Trump’s Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ promises Tony Blair yet another payday

AL JAZEERA ENGLISH 

Just when you thought prospects for the future of the Gaza Strip could not get any bleaker, United States President Donald Trump has unveiled his 20-point “peace plan” for the Palestinian territory, starring himself as the chair of a “Board of Peace” that will serve as a transitional government in the enclave. This from the man who has been actively aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians since January, when he took over the US presidency from former honorary genocidaire Joe Biden. 

But that is not all. Also on board for the “Board of Peace” is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will reportedly play a significant governing role in Gaza’s proposed makeover. To be sure, importing a Sir Tony Blair from the United Kingdom to oversee an enclave of Palestinians smacks rather hard of colonialism in a region that is already quite familiar with the phenomenon.

And yet the region is also already quite familiar with Blair himself, owing in particular to his notorious performance during the 2003 war on Iraq, led by his buddy and then-chief of the so-called war on terror, George W Bush. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, earning him a most deserved reputation as a war criminal.

In other words, he is not a guy who should under any circumstances turn up on a “Board of Peace”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Near Daily’ Israeli Assaults on Lebanon Have Become Non-News for Western Media

FAIR

The Israeli military unleashed a large wave of air strikes on densely populated towns in South Lebanon on Thursday, September 18—although you’d never know it from the Western corporate media, who have increasingly lost interest in reporting on Israel’s unceasing war on its northern neighbor. . . .

Given that Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanese history that has proved capable of defending the country from Israeli predations, pretending that Israel isn’t continuously bombing Lebanon during a “ceasefire” also seems like a pretty good way of denying that there is any further need for Hezbollah. The Lebanese army, for its part, has not once managed to protect the nation from its bellicose neighbor to the south—a failure directly related to the US’s longtime “security cooperation” with Lebanon’s armed forces.

When corporate media outlets do find themselves obliged to document Israeli strikes on Lebanon, this is done in typically decontextualized fashion. Hezbollah are generally understood to be the “bad guys”; rarely is it mentioned that the group owes its very existence to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, greenlit by the US, that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, and occurred in the context of a brutal 22-year Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. READ MORE AT FAIR.

Around the world in a Free Palestine hoodie

 Al Jazeera English

Earlier this month, my mother and I took the train from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to the city of Bukhara, two and a half hours away. While I was waiting in line for the toilet, an Uzbek train attendant approached to express his delight at the hoodie I was wearing, which is black with a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine” in both English and Arabic.

During our ensuing conversation in modified English, the young man advised me to steer clear of Wagon Seven of the train, as it was full of Israeli tourists. He himself had requested to be reassigned from said wagon, he told me, so as to avoid having to deal with them. He proceeded to wonder how people could live with themselves while their government was slaughtering children en masse.

Indeed, of the more than 65,000 Palestinians Israel has officially killed in less than two years in the Gaza Strip – likely a severe underestimate – nearly 20,000 have been children. This is to say nothing of the countless kids who have been permanently maimed, mutilated and traumatised. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

With the Doha strike, Netanyahu has declared war on the world

Al Jazeera English

And so Israel has struck again.

On Tuesday, the Middle East’s favourite perennial aggressor launched missiles against the Qatari capital of Doha, targeting Hamas leaders involved in negotiations surrounding a proposal from the United States for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has officially killed more than 64,000 people in less than two years.

To be sure, Israel has never been a fan of ceasefires – even ones proposed by the reigning global hegemon and most devout backer of Israeli atrocities. After all, the state’s very existence is predicated on wiping out Palestinians and engaging in unceasing belligerence.

And while anyone harbouring an iota of common sense will have long regarded Israel as a rogue state, the unprecedented attack on Qatar appears to have opened some international eyes with regard to just how out of control the Israeli government actually is. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Distraction 101: Blow them up

 Al Jazeera English

On September 2, the United States conducted a sensational military strike on a speedboat in the southern Caribbean Sea in violation of both international and US law. The extravagant attack killed 11 civilians on board, whom US President Donald Trump had magically intuited to be drug traffickers affiliated with Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.

