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

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

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

What happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis was shocked, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept, as were her colleagues and students. The school did not give any explanation for why they did not renew her contract. Unbeknownst to Lewis, the pro-Israel blacklist organization StopAntisemitism had recently launched an online campaign against her, framing her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as “using her platform to spread vile antisemitic hate online.”

Lewis is one of at least 400 people StopAntisemitism has taken credit for getting ousted from their jobs in its online crusade, which has drawn widespread attention for targeting more prominent figures — including right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, progressive actor-turned-activist Cynthia Nixon, and the popular children’s educator Rachel Accurso, known by her stage name Ms. Rachel. Lewis, without her own platform or mass audience, is one of only two recent StopAntisemitism targets pursuing active federal lawsuits against the blacklist organization.

“I really thought we had free speech and this wouldn’t be a problem — that’s what social media is for, is that you can vent,” Lewis told The Intercept. “It wasn’t like I was saying anything above and beyond what other critics of Israel were saying.”

She sued StopAntisemitism for defamation in an Oregon state court over the summer, and the case was elevated to federal court last month. Her suit faces long odds, legal experts told The Intercept, but serves as a rare chance to register public dissent in the courts against the group’s targeting.

Founded in 2018 by social media influencer Liora Reznichenko and funded by the California-based real estate millionaire Adam Milstein’s foundation, StopAntisemitism targets public figures and private individuals over their criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights — forming a single-issue Rolodex similar to Canary Mission. The blacklists supplement the fierce crackdowns and censorship against Palestine solidarity activism increasingly seen at schools across the U.S. since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza.

StopAntisemitism elevated its own profile by targeting Accurso, who has used her platform to advocate for Palestinian children who have been killed, wounded, or starved by the Israeli military in Gaza, especially after she posted videos with a Palestinian 3-year-old who had lost her leg. In April, StopAntisemitism requested that the Department of Justice investigate her for alleged ties to Hamas, despite no evidence of such connections, and this month named her a finalist for “Antisemite of the Year,” on a list that also included Carlson and Nixon.

Accurso has faced an increase in online harassment, including physical threatening letters to her and her family members, she said in an Instagram post after StopAntisemitism released the “Antisemite” list. Her audience of nearly 5 million on Instagram and more than 18 million on YouTube has largely rallied around her — offering backing that hundreds of people like Lewis don’t have.

Reznichenko said that since October 7, 2023, her group has profiled 1,000 employees and students, often sharing their work or school information, encouraging their followers to contact their employers and at times calling for their firing, according to an October interview with the right-leaning Zionist media outlet Jewish News Syndicate.

When StopAntisemitism shared screenshots from Lewis’s personal Facebook page last August, it amplified the posts to a far larger audience than Lewis’s 2,000 Facebook friends. Lewis had criticized Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians, its genocide in Gaza, and Western support for the war. StopAntisemitism listed an email address for Valley Catholic School and encouraged its followers, who currently number more than 300,000 on X, to contact Lewis’s employer. “Warning to parents of students in Beaverton,” the post read. “Students at [Valley Catholic] are in grave danger under Sue Lewis.”

What followed was a flood of messages demanding her firing and a slew of personal attacks. “Their phones are ringing off the hook,” one user commented below the post, sharing the school’s phone number and listing school administrators’ names. “Keep trying.”

In one post highlighted by StopAntisemitism, Lewis reshared a statement pointing out the false reports of “babies beheaded” by Hamas and exaggerated claims of systemic rape to “mobilize Western support for the Palestinian genocide.” She had quipped in a separate post that Hamas would “wipe out Israel with their homemade bombs, small arms, hang gliders, grenades and sling shots,” and later clarified the post was sarcastic, given Israel’s clear military advantage thanks to billions of dollars’ worth of military aid each year from the U.S. and allied nations.

The following month, StopAntisemitism posted again: “Update: antisemite Sue Lewis is thankfully no longer teaching at Valley Catholic High School.”

In her lawsuit, Lewis is alleging that StopAntisemitism and Reznichenko defamed her, invaded her privacy, interfered with her work contract, and inflicted emotional distress.

Valley Catholic School did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

In court filings seeking an immediate dismissal, the organization has claimed its statements are true and protected by the First Amendment as opinion.

Groups like StopAntisemitism have free speech rights too, said Aaron Terr, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “even when it’s harsh, unfair, or deeply offensive.”

StopAntisemitism declined to comment on Lewis’s lawsuit and instead doubled down on its criticism of Accurso.

“Regarding Ms. Rachel, it is disturbing that the media continues to pretend she merely advocates for Palestinian children,” Reznichenko said in a statement to The Intercept, claiming that she attempted “to pass off pictures of children with birth defects as victims of Israeli aggression” and had inspired “an army of antisemitic lunatics” to make threats against the group.

A spokesperson for Accurso called Reznichenko’s accusations false and dangerous. In a statement, Accurso said that her “compassion and care for children doesn’t stop at any border” and that her advocacy for children in Gaza is no exception.

“I want every child to be fed, safe and able to attend school,” Accurso said. “I know that everyone benefits when we help children reach their full potential and grow into thriving, healthy adults. I also know that it’s not right for children to suffer like they are currently in Gaza, Sudan, the Congo and beyond.”

While her project’s main currency lies in the mass ire of social media, Reznichenko has also been a recurring guest on broadcast TV, including Jake Tapper’s CNN show, Fox News, and NewsNation. In a recent segment on Fox, she blamed the recent Bondi Beach mass shooting on the Palestinian liberation movement, calling for the deportation of “radicals” who want to “globalize the intifada,” a historical reference to Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, often framed by pro-Israel advocates as a call for violence against Jews.

The Encino, California-based nonprofit Merona Leadership Foundation, of which Adam Milstein is president, paid Reznichenko $142,722 in 2023 while she worked for StopAntisemitism, according to the group’s tax filing. The foundation, which helps cover StopAntisemitism’s operating costs, serves as one vehicle for Milstein to support efforts to crush Palestinian solidarity work, as first reported by the Washington Post.

The Milstein Family Foundation, which Milstein operates with his wife Gila, helps fund the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, as well as the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. Milstein, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2008, has also been tied to blacklist group Canary Mission and has praised their work, but rejected claims that he funds the group. StopAntisemitism, however, is listed as among the Milstein foundation’s supported groups.

The Milsteins sit on the board of Impact Forum Foundation, a network of dozens of pro-Israel philanthropists who support nonprofits that include StopAntisemitism. The supported companies include media organizations such as Jewish News Syndicate, pro-Israel think tanks like Middle East Forum and Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and advocacy groups such as Students Supporting Israel, Parents Defending Education, and ELNET, which has described itself as the AIPAC of Europe. The network’s website said the coalition’s aims are to “fight antisemitism, strengthen the State of Israel, and advance the U.S. – Israel alliance.”

The Milsteins did not respond to a request for comment.

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Lewis’s lawsuit against StopAntisemitism represents a rare legal challenge against pro-Israel doxxing groups, and it faces long odds because of First Amendment protections. Former Cabrini University professor Kareem Tannous, a Palestinian American who lost his job in 2022 after StopAntisemitism blacklisted him over social media posts critical of Israel, sued the group for defamation but had his case dismissed when a federal judge in Pennsylvania found that StopAntisemitism’s statements were protected opinion.

A federal judge in Michigan made a similar free speech ruling in a lawsuit filed against StopAntisemitism in 2024 by a former University of Michigan hockey player, John Druskinis, who the group had falsely accused of painting a swastika on the sidewalk in front of the Jewish Resource Center when he had instead painted a male genitalia and a homophobic slur. Although the court upheld Druskinis’s defamation claim, he dropped his suit earlier this year.

Aside from Lewis’s suit, the only other active lawsuit against StopAntisemitism was filed by Abeer AbouYabis, a physician and former professor at Emory’s medical school, who was fired after the group doxxed her over a social media post expressing “hope” in a free Palestine and praising the “glory” of Palestinian “resistance fighters” on October 7.

Unlike previous lawsuits, AbouYabis, who is an Arab Palestinian and Muslim, alleges discrimination based on race, religion, and nationality, as well as retaliation allegations under the American Disabilities Act. In a 213-page complaint, AbouYabis alleged Emory fired her while she was on medical leave for post-traumatic stress disorder after 37 members of her family were killed in the first month of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. The suit, originally filed in May, names the school, the Milsteins, StopAntisemitism, and Canary Mission, accusing Emory of collaborating with the latter two to silence AbouYabis’s protected speech. In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, attorneys for the Milsteins did not deny its financial support for StopAntisemitism, but said the couple cannot be held liable “for the acts of these third party websites.”

Central to Lewis’s complaint against StopAntisemitism is the group’s email campaign against Lewis as part of a series targeting educators called “Corrupting the Classroom,” in which they labeled her “a raging antisemite.” A link on the campaign’s site, which remains active, leads directly to a pre-written email message addressed to Valley Catholic School’s principal. The email calls Lewis “a grave threat to the safety and well-being of your students” whose “presence in the classroom cannot be tolerated” and called on the principal “to take immediate and decisive action to address this situation.” Lewis’s lawsuit frames the campaign’s message as “false and malicious statements” about her personal views on the Israeli government’s policies. The campaign, the suit alleges, is full of “mischaracterizations and distortions” of her social media posts.

In a motion to dismiss Lewis’s case, attorneys for the Reznichenko and the organization defended the “Corrupting the Classroom” campaign as having used Lewis’s own “quotes and screenshots from Plaintiff’s publicly available social media profile,” arguing that the group “simply framed them as an example of dangerous antisemitism, a conclusion StopAntisemitism is entitled to reach and express under the First Amendment” and Oregon law.

FIRE’s Terr, who is familiar with cases involving StopAntisemitism, said he agreed with the court’s previous decisions in other cases where judges ruled to protect StopAntisemitism’s free speech rights, even if he disagreed with the group’s tactics. It would be worse, he said, if the government could decide what speech is or is not acceptable.

The second Trump administration, however, has tested the limits of such constitutional protections by passing executive orders inspired by the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which aims to target the pro-Palestinian movement by accusing them of being Hamas supporters. The orders have only emboldened groups like StopAntisemitism.

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Earlier this year, the administration began detaining and attempting to deport high profile pro-Palestinian activists Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mahmoud Khalil — the latter of whom Reznichenko regularly attacks online. The right-wing Zionist group Betar has openly collaborated with the Trump administration, providing lists of pro-Palestine activists in the U.S. for deportation. StopAntisemitism has cheered on such deportation efforts. A Palestinian woman who joined a pro-Palestine protest in New York, Leqaa Kordia, has been in immigration detention since early March despite a judge twice ordering her release. The Trump administration and groups like StopAntisemitism have accused her of being a “pro-Hamas extremist” while failing to present evidence.

While Terr said StopAntisemitism is protected by the First Amendment, he criticized blacklist groups like StopAntisemitism for punishing people who say things the group disagrees with by “trying to inflict devastating consequences on people, like depriving them of their livelihoods,” which he said chills further speech.

“When an organization like Stop Anti-Semitism not only amplifies someone else’s social media posts to criticize their views, but also organizes a campaign to get them fired, it’s right to call that out as illiberal,” Terr said.

Calling out StopAntisemitism is perhaps the best recourse people have in seeking accountability, said Dylan Saba, an attorney at Palestine Legal, which has supported students and faculty who have been censored by schools due to their advocacy for Palestine.

“Because the speech protections are so strong, it’s really a situation in which sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Saba said. “The more that people understand who and what these organizations are, that there is this mass campaign to propagate smears and to stamp out any criticism of Zionism or criticism of U.S. support for Israel, the less effective those smears will be — especially as more people are becoming familiar with the issue of Palestine.”

Hundreds of comments by supporters of StopAntisemitism were leveled at Lewis, some of which her attorney described as as “violent and threatening” in court filings. They ranged from misogynist attacks to others calling for her to get a pager, referencing an attack in Lebanon in which the Israeli military detonated thousands of pagers and handheld walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members, killing 42 people, including 12 civilians, and injuring more than 4,000 others. Another user suggested Lewis should be “teached” by Mossad, according to a police report she filed with the Portland Police Department last year, a reference to Israel’s intelligence agency, which has a long history of assassinating its political enemies.

Lewis said the attacks strained her marriage and her livelihood. She said she has retained some of her students for private lessons, teaching from her home studio, but she misses the camaraderie with her co-workers and helping build the school’s music program.

Lewis, who is self-funding her case through her savings and a GoFundMe, said she is motivated by the many students who have been blacklisted by the group and whose lives have been interrupted because of StopAntisemitism’s blacklist.

“I’m a teacher, that’s what I do — I try to help my students reach their full potential,” she said. “Their whole career could be just snuffed out, you know? They may never be able to work in their chosen field. They got student loan debt, they got to pay the rent.”

The post StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing. appeared first on The Intercept.

The findings show it’s not just left-leaning voters who now object to Israel’s war on Gaza — a growing share of Republicans are souring on the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israel as well. That creates an opportunity for Democrats who want to flip Republican seats in upcoming elections, said Margaret DeReus, executive director of the IMEU Policy Project.

“Democratic leadership has so far refused to acknowledge Israel’s growing unpopularity with voters and offer voters a real alternative, the same disastrous mistake they made in 2024,” DeReus said. “If Democratic leadership can summon the political will to call for an end of weapons to Israel so those billions can be reinvested in the programs Americans need, our polling finds it won’t just boost support with the Democratic base — it will persuade Republican voters to cross over as well.”

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It depends in part on which Republicans a Democratic candidate wants to court. Similar to trends seen among Democratic voters about a decade ago, the Republican opposition contains a notable age gap: Among Republicans ages 18 to 44, the new IMEU poll said, support for a candidate who favors reducing arms transfers to Israel jumps to a majority, 51 percent.

The poll was taken from a sample of 1,287 self-identified Republicans who YouGov surveyed online in November. With a 3 percent margin of error, the results are consistent with findings from an August Quinnipiac University poll that found more than a third of Republicans oppose sending more military aid to Israel, and an October Pew Research Center poll finding that as many 41 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Israel, a jump from 27 percent only three years ago. A Gallup poll in July showed that a majority of all Americans — 54 percent — disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, a new high in dissatisfaction.

As the 2026 congressional primaries draw near, the Democratic Party is continuing to grapple with how to respond to mounting pressure to support Palestine among its voter base. Some Democratic candidates have sworn off support from conservative pro-Israel groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee after previously receiving funding, and are committing to a House bill that would block offensive weapons transfers to Israel; others remain committed to the pro-Israel cause.

Asked if they would rather support a Republican or Democratic candidate running on identical pro-Israel messages — that Israel should “do whatever its leaders say is necessary to defend itself” and that “the United States should always be there to provide weapons and logistical support to Israel when its leaders ask” — only 4 percent of the polled Republicans said they would vote for the Democrat.

But asked to pick between the pro-Israel Republican or a Democratic candidate whose priority is to “focus on Americans first, by ensuring our tax dollars are used to bring down prices here instead of paying for weapons and support for wealthy nations like Israel,” 17 percent of Republicans flipped left and said they would rather vote for a Democrat critical of Israel.

DeReus interpreted the results as indicative of frustration with President Donald Trump.

“Americans of all backgrounds are confounded that President Trump always finds billions of dollars to fund Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, while saying there’s not enough money to fund affordable healthcare for Americans,” she said.

The IMEU poll also found that among Republican voters, more than a third said they would rather support a Republican primary congressional candidate who rejected money from AIPAC, compared to 19 percent support for a candidate who accepts AIPAC donations.

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When asked specifically about U.S.-funded weapons deals with Israel, Republican voters signaled significant disapproval. The arms transfers between the two countries operate within a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama that expires in 2028. Last month, Axios reported that Israel is seeking a new 20-year MOU with the Trump administration, committing about $4 billion to Israel each year. The proposal reportedly asks for a reduction in the amount of money used for direct military aid with plans to instead spend such money on defense-related research, a possible concession to growing frustrations with Israel among Trump’s base, especially as the economy worsens.

The IMEU poll confirms some of that frustration, showing that 42 percent of Republican voters want the current U.S.–Israel military MOU to lapse in 2028 rather than renewing another 10-year agreement. Disapproval for the 20-year agreement slightly increases to 43 percent. A majority of Republicans below the age of 44 opposed a 10- or 20-year agreement, at 53 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

Amid Israel’s war on Gaza, former President Joe Biden approved a 2024 emergency bill sending $14.1 billion in military aid to Israel, in addition to the ongoing MOU. A new congressional defense bill released last week, which asks for a record $901 billion, also includes carveouts for the U.S. to fill any of Israel’s gaps in military aid created by arms embargoes by other nations, such as Spain, Italy, and Japan, according to a Zeteo report.

