Immediately following the surprise victory of left party coalition New Popular Front in France’s parliamentary elections last week, Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leftist leader of the bloc’s largest party, France Unbowed — vowed to see France “recognize the Palestinian state as soon as possible.”

France’s far-right National Rally party, alongside conservative centrists, had spent weeks painting the left’s support of Palestine as an electoral poisoned pill. In attacks all too familiar in the U.S., they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, slamming Israel’s critics as antisemites. Israeli officials explicitly backed the far-right party. In this last election, at least, it didn’t work to prevent left-wing success.

In Britain, too, the centrist Labour Party’s landslide victory was tempered in five constituencies, where independent candidates with pro-Palestinian platforms defeated Labour candidates. Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, won his North Islington, London, seat with ease; Corbyn was famously ousted from Labour when the party’s conservative wing and British media weaponized charges of antisemitism against the party’s left flank.

If there’s a lesson to be learned in the U.S. from the success of pro-Palestinian candidates in France and Britain, we can be grimly sure that no Democrat in November’s presidential election will learn it. President Joe Biden’s unfettered support of Israel and its genocidal Gaza war is not only a gross moral failure but also an electoral risk, particularly in crucial swing-state Michigan and for young voters in general. But his campaign refuses to change course on the issue. Even if the senescent president is replaced as the Democratic nominee, there’s scant chance that any successor will embrace a platform of Palestinian solidarity or even robust ceasefire demands. This, despite the fact that 77 percent of Democratic voters and two-thirds of voters in the U.S. support a permanent ceasefire.

The French and British results should, or at least could, however, be a lesson for left-wing Democrats to continue to fight against the vicious efforts of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, to crush Palestine-supportive candidates. This is especially important following the defeat of progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., after pro-Israel groups poured an unprecedented $15 million into the primary race to unseat the pro-Palestine incumbent.

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Progressives on AIPAC’s Defeat of Bowman: “Now We Know How Much It Costs to Buy an Election”

The astroturfed campaign against Bowman should not be heeded as a warning by progressive Democrats to abandon support for Palestine, or to temper their opposition to Israel’s Gaza onslaught. Rather, it should be a jolt to redouble organizing efforts in a united front against AIPAC’s interventions. Top Democrats did little to defend Bowman against the well-funded attack. It is somewhat encouraging that members of the Democratic mainstream have put more support behind AIPAC’s next target, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, for her primary next month; this support should be stronger still.

The French example is instructive here: Only through a highly strategic coalition of center-to-left candidates have the far right been kept from parliamentary leadership. Centrists did not throw their coalition partners on the left under the bus for their support for Palestine. The bloc can hardly be compared to the Democratic Party with its conservative, pro-Israel mainstream. Yet Democrats face a similar challenge: Win the trust of vast numbers of Muslim and Arab voters and young people, or stand with AIPAC — a lobby that has no problem raising millions for the Republican extreme right. 

It would go too far to say the recent French and British election results speak to the unambiguous popularity of Palestinian solidarity — too many variables were at play in both instances to draw simple conclusions. In Britain, desire to unseat the ruinous Conservative Party drove support for new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s uninspiring Labour. In France, strategic coordination between the center and left in the election’s second round was key. The New Popular Front is a fraught coalition, and internal disagreements over Israel, among other issues, will no doubt threaten its fragile cohesion. The bloc also did not win an absolute majority, despite winning the largest number of seats, and thus faces huge roadblocks to pushing through its political program. Remaining a united front is the only chance the left parties have — and that means support for Palestine cannot be pushed aside.

This is, of course, a vile state of affairs that requires an appeal to realpolitik to see candidates stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid. Since the need to stop Israel’s intolerable war remains as urgent as ever, however, the fact that support for Palestine can be shown as helpful, rather than harmful, to electoral success is worth stressing. At the very least, leftist candidates and leaders in France and Britain like Mélenchon and Corbyn have modeled powerful examples for U.S. progressives: In the face of bad-faith attacks, and even party expulsions, aimed a quashing support for Palestine, they remained steadfast on the right side of history.

The post Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will Democrats Learn From It? appeared first on The Intercept.

Similar real estate fairs have popped up across North America this year, in places such as Montreal, Toronto, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Brooklyn, and several have faced protests as the war on Gaza has brought the issue of Israeli settlements and Palestinian sovereignty to the fore.

An outbreak of violence at the LA event thrust the incident into the national spotlight. Protesters at the Adas Torah synagogue, who decried the sale of what they called “stolen land,” were met by pro-Israel counterprotesters on the West LA streets. Fights broke out among demonstrators, LA police said, while protesters reported being beaten by police with batons. The fracas was cast in the national media as an incident of violence at a place of worship, rather than a political protest at a corporate event, prompting political leaders from both parties, including President Joe Biden, to characterize the demonstration as antisemitic. The Justice Department said it is investigating the incident.

But homebuyers interested in purchasing a property in the occupied West Bank have a more convenient option for making an offer: a simple scroll through online listings. 

On websites largely tailored for Jewish American buyers looking to move to Israel, prospective homeowners can browse properties that include listings for homes in settlement communities, which offer the typical trappings of suburban life. 

Around a dozen real estate firms have participated in real estate fairs organized by My Israel Home across North America this year. Six of these firms are actively marketing at least two dozen separate properties for sale located within eight different West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, according to their online listings. Other real estate firms commonly list dozens of West Bank properties on their sites. The firms mentioned in this story did not respond to requests for comment.  

They listed homes for sale in Ma’ale Adumim, Efrat, Mitzpe Yericho, Ramat Givat Ze’ev, Har Adar, Hashmonaim, and Ariel — all West Bank settlements located within a one-hour drive of Jerusalem — as well as Givat Hamatos, which is in East Jerusalem.

West Bank settlements have long drawn criticism from the international community, which regards the settlements as illegal, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli government disputes their illegality, however, and recognizes 146 settlements as legal, according to Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that tracks and opposes settlement expansion. The Israeli government leases land exclusively to Israelis, the group said, as Palestinians are barred from using the new plots the state has usurped in the West Bank.

Criticism of settlements have only intensified in recent months amid a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied territory, as Israel’s war in Gaza rages. And on Friday, Israel announced its plans to adopt five illegal outposts in the West Bank as settlements, which has also invited international condemnation. 

On its website, My Home in Israel, which helped organize the LA event and runs a team of U.S.-based real estate agents, posted photos from its other conventions in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Montreal, showing the interior of synagogues lined with booths manned by real estate firms, mortgage companies, and law firms, sitting and talking with prospective buyers. “Find your dream home in Israel,” reads one booth’s banner. “Live the American dream in the heart of Israel,” another reads atop a rendering of luxury apartments.

“A lot of people want to live out there — it’s beautiful, the mountains, it’s scenic,” said Baruki Cohen, a real estate agent, referring to West Bank settlements. His firm, Israel Home, did not participate at the LA event, but markets similar properties to Jewish Americans, selling property within Israel alongside houses in East Jerusalem. He plans to list properties in an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the future. A native of New Jersey who grew up visiting family in Israel, Cohen bought a second home in 2014 in Jerusalem. 

Cohen said real estate conventions, such as the LA event, have been going on for at least the past decade. Conventions are commonly hosted in hotel conference rooms and in people’s homes, in addition to synagogues. He estimates as many as 100 different real estate conventions take place across North America each year.

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank],” Cohen said. “I would live there myself if I felt it was safe. Anyone who wants to move there, we’re happy to facilitate it.”

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank].”

Since the early years after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the country has invited the immigration of Jews from across the globe. Immigration beyond the Green Line — the border between Israel and the West Bank that was drawn after the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes as a part of an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba — boomed in the 1980s, as settlements expanded from small illegal outposts into suburban cities with the help of the Israeli government’s funding and military support. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to evict Palestinians from their land and homes as settlements expand.

Most Jewish Americans who exercise their right to emigrate to Israel don’t move to the West Bank, experts say, but hundreds still make the choice to do so each year.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a visiting professor at the University of Haifa and an expert on Jewish American settlers, estimates that among the 3,000 Jewish Americans who move to Israel each year, about 15 percent of them are moving into settlements. There are about 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. About 60,000 are American, according to Hirschhorn. This excludes the more than 200,000 Israeli settlers who live in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967. 

To the majority of American immigrants, Hirschhorn said, the border between the state of Israel and the occupied West Bank still matters. But the real estate firms profiting off the modest yet steady stream of American migration are less discerning.

Jerusalem-based Noam Homes, which was part of the LA real estate event, lists properties within Israel, in cities such as Tel Aviv, alongside homes beyond the Green Line, in major settlements like Efrat and Ma’ale Adumim, which boasts a population of more than 30,000 with little recognition of their status as settlements. Most listings for settlement communities show an address in Israel and at times refer to the region with the biblical name of Judea and Samaria, the Israeli government’s preferred term for the West Bank.

“These are not like tiny hilltop outposts; these are massive settlement blocks that are contiguous with and integrated into Israeli state proper,” said Rachel Feldman, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College who specializes in Judaism and Israel and Palestine. “I spoke to American Jewish settlers here who don’t even have a sense that they are living beyond the state’s borders.”

Parents often send their children there for a gap year or seminary school, she said, treating the settlements as part of Israel. She said that during the Trump era, even more American Jews were emboldened to ignore the Green Line. 

Their studies predate the October 7 attacks, so Hirschhorn and Feldman could not quantify the impact of the Gaza war on American interest in West Bank homeownership. 

But Cohen, the real estate agent, said that he’s seen demand for Israeli property increase since the war began. Before October 7, he would receive about four or five inquiries from homebuyers each week. While the immediate weeks after the attacks were quiet, interest has picked up over the last three months, parallel to a series of settlement expansions announced by the Israeli government. Cohen said he now gets 15 inquiries per week. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest. 

“Although we are in the midst of the Iron Sword war,” said the Meny Group in promotional material on their website, using the Israeli government’s official name for the campaign, “the real estate market is booming.” Several other firms argued that investing in housing is a way for Jews to support Israel in times of conflict and instability. Firms also cited the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic as another crisis that the Israeli economy survived due to support from foreign and American buyers. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest.

Most firms’ marketing materials appeal more broadly to Zionist ideals of supporting the homeland and its economy, pitching owning “a piece of the Promised Land for themselves and future generations.” One such firm, the Meny Group, which was also present at real estate conventions across North America, notes the rise in antisemitism across the globe, painting Israel as “a beacon of security for Jews.”  

The real estate companies also highlighted economic concerns for American buyers. The Meny Group’s website highlights public education options that teach the Torah, in an appeal to Orthodox families who struggle to meet religious education costs in the U.S. One real estate agent who made the move from the U.S. wrote that tuition for his four children cost roughly $17,500 per child. In Israel, his costs in a single year for his children was $3,000.  

Hirschhorn said even though housing is expensive in Israel and the West Bank — like in the U.S. — the overall lower cost of living made possible by a state-sponsored Jewish infrastructure allows for life to possibly be more affordable. Health care is also socialized in Israel, and new arrivals may also receive small stipends or tax incentives and deductions to buy a new car or appliances for a new home.

“Cost of Kosher food is a lot less, you don’t have to worry about sending your kids to Jewish day school, cost of college in Israel isn’t going to be too much,” she said. “Being a part of Jewish community just really isn’t as expensive or difficult.”

The properties in the settlements are hardly cheap, but they are less expensive than homes within Israeli cities. The price for a condo in the popular Gush Etzion group of settlements ranges from $500,000 to $1 million, for properties with around four to six bedrooms and more than 1,000 square feet. Cohen said a similarly sized home in central Jerusalem may run for as much as $3 million. 

One listing shows a 2,000 square-foot penthouse in a suburban enclave of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, east of Jerusalem, for $1.2 million. The space, listed as a “Stunning Penthouse” has five bedrooms and two “generously sized” balconies with panoramic views. There is also the assurance of plenty of storage space. However, the penthouse also includes one other amenity less common in American homes: “a dedicated safe room for your peace of mind.”    

“American Jews might want to maintain a certain kind of middle-class living standard if they’re imagining moving to Israel, and that actually might not be possible inside Israel proper,” Feldman said. “And so they start to look to the West Bank. What looks like a nice, spacious middle-class house with a yard starts to look nice compared to a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.”

Settlements often have their own schools, parks, swimming pools, supermarkets, dry cleaners, sports facilities, hairdressers, and synagogues. 

On the website for Nefesh-B’nefesh, a nonprofit that encourages and facilitates Jewish immigration from the U.S. to Israel, users are able to read neighborhood profiles to compare settlements’ educational and religious options. The profiles also mention whether there are other English speakers in the area. The online portal is often the starting point for Jewish Americans who look to immigrate; the organization assists with paperwork and other bureaucratic steps. 

Like the real estate companies, the nonprofit does not honor the Green Line, listing unlawful settlements in its neighborhood profiles as a part of Israel. The site also links users to Yad2, similar to Zillow and Craigslist, which shows dozens of housing listings across Israel and on settlements.

During the research for her book on Jewish American settlers, Hirschhorn said a woman told her that the settlement community she lived in “was the place I could get a bagel on Sunday morning, but also know that I was going to be in the right place when the redemption of the Jewish people and the messiah came.” 

In late June, the Israeli government seized an additional 3,000 acres of West Bank land for other planned settlements, barring Palestinians from using it. The land seizure, made public last week, is the largest by Israel since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Peace Now said. The government has taken more than 5,000 acres of land in the West Bank this year, the group said, the most in any single year during the same 30-year span. In March, the Israeli government also approved the construction of 3,400 new homes in settlements, the majority of which will be built in Ma’ale Adumim. Most of the companies attached to the real estate events list properties in the settlement. 

The Jewish real estate market in the West Bank remains an important piece of the current Israeli government’s expansion into the occupied territory. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who oversees the office that handles new housing developments, celebrated the project and declared on X, “The enemies try to hurt and weaken, but we will continue to build and be built in this country.” He lives in the settlement of Kedumim, though his home, built outside of the settlement proper, appears to violate even Israeli law, according to reports.

Smotrich most recently made statements that reveal his long-term goals of annexing the entirety of the West Bank away from Palestinians, and expressed his support of legitimizing newer, illegal settlements. 

“We will establish sovereignty … first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements,” Smotrich said last week during a meeting, according to Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The 2.8 million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank already face restrictions on day-to-day movement throughout the territory. And since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has resulted in the killings of more than 500 Palestinians, 133 of them children, by Israeli military forces or settlers, according to the United Nations’s top human rights official and an Intercept investigation. The 2023 death toll was the highest since 2005 when the U.N. started tracking casualties in the West Bank. 

“As the world’s eyes has been primarily focused on Gaza, the settler movement has continued unabated and pushed even harder to establish illegal settlements, to further develop settlements, to take more land,” said Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, which opposes West Bank settlements. “They’ve pushed whole Palestinian communities off of their land almost every day, certainly every week.”

His colleagues at their Israel-based counterpart, Peace Now, which tracks the settler movement, have reported incidents of violence from Jewish settlers, harassment, burning olive groves, and stealing sheep from Palestinian farmers. In 2023, settlers built 26 new illegal outposts, the most since the group starting keeping track in 2002, the group reported. So far this year, 14 additional settler outposts have been built.  

Americans, even outside the Jewish community, play a major role in supporting the expansion of settlements, Susskind said. He pointed to evangelical Christian groups that pump millions into pro-settler causes. In February, one American Christian pro-settler group, HaYovel, raised $3.5 million to buy hundreds of vests, helmets, binoculars, flashlights, and security drones for settlers in the West Bank. The group looks to raise an additional $25 million.

Americans for Peace Now has urged the U.S. government to do more to stop the flow of such funds. Susskind credited Biden’s executive order that allowed the State Department to sanction certain organizations and individuals for violence committed in the West Bank. So far the government has sanctioned Israeli Jewish settlers Zvi Bar Yosef, Moshe Sharvit, Neriya Ben Pazi, and Ben Zion Gopstein for repeated attacks and threats against Palestinians; the organizations Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich, which raised funds for that fueled further settler violence; and Tzav 9, an extremist Israeli group that has attacked aid convoys in the West Bank on their way to Gaza. 

“Palestinians are going to continue to have all the day-to-day problems, and they certainly are not going to have justice and equality until the occupation ends,” Susskind said. “You have to deal with people’s immediate needs, but the big picture there is only one answer, which is an end to the occupation.”

Correction: Tuesday, July 9, 5:11 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Rachel Feldman as an anthropologist at Dartmouth University; she works at Dartmouth College. A quote from Feldman was incorrectly transcribed to state that West Bank property “starts to look nice compared to a tiny, affordable apartment in Tel Aviv.” Feldman’s comparison invoked a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.

The post The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement appeared first on The Intercept.

When people told aid worker Fayad Mulla that as soon as asylum-seekers land on Greek soil, they’re immediately chased by groups of “masked men” assigned to kidnap them, Mulla found it hard to lend the stories credence.

Reports and rumors about black ops by Greek authorities have floated around for years, but the idea of state-sanctioned thugs running around beating migrants, throwing them in the trunks of cars, and forcing them back onto boats was too much for Mulla to believe. “It’s a European Union country,” he told an interviewer from the BBC, explaining his skepticism. That changed when he caught it on tape.

Through a long lens, he recorded a video of Greek guards on the island of Lesbos marching migrant families onto a speedboat. In one shot, you can clearly see a uniformed man in a balaclava carrying a child onto the boat. It’s shocking, yet this is part of a logical progression of escalating violence against migrants as governments erode the linked rights to asylum and rescue.

The BBC interviewed Mulla as part of its new documentary, “Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?” which starts with the question and ends with the facts: The Hellenic Coast Guard has turned the internationally recognized right of refugees to apply for asylum into a sick game, chasing down every man, woman, and child who lands unbidden in the country’s archipelago as part of a coordinated effort to deny them asylum rights.

