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No state or security body offers a single, systematic account of how Israeli agents are used, why they are recruited, or what services they ultimately provide. Outside experienced state institutions, universities and research centers rarely undertake such scrutiny. Israeli academia is the notable exception.
Israeli universities form part of the wider intelligence ecosystem through research, graduates, and seminars conducted with the security services and military. They produce personnel, assess institutional performance – as they have done since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – and examine intelligence work in detail.
The Second Annual Israeli Conference on Intelligence Studies, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 28–29 October 2025 under the title “Intelligence Transformations After Failure,” is one open example. No comparable body of work has emerged from Arab and Islamic institutions.
Accounts from current and former security practitioners, alongside cases involving agents both living and dead, reveal an intelligence pyramid: a layered system of recruitment, cultivation, and deployment built around the value of the intelligence sought and the risks demanded of each spy.
Level one: Building the picture
At the base of the pyramid is information gathering, a task common to almost every category of recruited agent, though the value and type of information vary widely. Israeli services generally separate the agent or cell collecting intelligence from the cell carrying out an operation. The roles sometimes overlap, but collection remains the gateway to action.
An agent may gather information during a probationary phase, without knowing what it will be used for or whether others are working alongside him, simultaneously or in sequence, inside or outside the same organization.
Then come the “mosaic collectors,” who move beyond isolated fragments. They, too, may not see the complete picture, but their assignments are more complex. Instead of passing a single detail or photograph, they may track a person’s movements and relationships in depth, or map an entire process, such as an organization’s purchase of motorcycles or communications equipment.
One recent Lebanese case involved a detainee later released by the judiciary despite the sensitivity of his alleged mission. According to security sources familiar with the file, he was instructed to mount specialized equipment on a vehicle and drive through selected areas, harvesting data from internet routers in homes and institutions and attempting to penetrate them.
A second, recurring example comes from Palestine: the penetration of external training chains. Trainees sent to courses in Lebanon, Syria before the government’s fall, and Iran before the war on Gaza were exposed.
At times, the training bodies themselves were compromised and discovered concealed cameras in equipment covers. The breach then operated at three levels – inside the organization, along the training chain, and within the host institution.
Higher up are agents with access to sensitive files or influence inside a faction’s military or security apparatus. Their task may be to construct a picture of a company, battalion, brigade, division, or specialist unit. No single member normally sees an entire arena or organization; that degree of access is usually confined to a political bureau, military, or jihadi council.
One battalion in northern Gaza was penetrated before the current war, specifically in 2021. The agent held considerable authority and ranked roughly third in its command structure, yet still lacked a complete map of the battalion’s tunnels.
Israeli handlers therefore supplied him with military boots resembling those worn by resistance fighters. A tracking device was hidden inside, and he was told only to walk through the tunnels, allowing Israel to chart the network.
After the breach was discovered – having paralyzed operations in that area during the Sword of Jerusalem battle – the agent fled to Europe. A counterintelligence operation later lured him back to Gaza by making him believe suspicion had passed.
He was arrested, and the source of the breach was exposed. Security sources inform The Cradle that the discovery spared the battalion from destruction in the latest war and helped turn the border area into a persistent problem for Israeli forces until the final stages.
The battalion commander responded through trial and error, creating separate tunnel routes and branches and preventing any one fighter from moving through all of them or taking part in the entire excavation process.
Yet the same agent escaped prison shortly before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. That extraordinary story lies beyond the scope of this investigation, though one detail is telling: another agent facilitated his escape.
At the top of this first level stands the source of “golden information” – intelligence decisive to a major operation, particularly an assassination. It may reveal a figure who has never been photographed, identify a safe house, or confirm a target’s presence during the final moments before a strike.
Some such agents have been killed by mistake; others, sources say, were deliberately abandoned when Israel judged that they had nothing more to offer or could not be extracted.
Technology has made field agents harder to detect and reduced the need for some older practices. At the beginning of the Second Intifada, for example, agents could be ordered to mark a building with a laser before an airstrike.
Such tasks are less necessary today because Israel already possesses extensive maps of public bodies – municipalities, governorates, and ministries – as well as many overt and covert resistance sites.
Israeli military publications openly use the Hebrew term yediat zahav – “golden information” – for decisive, current intelligence extracted from a mass of raw data. In resistance environments, invoking such intelligence can also fuel suspicion that a senior agent exists, even when the information was obtained through technical surveillance.
Where the source is human, investigations repeatedly show that an Israeli service may spend years and large sums cultivating one person for a single disclosure. The assassination of Yahya Ayyash is a prominent example.
The collaborator who enabled the operation was bound to be exposed because he supplied both the identifying information and the instrument of assassination – a booby-trapped mobile phone. With no plausible alternative suspect, an escape or extraction plan had to be prepared in advance.
Level two: Agents in the field
Information gathering already demands work on the ground – photography, surveillance, communications, and impersonation among them. Direct field missions require a different class of agent. Security sources estimate that nearly all must meet their handlers inside Israel or abroad and receive either task-specific instruction or broader operational training.
At the bottom are what security practitioners describe as “cheap missions”: assignments carrying minimal risk, with exposure more likely to result from chance or a basic mistake than from the work itself. These include leaving communications devices, messages, or cash at “dead drops.” Such tasks usually require little training and are assigned gradually.
A dead drop is selected after studying a country’s geography and population patterns. One agent leaves the material; another retrieves it without knowing the first and sometimes for an entirely different operation. Many recruits with reasonable collection skills can perform these tasks. They remain below the risk threshold reserved for more experienced and intensively trained agents.
The next rung involves logistics. This involves obtaining communications equipment, buying or renting homes and vehicles, or securing other tools later used by operational cells.
From there, the work can become far more dangerous. Agents may tamper with resistance weapons or insert tracking chips into them, including RPG and Kornet anti-armor rounds and even missiles or their explosive warheads. Others plant surveillance devices. At this point, the agent generally understands exactly what the mission entails.
In one prominent example, a single agent working in a manufacturing workshop belonging to an Islamic organization in Gaza was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 operatives between 2008 and 2012 by planting tracking devices in the rockets they launched, as well as weakening the explosive material in the warheads.
Having joined from another organization, he cultivated an image of exceptional devotion to deflect suspicion, even carrying wounded comrades on his shoulders while performing tawaf around the Kaaba.
Although eventually exposed, he escaped Gaza and, according to the same sources, still holds an official post in a Muslim-majority country.
At the summit are the hardest assignments: planting explosives or carrying out assassinations directly. Israel embraced this route only more extensively during the past decade. For years, a basic assumption among Palestinian and Lebanese investigators held that Israel killed only by Israeli hands. That premise often led inquiries to discount a local perpetrator from the outset.
