EU conference in Brussels links Gaza recovery funds to PA reforms
The Cradle | November 21, 2025
The EU held a donor conference in Brussels on 20 November to discuss reconstruction and post-war governance in the Gaza Strip, with several countries signing a reform-linked financial support package for the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Sixty delegations participated in the conference in Brussels. Four EU members states – Germany, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Spain – signed commitments confirming €82 million ($95 million) in support for the PA, which was already previously pledged.
This came as part of the new €1.6 billion ($1.85 billion), EU multi-year program for Palestinian recovery, unveiled earlier this year. In total, €88 million ($101.4 million) was pledged this year. The contributions will be channeled through the Palestinian-European Socio-Economic Management and Assistance Mechanism (PEGASE).
The disbursement of the funds is dependent on specific reforms that the PA must carry out first.
No new pledges were made during the donor conference on Thursday.
“Our aim is to strengthen governance, build a more resilient economy, stabilize finances, improve services for the population, and create conditions for future effective governance across all territories,” said EU commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica.
“Our financial support is linked to the PA reform agenda, which, of course, they committed to implement,” Suica added. “Switzerland, New Zealand, Norway, Turkiye, which are not members of the European Union, are looking forward to their pledges to use this mechanism … which is controlled and assures that money goes in the right place.”
Chief of the EU Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc was “committed to working towards a Palestinian state with a reformed, well-functioning Palestinian Authority at its core.”
A follow-up conference will be held in Egypt to secure more funding.
Three days ago, the UN passed a US-drafted resolution to approve the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan.
The initiative includes deploying international forces to Gaza to disarm the resistance, and allows Israel to maintain a presence inside the strip until the disarmament is complete. Hamas and the other factions have outright rejected the resolution.
The Trump plan includes an eventual return of the PA to Gaza, conditional on reforms that must be carried out by Ramallah. However, Tel Aviv has not signed off on PA governance in the strip.
Ramallah has already begun carrying out reforms at the request of Washington, Arab states, and western countries, including last year, when it ended its policy of stipends to the families of Palestinian prisoners convicted for resistance operations or attacks against Israelis.
Tel Aviv and Washington have referred to this policy as “pay-to-slay.”
In September, the French and UK governments announced their recognition of a Palestinian state. According to a report by The Telegraph that month, London and Paris conditioned their recognition of Palestine on an “overhaul” of the Palestinian education system.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas is “under pressure to drive through reforms to the Palestinian school curriculum in an effort to placate Israeli concerns over anti-Semitism,” the report said, adding that other political reforms and elections are also on the list of demands.
Last month, the Times of Israel reported Abbas sacked his finance minister for continuing payments to the families of prisoners in defiance of Israeli and western demands.
The PA was formed in the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Abbas was elected as president in 2005, and has been in power since then despite the expiry of his term in 2009.
Despite years of deep security coordination between Ramallah and Tel Aviv, and the PA cracking down on West Bank resistance on behalf of Israel, the authority is facing an Israeli campaign of financial strangulation and is constantly accused of encouraging terrorism and antisemitism.
The new kill zone: Gaza’s borders after the ‘ceasefire’
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | November 20, 2025
The so-called Gaza ceasefire was not a genuine cessation of hostility, but a strategic, cynical shift in the Israeli genocide and ongoing campaign of destruction.
Starting on 10 October, the first day of the announced ceasefire, Israel transitioned tactics: moving from indiscriminate aerial bombardment to the calculated, engineered demolishing of homes and vital infrastructure. Satellite images, corroborated by almost hourly media and ground reports, confirmed this methodical change.
As direct combat forces seemingly withdrew to the adjacent “Gaza envelope” region, a new vanguard of Israeli soldiers advanced into the area east of the so-called Yellow Line, to systematically dismantle whatever semblance of life, rootedness, and civilisation remained standing following the Israeli genocide. Between 10 October and 2 November, Israel demolished 1,500 buildings, utilising its specialized military engineering units.
The ceasefire agreement divided Gaza into two halves: one west of the Yellow Line, where the survivors of the Israeli genocide were confined, and a larger one, east of the line, where the Israeli army maintained an active military presence and continued to operate with impunity.
If Israel truly harbored the intention of, indeed, evacuating the area following the agreed-upon second phase of the ceasefire, it would not be actively pursuing the systematic, structural destruction of this already devastated region. Clearly, Israel’s motives are far more insidious, centered on rendering the region perpetually uninhabitable.
Aside from leveling infrastructure, Israel is also carrying out a continuous campaign of airstrikes and naval attacks, relentlessly targeting Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south. Later, and with greater intensity, Israel also began carrying out attacks in areas that were, in theory, meant to be under the control of Gazans.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 260 Palestinians have been killed and 632 wounded since the commencement of the so-called ceasefire.
In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves. Gaza is thus condemned to relive the same tragic cycle of violent history: a defenseless, impoverished region trapped under the boot of Israel’s military calculations, which consistently operate outside the periphery of international law.
Before the existence of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, the demarcation of Gaza’s borders was not driven by military calculations. The Gaza region, one of the world’s most ancient civilisations, was always seamlessly incorporated into a larger geographical socio-economic space.
Before the British named it the Gaza District (1920-1948), the Ottomans considered it a sub-district (Kaza) within the larger Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem – the Jerusalem Independent District.
But even the British designation of Gaza did not isolate it from the rest of the Palestinian geography, as the borders of the new district reached Al-Majdal (today’s Ashkelon) in the north, Bir al-Saba’ (Beersheba) in the east, and the Rafah line at the Egyptian border.
Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which codified the post-Nakba lines, the collective torment of Gaza, as illustrated in its shrinking boundaries, began in earnest. The expansive Gaza District was brutally reduced to the Gaza Strip, a mere 1.3 per cent of the overall size of historic Palestine. Its population, due to the Nakba, had explosively grown with over 200,000 desperate refugees who, along with several generations of their descendants, have been trapped and confined in this tiny strip of land for over 77 years.
When Israel permanently occupied Gaza in June 1967, the lines separating it from the rest of the Palestinian and Arab geography became an integral, permanent part of Gaza itself. Soon after its occupation of the Strip, Israel began restricting the movement of Palestinians further, sectionalising Gaza into several regions. The size and location of these internal lines were largely determined by two paramount motives: to fragment Palestinian society to ensure its subjugation, and to create military ‘buffer zones’ around Israeli military encampments and illegal settlements.
