Tag: palestine

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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Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize ‘70% of Gaza Strip’, violating ceasefire deal

Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has given orders to the Israeli army to seize control of 70% of the Gaza Strip in a move that threatens to torpedo an already fragile ceasefire and create catastrophic humanitarian conditions in the already devastated territory.

Under the US-brokered ceasefire in October, the Israeli army withdrew to a demarcation line which gave Israel direct control of 53% of the occupied territory. Since then, Israeli forces have steadily advanced their positions westward into the Hamas-controlled half of the strip, and declared an ever-expanded no man’s land west of that, within which they claim the right to decide who can enter and open fire on anyone perceived as a threat.

In recent days, Israeli-backed armed militias have taken a leading role in emptying the territory along the ceasefire line, telling residents to vacate their homes or shelters.

Throughout the eight months of the ceasefire, Israeli forces have continued to open fire on Palestinians within range of the “yellow line” splitting the strip, and carry out airstrikes deeper inside western Gaza, killing more than 900 Palestinians since the truce began.

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Global Sumud Flotilla Urges Probe of US Complicity in Members’ Abduction and Torture by Israel

Testimonies published Tuesday from activists, journalists, medical professionals, and others who took part in the latest international flotilla attempting to break Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza called for an investigation into US complicity in their illegal high-seas abduction and alleged torture, sexual assault, and other abuse by Israeli forces.

“As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States’ critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable,” Global Sumud Flotilla’s (GSF) media team said in a statement.

“This role goes beyond the State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information,” GSF continued. “It includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured, and the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.”

That vessel, the amphibious landing ship INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and was fully financed by the US government. GSF activists first became aware of what they now call the “torture boat” when it was used to detain members of the previous Gaza-bound flotilla, dozens of whom required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces.

This time, according to GSF, “detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”

Flotilla participant Yassine Benjelloun described his mistreatment by his Israeli captors.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to Israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” he said. “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician aboard the flotilla, documented 35 GSF members with fractured or dislocated bones, as well as severe head injuries including concussions and eye or ear trauma, and 14 cases of sexual assault.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” Jihan said. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have. It was so devastating.”

Jihan said she was shoved, struck, punched, kicked, and choked by her captors, who forcibly stripped off her hijab.

In addition to the ship, the weapons used against the civilian flotilla members were also made in the USA.

“Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI),” GSF said. “These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.”

GSF argues that “none of this was accidental.”

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The Israeli Knesset just voted to dissolve itself, but this won’t end the Gaza genocide

Israel might change its government sooner than expected after the Israeli Knesset voted to dissolve itself last week. The bill presented to the parliamentary body on May 20, which passed with a majority of 110 votes in favor and no opposing votes, could lead to early elections in September rather than November of this year. The vote was held in the absence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is set to be reconsidered at three more readings before moving toward implementation.

If passed, the current Knesset will expire, along with the government coalition based on its composition and the current cabinet led by Netanyahu. According to Israeli polls, Netanyahu’s main coalition allies, namely hardline ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have low chances of winning. Although the two main opposition leaders, Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid, joined forces in a new party, polls indicate that Netanyahu’s Likud Party would still win 56 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. This leaves the Likud as the main political force in Israel, but without enough of a majority to form a government on its own, forcing it to form a coalition with other opposition parties.

The vote came amid renewed controversy surrounding the military drafting of Orthodox Haredi Israelis to military service. Haredi leaders presented the bill after Netanyahu’s government failed to advance another bill to exempt the Haredis from military service. 

The vote to dissolve the Knesset also comes amid mounting criticism of Netanyahu over his performance during the war on Iran and the security failure on October 7, 2023.

But what would the dissolution of the Israeli Knesset mean for Palestinians? And what does it say about the current state of Israeli politics that Netanyahu didn’t oppose the vote to move to early elections?

The short answer is: not much, or at least not for the better. Israel’s opposition parties have backed the war on Gaza, the expansion of settlements, and the war on Lebanon just as fervently as Netanyahu’s coalition, and in some cases have criticized him for not going far enough. Any new government will most likely pursue the same fundamental policies toward Palestinians. In the near term, the more pressing concern is what the current government will do to shore up its electoral standing before it leaves office. Precedent suggests that means further escalation.

