U.S. secretly deporting Palestinians to West Bank in coordination with Israel

The United States is quietly deporting Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the occupied West Bank by private jet, with two such flights taking place in coordination with the Israeli authorities since the beginning of this year — part of a secretive and politically sensitive operation revealed through a joint investigation by +972 Magazine and The Guardian. 

Eight Palestinian men — shackled for the entire journey by their wrists and ankles — were flown from an ICE deportation hub in Phoenix, Arizona on Jan. 20 and arrived in Tel Aviv the following morning after refueling stops in New Jersey, Ireland, and Bulgaria. After arriving at Ben Gurion Airport, the men were put in a vehicle with an armed Israeli police officer and released at a military checkpoint outside the Palestinian town of Ni’lin in the West Bank.

The same private jet, which belongs to an Israeli-American property tycoon who is a friend and long-time business associate of President Donald Trump, conducted an almost identical journey on Monday this week, but the number of passengers onboard and most of their identities remain unclear.

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U.S. Envoys Refused to Report “Apocalyptic” Conditions in Gaza. Exclusive Photos Show the Reality They Suppressed

In February 2024, just over three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked an internal cable intended for wider distribution among senior officials in the Biden administration that warned northern Gaza had turned into an “apocalyptic wasteland,” according to Reuters. Lew and Hallett reportedly blocked the cable, which described the consequences of Israel’s assault in harrowing detail, because they believed it lacked balance.

The cable was drafted by U.S. Agency for International Development staffers and was based on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission by a small United Nations team that visited the area on January 31 and February 1, 2024.

I was part of that mission.

Northern Gaza had been under a total siege for over three months when we were eventually allowed to enter in January 2024. We moved through Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Jabaliya, and Beit Hanoun.

What we found was an endless horizon of destruction. People were living under plastic sheeting or in the rubble of buildings. Schools had been destroyed. In parts of Beit Hanoun, the entire area had been depopulated and decimated. There was a deadly shortage of clean drinking water, food and access to healthcare.

Mass starvation had already set in. Everyone we spoke to asked us for food. People gestured to us in the street for something to eat. Israeli authorities continued to deny the entry of any supplies despite our warnings of the deadly conditions.

We found bodies of people that had been killed for getting too close to Israeli checkpoints. Their remains were being eaten by cats and dogs. On a wall that was still standing in someone’s destroyed home we found the word “Revenge” graffitied in Hebrew, with the date of October 7, 2023, written below.

The purpose of a fact finding mission like this one is to report back on the humanitarian situation on the ground. The goal is to accurately reflect reality, not political balance. The images I captured during that trip are raw evidence of the conditions in northern Gaza at that time. Some, depicting bodies that were left to decompose in open air, are too gruesome to show. A selection is being published here for the first time. Many of these scenes had already been captured by Palestinian journalists, but they too had been dismissed as biased.

Almost exactly two years later to the day, the situation has been made far worse. The Israeli assault has destroyed, flattened and emptied northern Gaza even more—the UN estimates that over 81% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged. Much of the little that is depicted here is now gone.

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Ex-CIA Chief David Petraeus Briefs Officials in Israel Overseeing “New Gaza”

Former CIA Director David Petraeus—one of the godfathers of the modern doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare—last week visited the U.S.-military run coordination center established in southern Israel to oversee the so-called ceasefire in Gaza, multiple sources from the diplomatic community told Drop Site News.

In his remarks at the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Kiryat Gat, Petraeus praised Israel’s shift to clearing, holding, and rebuilding—a change from his previous criticism that Israeli forces were not implementing lessons from the U.S. counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, in particular the creation of “gated communities.”

One week prior to Petraeus’s visit, the U.S. Army presented the CMCC with plans for a “Gaza First Planned Community” in Rafah, as first reported by Drop Site. The residential compound would house up to 25,000 Palestinians in an area under full Israeli military control and would include biometric entry, identity checks, reeducation programs, and controls over aid and housing.

According to two sources with knowledge of the daily workings of the CMCC, the “Gaza First Planned Community” is intended to function as a pilot project—the first known step in the overall reconstruction plan of a “New Gaza.” The compound will be funded by the UAE, according to The Guardian.

Petraeus’s January 21 appearance at the CMCC coincided with President Donald Trump’s inauguration of the so-called Board of Peace the following day at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. At the ceremony, Trump said he was “committed to ensuring Gaza is demilitarized, properly governed and beautifully rebuilt,” adding: “I’m a real estate person at heart and it’s all about location. And I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property.” Trump was followed by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who listed among the priorities for the coming 100 days a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza.” There will also be a process to “synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments,” Kushner said.

