Tag: ethnic cleansing

The World Confronts the Genocide Washington Is Trying To Bury

On October 4th, 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Trump stressed that one of the main goals behind his Gaza plan was to restore Israel’s international standing. “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world,” Trump said. “Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Under Trump’s plan, a supposed ceasefire took effect on October 10th. But Israel only withdrew from less than half of the Gaza strip, and killed at least 93 people in the next two weeks, after killing at least that many per day for the previous two years. Israel has only allowed 15% of the humanitarian aid called for in the plan to enter Gaza, and has kept the critical Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza closed. The daily life-and-death struggle to find food, water and shelter carries on unabated for two million people in Gaza.

While the reduction in the daily scale of Israel’s mass murder is obviously welcome, this is not a real ceasefire. Like previous Israeli ceasefires in Gaza, as in Lebanon, this is a one-sided ceasefire that Israel violates at will, on a daily basis, with no accountability.

This is only the first part of Trump’s plan for Gaza, and there is still no agreement on the other parts, such as the disarmament of Hamas, who provide the only government and police force in Gaza. They now have the added job of protecting their people from Israel-backed criminal gangs and death squads, some with links to ISIS, who prey on them from the Israeli-occupied areas, stealing aid supplies, assassinating local leaders and terrorizing the population.

Hamas is obviously not going to disarm under these conditions, and previously said it would only surrender its weapons once Palestine has an internationally recognized government with its own armed forces. On the other side, Israel has not agreed to other parts of Trump’s plan, such as its withdrawal from the rest of Gaza, nor to any plan for the future of Palestine.

In the United States, where corrupt politicians and corporate media take U.S. and Israeli lies at face value or even repeat them as statements of fact, some may believe that Trump’s plan has resolved the crisis in Palestine. The rest of the world is not so naive or easy to manipulate, but many other governments are also beholden to oligarchies that profit from trade, investment and arms deals with Israel, even as the public in those same countries reels in shock at Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and U.S.-backed impunity for its crimes.

Trump’s Gaza plan, like much of his foreign policy, cynically exploits the greed and fear of political leaders and their oligarch patrons. Admitting that Israel has “lost a lot of support in the world,” he offers a shortcut back to “business as usual” for governments eager to protect – and even expand – profitable ties despite Israel’s ongoing atrocities and open contempt for international law.

In his first term, Trump brokered the “Abraham Accords,” normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan that included mutual recognition and expanded trade. He now has his eye on the big prize: Saudi Arabia.

But Arab-Israeli relations have long been contested. In the 1949 UN General Assembly vote on Israel’s admission, all Arab and Muslim countries except Turkiye (which abstained) voted against recognizing the state of Israel. Thirty-two mostly Arab and Muslim countries, including some of its closest neighbors, still either don’t recognize Israel or have no diplomatic relations with it.

Despite decades of hostility, Trump persuaded Israel and some of these countries to support his Gaza plan with the promise of future benefits from normalization and trade. But there is still a gaping chasm between Israel and these Arab and Muslim countries over Palestine. They say they will not recognize Israel unless Israel recognizes Palestine, with full sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But the foundational basis of Netanyahu’s Likud Party is its plan for a Greater Israel, to be formed by annexing all of occupied Palestine “between the sea and the Jordan.” And on October 22, during Vice President Vance’s visit to Israel, the Knesset voted in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Trump unveiled his Gaza plan at the very end of the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting in New York, where many world leaders spoke out for much stronger international action against Israel. The New York Declaration, which 142 countries voted for, was the result of a conference in July led by France and Saudi Arabia that promised “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” to enforce a ruling by the international Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must be ended “as quickly as possible.”

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CIA provided contradictory intel on Hamas during Trump-brokered peace deal, envoys reveal

As U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Middle East adviser Jared Kushner worked to secure a historic ceasefire between Israel and Hamas earlier this month, they faced an unexpected obstacle: conflicting intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In a revealing interview with “60 Minutes,” Witkoff disclosed that while mediators from Qatar, Turkey and Egypt assured them Hamas was open to negotiations, the CIA delivered daily briefings insisting the militant group would reject the deal. The discrepancy raises critical questions about the reliability of U.S. intelligence and its role in high-stakes diplomacy.

The Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan faced skepticism from regional players and international observers. Yet Kushner and Witkoff, leveraging personal relationships with Arab leaders, believed Hamas could be persuaded to accept key concessions—including a hostage release and ceasefire.

According to Witkoff, while Qatar’s emir, Turkey’s president and Egypt’s leadership privately signaled Hamas’ willingness to engage, the CIA’s assessments painted a starkly different picture.

“We were getting, because of our relationships… we were hearing that Hamas was positive on the deal,” Witkoff told “60 Minutes.” “And yet I was reading intelligence reports every day and getting briefings from the CIA three times a day and those intelligence briefings were suggesting that Hamas was going to say no.”

The contradiction forced Kushner and Witkoff to make a crucial judgment call: trust their diplomatic sources or defer to the CIA’s warnings.

Did the CIA mislead or misinterpret?

The White House defended the intelligence community’s role, with an official telling the Daily Caller News Foundation that CIA Director John Ratcliffe provided “critical support” throughout negotiations.

“It is the responsibility of the intelligence community to provide full scopes of assessments to the negotiating team to ensure they have the full range of information and can achieve the best possible outcome—as they did,” the official said.

But according to BrightU.AI‘s Enoch, Witkoff’s account suggests the CIA’s assessments may have been flawed—or deliberately skewed. The implications extend beyond Hamas, reinforcing long-standing concerns about intelligence politicization, particularly regarding Russia, Iran and other geopolitical flashpoints.

A pattern of distrust in U.S. intelligence

This incident adds to a growing list of credibility issues surrounding U.S. intelligence agencies. President Donald Trump famously clashed with the CIA, accusing it of undermining his policies. Sens. Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard have also voiced skepticism about intelligence assessments on Russia and Syria.

The Hamas episode underscores a recurring dilemma: when intelligence contradicts firsthand diplomatic feedback, which should policymakers trust?

Ultimately, Kushner and Witkoff’s gamble paid off. Hamas accepted the ceasefire, freeing hostages and opening the door to further negotiations. But the revelation that the CIA’s intelligence directly contradicted mediators’ assurances raises troubling questions. Was the CIA misinformed—or was it pushing an agenda? And if intelligence agencies can be so wrong on Hamas, how reliable are their assessments on Iran, Russia or China?

For now, the Trump administration celebrates a rare diplomatic victory. But the deeper lesson may be that in an era of intelligence wars and geopolitical deception, sometimes the best intelligence comes not from classified briefings—but from trusted allies on the ground.

As the U.S. navigates future conflicts, the balance between intelligence analysis and real-world diplomacy will remain fraught. The Hamas case serves as a stark reminder that truth in foreign policy is often elusive—and sometimes, the most reliable intelligence comes from those who refuse to take “official assessments” at face value.

Watch the video below where Trump was lauded for the historic peace deal in Gaza.

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A Minefield in Gaza

After two years of unrelenting war, the world breathed a sigh of relief on October 9 as the first phase of Trump’s 20 point plan for Gaza went into effect. But, on October 13, while hostage release celebrations were taking place in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, five children playing amid the rubble near Al-Shifa hospital were injured, two severely, when an unexploded ordinance (UXO) went off.

In December 2023, only two months into the war, the Wall Street Journal called Israel’s actions in Gaza the “most devastating urban warfare in the modern record”. By April 2024, Euromed estimated that Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of explosives on the area, an amount exceeding all of the bombs dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg throughout World War II. This month, as the fragile ceasefire came into effect, the Gaza Government of Media office estimated the tonnage to be 200,000, the equivalent of thirteen Hiroshimas.

According to the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS), around 5% to 10% of the munitions used by Israel in the war in Gaza failed to detonate on impact. But, the duds are far from innocuous. Like the anti-personnel and anti-tank landmines being used right now in Ukraine and Myanmar, the UXO lie in wait, seemingly innocuous, ready to kill or maim whoever, soldier or civilian, adult or child, is unfortunate enough to come upon them.

