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Israeli strikes intensify across southern Lebanon, casualties reported

 Al Mayadeen | May 2, 2026

The Israeli occupation has intensified its attacks on villages and towns in southern Lebanon, with fresh airstrikes and artillery shelling reported across several districts, according to field reports from the south.

Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in southern Lebanon reported that three people were killed after an Israeli raid struck a house in the town of al-Louaizeh in the Jezzine district at dawn on Friday, with the escalation extending beyond the area as Israeli airstrikes also hit the towns of Harouf and Shoukin, as well as the al-Tuffah heights region.

The National News Agency (NNA) reported that an earlier strike on Shoukin resulted in the killing of civilians and the injury of several others, including the town’s mayor, Hussein Ali Ahmad.

Further raids targeted multiple towns in the Nabatieh district, including Zawtar al-Sharqiyah, A’dshit, Mayfadoun, Kfar Joz, and Ebba. An additional strike hit a vehicle on the Kfar Dajjal road in the same district.

Strikes across Tyre, Bint Jbeil, and Hasbaya

Southern Lebanon also came under intensified attacks across a wider area, with strikes hitting Majdal Zoun in the Tyre district and Burj Qalaway in the Bint Jbeil district.

The town of Qounine was targeted in an aerial attack, while heavy artillery shelling struck Touline and Qabrikha in the Marjeyoun district. Another airstrike hit Kfarshouba in the Hasbaya district.

Israeli artillery also struck residential areas and outskirts, including al-Mansouri in the Tyre district, while military aircraft maintained intensive overflights across southern Lebanese airspace.

The aggression has continued despite the so-called temporary ceasefire agreement, which took effect on April 17 for 10 days and was later extended for a further three weeks on April 24. However, since the agreement came into force, the Israeli occupation has maintained its attacks, while also facing continued retaliatory attacks from the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

Since March 2, the cumulative toll has reportedly exceeded 2,618 martyrs and more than 8,094 injured, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. Officials say the ceasefire framework involving Lebanon has not prevented continued strikes, with repeated attacks reported across multiple regions.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , | Comments Off on Israeli strikes intensify across southern Lebanon, casualties reported

Left in Disbelief: Israel in Panic over Hezbollah FPV Drone Nightmare

By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | May 1, 2026

Left in disbelief, an already drained Israeli military is left without any viable solutions to the ever-growing threat of first-person view (FPV) drones, now used by Hezbollah to overwhelm their newly assumed positions in southern Lebanon.

On April 16, Tel Aviv and Beirut agreed to a temporary ceasefire imposed by US President Donald Trump. Within the first hour of the ceasefire’s imposition, Israel had already violated the agreement 10 times, including an attack on an ambulance. What they sought to achieve was a return to the pre-war status quo, whereby the Israeli military attacked Lebanon at will, without any return fire.

It soon became clear that the 15-month ceasefire period, following November 27, 2024, during which the Israeli military violated the agreement 15,400 times according to UNIFIL, was not going to be replicated. The first wave of retaliation against Israeli violations began with Hezbollah detonating improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and destroying convoys of Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), after carrying out reconnaissance and anticipating the movement of armed convoys.

Initially, the Israeli military passed three successive IED attacks off as incidents occurring due to explosives previously left behind by Hezbollah fighters. Later, the Lebanese Party officially announced it had taken out four Israeli Merkava tanks in a single IED attack, forcing the Israelis to issue a statement acknowledging it.

Before long, Hezbollah was issuing statements claiming responsibility for a number of retaliatory attacks each day, including rocket fire on Israeli army positions across the Lebanon Blue Line (Lebanese border).

Then came the prominence of Hezbollah’s usage of the cheap, but highly effective FPV drones, inflicting considerable numbers of casualties amongst Israeli soldiers in retaliation for ceasefire violations and the attempt to illegally occupy a strip of territory in southern Lebanon.

Contrary to Israel’s initial claims to have established a considerable “buffer zone” and that only a small number of Hezbollah fighters had remained in the area, it would become clear that nothing of the sort had truly taken place. There was never any “full operational control” of the “buffer zone”, instead, the Israelis were practicing the Gaza strategy of deploying forces in their heavily armoured vehicles to towns and villages, where they would then be tasked with blowing up civilian infrastructure.

Hezbollah fighters remain positioned throughout this newly declared zone, a terrain that favors a defending force using guerrilla warfare tactics. Perhaps the most menacing is the usage of the FPV drones for both reconnaissance and attacks alike.

In a new article, written for Yediot Aharanot in Hebrew, correspondent Elisha Ben Kimon wrote the following:

 “For years, the IDF has invested billions in sophisticated interception systems, precision missiles, and the intelligence capabilities of superpowers. But when Hezbollah, with simple and deadly ingenuity, decided to lower its flight altitude and switch to drones, with fiber optics that make it difficult to detect and intercept, Israel found itself in a situation of dealing with a “low-tech” threat that disrupted all work plans.”

The FPV UAVs can be cheaply acquired for only hundreds of dollars per unit, yet when assembled domestically, they can be put together for as little as 50 dollars in some instances. Successful FPV drone deployment for war was pioneered by the Ukrainians and Russians during the Ukraine War. According to some sources, the majority of battlefield casualties in that war have been a result of this drone, which Kyiv can mass-produce at around 300 dollars per unit.

Equipped with a fiber-optic cable, the drones are completely immune to electronic warfare jamming, negating the high-tech advantages that the Israelis have previously enjoyed. Hezbollah does have access to a range of different attack drones, including various Iranian models, which have proven highly effective also. Yet, they are not available in as high quantities, and their most sophisticated technology is used to target high-value targets.

This development has meant that Hezbollah drone operator teams can safely fly these drones from up to and over 10 kilometers away, without being detected. The process of detecting these drones is the same as it is for Hezbollah’s arsenal of more sophisticated radio frequency (RF) drones, relying on acoustic sensors, radars and thermal imaging, yet FPV drones fly at such low altitudes and use the terrain of southern Lebanon to make them more difficult to detect until it is too late.

A recent article published by the Israeli daily Haaretz noted that back in 2024, the Israeli political and military leadership claimed to be on top of deploying solutions to the Hezbollah drone threat, stressing that a range of Israeli defense companies were engineering solutions.

However, an anonymous source “involved in the field” told Haaretz that “There is a need for a systemic response – not to acquire a little of this and a little of that, but a broad plan to address all unmanned threats along our borders. DDR&D (Directorate of Defense Research & Development) has known about this threat for many years but has not mobilized to address it.”

In a nightmare situation for the Israeli military, Hezbollah recently launched a retaliatory attack using FPV drones, inflicting 6 soldier casualties near the Lebanese town of Taybeh. Israel announced that one of its sergeants, Ithan Fukes, was killed in the attack. What happened next was perhaps even more damning.

