Mossad agents, warmongers trying to derail Iran-US talks: Trump allies
Press TV – April 30, 2025
US President Donald Trump’s closest media allies and supporters say “Mossad agents” and “warmongers” are pushing the US into a conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Last week, conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson featured a senior Pentagon official who he claimed was ousted because he was seen as an obstacle to hostile US measures against Iran.
Dan Caldwell, a top advisor to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, was removed earlier this month on charges that he allegedly leaked classified information about Hegseth’s use of a Signal chat, according to several media outlets.
Not so by Carlson’s telling, who has unparalleled access to Trump.
“You did make maybe one career mistake by giving on-the-record interviews describing your foreign policy views… that are out of the mainstream among warmongers in Washington,” Carlson said to Caldwell.
On Sunday, another conservative podcaster, Clayton Morris, a former Fox News anchor, said pro-Israel voices were “working overtime” to destroy the “anti-war team” that Trump has assembled at the Pentagon.
“We’ve learned here at Redacted that former Israeli Mossad agents are working overtime on social media and behind the scenes trying to discredit Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth,” Morris said, referring to his show.
Trump’s administration is reportedly divided between more traditional Republicans like US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Mike Waltz, and “America First” isolationists like White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Pro-Trump media personalities have singled out Merav Ceren, who was nominated to head Iran and Israel at the White House National Security Council, for criticism.
Ceren was born in Haifa, and worked in the Israeli ministry of military affairs. On his show, Morris said that, “Neo-con Mike Waltz has now hired basically a dual citizen and former IDF (Israeli army) official to work under him.”
According to a Pew Poll published in April, 53 percent of Americans now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42 percent in March 2022.
On Iran, Trump’s closest envoys have been left contradicting themselves.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy who has emerged as his go-to global troubleshooter, suggested earlier this month that Washington would allow Iran to enrich uranium at low levels.
After backlash from pro-Israel voices, he flipped, saying that Tehran “must stop and eliminate” its nuclear enrichment program fully.
This week, Secretary Rubio said the US could re-enter a deal that sees Iran keep a civilian nuclear program – so long as it halts enrichment, and instead ships it in from abroad.
American and Iranian technical teams met in Oman on Saturday for their third round of talks. Trump told reporters on Monday that the talks are going “very well” and that “a deal is going to be made there”.
“We’ll have something without having to start dropping bombs all over the place,” he said.
Zelensky should keep his original promise to voters – Moscow
RT | April 30, 2025
Moscow has urged Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to finally fulfill the promises that led to his landslide victory in the 2019 presidential election.
The former actor rose to power pledging to bring peace between Ukraine and Russia, Vassily Nebenzia, Moscow’s envoy to the UN, reminded him.
During a UN Security Council session on Tuesday, which focused on the Ukraine conflict, Nebenzia urged Zelensky to “finally honor the pledge made to Ukrainian voters back in 2019, which is to pursue peace with Russia and respect for the rights of the Russian-speaking population of his country.”
Zelensky defeated the incumbent, President Pyotr Poroshenko, by vowing to ease tensions with ethnic Russian citizens who had rejected the government imposed after the 2014 armed coup in Kiev. However, his initial overtures for dialogue were met with threats of violence from radical nationalists, causing his administration to abandon its compromise agenda.
The Ukrainian leader, who claims presidential power despite the expiration of his term last year, “needs to act in the interests of his country rather than for the benefit of those seeking to use Ukraine purely as a pawn in the geopolitical struggle waged against Russia,” Nebenzia said.
The diplomat emphasized that Moscow’s demands include an end to anti-Russian discrimination. According to Nebenzia, Zelensky has repeatedly demonstrated unreliability while his nation now resorts to terrorist tactics in its military campaign against its neighbor, which are tacitly supported by Western nations.
Nebenzia asserted that Zelensky currently “is concerned solely with saving his own skin and covering up the crimes that he has committed against his own people,” suggesting that these interests necessitate the continuation of hostilities rather than a peaceful resolution.
