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By Eman Abu Zayed

Mass deaths in Gaza continue and yet the world no longer pays attention, having been convinced that the genocide is over.

2 Jan 2026 – When rumours about a ceasefire started circulating in October, it felt like a distant dream. We clung to any thread of hope, even though deep inside we feared believing it. For two years, we had become accustomed to hearing about “ceasefires” that never lasted.

When the announcement was finally made, the streets erupted with ululations and cheers. Yet, fear crept into my heart that this calm might just be a pause before another round of attacks.

My fears were justified. Israel’s daily deadly attacks have continued; more than 400 people have been killed so far by its army. Many others have died in circumstances caused by Israel’s decimation of the Strip.

And yet the level of global attention began to decline. In November, I noticed that engagement with what I wrote about Gaza started to diminish, whether on social media or media outlets – something other Palestinian journalists and writers also observed. The world’s interest waned because the global public was easily convinced that the war had ended.

It became clear to me that the real goal of the ceasefire was not to stop the violence or death, nor to protect people or limit bloodshed and genocide. The real goal was to stop the world from talking about Gaza, about the crimes being committed there, and about the daily suffering of people.

Gaza has now become mostly invisible, as other news and other “hot spots” have taken the global media spotlight.

Meanwhile, mass death continues.

A little more than two weeks after the ceasefire was announced, on October 28, the Israeli army carried out a huge bombing campaign, killing 104 people. The overwhelming fear for the future and for my loved ones returned.

On November 20, Israel struck closer to my heart. The Israeli army attacked the home of the Abu Shawish family in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. My friend Batoul Abu Shawish lost her whole family – her sisters Habiba, 11, and Tima, 16; her brothers Youssef, 14, and Mohammed, 18; and her mum, Sahar, 43, and dad, Rami, 50. They were massacred despite the fact that the family had no political affiliation; they were all civilians. Batoul now has to face the genocide alone.

The Israeli attacks continue, and so does mass death by other means: Collapsed buildings, unexploded bombs, floods, hypothermia, starvation and illness – all creations of the Israeli genocidal strategy. We continue to struggle with no proper shelter or food, no heating, electricity or potable water.

The situation is so bad that winter itself is killing people.

We just had another storm. Tents were flooded and blown off again. Thirty-year-old Alaa Juha was killed by a wall that the rain collapsed onto her. Two-month-old baby Arkan Musleh died from hypothermia. In total, 15 have died from the cold weather this month. My family’s tent was flooded again; it is hard to describe the feeling of helplessness that overwhelms you when you can find no escape from the water and the freezing cold.

Israel continues to violate the ceasefire not only with its attacks but with its refusal to comply with its obligation to allow in the negotiated number of aid trucks, a full supply of necessary medicines and tents, shelter materials and mobile homes.

Israel is also curbing access to international organisations that try to provide some relief for the people of Gaza. New rules are making it hard for NGOs to register, including some as big as Save the Children. This, along with Israel’s continuous denial of requests to bring in aid by NGOs, is stifling international efforts to provide some relief to us.

Meanwhile, Palestinian organisations that try to ease our suffering are facing a collapse of donations. For example, the Samir Project, a donations-based initiative that provides material support for impoverished families and students, has lost a large number of individual donors and followers after the ceasefire was announced. Dr Ezzedine al-Lulu, the project’s director, confirmed to me that the decreased flow of donations has hindered their ability to provide essential assistance.

Israel is also keeping the Rafah border closed. There is no opportunity to travel outside unless you pay an exorbitant amount of money to Israeli-linked war profiteers and agree to never return. More than 16,000 people who urgently need medical evacuation are prevented by Israel from leaving; more than 1,000 have died waiting to be allowed to leave.

Gaza has entered a new stage of genocide – low-grade mass killing which does not make headlines because it is not as explosive as carpet-bombing campaigns. But the ultimate result is the same: The extermination of Palestinian life in Gaza. It is no wonder that Israeli politicians have not stopped talking about colonising our land. They still see Gaza free of Palestinians as a very real possibility that is within reach.

Eman Abu Zayed is a Palestinian writer and translation student from Gaza.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Dave DeCamp

Other groups that are being banned include the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Catholic charity Caritas, and Oxfam.

30 Dec 2025 – Starting on January 1, Israel will ban 37 international aid groups and charities from operating in Gaza in its latest effort to add to the misery for the Palestinian civilians living in flimsy tents and bombed-out buildings in the Strip.

The groups being banned include several prominent international aid organizations: Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Catholic charity Caritas, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Oxfam. The NGOs will also be barred from working in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel will stop the groups from operating in Gaza for failing to comply with its stringent new requirements, which include handing over information about their Palestinian employees. The new Israeli rules also include vague ideological requirements that can disqualify any NGO that “promotes delegitimization campaigns” against Israel, or if it, or any officeholder, has called for a boycott of Israel.

An Israeli official claimed, without providing evidence, that an investigation revealed “employees of certain organizations were involved in terrorist activity… in particular, Doctors Without Borders.” The action against MSF is seen in part as an Israeli reaction to the organization’s criticism of Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Strip.

In a statement warning of the consequences of banning it from Gaza, MSF said that it has served hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza this year.

“If Israeli authorities revoke MSF’s access to Gaza in 2026, a large portion of people in Gaza will lose access to critical medical care, water, and lifesaving support,” the group said. “MSF’s activities serve nearly half a million people in Gaza through our vital support to the destroyed health system. MSF continues to seek constructive engagement with Israeli authorities to continue its activities.”

Israel’s move to ban the NGOs comes as Israel continues to violate the US-backed ceasefire deal by continuing to launch attacks on Palestinians and maintaining restrictions on aid and shelter materials entering the Strip.

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of antiwar.com.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Sakai Tanaka 

30 Dec 2025 – The year 2025 marked the beginning of a turbulent period in which the United States, under the Trump administration, will bring about a major transformation in the world. This transformation will continue for many years to come, and the world will continue to be turbulent in 2026. The world will see the collapse of the British-led US sole hegemony that has existed since the end of World War II (the Cold War structure was also part of this sole hegemony, in that the UK and the US played the role of the “enemy” to China, the Soviet Union, and the anti-American left). It will shift to the multipolar hegemonic structure with the multiple “poles.” The essence of the transformation Trump is promoting is the “multipolarization of the world order” and the “collapse and self-destruction of the Anglo-American hegemony.”

