“We can confirm that there was a suspected rocket attack on August 5th against U.S. and coalition forces at Al Asad Airbase, Iraq,” a spokesperson with U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, the umbrella organization overseeing the Middle East, told The Intercept by email. “Base personnel are conducting a post-attack damage assessment.”

The latest attack raises renewed questions about the vulnerability of U.S. bases in the region. Since Israel’s war in Gaza began last October, attacks by Iranian proxy forces on these sites have killed or wounded at least 145 U.S. personnel on Middle Eastern bases. 

U.S. and allied forces have been attacked more than 170 times during the Gaza war: 102 times in Syria, 70 in Iraq, and once in Jordan. The latter assault, in January, ignited a round of escalatory U.S. counterattacks against Iranian-allied targets that led Iran to rein in its proxies. As Israel has widened the Gaza war in recent weeks, with more provocative attacks in Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, Iran’s partners have resumed attacks on U.S. outposts across the region.

While America’s enemies have demonstrated, to lethal effect, their knowledge of the locations of U.S. bases in the region, the Pentagon’s public affairs office claims to have no list of such outposts. “I don’t have any inherent information,” Defense Department spokesperson Pete Nguyen told The Intercept earlier this year. CENTCOM refused to comment on the locations of its bases, citing several reasons, including partners’ reluctance to admit to the presence of U.S. troops in their countries. “[O]ur relationship with the host nations is one of the reasons why this information is not made public,” CENTCOM spokesperson Vail A. Forbeck told The Intercept.

Undeterred, The Intercept launched its own investigation and developed a list of more than 60 U.S. bases, garrisons, or shared foreign facilities in the Middle East. These sites range from small combat outposts to massive air bases in 13 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. 

At least 14 of these bases have been attacked in recent years. Since October 17, 2023, alone, a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles have led to at least 145 U.S. casualties — troops and contractors — at regional outposts including three service members killed in a January drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan.

“The indefinite U.S. military presences in Iraq, Syria, and around the region have near-zero genuine strategic value for the American people, but D.C. national security elites still think the risk is well worth it. Those concerned with the well-being of our service members — such as their families — are likely less comfortable with these soldiers being sitting ducks for local militias,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “Americans who are tired of Mideast war should be worried about how these unauthorized hostilities effectively empower regional militias to draw the U.S. into an escalation any time they desire.”

The U.S. has regularly justified maintaining secrecy about bases by claiming that, as CENTCOM told The Intercept last year, “in order to protect our forces and maintain operational security, we will not confirm U.S base locations.” Forbeck — a private contractor from the Red Gate Group working for CENTCOM — refused to provide even a count of U.S. bases in the region. “Numbers. Cannot provide that because opsec,” she said, referring to operational security, while failing to explain how providing a simple tally of bases could jeopardize U.S. personnel.

But America’s enemies, specifically Iranian-backed militias, have had no trouble finding and striking U.S. bases since the late 2010s.

Regular tit-for-tat attacks began in January 2020 when Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, was killed near the Baghdad airport in a U.S. drone strike authorized by President Donald Trump. Trump said the U.S. was “totally prepared” for Iran to retaliate — which they did by firing 22 ballistic missiles at two American bases in Iraq. “All is well!” Trump proclaimed in the wake of the attack, as the U.S. claimed no U.S. troops were killed or wounded. Weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that there were actually 109 U.S. casualties.

Related

Missiles and Drones Among Weapons Stolen From U.S. in Iraq and Syria

Lies by American officials and secrecy surrounding bases in the Middle East has allowed the Pentagon to skirt accountability on several different fronts. U.S. outposts in the region have, for example, become sites of secret sexual assault and a ready source of weapons, ammunition, and equipment for criminals and militants.

Investigations by The Intercept have found, for example, that U.S. outposts in Iraq and Syria are plagued by systematic thefts of military materiel by militias and criminal gangs. Exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems, drones, 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, and specialized field artillery tools and equipment — have been stolen without comment or announcement by the Pentagon.

Beginning in October 2023, an umbrella group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq regularly claimed that attacks on U.S. bases in that country were in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza and were aimed at pressuring the U.S. to remove troops from the region. The attacks dwindled from March to July of this year, but after a July 17 drone attack targeting al-Asad Air Base in Iraq’s Anbar province, where U.S. personnel are deployed, a senior member of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia said that attacks by the “resistance factions” had resumed, following a four-month ceasefire, because a deadline given to the Iraqi government to negotiate the departure of U.S. forces from outposts there had expired. (The Iraqi government reportedly wants U.S. troops to begin withdrawing in September and to fully end their work by September 2025.)

The 64 Middle East bases identified by The Intercept have been active in recent years, according to Defense Department information or credible open-source intelligence. But without corroboration by the Pentagon, it’s impossible to know if all remain active today. What is clear are the sizable ongoing U.S. troop deployments in the region.

Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and a drawdown of forces in Iraq, there were more than 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East in 2023, according to Pentagon figures. 

As of June, there were more than 3,800 U.S. military personnel deployed to Jordan “to support Defeat-ISIS operations” and “to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability,” according to the White House. More than 2,300 U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia to “provide air and missile defense capabilities and support the operation of United States military aircraft.” The U.S. also reportedly has around 2,500 troops deployed to Iraq to “advise, assist, and enable select elements of the Iraqi security forces, including Iraqi Kurdish security forces.” In addition, around 900 troops are stationed in Syria to “conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from” that country. Approximately 75 U.S. military personnel are also deployed to Lebanon to “enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.”

Numbers of personnel deployed to the Middle East regularly fluctuate. Late last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered additional combat aircraft and warships to the region, in response to threats from Iran and its proxies to attack Israel in the coming days to avenge the death of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was assassinated while visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. (Hamas, as well as Iranian and U.S. officials, assessed that Israel, which has not publicly acknowledged its responsibility for the killing, was to blame.)

The Pentagon announced plans to send additional Air Force F-22 fighter jets and additional Navy cruisers and destroyers capable of intercepting ballistic missiles to the Middle East. Austin also directed the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, now deployed in the Pacific Ocean, to relieve the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is already in the region, in the coming weeks.

“When the supreme leader [of Iran] says he’s ‘going to avenge,’ we have to take that seriously. … We got to make darn sure that we’re ready, and we have the capabilities in the region to be able to help Israel defend itself and, quite frankly, defend our own people, our own facilities,” said White House national security communications adviser John Kirby on “Fox News Sunday.”

Nguyen, the Pentagon spokesperson, failed to respond to more than a dozen requests by The Intercept for updated information about attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East.

The post The U.S. Has Dozens of Secret Bases Across the Middle East. They Keep Getting Attacked. appeared first on The Intercept.

The far right and its fellow gender fascists typically focus their attacks on trans people. When it comes to women’s and girls’ sports — a terrain cherished by anti-trans crusaders — the exclusion of trans women has been a Republican legislative priority, leading even to proposals for abusive genital testing requirements on girls whose assigned sex at birth is questioned. The fact that the latest high-profile case of gender policing is aimed at athletes who were indeed assigned female at birth should, however, come as no surprise.

Right-wing extremists — including Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk — alongside gender-binary zealots like J.K. Rowling are currently hurling vitriol at a cis woman boxer, Imane Khelif of Algeria, following the athlete’s swift defeat of her Italian opponent in an Olympic match in Paris on Thursday. Khelif is a female athlete who was deemed by the International Olympic Committee to be eligible to compete. She is only the latest woman of color in sports to be deemed insufficiently female by a right-wing commentariat obsessed with forging the strictest gender binaries, contrary to social, biological, and medical realities.

Attacks on Khelif — like previous discriminatory treatment of other female athletes like South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya — reveal the right’s gender ideology for what it is: intellectually untenable and racist. Pointing this out will not stop their vile gender policing; it should, however, give pause to anyone who might entertain Republican and trans-exclusionary positions on gender as worthy even of debate.

On the New York Post’s homepage yesterday, a story by Douglas Murray decried Khelif’s fair win as the “tragic result of letting biological men compete in women’s sports.” (The tabloid published at least five articles about the controversy Thursday, showing the eagerness with which far-right media latches onto anti-trans sentiment.) Across social media, thousands of posts echoed, calling Khelif a “male” or a “biological man” and thus unfairly advantaged. Bigots were swift to glom onto the fact that Khelif, along with another female Olympics competitor from Taiwan now facing attacks, had previously been found ineligible to compete by the International Boxing Association — an organization that has been broadly discredited and officially unrecognized by the IOC.

Khelif was assigned female at birth. The controversy stems from biochemical tests by the IBA that resulted in her removal from their competition, likely because either high testosterone levels or some chromosomal variation was found. We don’t know the details about the IBA’s testing, and Khelif is entirely eligible to compete in the Olympics per its rules. More to the point, high testosterone levels and the presence of XY or XXY chromosomes do not make a person male, or biologically a man. This is a right-wing fantasy, aided in these cases by the practice of so-called sex-testing in sports. I say “so called” because these tests in no way actually test for something so dependent on multiple characteristics and determinations as a person’s sex. 

This is worth clarifying only to emphasize the incoherence of the right’s allegedly biology-based sex-gender ideologies, laid bare in the attacks on athletes like Khelif. Firstly, for a political stance so insistent on the capacity to “define woman” in order to distinguish readily, in everyday life, who is and is not a woman, it should be troubling to these gender authoritarians that only the vagaries of sports testing revealed chromosomal or hormonal variations in these adults who had previously lived unchallenged in their assigned sex-gender categories. “​​In many cases, these athletes had no idea they had chromosomal variations until the Olympic gender-verification authorities gave them their results, right before their events, and found them ineligible to compete,” noted Slate’s Christina Cauterucci.

Were such “sex testing” more widespread, Republicans and their anti-trans fellow travelers would perhaps be disturbed to learn that biology is not on their side: People with chromosomal variations outside the XX, XY binary are not extremely rare — around 1 in 100 people, more common than identical twins.

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive feature on “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such practices purport to draw: “Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw.”

Not that this has mattered to numerous regulating bodies and gender conformity zealots. Nor has it mattered that their application of this flawed methodology has a foul legacy of excluding athletes of color.

In what Human Rights Watch calls “practices that violate fundamental rights to privacy and dignity,” sports governing bodies have overwhelmingly selected successful Black athletes for invasive chromosomal, hormone, and genital testing, in order to potentially exclude them from competing. Human Rights Watch reported that the athletes targeted for sex testing are “overwhelmingly women of color from the Global South.” 

The fact that cis women are the victims of this discrimination gives no pause to those committed to trans elimination. In the same vein, women both cis and trans have been attacked in the street by extremists obsessed with identifying and eradicating anyone they feel should not count as women. Strict gender conformity requires expansive authoritarian enforcement far beyond the policing of trans and queer communities and individuals. That it is so often Black and other women of color — the women long excluded from the protections bestowed on white womanhood — who are consistently victims of violent gender policing is not merely a happy accident for the racist far right. Sex-gender exclusions cannot be disentangled from the historically colonialist, white supremacist project of strict sex categorization and gender enforcement. 

It would be foolish to suggest that the far right has ever been interested in either biological sciences or, of course, protecting women and women’s sports. If questions of fair competition were really at stake, the fact that Khelif has lost nine previous career fights against other women, including losing to Irish gold medalist Kellie Harrington in the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, would surely give lie to claims of her indefeasibly unfair advantage. The outcry exposes the illogic and intellectual failures of fascistic gender ideology. This does not mean, however, that such reactionary campaigns are best defeated with better arguments based in science and reason, in the form of political debate. The misogynistic, racist policing of bodies deserves only our contempt and fierce opposition. 

The post The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports appeared first on The Intercept.

The opposition had high hopes when ex-diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia stepped in at the last minute for María Corina Machado, who was barred from running, but the Venezuelan government’s election authority announced a Maduro victory, with a 51.21 percent to 44.2 percent margin. Claiming fraudulent results, the opposition declared its own victory, bringing Venezuela to the brink of a political crisis.

Washington immediately seized on the disputed election. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the government to produce verification of the vote, then issued a statement Thursday declaring the opposition victorious and urging a “respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people.” Prominent members of Congress like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are already doing the media circuit praising the Biden administration’s actions in defense of democracy in Venezuela.

In light of Maduro’s declared victory and the chaotic aftermath of the contested election, however, the case that U.S. policy worked in Venezuela is on shaky ground. Instead, Washington has embraced a policy of intense sanctions — implemented under President Donald Trump and largely continued by President Joe Biden — as a way to pressure the general population to force Maduro out of office. That aim has so far not been achieved, though it has devastated the nation’s economy, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans and forcing millions more to flee — fueling the migration crisis at the U.S. border in the process. 

“How can we blame asylum-seekers fleeing desperation and poverty if we’re contributing to the very desperation and poverty that they’re trying to escape?” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas told The Intercept. “At the end of the day, what we have seen in practice is that we don’t usually get the freedom of press and free and fair elections and transparency that we ask for. What we wind up getting is hungrier everyday people.”

Casar added that the U.S. approach to sanctions means “we just doom ourselves to continuing to strangle other nations’ economies.” We hurt the people in those countries, he said, “it ends up hurting us too because we’re all interconnected.”

As the Washington Post recently reported, U.S. sectoral sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry contributed to one of the most severe peacetime economic contractions ever recorded, significantly more severe than the Great Depression. As a result, more than 7 million Venezuelans have been driven to flee the country, triggering the largest migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere. 

The Biden administration temporarily allowed some sanctions relief, easing restrictions to allow Venezuela to export more oil and gas, in exchange for a promise of “free and fair elections.” In April, Biden reimposed the broader sanctions, while still allowing for licenses to be granted on a case-by-case basis.

“If it had not been for sanctions, Venezuela would have experienced a large economic crisis in the last decade, but it would have been more like other large economic crises in Latin America and even in prior Venezuela history,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist and professor who previously served as the head of the economic and financial advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly. “It wouldn’t have been like what we’ve seen.”

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The Venezuelan Perspective

The famously anti-migrant Trump approved the John Bolton-led sanctions on Venezuela in spite of an array of officials in both the U.S. government and other Latin American countries warning the White House that the region could not handle the ensuing migration wave. Now, Venezuelans compose one of the largest groups of migrants at the southern border and in transit through Central America (under additional sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, on top of the longtime, infamous embargo, the number of migrants from Cuba has also grown). On Wednesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the Biden administration to end the “anti-human” measure, adding that the sanctions only bring more hunger and violence. 

Sanctions have become an increasingly popular tool for U.S. foreign policy because they are perceived to be less harmful than outright war or proxy war. United Nations experts have argued that these coercive measures amount to economic warfare, and civilians harmed by sanctions “deserve the same protections provided by the Geneva Conventions to people in war.”

Venezuela offers a prime example of how sanctions are key to U.S. regime change strategies. Conventional wisdom holds that citizens living under economic decline are more likely to blame their own leaders — whose failings they can see firsthand — than economic analyses showing the impact sanctions imposed by a foreign power have on GDP. This strategy was succinctly articulated in a 1960 State Department cable regarding the purpose of the embargo on Cuba:

If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The only way of “alienating internal support” for Fidel Castro, the State Department argued, was through “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

This holds true for Maduro, who has campaigned against the U.S. sanctions directly but has seen the yearslong economic hardship erode overall levels of support for his government.