Hezbollah followed up their attack with an FPV drone strike targeting the medivac helicopter. The incident caused such a stir because the Israeli military leaked videos of the incident. Despite the Israeli soldiers wearing body cams or GoPros on their helmets, this was the first time such footage has been released, due to Israel’s strict military censor laws.

The first video released was from a distance, showing the FPV drone impacting the site where the evacuation of soldiers was happening, causing them to fall back and the helicopter to abruptly take off. From the footage, it was unclear whether the drone hit any target or not, triggering criticism from the Israeli media over why it was released.

Then, a second video was released, from a soldier’s helmet camera, revealing that the drone fell just short, either due to the wind force of the helicopter or due to the soldier’s gunfire. Any release of footage of this kind is deliberate; in this case, it was to jolt the Israeli leadership into action.

An enormous amount of criticism has been leveled at the Israeli political leadership over its failure to achieve its announced goals in Lebanon, and the army itself is even joining that parade. What this demonstrates is that the psychological impact of the FPVs is greatly burdening soldiers on the ground, while the army is left to sit in southern Lebanon twiddling its thumbs.

Hezbollah’s asymmetric warfare is already causing enormous strain on the some 6 Israeli divisions deployed to fight against Lebanon. Just as they were in Gaza, the Israelis are not doing much beyond demolishing civilian infrastructure, proving so risk-averse as to fear entering a fight in which they actually seek to degrade Hezbollah in any significant way. They may have gotten away with this in Gaza, but in South Lebanon, they are dealing with a much more powerful opponent and a more difficult terrain.

Israeli Merkava tanks, worth between 3.5 to 6 million dollars each, are being taken out day after day by FPV drones, carrying explosive charges, worth a maximum of a few hundred dollars each. Hezbollah is taking out mobile telecommunications equipment, command and control vehicles, APCs, D-9 bulldozers, and excavation equipment, with cheap drones that they continue to mass produce with ease. They also do this while their fighters are kept out of harm’s way.

Israel has attempted to consult Ukrainian advisors in order to learn new tactics to deal with the threat and has purchased its own FPV drones, yet none of this has borne fruit. Instead, individual soldiers have tried experimenting with netting to place over vehicles and the use of shotguns, while relying on soldiers to watch the skies for incoming drones.

Despite some of this being effective, out of fear, the Israelis do not normally deploy infantry next to their tanks while on the move. In Gaza, this tactic of hiding inside heavily armored vehicles and tanks did manage to reduce soldier deaths and injuries, but in Lebanon, it could actually be causing the opposite effect, at least when it comes to FPV drone attacks.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , | Comments Off on Left in Disbelief: Israel in Panic over Hezbollah FPV Drone Nightmare

Trump Taps Israel Lobbyist From Mossad Cutout FDD To Join Iran Negotiations

The Dissident | May 1, 2026

Journalist Alex Marquardt reported recently that , “Amid stalled talks with Iran, President Donald Trump’s negotiators are adding a new member to the team from an outside Washington lobbying group” adding, “Nick Stewart, the Managing Director of Advocacy at FDD Action, the lobbying side of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, has joined the office of Steve Witkoff, the Special Envoy for Peace Missions”.

This means- as I will demonstrate- that a literal Israel lobbyist is now joining the team negotiating with Iran on behalf of the Trump administration.

The think tank, initially founded by the journalist Clifford May, was initially called “EMET,” the Hebrew word for truth, and was established in order to “provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America”.

John Judis at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace documented in 2015 that , “On April 24, 2001, three major pro-Israel donors incorporated an organization called EMET (Hebrew for “truth’). In an application to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, (Clifford) May explained that the group ‘was to provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations.’ But in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, May broadened the group’s mission and changed its name to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As he explained in a supplement to the IRS, the group’s board of directors decided to focus on ‘develop[ing] educational materials on the eradication of terrorism everywhere in the world.’”

He added that the funding for FDD comes primarily from U.S.-based Zionist donors, writing, “FDD’s chief funders have been drawn almost entirely from American Jews who have a long history of funding pro-Israel organizations. They include Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, whiskey heirs Samuel and Edgar Bronfman, gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson, heiress Lynn Schusterman, Wall Street speculators Michael Steinhardt and Paul Singer, and Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare.”

He also noted that, similar to AIPAC and other Israel lobby groups, the FDD runs propaganda tours of Israel for Americans, noting, “Since its founding, FDD has been running tours of Israel for American academics (with most of their expenses paid) similar to those run for journalists and politicians by AIPAC and other groups. University of Kentucky political scientist Robert Farley, who went on an FDD tour in 2008, says ‘the goal of the trip was to inculcate a particular view of the Israeli security situation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’ FDD’s view, Farley says, was ‘rght-wing Likudnik on the relations between Israel and its neighbors and with the Palestinians.’ The tour leaders took a ‘negative’ view of Palestinian statehood. ‘It was understood that the military occupation of the West Bank was necessary to prevent a terrorist campaign against Israel.’”

Al Jazeera’s 2018 documentary on the Israel lobby further exposed that FDD “is functioning as an agent of the Israeli government”.

Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli intelligence official and official in the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, admitted in the documentary that “We have FDD,” adding that “the foundation is ‘working on’ projects for Israel, including ‘data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best.’”

By putting a lobbyist for Israel from a “think tank” that is in reality a cover for an Israeli intelligence cutout, the Trump administration is guaranteeing that Israel will be driving the American side during negotiations with Iran.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on Trump Taps Israel Lobbyist From Mossad Cutout FDD To Join Iran Negotiations

Trump’s Blockade Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

By Trita Parsi | May 1, 2026

It appears Donald Trump once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by heeding the hawkish counsel of the warmongers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

As I have argued before, the fragile ceasefire disproportionately favored the United States over Iran: Trump secured his central objective — a swift exit from a costly war — while Iran forfeited its primary source of leverage, namely the inflationary pressure of elevated oil prices. Tehran, by contrast, remained unable to achieve its core objective — meaningful sanctions relief — without entering a difficult diplomatic process with Washington.

The asymmetry was stark: Trump could afford strategic patience, whereas Iran risked squandering the most consequential gains the conflict could have yielded if negotiations faltered or collapsed.

In short, this emerging status quo could have constituted a quiet but decisive victory for Trump. Yes, Iran would retain control over the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz — but it does so today as well and would do so in almost any scenario. But the status quo would have seen oil prices drop as the Iranians would allow tankers to transit in order to collect fees. And as long as oil prices came down, Trump’s position at home and vis-à-vis Iran would have strengthened.

FDD argued that blockading the Persian Gulf would swiftly cripple the Iranian economy and coerce Tehran into capitulation, allowing Trump to achieve through economic strangulation what he had failed to secure through military force. In short, it was sold to him as a silver bullet. More on that later.