The diplomat also accused Western nations of misrepresenting Kiev’s position as genuinely seeking a truce while falsely attributing warmongering motives to Moscow.
White House calls out ‘media cover-up’ on Biden’s health
RT | April 30, 2025
The “cover up” of former US President Joe Biden’s poor mental and physical health has led to a decline of public trust in “legacy media”, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has claimed.
Throughout Biden’s time in office, Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly argued that he was unfit for the job – claims the Biden administration and US media vociferously denied. Biden only withdrew from the presidential race when he faced pressure from within the Democratic Party and major campaign donors after a disastrous debate performance against Trump last June, in which he appeared confused and struggled to finish his sentences.
“Millions of Americans watched our mentally incompetent president [Biden] struggle with his day-to-day duties of this office. We watched our country be run into the ground as a result. And nobody in the media wanted to write about that,” Leavitt said during a White House briefing on Monday.
The spokeswoman recalled how during Trump’s campaign her warnings about Biden’s “clear mental incompetence” led to her being “accused by people in this room [journalists] of manufacturing deepfake videos trying to persuade the public into not believing what they saw with their own eyes for many years.”
“I think it is about time the legacy media finally admits that was one of the greatest cover-ups and scandals that ever took place in American history,” she insisted.
Leavitt said that the reluctance to report on Biden’s actual physical and mental condition “certainly did contribute to the decline in the trust that Americans have for the legacy media.”
A poll by Gallup earlier this year suggested that confidence in fair reporting of the news by US media has dropped to its lowest point in five decades. Only 31% of those surveyed said they trust the mainstream media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36% said they do not trust it “at all.”
On Free Speech, Trump’s as Bad as Biden
By Jack Hunter | The Libertarian Institute | April 30, 2025
In September, candidate Donald Trump vowed, “I will bring back free speech in America…I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.”
Trump was addressing the clear danger that Democrats posed to the First Amendment.
The Republican presidential nominee was talking about the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, who had once threatened to sic the Justice Department on social media platforms that “profit off hate.” In 2022, her choice for running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, said that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” In 2021, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the government needs to figure out how to “rein in the media environment.” The Biden administration had not only proposed a new federal agency that would regulate citizens’ speech, but was revealed to have pressured private social media companies to censor users’ speech, as revealed by the Twitter Files.
All of these anti-First Amendment actions, among many others, were not at all controversial to Democrats. In their blind hatred for Trump, the party had become one that began to see government censorship and regulation of speech as a positive good in their efforts to defeat or at least contain MAGA. As Hillary Clinton put it one month before the 2024 election, allowing free speech on social media was too dangerous because it means “we lost control.”
Luckily free speech mostly prevailed during that time period, but Clinton was right: The free flow of news and ideas coming from populist social media and alternative podcast worlds would end up helping to defeat Democrats in 2024.
Democracy prevailed, despite Democrats being so eager to suppress it.
Now, President Donald Trump is behaving like these Democrats.
The ACLU’s Allegra Harpootlian writes, “On March 25, [Rümeysa Öztürk] was planning to go to an iftar dinner with friends. Instead, while walking near her apartment, she was approached and then grabbed by a hooded man. Other figures soon closed in, including several wearing face coverings and dark clothing. Finally, one officer flashed a badge…”
Öztürk has not been charged with a crime. By all of the available evidence, she is seemingly being held for being a co-author of an op-ed that was critical of the Israeli’s government’s actions in Gaza.
Öztürk is but one of a number of those in the United States on student visas who have been arrested without charge for criticizing Israel’s government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio now brags that he has revoked over 300 student visas. “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day,” Rubio said at a press conference in March.
“Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he said.
You’re a “lunatic” if you criticize Israel’s government?
Rubio continued, “At some point, I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.”
They should be charged with vandalism if they are literally tearing this up. But it was not clear that physical destruction or violence is what Rubio meant.
