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By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

23 Jun 2025 – Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.

The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10th to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.

The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.

On June 20th, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.

The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium.

Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.

While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.

The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”

The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.

The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”

And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.

Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.

The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”

The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.

Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.

Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”

In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.

When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.

Bush kept repeating the lie about yellowcake from Niger, and other flagrant lies about Iraq, and the United States invaded and destroyed Iraq based on his lies, a war crime of historic proportions. Most of the world knew that ElBaradei and the IAEA were right all along, and, in 2005, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation.

In 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with the IAEA’s finding that Iran, like Iraq, had no nuclear weapons program. As Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” Even Bush couldn’t believe he would get away with recycling the same lies to destroy Iran as well as Iraq, and Trump is playing with fire by doing so now.

ElBaradei wrote in his own memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, that if Iran did do some preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it probably began during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, after the US and its allies helped Iraq to manufacture chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians.

The neocons who dominate U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy viewed the Nobel Prize winner ElBaradei as an obstacle to their regime change ambitions around the world, and conducted a covert campaign to find a more compliant new IAEA Director General when his term expired in 2009.

After Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was appointed as the new Director General, U.S. diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks revealed details of his extensive vetting by U.S. diplomats, who reported back to Washington that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

After becoming IAEA Director General in 2019, Rafael Grossi not only continued the IAEA’s subservience to U.S. and Western interests and its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons, but also ensured that the IAEA played a critical role in Israel’s march to war on Iran.

Even as he publicly acknowledged that Iran had no nuclear weapons program and that diplomacy was the only way to resolve the West’s concerns about Iran, Grossi helped Israel to set the stage for war by reopening the IAEA’s investigation into Iran’s past activities. Then, on the very day that Israeli warplanes were being loaded with weapons to bomb Iran, he made sure that the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution to give Israel and the U.S. the pretext for war that they wanted.

In his last year as IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei faced a similar dilemma to the one that Grossi has faced since 2019. In 2008, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies gave the IAEA copies of documents that appeared to show Iran conducting four distinct types of nuclear weapons research.

Whereas, in 2003, Bush’s yellowcake document from Niger was clearly a forgery, the IAEA could not establish whether the Israeli documents were authentic or not. So ElBaradei refused to act on them or to make them public, despite considerable political pressure, because, as he wrote in The Age of Deception, he knew the U.S. and Israel “wanted to create the impression that Iran presented an imminent threat, perhaps preparing the grounds for the use of force.” ElBaradei retired in 2009, and those allegations were among the “outstanding issues” that he left to be resolved by Yukiya Amano in 2015.

If Rafael Grossi had exercised the same caution, impartiality and wisdom as Mohamed ElBaradei did in 2009, it is very possible that the United States and Israel would not be at war with Iran today.

Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on June 17th 2025, “To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is), and sends a clear message to many countries that their “ultimate security” is to develop nuclear weapons!!!”

Despite Grossi’s role in U.S.-Israeli war plans as IAEA Director General, or maybe because of it, he has been touted as a Western-backed candidate to succeed Antonio Guterres as UN Secretary General in 2026. That would be a disaster for the world. Fortunately, there are many more qualified candidates to lead the world out of the crisis that Rafael Grossi has helped the U.S. and Israel to plunge it into.

Rafael Grossi should resign as IAEA Director before he further undermines nuclear non-proliferation and drags the world any closer to nuclear war. And he should also withdraw his name from consideration as a candidate for UN Secretary General.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022.

30 June 2025

Source: transcend.org

By The Chris Hedges Report w/ Francesca Albanese

26 Jun 2025

Francesca Albanese joins Chris Hedges to break down the current starvation campaign in Gaza, and her upcoming report detailing the profiteering corporations capitalizing on the erasure of Palestinians.

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

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

30 June 2025

Source: transcend.org

By BADIL

The Israeli regime’s use of colonizers to carry out forced displacement of Palestinians is not a symptom of rogue extremism—it is the infrastructure of its colonial domination. Regardless of deliberate obfuscation, the incitement, arming, protection and impunity provided to colonizers clearly indicates that their role constitutes a foundational policy in the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime. By outsourcing attacks to colonizers, the regime attempts to evade international scrutiny and accountability, disguising its systemic nature. As colonizer assaults escalate across the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza continues, this manufactured blurred distinction between the Israeli regime, its forces and colonizers, attempts to conceal a coherent and unified apparatus of colonial domination. Sanctioning individuals alone is inadequate; the international community, especially States, must impose sanctions on the entire Israeli regime.

The foundations of this policy were initiated pre-Nakba, and carried forward ever since, but escalated significantly in the 1980s during a surge in colonial expansion throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rather than relying solely on overt “military” seizure, the Israeli regime empowered colonizer outposts to further colonial expansion, while avoiding direct condemnation. These actions, largely ignored by the international community, normalized a model where colonizer attacks appeared spontaneous but were structurally embedded and regime-enabled.

This same policy remains central today. Impunity for colonizer attacks and the formal sanctioning of colonizer-established outposts facilitate land theft and have become the norm. In May 2025, the Israeli Minister of War, Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the establishment of 22 new colonies—many originating from such outposts. This exposes the colonizer not as rogue, but as a crucial component of the Israeli regime. Working hand in hand to implement Palestinian forcible displacement and colonial expansion.

In Masafer Yatta, over 2,300 residents have endured decades of colonizer attacks, Israeli forces night raids, home demolitions, forced evictions, road closures, and encirclement by expanding colonies. These practices, intensified under the pretext of a “firing zone” since 2022, have been condemned as a war crime of forcible displacement. These colonizer attacks, as a method of forced displacement, are now being replicated with significant regularity across the West Bank. This escalation did not begin in October 2023. In fact, the first eight months of 2023 saw a record average of three colonizer-related attacks per day—surpassing two per day in 2022 and one in 2021—marking the highest rate since UN tracking began in 2006.