Some on the left who support Palestinian human rights are beginning to capitalize on their overlap with conservatives — like Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, who last week met with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who is resigning in January and has been seen as an avatar for growing dissatisfaction toward U.S. support for Israel among Trump’s supporters.

That’s not to say right-wing criticism of pro-Israel spending is necessarily born out of concern for Palestinian people. The strain of conservatism that gave rise to Greene and other “America first” Republicans relies on a nationalist logic that privileges U.S. citizens above all other people, and right-wing criticism of Israel often peddles in antisemitic tropes. The influential right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson has criticized U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and recently drew criticism for platforming Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who often spews antisemitic beliefs.

Brett Cooper, another popular conservative personality and regular Fox News contributor, attempted to untangle this concern in a recent interview on NPR. When host Steve Inskeep asked Cooper whether she agreed with Fuentes’s peddling of an antisemitic idea that the U.S. is run by “Jewish gangsters,” Cooper, 24, said she rejected Fuentes’s antisemitic claim and instead insisted her generation’s concern with Israel had more to do with spending priorities in a struggling U.S. economy.

“Young people’s biggest concern right now, both sides of the aisle, is the economy — we are concerned about being able to buy homes, we are concerned about affordability,” Cooper said. “And so when we see the news, when we see how much money is being sent overseas, to Ukraine, to Israel … my generation is concerned, we are upset.”

The post Republicans Are Splitting Over Israel. Will Democrats Take Advantage? appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misdirection and Lack of Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Pattern of Censorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State-Sponsored Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing the Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Calls It Quits After Thousands Die Seeking Its Aid appeared first on The Intercept.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian groups’ YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians.

“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”

After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants and charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant with war crimes in Gaza, the Trump administration escalated its defense of Israel’s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court.

“YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.”

“It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Congress did not intend to allow the president to cut off the flow of information to the American public and the world — instead, information, including documents and videos, are specifically exempted under the statute that the president cited as his authority for issuing the ICC sanctions.”

“Alarming Setback”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.

“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.

According to Google’s Sanctions Compliance publisher policy, “Google publisher products are not eligible for any entities or individuals that are restricted under applicable trade sanctions and export compliance laws.”

Al Mezan, a human rights organization in Gaza, told The Intercept that its YouTube channel was abruptly terminated this year on October 7 without prior notification.

“Terminating the channel deprives us from reaching what we aspire to convey our message to, and fulfill our mission,” a spokesperson for the group said, “and prevents us from achieving our goals and limits our ability to reach the audience we aspire to share our message with.”

The West Bank-based Al-Haq’s channel was deleted on October 3, a spokesperson for the group said, with a message from YouTube that its “content violates our guidelines.”

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“YouTube’s removal of a human rights organisation’s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression,” the Al-Haq spokesperson said in a statement. “The U.S. Sanctions are being used to cripple accountability work on Palestine and silence Palestinian voices and victims, and this has a ripple effect on such platforms also acting under such measures to further silence Palestinian voices.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which the U.N. describes as the oldest human rights organization in Gaza, said in a statement that YouTube’s move “protects perpetrators from accountability.”

“YouTube’s decision to close PCHR’s account is basically one of many consequences that we as an organisation have faced since the decision of the US government to sanction our organisations for our legitimate work,” said Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the group. “YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on 7 October.”

“By doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” al-Sourani added.

Looking Outside the U.S.

The three human rights groups’ account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos, according to an Intercept tally.

The deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like “The Beach,” about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike.

Some videos are still available through copies saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or on alternate platforms, such as Facebook and Vimeo. The wiping only affected the group’s official channels; videos which were produced by the nonprofits but hosted on alternate YouTube channels remain active. No cumulative index of videos deleted by YouTube is available, however, and many appear to not be available elsewhere online.

Videos posted elsewhere online, the groups fear, could soon be targeted for deletion because many of the platforms hosting them are also U.S.-based services. The ICC itself began exploring using service providers outside the U.S.

Al-Haq said it would also be looking for alternatives outside of U.S. companies to host their work.

YouTube isn’t the only U.S. tech company blocking Palestinian rights groups from using its services. The Al-Haq spokesperson said Mailchimp, the mailing list service, also deleted the group’s account in September. (Mailchimp and its parent company, Intuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Caving to Trump’s Demand

Both the U.S. and Israeli governments have long shielded themselves from the ICC and accountability for their alleged war crimes. Neither country is party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the court.

In November 2024, the ICC prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, charging the leaders with intentionally starving civilians by blocking aid from entering into Gaza. Both the Biden and Trump administrations rejected the legitimacy of the warrants.

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Since his reelection, Trump has taken a more aggressive posture against accountability for Israel. In the early days of his second term, Trump renewed sanctions against the ICC and issued new, more severe measures against court officials and anyone accused of aiding their efforts. In September, in a new order, he specifically sanctioned the three Palestinian groups.

The U.S. moves followed Israel’s own designation of Al-Haq as a “terrorist organization” in 2021 and an online smear campaign by pro-Israeli activists attempting to link Palestinian Centre for Human Rights with militant groups.

The sanctions freeze the organizations’ assets in the U.S. and bar sanctioned individuals from traveling to the country. Federal judges have already issued preliminary injunctions in two cases in favor of plaintiffs who argued the sanctions had violated their First Amendment rights.

“The Trump administration is focused on contributing to the censorship of information about Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the sanctions against these organizations is very deliberately designed to make association with these organizations frightening to Americans who will be concerned about material support laws,” said Whitson, of DAWN, which joined a coalition of groups in September to demand the Trump administration drop its sanctions.

Like many tech firms, YouTube has shown a ready willingness to comply with demands from both the Trump administration and Israel. YouTube coordinated with a campaign organized by Israeli tech workers to remove social media content deemed critical of Israel. At home, Google, YouTube’s parent company, secretly handed over personal Gmail account information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to detain a pro-Palestinian student organizer.

Even before Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, YouTube had been accused of unevenly applying its community guidelines to censor Palestinian voices while withholding similar scrutiny from pro-Israeli content. Such trends continued during the war, according to a Wired report.

Earlier this year, YouTube shut down the official account of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. The move came after pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel, which wrote to YouTube to point out that the organization had been sanctioned by the State Department.

Whitson warned that YouTube’s capitulation could set a precedent, pushing other tech companies to bend to censorship.

“They are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience,” she said. “It’s not going to end with Palestine.”

The post YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations appeared first on The Intercept.

Among Palestinians in Gaza who survived Tuesday’s attacks, however, there is a growing belief that the ceasefire agreement exists only on paper, providing diplomatic cover that allows Israel to continue to kill. 

The Intercept asked 60 residents in Gaza, many of them students living in Gaza City, whether they believed the ceasefire still held. Fifty said no. Four said the ceasefire was still in place, but it was fragile and at risk of falling apart. Six expressed hope that the ceasefire would remain.

Residents described nights filled with explosions and mornings shadowed by tension, as Gaza braced itself for what may come next. 

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“I panicked and my body shook violently,” said 20-year-old Aya Nasser, a university student who recalled Tuesday’s attacks to The Intercept. She was in bed when, just after midnight, she heard an Israeli missile explode 30 meters from her home. A second followed shortly after. 

Nasser said she later learned that the Israeli strike had hit a nearby home and killed nine people from a single family: a grandmother, a father, a daughter-in-law, four children, and two grandchildren. 

Nasser said this was the third time an Israeli attack had targeted her neighborhood in the Al-Nuseirat camp since the ceasefire went into effect. She did not think it was still in place. “The fear is indescribable,” she said, anticipating further attacks.

When Israel announced its strikes on Tuesday, Hala, also 20, had been shopping at a market for her upcoming wedding. She rushed back to her home in Nuseirat and eventually fell asleep to relative calm. But she was jolted awake when a missile struck their neighbor’s home, which caught on fire. Hours later, she received word that another strike had killed her fiancé’s cousin, along with his wife and children. Only their 7-year-old son survived. 

For now, Hala said the wedding has been postponed while their neighborhood remains under threat of future attacks. 

“There is no ceasefire,” she said. “The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives.”

Israel claimed its attacks on Tuesday had targeted senior Hamas fighters. However, the vast number of children killed and wounded in the strikes told a different story.

Morten Rostrup, a physician working with Doctors Without Borders at al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza City, said after Israel’s airstrikes, he treated many wounded children in the hospital’s emergency room.

“There is no doubt this is an attack on civilians,” he said. “Do we really call this a ceasefire?” A Doctors Without Borders spokesperson said their teams had treated 242 patients wounded from the attacks, with 49 later dying in treatment.

Tuesday’s bombing forced 28-year-old teacher Esraa and her small children out of their home in Al-Zawaida, which had already been damaged by previous attacks. In the middle of the night, she and her children went to stay in a tent with her parents and other relatives. She said they spent the evening with no access to water. “My baby clung to me tightly the whole time, crying,” she recalled.

A 20-year-old writer and student, also named Esraa, called the ceasefire “just a declaration, not reality.” The bombs on Tuesday woke her up late at night while in her home in Nuseirat, triggering memories of the previous two years of war.

“They keep bombing and killing people and then declare that the so-called ceasefire is still going on,” she said. “How so, while lots of people are still losing family members?”

Even after the Israeli military said it resumed the ceasefire on Wednesday morning, it carried out another airstrike in Gaza’s Beit Lahiya area in the evening, killing two more people. In addition to its military barrages, Israel continues to restrict the amount of humanitarian aid to enter the Strip, choking its depleted markets, leaving food unaffordable for many.

In the first few weeks of the previous ceasefire deal brokered in January, Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza, before shattering the deal completely by killing more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. What 20-year-old student Ali Skaik fears most, he said, is that the situation in Gaza would mirror the ceasefire in Lebanon, where despite having a supposed peace deal with Hezbollah in place for almost a year, Israel has continued to attack and has killed more than 100 civilians. 

After the ceasefire, Skaik moved into his grandfather’s home in eastern Gaza City to the Al-Zaytouna neighborhood, which sits near the border of Israel’s yellow line. The Israeli military maintains control of portions of land on the other side. Every night for the past week, Skaik said, he’s heard explosions stretching from 10 p.m. until the morning. 

“For that reason, I never really felt that there was a complete ceasefire in place,” he said.

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The 109 Gazans killed Tuesday represent roughly half of the 200 Palestinians Israel has killed since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10. Throughout the genocide, Israel has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to official numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry — though the true count is likely much higher. As many as 14,500 others also remain missing, whether killed in airstrikes and buried beneath rubble, abducted by Israeli military forces, or disappeared under other circumstances.

Bodour, 20, a university student, said he has grown accustomed to living through Israel’s ceasefire violations and has learned to mistrust Israel’s “speeches and pursuit of peace,” finding “strange comfort” in always expecting the worst from Netanyahu’s government.

“What ceasefire are we talking about?” Bodour said. He laughed when asked the question about whether there was still a ceasefire in Gaza. “The scattered bodies? The destroyed houses? The orphaned children?”

Israel reportedly notified the Trump administration before conducting its strikes on Tuesday, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused Hamas of failing to return the remains of deceased Israeli hostages and firing on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza. Hamas has denied responsibility for the attacks.

As bombs began to rain down on Gaza, Trump, on a trip to Japan, told reporters inside Air Force One that he supported Israel’s strikes. “The Israelis hit back and they should hit back,” Trump said, blaming Hamas for an Israeli soldier’s death. At the same time, he insisted that “nothing’s going to jeopardize” the ceasefire. Vice President JD Vance minimized Tuesday’s bombings as “little skirmishes here and there.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously predicted there would be “bumps along the road, but we have to make it work.”

“Those ‘bumps’ are ‘Israel gets to violate the ceasefire wherever it sees fit,’” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “As long as it doesn’t return to that full-blown, full-on assault or a full-on blockade.”

Trump has much to gain from continuing to tell the public that the ceasefire is holding, even while Israel kills dozens of Palestinians in Gaza. Throughout his second term, Trump has positioned himself as a so-called “peacemaker,” and his inner circle, including his son-in-law and ceasefire negotiating team member Jared Kushner, have voiced interest in development projects in Gaza to reap a profit in the wake of Israel’s destruction. Trump has further expressed interest in leveraging the ceasefire in an attempt to finish the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israel’s relationships with Arab countries — and fast-track Trump’s policy goals and personal financial interests. 

“For Trump and for the Israelis, what matters is the appearance of a ceasefire,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. 

The ceasefire plan, in many ways, was Trump’s way for providing diplomatic cover for Israel, which had been under increasing pressure from the international community amid images of famine and genocide, to allow it to continue its military control over the Strip, Kenney-Shawa said. 

“I think none of us should be surprised that Israel has continued breaking the ceasefire,” Kenney-Shawa said. “It very much still fits into the Trump administration’s bigger picture, because as long as they can kind of say that there is a quote-unquote ‘ceasefire’ in effect, as long as they can say, ‘At least it’s better than before,’ that enables the U.S. and the rest of the international community to let up on the pressure on Israel and to return to business as usual.”

Israel has also spent the ceasefire demolishing structures within parts of Gaza it continues to occupy. Kenney-Shawa said such tactics are meant to make the Strip even more uninhabitable to ultimately force Palestinians out of Gaza, the ultimate goal of Israel’s campaign.

The morning after Tuesday’s bombings, Tasneem, a 25-year-old homemaker in Gaza, accused Trump of lying, asking, “Where is the ceasefire they talk about?” 

Said, 26, an English teacher in Gaza, said that even with the ceasefire in place, he has felt “constant exhaustion and misery,” given the ongoing attacks. He dismissed the term “ceasefire” as “just a media trick.”

There is still recognition in Gaza that the frequency and scale of Israel’s attacks since the ceasefire have decreased from the two previous years of genocide. Tuesday’s bombings, however, returned things back to the pre-ceasefire average daily death toll of 100, shattering illusions of peace. The uncertainty is crippling for many.

Mervat, a 51-year-old homemaker, said she feared the resumed attacks would again displace her and her family, and that they would again face famine conditions. She said as long as Israel’s occupation continues, “there is no safety.”

“Simply knowing that the agreement is still in place offers a psychological reassurance,” said Aseel, a 20-year-old university student in Gaza. “Yet, news of its violation or the return of genocide imposes an unimaginable weight and traps you in an endless cycle of worry.”

Believers in Islam are encouraged to maintain hope and trust in Allah’s mercy, and many people who spoke to The Intercept said they had hope that Allah would restore the ceasefire, but currently they don’t see it as in place.

Hend, 21, another university student, said she’d lost trust in the agreement. Though she felt the ground shake during Tuesday’s bombings, she said she still has “hope for peace, and that we can feel safe.”

Such hope began to fade after Tuesday’s attacks, said Marah, a 22-year-old English literature student at Islamic University of Gaza. She said there can only be peace in Gaza with the removal of Israeli occupation in the territory.

When the ceasefire went into effect, she said, “I tried to reclaim even a small part of life before October 7, but everything collapsed again in an instant. Fear returned, along with the sounds of bombing and the smell of death.”

The post We Asked People in Gaza What They Think of the Ceasefire: “Just a Declaration, Not Reality” appeared first on The Intercept.

The bombing killed over 100 people as of early Wednesday, according to Gaza officials. It came just four days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio toured a new U.S. military base in Israel, a rare deployment of U.S. forces meant to signal that President Donald Trump was serious about maintaining the end to the bombardment of Gaza. 

“There is no plan B,” Rubio said on the tour, rebuffing an Israeli reporter’s question of whether Israel needed Trump’s permission before resuming its attacks on Gaza. “This is the best plan, it’s the only plan, it’s one that we think can succeed.”

According to The Associated Press, Israel notified the Trump administration before conducting Tuesday’s strikes — presenting the question of whether the U.S. would hold Netanyahu accountable for the latest round of ceasefire violations.

“All eyes now are going to be on Washington,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC. “Would they really be a referee that calls balls and strikes fairly? Or were they just there for decoration and were they just going to allow the Israelis to get away with murder, as they always have?”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance signaled that they would opt for the latter. He described the attacks as “little skirmishes here and there” and said that “the ceasefire is holding.” 

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“We know that Hamas or somebody else within Gaza attacked an [Israeli military] soldier,” Vance said. “We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president’s peace is going to hold despite that.”

Israel’s strikes on Tuesday and stretching overnight into Wednesday mostly targeted Gaza City, including the courtyard of the al-Shifa Hospital, the Strip’s largest medical complex, and apartment complexes throughout the city, according to Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. Other strikes hit Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. The attacks killed least 104 people, including 46 children, the Gaza Health ministry announced early Wednesday.

