Tag: israel

Oman Banned FlyDubai Hijacker From Flying. So Why Was He?

FlyDubai has major questions to answer, because the anti-Israel terrorist who tried to hijack an airplane and crash it this week while acting as a FlyDubai copilot had a ban from his home country on flying because of his beliefs.

We already knew the airline company had messed up because pilots flying to Israel are not supposed to be from countries that do not have diplomatic ties with Israel, and Oman does not. So an Omani copilot should never have been on a flight to Tel Aviv. But now it appears the failure goes back much further, because FlyDubai didn’t even do enough background checking when hiring the copilot to discover that even pro-terrorist Oman thought he was too radical to pilot a plane.

Oman has been fairly consistently in support of the terrorist Iranian regime throughout this whole year of Iran’s domestic and international massacres, so the copilot must be extreme indeed if he is worse. Fox News reported Friday:

The FlyDubai co-pilot accused of stabbing the captain of a passenger jet mid-flight and nearly causing a catastrophic crash was grounded by Oman Air in 2024 after the airline discovered he had been visiting radical Islamic websites, according to a source familiar with the matter… Authorities believe the co-pilot moved to Dubai later that same year, according to the source, who also told Fox News the co-pilot spent a significant part of his life outside Oman, including with his mother, who is from Syria.

According to the source, FlyDubai did not check with Oman Air about the co-pilot before hiring him.

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The American Public Has Turned on Israel. Washington Doesn’t Care.

For decades, American support for Israel was a bipartisan consensus. It was believed that only fringe figures, kooks, or antisemites would question the close bond between the two nations, and that this was a relationship forged on the grounds of mutual geopolitical interests.

Well, after years of Israel conducting a mass slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza, and after having successfully convinced President Donald Trump to launch a disastrous war in Iran, American public opinion has taken a turn. According to a Marquette Law School survey from September 2026, 59 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, compared to only 29 percent who say they have a favorable view of the country. This is a shocking collapse from where Israel’s support was just years ago.

The policy emanating from the U.S. government, however, has not reflected this change. In fact, our political leaders and media figures have decided that now is the time to showcase their undying loyalty to Israel in a very transparent fashion.

On September 29, the Senate voted on a resolution introduced by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), that sought to force the State Department to report to Congress on the killing of U.S. citizens by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The resolution was rejected with a 47-51 vote, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) being the only member of the GOP to buck party lines and support the resolution.

Besides Paul, every Senate Republican – as well as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) – voted against transparency on the issue of American citizens being killed overseas by violent settlers. What could the possible justification be for such a vote?

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), who voted “nay”, claims that the resolution was “another cynical ploy by Democrats to isolate our closest ally in the region.”

Not really a substantive rationale for opposing transparency on American civilians being attacked and killed abroad.

The GOP isn’t the only place where loyalty to Israel remains unshaken. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, has again made statements that, at first glance, seem almost comically deranged.

In a recent virtual appearance at the “Pray Vote Stand Summit,” Huckabee was asked to identify the greatest threat facing Israel (as if that should be the primary concern of a U.S. official). He responded by saying that Israel’s most pressing danger does not come from a regional enemy, but from the collapse in support among the American populace.

“I think the greatest threat to Israel,” Huckabee explained, “is that they would be abandoned by those who should be their natural allies. Let me begin with the United States. We get more from Israel than we give to Israel, but most Americans don’t know it.”

“What I’m seeing happen in Europe, their turning against Israel and against the Jewish people,” Huckabee added. “This is setting up for a real challenge and a conflict not between countries, but between heaven and hell, light and darkness, truth and lies.”

“Some of the nations… have created for themselves a disastrous future by saying, yeah, we’re going to curse Israel. Well, based on Genesis 12, I don’t recommend it.”

Huckabee is implying here that by withholding support for Israel, European nations – and those who would do the same in America – have enacted a curse upon themselves and their countries. Huckabee’s position, therefore, is that we can never withdraw support for Israel, regardless of whether or not it’s in our nation’s interests. In doing so, he fears, we would be sentencing ourselves to hell.

Huckabee has articulated this stance before, so it comes as little surprise that he would make such an outlandish statement. Yet one can’t help but be startled by the fact that this man – delusions and all – is a government official.

A core source of Israeli influence is the neoconservative media. A cast of pro-Israel characters have been busy over the last few years doing damage control, attempting to reverse the draining of American support for Israel.
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), is one of the most prominent advocates for a close U.S.-Israel relationship. He published an article in FDD on September 6 discussing the risk of Israel becoming financially isolated on the global stage. In his piece, he gave the Israeli government advice on how to prepare for such a scenario. One of his recommendations was deeply concerning:

“Israel and the United States should deepen their military, technological, intelligence and economic integration,” Dubowitz said, “to such an extent that inflicting financial harm on Israel would also carry a significant cost for Washington.”

