Australian activists who took part in the Global Sumud Flotilla for Gaza filed a formal submission with the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 30 May, accusing Israel of war crimes based on documented evidence of torture and sexual violence sustained during their abduction and imprisonment.
The legal filing, submitted by 11 Australian survivors of the Flotilla and their legal team, is supported by dozens of survivor testimonies, video evidence, medical records, and sworn statements.
This evidence details severe beatings and sexual abuse following the 18 May interception of an international aid mission carrying food and medicine to the besieged Gaza Strip in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade of the enclave.
One specific account included in the submission describes an Australian humanitarian worker being forcibly injected with an unidentified substance by Israeli captors.
The submission also incorporates video evidence, including footage posted to social media by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who boasted of the ill treatment and showed handcuffed activists on their knees being taunted by Israeli soldiers.
The Global Sumud Flotilla reports that at least 67 participants suffered injuries during their imprisonment that required medical evaluation, with 12 individuals requiring hospitalization.
One survivor, Australian filmmaker Juliet Lamont, in an interview with Double Down News, recounted being dragged into a shipping container she called a “torture tunnel” where she was placed in a stress position, hands restrained behind her back, and ankles shackled in the dark before being “vaginally raped by one of the male soldiers,” while “other people had guns inserted inside them.”
She added that a 70-year-old woman’s ribs had been broken as “howls of torture and pain” would emit from the same chamber she had been tortured in.
This legal action follows the UN adding Israel to a 2026 blacklist for parties guilty of committing sexual violence in conflict zones. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited documented “patterns of sexual violence” against detainees, leading to the designation of the Israeli Prison Service on the blacklist.
While Israel’s ambassador to Australia and other Israeli officials have denied these claims, asserting that participants were treated according to established procedures, the Australian government previously sanctioned Minister Ben Gvir for his “shocking and unacceptable” treatment of the detainees.
Returning survivors have expressed outrage at the Australian federal government, noting that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declined multiple requests to meet with them.
Flotilla participant Isla Lamont highlighted the contrast of being granted a hearing at the ICC while being ignored by domestic leadership, stating that “If Australian survivors can be heard in The Hague but not in Canberra, something has gone badly wrong”.
The flotilla organizers are now calling for independent international investigations, arms embargoes, and the enforcement of arrest warrants for the officials responsible.
French activists are also pursuing their own separate legal complaint on the “humiliation, rape, and acts of torture” they endured, explicitly declining to cooperate with the French Foreign Ministry’s request for a criminal probe due to their government’s continued diplomatic support for Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza.
A revived attempt to scapegoat a handful of Israeli officials for the crimes of its entire regime structure has again taken off, especially in light of the recent diplomatic fallout over Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s public humiliation of Gaza aid flotilla activists. The idea behind this Hasbara campaign is to normalize Israel’s actions.
When Itamar Ben-Gvir posted the video of him mocking the brutal treatment that foreign activists were being subjected to – after being kidnapped in international waters – entitling it “welcome to Israel”, it understandably triggered a diplomatic firestorm. However, the Western leaders who summoned their envoys in response haven’t dared to address the treatment of the activists, including their own citizens, since.
All of this begs the question as to how much authenticity came along with these stances. One point of note is that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined in with the chorus of condemnation, as did his Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and others. Since that time, at least 15 activists who were part of the latest Global Sumud Flotilla have accused the Israeli military of committing different forms of sexual assault against them, including rape.
The widespread weaponization of sexual violence by the Israeli military and security forces is no new phenomenon, yet it has occurred at a markedly higher frequency over the past few years, and it is something that has solely occurred to international peace activists. Instead, the Israelis have been proven to have implemented a systematic campaign of sexual violence against Palestinians, in particular those who are held hostage in military detention centers and civilians who have been detained in Gaza.
UN and human rights reports, eye witness testimonies, victim accounts, even video and photographic evidence, have all been presented to support the conclusion that sexual violence, including rape, has been used in unprecedented ways against the Palestinian civilian population. Despite all of this, the only mainstream corporate media outlet in the West that dared report on the issue was the New York Times, in a piece that addressed the issue years too late.
These same Western governments have not followed up the summoning of their envoys with any solid action, nor have they made a deal about the testimonies of sexual assault against activists who were kidnapped in international waters. Now, a coordinated media push, within which the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, has recently participated, seeks to play the “bad apples” public relations strategy.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have become popular scapegoats, used to hide a society behind them that supports almost everything they do, even if they seek to be more well hidden. The overwhelming majority of the Israeli public supported their military committing genocide.
In fact, things are so bad that the 10 Israeli soldiers who were accused of gang raping a Palestinian hostage have now become celebrities in their society. Israeli comedians make jokes about the rape of Palestinians with dogs, Israeli politicians openly defend such despicable behavior, and there were even the infamous “right to rape” protests when soldiers were temporarily detained for the acts they committed.
The gang rape incident was not just alleged; it was caught on film and leaked. In the end, all of the Israeli soldiers who committed the violent rape got off scot free. The Israeli military’s top lawyer, who had leaked the video of the incident, something that forced the arrest of the perpetrators, ended up getting arrested herself, resigning from her job, and then made at least two suicide attempts following a string of death threats.
Itamar Ben-Gvir did not sexually assault those 15 activists; it wasn’t Bezalel Smotrich who convinced Israeli society to turn gang rapists into heroes and place them on public television shows. Israel has a citizen army and is a society built around a military culture.
When others try to scapegoat Benjamin Netanyahu, something that you will hear from Western liberals and mainstream Democrats, this, too, is disingenuous. According to polling data, a plurality of Israelis dislike the current Premier, which means it isn’t him that is to blame for the vast majority of Israeli citizens supporting the genocide in Gaza, or even worse, advocating publicly for even harsher means of dealing with Palestinian civilians.
It’s also not only Netanyahu that has openly supported the notion of achieving the “Greater Israel” project, his so-called “moderate” opponent, Yair Lapid, has himself publicly advocated the exact same policy– the only difference is that the opposition leader seeks to be more strategic about stealing territory all the way up to and including Iraq.
The reality is, these Western leaders are fully complicit with the Israelis. They only withdrew their summoned diplomatic envoys because Ben-Gvir’s video embarrassed them, robbing them of the ability to lie and cover up Israel’s blatant crimes against the international activists. It took no courage and it would have been more genuine of them to have endorsed the Israeli Security Minister’s actions.
Why? Because many of these nations that summoned their envoys are openly part of the so-called “Civil Military Coordination Center” (CMCC) that was set up to enforce the Gaza ceasefire and prevent violations of it. Instead, these nations have joined a center that watches Israeli war crimes – including the mass murder of over 900 Palestinians during the ceasefire – in real time, refusing to even leave the center in protest, let alone take any action. They are all directly complicit in the genocide.