• (Trump’s Multipolar Global Strategy/トランプの多極型世界戦略）
• [Trump 2.0 and the Churning Global Order]
• [The many ways Trump changed the federal government this year]
• [How Trump upended the federal government in 2025]
• [The Things That Trump Has Done in 2025]

The biggest shift Trump made in 2025 was his shift in the structure of the Ukraine War from “the US, UK, and Europe unite to prop up Ukraine and continue the War against Russia” to “the US colludes with Russia to try (act) to end the Ukraine War, but the UK and Europe are unwilling to give up their hostility to Russia, leading to conflict between the US, the UK, and Europe.” The strategy of uniting the US, the UK, and Europe by viewing Russia as their enemy and maintaining the Anglo-American hegemony was essentially a ploy by the former hegemonic power, the Britain, to turn the US’s upper echelons (i.e. the US Intelligence Community), which was supposed to have become a hegemonic power after the War, into puppets, allowing the Britain to continue to control the US hegemonic system (i.e. the world). The US upper echelons before Trump, including the Biden administration, were essentially the “British puppets” and the “British-affiliated,” and the hostility to Russia was used to maintain the British-affiliated control (the upper echelons of Germany, France, the EU, and Japan and Australia are also the British puppets).

• [Trump sides with Russia on claims Ukraine targeted Putin residence]
• [29 times Donald Trump did what Putin wanted]
• [As Trump detonates relationship with Ukraine, Europe has no answer]
• [Opinion | America and Russia Are on the Same Side Now]

The Ukraine War also began as a strategy by the British-affiliated parties to strengthen the US hegemony by viewing Russia as an enemy. However, in reality, that war was planned from the beginning as a plot to cause the British-affiliated parties to self-destruct. Weapons provided to Ukraine by the US, the UK, and Europe continued to be destroyed by the Russian forces on the battlefield, the US, the UK, and Europe wasted their military power, furthering their self-destruction, and the war front itself remained deadlocked, with Russia having taken the Donbas region, which it had wanted to recapture, and incorporating it into Russian territory. A scenario where Russia would largely win and the military might of the US, the UK, and Europe would be squandered was established early on. This situation will continue into the future. The Ukraine War will likely continue even at the end of 2026.
(The Perpetuation of the Ukraine War/ウクライナ戦争の永続 )

• [Trump has proven he ‘stands with Russia’ after Ukraine peace talks]
• [Trump and Putin both blame Europe as Ukraine peace effort languishes]
• [‘This is shattering’: Europe reels from Trump’s new world order]

Trump continues to publicly attempt a ceasefire, but in reality, there is no ceasefire, and the farce of ceasefire arbitration continues. This is because Trump is “anti-British,” and the Ukraine War is a plot to destroy Britain. After Trump returned to the presidency, the British in the upper echelons of the US were expelled, and the Democratic Party, a British puppet, will no longer be able to hold power. Trump has removed the US from its British puppet status. In Japan, the Takaichi administration is also beginning to destroy the dictatorial system of the British puppet bureaucracy. Japan will no longer be a British puppet. Australia and others will eventually change. The only remaining British-affiliated countries are the UK, Europe, and the EU. The longer the Ukraine War continues, the more the British-European EU will be trapped in the structure of the war against Russia that is already certain to be lost, wasting their national power and leading to self-destruction. Both Trump and Putin want the British-European EU to self-destruct. The US and Russia will continue to communicate behind the scenes, publicly pretending to be working toward a ceasefire, but in reality there is no ceasefire, and the structure of the Ukraine War will continue until the British-European EU completely self-destructs.

Another war that caused a big stir in 2025 (and is likely to continue indefinitely) was Israel’s Gaza War, or its plan to wipe out Palestine. The Gaza War is also related to the collapse of the British-European hegemony. Israel is intentionally committing heinous crimes against humanity to anger the world. At first glance, it is difficult to understand why they would do such a thing. However, considering that the Palestinian issue was a British plot to weaken Israel, that humanitarianism was a ploy at the core of the British hegemonic strategy, and that Israel, which controls the intelligence community under the Trump administration, has great international political power (hegemony), it is thought that Israel is trying to neutralize the British, along with their humanitarianism, by showing the world that they will not be crushed even if they commit serious crimes against humanity, but will instead rise to power.

(The ongoing Gaza war/ずっと続くガザ戦争）

Israel (the Jews) are the originators of espionage and hegemony. The British hegemony (i.e. the British Empire), the first world empire in human history, used the skills of Jewish intelligence networks such as the Rothschilds to secretly manipulate the world and establish and maintain its hegemony. After World War II, Israel separated from the British Empire, and the British tactics to weaken Israel to prevent it from using intelligence to expand its own hegemony or rise to rival the British included the “Partition of Palestine” to reduce Israel’s territory (and the establishment of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon), and the “Middle East War,” in which the British used their intelligence to manipulate the Arab countries into permanent war with Israel.

• [Rothschild & Co]
• [The Rothschilds — The First Global Intelligence Network]
• [British Empire | History, Countries, Map, Size, & Facts]

Since the transfer of global hegemony from Britain to the United States at the end of World War II, there has been a secret struggle among the upper echelons of the Britain and the United States between Americans (such as Rockefeller, the hidden multipolar faction) who wanted to break up global hegemony into a multipolar system, and the British forces who wanted to maintain the British sole hegemony. The British started the Cold War to contain the multipolar faction, while the multipolar faction deliberately waged the Vietnam War in a childish and extreme manner, causing defeat and causing the self-destruction of hegemony, leading to reconciliation between the United States and China and the United States and the Soviet Union.

[The Hegemon’s Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the International Economic Order]

With the Cold War coming to an end, the British, in order to restore the hegemonic structure of “Britain, America, Europe vs. enemy forces,” plotted a second Cold War-style “clash of civilizations” by portraying the Islamic world as the enemy. They also tried to deceive Israel, which was showing signs of rising power, and fit it into the divisive structure of the second Cold War (this part is a new theory in this article). This led to the Oslo Accords, a plan to end the Palestinian issue by creating a Palestinian state/Palestinian authority (PA) as a puppet of Israel. The Palestinian state under the Oslo Accords was a puppet state that did not border the Jordan River, was completely surrounded by Israel, and would be under the Israeli supervision in terms of finances, infrastructure, and security. Israel (the Labor Party government) decided that this would not pose a threat, so it welcomed Arafat and concluded the Oslo Accords.

However, the Oslo Accords were likely a trap set by the British to deceive Israel (my own new theory). Around the same time, the US began to talk about a “clash of civilizations,” which led to the Clinton administration’s hostile policies toward the Taliban (a shift from Afghanistan-approaching policies such as the Unocal Pipeline proposal to hostility toward the Taliban, including policies regarding “rogue states”), and increased hostility toward the Islamic world. If Israel had continued to move forward with the establishment of a Palestinian state, around the time the Palestinian state was completed and a lightly armed police force was formed around 2000, relations between the increasingly Islamist Palestinians and liberal Israel, which was far more humanitarian-oriented than it is today, would have deteriorated, and Israel would have been permanently plagued by internal instability on the verge of a civil war.