According to this logic, the blockade would “effectively zero out” Iran’s export revenues within days, inflicting losses of nearly $500 million per day. With oil exports halted, Iran’s limited storage capacity would be filled within weeks, forcing the costly and technically damaging shutdown of its oil wells. This, FDD claimed, would dramatically reverse the strategic balance — transforming the Strait of Hormuz from a perceived Iranian asset into a crippling Achilles’ heel, while handing Washington the invaluable advantage of time. Pressure on Iran would escalate sharply while pressure on the United States would rapidly dissipate.

Trump was fully on board. His long-sought subjugation of Iran suddenly appeared tantalizingly within reach. “The blockade is genius,” the president told reporters. “Now, they have to cry uncle; that’s all they have to do. Just say, ‘We give up.’” (Notably, an FDD staffer has reportedly since joined Steve Witkoff’s team.)

Predictably, the opposite occurred. FDD’s confident calculations and tidy logic were, as so often, rooted more in wishful thinking than in hard reality. By its own projections, Iran should have exhausted its storage capacity nearly a week ago. Yet satellite imagery shows Tehran still actively loading oil onto tankers at Kharg Island. While the blockade has undeniably increased economic pressure, there is no sign of the acute storage crisis — or the cascading collapse — FDD confidently promised Trump.

But by targeting Iran’s oil exports, Trump did more than complicate an already fragile diplomatic pathway — he tightened global supply and drove prices upward. In fact, thanks to the blockade, oil prices now exceed the levels seen during the war itself.

Exxon’s CEO told shareholders today that gasoline prices are poised to rise even further, noting that “the market hasn’t seen the full impact of [the Iran conflict] yet.” Meanwhile, Joe Kent, Trump’s former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, cautions that “the blockade is now triggering a global fertilizer shortage that will cause major food security crises and potential famines.”

In short: the desperately needed pressure release Trump secured through the ceasefire has been entirely undone by FDD’s vaunted silver-bullet blockade.

The lure of the silver bullet 

There is a pathology in U.S. policy on Iran that transcends administrations and party affiliations: The incessant search for an escalatory silver bullet that brings Iran to its knees, forces it to capitulate, and enables the U.S. to assert its superpower dominance and avoid a compromise with the Islamic Republic.

Across 47 years, the hunt for this fabled silver bullet has echoed on — yet nothing answers back. Countless diplomatic opportunities have been sacrificed, and face-saving exit ramps have been burnt in the process. Yet, the quest continues.

The demand for Iranian capitulation and the enduring faith in elusive silver bullets are deeply intertwined. In January, Trump believed that the mere threat of military force would compel Tehran to surrender. After issuing a series of increasingly explicit warnings that Iran pointedly ignored, he proposed a calibrated strike — one to which Tehran should respond symbolically by targeting an empty American base. Iran refused outright, making clear that any attack would trigger a full-scale war.

Interpreting this defiance as a failure of credibility rather than a rejection of coercion, Trump escalated. He ordered a substantial buildup of military assets in the region, convinced that a critical mass of force would finally deliver the decisive breakthrough — the long-sought silver bullet. It didn’t.

Indeed, Witkoff revealed in an interview that Trump was frustrated that, despite his military threats, Iran had still not “capitulated.”

Clearly, more escalation was needed. The next imagined silver bullet was the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Midway through the war, a GCC official told me that Trump had assured regional leaders the conflict would last no more than 100 hours. Israeli media similarly reported that he told Britain’s Keir Starmer it would be over within three days. The logic was stark: the killing of Khamenei would trigger either the regime’s rapid implosion or its immediate capitulation. It proved to be yet another illusory silver bullet.

Nor did the sweeping bombardment of Iran’s civilian infrastructure deliver the long-sought breakthrough. A Bloomberg analysis found that only 32% of the damaged buildings were linked to military targets — the overwhelming majority were civilian. Even this devastating and indiscriminate campaign failed to produce the decisive outcome its architects had promised.

The blockade-on-the-blockade is merely the latest in a long line of delusional silver bullets that American presidents have chased instead of pursuing far less costly and far more effective diplomacy. I suspect that a stunning number of those silver bullets were cooked up by FDD.

Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s Blockade Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of the Strait of Hormuz

Sputnik – 02.05.2026

The reckless reliance on a blitzkrieg to eliminate Iran’s political and military leadership has left Israel and the United States in an extremely precarious situation, where Tehran’s key trump card in the conflict turned out to be control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Alexander Yakovenko, deputy director of Sputnik’s parent company Rossiya Segodnya and head of the Committee on Global Issues and International Security of the Russian Security Council’s Scientific-Expert Board, has addressed the standoff around the Strait of Hormuz.

Analysts in Israel are already writing of a complete failure, with the prospect of “returning to the issue” sometime in the future. Judging by published reports, everything was planned for June this year, but, as the saying goes, the devil intervened, and Benjamin Netanyahu succumbed to the temptation of a final solution through “regime change.” The scapegoats will be the Mossad division responsible for Iran and the military command responsible for Lebanon.

Donald Trump faces a far more difficult predicament: he has been drawn into a war that is neither his own nor in America’s interest. But the main issue is that the Strait of Hormuz problem now rests squarely on his shoulders. Aside from acceding to all of Iran’s demands, there appear to be no viable options for resolving the blockade – including the resumption of military action, which, according to observers, would have catastrophic consequences for the region, the global economy, and the Trump administration.

In terms of the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East, a complete geopolitical reconfiguration has taken place, including a shift in Turkiye’s role (it was Ankara that effectively killed the plans to bring Iraqi Kurds into the “march on Tehran,” which was intended to bolster the confidence of those whom Israeli intelligence believed were ready to take to the streets of Iranian cities).

The destruction of the region’s extraction and logistics infrastructure prompted the UAE to withdraw from OPEC and OPEC+, which will only intensify Abu Dhabi’s contradictions with Riyadh and accelerate the political realignment of smaller players toward Ankara, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.

Iran’s agency has grown qualitatively: from a pariah state burdened by sanctions, Iran has genuinely become a regional power (in contrast to Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is a regional power and “in some ways even a global one”). Everything now depends on Iran – a fact understood by those at the helm in Tehran, namely, by general consensus, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And all this is aside from the most pressing issue on the regional agenda: the restoration of extraction and logistics infrastructure, especially given that the damage has a cumulative effect – in other words, “time is money.”

Russia, Pakistan, and China have become even more deeply involved in the affairs of the region, while the United States has demonstrated its inability to provide military protection for its allies. In other words, the role of external players has grown, whereas control over the region had been in American hands since the Baghdad Pact at the beginning of the Cold War. Now it can be said that the entire institutional structure in the region is collapsing – even in the OPEC format – and the region is opening up to an entirely new architecture.

In terms of geoeconomics, Tehran now holds a powerful lever of influence over the global economy and world trade through its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, this is not only direct control but also the ability to destabilize the situation around the Strait at any point in the future, regardless of any agreements that might be reached regarding its possible reopening as part of a ceasefire. In other words, everyone understands that things will never return to how they were before.