In villages across the West Bank, such as Deir Dibwan, Masafer Yatta, Sinjil, and Turmusayya, armed and often masked colonizers and militias have launched organized assaults on Palestinian homes and communities. These colonizer attacks have now doubled; as of 2025 there has been an average of about seven attacks per day. Eroding access to services, terrorizing residents, and degrading daily life—have one aim: to contribute to the coercive environment that makes Palestinian presence unsustainable and results in their forcible transfer.

When Palestinians attempt to defend themselves or their land, they are summarily suppressed. This convergence of colonial and military suppression was blatantly evident in the assault against Kafr Malik, where colonizers, operating with the Israeli forces, murdered three Palestinians in a coordinated attack. Protection—through physical Israeli force presence, legal shielding, and judicial impunity are one of the mechanisms of regime enablement.

In June 2023, Itamar Ben Gvir openly called for escalation in colonial expansion and Israeli force operations, declaring, “There needs to be a full settlement here. Not just here but on all the hilltops around us.” His call reflects how the Israeli regime empowers colonizers through incitement—demonizing Palestinians and encouraging aggressive actions.

Since 7 October 2023, the regime’s National Security Ministry (headed by Gvir) distributed over 120,000 firearms to the public, supplying armed colonial militias and “Rapid Response Squads” who have carried out systematic attacks on Palestinians, while posing as independent actors. In reality, colonial coalitions like the Yesha Council, Nachala, and Kahanist networks operate in full coordination with Israeli forces. This policy—refined over decades—enables the regime to advance its colonial expansion, while deflecting international accountability by framing colonizer attacks as isolated or extremist.

The purported blurred line between the Israeli regime, its forces, and colonizers is not accidental—it is central to the architecture of erasure. Many colonizers act in the same way as the Israeli forces but are in civilian clothing, to obscure regime responsibility. The Israeli far right, often presented as an extremist fringe, is instrumentalized to mask a broader consensus around ethnic cleansing, externalize blame, and maintain the Israeli regime’s facade as a democratic and legitimate entity.

Western governments, mainstream media, and even segments of civil society help sustain this illusion—condemning “fringe violence” while continuing to fund, support, and normalize the regime that enables it. Self-proclaimed “progressive” Zionist-Israeli officials and civil society groups, who distance themselves from far-right rhetoric, uphold and drive the same Israeli system of domination through forced displacement and transfer, colonization, and apartheid.

Targeted sanctions against figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich do not address the core problem: the Israeli regime’s entire colonial architecture must be confronted. Forcible transfer and displacement systematically amount to crimes against humanity. The regime’s policies—whether enacted by Israeli forces or by armed colonizers acting with impunity—clearly meet these thresholds. Condemning colonizers while maintaining military aid and trade with corporations linked to the Israeli regime enables ongoing crimes. Framing the violence as “intercommunal conflict” erases regime responsibility and provides impunity to ongoing international crimes. This fixation on so-called extremists obscures a deliberate regime tactic: using colonizers as enforcers of displacement allowing structural domination to masquerade as rogue unrest. While the sanctions and prosecutions of individuals are a start, they fail to address the systemic project of colonial domination embedded in the regime, since before its establishment. True accountability requires the imposition of sanctions against the entire apparatus—not just its visible actors.

7 July 2025

Source: badil.org

By Chris Hedges

Israel is weaponizing starvation. The objective is to dismantle all remnants of civil society and reduce Palestinians to herds of desperate scavengers who can be driven from historic Palestine.

Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.

Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

The report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.

Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1,400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (U.N.) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of U.N. food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.

The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.

Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.

Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.” On the advice of his neighbor in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”

He left at about 9 p.m. with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food. Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.

“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers. Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”

He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 a.m., the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.

“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others. Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”

The U.S. contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.

“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey. I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”

GHF is a Mossad-funded creation of Israel’s Defense Ministry that contracts with UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, run by former members of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. GHF is headed by Rev. Johnnie Moore, a far-right Christian Zionist with close ties to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The organization has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.

As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”

Israel, along with the U.S. and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.

Haaretz, in its article headlined “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid” reported that Israeli commanders order soldiers to open fire on crowds to keep them away from aid sites or disperse them.

“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”

“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Haaretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.

Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.

There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive. The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.

Chris Hedges worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. 

30 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Israeli forces have intensified direct and deliberate attacks on Palestinian civilians, increasingly targeting shelters and tents of displaced persons. This escalation reflects a clear policy to further the crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip, amid the international community’s legally and morally unjustifiable silence.

Israeli warplanes have launched a series of intense airstrikes on densely populated residential areas in the Tuffah neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, killing over 23 civilians, including women and children, and injuring dozens. This attack is part of a systematic policy to destroy Gaza’s social fabric and foundations of life by targeting civilians in homes and displacement camps. It forms part of a genocidal campaign aimed at erasing the Palestinian presence, depopulating the Strip, and subjecting those who remain to deadly conditions of hunger, terror, and constant targeting.

According to documentation from Euro-Med Monitor’s field team, the airstrikes began at approximately 12:30 p.m., targeting a gathering of civilians at the Snafour intersection in the neighbourhood. Three civilians, including two brothers, were killed and several others injured.

At approximately 1:40 p.m., Israeli aircraft resumed bombing, targeting a market stall on Yafa Street. The strike resulted in a horrific massacre, killing 11 civilians, including women and children, and injuring 15 others with varying degrees of severity. Later, at around 3:50 p.m., aircraft bombed the vicinity of Abdul Fattah Hamoud School in the same neighbourhood, targeting a group of civilians. The strike killed nine people, including five children, and injured several others.

