Tag: israel

Trump Backpedals On Controversial Plan: ‘No One Is Expelling Anyone From Gaza’

President Trump in a Wednesday press conference while hosting Irish prime minister Micheál Martin at the White House appeared to backpedal on his plan to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” by expelling all Palestinian inhabitants. 

Trump told reporters “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians” in response to a question on whether he still stands by his ultra-provocative remarks which were tantamount to calling for ethnic cleansing of the enclave.

“We’re working hard with Israel… to see [how] we can solve the problem,” Trump explained. 

The fresh remarks stand in stark contrast with his earlier February words spoken alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he said, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip… I see it as a long-term ownership position.” He had explained that Palestinians in Gaza would have to leave and be resettled elsewhere.

In the Wednesday back-and-forth with reporters he actually again called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer a “Palestinian” and then quipped “He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore.”

The White House position on Gazans being expelled to other countries is based on the prior explanation that “Gaza is currently uninhabitable and residents cannot humanely live in a territory covered in debris and unexploded ordnance,” in the earlier words of US National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes.

But even many Republicans see the plan as completely unrealistic and absurd, given that for starters it would ensure years more of brutal war, and the likelihood that conflict would spiral over into other Arab countries.

Removal of the debris which has piled up in the demolished Strip could take years or even decades…

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Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal is Former Israeli Spy

The professor at the center of the Columbia University deportation scandal is a former Israeli intelligence official, MintPress News can reveal.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of the university’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), was abducted by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Saturday for his role in organizing protests last year against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Khalil’s dean, Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, head of the School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. Yarhi-Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus, thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has followed the protests.

Spooks in Our Midst

Before entering academia, Dr. Yarhi-Milo served as an officer and an intelligence analyst with the Israeli Defense Forces. Given that she was recruited into the intelligence services because of her ability to speak Arabic fluently, her job likely entailed surveilling the Arab population.

After leaving the world of intelligence, she worked for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. While there, she met and married her husband, Israel’s official United Nations spokesperson.

Although she is now an academic, she has never left the world of international security, making the subject her area of expertise. She has made a point of trying to lift women’s voices in the field. One of these was the then-U.S. Director of National Security, Avril Haines, whom she spoke with in 2023. But even though Khalil was a student in her school, she had nothing to say about his arrest. Indeed, rather than speak out on the issue (as activists have demanded), she instead chose this week to invite Naftali Bennett, prime minister of Israel from 2021 to 2022, to speak at Columbia. Students protesting Tuesday’s event were condemned by university authorities for “harassing” Yarhi-Milo.

Unprecedented Protests, Unprecedented Repression

Columbia was the epicenter of a massive protest movement across university campuses nationwide last year. It is estimated that at least eight percent of all American college students participated in demonstrations denouncing the genocidal attack on Gaza and calling on educational institutions to divest from Israel. The response was equally vast in its scale. Well over 3,000 protestors were arrested, including faculty members themselves.

The nationwide movement began at Columbia on April 17, when a modest Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protestors were shocked when university president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the New York Police Department – the first time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Mahmoud Khalil was among the leaders of the movement. The Syrian-born Palestinian refugee was willing to speak calmly and cogently to the press about the protest’s goals. A permanent resident of the United States, he was abducted by ICE on Saturday.

“ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come,” President Trump stated. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed Trump’s ominous threat, announcing, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” In another clear threat, the Trump administration moved to cancel $400 million in funding to Columbia University, citing the institution’s failure to sufficiently crack down on “antisemitic” incidents on campus.

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Jewish torture: Urinating on Palestinian prisoners, burying them alive and beating the sick

Israeli jailers would wrap Palestinian prisoners in shrouds and bury them alive.

As they began to suffocate, just before death took hold, a small amount of air was allowed in to keep them alive, only for the process to be repeated moments later.

This is one of many accounts of torture inflicted on Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities.

Following the recent Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange, hundreds of detainees have been released, and similar harrowing testimonies have emerged.

Mahmoud Ismail Abukhater, 41, was at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza when an Israeli military quadcopter hovered overhead, broadcasting a voice ordering “people of the neighbourhood to surrender,” on 20 October 2024.

“They fired bullets at houses and balconies and bombed homes nearby as they broadcast those messages to terrorise us. That’s when they detained us,” he recalled.

Abukhater said the torture began the moment they were detained and continued until the very last moment before their release.

“They treated us like animals, not humans,” he said.