Between 1967 and Israel’s so-called ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, Israel had built 21 illegal settlements and numerous military corridors and checkpoints, effectively bisecting the Strip and confiscating nearly 40 percent of its land mass.
Following the redeployment, Israel retained absolute, unilateral control over Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, and even the population registry. Additionally, Israel created another internal border within Gaza, a heavily fortified “buffer zone” snaking across the northern and eastern borders. This new area has witnessed the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of unarmed protesters and the wounding of thousands who dared to approach what was often referred to as the “kill zone.”
Even the Gaza sea was effectively outlawed. Fishermen were inhumanely confined to tiny spaces, at times less than three nautical miles, while simultaneously surrounded by the Israeli navy, which routinely shot fishermen, sank boats, and detained crews at will.
Gaza’s new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible. The current line, however, is worse than any before it, as it completely suffocates the displaced population in a fully destroyed area, without functioning hospitals and with only trickles of life-saving aid.
For Palestinians, who have been battling confinements and fragmentation for generations, this new arrangement is the intolerable and inevitable culmination of their protracted, multi-generational dispossession.
If Israel believes it can impose the new demarcation of Gaza as a new status quo, the next few months will prove this conviction devastatingly wrong. Tel Aviv has simply recreated a much worse, inherently unstable version of the violent reality that existed before 7 October and the genocide. Even those not fully familiar with the deep, painful history of Gaza must realise that sustaining the Yellow Line of Gaza is nothing more than a dangerous, bloody illusion.
Germany Turns an X Post Into a Police Raid at Dawn
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 18, 2025
The story starts with a tweet that barely registered on the internet. A few hundred views, a handful of likes, and the kind of blunt libertarian framing that is common on X every hour of every day.
Yet in Germany, that tiny post triggered a 6am police raid, a forced phone handover, biometric collection, and a warning that the author was now under surveillance.
The thing to understand is that this story only makes sense once you see the sequence of events in order.
The story goes like this:
- A man in Germany, known publicly only as Damian N., posts a short comment on X, calling government-funded workers “parasites.”
- The post is tiny. At the time he was raided, it had roughly a hundred views. Even now, it has only a few hundred.
- Despite the post’s obscurity, police arrive at Damian’s home at six in the morning.
- He says they did not show him the warrant and did not leave documentation of what they seized.
- Police pressured him to unlock his phone, confiscated it, took photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data, and even requested a blood sample for DNA.
- One officer reportedly warned him to “think about what you post in the future” and said he is now “under surveillance.”
- The entire action was justified under Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which is meant to prohibit inciting hatred against protected groups.
- Government employees are not such a group, which makes the legal theory tenuous at best.
- Damian’s lawyer says the identification procedures and possibly the raid itself were illegal.
That is the sequence. A low-visibility political insult becomes a criminal investigation involving home searches, device seizure, and biometric collection.
The thing to understand is that this is not about one man’s post. It is about a bureaucracy that treats speech as something to manage and a set of enforcement structures that expand to fill the space they are given.
Start with the enforcement context. Germany has built a sprawling ecosystem around “online hate”: specialized prosecutor units, NGO tip lines, and automated scanning for taboo keywords.
The model is compliance first and legal theory second.
Once you create an apparatus like this, it behaves the way bureaucracies behave. It looks for work. It justifies resources by producing cases. A tiny X post with inflammatory language becomes a target because it contains the right keyword, not because it has societal impact.
Police behavior fits the same pattern. Confiscating phones is strategically useful because it imposes real pain without requiring a conviction.
Even prosecutors have said that losing a smartphone is often worse than the fine.
Early-morning raids create psychological pressure. Collecting biometrics raises the stakes further. None of this is about public safety. It is about creating friction for saying the wrong thing.
The legal mismatch is the tell. Section 130 protects groups defined by national, racial, religious, or ethnic identity.
There is also the privacy angle, which becomes impossible to ignore. Device access, biometrics, DNA requests: these are investigative tools built for serious crimes.
Deploying them against minor online speech means the line between public-safety policing and opinion policing has already been crossed. Once a state normalizes surveillance as a response to expression, the hard part becomes restoring restraint.
It is a deterrence strategy, not a justice strategy. And it reinforces why free speech and strong privacy protections matter. Without them, minor speech becomes an invitation for major intrusion.
The counterintuitive part is that the smallness of the post makes a raid more likely, not less.
High-profile content generates scrutiny and political costs. Low-profile content discovered through automated or NGO-driven monitoring is frictionless to act on. Unless people are reading Reclaim The Net, most people never hear of these smaller cases.
Looking ahead, the pressure will only increase. As more speech moves to global platforms that are harder to influence, local governments will lean more heavily on domestic law enforcement as their lever of control.
That means more investigations that hinge on broad interpretations of old statutes and more friction between individual rights and bureaucratic incentives.
This is particularly true in Germany and places like the UK, where the government doesn’t seem to feel any shame about raiding its citizens over online posts.
Palestinian leader Barghouti subjected to brutal torture in Israeli prison, says advocacy group
Jailed Palestinian leader Abdullah Barghouti
Press TV – November 18, 2025
A Palestinian prisoners’ advocacy group says jailed Hamas leader Abdullah Barghouti has faced extreme physical and psychological torture at the maximum-security Gilboa Prison in the northern part of the Israeli-occupied territories since his abduction more than two decades ago.
The Asra Media Office (AMO) announced in a statement on Monday that 53-year-old Barghouti is currently enduring conditions that have been described as “a form of slow execution,” aimed at one of the leading figures of the Palestinian Captive Movement. Concerns have been raised that his life could be at risk at any moment.
The statement disclosed that the prison administration has been systematically and repeatedly targeting Barghouti with assaults for more than 25 months.
Prison guards storm his cell relentlessly, day and night, often accompanied by dogs. They taunt him, claiming they missed assaulting him, before three of them restrain him and viciously attack him with batons. The beating leaves him with severe injuries, including bleeding and deep wounds.
His fellow inmates are left to care for him, using torn fabric and rudimentary cleaning supplies to tend to his wounds.
Barghouti, currently serving 67 life sentences, is enduring severe, untreated injuries. These include fractures in his right elbow and hand that have persisted for more than three months, a broken pinky finger on his left hand, two fractured ribs, torn tendons, and a drastic weight loss of approximately 35 kilograms caused by starvation and inadequate nutrition.
The rights group added that guards have doused him with water before subjecting him to electrocution and confined him to a cell infested with scabies, resulting in painful boils all over his body. To minimize the risk of further infection, he now resorts to sleeping on the floor.
