Iran Red Crescent says 6,668 civilian sites targeted in US-Israeli attacks
MEMO | March 7, 2026
The Iranian Red Crescent Society said that 6,668 civilian locations have been targeted in attacks carried out by the US and Israel, including thousands of homes and dozens of public service facilities, Anadolu reports.
In a statement, the Iranian aid organization said that the attacks by the US and Israel struck a wide range of civilian infrastructure across the country.
According to the statement, 5,535 residential buildings, 1,041 commercial units, 14 health centers, 65 schools, and 13 facilities affiliated with the Red Crescent were among the locations hit.
The organization also reported that numerous aid and rescue vehicles were damaged during the attacks, while several relief workers and Red Crescent staff members were injured.
The statement emphasized that the attacks by the US and Israel targeting civilians violate the Geneva Conventions.
“International institutions, humanitarian aid organizations, and human rights defenders are expected to take urgent and effective measures to protect civilian lives, ensure the safety of aid workers, and guarantee respect for the rules of international humanitarian law,” it added.
Indian journalist reveals severe Israeli censorship after escape from occupied territories
Press TV – March 7, 2026
An Indian journalist who was trapped in the occupied territories from February 28 to March 6 has revealed severe Israeli censorship amid the regime’s war of aggression against Iran.
Braj Mohan Singh of India’s Sandha News said he witnessed people dying in 100‑foot‑deep bunkers while Israeli officials withheld details.
Missiles “don’t differentiate between Indian or Israeli,” he said.
He contrasted press freedom in India with the restrictions in Israel, noting journalists cannot film bodies, visit hospitals, or receive accurate casualty numbers. Local accounts often reveal far higher losses than official reports, he added.
“When an incident takes place, we are not given the details of the location. The next day, when we visit the site, we are told, ‘There was only one casualty,’ but a local told us, ‘There were four houses, and everyone died,” which shows there was a major incident,’” he added.
Despite Israel’s touted advanced warning systems, Singh reported missiles arriving without sirens or prior alerts, highlighting technology failures and the unpredictability of drone and missile attacks.
He also mentioned reports of Iranian targeting of US embassies across West Asia and possible attempts in Tel Aviv, underscoring the heightened danger in the region.
The regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv started their unprovoked military assault on February 28, assassinating Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and top Iranian military commanders.
Iran began to swiftly retaliate against the criminal aggression by launching barrages of missile and drone attacks on the Israeli-occupied territories as well as on US bases in regional countries.
Majority of Israelis Back War with Iran as Anti-War Minority Faces Stigmatization
teleSUR | March 7, 2026
Israelis who oppose the war with Iran face threats and stigmatization, according to testimonies collected by a Spanish news agency. However, they represent a small minority, as 93% of Jewish Israelis support the offensive, a new poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) shows.
“Opposing the war and war crimes in Israel is practically a punishable offense. Even leftists and pacifists consider this a ‘just war,’” Adam Eli, secretary of the Jewish-Arab leftist coalition Hadash in Tel Aviv said.
Among those few critics is 19-year-old activist Itamar Greenberg, known in Israel for refusing to serve in the military in 2024. That decision, he recounted, cost him six months in prison and ostracism at his university, where he still leads a student circle while studying law.
Nearly one year after walking out of prison, Greenberg found himself back in custody on Tuesday for attending an anti-war rally that barely mustered 20 people across a nation of 10 million.
“About 40 police officers charged at us, confiscated our signs, and beat us. I was arrested and stripped naked for a search,” Greenberg said. He is also the founder of Mesarvot, a network of Israeli youth refusing military service.
An anti-war demonstration scheduled for Saturday at Habima Square in Tel Aviv will test wartime restrictions that cap gatherings at 50 people.
Meanwhile, restrictions on the right to assembly have been applied loosely during recent Purim celebrations—a sort of Jewish carnival—while Israeli authorities continue to bar Palestinians from praying at Al Aqsa Mosque despite Ramadan, and have militarily sealed off much of the West Bank.
Report- U.S. and Israel Are Targeting ‘Hospitals, Residential Buildings And Schools Across Tehran’
The U.S. and Israel Are Repeating The Gaza Strategy In Iran
The Dissident | March 4, 2026
Failing to achieve regime change, the U.S. and Israel are bombing civilian areas in Tehran, in an attempt to destroy Iran as a nation.
A report in the Telegraph, a mainstream British newspaper, wrote , “Tehran an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble”.