The first widespread use of landmines occurred during the American Civil War, when the Confederate army invented and instituted them as an affordable way to compensate for shortages of resources and manpower. An immediate debate arose on the ethics of their use.

In WWI, an extensive number of anti-tank landmines were laid by the Germans. When the Armistice Agreement was signed in 1918, it obligated Germany to provide the locations of the mines and assist in their removal.

In WWII, landmines were used heavily by both sides. After Germany lost the war, their POWs were forced by Allied troops to undertake the extensive and dangerous job of removing the mines. In Denmark, around 1,000 Germans, many of them mere teenagers, were either killed or maimed in the process.

1.5 million mines were laid during the 1967 war by Israeli, Jordanian, and Syrian forces. It wasn’t until 2011, following the tragedy of an 11-year-old Jewish-Israeli boy losing his leg after tripping a leftover mine while playing outside his home in the Golan Heights, that cleanup efforts began in earnest.

In 1992, Human Rights Watch and five other NGOs launched the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), and in 1997, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (known informally as the Ottawa or Mine Ban Treaty) was signed by 122 countries.

Today, 165 countries, more than three-quarters of the world’s states, are party to the convention. Jordan joined in 1998, and Palestine in 2017. Israel, however, insists that, due to security needs, they are unable to commit to a total ban on landmines.

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UN records 71 settler attacks in one week across occupied West Bank

Israeli settlers carried out 71 attacks against Palestinians across the occupied West Bank between 7 and 13 October, according to a UN report published on 16 October.

The attacks, many of them armed, resulted in the death of one man and the injury of 99 others, as documented by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Most of the settler assaults hit farming areas just as the olive harvest began, affecting 27 Palestinian villages, with nearly half of all reported attacks tied to the harvest that started on 9 October.

In the town of Deir Jarir in east Ramallah, Israeli settlers and military forces jointly opened fire on residents after settlers attacked Palestinian vehicles with stones, resulting in a 26-year-old man being shot dead, and two others being injured. 

The assault followed months of settler expansion in the area, including a new outpost and road connecting an Israeli military base to the village’s western entrance.

Two days later, settlers armed with rifles and sticks raided the village of Atara, also in the Ramallah governorate, attacking residents and opening fire on Palestinian vehicles. 

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To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. On October 17, for example, eleven members of the Abu Shaaban family, including seven children and three women, were blasted to bits in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood while attempting to reach their home. According to the Israelis, the family’s vehicle had trespassed over the so-called “yellow line,” the invisible boundary arbitrarily demarcating the more than 50 percent of Gazan territory still occupied by the genocidal army. 

Then on October 19, Israel bombed the living daylights out of central and southern Gaza and killed dozens after alleging a ceasefire violation by Hamas—an allegation that not even Trump found convincing, but that enabled such impressively passive headlines as “Strikes Hit Gaza After Truce Violations Alleged” (Guardian, 10/19/25). Once the carnage was complete, the BBC (10/19/25) assured readers that “Israel Says It Will Return to Ceasefire After Gaza Strikes.” For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Knesset that the Israeli military had dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza during this particular, um, pause in the ceasefire.

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It Was Never a Gaza ‘War.’ The ‘Ceasefire’ Is a Lie Cut From the Same Cloth

Ceasefires stick because the two sides in a war have reached military stalemate – or because the incentives for each side in laying down their arms outweigh those of continuing the bloodshed.

None of this applies in Gaza.

The past two years in the enclave have been many things. But the one thing they have not been is a war, whatever western politicians and media wish us to believe.

Which means the current narrative of a “ceasefire” is as much a lie as the preceding narrative of a “Gaza war”.

The ceasefire is not “fragile”, as we keep being told. It is non-existent, as evidenced by Israel’s continual violations – from its soldiers continuing to shoot dead Palestinian civilians to it blocking promised aid.

So what is really going on?

To understand the “ceasefire” and US President Donald Trump’s even more deluded 20-point “peace plan“, we first need to make sense of what the earlier “war” rhetoric was used to conceal.

Over the past 24 months, we witnessed something deeply sinister.

We watched the indiscriminate slaughter of a largely civilian population, already under a 17-year siege, by Israel, a regional military goliath supported and armed by the global military goliath of the United States.