The only thing that matters for the global economy and the international financial system – including the dollar’s linkage to oil trade – is the stability of commercial traffic through the Strait. With no indication of it being reopened, the world is losing between 8 and 15 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day, as well as up to 20% of global LNG supplies. This also includes a range of industrial goods in the petrochemical sector and derivatives for the agricultural sector. Experts expect a monthly shortfall of 300 million barrels, which amounts to three-quarters of the released strategic reserves of developed countries. Moreover, by early May, both strategic reserves and the advantages of unlocking Russian and Iranian oil, along with the balancing buffer of floating storage, will be nearly exhausted. In short, in every respect, a moment of truth is approaching in a conflict that is difficult to restart now that military action has been paused.

Not only have the United States and Israel handed Iran, on a silver platter, escalation dominance in the conflict – the ability to manage escalation if Washington and Tel Aviv launch another round – but Tehran will also gain additional revenue from selling its 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, which economists estimate at 2–3 billion per month, or 24–36 billion per year. Essentially, even without the unfreezing of Iranian assets in Western countries, Iran will have the resources to rebuild what has been destroyed. To this should be added the fees collected from commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

It is also worth noting a direct geopolitical consequence of the Iranian conflict: the discord within the Western alliance along the line of Trump’s America versus liberal-globalist Europe. The recent visit of the British monarch to the United States, during which he called in his address to Congress for the collective “defense of Ukraine” invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty (despite the fact that Kiev is not a NATO member), indicates that the lack of allied support for the Iranian adventure is a clear appeal to restore Western unity specifically on an anti-Russian basis – everything else is secondary. In Europe, they no longer hide the fact that they intend to “wait out” Trump, if that is what it takes, but under no circumstances will they agree to a settlement of the Ukrainian conflict.

As such, it is not denied that Ukraine is merely the opening move in yet another war of the West against Russia, and that Western elites are determined to make it a decisive, final confrontation of a civilizational nature. This presents an interesting situation for Russia, which could be resolved one way or another very soon. If Russia participated in two world wars, in which, albeit in different ways, relations between groups of Western countries were contested, and in the Cold War we faced a united West, then now we see a disunited West, weakened militarily and in terms of domestic political development. Its consolidation is only possible at our expense.

Charles III quite opportunely mentioned the burning of the White House by the British in 1814, as it reminds us – and perhaps Washington – of positive moments in our shared history, including Russia’s support for the American Revolution and the Union side in the Civil War. The decision rests with the Americans, but it is curious how the Middle East references an era before the ideologization of international relations in the 20th Century.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , , , | Comments Off on Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of the Strait of Hormuz

Mali: a new front in the Western war on multipolarism

Strategic Culture Foundation | May 1, 2026

An audacious coup attempt against the government in the West African state of Mali appears to have been thwarted by the Malian Armed Forces, supported by their Russian allies.

The surprise coup was launched last weekend when an estimated 12,000 fighters attacked at least five cities, including the capital, Bamako. Fighting continued during the past week, with most of the casualties – over 1,000 dead – suffered by the insurgents who came under heavy ground and air fire from state forces backed by Russian auxiliaries belonging to the Africa Corps.

Mali’s leader, Assimi Goïta, made a nationwide televised address appealing for calm and stating that the country’s security situation had been brought under control. He paid tribute to his defense minister, General Sadio Camara, who was killed in action on the first day of the coup attempt on April 25. The leader also acknowledged the actions of his country’s strategic partner, the Russian Federation, for helping to defeat the coup, which he condemned as “foreign-sponsored”.

For its part, the Kremlin said it would continue supporting the Malian government to restore stability and security to the country.

Both the Malian authorities and Moscow have accused Western sponsors of involvement in the insurgency. Russia’s foreign ministry claimed that Western military instructors had helped coordinate the wide-ranging attacks. There were reports of militants armed with French Mistral anti-aircraft missiles and U.S.-made Stinger Manpads. There are also unverified reports of mercenaries from Ukraine and NATO states fighting on the ground.

This is not the first time that NATO and Ukraine have been linked to destabilizing the national security of Mali. Two years ago, Mali cut diplomatic links with Kiev after a Ukrainian military intelligence official claimed that Ukrainian forces had been supplying insurgents.

In the latest uprising, the Western news media have been quick to highlight supposed military gains made by the rebels. The Western coverage has sought to portray the violence as a spontaneous challenge to the government in Bamako, which the Western media disparages as a “military junta”. The same media have also claimed that the unrest is a blow to Russia’s strategic interests in Africa. In particular, it is claimed that Moscow’s security partnership with Mali and other African states is being exposed as ineffective and weak.

Two militant groups were involved in the coup attempt this week. The Tuareg ethnic people’s liberation movement, known as the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), and an Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group known as Jammat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). Both entities had been fighting each other until recently, but now seem to have allied. Who brokered that expedient alliance?

The widespread insurgent attacks mounted against five cities covering a distance of some 2,000 kilometers also suggest that the fighters were provided with considerable intelligence and logistical support. Mali is a huge country, the sixth largest in Africa, with a land area twice that of France or Texas. Previous attacks were mainly confined to the remote northern half of the country, which is typically a desert landscape. To launch an assault on the capital in the south is a significant development. The devastating bomb attack on the defense minister’s residential compound near Bamako also suggests that there was foreign assistance.

The geopolitical background is highly significant. Mali formed an Alliance of Sahel States (AES in French) in September 2023 along with Niger and Burkina Faso. The three former French colonies ordered the withdrawal of French military forces and asserted a newfound political independence. They accused France of playing a double game by secretly supporting separatists and Islamist groups to give a pretext for French military involvement in their countries. In a further affront to French arrogance, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso pointedly turned to Russia for security assistance and, in return, have offered Russia access to key natural resources in a mutual partnership.

For centuries, France and other Western states have plundered Africa without giving anything back to the continent except new forms of economic slavery and exploitation.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have gained renewed partnerships with many African nations. A history of colonial depredation hampers neither Russia nor China. Indeed, the Soviet Union has a largely honorable legacy of supporting African independence, which many Africans acknowledge. In the contemporary context, Moscow and Beijing’s espousal of a multipolar world and cooperative development has resonated strongly with African countries.

When Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso kicked out the French neocolonial trappings three years ago, there was palpable scorn in Paris, particularly from French President Emmanuel Macron. If the Sahel alliance succeeded with Russian help, that would be a major blow to France’s national esteem and the anti-Russian propaganda narrative of the NATO bloc.

The attempted coup in Mali should be viewed in this light. It is much bigger than Mali’s internal tensions and divisions. What’s at stake is maintaining the right of political independence and sovereignty in African nations to choose their own political and developmental path. In a word: self-determination. Old colonial powers like France and other NATO members would like to turn the clock back to the former times of hegemonic control.