“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses,” he added. “And if we’ve given you a visa and you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away.”
To note, the Supreme Court decided long ago that anyone in the United States has First Amendment protections, citizen or not.
Rubio would add, “We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country. But you’re not going to do it in our country.”
The Trump administration framing the suppression of free speech as a matter of non-citizens’ rights vs. those of citizens is a cheap way of ignoring the First Amendment, no different than the Biden administration holding up the supposed threats of “misinformation” and “disinformation” in the name of doing the same.
Republicans and Democrats have created spectres supposedly so threatening to convince enough people that the First Amendment no longer applies.
Bullshit.
Many Republicans right now argue that criticizing Israel’s government is inherently anti-semitic, which is about as ridiculous as arguing that every conservative talk host who criticizes the United States government is anti-American.
And if they genuinely were anti-semitic, that’s still protected by the First Amendment.
“Hate speech” is protected speech. Do Trump Republicans now agree with Biden-Harris Democrats like Tim Walz that there are no First Amendment protections for hate speech?
Apparently they do.
With Trump’s speech precedent, it’s not hard to imagine a future President Harris targeting conservative college students who challenge DEI or trans ideology. Leftists could argue—and do—that speech against minorities or LGBTQ members constitutes violence and therefore, somehow, falls outside of First Amendment protections.
So many of the Republicans who defend the arrest and deportation of those who criticize Israel’s government sound pretty much like identity politics-driven lefties. Their subjects are different but the logic is the same. Safe spaces, all around.
There are other examples of where the Trump administration has reneged on his free speech promises, and now just offers mirror images of Joe Biden’s censorship regime. I’m just focusing on one aspect.
One glimmer of hope is that while Democrats appeared to have reached a consensus over the last decades that censorship is a positive good, there is a loud and growing debate on the right over Trump’s affronts to free speech, with some of the most high profile personalities pushing back.
Still, Donald Trump campaigned vowing to protect the First Amendment. He’s not delivering. Quite the opposite.
He should do what he promised, not just be another Joe Biden.
European Union To Use Digital Services Act to Crack Down on Online Vaccine “Misinformation”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 28, 2025
The European Union has begun wielding the controversial censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), to intensify its crackdown on what it labels “misinformation” about immunization efforts. Framing the campaign as necessary for safeguarding democracy, the European Commission pointed to the European Democracy Action Plan and a reinforced Code of Conduct on Disinformation as foundational measures. According to the Commission, these initiatives, aligned with the DSA, create a “strong framework” to regulate content across major online platforms and search engines.
Citing a sharp rise in measles cases across Europe, the Commission has drawn renewed attention to immunization programs. A health spokesperson, speaking to Vaccines Today, warned, “The Commission is very concerned by the spike in reported measles cases in Europe – particularly as the number doubled in 2024 compared to 2023.” The spokesperson noted that the institution is actively cooperating with national health authorities and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) to manage the outbreaks.
The Commission argues that low vaccination rates, described as “sub-optimal” coverage, are enabling the spread of diseases like measles, which can otherwise be prevented through “safe and efficient vaccination.” Efforts are reportedly underway to support national governments in strengthening immunization programs and ensuring a steady vaccine supply across the EU while cracking down on critical online speech.
Public distrust in health authorities and vaccination campaigns is being framed as the root cause of falling immunization rates. EU officials are quick to blame what they term “misinformation” and “disinformation,” suggesting that any narrative diverging from official positions is inherently dangerous.
The Commission emphasized, “Protecting Europe from the harmful effects of disinformation, information manipulation, and interference is a high priority for the Commission,” making clear its commitment to aggressively policing speech under the guise of public health.
Meanwhile, the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic and intelligence apparatus, has ramped up its monitoring and analysis of information flows. Working hand-in-hand with member states and international organizations, it now targets so-called disinformation across an expanding array of policy areas, raising serious concerns about political overreach.