Israeli officials claimed Tuesday that Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza, while Hamas denied responsibility for the attacks.

It was the latest of several instances in which the Israeli government pushed the notion that Hamas was the one in violation of the ceasefire agreement. Israeli officials have accused Hamas of intentionally delaying the return of the remains of Israeli hostages, a claim on which even the U.S. has cast doubt. Speaking to reporters on his own visit to the new U.S. base in Israel last week, Vance urged “a little bit of patience,” citing the difficulty of uncovering bodies buried under tons of rubble of destroyed buildings.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is assisting and overseeing the return of hostages, continues to work with Hamas’s search crews — though the group issued a statement on Tuesday reacting to drone footage Israel released, which it purports to show Hamas reburying hostage remains to stage a recovery for the Red Cross. The video and the claim have not been independently verified. The Red Cross said it was “raising its concerns directly with the parties” and called on both sides to follow international humanitarian law while handling remains. Many of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel, meanwhile, have shown signs of abuse and torture.

Hamas returned all living Israeli hostages within the required 72 hours and has since returned the remains of 15 of the 28 deceased Israelis. The ceasefire deal included a stipulation that allowed Hamas leeway beyond the initial 72 hours to continue its search for the remaining bodies, as long as it continues to communicate with the Red Cross. 

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has gone to lengths to undermine the peace process. Israel is still limiting the amount of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza; it has continued to block the Rafah border, an essential crossing for aid transfers; and it has continued a range of attacks on Palestinians, including a wave of airstrikes on October 19 that killed at least 26 Gazans, including civilians. One of the attacks struck a school sheltering displaced families in Nuseirat. Israel has also continued to demolish large swaths of city infrastructure within the more than 50 percent of the Strip that remains under its military control. Beyond Gaza, Israel has conducted mass military raids and an airstrike in the West Bank, where daily settler violence against Palestinians continues unabated.

“They are trying to push the Palestinians to react,” said Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza. “This is their strategy, they want Palestinians to do anything to react just to complete their mission.”

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Abdu said he thinks Israel was never serious about holding to the ceasefire agreement but rather has looked for reasons to resume its attacks. On Tuesday, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir claimed that Hamas “continues to play games” in a social media post on X, calling on Netanyahu to resume the bombing. 

“If Israel has the genuine intention to bring their hostages back, then it will facilitate every effort to get them back, not articulating these kinds of stories and fabricated images,” Abdu said.

Hamas, for its part, maintains it is committed to upholding the deal and has accused the Israelis of barring entry to teams and heavy machinery to complete the digging.

Israel’s resumed aggression fits into a pattern that we’ve seen before, Munayyer added. During previous ceasefires in November 2023 and this January, Israel retrieved as many hostages as it could to soften blowback from its citizens, then restarted attacks on Gaza, Munayyer pointed out.

And while the U.S. is the major player, it’s not the only one with sway. Leading up to the ceasefire deal, the European Union and several major Western countries — the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia — began to threaten Israel with sanctions or the formal recognition of a Palestinian state if it did not halt its genocide, likely responding to mass protests from their citizens. 

“The Israelis are now trying to create a narrative that Hamas violated the ceasefire and therefore the agreement’s off,” Munayyer said. “Is the international community going to buy that?”

Update: October 29, 2025
This story has been updated to increase the death toll from Israel’s latest airstrikes on Gaza as new numbers emerged.

The post Netanyahu Is Blowing Up the Gaza Ceasefire — and Trump Is the One Losing Face appeared first on The Intercept.

Zaher’s son, Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old Palestinian American, was swept up by Israeli forces during a dawn raid at their home in the village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya in February. The Israeli military charged Mohammed with throwing a rock and striking a car driven by an Israeli settler, an accusation he and his family deny. While Israel has not publicly provided evidence, Mohammed has spent the last eight months in Israeli prisons awaiting a trial that has been repeatedly postponed. Mohammed has been barred from speaking with his family, who have continued to push for his release. And after learning that he suffered a scabies infection and severe weight loss, Mohammed’s family has begun to fear for his life.

The U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, which freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians from detention, appeared to be the breakthrough Zaher and his wife Mona Ibrahim had so desperately awaited.

On the morning of the releases, Zaher rushed to Beituna and carefully watched the buses empty. Mohammed wasn’t a part of the caravan. Zaher then got word that some of those released were being taken to local hospitals for treatment. He hurried from hospital to hospital. Back at home, Mona prepared to celebrate Mohammed’s return by cooking maqluba — a pot of rice, vegetables, and meat served upside down — her son’s favorite dish. 

Hours later, Zaher returned home alone. 

“I just waited and waited and waited,” Zaher recalled, “and still waiting.”

Mohammed Ibrahim is among an alarming number of children overlooked by the ceasefire agreement. More than 300 Palestinian children remain in Israeli prisons, according to Defense for Children International–Palestine. Nearly half are being held without charges — the highest number since 2008, when DCIP began tracking cases. The rest of the children are serving sentences or, like Mohammed, are still awaiting trial. The most common charge among children is throwing rocks, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. This tally doesn’t include the unknown number of children held inside Israeli military facilities.

While Mohammed’s detention is a single case among many, his story offers a window into Israel’s deadly and unlawful carceral system. Through The Intercept’s interviews with family members and advocates for imprisoned Palestinians, review of medical records, and legal testimony and footage of the Israeli police’s interrogation of Mohammed in February, it became clear that Mohammed’s case fits within the Israeli government’s long-standing patterns of detention, abuse, and deprivation of basic human rights.

Mohammed’s case has received widespread attention over the past week, largely due to his status as an American citizen, but also because of a tireless campaign led by his family. In the U.S., Zaher’s cousin, Zeyad Kadur, has met privately with lawmakers in Congress, alongside parents whose American children were killed by Israeli forces or settlers, calling on the U.S. government to secure Mohammed’s release. In September, the State Department assigned a diplomat to handle Mohammed’s case. And on Wednesday, after two days lobbying in D.C. — Kadur’s second visit to the Capitol in as many months — 27 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter calling on U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to exert pressure to free Mohammed.

The campaign arrived as details of Mohammed’s prison conditions came to focus this week with the release of a firsthand testimony relayed to a lawyer with DCIP. In the account, Mohammed tells of living in a cell with four bunk beds, shared with at least eight children, forcing some to sleep on the floor. The only items in each cell are thin mattresses, blankets, and a single copy of the Quran, he said.

He and other children are served two meals a day: three small pieces of bread and a spoonful of labneh for breakfast; a small cup of rice and a single sausage with pieces of bread for lunch, he said in the document. Every two to three days, they receive a spoonful of jam and occasionally a small cucumber or tomato. The prison does not serve dinner. 

Mohammed also recounted the night of his detention. He said Israeli soldiers burst into his home, blindfolded him, and zip-tied his hands, before hauling him into a military vehicle where he lay flat on its metal surface as soldiers beat him with the butts of their rifles. At the Ofer military base, the beating continued, he recalled. Mohammed then told of being taken to a police station where a masked interrogator threatened to instruct soldiers to beat him again if he didn’t comply. “Out of sheer fear, I ultimately confessed,” he said in the testimony.

Such details have begun to spark the outrage of many in Washington and across the world. Advocates for imprisoned Palestinians who have been following the case were disturbed by the alleged abuse Mohammed has suffered at the hands of the Israeli military. But perhaps what has troubled advocates most about Mohammed’s case is how familiar it sounds. 

“It breaks my heart to say that his case is not exceptional,” said Miranda Cleland, an advocate with DCIP. “His case is so similar to what we’ve heard from so many Palestinian children and families, not just in the last two years, but in the last 30 years — this is exactly how the Israeli military targets Palestinian children and their families.”

Since Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, indefinite detentions have been a tool used to control Palestinians. Palestinians are subject to military law and military courts, where prosecutors and judges are Israeli soldiers and Palestinians lack due process rights. United Nations experts last July called for the dismantling of Israel’s military court system, saying that it violates humanitarian international law and cannot be improved. They criticized the role of military judges providing “legal and judicial cover for acts of torture, cruel and degrading treatment against Palestinian detainees” by Israeli soldiers and police. The experts specifically mentioned their concern that such practices extend to children.

The Israeli military declined to comment for this story, referring to the Israeli Prison Service. The IPS and Israeli police did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The Israeli military court system prosecutes as many as 500 children each year, with a conviction rate of around 99 percent, according to DCIP. The most common charge against Palestinian children in the military court system, like Mohammed’s case, is throwing a rock. Nearly all of the convictions result from a plea deal, which is often the only chance a child has toward being released.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, delays in trials and hearings have been increasingly common in military court, and plea deals have been harder to come by, with prosecutors pursuing more aggressive sentencing, said Sahar Francis, a Palestinian human rights attorney who has decades of experience representing Palestinians in Israel’s military courts. Before the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, she said children in similar situations as Mohammed would typically be released on bail and would spend around four to five months in prison. Children are now regularly held for longer periods.

During her 30-year career, Francis came to realize a pattern: Even in cases where children throwing rocks didn’t cause any harm, prosecutors would pursue lengthy sentences. Meanwhile, she noted, cases where Israeli children threw rocks at Palestinians went unpunished. 

“There is a huge discrimination policy and it’s intentional — they know they can affect the whole generation,” Francis said. “This is why we are saying it’s a collective punishment because it’s also against the family, in order to intimidate, in order to cause fear within other children, that you could be arrested, you could be punished.”

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In 2014 and 2015, the Israeli government enacted a slew of laws to further criminalize stone throwing, including harsher sentences and fines, as well as permission for police to fire live ammunition at individuals throwing stones, including minors, if officers believe the stones pose a danger to anyone. In its press releases and public statements, the Israeli government regularly labels Palestinians who throw rocks as “terrorists,” even during protests against illegal Israeli settlements that are often guarded by heavily armored military units. 

Throwing stones carries both a tactical and symbolic significance to Palestinian resistance, illustrated by the emblematic photo of a Palestinian woman in Beit Sahour throwing stones at Israeli soldiers with one hand while carrying her yellow heels in another during the First Intifada in the 1980s. Another image captured during the Second Intifada in 2000 shows 14-year-old Palestinian boy, Faris Odeh, throwing a stone at an Israeli tank. The following day, an Israeli soldier fatally shot Odeh in the neck as he protested the military, transforming Odeh into an international symbol of Palestinian resistance.

An Israeli military charge sheet, obtained by the family and reviewed by The Intercept, accuses Mohammed of throwing stones toward Israeli vehicles that were traveling on Highway 60 near the Israeli settlement of Kochav Hashachar. One of the stones, the military alleged, struck and damaged the vehicle. The document stated that the stones endangered the lives of the drivers. The charge sheet cited a military patrol unit that had reported stone-throwing incidents in the area, and mentioned that an Israeli vehicle driven by an Israeli settler was damaged.

Since there have been no court proceedings in Mohammed Ibrahim’s case, it’s unclear whether the Israeli military has evidence to back its charges. He and his family reject Israel’s charges. 

The military leveled the charges following an interrogation with masked, armed soldiers and no attorney present, which advocates said is a common practice for detained children.

According to footage of the interrogation obtained by The Intercept, Mohammed sat alone at a table on a swiveling chair with a blindfold lowered to his neck. He spoke to an interrogator who was outside the frame. Video of a separate interrogation with another child implicated in the case shows the interrogators are masked. 

In the six-minute video, which The Intercept translated from Arabic, the interrogator prompts Mohammed to “Tell me everything you did, and say it specifically.” At times, the interrogator seems to feed him lines, stating, “Tell me: ‘I went down and I ate, me and my friends, at 8 p.m., we walked, we got into a car.’”

Mohammed responds by saying he and his friends ate and then went for a walk down toward a highway referred to as “Iltifafy.” The highway is known as a road exclusive to Israelis that connects Israeli settlements throughout the occupied West Bank, slicing through and effectively dividing Palestinian towns. While there, he says “they started striking.” The interrogator, referring to the distinct license plate colors — yellow or white — that denote Israeli and Palestinian identity, asks if they saw “cars for the Arabs and cars for the Jews.” Mohammed acknowledges he did. 

When the interrogator presses further, Mohammed says he and his friends began to throw rocks at “any” cars as “horseplay.” When asked why, he says: “We just did it. We wanted to try.” 

“What if your parents were driving by? They’d throw it at them?” the interrogator continues to press. Mohammed says yes and that they were not able to see who was driving the cars.

At one point, Mohammed admits to blindly throwing a rock toward the road “from far away,” but says that the stone didn’t hit anyone or anything. “It just landed on the street.” The interrogator exclaims, “But you threw one!”

“I mean I threw a rock; wherever it would land, it would land,” Mohammed responds. 

The video ends with the interrogator questioning where Mohammed was that morning — “asleep” — and where he was on that Friday – “at work.”

DCIP’s Cleland criticized the forceful nature of the interrogation and lack of due process rights. 

“Mohammed Ibrahim was subjected to a very coercive interrogation,” she said, adding that the practice is common in cases of detained children, “and all interrogations are designated to extract a confession.”

The short video does not corroborate Mohammed’s claim in his testimony that an interrogator ordered soldiers to beat him if he didn’t comply.

For decades, Palestinians in detention have routinely reported poor living conditions, abuse, and even instances of torture. Since October 7, such abuse grew in scale, becoming a more systematic policy of collective punishment, according to human rights advocates as well as a recent Israeli court ruling acknowledging forced starvation in detention centers. 

Due to threats of violence from Israeli authorities, many children have been afraid to speak about their abuse after their release, advocates said. Despite these threats, child prisoners have reported abuse, torture and sexual assault — claims that echo reports by adult detainees. One teenager from Jenin, released as part of the November 2023 ceasefire agreement, recalled beatings that broke his fingers in both hands.

Treatment against both adults and children from Gaza were especially brutal, Francis, the human rights attorney, said. Children from Gaza spoke of having their hands continually shackled for consecutive months. Others from Gaza told Francis they were beaten and sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers, who shoved batons up their anuses through their clothes.

“Lots of the prisoners described for me in the visits that they feel they are animals,” Francis said. “They were saying, ‘We believe they treat their pets in their homes better than us.’”

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Pinning down exactly how many Palestinian children are in Israeli custody is difficult. The official count — 360 — could be lower, given the release of several children back to Gaza as part of the recent ceasefire agreement (the Israeli Prison Service has also delayed its quarterly release of updated figures). That figure is likely an undercount since an unknown number of Palestinian children, along with adults, are believed to be imprisoned within Israel’s military facilities, such as the notorious Sde Teiman. Unlike the facilities under the Israeli Prison Service, the military does not share data on Palestinians held inside its military bases. Newly freed Palestinians, including children, are also commonly re-arrested within weeks of their release. Throughout the war, families from Gaza have reported witnessing their relatives detained by Israeli soldiers, only to be told later by Israeli officials that their relatives are not in custody. Last November, Israel-based human rights organization HaMoked documented 400 of such cases of missing Palestinians.

“What is the fate of these hundreds, we don’t know,” said Naji Abbas, an advocate for Palestinian detainees with Physicians for Human Rights Israel, referring to the missing names. “Sadly, we believe most are not alive.”

At least 75 Palestinians have died within Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, according to a tally of publicly reported cases by the United Nations. In the weeks since the U.N. count, three more Palestinians have died in Israeli custody. 

Due to lack of access to hygiene products and overcrowding, scabies has spread rapidly throughout Israel’s prisons. Abbas and journalists have accused Israeli prison officials of allowing the highly contagious skin disease to spread unabated throughout its facilities as another form of punishment. The disease, spread by microscopic mites that burrow into skin, causes extreme itchiness and can lead to psychological distress from lack of sleep, as well as injury from scratching.

A court petition filed by PHRI, along with other organizations, in July 2024, led to medical treatment given to some incarcerated Palestinians. But without changes to their living conditions, reinfection is rampant. 

When a U.S. embassy official notified Zaher that Mohammed had contracted scabies in July, his family began to fear for his life. The IPS said that he had received treatment for the disease and was placed in medical isolation for 17 days before symptoms had subsided. But memories of recent prisoner deaths fed their concern.

In March, Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad, a 17-year-old Palestinian from Brazil died in Megiddo Prison, the same prison where Mohammaed was held at the time. He was the first known child to die within Israel’s prison system since October 7. Walid was arrested in September 2024 in a village neighboring Mohammed’s and was held in administrative detention without charges. While spending time outside of his cell, Walid collapsed in the prison yard, hit his head, and died. According to an independent autopsy conducted by a doctor and Abbas’s organization, which was granted after PHRI requested a court intervention, Walid showed signs of scabies across his entire body, as well as signs of severe weight loss and malnutrition. The doctor found that Walid, a former athlete and soccer player, had little to no muscle mass left on him, Abbas said. Medical records noted Walid had been complaining about lack of food and being hungry for three months leading up to his death. 

