Is Trump abandoning Israel? Not really

 Al Jazeera English

United States President Donald Trump descends on Tuesday on the Middle East for a regional tour that will begin in Saudi Arabia and include stops in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. It is a business trip in every sense of the term, involving potentially trillions of dollars in investment and trade deals.

The UAE, for example, has already pledged $1.4 trillion in investments to the US over 10 years in sectors ranging from artificial intelligence and energy to mining and aluminium production. Saudi Arabia, for its part, has committed to investing $600bn in the US over the next four years. According to the Reuters news agency, Trump will also be offering the kingdom an arms package to the tune of $100bn.

Meanwhile, in keeping with the president’s solid history of nepotism and self-enrichment, it just so happens that the Trump Organization is currently presiding over real estate projects and other business ventures in all three Gulf countries he is slated to visit.

And yet one country is conspicuously absent from the regional itinerary despite being the US’s longstanding BFF in the Middle East: Israel, the nation that has for the past 19 months been perpetrating genocide in the Gaza Strip with the help of gobs of US money and weaponry. The official Palestinian death toll stands at nearly 53,000 and counting. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

From Gaza to Vietnam, what is the value of a photo?

Al Jazeera English

This month, Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award for her image titled Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, taken last year for The New York Times.

Ajjour had both of his arms blown off by an Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing genocide has now killed at least 52,365 Palestinians since October 2023. In the award-winning photograph, the boy’s head and armless torso are cast in partial shadow, his gaze nevertheless intense in its emptiness.

Speaking recently to Al Jazeera, Ajjour recalled his reaction when his mother informed him that he had lost his arms: “I started crying. I was very sad, and my mental state was very bad.” He was then forced to undergo surgery with no anaesthetic, an arrangement that has been par for the course in Gaza on account of Israel’s criminal blockade of medical supplies and all other materials necessary for human survival. “I couldn’t bear the pain, I was screaming very loud. My voice filled the hallways.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

As Israel Openly Declares Starvation as a Weapon, Media Still Hesitate to Blame It for Famine

FAIR

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival.

And just this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proclaimed that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza”. . . . the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that Gaza is “likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023”—its population being “starved, bombed, strangled” and subjected to “deprivation by design” . . . .

Israel’s starvation of the Gaza Strip is multifaceted. It’s not just about physically blocking the entry of food into the besieged enclave. It’s also about Israel’s near-total decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system: the bombardment of hospitals, the targeting of ambulances, the massacres of medical personnel (FAIR.org, 4/11/25). It’s about Israeli military attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and workers, including the April 2024 massacre of seven international employees of the food organization World Central Kitchen.

It’s about Israel razing agricultural areas, wiping out food production, devastating the fishing industry and depleting livestock. It’s about Israel bombing water infrastructure in Gaza. And it’s about Israeli troops slaughtering at least 112 desperate Palestinians queuing for flour on February 29, 2024 (FAIR.org, 3/22/24)—which was at least a quicker way of killing starving people than waiting for them to starve. READ MORE AT FAIR.

Before he died, Pope Francis called for peace in Gaza. Will anyone listen?

 Al Jazeera English

Pope Francis died today at the age of 88 following a prolonged illness. Just yesterday, in his Easter Sunday address in Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church chose to express his “closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people”.

He went on to state that he was “think[ing] of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” – a toned-down reference, of course, to Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has officially killed more than 51,200 Palestinians since October 2023. . . .

[T]he pope deserves praise for utilising what would be his final platform to call for a ceasefire in Gaza – at a time when the world appears all too content to allow the mass slaughter of Palestinians to proceed indefinitely. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Faux feminism has left the planet

AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

On Monday, April 14, six elite American women blasted off into space from west Texas on a self-piloting rocket ship developed by the space technology company Blue Origin, owned by bazillionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The “crew” of the much-ballyhooed all-female flight – marketed by Blue Origin as a giant leap not only for womankind but for the entire world – included pop star Katy Perry, television personality Gayle King, and Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez, author of the children’s book The Fly Who Flew to Space and the organiser of the wannabe feminist space excursion.

In preparation for the star-studded spectacle, Elle magazine ran a fawning cover story on the “historic mission”, which the magazine described as “the first time anybody went to space with their hair and makeup done”. By the end of the article, which is basically a continuous succession of aneurysm-inducing lines, one finds oneself with little hope for the world aside from that an asteroid would strike and just put an end to it all.

Perry, for example, is quoted as declaring that “we are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut”, while also sharing the scintillating logistics of celebrity space travel: “I was like, What am I going to wear?” Then there’s an exchange between Sanchez, who predicts that “we’re going to have [eye]lash extensions flying in the capsule!”, and King, who wonders if the lashes will “stay on”, prompting the response from Sanchez: “Mine are glued on. They’re good.”  READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Deterrence Theory: Signalgate isn’t the scandal

 THE BAFFLER

On Saturday, March 15, the United States launched large-scale air strikes on Yemen, killing at least fifty-three people, including five children, by Tuesday. The U.S. military continues to pound the country with daily strikes in an open-ended operation that has also destroyed such infrastructure as a cancer hospital in northern Yemen.