Alongside its censorship push, the Commission continues to roll out a series of public relations campaigns intended to shepherd citizens toward preferred viewpoints. Initiatives like United in Protection promote vaccination using “reliable, evidence-based information,” though what qualifies as “reliable” is determined solely by authorities. The EU has also created the European Vaccination Information Portal and collaborated with bodies such as the ECDC and European Medicines Agency (EMA) to saturate public discourse with officially approved messages.
Vaccination advocacy has been woven deeply into EU policy frameworks. Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and the EU4Health Program are now tied to vaccine promotion, with projects like Overcoming Obstacles to Vaccination aiming to remove barriers to vaccine access, all while dismissing legitimate public hesitations as obstacles to be overcome rather than concerns to be addressed.
Yet more legacy media deception on a vital issue
By Alex Berenson | Unreported Truths | April 29, 2025
I can’t believe I have to call out my old editors at the New York Times for running blatantly dishonest journalism for the second day in a row.1
But I do, so here goes.
Yesterday, just past noon local time, the electric systems in Spain and Portugal failed without warning.
Power remained out across both countries for much of the day and wasn’t fully restored until today. The disruption was profound. Subway riders evacuated stalled trains in darkened tunnels. Cellular service (which, unlike landlines, does not have backup batteries) went down. Elevators were stuck. ATMs and traffic lights went out.
Not across a city, or a state, but two nations that together have almost 60 million people. (Small parts of southern France were also affected.)
The outage attracted worldwide attention — and legacy media headscratching.
The usual explanations for blackouts were nowhere in sight. No earthquakes hit, no hurricanes or forest fires were raging. Even climate change, the usual media bugaboo for all disasters natural and manmade, couldn’t be blamed. It’s April, not July, and the weather was mild across the Iberian peninsula, in the 70s from Lisbon to Barcelona, 700 miles northeast. Nor was demand for power particularly high yesterday.
Just after the outage, Portugal’s electric network operator supposedly blamed “extreme temperature variations” in Spain for “induced atmospheric vibration.” Those led to “oscillations” on high voltage lines, according to several newspapers, including England’s Guardian.
“Millions without power in Spain, Portugal after ‘induced atmospheric vibration’,” a USA Today headline incoherently but confidently explained.
Of course. Induced atmospheric vibration. If that sounds like gobbledygook, it’s because it is. By Tuesday morning, the Guardian had disappeared those words, claiming the Portuguese company “said the statement was falsely attributed to it.”
Oh. Other unlikely explanations included cyber attacks and solar flares, eruptions of radiation from the sun that can disrupt powerlines. But solar flares are hard to miss, and none were a problem on Monday.
But even as the legacy media offered bizarre theories, power industry analysts and energy experts on X proposed a far simpler, more plausible explanation: Spain’s near-total reliance on green energy had left it very vulnerable to cascading blackouts.
For all its magic, electricity is actually relatively easy to understand at the theoretical level; it is the flow of electrons — negatively charged particles — that carry energy. Scientists began to understand this fact in the 1700s. A century later they had realized that swinging magnets along coils of wire would produce usable current. The energy to swing the magnets comes from steam heated in coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear plants, or directly from the flow of water in hydropower dams. (I remember the basics from AP Physics, and Google confirms them.)
After the electricity is produced, grids of wires carry it to homes and businesses, where it makes lights, computers, and motors run.2 Here, the engineering gets complicated. Electric plants produce “alternating” current, because of the way the magnets spin, and most household devices run on it.3 Demand for electricity fluctuates by the second, and supply must exactly match demand to keep the grid functioning properly. Traditional power plants have several different ways to manage this task. Their success in doing so is a key reason that modern, wealthy countries almost never have widespread blackouts.
But solar plants produce direct current, which must be “inverted” into alternating current before it is added to the grid. Wind turbines have their own hurdles adding power. As a result, wind and solar plants cannot manage unexpected changes in frequency nearly as well as older sources.
This risk is not a secret to power companies — or renewable energy suppliers. In 2022, the consortium of companies that runs Europe’s electricity network released a 63-page report on the issue.