The 2010 assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai reinforced that belief. The large team seen on Emirati surveillance footage used foreign passports; many were believed to be Jewish. But subsequent cases in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran indicate that Israel has sought to reduce the risks borne by Jewish operatives, Arabic-speaking Israeli agents, and Druze or Bedouin recruits by transferring more of the execution phase to local assets.
The March 2017 assassination of freed prisoner Mazen Fuqaha in Gaza exposed the limits of the old assumption. Fuqaha, a commander in the Qassam Brigades, was responsible for supporting military activity in the occupied West Bank. Investigators faced a missing link. Even after a Palestinian agent confessed, some remained convinced that an Israeli special unit must have entered Gaza to carry out the shooting.
Nearly nine years later, on 5 February 2026, Netanyahu publicly acknowledged Israel’s responsibility for Fuqaha’s assassination. He confirmed that the killing was carried out through recruitment of a Palestinian collaborator, Ashraf Abu Leila, who shot Fuqaha outside his home in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City.
The disclosure was unlikely to have been casual. Its timing came as Palestinian resistance movements were conducting sweeping reviews of their security and military performance after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
The following day, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation into armed groups in Gaza accused of serving Israel.
The program included material on local militia members used to track targets and carry out armed tasks. One case involved two men assigned to kill a wanted figure with a suppressed weapon. One was captured despite having received little training and not being a long-serving recruit – another departure from the model that prevailed before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
During Israel’s June 2025 war on Iran, Israeli messaging sought to portray every ground operation as the work of Mossad officers. Field investigations and sources following the cases point to a different picture. Iranian Jews living abroad, migrants, and their descendants accounted for only a small share of those allegedly involved.
Many of the operatives proved to be residents of Iran, meaning Mossad personnel had not acted alone as Israeli accounts implied. Some people who helped smuggle equipment into the country reportedly did not know it would be used in military or intelligence operations, believing they were moving civilian goods for profit.
Level three: Re-engineering the enemy
At the highest level, the selection, conduct, and mission of an agent change fundamentally. Israel studies a target organization strategically, seeking to dismantle it or redirect its course. The work demands highly placed, carefully cultivated recruits. An assignment may involve reading a leader’s behavior or tracing ideological currents across an entire movement.
One agent admitted during interrogation that his task had been limited to observing a leader’s social life and political language. He was required to remain close to a figure in an Islamic organization in Gaza who was assassinated in 2003, mapping his community relationships, recording what he said away from the media, and assessing whether he belonged to the movement’s “hawk” or “dove” camp. The findings helped determine Israel’s targeting priorities.
Past Israeli statements and signals support the view that assassinations, particularly of political figures, are not always ordered for immediate military reasons. A killing can create a vacancy in a movement’s hierarchy.
Israeli planners then anticipate who will fill it and whether that successor better suits their objectives. In effect, an organization’s political trajectory can be re-engineered while its members believe they are responding to internal circumstances.
The practice is old. It dates at least to the rivalry between Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This was a time when Israeli services sought to exploit disputes within and between Palestinian factions and used agents to deepen them.
During periods of intense military escalation, anyone who appears on the radar may be killed as Israel pursues the largest possible number of assassinations. The campaign unleashed after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood marked the largest exception of all.
The US has played a comparable game, sometimes without recruiting a conventional agent. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou described one such method in a podcast released on 29 January 2026, explaining how the agency helped fragment the Abu Nidal Organization.
Unable to penetrate the group directly, the CIA instead planted suspicion. Through direct and indirect contacts, it suggested that a senior member had been recruited. One cadre then killed another on suspicion of betrayal, setting off further internal bloodletting.
The organization was thus driven to destroy itself without the recruitment of a single agent. Its founder, Sabri Khalil al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal, died in Baghdad in 2002. The author’s security sources maintain that Saddam Hussein had him killed after years of using his organization in external and internal operations, though the circumstances remain disputed and other accounts describe suicide.
A different strategic path requires elevating an agent into the leadership. That person needs achievements to build credibility, even if Israel must allow an operation to appear successful – or announce casualties in its own ranks – to manufacture the necessary record.
A source in Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades reveals to The Cradle that an operative identified as A.N. rose rapidly after an Israeli jeep was apparently destroyed by an explosive along the boundary and Israel announced one death and several injuries. A later transaction involving night-vision equipment exposed him, and he fled into the territories occupied in 1948.
The subsequent investigation found that the jeep had been remotely driven to the site of a bomb reported in advance. The explosion created a filmed “achievement,” giving the agent credibility, quicker access, and a degree of trust that was difficult to challenge.
Once an agent reaches the intended leadership tier, he may be ordered to identify additional cadres for recruitment. Another recurring task is to cultivate financial and moral corruption. The aim is to convince members that their sacrifices are being exploited for private gain. Such tactics work precisely because corruption already exists, to varying degrees, within the structures of several organizations.
One of the starkest cases uncovered by the Palestinian resistance involved a historic leader identified as M.N. He was reportedly not asked to transmit operational intelligence. Instead, his assignment was to magnify organizational failures and obstruct successful work.
Other agents were instructed to arrange commercial deals and partnerships that implicated people who were not directly recruited, widening the perception – and sometimes the reality – of corruption and exploitation.
The effort to create a negative example belongs to the same strategy. Israeli handlers may target the children of leaders whom they have failed to recruit or assassinate. Security pressures and the prolonged absence of a father who once acted as protector and disciplinarian can make those children more vulnerable. Families of martyrs face the same danger.
Palestinian and Lebanese files contain many such examples. The most politically embarrassing involve the sons of a well-known West Bank leader in an Islamic movement, one of whom publicly converted to Judaism and repeatedly entered Israel.
Whether he settled there permanently remains unclear. Such cases are rare, but Israel amplifies them to discredit the movements concerned, dishonor prominent families, and weaken their standing within Palestinian society.
The most dangerous outcome combines two tracks: assassinations designed to reorder an organization and the promotion of an agent into its senior leadership. Together, they open the way to direct influence over decisions and strategy. The danger is greatest after the killing of historic figures who cannot easily be replaced.
Israel’s intelligence services invest for the long term. They study the remaining leaders, their histories of disagreement, and the character of each relationship, then seek to create friction inside the organization. As sources familiar with these files put it, the intended result is to weaken effectiveness, waste effort, and expose structures.
That investment can consume enormous human resources. Specialists may spend a decade or more building a single subject’s biography – from his waking hour and favorite foods to his relationships and most closely guarded secrets.
In several cases, such intimate knowledge has ended in assassination. The spy’s service to Israel is therefore measured by more than the secret he steals or the device he plants. At its highest level, it lies in helping the occupation reshape an adversary from within, long before the target recognizes that its choices are no longer entirely its own.
The pandemic is over. Yet two key pieces remain that should concern everyone.
