Tag: palestine

Gaza’s “Board of Peace” holds zero dollars despite billions pledged

In a stark revelation that underscores the paralysis of international reconstruction efforts, the World Bank-administered fund established for President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” in Gaza officially contains zero dollars. This finding comes despite approximately $17 billion in pledges from various nations, raising serious questions about the viability of the administration’s signature post-conflict initiative.

The board, personally chaired by Trump, was conceived to oversee the rebuilding of the devastated Palestinian enclave, but it remains a financial shell, stalled by legal uncertainty and disputes over transparency.

The empty vault: Where did the pledges go?

The core issue is a fundamental disconnect between promises and disbursement. A senior congressional aide confirmed that none of the pledged money has reached the Board of Peace. The Department of State has indicated there is no intention to route those funds through the board’s official channels. Instead of using the transparent, World Bank-administered account, the board has reportedly directed some donations into a private account at JPMorgan Chase.

This arrangement bypasses independent oversight and standard aid protocols, leaving donors and the public with limited visibility into how any funds are spent.

A king’s court or a UN-like agency?

The board’s unconventional structure has also drawn sharp criticism. Unlike traditional multilateral bodies, the Board of Peace is personally led by Trump, who retains final authority indefinitely. The charter requires countries to pay a one-billion-dollar fee for a permanent seat, a price tag that has deterred major European allies. Sen. Brian Schatz highlighted the tension between the State Department’s portrayal of the board as a standard UN-like agency and Trump’s characterization of it as a “king’s court.” Key powers like France and Britain have refused to pay the entry fee, leaving the board’s membership thin and its financial base weak.

No contracts, no construction: A stalled operation

The board has awarded no contracts for actual reconstruction projects, as it is not yet operating inside Gaza. The primary obstacle is Hamas’ refusal to disarm. Trump has linked all reconstruction aid to full demilitarization, creating a classic deadlock: the board cannot operate in Gaza without security, but security cannot be achieved without reconstruction funding. The Palestinian technocratic committee, formed to assume governance, remains unable to execute any work due to a total lack of funding. Even modest sums from Morocco and the UAE have been used primarily for staff salaries, not infrastructure.

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UK’s Renewed Ban on Palestine Action Confirms Legal Overreach in the Designation of Terrorism

In a dispiriting ruling yesterday, the Court of Appeal in London overturned a ruling in February, by the High Court, that the government’s proscription of the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, which was passed by Parliament last July, was unlawful.

The High Court’s ruling, in response to a judicial review submitted by Huda Ammori, one of Palestine Action’s two co-founders, repudiated the two counts on which the High Court had ruled the proscription unlawful.

Garden Court Chambers, whose barristers represented Huda Ammori at the judicial review in February, explained that these two counts were, firstly, that the Court “upheld the Claimant’s challenge that the Home Secretary failed to comply with her own policy when making the decision to proscribe Palestine Action”, and, secondly, that “proscription breached the rights of Freedom of Expression and Assembly as protected under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

The Court of Appeal shamefully reinstates the terrorism proscription

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal overturned both. The repudiation of the first was a long and detailed analysis of the home secretary’s powers regarding proscription, in which it was noticeable that, in dismissing it, the Court of Appeal not only poured scorn on the High Court, declaring that they had “adopted an excessively analytical approach to the interpretation of the Proscription Policy”, but also showed repeated and obsequious deference to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary at the time of the proscription, and her “expert” advisers from the police and the intelligence services.

At one point, for instance, the judges described how they were “required to attach special weight to the judgments and assessments of a primary decision-maker with special institutional competence” — yes, that really is a fawning description of Yvette Cooper! — and elsewhere, in deference to the executive branch of government, they noted that “The Proscription Decision lies in the area of national security which, before the Human Rights Act 1998, would have been regarded as unsuitable for judicial scrutiny at all.”