• [Taliban Oil | Taliban]
• [Unocal Archives – Page 2 of 2 – International Center for 9/11 Justice]
• [The Afghan Oil Pipeline and the US Negotiations with the Taliban]
• [Afghanistan Pipeline Politics & And The US Oil, Gas Interests]

In fact, before the Anglo-Japanese War started the Second Cold War and revived its sole hegemony, the anti-British American hidden multipolar factions colluded with Israel and right-wing Jewish Americans (Likud faction), and this led to Israel’s hostility toward Palestine, its rightward shift, and its anti-liberalization, which began with the assassination of Rabin and the rapid expansion of settlements. The Likud faction infiltrated and hijacked the US Intelligence Community, posing as a working force advancing the “Clash of Civilizations” plot originally conceived by the British faction. This transformed the anti-Islamic policy, which was meant to be expanded covertly, into the extravagant, radical, and naive war on terror, which saw the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War. My new hypothesis is that the Likud faction hijacked the war on terror, originally conceived by the British faction as a second Cold War against the Islamic world, midway through, and instigated the heinous 9/11 attacks and Iraq War, which the British faction had not intended, thereby radicalizing and naive the strategy and transforming it into a plan to destroy the US and British hegemony. The hidden multipolar faction invited the Likud faction to undermine the Oslo Accords, the 9/11 attacks, and the takeover of the US Intelligence Community, thereby destroying their rival, the British faction. Plot takeovers and impersonation (piggybacking) of intelligence agents are not uncommon in the intelligence community.

(The Gaza massacre as a strategy to crush British interests/英国系潰し策としてのガザ虐殺 )

Following the 9/11 attacks, the US Intelligence Community, which had been responsible for managing the US hegemony, was taken over by the Likud faction, and the original masterminds, the British, were driven out. The arrival of Trump marked the completion of the Likud takeover of the US Intelligence Community (the Intelligence Community deliberately corrupted the Democratic Party to cause Trump’s defeat in the election in order to start the Ukraine War, and then allowed him to return to power). The Gaza War began in the fall of 2024, shortly after Trump’s return to office was virtually certain (a plan to lure Hamas into an invasion). Immediately after the war began, the trend toward ethnic cleansing and the complete destruction of Gaza City became apparent. Gazans, who had previously refused to flee Gaza City to the south despite Israeli threats, began fleeing en masse to the south

• [Intelligence Community | Office of the Director of National Intelligence]
• [The Intelligence Community’s Politicization: Dueling to Discredit]
• [Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”: Predicting Future Global Conflicts]

Once Trump’s return to office was certain, the British faction was crushed globally, the US sole hegemony was eliminated, and a shift to a multipolar world was decided. Israel launched the Gaza War to eliminate Palestine upon the confirmation of Trump’s return to power, in order to prevent the multipolar world from pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian state. The Gaza War will not cease anytime soon. A ceasefire would mean demands to rebuild Gaza City (i.e. Palestine). Globally, it is the liberal left and Islamists who continue to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, both of whom are (inadvertently) puppets of the British. If the British continue to self-destruct and their power becomes irreversibly reduced to zero, the liberal left and Islamists calling for the creation of a Palestinian state will also change their thinking. This will significantly weaken the global push for humanitarianism. Until then, Israel will leave Gaza a pile of rubble while expanding its humanitarian crimes in the West Bank. The far-right around the world, friendly with Trump and Israel, disregards humanitarianism and is harsh on Muslims.

Israel (Likud faction), which took over the US Intelligence Community, has gained enormous international political power. The Likud faction took over the British sole hegemony without any change. While this sole hegemony is collapsing, it still retains some degree of power. Israel is using this remaining hegemony to strengthen its ties with countries around the world. Islamic countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Somaliland are deepening their diplomatic ties with Israel without criticizing the humanitarian crimes committed in the Gaza War. Trump, relying on the intelligence power he has taken over by Israel, has repeatedly implemented measures to support Israel. This also strengthens Israel. The more international political power (hegemony) Israel exerts, the more countries refrain from criticizing it.

Among the BRICS, China, South Africa, and Brazil previously supported Palestine, but China has recently stopped supporting Palestine. South Africa filed a lawsuit against Israel with the ICJ, but has faced retaliation, including sanctions from Trump. Israel is propping up the right-wing Milley government in neighboring Argentina in order to undermine Brazil’s left-wing government. Brazil’s left-wing government imprisoned Jair Bolsonaro, his right-wing predecessor, but thanks to Israeli and Trump intelligence, Bolsonaro will eventually be acquitted and either he or his son will return to the presidency.

The Ukraine and Gaza Wars are still ongoing, as they are related to the “suppression of the British colonies” and the “multipolarization of the world order”. These wars will not end by the end of 2026. There are also stories about Israel’s expansion of hegemony that I have not yet analyzed. For example, there is a story that the formation of the Takaichi administration in Japan could become one way of containing China’s expansion over Israel’s hegemony. [The author’s self-talk] → I always spend ages explaining basic (repetitive) things before writing about the main point, and end up not getting to write the main point.

[Colonialism and imperialism: Understanding the British Empire’s quest for global dominance]

[The Rise Of A Multipolar World Order: The West Just Watched The World Shift]

[Hegemony or Normalization: Israel’s Future in the Middle East]

• [Unraveling China’s Grand Strategy: Its Aim is to Erode U.S. Global Hegemony, Not Seek World Domination]
• [China adjusts to Middle East turbulence in 2025, faces challenges in Iran, Yemen]

__________________________

Notes:

1. The underlined hyperlinks with the parentheses ( ) under some paragraphs above were added by the original author.
2. Those hyperlinks in the paragraphs and those with underlined brackets [ ] with the italic letters under some paragraphs were added by the translator for the convenience of the reader.
3. The views and/or opinions in those hyperlinks added by the translator do not necessarily reflect those of his.
4. The verification of the genuineness of the information in these links is unavailable for the translator. He does not take any responsibility for the contents in those relevant links at all.
5. The views and/or opinions expressed in the above-mentioned article, written by Sakai Tanaka, the original author, do not necessarily reflect those of the translator. Therefore, the readers are kindly requested to interpret, understand or judge the contents in those hyperlinks at his or her own responsibility.

________________________

Translation:  Satoshi Ashikaga — Google Translate

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Ann Garrison and Jamal Abdulahi

2 Jan 2026 – Israel has declared its intent to expand into the geostrategic Red Sea Region by recognizing Northern Somalia’s secessionist state, but Somalia and much of the rest of the world are pushing back hard. No other nations followed suit and only the US was supportive.

There Is No “Somaliland”: Hargeisa Controls Only Half Its Former Territory

On December 26, 2025, in a move that sent shockwaves around the world, Israel announced that it was formally recognising “Somaliland,” a secessionist region in Northern Somalia that has been seeking independence since the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991.