In another egregious act fulfilling the criteria of genocide, Israeli aircraft targeted the tents of displaced Palestinians near the Holy Family School in the Rimal neighbourhood, northwest of Gaza City, using a heavy bomb that buried entire tents and their occupants under rubble and sand. Rescue crews recovered the bodies of 11 members of the Abu Amsha family, including nine women and children, while others remain missing.

In a testimony to Euro-Med Monitor, a survivor of the Rimal neighbourhood bombing said: “We thought the tents would be safer than our destroyed homes, but we found death here as well. The bombing was sudden, burying our neighbours’ children under the sand. We don’t know who is still alive.”

The intense Israeli attacks are neither incidental nor isolated, but part of a recurring and systematic pattern of targeting displaced persons already deprived of basic protection and food. These attacks reflect a deliberate policy aimed at forcible displacement and depopulation.

Following the ceasefire between Israel and Iran on 24 June, the Israeli army significantly escalated its aerial and artillery bombardment of several areas in the north and south of the Gaza Strip. Most casualties were killed in their tents and shelters or while trying to obtain food or water, whether in markets or near aid distribution centres, which have effectively become tools of killing and humiliation.

Israel is expanding its killing campaign as part of a broader escalation, adopting a scorched-earth policy and systematically destroying the remaining neighbourhoods and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. This ongoing approach, sustained for over 20 months, is marked by mass killing, starvation, and the deliberate dismantling of the foundations of life, aiming to annihilate Palestinian society in Gaza and eliminate any prospect of reconstruction.

These crimes follow a consistent pattern of targeting civilians gathered near aid distribution centres established by the Israeli military in central and southern Gaza. Killings occur each time residents attempt to access basic necessities, in grave violation of international humanitarian law, particularly the principles of protecting civilians and ensuring unhindered access to humanitarian aid.

It is essential to provide special protection for shelters and establish safe humanitarian corridors to ensure the delivery of aid and the evacuation of the wounded. The international community must act immediately to halt Israeli attacks, implement effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians, and end the political and military impunity that enables Israel to continue its crimes without accountability.

UN and international relief organisations must take immediate, collective action through all available legal, diplomatic, humanitarian, and field channels to end Israeli crimes against the starving people in the Gaza Strip.

Israel must halt its inhumane aid distribution mechanism and urgently push for the restoration of humanitarian access and the lifting of the illegal blockade, as this is the only way to stop the accelerating humanitarian deterioration and ensure the entry of aid, given the imminent threat of famine.

The establishment of safe humanitarian corridors under UN supervision is vital to ensure the delivery of food, medicine, and fuel to all areas of the Strip, with independent international monitors deployed to verify compliance.

All states, both individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal responsibilities by taking urgent action to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip, through implementing effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians; ensuring Israel’s compliance with international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice; preventing the implementation of the US-Israeli forced displacement plan; and holding Israel and its more powerful allies accountable for all crimes against the Palestinians in the Strip. The International Criminal Court must implement the arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defence at the earliest opportunity, in accordance with the principle that there is no immunity for international crimes.

The international community must impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel for such grave violations of international law. These sanctions should include arms embargoes; a ban on the export and import of parts, software, and dual-use goods; an end to all political, financial, and military support; freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians and imposing travel bans on these officials; suspending the operations of Israeli military and security companies in international markets and freezing their assets; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide Israel with economic benefits that enable its continued crimes against the Palestinian people.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

30 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

They say history swings on a hinge—on moments that demand a reckoning, not a retweet. Today, we stand at such a crossroads. One path leads to ‘Zohran’: a world built on egalitarian liberation, where justice is not a marketing slogan but a lived reality, and where the commons are rescued from corporate siege. The other path barrels toward Zion—not the ancient hill, nor the faith of a people, but an ideology of supremacist violence, perfected in the smoking ruins of Gaza.

Two futures, one choice. And neutrality is a myth.

The Rise of a World Worth Fighting For

“Zohranism” is not a campaign slogan. It is not another rebranding of left-liberal identity politics. It is not about a singular politician—though New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani has come to symbolize its ethos. Rather, Zohranism is a slow, stubborn insurgency of principles against propaganda. It’s the recognition that justice cannot be carved into electoral soundbites or sacrificed on the altar of bipartisan respectability.

This political ethic isn’t crafted in think tanks or donor retreats—it’s forged in food lines, on picket lines, and in frontlines like Gaza. It does not sanitize its outrage to fit into Sunday talk shows. It names genocide when genocide is unfolding. It calls out apartheid even when that means losing endorsements. It links domestic struggle to international solidarity without flinching.

Zohranism, at its core, is a politics of coherence. It sees no contradiction between organizing for tenant rights in Brooklyn and condemning Israeli airstrikes in Rafah. It’s not driven by public relations, but by public conscience. It is growing—not because it flatters power, but because it refuses to bow to it.

Gaza: The Graveyard of Illusions
No place on Earth lays bare the moral fraudulence of our global order more brutally than Gaza. And no people expose the hollowness of militarized supremacy more defiantly than Palestinians.

Since October 2023, over 56,000 lives—mostly women and children—have been erased by Israel’s war machine. Hospitals have been converted into morgues. UN shelters pulverized. Entire families incinerated in drone strikes deemed “surgical.” In March 2025, Operation Might and Sword murdered over 855 civilians in a single night—no credible military objective, just a spectacle of vengeance.

But Gaza does more than grieve. It resists.

Even amid siege and starvation, Gazans cook communally, organize aid, write poetry, and dig the dead from rubble with bare hands. They live—and that is their revolt. Gaza has become a crucible of courage, a frontline of the possible. And it is this fierce will to live, not just survive, that animates Zohranism. A refusal to let brutality dictate the boundaries of imagination.