The report noted, “American and Israeli aircraft bombed hospitals, residential buildings and schools across Tehran on Tuesday in what residents described as ‘an apocalypse’” adding, “Millions of civilians are trapped under relentless bombardment as food and medical supplies dwindle and the death toll mounts.”
One resident of Tehran told the paper, “They have been bombing us without pause today, and the sound of explosions never stops. They don’t care where they are hitting. I have felt the shockwaves several times already”.
He added, “They are striking buildings where families live. After each explosion, people rush to help – and then another bomb hits the same area.”
The report added:
Families ration meals to make supplies last. Children go to bed hungry. Elderly residents with medical conditions cannot find their medications.
Diabetics run out of insulin. Parents water down milk to make it stretch further. Some families have not eaten in two days. Bakeries that remain open face long lines.
It went on to write:
Areas around Revolution Square in central Tehran were struck on Tuesday, causing extensive damage to residential homes in one of the capital’s most densely populated districts.
The Haft-e-Tir neighbourhood, also in central Tehran, was hit. Video footage showed destroyed apartment buildings and rescue workers digging through rubble.
A hospital in southern Bushehr was destroyed, with emergency workers frantically evacuating newborn babies as the building was struck.
Kamran ( Tehran resident) said: “Many people are trapped under the rubble. Hospitals are filled with injured patients, and staff are overwhelmed. They are even striking hospitals where the wounded are being treated.”
The scene echoed strikes on Gandhi Hospital in Tehran and multiple other medical facilities across the country.
The destruction of hospitals means the wounded have nowhere to go. Nurses carry premature infants through smoke-filled corridors as bombs fall on maternity wards.
Burn victims lie on floors because all beds are full. Surgeons operate by torchlight when electricity fails.
Medical staff work until they collapse from exhaustion, then wake and work again. Some doctors have not left their hospitals in three days, sleeping in supply closets between emergency procedures.
Millions remain trapped in Tehran, a city under sustained aerial assault.
The report added, “‘An apocalypse is unfolding here,’ said Ashkan, another Tehran resident. ‘Today has been the worst day. Those who had cars fled. Those of us without cars are left here under the bombs.’”
It went on to note:
The strikes have created a humanitarian crisis that casualty figures do not fully convey.
Food supplies have become scarce in several parts of the city as distribution networks break down and stores close.
‘I don’t know if any of my relatives are dead or alive,’ Ashkan said. ‘One kilo of potatoes is now 200,000 tomans. That was 30,000 tomans last week.’
The report also documented the repeated use of “double tap” strikes on rescue workers, writing:
The Red Crescent said more than 100,000 rescue and relief workers across the country are on full alert, but residents said help often arrives too late or cannot reach victims at all.
“By the time rescuers arrive, another bomb falls on the same place,” Kamran said, describing what appeared to be “double-tap” strikes where initial attacks are followed by secondary strikes targeting first responders – a tactic that violates international humanitarian law.
Middle East Eye reported that the U.S./Israeli slaughter 165 children at the school for girls in Minab was also the result of a “double tap” strike, writing, “The girls’ school in Iran, where 165 people were killed by an apparent US-Israeli attack, was hit with two strikes, with the second missile killing sheltering survivors, two first responders and the parent of a slain child have told Middle East Eye.”
One Red Crescent member told the outlet, “When the first bomb hit the school, one of the teachers and the principal moved a group of students to the prayer hall to protect them. The principal called the parents and told them to come and pick up their children. But the second bomb hit that area as well. Only a small number of those who had taken shelter survived.”
The father of one victim told the outlet that, “his daughter survived the first strike and was moved to the prayer hall. The second strike hit before he could reach her.”
The outlet documented other instances of “double tap strikes” used in Iran wiring:
Since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran on Saturday, some Iranians have reported attacks that resembled double-tap strikes.
A video circulating on social media shows one woman in central Tehran in distress saying: “They dropped one bomb, people went inside, then they bombed again. They killed people.”
Another shows two men on a motorcycle, with one of them describing a near-death experience.
“We went to drag out people from under the rubble, and then the jet returned twice and pounded the same location four more times. We would have been dead if we weren’t still under the rubble,” he says.
A resident of Tehran who left for Turkey told Reuters , “We saw a lot of buildings destroyed, especially on the way leaving the country. There were a bunch of buildings, a bunch of cars and streets were destroyed. People are panicking to leave the country. They don’t know what to do”.