Barghouti currently struggles with significant difficulty in moving his hands, with one almost completely paralyzed. Despite his condition, Israeli prison authorities deny him any form of medical treatment, including pain relief, and block human rights organizations from reaching out to him.
The AMO asserted that Barghouti’s suffering is part of a broader campaign against the leadership of the Captive Movement.
It emphasized that the mistreatment he endures surpasses mere punishment, amounting to a calculated effort to end his life, underscoring the urgent need for international intervention.
The circumstances surrounding the detention of Palestinian inmates by Israel are unacceptable and characterized by inadequate hygiene standards. Moreover, Palestinian detainees have endured persistent torture, harassment, and oppression.
Palestinian detainees have consistently participated in indefinite hunger strikes to express their frustration over their unjust imprisonment.
Human rights organizations say that Israel continues to violate the rights and freedoms granted to abductees as stipulated by the Fourth Geneva Convention and international laws.
According to the Palestine Detainees Studies Center, around 60 percent of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons suffer from chronic illnesses, with many having passed away either during their incarceration or after their release due to the seriousness of their health issues.
UK Government Caught Hiding COVID Shot–Death Data “To Prevent Distress or Anger”
By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH | FOCAL POINTS | November 15, 2025
Today, The Telegraph revealed that the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has refused to publish anonymized data that would likely show strong evidence of a link between COVID-19 “vaccines” and mass deaths.
According to the report, UKHSA justified the secrecy by claiming that releasing the figures could cause “distress or anger” among bereaved families if a connection were discovered.
Even more concerning: The same dataset — mapping vaccination dates to dates of death — was provided to pharmaceutical companies but NOT released to the public. UKHSA also claimed that publishing the numbers could “lead to misinformation” or impact vaccine uptake.
For two years, the campaign group UsForThem fought to obtain the anonymised dataset through FOI requests. UKHSA refused every time. Ultimately, the Information Commissioner sided with the agency, allowing the data to remain hidden indefinitely.
MPs and peers had already sounded the alarm last year, urging the government to release the data “immediately,” noting that it had been quietly shared with vaccine manufacturers.
Intentionally withholding critical vaccine-safety data carries serious legal consequences, including but not limited to Misconduct in Public Office, Corporate Manslaughter or Gross Negligence Manslaughter, breaches of statutory duties under public-health and disclosure laws, and potential Fraud by omission or abuse of position.
Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation
Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org
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UK Government Wins 2-Year Battle to Withhold Data Linking COVID Vaccines to Excess Deaths
Swiss probe links Ali Abunimah detention to Israeli political pressure
Al Mayadeen | November 17, 2025
A Swiss parliamentary investigation has revealed that the detention and expulsion of Palestinian-US journalist Ali Abunimah in January were the result of political interference and undisclosed ties between senior Swiss officials and Israeli interests. The findings have raised alarms about institutional bias and shrinking space for Palestine advocacy in Europe.
The Control Commission of the Council of States released its report last week, confirming that Nicoletta della Valle, then-head of Switzerland’s federal police agency (Fedpol), personally intervened to impose an entry ban against Abunimah. The decision, investigators found, “deviated from standard practice” and was implemented in a manner they described as “unsatisfactory” and “particularly problematic.”
Abunimah, the executive director and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, had entered Switzerland legally and was scheduled to speak at a public event before being detained without warning by plainclothes officers. He was held incommunicado for three days and deported without due process.
Della Valle’s ties to Israeli interests raise conflict concerns
The report detailed how Zurich police initially requested a ban before Abunimah’s arrival. Fedpol rejected the request after consulting intelligence and immigration agencies. However, following a phone call from the commander of Zurich’s cantonal police, della Valle reversed that decision, without new evidence, and verbally instructed her staff to enforce the ban after Abunimah had already entered the country.
Critics have pointed to Della Valle’s post-retirement role at Champel Capital, an Israeli investment firm with ties to high-ranking Israeli officials, including Major General Giora Eiland and politician Amir Weitmann. Both men are known for advocating extreme measures against Gaza and its population. Della Valle’s name has since been quietly removed from the firm’s website.
Abunimah said the findings confirmed that “serious irregularities and abuses of power” were carried out to suppress public criticism of “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza. He noted that the entry ban violated basic democratic rights and was politically motivated.
UN experts condemn growing restrictions on Palestine advocacy
International human rights bodies have condemned Abunimah’s detention and broader crackdowns on critics of the Israeli occupation in Europe.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, warned at the time of a “toxic climate” for freedom of speech, while UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Irene Khan, called the repression of Palestinian voices “alarming” and “unjustifiable.”
The parliamentary report reconstructs a clear pattern of intervention. Authorities confirmed that Abunimah posed no threat, but the entry ban was forced through via irregular backchannel influence. Della Valle’s personal directive to override procedural safeguards has become the centerpiece of a growing scandal.
Swiss Zionist lobbying under scrutiny following revelations
The case has intensified scrutiny of Swiss institutions and their connections to Zionist lobbying networks. Switzerland hosts a wide range of organizations affiliated with the global Zionist movement, including the Swiss Zionist Federation, KKL-JNF, Keren Hayesod, and the Jewish Agency’s Swiss branch, all of which have supported illegal settlement activity and lobbied for policies targeting Palestinian advocacy.
Parallel groups, such as the Switzerland-“Israel” Society (GIS), the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG), and CICAD, as well as newer outfits like NAIN, have pushed for bans on the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, cuts to UNRWA funding, and efforts to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Observers say these organizations shape political narratives and influence policymakers, enabling state repression of pro-Palestinian voices under the guise of combating hate speech.
Legal challenge underway
Abunimah is now taking legal action in Zurich and at the federal level, with his legal team preparing further filings based on the parliamentary commission’s findings. His case has become emblematic of growing concerns about freedom of expression in Europe and the ability of foreign-linked networks to suppress dissent through state institutions.
“These grave violations of democratic and human rights were carried out to prevent me from speaking at lawful public events, organized by Swiss citizens and residents, calling for an end to ‘Israel’s’ genocide in Gaza,” Abunimah said in a social media post.
Red ribbons in London: A silent uprising bringing Palestinian hostages back into view
By Adnan Hmidan | MEMO | November 16, 2025
Walking through Westminster, in the quiet rush of central London, flashes of red caught my attention — ribbons tied to lampposts, railings, and street fixtures. They were not adverts or campaign posters, but dense, symbolic gestures: spontaneous in form, unmistakable in meaning. They returned to public sight faces that have long been hidden behind prison walls — Palestinian hostages abducted by the occupation from homes and hospitals, held without trial under a system that resembles nothing but the law of the jungle.