Lets talk about the COVID shot. Still being mandated (recommended) by East and West Coast Health Alliances comprising 14 states all the way down to infants.
Why? To stick it to Kennedy? To ‘follow the science’‘? To secure a market as demand tanks? Who knows for sure but here we are.
The COVID shot was birthed in fraud and failed science. That is the true legacy media pundits won’t tell you.
As the first cases of coronavirus happened in the U.S., Moderna and Pfizer began designing their mRNA vaccine candidates.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates pulled the trigger. A Fauci files/diary email from Gates to Fauci asks the NIAID director for “changes or additions” to Gates’ masterplan titled simply Pandemic I.
Gates’ document, given the stamp of approval from Fauci, stated:
“The goal is to pick the one or two best vaccine constructs and vaccinate the entire world—that’s 7 billion doses if it is a single-dose vaccine, and 14 billion if it is a two-dose vaccine.
How about 9-12 doses? That is what has been recommended to date for adults and immunocompromised respectively.
Far from a stranger, Gates and his foundation were fraudulently close to U.S. agencies funding pieces of NIH and receiving private briefings from DARPA on biological threats. More on that in another report.
FAUCI KILLS EARLY TREATMENT
Under Section 564 of the FD&C Act, FDA can grant the emergency use for a medical countermeasure (the vaccine) because, as revisionist history tells, there was no approved alternatives adequately available for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease.
The guidelines and experiences used at the start of the pandemic from pioneers like Peter McCullough’s protocol, New York family physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s protocol, Texas Dr. Richard Bartlett nebulized budesonide, Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s ivermectin push and so many others using similar treatments with repeated success and real-world results tells a different story.
Evidence that would have effectively ended the FDA EUA vaccine hunt.
Didn’t matter to Fauci and the captured U.S. regulatory agencies. Their job was to kill those ideas and pave the way for the coming experimental, world-injecting gene therapy.
Fauci files/diary explains how it was done at the highest level. March 2020, two months into the first U.S. cases Fauci finds himself in a high-level White House Meeting and writes:
“A friend of POTUS… said that he heards [sic] that someone gave Hydroxychloroquine (HC) to 51 people and 51 got better. POTUS has heard similar stories, including Remdesivir (R) about other drugs and wants to make these available. To my amazement and dismay, Azar said that he could approve HC and Remdesivir now with the powers that he has. Steve Hahn and to some extent Deb and Bob started to chime in that this would give people hope. I took a deep breath and said that this was wrong and should not be done.”
None of the trials were designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor were the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus. (*I was the first journalist to report this in October 2020)
FDA and VRBPAC votes were near unanimous to get them to market and in American arms while legacy media ‘journalists’ and their ‘experts’ like Fauci and others touted the shot’s transmission-stopping magical qualities. While Influencers and celebrities sucked up $911 million of taxpayer money for their injectable PR efforts.
There was just one problem. The shot didn’t stop transmission. And it didn’t perform against mutations. In short, it was worthless and gave false hope with a growing profile of side effects (harms).
September 2021 Fauci writes:
“… there is a concern about safety regarding myocarditis for younger people, mostly men; however, once this is taken care of in my mind there is no reason not to vaccinate essentially everyone.”
Heart damage from the shot was never “taken care of” and still remains a concern and risk to this day especially for young men.
January 2021, world-renowned HIV virus researcher Dr. David Ho shares immediate concerns about the COVID shot’s performance according to Fauci’s diary:
“David Ho is doing tests on convalescent sera and sera of people who were vaccinated and is finding disturbing data in both the UK and worse in the RSA mutants. It looks like the vaccine might be compromised.”
Fauci continues:
“Had regular every 2 weeks call with Bill Gates – Bill and Trevor Mundel know about the issue with the mutations that David Ho is working on.”
What exactly were Dr. Ho’s warnings? Dr. Ho writes to Fauci the following:
“It is quite clear that these two variants could now resist several classes of neutralizing monoclonal antibodies already used in the clinic or still in development, and in most cases we understand which of the mutations are conferring the resistance.”
Ho continues:
“… a large majority of convalescent plasma samples showed an appreciable loss in activity against the new variants, suggesting re-infection may be more likely when confronted with either of these two strains.”
And then the death blow to the non-transmission-stopping COVID shot as Ho writes:
“Finally, we also observed a significant impact on vaccinee sera in that every serum sample tested showed a substantial loss in neutralizing activity against the SA variant, whereas the loss in activity against the UK virus is not as large or as universal. Again, we believe the latter findings should be shared promptly with the field, because these new strains threaten the effectiveness of the current vaccines.”
The very next day, Fauci writes in his diary:
“Had Zoom briefing of Biden and Harris to prep them for the speech that Biden will give at 3:45 PM on the vaccine rollout plan. We briefed him at 2:30 to 3:30 and he and Harris (only he spoke) gave briefing to the Nation.”
No word of the vaccine issues, mutations or danger now scientifically evident.
It later became clear that Ho was not only right, but his warnings were mild compared to the reality that unfolded. UK COVID vaccine surveillance data began showing the shots were not only failing to prevent infection but they are making you more vulnerable to it.
2022 data suggested that in all age groups COVID vaccines were demonstrating negative efficacy. That means, the vaccinated were at greater risk of infection than the unvaccinated.
Meanwhile, that same year Fauci writes:
“More drama with regard to the CDC and Rochelle Walenski. After much going back and forth between the CDC and the other docs including me… we thought we had gotten them pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission…
Why? As Fauci writes, “it would undermine the DoJ’s efforts at mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances.”
In the end, CDC director at the time Walensky who, as Fauci writes, called him “… her hero, her mentor, her friend… agreed to pull back on the statement of absolute lack of efficacy of vaccines against infections and transmission.”
Throughout all this, Fauci went to bat for Big Pharma indemnity in 2021 as he pens in his diary:
“I had an important zoom meeting today with Larry Corey an Emilio Emini about the same subject as above, namely, how the United states can play a major proactive role in getting mRNA vaccines to the developing world. Apparently there are liability issues that the pharmaceutical companies are concerned with. These revolve around the fact that although the United States government can indemnify the companies against lawsuits here in the United states the companies feel that they are liable to being sued for adverse outcomes by people in the countries to whom they’re providing vaccine. Some mechanism needs to be worked out to address this concern.”
(Emilio Emini was Chief Executive Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute and Larry Corey head of COVID-19 Prevention Network collaboration formed by Fauci)
The shot is still protected by the PREP Act which was extended until 2029 by outgoing HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (now in the running for California Governor).
The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) meant to field harms from the COVID shot is a black hole and sick joke. Kennedy is attempting to create a table of accepted injuries to ease compensation efforts for the injured public. Is this enough? Not by a long shot.