According to the Western group “Human Rights Activists News Agency, “the total number of reported civilian deaths stands at 1,114, including 181 children”.
As academic Glenn Diesen noted, referring to this report , “The US and Israel are bombing hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and Mehrabad international airport in Tehran. Having failed to regime change Iran, the new objective appears to be terror-bombing Iran into submission”.
Security Researchers Warn Age Verification Laws Are Building a Global Surveillance System
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | March 3, 2026
Three hundred and seventy-one security and privacy academics from 29 countries signed an open letter this week calling on governments to halt age verification rollouts until the privacy and security implications are properly understood.
The letter arrives as lawmakers across the world race to ban children from social media, pushing platforms to implement age checks before anyone has settled on what those checks should actually look like.
The signatories are unambiguous. Deploying large-scale identity verification systems without a clear grasp of what they do to user security, autonomy, and freedom is, in their words, “dangerous and socially unacceptable.”
Among those signing: Ronald Rivest, Turing Award winner, and Bart Preneel, president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. These voices represent the core of the global security research community.
What governments are building, the letter argues, is surveillance infrastructure masquerading as child protection. A real age verification system, the academics explain, would require “government-issued IDs with strong cryptographic protection for every single interaction with the service.”
That means every search query, every message to a friend, every news article read online would require identity confirmation. Nothing in offline life demands that. The parallel doesn’t exist.
Companies are already moving. OpenAI, Roblox, and Discord have all begun implementing age checks in anticipation of legal mandates.
The academics aren’t dismissing the underlying concern. “We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children,” the letter states. What they’re rejecting is the proposed solution, which turns every adult into a suspect who must prove their identity before accessing the open web.
The technical problems compound the political ones. Building and maintaining identity verification at a global scale is genuinely hard. Many service providers, faced with the friction and cost, would simply refuse to comply.
And the platforms that can deploy these systems at scale are a handful of large corporations, meaning age verification becomes another mechanism for centralizing internet infrastructure in the hands of the few companies already dominant enough to afford it.
There’s another risk the academics name directly: governments banning VPNs. Age checks are trivially circumvented with a VPN, and the predictable policy response is to ban them outright. VPNs are currently one of the few tools available to people living under authoritarian regimes trying to protect their communications and identities.
Banning VPNs to enforce age checks on teenagers would strip that protection from dissidents, journalists, and activists worldwide. The collateral damage would be severe and global.
The academics are asking for a pause until scientific consensus forms around “the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility.”
What’s unreasonable is building mass identity verification systems first and studying the consequences after.
UK Government Secretly Tracked 25 Million People as Potential EV Owners
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 2, 2026
The UK government spent two years tracking 25 million mobile devices to build a picture of who drives electric cars. Not suspects or criminals. Just ordinary people whose browsing history mentioned EVs often enough to flag them as worth following.
The Department for Transport paid telecoms company O2 £600,000 ($809,000) to run the operation. According to the Telegraph, O2 trawled through its customers’ web browsing histories and app records, flagging anyone who visited an EV-related site at least once a month across two or more months.
That pool extended beyond O2’s own customers to include people on Tesco Mobile, GiffGaff, and Virgin Mobile, networks that run on O2’s infrastructure and whose users had no idea their data was being packaged and sold to a government agency.
Once flagged as a “potential EV owner,” your physical movements were traced across the country. London, the North-West, and the East of England received particular attention.
The techniques are standard in serious organized crime investigations. The DfT applied them to people buying environmentally friendly cars.
Andy Palmer, former executive at Nissan and Aston Martin, put it plainly: “I’m told it’s anonymized and aggregated, and that may well satisfy legal thresholds. But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.” He added: “If you erode public trust in how that data is gathered, you undermine the very transition you are trying to accelerate.”
The idea of “anonymized” data means very little.
The surveillance ran for two years before the DfT quietly admitted defeat in April 2024, conceding that “mobile data cannot directly be used to provide information around charging behaviour or travel time.”
The program ended not because anyone questioned whether mass tracking of innocent people was appropriate, but because the data turned out to be useless for its stated purpose.
Civil servants from the DfT and Treasury were simultaneously exploring new EV taxes to replace fuel duty revenue. The people being surveilled were doing exactly what government policy encouraged them to do.
Conservative MP Sir David Davis drew the obvious conclusion: “It’s an object lesson in why you can’t trust the state with unfettered access to people’s information, because they’ve obviously taken this information without people’s permission with the objective of disadvantaging them, either by tax or other policy matters. If they’ll do it on this, with people who are doing what the government wants in policy terms, namely, pursuing green policies, what on Earth will they do elsewhere?”