These ribbons seemed like individual efforts, small and uncoordinated, yet unified in what they were trying to say: that the Palestinian hostage file remains locked in darkness, despite being one of the most devastating human crises. Thousands have been torn from their lives with no charges, no legal process, no daylight.
Of the nearly 9,100 Palestinians currently detained, it is estimated that almost a third are effectively treated as hostages; abducted and denied even the bare minimum of legal rights or guarantees.
A language that must reclaim its meaning
For years, the word “prisoner” has been used broadly. But what the occupation practises is not detention — it is abduction. People are taken from their beds or hospital rooms and disappear for indefinite periods, without charges, court hearings, or the most basic procedural rights.
The figures alone reveal the scale of the crisis:
3,544 held under administrative detention without trial
400 children
53 women
16 doctors
117 Palestinian hostages killed in the past two years alone during the genocide in Gaza
These individuals cannot honestly be called “prisoners.” They are hostages in every legal and moral sense — seized outside any legitimate framework by a state whose own foundations rest on dispossession and violation.
Red… a colour that bears witness, not beauty
The choice of red is self-explanatory. It is the colour of spilled blood, of injustice endured, of wounds that never fully heal.
These ribbons may hang quietly across London, but the question they raise is anything but quiet:
How can thousands of people be abducted in this way, while the world remains unable — or unwilling — to see them?
No one is asked to lead a campaign or become an activist. What is needed is recognition, a wider awakening to a file packed with human lives, daily suffering, families searching, and children growing up in absence.
Stories hanging from lampposts… so memory does not fade
Seeing the ribbons brought back the painful stories that fill this file:
The child pulled from his bed because soldiers deemed him a “threat,”
The woman taken from her home in front of her children,
The doctor who vanished from an operating room and never returned,
Those subjected to torture and enforced disappearance,
And the testimonies of rape and sexual abuse recently documented by international organisations.
These stories need no embellishment; their truth is weight enough. They also echo Steve Biko’s famous line:
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
These red ribbons feel like a modest attempt to unsettle that weapon.
Catherine Connolly’s victory: Europe’s moral rebellion against the Israeli occupation
When execution becomes a celebration
It is difficult to grasp that the occupation’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, celebrated inside the Knesset after passing a law permitting the execution of Palestinian detainees.
More troubling still is how easily such a moment can pass as a routine political step — as though it were merely another debate rather than a descent into deeper, institutionalised brutality.
When a state legalises killing those it has abducted without trial, imprisonment ceases to resemble detention. It becomes just one point on a chain that runs from abduction to torture to death.
The rising number of Palestinians dying inside Israeli prisons is not an exaggeration — it is an expanding reality.
Preserving memory before preserving the body
Red ribbons do not claim to liberate anyone, nor do they replace political or legal work. But they accomplish something essential: they return faces to public view and stop stories from being buried in darkness.
The Palestinian hostage file needs wider adoption and genuine engagement. It is a file overflowing with pain and heavy with violations, yet among the least addressed internationally.
Ribbons cannot break iron bars.
But they can remind the world that behind every statistic is a human being waiting to be rescued from disappearance.
Justice begins when we choose to see.
And sometimes, the first step toward that justice is nothing more than a small red thread tied to a lamppost in a distant city.
Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape!
Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity
By Ilana Mercer • Unz Review • November 15, 2025
There’s a reason I purposefully avoided mention of the fracas in Israel over the leaked Sde Teiman video, in the companion column to this one: “Rectal Raping of Palestinian Men Is Habitual In the Sexually Deviant, Serial-Killer State.”
You see, the Hasbara herd seems to have one gift, in Israel and stateside. They live in a self-reverential and self-referential world: They talk from under wet cement about … themselves. And, they are training you to do the same: talk about them.
As hard as it is for this lot to compute; the genocide, however, is about their victims, Israel’s victims, the Palestinians.
About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say the following: Like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for only their hostages; the same Israeli society is not unhappy about crimes against Palestinians; but that one such crime had been made public to the detriment of their criminally complicit countrymen.
More so than mere publicity—after all, Israel is conducting genocide to a packed house, the world—Israel’s military advocate general worries that the leaked Sde Teiman footage will undermine Israel’s international legal impunity.
The case of the rectal-rape-with-objects of a Palestinian hostage, one among thousands held in the legal limbo of detention-without-trial, was leaked by the Military Advocate General’s office (MAG), whose apparatchiks had heretofore never expressed—nor acted to convey—regret, remorse, contrition, or penitence over the genocide ongoing. (So you know, Israel has merely shifted to “genocide lite” and to the “ghettoization” of the Strip.)
There are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity.
Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. The leak of the filmed rape is but a procedural, administrative annoyance, the “Minister of Defense and many others in the political sphere and public discourse,” even claiming that any criminal proceedings constitute a “blood libel.”
At about this time, Israeli think-tank residents are fretting. As the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) put it (in all sincerity), it is imperative to preserve “Israel’s legal and diplomatic ‘resilience’ internationally, and thus … our ability to protect IDF (Israel Defense Forces) service members from legal risks around the world.”
If the IDF justice system, headed by the [aforementioned] MAG [Military Advocate General], is not perceived as professionally independent, Israel will struggle to argue that there is no place to advance overseas legal proceedings against soldiers and commanders alleged to have violated the law of armed conflict, and that the Israeli justice system should be given primacy in handling suspects. (IDI)
Cloaking themselves in the raiment of decency, the code-word for “impunity” in Israeli think tanks is “resilience.” The country must remain “resilient” internationally. Bathed in blood though it is; Israel and its military advocate general still want continued carte-blanche from the international community for their crimes. Hence the Brownian motion over the public rape of a Palestinian hostage.
Again, the leaked Sde Teiman tape threatens Israel’s legal impunity which is meant to last in perpetuity.
Let us, then, end forthwith conversation about Israel’s two-bit Kabuki players. We who inhabit the Global Genocidal Western Woke matrix have a responsibility to help pilot Palestinians through these dangerous shoals. Or, support those who are doing that work. Let’s, then, return to the resilient victims of the genocidal entity, the Palestinians.
Early in the genocide, in essays that provide a comprehensive chronology of the signal events, the people violated and the first principles flouted, I had picked up on—and postulated about—the seemingly systematic nature of the sexual sadism evinced by Israel’s army and security forces.
