firearm holstered at his side, can be seen giving directions. Chappel, who had combat experience in Iraq, also appears in several videos demonstrating tactics. FBI agents gave Chappel permission in advance to share combat tactics with the militia members, telling him: “You can do what’s on YouTube.”

In a group photo from the event, many attendees hold up rifles, offering the reluctant half-smiles of an awkward family picture. Robeson is off to the left, wearing flip-flops, American-flag swimming trunks, and a sleeveless T-shirt that hangs over his large belly. He’s holding up three fingers, the sign of the Three Percenters.

The events of that weekend were critical to the Justice Department’s case, as they appeared to show the men training for scenarios they’d encounter in their supposed attempt to kidnap Michigan’s governor. But by the time the FBI spoke to Robeson in December 2020, federal agents were deeply concerned that the fine details of that weekend might suggest entrapment.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping with Wolverine Watchman at the training you’ve set up, right?” Impola, the FBI agent, said to Robeson.

“It wasn’t just me,” Robeson said. “I set it up and —”

“These are things we need to discuss,” Chambers interrupted.

Impola told Robeson that the FBI’s case notes show that a Wisconsin agent was aware of the training, but that federal agents did not know that Robeson was the one who had organized it.

“I don’t want to put these words in your mouth, but the question is —” Impola said.

“Did I do it under FBI directive?” Robeson interrupted.

“Right,” Impola answered.

“No, it wasn’t just — What I’m saying is, it wasn’t me. It was Adam [Fox] that asked if they could do that —”

“Yup,” the two FBI agents said in unison.

“It was Barry [Croft] who asked if we could get a joint one together. It was Illinois. And I asked before I said yes.”

“The question becomes: Did a bunch of terrorists Shanghai your training for their purposes, or did you set up a training for terrorists?” Impola asked. “That’s the question, right? There’s a training that happened in which a terrorist operation was planned and played out, and you’re involved in setting it up.”

“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”

Robeson’s organizing and financing of the weekend training in Wisconsin wasn’t the FBI’s only problem.

In multiple videos from the training, Robeson can be seen using firearms. As a felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. But FBI agents apparently believed that handling firearms would be critical to his credibility among the militia members, so they had asked the Justice Department for a waiver to let Robeson handle “nonfunctional” weapons in his undercover capacity, according to internal emails.

The Justice Department said no, reminding Robeson’s handlers that he was prohibited from handling even an inoperable firearm. “Just the receiver satisfies the federal definition of a firearm,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rita Rumbelow told the FBI in a May 21, 2020, email, referring to the tube that houses the firearm’s bolt.

Internal FBI records show that Robeson and his handlers found creative ways to get around the Justice Department’s directive. One month after the Wisconsin training event, the FBI assigned Robeson a new handler, Corey Baumgardner, an agent in Wisconsin. Baumgardner later testified that he collected a firearm from Robeson: an AR-15-style rifle with an illegal suppressor and a launcher attachment. Instead of handing the firearm to the agent, Robeson left it on the ground in front of his truck. Baumgardner collected the gun, without having to see Robeson handle it.

The gambit appeared to allow Robeson and the FBI to have it both ways: Robeson could have access to guns, maintaining his credibility with the militia members, and FBI agents wouldn’t directly see him handle firearms.

Federal agents went to great lengths to maintain this sleight of hand. As part of the sting, the FBI in early August 2020 went to Delaware, where Robeson and Plunk met with a group that included Croft, a truck driver Robeson started messaging online in 2019 about targeting politicians for violence, and Frank Butler, a Navy veteran from Virginia.

Butler had been in contact online and in person with both Robeson and Chappel, and Chappel had discussed with him a fantastical plan to fly an explosives-laden drone into the Virginia governor’s North Carolina vacation home, though the plot went nowhere. Butler, who was never charged with a crime, later told investigators that Robeson and Chappel “were literally brainwashing me” and “weaponizing me.” (Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that Robeson had offered to provide money to “purchase weapons for attacks” and “the use of a drone, to aid in acts of domestic terrorism.”)

After their meeting in Delaware, Robeson had something for Croft. Baumgardner, the FBI agent in Wisconsin, had driven the AR-15-style rifle he’d collected next to Robeson’s truck more than 900 miles to Delaware. The rifle had originally belonged to Croft, and Robeson tried to give the weapon back to him. According to internal FBI reports, Croft refused to accept it, saying he couldn’t keep it at that moment. Plunk, the other FBI informant, took the illegal gun instead.

The following month, two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants — Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk — gathered for another training event in Luther, Michigan, with around 26 others, including Croft from Delaware and Fox from Michigan. Plunk secretly recorded audio and video during the training event. In one recording, Robeson proclaimed that he was now the national leader of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had appointed someone else to run his chapter in Wisconsin. “I’m no longer the state C.O.,” Robeson said. “I’m the national C.O.”

Also during this training event, on the afternoon of September 13, 2020, Plunk gave the rifle to Croft, who, in turn, handed it over to Chappel, according to FBI reports.

The story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation.

FBI agents appeared to view the rifle with an illegal suppressor and attached launcher as a critical piece of evidence in their conspiracy case. But the story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation. The illegal rifle made a full circle, from the FBI and back, through the hands of three paid informants, never staying long with any targets of the investigation.

The gun anecdote is emblematic of the larger sting: The FBI’s informants were ham-fistedly encouraging their targets to discuss plots to harm elected officials. Those efforts reached farcical levels on September 12, 2020, during a meeting and training exercises in Luther.

For that meeting, Chappel brought a friend nicknamed “Red,” a slender man with a 187th Airborne sleeve tattoo on his right arm. “Red” was in fact Timothy Bates, an undercover FBI agent who identifies himself in government recordings as “UCE 7775,” referring to his FBI undercover employee number. Just three weeks earlier, Bates had been in Denver, where he encouraged political violence. In Colorado, an FBI informant named Mickey Windecker introduced Bates to a racial justice activist who expressed interest in assassinating the state’s attorney general — a plot that, like the one targeting Virginia’s governor, ultimately fizzled.

Bates and Chappel, both Army veterans, led a close-quarters combat training for the Wolverine Watchmen. Bates also told the group gathered in Michigan that he could supply explosives. The group’s rough plan to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home involved possibly blowing up a nearby bridge to slow rescue efforts.