“Whether you are beating people until death, or denying people who you are holding in custody from medical care, you are killing them,” Abbas said.

Since family visits and phone calls have been prohibited in Israeli detention facilities — another post-October 7 measure — Mohammed’s family haven’t heard their child’s voice since he was taken in February. Instead, for information about Mohammed’s well-being, the family has relied on attorneys and the U.S. Embassy.

On rare occasions, attorneys and U.S. embassy officials have been allowed to visit Mohammed, who was 15 at the time of his detention and spent his 16th birthday in prison. In the visits, they reported that Mohammed has lost at least 30 pounds. One medical report provided by the IPS to the U.S. Embassy and reviewed by The Intercept noted Mohammed as having a low body mass index. 

Every month and a half, Mohammed has a scheduled court date. Each time, prosecutors postpone the hearings. Even so, his family has attended every one, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mohammed through the CCTV cameras fixed onto a holding cell. During a hearing in August, Mohammed’s older brother, along with the mothers of the three other children detained alongside Mohammed in their village, watched the monitor as their sons shuffled into the holding cell. The mothers didn’t recognize their children — all of them with shaved heads and skinny bodies. They were shocked when they saw Mohammed. While sitting in the cell, Mohammed noticed the camera and raised his cuffed hands toward the lens to reveal his arms covered in rashes and scabs. His face was gaunt and dark rings encircled his eyes, family said. Mohammed’s brother returned home, shaken, before sharing his condition with his parents and uncle.

That same month, his parents were able to pass Mohammed a message through the embassy official, assuring him that they were doing everything they can to free him. He responded by asking whether his older sister had passed her final exams needed to graduate high school. After the official told him yes, he said to tell his father to buy a gold necklace as a gift for his sister and that he would work to pay him back once he gets out.

Other messages remain undelivered. 

Mohammed’s family have yet to tell him about the killing of his cousin Sayfollah Musallet, 20, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers on July 11. He had been trying to protect his family’s land from the mob of settlers, his family said. The mob prevented an ambulance from reaching him and his younger brother eventually carried him to paramedics, but he died before making it to the hospital.

A tight-knit family, Mohammed and Sayfollah were close. Sayfollah had been visiting family in the occupied West Bank, processing the ongoing detention of his cousin. The pair had planned to spend the summer working together at the family’s ice cream shop, Ice Screamin, in Tampa, Florida. Sayfollah had managed the shop after his family bought it one year earlier, introducing a popular Dubai chocolate sundae to the menu. 

Zaher wanted the news of his passing to come from a family member or family friend, not through the lips of a third-party official or attorney. 

Back in the U.S., Kadur, Zaher’s cousin, is careful how he describes Mohammed’s plight. He is cautious not to frame the push for Mohammed’s release within the context of the Israeli occupation. He’s aware of how polarizing the issue may be while lobbying a U.S. government that has remained a staunch supporter of Israel even as it commits genocide in Gaza. Kadur received a call from a concerned rabbi from Florida who lamented, “It’s just sad that if his name was closer to mine, he probably wouldn’t be there.” 

Instead, Kadur has attempted to appeal to officials from a “more human and humanitarian” perspective. “We can’t resolve a 75-year conflict,” he said, “this is just a 15-year-old kid that needs to come home.”

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Despite what the family says were private promises from Trump administration officials, they have yet to lead to signs of progress toward Mohammed’s release. It illustrates the limitations of the expected privileges U.S. citizenship affords, particularly if you are Palestinian, and especially if you are on Israeli soil. Among those who called the family to intervene is longtime diplomat Richard Grenell, a former Bush administration adviser who has been Trump’s envoy for special missions, who was key in securing the release of six American prisoners from Venezuela in January. Since the initial call, however, the family said they have not heard of progress. 

After Sayfollah’s killing, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited their family in their village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, known as Miami of the West Bank due to its large population of American Palestinians who own land there, often building luxurious homes. Also at the hourlong meeting, was Mohammed’s family, along with the family of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, a 17-year-old Palestinian American from New Orleans, who was fatally shot by Israeli settlers, military, and police in January 2024. He was the first American killed in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza.

The parents of Tawfic and Sayfollah told Huckabee that while their children are dead, the U.S. can still bring Mohammed home, Zaher and Kadur recalled. 

“Our family, our village, our city can’t take another American funeral here,” Sayfollah’s father added, according to Kadur.

Huckabee told the group that he would also contact Israeli officials to help free Mohammed, according to Zaher and Kadur.

Israeli authorities have yet to make an arrest or charge any suspects in the killing of Sayfollah or Tawfic. And Zaher said he’s begun to give up hope that the U.S. government would intervene on behalf of Mohammed.

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A State Department spokesperson told The Intercept that it is “tracking Mr. Ibrahim’s case closely and working with the government of Israel on this case” and said it is providing consular assistance to Mohammed and his family. The department declined to comment further on what actions they have taking in trying to free Mohammed, citing privacy and “other considerations.” With much of the focus on ensuring the ceasefire deal holds in Gaza, Rubio briefly addressed Mohammed’s case during a press conference in Israel, saying that they are working through their embassy and diplomatic channels.

“The U.S. government is just closing their eyes,” Zaher said. “If this happened in Venezuela, [Trump] would probably send a warship, just because he wants to attack it anyway. But when it comes to the Palestinian cause, they close their eyes and they laugh. They just close the phone, they act like they care, then they forget about it.”

In a sign of increasing pressure, Tuesday’s letter by Democratic lawmakers to both Rubio and Huckabee called on the State Department to begin “engaging the Israeli government directly to secure the swift release of this American boy.” Signatories included Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley, who also visited Mohammed’s family in the West Bank; Mohammed’s U.S. representative, Kathy Castor, who has been in regular contact with his family; and prominent senators including Adam Schiff, Raphael Warnock, and Bernie Sanders.

There is little precedence for the U.S. applying pressure to compel an early release of a Palestinian American imprisoned by Israel. If an individual faces charges, typically the only way to be released is to take a plea deal from military prosecutors and serve a reduced sentence, said DCIP’s Cleland.

Back in the West Bank, Zaher continues to text the U.S. Embassy everyday, asking for updates; he watches the news and scours the internet for any sign of other possible releases. Zaher said he’s been losing track of time. Days without his son have felt like months. He said he misses Mohammed’s quiet presence, describing him as sweet and gentle and a family boy. Like many his age, he spent much of his time playing “Fortnite” or watching soccer — his team is Real Madrid. Mohammed also loves photography and spent his weekends working part-time at a coffee shop.

“When you talk about eight months of every day trying something and you don’t get nowhere, you’re just hopeless,” Zaher said.

Mohammed’s next court date is scheduled for October 29. His family has little faith prosecutors will actually hold the hearing, but they plan to attend. Zaher said he and his wife know the routine well: Waiting at the courthouse, at times as long as 15 hours, only for the judge to announce that the hearing is postponed. But if that means a chance to spot Mohammed through the CCTV monitor, it will have been worth it. 

“We’ll waste the whole day,” he said, “but we go there, just so one of us can see him for that 30 seconds.”

This story includes translation from Arabic to English by Rayan El Amine.

The post This 16-Year-Old American Is Among Hundreds of Palestinian Children Jailed in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

The agreement stipulated that Israel would halt all of its military operations and that the flow of aid would return to levels seen under the previous ceasefire, during which at least 600 aid trucks entered the territory each day. Despite this, Israel’s military carried out two strikes and COGAT, the military unit that controls shipments of aid into Gaza, told aid groups that it would limit deliveries to half the amount — 300 trucks daily — agreed upon in the deal. The Israeli government also said it would not reopen the Rafah crossing along the border of Egypt, a key avenue for the delivery of aid.

Israel carried out the attacks and restricted aid as it accused Hamas of failing to hand over the bodies of the remaining Israeli prisoners in a timely manner as promised in the ceasefire agreement. Within the 72 hours allotted in the deal, Hamas returned the 20 living Israeli prisoners, in exchange for about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were detained in Gaza during the war without charges. For the retrieval of the remains of the deceased detainees in Gaza, all sides, including Israel, had acknowledged it would take more time since many of the bodies are buried beneath rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel’s bombardment. According to Palestinian and United Nations estimates, 10,000 bodies remain buried beneath the 50 million tons of rubble from buildings leveled by Israel’s attacks. Some of the bodies are also believed to be within the nearly 60 percent of Gaza that remains under Israeli military occupation.

The implementation of the ceasefire, signed by both Israel and Hamas, spelled out such terms to deal with the logistical obstacles. The plan, published by Israeli media, called on Hamas and Israel to share information about the whereabouts of “any remaining deceased hostages that were not retrieved within the 72 hours.” The information would be shared through mediating countries and the International Committee of the Red Cross. “The mechanism shall ensure that the remains of all the hostages are fully and safely exhumed and released,” the plan said. “Hamas shall exert maximum effort to ensure the fulfillment of these commitments as soon as possible.”

The Red Cross, which is facilitating the transfer of remains, said the search for the bodies may take days or weeks.

Hamas has returned the bodies of eight individuals, according to the Red Cross and the Israeli government, while the search for 20 others continues. 

While the ceasefire plan included exceptions for the return of bodies, no such exemptions existed for the resumption of delivering humanitarian aid. 

Both the Red Cross and the United Nations blasted Israel’s decision to again limit aid into the territory. 

While Palestinian American writer and foreign policy expert Tariq Kenney-Shawa expected Israel to violate the new ceasefire deal — as Israel repeatedly did during the first few months of a previous ceasefire before shattering it completely by killing more than 400 Palestinians in a single day — he didn’t expect it to happen so shortly after Trump’s tour of the region, which included a speech before Israel’s parliament. 

“Israel knew that those technicalities existed,” Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, said, referring to the difficulty of locating the Israeli bodies amid the rubble. “And what they’re doing now is that they’re exploiting it in order to continue to genocide, albeit at a slightly reduced rate of killing.”

Experts worried the ceasefire deal was vague, allowing Israel leeway to resume attacks whenever it sees fit. They had pointed to Israel’s routine violations of its ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in Lebanon, in which the Israeli military’s ongoing strikes have killed dozens of civilians. 

On Tuesday, an Israeli drone strike killed at least five people who were inspecting their homes in a residential area of Gaza City. A separate Israeli drone strike killed another individual in the territory’s south outside of Khan Younis, according to Middle East Eye. And on Monday, Israeli soldiers killed a man, identified by state-sponsored news outlet Wafa as Khalid Barbakh, while he inspected his home in the downtown area of Khan Younis, reports said. 

Israel’s far-right leadership is already suggesting future ceasefire violations. Over the weekend, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on social media that after the return of the Israeli prisoners, the military’s focus would be on “the destruction of all of Hamas’ terror tunnels in Gaza,” adding that he had “instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission.” He did not specify how such a mission would take place, but would likely require Israeli soldiers to re-occupy large swaths of Gaza’s cities. 

For Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza, such attacks and aid restrictions are a part of Israel’s long-term plan to undermine the ceasefire so that it can continue to displace Palestinians from Gaza by further worsening their living conditions. Such efforts could set the stage for the economic redevelopment plan outlined in the deal, which largely excludes Palestinian involvement and promises foreign investment opportunities to “well-meaning international groups” that have already pitched “investment proposals and exciting development ideas.”

“The matter is not a ceasefire,” said Abdu, who is from Gaza and whose sister and her family were killed in March by an Israeli strike. “We are talking about a managed genocide, a managed forcible displacement.”

During the rollout of Trump’s plan for Gaza several weeks ago at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened further military action in Gaza if he deemed Hamas to be violating the deal. A major piece of the plan that is yet to be negotiated is the disarmament of Hamas. The militant and political group has previously said it would only surrender its weapons to a Palestinian-led government in Gaza. 

But on Tuesday, Trump laid out his position with a threat of further violence, telling reporters at the White House, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. And it will happen quickly, and perhaps violently.”

Such threats echoed those by Israeli’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who voted against the ceasefire deal last week. He urged Netanyahu to issue an ultimatum to Hamas that if it did not immediately return the remaining bodies of Israel captives, “we will immediately halt all aid supplies entering the Strip.”

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

Such a move would not only violate the ceasefire but exacerbate an already catastrophic level of starvation and famine throughout Gaza, which Israel has choked off from aid since March. Before the deal, images of Israel’s famine in Gaza had begun to change the tides of the international community’s view on Israel, further isolating the nation. As governments such as the European Union weigh whether to continue its push for sanctions against Israel, EU officials are reportedly watching how Israel handles the resumption of humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, according to Politico Europe. Over the weekend, the U.N. said “progress” has been made in Gaza, but called on more aid to be allowed in. Some hundreds of trucks have entered the territory over the past several days, still short of the necessary amount, according to aid groups, which are limited to movement through two crossings into Gaza.

“What Israel is trying to do is actually very strategic in the long-term,” Kenney-Shawa said. “They’ve signed this agreement that’s going to get their hostages back, but that will allow them to resume their strategic objectives of rendering Gaza uninhabitable and eventually leading to mass exodus … in a way that is palatable by the international community.”

Correction: October 15, 2025, 2:02 p.m. ET
An earlier version of the article misstated the month that Ramy Abdu’s sister and family were killed by an Israeli airstrike; it was May, not March. The number of people who were inspecting their homes, then killed by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City was also corrected, from at least six to at least five people.

The post Israel’s Mounting Ceasefire Violations in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

For much of Israel’s war on Gaza, Trump showed little interest in the suffering of Palestinians. Before he was reelected, Trump used the word “Palestinian” as a slur meant to insult then-President Joe Biden on the debate stage. In February, as Palestinians in Gaza had just begun to return to their homes amid a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, Trump called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza so that he could redevelop it into a “Middle East Riviera.” After Israel breached the Trump ceasefire in March, Trump put little overt pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end his war as the death toll mounted. Trump didn’t object when Israel attacked Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.

That changed suddenly after Israeli fighter jets launched 10 missiles at a residential building in the Qatari capital of Doha in early September.

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The building in Doha housed Hamas political leaders and their families who at the time were engaged in peace talks with the Qataris serving as mediators. While the Hamas officials survived the attack, the strike killed six people, including a Qatari security official, and injured several others, including civilians.

Trump immediately took to Truth Social to say he was “unhappy” with the Israeli operation and denounced the strike on Qatar, which he called a “close Ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker Peace.” Suddenly, Trump was facing pressure from his allies in the Middle East.

A U.S. ceasefire proposal followed several weeks later, with Trump strong-arming Netanyahu to accept. “He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine,” Trump told Axios. Prior to the press conference announcing his plan, Trump cornered Netanyahu in the Oval Office and pressed him to apologize over the phone to Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani for the September 9 airstrike. A Qatari official reportedly helped write Netanyahu’s apology, along with the White House, and remained in the Oval Office to ensure the Israeli leader stayed on script, according to Politico. Trump went on to start the press conference by praising the Qatari leader as a “fantastic person” who “wants peace.” 

Qatar has long been a key U.S. ally, but since Trump’s reelection, the Persian Gulf nation has forged an especially close alliance with Trump and his inner circle. Qatar has pumped billions of dollars into U.S. companies over the past year — in many cases enriching companies and business ventures linked to Trump’s family and friends. Meanwhile, it has forged deepening ties with the U.S. military. Whether it was fueled by geopolitics, personal profit, or some mix of the two, Israel’s attack on Qatar appears to have been a spark that spurred Trump into action on Gaza.

“It became quite clear that this really backfired on Israel, that it changed the balance of the debate inside of the administration,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an expert on the region.

Business Deals

A mere 20-minute drive north along the Qatari coast from the Doha residence that Israel bombed is a new $5.5 billion Trump-branded golf course and luxury villa development. In early May, Trump’s son, Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, inked a deal with real estate firm Qatari Diar, backed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund to launch the project.

That same month, Trump scored an economic deal between the U.S. and Qatar worth $1.2 trillion. Qatar pledged to buy more than 200 Boeing commercial jets and invest billions in energy and tech projects for the U.S.-based corporations McDermott, Parsons, and Quantinuum. It promised to purchase $1 billion in counter-drone technologies from Raytheon and $2 billion in military drones from General Atomics. And to sweeten the pot, the Qatari government gifted the Trump administration with a luxury Boeing jumbo jet worth $400 million to be used as Trump’s Air Force One, a present that drew accusations of corruption.