The spectacle was staged amid the ongoing deployment of US warships off the Venezuelan coast under the pretence of fighting “narcoterrorists” whose ringleader, according to the current Trumpian narrative, is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – no surprise given the country’s lengthy role as a thorn in the side of US imperialism. . . .

But why the sudden need on Trump’s part to project a warrior image by blowing up a speedboat in the Caribbean? To put it briefly, it serves as a convenient distraction from the president’s dismal failure on other fronts to live up to his super-tough-guy vision of himself.

His ultimatums to Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine, for example, have proved fruitless. Ditto for intermittent pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wrap up the genocide in the Gaza Strip, where in less than two years Israel has officially killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Path Is Made by Walking

 THE BAFFLER

Hanging from the ceiling at the open-air albergue, or shelter, in the Colombian village of Capurganá—one of the jumping-off points for traversal of the Darién Gap—was a sign featuring “general information,” in both Spanish and English, for the migrants who had gathered in the hopes of reaching the United States, more than three thousand miles away. The English version read:

Darién jungle crossing Colombia–Panamá
“Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking”
Generating more hope, to achieve the American Dream

A U.S. flag occupied one section of the sign, atop which were perched a pair of rain boots and four dirt-caked children’s shoes, one of them bearing the Nike swoosh. The albergue is where refuge seekers from around the world pay Colombian “guides” for passage to Panama, a journey that can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Said guides do not chaperone the entire trajectory—a detail that is often not made clear to migrants at the outset and revealed only when their smugglers turn back prior to reaching the Panamanian border. The sixty-six-mile Darién Gap is notorious for its lethal perils, ranging from rushing rivers to armed assailants to hostile wildlife, and a countless number of those who have set out “to achieve the American Dream” have ended up corpses in the jungle. (Lest anyone underestimate the intellectual credentials of Colombian organized crime, it bears noting that the inspirational quote directed to the walker is a line from a poem by Antonio Machado, who died in French exile from Spain in 1939, the year that Francisco Franco forged his path to the Spanish dictatorship.) READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

A Reporter’s Journey through the Darién Gap: A Q&A with Author Belén Fernández

 The Border Chronicle

What has been happening on the Darién Gap, one of the deadliest border crossings in the Western Hemisphere? Luckily, we have author Belén Fernández here to give us an in-depth rundown. Fernández has the unique ability to capture the absurdity, terror, and sorrow of a situation—often in the same sentence—and add a biting layer of sociopolitical and economic analysis on top of that. She accomplishes this in her new book, The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, and she does it here with her answers in this interview.

Here, she discusses the Gap as an extension of the U.S. border, her own travel in it in 2024, the people she met—including the smugglers—and the testimonies she heard from people about the Darién Gap when she was locked up in an immigration prison in Mexico. Fernández is a prolific author, and her other work includes Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up inside Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center and Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She also writes a regular column for Al Jazeera. READ MORE AT THE BORDER CHRONICLE.

Media Dance Around Illegality of Trump’s Third-Country Deportation Scheme

 FAIR

Back in March, 29-year-old Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran native who had lived and worked in the United States for nearly half his life—became the face of Donald Trump’s sadistic mass deportation campaign when he was unlawfully sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison and torture center.

The US government itself acknowledged that Ábrego García’s removal had transpired as a result of an “administrative error.” However, both the Trump administration and that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—the self-described “coolest dictator in the world”—were huffily opposed to rectifying said error. Ábrego García was at last returned to the US in June, only to now face deportation to…Uganda, the east African country that has been roped into serving as one of numerous international dumping grounds for asylum seekers and undocumented persons who are unwanted in the US. READ MORE AT FAIR.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony says a lot about our dystopia

 Al Jazeera English

And so the verdict is out. United States President Donald Trump’s name has been cleared of ignominious association with the late disgraced financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. This is according to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years behind bars on sex trafficking charges.