Palestinians are “living alongside serial-killing sexual sadists,” I remarked in a subsection of the essay, “Why The Israel-Occupied Levant Must be Liberated, S.O.S.,” further noting that “the pairing of sexual arousal and violence toward Palestinians, in the practices of the IDF and Israeli Security Forces, makes for a particularly irremediable pathology, the stuff of serial killers.”
As though Israel was not already outside all moral gravitational pull—the evidence for my deductions is now in. What we’ve known to be deductively true has been empirically confirmed. The social science is in: Palestinians are sexually brutalized by Israeli occupation forces!
If you had lingering doubts that sexual perversion and predation by the Israeli military and security forces is systemic and statistically significant—new social science nixes that naïve notion.
Incidents of sexual torture are not outlier cases. The Israel Occupation Forces are indeed a festering cauldron of serial-killing sadists and sexual deviants. Helpless Palestinians are the repository of this rot.
Having investigated the phenomenon and tabulated the results; the UN International Commission of Inquiry has revealed that rape, genital mutilation—of men, women, boys and girls—exhibitionism (public flashing); all the sexual perversions and paraphilias I had picked up on—are systemic, pervasive, carried out happily, seemingly ordained from above. No crime is a “one-off.”
“Israel uses sexual violence as a weapon of war,” concludes the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, writing, on March 13, 2025, that,
The frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory leads the Commission to conclude that sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people. The Commission documented a pattern of sexual violence, including cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and other inhumane acts that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Section number 222 of the report’s summary states that, “Israeli detention is characterized by widespread and systematic abuse and sexual and gender-based violence. These practices have increased significantly in severity and frequency since 7 October 2023, following orders and statements of the Minister for National Security Ben Gvir who is in charge of prisons. The mistreatment of Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities is a result of an intentional policy that utilizes sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence to humiliate and degrade Palestinians in detention. This was observed across several facilities, temporary holding locations, during interrogation and while in transit.”
These Israelis are men and women of cold violence. Their hearts are as black as boot polish. The brutalized bodies of Palestinian men, women, and children; their pets and livestock bear this out. But broad-brush statements aggregating their practices are not enough.
Daily, the Palestinians’ closest neighbors, the settlers, make manifest their red-hot hatred toward them, stealing private Palestinian property, vandalizing installations on this land, regularly slaughtering helpless livestock with biblical cruelty (watch settlers gouge the eyes out of helpless lambs), and generally menacing Palestinian property owners. Most disturbing is the overt, perverted threat of sexual violence from settlers and their soldier helpers.
Indeed, the poisonous cabal of Israeli settlers and soldiers works cheek by jowl.
In “Holy Redemption: Stealing Palestinian Land,” a TRT World exclusive documentary, there is no editorializing. The videographers plainly followed and recorded these settlers in character. Twenty-nine minutes and 20 seconds into this TRT settler odyssey, Turkish TV captures a uniformed IDF, in cahoots with settlers, publicly manhandling himself on camera, in a manner not fit to print.
Said IDF soldier hisses:
“I spit on Palestine. F-ck your mother. I’m the Israeli Army.” He is not done. Just as I imagined this breed of Cain could not expose itself as more indecent, the same soldier comes close to indecent exposure. At the said timestamp, the atavistic, low-brow individual shows himself to be lacking the inhibitions to keep his perversion private. Reflexively. Quite obviously, this IDF had been aroused by threatening a helpless group of Palestinian homesteaders. He had likely imbibed a pornographic sensibility and had not been taught propriety and shame in public.
Right there on film is that pathological pairing of violence and sexual arousal, the stuff of serial killers!
In another unremarkable vignette, filmed by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, an armed settler threatens a Palestinian farmer in the South Hebron Hills with rape. “Rape in the name of God,” a la SdeTeiman, promises settler Shem Tov Luski, to a mortified, modest Palestinian man. “No officers were dispatched, and the residents were advised to file a complaint at the Kiryat Arba police station,” reports Wikipedia.
At one point, the “Halachic right to rape” (See “Sde Teiman: Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal in Israel”) had been issued from the very top of Israeli moral precincts.
His flesh softer than sin, the delightful Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had instructed, in 2016, that, essentially, any carnal demands of the flesh be allowed: “As part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to … satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s own YnetNews.com.
Before Rabbi Karim, there was Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safad, who “urged a genocide in Gaza and excused rape by soldiers.” (Via Electronic Intifada.)
Israel’s female soldiers are as sadistic and malevolent. In a clip, “Israel’s ‘Sick’ Female Guards,” young Israeli uniformed IDF females and security police terrorize Palestinian men as they shuttle from one check point to the next.
We zoom out again to the abstraction of the aggregated data:
214. “Israel has targeted civilian women and girls directly, acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder and the war crime of willful killing. Women and girls have also died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities impacting access to reproductive health care, acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination. …”
221. “Palestinian men and boys have been subjected to specific persecutory acts intended to punish them collectively. The way in which these often-sexual acts are committed, including their filming, photographing and dissemination online, in conjunction with similar cases being documented in several locations, shows that forced public stripping and nudity, as well as sexualized torture and ill-treatment, are part of the persecutory attack against men and boys committed to punish, humiliate and intimidate Palestinian men and boys into subjugation. …”
224. “Specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence such as forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, de facto form part of the Israel Security Forces (ISF) standard operating procedures towards Palestinians. The Commission concludes that these and other forms of sexualized torture, including rape and violence targeting the genitals, are committed with either explicit orders or an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership. The Commission found that all its documented incidents of sexual and gender-based violence committed by members of the ISF were met with impunity. Under these circumstances, the civilian and military leaders are as responsible for these crimes, as are the direct perpetrators. …”
In the “widespread use of sexualized violence against men and boys,” the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has [too] identified several specific patterns of sexualized violence that are indicative of a genocidal process, not all overlapping the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory:
Life-force atrocities (including ritualized humiliations); separation of families and other reproductive violence; and possible elitocide through the use of sexualized violence.
By “elitocide,” the Lemkin Institute is probably referring to sexual violence to whittle at the finest and noblest; the people we most rely on: altruistic aid and rescue workers, healers in their clinics ministering to their patients, peace activists, writers, reporters and intellectuals recording the crimes for posterity.
Dr. Adnan Al Bursh, for example. The 50-year-old renowned orthopedic surgeon headed the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “A doctor. a stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics, Dr. Al Bursh was likely raped to death.”
To genocide, snuff films, the torture and torching of animals, and the rape and robbery of their Palestinian owners; to bombings, boobytrapping and extra-judicial assassinations the world over—add “elitocide.”