Rather than an exception, the Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers. From Venezuela to Mexico to Libya to Hungary to Japan, we’re seeing a semi-coordinated effort among wealthy countries to abolish one of the few legal responsibilities the world’s rich and comfortable have toward the poor and afflicted.

The Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers.

Mulla’s video, first published by the New York Times in 2023, is a smoking gun, but analysts have also compiled a ton of circumstantial evidence that details an inescapable pattern. Forensic Architecture tracked and mapped over 2,000 instances of what the research group calls “drift-backs” from Greek territorial waters between 2020 and 2023. Once captured by the masked men, migrants are put onto motorless rubber boats and literally shoved toward Turkish territorial waters. Instead of the authorities expelling people directly, according to Forensic Architecture, “natural processes and geographical features of the Aegean archipelago — currents, waves, winds and uninhabited rocks — carry out the expulsion, distancing the perpetrators from the impact of their lethal actions.” The group counts 55,445 people expelled via the technique over three years, including 24 deaths and 17 disappearances.

Not included in the Forensic Architecture count is the June 2023 sinking of the migrant ship Adriana in the Mediterranean, in which over 600 people lost their lives. As recounted by survivors in “Dead Calm,” the Hellenic Coast Guard was so slow to respond to the ship’s distress that presumed negligence becomes probable malice. Ultimately, it was a Mexican-owned luxury yacht that came to the rescue, such as it was. But the Greeks weren’t the only ones responsible for the Adriana disaster: As Mulla said, Greece is part of the EU, and the EU has Frontex, an international border management agency. At its Polish headquarters, Frontex was monitoring the situation, but that didn’t do the passengers on the Adriana much good. Pushed by the BBC to condemn the now well-documented practices of the Hellenic Coast Guard, Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer Jonas Grimheden walked off the set.

Though it appears that the EU is defending the Hellenic Coast Guard, the inverse is closer to the truth: As the southeastern corner of the EU, Greece is responsible for deflecting as many migrants as possible from Europe.

“This border is not only a Greek border, it is also a European border,” declared European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in a 2020 joint press conference with the Greek prime minister. “I thank Greece for being our European aspida in these times,” she said, using the Greek word for “shield.” Greece is between Europe and many tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, and it stands astride the border wearing a mask and strapped with a combat knife. In support of this border work, the EU has funneled billions of euros to its member-state. Frontex also deploys aerial surveillance assets, its own ships, and even on-the-ground personnel who have collaborated with Greek police in the drift-back scheme.

Europe doesn’t just fund the Greek side: The European Union has sent over $10 billion worth of assistance to Turkey, a non-member state, to help guard the border. Billions more have gone to Egypt, Tunisia, and Mauritania — all with the goal of reducing the number of asylum-seekers who make it to somewhere within the EU where they can exercise their inviolable rights.

In the Western hemisphere, Mexico serves as un escudo for the United States, shielding its richer neighbor to the north.

President Joe Biden ended the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, but his June order to halt asylum processing at the southern border has had a similar effect. And under heavy pressure from the United States, Mexico adopted the cost-effective practice of pushing migrants back to the country’s own south, relying on the difficult journey to dissuade people traveling to the U.S. from Central and South America. Last month, the Associated Press reported accusations from an asylum-seeker that she was beaten by Mexican soldiers in front of her children before they were all put on a bus south. Such scenes and their direct connection to U.S. policy are so well-documented that any deniability is implausible, but that seems to be good enough for Biden and the international bodies to which heads of state are supposedly accountable.

If Donald Trump wins in November, the American attack on asylum will only accelerate. Like other conservative demagogues, the ex-president has made “migrant crime” a focus of his campaign, using it as an all-purpose answer in last month’s debate. Along with “Remain in Mexico,” we can expect Trump to reinstate Turkey-style Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras at minimum. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 victory plan goes further, hinting at a frontal attack on the right to asylum itself. “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed,” the authors write, “They should be abandoned.”

The dastardly Project 2025 schemers are correct about one thing: It is not the prerogative of individual states to protect their borders by whatever means they choose. The right to seek asylum as a refugee is statutorily enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and is, in theory, one of international law’s few guarantees. Non-refoulement (the French word for “push back”) is supposed to be a human right.

Non-refoulement is supposed to be a human right.

But if the rich Western countries who enforce international law conspire to obviate the same rule, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. For example, Hungary is currently subject to a $1 million euro fine per day by the EU’s highest court to penalize it for refouling migrants, but Prime Minister Viktor Orbán should be able to afford it: von der Leyen graciously unblocked over 10 billion euros in frozen EU funds for Hungary’s illiberal ruling clique in December. Taken as a whole, the EU’s position is clear — and clearly lawless. Investigative agencies will continue to write their reports, but there’s no way to appeal the decisions of armed men in masks.

As of yet, nations are not challenging the Refugee Convention directly, even as they move to scale back and even nullify its protections. In this environment, nations that sit between the world’s richest countries and its poorest and most war-torn can offer a valuable service as buffers and border guards. Every asylum-seeker that Greece pushes back is one that Germany never needs to worry about accommodating.

Though a climatically and politically unstable world does mean more refugees, the global attack on asylum is not a byproduct of overwhelming immigration. Japan, for example, tightened its policy in June by making it easier to deport asylum-seekers, although the restrictive country only awarded refugee status to 303 people in 2024, which was still a national record. A few hundred people in a population of over 100 million can’t pose any real burden on the country’s resources; the problem is with the principle that people are entitled to flee hardship and seek refuge. The goal is to whittle a right into a rare privilege.

To accomplish that, the West has to find ways to make seeking asylum even less appealing and more dangerous than the wars and disasters people are fleeing in the first place. Authorities must invent new cruelties to administer, cook up new nightmares to visit on the world’s most desperate. With their masks and knives and beatings, the Hellenic Coast Guard leads the way.

“There is a huge amount to learn from the Greek authorities and the Greek government in terms of the approach that they’ve taken towards illegal migration,” United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the press after a guided tour of coast guard operations on Samos, an island notorious for drift-backs. In April, the day after the U.K. passed a new policy that involves deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, five people drowned in the English Channel on their way to Britain, including a child.

As far as rich countries are concerned, these drownings are not a problem — they are a model policy solution. So if you want an image of the future, imagine a masked man kidnapping a child, putting her on a raft, and shoving it into the open sea, over and over and over again.

The post The World War on Asylum appeared first on The Intercept.

The communications include new allegations about Khan’s history with Munir. According to those in touch with the imprisoned prime minister, Khan is making new allegations that Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

Imran Khan is making new allegations that Asim Munir violated an agreement to remain neutral in Pakistani politics in exchange for Khan accepting his appointment as army chief.

The deposed prime minister also alleges that Munir conspired with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to cooperate against him in exchange for dropping corruption charges that had forced Sharif into exile.

The escalating personal conflict between Khan and Munir also looms large in the communications. Khan alleges that Munir ordered agents of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service to kill him and that the general covered up assassination attempts by squashing a police probe and burying CCTV footage.

The allegations from Khan about Munir come as the general has continued amassing political power and leading a brutal crackdown on rival political parties, activists, and the press in Pakistan.

The crackdown included the removal and imprisonment of Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician; violence and arrests targeting his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party; and a rigged election this February.

Khan’s fate remains the biggest unanswered question in the country’s politics, which the prison communiques suggest are driven by acrimony between him and Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists.”

With transnational repression reaching the U.S. — the military reportedly detained Pakistan-based family members of rivals living in the U.S. and Canada — the crackdown is drawing increasingly stronger condemnations from American officials.

Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., issued a video statement condemning the targeting of family members of Americans and called for sanctions to be placed on Pakistani military leaders including Munir.

“Pakistan’s military ruler Asim Munir is now targeting American families of pro-democracy activists,” Khanna said. “We all know the elections in Pakistan were rigged, and Imran Khan is still in jail. The United States needs to sanction Asim Munir and any military leader in Pakistan who is targeting Americans.”

Assassination Attempts

Khan’s allegations about Munir were shared with The Intercept by a number of sources close to him who requested anonymity to protect their security.

In the communications, Khan alleges the existence of CCTV footage and other evidence showing that Munir concocted a scheme to have Khan killed at a tumultuous court appearance on March 18, 2023.

Khan’s car was mobbed by spectators on the way to court, some of whom, Khan alleges, were Inter-Services Intelligence agents dressed in civilian clothes. The attempt on his life, Khan says, was only thwarted by a crowd of PTI supporters who surrounded his car.

Khan also offered his own narrative on a November 2022 incident when he was wounded in a shooting attack at a political rally that killed one of his supporters. The Pakistani government detained a single person for the attack, whom officials claimed had been motivated by religious extremism.

According to sources close to the former prime minister, Khan accused Munir of being behind a cover-up of the incident. The general, he claims, blocked an independent probe into the attack and that eyewitness accounts pointed to the involvement of multiple assailants.

Munir’s Political Plays

Pakistan has been held hostage to the political clash between Khan and Munir, with the former prime minister now imprisoned on charges widely seen as politicized.

Khan claims that Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including Sharif, the former prime minister, to spare them from corruption charges. In exchange, the politicians like Sharif supported jailing Khan and cracking down on his party.

Khan claims Munir bargained with his civilian political rivals, including former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to spare them from corruption charges.

The crackdown — extrajudicial killings, torture, mass detentions, and other sweeping measures aimed at dismantling the PTI — has so far failed to dim Khan’s popularity. In elections this February, candidates affiliated with PTI won sweeping support, according to exit polls, before electoral rigging engineered by the military allowed a coalition government of Khan’s opposition to form.

Khan characterizes the events as a betrayal by Munir. In Khan’s telling, according to the sources close to him, the prime minister’s downfall was precipitated after Munir reneged on an agreement. Khan says that the then-President Arif Alvi, a senior member of his party, had the power to block Munir’s ascension to the top military post in the country but allowed it to go forward after the general’s emissaries said he planned to stay out of politics.

Munir, like Pakistani military leaders before him, plays a prime role in the country’s political affairs.

Khan’s legal status remains in flux after serious corruption and espionage charges against him were thrown out in court. The former prime minister now remains imprisoned solely on charges that he improperly married his third wife in contravention of religious guidelines.

PTI meanwhile remains at odds with the military establishment, with halting attempts to mediate a resolution to Pakistan’s ongoing political standoff so far unsuccessful.

Deepening Crackdown — and Crises

Khan’s removal by his military and civilian rivals came in a 2022 no-confidence vote organized amid pressure from the U.S. over the prime minister’s foreign policy stances.

Since the removal, Pakistan has been wracked by overlapping economic and political crises that have paralyzed the nation of 200 million.

Even with Khan and PTI sidelined, the military continues its attempts to suppress speech. This year, the military blocked X and issued a statement denouncing “digital terrorism.” Government officials have also made reference to imposing a national firewall on the country’s internet.

Khan’s personal safety is widely believed to be in jeopardy by his supporters, including Pakistani Americans who recently lobbied for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to contact the Pakistani government about his safety.

In addition to blaming Munir for betraying his trust and attempting to engineer his murder, from prison Khan has repeatedly raised the specter that the general is leading the country toward a repeat of its traumatic 1971 partition — a stinging embarrassment for Pakistani nationalists.

The partition occurred following a military-led crackdown and massacre after an army rival won elections. The civil war spurred the secession of the eastern half of the country into the nation of Bangladesh.

Correction: June 27, 2024, 2:47 p.m. ET

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Imran Khan was prime minister at the time of Asim Munir’s ascension, and could have blocked it. This story has been updated to note that Arif Alvi was president at that time.

The post From Prison, Imran Khan Says Top Pakistani General Betrayed Secret Deal to Stay Out of Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

“Since the attack at our ambulances that was dispatched to save Hind Rajab, there has been no investigations made by the Israelis or any contact from the Israelis to the Red Crescent,” said spokesperson Nebal Farsakh. “We as the Palestinian Red Crescent have not received any kind of communication from the Israeli military.”

On Monday, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that, according to Israel, the Red Crescent and the United Nations had rebuffed Israeli efforts to investigate the incident that had made headlines around the world. On January 29, Hind and her 15-year-old cousin made a desperate call to the Red Crescent, asking for help while stuck in a car with family members they said were killed by Israeli fire. After hours of negotiations with the Israeli military to coordinate safe passage, the Red Crescent dispatched an ambulance to save Hind (her cousin was killed during their first call), only for the medics to be found dead near Hind days later.

“All I can tell you is what they’ve told us. And what they have said is, they went to the U.N. and the Palestinian Red Crescent and asked them to supply information that would help them, and what they claim is that they were given none,” Miller said. 

His comments came on the heels of an independent investigation by the U.K.-based firm Forensic Architecture, which concluded that Israeli fire was most likely responsible for the attack, and that it was “not plausible” that Israeli forces would not have seen who they shot 335 bullets at.

“It’s not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children,” the firm found. “From the tank position indicated by the greatest alignment between entry and exit holes, we concluded that the shooter would have had a clear view of the car and its passengers.”

Asked about those findings on Monday, Miller noted that Israel said there were no tanks in the area, and that the State Department couldn’t attest to any particularities because it is only conveying what Israel has said. The State Department did not respond to a follow-up question about the Red Crescent’s statement, nor did the Israeli military.

Hind, in some of her final moments to a Red Crescent dispatcher, said she had seen a tank nearby.

“They are dead,” Rajab said about her family members who were killed right in front of her. “The tank is next to me.”

“It’s almost night, I am scared,” she cried. “Come get me, please.”

The Washington Post previously confirmed there were armed military vehicles in the vicinity, as did Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite imagery. 

Miller, when citing Israel’s claim that there were no tanks in the area, said, “I am not attesting to any of these facts.” Asked about whether the U.S. will verify any of Israel’s statements, he added, “It is not for us to do it.”

“Those agencies can come forward and provide information, it’s easy to do so. If in fact they have information, they should come forward and do it, and provide, and we’ll be happy to look at that.”

Farsakh also said that the Red Crescent and the International Red Cross received no information during the 12 days after January 29, when Hind’s whereabouts were unknown. She also noted that Tel al-Hawa, where the attack happened, was under evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military due to ongoing operations at the time. Such conditions prompted the Red Crescent to make arrangements with Israeli forces to dispatch an ambulance, a process that took three hours.

It was during those hours that Hind uttered her final, chilling pleas for help. Despite the coordination, paramedics Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun were found dead, just meters from where Hind was found on February 10.

In the nearly five months since the killings, The Intercept repeatedly asked the State Department about the incident, the status of investigations, and how the U.S. could continue sending Israel aid if it could not get straightforward answers on the case. (U.S. policy requires foreign governments to provide assurances they won’t violate international law with U.S. weapons; the U.S. found that Israel likely violated law with American weapons, but did not act on the conclusion.) On almost every occasion, Miller said the U.S. was asking Israel to investigate. 

On February 14, for example, after The Intercept asked about the range of material available for an investigation to proceed, Miller said the question is “appropriately addressed to the government of Israel,” but that the U.S. wanted the incident to be investigated. Several times after, Miller either did not have an update on the “ongoing” investigation, or said the department would “come back” after getting an answer.

After nearly 150 days, the State Department finally came back with answers: ones that relied wholly on Israeli claims — assertions the U.S. admitted it did not attempt to verify, that deflated upon the slightest provocation.

The post Red Crescent Says Israel Never Reached Out About Hind Rajab’s Death, Despite State Department Claim That Israel Said Otherwise appeared first on The Intercept.

This investigation, conducted by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, is part of the Gaza Project, a collaboration involving 50 journalists from 13 organizations coordinated by Forbidden Stories

“Targeting of al Ghefari tower, which houses media offices, west of Gaza City,” read the chyron of Alhurra TV, a U.S. government Arabic broadcaster, just before 11:57 a.m. local time on November 2. The channel was covering the strike on an 18-story building, the tallest in the Gaza Strip. The building is visible in the far left corner of the screen when suddenly an explosion rattles the image. Debris and smoke fly live on camera. The presenter, unsure of what had happened, says, “We don’t know yet where this strike is, but it happened live just now.”

What the presenter didn’t know was that viewers were watching live on TV a strike on another media organization, Agence France-Presse, less than an hour after the one on the offices of Palestine Media Group in the al-Ghefari tower — the very building Alhurra TV was discussing while viewing the AFP live feed. AFP itself occupies the 10th and 11th floors of the 12-story Haji Tower, just a few hundred meters, or 0.2 miles, away on the same street.

Alhurra broadcast the strike live not because it had its own camera in the tower, but because the network was tapped into an AFP live feed from a camera set up on the balcony of the 10th floor. The attack caused extensive damage to the building and offices: a large hole in one side of the building, and significant interior destruction. Fortunately, no one was there. AFP’s Gaza City staff of eight had evacuated the building, leaving behind a mostly unmanned camera powered by solar panels, broadcasting a 24/7 live feed. AFP was the only one of the three major global news agencies still broadcasting live from the Gaza Strip.

AFP immediately contacted the Israeli military. The initial response was that there were no strikes on the building. Pressed for more details, the Israeli spokesperson said the army had carried out a strike nearby that “might have caused debris” but that “the building was not targeted in any way.” AFP said the extent of the damage cannot be explained by the military’s response and requested “an in-depth and transparent investigation.”

The condemnations were swift. AFP’s chair and chief executive Fabrice Fries said the bureau’s location was known and communicated to the Israeli military routinely “precisely to prevent such an attack and to allow us to continue to provide images on the ground.” The Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, issued a statement categorizing it as an “attack.” The International Federation of Journalists demanded “an immediate investigation.”

After the early November strike, the war in Gaza grew more intense and the number of Palestinians killed, reported to be over 37,000 today, continued to climb. The scale of the destruction was beyond anyone’s expectations.