Earlier this year, US Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly informed the president that his name appeared in the so-called “Epstein files”, the content of which Trump had said on the campaign trail he would be quite keen on releasing.

Once in office, however, he spontaneously decided that the Epstein case was old news, going so far as to reprimand those in his own MAGA base who were “stupid” and “foolish” enough to continue insisting that the files be declassified.

Now, the US Justice Department has released transcripts of a July interview between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, and Maxwell, who had nothing but praise for the president’s moral solidity. . . READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Darien Gap ‘closure’: Border theatre in the jungle

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

In January, just before Donald Trump resumed command of the United States on a bevy of sociopathic promises, incoming US border czar Tom Homan announced that the new administration would be “shutting down the Darien Gap” in the interests of “national security”.

The Darien Gap, of course, is the notorious 106km (66-mile) stretch of roadless territory and treacherous jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia at the crossroads of the Americas. For the past several years, it has served as one of the only available pathways to potential refuge for hundreds of thousands of global have-nots who are essentially criminalised by virtue of their poverty and denied the opportunity to engage in “legal” migration to the US.

In 2023 alone, about 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, which left them with thousands of kilometres still to go to the border of the US – the very country responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that forces folks to flee their homes in the first place. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Fortress Beirut

THE BAFFLER

At the 2017 groundbreaking ceremony for the United States’ $1 billion-fortified new embassy in Beirut, then-U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard offered some words on the momentousness of the occasion:

"Breaking ground today on our new embassy compound is a strong message to the Lebanese people that we are with you for the long term. We intend to continue the spirit of cooperation and partnership that has defined our journey together for two hundred years."

Given America’s history of backing Israel’s bouts of mass slaughter in the country, many Lebanese were presumably not overly reassured by the prospect of further “cooperation.” The ambassador’s chronological calculations regarding the joint “journey” were curious, as two hundred years ago Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire. . . .

Lebanese still can’t get a break. In October 2023, Israel launched a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and decided to take advantage of the bellicose momentum to go after Hezbollah as well. The Israeli military was no doubt encouraged by the obscene increase in military aid and weaponry from the United States; after President Joe Biden authorized an additional $26 billion in wartime assistance to Israel in April 2024, Israel’s former Foreign Minister Israel Katz took to X to applaud the aid package as sending “a strong message to all our enemies.” READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

The Alaska summit was a spectacular distraction

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Say you are the president of the United States and the relationship with a significant chunk of your political base has become less than blissfully harmonious. What do you do?

Well, one option is to stage a summit, accompanied by much fanfare, with the president of Russia, ostensibly in order to end that country’s war in Ukraine.  

And this is precisely the manoeuvre that was pulled by US President Donald Trump, who on Friday rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The short-lived encounter was ultimately anticlimactic, with Trump offering the incisive assessment that “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

 . . . the no-deal talks constituted a convenient distraction from current intra-MAGA strife, which owes to a couple of factors. There is, for example, the matter of the files relating to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019. . . And while the Alaskan red-carpet stunt provided little to write home about, distraction may yet prevail as folks ponder what the hell that was all about. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Respecting the human right to sleep? Dream on

 Al Jazeera English

When I was a freshman at Columbia University in 1999, the professor of my Literature Humanities course shared some personal information with my class, which was that she slept exactly three hours per night. I forget what prompted the disclosure, though I do recall it was made not to elicit pity but rather as a matter-of-fact explanation of the way things were: sleeping more than three hours a night simply did not allow her sufficient time to simultaneously maintain her professorship and tend to her baby.

This, of course, was before the era of smartphones took the phenomenon of rampant sleep deprivation to another level. But modern life has long been characterised by a lack of proper sleep – an activity that happens to be fundamental to life itself. . . .

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States, approximately one-third of US adults and children under the age of 14 get insufficient sleep, putting them at increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and a host of other potentially life-threatening maladies. As per CDC calculations, a full 75 percent of US high schoolers do not sleep enough. . . .