On the ECHR issues, described by the Court of Appeal as “questions of proportionality and the fair balance between the rights of individuals (free speech and freedom of assembly) and the rights of the community (national security and the rights of others)”, the Court acknowledged difficulties involving “the rights of the many law-abiding citizens wishing peacefully to protest, hold placards and otherwise support Palestine Action”, over 3,500 of whom have now been arrested — although they did also note that all of them ought to have been aware that doing so had become a “criminal act.” They also acknowledged “the ‘chilling effect’ that proscription may have upon those wishing to support the Palestinian cause, but who may be dissuaded from doing so by fear of committing offenses under the 2000 Act.”

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The Mladenov Distraction: Behind the Screen, Netanyahu Is Annexing Gaza ‘Step-by-Step’

Gaza requires urgent international attention.

What is happening in the besieged and devastated Strip at the moment by far exceeds an unfolding humanitarian disaster; it is a calculated geopolitical reshaping. Israel is actively executing a plan to permanently occupy the vast majority of Gaza, with consequences that require little elaboration considering what we already know about the ongoing genocide.

Currently, much of the international debate centers on a single official: Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov. The former United Nations Special Coordinator has been designated by the United States as the Executive Director of the Trump administration’s newly established ‘Board of Peace’ – an international council founded to oversee the implementation of Washington’s 20-point Gaza roadmap.

The issue, however, is much bigger than a single Washington-backed bureaucrat. A growing number of Palestinians and political analysts accuse Mladenov of manufacturing the very conditions that continue to obstruct progress on the agreement’s transition to its second phase.

Under the framework, the official transition to this second phase – which Trump and the Board of Peace declared to have begun in January 2026 – demands sweeping, one-sided Palestinian concessions, most notably the total disarmament of armed factions.

This demand is a recipe for the failure of the entire project, especially given that Israel has completely failed to implement the most basic requirements of the agreement’s first phase. It has refused to halt its routine military incursions, has failed to withdraw its forces to the originally mandated ‘Yellow Line‘ demarcation, and continues to deny entry permits to the technocratic committee slated to assume civil governance of the Strip.

Mladenov’s insistence on Palestinian disarmament before the agreement can advance – without a single guarantee of Israeli compliance – conveniently flips the narrative. It cynically reframes systematic starvation and the blockade of medical and construction supplies as a Palestinian failure to honor commitments.

In reality, Mladenov holds no real cards; he is merely a cog in a larger machinery controlled by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister has made it explicitly clear that he has no intention of following any peace roadmap, planning instead for the permanent, incremental takeover of Gaza.

Speaking at a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement on May 28, Netanyahu explained his strategy with total clarity, abandoning all diplomatic doublespeak: “We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60% of the territory of the Strip – you know this. We were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to…” he said, pausing as an audience member shouted “100!”

Netanyahu smiled and responded: “Let’s go step by step. First of all, 70. Let’s start with that. We’re pressing them from all sides, we’ll deal with the remnants.”

This is the actual blueprint of the Israeli government, declared openly to domestic audiences. The admission was so brazen that even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed frustration at Netanyahu’s candor. Testifying before Congress on June 2, Rubio remarked, “We have a plan – it doesn’t call for that,” referring to further Israeli territorial expansion.

Yet, Rubio quickly reverted to Washington’s standard line: “And at the end of the day, we understand that what we want, and I think what the Israelis would ultimately want, is a Gaza that is governed by a non-Hamas entity.”

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Stanford Graduation Descends Into Chaos as Students Stage Mass Walkout on Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Commencement Speech

More than 100 Stanford University graduates walked out of their commencement ceremony on Sunday to protest Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Videos posted on social media showed students leaving their seats at Stanford Stadium while chanting “Free, free Palestine.”

Others booed and shouted “shame on you” as Pichai addressed the crowd.

The protest was organized by groups including Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid.

Pichai, a Stanford alumnus who earned a master’s degree in materials science and engineering in 1995, was selected earlier this year to deliver the keynote address at the university’s 135th commencement ceremony.

Many of the protesting graduates carried Palestinian flags as they exited the stadium, turning what is traditionally one of the university’s most celebratory events into a political demonstration.

The protest centered on Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing and artificial intelligence contract jointly held with Amazon that provides services to the Israeli government.