What this whole ordeal has proven is just how low Western governments and their stenographers in the media will go in order to cover up the crimes of the Israeli regime. No matter what, they refuse to take a stand. If they had grown a backbone, it could have deterred many of the horrors we see playing out today.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
From Guantánamo to Palestine, Washington has a long, brutal history of silencing, blacklisting, and deporting rapporteurs who dared tell the truth.
When the United States government decided to impose sanctions against the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, honest defenders of human rights were astonished. The measure, announced in July 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was presented as a response to what the U.S. government called the expert’s “illegitimate and shameful efforts” to promote actions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli and American officials.
In practice, the sanctions meant much more than a diplomatic gesture. Albanese was included in restriction mechanisms linked to the U.S. financial system, which, in theory, may imply the freezing of assets under American jurisdiction, banking restrictions, and travel limitations. The decision is the most blatant attempt to intimidate a United Nations Special Rapporteur.
The importance of the Italian jurist’s work helps explain why she became one of the main targets of Israel and its Western allies. Since assuming office in 2022, Albanese has produced forceful reports on the Israeli occupation system, describing it as a structure of permanent colonization, segregation, and apartheid. After the beginning of the extermination in Gaza in October 2023, she began arguing that there were plausible elements of genocide in Israel’s military campaign.
Behind diplomatic closed doors, her work came to be seen by Israeli authorities as especially dangerous because it combined denunciations of humanitarian violations with a strategy of international legal accountability.
Despite the exceptional nature of the sanctions, the Albanese case did not emerge out of nowhere. Over the last several decades, the United States developed different methods of pressure against UN Special Rapporteurs considered excessively critical of its foreign policies, its allies, or its domestic human rights situation. Before reaching the point of imposing financial sanctions, Washington had already resorted to diplomatic campaigns, public attacks, attempts at delegitimization, restrictions on access, and political pressure within the Human Rights Council.
The most visible precedents of this pattern lie precisely within the mandate dedicated to the occupied Palestinian territories.
Before Albanese, two Special Rapporteurs became frequent targets of discrediting campaigns: John Dugard and Richard Falk.
A South African jurist and expert in international law, Dugard held the position between 2001 and 2008 and became known for drawing comparisons between the Israeli occupation and the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa. In reports presented to the UN, he argued that the combination of territorial segregation, checkpoints, settlement expansion, and severe restrictions on Palestinian mobility produced a system of domination incompatible with international law.
His positions provoked a strong reaction from Israel and growing discomfort in Washington. American diplomats, although often in a less strident manner than Tel Aviv, demonstrated systematic opposition to the rapporteur’s conclusions within the Human Rights Council, orchestrating pressure campaigns on allies and countries that could influence key votes and decisions.
If John Dugard faced diplomatic resistance and attempts at political disqualification, his successor in the Palestinian mandate, Richard Falk, became the target of a far more aggressive and personalized campaign.
An emeritus professor of international law at Princeton, Falk took office in 2008 and quickly entered into open conflict with Israel and the United States. His criticism of the Israeli occupation, the blockade of Gaza, and the country’s military offensives began generating frequent diplomatic confrontations.
Israel went so far as to bar his entry into the country in December 2008, when Falk attempted to carry out an official UN mission in the occupied territories. Detained at Ben Gurion Airport, he was kept in custody and later deported. The episode triggered protests at the United Nations, since independent experts are, in principle, entitled to access in order to carry out their mandates.
Throughout his period as rapporteur, Falk came to argue that Israeli policies displayed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid, exposing the nature of Zionist oppression over Palestinians. At various moments, American diplomats accused the rapporteur of bias and unfitness for office simply because he did not fully follow the dictates of Tel Aviv and Washington, unlike what they had become accustomed to.
One of the most intense episodes occurred after Falk published comments on the national oppression of Palestinians and American foreign policy. Then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice publicly called for his removal from office, stating that he was “unfit to serve” as Special Rapporteur. Organizations from the Zionist lobby, such as UN Watch, also conducted permanent campaigns for his dismissal, accusing him of antisemitism and conspiracism.
Falk responded by saying he was the target of a systematic attempt at silencing. In interviews and public statements, he described the pressure he faced as a campaign of “personal attacks” intended to divert attention from the Israeli violations documented under his mandate.
Guantánamo and the War Against Anti-Torture Rapporteurs
The pattern of pressure seen in mandates on Palestine — public discrediting, diplomatic pressure, and attempts at institutional marginalization — would reappear on other fronts, especially when UN experts began investigating the consequences of the so-called “war on terror” launched by the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The issue of torture became one of the main points of friction between Washington and international human rights mechanisms.
One of the most emblematic episodes involved Austrian jurist Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on torture between 2004 and 2010. During his mandate, Nowak repeatedly sought unrestricted access to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of detainees remained without formal trial under accusations of terrorism.
The Bush administration partially accepted a visit but refused conditions considered essential by the United Nations. Among them was the possibility of conducting private interviews with prisoners — a standard procedure in international investigations into torture and mistreatment. Without such guarantees, Nowak refused what would have been a merely symbolic visit.
In public statements, the rapporteur argued that inspections without confidentiality would amount to a “guided tour,” incapable of producing any serious assessment of detention conditions. Even so, after analyzing documents, testimonies from former prisoners, and medical reports, he concluded that certain practices used at Guantánamo could be classified as torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
In the following years, other UN specialists would face similar reactions when addressing the issue.
Juan Méndez, Special Rapporteur on torture between 2010 and 2016, criticized the prolonged use of solitary confinement, classifying certain periods of extreme isolation as a form of psychological torture. American authorities challenged his conclusions and resisted allowing unrestricted access to prisoners.
Another relevant case was that of British expert Ben Emmerson, Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. Emmerson called for criminal investigations into the CIA’s secret torture programs, including clandestine prisons (“black sites”) and interrogation techniques used after 9/11.
In a particularly strong position, he argued that it was a “legal obligation” of states to investigate and prosecute those responsible for acts of torture authorized in the name of combating terrorism. The American reaction was predominantly defensive, with officials maintaining that internal investigations had already taken place and rejecting international interference.
More recently, Swiss jurist Nils Melzer, also a rapporteur on torture, faced strong political resistance after denouncing abuses linked to U.S. security policy and the treatment of prisoners in contexts of war and international extradition. Although his case is more closely associated with the treatment of Julian Assange, Melzer also criticized the persistent impunity surrounding post-9/11 abuses.
Marking the 2000 Israeli withdrawal after 22 years of occupation, the Resistance today is still standing strong on the frontlines. Here is a look into the history of occupation and the deterrence written in blood.