Meanwhile, speaking of the Gaza Strip, residents of the occupied territory are well acquainted with acute sleep deprivation, which is currently a component of the Israeli military’s genocidal arsenal for wearing Palestinians down both physically and psychologically. Not that a good night’s sleep in Gaza was ever really within the realm of possibility – even prior to the launch of the all-out genocide in 2023 – given Israel’s decades-long terrorisation of the Strip via periodic bombardments, massacres, sonic booms, the ubiquitous deployment of buzzing drones, and other manoeuvres designed to inflict individual and collective trauma. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Yes, The New York Times is committing genocidal journalism

 Al Jazeera English

The Israelis certainly owe Bret Stephens a favour.

Yesterday, The New York Times opinion columnist took to the pages of the United States newspaper of record to promote his latest deranged argument, headlined: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”. . . .

In the very first paragraph of his Times intervention – which should perhaps come accompanied by a trigger warning for readers prone to aneurysms – Stephens demands defiantly: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”. . . . He goes on to proclaim that “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump’s big beautiful police state is here

 Al Jazeera English

On July 4, United States President Donald Trump signed into law his so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”, which will reduce taxes for the rich, punish the poor, and otherwise propel American plutocracy to ever more noxious heights.

Just days earlier, Trump’s Vice President JD Vance took to X to underline the key component of the legislation: “Everything else — the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

Indeed, the bill allocates the unprecedentedly ludicrous sum of $175bn to anti-immigration efforts, approximately $30bn of which will go directly to the notorious federal law enforcement agency ICE, known in long form as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another $45bn is earmarked for the construction of new immigration detention centres, which, as the American Immigration Council notes, “represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget”. 

Thanks to these budgetary machinations, ICE now occupies the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money at its annual disposal than the military of any country in the world apart from the US and China. 

Given that ICE agents have as of late made a name for themselves running around in masks and kidnapping people, however, one would be forgiven for seeing this sudden windfall to the agency as something less than, um, “beautiful”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Massive Expansion of Trump’s Deportation Machine Passes With Little Press Notice

 FAIR

And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.

Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.

Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation: "Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement." READ MORE AT FAIR.

Who better than Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize?

 Al Jazeera English

In the latest instalment of the “can’t-make-this-sh*t-up” contest in global politics and diplomacy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated United States President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In other words, the person currently presiding over the genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has proposed that the world’s top peacemaking prize be awarded to the primary enabler of that genocide – the man who in March announced that he was “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job” in Gaza. That “everything” has entailed billions of dollars in lethal weaponry and other assistance.

From October 2023 to the present, nearly 60,000 Palestinians have officially been slaughtered in the diminutive territory, although the true death toll is no doubt far higher considering the surplus of bodies lost under the pervasive rubble. More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks while seeking food at aid distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organisation backed by both the US and Israel. . . .

Of course, it should go without saying that anyone who positively invokes the nuking of hundreds of thousands of civilians should be categorically ineligible for any sort of serious peace prize. But in a world in which the supposed pursuit of peace is so often utilised as an excuse for more war, Trump’s nomination might very well be meaningful, indeed. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Did God want Trump to bomb Iran?

 Al Jazeera English

After ordering the United States military to bomb Iran last month, US President Donald Trump made a brief address at the White House to laud the “massive precision strike” that had allegedly put a “stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.

The speech, which lasted less than four minutes, ended with the invocation of God’s name no fewer than five times in a span of seven seconds: “And I wanna just thank everybody and in particular, God. I wanna just say, ‘We love you God, and we love our great military – protect them.’ God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.” . . . .

This, to be sure, was not the first time that Trump relied on God to sign off on worldly events. Back in 2017, during the man’s first stint as president, the deity made various appearances in Trump’s official statement following a US military strike on Syria. God, it seems, just can’t get enough of war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

By bombing Iran, the US continues to make the world safe for war

 Al Jazeera English

It seems like just yesterday that United States President Donald Trump was pushing a “diplomatic resolution” to the Iranian nuclear issue.