As many informed analysts have noted, the current conflicts in Ukraine and other places, such as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, the Arctic, and so on, are not isolated aberrations. They are all part of a “new great game” for Western powers to reassert global dominance.

The Western ruling elites want to, indeed need to, confront the rising multipolar world that challenges their hierarchy of privileges and profits. Russia and China are the main targets for the Western powers to win their strategic war. The proxy war in Ukraine is part of that. So too is Washington’s aggression against Iran to cut off energy supplies to China and Asia.

The coup attempt in Mali is another site of struggle that appears to be instigated by NATO powers in their proxy war against Russia and the historic vision for a multipolar world.

There is an ominous echo of the Syria scenario, where Western powers finally overthrew a Russian ally at the end of 2024, to be replaced by jihadists whom the West backed covertly for years before that.

Given the strategic importance, Russia and China must not let this happen in Africa. The firm defense of Mali this week by the country’s leadership and armed forces, acting with the support of Russia and the mass of Malian people, indicates that Western intrigue will fail.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Comments Off on Mali: a new front in the Western war on multipolarism

CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 29, 2026

Federal health officials under the Biden administration failed abysmally to look for COVID-19 vaccine safety signals, according to congressional testimony delivered today by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski.

The government’s vaccine safety monitoring “over the past several years has been insulting, and many people are injured,” Jablonowski wrote in his written testimony.

History repeats itself if we don’t learn our lessons, Jablonowski warned.

“The COVID-19 pandemic created over 100 billionaires in the United States and over 1,000 billionaires around the world,” Jablonowski wrote. “Anything that profitable is going to repeat.”

Jablonowski, who holds a doctorate in biomedical and health informatics from the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, spoke as a witness at the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing, “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.”

Hours before the hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), subcommittee chair, released a report detailing how Biden-era federal health officials refused to use a state-of-the-art statistical tool for detecting COVID-19 vaccination signals in VAERS — even though they knew the tool they were using was too broken to pick up on safety signals, including sudden cardiac death.

Johnson’s report, which cited roughly 600 pages of emails, revealed that in 2021, officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told an FDA researcher to “cease and desist” using the state-of-the-art tool to analyze COVID-19 vaccine injury reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

Johnson obtained the emails after he subpoenaed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in January 2025 for COVID-19 vaccine safety records and pandemic-related communications.

FDA was ‘blind’ to COVID vaccine injury reports in VAERS

In his testimony, Jablonowski detailed how each of the federal government’s three vaccine safety monitoring systems — VAERS, V-safe and Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) — had “pitfalls” and “failed” to adequately assess safety issues with the COVID-19 vaccine and other vaccines.

The failures of vaccine safety monitoring “can be, and were, catastrophic,” he said.

For instance, the FDA insisted on monitoring COVID-19 vaccine reports using a method that it knew didn’t work. The FDA knew the method was likely to give inaccurate results if similar vaccines — such as the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines — were included in the dataset. This is called masking.

“The FDA was completely blind to COVID-19 vaccine adverse events,” Jablonowski wrote. He said the FDA could have used an improved statistical method accounting for masking.

A 2022 peer-reviewed paper in Drug Safety showed that the improved method detected roughly 25 statistically significant COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — including sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy and pulmonary infarction — that the FDA’s older method missed.

In an earlier interview with The Defender, Jablonowski explained why it was so harmful for the FDA to continue using the older method:

“Imagine a night watchman has to find something on the ground. But instead of holding a flashlight, he is wearing sunglasses. In the morning, he says he didn’t find anything. That’s true, but it’s because he was using a tool that impeded his ability to see.”

As of March 27, 1,675,590 adverse events were reported to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccination, according to OpenVAERS. That number includes over 39,077 reports of death, 29,200 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis, and 18,009 reports of Bell’s palsy.

A national survey conducted in November 2025 found that roughly 1 in 10 U.S. adults who received the COVID-19 vaccine experienced “major” side effects.

V-safe was designed to collect ‘inconsequential’ data

Jablonowski told lawmakers that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring tool, V-safe, was designed to collect only “inconsequential” information that no one really cares about.

The V-safe app invited COVID-19 vaccine recipients to check off boxes to indicate what, if any, side effects they experienced after getting the shot.

However, the box options were for common short-term vaccine side effects that most people would consider “inconsequential,” such as chills, headache, joint pain, muscle or body aches, fatigue or tiredness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain or rash.

If a person experienced a more serious problem, they had to manually type it into the “other” text field, Jablonowski noted. He said:

“It is with horror that we find 366 individuals typed ‘myocarditis’ in the ‘other’ free-text field, a condition requiring a medical diagnosis. The horror is amplified by the nearly 50,000 registrants who typed ‘chest pain’ into the ‘other’ free-text field.”

Vaccine Safety Datalink is off-limits to independent researchers

Jablonowski also detailed how VSD, a collaborative database of patient information from 13 integrated healthcare organizations covering over 15.5 million people, also fails the public.

VSD data can ostensibly be used to detect vaccine safety issues in near-real time, Jablonowski said.

The problem is that only a small handful of scientists are ever allowed to look at the data. Jablonowski said:

“This many million-dollar taxpayer funded resource is not available to any scientist outside of the 13 Managed Care Organizations (MCO) or the federal government without independent IRB [independent review board] applications approved by all 13 MCOs, an estimated $250,000 per project.”

In other words, independent researchers are realistically barred from analyzing the data. “Transparency is simply unattainable,” Jablonowski said.

Watch Jablonowski’s opening statement here.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Comments Off on CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’

COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026

David Morens, a former top advisor to COVID Czar Tony Fauci was indicted this week and “charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” according to the Justice Department press release.

Morens allegedly helped top federal health officials cover up the potential role of federal grants in spurring the COVID pandemic. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires federal agencies to preserve and disclose federal records with some narrow exceptions. In early 2021, Morens emailed a colleague, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe.”

Morens added, “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” In a previous email, he assured his collaborators, “I have spoken to our FOIA folks” and “I should be safe from future FOIAs. Don’t ask how…”

Fauci doesn’t need to worry about getting indicted since President Joe Biden, on his last morning in office, pardoned any crimes that Fauci might have committed in the previous decade. Fauci justified COVID mandates because average citizens “don’t have the ability” to determine what is best for them. Congressional investigations revealed that Fauci was at the center of string-pulling to shirk responsibility on COVID.

Top federal officials scrambled to erase the federal role in bankrolling reckless gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the most likely source of the COVID virus that killed more than seven million people around the world. That type of research seeks to genetically alter organisms to enable the spread of viruses into new species. As MIT professor Kevin Esvelt asked in 2021, “Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?” The risks were compounded because the Wuhan Institute had a very poor safety rating. Two years earlier, the State Department confidentially “warned other federal agencies about safety issues at Wuhan labs studying bat COVID,” but the public disclosure of that alert was delayed until 2022—long after President Biden illegally mandated COVID vaccines for a hundred million American adults.