It is highly technical and obscure (perhaps deliberately so), but it notes that older plants “have traditionally provided various ‘inherent’ capabilities to the system critical to ensure the stable operation of the power systems…” and that wind and solar power have a “lack of these system capabilities.”
But in the rush last decade to pacify climate change activists and decarbonize the world (except, of course, for India and China), niceties like the realities of physics seem to have been overlooked. European countries have moved quickly away from boring, reliable sources of power generation and towards solar and wind.
No country has moved faster than Spain, which has sol to spare. In mid-April, Spain ran its electricity grid fully on renewable energy on a weekday for the first time.
Oh well. Renewable energy was fun while it lasted. Heck, I’ve got panels on my roof (the tax credit didn’t hurt).
But well-defined theoretical risks that are ignored for political reasons have a strange way of coming true. The strong consensus on X is that the lack of simple, reliable, fossil fuel or nuclear-powered baseload generation with high “inertia,” as the engineers say, is a big reason that Spain’s grid failed so fast and took nearly a day to reboot fully.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media keeps scratching its head and staring into the sun for solar flares. “The cause of the outage remained unclear,” the Times’s current headline explains helpfully.
If this were 2021, the Biden Administration would no doubt call blaming renewables “misinformation” and Twitter and Facebook would be censoring articles like this one as Russian propaganda or whatever. At least now the skeptics can call the media out without fear of being banned.
Progress, I suppose.
Though it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. After two decades of putting up solar and wind farms at massive taxpayer expense, Europe has turned electricity from cheap and reliable to the reverse. If the sun shines too brightly, the lights go out.
Congrats, Greta Thunberg!
I know, you can. As cynical as I’ve become, I guess I’m still not cynical enough.
Along the way the voltage – a measure of the “pressure” causing the electrons to move — is raised in order to reduce the energy wasted as the current flows, then lowered so it is safer for household use.
In Europe, alternating current is produced at 50 hertz, or cycles per second. In the United States, it’s produced at 60.
Net Zero Watch warns of growing grid instability
Net Zero Watch | April 29, 2025
With more than 50 million EU electricity consumers suffering blackouts yesterday, campaign group Net Zero Watch has reiterated its warning that the UK power grid is also becoming increasingly unstable.
Grid analysts have suggested a high likelihood that the extent of yesterday’s blackout in Iberia was a result of the Spanish grid operating almost entirely on renewables at the time. The stability of power grids depends on so-called ‘inertia’, a resistance to rapid change that is an inherent feature of large spinning turbines, such as gas-fired power stations, but not of wind and solar farms. Too much renewables capacity on a grid can therefore mean inadequate inertia. As a result, in grids dominated by wind and solar, faults can propagate almost instantaneously across grids, leading to blackouts.
In a recent Net Zero Watch paper, entitled Blackout Risk in the GB Grid, energy system analyst Kathyn Porter pointed out that Britain’s electricity system is also becoming increasingly unstable. Large fluctuations in grid frequency – the first sign of problems – are becoming much more common.
In the past four years, the upper operational [frequency] limit was breached around 500 times in each winter season… the number of such breaches has also been growing steadily, which is consistent with falling grid inertia… and a perception that the grid is becoming less reliable.
In addition, Ms Porter points out that the GB grid experienced a ‘near miss’ at the start of the year.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
For 20 years, every aspect of the grid has been subordinated to the concerns of the eco-warriors. It’s no surprise that our electricity system is now both unaffordable and dangerously unstable. We can no longer afford to have energy policy determined by fantastists.
France using the ‘terrorism’ charge to silence criticism of crimes in Gaza: French lawyer
French political scientist Francois Burgat
MEMO | April 29, 2025
French lawyer Rafik Chekkat said today that the charge of “terrorist propaganda” is being used in France to silence those who speak out about crimes committed by Israel in Gaza.