Venezuela’s opposition leaders, in contrast, are well aware that the economic sanctions benefit them electorally, as long as they don’t give any sound bites endorsing collective punishment of their own citizens by the U.S. In a June interview, González Urrutia falsely claimed that the U.S.-imposed sectoral sanctions on much of Venezuela’s economy “are not directed against the country” but merely are targeting government officials. Corina Machado, the conservative activist leading the opposition, has also falsely claimed that Maduro is exclusively to blame for the economic crisis.

As Venezuela erupted into protests in the aftermath of the vote, Rodríguez argued that the influence of U.S. sanctions may be hardening both Maduro’s stance and that of the opposition. “The government is also uncompromising, of course, but I think that it’s made finding agreement much more difficult, because the opposition sees itself as backed by the U.S,” Rodríguez said.

Policymakers may feel the urge to intensify sanctions on Venezuela in the coming weeks as Maduro digs in, hoping it will spur the change they seek. But when asked whether U.S.-led sanctions ultimately skew the democratic process in other countries, Casar acknowledged that “it ends up just getting really messy, and it’s hard to see what the mess gets us.”

The post U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela. How Does That Help Democracy? appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas’s Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda

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

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

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

A Short-Lived Evacuation

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

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

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

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

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

Military Buildup

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

Yet despite its venture capital bounty and recent military contracts, XTEND has also been asking for charity.

“Join Us in Supporting Israel’s Defense,” read the text on the Xtend-Support-Israel.com website, directly above a large “DONATE” button. All donations would be “used for the immediate production & deployment of life saving systems for our IDF troops on the frontlines.” The site included a dazzling marketing montage of XTEND robots zooming across buildings, smashing through windows, and dropping what appears to be an explosive device from the air, “enabling soldiers to perform accurate maneuvers in complex combat scenarios.”

XTEND’s fundraising page — taken offline shortly after The Intercept raised questions about it — is one of several similar efforts soliciting charitable, tax-deductible donations to bolster Israeli national security. 

U.S. law governing charitable contributions gives wide leeway to nonprofits operating overseas, though questions linger about directing such donations to fund combat.

XTEND did not respond to a request for comment and questions about its Israel Defense Forces fundraising campaign. The Israeli nonprofit AlmaLinks, which was listed on the site as participating in the fundraiser, told The Intercept that upon learning of the campaign it asked XTEND to take it down. A PayPal page for the fundraiser told American donors that tax-free contributions could be sent through the U.S.-based donor-advised fund FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds. FJC disavowed the campaign and said the drone startup was being instructed to cease and desist use of its name. 

XTEND’s drones are flexible, affordable, and outfitted with powerful cameras, making them excellent surveillance tools that can stand in for human soldiers in dangerous situations. Certain models come with a claw, allowing them to drop any manner of item — or weapon — from high above. This functionality has proven transformative in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Even for Israel’s armed forces, among the best-equipped in the world, drones like XTEND’s offer the powerful advantage of an off-the-shelf, somewhat disposable miniature air force.

“Boots on the ground testimonials” included on the site leave little ambiguity about their use. “The best thing to have is drones,” says one uniformed Israeli soldier, his face blurred, in a video set before a house he states was recently cleared of terrorists. “Drones can go inside, do the search, clear the house, put even an explosive, instead of us going in.”

“We have killed dozens of vile terrorists, but we continue to constantly discover more terrorists who are hiding in buildings,” say soldiers in another testimonial video, who explain XTEND’s products are preferable because their radio uplink is not as easily jammed.

In interviews and marketing materials, XTEND tends to argue its drones are a life-saving reconnaissance technology that permit soldiers to hang back from danger while robots lead the charge. But the company is very much in the business of offense too. In December, XTEND told the Wall Street Journal that the IDF is using its robots to “drop grenades” in Gaza. “We were the first drones to enter Be’erik, Faraza, and deal directly (indoors, outdoors, and face to face) with these terrorists,” Shapira explained to the Israeli business publication Calcalist last year. “We learned so much from that.”

Israel’s war on Gaza has been integral to XTEND’s current success and its future, according to local business press reporting. Since the conflict erupted, the company has deepened its ties with the Israeli military. An article in Calcalist announcing the $40 million deal noted that, since the war’s start, “the company has shifted its entire focus in developing systems for the IDF. This new focus has led the company to a decision to upgrade its activity in the military sector.” In the May 10 press release announcing its latest venture capital round, Shapira — depicted in an attached photo dressed as a character from “The Matrix” — explained how the company’s new funds would help refine its drones’ software in part to better serve “Israel’s Ministry of Defense tier-1 units.”

So-called quadcopter drones similar to those manufactured by XTEND have been implicated in a litany of gruesome civilian deaths and injuries. A June 4 report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor described how the IDF has “ramped up” its use of small quadcopters to drop explosives and fire mounted rifles at Palestinians in Gaza.

One Palestinian who spoke to the organization recounted the killing of his cousin: “We were approached by a quadcopter as we went by a side street. I warned him to run and hide as soon as I saw it, but it is likely that his poor hearing prevented him from hearing my call. I told him to hide, as I was doing, when all of a sudden I heard an explosion. When I heard Ibrahim calling, I told him to stay [put] to the right until assistance arrived. I saw him being targeted by a quadcopter bomb.”

On the webpage soliciting donations for its drones, XTEND listed AlmaLinks, a nonprofit network headquartered in Tel Aviv that connects business leaders with a focus on Jewish and Israeli communities, as the organization that would process donations. 

“All donations will be used for the immediate production and deployment of life saving systems for our IDF troops on the frontlines,” the site read. “All donations are kindly processed through the ALMA LINKS non-profit organization. www.almalinks.org We kindly request that you fill out the information here and at the dedicated donation page for tracking purposes.”

Shapira, XTEND’s CEO, is listed on AlmaLink’s website as a member of its board of trustees. AlmaLinks told The Intercept it had no knowledge of XTEND’s fundraiser and that Shapira does not serve in a decision-making role.

“We were not aware of the XTEND website asking for funds in our name, and as soon as we became aware of it we asked them to take it down,” a spokesperson for AlmaLinks said. 

Shapira “is on a purely advisory board of trustees that includes many people and does not have authority to make decisions,” the spokesperson said.

The fiscal sponsor for AlmaLinks is FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds, a nonprofit donor-advised fund based in New York. Founded in 1995, FJC manages over $300 million in assets and has provided over $400 million in philanthropic grants around the world, according to its website. FJC accepts tax-deductible donations on behalf of AlmaLinks, which then passes the money onward to recipients such as XTEND. Because contributions to foreign nonprofits like AlmaLinks are not tax-deductible, a donation to the American fiscal sponsor FJC would allow donors to benefit from U.S. tax laws.

Potential American donors who came across the online fundraiser were directed to a PayPal page bearing a checkmark icon confirming FJC is the recipient of the funds, and noting any contributions would be earmarked for XTEND.

In response to an inquiry from The Intercept about its role in the fundraiser, FJC CEO Sam Marks disavowed the campaign. “FJC has no relationship with XTEND, and that company is not authorized to use FJC’s 501(c)(3) tax exempt status to fundraise for any campaign,” Marks explained in an emailed statement. “They are being instructed to cease and desist any fundraising campaign using FJC’s name.” 

Soon after this exchange, the PayPal page was taken down. Marks did not respond when asked if the PayPal page had been set up without FJC’s knowledge, when FJC became aware of the fundraising campaign, or how much money had been raised to date.

XTEND did not respond to questions about whether it organized the fundraiser without the advance knowledge of AlmaLinks and FJC, and about Shapira’s role on AlmaLinks’ board of trustees.

Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, questioned whether it was appropriate for a nonprofit to use charitable donations to support a war effort, particularly one that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.

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“I’m aware of reports of quadcopters being involved in crimes in Gaza. There is nothing charitable about that,” said Shamas, whose nonprofit legal advocacy group is working on a New York bill to restrict tax-deductible donations to illegal Israeli settlements. “I can’t see this fitting in the New York law definition of charitable purpose, not the IRS definition of charitable purpose.”

Another issue is whether those efforts are supplying equipment being used in violation of international law, Shamas added. “Setting aside the question of charitability all together, there are serious questions of complicity in war crimes here. Even if it weren’t a nonprofit, even if it were just a traditional company, there would be serious legal risks here.”

Legal experts have long warned that charitable contributions cannot be used to support combat, an issue that came up at the height of the war in Ukraine. Charities funding combat against Russia’s invasion faced less scrutiny because of widespread political support for Ukraine, attorney Daniel Kurtz told the Associated Press last year. “You can’t support war fighting, can’t support killing people, even if it’s killing the bad guys,” he said at the time. “It’s not consistent with the law of charity.”

Henry Dale, director of New York University law school’s National Center on Philanthropy and the Law, said that U.S. tax code — and an extreme lack of oversight by the Internal Revenue Service — affords a great deal of latitude to efforts like those of XTEND. Even though XTEND’s fundraising page made clear that the money was for drones, specifically its “Human Extension Platforms” that aid soldiers in combat, the fact that donated funds were advertised as being directed to FJC, whose PayPal site did not mention drones, likely legally insulates the campaign overall, Dale said.

Though the IRS has the ability to strip organizations of their tax-exempt status for engaging in efforts contrary to public policy, “the edges of that doctrine are completely unclear,” Dale said.

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Lawmakers and nonprofits experts have long criticized the network of U.S. nonprofits that funnel millions of tax-deductible dollars to settlements in the West Bank that the international community recognizes as illegal. Those concerns have come back with new urgency amid the surge of U.S. fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces during Israel’s war on Gaza.

Pending legislation in New York targets nonprofits that facilitate such donations by making it easier to sue the groups for civil penalties. Lawmakers expanded and reintroduced the “Not on Our Dime” bill in May to include charities in New York fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces amid Israel’s destruction in Gaza. The role of any nonprofit taking part in the XTEND fundraising operation is the kind of activity the legislation seeks to target, said Shamas of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of the campaign backing the bill. FJC’s work includes fundraising for a number of groups that responded to aid Israel after the October 7 attacks, including Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. As recently as 2021, the group has also directed contributions to the Jewish National Fund, which has long financed activity in Israeli settlements. 

New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who introduced the bill, said the measure would allow the state attorney general to fine groups funding the genocide, including FJC.

“The purpose of tax breaks is to encourage charitable activity: feeding the poor, clothing the needy, and funding the arts — not to support war crimes and genocide,” said Mamdani. “Funding Israeli war crimes is inconsistent with a charitable purpose.”

XTEND’s fundraiser is just one of many ongoing drone crowdfunding efforts pegged to the war, a review by The Intercept found.

The Israeli Resilience Association, which describes itself as “a group of experienced professionals, and officers from the IDF Special Forces, Secret Service (Shin Bet), and the special forces of the Israeli Police,” has to date raised over $287,000 to send small hobbyist drones into Gaza. Noting that the “current crisis in Israel has put every community throughout Judea and Samaria on high alert,” the One Israel Fund, meanwhile, has raised over $160,000 to furnish illegal settlements in the West Bank with surveillance drones “in cooperation with the regional and local security personnel.”

Even without the legislation, genocide is illegal under international law, Mamdani added. “Fundraising for IDF units carrying out what has been called a plausible genocide in federal and international courts should merit inquiry. Advocating to end tax deductions for these crimes is to call for the bare minimum.”

The post The Crowdfunding Campaign for Deadly Israeli Military Drones appeared first on The Intercept.

McDonald’s yesterday reported that its global sales declined for the first time since 2020, with its net profit declining 12 percent compared to the same period last year. Starbucks announced Tuesday that sales in North American stores dipped 2 percent, and sales in the rest of the world dipped 7 percent. It also reported that its total international profits dropped by 23 percent.

Although the companies point to currency fluctuation, slowdown within the Chinese market, and consumer reaction to rising menu prices to account for the change, the chief executives of both corporations cited the conflict in Gaza when discussing problems the businesses face.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — a Palestinian-led movement to oppose Israel’s occupation and apartheid in Palestine — celebrated the dip in McDonald’s earnings on their social media accounts, writing, “#BDS is working!” While McDonald’s is not a part of the group’s list of targeted economic or consumer boycotts, they have endorsed it as an organic, grassroots movement that started shortly after October 7, when the chain’s Israeli franchises supported the Israeli military in its incursion on Gaza.

“McDonald’s Israel provided free meals for Israel’s forces during #GazaGenocide against 2.3 million Palestinians, and the company with its dozens of branches has for decades fed apartheid Israel’s war chest,” the group said, using the hashtag #BoycottMcDonalds.

During a quarterly earnings call on Monday, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said “several markets … continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East.” The company had previously warned of low earnings in Middle Eastern countries and Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which have Muslim majorities. On the earnings call, Kempczinski also noted that sales in France were down, and attributed that decline to the country’s large Muslim population.

Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan also invoked the conflict in the company’s quarterly call on Tuesday, indirectly pointing to boycott efforts in the same regions as McDonald’s international trouble spots.

“Headwinds persist in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, parts of Europe driven by widely discussed misperceptions of our brand,” said Narasimhan. Earlier this year, the company reported a “significant impact on traffic and sales” in the Middle East and the U.S. markets, which it also attributed to “misperceptions” about its brand.

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Shortly after October 7, Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents more than 10,000 of the chain’s employees, expressed solidarity for Palestine on its X account in a since-deleted tweet. The union’s post read “Solidarity with Palestine!” and quote-tweeted an image of a bulldozer breaking through the fence encircling Gaza. Starbucks retaliated, suing the union for damaging its reputation and misleading consumers to think the company itself supports Palestine. News of the lawsuit went viral online, along with calls to stop buying from the chain.

Calls to boycott McDonald’s also began days after October 7, when the fast food giant’s Israeli franchisee announced on social media it had “donated and continues to donate tens of thousands of meals to IDF units, the police, hospitals, residents around the strip and all rescue forces,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. 

Kempczinski defended his company amid the McDonald’s boycott in a January LinkedIn post, blaming hits to stores internationally on “the war and associated misinformation.” Seemingly drawing distance between Israel and its other markets, he noted that McDonald’s international stores are owned locally, “including in Muslim countries.”

Residents and rights groups, namely in Muslim-majority nations such as Pakistan and Kuwait, started to boycott the chain, prompting the Pakistani franchisee to distance itself from the issue. In April, McDonald’s was forced to buy back its 225 restaurants in Israel after the boycott tanked sales in the Middle East, according to reports.

The post Boycotts Against Israel Are Hurting Starbucks and McDonald’s Sales Worldwide appeared first on The Intercept.

Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia group loosely allied with Hamas, has been in a low-level war with Israel since the conflict in Gaza began last October. Hezbollah, which is believed to have an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, has repeatedly emphasized that attacks will continue as long as the war persists.

Over the weekend, a rocket attack that the U.S. and Israel said originated in Lebanon killed at least 12 civilians in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights. The Israeli foreign minister said that the attack “crossed all red lines,” and said “the moment of all-out war against Hezbollah and Lebanon” is approaching. Hezbollah denied responsibility for the strike.

On Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken cautioned Israeli President Isaac Herzog about ramping up its war with Hezbollah in response on a call, according to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.