Every year, the Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon is marked across the country, especially in the South, with ululations echoing through the streets, feet shaking the ground to liberation songs, and motorcades filling the roads of villages and towns. It is a day that recalls the moment southern Lebanon was liberated from 22 years of Israeli occupation on May 25, 2000, marking the defeat of what was once known as an “invincible army”.
But as I write these words today, southern Lebanon is bleeding again. This year, the memory is no longer only about ululations and celebrations; it is about the resilience of the South, the same resilience that made liberation possible in the first place.
Twenty-six years later, the Israeli occupation has not ended its efforts to occupy southern Lebanon, nor its attacks on civilians, nor its broader expansionist agenda. However, since May 25, a new equation of deterrence has been written across the border. And as the occupation escalates, the resistance continues to adapt; as military capabilities evolve on one side, the other continues to consistently work to deter and resist, even with a hefty price paid in blood.
The occupation came first
The Israeli occupation has always sold a false narrative about its occupation and aggression against southern Lebanon by justifying its attacks under the umbrella of so-called security measures, but history has proven otherwise.
Way before any well-established resistance movement was recorded in southern Lebanon, the Israeli occupation invaded the area on November 1, 1948, and occupied 15 villages, simultaneously with the occupation of Palestine. On October 24, the Israeli Carmeli Brigade invaded the town of Houla and committed a massacre, which resulted in at least 67 martyrs.
There were records of 14 massacres in one week during the so-called “Operation Hiram”, which was launched “in a bid to cleanse the area of its population,” according to records by MERIP. As mentioned in its records, Israeli soldiers violently and forcibly expelled the residents of at least seven Lebanese villages in areas near the northern border of Palestine during that period.
The IOF then withdrew from occupied Lebanese villages by mid-March 1949 (Houla, al-Mansoura, Suruh, Ghabbatiyya, Kafr ‘Inan, Marus, al-Ras al-Ahmar, Kafr Bir’im, Iqrit, Iribbin, Mi’ilya, Arab al-Samniyya, and Nabi Rubin), as under the negotiated armistice terms, “Israel” was compelled to withdraw from occupied villages. Seven villages (Ibl al-Qamh, Hounin, al-Nabi Yusha’, Qadas, al-Malikiyya, Salha, and Tarbikha) remained under occupation and were turned into illegal Israeli settlements.
The aggression, however, didn’t stop there. In 1967, the UN ISPAL recorded Israeli massacres in Houla and Hanin.
The second Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon began on March 14, 1978, killing approximately a thousand civilians, before the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) withdrew under the UNSC Resolution 425, which demanded an immediate withdrawal of the IOF and the transfer of control to the UNFIL. But “Israel” transferred control of border areas to Saad Haddad’s “Army of Free Lebanon” (AFL), an Israeli-backed splinter faction of the Lebanese Army, which emerged in 1976, before being renamed the “South Lebanon Army” (SLA) in May 1980.
“Israel” reinvaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, advancing all the way to Beirut and killing at least 19,000 civilians, before it was forced to withdraw to the so-called “security zone” in southern Lebanon, a point at which a resistance nucleus began to take shape.
Israeli pressure tools in southern Lebanon
The occupation operated through two parallel chains of command: the Israeli Occupation Forces as the occupying power, and the so-called South Lebanon Army (SLA) as “Israel’s” collaborationist force and punching bag, also carrying out different tactics of aggression, targeting the people economically, physically, and psychologically.
One of the crimes carried out by the occupation was the SLA’s practice of forced conscription of Lebanese civilian men. All males over 18 living in the occupied area were required to serve one year as SLA military recruits, effectively fighting for a force occupying their own territory. Human Rights Watch documented that the SLA “filled its ranks through the involuntary conscription of residents of the ‘security zone,’ including children.” Men who refused faced harassment, detention, economic punishment, and their houses were demolished with their families inside.
Khiam Detention Center: Systematic torture
As part of the occupation’s torture tactics was the established Khiam Detention Center in al-Khiam, which was targeted in an Israeli airstrike during the 2006 war on Lebanon and completely razed during the ongoing war today, in an effort to erase the footprints of Israeli barbarism and the subsequent heroic resistance that forced its closure for good.
During the Israeli occupation, the established detention center replaced the Ansar detention camp (located in the southern town of Ansar) and housed more than 5,000 Lebanese citizens, resistance supporters, and fighters, who were held in harsh conditions and subjected to systematic torture by the SLA.
In the center, the Israeli-backed forces exercised extensive torture practices, including electric shocks, prolonged suspension from ceilings, sleep deprivation, deprivation of food and water, and extended solitary confinement, as well as the “red box”, a metal container where the detainee had to sit in a squatting position and the guards would bang on it with metal rods, with the sound reportedly reaching nearby villages.
Additionally, “Israel” denied Red Cross access to detainees despite the evidence of savage torture. The detention system was also reportedly used as a coercive leverage mechanism, with families of detainees pressured to provide information on resistance activities in exchange for updates about, or the release of, their relatives. Today, “Israel” isn’t preventing healthcare workers; it’s deliberately bombing them, alongside journalists, further exposing its savagery against civilians in southern Lebanon and its fear of the truth.
Economic strangulation of occupied South
The Israeli occupation also heavily relied on the economic strangulation of South Lebanon and its people by establishing chokepoints, setting the grounds for economic dependency, destroying the region’s agriculture, and completely isolating the region from the rest of Lebanon.
The IOF’s checkpoint system established economic control as a deliberate instrument of occupation. The occupation installed curfews, bans on night travel, motorcycles, and multiple passengers per vehicle, alongside extensive searches and unpredictable closures. The Awali River checkpoint, which was established in 1982 during the Israeli invasion, became the primary chokepoint for all goods moving between south and north Lebanon, causing delays, confiscations, and arbitrary shutdowns that made normal commerce structurally impossible. Supply chains collapsed, contracts could not be honoured, and agriculture and industry were effectively severed from national markets.
Economic dependency was simultaneously engineered from the other direction. Israeli goods flooded the occupied zone while southern producers were barred from Lebanese markets and forced to sell primarily to “Israel”.
The land itself was targeted. Crop destruction, contamination of farmland with mines, military deployment across cultivated areas, and later use of white phosphorus rendered large tracts unusable. Moreover, significant portions of agricultural land remain inaccessible to this day due to unexploded ordnance.
Approximately 180,000 residents lived outside effective Lebanese state administration for the duration of the occupation. Services, infrastructure, and governance were mediated through the SLA rather than Beirut. Movement restrictions severed access to national courts, healthcare, education, and family networks. Lebanese state investment halted at the occupation perimeter, triggering a long-term demographic displacement.