Now, the US has joined Israel’s illegal assault on Iran, striking three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday in what Trump has boasted was a “very successful attack”.

As CNN dramatically put it, “a midsummer night in June 2025 could come to be remembered as the moment the Middle East changed forever; when the fear of nuclear annihilation was lifted from Israel; when Iran’s power was neutered and America’s soared”.

Of course, a “fear of nuclear annihilation” has nothing to do with Israel’s current strikes on Iran, which have been dutifully portrayed in the US media as targeting military and nuclear facilities but have somehow managed to slaughter hundreds of civilians. . . .

[A]side from being a persistent thorn in the side of US imperialism, Iran’s behaviour has been rather less apparently, um, “evil” than certain other international actors – like the US itself. For instance, Iran is not the one currently funding a straight-up genocide to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Nor is Iran the one that has spent the past several decades bombing and otherwise antagonising folks in every corner of the world – from backing right-wing state terror in Latin America to conducting mass slaughter in Vietnam.

Furthermore, the sole clandestine nuclear weapons power in the Middle East is not Iran but Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has never allowed UN safeguards on its facilities. READ  MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

FAIR

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead. READ MORE AT FAIR.

As Israel strikes Iran, what happened to ‘America First’?

 Al Jazeera English

Early this morning, Israel conducted unprecedented strikes on Iran, killing civilians along with senior military officials and scientists and basically forcing the Iranian government into a position in which it must retaliate – as if there already was not enough going on in the Middle East, particularly with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Israel, of course, thrives on perpetual upheaval and mass killing, all the while portraying itself as the victim of the folks it is slaughtering and otherwise antagonising. True to form, the Israelis have now cast Iran as the aggressor, with the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons allegedly posing a “threat to Israel’s very survival”, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his statement announcing the launch of “Operation Rising Lion”.

Unlike Iran, Israel does happen to possess nuclear weapons – which just renders the whole situation all the more flammable. But for Netanyahu, at least, keeping the region in flames is a means of saving his own skin from domestic opposition and embroilment in various corruption charges. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Democrats wooing Musk after the Trump breakup is US plutocracy at its best

Al Jazeera English

It’s official: United States President Donald Trump and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, have broken up.

At the end of last month, Musk departed from his post as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he oversaw the mass firing of federal employees and dismantling of various government agencies – all the while benefitting from his own companies’ lucrative contracts with the government.

Anyway, US “democracy” has never met a conflict of interest it didn’t like. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

The Hidden Story: Israeli ‘Aid’ Is Part of Genocide Plan

 FAIR

Israeli tanks opened fire last Sunday on a crowd of thousands of starving Palestinians at an aid distribution center in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The victims had gathered in hopes of finding food for themselves and their families, following a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade of the territory. At least 31 people were killed; one Palestinian was also killed by Israeli fire the same day at another distribution site in central Gaza.

On Monday, June 2, three more Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli projectiles while trying to procure food, and on Tuesday there were 27 fatalities at the aid hub in Rafah. This brought the total number of Palestinian deaths at the newly implemented hubs to more than 100 in just a week.

Mass killing in the guise of food distribution is occurring under the supervision of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a sketchy-as-hell organization registered in Switzerland and Delaware. It boasts the participation of former US military and intelligence officers, as well as solid Israeli endorsement and armed US security contractors escorting food deliveries.

Jake Wood—the ex-US Marine sniper who had taken up the post of GHF executive director—recently resigned after reasoning that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.” READ MORE AT FAIR.

In Gaza, aid kills

Al  Jazeera English

Today, three Palestinians have been killed and 35 wounded by Israeli fire near an aid distribution centre in the Gaza Strip’s southern city of Rafah. The attack came a day after Israeli tanks opened fire on thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians at the same site, killing at least 31 people. One person was also shot dead at another distribution site near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza the same day.