“So my guy up in Minnesota, he can pretty much get whatever. He has access to whatever one would want,” Bates said in an undercover recording. Bates had brought along several videos showing men assembling and detonating homemade bombs. These videos were all stage-managed by the FBI, with agents pretending to be rogue bomb-makers.

One showed an SUV obliterated by a pipe bomb. “It’s a short video,” Bates told the group.

“Oh, yeah!” Robeson said, laughing approvingly at the explosion.

Bates explained that some of the bombs used C-4 inside pipes, with timing devices. Others used liquid explosives, he said.

“I need to come play with y’all,” Plunk said excitedly.

As he watched the video, Fox asked Bates: “What kind of price tag we looking at?”

“Depending on how big you want it,” Bates answered. “For that right there? That’s pretty cheap — 1,600 bucks, maybe. Maybe a thousand bucks.”

It wasn’t the first time Bates had offered bargain prices. In Colorado, Bates suggested he could hire a hitman for $500 to kill the state’s attorney general. In Michigan, he was offering explosives for pennies on the dollar.

That evening, Robeson, Chappel, Bates, and a few militia members drove near Whitmer’s vacation home. They inspected the bridge they’d bomb, tried to view Whitmer’s home from across the lake, and drove down her road. This apparent reconnaissance trip was central to the government’s case.

But true to form, Robeson mucked up the evidence. Fellow Wisconsinite Brian Higgins was the one who drove past Whitmer’s home — a seemingly incriminating act — but Higgins later told federal agents that Robeson had said they were hunting for sexual predators. In his December meeting with FBI agents, Robeson confirmed that Higgins was not initially aware of the kidnapping plot and instead believed they were out “hunting pedophiles.” But once he was in Michigan, Higgins learned that some of the attendees had a rough plan to kidnap Whitmer. Higgins drove down Whitmer’s road using a dash camera and provided the video to Chappel. After he returned to Wisconsin, Higgins claims he told Robeson he didn’t want to be involved in the plot.

The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

Feeling guilty for tricking him, Robeson tried to protect Higgins from criminal exposure — a fact federal prosecutors admitted to in a court filing. Robeson called Chappel, still unaware that he was also an FBI informant, and told him to destroy his copy of Higgins’s dash-cam video. The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

During the December 10, 2020, recorded interview with Robeson, Impola tried to coerce the informant into changing his story about what Higgins knew before the drive: “If you’re sticking with the story that [Higgins] was out there on a pedophile ring,” the FBI special agent said, “you’ll be his star witness in the defense. There’s zero options for that.”

“We Have One Chief”

When arrests and charges were announced in the Whitmer plot, the Justice Department portrayed Adam Fox as the leader. But FBI recordings suggest the informants were the ones in charge.

On October 7, 2020, as the government was making arrests in the case, Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk were on a recorded phone line talking about who should make future calls to action — in other words, who should be the leader.

“I mean, I’m good with Robey, because you’re the national guy, the president,” Chappel said, adding a minute later: “We have one chief.”

“We can definitely roll,” Robeson said. “That’s fine.”

The FBI arrested 13 people that day, and the foiled kidnapping plot made national news. (Higgins, the 14th defendant, was arrested a week later.) After the initial arrests, Robeson made a series of calls to Chappel; the girlfriend of one of the militia members; and others who orbited the supposed kidnapping plot. Robeson offered several outlandish claims, including that he believed Croft, a primary target of the investigation, had leaked information that caused the arrests. FBI reports indicate that Robeson again called Chappel, still unaware that he was also working for the FBI, and told him to throw the rifle with the illegal suppressor and attached launcher into a lake. Chappel, however, had already returned the gun to his bureau handlers.

During these calls, Robeson told fellow informant Plunk that he believed Chappel was an informant. Robeson appeared to be flailing after the arrests, pointing fingers to avoid being revealed as a government snitch.

His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the arrests was so concerning to FBI agents that federal and state prosecutors discussed charging him with witness tampering, according to emails that circulated among more than a dozen FBI agents the day after the kidnapping plot was announced. The bureau then began to investigate Robeson, internal records show. Agents reinterviewed the woman living in his garage, who claimed he had coerced her into having sex with him. That woman told the FBI that during the undercover sting, Robeson had an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom; that he was bringing in drugs from out of state; and that he had proposed taking her to rallies and training events in other parts of the country so she could make money, which she described to the FBI as “sex trafficking.”

For his part, Robeson appeared to realize that he had crossed the line from informant to participant in the kidnapping plot, putting himself in legal jeopardy. An internal FBI report said Robeson told another informant that he was worried he could be linked to “product,” by which he meant explosives.

“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”

The Whitmer kidnapping plot has yielded five acquittals, five convictions, and four guilty pleas in federal and state courts. Robeson didn’t testify in any of the trials. When defense lawyers tried to compel him, he told the federal court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The Justice Department claimed that Robeson was a “double agent” whose statements would not be “binding admissions of the government itself.”

The recording of Robeson’s December 2020 meeting with the FBI reveals that the “double agent” ploy was a carefully planned strategy. When Robeson was called into that Wisconsin FBI office, agents described three possible scenarios for him.

The first was that all the defendants would take plea deals, in which case “your name is not on the witness list,” Impola said. The second was that Robeson could be a government witness or, in the third option, a witness for the defendants whose testimony could support their claims of entrapment.

At the time, the agents errantly assumed that option one was the likeliest. “I am fairly confident that when anybody looks at that witness list, they’re not going to trial now because they know the ramifications,” said Impola.

But what he didn’t say was that the second and third options — involving Robeson testifying in court — weren’t real options at all, at least not in the view of the FBI. There was also a fourth option that the agents didn’t mention: The Justice Department could jam Robeson, a felon, with firearms charges for crimes he committed while working undercover for the FBI.

And that’s what happened. On March 3, 2021, the Justice Department indicted Robeson in Wisconsin on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged that Robeson bought a .50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms available to civilians in the United States, and later sold it on Facebook — all while working for the FBI.

At his plea hearing, Robeson claimed he’d bought the gun to bolster his FBI cover. “I did this trying to keep my undercover position where I was at and kind of make me look a little more aggressive in the organization,” Robeson said in court.

Robeson was sentenced to probation on a federal felony charge that could have carried a 10-year sentence. He and his handlers knew he had illegally possessed, purchased, and sold multiple firearms in the course of the sting; the single gun charge represented a threat of more to come if he were to testify in any of the state or federal prosecutions.