Zion: The Empire with No Clothes
Let’s be precise. Zion(ism), as referred to here, is not Judaism. Nor is it simply the existence of the Israeli state. It is a settler-colonial doctrine—an ethno-supremacist framework that privileges Jewish identity above all others, sanctions dispossession, and lauds apartheid as self-defense. It is the blueprint behind razed villages, stolen land, and a state machinery that murders with impunity.

Once, Zionism relied on liberal fig leaves: “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “a vibrant multicultural society,” “a beacon of progress.” Gaza tore those fig leaves into confetti. You cannot bomb children in U.N. schools and then deliver TED Talks about tolerance. The contradictions are now too glaring to cover.

Even in the propaganda heartland of the United States, the mask is slipping. AIPAC can still buy Congress, but it can’t buy the conscience of the streets. Jewish peace activists now chain themselves to weapons factories. Students occupy campuses with chants of “Divest from genocide.” CIA analysts murmur that Israel has become a “strategic liability.” When Langley begins to fidget, it’s no longer just a moral indictment—it’s a geopolitical alarm.

Inside Israel, the rot is also visible. The far-right coalition fights over whether to ethnically cleanse Palestinians slowly or in one fell swoop. Netanyahu, trapped between trial and tyranny, rides the backs of messianists and militarists alike. The project of Zion(ism) is no longer expanding. It is entrenching, collapsing inward, scorched by the fires it set.

The Genocide That’s Losing the Narrative
Here’s the bitter truth: For all its billions in U.S. weapons, satellite precision, and air superiority, Zionism is failing to achieve its core goals. Gaza has not been pacified. Hamas has not been crushed. Palestinian resistance has not been broken—it has evolved, militarily and morally.

Despite the flattening of neighborhoods, over 860 Israeli soldiers have been killed. Despite overwhelming firepower, Israeli occupation troops face a landscape riddled with IEDs, tunnel ambushes, and unyielding defiance. Despite international pleas, Israel has ignited a diplomatic inferno. Even U.S. allies now whisper about “exit strategies” and “regional containment.”

Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes—targeted and bold—have signaled a regional red line. Hezbollah’s posture in the north, the mobilization of militias in Iraq and Syria, the global South’s fury—all point to a growing consensus: Israel’s impunity is no longer sustainable.

Meanwhile, Washington’s contradictions are impossible to conceal. It pledges humanitarian aid with one hand and airlifts bunker busters with the other. The Pentagon drops leaflets warning of famine, while Raytheon profits from missile contracts. The theater is obscene—and the audience is done clapping.

You can bulldoze buildings. You cannot bulldoze memory. Or truth.

Zohranism as a Foreign Policy
Zohranism is not just a domestic vision. It is a redefinition of global politics itself. It stands against endless wars, not out of pacifism, but out of a principled belief in sovereignty, dignity, and collective liberation.

It declares housing a right. Water a human necessity. Health a public good. Zohranism fights the climate crisis not with carbon markets, but with a Green New Deal that doesn’t exclude Gaza, Sudan, or the Global South. It disarms empire by divesting from its factories of death. It speaks of Palestine not as a “complex issue,” but as an open wound—inflicted daily, funded hourly.

This is the threat it poses to empire: not simply moral dissent, but material disruption. The Zohranistas demanding rent control in Queens are also organizing to defund war. The students occupying campuses are not just calling for a ceasefire—they are building an ethic of solidarity that spans continents and breaks lobbies.

They understand something the old world order refuses to admit: that injustice is not local. It is systemic. And so must be the resistance.

A World Reaching for Its Tipping Point
From strikes in California to encampments at Columbia, from women’s rights marches in Argentina to anti-imperialist movements in Kenya, the signs are clear: the people of the world are fed up with crumbs and carnage. The old order—of endless growth, war without cost, and profit over people—is trembling. Its mask is cracking. Its guns are no longer enough.

And this terrifies our global plutocrats.

Because the truth is, their entire edifice—of oil deals, surveillance states, and apartheid walls—depends not on strength, but on obedience. They rule not because we are weak, but because we have forgotten our strength.

Zohranism reminds us. It is a memory returning. A politics grounded in the radical idea that people matter more than profits, that borders should not eclipse justice, and that Gaza’s suffering is not exceptional, but emblematic.

The Choice Is Clear—And Urgent

So here we are.

Not just at a fork in the road, but at the cliff’s edge of history.

Zion or Zohran.

One future leads to biometric checkpoints, billion-dollar bombs, and sanitized genocide livestreamed in high resolution. It ends in surveillance, in scarcity, in silence dressed as stability.

The other dares to dream. It dismantles walls, not just with protest, but with policy. It builds not empires, but coalitions. It doesn’t just resist genocide—it organizes to uproot its causes.

The empires have picked their side. The question is—have we?

Let’s not pretend the middle ground is a moral ground. Let’s not hide behind the fig leaf of complexity. The blood on Gaza’s pavement is not complicated. It is evidence. Evidence of a system that must be not only condemned—but dismantled.

Zohranism is not perfect. It is flawed, contested, still forming. But it is real. And it is rising.

The bombs falling on Gaza are not the future—they are the shrieking death rattle of an order that cannot survive the light. Our task is not just to mourn, but to mobilize.

History is not written by those who stayed neutral. It is written by those who refused.

So stop asking what is possible.

Ask what is intolerable.

And then act accordingly.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.

27 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The confidence trickster was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO.  President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily on defence, inflating the margins of sense and sensibility against marginal threats.  Never mind the strain placed on the national budget over such absurd priorities as welfare, health or education. 