However, “Somaliland” no longer exists within the boundaries it claims in Northern Somalia. The authorities in Hargeisa, the capital of “Somaliland,” control approximately 60 percent of its former territory consequent to a conflict it lost in a civil war in August 2023. Roughly 30 to 40 percent is now the North Eastern State, a Federal Member State of Somalia, one of its seven Federal Member States with their own security forces and administration, and some undetermined percentage more is held by Puntland and the Warsangali sub-clan.

Djibouti, a small one-city country which is north of “Somaliland” with a predominantly Somali population, has been startled by Hargeisa’s aggressive and reckless pursuit for recognition and thus started organizing some of the communities in Awdal to resist.

The people of Awdal, which makes up another ten percent of “Somaliland” territory, are also defying Hargeisa’s authority.

The World Awakens to “Somaliland”

Most of the world had given little if any thought to “Somaliland” before December 26, but suddenly they saw Israel expanding into the Red Sea region bordering both West Asia and North Africa, where maritime security is crucial to the global supply chains that the world depends on. Roughly one-third of the world’s trade passes through the Red Sea, and its choke points on the Suez Canal and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait make them the most contested waterways in the world.

Awareness of their geostrategic significance grew in March 2021, when the massive container ship Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days, causing huge global trade disruption, and then again in November 2023, when the Houthis began firing at ships associated with Israel in the Red Sea to support the Palestinian people.

Dr. Dan Diker, President of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, stated in an X social media discussion that the first component of Israel’s strategic thinking was “securing the Red Sea.” A base in Somaliland would be a perfect place to launch strikes against the Houthis, whose leader was quick to warn that they would target any Israeli presence in “Somaliland.”

Dr. Diker also stated that “Somaliland” had “generously” agreed to accept up to 1.5 million Palestinian exiles and that President Trump had been made aware of the offer. Diker is also longtime Director of the Jerusalem Center’s Counter-Political Warfare Project, and former Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress.

Regional capitals and organizations scrambled to respond. The African Union (AU), Arab League (AL), Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), East African Community (EAC), and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) all vehemently came out against Israel’s decision. The EU followed suit.

Eritrea, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Djibouti, and Algeria added their own condemnation to that of their respective political blocs, as did the Palestinian Authority. Ethiopia, Kenya, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all of which have ties to both “Somaliland” and Israel, chose not to respond.

China, which has viewed “Somaliland” as equivalent to Taiwan, adamantly reaffirmed its support for the territorial integrity of Somalia. The secessionist state has no hope of becoming a UN member state in the foreseeable future because China would without a doubt veto its acceptance at the UN Security Council.

Turkiye, which has a large economic and military footprint in Somalia and Ethiopia, objected to Israel’s entrance in the race to dominate the Red Sea. Israel recently entered an economic and military cooperation agreement with two of Turkiye’s neighbors and historical nemeses, Cyprus and Greece. Some analysts surmised that Israel and Turkey are taking their competition for global influence to the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.

Israel Is a Global Pariah–Somalis Passionately Support Palestinians

Markus Virgil Hoehne, a noted German anthropologist and expert on Northern Somalia, weighed in on X to say that Israel is a pariah, now isolated on the international stage, and that no other nation has yet indicated it will follow its reckless lead and recognise “Somaliland.”

Somalia is one of the 29 UN member states that do not recognise Israel. It has officially and unequivocally stood with the Palestinian people since its independence in 1960. Many Somalis took to the streets waving both Palestinian and Somali flags shortly after Netanyahu and “Somaliland” President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi announced their new alliance.

“Somaliland” itself was never an oasis of stability and mature democracy as portrayed by the secessionist movement. Although relatively stable for some years, it was never free of the troubles that plague the rest of the country, including religious extremism and the clan conflict that finally erupted into civil war and led to the loss of half its territory in 2023.Now the Isaaq clan, which controls Hargeisa, may be rent asunder or even descend into civil war over the alliance with Israel because Somalis in “Somaliland” are as passionately pro-Palestinian as Somalis in the rest of Somalia. A prominent “Somaliland” cleric, Sheikh Mohamed Kariye was arrested almost as soon as Israel made its announcement. He said: “It is an honor to be arrested for opposing Netanyahu.”

“Somaliland” in the US National Defense Authorization Act

On December 29, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on Israel’s recognition of Somalia at Somalia’s request. There the US alone stood with Israel. US Deputy Ambassador Tammy Bryce angrily and defiantly declared that “Israel has the same right as any other sovereign state to form bilateral relations,” and that several Council members had, earlier this year, “unilaterally recognised a non-existent Palestinian state” without triggering an emergency meeting.

Bryce also said that the US is not announcing any plan to recognise “Somaliland,” but in fact the US has for years maintained bilateral relations with Hargeisa, bypassing Mogadishu, most of all as a military partner. This has been a blatant but informal violation of Somalia’s sovereignty.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a massive document that annually delineates US defense expenditures, has been gradually laying groundwork for a larger American footprint in northern Somalia, most importantly for a military base in Berbera Port, which Hargeisa controls. Berbera sits on prime coastal property, along the northern edge of the Gulf of Aden, very close to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. It’s a perfect location for the US and Israel to launch strikes against the Houthis and further project power in the Red Sea.

The Fiscal Year 2023 NDAA required the Department of Defense (DoD) to study the issue and controversially referred to “Somaliland” at least 12 times, far more than to any actual African nation. Hargeisa crowed that recognition was on the way, but it didn’t come.

The signed version of the 2026 NDAA requires that the expansion work for a military base in Berbera Port be implemented, but again without recognising “Somaliland” as a sovereign nation. It nevertheless makes way for a clear platform for US and Israeli military collaboration

Why hasn’t the US gone ahead and recognised “Somaliland”? There’s a sizable lobby for it, including the Heritage Foundation and New Cold Warrior Senator Ted Cruz, who proposes that it would make way for a splendid US/Israel/Taiwan/Somaliland Pact. In 2025, Pennsylvania House Rep. Scott Perry introduced the Somaliland Independence Act, which has since been referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

However, the US doesn’t need to recognise “Somaliland” to gain the strategic advantages it seeks. Hargeisa is already as welcoming as it could be, never standing in the way of US military expansion. The global pushback against Israel may have given the Trump Administration pause about acquiescing to the lobby, especially since it’s already getting all it needs strategically.

Israel had more reason to recognise. It can now claim to be expelling Palestinians in accordance with a bilateral agreement between nations it considers sovereign. It gives them something to say that can at least be argued. Never mind that it’s ethnic cleansing, which falls within the scope of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the UN Genocide Convention.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni,

“We always pray for peace. But unfortunately, we have gotten into a rocky start for 2026,” Larry C. Johnson, former Central Intelligence Agency analyst told his Norwegian interviewer and International Relations Professor Glen Diesen in Oslo on 4 January.