With that threat, FBI agents stopped the facts from getting in the way of their “good story” about the Whitmer kidnapping plot. In their zeal to protect a career-making case, those federal agents also poured jet fuel on conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the January 6 Capitol riot that will be central to this year’s presidential election.

The post The Informant at the Heart of the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Was a Liability. So Federal Agents Shut Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everyone was screaming,” AlAbssi said. “‘May God never let you live my terror,’ she told me, ‘Pray for us, pray for us.’” The call disconnected. 

Panicked and crying, AlAbssi redialed her sister over and over until, on the 10th try, she got through. An Israeli airstrike had just hit the house neighboring their family in Gaza City, her sister said, and a piece of shrapnel entered her younger brother’s wrist.

“All the windows were broken, and the doors flew in their faces,” AlAbssi said. “My brother was bleeding, everyone was screaming and did not know anything, and the world was dust.” The phone disconnected again, and AlAbssi was alone, shaking and sweating in her dorm room thousands of miles away. 

“Everyone was screaming and did not know anything, and the world was dust.”

Since the bombing, AlAbssi has had a headache that won’t go away. She’s struggled to sleep and fallen behind on her coursework — all she can think about is what might happen to her family. She says she wakes up every night and scrolls through Telegram for images or names of her family members. 

“I get drunk on the news and fall back asleep,” she said. “I feel so guilty.”

The Intercept spoke with several Palestinians who left Gaza in the months before October 7 to pursue opportunities for work or higher education. Like AlAbssi, they are racked with anguish and helplessness as the Israeli military attacks their families and destroys the homes they grew up in. They described the dissonance of witnessing from afar the familiar scenes of death and destruction while trying to cope with distress and grief in Western countries where daily life continues uninterrupted. Whether they will ever return to Gaza — and who will still be there if they do — is for now uncertain.

“When I first left Gaza, I just wanted to get a master’s in public health because the health system was so bad, and I wanted to help the fresh graduates to get jobs,” AlAbssi said. “But now everything has changed in Gaza. All my plans have changed.”

As journalists and others flood social media with images and videos from Gaza, psychologists have cautioned about the secondhand trauma people can experience from regularly consuming distressing content. For Palestinians who are from Gaza, the mental health impacts are compounded by survivor’s guilt, said Iman Farajallah, a California-based psychologist who grew up in the coastal enclave. 

“We will have excessive worry, depression, stress, fatigue,” she told The Intercept. “We’ll have our trauma activated, and we will feel loss of control.” In the past two months, 11 members of Farajallah’s family have been killed in Gaza, and her 85-year-old father is displaced after his house was bombed.

“You are seeing in front of your eyes that your family is suffering and might be killed,” she said, “but you can’t do anything about it.”

Left/Top: Walaa AlAbssi, left, and her siblings Reema and Ahmed, who are still in Gaza, are seen on AlAbssi’s cellphone screen. Right/Bottom: Walaa AlAbssi poses for a portrait in her room in Dublin. Photos: Molly Keane for The Intercept

Repetitive Trauma

It was hours before AlAbssi heard from her family again. Her parents and brother had run to Al Shifa Hospital as missiles fell around them. The doctors determined that the shrapnel had cut four tendons in her brother’s wrist, but because the hospital was overwhelmed with more urgent surgeries, they told him to come back in a week.

AlAbssi’s family could not wait. Two days later, they walked three miles to a different hospital where they learned that her brother’s arm was on the brink of gangrene and his nerves had been damaged. Doctors operated on him for two and a half hours and removed the shrapnel.

“Imagine that there is a fragment in your hand, and you do not know what it’s made of,” AlAbssi said. “That day was literally the worst day of my life.”

Before she left Gaza, AlAbssi had been first in her class of aspiring dentists and worked as an assistant teacher at Al-Azhar University’s dentistry school. She had received a scholarship to continue her education at University College Dublin. But since the attack near her family’s home, she has postponed exams and gotten extensions on assignments, including her graduate thesis — accommodations she has never needed. “This is not Walaa,” she said. “My real academic performance is not like this.”

According to Farajallah, Palestinians from Gaza are more likely to experience mental illness living under conditions of conflict, siege, and occupation since Israel implemented the blockade 16 years ago. After an Israeli military attack on Gaza in 2021, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that 9 out of 10 children suffered from conflict-related trauma. According to findings from Save the Children, in 2022, 4 out of 5 children in the Gaza Strip reported feeling depression, fear, and grief.

Farajallah said that Gazans’ experiences run deeper than trauma from the current war. “What’s been happening is a repetitive trauma over 75 years, and it’s 24/7,” she said, referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral lands in 1948.

Because of the dire circumstances in Gaza, thousands of Palestinians seek work or schooling outside the Strip. Palestinians who The Intercept spoke to expressed mixed feelings about leaving home: a gratitude for freedom of movement but bitterness at having to go elsewhere for opportunities. 

“There’s nothing like Gaza. It’s the best place despite everything.”

Growing up in the village of Beit Lahia, Mohammed Dawas, 24, would gaze over at the Israeli villages just on the other side of the border wall.

“I used to say, Israel is lit up while Gaza was always in complete darkness. I used to say they are so lucky — their life is totally different than ours,” he said. “I constantly thought about leaving Gaza to a country without a siege.”

In 2019, he traveled to California and got married. Not long after, he moved to a rural town in Utah, where he found work in a factory to send money to his family. 

Homesick, he quit his job in March and returned to Gaza but reluctantly came back to the U.S. in May to find work. “There’s nothing like Gaza,” he said. “It’s the best place despite everything.” The trip would be the last time he would see his family’s house standing and many of his relatives alive.

“You Die a Thousand Deaths”

On October 14, Dawas woke up to a call that 25 of his family members had been hit by an airstrike on their home; 15 of them were killed, including his cousin and best friend, Yousef. The bodies of some of his family members remained under the rubble for two days before neighbors and rescue workers were able to pull them out.

“I still can’t believe I won’t see Yousef again,” Dawas said. “I’ve lost the joy of life. I still can’t express the horror of the shock.” 

Just hours later, his own home in Beit Lahia was bombed. Unable to reach his mother or any of his six siblings, Dawas worried they might have died. Hours later, he called again and his mother picked up — they had all fled to the homes of other relatives in Beit Lahia, she told him, and survived two more bombings. 