The EV surveillance program wasn’t a one-off. During the earlier days of the COVID saga, the government ran a parallel operation, this time tracking people who showed up to get vaccinated.
Researchers funded through the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors used mobile phone location data covering one in ten British people, without their knowledge or consent, to analyze behavioral changes after vaccination.
From that pool, they selected over 4,200 vaccinated individuals and tracked their movements through call data records, analyzing how far they traveled on vaccination day and whether they went straight home afterward.
The government was monitoring where citizens went after receiving a government-administered medical intervention, and chose not to tell anyone.
Female Iranian academic sentenced to 4 years in prison in France over protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Press TV – February 26, 2026
An Iranian academic woman in France has been sentenced to four years in prison after she protested Israel’s genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip, with a permanent ban on her entry into the European country.
A court in France on Thursday, sentenced Iranian citizen Mahdieh Esfandiari, who had been detained on alleged charges of “public defense of terrorism,” to four years in prison, France 24 reported.
According to the court ruling, Esfandiari, a linguist and French language graduate, received a four-year sentence, three years of which were suspended and one year to be served.
The 39-year-old Iranian citizen had previously spent eight months in pretrial detention before being released under conditional terms.
The court also permanently barred Esfandiari from entering French territory.
Esfandiari graduated from Lumière University, where she worked as a professor, translator, and interpreter. She has also been a prominent pro-Palestinian activist with a significant online presence.
Her arrest last year came amid a crackdown in the United States and other Western countries targeting scholars, students, and activists who opposed Israeli genocide and advocate for peace, both on campuses and in public spaces.
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office charged the Iranian academic with “apologie du terrorisme” over Telegram posts that allegedly supported the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israel in October 2023.
US university cancels Palestine conference citing sanctions concerns
Al Mayadeen | February 26, 2026
The University of Southern Maine has withdrawn permission to use a campus venue for a conference centered on Palestine, just days before it was scheduled to begin, triggering a dispute over sanctions law and First Amendment protections.
The event, titled “Consequence of Palestine,” had drawn more than 300 registrants and was organized by the Maine Coalition for Palestine, Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, and the university’s department of criminology and sociology. It was expected to feature virtual remarks by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, who has been under US sanctions since last year.
University officials said the decision was based on federal sanctions law. Samantha Warren, chief external and governmental affairs officer for the University of Maine system, told The Guardian in an email that “hosting a conference that is being actively promoted as including a speaker sanctioned by the US government would put our public university in violation of federal law”. She said organizers should have obtained authorization from the Treasury Department before proceeding.
Sanctions regulations prohibit US entities from providing “any goods or services” to individuals designated under sanctions regimes. Violations can carry severe penalties, including heavy fines and potential prison time. However, legal scholars argue that the scope of what constitutes a “service” remains ambiguous.
Campus rights clash
In December, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) clarified in correspondence with the Middle East Studies Association that “no authorization” was required to include Albanese in an academic event, provided that she did not receive payment, reimbursement, or “training or assistance”. That clarification emerged after concerns were raised about the impact of sanctions on academic exchange.
Xiangnong Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute who had sought clarification from OFAC, said the cancellation reflects broader concerns about the chilling impact of sanctions on constitutionally protected speech. “It’s very concerning that sanctions continue to have such a broad deterrent effect on speech that is undoubtedly protected by the First Amendment,” he said.
Organizers said they were caught off guard by the abrupt cancellation. Abigail Fuller, a sociology professor involved in planning the conference, stressed the constitutional implications of the decision. “We’re a public university; the university system is subject to First Amendment laws,” she said. “We feel we have a very, very strong case that they are suppressing our free speech.”
According to organizers, they attempted to clarify that federal guidance did not require special permission to include Albanese. They even proposed removing her from the program in an effort to preserve the event. They were subsequently told there was insufficient time for administrators to evaluate the conference’s “risk”.
Speech under pressure
The dispute comes amid reports that Republican lawmakers had written to the system’s chancellor requesting “information on steps the university is taking to ensure the safety and well-being of its Jewish students”. Organizers believe such political pressure contributed to the reversal and said administrators had also expressed concern about possible federal funding consequences.
Albanese was sanctioned last July, with US authorities accusing her of “unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West”. She has previously rejected those allegations and criticized the move as politically motivated, describing the United States as “a country of contradictions, full of ideals and principles and still, plotting against democratic values”.