Of course, Johnson was referring to Washington’s most recent brazen act of attacking Venezuela and kidnapping its sitting President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, former head of the National Assembly in the wee hours of January 3

To belabour the obvious, US President Donald J. Trump is proving to be yet another aggressor in the White House despite the schizophrenic claims that he has ended eight wars, for which he practically demanded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

For the coveted “peace” prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, however, opted for a more suitable candidate, whom the committee gift-wrapped as “a democrat”. Her qualification?

At “America Business Forum” recently, the Venezuelan democrat announced, via a giant monitor, to the audience of greedy-eyed global businessmen and -women, that she will, in effect, pimp Venezuela, “upstream, downstream, midstream,” for the grand commercial opening. “Privatization”, and guaranteed “safety for foreign investment, ”in her words. All this, to the tune of $1 .7 trillion (i.e., $ 1,700 billion), presumably largely in the oil and gas sector. To the interested corporate representatives while throwing in a huge bonus of “2,800 km of pristine Caribbean coastline” for hoteliers, developers, tourism industrialists and so on.

In the pundit-sphere, a lot of ink has been spilled and many an expertly words have been spoken, in the last 24 hours since the US Delta Force’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president and his wife. The operative word that keeps coming up is “imperialism” of the United States whose business has always been business, that is, accumulation of wealth – in land, resources, profits, cheap labour, consumer markets and banking.

Some analysts rightly connect the dots between Israel’s coming big war with Iran and Trump-Rubio-Hegseth’s crime of aggression–a charge senior Nazi officials faced at the Nuremberg in 1945-46–against Venezuela, with its world’s largest known, but untapped deposit of oil. [Hitler wanted land “in the East of Germany (Eastern Europe) for his chosen people of Aryan and Trump wanted oil in Washington’s “Latin backyard” for his chosen circle of US oligarchs.]

When – not if –in the coming weeks or months, Israel attacks Iran’s missile facilities and whatever else the genocidal Jewish supremacists in Tel Aviv feel like taking out in the coming months it is widely expected that Iran will shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which passes 20% of the global oil flow, as an act of retaliation, in addition to striking US bases across West Asia.

It appears that the US invasion of Venezuela for regime change for oil control in Caracas kills two birds with a single stone: as criminal as it is, the act enables Washington to pre-emptively acquire a massive mitigating alternative to the oil from the Middle East in the face of a likely economic fallout from the US-backed Israel’s war with Iran, while it is pregnant with massive oil bonanza for the Big Oil in USA, which had been shut out by the socialist-leaning policies that the late Hugo Chavez instituted. Chavez’s rationale was straightforward: Venezuela’s lucrative resources must be used for the welfare of the Venezuelan public the majority of whom were unemployed and poverty-stricken.

Obviously, the Big Oil drills on foreign soil not for the local people in any oil rich country, but for the shareholders at home in the USA – or for that matter, UK, Canada, France, Italy, etc. So, a foreign leader anchors his government on this oil-for-welfare, he or she is viewed unfavourably by the Free Marketeers of Global North (that is, formerly colonizing Europe and its settler colonial offshoots of which the United States is the most ruthless case of White Supremacist genocidal success).

As the cancerous mindset and politico-economic system aimed at sucking the planet and people dry by any means necessary, imperialism is antithesis of what is referred to as “humanity”. This is universally applicable to all strains of imperialism, dating back to the days of such darkly iconic fortune-diggers as Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes who led the plunder in the Caribbean, the New World.

Over the last 500 years, the list of lucrative resources which the White Men of “the Judeo-Christian Civilization” have sought after have changed. From spices, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, tea, copper, silver and gold to the Black Gold of gas and oil and rare earth minerals.

The tribal backgrounds of largely white men leading the packs of Europe’s (and subsequently West’s) royally patronized and God-blessed plunderers and looters have changed from Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, British, Italian or German to North Americans.

But the methodologies, the narratives and the vocabularies these Nuremberg-worthy “civilizational” criminals, and their “democratic” regimes, deploy remain more or less the same.

Enter “Propagation of the Gospel”, “bringing Light to the dark corners of Heathens, “Civilizing Mission”, “Progress and productive uses of the soil”, democracy, human rights, and freedom, “anti or counterterrorism”, women’s liberation and so on.

If one takes a close look what has been promoted as part of this Imperialist Design rooted in “Christian Europe” and, since the Palestinian revolt on 7 October 2023, “Judeo-Christian Civilization”, peace is never a value, a political vocabulary, a policy objective.

And yet peace is the essential pre-condition for life as we know it, for all humans, animals and their/our shared ecosystems.

For (Western) imperialism has aimed to conquer, control, dominate and decimate local populations for want of their land, labour and resources, above and underground, with some ruptures over the last five hundred years.

As such, it is the highest stage of organized tyranny marked by mass murder and loot. It has remained a quintessentially European/Western in form, essence and operation, aided by its technological superiority. Its foundation is the absence of universal humanity.

Europe as we know it lacks any potential or prospect for self-enlightenment, despite its claim to the contrary.

As the latter-day conquistadores like Donald Trump and his European sycophants heading the old genocidal European states cannot be reasoned with or appealed to their humanity. For they have displayed none that qualifies as human decency, empathy or conscience.

These 21st century conquistadors and their policies of plunder must be resisted worldwide.

No one knows this centuries-old White Supremacy Criminal Enterprise packaged as “Judeo-Christian Civilization” better than enslaved Africans. Over the last nearly four decades of my trans-national activism, I have always gone to the corpus of grounded wisdom that the freed men of African origin have gifted We the People, including Frantz Fanon and Frederick Douglas.

I will leave this editorial note with two short quotes by Frederick Douglas, a born slave on a plantation in Maryland, outside of American imperialists’ swamp known as Washington, DC. two hundred years ago.

Advocating for active resistance for one’s freedom, the self-freed man wrote:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

In the opening of this editorial, I quoted the former CIA agent Larry C. Johnson, now a vocal critic of his former employer, the United States, who talked of praying for peace. Douglass had a more practical piece of advice.

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

We must pray with our resistance. For imperialists are not peaceable.

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Kathy Kelly

29 Dec 2025 – On Thu 25 Dec, during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, 168 students graduated from medical school, in Gaza. Wearing their white coats, they stood in front of the ruined façade of what was formerly Gaza’s largest hospital, the Al-Shifa Medical Complex. As a backdrop, the destroyed building realistically conveys perils the graduates faced while earning their medical degrees. Throughout the last two years of their studies, they risked assassination, injury, arrest, imprisonment, and torture, as well as attacks on their own family members.

Israel has waged a systematic campaign to destroy Gaza’s health care delivery and to kill or imprison health care professionals. From October of 2023 to October of 2025, The World Health Organization documented 687 Israeli attacks on Gazan health care facilities and 211 attacks on ambulances. These attacks killed 985 people. In the same time period, Israel detained over 306 health care workers.