The cumulative economic disruption did not end with the 2000 withdrawal. The wars of 2006, 2024, and now 2026 have continued the same cycles of infrastructural and agricultural loss, attempting to fracture any attempt at a full economic reset by committing acts of agriecocide and ecocide.
Israeli massacres in southern Lebanon
Beyond the structural violence of occupation, Israeli forces conducted periodic large-scale attacks that killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, in an effort to carry out mass killings and trigger mass displacement. Some of the notable attacks are the Israeli massacre in 1993 and the April aggression (Udwan Nisan) in 1996.
Israeli massacre in July 1993
“Israel” launched the so-called “Operation Accountability” on July 25, 1993. For seven days, the IOF bombarded southern Lebanese villages with massed artillery and airstrikes. Approximately 118 to 120 Lebanese civilians were killed and close to 500 were wounded. The attack displaced an estimated 300,000 people northward toward Beirut, a displacement that was not incidental but declared as a strategic objective. The IOF’s logic, openly stated by Israeli officials, was to generate a humanitarian crisis.
April aggression in 1996
Known in Lebanon as Udwan Nisan, the April Aggression was carried out for seventeen days from April 11 to 27 in 1996, authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The IOF flew over 600 air sorties and fired approximately 25,000 artillery shells against Lebanese territory. Evacuation threats were issued to 86 villages, displacing approximately 400,000 people. Among the deliberate targets struck by a helicopter gunship was an ambulance carrying fleeing civilians near Tyre, killing two women and four children.
On April 18, 1996, at 2:07 in the afternoon, Israeli artillery fired 36 shells at the UNIFIL compound near Qana, which was sheltering between 800 and 845 civilians who had fled the bombardment of surrounding villages. One hundred and six people were killed, among them a disproportionate number of children.
Resistance born under occupation
As it has become clear, before any organized armed group existed in South Lebanon, the region was reeling under Israeli invasions and attacks. The resistance then emerged from the very ground Israeli boots were forced to leave, as the South saw the sprouting of small groups individually targeting the Israeli occupation.
Among the first Lebanese to take up arms were secular leftists. Following the 1978 invasion and “Israel’s” installation of Haddad’s AFL, cadres of the Lebanese Communist Party and the Organization of Communist Action began conducting small-scale armed operations in the South. Simultaneously, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, with deep roots in southern Lebanese villages, was running parallel operations against Israeli patrols and AFL positions.
These operations were scattered and uncoordinated, but they established something essential: an armed Lebanese refusal of the occupation, rooted in the land itself; a mission protected by international law that broadly acknowledges the right of people under foreign occupation to resist, including the use of armed struggle, to achieve self-determination.
The resistance that eventually drove “Israel” out was never the product of a single sect or ideology. It was communist, nationalist, and Islamic. It was Shia, Sunni, Druze, and Christian, unlike how some try to portray it under tight sectarian titles. What unified these currents was a common geography, the occupied South.
The same occupation planted in the land also saw the blossoming of the Movement of the Deprived, co-founded by Imam Musa al-Sadr and Greek Catholic Bishop Grégoire Haddad in 1974. On January 20, 1975, the military wing was established as the Lebanese Resistance Regiments to fight and repel the occupation. The regiments engaged in operations against the Israelis before evolving toward institutional politics in 1980 after the disappearance of Imam al-Sadr.
34 years after the first Israeli invasion, Hezbollah was formed in 1982 from the very seed that Sayyed al-Sadr had planted against the occupation.
Hezbollah: An imposed deterrent equation
The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon – Hezbollah did not emerge from a conference room; it emerged from under occupation.
The first phase of Hezbollah’s operational strategy was not guerrilla-like in the classical sense. The Resistance group adopted the methodology of strategic coercion through hard-scale operations, designed to make the cost of Israeli presence in Lebanon so high that continued presence became untenable. Hezbollah began engaging in jihadist operations using car bombs.
On November 11, 1982, an explosive-laden truck was driven by a resistance fighter into the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, before exploding and killing 75 soldiers. A year later, on November 4, 1983, the IOF headquarters in Tyre was bombed again, killing 28 Israelis.
After “Israel’s” partial withdrawal to the so-called “security zone” in 1985, the nature of the campaign shifted. Hezbollah, at the time, fought a grinding occupation over a defined strip of territory rather than a sprawling invasion and carried out large-scale frontal raids on IOF and SLA outposts, which resulted in heavy losses.
Katyusha\Grad rockets: A new deterrent equation
In parallel, the Katyusha\Grad rocket was first used in the mid-1980s and was highly visible on the battlefield in the 1990s. What the Katyusha\Grad introduced was not a military victory but something more durable, a deterrence equation. Hezbollah did not fire the rockets indiscriminately. It fired them in calibrated, declared responses to Israeli strikes on Lebanese civilians, establishing through practice what eventually became an informal but understood rule: attacks on Lebanese civilian areas would be met with rockets into northern “Israel”.
This equation was visible during the aforementioned Israeli aggression in 1993 under “Operation Accountability”, and seventeen days in 1996 under the April aggression, “Israel” unleashed its full air and artillery power on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah retaliated every single day with Katyusha\Grad rockets on northern occupied Palestine, emptiying Kiryat Shmona, paralyzed the economy in occupied al-Jalil, and placed the Israeli government under unbearable domestic political pressure, pushing it to turn to Washignton and Paris to broker the 1993 and 1996 understandings.
IED war, tactical adaptation
The 1990s were defined by a single tactical contest: Hezbollah’s roadside bombs against any IOF deployment. When the IOF used sniffer dogs to detect wire-triggered devices, Hezbollah concealed IEDs inside fiberglass rocks and switched to radio detonation.
When the IOF swept radio frequencies from Mount Hermon listening posts, Hezbollah switched to cell phone receivers. By the end of the war in 2000, IOF mine-clearing patrols were physically counting rocks along roads to identify which were fiberglass, an image that captured the dramatic shift in the military balance.
By 1998, the rate of operations had reached nearly four operations per day. The attack on the Ansariyye beach landing in September 1997, in which twelve Shayetet 13 commandos were killed in a single night, after Hezbollah obtained Israeli drone reconnaissance footage of the landing zone four days before the operation, demonstrated that Hezbollah had achieved not just tactical superiority but intelligence penetration of IOF operational planning.
On February 28, 1999, the IED campaign reached its peak, with the killing of Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, the senior IOF commander in Lebanon, in a roadside bomb disguised as a rock near Kfar Shouba.
The day of resistance and liberation
By 1995, a paratrooper unit had been disbanded after soldiers refused a Lebanon deployment, and by 2000, 200 IOF soldiers had been imprisoned for refusing to serve in the area, fearing the Resistance’s operations, thus weakening the Israeli occupation.