The marvellous irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump’s perceived unreliability and capriciousness when it comes to European affairs.  Would he, for instance, treat obligations of collective defence outlined in Article 5 of the organisation’s governing treaty with utmost seriousness?  Since Washington cannot be relied upon to hold the fort against the satanic savages from the East, various European countries have been encouraging a spike in defence spending to fight the sprites and hobgoblins troubling their consciences at night. 

The European Union, for instance, has put in place initiatives that will make getting more weaponry and investing in the military industrial complex easier than ever, raising the threshold of defence expenditure across all member countries to 3.5% of GDP by the end of the decade.  And then there is the Ukraine conflict, a war Brussels cannot bear to see end on terms that might be remotely favourable to Russia. 

The promised pecuniary spray made at the NATO summit was seen by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte as utterly natural if not eminently sensible.  Not much else was.  It was Rutte who remarked with infantile fawning that “Sometimes Daddy has to use tough language” when it came to sorting out the murderous bickering between Israel and Iran.  Daddy Trump approved.  “He likes me, I think he likes me,” the US president crowed with glowing satisfaction.

Rutte’s behaviour has been viewed with suspicion, as well it should.  Under his direction, NATO headquarters have made a point of diminishing any focus on climate change and its Women, Peace, and Security agenda.  He has failed to make much of Trump’s mania for the annexation of Greenland, or the President’s gladiatorial abuse of certain leaders when visiting the White House – Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa come to mind. “He is not paid to implement MAGA policy,” grumbled a European NATO diplomat to Euroactive.

In his doorstep statement of June 25, Rutte made his wish known that the NATO collective possess both the money and capabilities to cope, not just with Russia “but also the massive build-up of military in China, and the fact that North Korea, China and Iran, are supporting the war effort in Ukraine”.  Lashings of butter were also added to the Trump ego when responding to questions. “Would you really think that the seven or eight countries not at 2% [of GDP expenditure on defence] at the beginning of this year would have reached the 2% if Trump would not have been elected President of the United States?”  It was only appropriate, given the contributions of the US (“over 50% of the total NATO economy”), that things had to change for the Europeans and Canadians.

The centrepiece of the Hague Summit Declaration is a promise that 5% of member countries’ gross GDP will go to “core defence requirements as well as defence and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations”.  Traditional bogeyman Russia is the predictable antagonist, posing a “long-term threat […] to Euro-Atlantic security”, but so was “the persistent threat of terrorism”.  The target is optimistic, given NATO’s own recent estimates that nine members spend less than the current target of 2% of GDP.

What is misleading in the declaration is the accounting process: the 3.5% of annual GDP that will be spent “on the agreed definition of NATO defence expenditure by 2035 to resource core defence requirements, and to meet NATO Capability Targets” is one component. The other 1.5%, a figure based on a creative management of accounts, is intended to “protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.”

Another misleading element in the declaration is the claimed unanimity of member states.  The Baltic countries and Poland are forever engaged in increasing their defence budgets in anticipation of a Russian attack, but the same cannot be said of other countries less disposed to the issue. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, for instance, declared on the eve of the summit that his country had “better things to spend money on”.  Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also called the 5% target “incompatible with our world view”, preferring to focus on a policy of prudent procurement.

Rutte seemed to revel in his role as wallah and jesting sycophant, making sure Trump was not only placated but massaged into a state of satisfaction.  It was a sight all the stranger for the fact that Trump’s view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a warm one.  Unfortunately for the secretary general, his role will be forever etched in the context of European history as an aspiring warmonger, one valued at 5% of the GDP of any of the NATO member states.  Hardly a flattering epitaph.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. 

28 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Today, the Middle East has just passed a historical watershed never seen before in at least 100 years of development. It represents a major turning point for the Arab region that has long been characterized by its western hegemony, imperialism and domination.

One external power outside the Arab fold has managed to turn the tables around and thrust the Middle East region into the forefront of modernity and civilization through its military prowess and technical ingenuity.

That country is Iran: A regional actor that has been forced to come out of its self-imposed shell and hit Israel as hard as it can in a 12-day war-spree brought on by the political masters of Tel Aviv who had long insisted that Iran, its economy, military capability and nuclearization must be destroyed.

These words were uttered time and again by Israel’s radical Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist ministers and who made it their business to start a war on Iran and seek to destroy the country through a third super-power actor, that of the United States of America.

And so, with its supposed military superiority backed by Washington, Israel started a deadly war on Iran on 13 June, going after its cities, military infrastructure and top military generals, including its nuclear military experts.

It was a surprising, devastating, early Friday morning attack that shocked Iran and the rest of the region. Netanyahu’s wish was coming true. He had destroyed Gaza but not Hamas, reduced Hezbollah to a shadow of its former self, awkwardly standing up to the Houthis and now is going after the big Iranian bear.

But that became a dream come true not only for Iran but the Palestinians of Gaza and the people of the region because until then – 23 months into the Israeli genocide, not a single Arab state, dared to move its head and stand up to Israel. It was mind-boggling.

However, unease was manifesting in the region. Here was a “super-Israel” that was standing up to anyone who dared to question its superiority and transcendence. But not for long;  things started to change very quickly on the night of the very same day with ballistic missiles and drones started to rain down on Tel Aviv and the other Israeli cities in an incessant unexpected manner.

And therefore, it became the turn of Israelis, their politicians, ministers, lawmakers, generals and soldiers to experience the shock, horror and devastation of what they had been doing to Gaza since 7 October, 2023.

Since 13 June, the Israeli skyline, especially in the night and early morning hours became littered by incoming missiles with their top defense systems like the prestigious Iron Dome, American Thud and the David Sling were powerless to deflect. Here was a new invasion sparkling in its skies, of the dangerous variety.