“The weapon type and accuracy inherent in the Israeli tank weapon system means that the weapon hit the target it was aimed at. The question of why remains unanswered.”

The AFP incident was mostly laid to rest until Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and its partners, including AFP, began looking into it as part of the Gaza Project: a collaboration of 50 journalists from 13 media organizations coordinated by Forbidden Stories to investigate attacks on journalists and press infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank.

The four-month investigation revealed that, contrary to Israeli army claims, the AFP office was directly fired at by Israeli tanks. The tanks fired four times between 11:55 a.m. and 12:09 p.m. local time on November 2, from around 3 kilometers away.

At least two strikes hit the AFP offices, damaging it and making it unusable.

The investigation’s findings relied on independent visual analyses of the live feed footage conducted by Le Monde and Paper Trail Media. They were confirmed by weapons and other experts. The findings matched the conclusions from an audio analysis provided by Earshot, an organization specializing in forensic audio investigations.

Adrian Wilkinson, a forensic explosives engineer who regularly works for the United Nations, said, “It is almost certain that the AFP office was shot at by an Israeli tank.” At least five other experts, including independent weapons and conflicts researcher War Noir and Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, agreed. Ball said the damage to the server room was consistent with tank fire.

​​Wilkinson ruled out the possibility of an accidental hit. He’s convinced that the soldiers operating the Israeli tanks intended to hit that floor precisely. “The weapon type and accuracy inherent in the Israeli tank weapon system means that the weapon hit the target it was aimed at,” he said. “The question of why remains unanswered.”

A key element in the investigation was a series of flashes of light appearing 4 seconds before every explosion in the live footage. The flashes are shots being fired. A calculation based on an analysis of the flashes and detonations concluded that they were fired from about 3 kilometers away. Further analysis of the speed and features of ammunition led to the conclusion that it was a tank that fired them. Only Israel has tanks in Gaza.

Footage from al-Ghefari tower, the first building hit that day, shows Israeli tanks near the area on November 1. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs on October 31 and November 3 show hundreds of tanks a few hundred meters north of the suspected firing area, with visible tank tracks in the area. Satellite imagery shows no tanks the days before.

On November 2, 2023, Israel announced the completion of its encirclement of Gaza City, marking the beginning of the city’s siege.

In a written response to the consortium, the Israeli military insisted that there was no strike on the building on November 2 and said the AFP office was not targeted.

AFP Notified Military

AFP thought it had taken all necessary precautions to secure its offices when the war started. The news agency had had an office in Gaza for 30 years and were familiar with the protocols. AFP routinely shared its office address and Google Maps coordinates with the Israeli military, a standard practice for foreign media in Palestine. In October alone, AFP representatives reminded the military four times of its office location at Haji Tower in Gaza City.

On October 9, 2023, the news agency sent a letter from its CEO urging the military to “exercise extreme vigilance regarding the security of our Gaza staff,” particularly following an incident where a piece of shell landed on their building’s terrace. That same night, the Foreign Press Association asked for the AFP’s office location to share with the Israeli military, as it was doing for member organizations. The association confirmed to AFP that they shared the information with the army.

Despite their efforts, in the early hours of October 10, a staffer from the Gaza office informed Marc Jourdier, the agency’s Jerusalem bureau chief, of a call to a local resident by the Israeli military to evacuate the building. “Don’t waste a minute and evacuate,” Jourdier told the staffer. “I’m calling the army and getting back to you ASAP.”

Jourdier contacted the military and sent the office’s coordinates again. At 2:26 a.m., a powerful strike hit a smaller building nearby. Several people were killed, including three journalists who were standing in front of the building to cover the expected strike on Haji, which by then had been evacuated. An Israeli spokesperson told Jourdier they managed to stop the strike “thanks to your call.”

The full picture of what happened that night is still unclear. In its response to the consortium, Israel’s military said it targeted a facility used by a Hamas member but did not explain why an evacuation call was issued for the building housing the AFP.

On October 28, five days before the attack on the AFP offices, Jourdier sent the office location once more.

“Importance of the Livestreams”

Presented with the investigation’s findings, Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said, “According to international humanitarian law, media infrastructure is civilian infrastructure, so targeting it would be potentially a war crime.”

“I am not surprised,” said Shuruq As’ad, a journalist and spokesperson for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. But she is angry. “This is a clear and direct attack on a press office.” She added, “Israel knows the importance of the livestreams, especially the wires and how important they are for the international press which use these wire services.” The syndicate has documented the partial or total destruction of 73 media offices since October.

AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd said Israel needs to explain what their policy around live feeds is and if “in any way” they consider them legitimate targets, “because there’s enough circumstantial evidence to make us suspect that is how they are working.” He added, “We really must have answers and for the moment, we don’t have those.”

The “IDF has a history of attacks on media facilities,” says Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director at CPJ. He pointed to previous incidents, including the destruction of at least 20 media outlets in 2021, including the building housing The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. He insisted that it is part of a pattern that reflects a “lack of accountability” when it comes to the Israeli military attacking media facilities. “It’s not like you can easily make a mistake,” he said. “Israel knows everything about Gaza.”

51 Minutes Earlier…

While reviewing the AFP live feed for this investigation, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and its partners discovered footage of the earlier strike on the Palestine Media Group, or PMG, offices in the al-Ghefari building 51 minutes before the first strike hit AFP. We showed it to Earshot. “This strike also contains a similar succession of events as the four strikes on the server room: a distant muzzle flash in the same area as the flash observed in the four strikes,” Earshot analysts concluded.

There are notable similarities and differences between the PMG and AFP strikes. The offices of both media organizations, only a few hundred meters apart, were fired at by Israeli tanks on the same day, within an hour of each other. Both had cameras broadcasting live video of Gaza.

“They targeted us directly. They targeted the floor we were on.”

While there was nobody in the AFP office at the time of the strike, four people, including two journalists, who later recounted the incident to ARIJ and its partners, were on the 16th floor of al-Ghefari building. One of them sustained a leg injury.

On the morning of November 2, Ismail Abu Hatab, a freelance journalist who had been spending the night in the PMG offices, made his coffee and turned on the computer to finish uploading his footage from the previous night. “I grabbed the camera and then I didn’t see anything, I couldn’t hear anything, all I remember is a yellow line of light,” he said. A wall collapsed on Abu Hatab, and the force of the blast threw Abed Shanaa, the other journalist there that day, against the opposite wall.

Abu Hatab lost consciousness briefly. Then he realized what had happened. “They targeted us directly. They targeted the floor we were on,” he said. Shanaa rushed to pull Abu Hatab from under the rubble, fearing there might be another strike. Shanaa’s 20-year-old son, Haitham, pulled Abu Hatab from under the rubble. There was no elevator because the building had lost power earlier, so Haitham carried Abu Hatab down the 16 flights of stairs.

PMG occupied all four apartments on that floor, giving it 360-degree panoramic views of Gaza. “From the place where I take pictures, I took in all of Gaza,” said Abu Hatab. PMG set up cameras on all four sides and offered live feed services, including to Reuters and Al Arabiya TV.

Hassan al Madhoun, the CEO of PMG, said that a few days before the attack, on October 30, Israeli tanks appeared through the northern windows. Shanaa confirms they were visible from at least two cameras. Footage broadcast from al-Ghefari the day before the strike showed Israeli tanks in the vicinity. The video establishes a line of sight between the building and the area designated through audio and visual analysis as the place where the tanks fired from. Satellite imagery shows tracks from tanks were visible the next day, where none appeared before.

In a written response to the consortium, the Israeli military said it was not aware of a strike in the location and on the date provided.

After evacuating the building, Shanaa took Abu Hatab to the hospital for medical attention. Shaken by what had just happened, Shanaa decided to head to southern Gaza that day. The following day, al Madhoun, who was not at the office at the time of the attack, returned to salvage whatever equipment he could. He took a video of the damage.

Some time between November 25 and December 3, al-Ghefari building was struck again, this time causing more serious damage to the whole structure, with parts of the upper three floors completely collapsing.

While both AFP and PMG experienced similar attacks that day, one notable difference between the media organization stands out: PMG is a local Palestinian outlet, while AFP is an international French organization. Though the journalist was injured in the PMG attack, it was the strike against AFP’s empty office that attracted international attention and merited a response from the Israelis.

Martínez de la Serna, of CPJ, considers this another pattern. “Investigations or responses to the killing of a journalist usually only occur when an international journalist or news organization is affected,” he said. “For local journalists, the typical response is propaganda and nothing more.”

As’ad, of Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, expressed frustration at the international community’s failure to give equal importance to the safety of local journalists. “For us,” she said, “the crime of targeting media offices is the same, whether it’s AFP, Reuters, or Arab and local offices.”

​​On November 12 at 10:31 a.m., the AFP camera’s live feed, which continued running after the attack, shut down for good. There was no one available to reboot the transmission system. It was the last live feed from an international news agency in Gaza.

The shutdown marked the end of an avenue for important information gathering. “Where there is strong potential for a war crime being committed, obviously, the livestream becomes critical evidence,” said Khan, the U.N. special rapporteur.

Al Madhoun, PMG’s CEO, noted that his organization was broadcasting a raw livestream, an unfiltered reality without commentary.

He said, “But the image seemed to bother Israel.”

With additional reporting from Arthur Carpentier of Le Monde; Gaëlle Faure, Marc Jourdier, Sarah Benhaïda, Benoît Toussaint, and Jean-Marc Mojon of AFP; Léa Peruchon and Walid Batrawi of Forbidden Stories; Christo Buscheck, Maria Retter, Maria Christoph, Dajana Kolling, and Frederik Obermaier of Paper Trail Media; and Manisha Ganguly of The Guardian.

The post The Day Israeli Tanks Fired Directly at AFP’s Gaza Bureau appeared first on The Intercept.

This investigation, conducted by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, is part of the Gaza Project, a collaboration involving 50 journalists from 13 organizations coordinated by Forbidden Stories.

Salman Bashir had been covering Israel’s war in Gaza on the ground for a month when his fellow journalist, Mohammed Abu Hatab, was killed. He threw his vest emblazoned with “PRESS” down on the ground in anguish during a live broadcast.

“We are victims on live TV,” Bashir said.

Abu Hatab, who worked for Palestine TV, was killed in November in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in an Israeli strike that destroyed his home and killed 11 of his family members.

He is among the more than 100 journalists who have been killed in the nine months of the war, marking it as the deadliest conflict on record for reporters — even more than World War II, which lasted six years.

When Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza, following the October 7 Hamas attack, the lives of journalists in the Gaza Strip were upended. No one anticipated the scale of loss and pain that was to follow.

Over four months, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, or ARIJ, partnered with 13 other news organizations to investigate the killing, injury, detention, and threats against Palestinian journalists and the destruction of media offices in Gaza. We also investigated attacks on journalists in the West Bank.

Despite telecommunication blackouts, the consortium interviewed 120 witnesses in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and consulted around 25 weapons experts and analysts.

The exact number of journalists who have been killed is difficult to determine, with several organizations collecting the information differently, but they all agree that the number is record-breaking.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, documented the killing of 102 Palestinian reporters and other media workers as of June 25, making this the deadliest war for journalists worldwide since the organization began collecting data in 1992.

“They’ve been killed while picking out food. They’ve been killed while resting in a tent,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director at CPJ. “They’ve been killed while reporting on the aftermath of a bombing.”

“They Are Doing Journalism”

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, or SPJ, a nonprofit based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, puts the figure even higher, at 140 journalists and media workers killed from the start of the war, and another 176 injured.

The deaths represent 10 percent of the journalists in Gaza, according to Shuruq As’ad, a spokesperson for the syndicate. “Journalists everywhere should be protected regardless of the country they work in,” she said.

The vast majority of journalists — 89 — were killed in airstrikes. At least 16 were killed while working. At least 56 were killed at home, and most of the time family members were killed with them.

While those killed were overwhelmingly men, 12 of the journalists were women.

The newsroom that lost the most journalists was Al-Aqsa Media Network, a media network affiliated with Hamas: 20 of its journalists were killed.

The Israeli military denied it targets journalists. “The IDF outright rejects the false accusation of targeted killing of journalists,” it said in a statement. “The IDF takes all operationally possible measures to reduce any harm to civilians, including journalists.”

The Israeli military said it “only targets military targets” and claimed Al-Aqsa often employs “terrorists” posing as journalists, but did not provide evidence.

CPJ says it is confident that every name on its casualties list is a journalist. “They are doing journalism, and they’re not engaged in incitement to violence. We clearly draw a line there,” said Martínez de la Serna. “We don’t get into evaluating Al-Aqsa or any other publication.”

“We will describe propaganda as propaganda, because it’s what the IDF has been traditionally doing when they have killed a journalist.”

He said the Israeli military is known to discredit journalists by calling them terrorists without evidence, noting that in the 30 years of CPJ’s work, they have never had to remove a name from their lists based on information provided by the Israeli army.

“We will describe propaganda as propaganda, because it’s what the IDF has been traditionally doing when they have killed a journalist,” Martínez de la Serna said.

Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said Israel has not provided evidence when it makes these accusations.

“The Israelis not only have spread disinformation about journalists being linked to militants, but they have not actually provided enough evidence of what care they are taking [to avoid killing journalists],” Khan said. “So they failed on both sides.”

“Why Do We Wear Press Vests?”

Dozens of journalists said they believed they were being targeted by the Israeli army. Many are afraid to wear press vests and helmets. Those around them fear they will be harmed by association, making it hard for some journalists to rent an apartment or get transportation, which is already difficult in a war.

“The [press] jacket, believe me, it’s not a protection,” said photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who evacuated Gaza in January. He recalled frequenting a cafe to upload his photos before the owner asked him to stop coming, fearing the Israeli army would target the cafe because a journalist was there.

One journalist said he limits his visits to his wife and children, who live separately while he’s reporting, out of fear that being with him would put them at risk.

Sami Barhoum, a correspondent for TRT Arabia, said, “My cameraman and I were on an assignment … we were directly hit by an artillery shell.” The news channel’s crew was attacked in April in Nuseirat refugee camp. He believes they were attacked because they are journalists.

His cameraman Sami Shehadeh, who was injured in the attack, said, “Why do we wear press vests? Why do we wear helmets? So they can target us?” He made the remarks from his hospital bed before his leg was amputated.

Since the beginning of the war in October, Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, filed three complaints with the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court “regarding Israeli war crimes against journalists.”

The complaints included the cases of more than 20 Palestinian journalists killed by the Israeli military during the war. “RSF has reasonable grounds to believe that some of these journalists were deliberately killed and that others were victims of deliberate attacks by the Israel Defense Forces against civilians,” the organization said in a statement.

CPJ is investigating over 500 incidents involving suspected targeting of journalists by Israeli forces.

Five months before the war, on the anniversary of the killing of well-known Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, CPJ published a report titled “Deadly Pattern,” which documented at least 20 cases in which journalists had been killed by Israeli forces over the past 22 years. No one has been charged and no one has been held accountable, according to CPJ.

Khan, the U.N. special rapporteur, said, “There is a history of Israeli impunity in the occupied territories.”

Israel’s Full Visibility in Gaza

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate documented 73 media offices that have been partially or completely destroyed by Israel in the war.

An investigation by ARIJ and its partners revealed that the Israeli military made false statements following an explosion at the Agence France-Presse headquarters in Gaza on November 2, 2023. The reporters obtained video of the attack on the Palestinian Media Group office in the tallest tower in Gaza, a few blocks away, on the same day. Both had livestream cameras.

Projectiles that struck the media offices were shells fired by Israeli tanks, according to the findings of the investigation. “Where there is strong potential for a war crime being committed, obviously, the livestream becomes critical evidence,” said Khan.

In February, the headquarters of Press House, a nonprofit supported by the governments of Norway and Switzerland, was destroyed despite donors notifying the Israeli military about the building’s location. One of Press House founder Belal Jadallah’s friends was staying there with his family until late January. He witnessed a tank firing directly at the building and was convinced they were targeting Press House. They evacuated the building, and shortly afterward, it was completely demolished. (Jadallah himself was killed by Israeli tank shelling in November.)

“It’s not like you can easily make a mistake,” said CPJ’s Martínez de la Serna, “Israel knows everything about Gaza.”

It’s not the first time that Israel has destroyed media offices during a war in Gaza. In 2021, Israel struck a tower housing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera — two of the more than 20 outlets whose offices were destroyed in the war that year. “So we see this as part of a pattern of attack on journalism,” Martínez de la Serna said.

Khan said, “According to international humanitarian law, media infrastructure is civilian infrastructure, so targeting it would be potentially a war crime.”

Drones See, Hear, and Kill

Earlier this year, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif said, “We were directly targeted by surveillance drones” in an attack while working in the Tel al-Zaatar area of northern Gaza. He told ARIJ that he received additional threats over the phone from the Israeli military.

Even before the recent war, Israeli drones were constantly flying over Gaza, gathering information and conducting surveillance. Local residents call them “zanana,” an Arabic word to describe the buzzing sound they make.

Khalil Dewan, a lawyer and researcher in the use of drones at the University of London, said the Israeli army “hits its targets with a high degree of knowledge of who it is killing.” He added that drones accurately identify their targets, based on information gathered from cellphones, social media, livestreams, and location detection if activated on phones.

As with human sense, drones have sensors that allow them to hear and see, with collected data transmitted to a ground station. Three experts said Israeli drones have sensors strong enough for a drone operator to see a press vest.

“We were directly targeted by surveillance drones.”

Asa Kasher, who drafted the Israel Defense Forces’ 1994 code of ethics, said, “I believe that if the press markings are clearly placed on the journalist, the drone operator will see them.”

The Israeli military claimed it doesn’t “deliberately target journalists.”