In his remarks to the CMCC, Petraeus compared the 2007 U.S. troop surge in Iraq to the military operation in Gaza. Petraeus, who presided over a massive escalation of U.S. troops during the occupation of Iraq and the arming of local militias in what became a brutal sectarian civil war, is the former commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). He also dramatically expanded night raids and CIA and Special Operations missions inside Afghanistan. He was a key player in the expansion of U.S. covert warfare in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa before President Barack Obama installed him as CIA director.

Apart from promoting the implementation of gated communities based on his history in Iraq and Afghanistan, Petraeus is likely taking a special interest in Gaza because of the business opportunities Trump appears to be selling. Soon after his resignation from the CIA in 2012, Petraeus began work for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), a powerful U.S. private-equity and investment company. Petraeus is currently a partner at KKR, chairman of the KKR Global Institute, and chairman of KKR Middle East, which has offices in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Petraeus also used his CMCC address to highlight the field manual for counterinsurgency that he developed at the end of 2006. That manual (which is available here) “establishes doctrine (fundamental principles) for military operations in a counterinsurgency (COIN) environment.” In it, Petraeus writes “Not all Islamic insurgents or terrorists are fighting for a global revolution. Some are pursuing regional goals, such as establishing a Sunni Arab-dominated Iraq or replacing Israel with an Arab Palestinian state.”

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The U.S. occupation of Gaza has begun

This week, Drop Site News revealed a draft resolution from Trump’s newly christened “Board of Peace.” The resolution outlines what is, in essence, Phase Two of Trump’s unrealistic peace plan that ushered in a new phase of horror in Gaza under the guise of a ceasefire. 

The actions outlined in the resolution ignore realities on the ground and paint a very grim picture of what the United States is planning for Gaza. Far from abandoning the ludicrous and offensive imagery Trump shared in that AI video from last year of himself and Elon Musk on a beach in an unrecognizable Gaza, this resolution is the battle plan to turn Gaza into the playground for the wealthy that Jared Kushner presented to the World Economic Forum at Davos last week. It’s a Gaza where the only Palestinians remaining are those chosen to be the servants in the new regime. 

It’s a Gaza under permanent American occupation. 

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IDF Proposes Limiting Aid Deliveries to Gaza to 200 Trucks Per Day

The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday that the IDF has recommended restricting aid deliveries to Gaza to 200 trucks per day. The Israeli military claims that this is the amount of aid required to sustain the Palestinians, and additional aid is given to Hamas.

Under the deal between Hamas and Israel brokered by President Donald Trump in October, Tel Aviv agreed to allow 600 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day. Throughout most of the ceasefire period, Israel has kept aid deliveries to a minimum. Over the past week, 600 trucks per day have entered Gaza. 

While the Israeli military claims the Palestinians are “flooded” with supplies, aid agencies say the people of Gaza are still struggling to survive. Most people in Gaza are displaced and living in tents. Israel is refusing to allow temporary housing to enter Gaza, leading to several children freezing to death. 

The UN’s humanitarian affairs spokesperson, Olga Cherevko, said aid organizations were still facing “severe limitations.”

The assertion that Hamas is stealing a large portion of the aid that enters Gaza has also been debunked by multiple investigations. 

In addition to restricting the number of aid deliveries into Gaza, the IDF wants to maintain that all aid going to Gaza enters through Israel. Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt is scheduled to be reopened within the coming week. The IDF wants to prevent cargo from entering the Strip via Egypt. 

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Israel Replicating a Genocidal Mindset

On 29th of December 2025, The New York Times reprinted an article entitled, “At Last, a Name for the Face of a Nazi in an Iconic Holocaust Photo.”

The photo was taken on July 28, 1941, and here is how the article describes what the picture shows:

“One man kneels at the edge of a pit filled with bodies. He knows that, within moments, he will be dead. His drawn face burns with defiance. Behind him stands a uniformed, bespectacled Nazi soldier. In his extended right arm, the soldier holds a pistol, just inches from his victim’s skull. A crowd of other Germans stand watching, curious but undisturbed.”

The man about to be executed remains nameless and is guilty of nothing other than being Jewish. But who was the executioner? His identity is the revealing part of the story.

“The killer was Jakobus Onnen, 34, a former teacher [he taught languages, French and English as well as physical education] from the town of Tichelwarf, near the German border with the Netherlands.”

His identity was finally matched to other named photos identifying Onnen and attested to by living relatives.

It turns out that Onnen may be seen as an example of “well-educated, prosperous [German] professionals in early middle age” who were transformed into genocidal killers during the era of Nazi influence. How did this occur?