For the first time in Israel’s ungodly creation since 1948, Israel was under attack. June 13 was the first in a 12-day series in which Israeli cities were torn to pieces and destroyed. Direct hits were being made to their skyscrapers, high-rise buildings, military installation, ports, electricity grid and its famous Ben Gurion International Airport. 

Overnight everything in sight became fair game with the US gleefully watching but unable or unwilling to do anything.

Despite the tough military clobbering Iran was getting, for the first-time Israel’s nose was being rubbed in the mud on a daily, nightly basis with its military standing powerless. What they were doing to Gaza was being done to them with missiles fired 1,724 kilometers away, the distance from Iran to Israel.

Its prestigious city Tel Aviv and its Jewish neighborhoods, other towns and settlements reaching all the way to Jerusalem where getting knocked, bombed and struck with debris and mortar falling on cars and other vehicles.

These previously top places of living were falling down, with Israelis, ordinary, and experts were licking their wounds. Very quickly the economy, public life, day-to-day ordinary living was brought to a standstill. Tel Aviv, the economic and technological center of the country, was being hammered. 

The Israeli state quickly found itself in a war-situation with deadly, eerie, screaming sirens blasting all over – from the far-north of the country till its furthest south – carrying almost non-stop. Israel was no longer able to protect its Jews many of whom were trying to escape through tugboats to Cyprus and/or through Sina’s Egypt.

The city was being attacked, there was no way to stop it. Missiles were seen nightly beaming into the skies in flicks and flares. Some came crashing down, others also fell heavily just the same because of being fired upon by Israeli counter-missiles that were just as destructive..

For 12 days, seven or eight million Israelis were spending their days and nights in the shelters and bunkers, seeking to get away from the Iranian missiles but without much success. As soon as the so-called Israeli Home Front would give permission to leave the underground holes, people would get back as ordered for their own safety. Of course these were unlike the top-notch bunker Netanyahu. was hiding in, but they had to do. 

The social media was becoming filled with “ruined Israel”. Videos posted on different platforms showed the destruction of the blasts. These were just a fraction of the mayhem that was being inflicted in the Star Wars blasts Israel was being subjected to through Netanyahu who continued to promise to inflict “hell and damnation” on Iran.

For a so-called democratic state like Israel the military censors had worked hard in the war to smack-gob the media and prevent them from publishing images and stories of the impact of these Iranian missiles on military bases, intelligence centers and Mossad headquarters but it was to no avail. The cracks penetrated. Big brother Israel might be superior to Hamas and Islamic Jihad but definitely not to Iran.

[https://twitter.com/SilentlySirs/status/1934895049537364075]

Despite this however, and all in the name of Israeli public accountability, the censors were forced to relent. They couldn’t prevent but show the complete destruction of the Weizmann Institute of Science that had close relations with the Israeli army.  The censors couldn’t prevent the publishing of the bombing of the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv either but there were many sensitive sites and bases that were struck by Iranian missile barrages.  

First to be hit in the beginning of the conflict was the Kirya – the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv and which the Israelis proudly called their “Pentagon” that housed the Israeli Ministry of Defense/or the Ministry of War depending on your own point of view.

This was just the start for in the subsequent days, and contrary to claims the Iranian missiles target Israeli residential houses, the ballistics – over 550 missiles and 1000 drones according to the Israeli army – struck the so-called Moshe Dyan Camp which is a complex of training and operations center for intelligence officers.

Then missiles fell on the Tel Nof Airbase, Navatim Airbase, Hatzerim Airbase, Ovada Airbase, the Herzliya Mossad headquarters and the Gav-Yam Negav Advanced Technologies Park in southern Israel. The last was a research and cyberwarfare hub for the Israeli army and the Mossad gathering intelligence for the Israeli slaughter of Gaza.

The missiles which Tehran had been developing in so-called underground “missile cities” as branded by Iranian watchers targeted the Bazan oil refinery deemed as Israel’s largest processing centers, the Haifa power station, Hedera Power Station and the Ashdod Power Station with numerous other targets.

By the end of the war as brokered by US President Donald Trump, making it clear his objective was complete when he bombed the three Iranian nuclear plants – Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan – he ordered a ceasefire which Netanyahu submitted to after much arms-twisting for the latter wanted to continuing bombing Iranian sites despite the mayhem that was being done to Israel.

The Iranian missiles – 22 barrages over 12 days and the last on 23 June, minutes before the ceasefire between Israel and Iran took effect. At the end of the war over 30,000 buildings were destroyed and damaged with around 4000 vehicles ruined through falling debris.

Many said and with relish that Israelis were getting some of the medicine they had been dishing out to Gazans with 28 killed and over 3000 injured and needed to go to hospital, not to say of the numbers buried under the rubble. Up to this war, the great majority of Israelis had been “cushioned” against the destructive actions perpetrated by their government but no longer for the deep cracks and fissures have set in.

Although Israelis and American politicians say they set back the Iran nuclear program years back, this is doubtful. Despite its boastful echoes, Israel has been struck really hard this time around – a wake up call to what can happen time and again from now on and exposing its own fragility. Israel is not invincible and it knows it.

Dr Marwan Asmar  is a writer based in Amman and blogs at https://crossfirearabia.com/

28 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Brett Wilkins

Israel Defense Forces commanders ordered troops to shoot and shell aid-seeking Palestinian civilians in Gaza, even when they posed no threat, according to IDF officers and soldiers interviewed by Israel’s oldest daily newspaper.

Haaretz on Friday published testimonies of IDF members including senior officers who said that commanders including Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach ordered troops to open fire on aid-seeking Palestinians in order to disperse them, even when there was no danger to Israeli troops.