Health Care Workers Watch – Palestine, a nongovernmental organization, reports that 95 Palestinian health care workers are still in prison, eighty of whom are from Gaza. Prisoners who have been released from detention report that doctors are singled out for particularly brutal treatment.

Among the 80 Gazan health care workers who are still detained is the former director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. On December 27, 2025, Dr. Abu Safiya began his second year of imprisonment.

For over a year, prior to his incarceration, the Israeli military had subjected the Kamal Adwan hospital to repeated sieges and attacks. Dr. Abu Safiya and his staff, refusing to desert their patients, managed to increase the number of available beds in the hospital as theirs became one of the few hospitals still operating in northern Gaza.

On October 25, 2024, Israel raided the hospital, bombing its buildings, detaining many patients, and arresting all hospital staff, including Dr. Abu Safiya who was interrogated and released. On that same day, an Israeli drone attacked one of the hospital buildings and killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s twenty-year-old son, Ibrahim. Dr. Abu Safiya buried his son on the hospital grounds and still refused to abandon the patients.

“The Israeli army does not know what it wants,” Dr. Abu Safiya told a reporter with The Electronic Intifada. “They detained me for a few hours and interrogated me about whether there were fighters inside the hospital, and demanded that I evacuate the hospital completely, but I refused and assured them that there were only patients inside the hospital. But fifty-seven of the hospital’s medical staff were arrested, (…) So we are suffering from a severe shortage of doctors, especially surgeons. Right now, we only have pediatricians — it is a huge challenge to work under these circumstances. I refused to leave the hospital and sacrifice my patients, so the army punished me by killing my son. I saw him die at the entrance gate — it was a great shock. I found a grave for him near one of the hospital’s walls, so that he could stay close to me.”

On December 27, 2024, when Israeli forces threatened to level the whole facility, Dr. Abu Safiya agreed to leave the hospital which was, by then, largely inoperable. An iconic video shows him, clad in his white coat, walking through the rubble toward two Israeli tanks.

He was held incommunicado, and then taken to the Sde Teiman prison, in the Negev desert, where he was interrogated and beaten before being transferred to the Ofer prison. There, he is held in solitary confinement. Only his lawyer has been allowed to visit him. She expresses rising alarm over his weight loss, inadequate health care, and frequent beatings.

Amnesty International says he has been forcibly disappeared and arbitrarily held without charge. Even though no charges have been brought against him, an Israeli court has extended his detention multiple times. On October 16, 2025, Israel’s Be’er Sheva District Court added an additional six months to his detention.

Who are the criminals? Israel and its partner, the United States, egregiously flaunt international law, committing numerous war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Dr. Abu Safiya endures daily punishments in return for his courageous dedication to serving victims of war.

In a better world, in a better future, we can hope that Palestinians graduating from medical school could assemble for an address delivered by Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Together, they could uphold “the Humanity Cohort,” as the Gazan doctors who graduated in December 2025 call themselves, and safely commemorate the courageous health care workers who risked and lost their lives to care for patients during an Israeli genocide that is still ongoing. Confident that health care is never a crime, they could cite their fallen colleagues’ historic and extraordinary adherence to the UN’s core mission, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Kathy Kelly is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, board president of World BEYOND War, an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Prof. Richard Falk

27 Dec 2025 – The short assessment of Israel’s strategic objectives that are not addressed in the Trump Twenty-Point Plan was initially written in response to a question by a Brazilian journalist with a special interest in the Middle East.

******************************

Reading Israel Katz’s Comments on Annexation of the West Bank, Permanent Presence in Gaza, and Policies of Disproportionate Reprisal

Israel Katz, Israel’s Minister of Defense, used blunt language to express his version of ‘Greater Israel’ that is alone an acceptable outcome of this long struggle culminating in the Gaza Genocide. What Katz proposes is at minimum the de facto annexation of the West Bank and Israel’s permanent presence in the 53% of Gaza that Israel now occupies, made irreversible by the establishment of Jewish settlements in Northern Gaza.

Katz can be read as implicitly recognizing Israel’s inability to reach these goals de jure, which can be understood as an expression of Zionist realism as to the limits of Israel’s influence at any given time. Such remarks may have been unscripted, and not indicative of how Netanyahu proposes to handle this interaction between the Trump Plan and the Zionist Endgame.

This controversial language of Katz should be interpreted both as trouble ahead for the Trump diplomacy, an exhibition of Israel’s growing awareness that the contradictions between the further implementation of remaining fundamental tenets of the Zionist vision and the Trump diplomacy may collide in the future. In the past this gap between what geopolitical managers were willing to grant Israel and what Israel insists upon as the price of peace meant a frozen diplomacy. Before Katz spoke this acceptance of a de facto version of realizing Israeli goals had rarely openly acknowledged by a public official in relation to these expansionist and hegemonic ambitions.

This official silence in relation to Israel’s unattained strategic objectives may have been intended as a temporary expression of deference to the international consensus on an endgame for the struggle between Jews and Palestinians, which has been the case since the General Assembly 1947 Partition Resolution of 181, continues to support a ‘two-state solution.’ Such solution is not favored by a wide spectrum of opinion among the political elites and citizenry of Israel that currently affirm a commitment to a single Israeli state, often known as ‘Greater Israel’, but seemingly excluded from the Trump Plan. This helps explain why Netanyahu and other prominent Israelis have in recent months made their determined opposition to Palestinian statehood in any form. Also relevant is that criticism directed at Israel’s tactics of starvation and civilian targeting has been made by the governments most complicit with the genocide (except the US), including France, the UK, and Canada, that pointedly and stubbornly support the establishment of a Palestinian state. [See French-backed New York Declaration:United Nations High-Level International Conference – New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State solution (29 July 2025)]

A previous signal of Israeli one-statism was the refusal to declare existing territorial borders as final.

Katz has made other disturbing comments in his official response to a deadly stabbing attack in the West Bank a few days ago. Katz declared that he has “ordered a military action against the home village” of the Palestinian attacker, a measure of reprisal contrary to international law in two respects: openly attacking a civilian village and inflicting collective punishment on an innocent community. Israel newspapers reports more measured Israeli responses to the incident of course labeled as ‘terrorism’ that may suggest that Katz’s provocative words should be partially discounted given his reputation as a stand-alone ‘hothead.’

All along Israel has opted for disproportionate and indiscriminate responses to any signs of armed Palestinian resistance. Israel formulated the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, first enunciated in 2006 as an articulation of Israel’s response to Hezbollah operating out of Lebanon in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. As Dahiya was long understood it was nothing new. It made explicit what Israel had been doing all along in the name of national security.