Dubowitz went on to reiterate this message, saying in an interview later that month that Israel has “got to make the relationship deeper.”

“You’ve got to make Israel so valuable… that weaponizing that financial relationship against Israel is going to impose costs on the United States.”

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Border Agents Are Randomly Seizing Phones of US Citizens Who Support Palestine

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.

“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.

He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.

Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.

She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.

Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.

“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”

The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.

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Irregular: The Israeli Company with Intelligence Ties at the Center of the Rogue AI Incidents

On Friday, September 18, Google acknowledged that its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot had “escaped its testing environment in May and hacked into three companies.”

According to Google, the AI models found passwords available online and logged into the online infrastructure of three companies. Once Gemini gained access to the companies’ real-world infrastructure, it recognized it was not in a simulated environment and ended the attacks.

The Gemini incident followed reports of similar attempted hacks or escapes by AI agents developed by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.

These reports of AI agents attacking other companies and escaping their environments have led to a barrage of calls for legal action and warnings about impending doom. From claims that humanity is in danger of being killed by AI in the next decade to calls for a coordinated slowdown of AI research, fears that AI will negatively impact the future of the planet have gone mainstream.

While it’s important to take a sober look at the warnings from employees of the Big Tech companies developing AI models, as well as the CEOs, it is equally important to interrogate this narrative. Some skeptics have already claimed that the Big Tech companies are seeking to profit from the reports of the alleged danger posed by their AI models. Others speculate that the companies may be calling for regulation of their industry to shape government policies and potentially undercut future competitors and smaller AI firms.

To better understand whether these reports are genuine, represent an attempt at widening profit margins, or simply another sign of regulatory capture, we need a closer examination of the company at the center of several of these “rogue AI” incidents.

While nearly a dozen incidents have been reported in total, the “escapes” reported by Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic happened during tests designed to measure the capabilities of the AI bots. Each of those tests was being conducted by a company known as Irregular, an Israeli AI security firm that conducts third-party tests of frontier models.

Irregular has stated that the AI agents were able to take unapproved actions because internet access was “unintentionally made available.” They say the errors have been patched and similar incidents should no longer be possible.

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Israeli PM Netanyahu Makes Most Of FlyDubai Terror Attack As Elections Approach

It is too early to determine whether Iran was behind Monday’s alleged attempt to sabotage Flydubai Flight FZ1073, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in overnight media interviews.

However, the Israeli premier said his country would help determine the motives of the attacker and any other accomplices. Netanyahu spoke to Fox News’s Sean Hannity and CNN in the interviews, given overnight, after he had told the media earlier in the day that a co-pilot had stabbed the captain of the Boeing 737, which was carrying 174 people, including 174 Israeli citizens, and attempted to crash the plane over Israel.

He described the incident as “an extremely serious security incident” that had been averted by the “heroic” actions of the passengers and crew on board, preventing what he termed “a 9/11-type disaster.” Flight FZ1073 took off from Dubai’s Airport on Monday at 1:15 p.m. Local time, and had been en route to Tel Aviv, in Israel, when it suddenly began plummeting downwards, issuing a distress signal, as it dropped some 14,000 feet in less than half a minute, according to the flight-tracking service, Flightradar24, cited by the news service Reuters.

The plane managed to make an emergency landing at the Al Mulayah Airfield in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. All 174 passengers, including the majority of Israeli citizens on board, were safely returned to Israel.

The two pilots on board, including the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, were hospitalized for wounds sustained during the attempt to sabotage the plane. The captain is reported to be in stable condition, according to the Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

A Shin Bet delegation is set to travel to the UAE in order to conduct security talks with the Emirates’ authorities, ahead of the return of the hundreds of Israeli travelers who were stranded in Dubai following the Flydubai suspension of all flights to and from Israel pending an investigation into the causes of the near catastrophe.

In his initial assessment of the attempted sabotage, Netanyahu said that a pilot who was identified as the co-pilot of FZ1073, an Omani national, had attacked the captain with a weapon, in an attempt to bring down the plane carrying 174 people over Israel. The stabbed captain had managed to open the cockpit door and the passengers and crew, including another pair of pilots from Flydubai who were traveling on the plane as passengers, had collectively managed to overpower the co-pilot and take control of the plane in order to land safely in Saudi Arabia.