Since the war began, at least 20 journalists and media workers were reportedly attacked by precision strikes likely launched from drones. At least seven were wearing press vests identifying them as journalists.

“Journalists killed by drones are a priority for us, and they need to be very carefully investigated,” said Martínez de la Serna.

Surveillance technology used by Israel in Gaza goes beyond drones. A New York Times investigation published in March showed that, by the end of 2023, Israel had deployed facial recognition software in Gaza, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent. In addition, a recent investigation by +972 Magazine revealed that the Israeli military has used artificial intelligence to identify targets.

The Survivors

Amid ongoing Israeli bombardment, neighborhoods in Gaza have been reduced to rubble, and the threat of famine looms, particularly in the north, where insufficient aid is being allowed in.

Palestinian journalists, besieged alongside all Gazans, have been key in informing the world about what’s happening in the war, especially given Israel’s ban on foreign media entering the Gaza Strip.

Of the 213 journalists from Gaza surveyed in June by ARIJ, 59 said they had been injured during the war.

Many have lost family members.

A third of the 213 respondents said they lost family members, including 49 who lost a member of their immediate family and 11 who said one or more of their children died in the war.

There were five journalists who lost 40 members of their families or more. The total number of family members lost by all journalists surveyed was 661.

Almost all of them have been displaced from their homes. Half of them have been displaced from homes at least five times, and four of them have been displaced 20 times or more.

Almost half are living in tents. The homes of 183 journalists were partially or totally destroyed. One hundred ninety-five people lost equipment used for reporting, and 100 lost their jobs.

One aspect of the war’s toll that is difficult to capture with numbers is the combination of fatalism and dedication among the journalists.

Roshdi al-Sarraj, a journalist who ran an independent media company that did work for the BBC and Le Monde, wrote on October 13 on Facebook that he intended to defy an Israeli army order to evacuate Gaza City.

“We will not leave … and if we leave, we will go to the sky, and only to the sky,” he wrote in his post.

Nine days later, al-Sarraj was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in the Gaza City neighborhood of Tal al-Hawa.

With additional reporting by Ethar AlAzem of ARIJ; Léa Peruchon and Mariana Abreu of Forbidden Stories; Frederik Obemeyer of Paper Trail Media; and Madjid Zerrouky of Le Monde.

The post Israel’s War on Gaza Is the Deadliest Conflict on Record for Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

A photo posted by the unit itself, however, seems to suggest that the U.S. was providing support as far back as December of last year. 

The photo, in tandem with the administration’s own statements, highlights the murky nature of the arms ban, how it was imposed, and under what U.S. authority. Two mechanisms could have barred arms transfers: a law passed by Congress specifically prohibiting assistance to Azov, and the so-called Leahy laws that block support to units responsible for grave rights violations. 

“My guess is that the Department found that the Brigade is a ‘new unit,’ distinguishable from the Battalion and the Regiment.”

The State Department said this month that weapon shipments will now go forward after a Leahy law review, but won’t comment on if and when a Leahy ban was in effect. The congressional prohibition, the U.S. says, does not apply because it barred assistance to the Azov Battalion, a predecessor to the Azov Brigade. The original unit had earned scrutiny for alleged human rights violations and ties to neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies.

The U.S. has not made clear about when the apparent ban started, but a deputy Azov commander and media reports indicate some type of prohibition has been in effect for nearly a decade — though the congressional ban has only been in effect since 2018.

“There was a request for resources for the 12th Special Forces Brigade, which prompted a Leahy vetting process, in which they were found to be eligible,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept, suggesting the approval process did not deal with any existing bans. (The State Department did not respond to questions asking for clarity if that was the case.)

One former American official said that because of the unit’s byzantine history of reorganizations and official status, the State Department should better explain its decisions.

“Given the history of the Azov Regiment, the Azov Battalion, and the Azov Brigade, the State Department’s ought to provide a more detailed rationale for the finding that the Brigade is eligible pursuant to the Leahy law,” Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, told The Intercept. “My guess is that the Department found that the Brigade is a ‘new unit,’ distinguishable from the Battalion and the Regiment. If that’s correct, the Department should say so.”

U.S. Special Ops Training

Restrictions on U.S. military support may have been in effect when the Azov Brigade’s official Telegram channel and X account announced in March that the unit’s personnel recently completed an American military training. The course, on civil–military cooperation, was provided by U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, or SOCEUR, according to the posts.

One attached photo shows a captain in the Azov unit being presented with a certificate dated December 2023 by a person with a blurred face in U.S. military fatigues. A second photo shows a group of people in U.S. military apparel holding an American flag next to a group of several dozen others, some of whom are holding a flag with the Azov insignia.

Department of Defense spokesperson Tim Gorman would not comment on the SOCEUR training, including whether or not it was legal, and referred The Intercept to the State Department. (The Azov unit did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department also declined to answer repeated questions about the SOCEUR training and its legality, or whether there had been other U.S. military training with Azov before clearing the group under the Leahy laws.

The spokesperson told The Intercept that it found no evidence of the Azov Brigade committing violations of human rights that would bar American aid under the Leahy laws.

Russia has tried to discredit the Azov Brigade, the State Department spokesperson said, by conflating it with its predecessor, the Azov Battalion militia. The Azov Battalion, which is under congressional sanctions, was absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014 then underwent several more reorganizations before becoming a brigade in 2023. Others have echoed concerns of propaganda against Azov, pointing to Russia’s amplification of claims about Nazis in Ukraine to justify its invasion.

“That militia disbanded in 2015 and the composition of Special Forces Brigade Azov is significantly different,” the spokesperson noted. Another spokesperson, meanwhile, said, “The Battalion was disbanded in 2014 and the United States has never provided security assistance to the ‘Azov battalion.’”

With the State Department leaning on the distinction between the “battalion” and the “brigade” to get around congressional sanctions, some representatives are moving to shore up the statutory ban on military support to Azov. In recent days, the proposed defense appropriations language was updated. 

“None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, intelligence, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion, the Third Separate Assault Brigade, or any successor organization,” the new language reads, gesturing to a brigade created by Battalion veterans, as well as the Azov Brigade itself. The current language in effect only addresses the Azov Battalion.

A former House staffer who was involved in efforts to ban support to Azov, requesting anonymity for fear of threats from the group, told The Intercept, “The fact that Congress is moving so quickly to reaffirm that the ban does apply to ‘successor organizations’ like the Azov Regiment, Azov Brigade, or whatever else they might change their name to next, shows that the White House view doesn’t hold water.”

Significantly Different?

As it is, the State Department’s limited rationale for lifting arms restrictions rests on the claim that the composition of the battalion and the brigade are “significantly different.” That finding would be made under provisions of the Leahy determinations that allow for differentiating between old and “fundamentally different units,” such as changes in leadership and culture. 

Yet the Azov unit has significant continuity and, while Leahy laws are concerned with human rights, the State Department’s appeal to the Leahy determination may not cover the ideological justification of the congressional ban on the transfer of arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.

Azov commander Denys Prokopenko and deputy commander Svyatoslav Palamar, for instance, are holdovers from the original battalion militia. And, along with other higher-ranking Azov members, they are linked to white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies, as Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin reported in The Nation last year. 

“If the White House wants to arm and train the most neo-Nazi-linked group in Ukraine, it should push for Congress to remove the ban.”

The suggestion that the battalion was “disbanded” and the brigade is “significantly different” is also undermined by the unit’s own words. A page on their website celebrates its 10-year anniversary. “This is the path from a few dozen volunteers, who had only motivation and faith in justice, to a special purpose brigade — one of the most effective units of the Defense Forces,” it reads.

Another biographical page suggests the Azov Battalion was never actually dissolved, but subsumed into the official Ukrainian military structure. “On September 17, 2014, by order of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the ‘Azov’ battalion was reorganized and expanded into the ‘Azov’ special purpose militia regiment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the page says. “On November 11, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine signed an order on the transfer of the ‘Azov’ regiment to the National Guard of Ukraine, with its further staffing up to the combat standard of the National Guard brigades.”

Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs who resigned in protest of the administration’s policy on Israel’s Gaza war, told The Intercept he was not aware of any standing restriction on Azov. He recalled speaking to subject matter experts who said there were no concerns, and, as far as he knew, the unit had been eligible for aid since at least 2022. “My understanding is that they genuinely are different entities,” he said, adding that he did not see any evidence while at the State Department to suggest the Azov Brigade should be prohibited from receiving security assistance.

Ukrainian officials, for their part, seemed to suggest to the Washington Post that there was indeed a ban, one that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba apparently raised to Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month. (Paul said there was “something odd going on, but my solid recollection is that there was no restriction, so I’m not sure what the Ukrainians are on about.”)

Two months ago — after the social media pictures appearing to show the training — Prokopenko, the Azov commander, said on X, “Azov is still blacklisted from receiving any U.S. aid.” In a May post, Prokopenko complained Azov had fought to defend Mariupol in 2022 with limited resources and outdated weapons because of the congressional ban on aid — suggesting the statutory sanctions applied to the unit at the time.

“The unavoidable reality is that there is a current ban on U.S. arms and training going to the Azov units,” said the former House staffer. “If the White House wants to arm and train the most neo-Nazi-linked group in Ukraine, it should push for Congress to remove the ban.”

“That may be a tall ask, however, as Congress is currently seeking to strengthen the law, rather than weaken it.”

The post The U.S. Says a Far-Right Ukrainian Army Unit Can Now Get Aid. A Photo Shows Training Was Already Happening. appeared first on The Intercept.

The resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia for last week’s U.N. International Telecommunication Union summit in Geneva, is aimed at returning internet access to Gaza’s millions of disconnected denizens.

It ultimately passed under a secret ballot on June 14 — but not before it was watered down to remove some of its more strident language about Israel’s responsibility for the destruction of Gaza. The U.S. delegate at the ITU summit had specifically opposed those references.

Israel, for its part, had blasted the proposal as a whole. Israel’s ITU delegate described it as “a resolution that while seemingly benign in its intent to rebuild telecommunications infrastructure, distorts the reality of the ongoing situation in Gaza,” according to a recording of the session reviewed by The Intercept. The delegate further argued the resolution does not address that Hamas has used the internet “to prepare acts of terror against Israel’s civilians,” and that any rebuilding effort must include unspecified “safeguards” that would prevent the potential use of the internet for terrorism.

“Based on this rationale, Gaza will never have internet,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy adviser with the digital rights group Access Now, told The Intercept, adding that Israel’s position is not only incoherent but inherently disproportionate. “You can’t punish the entire civilian population just because you have fears of one Palestinian faction.”

The Israeli Ministry of Communications did not respond to a request for comment.

Getting Gaza Back Online

When delegations to the ITU, a U.N. agency that facilitates cooperation between governments on telecommunications policies, began meeting in Geneva in early June, the most pressing issue on the agenda was getting Gaza back online. Israel’s monthslong bombardment of the enclave has severed fiber cables, razed cellular towers, and generally wrecked the physical infrastructure required to communicate with loved ones and the outside world.

A disconnected Gaza Strip also threatens to add to the war’s already staggering death toll. Though Israel touts its efforts to warn civilians of impending airstrikes, such warnings are relayed using the very cellular and internet connections the country’s air force routinely levels. It is a cycle of data degradation that began at the war’s start: The more Israel bombs, the harder it is for Gazans to know they are about to be bombed.

The resolution that passed last week would ensure “the ITU’s much needed assistance and support to Palestine for rebuilding its telecommunication sector.” While the agency has debated the plight of Palestinian internet access for many years, the new proposal arrives at a crisis point for data access across Gaza, as much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble, and civilians struggle to access food and water, let alone cellular signals and Wi-Fi.

The ITU and other intergovernmental bodies have long pushed for Palestinian sovereignty over its own internet access. But the Saudi proposal was notable in that it explicitly called out Israel’s role in hobbling Gaza’s connection to the world, either via bombs, bulldozers, or draconian restrictions on technology imports. That Saudi Arabia was behind the resolution is not without irony; in 2022, Yemen plunged into a four-day internet blackout following airstrikes by a Saudi-led military coalition.

Without mentioning Israel by name, the Saudi resolution also called on the ITU to monitor the war’s destructive effects on Palestinian data access and provide regular reports. The resolution also condemned both the “widespread destruction of critical infrastructure, failure of telecom services and mobile phone outages that have occurred across the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the aggression by the occupying power” and “the obstacles practiced by the occupying power in preventing the use of new communications technologies.”

In a session debating the resolution, the U.S. delegate told the council, “We have made clear to the sponsors of this resolution that we do not agree with some of the characterizations,” specifically the language blaming the destruction of Gaza and the forced use of obsolete technology on Israel. “The United States cannot support this resolution in its current form as drafted,” the delegate continued, according to a recording reviewed by The Intercept.

Whether or not the U.S. ultimately voted for the resolution — the State Department did not respond when asked — it appears to have been successful in weakening the version that was ultimately approved by the ITU. The version that did pass was stripped of any explicit mention of Israel’s role in destroying and otherwise thwarting Gazan internet access, and refers obliquely only to “​the obstacles practiced in preventing the use of new communication technologies.”

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s other questions about the resolution either, including whether the administration shares Israel’s terror-related objections to it.

The U.S. has taken a harsher stance on civilian internet blackouts caused by a military aggressor in the past. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing national internet disruptions it caused, the State Department declared, “the United States condemns actions that block or degrade access to the Internet in Ukraine, which sever critical channels for sharing and learning information, including about the war.”

Outdated Technology

The approved resolution also calls on ITU member states to “make every effort” to both preserve what Palestinian telecom infrastructure remains and allocate funds necessary for the “return of communications in the Gaza Strip” in the future. This proposed rebuilding includes the activation of 4G and 5G cellular service. While smartphones in the West Bank connect to the internet with 3G wireless speeds unsuitable for many data-hungry applications, Gazans must make do with debilitatingly slow 2G service — an obsolete standard that was introduced to the United States in 1992.

Fatafta, of Access Now, noted that Israel does have a real interest in preventing Gaza from entering the 21st century: surveillance and censorship. Gaza’s reliance on insecure cellular technology from the 1990s and Israeli fiber connections makes it trivial for Israeli intelligence agents to intercept texts and phone calls and institute internet blackouts at will, as has occurred throughout the war.

The resolution is “an important step, because the current status quo cannot continue,” she said. “There is no scenario where Gaza can be allowed to keep a 2G network where the rest of the world has already moved on to 5G.”

The post Israel Opposes Rebuilding Gaza’s Internet Access Because Terrorists Could Go Online appeared first on The Intercept.

On Sunday, some current faculty members at Columbia University learned through a news article that all new students and faculty at the school will be mandated to go through an orientation on antisemitism. The plan was not announced in any direct communications from the university.

Rather, it was reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a story about the university’s task force on antisemitism.

Formed last November as political pressure mounted against criticism of Israel on campuses, the task force set out to examine specific notions of bigotry at the university, which has become a flashpoint of protests against Israel’s war on Gaza — often followed by violent police crackdowns.

The plan was not announced in any direct communications from the university. Rather, it was reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Numerous participants in the antisemitism task force, including its three co-chairs — Columbia faculty members, many of whom are outspoken Israel supporters — openly discussed the not-yet published report with the newspaper before any such information was shared with the university’s community, or even their colleagues.

The antisemitism task force will release a report in the coming weeks detailing accounts from students who submitted written testimony or participated in “listening sessions,” according to Haaretz. All the anecdotes, equally, were shared without any attribution except that they were anonymously gathered by the task force — a body with pro-Israel leadership that has been controversial since its inception last November.

The article also revealed that a mandatory antisemitism orientation would be developed. The trainings will include expressions of anti-Zionism as examples of possible antisemitism, touching on a controversy that has enveloped the protests, crackdowns, and larger national conversation about Israel–Palestine.

Anecdotes that the task force shared with Haaretz include disturbing examples of antisemitism, like a professor reportedly telling a class “to avoid reading mainstream media, declaring that ‘it is owned by Jews.’”

Examples like these have been widely reported, but they are fewer and further between than the explicit and tacit conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that pervade task force members’ comments — a conflation that has helped lead to dire consequences, including arrests, for thousands of students protesting Israel’s war.

A Dangerous Conflation

Up until this point, the chairs and participants in the antisemitism task force have demurred from offering a working definition of antisemitism. Now, with the new orientation planned, task force members now said that a definition of antisemitism will be put forward — and it will include anti-Zionism.

According to the Haaretz article, the task force’s antisemitism definition “is expected to determine that statements calling for the destruction and death of Israel and Zionism can be considered antisemitic, while criticism of the Israeli government cannot.” It mirrors, then, the contested and nationalist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA, definition, which has been championed by Republicans and other conservative Zionists, including President Joe Biden.

“This definition is designed to inform faculty and students about what can offend Jewish people and which types of statements can cause pain and discomfort,” Haaretz reported. “An educational definition will not infringe upon freedom of speech on campus or prohibit potentially antisemitic phrases.”

Given that aggressive police raids at Columbia and Barnard, its women’s college, that saw student protesters arrested and the shutdown of the entire campus, the claim that free speech on campus will not be repressed beggars belief. Even if the only use of the definition is during mandatory orientations on antisemitism, its deployment inscribes the dangerous antisemitism/anti-Zionism conflation into campus culture. Views of Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, and the many others in the community who express criticism of Israel are bound to be delegitimized.

Even in their own telling to Haaretz, task force members make clear that their interest involved validating pro-Israel students’ discomfort as examples of widespread antisemitism. “We heard from students who feel their identity, values and very existence on campus have been under attack,” said task force co-chair and political science professor Ester Fuchs.