We watched the erasure of almost every home in Gaza – in what already amounted to a concentration camp for its people.

Families were forced into makeshift tents, as they had been when they were expelled decades ago at gunpoint from their lands in what is now Israel. But this time they have been exposed to a toxic brew of the rubble-dust of their former homes and the spent materials from many Hiroshimas-worth of bombs dropped on the enclave.

We watched a captive population being starved for months on end, in what amounted to, on the most generous view, an undisguised policy of collective punishment – a crime against humanity for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being pursued by the International Criminal Court.

Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have been physically damaged, in addition to their psychological trauma, by a malnourishment that has altered their DNA – damage that will most likely be passed on to future generations.

We watched Gaza’s hospitals being systematically dismantled, one by one, until the entire health sector was hollowed out, unable to deal with either the flood of wounded or the growing tide of malnourished children.

We watched large-scale ethnic cleansing operations, in which families – or what was left of them – were driven out of “kill zones” into areas Israel termed “safe zones”, only for those safe zones to quickly turn, undeclared, into new kill zones.

And as Trump stepped up the pressure for a “ceasefire”, we watched Israel unleash an orgy of violence, destroying as much of Gaza City as it could before the deadline arrived to stop.

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Israeli Scramble for Gaza’s Gas Reserves

As the Second Intifada was about to begin in September 2000, PLO leader Yassir Arafat celebrated a natural gas discovery in a fishing vessel about 30 kilometers off the Gaza Strip. “This will provide a solid foundation for our economy, for establishing an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital,” Arafat said.

Efforts to undermine this hope that could have done much to foster the Gazan economy have gone in tandem with the crumbling of the peace process.

Gaza catastrophe is (also? mainly?) about natural gas

Ever since the late 1990s, the Eastern Mediterranean has become highly attractive to energy interests, with major fields like Israel’s Leviathan (600 billion cubic meters, bcm), Egypt’s Zohr (850 bcm), and the Gaza Marine field (28–30 bcm).

Relative to Israel’s Leviathan, which generates $10 billion annually in export revenue, or Egypt’s Zohr field, which meets 40% of Egypt’s gas demand, the Gaza Marine field has lower output. However, it could have a transformative impact on Gaza’s economy and Palestinian living standards.

Located 30 km offshore from the Strip, the Gaza Marine field was discovered in 2000 by British BG and the Palestinian Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC). It was expected to develop revenue at $4 billion.

Let’s put things into context: In 2023, Gaza’s GDP amounted to less than $18 billion. And today, after Israeli decimation, it is barely $350 million. So the field represents a lifeline to Gazans and a great opportunity to overcome chronic energy shortages in Gaza, which remains highly dependent on foreign aid.

With its natural gas industry, Egypt was to serve as the onshore hub and transit point for the gas. The British BG Group was to finance the development and operations in return for 90 percent of the revenues. The Palestinian Authority (PA) would receive just 10 percent, plus access to adequate gas to meet their needs.

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New wave of Israeli army, settler violence hits occupied West Bank

Israeli occupation forces caused large-scale destruction in the occupied West Bank city of Tubas overnight, as part of military operations which coincided with an escalation of settler violence against Palestinians across the territory.

Footage released after the Israeli army’s withdrawal on 19 October showed the aftermath of the hours-long assault, which came after resistance fighters targeted an Israeli force with an explosive over the weekend. 

Thirty military vehicles, two bulldozers, and infantry troops took part in the attack on Tubas, according to the governor.

The Israeli army was carrying out a raid in the city on Saturday evening when fighters from the Tubas Brigade of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement’s Quds Brigades targeted troops with an explosive device. 

The Tubas Brigade said it injured soldiers and witnessed rescue teams arriving at the site to evacuate casualties. 

In a statement, the Israeli army said two soldiers were injured and taken to hospital. 

Reinforcements invaded the city shortly after, carrying out an hours-long assault including the destruction of infrastructure and extensive search operations. 

As the army withdrew from Tubas on Sunday morning, Israeli occupation forces carried out other violent attacks and incursions in the West Bank. 