When “Israel” completed its withdrawal on May 24, 2000, no IOF officer could credibly claim the army had achieved anything in Lebanon. On the contrary, “Israel” had a designed exit scenario, but the Resistance shattered it before it could have been executed.
May 25, 2000, was announced as a national historic day, marking the IOF’s forced, unconditional withdrawal from southern Lebanon, ending an 18-year military occupation.
Martyred Hezbollah Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, during his famous Bint Jbeil speech on May 26, 2000, declared that the IOF intended to withdraw gradually over several weeks beyond May 25. When the UN Security Council issued a resolution and UNIFIL arrived to take charge, “Israel” intended to frame the departure as a sovereign, orderly transition and, crucially, could have claimed to be “liberating” the al-Khiam detainees as a gesture of goodwill, to sell the narrative of an Israeli choice rather than Israeli defeat.
But instead, civilians from the occupied villages, side by side with Resistance fighters, broke through to liberated areas in the towns of al-Qantara, Deir Seryan, al-Qusair, and al-Taybeh on May 22 and 23. SLA positions began collapsing one after another in a single night. The central sector of the so-called “security zone” collapsed within hours, and Israeli soldiers fled, leaving everything behind.
On the morning of May 23, 2000, residents of al-Khiam marched to the Khiam Detention Center, chanting Allahu Akbar (God is Great), tore the bars off the cells with their bare hands, and carried the detainees who had been unlawfully imprisoned for months and years, out into the sun. Some fainted, some wept, others kissed the ground; southern Lebanon was liberated.
Today, the pattern has not changed. In the 1990s, Hezbollah defeated “Israel’s” wire-detection technology with fiberglass. In 2006, it defeated “Israel’s” air supremacywith Kornet rockets, and in 2026, it continues to defeat “Israel’s” electronic dominance with a fiber-optic cable, introducing the FPV drone, and more specifically, the Ababil FPV drones.
The occupation, indeed, has become more aggressive and bloodier, but the Resistance has proven to be more adaptable. The equation written on May 25, 2000, endures: that the people of this land, given will and time, can raise the cost of occupation beyond what it can bear. It is being rewritten, kilometer by kilometer, in the hills, forests, and valleys of southern Lebanon, with a spool of cable and a low-cost drone.
The equation Hezbollah established in 2000 was not a peace agreement, a ceasefire, or a diplomatic settlement. It was a demonstrated fact that an occupying army, regardless of its technological superiority, can be forced out through sustained, adaptive resistance that raises the cost of presence beyond what the occupying entity is willing to pay.
Twenty-six years later, that same demonstration is being performed again, and “Israel”, with five divisions on Lebanese soil and an “unlimited budget” allocated to counter $400 drones, is on the wrong side of the equation again. The organization that Israeli officials described as “significantly weakened” after the war in 2024 is conducting an average of 24 separate operations on Israeli soldiers, vehicles, and positions in a single day.
Liberation continues to be rewritten right now, in the hills around al-Khiam and in Bint Jbeil, al-Taybeh, Ayta al-Shaab, al-Naqoura, Maroun al-Ras, Ainata, and al-Ghandouriyeh. It is being rewritten across all of southern Lebanon. And the South, our South, remains steadfast and forever-present, holding steady under the boots of the very men that stand their ground on the frontlines, steadfast and resilient.
And “Israel”? as martyr Sayyed Nasrallah put it during his famous speech in Bint Jbeil, “By Allah, Israel, which owns nuclear weapons and the strongest air fleets in the region, is indeed frailer than a spider web.”
By most accounts, German POWs were treated well by the US Army during World War II. Those sent to the United States had no chance to escape so were loosely guarded as they provided valuable farm labor and lived well. But something happened in 1945 that resulted in abuse and thousands of POWs died.
The Rheinwiesenlager, or Rhine Meadow camps in English, were a group of 19 camps built in Germany by the US Army to hold captured German soldiers during the last months of World War II as millions of German soldiers surrendered. German POWs were herded into outdoor pens and held for months with no shelter, toilets, or beds, while water and food were rationed. The horrible conditions led to the death of thousands. This led to controversy and a US Army investigation determined this abuse caused 3053 deaths. Later investigations by the new West German government claimed between 4000 to 27,000 German prisoners perished in these camps because of poor conditions.
In 1989, Canadian James Bacque authored a book titled: “Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II”. He had examined US Army records that showed over a million Germans listed as taken prisoner were never recorded as discharged and disappeared. Bacque assumed that most died in captivity due to intentional neglect.
Israel has mass raped and tortured detained activists with the Sumud Flotilla, who were attempting to bring aid to Palestinians in Gaza, multiple victims have revealed.
On Tuesday, Israel kidnapped “430 people onboard 50 ships in international waters”.
Israel’s National Security Minister Ben Gvir released a video showcasing Israeli abuse of the detainees, including by forcing them to kneel while the Israeli national anthem played.
Democracy Now noted , “The video shows dozens of men and women kneeling in rows, with their foreheads to the ground and their hands zip-tied behind their backs at the port in Ashdod”.
Now, released activists from around the world have detailed mass rape, sexual abuse, and torture that Israeli forces unleashed on them while in detention.
A Press release from the Global Sumud Flotilla documented that, “Participants from the Global Sumud Flotilla, now in Istanbul, have begun providing harrowing testimony about widespread abuse, assault and torture: rubber bullets fired at close range, tasers to the face and upper body, stun grenades thrown into groups of detainees, stress positions held for hours under permanent bright light, hijabs (Muslim religious headcovers) forcibly removed, as well as various forms of sexual violence including: humiliating strip searches, sexual taunting, groping and pulling of genitals, and multiple accounts of rape.”
It added, “Some of the most horrifying accounts centre on a single vessel that participants call the ‘torture boat.’ This specific israeli naval vessel with a makeshift prison constructed of barbed wire and metal shipping containers became the primary site of intense violence following the interception; this reflects a small fraction of the patterns of systemic violence and sexual abuse against the Palestinian people at the hands of the israeli regime for decades.”
The activist organization has documented “At least 15 cases of sexual assaults, including rape” along with activists “shot with rubber bullets at close range” and “tens of people’s bones broken”.
Adrien Jouan, one activist with Global Sumud Flotilla, showed evidence of brutal torture, with severe bruising all over his body.
Another activist on Instagram live showcased severe bruising on his leg.
Released Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila revealed that , “there is no easy way to say it, but I have to say it, people got raped at the Global Sumud Flotilla. These monstrous soldiers raped our participants. It was not one, not two, not three, it’s many cases of sexual violence against our participants on the prison boat on the way to the port of Ashdod, where they got once again beaten up, many people with broken ribs, many people with broken bones in the arms, the collar bone, the ribs”.