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the university’s interpretation of sanctions law.
Despite losing access to their campus venue, conference organizers say they are seeking an alternative location and are exploring possible legal action. Fateh Azzam, a member of the Maine Coalition for Palestine, said canceling the conference outright was not an option.
“That would mean that they have effectively silenced an open and public debate on the issues,” he said. “This controversy will probably bring in more people.”
Islamic Jihad: Trump’s peace board is a “theatrical stunt detached from reality”
Palestinian Information Center – February 25, 2026
BEIRUT – Mohamed al-Hindi, Islamic Jihad’s deputy secretary-general, has described the US-led Board of Peace as nothing more than a “theatrical stunt,” saying it is detached from the reality on the ground.
In an interview with Al Jazeera Mubasher satellite channel on Wednesday, Hindi stressed that the board’s recent meeting “has not brought about any change in the course of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip or in the scale of Israel’s ongoing violations against Palestinians.”
Hindi affirmed that this peace council was founded on a “formula of absolute American dominance and full security for Israel, while denying the Palestinian people the right to shape their own future.”
“The Palestinian role in this framework is purely symbolic, confined to technocratic committees handling Gaza’s municipal affairs without any sovereignty or political power,” Hindi said.
“The proposed vision fully embraces Israel’s stance, linking Gaza’s reconstruction to resistance groups surrendering their weapons, without any serious discussion of an Israeli withdrawal or accountability for ceasefire violations,” the Islamic Jihad official added.
He underscored that his Movement never trusted the US administrations under president Donald Trump or his predecessor Joe Biden, citing America’s unwavering pro-Israel bias.
He said that the Palestinian acceptance of prior understandings over Gaza aimed solely to put an end to Israel’s relentless massacres against civilians.
Project Artichoke: 70 Years Ago, CIA Discussed Hiding Mind-Control Drugs in Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 24, 2026
In the 1950s, the CIA brainstormed ways to secretly perform mind control on humans — including concealing drugs in vaccines and widely consumed food products, a newly unearthed CIA document revealed. The Daily Mail first reported the story on Monday.
The seven-page document, “Special Research for Artichoke,” is dated April 23, 1952. It describes a series of ideas for how to develop chemicals designed to alter human behavior and thought.
The proposals contained in the document were part of the CIA’s top-secret Project Artichoke, which ran from 1951 to 1956, according to the Daily Mail.
The document, declassified in 1983, recently circulated on social media. However, it was not published in the CIA’s online reading room until last year.
“Some of the suggestions are controversial,” the document states. The proposals included administering drugs in secret as part of a “long-range approach to subjects.”
According to the document:
“This study should include chemicals or drugs that can effectively be concealed in common items such as food, water, coca cola, beer, liquor, cigarettes, etc.
“This type of drug should also be capable of use in standard medical treatments such as vaccinations, shots, etc.”
CIA experimented on humans as part of Project Artichoke
The document also included a special field of research for “bacteria, plant cultures, fungi, poisons of various types, etc.,” that are “capable of producing illnesses which in turn would produce high fevers, delirium, etc.”
This included “species of the mushroom” that “produce a certain type of intoxication and mental derangement.”
Also among the proposals was a suggestion to research “diet” or “dietary deficiencies” on prisoners and on people undergoing interrogation, including using “specially canned foods having elements removed.”
The document included proposals for both short-term and long-term use on humans. Drugs deemed most suitable for long-term use would be designed to produce an “agitating effect (producing anxiety, nervousness, tension, etc.) or a depressing effect (creating a feeling of despondency, hopelessness, lethargy, etc.).”
According to The Daily Mail, the CIA experimented on humans as part of Project Artichoke. The experiments often involved “vulnerable subjects, including prisoners, military personnel and psychiatric patients.” The experiments were usually performed “without informed consent.”
According to Ben Tapper, a Nebraska chiropractor who was included in the “Disinformation Dozen” list in 2021 for questioning vaccine safety, the document exposes “a disturbing reality that government agencies have historically explored ways to manipulate human behavior through chemical and biological means, including concepts involving food and medical interventions.”
“This is not speculation or conspiracy, and it should deeply concern every American who values bodily autonomy and informed consent,” Tapper said.
Precursor to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control experiments?
The Daily Mail cited CIA documents suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies were concerned that enemy nations had developed their own mind and behavioral control techniques. This led the agency to prioritize the development of its own methods.