Netanyahu said that he had spoken with Saudi authorities and that they had arrested the pilot and were questioning him in connection with the attempted sabotage of the plane carrying 174 people, mostly Israelis, on Monday. An Israeli passenger, Yaniv Hayun, had entered the cockpit and subdued the attacking co-pilot with the help of another crew member, enabling the two other pilots from Flydubai to take over the plane, in order to land safely with all 174 passengers on board, the premier said, hailing the heroic actions of the passenger and the two pilots in saving the lives of 174 people.

Netanyahu had written on his social media pages earlier in the day, saying that he had met the heroic Yaniv Hayun and captain Machchhar, who had fought back against his attacker and opened the cockpit door, enabling the passengers to overpower the co-pilot and take control of the plane in order to save 174 lives. The premier wrote that “we will get to the root of this attacker, whether he had accomplices, whether Iran was behind it.

It is too early to say.” In his interview with Hannity, Netanyahu said that he had spoken with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and that the two leaders had agreed that Israel would join the investigation into the cause of the attempted sabotage. The premier said that he had received no specific warning or intelligence about any possible threat to the flight, although there were threats of possible attacks by Iranian jihadist proxies against Israelis abroad, which were generally known to Israeli security services.

As a result of the attempted sabotage, Netanyahu said that he had instructed all relevant security institutions to prepare and to increase security in order to deal with any possible “worst case scenarios” that may arise, as well as to tighten checks on pilots flying into Israel.

The incident was described by Defense Minister Israel Katz as an “attempted jihadist attack” that had been thwarted by heroic Israeli passengers. Flydubai has suspended all flights to and from Israel, pending an investigation into the causes of the near disaster, and cautioned against speculating about the possible causes of the attempted sabotage of the plane.

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The Usefulness of a Massacre

On Sunday morning, without notice, a private plane carried Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel and into Abu Dhabi. Channel 12 broke the story while he was still on the ground. A day later both governments confirmed the meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calling it a conversation about bilateral relations. The Israeli account gave the errand away. Netanyahu had gone to ask the Emirati president to deny publicly a report that he had telephoned Netanyahu days before 7 October 2023 to warn that Hamas was preparing a major assault.

A prime minister who wanted the record corrected would send a lawyer or a spokesman. This one flew across the Gulf in secret, a month before an election, to ask a foreign head of state to say a warning never happened. The method is the tell, and it points at everything the errand is meant to protect.

What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed.

In Gaza the army holds more than half the territory after the autumn ceasefire, and the plan for what remains was drawn up in Washington. A proposal built around Donald Trump would place the enclave under American trusteeship for at least a decade and rebuild it as a coastal resort on cleared land. Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the voluntary transfer of Gazans to third countries, and his defense minister ordered the army to prepare for a mass departure. A UN commission gave the campaign its legal name last September, finding that Israel had committed genocide and that its object was permanent control of Gaza and a Jewish majority across the land it holds. Israel rejects the finding. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over the conduct of the war, which his office calls false.

The other fronts complete the picture. In the West Bank the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, pushed through the E1 settlement, some 3,401 homes on the corridor that severs the territory, and said its approval buries any Palestinian state. His cabinet colleagues inaugurated two new settlements last week, and Smotrich has demanded the army wage in the West Bank what it waged in Gaza. In Lebanon the military sits on some 234 square miles of the south. In Syria, after the fall of Assad, it crossed the old disengagement line into the UN buffer zone and dug into nine positions, including the peak of Mount Hermon. The war opened on Iran this year runs on the same logic. The Atlantic Council, no enemy of Israel, describes an emergency response to October that has hardened into a permanent doctrine of forward defense. None of this was concealed as intent. Handed a map of the promised land on live television last August, Netanyahu said he felt very attached to the idea of a Greater Israel reaching into Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been. When the fighting began, the expectation across Israel was that it would close within months, the coalition would fracture, and Netanyahu would answer for the worst security failure in the country’s history. A New York Times investigation later set out how the opposite came to pass. He stretched the fighting past the point his own commanders judged necessary and added war aims as ceasefire talks matured. In April 2024 a six-week truce that would have freed more than thirty hostages reached the edge of a cabinet vote, and Smotrich ended it with a line, warning Netanyahu that if the deal passed, you no longer have a government. In March 2025 Israel broke a standing ceasefire, which brought the departed Itamar Ben-Gvir back into the coalition. The hostages were the cost, paid in installments.

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Why Didn’t Netanyahu’s Cabinet Preempt October 7 (if it Knew About it in Advance)?

In his fiery speech to the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against accusations of genocide levelled against Israel, as many delegates walked out and hundreds of protesters rallied against him across Manhattan.