But the conflict has been escalating for weeks. Israel has increased airstrikes aimed at the group. Current and former Israeli officials have also spoken publicly about shifting their attention from Hamas to the more powerful Hezbollah.

After Israeli officials warned of the possibility of launching a war that would send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age,” the Biden administration intensified diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions and forestall a conflict that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said could have “terrible consequences for the Middle East.”

The low-level war has created a tinderbox that could explode into a regional conflict involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and, to an even greater extent than now, the United States.

Lebanon and Israel are both U.S. allies, and America has poured billions of dollars in military aid into Lebanon, trained tens of thousands of its troops, and operated a proxy commando unit run by U.S. Special Operations forces there for years.

After all that aid and billions of dollars in support, Hezbollah remains Lebanon’s dominant military force and a quasi-“state within a state” that wields significant influence in Lebanon’s government. Israel’s war on Gaza has only bolstered the group’s support, according to some metrics.

While Hezbollah’s popularity is centered in Lebanon’s south and east, the group has gained support among non-Shiite Lebanese across the country since the outbreak of the war in Gaza due to its resistance to Israel, according to a survey by the Arab Barometer.

The U.S. has also contributed to the group’s sway, says Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “U.S. support for the mass killing of Palestinians is so indefensible that it is actually strengthening groups like Hezbollah, who are able to capitalize on their firm but relatively restrained opposition to U.S.-Israeli actions,” he told The Intercept.

In Lebanon’s south, the conflict with Israel in the past year has left towns and villages deserted and destroyed. More than 1,900 casualties, including 466 deaths, have been reported and almost 100,000 residents have already been displaced, according to the United Nations.

Last month, Human Rights Watch released a report chronicling Israel’s widespread use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon. The use of the incendiary agent, which ignites when exposed to oxygen and can cause gruesome lifelong injuries or death, may be a violation of international law and is, according to the rights group, “putting civilians at grave risk and contributing to civilian displacement.”

But as grave as their suffering has been to this point, a wider war between Israel and Hezbollah would be “catastrophic” for the people of Lebanon, said Seth Binder of the Washington-based Middle East Democracy Center. “A war would only make things exponentially worse,” he told The Intercept. “For the region, it risks a further conflagration, likely at enormous cost to the people of the region and U.S. national security interests.”

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Lebanon has been in crisis since well before the Gaza war began, having been overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic; the largest refugee population per capita in the world; systemic corruption; and the 2020 explosion of a warehouse full of fertilizer at Beirut’s port that killed more than 200, wounded another 6,000, and demolished significant portions of the capital, causing billions of dollars in damage. Since then, Lebanon’s economy has collapsed, with its GDP shrinking from $55 billion in 2018 to $31.7 billion in 2020 — one of the steepest depressions in modern history. About 80 percent of the population is now estimated to be living in poverty.

The Senate Armed Services Committee recently summed up the situation in a report: “Lebanon was already assessed to be on the precipice of being a failed state prior to the [Gaza war], which is negatively impacting the stability of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and their capabilities, to counter and deter regional threats including violent terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah.”

Earlier this month, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to attack new areas in Israel if its military does not stop killing civilians in southern Lebanon. “The resistance missiles will target new Israeli settlements that were not targeted before,” he warned. “If Israeli tanks come to Lebanon, they will not only have a shortage in tanks but will never have any tanks left.”

The Biden administration has reportedly warned Israel against launching a “limited war” in Lebanon. “Restoring calm along the Blue Line remains a top priority for the United States and must be of the utmost importance for both Lebanon and Israel,” a State Department spokesperson, referring to the border between the countries, told The Intercept. “The conflict along the Blue Line between Israel and Hezbollah has gone on for long enough. It’s in everyone’s interest to resolve it quickly and diplomatically. We continue to believe a diplomatic resolution is both achievable and urgent.”

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At the same time, the U.S. has also assured Israeli leaders of continued military support, even in the event of a full-scale war with Hezbollah. Since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, the U.S. has called out Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing and pressed its ally to “implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm [and] humanitarian suffering.” Its support has nonetheless been almost unwavering despite the fact that the conflict has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, injured more than 89,000, displaced 90 percent of the population, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble.

“The nearly unconditional support that the United States has provided Israel over the past nine months has not only resulted in horrific tragedy in Gaza and extended the war in Gaza, but it has also allowed Israel to continue to escalate against Hezbollah, further risking a wider regional conflict,” Binder told The Intercept.

The U.S. has also cautioned Lebanese officials that it cannot prevent an Israeli invasion. This mirrors Biden administration policy in regard to the Gaza war where the U.S. has kept arms flowing to Israel despite the administration’s own assessment that U.S. weapons were likely used by Israel in violation of international humanitarian law.

“Biden’s efforts to avert a wider war in Lebanon are plagued by the same failures as his policy towards Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Israeli generals acknowledge that Israel cannot survive without U.S. diplomatic and military support, and as a result, the U.S. could force Israel to change policy at any time,” said Sperling of Just Foreign Policy. “Biden is reluctant to employ this leverage, however, because he doesn’t want to alienate the pro-Israel constituencies in the U.S. who have appreciated his steady support for the biggest mass killing of Palestinians in history.”

The U.S. has a long and checkered history in Lebanon, including a 1958 intervention by U.S. Marines to forestall an insurrection there. In 1983, during a civil war that lasted 15 years, bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut killed more than 300 people. The United States blames Hezbollah for both attacks and has long designated the group as a terrorist organization. (Israel invaded Lebanon, during this same war, in 1982 and only left in 2000.)

For years, the U.S. has poured funds into the Lebanese Armed Forces to provide a counterweight to Hezbollah. A recent State Department report called the United States “Lebanon’s paramount security partner.” Since 2006, America has provided more than $5.5 billion in foreign assistance to Lebanon, including $3 billion in military aid.

The U.S. government has facilitated almost $2 billion in Lebanese purchases through the Foreign Military Sales program, including light attack aircraft, helicopters, and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. separately provided Lebanon with 130 armored and tactical ground vehicles. From 2016 to 2021, the United States also authorized the export of more than $82 million in U.S. military equipment to Lebanon, including $12 million in “firearms and related articles.”

“U.S. security assistance to Lebanon has been quite extensive — one of the largest assistance programs in the world,” said Binder, noting that the U.S. has even rerouted tens of millions of dollars withheld from Egypt due to human rights concerns to Lebanon. “Despite the assistance, however the country remains incredibly unstable and its security forces remain unable to respond to Hezbollah’s domestic or regional operations.”

In addition to pumping military aid and arms into Lebanon, the U.S. also maintains its own small military presence in the country.

For years, the U.S. has waged a “secret war” in Lebanon against Sunni terror groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, according to retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former four-star commander who oversaw the effort; declassified documents; former special operators with knowledge of the program; and analysts who have investigated U.S. Code Title 10 § 127e — known in military parlance as “127-echo” — which allows Special Operations forces to use foreign military units as proxies.

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Through 127e, the U.S. arms, trains, and provides intelligence to foreign forces. But unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are sent on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims. The 127e program in Lebanon — code-named Lion Hunter — supported an elite unit known as the G2 Strike Force and was in operation as recently as 2019, according to a formerly secret Special Operations Command document obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act.

Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the greater Middle East, did not respond to questions about Lion Hunter and the number of U.S. troops who have been, and may still be, involved. But in a June “War Powers” report to Congress, President Joe Biden noted that approximately 75 United States military personnel are deployed to Lebanon to “enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces.”

In a joint written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, Christopher P. Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, and SOCOM’s commander, Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, also noted that U.S. commandos are “postured to prepare for a wide-range of contingency operations in Israel and Lebanon.”

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in March, Fenton called out Iran as “a longtime malign actor [that] leverages its proxies … to sow instability in the Middle East,” specifically citing Hezbollah. But Special Operations Command refused to talk about America’s own proxy force in Lebanon. “Unfortunately, we cannot provide comment on … whether the U.S. has continued to work with the G2 Strike Force,” James Gregory, a SOCOM spokesperson, told The Intercept.

The U.S. has trained more than 32,000 Lebanese troops, including 6,000 schooled in the United States since 1970.

Requests for comment about U.S. military assistance sent to Lebanon’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were not returned. 

The post U.S. Poured Billions of Military Aid Into Lebanon. Now Israel Threatens to Invade. appeared first on The Intercept.

That partnership came to a sudden end this past March 16, when a spokesperson for the country’s ruling junta took to national television to announce that the government was unceremoniously kicking the U.S. military out.

“The government of Niger, taking into account the aspirations and interests of its people, revokes, with immediate effect, the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees,” Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane said, declaring that the security pact, in effect since 2012, violated Niger’s constitution.

Just days after that announcement, a top Pentagon official went in front of the House Armed Services Committee and misled both Congress and the American people about what was happening, according to a letter sent today to the Pentagon and State Department by Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., and shared exclusively with The Intercept.

“We write to express concern about the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of State’s (DoS) internal communication and subsequent relay of inaccurate information to Congress regarding the drawdown of 1,000 U.S. troops from Niger,” reads the letter which was sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday.

The “inaccurate information” in question has to do with when, and how, the Pentagon was informed that Niger was booting U.S. troops from its soil.

On March 21, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander appeared before the House Armed Services Committee and told Panetta that Niger’s ruling junta “has not asked or demanded” that the U.S. military leave Niger. Almost a month later, Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, told The Intercept that the U.S. was still attempting to “obtain clarification through diplomatic channels … regarding the Status of Forces Agreement between Niger and the United States.”

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But the junta had sent a diplomatic note on March 19, which immediately terminated the Status of Forces Agreement governing U.S. troops in Niger and the Pentagon’s use of military facilities there, according to a letter, also shared with The Intercept, sent to Gaetz by the State Department in response to a formal request for information.

“Given the date DoS provided according to the department’s records … and that Dr. Wallander’s testimony took place days after the information was received by DoS, we have reason to believe that Dr. Wallander misrepresented the situation in Niger,” wrote Gaetz and Panetta.

The State Department refused to provide clarification about its communications with Niger’s junta. “We do not comment on details of diplomatic correspondences,” a department official told The Intercept.

A return receipt shows that Lt. Col. Bryon J. McGarry, a Defense Department spokesperson, read questions sent from The Intercept by email but failed to reply to them.

Before getting ejected from the Sahelian nation, the U.S. had roughly 1,000 military personnel and civilian contractors deployed to Niger, most of them clustered at an air base near the town of Agadez. Known locally as “Base Americaine” but officially called Air Base 201, the outpost served as the linchpin of the U.S. military’s archipelago of bases in North and West Africa and was a key part of America’s wide-ranging surveillance and security efforts in the region. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into the outpost. This is in addition to more than $500 million in military aid provided to Niger since 2012.

The U.S. military withdrew its personnel from Niger’s Air Base 101, near the airport in the capital Niamey, in early July. “The effective cooperation and communication between the U.S. and Nigerien armed forces ensured that this turnover was finished ahead of schedule,” Niger’s defense ministry and the Pentagon said in a joint statement. The withdrawal from Air Base 201 is expected to happen in August.

“The United States is proud of the past security cooperation between U.S. forces and Nigerien forces, a partnership which effectively contributed to stability in Niger and the region,” a State Department official told The Intercept. But statistics supplied by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution, show that terrorist violence in West Africa spiked while that partnership was in effect. Fatalities from attacks by militant Islamist groups in the Sahel, for example, have jumped more than 5,200 percent since 2016.

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As violence has spiraled, at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror, including in Niger last year. At least five leaders of that July 2023 coup received American assistance, according to a U.S. official.

After its protégés toppled Niger’s democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum last summer, the U.S. spent months avoiding the term “coup” before finally, as mandated by law, suspending approximately $200 million in aid.

In April, following the junta’s public break with the United States, Gaetz’s office issued a report chronicling U.S. troops’ inability to access medicine, mail, or other support while deployed to Niger. “The Biden Administration and the State Department are engaged in a massive cover-up,” Gaetz told The Intercept at the time. “They are hiding the true conditions on the ground of U.S. diplomatic relations in Niger and are effectively abandoning our troops in that country with no help in sight.” The Pentagon disputed the allegations.

Gaetz and Panetta called on Austin and Blinken to provide answers about communications between the junta and the United States and copies of relevant correspondence in order to perform their “oversight measures with respect to Dr. Wallander’s testimony.” The lawmakers gave the departments until early September to furnish the information, just days ahead of a September 15 deadline, imposed by the junta, to remove all U.S. troops from Niger.

The post This African Country Kicked Out the U.S. Military. Did the Pentagon Lie About It? appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abu Safia then took the phone from the man.

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

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

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

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

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

“They Thought They Were In a Safe Place”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video: Agence France-Presse (AFP)

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

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

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

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

“It’s Not Haji!”

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

Everyone was waiting for the moment of the strike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the beginning, something has been off about President Joe Biden’s approach to the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal invasion of Gaza.

Even by the low standards of America’s steadfast support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Biden’s own long-standing Zionism, he’s been careless: endorsing baseless Israeli propaganda, bear-hugging the notoriously unreliable Benjamin Netanyahu, and slandering his own supporters as antisemites.

The disastrous presidential debate, and Biden’s decision to bow out of the race, has given us a new way to understand what’s been happening. Maybe Biden’s approach has been thoughtless because the president is having trouble thinking.

In retrospect, Biden’s incapacity has been on display since the first days following the October 7 raid. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” the president said, repeating a gruesome but uncorroborated rumor.

The press raced to clarify: Had Biden seen evidence that the Israelis were keeping secret? White House staff explained that the president was merely referring to Israeli media reports. We could chalk it up to a gaffe at a highly charged moment, except that Biden kept repeating the charge, leading Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler to accuse the president of exaggerating under the headline “Biden yet again says Hamas beheaded babies. Has new evidence emerged?” The answer was “No.”

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The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill called Biden’s constant invocation of the fantastical beheaded babies story “inexplicable,” but now we know better. As two Harvard researchers wrote in a 2020 peer-reviewed study titled “Aging in an Era of Fake News,” those in late adulthood tend to have “difficulty detecting lies,” and they place “less emphasis on accuracy when communicating.” Obviously this does not apply to all older adults — Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, has remained notably sharp into his 80s — but after what we saw on the debate stage and in subsequent interviews, I find it hard to argue that it doesn’t fit Biden. At very least, it’s an explanation that fits the facts.

If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then how to describe Biden’s plan to break Yemen’s hold on Red Sea shipping lanes? When asked if U.S. airstrikes were working, Biden told the press, “When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” It’d be easier to call this another gaffe if that weren’t exactly what happened. Operation Prosperity Guardian airstrikes have killed dozens of Yemenis, and two Navy SEALs were lost at sea, but there has never been any hint of success for the Western alliance.

Over six months after the beginning of Prosperity Guardian, U.S. forces remain locked in what personnel have called “the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II.” America has been losing that battle every step of the way, something the troops aren’t used to. “I’ll be honest,” one recently returned Navy pilot told the AP about the novelty of getting shot at off Yemen, “it was a little traumatizing for the group.”

This drawn-out defeat is more or less what Biden said was going to happen; it’s not the statement that was the mistake, it was the mission itself. Starting a deadly international fight you can’t even plan to win is professional incompetence, but not being able to stop yourself from saying so out loud to the press suggests a different, more personal kind of incompetence.