(*No artificial intelligence was used to write this article. Just a genuine human… me)
The US Senate Homeland Security Committee has voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt after the former White House coronavirus czar refused to answer questions on the origins of Covid-19 at a hearing last week.
The Republican-led committee voted 8-7 along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt on Thursday. The committee’s Democrats introduced five motions aimed at postponing the vote, but all were shut down by the Republican majority.
Fauci appeared before the committee last Wednesday, where he was grilled on his role in funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, his knowledge that Covid-19 was likely created in a laboratory, his work with US intelligence agencies, and his promotion of ineffective vaccines against the virus.
The former bureaucrat refused to answer any questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to silence more than 100 times. Fauci pleaded the Fifth despite having already received a pardon from former President Joe Biden shielding him from criminal prosecution over any offense committed between January 1, 2014 – when the US first outsourced gain-of-function research to China – and January 20, 2025.
“More than a million Americans died from Covid,” committee chairman Rand Paul said before Thursday’s vote. “Many of them died alone. Workers were forced to choose between a mandate and a job they needed. Businesses closed and never reopened. Americans lost the freedom to work, to worship, and to decide what went into their own bodies.”
“Dr. Fauci faced no risk of federal prosecution,” Paul continued. “All he had to do was tell the truth.”
Although Fauci is immune from prosecution for any misdeeds that he committed between 2014 and 2025, his pardon does not cover any crimes committed at last week’s hearing. Contempt of Congress is a criminal offense, and Paul referred Fauci’s case to the US Justice Department immediately after Thursday’s vote.
Should the department choose to prosecute, Fauci could face a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison sentence of up to 12 months.
Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both former aides to US President Donald Trump, were jailed for contempt of Congress by Biden’s Justice Department. Navarro and Bannon both spent four months in prison in 2024.
Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and as chief medical adviser to Biden from 2021 until his retirement in 2022. In the latter role, Fauci became the face of Biden’s heavy-handed response to the pandemic, advocating mask and vaccine mandates and lockdowns, and dismissing opposition to these measures as “anti-science.”
I stumbled across something pretty bizarre today when I queried one of the AI-search engines about Russia’s capture of territory in Ukraine in 2026. Here is what the Chinese KIMI claimed:
The evidence from multiple sources — including Ukrainian official claims, Western think tanks, and Ukrainian independent trackers — suggests that Ukraine recaptured substantially more territory than Russia captured during the first half of 2026, driven by the southern counteroffensive. However, the pace of Ukrainian gains has slowed since spring, and Russia has made small net gains in recent months (June–July). The overall net for the full year so far appears to still favor Ukraine, but the margin and the exact numbers depend heavily on whose methodology you use.
There you have it… Ukraine is winning the war on the ground according to AI. Let me emphasize that you will find this same propaganda on GROK or Claude. The Western propaganda effort is paying dividends on the information operation side of the house. Even the Chinese-coders who created KIMI are pushing Western propaganda.
So let me give you the actual rundown for 2026. Russia started 2026 with Gerasimov’s report to Putin announcing the liberation of Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk) — the Donetsk logistics hub under siege for nearly two years — and of Vovchansk in Kharkiv. Through November of 2025 the MoD had reported a steady run of captures, including Petrovskoye in the DPR and Tikhoye and Otradnoye in Dnepropetrovsk.
Moving into the spring of 2026, TASS reported that Russian forces liberated 63 settlements from March through May 2026 — 20 in March, 16 in April, and 27 in May, the strongest month. The regional breakdown was 21 in Kharkiv Region, 19 in the DPR, 14 in Sumy, six in Zaporozhye, and three in Dnepropetrovsk. The Sumy and Kharkiv gains are framed by Moscow as building a “security zone” along the Russian border.
By early summer (June), Gerasimov reported that Russian forces were continuing the liberation of “Donbass and Novorossiya,” advancing on all fronts. The 3rd Army was advancing toward Slavyansk and Kramatorsk — liberating Piskunovka, reaching the outskirts of Nikolayevka, and reported to be less than 5 km from the eastern edge of Kramatorsk, with the capture of Krasny Liman (Lyman) said to be due soon.
Battlegroup West advanced on a broad front; in the Kupyansk area, having repelled Ukrainian attempts to break through to western Kupyansk, with assault units pushing west toward Shevchenkovo. In the Dobropolye area north of Krasnoarmeysk, fighting in Dobropolye and Annovka, with Lenina (Ukrainian name Mirnoye) taken and Shevchenko, Krasnoyarskoye, and Svetloye reported as liberated.
In July TASS counted 32 settlements liberated, with 22 of them — over 68 percent — in Kharkiv Region and the DPR. By battlegroup: North took ten, Center eight, West six, East five, and South three, and the month’s most significant developments were the liberation of Konstantinovka in the DPR by Battlegroup East and the capture of Belitskoye by Battlegroup Center. Konstantinovka is one of the four Donetsk fortress belt cities.
At present the Russians are driving on the last major Ukrainian-held Donetsk agglomeration — the Konstantinovka–Druzhkovka–Kramatorsk–Slavyansk belt — alongside the Sumy/Kharkiv border zone and consolidation in Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk.
Along with the ground operations in eastern Ukraine, Russia has ended Ukraine’s ability to conduct maritime and trade operations from Odessa and Nikolaev since July 22nd. Ukrainian farmers will not be able to export products via the Black Sea ports and western supplies, which once flowed freely through Odessa. Ukraine’s maritime lifeline is severed and will not be in operation until after the war with Ukraine is over.
Finally, there is the daily Russian missile and drone attacks on Kiev and other key Ukrainian logistics and military hubs. The destruction of factories and warehouses is effectively bleeding Ukraine dry. The West persists in painting the war in Ukraine as a crusade that sits on the threshold of victory, but the realities on the ground tell a dramatically different, grim story… Ukraine is losing.
There are a great deal of conspiracy theories floating around since the extraordinary events in recent days in northern Morocco, where an estimated 50,000 of its citizens attempted to place themselves in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. In a country where the press are heavily controlled and free-spirited citizen journalism is assiduously discouraged, it’s hardly surprising there is speculation – given how in the dark the government operates most of the time. Yet few, if any Moroccans, believe the government narrative that the entire thing developed an energy of its own on social media platforms and that the state itself was taken by surprise. True, a lot of how quickly the information spread was due to social media platforms, but there are too many oddities which can’t be ignored that point the finger at the government – or whoever is running Morocco – for organising the huge mobilisation. Firstly, the number of trucks full to the brim of young men who drove all the way to the border and were directed by police and gendarmerie; secondly, the more recent scenes of hundreds of these young men at bus and train stations all over the country on their way home, where clearly their transportation has been paid for by someone; and of course, lastly but not least, the fact that Moroccan police on the Moroccan side of the border made no effort at all – not even a token effort – to stop people from going around the fence or into the water. In fact, many of those who made the journey have already told media that they were actually directed and encouraged to “go to Spain” by those same police officers.