French political scientist Francois Burgat, known for his work on the Arab world, was detained on 9 July 2024, in Aix-en-Provence on charges of “terrorist propaganda.” His arrest followed a complaint by the European Jewish Organisation (OJE) over social media posts he shared in January 2024 about Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
“The two most commonly used charges to silence those who respond to the crimes committed in Gaza are ‘terrorist propaganda’ and ‘incitement to hatred and discrimination,’” said Chekkat, one of Burgat’s lawyers and a member of the Marseille Bar Association.
“Sometimes you are prosecuted under one charge, sometimes the other, and sometimes even both simultaneously,” he added.
Burgat was released the same day he was arrested and appeared before a judge at the Aix-en-Provence Criminal Court last week.
The prosecution has requested an eight-month suspended prison sentence, a €4,000 (about $4,550) fine, and a six-month ban on posting on X.
“Despite being an expert on terrorism-related issues, he is now being prosecuted for ‘terrorist propaganda’,” Chekkat said.
The court is expected to announce the verdict in Burgat’s case on 28 May.
Chekkat argued that Burgat’s case is part of a broader pattern of cracking down on criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The law regarding “terrorist propaganda”, he explained, was originally designed to combat terrorist organisations’ recruitment efforts in online environments but is now “being used to suppress dissenting voices on the issue of Palestine.”
“This is just the visible tip of the oppressive iceberg. That is to say, not only are publicly known figures involved here, but also many lesser-known individuals,” he said.
“Sometimes activists, and sometimes people not affiliated with any group — even ordinary individuals — have been questioned, prosecuted, and some have even been convicted of terrorist propaganda,” he added.
UNRWA details harrowing abuse of Gaza aid workers in Israeli detention
Al Mayadeen | April 29, 2025
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has accused the Israeli military of abusing over 50 of its staff members detained during the war on Gaza.
According to UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini, the detained individuals, including teachers, doctors, and social workers, were subjected to harsh treatment while in Israeli custody. Lazzarini stated on X that the staff reported being beaten, humiliated, and even used as human shields.
“Since the start of the war in October 2023, over 50 UNRWA staff among them teachers, doctors, social workers, have been detained and abused,” Lazzarini wrote. “They have been treated in the most shocking and inhumane way.”
Testimonies reveal torture, forced confessions
Sharing testimony from one of the released workers, Lazzarini highlighted the severity of the mistreatment.
“I wished for death to end this nightmare I was living through,” the staff member reportedly said. According to the accounts collected by UNRWA, detainees faced sleep deprivation, humiliation, threats against themselves and their families, dog attacks, and forced confessions under duress.
Lazzarini described the testimonies as “harrowing and outrageous,” adding to concerns about the treatment of Palestinian detainees during the ongoing Israeli war.
The reported abuse of humanitarian workers further complicates the already dire situation in Gaza, where aid agencies have been struggling to deliver assistance amid ongoing Israeli bombardments and blockades.
International reactions and ICJ proceedings
The broader humanitarian crisis in Gaza is under increased international scrutiny. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently hearing arguments from dozens of nations and organizations regarding “Israel’s” humanitarian obligations to Palestinians.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) began a week-long series of hearings on Monday to examine “Israel’s” humanitarian obligations toward Palestinians, as the Gaza Strip endures over 50 days under a total blockade that has halted the entry of vital aid.
The ICJ hearings on Gaza started with a submission from Palestinian representatives, followed by arguments from 38 countries, including the United States, China, France, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
The League of Arab States, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the African Union are also expected to present their positions before the 15-judge panel.
These proceedings stem from a December resolution by the UN General Assembly, led by Norway and passed with broad support, calling on the court to urgently issue an advisory opinion on “Israel’s” legal responsibilities under international law.
The United Nations has asked the court to clarify “Israel’s” obligations to facilitate the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, in coordination with UN agencies, international organizations, and third-party states. This comes as the Gaza humanitarian crisis continues to worsen, with growing concerns over famine risk due to the blockade.