“It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

[https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1938596144340189300]

The soldier said troops informally call this activity “Operation Salted Fish.” Salted fish, or dag maluach in Hebrew, is an Israeli children’s game similar to red light, green light. One IDF reservist who just finished a round of duty in Gaza this week said that “the loss of human life means nothing. It’s not even an ‘unfortunate incident,’ like they used to say.”

Last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report revealed that 244,000 people in Gaza were suffering such “an extreme deprivation of food” that “starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident.” Gaza officials say at least hundreds of people have already died of malnutrition and lack of medical care since Israel tightened the siege in March. Many of the victims are children and elders. Hundreds of premature infants face imminent death.

Amid such desperation—driven by 629 days of U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment, invasion, and ethnic cleansing that have killed, wounded, or disappeared more than 200,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced over 2 million—Gazans are willing to risk their lives for their next meal.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, at least 549 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 others have been wounded by IDF troops since May 27 while trying to obtain humanitarian aid amid Israel’s “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip that has fueled mass starvation and illness. Dozens or more civilians have been killed in the worst of these aid massacres.

A reserve officer in Vach’s Division 252—veterans of which have accused the general of telling them “there are no innocents in Gaza”—told Haaretz that he was ordered to fire artillery shells toward a crowd gathered near an aid distribution site.

“Technically, it’s supposed to be warning fire—either to push people back or stop them from advancing,” he said. “But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there’s never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders.”

“You know it’s not right. You feel it’s not right—that the commanders here are taking the law into their own hands,” the soldier added. “But Gaza is a parallel universe. You move on quickly. The truth is, most people don’t even stop to think about it.”

A senior reserve officer who was present when more than 10 aid-seekers were killed said:

When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless—they were just killed, for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people—it’s been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.

That message has come all the way from the top. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and weaponized starvation—has invoked the biblical command for genocide against Israel’s ancient enemy Amalek. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that the killing of every man, woman, and child in Gaza would be “justified and moral.” Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi asserted that “there are no uninvolved people” in Gaza, and “we must go in there and kill, kill, kill.” Many other prominent Israelis have made similar statements.

Israel’s Military Advocate General has instructed the IDF General Staff’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism to investigate the killing of aid-seeking civilians as possible war crimes. However, the historical record suggests impunity—or at worst, wrist-slap punishment—will prevail for most if not all of those who ordered and carried out the shooting and shelling of civilians.

One military source who attended a high-level IDF meeting during which the use of artillery on aid-seekers was discussed told Haaretz that “they talk about using artillery on a junction full of civilians as if it’s normal.”

“An entire conversation about whether it’s right or wrong to use artillery, without even asking why that weapon was needed in the first place,” the source said. “What concerns everyone is whether it’ll hurt our legitimacy to keep operating in Gaza. The moral aspect is practically nonexistent. No one stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day.”

A legal official who attended the meeting told Haaretz that representatives of the Military Advocate General’s Office rejected the IDF’s argument that aid killings were one-off incidents.

“The claim that these are isolated cases doesn’t align with incidents in which grenades were dropped from the air and mortars and artillery were fired at civilians,” the official said. “This isn’t about a few people being killed—we’re talking about dozens of casualties every day.”

The near-daily massacres of aid-seeking Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces and Israel’s use of the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—whose operations have been called a “death trap“—have drawn international condemnation.

[https://twitter.com/RepRashida/status/1938682400265138231]

Earlier this week, a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that “the weaponization of food for civilians… constitutes a war crime and, under certain circumstances, may constitute elements of other crimes under international law,” remarks that came amid the ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz rejected the claims in the Haaretz report as “blood libels,” while the IDF responded to the exposé in a statement claiming that “any allegation of a deviation from the law or IDF directives will be thoroughly examined, and further action will be taken as necessary.”

“The allegations of deliberate fire toward civilians presented in the article are not recognized in the field,” the IDF added.

IDF troops have previously admitted to witnessing alleged war crimes including indiscriminate murder of people including women and children in Gaza and torture, sometimes fatal, in Israeli detention centers including the notorious Sde Teiman prison.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

28 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Robert Hunziker

Science is under attack throughout the world. Meanwhile, there’s substantial scientific evidence that the planetary system is turning unstable. This may not strike most people as a big problem because ‘life goes on,’ an attitude that’s more, and more, prevalent and one of the factors behind anti-science attitudes. But, if in fact the planetary system is becoming unstable, if it is true, life will be hell.

Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research/Germany, internationally recognized for his work on global sustainability, recently gave a 30-minute speech that specifically addresses stability of the Earth system. This is a synopsis of his remarks, including some editorial comment.

“We are facing, undoubtably, in all forms of risk assessment, a decisive moment for humanity’s future on planet Earth… I’m talking about for the first time in human history on planet Earth that we are forced to seriously consider the risks we are destabilizing the stability of the entire planet.” (Johan Rockström, Potsdam Institute speech Publica 25: Decisive Decade: From Global Promises to Planetary Action)

“We are hitting the ceiling of the biophysical processes, the hardwired process that regulates the very functioning of the Earth’s system,” Ibid.

All parameters of planetary health for human well-being have similar trajectories, sharply upwards. Until the 1950s we had a linear system (relatively stable and predictable but unsustainable exploitation) and starting in 1955 with 3.5 billion people, and going forward, an exponential rise suddenly took off with overexploitation of biodiversity, and acid rain, and massive deforestation. All forms of pressure on the planet took off to the point where today we are in an entirely new geological epoch, and it’s happening within only one generation, remarkably, in the context of a stable planetary system ever since humans first huddled together around fires. It’s potentially the most momentous happening in all of human history, period!