“I didn’t expect to hear my mother’s voice again,” he said. “We spent the whole call crying. It was like I was born again, as if I heard her for the first time in my life.” 

Dawas told The Intercept that the war has triggered fear, anxiety, and depression within him — emotional responses accumulated from living through six Israeli attacks on Gaza. 

“I haven’t been able to sleep well since then. I read all day and night, which made me sick. I was scared to death about my family,” he said. “I didn’t expect to lose anyone because I hadn’t lost anyone before.” He began to imagine the worst-case scenarios — one of which came true.

On December 1, the last day of the weeklong truce between Hamas and Israel, Dawas was working a day job removing fallen leaves in a backyard when his sister who lives in Egypt called. She told him that an Israeli airstrike hit the shelter in northern Gaza where Dawas’s 32-year-old brother Saleh was staying. Saleh was injured and had no access to medical treatment; his sister said that he seemed to have developed an infection and showed signs of kidney failure.

“I didn’t expect to lose anyone because I hadn’t lost anyone before.”

Dawas felt numb, except for a pounding pain in his chest. He said a quick prayer. Being close to God was the only way he could withstand the heartache. 

“When someone is injured,” he said, “you start to imagine how he will die, and you wait, and you die a thousand deaths.” 

The next day, Saleh died. Dawas was having trouble calling Gaza, so his relative in Amman called him and his mother on separate phones, and put them on speaker. 

“I had broken down, and she was comforting me,” Dawas said. “She told me, ‘God chose him to be a martyr. Thank God Allah gave us strength in our hearts.’”

Coping With War

Everyone in AlAbssi’s family has been displaced by the war, leaving their homes to stay with neighbors and other relatives. Neighbors told AlAbssi that her family’s house had likely been bombed during Israel’s ground invasion into northern Gaza.

To cope with her family’s plight, AlAbssi spends time with a Palestinian friend and goes to protests alongside thousands of others in Ireland, where solidarity with Palestinians is widespread. But at the end of the day, she spends most of her time alone and at home. 

The truce had alleviated some of her worry, and she was able to finish some assignments. Her professors have been sympathetic and accommodating, she said, and she’s gone to talk to her university’s well-being officer. But she still plans to spend Christmas break studying. 

“Before the war, I was expecting to achieve high grades, but now I just want to succeed and pass,” AlAbssi said. “Thinking about there being no home in Gaza puts me under a lot of pressure.”

Dawas also struggles with the reality that the family and home he once knew are no more.

One of his sisters, her family, and his mother are staying in a United Nations school in the south and living off UNRWA donations, while his other brother and his family are stuck in the north. He feels helpless that he can’t even send money to his family — the main reason he returned to Utah — because they cannot receive it, and there’s nothing to buy.

Dawas has also found living in the U.S. distressing. Coming across posters of Israeli hostages and watching biased news coverage fills him with anger and fear. He said some Americans have gotten upset at him when he’s defended his family and Gaza. 

He finds relief in driving long distances while reciting the Quran, listening to Hans Zimmer and Ivan Torrent, and walking through Utah’s Maxwell Park. But he has stopped going to the gym and has no appetite; he struggles to find steady work and put his plans to study computer engineering in the spring on hold. 

“Every time I want to eat, I feel guilty. Everything is available to me, but my family cannot even drink water,” he said. “I constantly live with feeling humiliated and oppressed. It makes me not want to live. Life feels worthless.”

Correction: December 12, 2023
A previous version of this story stated that Mohammed Dawas’s cousin Yousef and Yousef’s two children were killed in an airstrike. In fact, the children were also cousins of Dawas.

The post For Palestinians Who Just Left Gaza, Witnessing the War From Afar Evokes Helplessness and Grief appeared first on The Intercept.

One evening in the spring of 2015, Ahmed left his family home in a residential neighborhood of Baghdad and got into his red Toyota Corolla. Ever since his family had fled their hometown of Ramadi as the Islamic State advanced in 2014, the 20-something had been working as a taxi driver, ferrying passengers and their possessions between the capital and Anbar, a Sunni-majority province where Ramadi is located. But that evening, he planned to make a special delivery. An emir – a senior ISIS leader – had instructed him to collect a car rigged with explosives destined to detonate in the capital.

It wasn’t the first time Ahmed had participated in operations aimed at spreading terror in Shia-majority areas and retaliating against government forces fighting to uproot ISIS from its self-declared caliphate further north, according to Iraqi prosecutors. Since Ahmed had pledged bay’a, or allegiance, to the terrorist group, the prosecutors contended, ISIS had tasked him with transporting two other car bombs from Anbar. As before, this latest bomb would probably target Iraqi security forces in the capital. But it also might explode in front of one of Baghdad’s popular bakeries or ice cream shops, where Iraqi families sought to unwind in the cool evening air, or near a crowded Shia shrine, targeting thousands of pilgrims who had recently flocked to the capital to attend a religious festival.

Ahmed didn’t know the precise location of the car; this was a precaution to avoid alerting the security forces to the operation. He called another contact, who connected him with a third person to fetch the car. This third man drove the car bomb, a Kia Sorento, while Ahmed accompanied him in his red Toyota Corolla. As they made their way through Baghdad’s crowded streets, Ahmed called a fourth person, an ISIS operative who had gained a reputation for orchestrating attacks in the capital. The operative guided them to the drop-off location.

But as they arranged to meet in western Baghdad, intelligence officers were monitoring their phone calls and tracking their movements. Unbeknownst to Ahmed and the others, the ISIS operative they were talking to had been detained and forced to cooperate. He led the men and the car bomb straight into the hands of the security forces. An Iraqi government forensic team later confirmed that the Kia Sorento was indeed rigged with a bomb that could be detonated using a mobile phone.

In what the government considered a highly successful operation, Iraq’s intelligence services managed to foil a terrorist attack and penetrate an ISIS cell they say was responsible for masterminding many suicide blasts in Baghdad. Ahmed and two of the other operatives confessed to belonging to ISIS.

A few months later, the driver of the car bomb was acquitted after claiming that he did not know the car was rigged with explosives, but Ahmed and the other two detainees were sentenced to death by hanging. “The details of the crime clearly show they are a danger to society,” the verdict read. “Applying a harsh punishment is more suitable than being merciful.”