Before being transferred to prison, the prisoners were taken to a place that resembled a cattle farm in Gaza, he explained.

There, they were forced to endure the freezing night, wearing only boxers and the thin white clothes they were given.

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Green Card-Holding Palestinian Trump’s Deporting Gets Even Worse News as Justice Finds Him

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student detained by immigration authorities over the weekend, appears to have violated explicit federal immigration laws.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil, a permanent resident with a green card, on Saturday.

The agents originally told Khalil his student visa was being revoked, according to The Associated Press, which quoted Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer.

Greer told the AP she spoke on the phone with the agents during the arrest and said her client had a green card. The agent then told her the green card was being revoked instead, Greer said, according to the AP.

On Sunday, in a post on the social media platform X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the federal government will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” because he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” according to the AP.

On Monday, however, a federal judge in New York blocked Khalil’s deportation. Judge Jesse M. Furman said that Khalil must remain in the United States “to preserve the court’s jurisdiction” as the court considers his case, according to NBC News.

A hearing for the case is scheduled in federal court for Wednesday.

Other protesters have assembled in New York City to demand the release of Khalil.

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From Gaza to Syria: The Unyielding Reality of Israeli Settler Colonialism

The conversation on settler colonialism must not be limited to academic discussion. It is a political reality, clearly demonstrated in the everyday behavior of Israel.

Israel is not merely an expansionist regime historically; it remains actively so today. Additionally, the core of Israeli political discourse, both past and present, revolves around territorial expansion.

Frequently, we succumb to the trap of blaming such language on a specific set of right-wing and extremist politicians or on a particular US administration. The truth is vastly different: the Israeli Zionist political discourse, though it may change in style, remains fundamentally unchanged throughout time.

Zionist leaders have always associated the establishment and expansion of their state with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, later referred to in Zionist literature as the “transfer.”

Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his diary about the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population from Palestine:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

It is unclear what happened to Herzl’s grand employment scheme aimed at “spiriting” the population of Palestine across the region. What we know is that the so-called “penniless population” resisted the Zionist project in numerous ways. Ultimately, the depopulation of Palestine occurred through force, culminating in the Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948.

The discourse of the erasure of the Palestinian people has been the shared foundation among all Israeli officials and governments, though it has been expressed in different ways. It has always had a material component, manifesting in the slow but decisive takeover of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the confiscation of farms, and the constant construction of “military zones.”

Despite Israeli claims, this “incremental genocide” is not directly linked to the nature and degree of Palestinian resistance. Jenin and Masafer Yatta illustrate this clearly.

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New BBC Documentary ‘The Road to 7th October’ Is an Utter Travesty

There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.

The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.

He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him.

His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas – as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.

The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza – this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine – that has received none of the controversy.

And for good reason.

Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.

It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.

What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.

Which is no mean feat, given the subject matter: nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.

But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative – one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.

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Congressman Thomas Massie Faces Trump’s Wrath Over Dual Citizenship Proposal and AIPAC Stance

U.S. Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) has found himself at the center of a political firestorm after proposing a ban on dual citizenship for lawmakers, a move that has drawn sharp criticism from President Donald Trump and highlighted Massie’s ongoing tensions with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The libertarian-leaning Kentucky congressman, known for his independent streak, has taken no financial contributions from AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group, which some of his supporters claim has made him a target for political retaliation.

Massie’s proposal, first publicized in August 2024 via a post on X, calls for members of Congress who hold dual citizenship to renounce citizenship in all other countries. At a minimum, he argued, they should disclose such statuses and abstain from votes that specifically benefit those nations. “Dual citizens elected to United States Congress should renounce citizenship in all other countries,” Massie wrote, igniting a debate about loyalty and influence in American politics. While the proposal has not yet been formally introduced as legislation, it has gained traction among some conservative and populist circles, who see it as a way to ensure lawmakers prioritize U.S. interests.

The controversy escalated on March 10, 2025, when Trump announced on Truth Social that he would “lead the charge” to primary Massie, accusing the congressman of being an “automatic ‘NO’ vote on just about everything” and comparing him to former Representative Liz Cheney, whom Trump successfully helped oust in 2022. Trump’s ire appears to stem from Massie’s refusal to support a short-term government funding bill backed by the president, as well as his broader history of bucking party leadership. However, posts on X and comments from Massie’s supporters suggest that his stance on dual citizenship and his rejection of AIPAC funding may also be fueling the conflict.