Though Biden is unlikely to jump to the alternate explanations — corruption or racism — in his own defense, there’s evidence for both.

As a senator, Biden topped the Open Secrets list of recipients for pro-Israel money, receiving more than twice as much since 1990 as second-place Bob Menendez of New Jersey. (Menendez is corrupt: He was recently convicted at trial of acting as an overseas agent for Egypt.)

Whatever combination of earnest and bought, Biden’s support for Israel has never been tempered by concern for Palestinians. When the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner suggested to former State Department official Aaron David Miller that American policymakers don’t value Israeli and Palestinian lives equally, he didn’t get much pushback. “Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis?” said Miller. “No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.” I have similarly little doubt that Biden’s bigotry has made it easier for him to support the genocide in Gaza, but it’s not sufficient to explain his conduct.

But incompetence explains Biden’s actions in a way that unconditional support for the Israeli project can’t. It would have been easy enough to try and muddy the waters and obscure Israel Defense Forces responsibility for the massacre at Gaza’s largest hospital, for example, but there was no strategic reason for Biden to claim, as he did in November, that it was a “fact” that Hamas was hiding its military headquarters under al-Shifa.

When pressed by reporters to present some, or any, evidence that this was the case, Biden said with a strange, crooked smile, “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.” He doesn’t even allow a reporter to get through the follow-up: “Do you feel absolutely confident based on what you know, that—?” “Yes,” he says, holding his bizarre expression. Hamas did not, in fact, have its military headquarters in tunnels under al-Shifa Hospital, and the president has never revealed any basis for his false but absolute confidence.

George W. Bush is not famous for having been one of America’s brighter presidents, but even he knew that you’re not supposed to get fooled twice. Biden, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to realize Netanyahu and his administration are running up the score on him: expanding the scope of the war to Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran; demanding the defunding of UNRWA under false pretenses, assassinating Western aid workers, and blocking aid trucks; and sabotaging peace negotiations. Israeli media has even reported that Netanyahu’s right-wing allies are opposing a hostage deal because it would be a victory for Biden and a “slap in the face” to their ally Donald Trump. None of this has upset Biden’s “bear hug” approach to the Israeli leadership, by which he preemptively ceded any leverage America might have over the country’s actions. Just look to Rafah, Biden’s “red line,” where the IDF has called his bluff and turned Gaza’s final “safe zone” into a killing field with impunity.

And yet, Biden seems to earnestly believe he is doing a good, fair job. “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” he told Speedy Morman of Complex. “I mean, I’ve been very supportive of the Palestinians.” When asked why an Arab or Muslim voter would support him, Biden says his leadership represents the best path to peace and a two-state solution.

Meanwhile, under Biden’s watch, Israel has not only been seizing land in the West Bank at an unprecedented clip, but the Knesset also overwhelmingly voted against the idea of a two-state solution, right before Biden is set to reward Netanyahu with another bear hug during his visit to address Congress in D.C. this week.

Let’s not even get started with the disastrous temporary pier except to say that managing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without helping any of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people in direct proximity to the project surely represents an ironic achievement in American international aid. If still-President Biden thinks he has brought Palestinians anything but the kind of unfathomable tragedy and grief that resonates for centuries, it is the single strongest piece of evidence that he lacks the mental capacity to govern.

Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.

Ditching Biden won’t automatically change anything, and the president is not solely responsible for Gaza, even within the White House. Anyone who is held personally responsible for a broad social crime such as genocide is, to some degree, a scapegoat — but that is not a reason to hold no one responsible. And Biden’s public incapacity opens a door to a better way forward for American policy. It’s time to take the keys; millions of Palestinians can’t wait for next January.

The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.

The alternative is to force a change in policy. Harris must assure voters that, as the party’s leader, she won’t assume Biden’s biggest mistake, effective immediately. That starts with staying out of town during Netanyahu’s visit, and it has to grow from there, with public pressure from her office on the Israelis to sign a permanent ceasefire. This would in effect concede that the president’s incompetence has not been harmless at all: that on the contrary, it paved the road to hundreds of thousands of awful deaths.

Biden may well go down in history as Genocide Joe, a disgrace even to the job of president of the United States, roped to Israel’s atrocities in the same way Lyndon Johnson is tied to the Vietnam War. The upside for the rest of us is the possibility of an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

If the Democrats and Kamala Harris can’t decide between protecting Biden’s legacy and thousands of Palestinian lives, they’re no more competent to lead than he is.

The post Biden’s Failing Mind Might Explain His Incoherent Gaza Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion also called for reparations for Palestinians who have lived under Israel’s occupation since it began in 1967, an unprecedented step for the court. The court also notably declared Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians to be a form of segregation and apartheid. It further ruled that nations cannot offer aid in support of the illegal occupation without violating international law, and upheld the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Advisory opinions from the ICJ are not legally binding and cannot, in itself, force a country to act. But their legal and moral weight can have significant influence on countries’ decisions and foreign policy.

Jessica Peake, an international law professor at UCLA Law, said the ruling has the potential to shift the international community’s ability to push for Palestinian statehood. She added that the ruling exceeded her expectations, specifically around the issue of the Israeli government’s systemic abuses toward Palestinians.

“What was particularly surprising was that they basically made a finding that Israel is creating a situation of apartheid against Palestinians within Israel,” Peake said, “because of the racially discriminatory laws and policies in place that basically treat Palestinians as second-class citizens.”

But some advocates for Palestinians living within the occupied territories are less enthusiastic about the ruling.

Eitay Mack, an Israeli attorney and advocate for Palestinians in the West Bank, said the ruling does little to immediately change the lived reality for Palestinians. While ICJ officials read out their ruling on Friday from the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, Mack received new reports of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. 

“The court just said the obvious,” Mack told The Intercept. “In the West Bank, it’s business as usual unless governments have the political will to force both Israelis and Palestinians” into implementing a two-state solution that gives Palestine sovereignty.

Amid the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem. Soon after, Israel began to establish settlements inside the occupied territories, supporting Israeli civilians as they built communities atop land taken from Palestinians. While Israel withdrew its troops and settlements from Gaza in 2005, it continued to promote and expand its settlements in the West Bank. And in recent months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has used its war in Gaza as a cover to expand its settlements at a rate faster than previous decades. 

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The Israeli government immediately dismissed the ICJ ruling, with a defiant Netanyahu calling Jerusalem “our eternal capital” and referred to the West Bank as “the land of our ancestors,” using the biblical names “Judea and Samaria.” 

“No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth,” he said in a statement, “and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”

B’Tselem, an Israeli-based human rights group, was among a host of organizations that welcomed Friday’s ruling after decades of their own advocacy calling for an end to Israel’s occupation. They said the international community has been avoiding the issue by buying Israel’s claim that its occupation is temporary and that it is engaged in negotiations and diplomacy toward a solution. 

“The release of the ICJ’s advisory opinion puts an end to these justifications, and now the international community must use every tool — criminal, diplomatic and economic — to force Israeli decision-makers to end the occupation,” the group said on Friday.

In recent months, more nations have officially recognized Palestine as a state, with Norway, Spain, and Ireland joining 143 other nations in recognition. The ICJ ruling, which declares Israel’s occupation an obstacle to Palestinian statehood, may embolden more nations to follow suit. In April, the U.S. vetoed a measure in the U.N. Security Council, that would have recognized Palestine as a member of the U.N. At the time, the U.S. said Palestinian statehood could only come from direct negotiations between Palestine and Israel. The United States sends billions of dollars of military aid to Israel each year.

Israel made similar arguments in the lead-up to the ICJ decision, stating that the ruling would interfere with ongoing negotiations. Separately, Israel’s Parliament this week also passed a resolution that rejects Palestinian statehood, calling it “an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens.” Friday’s ICJ decision, Peake noted, undercuts that notion and upholds Palestine’s right to self-determination. 

“The ICJ decision, I think really will give states the legal backing or the legal cover that they need to recognize Palestine,” Peake said, “and insulate them a little bit from some of the political pressure that would come from the United States and Israel.” 

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Peake acknowledged that the U.N. has made declarations in the past condemning Israeli occupation. But most of those were issued by U.N. bodies that were organized to specifically address Palestine. A separate ICJ advisory opinion, issued in 2004, declared Israel’s 400-mile wall in the West Bank illegal.

But the U.N.’s top court has never before issued such strong language about the occupation with the backing of the majority of U.N. membership. 

“I don’t think this is going to change everything tomorrow,” Peake said. “Hopefully what this does do is provide an even stronger set of tools to states and to the international community to try and address some of what is going on in occupied Palestine.”

Update: Friday, July 19, 7:35 p.m. ET
The article was updated to clarify what an ICJ advisory opinion can and cannot do. 

The post The ICJ Ruling Confirms What Palestinians Have Been Saying for 57 Years appeared first on The Intercept.

Immediately following the surprise victory of left party coalition New Popular Front in France’s parliamentary elections last week, Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leftist leader of the bloc’s largest party, France Unbowed — vowed to see France “recognize the Palestinian state as soon as possible.”

France’s far-right National Rally party, alongside conservative centrists, had spent weeks painting the left’s support of Palestine as an electoral poisoned pill. In attacks all too familiar in the U.S., they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, slamming Israel’s critics as antisemites. Israeli officials explicitly backed the far-right party. In this last election, at least, it didn’t work to prevent left-wing success.

In Britain, too, the centrist Labour Party’s landslide victory was tempered in five constituencies, where independent candidates with pro-Palestinian platforms defeated Labour candidates. Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, won his North Islington, London, seat with ease; Corbyn was famously ousted from Labour when the party’s conservative wing and British media weaponized charges of antisemitism against the party’s left flank.

If there’s a lesson to be learned in the U.S. from the success of pro-Palestinian candidates in France and Britain, we can be grimly sure that no Democrat in November’s presidential election will learn it. President Joe Biden’s unfettered support of Israel and its genocidal Gaza war is not only a gross moral failure but also an electoral risk, particularly in crucial swing-state Michigan and for young voters in general. But his campaign refuses to change course on the issue. Even if the senescent president is replaced as the Democratic nominee, there’s scant chance that any successor will embrace a platform of Palestinian solidarity or even robust ceasefire demands. This, despite the fact that 77 percent of Democratic voters and two-thirds of voters in the U.S. support a permanent ceasefire.

The French and British results should, or at least could, however, be a lesson for left-wing Democrats to continue to fight against the vicious efforts of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, to crush Palestine-supportive candidates. This is especially important following the defeat of progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., after pro-Israel groups poured an unprecedented $15 million into the primary race to unseat the pro-Palestine incumbent.

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The astroturfed campaign against Bowman should not be heeded as a warning by progressive Democrats to abandon support for Palestine, or to temper their opposition to Israel’s Gaza onslaught. Rather, it should be a jolt to redouble organizing efforts in a united front against AIPAC’s interventions. Top Democrats did little to defend Bowman against the well-funded attack. It is somewhat encouraging that members of the Democratic mainstream have put more support behind AIPAC’s next target, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, for her primary next month; this support should be stronger still.

The French example is instructive here: Only through a highly strategic coalition of center-to-left candidates have the far right been kept from parliamentary leadership. Centrists did not throw their coalition partners on the left under the bus for their support for Palestine. The bloc can hardly be compared to the Democratic Party with its conservative, pro-Israel mainstream. Yet Democrats face a similar challenge: Win the trust of vast numbers of Muslim and Arab voters and young people, or stand with AIPAC — a lobby that has no problem raising millions for the Republican extreme right. 

It would go too far to say the recent French and British election results speak to the unambiguous popularity of Palestinian solidarity — too many variables were at play in both instances to draw simple conclusions. In Britain, desire to unseat the ruinous Conservative Party drove support for new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s uninspiring Labour. In France, strategic coordination between the center and left in the election’s second round was key. The New Popular Front is a fraught coalition, and internal disagreements over Israel, among other issues, will no doubt threaten its fragile cohesion. The bloc also did not win an absolute majority, despite winning the largest number of seats, and thus faces huge roadblocks to pushing through its political program. Remaining a united front is the only chance the left parties have — and that means support for Palestine cannot be pushed aside.

This is, of course, a vile state of affairs that requires an appeal to realpolitik to see candidates stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid. Since the need to stop Israel’s intolerable war remains as urgent as ever, however, the fact that support for Palestine can be shown as helpful, rather than harmful, to electoral success is worth stressing. At the very least, leftist candidates and leaders in France and Britain like Mélenchon and Corbyn have modeled powerful examples for U.S. progressives: In the face of bad-faith attacks, and even party expulsions, aimed a quashing support for Palestine, they remained steadfast on the right side of history.

The post Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will Democrats Learn From It? appeared first on The Intercept.

Similar real estate fairs have popped up across North America this year, in places such as Montreal, Toronto, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Brooklyn, and several have faced protests as the war on Gaza has brought the issue of Israeli settlements and Palestinian sovereignty to the fore.

An outbreak of violence at the LA event thrust the incident into the national spotlight. Protesters at the Adas Torah synagogue, who decried the sale of what they called “stolen land,” were met by pro-Israel counterprotesters on the West LA streets. Fights broke out among demonstrators, LA police said, while protesters reported being beaten by police with batons. The fracas was cast in the national media as an incident of violence at a place of worship, rather than a political protest at a corporate event, prompting political leaders from both parties, including President Joe Biden, to characterize the demonstration as antisemitic. The Justice Department said it is investigating the incident.

But homebuyers interested in purchasing a property in the occupied West Bank have a more convenient option for making an offer: a simple scroll through online listings. 

On websites largely tailored for Jewish American buyers looking to move to Israel, prospective homeowners can browse properties that include listings for homes in settlement communities, which offer the typical trappings of suburban life. 

Around a dozen real estate firms have participated in real estate fairs organized by My Israel Home across North America this year. Six of these firms are actively marketing at least two dozen separate properties for sale located within eight different West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, according to their online listings. Other real estate firms commonly list dozens of West Bank properties on their sites. The firms mentioned in this story did not respond to requests for comment.  

They listed homes for sale in Ma’ale Adumim, Efrat, Mitzpe Yericho, Ramat Givat Ze’ev, Har Adar, Hashmonaim, and Ariel — all West Bank settlements located within a one-hour drive of Jerusalem — as well as Givat Hamatos, which is in East Jerusalem.

West Bank settlements have long drawn criticism from the international community, which regards the settlements as illegal, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli government disputes their illegality, however, and recognizes 146 settlements as legal, according to Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that tracks and opposes settlement expansion. The Israeli government leases land exclusively to Israelis, the group said, as Palestinians are barred from using the new plots the state has usurped in the West Bank.

Criticism of settlements have only intensified in recent months amid a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied territory, as Israel’s war in Gaza rages. And on Friday, Israel announced its plans to adopt five illegal outposts in the West Bank as settlements, which has also invited international condemnation. 

On its website, My Home in Israel, which helped organize the LA event and runs a team of U.S.-based real estate agents, posted photos from its other conventions in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Montreal, showing the interior of synagogues lined with booths manned by real estate firms, mortgage companies, and law firms, sitting and talking with prospective buyers. “Find your dream home in Israel,” reads one booth’s banner. “Live the American dream in the heart of Israel,” another reads atop a rendering of luxury apartments.