If COVID-19 had been initially recognized as the result of one of the biggest government boondoggles in history, it would have been far more difficult for American politicians and government scientists to pirouette as saviors as they seized sway over daily life. Instead, politicians, bureaucrats, and the media stampeded most of the American public with the notion that total submission to boneheaded decrees was their only hope to survive.

Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a statement on the indictment of Morens:

“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most—during the height of a global pandemic.”

Luckily, there haven’t been any “profound abuses of trust” since Trump took office again—at least according to his Justice Department. Blanche added, “Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”

Be still my beating heart. Is this a subtle signal that the Trump team will disclose the other three million documents on the Epstein scandal?

FBI chief Kash Patel announced at the indictment press conference, “Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”

Has the FBI turned over a new leaf or what? The FBI is one of the most notorious FOIA violators in Washington. When FOIA was first passed in 1966, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agency to totally refuse compliance with the law. A federal judge slammed the FBI in 2017 for claiming it needed seventeen years to fulfill a FOIA request on surveillance of antiwar activists in the 1960s. The FBI deleted the names of Clark Kent and Lois Lane from a letter that made reference to the famous Superman characters—because disclosing them in a FOIA response would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Louis Freeh, director of the FBI from 1993-2001, repeatedly denounced my articles on Ruby Ridge; but when I filed a FOIA, the FBI claimed to have no records of those published letters to the editor. They sent their response to “Mr. Brovard” so maybe that helped them not find anything.

FBI FOIA trampling is par for the Bureau covering up its destruction of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As federal judge Terry Doughty declared in a 2023 decision, “The FBI [acted] as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

Morens may be the first federal official to ever be charged with a crime for actions to evade FOIA requests. Certainly, in more than fifty years, no federal FOIA official has ever been jailed for violating the law by refusing to disclose information. I’ve received so many BS responses from FOIA officers over the decades that I have lost count. When I filed a FOIA with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to see what information they had on me in their files, they replied in 2010, “We have no records on Kevin Bovard.” But I wasn’t asking about my cousin.

In 2015, I heard scuttlebutt that the Justice Department pressured USA Today to cease publishing my articles bashing Attorney General Eric Holder. I filed a FOIA to get the department’s official emails to my editors, but DOJ FOIA claimed it had nothing. I only got the damning emails after I filed a follow-up FOIA request and made a lucky guess on the exact day, hour and minute the emails were sent.

For too long, deceiving the American people has been treated like a victimless crime in Washington. If the Morens indictment can set a precedent leading to more such criminal investigations of bureaucratic cover-ups, that will be a booster shot for American democracy.

May 2, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Comments Off on COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment

Iran Blockade Complications /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Nima Alkhorshid

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – May 1, 2026

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on Iran Blockade Complications /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Nima Alkhorshid

Pirates of Mediterranean: Israel does as it pleases in the Sea of Three Continents

By Lorenzo Maria Pacini | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 1, 2026

How control of the Mediterranean works

On the night of April 29–30, the Zionist entity Israel attacked the 22 ships of the Global Sumud Flotilla 600 kilometers off the Italian coast, from where the group had set sail. All of this took place unhindered, constituting yet another act of bullying, piracy, and barbarism. But how does the Mediterranean work?

The Mediterranean, often referred to as “Mare Nostrum” in European political culture, is one of the most complex maritime theaters in the world: a crossroads of trade routes, a setting for migration crises, regional conflicts, and the strategic interests of major powers. The management of international waters, military control of shipping lanes, and initiatives by civilian vessels such as the Global Sumud Flotilla constitute three facets of the same dynamic: the attempt to regulate and control the use of the sea in the name of state interests, security, and humanitarian solidarity.

The basic legal framework for the management of international waters is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982 and in force since 1994, which regulates the mapping, use, and responsibilities of states regarding various maritime zones. In the Mediterranean, which is a nearly enclosed sea, this convention applies in a particular way, because the distance between the coasts is often less than 400 nautical miles—that is, the sum of the maximum EEZs of two opposing states.

The main zones recognized by UNCLOS are: the territorial sea (up to 12 miles from the baseline), where the coastal state has full sovereignty but is obligated to guarantee “innocent passage” to foreign vessels; the contiguous zone (up to 24 miles), with limited control for customs, tax, health, and immigration laws; The exclusive economic zone (up to 200 miles), for the rights to exploit biological and mineral resources, balanced by the freedom of navigation and overflight for other nations. Finally, the so-called High Seas (beyond the EEZs), a space open to all states, governed by the principle of freedom of navigation, fishing, scientific research, and the laying of cables and pipelines, provided this is done peacefully and with respect for environmental protection. In the Mediterranean, the scarcity of “true” high seas makes the delimitation of exclusive economic zones between coastal states—such as Italy–Greece, Greece–Turkey, or Cyprus–Turkey—a delicate matter, often linked to gas and oil resources and political-military disputes.

The management of international waters therefore takes place through: bilateral and multilateral delimitation agreements; regional cooperation measures (for example, under the Barcelona Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and the Protocol on Integrated Coastal Zone Management); and institutions such as the UNCLOS Authority for resources beyond EEZs, which also regulate the use of the seabed “beyond national jurisdiction.” Alongside the law of the sea, the Mediterranean is subject to intense military surveillance that reflects the overlapping interests of major global and regional powers.

The “management” of international waters is therefore not merely a matter of rules, but also of operational capabilities, intelligence infrastructure, and military alliances.

Furthermore, there are various key actors and spheres of influence. First and foremost, NATO and the U.S.: the U.S. Sixth Fleet has its main base in Gaeta (Italy) and projects power throughout the Mediterranean, with particular attention to the routes connecting the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to European economies. The United States uses the Mediterranean as a hub to control energy supply routes and to project power toward the Middle East and North Africa. Then there is Russia, though numerically less present, which has a task force in the Mediterranean, with logistical bases in Syria and a strategic focus on the passages between the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Obviously, the EU and individual member states, such as Italy, France, Greece, and Spain, maintain a strong naval presence, serving both national interests and EU and NATO operations. Then there are Israel and Turkey, which have advanced navies and conduct patrols and maritime traffic control around their coasts—Israel primarily regarding the Gaza Strip, and Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean in relation to energy resources.

These actors effectively define several areas of influence:

  • The Western Mediterranean (Gibraltar–Tunisia): a strong EU–NATO presence, with control over migration routes and maritime traffic toward the port of Gibraltar, the sole strategic access point to the Mediterranean.
  • The Central Mediterranean (Sicily–Libya): a frontline zone for Italian surveillance, rescue, and migration control operations, with Operation Safe Mediterranean expanding Italy’s naval presence to over 2 million km².
  • The Eastern Mediterranean (Greece–Turkey–Cyprus–Israel): a theater of conflict over EEZs and energy sovereignty, with the deployment of military ships and specialized units monitoring natural gas fields.