After Netanyahu had downplayed Israeli settler violence, rejected Gaza genocide and presented a number of misrepresentations, his speech reached its hallucinatory crescendo: “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”

Netanyahu’s speech was an effort to shift attention away from a political storm brewing in Israel that won’t go away. It failed.

October 7, 2023 was no surprise

A day after October 7, 2023 Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer said that the “massive attacks by Hamas leadership into Israel … is no less than Israel’s 9/11.” I fully disagreed. In the same interview for CNBC, I said the attack did not come out of the blue: “The Israeli-Hamas War is a logical result of 50 years of failed military policies.”

Half a decade before. I had written of the ticking time bomb in Gaza. And a day or two before October 7, I warned of the coming explosion. It was not a prophetic insight. That date was the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and a high-profile escalation was a no-brainer.

But why wasn’t Hamas’s operation disrupted when Netanyahu cabinet knew about it in advance?

In early 2025, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) 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, pointed fingers at Prime Minister Netanyahu. The key mistakes featured the political idea of Hamas as an Israeli asset, the intelligence misjudgment that it couldn’t launch a large-scale attack, and weak defensive deployment.

As we are approaching the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War (October 5, 1973), the Hamas-led attack (October 7, 2023) and the late October election in Israel, new disclosures have been many recently.

Intriguingly, many of these warnings were initially reported a long while ago. Now they have been weaponized in the bitter Israeli election struggle. That’s why most focus on Netanyahu and his cabinet rather than his rivals, several of whom effectively supported the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

UAE president’s pre-October 7 warning of a major operation

A week and a half before October 7, 2023 UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes.

In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ then-leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. He expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.

MBZ told Netanyahu that Israel should be ready. He recommended trying to find an economic solution for the Strip and calming the West Bank to prevent escalation.

To bin Zayed’s surprise, the Israeli PM felt there was little reason for concern. Netanyahu reassured him that Israel was prepared for any scenario.

The story was disclosed in early September by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval in their new book, Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment (in Hebrew).

If the story is valid, the inaction of Netanyahu’s cabinet on October 7 was a colossal political failure at the highest level of the Israeli government.

Hamas leader’s pre-October 7 warnings

Just days ago, former senior Fatah official Sufian Abu Zaida, who mediated between Israel and Hamas before the attacks on October 7, 2023, said that the sides had been close to signing an agreement before the massacre.

In an interview with Egypt’s Alghad TV, Abu Zaida said that Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar warned twice in September 2023 he was preparing a major operation.

The disclosures make the pre-October 7 diplomatic environment even more consequential. Abu Zaida says Israel and Hamas were nearing a proposed arrangement, which involved Palestinian prisoners, easing restrictions on Gaza and measures concerning electricity, water and workers.

Reportedly, Sinwar explicitly dictated an ominous message to Abu Zaida, ordering him to deliver it to Israeli officials word-for-word. Sinwar warned that Hamas would put cards on the table and cause an “earthquake” in negotiations, demanding that Israel prepare to “empty its prisons.”

Subsequently, then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar briefed Netanyahu on the meeting with Abu Zaida in mid-September 2023. Two days later, senior Israeli defense figures held an urgent discussion on Sinwar’s threat.

At the end of September, Egypt’s then-intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, came to Israel, reportedly to deliver a warning that Hamas was preparing for something big.

Why were these high-level warnings ignored on October 7?

Oddly enough, many of these disclosures have been known since late fall 2023, when I, too, incorporated them in my The Fall of Israel (2024).

Repeated warnings, repeated inaction

After October 7, the Egyptian intelligence chief Kamel acknowledged that Israel had ignored repeated warnings that “an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big.”

While Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning, the Egyptian said that the Israeli PM had received direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister. Similarly, Michael McCaul, Chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters of the alleged warning.

The inconvenient fact was that Israeli intelligence authorities had been aware of the threat for months yet ignored it.

Right after October 7, several Israeli media released several reports indicating that intelligence analysts’ warnings were ignored. In November 2023, even the New York Times reported “Israel knew Hamas’s attack plan more than a year ago.”

What was new in the Times piece was the document verifying the story. Code-named Jericho Wall, the 40-page blueprint outlined a lethal invasion.

But it was known to have been circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders. Yet, experts determined an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities.

In effect, based on over 1 year of evidence, Hamas militants had trained for the blitz attacks in at least six sites across Gaza in plain sight and less than 1.5 km from Israel’s heavily fortified and monitored border, as even the mainstream CNN concluded barely a week after October 7.

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Google Earth exposes devastation in Gaza with new updated images

Google Earth has updated its images to show the devastating scale of destruction across Gaza with swathes of the strip reduced to rubble.