Another new term to add to Israel’s lexicon of crime. All this, remember, is customary, informal law in the Genocidal Society.
***
* Image of Lebanese boys disfigured by Israeli boobytraps courtesy of Rania Khalek. https://raniakhalek.com/israeli-terror-in-lebanon-inside-the-pager-attacks-bt-documentary-exclusive/
Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide (because that is our obligation). A war against civilians is a war on civilization.
Trump dumps Marjorie Taylor Greene in escalating Epstein-files clash
Al Mayadeen | November 15, 2025
US President Donald Trump formally withdrew his support for Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on Friday, publicly severing ties with one of his most loyal MAGA allies after she criticized his attempts to block the release of files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump announced the break on Truth Social, writing: “I am withdrawing my support and endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene, of the great state of Georgia. All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”
He added that he would offer his “unyielding support” to a primary challenger “if the right person runs” for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. The rupture came hours after Greene told Politico that Trump was wrong to try to halt the release of Epstein-related documents at a time when many US citizens, including his own supporters, are struggling financially.
“It’s insanely the wrong direction to go. The five-alarm fire is healthcare and affordability for Americans. And that’s where the focus should be,” she said.
“Releasing the Epstein files is the easiest thing in the world. Just release it all. Let the American people sort through every bit of it, and, you know, support the victims. That’s just like the most common sense, easiest thing in the world. But to spend any effort trying to stop it makes – it just doesn’t make sense to me,” she added.
Policy clashes and Gaza stance fuel Greene’s widening split with Trump
It marks the sharpest public split yet between Trump and the 51-year-old lawmaker, who built her national profile as one of his fiercest defenders. In recent months, Greene has increasingly broken with the White House and members of her own party on domestic and foreign policy.
Earlier this week, Trump rebuked her criticism of his agenda, saying she had “lost her way” after she accused him of prioritizing foreign affairs over the economic struggles facing US citizens. Greene responded on X: “The only way is through Jesus. That’s my way, and I’ve definitely not lost it. Actually I’m working hard to put my faith into action.”
Since Trump’s return to office, Greene has clashed more frequently with Republican leadership. She denounced plans to send “billions of dollars” in weapons to Ukraine and broke with the party’s longstanding support for “Israel” by calling its war in Gaza a “genocide.”
She has also voiced frustration with congressional leaders during the government shutdown that ended this week. In a rare move for a Republican, she joined Democrats in pushing for expanded healthcare subsidies.
The global Zionist organ trafficking conspiracy
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | November 15, 2025
In early October, Israeli-Ukrainian Boris Wolfman was arrested in Russia. He is charged with masterminding a criminal organ trafficking scheme. His capture, wholly ignored by the Western media, raises the prospect that at long last, some justice will be served in a number of major organ trafficking scandals, dating back many years. Wolfman’s apprehension also highlights Tel Aviv’s little-scrutinised role as the world’s centre of illegal organ harvesting and trafficking. Grimly, the Gaza genocide may have greatly facilitated this perverse commerce.
Ever since October 7th, credible allegations have widely circulated that Zionist Occupation Forces are illegally harvesting the organs of slain Palestinians. In November 2023, the Euro-Med Monitor published a report documenting how Israeli soldiers confiscated dozens of corpses from major hospitals in Gaza, to the extent of digging up and raiding mass graves built in their grounds to accommodate the never-ending influx of slaughtered civilians. While some bodies were subsequently handed over to the Red Cross, many were and remain withheld.
Euro-Med Monitor records how many corpses exhibited clear indications of organ harvesting, including missing cochleas and corneas, as well as hearts, kidneys, and livers. Since then, the Zionist entity has released token numbers of murdered Palestinians at intermittent intervals to their surviving relatives. Frequently, the bodies are decomposed beyond recognition, making conducting professional autopsies – and identifying whether organs have been stolen – difficult if not impossible. Sometimes, the corpses are frozen solid, again greatly complicating medical examinations, and potentially obscuring organ theft.
The 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention mandates respect for the dignity of dead civilians, and explicitly prohibits the looting or mutilation of their bodies during wartime. However, the Zionist entity has not only failed to ratify the treaty, but expressly rejects its applicability to Gaza and the illegally-occupied West Bank. Moreover, repulsive local laws and legal precedents unique to Tel Aviv grant authorities the power to refuse to release dead Palestinians to their families.
Their bodies can be used as grisly bargaining chips – or their organs looted with impunity. For decades, the Zionist entity has been the illicit organ trade’s international nucleus. While Palestinians have long-raised alarm over Tel Aviv’s theft of their fallen comrades’ organs, it was not until the early 2000s that the practice was officially admitted. Yehuda Hiss, head of “Israel’s” Abu Kabir Institute, openly boasted of harvesting skin, bones, and other human materials during autopsies. He was never punished, suggesting his macabre activities were state-sanctioned.
This interpretation is amply reinforced by former Institute employee Meira Weiss’ 2014 work Over Their Dead Bodies. She reveals how, during the First Intifada 1987 – 1993, ZOF officials directed the centre “to harvest organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian.” This gave them free rein to seize whatever they wished from bodies in their care. Institute apparatchiks nostalgically referred to these years as the “good days”, as they could pilfer organs “consistently and freely”.
Disturbingly, the Gaza genocide’s catastrophic death toll may represent the dawning of a new era of “good days” for the Zionist entity’s organ trade. Wolfman’s arrest, and the collapse of the conspiracies he oversaw, are unlikely to dent Tel Aviv’s operations in the field. He was but one player in a world-spanning nexus of Israeli traffickers. In the manner of a hydra, Wolfman’s removal will simply lead to others taking his place. After all, the returns are high, and risks mysteriously low.
‘Organ Broker’
In July 2015, the European Parliament issued a landmark report on organ trafficking. Its introduction notes, “before 2000, the problem of trafficking in human organs…was primarily limited to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.” However, the report noted that following the turn of the millennium, “trafficking in organs has seemingly started to spread globally, to a large extent driven by Israeli doctors.” The document went on to detail a number of high-profile organ trafficking cases.
In all but one, the evidentiary trail led directly back to the Zionist entity. An accompanying map of international organ trade routes places Tel Aviv at the very core, with its citizens both being leading customers, and heading the gangs that supply organs to overseas buyers. One cited case was the exposure in 2003 of a leading South African hospital performing over 100 illegal transplants on overseas patients – “the majority” from “Israel”.