Moroccans know only too well what is happening. They remember the few times before when thousands of African migrants also magically all turned up at the border with Ceuta and Melilla and also remarkably found on that particular day no Moroccan police officers and so scaled the fence. On at least two occasions in recent years, this stunt has been used by Rabat to indicate to Madrid how angry and displeased it is about Spain’s actions over Algeria, Western Sahara or other regional policies.
But those days were before 2022, when relations with Spain were far from ideal. These days, since Madrid backed Morocco’s sovereignty bid for Western Sahara, relations – until just the other day – were as best as they could get. Almost.
It’s important to remember how easily good relations with Spain could turn sour, and that in recent weeks Madrid’s rapprochement with Algeria and moves afoot in the Spanish parliament to give the indigenous people of Western Sahara Spanish passports could ruin everything that has been achieved overnight. Why would Rabat throw away a relationship so important to it, unless there is something else at play which analysts and journalists alike are missing? Is there another dimension to the Ceuta story which we are entirely missing?
According to the Iranians, Israel had a hand in what happened. Tehran believes that the Moroccans have been led down the garden path by primarily Israel and then Trump, and some recent events suggest there could be some truth in their assertion.
There is an obvious question here to be asked, which no Western journalists have so far identified. Trump and Netanyahu both have Spain in their crosshairs and desperately want to make the country a pariah state, cutting off U.S. aid and even having Madrid ousted as a NATO member. Of course, some of this is unrealistic and far-fetched, but it is rare that Trump and Bibi see eye to eye on the Iran war – when it comes to Spain and Morocco, there is clarity. It is clear that Israel and the U.S. are trying to stir trouble up, and the only real way to do that quickly and effectively, they see, is to destroy this relationship between Rabat and Madrid. Bringing Algeria in from the cold, for Spain, might have blown a fuse in Rabat with the country’s ruling elite called the Makhzen, which could explain quite a few things. Add to that $40 million USD which the Trump administration is reported to have put aside for Rabat, while we begin to see Melilla and Ceuta becoming Moroccan territory in Congress reports (the most recent one being a State Department budget report just signed off by the House), and a picture emerges which puts the entire Ceuta story into context. The geopolitics starts to make sense. “When two neighbouring countries fight each other, just know the USA visited one,” Nelson Mandela once said, and this is the story now of Morocco and Spain.
The Ceuta “invasion”, many believe, was merely a stunt to derail the good relations which both countries have enjoyed until now. And it will probably work. If Madrid believes that the U.S. and Israel are goading Rabat on, then clearly Sanchez and his closest advisors will tone down the relationship with Morocco – which in fact is already happening, when one Spanish minister told a journalist “it is clear what is happening”, hinting that Madrid knows who is behind the move and what the objectives were. If Israel has bedazzled the palace in Rabat with the dream of these enclaves becoming Moroccan, then the biggest winners by far are Israel – which is how analysts should frame their take. If relations turn sour between Rabat and Madrid and tensions start to mount over these enclaves, could the U.S. and Israel send warships there to blockade them, as part of a security measure to support its ally, Morocco? Could that even be the basis to send in Moroccan troops to take them over completely? Sounds far-fetched, but there are similarities with what happened after 1975, when the Spanish abandoned Western Sahara and the Moroccan king at that time sent in thousands of Moroccans into the territory to legitimise its claim, assisted with military aid – we shouldn’t forget – from the U.S. The ‘Green March’ is celebrated each year with its own anniversary. In those days, U.S. involvement only enhanced America’s military spending but didn’t really offer the U.S. anything beyond that. Today, for Morocco to make moves on Melilla and Ceuta comes with a huge payback for Israel and the Trump administration, in that it would give the victors a massive annexation of international waters around the Straits of Gibraltar – effectively handing over the straits to Morocco, Israel, the U.S. and UK (Gibraltar). Under such a scenario, Trump would feel emboldened, as he and Bibi could decide which countries enter the Mediterranean and who pays what tariffs, etc. This new arrangement would give Trump exactly what he needs right now – leverage – while presenting on a plate to Israel a decisive blow which it can claim credit for by dealing with the so-called threat from Spain. It would effectively set up Israel as a regional player and breathe new life into the ‘Greater Israel’ project, while giving the King of Morocco the prize of his father’s dream: sovereignty over these two colonial anachronisms. Everyone’s a winner. Trump and Bibi have so much to gain by destroying Rabat’s good relations with Madrid that it’s hardly surprising the Ceuta “invasion” didn’t come earlier. And isn’t it funny that the frequency of how many times Trump announces his undivided support for Rabat’s claim over Western Sahara seems to be increasing? It’s childish thinking, but is he doing this to try to draw attention to other EU “partners” who haven’t done so for a while?
If you think it’s a conspiracy theory that Israel and the U.S. had a hand in the Ceuta stunt, then you probably think Israel had nothing to do with 9/11, or the assassination of JFK. It’s entirely possible that Israel organised the entire thing without even the knowledge of the King, who is distancing himself more and more recently from public duties. Conspiracy theories, remarkably, often have a habit of turning out to be true – but the idea that Ceuta was not organised and just came about randomly and organically is preposterous. Watch Madrid’s next move and how Rabat reacts.
This film is about how the French army secretly used chemical weapons in the Algerian independence war, in contravention of international law. The documentary presents archival evidence and personal testimony from former French soldiers and Algerian fighters, exposing France’s violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Historian Christophe Lafaye’s evidence includes a letter from a senior army commander to the government in 1956, which refers to the “use of chemical means”.
France set up a Special Weapons Unit in December 1956, using the same CN2D gas as in World War I, to target Algerian fighters in mountain caves. Of the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 incidents, only 440 attacks have been documented so far. One of the most devastating attacks was at Ghar Ben Shatouh in March 1959, in which an estimated 150 civilians were killed. Despite this, France did not formally ban chemical weapons until 1993, more than 30 years after Algeria’s independence.
Media reports claiming that the Islamic Republic of Iran has agreed to a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are false, and no change has been made to the country’s policy regarding the strategic waterway, according to a report.
Foreign media outlets, citing Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, have claimed earlier that Iran had accepted a proposal under which ships would enter the Persian Gulf through Iranian territorial waters and leave through Omani territorial waters.
Fars News Agency, citing a source close to Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, rejected those claims, with the source saying, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has reached no agreement on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and the reports published in this regard are false.”
According to Fars, a military source also dismissed the claims, saying they were entirely unfounded.
“As long as the hostile actions and acts of malice by the United States continue, the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed,” the military source was quoted as saying.