Israeli’s military action in Gaza has led to the damage and destruction of the majority of housing, hospitals, schools, and buildings across the 141 square mile territory, which is widely considered one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has not allowed foreign journalists, independent investigators or several human rights groups into the strip. The Independent’s Bel Trew flew over the war-torn region last year and noted the “torched ruins of once-bustling cities” leaving Gaza in “ash and ruin”.

“It is as if giants have torn through anything that once lived here: monstrous teeth have ripped chunks out of the few buildings that still teeter above ground. Everything else appears stamped underfoot,” she said.

Barry Andrews, Member of the European Parliament for the Dublin constituency wrote: “The updated Google satellite images of Gaza are quite incredible, for all to see…”

It is unclear when the update was made. The Independent has contacted Google for comment.

Earlier this month, the UN called for international investigators to be granted access to all areas of Gaza to help collect evidence and document alleged violations as human remains continued to be uncovered from underneath the rubble.

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The Senate Can and Should Take an Important Step Toward Ending Israeli Impunity

Last week, I was pleased to once again participate in a meeting with one of my US Senators, Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a consistent leader for peace, justice, and human rights in Congress, and especially for ending US support for Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing against the people of Palestine.

The subject of the meeting was his bill, with a vote expected early next week, Senate Resolution 852, to hold Israel accountable for its horrific actions against US citizens killed or detained by Israel. The goal of the resolution is very simple: within 30 days of passage, to require a State Department report on Israel’s alleged killings of nine US citizens, and more broadly, on the commission of “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights by Israel.” The resolution cites US law, section 502(B)(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

The resolution reads, in part “…since January 2022, at least nine United States citizens have been killed by violent Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces in the West Bank, including Omar Assad, Shireen Abu Akleh, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, Mohammad Khdour, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, Amer Rabee, Sayfollah Kamel Musallet, Khamis Ayyad, and Nasrallah Abu Siyam” and “…the killings of these Americans in the West Bank have been met by a lack of accountability from the Netanyahu government and an inability to secure justice by the United States Government.”

Asking the Department of State to produce such a report sounds like the absolute minimum we, as taxpayers, deserve from our government, and certainly the families of those killed by Israel, likely with US-provided weapons, deserve that and much more. The resolution is supported by 84% of voters, on a bipartisan basis, in a just-released poll, and has 24 Senate co-sponsors. And as the resolution states, and many supporters note, protecting US citizens abroad is constantly touted as the top priority for US foreign policy, even by the current rogue Trump regime that regularly flouts domestic and international law, with the most egregious example being the illegal US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

Peace advocates regularly support much stronger legislation, and will do so repeatedly, until peace, justice, and human rights are the real foundations of US foreign policy, and not just paid cynical lip service. Soon there will likely be a Joint Resolution of Disapproval (JRD) in Congress to stop the proposed shipment of 40,000 one-ton bombs to Israel. The Biden administration, as bad as it was in its support for Israel during the razing of Gaza, had put this sale on hold, but President Donald Trump is now moving it forward. But the relatively modest Van Hollen resolution would be an important step toward ending Israel’s impunity, and if we can’t get justice for American citizens killed by Israel, then Congress is completely derelict in doing its job.

Peace Action and our colleagues have already generated over 57,000 letters to the Senate in favor of Sen. Van Hollen’s resolution, and many groups are pushing to get that figure close to 100,000, if not more.

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UN adds 61 firms to settlements blacklist over alleged human rights violations against Palestinians

The UN human rights office has added 61 more companies to a blacklist of firms that it says are involved in violating Palestinian human rights through business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The vast majority of the total 214 companies, which are based in 11 countries, are Israeli. Five of the 158 companies listed last year were removed in the latest update.

The blacklist, first published in 2020, was born of a vote by the UN’s human rights council, which has no ability to force companies to act. Its main goal is to name and shame businesses with ties to the settlements.

It is unclear how the inclusion on the list has affected the companies financially.

“This report is another reminder to companies that they have human rights responsibilities and are expected to conduct due diligence to ensure that they do not become involved in human rights violations or abuses,” said Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, in a statement.

Israel said it “categorically rejects” the publication. “This database is meant to serve as a blacklist against businesses that have committed no wrongdoing,” the Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva said in a statement. “We call on friends not to yield to this ugly attempt to blacklist Israeli firms.”

The UN office said it had advised the companies of their listing and given them a right of reply.

The latest report comes as Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas have faced new scrutiny.

Earlier this month, Britain banned trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, where it says “settler terrorists” are carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. France and Canada announced they would take similar action.

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