Civilization is exiting the Holocene, entering the Anthropocene. Humans are now the dominating “force of change.” This is too new, too quick for a 4.5-billion-year-old planet system accustomed to old-fashioned ways. In fact, we’re already hitting the ceiling of stable planetary processes and starting to push through. For example. for the first time, last year was a full year to exceed 1.5°C pre-industrial, the warmest temperature on Earth over the last 100,000 years. We’re starting to feel it, see it, smell it, and taste it, record wildfires, record floods, record hurricanes, record tornados, record coral bleaching, record glacial melt, record droughts, record sea level rise, record dry riverbeds, record heat deaths, record ocean acidification, record insect loss, and record marine loss. Humans are the only gainers.

The 2023 Watershed Year

According to Rockström: “We are already outside of the Holocene range of variability… let me bring you to why we are so nervous today. Why we have over the past 12 months heard scientific language that I’ve never experienced in my whole career, mind-boggling, shocking data, observations that we never thought was possible, that we would never be able to predict in our models… it’s the observation of air temperature and sea surface temperatures”:

“We have a global climate crisis.”

“We are in a situation of dire need of change.”

In 2023, a 0.3°C jump in global temperature occurred. The planet experienced a sudden 10-times increase in only 12 months; it’s unheard of.

Under normal circumstances, with the 2023 watershed year, when global temperature suddenly spikes up, it stabilizes for a period of time, but it demonstrated an alarming change in behavior and serious cause for concern because El Niño (natural warming phase) and La Niña (natural cooling phase) cycles that always influence the climate system are not having any impact, none!. This has never happened before.

Rockström: “There is something wrong. What is happening?” Honest answer: “We do not know yet.”

The rapid escalation of planetary instability has sparked unprecedented concern as the interplay of human activity with natural systems has created a volatile environment, thunderstorms become more severe, rainstorms more powerfully destructive as atmospheric rivers suddenly bring flash floods, and droughts longer, hotter.

Increasingly, feedback mechanisms include the accelerated release of methane from thawing permafrost, which is a potent greenhouse gas, and the retreat of polar ice, which diminishes the planet’s reflection of solar radiation and further intensifies warming. The urgency of the situation has led to calls for systemic change, not only in reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also in restructuring economies and societies to prioritize sustainability over short-term gains. Yet, global emissions continue, and international agreements fall short of binding commitments or fail altogether in implementation.

The risks are glaring, for example, the latest data on the Brazilian Amazon rainforest tells the story, as Earth’s richest ecosystem, the Brazilian portion of the rainforest, which is the largest part, has already tipped. It’s no longer a carbon sink. It’s a carbon source. This has ominous warning signs written all over it. For the first time, we are seeing signs of the planet losing its resilience, losing its buffering capacity, which the science community refers to as “climate sensitivity.”

We now have the evidence of what occurs as certain limits are exceeded. For example, coincident with 1.5°C, “we’ve never before seen the frequency, amplitude, and strength of droughts, fires, floods, heat waves… There’s been a 60% increase in droughts.” The signs are everywhere. The planet is leaving the all-important “corridor of life.” The planet, for over one million years, never exceeded +2°C during warm interglacial and never below -5°C deep ice age. It’s the biogeochemical system that we depend on. It is threatened.

It’s already approaching the high end of that range. There are 16 tipping elements that regulate the Earth system. Six of those are in the Arctic, which is ground zero for Earth: 1) Greenland ice sheet 2) boreal forest 3) Arctic winter ice 4) permafrost system 5) connected by North Atlantic and AMOC. Also impacting, the Amazon rainforest, all three big systems, Antarctica, and tropical coral reef systems. These regulate the stability of the climate system.

Risk of Domino Effect

Temperatures at which a system tips from a state that helps us survive to a state of self-amplified warming include threats to the Greenland Ice Sheet, West Antarctica Ice Sheet, abrupt permafrost thawing, tropical coral systems, collapse of Labrador Sea ice and collapse of Barren Sea ice. These are all at risk. There is strong evidence that these systems interact with each other, meaning, there’s a risk of cascading impacts. Where one system triggers several others. These six systems are already outside the boundary of safe space. This is an extremely significant development for the first time in human history.

We’re at a point where we need to buckle up for a challenging journey. The probability of not exceeding 1.5°C on a sustained 10-yr basis is no longer possible. No matter what course is taken going forward, “it will get worse before it gets better.” And every tenth of a degree warming has big impact going forward.  Along those lines, science has identified big costs to the global economy based upon current economics with up to 20% costs over the next decades as a result of loss of planetary stability.

The amount of time remaining to take mitigation measures is running short. Based upon analyses by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we only have 200 Gt CO2 remaining in the global carbon budget to achieve a 50/50 chance of holding to 1.5°C, after an expected upcoming overshoot to 1.7°C. That’s five years of global emissions. Five years to accomplish “decades of work” to hopefully hold the line.

Positive Signs Within a Narrow Window of Opportunity

Efforts are being made to harness innovative technologies and traditional ecological knowledge to mitigate. From reforestation projects aimed at sequestering carbon to advancements in renewable energy, the pathways for resilience are there. However, time is running out; incremental progress will no longer suffice to prevent catastrophic outcomes. A lot needs to squeeze into the next five years, or all bets are off.

There are some favorable signs, for example, renewables are on a strong pathway in parts of the world economy, 90% of vehicle sales in Norway today are fully electric. In Denmark the EV market share is almost 60%.

Rockström: “As of today, we are in a danger zone. But we still have an opportunity to turn this around.”

Or does the strong anti-science political movement, emanating throughout the world from the United States, throw a wet blanket on the crucial five years ahead?

Useful link: Resources for Researchers and Scholars Under Threat in the United States, National Academies, Sciences, Engineering, Medicine.

Robert Hunziker is a journalist from Los Angeles

27 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org