“Passage will only be possible through the designated route, in coordination with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Navy and after obtaining permission to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Otherwise, other routes are unsafe, and vessels attempting to use them will certainly encounter incidents.”
The source further emphasized that reports claiming that Iran had agreed to any plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz were “baseless” and that no decision or policy change had been made regarding the strategic waterway.
It came after US President Donald Trump said he had canceled declared attacks on Iran, following warnings from Tehran that any new US or Israeli aggression would face strong retaliation.
In a post on Truth Social on Saturday, Trump claimed that the US was “locked and loaded” and prepared to launch a military assault against Iran, describing the potential aggression as involving levels of military power “not seen since World War II.”
The latest round of war against Iran began on February 28, when US and Israeli forces launched large-scale strikes on Iranian territory.
Iran responded with daily waves of missiles and drones targeting US and Israeli assets across the region, while closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran and the US later signed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on June 17 in an effort to end the war across all fronts.
However, renewed US military aggression against Iran in recent weeks has prompted Tehran to resume missile and drone strikes against US assets in the region and close the Strait of Hormuz once again.
Among the adherents to the cult of climate change, nobody can claim a higher level of sanctimony than the Big Tech behemoths — the likes of Google, Microsoft and Meta. These new economic titans fancy themselves to be totally unlike the dirty and grubby industrial companies of the past, like the steel, automobile or oil producers with their belching smokestacks. Each of these new tech powerhouses loudly proclaims its sacred and unwavering commitment to “net zero” emissions by some early date, typically 2030.
At the time of that post, all three of those Big Tech behemoths, besides maintaining their own supposed paths to “net zero,” were also engaged to one degree or another in censoring and/or de-monetizing and/or downgrading anybody who dared to deviate from the so-called “climate consensus” — whatever that may be.
And as they censored and de-monetized anyone who deviated from the climate religion, each of those tech giants published their own annual “environment” or “sustainability” reports proclaiming their own strict adherence to the official orthodoxy. My 2024 post linked to the 2024 Reports of Google and Microsoft, and the then-most-recent 2023 Report of Meta. Those Google and Meta Reports can be found here and here; the Microsoft 2024 Report seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the internet.
In 2024, the AI craze and the accelerated build-out of infrastructure by the tech giants was just getting going. Today, all of them are engaged in a mad race to build the most and the fastest. In this light, the bloviation of the 2023 and 2024 “sustainability” reports makes truly entertaining reading today. Here are a few excerpts from the intro to the Google 2024 Report:
Since our earliest days, we’ve been on an ambitious journey to help build a more sustainable future. . . . To help minimize our environmental footprint, we’ve built world-leading efficient infrastructure for the AI era. . . . We strive to build the world’s most energy-efficient computing infrastructure. . . . In 2017, Google became the first major company to match 100% of our annual electricity consumption on a global basis with renewable energy, which we’ve achieved every year since [what does that mean?]. . . . Building on our first two decades of progress, in 2020 we launched our third decade of climate action—our most ambitious yet. . . . We have a bold goal to reach net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030. . . .
And from the Meta 2023 “Sustainability” Report:
We are now reaching toward the goals of net zero emissions across our value chain and becoming water positive throughout our operations, aiming to achieve both of these milestones in 2030. Meta’s net zero in 2030 goal focuses on embedding sustainability into everything we do, whether designing products, commuting, selecting construction materials or working with suppliers to set their own net zero targets. For example, through our Net Zero program, we work closely with suppliers to determine their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, set reduction targets and promote strategic action. . . . We are committed to protecting what is truly important: The well-being of people and our planet. . . . [We] take bold climate action by minimizing our footprint, championing renewable energy, restoring water resources, engaging our suppliers and supporting climate justice.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, fast forward to July 2026 — with the AI and data center build-out in full swing — and Google is just out with the 2026 version of its Report. Here is a link to the Google 2026 Report — 116 pages long. You would think that they would just give up and walk away from this nonsense, but instead they try to keep up the brave talk. The Executive Summary is all about mis-direction:
At Google, we’re deeply committed to responsibly managing the environmental footprint of our operations and unlocking the power of AI for the planet. . . . The AI revolution has made the last five years especially transformative, and we’re proud of the progress we’ve achieved. In 2025 alone, we signed agreements for over 12 GW of net-new clean energy. By combining this record-breaking procurement with our industry-leading infrastructure, we’re working to ensure that every megawatt is used as efficiently as possible. . . . It was with this same bold spirit that, at the beginning of the decade, we set net zero and 24/7 carbon-free energy2 (CFE) moonshots that were intentionally aspirational and designed to push the frontiers of what’s possible in energy systems and data center operations. . . . Our moonshots pushed us to meet this moment, and the scale of our impact has similarly undergone a step-change. In 2025, we contracted for eight times more clean energy than we did in 2019. Furthermore, the emissions we successfully avoided in 2025 represent seven times the size of our 2019 ambition-based carbon footprint. . . .
More blah-di-blah-di-blah. Guys, your promise was not to procure more “clean energy” or to “make every megawatt as efficient as possible.” It was “net zero” by 2030. Any progress on that?
To get the answer you’ll need to make it all the way to page 69, to a section titled “Progress update/carbon footprint”:
In 2025, our total ambition-based emissions were approximately 14.5 million tCO2e. . . . Our total ambition-based emissions increased 18% compared to 2024—primarily driven by increases in supply chain activities that supported the rapid expansion of our business. We recognize that our climate impact has been growing alongside the unprecedented growth of AI, and we’re actively working to minimize this impact.
What a joke.
Over at Meta, they continue to be a year behind in the reporting. But the basic story is no different. Here is a link to their (most recent) “2025 Sustainability Report.” Here’s the same sort of mis-direction in the introduction:
We are taking a multifaceted approach to implementing emissions reduction strategies that includes procuring clean and renewable energy and exploring innovative technologies like energy storage and geothermal energy. As a result of our clean and renewable energy procurement, we have reduced our emissions by 23.8 million metric tons (M MT) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) since 2021.
I’ve gone all the way through this Report and I can’t find any actual comparison of 2025 emissions versus 2023. Maybe I missed it. On page 70 there is a link labeled “environmental metrics.” It doesn’t even say what is there, but if you go there you will find a chart headed “Total GHG Emissions.” Those are reported to have been 7,443,182 MTCO2e in 2023, and 8,150,595 in 2024 (most recent year reported). That’s an increase of about 9.5% in that one year.
And here’s the latest about Meta, not from Meta itself, but from Yahoo Financeon July 24:
Meta quits clean energy pledge amid gas-powered data center push. Meta has abandoned a global pledge by leading companies to source all of their electricity from renewable sources, the social media giant confirmed Friday. Meta joined the pledge in 2016 according to a Wayback Machine archive of RE100’s website. The departure comes amid a frenzied data center buildout by leading tech companies. Meta has struck deals paying utilities to bring new natural gas power plants online, including 10 to power its Hyperion data center in Louisiana alone.