It is worth noting that “Israel” maintains strict control over all international aid entering the Gaza Strip, home to 2.4 million Palestinians. Aid deliveries were fully halted on March 2, just before the ceasefire collapsed, ending a temporary reduction in hostilities after 15 months of conflict.
The ongoing Israeli aid blockade has pushed Gaza to the brink of catastrophe, with supplies rapidly depleting and Palestinian civilians facing severe restrictions on access to essential resources.
Screaming soldiers and open revolt: How one video unmasked Israel’s internal power struggle
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | April 29, 2025
An apparently strange choice was made by a correspondent from Israel’s Channel 12 when, on 22 April, he decided to release one of the most humiliating videos of a relatively large number of Israeli soldiers coming under attack by a single Palestinian fighter. As soldiers screamed and stumbled down the stairs of a building in Khan Yunis chaos erupted: some fell over each other, others hid behind a concrete wall, and some even fired erratically, endangering their own colleagues.
This begs a serious question: given the Israeli media’s frequent adherence to strict, often unreasonable, military censorship, what prompted the decision to release such a damaging portrayal of its own soldiers?
The answer lies in the open war between the Israeli political institution, represented by the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the one hand, and the rest of the country on the other. The “rest of the country” may seem to be an elusive concept, but it is not. Currently, Netanyahu is at war with the military institution, the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet, the judiciary, much of the media and the majority of Israelis who want the war to end and Israeli captives to be released.
This explains the unprecedented and open criticism by former top Israeli officials who are accusing Netanyahu of being a threat, not only to the Israeli military and Israeli society, but also to the future of Israel itself.
On 21 April, the head of Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, breached every protocol when he presented Israel’s Supreme Court with two documents, one of which was revealed to the public. According to Israeli media, in the unclassified affidavit, Bar stated that he was fired by the prime minister “because of his refusal to meet those expectations of loyalty,” particularly “regarding investigations into the prime minister’s aides” and for “his refusal to help Netanyahu avoid testifying in his criminal trial.”
Bar’s comments represented a fundamental historical shift in how Israel’s power players treat extremely sensitive security matters.
They were also, essentially, a call for the overthrow of Netanyahu.
A former head of Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, has been equally vocal, although he was the first to speak about Netanyahu’s transgressions, suggesting clear coordination between the various elements of Israel’s notorious and powerful intelligence agencies. “If the prime minister acts unlawfully, I will say everything I know,” he told Channel 12 last month.
The coordination runs deeper, with former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who, along with Netanyahu, is wanted by the International Criminal Court, going on his own rampage on 23 April. Aside from the direct attacks on Netanyahu, calling his policy a “moral disgrace”, Gallant seems to have disparaged the Israeli military itself by revealing that, last August, Israel faked pictures of an alleged Hamas tunnel in order to block a ceasefire agreement.
The Israeli government used this specific episode as its rationale for maintaining control over the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza, a justification that emerged around the same time as the deeply embarrassing video of Israeli soldiers running in terror from a lone Palestinian combatant. The layers of humiliation continued to accumulate.
While Gallant’s actions may discredit the military and his own leadership, his primary aim appears to be to have an impact on Netanyahu, who many Israelis believe is prolonging the Gaza war for personal political gain.
Israel’s actual war losses are another key point. One of the occupation state’s historically best-kept secrets is its losses in fighting against Arab armies or resistance groups.
Its casualties in the current war on Gaza were also supposed to be a well-kept secret, except that they aren’t.
Although the Israeli army has tried to minimise its death toll since the start of the war on 7 October, 2023, it has faced many leaks, some initiated by the military itself. The aim? To put pressure on Netanyahu to end the war, especially in light of new information that at least half of Israel’s military reserves are refusing to return to the battlefield.
Interestingly, it was Eyal Zamir — Netanyahu’s hand-picked replacement for Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi — who surprised everyone in a speech shortly after his appointment in February. Zamir revealed that 5,942 Israeli families had “joined the list of bereaved families” in 2024. He had already committed 2025 to be “a year of war”, but now seems less inclined to escalate the war beyond Israel’s ability to sustain it.