“A lot of people want to live out there — it’s beautiful, the mountains, it’s scenic,” said Baruki Cohen, a real estate agent, referring to West Bank settlements. His firm, Israel Home, did not participate at the LA event, but markets similar properties to Jewish Americans, selling property within Israel alongside houses in East Jerusalem. He plans to list properties in an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the future. A native of New Jersey who grew up visiting family in Israel, Cohen bought a second home in 2014 in Jerusalem. 

Cohen said real estate conventions, such as the LA event, have been going on for at least the past decade. Conventions are commonly hosted in hotel conference rooms and in people’s homes, in addition to synagogues. He estimates as many as 100 different real estate conventions take place across North America each year.

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank],” Cohen said. “I would live there myself if I felt it was safe. Anyone who wants to move there, we’re happy to facilitate it.”

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank].”

Since the early years after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the country has invited the immigration of Jews from across the globe. Immigration beyond the Green Line — the border between Israel and the West Bank that was drawn after the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes as a part of an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba — boomed in the 1980s, as settlements expanded from small illegal outposts into suburban cities with the help of the Israeli government’s funding and military support. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to evict Palestinians from their land and homes as settlements expand.

Most Jewish Americans who exercise their right to emigrate to Israel don’t move to the West Bank, experts say, but hundreds still make the choice to do so each year.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a visiting professor at the University of Haifa and an expert on Jewish American settlers, estimates that among the 3,000 Jewish Americans who move to Israel each year, about 15 percent of them are moving into settlements. There are about 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. About 60,000 are American, according to Hirschhorn. This excludes the more than 200,000 Israeli settlers who live in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967. 

To the majority of American immigrants, Hirschhorn said, the border between the state of Israel and the occupied West Bank still matters. But the real estate firms profiting off the modest yet steady stream of American migration are less discerning.

Jerusalem-based Noam Homes, which was part of the LA real estate event, lists properties within Israel, in cities such as Tel Aviv, alongside homes beyond the Green Line, in major settlements like Efrat and Ma’ale Adumim, which boasts a population of more than 30,000 with little recognition of their status as settlements. Most listings for settlement communities show an address in Israel and at times refer to the region with the biblical name of Judea and Samaria, the Israeli government’s preferred term for the West Bank.

“These are not like tiny hilltop outposts; these are massive settlement blocks that are contiguous with and integrated into Israeli state proper,” said Rachel Feldman, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College who specializes in Judaism and Israel and Palestine. “I spoke to American Jewish settlers here who don’t even have a sense that they are living beyond the state’s borders.”

Parents often send their children there for a gap year or seminary school, she said, treating the settlements as part of Israel. She said that during the Trump era, even more American Jews were emboldened to ignore the Green Line. 

Their studies predate the October 7 attacks, so Hirschhorn and Feldman could not quantify the impact of the Gaza war on American interest in West Bank homeownership. 

But Cohen, the real estate agent, said that he’s seen demand for Israeli property increase since the war began. Before October 7, he would receive about four or five inquiries from homebuyers each week. While the immediate weeks after the attacks were quiet, interest has picked up over the last three months, parallel to a series of settlement expansions announced by the Israeli government. Cohen said he now gets 15 inquiries per week. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest. 

“Although we are in the midst of the Iron Sword war,” said the Meny Group in promotional material on their website, using the Israeli government’s official name for the campaign, “the real estate market is booming.” Several other firms argued that investing in housing is a way for Jews to support Israel in times of conflict and instability. Firms also cited the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic as another crisis that the Israeli economy survived due to support from foreign and American buyers. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest.

Most firms’ marketing materials appeal more broadly to Zionist ideals of supporting the homeland and its economy, pitching owning “a piece of the Promised Land for themselves and future generations.” One such firm, the Meny Group, which was also present at real estate conventions across North America, notes the rise in antisemitism across the globe, painting Israel as “a beacon of security for Jews.”  

The real estate companies also highlighted economic concerns for American buyers. The Meny Group’s website highlights public education options that teach the Torah, in an appeal to Orthodox families who struggle to meet religious education costs in the U.S. One real estate agent who made the move from the U.S. wrote that tuition for his four children cost roughly $17,500 per child. In Israel, his costs in a single year for his children was $3,000.  

Hirschhorn said even though housing is expensive in Israel and the West Bank — like in the U.S. — the overall lower cost of living made possible by a state-sponsored Jewish infrastructure allows for life to possibly be more affordable. Health care is also socialized in Israel, and new arrivals may also receive small stipends or tax incentives and deductions to buy a new car or appliances for a new home.

“Cost of Kosher food is a lot less, you don’t have to worry about sending your kids to Jewish day school, cost of college in Israel isn’t going to be too much,” she said. “Being a part of Jewish community just really isn’t as expensive or difficult.”

The properties in the settlements are hardly cheap, but they are less expensive than homes within Israeli cities. The price for a condo in the popular Gush Etzion group of settlements ranges from $500,000 to $1 million, for properties with around four to six bedrooms and more than 1,000 square feet. Cohen said a similarly sized home in central Jerusalem may run for as much as $3 million. 

One listing shows a 2,000 square-foot penthouse in a suburban enclave of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, east of Jerusalem, for $1.2 million. The space, listed as a “Stunning Penthouse” has five bedrooms and two “generously sized” balconies with panoramic views. There is also the assurance of plenty of storage space. However, the penthouse also includes one other amenity less common in American homes: “a dedicated safe room for your peace of mind.”    

“American Jews might want to maintain a certain kind of middle-class living standard if they’re imagining moving to Israel, and that actually might not be possible inside Israel proper,” Feldman said. “And so they start to look to the West Bank. What looks like a nice, spacious middle-class house with a yard starts to look nice compared to a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.”

Settlements often have their own schools, parks, swimming pools, supermarkets, dry cleaners, sports facilities, hairdressers, and synagogues. 

On the website for Nefesh-B’nefesh, a nonprofit that encourages and facilitates Jewish immigration from the U.S. to Israel, users are able to read neighborhood profiles to compare settlements’ educational and religious options. The profiles also mention whether there are other English speakers in the area. The online portal is often the starting point for Jewish Americans who look to immigrate; the organization assists with paperwork and other bureaucratic steps. 

Like the real estate companies, the nonprofit does not honor the Green Line, listing unlawful settlements in its neighborhood profiles as a part of Israel. The site also links users to Yad2, similar to Zillow and Craigslist, which shows dozens of housing listings across Israel and on settlements.

During the research for her book on Jewish American settlers, Hirschhorn said a woman told her that the settlement community she lived in “was the place I could get a bagel on Sunday morning, but also know that I was going to be in the right place when the redemption of the Jewish people and the messiah came.” 

In late June, the Israeli government seized an additional 3,000 acres of West Bank land for other planned settlements, barring Palestinians from using it. The land seizure, made public last week, is the largest by Israel since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Peace Now said. The government has taken more than 5,000 acres of land in the West Bank this year, the group said, the most in any single year during the same 30-year span. In March, the Israeli government also approved the construction of 3,400 new homes in settlements, the majority of which will be built in Ma’ale Adumim. Most of the companies attached to the real estate events list properties in the settlement. 

The Jewish real estate market in the West Bank remains an important piece of the current Israeli government’s expansion into the occupied territory. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who oversees the office that handles new housing developments, celebrated the project and declared on X, “The enemies try to hurt and weaken, but we will continue to build and be built in this country.” He lives in the settlement of Kedumim, though his home, built outside of the settlement proper, appears to violate even Israeli law, according to reports.

Smotrich most recently made statements that reveal his long-term goals of annexing the entirety of the West Bank away from Palestinians, and expressed his support of legitimizing newer, illegal settlements. 

“We will establish sovereignty … first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements,” Smotrich said last week during a meeting, according to Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The 2.8 million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank already face restrictions on day-to-day movement throughout the territory. And since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has resulted in the killings of more than 500 Palestinians, 133 of them children, by Israeli military forces or settlers, according to the United Nations’s top human rights official and an Intercept investigation. The 2023 death toll was the highest since 2005 when the U.N. started tracking casualties in the West Bank. 

“As the world’s eyes has been primarily focused on Gaza, the settler movement has continued unabated and pushed even harder to establish illegal settlements, to further develop settlements, to take more land,” said Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, which opposes West Bank settlements. “They’ve pushed whole Palestinian communities off of their land almost every day, certainly every week.”

His colleagues at their Israel-based counterpart, Peace Now, which tracks the settler movement, have reported incidents of violence from Jewish settlers, harassment, burning olive groves, and stealing sheep from Palestinian farmers. In 2023, settlers built 26 new illegal outposts, the most since the group starting keeping track in 2002, the group reported. So far this year, 14 additional settler outposts have been built.  

Americans, even outside the Jewish community, play a major role in supporting the expansion of settlements, Susskind said. He pointed to evangelical Christian groups that pump millions into pro-settler causes. In February, one American Christian pro-settler group, HaYovel, raised $3.5 million to buy hundreds of vests, helmets, binoculars, flashlights, and security drones for settlers in the West Bank. The group looks to raise an additional $25 million.

Americans for Peace Now has urged the U.S. government to do more to stop the flow of such funds. Susskind credited Biden’s executive order that allowed the State Department to sanction certain organizations and individuals for violence committed in the West Bank. So far the government has sanctioned Israeli Jewish settlers Zvi Bar Yosef, Moshe Sharvit, Neriya Ben Pazi, and Ben Zion Gopstein for repeated attacks and threats against Palestinians; the organizations Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich, which raised funds for that fueled further settler violence; and Tzav 9, an extremist Israeli group that has attacked aid convoys in the West Bank on their way to Gaza. 

“Palestinians are going to continue to have all the day-to-day problems, and they certainly are not going to have justice and equality until the occupation ends,” Susskind said. “You have to deal with people’s immediate needs, but the big picture there is only one answer, which is an end to the occupation.”

Correction: Tuesday, July 9, 5:11 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Rachel Feldman as an anthropologist at Dartmouth University; she works at Dartmouth College. A quote from Feldman was incorrectly transcribed to state that West Bank property “starts to look nice compared to a tiny, affordable apartment in Tel Aviv.” Feldman’s comparison invoked a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.

The post The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement appeared first on The Intercept.

When people told aid worker Fayad Mulla that as soon as asylum-seekers land on Greek soil, they’re immediately chased by groups of “masked men” assigned to kidnap them, Mulla found it hard to lend the stories credence.

Reports and rumors about black ops by Greek authorities have floated around for years, but the idea of state-sanctioned thugs running around beating migrants, throwing them in the trunks of cars, and forcing them back onto boats was too much for Mulla to believe. “It’s a European Union country,” he told an interviewer from the BBC, explaining his skepticism. That changed when he caught it on tape.

Through a long lens, he recorded a video of Greek guards on the island of Lesbos marching migrant families onto a speedboat. In one shot, you can clearly see a uniformed man in a balaclava carrying a child onto the boat. It’s shocking, yet this is part of a logical progression of escalating violence against migrants as governments erode the linked rights to asylum and rescue.

The BBC interviewed Mulla as part of its new documentary, “Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?” which starts with the question and ends with the facts: The Hellenic Coast Guard has turned the internationally recognized right of refugees to apply for asylum into a sick game, chasing down every man, woman, and child who lands unbidden in the country’s archipelago as part of a coordinated effort to deny them asylum rights.

Rather than an exception, the Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers. From Venezuela to Mexico to Libya to Hungary to Japan, we’re seeing a semi-coordinated effort among wealthy countries to abolish one of the few legal responsibilities the world’s rich and comfortable have toward the poor and afflicted.

The Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers.

Mulla’s video, first published by the New York Times in 2023, is a smoking gun, but analysts have also compiled a ton of circumstantial evidence that details an inescapable pattern. Forensic Architecture tracked and mapped over 2,000 instances of what the research group calls “drift-backs” from Greek territorial waters between 2020 and 2023. Once captured by the masked men, migrants are put onto motorless rubber boats and literally shoved toward Turkish territorial waters. Instead of the authorities expelling people directly, according to Forensic Architecture, “natural processes and geographical features of the Aegean archipelago — currents, waves, winds and uninhabited rocks — carry out the expulsion, distancing the perpetrators from the impact of their lethal actions.” The group counts 55,445 people expelled via the technique over three years, including 24 deaths and 17 disappearances.

Not included in the Forensic Architecture count is the June 2023 sinking of the migrant ship Adriana in the Mediterranean, in which over 600 people lost their lives. As recounted by survivors in “Dead Calm,” the Hellenic Coast Guard was so slow to respond to the ship’s distress that presumed negligence becomes probable malice. Ultimately, it was a Mexican-owned luxury yacht that came to the rescue, such as it was. But the Greeks weren’t the only ones responsible for the Adriana disaster: As Mulla said, Greece is part of the EU, and the EU has Frontex, an international border management agency. At its Polish headquarters, Frontex was monitoring the situation, but that didn’t do the passengers on the Adriana much good. Pushed by the BBC to condemn the now well-documented practices of the Hellenic Coast Guard, Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer Jonas Grimheden walked off the set.

Though it appears that the EU is defending the Hellenic Coast Guard, the inverse is closer to the truth: As the southeastern corner of the EU, Greece is responsible for deflecting as many migrants as possible from Europe.

“This border is not only a Greek border, it is also a European border,” declared European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in a 2020 joint press conference with the Greek prime minister. “I thank Greece for being our European aspida in these times,” she said, using the Greek word for “shield.” Greece is between Europe and many tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, and it stands astride the border wearing a mask and strapped with a combat knife. In support of this border work, the EU has funneled billions of euros to its member-state. Frontex also deploys aerial surveillance assets, its own ships, and even on-the-ground personnel who have collaborated with Greek police in the drift-back scheme.

Europe doesn’t just fund the Greek side: The European Union has sent over $10 billion worth of assistance to Turkey, a non-member state, to help guard the border. Billions more have gone to Egypt, Tunisia, and Mauritania — all with the goal of reducing the number of asylum-seekers who make it to somewhere within the EU where they can exercise their inviolable rights.

In the Western hemisphere, Mexico serves as un escudo for the United States, shielding its richer neighbor to the north.

President Joe Biden ended the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, but his June order to halt asylum processing at the southern border has had a similar effect. And under heavy pressure from the United States, Mexico adopted the cost-effective practice of pushing migrants back to the country’s own south, relying on the difficult journey to dissuade people traveling to the U.S. from Central and South America. Last month, the Associated Press reported accusations from an asylum-seeker that she was beaten by Mexican soldiers in front of her children before they were all put on a bus south. Such scenes and their direct connection to U.S. policy are so well-documented that any deniability is implausible, but that seems to be good enough for Biden and the international bodies to which heads of state are supposedly accountable.

If Donald Trump wins in November, the American attack on asylum will only accelerate. Like other conservative demagogues, the ex-president has made “migrant crime” a focus of his campaign, using it as an all-purpose answer in last month’s debate. Along with “Remain in Mexico,” we can expect Trump to reinstate Turkey-style Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras at minimum. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 victory plan goes further, hinting at a frontal attack on the right to asylum itself. “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed,” the authors write, “They should be abandoned.”