Independent journalist Alex Colston, who was part of the Sumud Flotilla, revealed , “I just got out of Israeli prison … I saw people shot point blank with rubber bullets, I myself, I can’t feel my hands because they are all scarred up because they would take the cuffs and they would yank my hand over and over again. When I would be tied or cuffed, they would step on my cuffs. They kicked me in the ribs more times than I can count. I passed out at least one time. … even if you plead for them to stop … Israeli guards were getting obvious pleasure from hurting us as much as they could”.
Handcuffs on my hands and feet. Dragged me. When I couldn’t walk, they dragged me on the ground.
They hit us. Hurt all of us a lot. Handcuffs so tight my hands lost feeling
They laughed all the time. Super sadistic.
Took off my shirt. Took pictures. Mistreated us all night long
Another activist testified that , “I had my hands zip-tied behind my back for so long and it was so tight I almost started vomiting, they slammed my head into a table several times and degraded me as I was strip-searched. They had me in handcuffs for 19 hours to the point my skin had begun to swell around them.”
Australian activist Juliet Lamont revealed , “We had people who were tasered in the face. People were syringed with unknown sedatives. I was put down, cable tied. They put so much water under me for an hour that I thought I was going to drown. I was sexually assaulted in this kind of torture chamber. And five men were bashing me and smashing my face”.
Italian economist, Luca Poggi, who was with the Flotilla activists revealed that “We were stripped, thrown to the ground, kicked. Many of us were Tasered, some were sexually assaulted, and some were denied access to a lawyer”.
The barbaric torture of the Sumud Flotilla activists is just another example of the brutal torture, sexual violence, and rape that Israeli forces unleash on Palestinian detainees daily.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said on Wednesday that Israel has turned the detention and abduction of international solidarity activists into a systematic policy aimed at intimidating supporters of the Palestinian cause worldwide.
In a statement, the organisation said Israeli authorities seek to send a message that anyone showing solidarity with the Palestinian people could face detention, abuse, arrest and torture.
The statement followed the circulation of videos released by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir showing the mistreatment of activists from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and the “Global Solidarity Flotilla,” who were detained by Israeli forces while attempting to reach the Gaza Strip.
According to the Prisoners Club, Israeli authorities intercepted the activists in international waters and forcibly transferred them to the Port of Ashdod.
The organisation described the scenes shown in the videos as involving humiliation, mistreatment and abuse, arguing that they reflect treatment routinely experienced by Palestinian and Arab detainees in Israeli prisons.
The group further stated that the involvement of Ben-Gvir in the filmed incidents highlighted what it characterised as the broader policy of intimidation directed against international solidarity movements supporting Palestinians.
Khalil al-Hayya, head of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip, said Israel’s attempts to impose its will through assassinations and attacks on political leaders and their families “will fail,” following the assassination of his son Azzam al-Hayya in an Israeli strike on Gaza City.
Speaking during a memorial gathering on Thursday, al-Hayya described the martyrdom of his son, alongside several other Palestinians, including neighbor Hamza al-Sharbasi, as part of a continuing campaign targeting Palestinian families and resistance leaders.
He said the martyrdom of Palestinians would only strengthen the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem, adding that Israel’s efforts to pressure negotiators through violence would not succeed.
Al-Hayya also linked the attack to previous Israeli strikes targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar last year, saying the Movement continued negotiations “on behalf of its people and national interests,” despite ongoing attacks.
Meanwhile, Khaled Mishaal, head of the Hamas Movement abroad, praised al-Hayya’s resilience during the funeral gathering, describing the loss of multiple sons and relatives as “a great sacrifice.”
Mishaal said Gaza continues to “write epics of steadfastness and sacrifice” despite the Israeli war, siege, and destruction, arguing that the suffering endured by Palestinians increases the responsibility of the wider Arab and Muslim world toward Gaza and the Palestinian cause.
He also called for greater support for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Palestinian prisoners, while stressing that the sacrifices made during the war were “not only for Palestine but for humanity as a whole.”
Former Palestinian detainees have come forward with disturbing firsthand accounts of the systematic torture inflicted on Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, during his detention in an Israeli prison.
Rami Abu Amira, a former prisoner, described how interrogators stripped Dr. Abu Safia naked and set police dogs on his frail body, leaving deep wounds and scratches.
Ahmad Qaddas recounted that the prison cells echoed with the doctor’s screams as he endured severe beatings.
He said he could no longer recognize Abu Safia due to extreme weight loss and his dazed, barely conscious state.
“He was physically shattered,” Qaddas added. Another former detainee, Hamza Abu Amira, spoke of the “relentless humiliation” and combined physical and psychological torture carried out by specialized Israeli prison units.
Guards reportedly forced Dr. Abu Safia to repeat degrading phrases while inflicting extreme pain in an apparent effort to break him.
Prisoners also described repeated night raids on their cell using sound grenades and tear gas canisters. Other detainees were strictly forbidden from approaching his cell or inquiring about his condition.
Dr. Abu Safia has been held since 27 December 2024, when Israeli forces abducted him during their assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital — the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza at the time. Even after an Israeli airstrike killed his own son, he had refused to abandon his post and his patients.
In March, UN Special Rapporteurs Tlaleng Mofokeng and Ben Saul confirmed receiving credible reports of his torture and the systematic denial of medical care.
They warned that his life was in grave danger and urged countries with influence over Israel to intervene.
Yet the US and its Western allies have taken no meaningful action to halt Tel Aviv’s brutality.
A UK-based human rights organization described his arrest as part of Israel’s broader policy of systematically targeting Palestinian health workers and destroying Gaza’s healthcare system — actions it said were intended to create conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people.
Dr. Abu Safia is one of at least 737 Palestinian medical workers arbitrarily detained by Israeli forces since October 2023.
During the same period, at least 1,722 medical personnel have been killed — an average of more than two per day.
The World Health Organization has documented over 930 attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system, with all 36 hospitals damaged or destroyed and only half partially functional.
These assaults form part of a deliberate campaign to annihilate Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure as an integral component of Israel’s genocidal war on the Strip, which has so far claimed more than 72,500 Palestinian lives since October 2023.
Israeli forces have threatened two Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla activists, seized in international waters last week, with death or long prison terms, according to a rights group representing them.
The two pro-Palestinian activists, Saif Abu Keshek and Thiago Avila, were among dozens detained during an Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters off Greece on April 30.
On Tuesday, an Israeli court extended their detention until Sunday, May 10.
The legal rights centre Adalah, which represents the pair, said they have been subjected to psychological abuse and held in solitary confinement. According to the group, Israeli officers threatened to kill them or imprison them “for 100 years.”