There can be no doubt, as I’ve previously noted, that students for whom Israel is central to their Jewish identity have felt immense discomfort in the months of protests against Israel’s violence. This discomfort is not, however, proof of real threat. Nor is it grounds to continue to uphold the dangerous claim that criticism of Israel, even criticism of Israel as an ethno-state, is an attack against Jewish people.

All professors at universities nationwide should be committed to all of our students’ safety and well-being; this does not mean we must accept all feelings of fear and discomfort as legitimately grounded in persecution and oppression.

A definition of antisemitism, even for purely educational purposes, that insists on defending Israel as an ethno-state will only serve to further silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, while rendering real cases of antisemitism — Jewish people targeted for being Jewish — harder to target and fight.

We would not, for instance, validate the fears of a white student brought up to see Black people as a threat — an important counterfactual, given a particularly striking comment by task force member Gil Zussman, an Israeli electrical engineering professor, about the Black Lives Matter movement.

“If, for example, a student group were to use an abhorrent chant such as ‘We don’t want BLM supporters here,’ there would be immediate consequences,” Zussman told Haaretz. “However, chants such as ‘We don’t want Zionists here’ have been normalized and currently have no consequences. These double standards are unacceptable and will eventually fracture the university.”

The idea that the standards should be the same — that support for an ethno-state should be as protected as efforts to end anti-Black racism — reveals exactly the problem with the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism: a troubling conflation of nation-state ideology with racial identity.

A Controversial Task Force

Since its formation last year, numerous students and faculty members expressed concerns about the antisemitism task force’s makeup, methodology, and purview.

“Ever since the task force was announced, we feared it would equate Zionism and Jewishness,” wrote four Jewish graduate students, all critical of Zionism, in an op-ed for the Columbia Spectator last week. “All three co-chairs of the task force — Ester R. Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David M. Schizer — are members of the Academic Engagement Network, a Zionist advocacy organization, and the three of them penned a statement supporting Columbia’s ties to Israel.”

Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, writing in The Nation in April, noted that the task force is “chaired by among the most ardent Zionist faculty members on our campus” and that “none of its members has any academic expertise in the study of antisemitism, or in how antidiscrimination laws apply in an academic setting.” (Franke was among the five Columbia faculty members maligned by university President Minouche Shafik in Congress for their Israel-critical positions.)

The antisemitism task force itself published an op-ed in the Spectator under a shared byline last month. The text was riddled with claims indicating the body’s readiness to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism. “Zionism literally means the venerable movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland,” the task force wrote, “but in many settings on campus it has become a less well-defined general-purpose accusation.”

Zionism — literally, practically, and historically — is by no means reducible to this rosy abstraction. While the group for months refused to give a clear definition of antisemitism, it was willing to offer a simple and reductive definition of Zionism — one that ignores that political, nation-state ideology’s unbroken history of Palestinian exile, oppression, and occupation.

In February, LitHub published an email exchange between task force co-chair Nicholas Lemann, a professor of journalism and film, and the celebrated filmmaker James Schamus. Schamus continuously urges Lemann to be transparent about the task force’s working definition of antisemitism, expressing concern over the task force’s pro-Israel bias.

Demands like Schamus’s for the task force to give a definition of antisemitism don’t presume a clear and simple definition of antisemitism. Instead, they ask for recognition that discrimination and bigotry are context-dependent and that definitions can’t be relied upon in every case.

The concern is that, all too often, anti-Zionism is treated as antisemitism.

Unacceptable on Campus

In remarks to the Israeli paper, task force members themselves the task force members seemed to acknowledge that felt experiences of antisemitism related to opposition to the ideology of Zionism.

“The concept of Zionism has become unacceptable in some circles at Columbia,” Lemann, the co-chair, told Haaretz. “People are asked to promise that they’re not Zionist.”

For many Jewish people, including the many thousands of us worldwide who have taken part in Palestine solidarity protests and campus encampments, the growing opposition to Zionism is not an attack on Jewish people but an overdue challenge to an oppressive, nationalist worldview.

The task force wants it both ways: to themselves insist upon the identification of Zionism with Jewishness, and then to call the identification itself antisemitic.

“Zionism is a political ideology — not an ethnic or religious identity,” wrote the Jewish graduate students in their Columbia Spectator open letter to the task force. “We can attest to that fact: Some of us believed in Zionism when we were younger, and even wanted to enlist in the Israeli military. Some of us grew up feeling like Zionism and Jewishness were inseparable, but our study of the history of Zionism led us to reject it.”

The task force wants it both ways: to themselves insist upon the identification of Zionism with Jewishness, and then to call the identification itself antisemitic. It is, in short, a trap.

When it comes to views deemed “unacceptable” on campus, meanwhile, it was Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — two pro-Palestine organizations — that Columbia banned from campus last November. Over 100 students engaging in peaceful Palestine solidarity protests were arrested in April, with many suspended and, in the case of Barnard students, kicked out of their campus housing. It was Palestinian students and their supporters who were sprayed with noxious chemicals by two former members of the Israeli military on campus.

It was also, as I witnessed firsthand, young Palestinian and other Arab women students who were met at their campus gates by a crowd of middle-aged men and women wrapped in Israeli flags, screaming that the students should “go get raped” in Gaza. It is professors who have criticized Israel and supported Palestinians who were then smeared in Congress. Yet it is only in service of a perverted definition of antisemitism that there will be mandatory orientations.

“To be Muslim at Columbia is to be racially profiled and doxxed, beg for administrative resources and support, and still receive none,” wrote Noreen Mayat, a recent Barnard graduate and former president of the school’s Muslim Students Association, in the Columbia Spectator in May. “To be Muslim at Columbia is to face Islamophobia on campus — to be spat on and called ‘terrorists’ — and receive no University acknowledgment or recognition.”

In the Haaretz article, the antisemitism task force’s apparent prioritization of pro-Israel student experiences shields itself from critique by calling for a space of open discussion, when only one line of discourse will be institutionally sanctioned.

“Part of what a great university does is introduce us to people with different opinions,” David Schizer, Columbia law school professor and task force co-chair, said.

It’s a rich comment from the self-identifying conservative who went out of his way to see pro-Palestine colleagues censured and peaceful protests shuttered. It was in this very vein that the task force has operated from the jump: exploratory, but with only one possible focus and thus one possible conclusion.

“The priority has always been the comfort of students other than us,” Mayat, the Barnard graduate, wrote. “The priority has always been the safety of others, at the expense of ours.”

The post Columbia Task Force for Dealing With Campus Protests Declares That Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism appeared first on The Intercept.

Soon after Israel launched its retaliatory assault on the Gaza Strip on October 7, the 22-year-old al-Absi and his family were forced to flee from their home in the Jabalia refugee camp in the north and seek refuge, along with thousands of others, in the nearby Al-Fakhoura school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which aids Palestinian refugees.

The Al-Fakhoura school soon came under attack. On November 4, an Israeli airstrike on the shelter killed at least 15 people, including two of al-Absi’s relatives, and injured dozens more. Al-Absi decided, along with his family, to move to Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which had been designated a safe zone by the Israeli military.

The family would stay in Rafah for the next five months, initially at a warehouse in the city. With the ground invasion looming in late April, the al-Absis relocated to the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, with tens of thousands of other families, into a tent camp.

Then came the Israeli bombs. Al-Absi and his family would become survivors of what is known as the “tent massacre” on May 26.

Even in the massacre’s wake, however, they were unable to leave Tal al-Sultan — the cost of moving around Gaza was prohibitively high. In a matter of days, after another volley of Israeli airstrikes against the city, Mohammad Jaber al-Absi and his brother Abed would end up burying 15 members of their family, including their father and five children.

“Nowhere Safe in Gaza”

The sustained Israeli attack on Rafah — and the fates of families like the al-Absis — highlight the near impossibility of finding anywhere safe in Gaza.

In early June, after the Rafah strike, the pervasive danger in Gaza was again highlighted. Israel unleashed a midday assault on Nuseirat refugee camp and Deir al-Balah, part of a hostage rescue operation that killed hundreds of Palestinians and wounded countless more. The attack’s victims in Nuseirat had been, like many in Rafah, displaced multiple times.

The stories of survivors of the “tent massacre” illustrate the long odds faced by Palestinians in Gaza, who bankrupt themselves to follow orders to repeatedly relocate themselves to areas that the Israelis say won’t be attacked, only to be attacked.

Around 1.4 million internal refugees were packed in Rafah, normally a city of 230,000 on the evening of the tent massacre, which triggered a fire; killed at least 45 people, many of them children; and wounded more than 240 others. The same insecurity that brought down Israeli bombs on a tent city in a purported safe zone, however, would also continue to shadow the survivors of Tal al-Sultan.

“Those were scenes that will never be erased from my memory, and my kids’ memories.”

Some survivors, like Layla Samour and her family, who had been displaced from northern Gaza early in the war, would make their way out of Rafah, bringing with them what little they had left, along with the scars of the massacre.

Samour described seeing charred bodies in the massacre, torn-apart children, and the wounded crying for help in vain. “I saw people trying to pull the bodies of their loved ones from the fire while the smoke filled the air and made it difficult for us to breathe,” she told The Intercept in an interview. “Those were scenes that will never be erased from my memory, and my kids’ memories.”

Others, like the al-Absis, had moved and moved and been bombed out of place after place. This time, they would stay, and almost immediately experienced the acute dangers of the continued Israeli assault.

“There is nowhere safe in Gaza,” Tamara Alrifai, a spokesperson for UNRWA, told The Intercept.“Not even UNRWA shelters that are clearly marked, and whose GPS we share.”

According to Alrifai, over 180 UNRWA buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the Israeli military assault over the past eight months, killing over 450 Palestinians seeking shelter inside them and wounding nearly 1,500.

“All civilian infrastructure, including UN infrastructure, is protected under international humanitarian law,” said Alrifai, “and this has clearly been totally disregarded during this conflict.”

“Raining Shrapnel”

When Layla Samour fled her home in northern Gaza last fall, she was 37 years old and nearly nine months pregnant with her eighth child. In her state, with seven kids in tow, the journey south was daunting, but there was little left for her in the north: Her family home was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on October 14, a week into Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Eventually, the Samours settled into the Tal al-Sultan displacement camp, near an UNRWA logistics base. She gave birth at the end of October, in a tent.

In late April, shelling in the area picked up. On May 6, Israel began its ground invasion.

The White House, which had repeatedly cautioned Israel against invading Rafah without a “plan to protect civilians,” nevertheless signed off on a new $1 billion arms sale to Israel on May 14, a little over a week into the offensive. The attack came in for worldwide condemnation, and the International Court of Justice issued new provisional measures ordering Israel to immediately end military operations in Rafah.

Yet two days later, on the evening of May 26, Israeli airstrikes slammed into the tent camp in Tal al-Sultan. The bombs used in the Israeli attack were U.S.-made, according to investigations by multiple news outlets.

“I screamed as I never did before,” Samour told The Intercept. “The first thing I felt was the shock of the explosion, as if the ground was shaking beneath us. I rushed to my children and hugged them close, fearing that the missile would fall on our heads. I found safety in dying together. It was raining shrapnel.”

“I was devastated that I could not bring my kids back inside my belly.”

Samour heard the screams of children and women around her as tents were set ablaze. “The flames were surrounding us, it was beyond my worst nightmares,” she said, describing her desperate attempts to protect her children. “I was devastated that I could not bring my kids back inside my belly.”

She says she tried to help extinguish the blaze, but the dense smoke and intense heat made it nearly impossible. Every time she tried to approach an area to put out the flames, a wave of fire and smoke pushed her back.

“I carried a child in my arms and held the hand of another, while the rest followed me, praying to find a safe place,” she said. “We ran amid the fire and smoke, trying to avoid the casualties and shrapnel.”

Samour spent a harrowing night in the streets with her children. The next morning, she decided to leave the area, but the fuel shortage had made transportation costs prohibitively expensive. Then she had a stroke of luck: After two days, Samour was finally able to secure a staggering $550 through an acquaintance to be able to move to Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest city.

Yet Khan Younis did not offer safety either. Israeli troops withdrew from the city in April following a weekslong ground offensive, leaving the city in ruins. An estimated 55 percent of the structures in the Khan Younis area — around 45,000 buildings — and much of the city infrastructure has been destroyed, with dire shortages of food, clean water, medical supplies, and health care services, according to the World Food Program.

Samour would have opted to relocate somewhere else, but the money she got was only enough to travel to Khan Younis, a mere 10 to 15 kilometers away from Rafah. Traveling any further north would cost even more.

Two Days Later

When they first arrived in Rafah in November, Mohammad Jaber al-Absi and his family settled in a warehouse, where they lived for five months. Israeli attacks came in waves: airstrikes, artillery shells, and finally ground troops. The eldest of his siblings at just 22, al-Absi strove desperately to provide for the others.

By late April, Israel was gearing up for its full-scale ground assault on Rafah. As the shelling increased in advance of the attack, al-Absi moved with his family yet again, this time to the Tal al-Sultan tent camp near the UNRWA logistics base. Several days later, on May 6, Israel launched its ground offensive.

They were still in the camp when the bombs came down on May 26.

Survivors of that “tent massacre,” al-Absi and his family were unable to flee the area. The cost of transportation, which had risen to hundreds of dollars just to travel a few kilometers, was unaffordable, al-Absi told The Intercept.

“The only safe place is where my family is now. They were killed for the sake of safety. I envy them.”

Unable to leave, and believing the international outcry following the May 26 airstrike meant the area would be spared another attack, the family moved to another displacement camp some 150 meters away.

Just two days later, however, on May 28, an Israeli strike slammed into the camp, killing dozens. Al-Absi, who had left the area that day with his brother Abed to look for food and supplies, returned to find his family massacred. He tried to revive his father, who lay on the ground with a fatal head injury, but it was too late. The bloodied bodies of his siblings and other relatives were strewn nearby. None survived. In all, 15 of his relatives were killed, including five children.

“I felt helpless watching my family dying and not able to help them,” Al-Absi told The Intercept. “It is a nightmare that I will never wake up from.”

The al-Absi brothers buried their family members with the help of some friends.

In a final desperate bid, they moved to al-Muwasi, a nearby desolate plot of land on the coast. As it once had for Rafah, Israel designated al-Muwasi a humanitarian area for evacuees and, like Rafah, it has been hit with airstrikes and shelling.

“The only safe place is where my family is now,” Al-Absi said. “They were killed for the sake of safety. I envy them.”

The post These “Tent Massacre” Survivors Couldn’t Afford to Leave Rafah. The Next Israeli Attack Nearly Wiped Their Family Out. appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, June 13, the World Bank Group’s Executive Board was scheduled to vote on whether to approve the International Finance Corporation’s plan to remedy harms relating to its $13.5 million investment in Bridge International Academies, following a lengthy investigation that concluded in December. The Compliance Advisor Ombudsman found a series of failures relating to school safety and labor practices at Bridge schools in Kenya, according to a summary of its draft report that was leaked to The Intercept. The CAO asked the IFC — the World Bank’s financing arm — to work with Bridge to establish processes to compensate the affected individuals for harms suffered. Yet the IFC’s proposal declines to do so, according to two sources familiar with the case. After this article was published, the board postponed the vote, instead holding an informal discussion with the IFC about its action plan.

This comes just months after the IFC bucked a CAO recommendation for direct payments as a remedy for harm in a separate investigation involving the sexual abuse of young female students in 2016 by a teacher at a Bridge school in Kenya. Instead, the IFC agreed to fund a program that would support survivors of child sexual abuse to access services, such as counseling and health care, on a case-by-case basis and regardless of whether they were abused at a Bridge school.

Civil society groups are up in arms about what they perceive as the IFC’s inadequate response to the CAO’s findings in both cases. “The truth is that the IFC knew about these problems. They failed to act when they became aware of the problems,” said Angelo Gavrielatos, campaign manager at the nonprofit Education International. “That is reckless and complicit behavior. It’s long overdue that they establish a remedy and contribute to that remedy for those who have been harmed.”

The IFC declined to comment specifically on the plan it was scheduled to present to the World Bank board, saying only that its policy is to publicize its action plans following board approval. In a statement on Thursday, World Bank leadership acknowledged the change in plans. “We … agreed that IFC will take more time to explore collaboration with relevant stakeholders before the Board formally considers the Management Response and Management Action Plan,” reads the statement.

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Two Harvard Grads Saw Big Profits in African Education. Children Paid the Price.

Since 2018, the CAO has investigated a series of formal, overlapping complaints against Bridge International Academies, which opened in Kenya in 2009, for issues including school safety and sexual abuse. The CAO’s probes, and reporting by The Intercept, have revealed that students, parents, and teachers in Kenya were harmed as a direct result of Bridge’s wrongdoing and the IFC’s failure to supervise its investment. Bridge did not respond to requests for comment.

Civil society experts say that the best way for the IFC to make amends is to give money directly to survivors with no strings attached, as a way to acknowledge their suffering, as well as to give them the autonomy to decide what they need to heal and move forward with their lives. There is global precedent for providing compensation to survivors of abuse, including sexual abuse. A task force at the World Bank Group itself endorsed this approach in a 2017 report responding to sexual misconduct during a Bank-funded development project in Uganda. The IFC, for its part, said it has never provided no-fault compensation for harms suffered by survivors of sexual abuse on any IFC-supported project.

The IFC is facing compensation requests in other ongoing investigations as well. Emily, a Kenyan woman who filed a complaint with the CAO last year about sexual assault she experienced at a Bridge school as a child, said that her decision to request compensation from the IFC was about acknowledging her father’s vehement advocacy on her behalf. (After first meeting Emily about a year ago, this writer introduced her to civil society groups that helped her to file the complaint, which is being reviewed by the CAO).

“I didn’t consider myself; I considered my father. He was always at the police station,” said Emily, who The Intercept is identifying with a pseudonym to protect her privacy. “He wanted me to go through this process and get justice, not only for myself, but for the others. Can you give something small to appreciate this man?”