The dastardly Project 2025 schemers are correct about one thing: It is not the prerogative of individual states to protect their borders by whatever means they choose. The right to seek asylum as a refugee is statutorily enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and is, in theory, one of international law’s few guarantees. Non-refoulement (the French word for “push back”) is supposed to be a human right.

Non-refoulement is supposed to be a human right.

But if the rich Western countries who enforce international law conspire to obviate the same rule, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. For example, Hungary is currently subject to a $1 million euro fine per day by the EU’s highest court to penalize it for refouling migrants, but Prime Minister Viktor Orbán should be able to afford it: von der Leyen graciously unblocked over 10 billion euros in frozen EU funds for Hungary’s illiberal ruling clique in December. Taken as a whole, the EU’s position is clear — and clearly lawless. Investigative agencies will continue to write their reports, but there’s no way to appeal the decisions of armed men in masks.

As of yet, nations are not challenging the Refugee Convention directly, even as they move to scale back and even nullify its protections. In this environment, nations that sit between the world’s richest countries and its poorest and most war-torn can offer a valuable service as buffers and border guards. Every asylum-seeker that Greece pushes back is one that Germany never needs to worry about accommodating.

Though a climatically and politically unstable world does mean more refugees, the global attack on asylum is not a byproduct of overwhelming immigration. Japan, for example, tightened its policy in June by making it easier to deport asylum-seekers, although the restrictive country only awarded refugee status to 303 people in 2024, which was still a national record. A few hundred people in a population of over 100 million can’t pose any real burden on the country’s resources; the problem is with the principle that people are entitled to flee hardship and seek refuge. The goal is to whittle a right into a rare privilege.

To accomplish that, the West has to find ways to make seeking asylum even less appealing and more dangerous than the wars and disasters people are fleeing in the first place. Authorities must invent new cruelties to administer, cook up new nightmares to visit on the world’s most desperate. With their masks and knives and beatings, the Hellenic Coast Guard leads the way.

“There is a huge amount to learn from the Greek authorities and the Greek government in terms of the approach that they’ve taken towards illegal migration,” United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the press after a guided tour of coast guard operations on Samos, an island notorious for drift-backs. In April, the day after the U.K. passed a new policy that involves deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, five people drowned in the English Channel on their way to Britain, including a child.

As far as rich countries are concerned, these drownings are not a problem — they are a model policy solution. So if you want an image of the future, imagine a masked man kidnapping a child, putting her on a raft, and shoving it into the open sea, over and over and over again.

The post The World War on Asylum appeared first on The Intercept.

The communications include new allegations about Khan’s history with Munir. According to those in touch with the imprisoned prime minister, Khan is making new allegations that Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

Imran Khan is making new allegations that Asim Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

The deposed prime minister also alleges that Munir conspired with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to cooperate against him in exchange for dropping corruption charges that had forced Sharif into exile.

The escalating personal conflict between Khan and Munir also looms large in the communications. Khan alleges that Munir ordered agents of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service to kill him and that the general covered up assassination attempts by squashing a police probe and burying CCTV footage.

The allegations from Khan about Munir come as the general has continued amassing political power and leading a brutal crackdown on rival political parties, activists, and the press in Pakistan.

The crackdown included the removal and imprisonment of Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician; violence and arrests targeting his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party; and a rigged election this February.

Khan’s fate remains the biggest unanswered question in the country’s politics, which the prison communiques suggest are driven by acrimony between him and Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists.”

With transnational repression reaching the U.S. — the military reportedly detained Pakistan-based family members of rivals living in the U.S. and Canada — the crackdown is drawing increasingly stronger condemnations from American officials.

Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., issued a video statement condemning the targeting of family members of Americans and called for sanctions to be placed on Pakistani military leaders including Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists,” Khanna said. “We all know the elections in Pakistan were rigged, and Imran Khan is still in jail. The United States needs to sanction Asim Munir and any military leader in Pakistan who is targeting Americans.”

Assassination Attempts

Khan’s allegations about Munir were shared with The Intercept by a number of sources close to him who requested anonymity to protect their security.

In the communications, Khan alleges the existence of CCTV footage and other evidence showing that Munir concocted a scheme to have Khan killed at a tumultuous court appearance on March 18, 2023.

Khan’s car was mobbed by spectators on the way to court, some of whom, Khan alleges, were Inter-Services Intelligence agents dressed in civilian clothes. The attempt on his life, Khan says, was only thwarted by a crowd of PTI supporters who surrounded his car.

Khan also offered his own narrative on a November 2022 incident when he was wounded in a shooting attack at a political rally that killed one of his supporters. The Pakistani government detained a single person for the attack, whom officials claimed had been motivated by religious extremism.

According to sources close to the former prime minister, Khan accused Munir of being behind a cover-up of the incident. The general, he claims, blocked an independent probe into the attack and that eyewitness accounts pointed to the involvement of multiple assailants.

Munir’s Political Plays

Pakistan has been held hostage to the political clash between Khan and Munir, with the former prime minister now imprisoned on charges widely seen as politicized.

Khan claims that Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including Sharif, the former prime minister, to spare them from corruption charges. In exchange, the politicians like Sharif supported jailing Khan and cracking down on his party.

Khan claims Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to spare them from corruption charges.

The crackdown — extrajudicial killings, torture, mass detentions, and other sweeping measures aimed at dismantling the PTI — has so far failed to dim Khan’s popularity. In elections this February, candidates affiliated with PTI won sweeping support, according to exit polls, before electoral rigging engineered by the military allowed a coalition government of Khan’s opposition to form.

Khan characterizes the events as a betrayal by Munir. In Khan’s telling, according to the sources close to him, the prime minister’s downfall was precipitated after Munir reneged on an agreement. Khan says that the then-President Arif Alvi, a senior member of his party, had the power to block Munir’s ascension to the top military post in the country but allowed it to go forward after the general’s emissaries said he planned to stay out of politics.

Munir, like Pakistani military leaders before him, plays a prime role in the country’s political affairs.

Khan’s legal status remains in flux after serious corruption and espionage charges against him were thrown out in court. The former prime minister now remains imprisoned solely on charges that he improperly married his third wife in contravention of religious guidelines.

PTI meanwhile remains at odds with the military establishment, with halting attempts to mediate a resolution to Pakistan’s ongoing political standoff so far unsuccessful.

Deepening Crackdown — and Crises

Khan’s removal by his military and civilian rivals came in a 2022 no-confidence vote organized amid pressure from the U.S. over the prime minister’s foreign policy stances.

Since the removal, Pakistan has been wracked by overlapping economic and political crises that have paralyzed the nation of 200 million.

Even with Khan and PTI sidelined, the military continues its attempts to suppress speech. This year, the military blocked X and issued a statement denouncing “digital terrorism.” Government officials have also made reference to imposing a national firewall on the country’s internet.

Khan’s personal safety is widely believed to be in jeopardy by his supporters, including Pakistani Americans who recently lobbied for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to contact the Pakistani government about his safety.

In addition to blaming Munir for betraying his trust and attempting to engineer his murder, from prison Khan has repeatedly raised the specter that the general is leading the country toward a repeat of its traumatic 1971 partition — a stinging embarrassment for Pakistani nationalists.

The partition occurred following a military-led crackdown and massacre after an army rival won elections. The civil war spurred the secession of the eastern half of the country into the nation of Bangladesh.

Correction: June 27, 2024, 2:47 p.m. ET

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Imran Khan was prime minister at the time of Asim Munir’s ascension, and could have blocked it. This story has been updated to note that Arif Alvi was president at that time.

The post From Prison, Imran Khan Says Top Pakistani General Betrayed Secret Deal to Stay Out of Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

“Since the attack at our ambulances that was dispatched to save Hind Rajab, there has been no investigations made by the Israelis or any contact from the Israelis to the Red Crescent,” said spokesperson Nebal Farsakh. “We as the Palestinian Red Crescent have not received any kind of communication from the Israeli military.”

On Monday, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that, according to Israel, the Red Crescent and the United Nations had rebuffed Israeli efforts to investigate the incident that had made headlines around the world. On January 29, Hind and her 15-year-old cousin made a desperate call to the Red Crescent, asking for help while stuck in a car with family members they said were killed by Israeli fire. After hours of negotiations with the Israeli military to coordinate safe passage, the Red Crescent dispatched an ambulance to save Hind (her cousin was killed during their first call), only for the medics to be found dead near Hind days later.

“All I can tell you is what they’ve told us. And what they have said is, they went to the U.N. and the Palestinian Red Crescent and asked them to supply information that would help them, and what they claim is that they were given none,” Miller said. 

His comments came on the heels of an independent investigation by the U.K.-based firm Forensic Architecture, which concluded that Israeli fire was most likely responsible for the attack, and that it was “not plausible” that Israeli forces would not have seen who they shot 335 bullets at.

“It’s not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children,” the firm found. “From the tank position indicated by the greatest alignment between entry and exit holes, we concluded that the shooter would have had a clear view of the car and its passengers.”

Asked about those findings on Monday, Miller noted that Israel said there were no tanks in the area, and that the State Department couldn’t attest to any particularities because it is only conveying what Israel has said. The State Department did not respond to a follow-up question about the Red Crescent’s statement, nor did the Israeli military.

Hind, in some of her final moments to a Red Crescent dispatcher, said she had seen a tank nearby.

“They are dead,” Rajab said about her family members who were killed right in front of her. “The tank is next to me.”

“It’s almost night, I am scared,” she cried. “Come get me, please.”

The Washington Post previously confirmed there were armed military vehicles in the vicinity, as did Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite imagery. 

Miller, when citing Israel’s claim that there were no tanks in the area, said, “I am not attesting to any of these facts.” Asked about whether the U.S. will verify any of Israel’s statements, he added, “It is not for us to do it.”

“Those agencies can come forward and provide information, it’s easy to do so. If in fact they have information, they should come forward and do it, and provide, and we’ll be happy to look at that.”

Farsakh also said that the Red Crescent and the International Red Cross received no information during the 12 days after January 29, when Hind’s whereabouts were unknown. She also noted that Tel al-Hawa, where the attack happened, was under evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military due to ongoing operations at the time. Such conditions prompted the Red Crescent to make arrangements with Israeli forces to dispatch an ambulance, a process that took three hours.

It was during those hours that Hind uttered her final, chilling pleas for help. Despite the coordination, paramedics Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun were found dead, just meters from where Hind was found on February 10.

In the nearly five months since the killings, The Intercept repeatedly asked the State Department about the incident, the status of investigations, and how the U.S. could continue sending Israel aid if it could not get straightforward answers on the case. (U.S. policy requires foreign governments to provide assurances they won’t violate international law with U.S. weapons; the U.S. found that Israel likely violated law with American weapons, but did not act on the conclusion.) On almost every occasion, Miller said the U.S. was asking Israel to investigate. 

On February 14, for example, after The Intercept asked about the range of material available for an investigation to proceed, Miller said the question is “appropriately addressed to the government of Israel,” but that the U.S. wanted the incident to be investigated. Several times after, Miller either did not have an update on the “ongoing” investigation, or said the department would “come back” after getting an answer.

After nearly 150 days, the State Department finally came back with answers: ones that relied wholly on Israeli claims — assertions the U.S. admitted it did not attempt to verify, that deflated upon the slightest provocation.

The post Red Crescent Says Israel Never Reached Out About Hind Rajab’s Death, Despite State Department Claim That Israel Said Otherwise appeared first on The Intercept.

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

“Targeting of al Ghefari tower, which houses media offices, west of Gaza City,” read the chyron of Alhurra TV, a U.S. government Arabic broadcaster, just before 11:57 a.m. local time on November 2. The channel was covering the strike on an 18-story building, the tallest in the Gaza Strip. The building is visible in the far left corner of the screen when suddenly an explosion rattles the image. Debris and smoke fly live on camera. The presenter, unsure of what had happened, says, “We don’t know yet where this strike is, but it happened live just now.”

What the presenter didn’t know was that viewers were watching live on TV a strike on another media organization, Agence France-Presse, less than an hour after the one on the offices of Palestine Media Group in the al-Ghefari tower — the very building Alhurra TV was discussing while viewing the AFP live feed. AFP itself occupies the 10th and 11th floors of the 12-story Haji Tower, just a few hundred meters, or 0.2 miles, away on the same street.

Alhurra broadcast the strike live not because it had its own camera in the tower, but because the network was tapped into an AFP live feed from a camera set up on the balcony of the 10th floor. The attack caused extensive damage to the building and offices: a large hole in one side of the building, and significant interior destruction. Fortunately, no one was there. AFP’s Gaza City staff of eight had evacuated the building, leaving behind a mostly unmanned camera powered by solar panels, broadcasting a 24/7 live feed. AFP was the only one of the three major global news agencies still broadcasting live from the Gaza Strip.

AFP immediately contacted the Israeli military. The initial response was that there were no strikes on the building. Pressed for more details, the Israeli spokesperson said the army had carried out a strike nearby that “might have caused debris” but that “the building was not targeted in any way.” AFP said the extent of the damage cannot be explained by the military’s response and requested “an in-depth and transparent investigation.”

The condemnations were swift. AFP’s chair and chief executive Fabrice Fries said the bureau’s location was known and communicated to the Israeli military routinely “precisely to prevent such an attack and to allow us to continue to provide images on the ground.” The Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, issued a statement categorizing it as an “attack.” The International Federation of Journalists demanded “an immediate investigation.”

After the early November strike, the war in Gaza grew more intense and the number of Palestinians killed, reported to be over 37,000 today, continued to climb. The scale of the destruction was beyond anyone’s expectations.

“The weapon type and accuracy inherent in the Israeli tank weapon system means that the weapon hit the target it was aimed at. The question of why remains unanswered.”

The AFP incident was mostly laid to rest until Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and its partners, including AFP, began looking into it as part of the Gaza Project: a collaboration of 50 journalists from 13 media organizations coordinated by Forbidden Stories to investigate attacks on journalists and press infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank.

The four-month investigation revealed that, contrary to Israeli army claims, the AFP office was directly fired at by Israeli tanks. The tanks fired four times between 11:55 a.m. and 12:09 p.m. local time on November 2, from around 3 kilometers away.

At least two strikes hit the AFP offices, damaging it and making it unusable.

The investigation’s findings relied on independent visual analyses of the live feed footage conducted by Le Monde and Paper Trail Media. They were confirmed by weapons and other experts. The findings matched the conclusions from an audio analysis provided by Earshot, an organization specializing in forensic audio investigations.

Adrian Wilkinson, a forensic explosives engineer who regularly works for the United Nations, said, “It is almost certain that the AFP office was shot at by an Israeli tank.” At least five other experts, including independent weapons and conflicts researcher War Noir and Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, agreed. Ball said the damage to the server room was consistent with tank fire.

​​Wilkinson ruled out the possibility of an accidental hit. He’s convinced that the soldiers operating the Israeli tanks intended to hit that floor precisely. “The weapon type and accuracy inherent in the Israeli tank weapon system means that the weapon hit the target it was aimed at,” he said. “The question of why remains unanswered.”

A key element in the investigation was a series of flashes of light appearing 4 seconds before every explosion in the live footage. The flashes are shots being fired. A calculation based on an analysis of the flashes and detonations concluded that they were fired from about 3 kilometers away. Further analysis of the speed and features of ammunition led to the conclusion that it was a tank that fired them. Only Israel has tanks in Gaza.