Justice had been served, at least according to the state. But this account represents just one version of events, laid out by institutions that many Iraqis, especially Sunnis, view with suspicion and fear.

None of it was true, said Ahmed’s family, who have been fighting to overturn the conviction in a federal appeals court. They feared that speaking publicly about the case could endanger Ahmed and his family, so The Intercept agreed not to identify them, instead using pseudonyms. Ahmed had never sworn allegiance to ISIS, the family claimed. To the contrary, he helped families victimized by its brutal rule. As a driver, he often snuck cars into Baghdad on behalf of displaced people who had been forced to leave them behind when they fled ISIS. Ahmed had been framed, his father said, a victim of security forces who harbor deep hatred against Sunnis, the sect ISIS purports to champion. Ahmed hadn’t known the car he had accompanied was carrying a bomb, his father said. He was to give the driver of the other car a ride once the man dropped off the vehicle. Ahmed had been targeted because he was from Anbar, a predominantly Sunni province known as a hotbed of extremism and a fertile recruitment ground for groups like ISIS.

Ahmed’s 18-page handwritten confession detailing the incident was a falsehood, the family said, extracted under severe torture. They viewed the judges as complicit: The court had turned down multiple requests for a medical examination to determine whether Ahmed had been tortured, which, if true, could have nullified his confession. Because Ahmed wasn’t the one driving the car bomb, there would have been little other evidence against him. If the Iraqi judiciary were fair, they said, Ahmed would have walked free.

Instead, his family had come to perceive the judicial process as deeply unjust, fraught with sectarian bias and corruption.

For over three years, the Iraqi government and its Western allies battled ISIS, engaging in some of the fiercest urban combat since World War II. The grueling, nine-month operation to retake Mosul claimed tens of thousands of lives and left Iraq’s second-largest city in ruins. In December, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced that the war was finally over. The terror group that had once held a third of Iraq’s territory had officially been defeated.

ISIS may be vanquished, but it has left behind a deeply divided Iraq. The group’s victims yearn for justice and, in many cases, revenge, a practice that is legitimized by tribal laws and often directed at families of ISIS fighters. Sunnis feel unfairly branded as extremists by other ethno-religious groups, who blame them for allowing ISIS to take root in their areas. Even though many Sunnis express gratitude for having been freed from ISIS, they remain deeply suspicious of the Iraqi state and its security forces that once again govern their territories, and whom they accuse of arbitrary arrests, looting, and forced evictions.

The Iraqi government must now separate good from evil, bring perpetrators to account, and deliver justice for victims of ISIS, while avoiding the corruption and unequal treatment that fueled the group’s rise in the first place. The scale of the undertaking is formidable, especially for the overburdened judicial system. Baghdad’s central criminal court delivered verdicts for around 2,800 ISIS suspects in 2017 alone, a judge there told The Intercept; hundreds of others were tried in other cities across Iraq. Thousands linger in crowded prisons, waiting months and sometimes years for a trial that only lasts a few minutes.

Views on the process differ starkly. Judges and prosecutors say that ISIS has trained its members to sabotage the judicial process by exploiting their rights as defendants and alleging procedural violations that sometimes result in dismissal. Private lawyers stay away from complicated and controversial cases, fearing retribution, arrest, and social stigma. Suspects’ relatives see the process as yet another tool to oppress the Sunni minority, while some accuse lawyers and investigators of financially exploiting desperate families.

Rather than mending intercommunal rifts to pave the way for reconciliation, the ISIS trials risk further polarizing Iraq’s fractured society. Unlike the justice and reconciliation process in post-genocide Rwanda, for example, Iraq’s state has offered little space for truth-telling and victim participation. The country’s harsh counterterrorism laws don’t differentiate between leaders and lowly aides, providing few opportunities for minor perpetrators to repent in return for lower sentences. Far from setting the stage for reconciliation, the rapid-fire trials of ISIS suspects appear aimed at a single goal: to purge ISIS from Iraq’s society as quickly as possible, with little regard for victims or concern that innocent people could be caught up in the system. Instead of mending old wounds, the process risks tearing open new ones; the ripple effects of decisions made in Iraq’s courts today could be felt for years, perhaps decades, to come.

“We All Confessed Under Beatings”

Nabil fiddled nervously with the plastic cup on the table in front of him. His dark eyes scanned the cafe, scrutinizing new arrivals as they ordered sweet tea and settled into stiff wooden chairs. This was Nabil’s first time in Baghdad since his arrest in 2015. “I go from my house to work and straight back. I don’t go anywhere to avoid trouble,” he mumbled, his voice nearly inaudible in the crowded cafe. Like Ahmed, Nabil comes from Ramadi, where the two grew up together. When Ahmed vanished that fateful spring evening, Nabil tried to help his friend’s family look for him. “We had no idea where he was. We didn’t know if he was arrested or kidnapped,” he said.

Nabil didn’t have to search for long. A few days later, in the middle of the night, security forces knocked on the door of his temporary home in Baghdad, where Nabil’s family had relocated, like Ahmed’s, when ISIS took control of Ramadi. The soldiers, who wore black uniforms with insignia that read “Special Operations,” didn’t explain why they had come. Nor did they present an arrest warrant when they handcuffed and blindfolded Nabil, his cousin, and another friend. “For an hour or an hour and a half, they kept us in the apartment, asking questions and beating us,” Nabil recalled.

The men were ushered into Humvees and driven to an interrogation facility at Baghdad International Airport, run by the Interior Ministry’s Directorate of Intelligence and Counterterrorism. The days that followed were the worst in Nabil’s life. The torture began around midnight and lasted until dawn. First came the beatings. Then they would hang him from the top edge of a door with his hands bound behind his back in a position known as “Palestinian hanging” because it is said to be used in Israeli prisons. Once suspended, he said, they would whip him with cables. On one occasion, Nabil told me, he was electrocuted, with wires attached to his ear and genitals. Although no witnesses could corroborate Nabil’s account, a Human Rights Watch researcher told The Intercept that “there are multiple prisons at the Baghdad airport, and Human Rights Watch has heard accounts of incidents of torture there. … I have heard accounts and seen photos depicting the types of torture you are describing in Iraq.”

After it was over, they would drag Nabil back to his tiny cell, where he would fade in and out of consciousness until the ordeal resumed a few hours later. After three days, he was ready to do anything to make it stop. “I told them, ‘Bring me any paper you want me to sign. You can write whatever you want on it,’” Nabil said.