The operational management of maritime control relies on coastal radar networks, which monitor naval and air traffic hundreds of miles from the coast, command and control systems (such as the MCCIS, Maritime Command and Control Information System) that link radars, ships, and aircraft into a single real-time “maritime picture,” and, of course, international cooperation coordinates maritime surveillance among the navies of some twenty European countries, as well as the information-sharing network with NATO and the southern Mediterranean.

This “situational awareness” apparatus allows for the monitoring not only of commercial traffic but also of migration flows, illicit activities (drug trafficking, arms trafficking, illegal fishing), intelligence operations on undersea cable communications, and, in general, any attempt to cross the Mediterranean without coming to the attention of the states concerned.

The Global Sumud Flotilla challenges the Mediterranean blockade

What happened with the Global Sumud Flotilla is yet another act demonstrating that there is an aggressor and a victim. A civilian flotilla organized by activists, humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and citizens from dozens of countries, with the stated goal of breaking the maritime blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip and delivering humanitarian aid to the Palestinian population, is attacked and seized—all while the other states operating in the Mediterranean stand by, subjugated to Israel’s authority.

The Sumud Flotilla is not a single vessel, but an international coordination of dozens of ships that set sail from various Mediterranean ports to converge in international waters and head toward the Palestinian coast. Thousands of activists and volunteers board the ships, often under conditions of high risk, yet fully aware of the great symbolic value of their action for the Palestinian people, while the elites continue to profit from their suffering.

The ships of the Sumud Flotilla primarily carry essential humanitarian aid, such as food, medicines, medical supplies, equipment for rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, and medical support—all items that Israel has banned for years, demonstrating the most atrocious barbarity that recent human history has ever witnessed. The presence of a dedicated medical fleet, with more than 1,000 healthcare professionals, has been explicitly linked to the effort to alleviate the crisis in Gaza’s healthcare system, devastated by years of war and blockade.

It is an act of symbolic and perfectly legal nonviolent resistance, where the use of dozens of boats, multiple flags, and symbols of peace, the LGBTQ+ community, anti-fascist movements, and international solidarity aims to create a “visible presence” that makes it more difficult for Israeli naval forces to use force, as coercion against unarmed civilians generates significant media and political backlash. One may or may not agree with the methods and nature of this initiative, but the fact remains that the social impact is extremely high and that, above all, Israel has committed an act of piracy involving numerous countries.

The Israeli Navy maintains a reinforced naval blockade, with naval patrols, frigates, and underwater vessels operating near Israeli and Gaza territorial waters. In previous missions, the flotilla was intercepted in international waters and the ships were escorted or stopped, on charges of violating security measures imposed by Tel Aviv. The events of the past few hours, unfortunately, are part of an operational practice that the terrorist state of Israel continues to employ.

Certainly, while the Sumud Flotilla relies on the law of the sea (freedom of navigation and the duty to assist human life at sea), it must nonetheless factor in the risk of interception, violence, arrests, or accidents. At the same time, the media and political dimensions of the mission compel states to balance security rigor with concerns over excessive force that could generate further international pressure on Israel.

The story of the Sumud Flotilla also highlights how the management of international waters in the Mediterranean is a realm of unstable conflict. And, above all, how there is no balance: there is a sovereign, Israel, which is free to do as it pleases, and a series of subordinate states that obey in silence, bound by a code of silence. Israel’s action against the Flotilla demands that we take a stand and take decisive action against those who have transformed the Mediterranean—a sea that should symbolize peace among three continents—into a space of raids and unjustifiable violence.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | Comments Off on Pirates of Mediterranean: Israel does as it pleases in the Sea of Three Continents

Minab children massacre not ‘unfortunate situation’ but ‘heinous war crime’: Tehran

Press TV – May 1, 2026

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman has condemned the US war secretary’s attempt to portray the massacre of children in Minab as an “unfortunate incident,” reiterating that the missile strike was “a heinous war crime.”

During hours of tense testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Pete Hegseth described the deadly strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Iran’s southern city of Minab as an “unfortunate incident,” which according to him remains under investigation.

On the first day of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran on February 28, US Tomahawk missiles struck the school, killing 168 people, most of them children.

In a post on X on Friday, Esmaeil Baghaei said that the attack “was not an ‘unfortunate situation.’ It was a premeditated, heinous war crime.”

Baghaei shared a video of Representative Ro Khanna questioning Hegseth about the cost to American taxpayers “in terms of the strike on the Iranian school where kids were killed, in terms of the missiles we used.”

“To put it plainly,” Baghaei said, “how much did it cost American taxpayers for their secretary of defense to direct the deliberate killing of innocent schoolchildren and their teachers?”

The spokesman added that those responsible for the crime “must be held fully accountable and brought to justice.”

In an address to the UN Human Rights Council in late March, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the incident as “the tip of the iceberg” of systematic violations committed with impunity by the United States and Israel.

The two enemies launched a large-scale, unprovoked war against Iran, assassinating the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and a host of senior commanders while indirect negotiations were underway between Tehran and Washington regarding Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

Subsequent terrorist strikes on civilian targets have so far killed more than 3,300 people, including children.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on Minab children massacre not ‘unfortunate situation’ but ‘heinous war crime’: Tehran

OPCW Forced To Pay Damages To Whistleblower Who Found Evidence Of False Flag In Syria

The Dissident | April 30, 2026

After years of a continued cover-up, the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) has been forced by the International Labour Organization to pay damages to Dr. Brendan Whelan, an OPCW scientist who found evidence that the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, that took place in 2018, was a false flag.

Evidence Of A False Flag Uncovered

For context, in April of 2018, the U.S., UK, and France bombed the Syrian government in response to allegations that the former Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the town of Douma.

The bombing took place before inspectors from the OPCW were able to visit the scene in Douma, and the evidence for the chemical attack was based on videos and photos put out by rebel groups, which showed dead civilians foaming at the mouth and two cylinders “found” on a roof of an apartment and on a bed.

However, once the OPCW team was able to inspect Douma, they found a significant body of evidence suggesting the attack was a false flag used to trigger Western intervention.

Ian Henderson, one of the inspectors at the scene, found that the two chlorine cylinders found at the scene were “manually placed rather than being delivered by aircraft”.

Going into further detail on this assessment, Henderson explained in his book released last year that , the damage of the cylinder found at location two did not match up with the damage to the roof at the location, signalling that the cylinder was placed in an already existing crater.

Above: What the cylinder looks like at the location (picture one) vs. what it should have looked like compared to the damage to the roof (picture 2)

“The smooth unsullied nose of the Location 2 cylinder remains the contrary smoking gun” Henderson notes in his book.

Similarly, Brendan Whelan found further evidence that the attack was a false flag.

No evidence of Sarin was found at the scene, but trace amounts of Chlorine were found, leading the official narrative to be that there was a chlorine gas attack at the scene.