Footage from al-Ghefari tower, the first building hit that day, shows Israeli tanks near the area on November 1. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs on October 31 and November 3 show hundreds of tanks a few hundred meters north of the suspected firing area, with visible tank tracks in the area. Satellite imagery shows no tanks the days before.

On November 2, 2023, Israel announced the completion of its encirclement of Gaza City, marking the beginning of the city’s siege.

In a written response to the consortium, the Israeli military insisted that there was no strike on the building on November 2 and said the AFP office was not targeted.

AFP Notified Military

AFP thought it had taken all necessary precautions to secure its offices when the war started. The news agency had had an office in Gaza for 30 years and were familiar with the protocols. AFP routinely shared its office address and Google Maps coordinates with the Israeli military, a standard practice for foreign media in Palestine. In October alone, AFP representatives reminded the military four times of its office location at Haji Tower in Gaza City.

On October 9, 2023, the news agency sent a letter from its CEO urging the military to “exercise extreme vigilance regarding the security of our Gaza staff,” particularly following an incident where a piece of shell landed on their building’s terrace. That same night, the Foreign Press Association asked for the AFP’s office location to share with the Israeli military, as it was doing for member organizations. The association confirmed to AFP that they shared the information with the army.

Despite their efforts, in the early hours of October 10, a staffer from the Gaza office informed Marc Jourdier, the agency’s Jerusalem bureau chief, of a call to a local resident by the Israeli military to evacuate the building. “Don’t waste a minute and evacuate,” Jourdier told the staffer. “I’m calling the army and getting back to you ASAP.”

Jourdier contacted the military and sent the office’s coordinates again. At 2:26 a.m., a powerful strike hit a smaller building nearby. Several people were killed, including three journalists who were standing in front of the building to cover the expected strike on Haji, which by then had been evacuated. An Israeli spokesperson told Jourdier they managed to stop the strike “thanks to your call.”

The full picture of what happened that night is still unclear. In its response to the consortium, Israel’s military said it targeted a facility used by a Hamas member but did not explain why an evacuation call was issued for the building housing the AFP.

On October 28, five days before the attack on the AFP offices, Jourdier sent the office location once more.

“Importance of the Livestreams”

Presented with the investigation’s findings, Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said, “According to international humanitarian law, media infrastructure is civilian infrastructure, so targeting it would be potentially a war crime.”

“I am not surprised,” said Shuruq As’ad, a journalist and spokesperson for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. But she is angry. “This is a clear and direct attack on a press office.” She added, “Israel knows the importance of the livestreams, especially the wires and how important they are for the international press which use these wire services.” The syndicate has documented the partial or total destruction of 73 media offices since October.

AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd said Israel needs to explain what their policy around live feeds is and if “in any way” they consider them legitimate targets, “because there’s enough circumstantial evidence to make us suspect that is how they are working.” He added, “We really must have answers and for the moment, we don’t have those.”

The “IDF has a history of attacks on media facilities,” says Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director at CPJ. He pointed to previous incidents, including the destruction of at least 20 media outlets in 2021, including the building housing The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. He insisted that it is part of a pattern that reflects a “lack of accountability” when it comes to the Israeli military attacking media facilities. “It’s not like you can easily make a mistake,” he said. “Israel knows everything about Gaza.”

51 Minutes Earlier…

While reviewing the AFP live feed for this investigation, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and its partners discovered footage of the earlier strike on the Palestine Media Group, or PMG, offices in the al-Ghefari building 51 minutes before the first strike hit AFP. We showed it to Earshot. “This strike also contains a similar succession of events as the four strikes on the server room: a distant muzzle flash in the same area as the flash observed in the four strikes,” Earshot analysts concluded.

There are notable similarities and differences between the PMG and AFP strikes. The offices of both media organizations, only a few hundred meters apart, were fired at by Israeli tanks on the same day, within an hour of each other. Both had cameras broadcasting live video of Gaza.

“They targeted us directly. They targeted the floor we were on.”

While there was nobody in the AFP office at the time of the strike, four people, including two journalists, who later recounted the incident to ARIJ and its partners, were on the 16th floor of al-Ghefari building. One of them sustained a leg injury.

On the morning of November 2, Ismail Abu Hatab, a freelance journalist who had been spending the night in the PMG offices, made his coffee and turned on the computer to finish uploading his footage from the previous night. “I grabbed the camera and then I didn’t see anything, I couldn’t hear anything, all I remember is a yellow line of light,” he said. A wall collapsed on Abu Hatab, and the force of the blast threw Abed Shanaa, the other journalist there that day, against the opposite wall.

Abu Hatab lost consciousness briefly. Then he realized what had happened. “They targeted us directly. They targeted the floor we were on,” he said. Shanaa rushed to pull Abu Hatab from under the rubble, fearing there might be another strike. Shanaa’s 20-year-old son, Haitham, pulled Abu Hatab from under the rubble. There was no elevator because the building had lost power earlier, so Haitham carried Abu Hatab down the 16 flights of stairs.

PMG occupied all four apartments on that floor, giving it 360-degree panoramic views of Gaza. “From the place where I take pictures, I took in all of Gaza,” said Abu Hatab. PMG set up cameras on all four sides and offered live feed services, including to Reuters and Al Arabiya TV.

Hassan al Madhoun, the CEO of PMG, said that a few days before the attack, on October 30, Israeli tanks appeared through the northern windows. Shanaa confirms they were visible from at least two cameras. Footage broadcast from al-Ghefari the day before the strike showed Israeli tanks in the vicinity. The video establishes a line of sight between the building and the area designated through audio and visual analysis as the place where the tanks fired from. Satellite imagery shows tracks from tanks were visible the next day, where none appeared before.

In a written response to the consortium, the Israeli military said it was not aware of a strike in the location and on the date provided.

After evacuating the building, Shanaa took Abu Hatab to the hospital for medical attention. Shaken by what had just happened, Shanaa decided to head to southern Gaza that day. The following day, al Madhoun, who was not at the office at the time of the attack, returned to salvage whatever equipment he could. He took a video of the damage.

Some time between November 25 and December 3, al-Ghefari building was struck again, this time causing more serious damage to the whole structure, with parts of the upper three floors completely collapsing.

While both AFP and PMG experienced similar attacks that day, one notable difference between the media organization stands out: PMG is a local Palestinian outlet, while AFP is an international French organization. Though the journalist was injured in the PMG attack, it was the strike against AFP’s empty office that attracted international attention and merited a response from the Israelis.

Martínez de la Serna, of CPJ, considers this another pattern. “Investigations or responses to the killing of a journalist usually only occur when an international journalist or news organization is affected,” he said. “For local journalists, the typical response is propaganda and nothing more.”

As’ad, of Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, expressed frustration at the international community’s failure to give equal importance to the safety of local journalists. “For us,” she said, “the crime of targeting media offices is the same, whether it’s AFP, Reuters, or Arab and local offices.”

​​On November 12 at 10:31 a.m., the AFP camera’s live feed, which continued running after the attack, shut down for good. There was no one available to reboot the transmission system. It was the last live feed from an international news agency in Gaza.

The shutdown marked the end of an avenue for important information gathering. “Where there is strong potential for a war crime being committed, obviously, the livestream becomes critical evidence,” said Khan, the U.N. special rapporteur.

Al Madhoun, PMG’s CEO, noted that his organization was broadcasting a raw livestream, an unfiltered reality without commentary.

He said, “But the image seemed to bother Israel.”

With additional reporting from Arthur Carpentier of Le Monde; Gaëlle Faure, Marc Jourdier, Sarah Benhaïda, Benoît Toussaint, and Jean-Marc Mojon of AFP; Léa Peruchon and Walid Batrawi of Forbidden Stories; Christo Buscheck, Maria Retter, Maria Christoph, Dajana Kolling, and Frederik Obermaier of Paper Trail Media; and Manisha Ganguly of The Guardian.

The post The Day Israeli Tanks Fired Directly at AFP’s Gaza Bureau appeared first on The Intercept.

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

Salman Bashir had been covering Israel’s war in Gaza on the ground for a month when his fellow journalist, Mohammed Abu Hatab, was killed. He threw his vest emblazoned with “PRESS” down on the ground in anguish during a live broadcast.

“We are victims on live TV,” Bashir said.

Abu Hatab, who worked for Palestine TV, was killed in November in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in an Israeli strike that destroyed his home and killed 11 of his family members.

He is among the more than 100 journalists who have been killed in the nine months of the war, marking it as the deadliest conflict on record for reporters — even more than World War II, which lasted six years.

When Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza, following the October 7 Hamas attack, the lives of journalists in the Gaza Strip were upended. No one anticipated the scale of loss and pain that was to follow.

Over four months, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, or ARIJ, partnered with 13 other news organizations to investigate the killing, injury, detention, and threats against Palestinian journalists and the destruction of media offices in Gaza. We also investigated attacks on journalists in the West Bank.

Despite telecommunication blackouts, the consortium interviewed 120 witnesses in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and consulted around 25 weapons experts and analysts.

The exact number of journalists who have been killed is difficult to determine, with several organizations collecting the information differently, but they all agree that the number is record-breaking.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, documented the killing of 102 Palestinian reporters and other media workers as of June 25, making this the deadliest war for journalists worldwide since the organization began collecting data in 1992.

“They’ve been killed while picking out food. They’ve been killed while resting in a tent,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director at CPJ. “They’ve been killed while reporting on the aftermath of a bombing.”

“They Are Doing Journalism”

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, or SPJ, a nonprofit based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, puts the figure even higher, at 140 journalists and media workers killed from the start of the war, and another 176 injured.

The deaths represent 10 percent of the journalists in Gaza, according to Shuruq As’ad, a spokesperson for the syndicate. “Journalists everywhere should be protected regardless of the country they work in,” she said.

The vast majority of journalists — 89 — were killed in airstrikes. At least 16 were killed while working. At least 56 were killed at home, and most of the time family members were killed with them.

While those killed were overwhelmingly men, 12 of the journalists were women.

The newsroom that lost the most journalists was Al-Aqsa Media Network, a media network affiliated with Hamas: 20 of its journalists were killed.

The Israeli military denied it targets journalists. “The IDF outright rejects the false accusation of targeted killing of journalists,” it said in a statement. “The IDF takes all operationally possible measures to reduce any harm to civilians, including journalists.”

The Israeli military said it “only targets military targets” and claimed Al-Aqsa often employs “terrorists” posing as journalists, but did not provide evidence.

CPJ says it is confident that every name on its casualties list is a journalist. “They are doing journalism, and they’re not engaged in incitement to violence. We clearly draw a line there,” said Martínez de la Serna. “We don’t get into evaluating Al-Aqsa or any other publication.”

“We will describe propaganda as propaganda, because it’s what the IDF has been traditionally doing when they have killed a journalist.”

He said the Israeli military is known to discredit journalists by calling them terrorists without evidence, noting that in the 30 years of CPJ’s work, they have never had to remove a name from their lists based on information provided by the Israeli army.

“We will describe propaganda as propaganda, because it’s what the IDF has been traditionally doing when they have killed a journalist,” Martínez de la Serna said.

Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said Israel has not provided evidence when it makes these accusations.

“The Israelis not only have spread disinformation about journalists being linked to militants, but they have not actually provided enough evidence of what care they are taking [to avoid killing journalists],” Khan said. “So they failed on both sides.”

“Why Do We Wear Press Vests?”

Dozens of journalists said they believed they were being targeted by the Israeli army. Many are afraid to wear press vests and helmets. Those around them fear they will be harmed by association, making it hard for some journalists to rent an apartment or get transportation, which is already difficult in a war.

“The [press] jacket, believe me, it’s not a protection,” said photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who evacuated Gaza in January. He recalled frequenting a cafe to upload his photos before the owner asked him to stop coming, fearing the Israeli army would target the cafe because a journalist was there.

One journalist said he limits his visits to his wife and children, who live separately while he’s reporting, out of fear that being with him would put them at risk.

Sami Barhoum, a correspondent for TRT Arabia, said, “My cameraman and I were on an assignment … we were directly hit by an artillery shell.” The news channel’s crew was attacked in April in Nuseirat refugee camp. He believes they were attacked because they are journalists.

His cameraman Sami Shehadeh, who was injured in the attack, said, “Why do we wear press vests? Why do we wear helmets? So they can target us?” He made the remarks from his hospital bed before his leg was amputated.

Since the beginning of the war in October, Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, filed three complaints with the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court “regarding Israeli war crimes against journalists.”

The complaints included the cases of more than 20 Palestinian journalists killed by the Israeli military during the war. “RSF has reasonable grounds to believe that some of these journalists were deliberately killed and that others were victims of deliberate attacks by the Israel Defense Forces against civilians,” the organization said in a statement.

CPJ is investigating over 500 incidents involving suspected targeting of journalists by Israeli forces.

Five months before the war, on the anniversary of the killing of well-known Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, CPJ published a report titled “Deadly Pattern,” which documented at least 20 cases in which journalists had been killed by Israeli forces over the past 22 years. No one has been charged and no one has been held accountable, according to CPJ.

Khan, the U.N. special rapporteur, said, “There is a history of Israeli impunity in the occupied territories.”

Israel’s Full Visibility in Gaza

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate documented 73 media offices that have been partially or completely destroyed by Israel in the war.

An investigation by ARIJ and its partners revealed that the Israeli military made false statements following an explosion at the Agence France-Presse headquarters in Gaza on November 2, 2023. The reporters obtained video of the attack on the Palestinian Media Group office in the tallest tower in Gaza, a few blocks away, on the same day. Both had livestream cameras.

Projectiles that struck the media offices were shells fired by Israeli tanks, according to the findings of the investigation. “Where there is strong potential for a war crime being committed, obviously, the livestream becomes critical evidence,” said Khan.

In February, the headquarters of Press House, a nonprofit supported by the governments of Norway and Switzerland, was destroyed despite donors notifying the Israeli military about the building’s location. One of Press House founder Belal Jadallah’s friends was staying there with his family until late January. He witnessed a tank firing directly at the building and was convinced they were targeting Press House. They evacuated the building, and shortly afterward, it was completely demolished. (Jadallah himself was killed by Israeli tank shelling in November.)

“It’s not like you can easily make a mistake,” said CPJ’s Martínez de la Serna, “Israel knows everything about Gaza.”

It’s not the first time that Israel has destroyed media offices during a war in Gaza. In 2021, Israel struck a tower housing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera — two of the more than 20 outlets whose offices were destroyed in the war that year. “So we see this as part of a pattern of attack on journalism,” Martínez de la Serna said.

Khan said, “According to international humanitarian law, media infrastructure is civilian infrastructure, so targeting it would be potentially a war crime.”

Drones See, Hear, and Kill

Earlier this year, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif said, “We were directly targeted by surveillance drones” in an attack while working in the Tel al-Zaatar area of northern Gaza. He told ARIJ that he received additional threats over the phone from the Israeli military.

Even before the recent war, Israeli drones were constantly flying over Gaza, gathering information and conducting surveillance. Local residents call them “zanana,” an Arabic word to describe the buzzing sound they make.