What may be noteworthy with respect to these utterances by Katz is their relevance to territorial sovereignty ambitions and the future of Gaza. It has long been agreed upon by expert observers of Israel that the current leadership of Israel to varying degrees adhered to Zionist ideology that included the prospect of West Bank annexation and further Judaification by way of the settlement movement as well as the partial annexation of Gaza reinforced by Jewish settlements situated in northern Gaza. That Zionist ambitions along these lines existed in Tel Aviv should not have come as a surprise in informed circles, although its open acknowledgement at this time is unexpected, especially as it rubs against the grain of US efforts to build wide international support for the Trump 20 Point Plan, which is strongly weighted in favor of Israel and dismissive of Palestinian grievances.

The timing of Katz’s utterances may reflect Israeli concern about the nature of Trump’s regional approach that seemed to preclude such territorial expansion. This might slow down Israel’s timetable, but would not likely inhibit the Israeli leadership, that Israel will move forward with its ‘day after’ diplomacy while paying lip service to the Trump Plan. Trump’s diplomacy has major benefits for Israel. It masks accountability issues, thereby ensuring impunity for Israel’s engagement with the criminality of genocide and apartheid, and possibly ecocide, exhibited daily in the past two plus years to the entire world. The Miami meeting scheduled for Monday, December 29 between Netanyahu and Trump may cast light on whether Katz’s comments touched on points of tension between Washington and Tel Aviv or were just a way of reminding the world of a major tenet of Zionist ideology at a critical moment when the non-Israelis were formulating the future of what has become known as Occupied Palestinian Territories. Time will tell us more about the relative leverage of Israel and the United States in crafting a post-genocide future for the two peoples. In this sense, it is most unfortunate that no modality of Palestinian participation could be agreed upon during this period of Trump diplomacy.

As such thoughts linger, the people of Gaza have not been treated with dignity but mostly left homeless amid the rubble to cope with fierce Winter without heat, adequate food, and a conscientious Israel effort to abide by the ceasefire that it has consistently violated in ways that overcome any uncertainty. There is little reason to doubt that Israel’s annexationist and expansionist goals retain their position at the top of Israel’s policy agenda.

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Mehdi Hasan

Here are five times Donald Trump himself admitted that illegally attacking Venezuela and toppling Nicolás Maduro was aimed at seizing the country’s massive oil reserves.

3 Jan 2026 – To understand why Donald Trump just (illegally) attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the country’s president and his wife, you only need to look at this chart, which is based on OPEC numbers.

Trump didn’t attack Venezuela because it produces fentanyl. It doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because President Nicolás Maduro controls the Tren de Aragua gang. He doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles. It doesn’t even exist.

It’s about the oil, stupid!

Don’t believe me? Think it sounds a little conspiratorial?

Well, here’s the thing: Donald Trump, the self-declared ‘peace president,’ the serial liar, also likes to say the quiet part out loud from time to time.

In 2003, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at least pretended their illegal invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein wasn’t about Iraq’s oil. It was about democracy! WMDs! Al-Qaeda!

Donald Trump, weirdly, shamelessly, and luckily for us, has been brutally honest on the subject of Venezuela and his motivation for regime change in Caracas.

Here he is in his own words.

1. “Return the oil”

On Dec. 16, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was ordering “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE” of all Venezuelan oil tankers by “the largest Armada ever assembled” until “such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

To be clear, US companies, as even the Washington Post has pointed out, “never owned oil or land in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest proven reserves of crude, and officials didn’t kick them out of the country.”

2. “We want it back”

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAA4W5Fos4c]

On Dec. 17, a journalist asked the US president on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews: “Is the goal of the blockade of Venezuela regime change?”

Trump replied: “You remember, they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil, from not that long ago. And we want it back.”

Another reporter then asked the president: “On Venezuela, sir, you mentioned getting land back from Venezuela. What land is that?”

To which Trump responded: “Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had. They took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching. But they’re not going to do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

3. “We’re going to keep it”
   On Dec. 22, Trump told reporters in Palm Beach that the US government planned on keeping the oil illegally seized from Venezuelan tankers in the Caribbean.

“We’re going to keep it,” the president said.

“Maybe we’ll use it in the Strategic Reserves – we’re keeping it. We’re keeping the ships also,” he added.

He also acknowledged having spoken to “all the big” US oil companies about them returning to Venezuela once Maduro was removed from office.

4. “They have all that oil”
   Trump has a long history of coveting Venezuela’s oil reserves.

In his 2019 memoir The Threat, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe quotes first-term Trump saying Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

5. “We would have gotten all that oil”
   Don’t take Maduro’s word for it. Take Trump’s word for it. He has long been obsessed with seizing Venezuela’s oil.

In June 2023, while he was out of office, Trump said at a rally in North Carolina:

“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.”

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

After all those months of babbling about fentanyl and “narcoterrorism” and freedom and democracy, the Trump administration has come right out and admitted that its regime change interventionism in Venezuela has always been a good old-fashioned oil grab.

4 Jan 2026 – Well, Trump finally did it. US special forces attacked Venezuela and abducted President Maduro from Caracas, reportedly killing at least 40 people in the process.

And now that it’s all over, the White House is getting a lot more honest about the real motives behind its actions. After all those months of babbling about fentanyl and “narcoterrorism” and freedom and democracy, the Trump administration has come right out and admitted that its regime change interventionism in Venezuela has always been a good old-fashioned oil grab.

“We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump told the press following Maduro’s abduction, saying “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said.

“We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves, we need that for the world,” the president added.

[https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/2007505294293905595]

Trump made it explicitly clear that this is going to be some sort of long-term US occupation project, contradicting early claims of his supporters who had defended the president’s actions in Venezuela as a brief in-and-out, one-and-done special ops intervention.

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” the president said. “And we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high level. Actually, we’re not afraid of it, we’re we don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”

You would think after all these incredibly honest admissions that this was a regime change operation aimed at controlling the resources of the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, people would get real and accept that they were lied to about the Trump administration’s real reasons for targeting Venezuela. But I am still getting Trump supporters prattling on about drugs and terrorism and democracy in my social media replies defending my criticisms of his monstrous act of war.

[https://twitter.com/TrumpFile/status/2007580924469526693]

I had one Trump supporter try to tell me the president’s admissions that it was all about the oil don’t necessarily prove it wasn’t also about fighting drug trafficking, arguing that it could possibly have been motivated by both. Which to me kinda sounds like a grandmother acknowledging that yes, she had been victimized by an email scam, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the nice man who scammed her wasn’t also a Nigerian prince.

Trump supporters would make excuses for literally anything he did. Literally anything. I am not using hyperbole for effect. There is literally nothing he could do that they wouldn’t twist themselves into cognitive pretzels trying to justify.

Trump is spelling out the truth of what he is and what the US empire is, and anyone with open eyes can see it plain as day.