One Palestinian, Majed Muhammad Dawoud, was shot multiple times and killed by the Israeli army in Nablus’s Al-Ain camp. 

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers backed by troops burned vehicles and attacked Palestinian farmers picking olives in Ramallah and Nablus. 

Video footage showed an Israeli settler attacking and injuring an elderly Palestinian woman with a stick during the attack on the olive pickers.

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Israel Massacres 11 Members of Palestinian Family in Deadliest Gaza Ceasefire Violation

Israeli forces killed 11 members of a Palestinian family attempting to return to their home in the flattened Gaza Strip on Friday evening in what local officials said was the deadliest violation of the shaky weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal said that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops fired a tank shell at a bus transporting members of the Abu Shaaban family, who were trying to return to inspect their home in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. Among the 11 victims were three women and seven children ages 5-13.

The IDF claimed the “suspicious vehicle” crossed the so-called “yellow line,” beyond which Israeli forces withdrew in accordance with the ceasefire agreement, and that warning shots were fired at the bus before troops acted to “remove the threat.”

However, according to the Palestine Chronicle, Basal asserted that “the family could have been warned or dealt with in a way that did not lead to murder.”

“What happened confirms that the occupation remains thirsty for blood and determined to commit crimes against innocent civilians,” he added.

In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement:

The Israeli government’s massacre of a family traveling to assess the remains of their home is the latest deliberate and blatant violation of the ceasefire agreement. The Trump administration must demand that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu stop using American taxpayer dollars and American weapons to sabotage the ceasefire agreement that America brokered so that he can restart the genocide in Gaza.

The State Department and the United Nations must also investigate horrific signs of torture and extrajudicial killing found on the bodies of returned Palestinian hostages. Torturing people to death after kidnapping them and holding them without charge is another example of [breaking] not only international law, but also US law related to foreign aid recipients.

Gaza’s Government Media Office said Saturday that Israeli forces have broken the truce 47 times, killing 38 people and wounding 143 others “in clear and blatant violation of the ceasefire decision and the principles of international humanitarian law.”

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Gaza officials formally accuse Israel of organ theft, demand international probe

Gaza’s Government Media Office formally accused Israel on 17 October of stealing organs from Palestinians after Israel returned 120 mutilated bodies following the recent ceasefire, including some who had been tortured to death.

“We formally accuse the Israeli army of stealing organs from the martyrs,” stated Dr. Ismail al-Thawabta, Director General of the Media Office, while demanding an international investigation into Israel’s “torture, mutilation, and organ theft.”

The 120 bodies “arrived in extremely poor and distressing condition,” including blindfolded, bound, crushed under tanks, and missing corneas, livers, and limbs, Thawabta stated.

“The Israeli occupation executed many of them in cold blood. A large number were found blindfolded, with their hands and feet bound, and others showed signs of hanging or close-range gunfire,” he added.

“We also found bodies showing clear evidence of severe torture until death.”

Thawabta explained that Israeli authorities refused to provide the names of the victims, making it extremely difficult for authorities in Gaza to identify them.

After the release of the bodies, families of missing Palestinians rushed to hospitals—especially Nasser Hospital—trying to see if their relatives were among them. But many remain unidentified and will have to be buried anonymously.

“The health system in Gaza is almost completely collapsed. We lack the equipment for DNA testing and forensic analysis. Some families could only identify their loved ones from personal belongings or clothing. If we cannot identify the rest, we will be forced, sadly, to document and bury them anonymously, to preserve human dignity,” Thawabta added.

According to the Media Office’s data, 9,500 Palestinians remain missing, most of them trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings.

“Entire families—father, mother, children—remain buried for nearly two years,” the Media Office director stated.

The bodies are difficult to locate due to the sheer amount of destruction Israeli bombing has caused, and because Israel has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s heavy machinery, bulldozers, and excavators, preventing rescue operations.

“Even now, despite the ceasefire, all crossings remain closed, and Israel blocks the entry of rescue machinery. This is a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in modern history—over 3,000 families completely wiped out, another 6,000 families killed with only one survivor,” Thawabta added.

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