Khalil Dewan, a lawyer and researcher in the use of drones at the University of London, said the Israeli army “hits its targets with a high degree of knowledge of who it is killing.” He added that drones accurately identify their targets, based on information gathered from cellphones, social media, livestreams, and location detection if activated on phones.

As with human sense, drones have sensors that allow them to hear and see, with collected data transmitted to a ground station. Three experts said Israeli drones have sensors strong enough for a drone operator to see a press vest.

“We were directly targeted by surveillance drones.”

Asa Kasher, who drafted the Israel Defense Forces’ 1994 code of ethics, said, “I believe that if the press markings are clearly placed on the journalist, the drone operator will see them.”

The Israeli military claimed it doesn’t “deliberately target journalists.”

Since the war began, at least 20 journalists and media workers were reportedly attacked by precision strikes likely launched from drones. At least seven were wearing press vests identifying them as journalists.

“Journalists killed by drones are a priority for us, and they need to be very carefully investigated,” said Martínez de la Serna.

Surveillance technology used by Israel in Gaza goes beyond drones. A New York Times investigation published in March showed that, by the end of 2023, Israel had deployed facial recognition software in Gaza, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent. In addition, a recent investigation by +972 Magazine revealed that the Israeli military has used artificial intelligence to identify targets.

The Survivors

Amid ongoing Israeli bombardment, neighborhoods in Gaza have been reduced to rubble, and the threat of famine looms, particularly in the north, where insufficient aid is being allowed in.

Palestinian journalists, besieged alongside all Gazans, have been key in informing the world about what’s happening in the war, especially given Israel’s ban on foreign media entering the Gaza Strip.

Of the 213 journalists from Gaza surveyed in June by ARIJ, 59 said they had been injured during the war.

Many have lost family members.

A third of the 213 respondents said they lost family members, including 49 who lost a member of their immediate family and 11 who said one or more of their children died in the war.

There were five journalists who lost 40 members of their families or more. The total number of family members lost by all journalists surveyed was 661.

Almost all of them have been displaced from their homes. Half of them have been displaced from homes at least five times, and four of them have been displaced 20 times or more.

Almost half are living in tents. The homes of 183 journalists were partially or totally destroyed. One hundred ninety-five people lost equipment used for reporting, and 100 lost their jobs.

One aspect of the war’s toll that is difficult to capture with numbers is the combination of fatalism and dedication among the journalists.

Roshdi al-Sarraj, a journalist who ran an independent media company that did work for the BBC and Le Monde, wrote on October 13 on Facebook that he intended to defy an Israeli army order to evacuate Gaza City.

“We will not leave … and if we leave, we will go to the sky, and only to the sky,” he wrote in his post.

Nine days later, al-Sarraj was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in the Gaza City neighborhood of Tal al-Hawa.

With additional reporting by Ethar AlAzem of ARIJ; Léa Peruchon and Mariana Abreu of Forbidden Stories; Frederik Obemeyer of Paper Trail Media; and Madjid Zerrouky of Le Monde.

The post Israel’s War on Gaza Is the Deadliest Conflict on Record for Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

A photo posted by the unit itself, however, seems to suggest that the U.S. was providing support as far back as December of last year. 

The photo, in tandem with the administration’s own statements, highlights the murky nature of the arms ban, how it was imposed, and under what U.S. authority. Two mechanisms could have barred arms transfers: a law passed by Congress specifically prohibiting assistance to Azov, and the so-called Leahy laws that block support to units responsible for grave rights violations. 

“My guess is that the Department found that the Brigade is a ‘new unit,’ distinguishable from the Battalion and the Regiment.”

The State Department said this month that weapon shipments will now go forward after a Leahy law review, but won’t comment on if and when a Leahy ban was in effect. The congressional prohibition, the U.S. says, does not apply because it barred assistance to the Azov Battalion, a predecessor to the Azov Brigade. The original unit had earned scrutiny for alleged human rights violations and ties to neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies.

The U.S. has not made clear about when the apparent ban started, but a deputy Azov commander and media reports indicate some type of prohibition has been in effect for nearly a decade — though the congressional ban has only been in effect since 2018.

“There was a request for resources for the 12th Special Forces Brigade, which prompted a Leahy vetting process, in which they were found to be eligible,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept, suggesting the approval process did not deal with any existing bans. (The State Department did not respond to questions asking for clarity if that was the case.)

One former American official said that because of the unit’s byzantine history of reorganizations and official status, the State Department should better explain its decisions.

“Given the history of the Azov Regiment, the Azov Battalion, and the Azov Brigade, the State Department’s ought to provide a more detailed rationale for the finding that the Brigade is eligible pursuant to the Leahy law,” Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, told The Intercept. “My guess is that the Department found that the Brigade is a ‘new unit,’ distinguishable from the Battalion and the Regiment. If that’s correct, the Department should say so.”

U.S. Special Ops Training

Restrictions on U.S. military support may have been in effect when the Azov Brigade’s official Telegram channel and X account announced in March that the unit’s personnel recently completed an American military training. The course, on civil–military cooperation, was provided by U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, or SOCEUR, according to the posts.

One attached photo shows a captain in the Azov unit being presented with a certificate dated December 2023 by a person with a blurred face in U.S. military fatigues. A second photo shows a group of people in U.S. military apparel holding an American flag next to a group of several dozen others, some of whom are holding a flag with the Azov insignia.

Department of Defense spokesperson Tim Gorman would not comment on the SOCEUR training, including whether or not it was legal, and referred The Intercept to the State Department. (The Azov unit did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department also declined to answer repeated questions about the SOCEUR training and its legality, or whether there had been other U.S. military training with Azov before clearing the group under the Leahy laws.

The spokesperson told The Intercept that it found no evidence of the Azov Brigade committing violations of human rights that would bar American aid under the Leahy laws.

Russia has tried to discredit the Azov Brigade, the State Department spokesperson said, by conflating it with its predecessor, the Azov Battalion militia. The Azov Battalion, which is under congressional sanctions, was absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014 then underwent several more reorganizations before becoming a brigade in 2023. Others have echoed concerns of propaganda against Azov, pointing to Russia’s amplification of claims about Nazis in Ukraine to justify its invasion.

“That militia disbanded in 2015 and the composition of Special Forces Brigade Azov is significantly different,” the spokesperson noted. Another spokesperson, meanwhile, said, “The Battalion was disbanded in 2014 and the United States has never provided security assistance to the ‘Azov battalion.’”

With the State Department leaning on the distinction between the “battalion” and the “brigade” to get around congressional sanctions, some representatives are moving to shore up the statutory ban on military support to Azov. In recent days, the proposed defense appropriations language was updated. 

“None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, intelligence, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion, the Third Separate Assault Brigade, or any successor organization,” the new language reads, gesturing to a brigade created by Battalion veterans, as well as the Azov Brigade itself. The current language in effect only addresses the Azov Battalion.

A former House staffer who was involved in efforts to ban support to Azov, requesting anonymity for fear of threats from the group, told The Intercept, “The fact that Congress is moving so quickly to reaffirm that the ban does apply to ‘successor organizations’ like the Azov Regiment, Azov Brigade, or whatever else they might change their name to next, shows that the White House view doesn’t hold water.”

Significantly Different?

As it is, the State Department’s limited rationale for lifting arms restrictions rests on the claim that the composition of the battalion and the brigade are “significantly different.” That finding would be made under provisions of the Leahy determinations that allow for differentiating between old and “fundamentally different units,” such as changes in leadership and culture. 

Yet the Azov unit has significant continuity and, while Leahy laws are concerned with human rights, the State Department’s appeal to the Leahy determination may not cover the ideological justification of the congressional ban on the transfer of arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.

Azov commander Denys Prokopenko and deputy commander Svyatoslav Palamar, for instance, are holdovers from the original battalion militia. And, along with other higher-ranking Azov members, they are linked to white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies, as Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin reported in The Nation last year. 

“If the White House wants to arm and train the most neo-Nazi-linked group in Ukraine, it should push for Congress to remove the ban.”

The suggestion that the battalion was “disbanded” and the brigade is “significantly different” is also undermined by the unit’s own words. A page on their website celebrates its 10-year anniversary. “This is the path from a few dozen volunteers, who had only motivation and faith in justice, to a special purpose brigade — one of the most effective units of the Defense Forces,” it reads.

Another biographical page suggests the Azov Battalion was never actually dissolved, but subsumed into the official Ukrainian military structure. “On September 17, 2014, by order of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the ‘Azov’ battalion was reorganized and expanded into the ‘Azov’ special purpose militia regiment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the page says. “On November 11, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine signed an order on the transfer of the ‘Azov’ regiment to the National Guard of Ukraine, with its further staffing up to the combat standard of the National Guard brigades.”

Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs who resigned in protest of the administration’s policy on Israel’s Gaza war, told The Intercept he was not aware of any standing restriction on Azov. He recalled speaking to subject matter experts who said there were no concerns, and, as far as he knew, the unit had been eligible for aid since at least 2022. “My understanding is that they genuinely are different entities,” he said, adding that he did not see any evidence while at the State Department to suggest the Azov Brigade should be prohibited from receiving security assistance.

Ukrainian officials, for their part, seemed to suggest to the Washington Post that there was indeed a ban, one that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba apparently raised to Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month. (Paul said there was “something odd going on, but my solid recollection is that there was no restriction, so I’m not sure what the Ukrainians are on about.”)

Two months ago — after the social media pictures appearing to show the training — Prokopenko, the Azov commander, said on X, “Azov is still blacklisted from receiving any U.S. aid.” In a May post, Prokopenko complained Azov had fought to defend Mariupol in 2022 with limited resources and outdated weapons because of the congressional ban on aid — suggesting the statutory sanctions applied to the unit at the time.

“The unavoidable reality is that there is a current ban on U.S. arms and training going to the Azov units,” said the former House staffer. “If the White House wants to arm and train the most neo-Nazi-linked group in Ukraine, it should push for Congress to remove the ban.”

“That may be a tall ask, however, as Congress is currently seeking to strengthen the law, rather than weaken it.”

The post The U.S. Says a Far-Right Ukrainian Army Unit Can Now Get Aid. A Photo Shows Training Was Already Happening. appeared first on The Intercept.

The resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia for last week’s U.N. International Telecommunication Union summit in Geneva, is aimed at returning internet access to Gaza’s millions of disconnected denizens.

It ultimately passed under a secret ballot on June 14 — but not before it was watered down to remove some of its more strident language about Israel’s responsibility for the destruction of Gaza. The U.S. delegate at the ITU summit had specifically opposed those references.

Israel, for its part, had blasted the proposal as a whole. Israel’s ITU delegate described it as “a resolution that while seemingly benign in its intent to rebuild telecommunications infrastructure, distorts the reality of the ongoing situation in Gaza,” according to a recording of the session reviewed by The Intercept. The delegate further argued the resolution does not address that Hamas has used the internet “to prepare acts of terror against Israel’s civilians,” and that any rebuilding effort must include unspecified “safeguards” that would prevent the potential use of the internet for terrorism.

“Based on this rationale, Gaza will never have internet,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy adviser with the digital rights group Access Now, told The Intercept, adding that Israel’s position is not only incoherent but inherently disproportionate. “You can’t punish the entire civilian population just because you have fears of one Palestinian faction.”

The Israeli Ministry of Communications did not respond to a request for comment.

Getting Gaza Back Online

When delegations to the ITU, a U.N. agency that facilitates cooperation between governments on telecommunications policies, began meeting in Geneva in early June, the most pressing issue on the agenda was getting Gaza back online. Israel’s monthslong bombardment of the enclave has severed fiber cables, razed cellular towers, and generally wrecked the physical infrastructure required to communicate with loved ones and the outside world.

A disconnected Gaza Strip also threatens to add to the war’s already staggering death toll. Though Israel touts its efforts to warn civilians of impending airstrikes, such warnings are relayed using the very cellular and internet connections the country’s air force routinely levels. It is a cycle of data degradation that began at the war’s start: The more Israel bombs, the harder it is for Gazans to know they are about to be bombed.

The resolution that passed last week would ensure “the ITU’s much needed assistance and support to Palestine for rebuilding its telecommunication sector.” While the agency has debated the plight of Palestinian internet access for many years, the new proposal arrives at a crisis point for data access across Gaza, as much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble, and civilians struggle to access food and water, let alone cellular signals and Wi-Fi.

The ITU and other intergovernmental bodies have long pushed for Palestinian sovereignty over its own internet access. But the Saudi proposal was notable in that it explicitly called out Israel’s role in hobbling Gaza’s connection to the world, either via bombs, bulldozers, or draconian restrictions on technology imports. That Saudi Arabia was behind the resolution is not without irony; in 2022, Yemen plunged into a four-day internet blackout following airstrikes by a Saudi-led military coalition.

Without mentioning Israel by name, the Saudi resolution also called on the ITU to monitor the war’s destructive effects on Palestinian data access and provide regular reports. The resolution also condemned both the “widespread destruction of critical infrastructure, failure of telecom services and mobile phone outages that have occurred across the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the aggression by the occupying power” and “the obstacles practiced by the occupying power in preventing the use of new communications technologies.”

In a session debating the resolution, the U.S. delegate told the council, “We have made clear to the sponsors of this resolution that we do not agree with some of the characterizations,” specifically the language blaming the destruction of Gaza and the forced use of obsolete technology on Israel. “The United States cannot support this resolution in its current form as drafted,” the delegate continued, according to a recording reviewed by The Intercept.

Whether or not the U.S. ultimately voted for the resolution — the State Department did not respond when asked — it appears to have been successful in weakening the version that was ultimately approved by the ITU. The version that did pass was stripped of any explicit mention of Israel’s role in destroying and otherwise thwarting Gazan internet access, and refers obliquely only to “​the obstacles practiced in preventing the use of new communication technologies.”

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s other questions about the resolution either, including whether the administration shares Israel’s terror-related objections to it.

The U.S. has taken a harsher stance on civilian internet blackouts caused by a military aggressor in the past. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing national internet disruptions it caused, the State Department declared, “the United States condemns actions that block or degrade access to the Internet in Ukraine, which sever critical channels for sharing and learning information, including about the war.”

Outdated Technology

The approved resolution also calls on ITU member states to “make every effort” to both preserve what Palestinian telecom infrastructure remains and allocate funds necessary for the “return of communications in the Gaza Strip” in the future. This proposed rebuilding includes the activation of 4G and 5G cellular service. While smartphones in the West Bank connect to the internet with 3G wireless speeds unsuitable for many data-hungry applications, Gazans must make do with debilitatingly slow 2G service — an obsolete standard that was introduced to the United States in 1992.

Fatafta, of Access Now, noted that Israel does have a real interest in preventing Gaza from entering the 21st century: surveillance and censorship. Gaza’s reliance on insecure cellular technology from the 1990s and Israeli fiber connections makes it trivial for Israeli intelligence agents to intercept texts and phone calls and institute internet blackouts at will, as has occurred throughout the war.

The resolution is “an important step, because the current status quo cannot continue,” she said. “There is no scenario where Gaza can be allowed to keep a 2G network where the rest of the world has already moved on to 5G.”

The post Israel Opposes Rebuilding Gaza’s Internet Access Because Terrorists Could Go Online appeared first on The Intercept.