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How Israel Planned the Gaza Genocide Decades Ago

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war – often referred to as the Six-Day War – not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza – levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population – is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” – the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

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The Praxian Genocidal Kill Chain — Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed how a group of Silicon Valley oligarchs, the self-professed “Praxians,” have seized control of the Trump administration and have aligned themselves with the “startup nation” of Israel. In my latest book, The Technocratic Dark State, I refer to the Praxians as NEONERDS, but we’ll continue to use their own moniker in this series of articles.

In Part 1, we also explored Praxian companies’ practical symbioses with Israeli SIGINT, especially Unit 8200. The evidence strongly indicates that the October 7th Hamas attack, which the Israeli Zionist Likud government cited as the justification for its genocidal destruction of Gaza, was a LIHOP false flag attack, in which an unknown number of Israelis were evidently killed—not by Hamas, but by their own military. That the attack proceeded unimpeded as it did was officially attributed primarily to SIGINT “failures.” Thus, the strong possibility exists that the Praxians participated in the extraordinary sequence of supposed SIGINT mistakes, oversights, and miscalculations that allegedly enabled Hamas to attack Southern Israel virtually unopposed.

The result of this LIHOP false flag attack was the deployment of the Praxians’ genocidal kill chains in Gaza. And now we have a larger Middle East conflagration. Not only have Israel and the US jointly attacked Iran, but the Israeli government, with Praxian kill chain assistance, is attempting to do to Lebanon what it has already done to Gaza. In Part 3, we shall see how the Praxians’ fingerprints are also observable in so-called intelligence “misjudgments” that led the US, for otherwise inexplicable reasons, to attack Iran.

Also discussed in Part 1 was how the Praxians have used their signature investment strategy—which they call “accelerationism”—to disrupt everything from markets to international relations by deploying “creative destruction” as their version of a “revolutionary tool.” Indeed, just as the Praxians’ accelerated “digital kill chain” is central to the devastation of Palestinian lives, so is it now featuring in a “new kind of war” in the Middle East.

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Digitally annexing the West Bank: Israel moves its theft of Palestinian land online

Israel’s annexation of the West Bank is moving full steam ahead on the ground, but it’s also going online. Last Wednesday, the Israeli government launched a new digital platform for registering lands in the West Bank, open for use by Israelis and Israeli corporations.

The new platform allows the registration of property and applies to lands in Area C of the West Bank, which comprises over 60% of the territory under the 1993 Oslo Accords. The rest of the West Bank is divided into Areas A and B, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) has varying degrees of civil and security control.

The launching of the platform comes on the heels of previous Israeli moves to alter how land ownership works in the West Bank, starting with an Israeli government decision in June 2025 to make Palestinian lands in Area C open to registration by anybody, including Israeli settlers. Since then, the Israeli government has taken several more steps to advance its annexation of the West Bank — not only with laws that lay the groundwork for annexation, but by exercising actual Israeli authority over Palestinian lands. 

Now, these measures have moved to the digital realm, making it even easier for Israelis to take control of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The PA has already condemned the online Israeli land registry as “a step towards actual annexation,” calling upon Palestinians to refrain from using the platform. 

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Israeli Knesset member Orit Strock, both hardline supporters of the Israeli settler movement, called the project “a fundamental pillar of implementing [Israeli] sovereignty” over the West Bank.

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‘Ceasefire Is a Joke’: Israeli Soldiers Recount Ongoing Indiscriminate Killings in Gaza

Israel Defense Forces soldiers interviewed for an article published Friday by The Associated Press described ongoing indiscriminate killing of Palestinians – including civilians – despite a purported ceasefire.

One IDF combat soldier told the AP that he saw his teammates “yelling in celebration” and “congratulating one another” after blowing up a vehicle driving near the ever-expanding so-called “yellow line” dividing the Gaza Strip into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled zones. The strike killed everyone inside the vehicle.

“It was a jungle,” the soldier said. “After the ceasefire, the order was: If someone crosses the line, you shoot them.”