Both men remain in “total isolation,” subjected to 24/7 high-intensity lighting in their cells and kept blindfolded whenever they are moved, including during medical examinations. They are also being held in very low temperatures, the group added.
Adalah said the court’s decision to prolong the detention “amounts to judicial validation of the regime’s lawlessness.” No charges have been filed, but the two face accusations including affiliation with a “terrorist organisation” and contact with “foreign agents,” which the legal centre described as “baseless.”
According to the group, the activists are continuing their hunger strike, consuming only water since their abduction.
Meanwhile, the flotilla’s organisers demanded their release in a post on X, urging the international community to intervene.
They said the activists were “forcefully brought against their will to occupied Palestine, where they have been subjected to interrogations, death threats, sleep deprivation and medical neglect.”
The governments of Spain and Brazil issued a joint statement on Friday describing the detention of Avila and Abu Keshek as illegal.
During the raid on the Global Sumud Flotilla, Israeli forces attacked 22 of the 58 aid boats heading toward the besieged Gaza Strip and detained 175 activists.
Testimonies indicate that the activists were tortured while in Israeli custody following their abduction.
Few individuals embody the conflict between American national interest and the demands of world jewry as sharply as Douglas Feith. Throughout his career, Feith has operated as a consummate advocate for the Jewish state, positioning himself within the highest echelons of the U.S. government to ensure that American military and foreign policy served as a potent instrument for his own tribal convictions. From his early days in the pro-Israel lobby to his role in architecting the catastrophic Iraq War, Feith’s career is a study in the subordination of American sovereignty to the priorities of the Jewish people.
General Tommy Franks, who commanded the invasion of Iraq, famously said he had to deal with “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day” — referring to Feith, as documented in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, separately stated: “Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.” Irrespective of his perceived deficiencies, Feith was able to reach the apex of the national security establishment and fundamentally reshape American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.
The Zionist convictions Feith brought to the highest levels of American government were not adopted in adulthood but absorbed in childhood.
The Origins of a Zionist Hawk
Douglas Jay Feith was born on July 16, 1953, into a Jewish family in Philadelphia. His background was rooted in Zionist tradition through his father, Dalck Feith, who had been a member of Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth organization founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, active in Poland during the 1930s. Betar was a militaristic movement associated with Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, a hard-line nationalist strand that rejected the socialist mainstream of the Zionist movement and evolved through the Herut Party into what became the Israeli Likud Party,
Dalck Feith came to the United States in January 1942 and became a businessman, philanthropist, and Republican donor. Douglas Feith grew up in Elkins Park, a Philadelphia suburb, and has acknowledged that his father’s Betar membership and the family’s experience of the Holocaust profoundly shaped his own Zionist convictions.
Feith has publicly described himself as a Zionist — specifically not a Labor or “peace now” Zionist but a right-wing Zionist closely aligned with the Likud tradition. He wrote a 2021 op-ed in the Jewish News Syndicate titled “Why I’m a Zionist,” arguing that support for a Jewish state is entirely compatible with American patriotism. His worldview draws heavily on Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” doctrine, the idea that Arabs will only accept a Jewish state after recognizing they cannot destroy it militarily.
Education and Early Career
This ideological foundation accompanied Feith through an elite educational track and into the upper reaches of the legal profession. Feith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1975 and magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1978, according to his Hudson Institute biography.
He began his public career in 1975 working as an intern on Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson’s Subcommittee on Investigations — the Democratic senator from Washington famous for his hawkish anti-Soviet foreign policy and strong support for Israel. While at Harvard, Feith studied under Professor Richard Pipes, a Polish-born Jewish scholar and anti-Soviet hawk who chaired the CIA’s Team B strategic intelligence exercise in 1976 and later joined Reagan’s National Security Council in February 1981. Feith joined the NSC as a Middle East specialist that same year, working under Pipes.
The Reagan Years
These formative experiences positioned Feith for a direct entry into the national security establishment. Feith joined the government in 1981 as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, serving under his former Harvard professor Richard Pipes. The following year, he moved over to the Pentagon to take up duties as Special Counsel to Richard Perle, then Assistant Secretary of Defense. Feith later characterized the role in his own words as covering “UN-related, law of war, and the like” issues that fell to him as the only lawyer in that office. Two years later, in 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger elevated Feith to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, where he remained until 1986.
One striking and highly contentious chapter unfolded in 1982, when Feith departed the NSC amid an FBI probe into administration officials suspected of leaking intelligence to Israel. Accusations surfaced that he had mishandled classified materials, though Feith never faced prosecution.
The Private Sector and the Pro-Israel Network
Feith soon traded government service for the lucrative side of the defense and foreign-policy world. When Feith left the Pentagon in 1986, he and Marc Zell co-founded Feith & Zell, P.C., a law firm based initially in Israel that lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of the Turkish, Israeli, and Bosnian governments while representing defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. In 1989, Feith separately established International Advisors, Inc., a lobbying operation whose clients included Turkey.
In 1999, Feith & Zell merged with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co. to form the FANDZ International Law Group. When Feith returned to government in 2001 as Undersecretary of Defense overseeing Iraq reconstruction, FANDZ was simultaneously running a task force to help companies secure reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
Throughout the 1990s, Feith built an extensive presence in neoconservative and pro-Israel organizations that would later staff the Bush administration’s national security apparatus. In 1997, the Zionist Organization of America honored both Feith and his father at its annual dinner. Dalck received the ZOA’s special Centennial Award “for his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people,” while Douglas received the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award.
Feith served as Vice Chairman of the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank promoting close military cooperation between the United States and Israel. He also served as Chairman of the Board of the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded in 1988 by Frank Gaffney that advocates higher military budgets, missile defense systems, space weapons programs, and hard-line Middle East policies.
Feith was also among the founding figures of One Jerusalem, created in 2001 following the Camp David peace talks, with the mission of “maintaining a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.” Other founders and principals included former Israeli diplomat Dore Gold and former Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky.
The Clean Break Document
Feith’s organizational work in this period laid the groundwork for direct policy advocacy on behalf of the Israeli government. The most consequential episode in Feith’s pre-government career was his participation in drafting “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” in 1996. The paper was produced by a study group led by Richard Perle and organized by the Israel-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It urged Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Accords and the land-for-peace framework entirely, called for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as an “important Israeli strategic objective,” proposed striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon and possibly in Syria proper, and laid out a new Israeli strategic doctrine grounded in “peace through strength” rather than diplomatic concessions.