An explanation is offered by Dr. Christopher R. Browning in his 1992 book, Ordinary Men. This is a history of a German reserve police battalion and its role in genocidal violence carried out in 1942 Poland.

Brown argues that most of the men in this battalion did not begin as conscripted Nazi fanatics, rabid antisemites, or congenital killers. Instead they allowed themselves to be remade by “years of propaganda” absorbed within a community environment that “discouraged independent thought”[my italics]. 

The same environment encouraged “conformity, deference to authority, adaptation to new roles and responsibilities, and the altering of moral norms to justify the resulting actions.” In the end, they “perversely believed [murder] to be a professional obligation.”

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After Trump Declared Gaza War ‘Over,’ Media Lost Interest

Since President Donald Trump declared that “the war in Gaza is over” on October 3, 2025, US news outlets’ interest in the occupied territory has plummeted. In a FAIR search of US-related news sites using Media Cloud, a news media database, coverage of Gaza post-ceasefire agreement averaged just 1.5% of the news hole—significantly less than the level of coverage before the agreement.

From July 2 through October 1, 2025, mentions of Gaza appeared in 2.3% of news stories in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets. Starting October 2, the day before the ceasefire agreement, coverage in the next three weeks jumped to an average of 4.5%. For the following three months (October 23–January 22), that average dropped to 1.5%. That’s less than two-thirds the level of coverage it received prior to the agreement.

It’s also the lowest three-month average at any point since the current crisis began on October 7, 2023.

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From Board of Peace to Board of Profit: Trump, Kushner, and the Gaza Master Plan Fantasy

At Davos, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser, unveiled a “master plan” for Gaza, a seven-slide spectacle of CGI skyscrapers, luxury apartments, data centres, and coastal resorts. Branded Project Sunrise, it promises to transform the bombed-out Gaza Strip into a high-tech Riviera. On screen, Gaza gleams. On the ground, it is a killing field. Over 70 thousands of Palestinians have been slaughtered, many of them women and children; millions are displaced and starving under siege. The United Nations has declared the situation a genocide and is accusing Israel of using hunger as a weapon. Yet Kushner’s presentation treats Gaza not as a humanitarian crisis, but as a blank canvas for profit, spectacle, and real estate development, erasing the ongoing Israeli bombardment and the engineered famine that continues to decimate civilian life.

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Gaza: Caught Between Israel’s Ongoing Genocide, and Trump’s US-Led Neo-Colonial Takeover

In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.

The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.

Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.

This was a considerable achievement, given how enthusiastically Israel had sunk into relentless genocidal depravity over the previous seven months since it deliberately broke the terms of an earlier ceasefire deal at the start of March, resuming its slaughter of Palestinians with horrific brutality.

However, although the death toll has dropped over the last three months from a daily average of somewhere between 60 and a hundred Palestinians, Israel has never honored the ceasefire in any meaningful sense, and has continued to break its terms on an almost daily basis, killing at least 465 Palestinians and injuring 1,287 since October 10.

In addition, Israel has resolutely refused to allow the unimpeded access into Gaza of 600 trucks a day of humanitarian aid, as stipulated in the ceasefire deal, including desperately needed shelter, medical supplies and medical equipment, as well as food and fuel, all very deliberately to try to ensure that the Palestinians will continue to die in significant numbers, as though the latest confirmed death toll of 71,548, with 171,353 injured, many grievously so — and itself a massive undercount — is still insufficient to placate its incessant bloodlust.

Israel is perpetually triggered by a refusal to recognize that the 1,200 or so people killed in the October 7 attacks on southern Israel cannot be perpetually obsessed over as the victims of an unprovoked day of horror, entirely unconnected to the previous 75 years of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the Palestinians from their own land, and their relentless oppression and arbitrary imprisonment. Nor too, can they realistically be allowed to demonstrate a callous indifference, almost beyond belief, to the catastrophic death toll in Gaza over the last 27 months, which dwarfs the death toll on October 7 to a sickening degree.

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Israel’s Netanyahu skips Davos over fear of arrest for Gaza war crimes

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos this week amid concerns he would face arrest in Switzerland under an International Criminal Court warrant, according to Israeli media reports.

Netanyahu was replaced at the summit by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, who travelled to Davos on Tuesday and met German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

During the meeting, Herzog criticised the absence of Israeli officials from the forum and called for the removal of ICC arrest warrants issued against Israeli leaders, describing the court’s actions as “politically motivated”.

He did not address the substance of the allegations against Israel stemming from the crimes committed by its military campaign in Gaza.

In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza.

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