“Deeply Inadequate”

The CAO probes misconduct that occurs at IFC-backed projects during the time of its investment and for 15 months afterward. In this case, the IFC poured millions of dollars into Bridge’s parent company, NewGlobe Schools, over the course of nearly a decade. In March 2022, amid the CAO investigations, the IFC quietly divested from NewGlobe Schools.

Yet the IFC still had indirect ties to the company because of its active investment in Learn Capital Venture Partners III LP, a venture capital firm that funds NewGlobe Schools. The IFC’s connection to Bridge ended in February, when Bridge transitioned away from NewGlobe Schools to become an independent foundation. (Learn Capital and NewGlobe Schools did not respond to requests for comment.)

The CAO launched its first probe into the IFC’s Bridge investment following a 2018 complaint by the Kenyan nonprofit EACHRights filed on behalf of parents and teachers at Bridge. Last December, the ombudsman completed its long-awaited investigation into the case, known as Bridge 01.

The CAO found that more than 100 Bridge students suffered potentially preventable injuries while at school, and at least two preventable student fatalities occurred during the years of the IFC’s investment, according to a copy of the executive summary of the leaked report, which is considered a draft until it is voted on by the World Bank board. Issues around worker compensation potentially affected thousands of Bridge employees, the report estimated. Overall, investigators found shortcomings in the IFC’s due diligence processes before making the investment, during the life of the project, and after its divestment.

The CAO recommended that the IFC work with Bridge to develop processes to provide fair and swift compensation to current and former workers and to the parents of current and former Bridge students. But the IFC declined to adopt the recommendation in its proposed management action plan, or MAP, which is scheduled to go before the World Bank board for approval on June 13, according to two sources familiar with the case as well as documentation viewed by The Intercept.

The IFC distributed a draft of portions of the MAP to some civil society groups on May 3 and gave them until May 15 to provide feedback. The limited timeframe reflected “a deeply inadequate and tokenistic approach to consultation and stakeholder engagement,” the nonprofit Oxfam wrote to the World Bank’s board on May 16 in an email obtained by The Intercept.

Oxfam also wrote that the MAP demonstrated “a clear lack of commitment to remedy by the IFC, despite a clear account of its failures that led to the harms outlined in the CAO report,” and “a lack of willingness to design a remediation program intended to address these harms.” Oxfam declined to comment to The Intercept.

Minimal Recourse

The IFC similarly resisted putting money in the hands of people who were hurt at Bridge’s Kenya schools following the CAO’s investigation into child sexual abuse. In October, the CAO published its report on the so-called Bridge 04 case, finding that the IFC had failed to supervise the project, leading to students being seriously harmed as a result. The watchdog asked the IFC to prepare an action plan and submit it for approval by the World Bank board.

In January, Emily and the other Bridge survivors wrote a letter to the board outlining their requests. These included money as reparations for the harm, as well as to pay for counseling, continuing education and training, and possible legal action. The survivors also asked for a public acknowledgment of and apology from Bridge for the harm that it caused to pupils.

Their request was backed by civil society groups as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., who have repeatedly raised concerns to the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department about the sexual abuse allegations. (In April, Bridge penned a letter to Warren asking that she hold off on further action relating to the company until she was “fully aware” of Bridge’s work with the CAO, according to a source familiar with the matter.) Even 11 members of the World Bank Group board urged the IFC not to exclude financial support or compensation proposed by the CAO in its action plan.

But on March 7, when the IFC submitted the final MAP for approval, it did not include a provision to give money directly to Bridge survivors as compensation for the harm they endured. Instead, the IFC proposed a “collective response” that would support programs for survivors of child sexual abuse in the parts of Kenya where Bridge has operated, regardless of whether the abuse occurred at a Bridge location, and would provide survivors, on a case-by-case basis, with funds related to the program’s services. In other words, the plan leaves only a narrow window for Bridge sexual assault survivors to get funds.

A group of nonprofit organizations urged the Bank’s board to reject the proposal because it failed to provide direct compensation for harms suffered. “IFC’s MAP fails to do the one thing that is required of it: provide remedy to the Bridge survivors,” they wrote in a letter. “It is a global embarrassment that signals the moral bankruptcy of the IFC’s leadership.”

The Bank board approved the plan anyway, though it can be updated in the future. The IFC told The Intercept that its key objective was to develop a program that would give Bridge child abuse survivors the support they need, and that it would determine specific ways of offering financial support in consultation with survivors and other stakeholders. That process could result in survivors being given payments, Emily Horgan, a CAO spokesperson, told The Intercept. Civil society groups say they will continue to push for direct financial compensation.

World Bank President Ajay Banga, meanwhile, has tried to do damage control. In a May letter to Warren and Welch, he said that the Bank is “committed to supporting the survivors,” according to a source familiar with the matter. Banga, however, did not mention direct payments for harm as a possible remedy.

He later expressed regrets about the IFC’s failure to monitor the Bridge investment during a June fireside chat with World Bank employees, according to a video clip obtained by The Intercept. Banga referred to Bridge as stain on the World Bank’s reputation. “We owed it to ourselves and our children to investigate it, to be open about it to other shareholders, and to do something about it,” Banga said. He added that World Bank employees should be “caring about what the heck went wrong in our institution, and how can we all fix it together.”

The World Bank Group did not respond to requests for comment.

“We Have a Voice”

Last year, Emily and three other sexual abuse survivors approached the CAO about their experiences at Bridge. While the abuse they described was part of the same pattern that the CAO was investigating in the Bridge 04 case, the CAO launched an investigation into Learn Capital, the firm that had invested in NewGlobe Schools and which was an IFC client at the time.

Earlier this month, the CAO completed its assessment report related to the claims from the four young women, who filed the complaints anonymously for security reasons. In it, the CAO describes how neither Learn Capital nor Bridge wants to engage in a dispute resolution dialogue with complainants who did not want to reveal their identities. It is now up to the CAO to decide whether the allegations warrant further investigation.

“It is appalling to read how dismissive both Bridge and Learn Capital are of the complaints by former students who were sexually abused at Bridge schools. Any organization that is serious about their commitment to child protection and their duty of care to children in their custody would be doing everything possible to support these girls right now and to compensate them for the long-term harm they have suffered,” said David Pred, executive director of Inclusive Development International. 

For Emily, the process of seeking reparations and working with the CAO and civil society groups has been restorative in and of itself. “The more we meet, the more I learn new things,” said Emily, who, through this process, has found a way to destigmatize the sexual abuse. She has become a de facto leader for the other survivors, encouraging them to come forward and report. “We have a voice,” she said proudly.

Emily’s father passed away suddenly in September. Now living alone and working full-time as a beautician, she has decided to keep fighting for justice to honor his memory. She still has dreams of becoming a counselor and helping other survivors of sexual assault to heal and move forward with their lives. But for that, she needs money for school.

Update: June 17, 2024
After this article was published, the World Bank Group postponed its board vote on the International Finance Corporation’s action plan to address school safety and labor issues at Bridge International Academies schools in Kenya. The article was updated to note this development.

The post World Bank Financing Arm Rejects Calls to Directly Compensate Victims of Harm at Kenya Schools appeared first on The Intercept.

As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.

Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.

According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”

But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.

Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades. 

The world’s attention has been on the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 36,000 people — including more than 15,000 children — and prompted accusations of genocide from U.N. officials and at the International Court of Justice. In the name of eliminating Hamas in retaliation for the attacks in October, the Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip continues.

But Israel has also transformed its tactics in the West Bank. Since June of last year, and with increasing regularity during the Gaza offensive, the Israel Defense Forces have shown a new willingness to use air power in the West Bank, regardless of the collateral damage to children and other civilians caught in the blasts.

An open-source Intercept investigation documented at least 37 Israeli airstrikes, drone strikes, and attacks by helicopter gunships in the West Bank since June 2023, which have killed 55 Palestinians, according to the United Nations. Most attacks struck densely populated urban areas and refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus, all in the northern part of the West Bank. 

The Israeli military repeatedly stated on social media that the strikes were carried out to kill terrorists. But this investigation identified a different pattern: Nearly half of the people killed in the strikes were children.

Some of the children killed were throwing homemade explosives at Israeli troops, or were close to armed men when they were killed. Many were unarmed and uninvolved in any confrontations. Their ages ranged from 11 to 17.

The database of attacks was compiled using information published by news outlets, the Negotiations Affairs Department of the State of Palestine, and the Israeli military. The determination of whether children were killed in the process is based on publicly available information and documentation gathered by Defense for Children International-Palestine. The Israeli military did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the findings of this investigation.

Many of these strikes are part of a broader Israeli campaign of targeted killings: assassinations of individuals by Israeli forces that, despite the name, often kill people who happen to be near the target at the time of the strike. Targeted killings, and these aerial attacks more broadly, are considered by some experts to be likely violations of international law.

“One of the things this says, which is not particularly surprising, is that the Israeli military is far more concerned about protecting the lives of its soldiers than it is with protecting the lives of civilians who may be killed when they drop bombs from the sky,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program and senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

The airstrikes began last June.

Ashraf Morad Mahmoud Al-Sa’di, 15, was killed by a drone strike — the first fatal strike documented in the West Bank since the Second Intifada — alongside two young Palestinian men in agricultural lands close to the Al-Jalameh military checkpoint, near the wall between Israel and the occupied territories. According to documentation collected by DCI-P, Al-Sa’di and the two men opened fire at Israeli military vehicles, and were later killed by a drone strike in their car.

After October 7, however, the pace of the airstrikes accelerated. Eight children, ages 11 to 17, were among over a dozen people killed in a series of drone, helicopter, and plane attacks on Jenin and the Nur Shams refugee camp late that month. In November, four children, ages 12 to 16, were killed over the course of seven drone strikes across the West Bank. On December 12, a strike killed a 17-year-old who was standing near three armed men.

Some of the children killed in the first months of airstrikes were described as armed or throwing homemade explosives at Israeli soldiers carrying out raids into the West Bank, according to DCI-P documentation. In other cases, what the children were doing in the moments before their death is unclear and could not be confirmed by DCI-P.

But in the waning days of 2023, two children — unarmed, uninvolved — were also targeted and killed by an Israeli drone strike.

The strike took place on December 27, during an Israeli raid on Nur Shams camp, one of 48 raids across the West Bank that day. While the Israeli forces destroyed parts of a kindergarten building, Palestinian fighters confronted them. In the words of the Israeli Air Force, “A terrorist squad was identified that threw explosives at the forces, and an Air Force aircraft attacked the squad.” Six people were killed, and another six were injured. 

Hamza Ahmad Mostafa Hmaid, 16, and Ahmad Abdulrahman Issa Saleh, 17, were among the dead. Hmaid and Saleh had not been a part of the group confronting Israeli soldiers, DCI-P reported.

They would not be the last unarmed, uninvolved children to die from an Israeli missile strike. On January 7, Wadea Yaser Hasan Asous, 17, was killed by a drone-fired missile near Jenin. Israeli forces were withdrawing after a raid when a group of Palestinians confronted them with explosives, according to documentation gathered by DCI-P. After the Israeli vehicles left the area, an Israeli drone fired on a different group of Palestinians, including Asous, who were sitting around a fire near an all-night cafe. Seven Palestinians, including four brothers, were killed in the attack. 

Later in January, a drone strike during a raid on the Tulkarem refugee camp killed three Palestinian boys, all aged 17. The boys were walking near an armed young man, according to DCI-P, but were themselves unarmed and were not participating in confrontations. Seven other people, including three paramedics, were injured in the raid.

The airstrikes have not let up. In the February strike on the white Mazda, 16-year-old Jaradat was fatally injured. On a single night in March, five individuals were killed in drone strikes in Jenin and Tulkarem. 

A total of six children have been killed this year to date in aerial attacks in the West Bank, as documented by DCI-P. In the latest attack, on June 6, an IDF helicopter carried out strikes during a raid in Jenin. The gunship’s missiles did not kill, but Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinians, including one child, in the raid. 

Bombs and missiles don’t only kill; they also maim those nearby. After an airstrike on Jenin last fall that sent roughly 20 people to the hospital, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, published an account of the scene. “Patients had lost their limbs, lost their legs,” said Dr. Elma Wong, an anesthetist with the group. “Lots of shrapnel injuries, which meant a piece of metal [went] into the chest, into the abdomen, into the head.” Two patients didn’t survive.

Israel’s reintroduction of air attacks in the West Bank comes alongside the intensification of land incursions, also called raids. In the year before October 2023, Israeli forces launched an average of 600 raids per month in the occupied territories. In the months since, raids have ratcheted up to over 1,000 per month. Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank killed 507 Palestinians — including 121 children — in 2023, according to DCI-P, making last year the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005, when the U.N. started recording casualties.

The Israeli military last regularly used air power in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, which lasted from September 2000 to February 2005, often in pursuit of assassinations, or targeted killings.

“The marriage of combat helicopters with special ground forces has become our ‘dream team’ for targeted killing operations,” remarked an Israeli general in 2003. By January 2005, media and defense sources reported over 550 attacks by the IAF on Palestinian targets.

These targeted killings weren’t only deadly for those targeted. According to B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based human rights nonprofit, targeted assassinations killed 103 Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. Just over 75 percent of those killed were the targets; the rest were collateral damage.

At the time, the U.S. government vocally opposed these killings, referring to them explicitly as assassinations. “The United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations,” said U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk in July 2001, on Israeli broadcast television.

Today, as the targeted killings continue, the State Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the current U.S. position on such killings or on the Israeli forces’ use of air power in the West Bank.

In 2006, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that targeted killings in the West Bank and Gaza had to be investigated after the fact to determine whether the killings met proportionality and targeting norms, but recent scholarship has questioned the “composition, objectivity, and independence” of the committees carrying out these investigations. “The doubt with Israel is that there has been so much impunity for Israeli violations, that nobody trusts such a process,” Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, told The Intercept. 

Several factors have contributed to this new wave of airstrikes in the West Bank. In part, they’re the result of an evolution in military tactics by both Israeli and Palestinian combatants.

This campaign marks Israel’s first use of armed drones in the West Bank since the Second Intifada — and the first time the IDF is announcing its use of drone strikes in the West Bank as they happen on social media. The IDF used drones to assassinate militants in Gaza in the intervening years, according to leaked documents, but until 2022, the government actively censored mentions of their use in the Israeli press.

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Israeli Raids in the West Bank Push Palestinians to Brink Again

Palestinian fighters’ have adopted more ambush tactics and deployed more improvised explosive devices in response to Israeli military raids in the West Bank in recent years, which Munayyer said could account for the new prominence of air power. In years past, “there were tactical ways in which the military could go into even densely populated refugee camps, conduct raids, and be able to do that with an acceptable degree of risk to their troops,” he said. “With the introduction of ambushes and improvised explosives as developed tactics, that started to change.” 

Other researchers trace the recent surge in West Bank airstrikes to the failure of the Palestinian Authority — the government that has partial control over the West Bank, which is distinct from Gaza’s elected Hamas leadership — to tamp down on militant activity in the West Bank. After a January strike in Balata refugee camp, Seth J. Frantzman, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and analyst at the Jerusalem Post, wrote that “increased activity from groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad have led Israel to be more aggressive in its campaigns.”

Israel has declared that the law of armed conflict governs its use of lethal force in the West Bank, whether that force comes from the barrel of a gun or the blast of a bomb.

In the same 2006 ruling that called for investigations of targeted strikes, Israel’s Supreme Court determined that the international laws of war applied to Israel’s actions in the West Bank, since Israel and Palestinian militant groups were in continuous armed conflict in the occupied territories.

But many experts say that international human rights law applies instead of — or in addition to — the laws of armed conflict. In this view, which casts Israeli forces in the role of law enforcement officers, rather than combatants in a war, the use of force is only allowable as a last resort to protect the life of an officer or others from immediate serious injury or death. 

Ido Rosenzweig — director of cyber, belligerencies, and terrorism Research at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions at Israel’s Haifa University — said that he believed a law enforcement situation could escalate into an armed conflict situation on the spot, changing the legal paradigm in real time. “Targeted killing on its own is not illegal,” he said. “It has to be done according to laws of armed conflict.”

Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, said that the dominant view is that humanitarian law applies in conjunction with international human rights law in the West Bank. “Israel’s international human rights law obligations apply extraterritorially in occupied territory, even though Israel rejects that,” Saul said.

Israel has obligations under the Geneva Conventions as an occupying power and under international human rights law to not use lethal force in policing situations, said Brian Castner, senior crisis adviser and weapons investigator at Amnesty International, unless it is used as a last resort to protect the life of the officer or others from immediate serious injury or death. “This is a very high standard, as spelled out in the UN Basic Principles on Policing,” Castner said. 

Another expert said the strikes are likely a violation of international law. Öykü Irmakkesen, a legal consultant at Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre in Jerusalem, commented in writing that the law enforcement regime under international human rights law governs all operations of the Israeli security forces. “It is thus extremely unlikely that the air and drone strikes targeting individuals are in compliance with Israel’s obligations under international law,” she commented.

In the middle of the night last November, an explosion rocked the center of the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. The camp is a densely packed place, built in 1950 to shelter 5,000 refugees. It now houses approximately 30,000 people.

The homes in Balata are so close together that most of them receive no direct sunlight, said Ibrahim, a camp resident and staff member of a community center who asked to only be identified by his first name. 

The Israeli drone strike targeted a building in the center of the camp that functioned as the local headquarters for Fatah, the political party that exercises partial control over the West Bank (and has fought armed conflicts of its own against Hamas). The building was destroyed, and five people died, including 14-year-old Mohammad Musa Mohammad Msaimi. 