Three members of that study group later occupied senior positions shaping Bush administration Middle East policy: Perle chaired the Defense Policy Board, Feith became Under Secretary of Defense, and David Wurmser became Dick Cheney’s top Middle East adviser. Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their 2006 essay “The Israel Lobby” in the London Review of Books, wrote that the Clean Break paper “called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East” and that “Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals.”
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
A second and far more consequential bureaucratic creation soon followed. Appointed on July 16, 2001, Feith served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy — the third-highest civilian position in the Department of Defense. His portfolio included formulating defense planning guidance, managing DoD relations with foreign governments, representing the Pentagon in interagency deliberations, and advising the President and Secretary of Defense on national security matters.
Early in the Bush administration, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence, established in November 2001 to conduct information operations targeting foreign audiences, including proposals to plant news items — “possibly even false ones” — with foreign media organizations, according to the New York Times. After the program’s existence became public in February 2002 and generated intense scrutiny, Feith decided to close the office, with Rumsfeld announcing the closure at a February 26 press conference. Rumsfeld later acknowledged that its functions continued through other offices, telling reporters in November 2002: “I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”
The Office of Special Plans
The most damaging controversy of Feith’s tenure centered on his supervision of the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit that operated from September 2002 through June 2003. The OSP was charged with supplying senior administration officials with raw intelligence about Iraq that bypassed the normal vetting process of the intelligence community.
The unit’s driving purpose was to build the political case for invading Iraq by circumventing both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which had each concluded that evidence for an operational Iraq-al-Qaeda link was weak or nonexistent. Rather than work through the established intelligence consensus process, the OSP fed its conclusions directly to Vice President Cheney’s office and other senior decision-makers. According to Mother Jones, the OSP’s director, Abram Shulsky, “turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points” that circulated to Rumsfeld and Cheney. The OSP also worked closely with Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, whose intelligence the broader community had largely discounted.
In September 2002, two days before the CIA completed its own final assessment of the Iraq-al-Qaeda question, Feith briefed senior advisers to Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, directly attacking the CIA’s credibility and alleging “fundamental problems” with its analysis. The version of the OSP briefing presented to senior White House officials differed from the version shown to the CIA — with a slide citing the CIA’s “fundamental problems” omitted from the version given to the intelligence community, according to the Washington Post’s reporting on the Inspector General’s summary.
In February 2007, the Pentagon’s Inspector General released a landmark report concluding that Feith’s office had “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.” The report found these actions “inappropriate” though not “illegal.”
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not accept the limitations of that framing. “The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration’s decision to invade Iraq,” Levin stated. “The inspector general’s report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war.”
Feith seized on the “not illegal” finding to declare he felt “vindicated” by the report, calling it proof that his office had been “smeared for years.” He disputed the Inspector General’s “inappropriate” finding as “bizarre” and “quibbling,” arguing that his office had simply produced “a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community.”
De-Ba’athification and Its Catastrophic Consequences
The intelligence controversy was only one front of the wreckage Feith’s office produced. Among the most consequential decisions associated with Feith’s tenure were two orders that remade Iraq’s governing and security structures. The Pentagon, under Feith’s direction, drafted the de-Baathification decree that became CPA Order 1, signed by Ambassador Paul Bremer on May 16, 2003, which stripped all senior Ba’ath Party members from government positions.
A separate instrument, CPA Order 2, signed one week later, dissolved Iraq’s military and security forces — affecting 385,000 soldiers, 285,000 police, and 50,000 presidential security personnel. Together, the two orders threw hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of work and destroyed the administrative and security infrastructure of the Iraqi state. They are now widely considered among the worst strategic decisions of the occupation, having helped ignite the sectarian insurgency that followed.
The Lawrence Franklin Espionage Scandal
The damage caused by Feith’s policy decisions was matched by serious security breaches involving his subordinates. Lawrence Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who worked in Feith’s Near East and South Asia Bureau, was arrested in 2005 and pleaded guilty to espionage-related charges for passing classified information to AIPAC officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, who then relayed the information to Israeli officials and the media. Franklin was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison, later reduced to ten months’ house arrest. All charges against Rosen and Weissman were dropped in 2009. Although Feith himself was not charged, the scandal reinforced longstanding concerns about the security culture within his office and its relationship to Israeli intelligence interests.
After the Pentagon
After leaving the Pentagon in August 2005, Feith held the position of professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service from 2006 to 2008. The appointment drew sharp opposition from the faculty — a letter signed by 35 professors accused Feith of ethical conflicts and of having defended the use of torture — and his contract was not renewed. He subsequently served as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution before joining the Hudson Institute in September 2008 as a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for National Security Strategies.
In 2009, Feith became one of several Bush administration officials considered for a war crimes investigation by a Spanish court under claims of universal jurisdiction, headed by Judge Baltasar Garzón.
Ultimately, the Iraq War must not be viewed merely as a tactical or strategic failure of the American state, but as a profound success for the interests of organized Jewry, which Feith serves with unwavering fidelity. By viewing Feith as an agent of the Jewish state rather than a servant of the American public, the true objective of his career becomes clear: the advancement of his own people is his paramount duty, with the welfare of the United States trailing as a distant afterthought.
A UN expert says that the Israeli regime systematically tortures Palestinians on a scale “that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent.”
In a report released on Friday, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said that since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime began a genocidal war on Gaza, Palestinians in custody “have been subjected to exceptionally ruthless physical and psychological abuse.”
Entitled “Torture and genocide”, the report “examines Israel’s systematic use of torture against Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory since October 7, 2023.”
“Torture in detention has been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance,” the report said.
Brutal beatings, sexual violence, rape, lethal mistreatment, starvation, and the systematic deprivation of the most basic human conditions have inflicted profound and lasting scars on the bodies and minds of tens of thousands of Palestinians and their loved ones,” the report stated.
Torture has become integral to the domination of and punishment inflicted on men, women and children, both through custodial abuse and through a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation and destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering, it warned.
Since October 2023, abduction of Palestinians in the occupied territory had “escalated dramatically,” with more than 18,500 people arrested, including at least 1,500 children, the report added.
About 9,000 Palestinians were still in detention, while more than 4,000 have been subjected to enforced disappearance, it said.
Israel’s detention system “has descended into a regime of systemic and widespread humiliation, coercion, and terror,” according to the report.
Albanese demanded Israel “immediately cease all acts of torture and ill-treatment of the Palestinian people as part of its ongoing genocide” and urged all countries “to do everything in their power to stop the destruction of what remains of Palestine” as every delay “worsens irreversible harm and further entrenches a system of cruelty.”
She urged the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request arrest warrants for hawkish Israeli ministers Israel Katz, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
She said she had gathered written submissions about these atrocities, including at least 300 testimonies, and is due to present her report to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) on Monday.
Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli regime has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 172,000 others, most of them women and children.
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