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Israel’s organ theft scandal exposes a culture of desecration

On 25 January, Israeli President Isaac Herzog stood before a crowd celebrating what Tel Aviv claimed was a world record in kidney donations. The event, promoted after a lobbying push to Guinness World Records, was meant to project generosity, discipline, and moral purpose.

But Guinness listed only the gathering itself as a record, not the kidney donations that Tel Aviv had turned into a public relations show.

The bodies behind the numbers

In Gaza, where Israel has been returning Palestinian bodies in bags, sometimes decomposed, mutilated, or showing signs of surgical interference, the celebration landed differently. For Palestinian health officials, the question was not how Israel had produced so many donors, but whether all of those bodies had consented.

Dimming Israel’s “propaganda facade” was none other than Dr Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. He said Israel’s “record numbers” raised serious questions about the sources of the kidneys and other organs now being celebrated. He pointed to the stark contradiction of an occupation state that has held Palestinian bodies for years in the “cemeteries of numbers” and refrigerators while presenting itself to the world as a humanitarian model in organ donation.

Bursh cited documented cases of bodies returned to families missing organs, especially kidneys, without medical reports, autopsy files, or any legal path to accountability. He demanded an independent international investigation into whether Israel’s claimed achievement had been built on the theft of Palestinian organs.

Just over a week later, Israel returned the scattered remains of some 54 Palestinians to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Forensic teams quickly got to work in an attempt to identify the bodies and give closure to their families, but noted that many of the corpses had clear signs of torture and the surgical organ removal.

This was not the first such warning since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Ten days into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, allegations of organ theft had already surfaced. By late November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for an investigation into the theft of Palestinian organs, after “medical professionals found evidence of organ theft, including missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts.”

Israel and its defenders moved to blunt the spread of these allegations by invoking “blood libel” and antisemitism. Because the evidence came from Palestinians, calls for international scrutiny have largely fallen on deaf ears.

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US to build AI park and nuclear energy facility in southern Israel with 99-year lease in motion

Israel and the United States have allegedly reached an agreement to establish a large-scale technology park in southern Israel, with the deal expected to be signed in Jerusalem later this month. The facility is set to function primarily as a strategic chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence centre.

A document obtained by Globes showed that the project, designated “Fort Foundry One,” will occupy approximately 16,000 dunams in either the Negev or Gaza Envelope region.

The memorandum of understanding, signed by the chief of the National Artificial Intelligence Headquarters, Brigadier General (res.) Erez Askal and US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg granted the United States a 99-year lease on the land.

While the territory will remain under Israeli sovereignty, ongoing management and primary investment will come from the United States, with American technology companies operating alongside Israeli firms.

This agreement appears to be occurring as Middle Eastern economies look to become part of the US’ Pax Silica, as Israel’s tech sector experiences renewed momentum following the Gaza war.

The recently signed Pax Silicaa deal is a US-led international initiative launched in late 2025 to build secure, resilient supply chains for advanced technologies, especially AI and semiconductors, under the Trump administration 

Current members of Pax Silica include the United States (as Lead), Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Qatar (Joined January 12) and the United Arab Emirates (Joined January 14).

The high electricity demands of data centres and AI computing systems have raised the possibility of constructing a new nuclear reactor on-site, which could prove complex given Israel’s non-signatory status to international civilian nuclear reactor treaties.

In an earlier report by the Times of Israel, construction work at Israel’s only nuclear site in Dimona appeared to increase at the end of 2025, indicating an increase of development of the sector ahead of the announcement of the new AI centres.

The Associated Press first reported on excavations at the facility, some 90 kilometres (55 miles) south of Jerusalem, in 2021. 

The United States’ treaty membership could enable a unique regulatory model where the reactor operates under American supervision despite its location on Israeli territory, though official documentation refers more broadly to “high-density energy infrastructure.”

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