“People woke up with a shock,” Ibrahim said, and emerged from their rooms to find that seven or eight of the homes near the targeted building were damaged to the point that they were deemed unsuitable for habitation. The inhabitants of the damaged homes were forced to move in with family members or rent elsewhere in the camp. 

Repairing a home or renting a new one is out of reach for most residents of Balata. The economic situation there was difficult before October 7, with unemployment rates at 17 percent. But it has only worsened since. The camp’s residents who previously worked on the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice lines are now blocked from doing so, after Israel indefinitely paused Palestinian workers’ permits in the wake of the October 7 attacks. “It’s a complete closure,” said Ibrahim. 

The displacement and destruction Ibrahim described in Balata is playing out across the West Bank. “The new level of violence by the Israeli army in the West Bank, specifically targeting refugee camps, has resulted in a large amount of internal displacement,” said Aseel Baidoun, acting director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians. “The camps are becoming more and more uninhabitable.”

While largely unseen compared to physical damage, air and drone strikes have a devastating psychological effect. A psychosocial specialist from Nablus, who requested to remain anonymous for security reasons, grapples with the increase in violence personally and professionally. Every morning, her son asks the same questions: “Is everything normal? Are we going to school?” The answer to those questions depends on if there was a strike, a raid, or any other events in Nablus overnight. 

At the nonprofit where she works, the need for psychosocial and financial support has increased significantly. The nonprofit provides sessions with social workers and psychologists to disadvantaged families in Nablus. It used to serve around 70 families. Since October 7, their work has ballooned to serve over 100 beneficiaries. She’s seen new behavioral issues in children and an increase in attachment issues across generations. 

For older generations, the strikes are a reminder of previous conflicts. “A lot of people are used to that from the First Intifada and the Second Intifada,” she said. For children, it’s a different story. “It’s a new thing for the new generation. It’s unexpected and very scary for them.” 

Community-based organizations in Tulkarem and Jenin have reported an increased demand for mental health and psychosocial support services, said Baidoun of Medical Aid for Palestinians. “The almost weekly attacks, invasions, airstrikes, and bombings are having a huge negative impact on people’s mental health.” 

The post Israel’s New Air War in the West Bank: Nearly Half of the Dead are Children appeared first on The Intercept.

“Following recent regulatory changes in Russia, we received persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that five add-ons be removed from the Mozilla add-on store,” a Mozilla spokesperson told The Intercept in response to a request for comment. “After careful consideration, we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within Russia. Recognizing the implications of these actions, we are closely evaluating our next steps while keeping in mind our local community.”

“It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information.”

Stanislav Shakirov, the chief technical officer of Roskomsvoboda, a Russian open internet group, said he hoped it was a rash decision by Mozilla that will be more carefully examined.

“It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information, and its policy was somewhat different,” Shakirov said. “And due to these values, it should not be so simple to comply with state censors and fulfill the requirements of laws that have little to do with common sense.”

Developers of digital tools designed to get around censorship began noticing recently that their Firefox add-ons were no longer available in Russia.

On June 8, the developer of Censor Tracker, an add-on for bypassing internet censorship restrictions in Russia and other former Soviet countries, made a post on the Mozilla Foundation’s discussion forums saying that their extension was unavailable to users in Russia.

The developer of another add-on, Runet Censorship Bypass, which is specifically designed to bypass Roskomnadzor censorship, posted in the thread that their extension was also blocked. The developer said they did not receive any notification from Mozilla regarding the block.

Two VPN add-ons, Planet VPN and FastProxy — the latter explicitly designed for Russian users to bypass Russian censorship — are also blocked. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are designed to obscure internet users’ locations by routing users’ traffic through servers in other countries.

The Intercept verified that all four add-ons are blocked in Russia. If the webpage for the add-on is accessed from a Russian IP address, the Mozilla add-on page displays a message: “The page you tried to access is not available in your region.” If the add-on is accessed with an IP address outside of Russia, the add-on page loads successfully.

Supervision of Communications

Roskomnadzor is responsible for “control and supervision in telecommunications, information technology, and mass communications,” according to the Russia’s federal censorship agency’s English-language page.

In March, the New York Times reported that Roskomnadzor was increasing its operations to restrict access to censorship circumvention technologies such as VPNs. In 2018, there were multiple user reports that Roskomnadzor had blocked access to the entire Firefox Add-on Store.

According to Mozilla’s Pledge for a Healthy Internet, the Mozilla Foundation is “committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.” Mozilla’s second principle in their manifesto says, “The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”

The Mozilla Foundation, which in tandem with its for-profit arm Mozilla Corporation releases Firefox, also operates its own VPN service, Mozilla VPN. However, it is only available in 33 countries, a list that doesn’t include Russia. 

The same four censorship circumvention add-ons also appear to be available for other web browsers without being blocked by the browsers’ web stores. Censor Tracker, for instance, remains available for the Google Chrome web browser, and the Chrome Web Store page for the add-on works from Russian IP addresses. The same holds for Runet Censorship Bypass, VPN Planet, and FastProxy.

“In general, it’s hard to recall anyone else who has done something similar lately,” said Shakirov, the Russian open internet advocate. “For the last few months, Roskomnadzor (after the adoption of the law in Russia that prohibits the promotion of tools for bypassing blockings) has been sending such complaints about content to everyone.”

The post Firefox Browser Blocks Anti-Censorship Add-Ons at Russia’s Request appeared first on The Intercept.

As with many large corporations, Apple employees can make donations to a number of nonprofit organizations and receive matching contributions from their employer through a platform called Benevity. Among the charitable organizations eligible for dollar-matching from Apple are Friends of the IDF, an organization that collects donations on behalf of soldiers in the Israeli military, as well as a number of groups that contribute to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank, including HaYovel, One Israel Fund, the Jewish National Fund, and IsraelGives.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

“Unfortunately, there has been very little scrutiny into 501(c)(3) organizations that openly support illegal activities in the West Bank and Gaza,” said Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who described the organizations listed in the campaign as among “the worst actors.”

A legislative effort in New York called the “Not On Our Dime Act” is seeking to challenge the ability of nonprofit organizations in the state to fundraise for illegal settlements, including by making them subject to legal liability or loss of their nonprofit status. Laws against funding activities that violate international human rights law are poorly enforced by the IRS, said Shamas, leaving it to companies and individuals themselves to ensure that their contributions are not going toward organizations potentially engaged in illegal activity.

“Companies often rely on the fact that an organization has 501(c)(3) status. But regardless of whether an organization has nonprofit status, it is illegal to aid and abet war crimes,” Shamas said. “Apple should ensure that it is not sending funds to any of these organizations — especially now when there’s no shortage of evidence or information about the unlawful activities of the settlement movement in the West Bank.”

Apple employees, who organized under the name Apples4Ceasefire, had previously objected to the disciplining and firing of Apple Store employees who “dared to express support of the Palestinian people in the form of kaffiyehs, pins, bracelets, or clothing,” according to a public statement published in April.

The letter — signed by 133 people who describe themselves as “a group of shareholders and current and former employees” — comes on the heels of broader activism at tech companies by some workers objecting to perceived complicity between their employers and the ongoing war in Gaza. Earlier this year, Google fired dozens of employees who took part in a protest over the company’s involvement in a cloud-computing project known as Project Nimbus, which provided services to the Israeli government and military. An open letter from employees of Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — has criticized its treatment of Palestinian solidarity within the company.

The provision of donations to NGOs helping facilitate the illegal occupation of the West Bank has come under increasing scrutiny as the situation in the region has deteriorated since the October 7 attacks by Hamas and subsequent Israeli military onslaught. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, are believed to have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces in a campaign that has resulted in war crimes charges brought by the International Criminal Court and genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. 

The conduct and discipline of the IDF has come under particular scrutiny as soldiers have been accused of torture, extrajudicial killings, and other abuses against Palestinians, alongside social media footage posted by many IDF service members themselves of apparent looting and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees. Friends of the IDF, one of the charities on Apple’s matching donations list, is registered as a nonprofit organization for the purposes of fundraising for IDF service members and claims to have transferred $34.5 million in donations to the Israeli military in the first weeks after the war began.

This conflict windfall has helped other organizations on Apple’s matching contribution list. An analysis by The Guardian last December showed that the crowdfunding platform IsraelGives received over $5.3 million in donations in just two months after the war to support military, paramilitary, and settlement activity in the West Bank. The same analysis showed that this money came disproportionately from U.S. donors, and included specific funding campaigns to support illegal settlements whose residents had a history of violent attacks against Palestinian civilians. 

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Other organizations on Apple’s matching contribution list appear to include support for religious extremism or back activity in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law. The One Israel Fund, for example, includes on its website a talk titled “The Arab Takeover of Judea and Samaria: Who Is Behind It; What Can Be Done?” — invoking the religious name of the territory that is deemed to be part of a future Palestinian state under international law. HaYovel, a Christian Zionist organization, states on its website that its goal is to help further the “prophetic restoration” of a region that “many incorrectly refer to as the West Bank.” The charitable status of the Jewish National Fund has come under criticism in both the U.S. and European Union due its historic involvement in the “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians since the founding of the state of Israel, as well as ongoing support for dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank. 

Like many of its competitors, Apple professes a corporate commitment to “respecting internationally recognized human rights” frameworks, including the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to its website. Since the war began, the U.N. Human Rights Office has repeatedly decried atrocities committed by the IDF.

The post Apple Matches Worker Donations to IDF and Illegal Settlements, Employees Allege appeared first on The Intercept.

DEIR Al-BALAH, GAZA ­— Suhail Mutlaq Abu Nasser didn’t originally come from the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. But, by the time the Israeli military attacked the area on Saturday — part of a large-scale operation to rescue four Israeli hostages seized from a rave on October 7 — the camp was the closest thing Abu Nasser had to a home.

After initially settling in the area in November, Abu Nasser, 60, faced more displacements, but the tortuous journey brought him back to Nuseirat this spring. The house in Nuseirat he’d taken up had been bombed and was partially destroyed, but he reasoned it was better than the nylon tent he had stayed in down south in Rafah.

On Saturday, at around 11 a.m., Abu Nasser was standing by a window in the home when missiles began to rain down on the area. One struck just 20 meters away.

“The area turned to ashes,” Abu Nasser told me in a Sunday interview. “I couldn’t find my wife and started calling out to those around me to ensure they were still alive.”

“The street was filled with civilian body parts and many injuries bleeding out without ambulances being able to reach them.”

Driven outside by fear of his building being bombed, Abu Nasser was confronted by a massive Israeli attack unfolding around him. The streets were filled by a swarm of quadcopter drones equipped with small arms. Tank tracks could be heard nearby. U.S.-made Apache attack helicopters hovered. Nearby homes were hit with missiles.

“We heard people crying for help in the bombed houses,” Abu Nasser said. “They had martyrs and injuries, but we couldn’t help them.”

The scene was gruesome. “The street was filled with civilian body parts,” he said, “and many injuries bleeding out without ambulances being able to reach them.”

The sustained attack on Nuseirat lasted about 75 minutes.

“The operation ended, but we stayed in our places, afraid to move for a long time,” Abu Nasser recalled. “It was a horrific scene and a difficult time that I had never experienced in my life.”

“Why Did They Deserve This?”

As the Israeli forces withdrew with four hostages in tow, they left death and destruction in their wake. The authorities in Gaza announced that 274 people, including 64 children and 57 women, had been killed, with more than 400 injuries, and that 89 inhabited homes or residential buildings had been bombed during the raid.

A release from the Hamas government media office in Gaza said Israeli soldiers disguised themselves as displaced persons in carrying out what is being called the Nuseirat massacre.

The Washington Post verified two videos of a truck bearing the logo of a dishwashing soap being escorted out of Nuseirat by Israeli tanks — though whether the scene was before or after the attack was unclear. Another video posted online showed a Mercedes-Benz van with living items strapped to it — a “Grapes of Wrath”-like scene common in Gaza. An eyewitness told the Post that about 10 Israeli soldiers leapt out of the van, shooting the eyewitness’s brother. (A representative for Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told The Intercept no civilian vehicles were used in the attack.)

“There is nothing, nothing at all that justifies what I saw today. Nothing.”

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, which I visited on Saturday, was overflowing with casualties from Nuseirat. Ambulances continually arrived, and screams filled the air. Chaos reigned in the emergency room throughout the afternoon, said Karin Huster, a policy organizer and supervisor working at Al-Aqsa with Doctors Without Borders, according to a recording she sent from Gaza that was released by the medical aid group, known by its French initials MSF.

“There is nothing, nothing at all that justifies what I saw today,” Huster said. “Nothing.”

“These children — the 3-month-old, the 7-year-old, the 12-year-old who died — the 25-year-old man, the 78-year-old woman, who all have horrendous injuries,” she continued. “Why did they deserve this? And why is the world looking on in silence? To what level of horror do we need to go before we finally do something, before we finally tell Israel that this is not acceptable?”

The Road to Nuseirat

I was on my way to Nuseirat when the Israeli military launched its attack.

The war has been turbulent for me. Like Abu Nasser, I’ve been displaced and relocated three times during the war. Most recently, in May, I arrived in Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza.

Like many others, I have lost loved ones and I have lost colleagues. One of the losses, my husband, was the epitome of both and much more. He was a partner in our production company, the father of my daughter, and the love of my life. He was killed by the Israelis in October, shielding me and our daughter when our home was struck by two rockets. I knew I had to go on, to keep telling stories.

And so it was on June 8 that I set out by car to make the roughly 4-mile trip from Deir al-Balah to Nuseirat to do an interview for a film we’re working on. The woman who was to be my interview subject lives in the camp.

As we were approaching Nuseirat, I felt a pang of uneasiness. I told the driver, “I feel uncomfortable going there and I’m thinking of canceling the trip.” Suddenly, everything escalated rapidly.

Through the car window, I saw four helicopter gunships flying low and firing continuously. Artillery shells were landing nearby, seemingly at random. The sounds of explosions were incessant.

We were contemplating whether to proceed or turn back when a missile targeted the house next to us, and shrapnel flew over our heads.

All I could think of in the moment was my little daughter. She had turned 1 within two weeks of her father’s killing. I wondered how she could possibly cope with losing her mother as well.

We headed back to Deir al-Balah and to Al-Aqsa Hospital.

“The Gamut of War Wounds”

Hospitals in the Gaza Strip have repeatedly faced attacks by the Israeli military, even as they sometimes served as shelters for displaced people. Health care facilities have come under sustained siege and faced repeated evacuation orders, with Israeli snipers picking people off outside as they tried to follow the commands.

Foreign doctors returning from aid missions to Gaza have reported unspeakable carnage. With military assaults and resources like fuel under strain, maternity wards have struggled to deliver and keep premature babies alive. And hundreds of health care workers have disappeared into Israeli detention.

Huster, the MSF aid worker at Al-Aqsa, said military activity in Deir al-Balah began around 11:30 a.m., according to the recording released by MSF.

“We started to hear really, really intense IDF activity, lots of bombardments, lots of shooting, helicopters,” she said in the recording. Soon, Huster said, the MSF workers heard a “huge blast right next to our office, which is not very far from Al-Aqsa Hospital.”

Huster said the MSF workers began preparing supplies and soon received a plea from the hospital director to come assist. In the early afternoon, after evaluating the security situation, they arrived at the hospital’s emergency room.

“It was, as usual, mayhem,” said Huster. “But it was compounded mayhem from the last four days: total chaos inside.”

The ER was “completely packed with patients on the floor coming from the bombings in Nuseirat” — there were hundreds of patients, she said.

“There were children everywhere, there were women, there were men,” Huster goes on in the recording. “We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs, traumatic brain injuries. Fractures, obviously, big burns.”

“Kids completely grey or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents — many of them not screaming because they are in shock,” she continues.

At one point during my visit, a panic coursed through the media tent. Word had spread that the Israeli military called the hospital to warn that it was going to attack — specifically against the gathered journalists.

Whether it was a rumor or not — the IDF, in a statement to The Intercept, denied any hospital evacuation had been ordered — we decided to leave. Having fled to the hospital to escape the violence of the attack on Nuseirat, now I was fleeing from it.

The doctors and the families of the injured refused to leave. The attack never came.

“Waiting for Death”

Abu Nasser and his wife had been displaced the first time in November, from their home in Al-Saftawi, in Gaza’s north. They left on foot after their neighborhood was attacked by the Israeli military. Artillery shells and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon whose use in civilian areas is banned, struck the area, and a shelter adjacent to their building was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike.

The journey along an Israeli-designated safe route took Abu Nasser and his wife 10 miles south, as the crow flies, to their first stint in Nuseirat. It was a new home, but only for a month and a half.

The displacement became an unwelcome pattern. In late December, Abu Nasser heeded Israel’s evacuation orders to again move south, this time ending up in Rafah with about 1.4 million other internally displaced Palestinians. They stayed in a tent in the Tel al-Sultan camp, not too far from Rafah’s center.

Five months later, when Rafah, in turn, was threatened by the Israeli army, Abu Nasser left again, returning to his bombed-out home in Nuseirat in May. The Tel al-Sultan camp in Rafah would become the site of what is now known as the “tent massacre” — named for the very shelters Abu Nasser left behind.

When the bombs struck near his place in Nuseirat on Saturday, and Abu Nasser and his wife fled to the street, he was surprised to find so many ways to die: tanks, attack helicopters, shells, missiles, and, picking people off on the street, the drones with small arms attached.

“People were running before our eyes, fleeing from the drones,” Abu Nasser said. “And we hid in a place the drones couldn’t reach.”

They stayed hidden behind the stairs for more than an hour, until the attack subsided.

“We were waiting for death,” Abu Nasser told me, “expecting the house to be bombed over our heads.”

Sharif Abdel Kouddous contributed reporting to this story.