There are currently only four such sites distributing food to Gaza’s starving population of two million people, who for nearly three months were forced to contend with a full Israeli blockade that prevented the entry of all aid into the enclave.

On May 19, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu magnanimously opted to allow a resumption of “minimal” aid deliveries to Gaza, having determined that impending mass starvation was a “red line” that might jeopardise the undying support of the US, Israel’s traditional partner in crime and the primary enabler of its slaughter.

And yet these mass killings suggest that the new “minimal” arrangement offers Palestinians a decidedly horrific choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food – not, of course, that these are the only two options for dying in a genocidal war in which Israel has indiscriminately bombed hospitals, refugee camps and everything else that can be bombed, killing more than 54,400 people. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why Trump and Bukele are destroying Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s life

 Al Jazeera English

In March, the United States government deported to El Salvador 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had lived and worked in the US for almost half his life. Little did he know that he would soon be the face of US President Donald Trump’s sinisterly exuberant mass deportation campaign.

Married to US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia was detained while driving in Maryland with the couple’s five-year-old autistic son, who got to witness his father’s capture by the US forces of law and order and has apparently been severely traumatised as a result. In a subsequent court affidavit, Vasquez Sura said her son, who cannot speak, had been “very distressed” by the “sudden disappearance of his father”, crying more than usual and “finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent”.

Of course, tearing families apart and traumatising children has long been par for the bipartisan course in everyone’s favourite “land of the free”, although Trump has certainly made more of a sensational spectacle out of it than his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Anyway, there is nothing like sowing a bunch of fear and psychological trauma in the name of national security, right?

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador along with more than 200 other people, who shared the honour of serving as demonised guinea pigs in the Trump administration’s current experiments in sadistic countermigration policy. The deportees were swiftly interned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the notorious mega-prison built by Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s self-described “coolest dictator in the world”. The facility houses thousands of people arrested under the nationwide “state of emergency”, which was declared in 2022 and shows no sign of abating. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Project Esther and the weaponisation of Zionism

Al Jazeera English

On October 7, 2024 – exactly one year into the United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Foundation unleashed a policy paper titled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. 

The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The “national strategy” proposed by Project Esther – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights. . . . 

. . . in spite of all of Project Esther’s ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic threat posed by the HSN, it turns out that “no major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release”, according to a December article in the Forward. 

A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had “struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups”, and that Project Esther “focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s Gaza ‘disengagement’ that paved the way for conquest

 Al Jazeera English

In August 2005, the Israeli government officially withdrew from the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian coastal enclave it had occupied continuously since 1967. Apart from pulling back its armed forces, it had to undertake the dismantlement of 21 illegal settlements housing 8,000 Jewish settlers.

Israeli troops were deployed to begin the process, which pulled at the heartstrings of international media outlets like The New York Times. The paper reported on the sobbing settlers affected by Israel’s “historic pullout from the Gaza Strip”, some of whom had to be carried “screaming from their homes in scenes that moved a number of the soldiers to tears”.

To be sure, there is nothing quite so tragic as illegal colonisers being uprooted from one section of land that does not belong to them and transferred to another section of land that does not belong to them. It bears mentioning that a majority of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip are themselves refugees from Israel’s blood-drenched conquest of Palestine in 1948, which killed 15,000 Palestinians, expelled three-quarters of a million more, and destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages. . . .

In 2006, Israeli government adviser Weisglass – the same character who revealed the “formaldehyde” approach to disengagement – also took it upon himself to charmingly clarify the logic behind Israel’s restrictions on food imports into the Gaza Strip: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Now that Israel is literally starving Palestinians to death in Gaza with the full complicity of the United States, it seems the “idea” has undergone some revisions. Meanwhile, recent news reports citing unnamed Israeli officials indicate that Israel is also currently plotting the “conquest” and full military occupation of the Gaza Strip.

Two decades on from Israel’s withdrawal-that-wasn’t from Gaza, it’s safe to surmise that “disengagement” paved the way for conquest. And this time around, there’s no disengagement plan. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.