The war between Israel’s political, military and intelligence elites has never been so ugly, let alone open, as if both sides have reached the conclusion that their survival — and the survival of Israel itself — is dependent on defeating the other camps.
After some reluctance and a relatively careful choice of words, Gallant has now joined the chorus of a powerful group of ex-officials who want to see Netanyahu out of power by any means necessary, including civil disobedience.
This internal conflict among Israel’s elite marks a departure from its long-cultivated image. For decades, Israel has presented itself as a beacon of democracy and civilisation amidst what it portrayed as its less cultured neighbours. However, the Gaza genocide has shattered this false narrative.
Consequently, the current infighting among the architects of this Israeli fantasy now offers an unprecedented opportunity to uncover deeper truths, not only about the ongoing war in Gaza, but also about Israel’s history, from its establishment on the land of historic Palestine to the ongoing genocide, nearly eight decades later.
Ukrainian MP issues post-war terror threat
RT | April 28, 2025
Ukrainian intelligence services plan to continue to assassinate Russian officials and public figures for decades to come, MP Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s Defense Committee, has said.
Speaking to the newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda on Sunday, the senior lawmaker welcomed the assassination last week of the deputy chief of operations of Russia’s General Staff, Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, and said that Kiev was behind it.
Prior to pursuing a political career, Kostenko served with the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), taking part in the early stages of the conflict in Donbass.
“I am pleased. This is good work by our special services,” Kostenko stated when asked about his take on the assassination of the Russian general. The MP also threatened a continuous campaign of killings inside Russia for decades to come.
“Even if we manage to get to the point when the war is put on hold, the work of the special services will only just begin,” he said, adding that attacks on Russian officials and public figures will remain a priority “for the next 10, 20, and possibly even 30 years.”
The remarks were swiftly condemned by Moscow, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova charging that Ukraine has already turned into a full-fledged terrorist state.
“The Kiev regime has become a true terrorist cell that receives international support with weapons and money,” she stated.
Moskalik was killed by a car bomb outside his residence in the suburban Moscow town of Balashikha early on Friday. Shortly after the explosion, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) detained a suspect, identified as 42-year-old Ignat Kuzin.
The suspect has confessed to acting under orders from Ukrainian security services and was allegedly promised a payment of $18,000 for the attack. According to Russian investigators, Kuzin was originally recruited by the SBU in 2023, later moving to Russia to await “specific instructions from a Ukrainian handler.”
Last December, a bomb that Russian authorities similarly linked to Ukrainian special services killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, who served as the commander of the Russian Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces. He was assassinated alongside an aide as they were exiting a building in Moscow, using an explosive device concealed inside an electric scooter. The scene was monitored by the perpetrators through a camera placed inside a parked car, and the bomb was detonated remotely.
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From the Archives
US Also Destroyed Iraqi Water Supply During First Gulf War
International Humanitarian Law prohibits the attack, destruction, or rendering useless of objects indispensable to civilian survival.
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | June 10, 2026
… During the first Gulf War, the United States “deliberately bombed Iraq’s water system,” Thomas J. Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, wrote in September, 2001. The Bush administration, “with malice aforethought,” “destroyed, removed, or rendered useless” Iraq’s ‘drinking water installations and supplies’… They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA’s own words, ‘fully degrade’ Iraq’s water sources.”
Nagy found declassified documents at the website of the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses that detailed the effort to degrade Iraq’s water supply and commit a serious violation of humanitarian law. The documents included “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerability,” “Disease Information,” “Disease Outbreaks in Iraq,” “Medical Problems in Iraq,” “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” “Health Conditions in Iraq,” and “Iraq: Assessment of Current Health Threats and Capabilities.”
Then Representative Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia (subsequently removed from Congress), referred to the Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities document, and said, “Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations.” … Read full article
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