Local law enforcement uncovered how a criminal syndicate led by well-connected Israeli Ilan Perry recruited poor, desperate individuals from Brazil, Romania, and elsewhere who were willing to sell their organs for a token sum, then transported them to South Africa. Customers would pay vast amounts for the transplants – Perry, the “organ broker”, and his associates would pocket the bulk, with the rest paid to ‘donors’ and hospital staff to perform the illegal procedures, then keep quiet about the connivance.
Another cited case is the Medicus Clinic scandal in Pristina, Kosovo. It erupted in October 2008, when a young Turkish man collapsed at the city’s airport. After a fresh surgical scar was found on his abdomen, he explained his kidney had been removed at the clinic, leading to a police raid. Medicus was already on local law enforcement’s radar due to the profusion of foreigners arriving in Pristina with letters of invitation to the clinic for heart treatment, which Medicus was not known to provide.
Subsequent investigations revealed Israeli Moshe Harel and Turkish doctor Yusuf Sonmez – known as “the world’s most renowned organ trafficker” – were responsible for sourcing clientele, who paid in excess of $100,000 for transplants. The surgeries were primarily conducted by local Kosovo Albanian medical professionals. Patients spent a short period in recovery before being discharged, provided with “information on their treatment to present to doctors in their home countries.” Donors did not enjoy such charity.
As the EU report notes, suppliers were forced to sign documents attesting they were donating their organs “voluntarily to a relative or altruistically to a stranger.” These documents were written in Albanian, and not translated to them. While in some cases they were promised fees of up to $30,000, “a number of them received only part of the money and some nothing at all.” Those given a portion were told they’d get the remainder “on condition that they themselves would recruit other ‘donors’.”
‘Notable Price’
Boris Wolfman was also centrally embroiled in Medicus. While a wanted man in multiple jurisdictions and subject to an Interpol red notice, he remained at large in Turkey for years until his recent deportation to Russia. Incredibly, he kickstarted another organ trafficking venture in the meantime, exploiting vulnerable Kenyans for small sums, selling their kidneys et al. to wealthy buyers from Germany and “Israel” for up to $200,000. As in Kosovo, donors were not given the money promised, or provided with appropriate medical care post-procedure.
It remains to be seen what, if any light, his prosecution will shed on the wider criminal network in which he operated, or whether the Zionist entity might be directly implicated in Wolfman’s venture. Still, that he is facing trial at all is somewhat miraculous. His confederates in the Medicus horror have proven suspiciously impervious to legal repercussions for their monstrous activities. Sonmez likewise lived freely and openly in Turkey for some years after the conspiracy’s unravelling, despite facing criminal charges in multiple countries.
Turkish prosecutors sought to jail him for 171 years, but Sonmez never served a day in prison, and appears to have vanished without a trace. Meanwhile, Harel was arrested by Israeli police in 2012, only to be released. He was nabbed again in Cyprus six years later on an Interpol warrant, but demands from Kosovo authorities he be extradited inexplicably appear to have not been acted upon. Whether the pair’s continuing liberty is indicative of state protection is an open, obvious question.
The Zionist entity’s 21st-century Holocaust in Gaza, and disastrously failed wars against Hezbollah and Iran, have “exacted a notable price” on its finances, Focus Economics has recorded. For example, tourism – once a core component of “Israel’s” income – has shrunk from millions of visitors annually to almost literally zero. “A full recovery could take multiple years and is likely dependent on a permanent end to hostilities with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran,” the outlet forecasts – fantastically, given the Resistance cannot peacefully coexist with Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the Zionist entity continues to suffer mass brain drain, foreign investor flight, diplomatic isolation, and a huge drop in confidence among its largest overseas trading partners. Grotesquely, organ trafficking might represent one of Tel Aviv’s few dependable profit sources at this stage. With thousands of Palestinians both dead and alive in its custody, “Israel” certainly has ample resources to fuel the trade. Mainstream blackout on Wolfman’s long-overdue arrest may indicate the entity’s overseas puppet masters are relaxed about the prospect.
US plan for a divided Gaza cements long-term occupation, trapping 2 million Palestinians in ruins: Report
Press TV – November 15, 2025
The US is drafting a plan to entrench Gaza’s division, creating a fortified “green zone” under “joint Israeli–international control,” while relegating most Palestinians to a devastated “red zone” left in ruins and neglect, a report says.
According to internal documents obtained by The Guardian and sources briefed on US deliberations, Washington is working towards institutionalizing a partition of Gaza along the Israeli-imposed “yellow line.”
Under the blueprint, foreign troops would be deployed alongside Israeli forces in the east, while nearly the entire Palestinian population remains displaced west of it, the daily reported on Friday.
One senior American official, acknowledging the depth of Washington’s ambitions, admitted, “Ideally, you would want to make it all whole, right? But that’s aspirational. It’s going to take some time. It’s not going to be easy.”
The revelation sharply contradicted earlier American pledges, including President Donald Trump’s own assurances, that a 20-point so-called ceasefire scheme announced by the chief executive earlier this year would pave the way to full Palestinian governance across Gaza.
Instead, Washington’s planning documents pointed to a fractured, semi-occupied coastal sliver, where reconstruction is limited to the Israeli-controlled sector, while the rest of Gaza is effectively abandoned.
The United States has been cycling through back-to-back plans, from fenced “alternative safe communities (ASC)” to a “green-zone enclave model,” all devised without Palestinian involvement and without addressing more than two years of Washington-backed Israeli genocide that Gaza has suffered since October 2023. Even humanitarian agencies, long alarmed by US proposals, were not informed of the abrupt scrapping of the ASC model.
Observers say, with no credible roadmap for Israeli withdrawal, international peacekeeping, or large-scale rebuilding, Gaza risks being locked into a “not war but not peace” paralysis.
This, they note, would pave the way for a divided territory under constant threat of Israeli attacks, stripped of Palestinian self-rule, and starved of the reconstruction needed for even minimal recovery.
Trump’s 20-point scheme hinges on, what he calls, an “international stabilization force (ISF)” mandated by the UN Security Council.
However, Washington refuses to place a single American trooper on the ground or finance the reconstruction Palestinians desperately need, the paper wrote.
European nations were drafted into early versions of the plan, including as many as 1,500 British troops and 1,000 French forces, but diplomats from allied capitals dismissed the proposals as unrealistic and politically suicidal, it added.
According to the report, after long, bloody missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, few leaders are willing to send troops into Gaza’s shattered landscape. One source described the plan in blunt terms as “delusional.”