During Trump’s first term, financial ties were more evident with other Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, often sidelining Qatar due to alleged ties to Islamic militant groups in the region. But Qatar has recently managed to win Trump’s favor after delivering a plethora of financial deals with Trump, his family, and U.S. officials.

In the days following Trump’s reelection, the Qatari government fund, along with the United Arab Emirates, injected $1.5 billion into Affinity Partners, an investment firm controlled by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. (Qatar, has in the past, bailed out Kushner from a failed real estate investment in Manhattan.) 

Trump, Kushner, and Trump’s billionaire friend and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff have wide-ranging investments among Gulf Coast states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The trio of families reaped a $2 billion cash injection from the UAE into Trump cryptocurrency ventures, including one co-founded by Witkoff. Witkoff’s son Zach brokered and announced the multibillion-dollar deal in May.

Experts on U.S. policy in the region say it’s not hard to understand the impetus for these deals and investments.

“This money is not being given to Jared Kushner because of his business acumen, it is being given to Jared Kushner because people understand that is a pathway to the president of the United States, to get the United States to do things for them,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Though Kushner insists he would have secured the deal even if Trump had not won his reelection campaign, Duss calls such arrangements “blatant corruption.” He and other experts say it’s hard to overstate the role that personal enrichment plays in shaping Trump’s policy choices. Such links between policy and personal profit have drawn accusations of nepotism, conflict of interest, and ethical violations.

“His calculations are always tied to his own personal and family and organizational financial calculation,” said Duss. Countries like Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, he said, understand that the easiest way to win favor from the U.S. government is to “give Donald Trump gifts.”

Long-Standing Ties

The U.S. working relationship with Qatar long predates the Trump administration. Qatar hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East — Al Udeid Air Base — and is the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command in the region. The base was built in 1996 but was not known to the public until 2002.

Qatar has also played an increasingly critical role in helping the U.S. broker diplomatic deals. In recent years, Qatar played a role in helping NATO and U.S. arrange the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Iran–U.S. prisoner swap, and the release of Ukrainian children from Russia. More recently, it has been a key mediator and drafter of ceasefire plans to end the genocide in Gaza.

Qatar was a major broker in the earlier Trump ceasefire in January. Since Israel broke that agreement, Qatar’s other attempts at forging an end to Israel’s war on Gaza fell short, with Trump ignoring a recent Qatari ceasefire plan in August even after it won Hamas’s agreement. But the calculus changed after Israel’s September 9 airstrike. 

Israel’s strike on Doha sent shockwaves through the region. At the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month, a coalition of Arab and Muslim majority states applied pressure on the Trump administration for a ceasefire in Gaza and also sought guarantees the U.S. would not tolerate another Israeli airstrike on its Gulf Coast allies.

The U.S. has long provided an unofficial security blanket over the Gulf states, including Qatar. Parsi of the Quincy Institute said Israel’s attack broke such unwritten rule, which “embarrassed” the U.S. on the global stage, prompting Trump to act.

“The trigger was this massive overreach by the Israelis by attacking Qatar and other U.S. partners in the region,” he said. The White House “decided that they needed to take some sort of initiative — they needed to stop Netanyahu.”

On September 29, Trump issued an executive order, pledging to defend Qatar’s security. While questions remain over how legally binding the order is since such security deals must be approved by Congress, it sent a clear message to Israel: “This is not something Israel can do again,” Parsi said.

Among those who reportedly encouraged Hamas to accept Trump’s ceasefire deal during talks this week in Egypt were Qatari and UAE officials. Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani served as one of the main mediators between Hamas and Israel. On the other side, Witkoff and Kushner were the main brokers alongside Israeli officials. Hamas is relying heavily on Arab and Muslim states such as Qatar, along with the U.S., to make sure the pressure remains on Israel to uphold its end of the deal and ensure peace. Trump personally joined negotiations, Axios reported, calling in several times to assure Hamas and its allies that the U.S. would ensure the ceasefire holds up. This week, the Trump administration deployed 200 U.S. troops to Israel to assist with the flow of aid into Gaza and that all parties uphold the agreement.

And Qatari troops will soon be headed to the U.S. On Friday, Qatar struck an unprecedented deal with the U.S., allowing the Qatari air force to build a military facility on U.S. soil. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a Qatari facility at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Force Base, will house F-15 fighter jets and Qatari pilots who will receive training alongside U.S. soldiers.

Domestic Opinion

Trump’s shift on Israel’s war may also have been coming from home. Pressure was mounting within his America First constituency, which began to turn against Israel in recent months. Far-right voices started criticizing Israel’s war, including Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who began referring to Israel’s offensive as “a genocide.” Trump reportedly warned a prominent Jewish donor of the shifting tides among his base toward Israel, according to the Financial Times. In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday following the announcement that both Hamas and Israel accepted the initial phase of the ceasefire, Trump said he had told Netanyahu in a phone call, “‘Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi. They can’t fight the world.’ And he understands that very well.”

In choosing to unveil his ceasefire plan alongside Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli leader a chance to rehabilitate his image to the international community. But it was also a chance for Trump to signal to his base that he had a handle on Israel. 

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Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan, which was heavily edited by Netanyahu before its release, does not bring an end to the Israeli occupation, nor does it guarantee a path toward Palestinian statehood. In fact, within the plan, the Israeli military would maintain strict control of Gaza’s borders, returning the territory to the status quo as an open-air prison. And perhaps most troubling to Palestinians is the reserved right for Israel to resume its genocidal attacks if it decides the Palestinians have violated the agreement. Israel’s long-standing policy has been a push to maximize control over the West Bank and Gaza. 

Also within the plan is a temporary governing structure led by Trump and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has long been accused of war crimes by critics over his involvement in the invasion of Iraq. While Trump had softened on his previous harsh statements about displacing all Palestinians from Gaza to build a Gaza Riviera, the plan’s economic portions envision a panel of developers that would oversee “investment proposals and exciting development ideas” by international groups.

It’s the exact type of business deal that the Trumps, Kushners, and Witkoffs have been making across the Middle East. And maybe that will convince Trump to ensure Israel complies with its end of the deal.

“We have all these players, including Trump, who are now sort of invested into this working, and it sounds funny to say, but we’re hoping that this corruption works in support of this enduring ceasefire,” Duss said, referring to Trump’s business relationships with Gulf nations.

The post Did Qatari Money Drive Trump’s Push for Gaza Ceasefire? appeared first on The Intercept.

The operation — which immigration rights advocates said was called “Freaky Friday,” though ICE denied the name — is a part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation campaign. With deportation continuing apace amid the federal government shutdown, advocates speculated that the latest scheme to pay off immigrant children was deliberately timed by ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to minimize public attention. 

“The idea that masked men would now go to 14-year-olds and ask them to waive their rights to return to the countries that they fled is shocking.”

The memo said immigrant children 14 years or older would receive $2,500 in exchange for agreeing to be deported.

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will provide a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500 U.S. Dollars to unaccompanied alien children, 14 years of age and older, who have elected to voluntarily depart the United States as of the date of this notice and moving forward,” said the memo, which the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that holds children in immigration custody, sent to service providers Friday.

Before receiving the government’s memo, immigrant rights advocates got word of the impending policy change and became alarmed. They began to widely circulate information about the plan in private email chains earlier this week.

“Voluntary departure has always been available,” said Melissa Adamson, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law who reviewed the government memo. “What children need is legal counsel to safely understand the risks or benefits of this option — not the government essentially enticing them into giving up their rights for a cash incentive.”

The government memo stipulated that children who elected to take the payment, must arrange to meet with an ICE officer. In order to waive their right to a removal hearing so that they can receive the payment, the child themself would have to sign a form to change their status with the U.S. government. 

“If the child agrees to the stipend, DHS will issue a l-210 addendum declaration for the child to sign,” the memo says.

In a statement to The Intercept that was subsequently posted online, an ICE spokesperson confirmed that the agency would begin to target unaccompanied minors for deportation, calling the plan “voluntary.”

The agency said ICE and DHS “are offering a strictly voluntary option to return home to their families” and that financial support would only be provided at the approval of an immigration judge.

ICE told The Intercept the “voluntary option” would initially be offered to 17-year-old unaccompanied children.

“The idea that immigration enforcement agents can coerce children into waiving their rights and protections under this memo to meet President Trump’s political goals is cruel,” said Bilal Askaryar, director of communications at Acacia Center for Justice, which represents and advocates for unaccompanied immigrant children. “Americans have been shocked by the tactics that ICE is using in communities across the country, and the idea that masked men would now go to 14-year-olds and ask them to waive their rights to return to the countries that they fled is shocking.”

Advocates Alarmed

The plan had been privately relayed to immigrant advocates earlier this week by what they said were sources inside the government.

The advocates had gotten word that ICE was expected to target children aged 14 or older and was considering lowering the range to children as young as 10. For children who decline ICE’s offer, advocates said they had heard from sources that ICE agents would threaten the children as well as their relatives in the U.S. with detention.

The ICE spokesperson said, “Any payment to support a return home would be provided after an immigration judge grants the request and the individual arrives in their country of origin.”

According to emails sent by advocates, ICE agents are expected to track down and visit the children who arrived in the U.S. without their parents. Many live in shelters, with relatives, or with host families. 

In the plan, according to advocates, agents would first target children who are currently in federal immigration detention, followed by those who have already been released from custody. 

As soon as unaccompanied immigrant children turned 18, according to advocates, they would be detained by ICE. Immigrant children in federal government custody are held by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.

By Friday afternoon, immigrant rights organizations and attorneys who were mobilizing against the operation began to receive emails and texts from the government about the deportation plan. Advocates have urged immigrants, especially children, not to sign any documents that attempt to threaten or incentivize children to waive their rights without first seeking legal advice. 

In its statement to The Intercept, ICE declined to say whether children would be threatened with detention.

The Trump administration has shown a willingness to lock up unaccompanied children. Over Labor Day weekend, the government targeted 300 Guatemalan children for deportation, with agents hastily rounding up 76 of the children from their caregivers’ homes in the middle of the night and boarding many of them onto planes. A federal judge blocked their deportation hours before takeoff.

Many unaccompanied immigrant children also lack legal representation, largely due to budget cuts by the Trump administration. 

In February, the Trump administration began to track the whereabouts of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. with the intent to deport them, according to a Reuters report. Then, in March, the administration cut a federally funded program that provided legal representation for minors in their immigration cases. The program supported more than 26,000 children, according to the University of California, Los Angeles, Latino Policy and Politics Institute. 

From 2023 to 2024, the U.S. government received referrals for 93,356 unaccompanied children entering the country, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador, according to government data.

Update: October 3, 2025, 6:20 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a quote from Melissa Adamson, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.

The post ICE Targets Unaccompanied Immigrant Children, Offering $2,500 Payment for Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

In contrast, the 20-point plan — written by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both real estate investors — is both vague and full of contradictions, largely excluding Palestinian involvement while allowing Israel and the U.S. to maintain broad political, military, and economic powers within Gaza, according to observers and experts on the region.

Similar to previous ceasefire proposals throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the recent plan calls for the immediate cessation of fighting, an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, the disarmament of Hamas, and the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza.

Where this plan differs is that U.S. officials are attempting to spell out what a post-war Gaza would look like.

The plan states that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza” and that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Palestinians would have the ability to leave or return, a reversal from Trump’s previous calls to expel all Palestinians from the territory. Yet experts cautioned that these assurances do not indicate a reversal of policy for the Israeli government, which has been consistent in its goals toward the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and total control over the territory.

Trump’s plan allows for Israel to have veto power during the military withdrawal phases, with terms largely set by the U.S. and Israel. Internal security of Gaza would then be managed by a so-called International Stabilization Force, led by the U.S. and other Arab states. Even after withdrawal from Gaza, the plan calls for “a security perimeter” around Gaza maintained by the Israeli military until the territory is “secure from any resurgent terror threat.” 

Allowing Israel to maintain such a security perimeter around Gaza all but guarantees Israel the opportunity to indefinitely occupy the territory in a similar manner to the decadeslong blockade that rendered Gaza an open-air prison preceding Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks. In 2005, Israel withdrew its military from and dismantled its settlements within Gaza, but the Israeli military remained in control of its borders. Experts said the new proposal promises a similar chokehold on the territory, along with the possible resumption of Israel’s military campaign.

“This is a continuation of the occupation, if not a continuation of the war by other means,” said Amjad Iraqi, a senior analyst on Israel/Palestine with the International Crisis Group. “Palestinians might be able to stay in Gaza, but they will not be able to really govern its affairs.” 

At Monday’s conference, Netanyahu thanked Trump, “the greatest friend that Israel ever had in the White House,” for the plan, which he said allows his government the chance to “achieve all of our war objectives without any further bloodshed.”

But the Israeli leader reserved the right to “finish the job … the hard way” and resume its military campaign in Gaza if Hamas were to reject the deal or fail to meet its conditions. Immediately after the conference, in which the leaders declined to take questions from the press, Netanyahu posted a video in Hebrew meant to address his coalition, promising that he does not intend to withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza.

As Hamas weighs how to respond to the plan, Trump on Tuesday threatened the Palestinian militant political group with “a very sad end” if it declines the deal. Trump said he would give Hamas “three to four days” to decide.

The plan already has buy-in from a number of Western nations, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia, which all were new to recognize Palestinian statehood last week. Other nations that welcome the plan include Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, China, and Russia. Also supporting the plan are a host of Arab and Muslim-majority nations, such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which had received a draft of the plan one week earlier from the Trump administration at the United Nations headquarters. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority also said it welcomed Trump’s plan.

Indefinite Occupation of Gaza

Experts worry that Israel’s veto power in the new Gaza plan gives it freedom to resume its military campaign at any moment.

Netanyahu’s government has hardly been a trustworthy partner in peace agreements in recent years: Israel has repeatedly bombed Lebanon even after signing a deal with Hezbollah last November, and in March, it broke the U.S.-brokered peace deal with Hamas by blocking all humanitarian aid into Gaza and resuming its bombing campaign, blaming Hamas for not releasing enough hostages, and falsely accusing the group of preparing new attacks on Israel.

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Regardless of whether Hamas rejects or accepts the plan, Israel is sure to continue its policy of mass removal of Palestinians from the territory, said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka.

“If Hamas rejects the ceasefire proposal, that’ll give Israel the pretext to just steamroll Gaza City and do it in the way that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir want, which is all at once in one fell swoop,” Kenney-Shawa said. But even if Hamas were to follow all of Israel’s demands of disarmament and return of hostages, he said, there is little guarantee that Israel would not renege on the deal as it has in the past.

For Ahmed Moor, a fellow with the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who was born in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, the Trump–Netanyahu meeting and the language in the deal echoes the Oslo Accords of 1993, which had been intended as a two-state solution, only for Israel’s government to illegally expand its settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank in the 30 years since.

“This is back to the future, right?” Moor said, recalling the 1993 scene on the White House’s South Lawn where Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestine Liberation Organization Chair Yasser Arafat. The Oslo deal, he said, is an example of Israel “front-loading” its demands while committing to the needs of Palestinians “at some indeterminate point in the future.”

In the hours since Monday’s announcement, the Israeli military has killed more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza, including five people who were attempting to receive aid, according to Gaza health officials. Meanwhile, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, often sanctioned by the Israeli military, continued unabated with Israeli settlers setting fire to a building outside a Palestinian village near Nablus on Tuesday evening.

“The Palestinians today need relief from genocide,” Moor said. “This document is not going to provide that.”

“Paul Bremer 2.0”

The plan itself also envisions the installment of a transitional government called “a Board of Peace,” overseen by Trump and a panel that includes former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who since leaving office in 2007 has attempted to establish himself as a power broker between European and Middle East nations. In its purview would be the funding and redevelopment of Gaza, where wide swaths have been rendered uninhabitable by Israel’s brutal military offensives.

Adding to the vagueness around the plans’ security details, it also calls for economic redevelopment led by those behind “some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East,” a vision that falls in line with Trump’s own musings for a Gaza Riviera. The plan looks to create a framework that would attract investment, as well as the creation of a “special economic zone” and tariff scheme for nations that agree to participate. 

Moor called such aspects of the deal “a neocolonial plan designed to enrich Tony Blair and a few other people.” He further coined the plan “Paul Bremer 2.0,” a reference to the former U.S. State Department diplomat who served as the head of the U.S. puppet government of occupied Iraq. In other words, Gaza would be rendered “a fiefdom for other overlords to manage,” Iraqi added.

There is a clear throughline between the governance structure in the Gaza plan and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. and U.K.-led coalitions during the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Similar to the cases of both Iraq and Afghanistan, Duss expects Israel to prolong its occupation of Gaza until it reaches its eventual aims of permanent control of the territory.