The post Inside the Nuseirat Massacre: This Is the Carnage I Saw During Israel’s Hostage Rescue appeared first on The Intercept.

The article, which calls for “standing up to Africa’s juntas,” fails to mention that at least 15 military officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror.

“An alarming string of military coups across the Sahel in recent years has greatly marginalized Western engagement in this important and highly volatile region,” wrote Jeffrey Smith, the founding director of the pro-democracy nonprofit organization Vanguard Africa, and Joseph Siegle, the director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, in a recent article published in the Journal of Democracy as well as the Africa Center.

Focusing specifically on the mutinies in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, they note, “Russia has had an active and not-so-subtle hand in coups in each of these three countries, which were preceded by at least a year of intensive disinformation aimed at destabilizing the democratically elected (and Western-leaning) governments in place.”

A series of reports by The Intercept found that military personnel who had received U.S. support were involved in coups in Burkina Faso (in 2014, 2015, and twice in 2022), Mali (in 2012, 2020, and 2021), and Niger (in 2023). U.S.-supported officers also played a role in coups in Mauritania (2008), Gambia (2014), Chad (2021), and Guinea (2021). 

The total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11 may be far higher than is known, but the State Department, which tracks data on U.S. trainees, is either unwilling or unable to supply it. 

The Pentagon is mandated to provide a briefing on coups carried out by U.S.-trained African partners to the Senate and House Armed Services committees but missed its March deadline. A source on Capitol Hill told The Intercept that the Pentagon eventually held the required classified briefing, but the Department of Defense failed to confirm the information. 

The U.S. has recently been forced into withdrawing its troops from Niger and Chad due to souring relations with these longtime allies and the former acolytes who now lead them. 

“While the juntas justify their coups — and continued strongman rule — based on the claim that they are uniquely able to restore security, episodes of violence linked to militant Islamist groups have doubled since these militaries have seized power,” wrote Smith and Siegle. 

Aside from a single sentence noting that “Western countries had been working closely with democratically elected governments in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali for more than a decade,” the report contains no substantive discussion of the billions in security assistance the U.S. government has pumped into the Sahel, nor the military training provided to many of the leaders of these coups. The failure of U.S. counterterrorism efforts and the far higher spikes in terrorist violence over the span of U.S. involvement also go unmentioned. 

Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism assistance in the Sahel. Last year, the number of violent events in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger alone reached 3,716, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a crisis monitoring organization. This represents a jump of more than 41,000 percent.

This has been disastrous for the people of the Sahel. In that same period, the number of fatalities linked to Islamist violence has skyrocketed from the State Department’s count of 23 deaths in 2002 and 2003 to 11,643 in 2023 — a jump of more than 50,000 percent — according to figures provided by the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

Earlier this year, Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. Africa Command, pushed back on any implication that U.S. support to African military personnel was linked to their rebellions. “There is no syllabus for overthrowing a government; not in our institutions,” said Langley. “It’s safe to say there’s no correlation or causation of U.S. training to a coup happening.” 

Siegle did not reply to a request for an interview sent to him via the Africa Center. Smith told The Intercept he was unsure if the rise in terrorism across the Sahel was higher during America’s interventions compared to the period of Russian involvement, but emphasized that this was “not an apology for or justification of failed U.S. policy for over a generation.” He also conceded that U.S. training of junta leaders, and abusive militaries in the region writ large, was “a fair criticism to raise.”

The post After Training African Coup Leaders, Pentagon Blames Russia for African Coups  appeared first on The Intercept.

The Columbia Law School students who run CLR were considering a proposal to append a note to the Palestine article disclaiming what the directors, in an unsigned letter to students, described as “secrecy and deviation from the Review’s usual processes.” In the letter proposing the text, the board of directors said it wanted to see the journal put back online.

The student editors rejected the deal for a disclaimer by a 20-5 vote, according to a student and documentation reviewed by The Intercept.

“To the extent that they’re trying to censor Rabea, that simply won’t happen — that simply hasn’t happened and can’t.”

“I think that this whole year, and particularly this last semester, has been about students recognizing, stepping into their power,” said Sohum Pal, a CLR articles editor. “And I’m very glad that the law students at the law review are doing the same.”

When the article on Palestine, titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” was published on Monday morning, Rabea Eghbariah became the first Palestinian legal scholar to publish in CLR. But within hours of publication, after months of revisions on the lengthy piece, the board of directors took the journal’s website completely offline, saying they had concerns about the process.

“Powerful legal scholarship cannot be silenced,” said Pal. “It’s already been circulating. It’s already gotten far more views or reads than the average law review article. And, yeah, to the extent that they’re trying to censor Rabea, that simply won’t happen — that simply hasn’t happened and can’t.”

The Intercept was not immediately able to reach members or representatives of the CLR board of directors, which oversees the independent, nonprofit student-led publication, for comment about the vote or the letter.

After voting, the students sent an email to board member Gillian Metzger, a Columbia law professor, saying that if the board continues to hinder the publication of Eghbariah’s piece, the staff of CLR will stop all work on the journal. The email, which was reviewed by The Intercept, said the students would continue to work on the Bluebook, a legal citation guide maintained and updated by four schools’ law reviews, including CLR. (Metzger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

On Thursday afternoon, the board of directors reinstated the website, including Eghbariah’s article. A link at the bottom of the CLR homepage went to a statement from the board about Eghbariah’s article.

Eghbariah told The Intercept he viewed the board of directors’ actions as an example of a “Palestine exception” to free speech and academic freedom.

“The CLR Board of Directors has yet to contact me or officially explain to me their decision to take down the website, let alone their proposal to add a disclaimer to the article,” Eghbariah said, in a statement received after publication. “The fact that the Board could not cite any substantive deficiencies with the piece but rather resorted to allegations about internal processes, which were rejected by CLR editors, tells me all I need to know. This is not only a Palestine exception in action but also a disingenuous attempt to manufacture controversy that undermines and deflects attention from the content of the article.”

The website takedown was the latest in a battle on Columbia’s campus — and on campuses across the country — over free speech and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Protests erupted on many of the campuses over Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, including at least 15,000 children. At Columbia and other universities, demonstrators were met with brutal police violence.

Disputes over the Gaza war more broadly have spilled into many aspects of university life, with pro-Palestine students often facing consequences ranging from censure, expulsion, and even censorship — including at well-respected academic journals. In November, the Harvard Law Review voted to kill an online article, also by Eghbariah, that had gone through the full editing process.

On Tuesday, the day after The Intercept published its story on the directors’ initial suppression of Eghbariah’s piece, student editors said they received a letter sent on behalf of the board of directors that offered what it said was “the best way to further the many important values at stake.” The proposal in the board letter required that the following statement be attached to Eghbariah’s piece:

“Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept was not subject to the usual processes of review and editing at the Law Review. It was solicited outside of the usual articles selection process and edited and substantiated by a limited number of student editors. Contrary to ordinary practice, it was not made available for all student editors to read. As a result, a number of student editors were unaware of the piece and did not have the usual opportunity to provide input on its content prior to its publication.”

Some of the student editors who worked on Eghbariah’s piece took exception to the directors’ demand. “The letter communicates the Board’s continued stance to usurp and interfere with the student-run editorial process,” Erika Lopez, one of the editors, told The Intercept on Wednesday. “The Board’s seemingly final decision to include a disclaimer is offensive and unprecedented.”

“The letter communicates the Board’s continued stance to usurp and interfere with the student-run editorial process.”

The letter also suggested additional measures, including taking the “article” label away from piece, since it wasn’t facilitated by the articles committee, and soliciting a response to it. Students had previously told The Intercept that CLR’s student administrative board made a unanimous procedural vote to create a committee for shepherding a piece on Palestine; a separate vote on whether or not to solicit a piece and create an opt-in committee to edit it also passed overwhelmingly. 

The Wednesday letter, delivered to students unsigned and not on letterhead, said the board of directors had been “informed that this piece had not been subject to the usual processes of review or selection for articles at the Law Review, and in particular that a number of student editors had been unaware of its existence until two days before.” 

“The secrecy that surrounded this article’s editing and substantiation review is unacceptable,” the directors’ letter said. “It is also unprecedented, in that every piece is either worked on by, or available on request to, all student editors during the editing process.”

The letter also raised questions about the “adequacy of the editing and substantiation processes” in light of the purported secrecy.

“We elected to use a different internal communications policy for the piece; we did not use a different editing process,” one of the editors, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals, told The Intercept on Wednesday. “Any implication that the internal communications policy reflected a deficient editing process is both untrue and insulting to the piece, the author, and our editorial staff.”

On Monday, student editors told The Intercept that the draft was stored on a server available to the opt-in editors of the article because of fears over leaks. The editors who spoke with The Intercept said they had never heard of a previous request by the board to distribute an article draft to the full membership of CLR.

In a statement to The Intercept on Monday, CLR’s board of directors, a group of eminent alumni and Columbia professors, said that it had requested a delay in the publication of the article so its content could be shared with the full membership of the journal, some 100 students. The delay was granted. 

When word of the article began to leak beyond the CLR community, however, the students responsible for producing it published the full May volume of the journal online. In response, the directors shut down the entire law review’s website. The directors, in their statement to The Intercept on Monday, said, “In order to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we have temporarily suspended its website.”

After their vote, some of the CLR students declared a victory.

“I just feel really grateful and proud of my colleagues for taking a meaningful and principled stance tonight,” said Pal, the articles editor. “I tend to be pretty cautious, but I think I also try to be really optimistic. And one thing that we’ve been saying to each other, during this last day, has been that, like, optimism requires a little grain of delusion, and I think that it really feels very meaningful right now, to be deluded enough to think that you can win and then to do it.”

Update: June 6, 2024, 2:02 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include the board’s reinstatement of the website without a PDF link for Rabea Eghbariah’s article; the students’ claim, made in an email, that they intended to keep working on the legal Bluebook; as well as a comment from Eghbariah received after publication.

The post Columbia Law Review Is Back Online After Students Threatened Work Stoppage Over Palestine Censorship appeared first on The Intercept.

In an emergency motion filed Tuesday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued they were “ethically compelled” to ask Judge Ryan Nelson of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to recuse himself because the WJC trip was “explicitly designed to influence U.S. judicial opinion regarding the legality of ongoing Israeli military action against Palestinians.”

The plaintiffs are a mix of Palestinian human rights organizations and individual Palestinians, including Dr. Omar Al-Najjar, who has written about his experiences working in the decimated health infrastructure in Gaza. In November, they filed a complaint in federal court against President Joe Biden and other top officials, seeking “an injunction requiring the United States to fulfill its international law duty to prevent and cease being complicit — through unconditional financial and diplomatic support — in the unfolding genocide in Gaza.”

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The district court dismissed the case in late January but urged the administration “to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.” The plaintiffs appealed to the 9th Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral arguments next week. Nelson’s selection for the three-judge argument panel was announced on Monday.

In March, Nelson joined 13 colleagues from the federal bench on the WJC-sponsored trip. Like Nelson, many of the judges on the trip were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

According to a disclosure about the trip, the judges met with high-ranking members of the Israel Defense Forces about “Operation Swords of Iron” — what Israel calls its current military operation in Gaza — and the application of international humanitarian law during war. The trip also included sessions with one of the attorneys defending Israel before the International Court of Justice, Tal Becker; former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin; and members of Israel’s Supreme Court and Knesset, the disclosure shows.

The judges met with a high-ranking official at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, to get the “American perspective,” one judge told the Jerusalem Post. State Department Secretary Antony Blinken is one of the defendants in the case before the 9th Circuit.

In a LinkedIn post summarizing lessons from the trip, Judge Matthew Solomson of the Federal Court of Claims, who helped organized the delegation, wrote, “Israel’s military culture is very attuned to international law; commanders consult lawyers at every step and the lawyers have veto power. We watched many video clips of Israeli military lawyers stopping strikes based on proportionality and collateral damage assessments. Their enemy doesn’t play by such rules.”

In late March, Nelson and Solomson spoke about the trip at a lunch talk hosted by Harvard Law School’s chapters of the Federalist Society and the Jewish Law Students Association. Their remarks were not made public, but Solomson wrote in a LinkedIn post that Nelson “expressed his inspiring faith in God and, concomitantly, an optimistic view of the future.”

In their recusal motion, the plaintiffs highlight coverage of the trip in the Israeli press, particularly by the English-language ILTV. “This invaluable experience allowed them to delve deeper into the legality of Israel’s conduct in the operation,” ILTV said of the trip in an Instagram post.

“At this time, when Israel is facing so much in the court of public opinion and in the courts around the world,” WJC’s chief marketing officer, Sara Friedman, told ILTV in March, “it’s so important for people who understand the judicial system, who understand the laws of war, to come here.”

“The World Jewish Congress is sending a message by bringing these groups that we are supporting the state of Israel,” Friedman told ILTV. “By bringing these groups here and showing them the truth about what is going on, it’s the best diplomacy we can do.”

Friedman did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about the trip. The Intercept also asked WJC for copies of materials given to the judges during the trip.

An anonymous statement by federal judicial clerks last month criticized the Israel trip.

Peter Joy, who studies legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, said it is often difficult to predict how judges will rule on recusal.

“They make a strong case for the judge to step down,” said Joy. “Here’s somebody who went on a trip, the explicit purpose of which was to try to get Israel’s point of view across.”

Cassandra Burke Robertson, director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, did not think it was a clear-cut case for recusal.

“The closest issue here is that it sounds like officials on the trip may have been providing specific information about the legality of the operation,” Robertson said. “But if the information was more general, then I don’t think it would be disqualifying.”

“Although Judge Nelson certainly COULD recuse, I don’t think recusal is required under the statute or Judicial Canons,” Rory Little, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, told The Intercept in an email. “He might recuse; it’s not a clear case in either direction.”

Arguments are scheduled for June 10, and the plaintiffs asked the 9th Circuit to rule on their emergency recusal motion by Thursday. A spokesperson for the 9th Circuit said the panel will address the motion, “presumably before Monday.”

The Justice Department, which did not oppose the recusal motion, declined to discuss the case.

Correction: June 6, 2024
The story has been updated to correct the date of the oral argument to the 9th Circuit. It is June 10, not January.

The post A Federal Judge Visited Israel on a Junket Designed to Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing a Gaza Case. appeared first on The Intercept.

Khan’s acquittal by the Islamabad High Court is a major victory for the former prime minister and his supporters, coming on the heels of a suspended sentence in a separate corruption case.

The ruling leaves Khan behind bars on precisely one charge: namely, that he and his third wife Bushra Bibi entered into an “un-Islamic marriage,” a crime for which Khan and Bibi are serving seven-year sentences. 

The court, both during the hearing and in its ruling, dove into the details of Bibi’s menstrual cycle, ultimately rejecting her claim that three cycles had passed between her divorce and her marriage to Khan. Instead, the court relied on the word of her ex-husband.

Asked by The Intercept at a briefing, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said the case and its merits were none of the United States’ business.

“We’ve addressed the question of Imran Khan many times,” Miller said. “The legal proceedings against him are something for the Pakistani courts to decide.”

Pressed on whether it was truly the case that Bibi’s menstrual cycles were a matter for the courts, Miller said that perhaps a Pakistani court will toss out this conviction just as they did the cypher case.

The overturning of the so-called cypher case was a blow to the Pakistani government’s contention that Khan was a traitor to his country, and bolsters his supporters’ position that the charges against the imprisoned former prime minister are politically motivated.

Khan and his ex-Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly mishandling the secret document, including Khan’s alleged brandishing a paper copy of it at a political rally.

The cypher has long since been a central piece of drama in Pakistan’s political wrangling. Khan had claimed in several instances, even when still prime minister, that the cypher revealed U.S. involvement in his removal from power in a no-confidence vote in 2022. 

In 2023, the cypher was provided to The Intercept by a source in the Pakistani military. The document showed that during Khan’s time in office, U.S. State Department officials had threatened the then-Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. about damaged ties between the two countries if Khan remained in power. Shortly after the meeting, a vote of no-confidence in Parliament advanced, a move orchestrated by the powerful Pakistani military that succeeded in removing Khan from office.

Since then, Khan and his supporters have been in an escalating conflict with the military, which has led to widespread crackdowns, killings, and torture, as well as a ban on Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI. Khan himself was imprisoned on an array of charges. 

The State Department has remained muted on the crackdown on democracy in Pakistan, including after February elections marred by extensive and brazen fraud.

Despite Khan’s imprisonment and a general ban on his party, candidates associated with PTI did resoundingly well in the vote. Following exit polls that seemed to show PTI-affiliated politicians sailing to victory, official announcements began to pour in that the candidates were losing. Amid allegations of election rigging by the military at the regional level, a coalition of opposition parties took power and was quickly recognized by the U.S.

The charges against Khan have now almost all fallen apart, save for an allegation of legal impropriety in Khan’s marriage to Bibi. 

The court, in its ruling, writes that her ex-husband tried to prevent his then-wife from visiting Khan, saying he “tried to stop her by force and during which hard words and even abuses were also exchanged but of no avail.”

The court, in its ruling, also approvingly reproduced her ex-husband’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, noting that “complainant believes that sister of respondent No.02” — Khan’s wife — “who resides in UAE has strong connection with Jewish Lobby.”

Bibi’s ex-husband, according to the ruling, also complained he was denied his right of “rujuh” — which refers to a husband getting their wife back in the initial period after a divorce. “He pointed out that under the law and ‘Shariah,’ the complainant has a right to have ‘Rujuh’ to his wife,” the ruling says, “but he was deprived of such right by the respondents.”

The post Imran Khan Remains Imprisoned Over His Wife’s Menstrual Cycles. State Department Says That’s “Something For the Pakistani Courts to Decide.” appeared first on The Intercept.