However, Whelan spoke to NATO state based experts who ruled out the possibility that chlorine was used at the scene based on the videos and images put out.

The minutes from the meeting with toxicology experts reads that “the experts were conclusive in their statement that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure. In particular, they stated that the onset of excessive frothing, as a result of pulmonary edema, observed in the photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time period between the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded (approximately 3-4 hours)”.

“The key ‘take away message’ from the meeting was that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine”, the minutes from the meeting added.

Brendan Whelan wrote a final interim report on the Douma case, which incorporated these findings.

The report written by Whelan writes that “Some of the signs and symptoms described by witnesses and noted in photos and video recordings taken by witnesses, of the alleged chemical victims, are not consistent with exposure to choking agents such as chlorine or phosgene” and adds that, “The FFM team is unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the relatively moderate damage to the cylinders allegedly dropped from an unknown height, compared to the destruction caused to the rebar-reinforced concrete roofs”.

A Cover-Up Of The Evidence

The officially released OPCW interim report, however, made no mention of the above evidence and instead implied that a chlorine attack took place in Douma by the Assad regime.

Instead of addressing the concerns of Henderson and Whelan, or providing a scientific answer to the evidence they uncovered, the OPCW resorted to smears in an attempt to discredit them- a campaign that ramped up after the initial work of the OPCW investigation was leaked and released on WikiLeaks.

Ian Henderson has previously given his account of the cover-up in his aforementioned book, which I previously detailed in a summary .

But now, after a long legal battle, the OPCW has been forced to pay damages to Brendan Whelan and to reverse it decision to bar him from ever working at the OPCW again by the UN court, the International Labour Organisation.

The court ruled, in reference to disciplinary measures brought by the OPCW against Brendan Whelan, that, “There was a requirement to observe due process at the disciplinary state prior to the imposition of any sanction upon to the complainant. According to the OPCW staff regulations and interim staff rules, no disciplinary proceeding may be instituted against a staff members unless he or she had been notified of the allegations against him or her, as well as of the right to seek assistance in his or her defence and be given a responsible opportunity to respond to those allegations. These steps were not taken before the director general issues disciplinary measures against the complaint to the extent that the complainant was not provided with the charges. He was also not provided with a copy of the full investigation report. The complaint right to due process before those measures were imposed upon him was violated.”

The court ruled that “The OPCW should pay the complainant 20,000 euros in moral damages” and that “the OPCW shall also pay the complainant 2000 euros in other costs”.

Now- after this vindication- Whelan has written an article at the Substack of journalist Aaron Mate, detailing what he went through at the OPCW.

Whelan revealed that the OPCW accused him of being behind the leak of the above engineering assessment “despite having left the Organisation some eight months before the leak”.

He added that, “I asked, repeatedly, to be told the precise allegations against me; a right not only enshrined in law but in the Organisation’s protocols. They refused to elaborate or specify any charges. At that point, I ended any collaboration with an investigation that was contemptuous of the requirements for due process. The investigation proceeded regardless.”

Despite the fact that “The official investigation report, for lack of evidence, had formally exonerated Inspectors A and B [Whelan and Henderson] (as my colleague and I were referred to respectively) from leaking the sensitive document” the OPCW basely claimed the two had “deliberately and in premeditated’ fashion enabled the leak by failing to comply with the ‘specified procedures for the handling of confidential information so as to create a clear risk of unauthorised disclosure.’”

He noted that this attack was done by the OPCW in order to get out of responding to the above engineering and toxicology assessments, writing:

It was no coincidence that I and my colleague—the only individuals investigated for the leak—had protested against bias and malpractice in the conduct of the OPCW’s Douma investigation, and, in my case, had been sidelined from the investigation for doing so. The OPCW had refused to address our concerns, which had since become a public controversy. The aim of the leak inquiry, therefore, was to attack our credibility without having to refute our scientific arguments.

For this, Whelan was “issued with a letter of censure and a lifetime ban from future employment with the Organisation I had served diligently for seventeen years.”

He added that, “As the legacy media had been heavily invested in maintaining the Western line that Syrian forces had used chemical weapons in Douma, the OPCW’s ad hominem attacks on the two dissenting inspectors were treated as a vindication of the official narrative.”

This included articles in the Guardian, Reuters, and the Western government sponsored Bellingcat, which repeated the false line that Whelan and Henderson were somehow responsible for the leak.

Then, after Whelan took the issue to the International Labour Organisation, the OPCW changed it’s story, now claiming that Whelan made a “serious breach of confidentiality” because he sent a letter to the OPCW chief of cabinet expressing concern over “the suppression of the team’s Douma report and a secretive attempt to publish a doctored version”.

The new allegation from the OPCW against Whelan was now a claim that “The Appellant forwarded an email exchange between himself and the former Chief of Cabinet to Director-OSP which contained specific and detailed information about evidence gathered by the FFM [Fact-Finding mission] investigators in Douma”.

“The ‘specific and detailed information’ they were referring to was a statement in my email to the Chief of Cabinet protesting the fact that the doctored report made the unsupported claim that ‘the team had sufficient evidence to determine that chlorine was released from two cylinders.’ This statement, despite being without basis, was ‘highly protected’, they said, and shouldn’t have been shared with the senior director” Whelan added.

He added, “In other words, by informing the Director of the Office of Special Projects of a phoney claim that had been fraudulently inserted into the team’s Douma report, I was committing a ‘serious breach of confidentiality.’ It is worth noting that, because it was challenged, this unfounded assertion was omitted from the final Douma report.”

The OPCW, referring to a letter sent by Whelan to the director general of the OPCW, also claimed that it, “contained specific and detailed information gathered by FFM investigators from toxicology experts. In creating and disseminating this letter, he failed to comply with the specified procedures for the handling, protection, release, and dissemination of confidential information so as to create a clear risk of unauthorised disclosure”.

“What was also significant about this new allegation was that it was the first time management has officially acknowledged this meeting with the German toxicologists. Even mention of it was excluded from the inspection timelines in official reports. By extension, it was the first tacit admission that this crucial piece of evidence was censored from the Douma investigation,” Whelan added.

The OPCW also claimed that Whelan has “sowed discord within the Organisation”, “By sharing information ‘within the Secretariat [emphasis added] [I]caused a staff member to call into question the integrity of the Organisation’s findings in Douma.’”

In other words, the complaint from the OPCW against Whelan was that he raised his concerns that the OPCW investigation was compromised and by providing solid evidence that the toxicology report was censored, a senior OPCW director began to (correctly) believe that the investigation had been compromised.

Now that the International Labour Organization has ruled that the OPCW acted unlawfully against Whelan, it again shows that the OPCW refused to engage with Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson’s scientific findings and instead engaged in a cover-up to forward the Western narrative about Syria.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Comments Off on OPCW Forced To Pay Damages To Whistleblower Who Found Evidence Of False Flag In Syria

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