For those whose eyes are open or are beginning to open, I hope you continue learning the same lessons with Venezuela that you learned with Gaza. The US empire always lies, the mass media always facilitate its lies, and the global south continues to be ransacked by the murderous abusers who run things.

[https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/2007573343206330740]

While I was decrying Trump’s Venezuela assault some empire simp mockingly told me, “It must be sad for you to lose a tyrant.”

I told him no, it’s sad for me that we live in a lawless world that is ruled by tyrants.

It’s sad for me that we are ruled by chaotic despots who can invade a sovereign nation and abduct its leader and suffer no consequences.

It’s sad for me that the people with their hands on the steering wheel of the fate of our species are a bunch of sociopathic thugs who can smash and rob any country they please with total impunity.

It’s sad for me that our planet’s population is subject to the whims of a globe-spanning empire which topples governments, wages wars, sponsors genocides, targets civilians with starvation sanctions, backs proxy conflicts, drops bombs, brainwashes entire nations with propaganda, uses its military and economic might to bully and cajole states into bowing to its dictates, and sows suffering, destruction and death around the world every moment of every day.

It’s sad for me that these are the people who are making the decisions which will determine humanity’s path into the future. The future of our society. The future of our planet’s resources. The future of our technological innovation. The future of our ecosystem. The future of our militaries. The future of our nuclear weapons.

That is what is sad for me. I have no special emotional attachment to Maduro as an individual, but I do have a strong emotional attachment to the possibility of a healthy world emerging in the future.

And as things stand right now it’s looking pretty dark.

I find that sad.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper. Contact: admin@caitlinjohnstone.com

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Michelle Ellner

3 Jan 2026 – I listened to the January 3 press conference with a knot in my stomach. As a Venezuelan American with family, memories, and a living connection to the country being spoken about as if it were a possession, what I heard was very clear. And that clarity was chilling.

The president said, plainly, that the United States would “run the country” until a transition it deems “safe” and “judicious.” He spoke about capturing Venezuela’s head of state, about transporting him on a U.S. military vessel, about administering Venezuela temporarily, and about bringing in U.S. oil companies to rebuild the industry. He dismissed concerns about international reaction with a phrase that should alarm everyone: “They understand this is our hemisphere.”

For Venezuelans, those words echo a long, painful history.

Let’s be clear about the claims made. The president is asserting that the U.S. can detain a sitting foreign president and his spouse under U.S. criminal law. That the U.S. can administer another sovereign country without an international mandate. That Venezuela’s political future can be decided from Washington. That control over oil and “rebuilding” is a legitimate byproduct of intervention. That all of this can happen without congressional authorization and without evidence of imminent threat.

We have heard this language before. In Iraq, the United States promised a limited intervention and a temporary administration, only to impose years of occupation, seize control of critical infrastructure, and leave behind devastation and instability. What was framed as stewardship became domination. Venezuela is now being spoken about in disturbingly similar terms. “Temporary Administration” ended up being a permanent disaster.

Under international law, nothing described in that press conference is legal. The UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against another state and bars interference in a nation’s political independence. Sanctions designed to coerce political outcomes and cause civilian suffering amount to collective punishment. Declaring the right to “run” another country is the language of occupation, regardless of how many times the word is avoided.

Under U.S. law, the claims are just as disturbing. War powers belong to Congress. There has been no authorization, no declaration, no lawful process that allows an executive to seize a foreign head of state or administer a country. Calling this “law enforcement” does not make it so. Venezuela poses no threat to the United States. It has not attacked the U.S. and has issued no threat that could justify the use of force under U.S. or international law. There is no lawful basis, domestic or international, for what is being asserted.

But beyond law and precedent lies the most important reality: the cost of this aggression is paid by ordinary people in Venezuela. War, sanctions, and military escalation do not fall evenly. They fall hardest on women, children, the elderly, and the poor. They mean shortages of medicine and food, disrupted healthcare systems, rising maternal and infant mortality, and the daily stress of survival in a country forced to live under siege. They also mean preventable deaths, people who die not because of natural disaster or inevitability, but because access to care, electricity, transport, or medicine has been deliberately obstructed. Every escalation compounds existing harm and increases the likelihood of loss of life, civilian deaths that will be written off as collateral, even though they were foreseeable and avoidable.

What makes this even more dangerous is the assumption underlying it all: that Venezuelans will remain passive, compliant, and submissive in the face of humiliation and force. That assumption is wrong. And when it collapses, as it inevitably will, the cost will be measured in unnecessary bloodshed. This is what is erased when a country is discussed as a “transition” or an “administration problem.” Human beings disappear. Lives are reduced to acceptable losses. And the violence that follows is framed as unfortunate rather than the predictable outcome of arrogance and coercion.

To hear a U.S. president talk about a country as something to be managed, stabilized, and handed over once it behaves properly, it hurts. It humiliates. And it enrages.

And yes, Venezuela is not politically unified. It isn’t. It never has been. There are deep divisions, about the government, about the economy, about leadership, about the future. There are people who identify as Chavista, people who are fiercely anti-Chavista, people who are exhausted and disengaged, and yes, there are some who are celebrating what they believe might finally bring change.

But political division does not invite invasion.

Latin America has seen this logic before. In Chile, internal political division was used to justify U.S. intervention, framed as a response to “ungovernability,” instability, and threats to regional order, ending not in democracy, but in dictatorship, repression, and decades of trauma.

In fact, many Venezuelans who oppose the government still reject this moment outright. They understand that bombs, sanctions, and “transitions” imposed from abroad do not bring democracy, they destroy the conditions that make it possible.

This moment demands political maturity, not purity tests. You can oppose Maduro and still oppose U.S. aggression. You can want change and still reject foreign control. You can be angry, desperate, or hopeful, and still say no to being governed by another country.

Venezuela is a country where communal councils, worker organizations, neighborhood collectives, and social movements have been forged under pressure. Political education didn’t come from think tanks; it came from survival. Right now, Venezuelans are not hiding. They are closing ranks because they recognize the pattern. They know what it means when foreign leaders start talking about “transitions” and “temporary control.” They know what usually follows. And they are responding the way they always have: by turning fear into collective action.

This press conference wasn’t just about Venezuela. It was about whether empire can say the quiet part out loud again, whether it can openly claim the right to govern other nations and expect the world to shrug.

If this stands, the lesson is brutal and undeniable: sovereignty is conditional, resources are there to be taken by the U.S., and democracy exists only by imperial consent.

As a Venezuelan American, I refuse that lesson.

I refuse the idea that my tax dollars fund the humiliation of my homeland. I refuse the lie that war and coercion are acts of “care” for the Venezuelan people. And I refuse to stay silent while a country I love is spoken about as raw material for U.S. interests, not a society of human beings deserving respect.

Venezuela’s future is not for U.S. officials, corporate boards, or any president who believes the hemisphere is his to command. It belongs to Venezuelans.

Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org