As per the official imperial narrative, the U.S. armed forces are going after Yemeni “terrorists,” i.e. the Houthis (formally Ansar Allah), who govern the most populous sections of the country and are forever maligned as diabolical proxies of Iran—America’s preferred nemesis and the bogeyman invoked to justify all manner of U.S.-backed bloodshed worldwide. Among the Houthis’ recent transgressions are repeated attacks on American and other warships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea, conducted in solidarity with Palestinian victims of the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Lest Yemenis doubt America’s renewed bloodthirsty intentions in their own territory, current U.S. commander in chief Donald Trump has warned the Houthis that they will be “completely annihilated.” READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

Media Find Ways to Minimize Israel’s Murder of Paramedics

 FAIR

Israeli soldiers on March 23 massacred 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers near the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide has officially killed more than 50,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The slaughter took place before dawn, as a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck from the Palestinian Civil Defense service endeavored to respond to a lethal Israeli attack on another ambulance, which had itself been attempting to rescue victims of an Israeli airstrike.

Eight Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, six Civil Defense workers and one UN staff member were murdered by Israeli gunfire. Their mutilated bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave, their vehicles crushed and buried as well.

The initial Israeli narrative was that nine of the emergency responders were militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously…without headlights or emergency signals.”

As it turns out, however, all headlights and emergency signals were very much on—not that it’s fine to massacre people for driving with no lights, of course. When, after a week of negotiations with Israeli occupying forces, another convoy was finally permitted to access the mass grave and unearth the bodies, the mobile phone of massacre victim Rifat Radwan was found to contain footage of the lead-up to the assault, which shows the clearly marked rescue vehicles advancing with emergency lights on. A barrage of Israeli gunfire then persists for more than five minutes, as Radwan’s screen goes black and he bids farewell to his mother. READ MORE AT FAIR. 

The US is in all-out kidnapping mode, and no one is safe

Al Jazeera English

Last week, the United States admitted it had wrongfully deported 29-year-old Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has now joined the burgeoning population of El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), which specialises in terrorising confined people. Married to a US citizen and the father of a five-year-old autistic child, Abrego Garcia arrived in the US more than a decade ago after fleeing gang violence at home.

The CECOT is the pride and joy of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world”, who delights in posting extravagant Hollywood-worthy videos of the sadistic reception and internment of the deportee “terrorists” that the Donald Trump administration is now funneling to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is one of hundreds of new such additions to the CECOT facility – where it appears he may remain, despite the administration’s full acknowledgement that his deportation transpired “because of an administrative error”.

When the judge overseeing the case of the wrongful deportation determined that Trump and company must return Abrego Garcia to the US, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt snapped: “We suggest the Judge contact President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH 

In Mexico, enforced disappearance is a way of life

 Al Jazeera English

At the beginning of March, an expansive clandestine crematorium was discovered on a ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, complete with burned human remains and 200 pairs of shoes. According to local officials, the apparent extermination site was likely operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which also reportedly used the ranch as a recruitment and training centre.

As Al Jazeera correspondent John Holman noted in a video dispatch following the discovery, the “strange thing” was that Mexican authorities had “seized the ranch five months ago, but reported none of the infrastructure” located there. Instead, it took a group of volunteers dedicated to the search for Mexico’s missing people to unearth the underground ovens. . . .

As per the official narrative, Mexico’s violence is entirely the fault of drug cartels, period. This rationalisation conveniently excises from the equation the Mexican state’s established track record of killing and disappearing – not to mention the lengthy history of collaboration between Mexican police and military personnel and cartel operatives. . . . 

[F]ormer Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador . . . once took it upon himself to accuse Mexicans involved in the search for the missing of a “delirium of necrophilia”. According to Mexico’s National Register of Missing and Disappeared Persons, a record 10,064 people disappeared during a single year of AMLO’s term – between May 2022 and May 2023 – which averaged out to 27.6 per day, or more than one person per hour. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel Kills Palestinian Journalist Hossam Shabat as US Media Look Away

 FAIR

The Israeli military killed Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist and correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, on Monday, March 24. The deadly targeting of Shabat’s vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip was in fact Israel’s second journalist assassination for the day; hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.

And yet it was all in a day’s work for Israel, which according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has now killed at least 170 Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, when Israel’s armed forces kicked off an all-out genocide in the besieged enclave. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the number of fatalities is actually 208.

No doubt many journalists would be expected to perish in an onslaught as indiscriminate and massive as Israel’s in Gaza, where in February the death toll for the past 16 months was raised to nearly 62,000 to account for the thousands of Palestinians presumed to be dead beneath the rubble. Shockingly, that’s one out of every 35 Gaza residents—but for Gaza journalists, the International Federation of Journalists estimates that Israel has killed one out of every ten. READ MORE AT FAIR.