I understand that a little hypocrisy is inevitable in this world. But after the level of sanctimony that these guys have engaged in, let alone censorship of others, nobody should forget that it was all a scam from the outset.
Deborah Birx got a hero’s welcome on News Nation, claiming she never understood how the country went from slowing the spread to a full shutdown, and pointing to Fauci’s private calls with governors and mayors as the cause. Jefferey Jaxen pulls up the actual headlines and timeline on the woman who was named White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, and it tells a very different story.
The most important question we should be asking after Karim Khan’s dismissal last week as chief prosecutor of the ICC – the international war crimes court in The Hague – is not whether he is guilty of “sexual misconduct” against another staff member, identified as “Sarah”.
That can only be decided through a legal process – one, let us note, that has already taken place. A fact-finding body carried out a lengthy investigation of Sarah’s allegations over more than a year; its thousands of pages of evidence were then evaluated in detail by three senior judges.
Though you would not know it from the media coverage, they concluded that there was no evidence to suggest any kind of misconduct by Khan, sexual or otherwise.
Strangely, that determination was largely confirmed by an extraordinarily deferential “exclusive” CNN interview with Sarah, aired earlier this month.
She declined to give any meaningful details of what Khan had allegedly subjected her to, and celebrity interviewer Christiane Amanpour delicately avoided pressing her for any clarification.
No matter. The purpose of the CNN interview was never about excavating facts. It was designed to offer face-saving cover as an entirely political body called the Assembly of States Parties, comprising diplomatic representatives of the 125 states signed up to the ICC, entirely ignored the legal findings and dismissed Khan.
Paradoxically, it was the Assembly of States Parties that appointed the judges who had concluded that there was no evidence of misconduct or breach of duty by Khan. That inconvenient judgment was simply reversed, despite the Assembly members being in no position to weigh the evidence themselves.
We should not forget that many of these states have an investment in weakening the only international court that can bring their own senior officials to trial for war crimes.
In May 2024 – shortly before Sarah made her allegations – the ICC demonstrated that it was finally ready to prosecute western leaders for war crimes, not just those from the Global South or from the West’s official enemies, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Khan issued an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Both are accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza through a prolonged blockade of food, water and power.
Were Netanyahu ever to face trial – and found guilty, as he almost certainly would be – a lot of other leaders would have good reason to fear they might be found culpable next, not least for their complicity in Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
The question that needs answering now is not whether Khan is guilty of misconduct – that has been decided at a political level, not a legal one. No, we need an answer to an equally political, and far more troubling, question.
“Cui bono?” Or “Who benefits?”
The evidence is hiding in plain sight. The evidence is revealed both in the deeply politicised process that led to Khan’s downfall, and in what that process means for the future of the court.
Covert war
Khan is not the first ICC chief prosecutor to face extreme pressures – and, as with Khan, those pressures surfaced at the very moment Khan’s predecessor tried to take on Israel over its war crimes.
Fatou Bensouda faced a “covert war” waged against her by Israel for the best part of a decade, according to an investigation by the Guardian in May 2024, just as Khan issued his arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
The Guardian’sreport, published nearly three years after Bensouda had completed her nine-year term at the ICC, revealed that, during that time, she had faced threats to herself and her family, the monitoring of her communications, and an intimidating visit to her home.
More recently, Bensouda has confirmed these accounts in an interview with Al Jazeera. Bensouda notes that she repeatedly reported Israel’s campaign of intimidation to the Dutch authorities, but they did nothing to investigate the threats or protect her.
She also says certain “authorities” – she does not name them – warned her that she was going too far in investigating Israeli crimes and that “you could be harmed or you could be killed, or family members could be harmed in some way.”
The campaign of threats – instigated by Yossi Cohen, then the director of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad – intensified as Bensouda considered whether to open a formal investigation into Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, we should remember, predate – by decades – Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023. In fact, though no one is supposed to mention it, Israel’s sustained crimes of occupation are the self-evident cause of that Hamas attack.
An Israeli source told the Guardian that “the Mossad’s objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who would cooperate with Israel’s demands”– that is, scrap the ICC’s investigation into Israeli crimes. Another source admitted that Cohen was acting on Netanyahu’s instructions.
During one contact, Cohen reportedly issued a Mafia-style threat to Bensouda: “You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
The Guardian reported that the Mossad “took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor”.
The paper also noted that there were fears among senior ICC officials that “Israel had cultivated sources within the court’s prosecution division” – the division Khan would inherit from Bensouda.
Cohen was described as “stalking” Bensouda, and personally “ambushed” her in a hotel room in New York in 2018. Afterwards he repeatedly phoned her, in a threatening manner that was said to have escalated over time. When Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, he reportedly replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”
According to the Guardian :
On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown Bensouda copies of photographs of her husband, which were taken covertly when the couple were visiting London. On another, according to sources, Cohen suggested to the prosecutor that a decision to open a full investigation would be detrimental to her career.
Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members.
The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.
Israel used the materials to mount a “smear campaign” against her, but one that ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Concerted backlash
When Khan took up the role of ICC chief prosecutor in June 2021, he proved reluctant to pick up where Bensouda had left off on the Palestine case. Presumably, he was only too aware of the retaliation from Israel against her.
Bensouda had announced in December 2019 that she had grounds to open a full criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
However, in the face of a concerted backlash from western states, she delayed opening the investigation. She first sought a ruling from a pre-trial chamber of ICC judges – presumably in the hope it would serve as some kind of insurance policy – on whether the court had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories.
By February 2021 the judges confirmed what was already self-evident. The court did have such jurisdiction because Palestine had been signed up to the court since 2015.
Bensouda stepped down a few months later.
The door was now open for Khan to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes. However, the new chief prosecutor gave every appearance – perhaps understandably – of preferring to sit on his hands.
It was not just Israel that had been fearsomely opposed to its officials being tried for war crimes. Washington was equally incensed at the prospect – sometimes, it seemed, more so than over the possibility that US officials might also face arrest warrants for crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Between 2019 and 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the US imposed severe visa restrictions and financial sanctions on Bensouda. Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions to the Palestine case: “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes.”
Khan might well have avoided pursuing Israel indefinitely had it not been for the events that followed 7 October 2023.
Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, its devastation of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure, and its starvation of the entire population were actions so criminally abhorrent that UN agencies, major human rights groups and Holocaust scholars were soon all in agreement that they amounted to genocide.
In May 2024, Khan announced arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders subsequently killed by Israel.
Tsunami of threats
Shortly before Khan made that announcement, 12 senior US Senators had sent a threatening letter to the ICC: “Target Israel and we will target you.” The letter ended: “You have been warned.”