“There’s always going to be some reason why the occupying military needs to stay, especially when you have a government as in Israel that is dominated by these kind of messianic extremists who see conquering and controlling the entire land as their religious duty,” Duss said.

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Duss and others also criticized the attempts to attract investments before guarantees to end Israel’s occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Any economic vision should be led by the Palestinian people, Al-Shabaka’s Kenney-Shawa added.

“It’s never too early to to talk about economic visions if it’s coming from Palestinians themselves,” Kenney-Shawa said, “but it’s way too early to be talking about these investments and economic visions when there is no plan to reconstruct Gaza or clear the rubble, or dig out the the 13,000 dead bodies that are under the rubble, and provide long-term care to the 2 million people who are in a very bad state and are desperate for that care.”

Where to Go From Here?

While a report by CBS News indicated that Hamas may be leaning toward accepting the U.S.–Israeli deal, Palestinians are faced with an almost impossible choice.

Kenney-Shawa, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza, said from his conversations with other Palestinians that the deal has left them feeling like there are no good options remaining.

“I’ve spoken to people who are just hoping that they accept the deal because they want this to be over,” he said, “And then there are some who say they hope they don’t accept the deal because it’s surrender.”

He said he thinks Hamas should accept the Trump deal as a way to remove any pretext for Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza. He said that Hamas no longer has leverage and is at its weakest point, given the indifference the Netanyahu government has shown toward the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza. Others called for the Arab-led plan to rebuild Gaza introduced earlier this year by Arab states that allowed for Hamas to give up its large-scale arms and be integrated into a Palestinian-led security force within the framework of a Palestinian-led government. Hamas has said it would accept giving up governance of Gaza but has in the past refused disarmament. 

There is already increasing pressure on Israel from other nations to end its incursion. That international pressure, along with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, may be the best chance toward ending the occupation, Moor, the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s fellow, said.

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More nations, such as Spain and Belgium, are enacting arms embargoes on Israel, while Germany and the European Union are weighing proposals on sanctions and blocking trade to Israel. Within the U.S., some Democratic lawmakers have broken with the powerful pro-Israel lobby and have voted or pledged to support legislation designed to block some weapons transfers from the U.S. to Israel. Calls for cultural boycotts have also intensified, with Ireland, Netherland and Spain promising to sit out of the popular singing contest show Eurovision if Israel were allowed to participate in 2026. 

Israel’s acceptance of Trump’s Gaza plan can be interpreted as an attempt to rehabilitate its image in the face of such growing international pressure, Moor said. The plan, however, is generating new political conflict within Israel as members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition have publicly expressed disgust with the deal, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called it a “resounding diplomatic failure, a closing of eyes and turning our backs on all the lessons of October 7.”

Trump’s plan references an earlier peace plan authored by France and Saudi Arabia and later codified in the United Nations as the New York Declaration, which, in a July vote, drew support from the vast majority of member states: 142 in favor, with Israel and the U.S. in opposition. The Trump plan borrows from the French–Saudi plan when convenient, such as in the formation of a transitional security force and government, but ignores many of its core provisions — such as allowing Palestinians to lead most points of the peace process, declaring “There must be no occupation, siege, territorial reduction, or forced displacement,” and the need for a Palestinian state with a unified Gaza and West Bank.

Kenney-Shawa took exception to the Trump administration’s labeling of the deal as “a comprehensive peace plan,” a phrasing that some mainstream media outlets have readily disseminated. Instead, he said the deal is similar to Oslo in that it is “a way to re-intrench Israeli control, just in a way that’s more palatable for the international community.”

Moor agreed, adding that Israel is trying to regain its legitimacy as a democratic state that provides equal rights to Jewish people and Palestinians. “That’s not a world that we can ever go back to,” Moor said. “And I interpret this deal as an effort to go back to that world.”

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While nations backing the plan also see it as a possible pathway toward a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood, experts said that such a pathway is circuitous at best. The only mention of Palestinian statehood is in the second-to-last point of the plan, tucked behind myriad requirements such as following advances in redeveloping Gaza and after the Palestinian Authority undergoes reform. Only then would the conditions “finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” Those reforms, however, rely on further conditions spelled out in Trump’s 2020 peace proposal. 

That plan, announced in January 2020, also co-written by Kushner, an old family friend of Netanyahu’s, similarly excluded Palestinians from its drafting and placed stringent conditions and ultimatums on Palestinians. The plan was hazy on details on Gaza’s fate, but it allowed the Israeli government to annex much of the West Bank. It was announced under similar circumstances, with Trump standing side by side with Netanyahu as he faced mounting political pressure. 

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On the same day the 2020 plan was unveiled, Israeli officials indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges. His hold on power was weakening heading into his reelection in March of that year. Trump’s 2020 plan was seen by observers as a political life raft for Netanyahu, at the expense of Palestinian lives, further eroding any chance at Palestinian sovereignty. 

Now, as Israel’s genocidal military and starvation campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 66,000 Palestinians, drags toward its third year, and as Israel is at its most isolated on the international stage in decades, the Trump administration has again given Netanyahu a place on a White House podium with this week’s 20-point plan for Gaza. 

While watching Monday’s press conference, Iraqi, of the International Crisis Group, said he was thrown back to 2020.

“It really is a repeat of history,” Iraqi said, “and it shows how much that the Trump–Netanyahu alliance, and the alliance of the Israeli right and the American right, has really allowed for the complete withering of any pushback to this one-state reality, where Israelis get to determine the Palestinians’ fate.”

The post The Trump–Netanyahu Gaza Peace Deal Promises Indefinite Occupation appeared first on The Intercept.

Both the French and British heads of state said that they decided to recognize Palestine in order to pursue peace. “The time for peace has come because we’re just a few moments away from no longer being able to seize peace,” said French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday before the U.N. A day earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a recorded speech, “In the face of growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace.”

What Macron and Starmer failed to mention, however, is that they — and many of their fellow nations now pushing for Palestinian statehood — continue to supply weapons and military support to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is leading an intensification of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and an expansion of settlements and annexations of Palestinian land in the West Bank, responded with defiance to the statehood calls of Western nations: “There will not be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan.”

Last week, a U.N. human rights commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The commission’s chair, Navi Pillay, said the international community is under the “legal obligation to use all means that are reasonably available to them to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

Yet the nations whose leaders are calling for peace keep the flow of armaments moving.

“The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity,” Pillay said.

Who Recognizes Palestine as a State but Still Arms Israel? 

Currently 157 of the 193 U.N. member states recognize a Palestinian state. The U.K., France, Canada, Luxembourg, and Australia have recently recognized Palestinian statehood but continue to send arms and military equipment to Israel. 

In September 2024, following widespread pressure and protests, the U.K. government enacted a partial arms embargo, halting export licenses on some weapons to Israel out of concern they were being used by the Israeli military to commit human rights violations. The embargo was limited to only 30 of the total 300 export licenses to Israel, but the U.K. pledged to no longer send F-35 fighter jet parts directly to Israel. F-35 jets have been used to drop bombs in Gaza, including operations that have killed civilians in so-called “safe zones.”

However, a May report — led by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Workers for a Free Palestine, and Progressive International — found that the U.K. government continued its direct shipments of F-35 components to Israel. The report also found the U.K. had shipped thousands of bombs, grenades, missiles, tanks, and firearm components to Israel over the past year.

A recent media report by Israeli publication Ynet also indicated that the British government is continuing to send arms to Israel despite its Palestinian statehood announcement. 

In early 2024, Canada’s government said it would halt granting export licenses to Canadian weapons manufacturers looking to sell to Israel. Then, in March 2024, its legislature passed a non-binding measure to halt government sales of weapons to Israel. 

However, despite claims by the Canadian government that only “non-lethal” goods are being sold to Israel, weapons exports continued through several loopholes. The government continued to honor export licenses granted before January 2024, allowing for more than $94 million in military goods to be sold to Israel from Canada, and $83 million more in explosives made in Canada but sold to Israel through a U.S. government deal, according to reporting by The Maple. 

A separate Palestinian Youth Movement report from July further detailed the continued flow of weapons from Canada to Israel, highlighting dozens of shipments between October 2023 and July 2025, carrying more than 400,000 bullets, cartridges, and aircraft components, including F-35 fighter jet parts. 

The French government similarly contradicts its public statements on apparent halt to arms sales and shipments to Israel, according to a June report from Palestinian Youth Movement and other organizations. 

During an October 2024 radio interview, Macron said, “The priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza” and added that “France is not delivering any” weapons to Israel. The June report – published by Progressive International, Palestinian Youth Movement, the French Jewish Union for Peace, BDS France, and Stop Arming Israel France – revealed that between October 2023 and April 2025, France had delivered $10 million worth in military goods, including 15 million bombs, grenades, torpedoes, missiles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, artillery, and rifles.

The French government has insisted that military goods sold to Israel are used only for the Iron Dome’s defensive missile systems. However, critics have noted that such defensive weapons enable Israel to continue its genocidal campaign in Gaza and its annexation in the West Bank. 

Luxembourg, which also recently recognized Palestinian statehood, has said it exports weapons to Israel but only sends defensive weapons, according to reports.

Australia has also been adamant that it does not send weapons for use by the Israeli military, with its acting Prime Minister Richard Marles calling claims that it does as “misinformation.” But political opposition leaders and rights groups have been quick to underline the country’s role in manufacturing components of F-35 jets, and is a crucial part of the supply chain to manufacture the fighter planes. 

Some European nations, however, have followed up their words with action. Belgium, which also joined the recent statehood calls, recently moved to enact a total arms embargo on military goods to Israel and is lobbying for the European Union to do the same.

Spain, which moved to recognize a Palestinian state in May 2024, this week enacted a total arms embargo on Israel (with some exceptions), banning the transfer of all weapons, dual-use technology, and military equipment to Israel, including the use of its ports or airports for such exports. It also banned imports of goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Spanish government had already begun to cancel arms deals with major weapons manufacturers who are selling arms to Israel.

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Norway, which also recognized Palestine as a state in May 2024, divested parts of its $11 trillion sovereign fund from 11 Israeli companies tied to the Israeli military’s jet program after global pressure, including from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

The largest exporter of weapons to Israel remains the United States, which criticized calls to recognize the Palestinian state a “reward for Hamas” this week.

A “Performance of Justice”

President and CEO of the Center for International Policy Nancy Okail welcomed the new calls for Palestinian statehood as a crucial step in the right direction, saying that such gestures further isolate Israel diplomatically. But she criticized what she called an “accountability gap” between these governments’ words and their actions with respect to Israel.

She pointed to countries such as the U.K., which is failing to uphold its own human rights laws in continuing to send weapons to Israel and has also been an obstacle to the International Criminal Court’s war crime proceedings against Israeli leaders.

“Such recognition of Palestinian statehood is largely symbolic unless it’s paired with halting arms transfers that actually fuels the genocide, otherwise, that would be like a performance of justice while complicit in violence,” she said. “And this is what creates an accountability gap, where you have states that are upholding the law in theory while breaking it in practice.”

Amnesty International USA has been calling for a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel even prior to the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Their proposed embargo would include the transfer of all arms, whether for military or security purposes, including surveillance equipment and infrastructure. It also calls for an end to military and security training relationships between Israel and other governments. The group views such embargo as necessary to end the genocide, the blockade on Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian territory, and Israel’s apartheid system. 

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“If governments want to put meaning behind these gestures or words of condemnation, then these are the type of actions that need to be taken,” said Elizabeth Rghebi, the Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International USA. Rghebi also said countries need to uphold the arrest warrants put forth by the ICC. 

Okail called the unconditional U.S. support of Israel “one of the biggest hurdles” toward meaningfully recognizing a Palestinian state. 

Okail maintained that the concessions by governments like the U.K. do show that the ongoing demonstrations across the globe, from Europe to the U.S., are having an impact internationally but also domestically within Israeli politics. 

“Because the people are seeing how their image is being portrayed globally, they’re seeing all the protests against them,” she said. “They’re seeing that they are losing the unwavering sympathy that they used to have.”

The post These Countries Recognized Palestine, but Still Send Arms to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

The epicenter of America’s anti-immigrant campaign has been Los Angeles and its surrounding cities, where thousands have been arrested since June. Almost every day this summer, federal agents from ICE and U.S. Border Patrol have stalked Home Depot parking lots, car washes, and immigrant communities across Southern California, detaining people based on ethnicity or language. 

But as the Trump administration’s war on immigrants expands, so does the resistance against it. 

“It’s important that they break LA,” said Ron Gochez, a high school history teacher and leading member of the LA-based grassroots group Unión Del Barrio. “If they break LA, they can break any community in this country.”

Gochez and Unión Del Barrio are a part of the Community Self-Defense Coalition, a network of dozens of grassroots groups. The network conducts daily street patrols to warn their neighbors of possible ICE activity. 

Filmmaker Brandon Tauszik embedded with Gochez and other members of Unión Del Barrio throughout the summer for The Intercept. In the documentary film “A City Fights Back: How LA Defends Itself Against ICE,” activists show a multifaceted strategy of opposition. They drive the streets in search of federal agents, monitor highway off-ramps to flag suspicious cars entering their communities, organize protests, and recruit and train new members willing to combat ICE.

For Gochez, a high school teacher and a father, the stakes are increasingly personal. 

On August 8, federal agents snatched up high school student Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, 18, while he was walking his dog in Van Nuys, days before he was set to begin his senior year at Reseda Charter High School. He remains in ICE detention at a privately owned facility 80 miles away in Adelanto, California. Days later, agents detained at gunpoint Nathan Mejia, 15, outside of Arleta High School before releasing him later that day. 

Both Mejia and Guerrero-Cruz are students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where Gochez teaches. In the film, he reflects on how his fight is intertwined with that of the next generation.  

“It’s a constant reminder why we struggle and why we do what we do,” he says, while playing with his son. “One day when we’re no longer here and he’ll be here, and maybe his children, they’ll have a better life than what we had and what our parents had — so we’re fighting for the next seven generations, and he’s next up.”

This project was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with funding made possible by The Puffin Foundation.

The post The Los Angeles Schoolteacher Leading the Fight Against ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

Ross, a moderate member of the House of Representatives, is the latest lawmaker to swear off the lobby amid sustained pressure and protest from voters who oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Her pledge closely follows that of fellow North Carolina Democrat Rep. Valerie Foushee, who vowed not to take money from AIPAC. Foushee was among AIPAC’s biggest recipients, having taken more than $800,000 in direct giving from AIPAC and individual donations it bundled.

“Congresswoman Ross is not currently accepting AIPAC contributions,” said a spokesperson for Ross’s office in a statement to The Intercept. She further clarified that the pledge covers AIPAC contributions throughout the 2026 cycle.

Anti-genocide organizers viewed Ross and Foushee’s anti-AIPAC pledges as evidence of a sea change within the Democratic Party.

“It is always good to hear someone is willing to have the courage of their convictions and not support organizations that they believe do not fully represent the interests of the U.S.” said Dr. Paul McAllister, a reverend and chair of the Interfaith Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party who has been organizing to oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza. “AIPAC uses the muscle of their resources to oust anyone who disagrees with them regarding Israel, the conduct of Israel and the atrocities that may be committed by the government of Israel — so it is good that Deborah Ross is willing to recognize and acknowledge that.”

Ross was first elected to the House in 2020 and began taking AIPAC money in 2022. She received $41,900 from AIPAC in that cycle and an additional $97,876 for her 2024 campaign, according to campaign finance records. 

Her pledge comes at a time when Democratic politics in North Carolina have been divided around the issue of Israel and Palestine. 

In late June, the North Carolina Democratic Party passed a resolution calling for a complete arms embargo on all military aid to Israel until it ends its apartheid rule of Palestinians. The resolution won by a narrow margin — 161 to 151 — and withstood pushback from the state’s centrist Jewish Democrats who argued it would direct voters’ attention to the party’s foreign policy platform, while they wanted to focus on the economy.

McAllister and a broad coalition within the North Carolina Democratic Party — which includes the party’s Arab, African American, LGBTQ, interfaith, Muslim, and progressive caucuses; the Jewish Democrats; and the NC Association of Teen Democrats — supported the resolution. 

McAllister was among five members of the coalition who met with members of Ross’s office on August 19, when her staff confirmed her anti-AIPAC pledge, McAllister told The Intercept. The group also urged her office to co-sponsor the Block the Bombs to Israel Act, a bill working its way through the House of Representatives that aims to end some weapons shipments to Israel. 

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The bill, which had drawn 40 co-sponsors as of Thursday, would prohibit the Trump administration from providing Israel with specific U.S.-made weapons that the Israeli military has used in documented war crimes against Palestinians.