AIPAC, a powerful lobbying organization that spent over $100 million in the 2024 election cycle to support pro-Israel candidates, has had a fraught relationship with Massie. In a June 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Massie claimed that every Republican congressman except him has an “AIPAC babysitter” – a liaison who lobbies them on behalf of the group’s interests. He has also criticized U.S. military aid to Israel, notably boycotting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July 2024 and calling for Israel to fund its own weapons if it targets civilian infrastructure in Lebanon. AIPAC, in turn, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on attack ads against Massie in past primaries, though he easily won reelection in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District in November 2024 with no Democratic opponent.

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Was October 7 Avoidable?

After the Hamas-led offensive of October 7, 2023, it was portrayed as “Israel’s 9/11,” which came out of the blue. Yet, this assumption is not supported by verified facts, including ignored intelligence, abandoned hostages and neglected Israeli communities around Gaza.

A day after October 7, Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer said that the “massive attacks by Hamas leadership into Israel… is no less than Israel’s 9/11.” By contrast, in the same interview for CNBC, I said that October 7 did not come out of the blue. “The Israeli-Hamas War is a logical result of 50 years of failed military policies.” Our views were diametrically opposed.

I had warned of the ticking time bomb in Gaza already in 2018, half a decade before. A day or two before October 7, I wrote an essay on the coming explosion in Gaza. It was not prophetic insight. October 7, 2023, was the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and I fully expected a high-profile reaction.

After the brutal Hamas-led assault, Israeli authorities vehemently condemned what they called “our September 11” and a “surprise attack.” But the hard questions were conveniently ignored – and still are.

A week ago, the Israeli Defense Forces’ landmark investigations into the October 7 attack disclosed severe, deep-rooted intelligence miscalculations and fundamental misconceptions on the nature of Hamas and its intentions by both the Israeli government and military. Probing the same attack, Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, recently pointed fingers at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Typically, the prime mistakes featured the political conception of Hamas as an Israeli asset, the intelligence misjudgment that it couldn’t launch a large-scale attack, and weak defensive deployment.

The intriguing part of the story is that these facts were pretty well known already in the first days after October 7, 2023 – that is, more than a year ago – as I argue in The Fall of Israel. And there is more to the story.

Why was the abundant intelligence on the impending Hamas attack deliberately ignored? Why were the Israeli hostages effectively abandoned? Why were the strategic border communities neglected? With all its might, backed up with U.S. military aid and financing, how did Israel fail to see the writing on the wall? 

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US B-52 Bomber Flies With Israeli Jets Over Eastern Mediterranean

A US B-52 Stratrofortress bomber flew over the eastern Mediterranean Sea on March 4, marking the third US flyover of the Middle East in the past month, shows of force that are meant as threats toward Iran and its allies in the region.

“Israeli F-35i and F-15i aircraft flew alongside an American US B-52 strategic bomber,” the Israeli military said in a statement on Thursday. “During the flight, the forces practiced operational coordination between the two militaries to enhance their ability to address various regional threats.”

US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that it conducted a “Bomber Task Force Mission in the Middle East.” It said the B-52, which is capable of carrying nuclear weapons, took off from a base in the UK and flew across Europe on its way to the Middle East.

According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the US bomber “orbited off the coast of Israel,” meaning it likely flew near the besieged Gaza Strip.

The flight came just two weeks after the US sent two B-52 bombers over the Middle East on February 20. CENTCOM said the two bombers “flew across Europe and six partner countries in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility during their mission, which included aerial refueling and training missions at ranges.”

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Israel Cuts Electricity to Gaza, Ramping Up Collective Punishment

Israel on Sunday said it was cutting off electricity to the Gaza Strip as it ramps up the collective punishment of the civilian population to pressure Hamas to release Israeli hostages, violating the ceasefire deal reached in January.

Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen made the announcement, saying he instructed the Israel Electric Corporation to immediately stop selling electricity to power stations in Gaza.

“We will employ all the tools available to us so that all the hostages will return, and we will ensure that Hamas won’t be in Gaza on the ‘day after,’” Cohen said. The move is expected to impact Gaza’s water supply since electricity powers desalination plants that produce drinking water.

Since March 2, Israel has blocked the entry of aid, medicine, fuel, and all other goods into Gaza. The UN’s World Food Program has warned that it’s running out of food supplies in Gaza, and Palestinians report a sharp rise in prices since Israel imposed the total siege.

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