Describing Israeli and US sovereignty as inseparable, the senators reminded Khan that Washington had demonstrated “the lengths to which we will go to protect [our] sovereignty.”
A 2002 law, popularly known as “The Hague Invasion Act”, authorises the US president “to use all means necessary and appropriate” to bring about the release US persons and any allies imprisoned or detained by the ICC. Those allies, it goes without saying, include Israeli leaders.
Such threats, it should be noted, are a violation of Article 70 of the Rome Statute.
Following the issuing of the arrest warrants, there followed a tsunami of similar threats – and presumably more that have yet to become public – against Khan and the ICC.
A British-Israeli lawyer within the ICC – one known to have ties to Netanyahu’s legal adviser – warned Khan “they will destroy you and they will destroy the court” if the warrants were not rescinded. He urged Khan to “climb down the tree” and drop the case.
The UK’s foreign secretary of the time, David Cameron, phoned Khan to tell him Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.
Cameron warned Khan that he was “on the brink of making a huge mistake” and urged him to “take a step back and consider things”. He added that applying for arrest warrants for Israeli officials was tantamount to “dropping a hydrogen bomb”.
Meanwhile, Trump issued an executive order imposing aggressive financial sanctions against Khan and other ICC officials, including several of its judges.
Khan himself received warnings that Israel’s Mossad was continuing its operations in The Hague, where the ICC is located, to monitor and compromise the court’s investigators as they compiled evidence on Israel – just as it had done earlier under Bensouda.
Khan publicly stated that retaliatory threats and intimidation were explicitly targeting members of his own family.
Untouchable criminals
What conclusions should we draw from all of this?
Quite aside from the matter of whether Sarah’s allegations of “sexual misconduct” are true or not, it is clear that Israel and the US have been digging for dirt – and apparently ready to fabricate such dirt – on any chief prosecutor who tries to hold them to account for their crimes.
Both have indicated that they are ready to manipulate legal and political processes to ensure the outcome they desire: that they remain untouchable.
We have a template for how this plays out. Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, published details in 2010 of US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost immediately he found himself entangled in accusations of sexual misdemeanours – in his case in Sweden – that were similarly amplified by an uncritical western media.
Assange faced years in various forms of confinement while the US and UK pressured Sweden to keep alive an investigation against him Swedish prosecutors at least twice sought to drop for lack of credible evidence.
In fact, the US and UK never wanted the evidence tested – they were quite happy with a permanent, unresolved “investigation” – precisely because they knew it would have been unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.
The point was simply to generate constant headlines about “rape”, turning Assange into a pariah, justifying his effective disappearance from public life, severely weakening Wikileaks as a whistleblowing platform, deflecting attention from the all-too-real crimes committed by the US and Britain, and paving the way to a political show trial to extradite him to the US on entirely confected “espionage” charges.
This has been repeated in the case of Khan and the ICC. In Khan’s case, the evidence was tested and found inadequate. So the legal process has been replaced by a flagrantly political one.
Khan has been turned into a legal pariah, even stripped of his right to work as a lawyer in the UK by the British Bar Association.
The ICC has been further weakened, just as Israel and the US have expressly stated they wanted it to be. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, has recently launched an official campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick”.
He says: “Now they [the ICC] are going to see the consequences”. Consequences of what? Of seeking to enforce international law against a key US client state.
Meanwhile, accountability for the all-too-real crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank – and actively supported by western states like the US, Germany and Britain – recedes yet further into the background
As each brick protecting the ICC is dismantled, a brick is added to the wall of protection around Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal war machine.
Israel, meanwhile, is barely concealing that it has been masterminding the effort to destroy the ICC.
According to Guy Azriel, the diplomatic correspondent for i24 News, Israeli foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar “oversaw a dedicated task force and employed intensive diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Khan’s removal from office”.
Hillel Neuer, director of the Israel apologist group United Nations Watch, cheered what he called “our campaign to remove” Khan, and warned Francesca Albanese, the UN’s legal expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, “you’re next”.
Like Khan, Albanese has been searching for practical, legal ways – not just rhetoric – to hold Israel and its western allies to account for the crimes in Gaza.
Predatory states
The ICC claims its work will not be affected by Khan’s removal and that the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant will still be pursued under new stewardship. That seems doubtful.
Israel and the US are cranking up the intimidation of the ICC, which has no tools – beyond the support of members states – to enforce its rulings or protect itself from the hostility of a rogue superpower.
Currently the court appears paralysed, allowing Israel to muddy the waters with interminable, and vexatious, appeals against the arrest warrants.
Any lawyer who takes up the post of ICC chief prosecutor will be only too aware of the fate that befell Khan and the campaign of intimidation against Bensouda as soon as each tried to enforce accountability on Israel and its western patrons.
It will take a very brave individual indeed to renew that task. Khan’s successor will understand that, in any further confrontation with Israel and Washington, the US will not hesitate to crush the ICC and, with it, remove the only effective restraint on criminality by powerful states.
More likely, however, the Assembly of States Parties – the political body that ousted Khan – will privately require from his successor reassurances that the new chief prosecutor reliably defer to the principle of Israeli and western impunity. Only someone less willing to ruffle feathers stands any chance of being appointed.
That was the clearest of messages sent by the Assembly when a majority of member states voted to be rid of Khan. The short-lived experiment in creating a mechanism for enforcing international law is over. We are back to the law of the jungle.
Hundred of thousands of people around the world – more likely millions – will now find themselves even more exposed to the criminal actions of predatory states. Unlike Khan’s accuser, they are unlikely to ever get their day in court.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement said Friday that the announced agreement between Palestinian factions and Israel was “inaccurate,” adding that it has reservations over the deal in its current form, Anadolu reports.
In a statement, the movement’s spokesperson said: “What has been announced regarding an agreement between the Palestinian factions and the enemy (Israel) is inaccurate, and we have reservations about it in its currently circulated form.”
The Palestinian group’s statement came after US President Donald Trump announced that an agreement had been reached for the complete disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, with Israeli forces set to withdraw in phases as the process moves forward.
Trump also credited Egypt, Qatar, and Turkiye for helping broker what he described as a “historic breakthrough,” saying the agreement would be implemented gradually, with an International Stabilization Force working alongside a new Palestinian police force to assume responsibility for security in Gaza.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and injured over 174,000 others, most of them women and children, while destroying about 90% of the enclave’s infrastructure.
The ceasefire was brokered under Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, which is being overseen by the Board of Peace, which he chairs.
Despite the ceasefire, which took effect on Oct. 10, 2025, Israel has continued daily attacks across Gaza, killing 1,214 Palestinians and injuring 3,977 others, most of them women and children, while causing widespread destruction.
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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