On the fourth day, Nabil finally saw Ahmed. He had heard his voice earlier, but thought that perhaps his mind, muddled by the beatings, was playing tricks on him. When the prisoners were brought into a courtyard to get some sunlight, the two friends exchanged brief accounts of their arrests, and quickly realized they were linked. Nabil’s cousin had been taken because the Toyota Corolla that Ahmed had driven at the time of his arrest was registered in the cousin’s name. Nabil, they figured, had been arrested because he was young, male, and living in the same house as his cousin.

Like Nabil, Ahmed had endured several days of torture and appeared broken.

“I confessed,” Nabil recalled Ahmed telling him.

“To what? You haven’t done anything.”

“I confessed under the beatings.”

“We all confessed under beatings,” Nabil tried to console him. But Ahmed was certain that he’d soon swap his yellow jumpsuit for a red one, the color reserved for convicts. Before the men parted, Ahmed asked Nabil to promise that if he got out, he would pass a message to Ahmed’s parents. He wanted them to know that he’d been detained and to ask their forgiveness for what they were about to go through.

Terrorism trials in Iraq unfold in three phases: the investigation, the trial, and the appeal. While the entire process is fraught with challenges, defense lawyers and judges say that the most serious violations occur during the initial investigative phase, when defendants are in the hands of often vindictive security forces. On paper, suspects can only be detained with an arrest warrant. Within 24 hours of their arrest, they must see an investigative judge, who determines whether there’s sufficient evidence to keep them for further investigation. The judge can extend the period of detention up to a maximum of six months, at which point the suspect must be released if the case against him isn’t strong enough to trigger an indictment. If there’s sufficient incriminating evidence, the investigative judge, who in the Iraqi system leads the investigation in collaboration with the prosecution, refers the case to the criminal court for trial.

But the process is rife with abuses, according to interviews with human rights experts, as well as more than a dozen lawyers, judges, and prosecutors. As in the case of Nabil, security forces frequently detain individuals without arrest warrants. Arrests are often driven by tribal disputes or sectarianism, and investigators routinely extort payments from relatives in return for dubious promises of better conditions or a quick release. Suspects often don’t see a judge within 24 hours, and torture is endemic, with investigators regularly resorting to beatings, electrocution, solitary confinement, and other harsh treatment. Until the investigation is complete and confessions have been written, suspects are rarely granted access to family or lawyers.

It took Nabil, his cousin, and the friend arrested with them two months to see an investigative judge, much longer than the 24 hours required by law. The investigative judge ordered their immediate release due to insufficient evidence, but it took a few more weeks, and, according to the family, about $100,000 in bribes to members of the security forces before the three men walked free. In all, they had spent three months in jail.

As soon as Nabil was released, he traveled north to the Kurdish capital Erbil, where he remained until the end of the war against ISIS. He considered it a small price to pay to avoid getting arrested again.

A Desperate Search

With Nabil’s release, word of Ahmed’s arrest finally reached his family. The news ended three months of uncertainty over his whereabouts, but it would also turn out to be the heaviest in a series of blows this Sunni family had suffered since the 2003 U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government.

In May 2003, in a quest to eliminate all remnants of the former regime, the U.S.-led transitional government dissolved the Iraqi army. Ahmed’s father, Omar, an army officer, was dismissed. With that, the family lost its main source of income. Omar was utterly humiliated. “What greater disgrace can you feel?” he asked. The disastrous policy left over 300,000 Iraqi soldiers unemployed and disgruntled. Many joined the various armed insurgencies that mushroomed across Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion to fight what they perceived as an unjust occupation.

Al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, a precursor of ISIS, thrived in the chaos, drawing recruits from among marginalized Sunnis who had been disproportionally affected by attempts to purge the country of Saddam loyalists. But Sunnis, like all Iraqis, were often victims of the insurgency against American and Iraqi security forces. Omar’s youngest son was seriously injured in a suicide attack in 2005 that left him permanently disabled.

Over the next decade, the family endured as one battle after another engulfed Ramadi, a famous site of rebellion against the Americans and, after their withdrawal in 2011, against the Iraqi government. When ISIS launched a major assault on the city in early 2014, the family sought refuge in nearby Hit, which was still under government control. But as the terror group gained ground, capturing Hit in October of that year, the family was uprooted again, this time joining tens of thousands of people who fled Anbar province for Baghdad.

In the capital, the family was relatively safe, but growing sectarian mistrust fueled by the war soon began to trouble them. Sunnis who had fled former ISIS strongholds lived under a cloud of suspicion that they were ISIS sympathizers. Omar constantly feared for his three sons, especially Ahmed, whose work as a taxi driver making frequent trips to Anbar brought him into contact with vengeful Shia militias and security forces who manned checkpoints along the route and stood accused of arbitrarily arresting young Sunni men.

When Ahmed didn’t return home that spring evening, Omar feared that he might have fallen into the hands of the security forces. Looking for a detainee meant approaching dozens of different armed actors, many of whom ran their own secret prisons.

Working his old army contacts, Omar spent countless hours and much of the family’s fortune trying to find his son. “People started extorting us,” Omar told me at the family’s home in a middle-class neighborhood of Baghdad. “They would say, ‘Your son is being detained in this place. Pay us $20,000 so he gets released.’” Three men who purported to hold powerful positions in the security forces promised to help in return for money. Desperate, Omar doled out one daftar — a $10,000 stack of bills — after another, driving his family to the brink of financial ruin. A total of $55,000 in bribes reportedly changed hands to find Ahmed and later, to grease the wheels of the justice system. Omar sold the family’s land and his wife’s and daughters’ dowry gold. “I would sell anything I own as long as my son walks,” Omar said.

But soon after the men received the money, all three disappeared. Their mobile numbers were disconnected, and Omar never heard from them again. He wasn’t entirely surprised. He had filmed himself giving money to one of them in a futile attempt to hold him accountable.

The psychological burden and social stigma of Ahmed’s arrest were far greater than the financial toll. One evening in late 2015, Omar received a distressed phone call from his brother, urging him to tune into state-run Al Iraqiya television, where an episode of a reality show called “In the Grip of the Law” was underway.