The documents, The Guardian revealed, also envision Jordan sending hundreds of infantry forces and thousands of police officers, despite King Abdullah’s explicitly rejecting any deployment.
With more than half the Jordanian population of Palestinian descent, such participation would be explosive domestically and a direct threat to Jordan’s internal stability, it said.
A US “concept of operation” states that foreign troops would operate only within the “green zone.” None would enter the Palestinian-held western side, where the Hamas resistance movement is reasserting control.
The “enclave” would begin with just a few hundred troops and slowly expand to a force of 20,000, integrating with Israeli forces along the dividing line.
According to the report, the parallels to the United States disastrous invasions of the 2000s are, therefore, unavoidable. In both wars, US-created “green zones” became symbols of occupation, shielded by blast walls, while chaos and destruction consumed the surrounding cities.
US planners openly hope that limited reconstruction in the green zone will “attract” desperate Palestinians into the Israeli-controlled area. As one US official put it, “People will say ‘hey we want that,’ and so it evolves in that direction. No one’s talking about a military operation to force it.”
Experts commenting on the report said the blueprint envisages a future for Palestinians conditioned on accepting the Israeli regime’s authority, not on justice, sovereignty, or the right to rebuild their own homeland.
The report came as more than 80 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure, including nearly every school and hospital, lies in ruins.
Israel continues to block even basic aid items. Tent poles, water filters, and construction materials remain barred under “dual use” claims.
Around 1.5 million Palestinians still wait for emergency shelter items, and more than two million are crushed into the narrow territory that the US plan designates as the red zone.
EU’s “Democracy Shield” Centralizes Control Over Online Speech
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 13, 2025
European authorities have finally unveiled the “European Democracy Shield,” we’ve been warning about for some time, a major initiative that consolidates and broadens existing programs of the European Commission to monitor and restrict digital information flows.
Though branded as a safeguard against “foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI)” and “disinformation,” the initiative effectively gives EU institutions unprecedented authority over the online public sphere.
At its core, the framework fuses a variety of mechanisms into a single structure, from AI-driven content detection and regulation of social media influencers to a state-endorsed web of “fact-checkers.”
The presentation speaks of defending democracy, yet the design reveals a machinery oriented toward centralized control of speech, identity, and data.
One of the more alarming integrations links the EU’s Digital Identity program with content filtering and labelling systems.
The Commission has announced plans to “explore possible further measures with the Code’s signatories,” including “detection and labelling of AI-generated and manipulated content circulating on social media services” and “voluntary user-verification tools.”
Officials describe the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet as a means for “secure identification and authentication.”
In real terms, tying verified identity to online activity risks normalizing surveillance and making anonymity in expression a thing of the past.
The Democracy Shield also includes the creation of a “European Centre for Democratic Resilience,” led by Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath.
Framed as a voluntary coordination hub, its mission is “building capacities to withstand foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) and disinformation,” involving EU institutions, Member States, and “neighboring countries and like-minded partners.”
The Centre’s “Stakeholder Platform” is to unite “trusted stakeholders such as civil society organisations, researchers and academia, fact-checkers and media providers.”
In practice, this structure ties policymaking, activism, and media oversight into one cooperative network, eroding the boundaries between government power and public discourse.
Financial incentives reinforce the system. A “European Network of Fact-Checkers” will be funded through EU channels, positioned as independent yet operating within the same institutional framework that sets the rules.
The network will coordinate “fact-checking” in every EU language, maintain a central database of verdicts, and introduce “a protection scheme for fact-checkers in the EU against threats and harassment.”
Such an arrangement destroys the line between independent verification and state-aligned narrative enforcement.
The Commission will also fund a “common research support framework,” giving select researchers privileged access to non-public platform data via the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Political Advertising Regulation.
Officially, this aims to aid academic research, but it could also allow state-linked analysts to map, classify, and suppress online viewpoints deemed undesirable.
Plans extend further into media law. The European Commission intends to revisit the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) to ensure “viewers – particularly younger ones – are adequately protected when they consume audiovisual content online.”
While framed around youth protection, such language opens the door to broad filtering and regulation of online media.
Another initiative seeks to enlist digital personalities through a “voluntary network of influencers to raise awareness about relevant EU rules, including the DSA.” Brussels will “consider the role of influencers” during its upcoming AVMSD review.
Though presented as transparent outreach, the move effectively turns social media figures into de facto promoters of official EU messaging, reshaping public conversation under the guise of awareness.
The Shield also introduces a “Digital Services Act incidents and crisis protocol” between the EU and signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation to “facilitate coordination among relevant authorities and ensure swift reactions to large-scale and potentially transnational information operations.”
This could enable coordinated suppression of narratives across borders. Large platforms exceeding 45 million EU users face compliance audits, with penalties reaching 6% of global revenue or even platform bans, making voluntary cooperation more symbolic than real.
A further layer comes with the forthcoming “Blueprint for countering FIMI and disinformation,” offering governments standardized guidance to “anticipate, detect and respond” to perceived information threats. Such protocols risk transforming free expression into a regulated domain managed under preemptive suspicion.
Existing structures are being fortified, too. The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), already central to “disinformation” monitoring, will receive expanded authority for election and crisis surveillance. This effectively deepens the fusion of state oversight and online communication control.
Funding through the “Media Resilience Programme” will channel EU resources to preferred outlets, while regulators examine ways to “strengthen the prominence of media services of general interest.”
This includes “impact investments in the news media sector” and efforts to build transnational platforms promoting mainstream narratives. Though described as supporting “independent and local journalism,” the model risks reinforcing state-aligned voices while sidelining dissenting ones.
Education and culture are not exempt. The Commission plans “Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training,” along with new “media literacy” programs and an “independent network for media literacy.”
While such initiatives appear benign, they often operate on the assumption that government-approved information is inherently trustworthy, conditioning future generations to equate official consensus with truth.
Viewed as a whole, the European Democracy Shield represents a major institutional step toward centralized narrative management in the European Union.
Under the language of “protection,” Brussels is constructing a comprehensive apparatus for monitoring and shaping the flow of information.
For a continent that once defined itself through open debate and free thought, this growing web of bureaucratic control signals a troubling shift.
Efforts framed as defense against disinformation now risk becoming tools for suppressing dissent, a paradox that may leave European democracy less free in the name of making it “safe.”
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‘Israel sees Iran as obstacle to its policies’
Press TV – August 25, 2017
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.
Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.
“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.
“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.
Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue
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