The problem is, the yellow line is often unclear, invisible, and often shifts. It cuts through farmland, roads, neighborhoods, and areas where Palestinians live and work.

Nadav Weiman, an IDF veteran who is now the executive director of the veterans’ whistleblower group Breaking the Silence, told the AP that the military’s permissive shoot-to-kill policy has “created a reality where countless civilians have and are being killed for crossing invisible lines.”

One IDF soldier interviewed by the AP said “there was a general feeling that human lives are not valuable.” The soldier said his commanding officer told him it would be “too much work” to clearly mark the yellow line, and that Palestinians were supposed to somehow know where it was.

According to the AP, one soldier said that “sometimes snipers fired warning shots at people close to the line… but commanders told troops to do more to protect themselves. The soldier understood that to mean firing more lethal shots.”

“Soldiers shooting or ordering drone strikes don’t always know who’s crossing the line,” the AP reported, citing interviewed troops. “Although soldiers must provide coordinates and get approval from superiors before striking, it’s hard to give exact information as people are moving,” and soldiers reported colleagues “calling in coordinates based on a hunch or the last place they saw someone.”

IDF troops interviewed by the AP also described “a sense of confusion” and “a lack of clarity on rules of engagement around the yellow line.” Some commanders “paid lip service” to the ceasefire agreement that’s been in effect since last October, but in practice ignored it.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Israel has violated the ceasefire more than 3,005 times, resulting in more than 900 Palestinians killed and nearly 2,800 others injured, despite the truce.

“To call it a ceasefire is a joke,” one IDF soldier told the AP.

Israel claims that the entire length of the yellow line is now clearly marked. However, as Common Dreams reported this week, the IDF has incrementally shifted the boundary deeper into Gaza, where Israel now controls more than 60% of the coastal strip. This has left Palestinians sometimes waking up to learn they’re in “open-fire zones” where they are subjected to being shot on sight.

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Israeli troops have previously described indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians, including children and aid-seekers.

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Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has for the moment turned international attention away from Gaza as Israel moves from high- to low-intensity genocide.  The genocide may be the horrific culmination of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, but in order to make sense of it we must analyze the radical transformations that have taken place in the Middle Eastern and global political economy in recent decades.

The impulse to genocide has always been built into the Zionist project. But that impulse has been activated by the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The Al Aqsa Flood attack of October 2023 furnished Israel with the historic opportunity for which they had been waiting for decades.  If the Zionists are still in pursuit of their elusive Eretz Israel, the United States has been heading up a much more expansive project, one that places Gaza in the very center of global capitalism and its epochal crisis.  In the game plan of the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, Gaza is now to become an experimental field for a new and deadlier phase of global capitalism.  It is this larger picture that we want to lay out in this article.

The contemporary crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional. Structurally it is a crisis of overaccumulation, which refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are built up but this capital cannot find productive outlets for reinvestment.  This overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as transnational capitalists undertake a predatory search for where to unload massive amounts of surplus capital and open up new spaces for profit-making.  This violent expansion involves the seizure of markets and resources around the world through war, displacement, and repression.  The U.S. state and beyond it, what we will call Global Trumpism, is its out-of-control instrument in this expansionary wave.  At the core of Global Trumpism is the Washington-Tel Aviv axis.

The larger backdrop to the Israeli genocide is the transnational integration of capital over the past half century and the radical restructuring of global class relations and power blocs that capitalist globalization has brought about. Globalization in West Asia region began in the 1980s and accelerated with the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed the establishment in 1997 of the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs and IMF-supervised austerity.

This integration unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism and other services.  It brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in emerging global circuits of accumulation.  In this way, nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies as the entire region became incorporated into the globally-integrated production, financial, and service system that came into being over the past half century.

Israel, far from remaining excluded, integrated into these expanding regional and transnational capitalist networks on the heels of the Oslo “peace” accords, signed in 1993, as the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies began to develop common class interests.  In 2020 the UAE and Bahrain, along with Morocco and Sudan, signed the Abraham Accords, joining Egypt and Jordan in normalizing relations with Israeli, an opening that allowed Gulf investment groups to pour billions of dollars into the Israeli economy.  The October 2023 Al Aqsa attack and the subsequent Israeli siege placed further normalization on hold.  The new U.S.-Israeli strategy revolving around the “Board of Peace” (henceforth, Board of Genocide) seeks to bring the Arab and other states in the region back into the Abraham architecture.