“In the Grip of the Law” started filming in 2013 to garner public support for the security forces in the wake of humiliating battlefield setbacks in the early days of the war against ISIS. The concept was controversial: Prisoners suspected of belonging to ISIS recount or re-enact crimes to which they have confessed. Relatives of victims sometimes appear at the crime scene, taking turns scolding the men they hold responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. The show has proven very popular, especially in Shia areas that are often targeted by jihadi groups. Sunnis like Omar, on the other hand, see it as an embodiment of Shia dominance, a tool for oppressing Sunnis who are forced to confess under torture to crimes they didn’t commit.

There, in the glare of the cameras and for everyone to see, was Ahmed. He was led into the studio by a man wearing black fatigues and a black balaclava over his face. Ahmed wore a yellow jumpsuit, plastic handcuffs and a blindfold. It was the first time Omar had seen him since his arrest six months earlier. Dramatic music played as Ahmed was made to sit on a chair in front of a large, white poster that read “Ministry of Interior, Falcon Intelligence Cell.” The man in black, presumably an intelligence officer, removed Ahmed’s blindfold. Then the interrogation began.

“Tell me about your joining process. Where did you join? What year?” an investigator asked from behind the camera.

“In 2015,” Ahmed answered with a shaky voice.

“And who recruited you?”

“Through Abu Jaafar, the man in charge of Baghdad, and Abu Islam. And they handed me over to Al-Mufti Abu Mohammed. I pledged allegiance with him.”

“Where?”

“In Hit, the district of Hit.”

“Why did you join the death gangs? Why did you join the Daesh gangs?” the investigator insisted, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

“The idea was to just be a driver, for material purposes,” Ahmed replied.

Omar was shocked to see his son paraded on TV like a convict even though, at that time, his guilt had yet to be proven in court. He was introduced as a “terrorist” and granted no opportunity to protect his identity, a right that courts were quick to invoke when The Intercept requested permissions to film trials of suspected ISIS members during a trip to Baghdad in January. As the interrogation progressed, the conversation became increasingly one-sided, with Ahmed uttering mostly monosyllabic responses as the investigator hurled accusations.

“So you joined to do anything in the organization,” the interrogator said.

“Just as a driver,” Ahmed answered.

“One day a driver, another day a transporter, another day as a passenger, another day as the perpetrator of operations!”

“I was notified that I was just to transport cars.”

“Whatever the case, if you’re transporting a car, what is this car, booby-trapped or not?”

“Booby-trapped, yes.”

“You knew it was booby-trapped.”

“Yes.”

“You knew it was going to explode on people.”

“Yes.”

“You knew, or you didn’t?”

“Yes, yes.”

“So in the end, you’re complicit in this operation to kill people. A part of this organization that participates in murder, yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“So, your principle is to kill!”

“Yes.”

“What do you say to Daesh now?”

“I mean … it’s injustice … harming people because … if you’re still young, it’s better to leave such things behind because your fate is with the police forces,” Ahmed stammered.

“How did you come to realize this?”

“Because, I mean, the police forces are in control,” Ahmed replied obsequiously. Satisfied with the response, the interrogator backed down, and the show cut to another scene.

Omar was convinced that just like his confession on paper, his son’s televised testimony had been brought about by force. The family decided to hire a lawyer, but finding a trustworthy advocate was difficult in a country where defending people caught up in sweeping antiterrorism laws has grown into a profitable business.

Ahmed’s uncle, himself a lawyer who helped behind the scenes, was unwilling to represent his nephew in court. “As soon as you go there, and the case is linked to terrorism, you will also be arrested. Even if you are a lawyer!” he told me.

Last year, at least 15 lawyers were arrested for defending ISIS suspects in the northern, Sunni-majority province of Nineveh. Two lawyers were sentenced to death in December for joining ISIS and obstructing justice, according to court records. What was needed, the family concluded, was someone with good government connections — someone who, by virtue of his background, wouldn’t be suspected of belonging to ISIS.

“It’s a Matter of Blood”

Mohammad Al-Khafaji, a short, round man with a meticulously shaved, angular buzz cut and goatee, comes from a family of lawyers. His office, monitored by four security cameras, is located on the first floor of an inconspicuous building just off a busy commercial street in the affluent Harthiya neighborhood of Baghdad. All four attorneys in his office specialize in terrorism cases, and the waiting room always seems to be filled with anxious families in search of help for relatives charged under Iraq’s draconian laws.

Over the years, 38-year-old Al-Khafaji has acquired a reputation for taking his work seriously. He talks about his cases with such avidity and detail that there’s little doubt about his intelligence or his fascination with his work. Unlike many other lawyers who are seen as merely pocketing the money of desperate families, he is known for rolling up his sleeves. That doesn’t mean he isn’t making a fortune. On average, he charges at least $10,000 to take on a counterterrorism defense, more than 20 times the average monthly salary of a government employee.

At first, Al-Khafaji hesitated to work on Ahmed’s behalf. Even though Ahmed wasn’t driving the car bomb, the investigators had built a compelling case against him. “I told the family, ‘This case is lost, 100 percent,’” he told me in his office one cold day this past winter.

Al-Khafaji is Shia and well-connected in Baghdad, but even he approaches defending ISIS suspects cautiously. He has secured his career in part by avoiding cases involving men captured in Mosul, the city where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the so-called caliphate and where the group made its final stand.

But an even more important factor guides Al-Khafaji in choosing his clients. He paused, then pointed at the two golden nameplates on the desk in front of him. “Do you know who this is?” he asked. One of the plates bore his own name, the other that of his sister, Suhad Al-Khafaji, a well-known lawyer who was killed in 2011 in a high-profile case that led to a death sentence for former vice president Tariq al-Hashemi and his son-in-law. Hashemi, a Sunni, was accused of running a hit squad aimed at eliminating his Shia opponents. He, in turn, claimed the case against him was politically motivated.

“It’s a matter of blood,” Al-Khafaji said. “If Iraqi blood was shed, I won’t accept the case. We as Muslims, we support the oppressed against the oppressors. It’s not acceptable to represent the perpetrators.”

In Ahmed’s case, there was no blood. Omar kept insisting, and after mutual acquaintances swore by Ahmed’s innocence, Al-Khafaji relented and took the case. In an effort to cast doubt on Ahmed’s confession, he approached the prosecutor’s office, which penned a letter to the central investigative court demanding a medical report. When the first letter went unanswered, he submitted a second request just days before Ahmed’s court date. He didn’t get a response to that one, either.