Ross’s spokesperson declined to comment on whether she would support the legislation.

IfNotNow, a Jewish-led progressive organization backing Block the Bombs and helping lead the Reject AIPAC coalition, praised Ross for rejecting the Israel lobby’s dollars and called on her to co-sponsor the bill.

“It’s great to see Rep. Ross join the growing number of Democrats who have previously welcomed AIPAC’s support and are now accepting the fact that aligning with right-wing billionaires only empowers fascists like Netanyahu and Trump,” said Lauren Maunus, the political director for IfNotNow. “Now, we look forward to her signing on to the Block the Bombs Act.”

Foushee is co-sponsoring the bill, as are at least two other lawmakers who previously received AIPAC money: Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who received $46,000 from AIPAC in 2022, and Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill., who took $15,000 in 2022 and 2024. 

At least three other representatives who are also AIPAC recipients have made statements in support of blocking arms to Israel in recent weeks, but have yet to sign on to the Block the Bombs bill. That list now includes Oregon Democrats Maxine Dexter and Suzanne Bonamici and, most recently, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, a leading moderate Democrat in Congress and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.

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On Tuesday, Smith said he supported blocking “the sale of some weapons now” to Israel to compel the country to enact a ceasefire, allow a flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and halt its expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

Smith has received more than $700,000 in contributions from AIPAC since 2022, including $46,900 in 2025, finance records said.

After decades of lobbying on the Hill, AIPAC, which includes Republican billionaires within its donor stream, began directly funding congressional elections in 2021. It spent millions last cycle unseating Democrats who have been critical of Israel, most notably progressive former lawmakers Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri. 

Correction: Aug. 29, 2025, 12:16 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to remove a reference to IfNotNow as an anti-Zionist organization after a spokesperson clarified that the group does not identify with the term.

The post Facing Voter Pressure, Swing-State Democrat Swears Off AIPAC Cash appeared first on The Intercept.

The Block the Bombs to Israel Act would prohibit the Trump administration from providing Israel with specific U.S.-made weapons that the Israeli military has used in documented war crimes against Palestinians. As the 2026 midterm elections near, the bill’s backers are seeking to frame it as a litmus test for Democratic voters, who have long expressed support for such restrictions.

Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., who was first elected to the House in 2022 while riding more than $800,00 in campaign donations from AIPAC, signed on to the bill on August 6. The next day, she pledged her campaign would not take AIPAC money during the 2026 midterms, as first reported by Indy Week.

Other AIPAC recipients who are co-sponsoring the bill include Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who received $46,000 from AIPAC in 2022 and Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill., who took $15,000 in 2022 and 2024, according to campaign finance data. 

During a town hall meeting held at a high school gym in her district in El Paso on Saturday, Escobar acknowledged that she had taken AIPAC money “early on” but said she no longer accepts the lobbying group’s donations. 

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“I had AIPAC support early on in my elected life — I do not receive AIPAC support, it’s been years,” she said when an attendee drew applause asking her about her ties to AIPAC and what she is doing to halt the genocide in Gaza. She pointed out that she was among the first co-sponsors of the Block the Bombs bill. 

The bill’s lead sponsor, Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois, praised her colleagues for supporting the bill and expressed hope that their stances signaled a loosening of AIPAC’s powerful grip on the Democratic Party in Congress. 

“I think it’s incredibly courageous and I think so much of the leadership of folks like Val and Veronica to say, ‘Look, you may have given money to my campaign, but I am taking a stance that is correct, and the stance as a leader and representative I must take, and the stance my constituents call on me to take,” said Ramirez, who was elected in 2022 and has not taken AIPAC funding.

The shift is likely to be politically expedient for many Democrats: A poll from January showed that a third of voters who cast ballots for Joe Biden in 2020 but not for Kamala Harris in 2024 said “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the main issue deciding their vote. 

The Block the Bombs bill had 12 co-sponsors when it was rolled out in June, including the band of progressives known as the Squad and some prominent Jewish lawmakers, like Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. It has since swelled to 37, with four representatives signing on on Friday, including ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., who is running for Senate to fill outgoing Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin’s seat.

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Most of the recent momentum behind the bill coincided with Congress’s summer recess, when lawmakers leave D.C. and return to their home districts. It’s at home where lawmakers have felt the most pressure from their constituents around Israel’s war in Gaza, said Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, one of the groups backing Block the Bombs. She pointed to a pair of votes Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., forced on two resolutions to block some weapons transfers to Israel. Both failed — blocking military aid to Israel is still far from a mainstream position in D.C. — but, with margins of 27-70 and 24-73, still drew record-high Democratic support.

“When senators went home, if they voted the wrong way, they were getting angry outreach from their constituents about ‘Why would you have tried to continue sending bombs to Israel?’” Miller said. 

She also noted the frosty reception Rep. Wesley Bell received last week at a St. Louis, Missouri, town hall, where Bell’s constituents grilled him over his support for Israel and relationship with AIPAC. St. Louis Magazine reported that protesters yelled “Wesley Bell loves killing children,” and “Wesley Bell loves bombs and rockets.” The town hall ended with security guards and police officers forcing attendees out of the building, and video of the incident showed a security guard grabbing an attendee by their hair and other officers tackling people to the ground.

Bell was elected to the House last year, when he unseated incumbent Israel critic Rep. Cori Bush in an election heavily influenced by AIPAC. The group poured $8 million into Bell’s campaign, on top of contributions from the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC.

In late July, as images of starving Palestinian children in Gaza circulated in the mainstream news, Bell made a statement uncharacteristically critical statement of Israel. “I’ve always supported Israel’s right to exist and defend itself,” he wrote on social media. “But supporting this government’s actions—allowing children to starve and firing on civilians seeking food—is something I can’t stand by. This isn’t self-defense. It must stop.”

Yet at his town hall, Bell defended AIPAC, dismissing criticism against them as “propaganda.” He likened the conservative pro-Israel lobby to interest groups focused on reproductive rights or clean energy and said that “everyone should be able to participate” in the electoral process. 

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

Block the Bombs has also faced some criticism from voters who stand for Palestinian human rights and liberation. During a town hall in San Diego, Jacobs’s constituents pressed her over why the bill only focuses on cutting off offensive weapons, which leaves out so-called “defensive” systems like the Iron Dome. Jacobs, for her part, said she still supports the transfer of weapons that arm Israel’s missile defense systems.

Asked to respond to the criticism, Ramirez said she had aimed to craft language that would hold Israel accountable for its atrocities but also appeal to a broader base within the party. She and her bill’s coalition of backers, including Iman Abid-Thompson of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, said the bill is only one tool for achieving their ultimate goal: an end to all U.S. military support and complicity with Israel’s apartheid and genocide of Palestinians.  

“The pro-Israel lobbying institution is being dismantled a bit at a time — it’s not as powerful as it once was,” said Abid-Thompson. “I think that’s clear especially in the fact that those who have taken these pro-Israel dollars are actually taking on pro-Palestinian stances that they haven’t taken on before. And I think that’s because people are afraid.”

At least four other representatives — Oregon Democrats Maxine Dexter and Suzanne Bonamici, both AIPAC recipients, as well as Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico and John Garamendi of California — have made statements in support of blocking arms to Israel in recent weeks, but have yet to sign on to the Block the Bombs bill.

Ramirez said her office is also trying to court the support of the pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, which was founded in 2008 as a more progressive counterweight to AIPAC. J Street has received considerable criticism, including from its own staffers, over its support for pro-war resolutions in Congress that left out consideration for Palestinian human rights. Even so, the Jewish-led lobby group, which advocates for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, threw its weight behind Sanders’s recent resolutions blocking some weapons to Israel.

J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said that when moderate groups like his join with constituents and progressive coalitions, it can provide cover for politicians to vote in favor of limiting arms to Israel despite getting support from AIPAC. 

“You can see a whole host of members of the House who did in fact get significant support from AIPAC in the last two elections who are beginning to take much more principled positions now,” Ben-Ami said. 

Ben-Ami declined to comment on why the organization hasn’t signed on to Ramirez’s bill, despite its similarities to Sanders’s joint resolutions.

Lauren Maunus, the political director for IfNotNow, another group backing the bill and encouraging lawmakers to reject AIPAC money, said blocking arms sales is becoming an animating issue as the Democratic Party attempts to shore up support from its disillusioned base.

“In the 2024 cycle, it was first, do you support a ceasefire, then an arms embargo, and now we actually have a legislative vehicle that’s stronger than just the notion of an arms embargo,” Maunus said. “Block the Bombs is very evidently becoming the litmus test for the 2026 midterm.”

AIPAC, of course, will also get involved in the midterms, and it remains to be seen where the Trump-aligned and billionaire-backed lobby will spend its resources in 2026.

The obvious targets include members of the Squad like Reps. Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee, both longtime advocates for Palestinians and co-sponsors of Block the Bombs. AIPAC appears to be testing the waters in their respective districts for possibly running its own candidates.

Because of AIPAC’s massive spending capabilities, Maunus said, some Democratic lawmakers may agree with their base on the issue of Gaza but remain fearful of “punching first” at AIPAC.

“What it takes to beat their money, or what it takes to beat any right-wing-billionaire-backed money is a massive turnout,” Maunus said. “And to win massive turnout, you actually need to like fight for things and not just be running a middle-of-the-ground, tepid, scared campaign.”

The post Even Former AIPAC Democrats Are Signing On to Block Arms Sales to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Yasin Elsamak, 22, and Ali Elsamak, 15, both U.S. citizens, were protesting the Egyptian government’s role in blockading the Rafah crossing into Gaza, cutting off essential food aid amid Israel’s ongoing genocide, their parents said.

Egyptian officials grabbed the teenager and dragged him and his older brother, who had attempted to intervene, inside the building, according to their parents and video of the incident published on social media. Their parents alleged that inside the building, Egyptian officials continued to beat Yasin in the legs with sticks before choking him with a chain and his own keffiyeh.

The Egyptian government did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

A video posted on X shows one man wrapping what appears to be a chain around the neck of one of the brothers, whom the family identified as Yasin, while another man beat him with a stick-like object. Another man is seen wrestling the other brother, identified by family as Ali, to the ground.

New York Police Department officers arrested the brothers on suspicion of assault but did not take any of the Egyptian government officials into custody, the family said. 

Their father, Akram Elsamak, said NYPD officers had turned him away when he attempted to visit his sons who were in police custody. The brothers told their parents that they were both interrogated by officers, including the 15-year-old, without a guardian or attorney present. Ali was released from custody the following day at 1 p.m., and Yasin was released around 6 p.m.

Egyptian Mission to the UN dragged 2 U.S. citizens inside the the building and repeatedly assaulted them earlier this evening.

The two were protesting outside the building when they were grabbed by staff & dragged inside. NYPD arrived & arrested them. Jail support now underway. pic.twitter.com/ixlXkWAxuR

— Talia Jane (@taliaotg) August 20, 2025

After his release, Yasin was hospitalized with injuries to his neck. He had difficulty swallowing and a 6-inch bruise on his right thigh, according to both parents. His teenage brother suffered minor injuries to his elbows.

“My oldest son said, ‘I had a fear that I would die there,’ and my younger one said, ‘I think if they didn’t have a glass door and were recording, they would kill us inside,’” their mother, Olga Elsamak, told The Intercept. 

An NYPD spokesperson said police had received a call around 4:40 p.m. about an assault outside the Egyptian government building at 304 East 44th Street, where officers arrived and found “two male individuals with complaints of pain throughout their bodies.” They took the two into custody and charged Ali, the 15-year-old, with strangulation and assault, and Yasin with assault alone. 

Akram Elsamak said he confronted NYPD officers, asking why his sons were charged when the video showed they were the ones being assaulted. He said an officer told him the video did not show the entire incident.

“‘Why did you arrest a minor and his brother without any evidence? And they were getting beat up by a foreign security, getting kidnapped from American soil inside an international building,’” he recalled asking the NYPD. “They couldn’t answer.” 

The NYPD did not comment on why they turned Akram away, nor on whether they interrogated a minor without a lawyer or guardian present. They also did not comment on whether NYPD officers were considering arrests of Egyptian officials. Their mother said that when the two brothers were released, they were visibly emotional, and Ali was crying. She criticized the lack of accountability from the NYPD. 

“I can expect it from the Egyptian security because this is a military-run country, but I wouldn’t expect it from a police force that’s supposed to protect American citizens,” Olga Elsamak said. Her husband Akram is originally from Egypt, where, in 2013, the Egyptian police and military killed hundreds of protesters in Cairo who had been protesting against the Egyptian government.

“For a father to see his both sons getting beat up with a chain, it is not something easy at all,” said their father, Akram Elsamak. “My sons went that day to stand and give their voice, that the Egyptian government has to open the border to pass a little bit of water and a piece of bread for the babies and children of Gaza before they get bombed and die — that was their only crime — and they were doing it in the American soil, on the sidewalk in the American soil, where we have right to protest and give our voice.”

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, decried the incident and their treatment by both Egyptian officials and the NYPD. DAWN was founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi prior to his 2018 murder at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. 

“It appears that these Egyptian employees are used to policing protests in this manner in Egypt where basically you can beat and kill anybody criticizing the government and thought that that is the appropriate course of conduct here in the United States here in New York City,” Whitson told The Intercept. “I hope there will be justice and accountability to all these violent Egyptian employees accountable for viciously assaulting a child and his young brother in broad daylight, and it seems that they are so confident of their impunity that they thought nothing of it.”

Both of the brothers were protesting as a part of daily rallies organized by Palestinian liberation group Within Our Lifetime, which has protested outside government and U.N. buildings in New York of several nations including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza, said Nerdeen Kiswani, head of the group.

Olga Elsamak told The Intercept her sons “are still in shock, they are recovering. It’s going to take time for them to sort it out, but thank god they’re home, thank god they’re not in custody.” 

The post Egyptian Officials in New York Beat Two Gaza Protesters on Video. The NYPD Arrested the Protesters. appeared first on The Intercept.

That’s when a group of at least seven Border Patrol agents dressed in tactical gear stormed out of the back of the truck and rushed toward the day laborers and street vendors gathered outside. 

Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino dubbed the raid “Operation Trojan Horse,” sharing video on social media from a Fox News reporter who was embedded with agents inside the moving truck.

Agents detained at least 16 people during the raid, which appears to be in direct defiance of a temporary restraining order a federal judge put in place in early July after immigrants rights groups sued the government. After a month of militarized raids and racial profiling throughout Southern California, Federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of California’s Central District, in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by community organizations and detained workers, delivered the Trump administration a major blow. She issued an order that prohibits federal agents from targeting individuals based on their race and ethnicity; whether they speak Spanish or English with an accent; their location such as a car wash, department store parking lot, or other worksite; or their occupation, such as landscapers or street vendors. 

The Trump administration appealed, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld the temporary restraining order. The order had brought relative calm to the region in recent weeks, slowing what had been near-daily operations to occasional isolated incidents. But the Trump administration’s Southern California campaign was not over.

Since Friday’s decision to uphold the temporary restraining order, federal agents have raided at least five other worksites in Los Angeles County, according to organizers and witnesses who spoke to The Intercept. Though it’s unclear whether federal agents had warrants for the operations, the raids did not appear to be aimed at any specific individuals and took place at worksites that had been previously targeted, all with predominantly immigrant and Latino workforces.

“Basically everything that they said not to do in the [temporary restraining order] was on a to-do checklist for today,” said a day laborer organizer at the MacArthur Park Home Depot on Wednesday who was not authorized to speak with the media. “Racial profiling, check. Going to a Home Depot, check. That was on purpose to undermine the courts and to undermine the power of the law.”

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The organizer said witnesses had reported seeing agents brandishing firearms at bystanders in front of the Home Depot, including at U.S. citizens. “There’s so many violations to the Constitution, not just to migrants,” he said

Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

Penske said it was not aware its truck would be used in Wednesday’s immigration operation and said its policy “strictly prohibits the transportation of people in the cargo area of its vehicles under any circumstances.” The company said it planned to reach out to the Department of Homeland Security to “reinforce its policy to avoid improper use of its vehicles in the future.”

Since Friday’s decision upholding the temporary restraining order, federal agents raided a car wash in Lakewood, detaining two workers on Saturday; a Superior Grocers in Lynwood on Sunday; another Home Depot in Hollywood on Monday, where at least two individuals were taken; and the Magnolia Car Wash in Fountain Valley, Orange County, where agents on Tuesday detained four workers, according to CLEAN Carwash Worker Center.

Among those taken in Fountain Valley was a father originally from El Salvador who was the main financial supporter for his mother, according to a GoFundMe page set up by a relative. 

Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California, or IDEPSCA, which advocates for the rights of day laborers and immigrants, said it is still working to confirm how many people were detained at the Hollywood Home Depot on Monday. During that raid, federal agents used a horn that tamaleros use to call people over to buy tamales in an attempt to lure people to detain them, said Maegan Ortiz, executive director of IDEPSCA, in a video posted on social media.

Deceptive tactics used by immigration authorities were recently banned in the context of home raids as a part of a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit based in Los Angeles. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of people who were lured out of their homes by ICE agents who claimed they were local law enforcement officers.

The Penske moving truck plot on Wednesday may have been beyond the scope of that settlement, but still prompted concern from organizers. 

“They had a lot of officers and did it quickly, and did not present warrants, and were targeting people indiscriminately,” said Zoie Matthew, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has run a community defense center at the store since the initial June 6 raid. “They were violating the TRO completely — which it seems like has been the case for the past several Home Depots they’ve hit this week.”

Even after the restraining order was granted, Bovino, who is heading Border Patrol operations across California, doubled down, promising to deliver on Trump’s pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history with a daily quota of 3,000 arrests per day.

“Different day, different illegal aliens, same objective,” Bovino wrote on his X account on Wednesday, alongside an edited video montage of agents detaining workers at a car wash. “We’re on a mission here in Los Angeles. And we’re not leaving until we accomplish our goals.”

The Fox News reporter who embedded with agents, Matt Finn, quoted DHS on his X account, saying that “MS 13 has a chokehold on this area, which is one reason they’re carrying out the highly optic immigration raids.” The government and Fox News have both evoked MS-13 to justify a previous raid in MacArthur Park in early July in which ICE agents, alongside military service members, surrounded and swarmed soccer fields and other recreation areas where a summer camp was taking place — but made zero arrests. Even so, Wednesday’s raids appeared to target only workers. The majority of people detained during immigration operations in the LA area in recent months do not have criminal records.

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Video taken by residents who live in an apartment directly overlooking the MacArthur Park Home Depot parking lot showed two Border Patrol agents yanking one man toward the pavement, while other agents pulled three women from a row of tables topped with food and drinks. The workers and vendors were led toward a white van parked in front of the Penske truck. 

A day laborer told The Intercept he managed to run inside the Home Depot with other workers during the raid and hid for a half-hour. He immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala a year ago to stay with his cousin and to find work.

“I’m nervous,” said the man, who goes to the Home Depot every day to find work. “I’m nervous because I feel like they’re going to come back again,” he said in Spanish. Even so, the man said he plans to continue returning to the store, the only place he knows where to find a job. 

The post What Court Order? Federal Agents Keep Raiding LA Workplaces Despite Ban appeared first on The Intercept.

Israeli human rights groups and scholars for the first time called the bombardment and siege of the Palestinian territory a genocide. The governments of France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all signaled they are prepared to join the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing Palestinian statehood. A majority of Senate Democrats voted last week in favor of blocking the U.S. from selling weapons to Israel, an historic first. Even the right-wing lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., now calls Israel’s actions a genocide, the first Republican lawmaker to do so.

A recent Gallup poll showed that just 32 percent of Americans approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza: a new low. The majority of Americans — 60 percent — disapprove of the offensive, and, for the first time, a majority said they disapprove of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Such shifting attitudes were most prominent among younger Americans.

These recent swings have yet to materialize into policies that exert actual pressure on Israel and save Palestinian lives. Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza continues unabated, with the death toll topping 60,000 last week — though the number is likely 40 percent higher, according to a Lancet study. A slight loosening of Israel’s aid blockade has done little to ease famine conditions. At least 175 people — 92 children and 82 adults — have died of hunger in Gaza in recent weeks; killings continue near the few available aid sites; and airdrops have been criticized as ineffective, expensive, and dangerous, resulting in the death of one Palestinian on the ground and injuries for at least a dozen others.

Yet there is a growing belief among organizers and advocates that a new groundswell of outrage may translate into lasting consequences for U.S. foreign policy on Israel and Palestine.

“It’s too late obviously to impact policy in a way that would save Palestinian lives now,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “But I think that the picture the current moment paints for a future of a pro-Palestine movement in the U.S. is significant.”

A Historic Senate Vote

A major flashpoint of the past week in U.S politics was a vote in the Senate on a pair of resolutions, authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,to block sales of certain U.S. weapons to Israel. Since November, Sanders has introduced several similar resolutions. With a Republican-controlled Senate, Sanders’s resolutions have largely been symbolic chances for lawmakers to signal to voters and lobbies where they stand on Palestine and Israel.

One of the recent resolutions aimed to bar the sale of more than $675.7 million worth of bombs — including hundreds of MK 83 1,000-pound bombs and BLU-110A/B General Purpose 1,000-pound bombs — as well as block the sale of tens of thousands of automatic assault rifles.

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With tallies of 27-70 and 24-73, the resolutions failed to pass the Senate. But they drew the largest showing of support for blocking weapons deals with Israel so far. Among the new Democrats who joined in the vote were ranking members Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (Foreign Relations Committee), Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island (Armed Services), and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington (Appropriations). Another supporter was Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who had voted in favor of a similar resolution in November but opposed another arms embargo attempt in April after considerable pushback from the powerful lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In his vote to prohibit assault rifle sales, Ossoff cited “the extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza, including the intolerable starvation of children, that have resulted from the policies” of Israel. This stood out to Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, especially since Ossoff is up for reelection next year amid the AIPAC pressure.

Friedman and her organization have monitored statements from members of Congress on issues related to Israel and Palestine since 2017. Although many lawmakers doubled down on their support for Israel last week and blamed the lack of aid on Hamas, she noticed a shift in the number of lawmakers making statements of support for Palestinians. Many, she said, were voicing their disgust at Israel’s starvation policy. Whether they would back up their statements with votes on the floor to pressure Israel, however, remains in question.

When Friedman previously worked as a lobbyist advocating for the human rights of Palestinians, she said there was an open joke about the futility of trying to sway Hill lawmakers on the issue. Behind closed doors, she said, members of Congress would tell her and her colleagues: “I agree with you on everything you’re saying, thank you so much for your doing, but don’t ask me to do anything unless you can get my constituents to defend me because otherwise AIPAC will take me down.”

The recent Senate votes may signal a shift.

“Is it that the members are suddenly more courageous, or do they suddenly feel like somebody’s got their back more and have more room to maneuver? Maybe it’s a combination,” Friedman said. “Something is changing in the calculation, and that is only good.”

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sanders, has been in touch with congressional offices where staffers are reporting an uptick in constituents calling about Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza.

Behind some of that pressure has been IfNotNow, a Jewish-led group that organizes within the American Jewish community against U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

In the 24 hours leading up the weapons Senate vote, IfNotNow interim executive director Morriah Kaplan said her group organized several thousand people to send letters to Senate offices in support of the resolutions.

“There’s possibility that Democratic lawmakers are also willing to step out against the AIPAC party line in a way that I think could fundamentally realign some of the politics around this issue,” Kaplan said. “And I hope that makes the Israeli government very nervous.”

Combating Israel’s Propaganda

There is tension for pro-Palestinian organizers and advocates grateful to see what feels like a wave of new support for Palestine within the U.S. and in other Western nations, while also questioning why it took so long.

“As someone who’s been a witness for 22 months of livestreamed genocide every day, what is it that made it a tipping point?” Friedman said. “I would have thought that the pictures of babies and kids killed with bombs, bullets, and deprivation of medical care over the past 22 months would have done it — it wasn’t.”

She and others pointed to the images of starvation in Gaza — emaciated babies, mothers holding their dying children, aid-seekers running from gunfire at aid sites laced with barbed wire — has forced a different kind of reckoning.

“Before, you could obfuscate. You could say, ‘There were 80 civilians killed because they wanted to go after one Hamas guy,’ or ‘Hamas is using human shields and hiding in tunnels behind civilians,’” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. “But that obfuscation is no longer feasible. There’s a realization that Israel is in fact intending to harm civilians. It’s taken literally starved babies, babies dying of hunger to get to this point. And that is a very sobering concept if you’ve spent the last two years telling yourself that Israel is doing its best to minimize civilian harm.”

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The mainstream news organizations that have repeatedly run Israeli disinformation around aid shortages for months leading up to the current famine in Gaza are now publishing front-page stories and television broadcasts featuring images of starving Palestinians. Such images even drew sympathetic comments from President Donald Trump, who has a long record of dehumanizing Palestinians.

The images are circulating widely, perhaps reaching Americans who could previously overlook the war’s human toll. Powerful images have a history of shifting perspectives, such as an image of the drowned Syrian boy Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Mediterranean Sea beach amid the Syrian civil war, a photograph of children running from a U.S. napalm strike on Trảng Bàng village during the Vietnam War, and pictures of the dead and malnourished survivors at Nazi death camps.

“Images that are coming out of Gaza right now, those are reminiscent of the Holocaust,” Al-Shabaka’s Kenney-Shawa said. “Moments like that hold a lot of space in the American psyche.”

A Bigger Umbrella

Advocates and organizers say there must be accountability for Democratic leaders, such as President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for their role in creating the conditions that have allowed the genocide to devolve to this point of mass starvation. But those who spoke with The Intercept were in favor of postponing such reckoning for a big-tent approach. Building a larger coalition, they say, will be more fruitful in getting aid to starving Palestinians, halting the war in Gaza, and ending U.S. support for Israel.

“There’s a very desperate situation on the ground, there is a huge imbalance of power, and you need as many people as you can involved in pushing in the right direction,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC and former executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

On top of the billions in taxpayer money earmarked for Israel to buy new weapons, the U.S. government each year sends military weapons, vehicles, and munitions from existing American military stockpiles to the Israeli military — typically with the approval of Congress. The U.S. also helps finance Israel’s own domestic arms manufacturing industry. Munayyer and others hope this new groundswell might pressure legislators to end such unchecked financing of Israel and put sanctions on the country’s military leaders.

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Other activists urged those who have newly taken up the pro-Palestine cause to call their elected representatives; protest arms transfers at ports; and embrace the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led campaign seeking to halt financial support for corporations and institutions complicit in Israel’s apartheid and genocide.

Duss, of Center for International Policy, said he was familiar with several former members of the Biden administration who are using their credibility and influence to pressure elected officials around Gaza. But he was disappointed at how few are doing so and called for more action from his colleagues. “Successful movements don’t scold people for being late, they welcome converts — that’s just successful politics,” he said.

“We may reasonably ask, what took you so long?” he said. “But we need to make it attractive for people to join this movement and to take the right position, even if they’re doing so belatedly.”

IfNotNow’s Kaplan said that she and other organizers have reported shifts in conversations with family members who previously had doubled down on supporting Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attack. These people, she said, are now more willing to break from their unconditional support for the Israeli government. She hopes those conversations spark a longer-term reckoning within the American Jewish community, but her group’s current priority is pushing for an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza. 

“We can’t afford to push people away who are joining us for the first time now,” Kaplan said. “Those who are just now joining us have a responsibility to do everything that they can and take the most courageous action that they can to leverage the power they have to end the genocide. Right now, we need to embrace them when they want to join us. It’s our responsibility to do so if we actually want to win and if we actually want to build our power.”

Elections and Beyond

While Munayyer applauded the growing number of votes in the Senate as an important sign of progress, he also said it was “insufficient” considering how many Democrats continue to support arming Israel. The vote, however, can serve as a record for Americans to consider in future elections, exposing a disconnect between elected officials and their constituencies.

“You have half the Senate Democrats still voting to support weapons to Israel even though upwards of 80 percent of Democrats in polls oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza,” he said. “It exposes that these senators are not even representing their constituents.”

A chasm between Democratic lawmakers and their constituents on Israel and Palestine is nothing new, said Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Friedman. But what’s novel is that progressives are no longer willing to make exceptions for Israel and are noticing the ways attacks on the pro-Palestine movement intersects with campaigns against free speech, racial justice, LGBTQ+ communities, and other efforts to curtail the rights of Americans, such as with the detentions of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk.

And this moment of outrage around Gaza may actually spell consequences for Democratic lawmakers who continue to unconditionally support Israel.

“The problem with U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine is that there’s only been costs for holding up Palestinian lives as valuable,” Duss said. “There need to be cost imposed from the other side now, as well, and I think that’s happening. That’s part of what’s changing the equation.”

Experts and advocates point to the New York City mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani as a sign of a shifting base among young voters. Mamdani is an outspoken critic of Israel, decrying its offensive in Gaza as a genocide, voicing support for the BDS movement, and pledging to arrest Netanyahu if he were to visit New York in response to war crime warrants from the International Criminal Court. Mamdani outlasted attacks from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who campaigned by conflating anti-Zionism with attacks on Jews. With Mamdani’s decisive victory and a new poll showing his popularity among Jewish voters in New York, there are already signs the Democratic Party is accordingly adjusting.

“That does show us is that come next presidential election, a smart Democratic candidate would take into account the fact that a majority of Democrats see what Israel is doing as genocide, and factor that into their thinking of how to message on Israel–Palestine,” Kenney-Shawa said.

With eyes ahead to the 2028 election, Munayyer likened the lead-up to that election to the 2008 Democratic primary in which then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama distinguished himself from then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton by reminding voters he had long been a critic of the Iraq War while Clinton had voted in Congress to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Obama’s opponent in the general election, Sen. John McCain, was a staunch supporter of the war.

The growing support for Palestine amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza particularly among younger voters mirrors other key political shifts after 9/11 or the Arab Spring, Kenney-Shawa said.

“That’s what’s extremely important because, in five, 10, 15, 20 years down the line, no longer is Israel kind of this untouchable subject in U.S. politics,” Kenney-Shawa said, “where you kind of can’t really talk about it or its political suicide to be supportive of Palestinians or critical of Israel.”

How Will Israel Respond?

It’s unclear how Netanyahu will respond to the current pressure. He has prolonged Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to maintain power by satisfying his right-wing, religious nationalist coalition, which includes leaders like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have been calling for the mass displacement of Palestinians and the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza. But Munayyer pointed out that with Israeli’s Parliament on break until October, Netanyahu is presented with a window to act on ending the genocide with little immediate political blowback.

Netanyahu, however, appears to be doubling down. Reports suggest that the Israeli government plans to expand its operations in Gaza, pursuing a full occupation of the Strip. This spurred some 600 former Israeli security officials to write to Trump on Monday, demanding he end the war in Gaza. The officials, including former heads of Mossad and Israel’s military, said “that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel,” and asked Trump to “steer Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government in the right direction” in order to “end the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering.” Israel had already said it achieved its goal of dismantling Hamas’s military last September. In the letter, the officials added that the return of the remaining hostages captured by Hamas on October 7 can only come through a deal and not extended fighting.

Outside the U.S., pressure is also mounting from the other European countries that are calling on the European Union to halt trade to Israel over its starvation campaign. The EU, Israel’s main trading partner, is also considering a suspension of its research funds to Israel.

The Hague Group, a bloc of countries founded in January, met in Bogotá, Colombia, last month, to strategize how to pressure Israel into ending the genocide. At the conference, 13 countries pledged to block weapons transfers to Israel, including a ban on allowing their ports to be used by vessels carrying arms meant for Israel; review public contracts to prevent funds from supporting unlawful occupation of Palestinian land; support war crimes investigations of bodies such as the ICC and the International Court of Justice; and support universal jurisdiction, which allows for the prosecution of suspected war criminals in a third-party country’s judicial system, even if the crimes were committed in another jurisdiction, such as in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Advocates in the U.S., however, don’t expect any such pressure from its government in the near term, despite the escalating outrage. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have routinely allowed the Israeli government latitude to make adjustments to its military campaign to ease public pressure. In fact, the Trump administration last week sanctioned the Palestinian Authority, the government body that rules over the occupied West Bank, due to its efforts to hold Israel accountable for alleged war crimes. Members of Congress have recently pushed for legislation to do the same against South Africa for its role in the genocide case against Israel in the U.N.’s top court.

Throughout the past 22 months, there have been various moments of increased attention on Gaza, from the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers last April, the “All Eyes on Rafah” campaign as Israel began its bombardment of southern Gaza, or when Israel broke its ceasefire agreement in March. Those moments passed with officials doing little to change the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.

But each moment is a part of a longer arc of change, Kaplan said. Next comes the challenge of translating such fever-pitch moments into something lasting.

“I’ve been working on this issue for 15 years and I can’t count the number of times when it felt like we’re at a tipping point and that something big is going to change and then it doesn’t,” Kaplan said. “And so I don’t really view moments in that way — I think we just have to keep at it, and I think organizing is how we win.”

The post The Week the World Woke Up to the Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.