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Self-Engineered Decay: Why Israel’s Political Collapse Cannot Be Separated from Its War Crimes

For those unfamiliar with the intricate machinery of Israeli politics, the unanimous 110-0 vote to dissolve the Knesset on May 20 appears to be an earth-shattering event. On the surface, it looks as if the days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition of far-right extremists are numbered. The reality, however, is far more complex.

Israel’s current political implosion is fundamentally tied to its failure to escape the ghosts of October 7. When the country’s military defenses collapsed on that day, Israel was transformed from a state with a formidable reputation as an invincible regional superpower into one trapped with a struggling army, structurally incapable of decisively winning a single war.

Since the launch of the devastating genocide in Gaza, neither the Israeli government nor the military establishment has been able to answer two fundamental questions:

One, how did the world’s self-proclaimed “invincible army” collapse in a matter of hours, leaving the entire Southern Command – whose sole job was to keep Gazans besieged – in total shambles?

Two, why has that same heavily funded military machine failed to achieve a decisive victory despite the near-total destruction of the Strip and the unprecedented slaughter and wounding of much of its population?

Complicating the matter is Benjamin Netanyahu’s pathological refusal to honestly investigate either the October 7 intelligence failure or the subsequent conduct of the Gaza war. Instead, he focused entirely on domestic damage control and image management, aggressively marginalizing or firing intelligence official, or high-ranking bureaucrats who challenged his narrative. Rather than pursuing a viable exit strategy, Netanyahu treated the defense apparatus as a public relations shield.

Consequently, opposition voices – initially led by Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party – began demanding Netanyahu’s resignation and snap elections. What began as predictable political fallout quickly evolved into a sweeping popular movement.

Public confidence in the government continues to plummet. Recent opinion polls consistently show that a vast majority of Israelis believe Netanyahu acts out of personal political survival rather than national interest. Data suggests that if elections were held today, his right-wing bloc would suffer a catastrophic defeat at the hands of a newly consolidated opposition – namely Beyachad (‘Together’), the newly formed unified list established by Naftali Bennett and Lapid.

Netanyahu, whose legacy as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is now defined by strategic failure, subsists in a profound personal and political crisis. His deliberate escalations of regional conflict served no distinct military purpose; instead, they merely highlighted his desperation, turning his rhetorical pledges of “total victory” into a hollow attempt to prevent his coalition from fracturing.

Meanwhile, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich exploited Netanyahu’s vulnerability to advance their own extremist agendas. Bent on rapid colonial expansion, they accelerated West Bank annexation, pushed draconian laws to execute Palestinian prisoners, and tightened the siege on occupied East Jerusalem.

Under normal circumstances, the sheer scale of the domestic, economic, and diplomatic harm engineered by this coalition should have removed it from power. Yet Netanyahu survived by exploiting deep social fractures and relying on unconditional support from Washington.

This survival shield was further fortified by the initial impotence of a fragmented political opposition and a perpetual wartime atmosphere that Netanyahu cultivated to freeze dissent. Not even his corruption trials derailed his career; he adapted state institutions into instruments of personal survival.

Yet the ultimate irony of Israeli politics is that pressure came not from mounting casualties or international isolation, but from compulsory military conscription of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim.

For decades, secular Israelis complained about the sweeping draft exemptions granted to yeshiva students, but the political elite routinely shrugged it off as a secondary culture war that could be managed via backroom political dealings.

Israel’s overextended, multi-front war of attrition completely smashed that equilibrium. The issue was violently pushed back to the surface because the military quite literally ran out of bodies. The true gravity of this manpower crisis was exposed when the army Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, explicitly broke ranks during a closed-door security cabinet meeting to warn that “the IDF is going to collapse in on itself.”

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