Although Iraq’s constitution and criminal law prohibit the use of force to extract confessions, they don’t explicitly mention the right to medical exams. But a spokesperson for the Higher Judicial Council, which oversees Iraqi courts in an effort to ensure the judiciary’s independence, told The Intercept that such exams constitute an inalienable right for defendants. “We aren’t denying that there is torture by members of the security forces. But any evidence that is brought through torture isn’t recognized,” said senior judge Abdulsattar Bayraqdar, the spokesperson. If a defendant claims he has been tortured, the council immediately sends him to a “medical committee” charged with examining prisoners and verifying their claims, Bayraqdar said. In reality, though, judges have broad discretion over whether or not a prisoner receives a medical exam.

Ahmed never got one. Even if he had, Al-Khafaji says, it would have made no difference in light of the evidence intelligence officers had gathered against his client. The lawyer approached a couple of defense witnesses to vouch for Ahmed, but he said they were too frightened to speak out in favor of an ISIS suspect in a public court. Ahmed’s conviction seemed inevitable.

Tears streamed down Omar’s face as he recalled seeing his son on the day of the trial. Families weren’t allowed inside the courtroom, but the two exchanged fleeting hugs and a few words in a room next door. Then Omar was asked to leave, handing his son’s fate to a justice system he had little reason to trust.

A few hours later, Al-Khafaji called Omar to his office, where he broke the news: Ahmed had been found guilty. His trial at Baghdad’s Central Criminal Court lasted only a few minutes. As usual in these cases, the panel of three judges, seated on a high bench in front of the accused, hastily read out the findings of the investigation. Ahmed pleaded not guilty. No witnesses were present to testify for or against him. The verdict made no mention of allegations of torture, nor did it mention the two requests for medical exams. In line with Article 4 of Iraq’s counterterrorism laws and no matter how minor his role may have been, Ahmed received the same sentence as the mastermind of the planned suicide attack: death by hanging.

The Road to Reconciliation

Since Ahmed was sentenced, the relationship between his family and Mohammed Al-Khafaji has soured. Ahmed’s father, Omar, accused Al-Khafaji of sectarianism and of colluding with the investigators to exploit the family. In Omar’s eyes, Al-Khafaji had failed miserably in building what should have been a straightforward defense for his son.

Ahmed’s only remaining hope to escape execution was the appeals court, and, in a peculiar twist, the man who had sentenced Saddam Hussein to death. Munir Haddad, now in his 50s, rose to fame while presiding over Saddam’s 2006 court case, described by some as a show trial. He personally oversaw the former dictator’s hanging “because all the other judges refused to do it,” he said. After he was forced out of his post in 2008 on what he says were political grounds, he opened a private law practice in Baghdad. He has made a reputation – and a fortune – defending people charged with terrorism, rebranding himself as an advocate for marginalized Sunnis and as a champion of reconciliation.

Omar found Haddad on a friend’s recommendation. When I visited Haddad, who has more than 900 clients, he asked his assistant to bring Ahmed’s legal file. “Maybe he is telling the truth, maybe he is lying. But he didn’t kill anyone,” he said as he scanned the documents. While Haddad also won’t take any case that involves Iraqi bloodshed, he is ready to defend the guilty from punishment he views as overly harsh. “I may be convinced that he did it, but I may not be convinced that he should be executed,” he said. “When there’s no blood, it’s possible to give the young man a chance.” He had promised Omar that he could reduce Ahmed’s sentence to life in prison.

Haddad wasn’t against the death sentence per se. “If someone killed hundreds, of course he should be executed.” But harsh punishments weren’t conducive to reconciliation, and reconciliation was what Iraq now needed most. “Saddam is gone, the Baath era has finished, so we have to start from the beginning,” he said.

Haddad knew this from personal experience. Dozens of his own relatives, including two brothers, had been killed and many more imprisoned under Saddam. Haddad himself had served almost six years in prison. “When you are released, you can have two personalities. Either you seek revenge or reconciliation.”

Haddad chose the latter. He went to law school and recently ran for a seat in parliament on a platform of judicial reform. (Because of widespread allegations of fraud in the June election, votes are being manually recounted and it’s still unclear whether Haddad has earned a seat in parliament.) He wants investigations to be carried out by the judiciary, instead of by security forces, so as to reduce the incidence of torture, and he has pledged to get rid of some of Iraq’s harshest laws. “We are building a state, and a state cannot be built on vengeance,” he said. “It must be built on forgiveness.”

But few politicians in Iraq seemed to think a reconciliatory approach toward low-level ISIS members was politically feasible, especially during an election year. “It’s very difficult for anyone to talk about [forgiveness] at the moment. Anyone who does will lose all credibility with the public,” said Hisham al-Suhail, who heads the Justice, Accountability and Reconciliation committee in Iraq’s parliament. A 2017 amnesty law could pardon ISIS members who didn’t commit serious crimes, but judges have been reluctant to apply the law to terrorism cases. “Most prisoners who are released with a pardon, frankly, return to terrorist activities,” Suhail said, though he did not offer evidence to support that claim.

Given the political climate, the quest to reduce Ahmed’s death sentence at the appeals court seemed quixotic, the idea that he could one day be pardoned almost foolish. Yet Omar’s faith in his son’s innocence was unshakable, underpinned by a feeling of marginalization that had taken root in the family over the past 15 years. Omar broke down in tears several times during the hours we spent talking about his son. In the first instance, his tears were those of a heartbroken father who felt powerless to end his son’s suffering. But at times, I wondered if they could also be the tears of a father who feared that his son had strayed, and who blamed himself for having failed to prevent it.

Whether Ahmed was guilty or not, the utter rejection of the judicial process by one segment of society was a sign of the justice system’s inability to mend the fissures in post-ISIS Iraq, which seemed to deepen with each passing day. If Ahmed had committed a crime, the courts hadn’t offered his victims an opportunity to participate, or a chance to repent in return for a lenient sentence that might allow him to eventually return to his community. If he was innocent, the state had denied him a reasonable chance to prove it.

Absent the truth, the long road to reconciliation had not even begun.

This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The post Iraq’s Courts Have Rushed to Convict Thousands of ISIS Fighters. This is One Family’s Struggle for Fairness, Truth, and Reconciliation. appeared first on The Intercept.