Project Artichoke “served as a precursor” to the MK-Ultra program, which the CIA launched in 1953. That program “broadened mind-altering experiments on a larger scale,” the Daily Mail reported.
Many of the documents related to this type of experimentation were destroyed in 1973, “leaving the full extent of the research and how far it progressed unknown.”
Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., CEO of Daily Clout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” told The Defender that the documents further confirm a long history of intelligence agency research targeting human thought and behavior.
“Sadly, it’s long been established that our intelligence agencies, and those of our enemies, have sought to alter human consciousness and behavior, often without the subjects’ consent. The existence of MK-Ultra, the clandestine project into which Project Artichoke evolved, is well documented,” Wolf said.
John Leake, vice president of the McCullough Foundation and author of the forthcoming book, “Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions,” said, “Researchers have long suspected that the Church Committee’s revelation of the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra mind control experiments, mostly using LSD, had the effect of obscuring the agency’s much larger Project Artichoke.”
Leake cited evidence suggesting that a 1951 mass poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, in which 250 residents experienced severe hallucinations and seven people died, was a Project Artichoke experiment. The outbreak was officially attributed to contaminated bread from a local bakery.
Leake said the 1952 document is “consistent with the suspicion that the CIA was seeking to discover mind control methods for even large populations.”
In 2024, a Reuters investigation revealed that the CIA operated a secret propaganda campaign involving vaccines in the Philippines. The campaign attacked what the agency perceived as China’s “growing influence” in the country by targeting the Chinese-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine through the use of phony online accounts spreading “anti-vax” messaging.
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda,” said the Project Artichoke revelations “make it clear that the CIA has posed an enormous threat to U.S. citizens, in addition to the horrors it unleashes on non-U.S. target governments and populations.”
Project Artichoke wanted to enlist help from Army’s Chemical Warfare Service
The 1952 Project Artichoke document also included a recommendation to involve the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service in the project’s efforts, citing its experience with “exhaustive studies along these lines.”
This proposal bears a resemblance to recent suggestions that COVID-19 — and the response to the pandemic — were coordinated at high levels of government, military and intelligence agencies.
Last year, former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova and retired science writer Debbie Lerman released the “Covid Dossier,” presenting evidence of the “military/intelligence coordination of the Covid biodefense response in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.”
According to Latypova and Lerman, “Covid was not a public health event” but “a global operation, coordinated through public-private intelligence and military alliances and invoking laws designed for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) weapons attacks.”
Leake said “it is far from clear” that the Church Committee hearings of 1975 “put a complete end to CIA covert programs.” He cited the possible laboratory development of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as an example.
“The laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2 with gain-of-function techniques developed at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the U.S. military’s involvement in developing and distributing of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, should … be regarded as possible outgrowths or even continuations of Project Artichoke,” Leake said.
Experts question similarities between Project Artichoke, COVID vaccines
In a Substack post today, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher drew a potential connection between Project Artichoke and the development of COVID-19 vaccines. Hulscher cited recent peer-reviewed studies that identified the vaccines’ adverse impact on neurological health and “surging rates of cognitive decline.”
Hulscher wrote:
“Disturbingly, since 2021, over 70% of humanity received a neurotoxic agent masquerading as a ‘vaccine.’ The same goals outlined in the CIA document (vaccines/drugs capable of covertly inducing anxiety, depression, and lethargy) are now being observed in COVID-19 vaccinated populations. …
“… If the CIA was secretly discussing covert methods to alter human behavior in the 1950s, it would be no surprise if similar classified projects emerged in the decades that followed.”
A 2024 paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry investigated psychiatric adverse events among over 2 million people in South Korea. The study found that “COVID-19 vaccination increased the risks of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and sleep disorders while reducing the risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”
A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science found “alarming safety signals regarding neuropsychiatric conditions following COVID-19 vaccination, compared to the influenza vaccinations and to all other vaccinations combined.”
This included increases in schizophrenia, depression, cognitive decline, delusions, violent behavior, suicidal thoughts and homicidal ideation.
“The fact that mRNA vaccines were designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and inflame the brain — or at least, they were known to do so, during their manufacture and distribution — should give us pause in light of this news,” Wolf said.
Wolf said the latest revelations, “while shocking, provide all the more reason for us to be critical of opaque, coercive or untested vaccination programs, additives in food and water, and toxic or opaque geoengineering programs.”
Tapper said the revelations reinforce “the urgent need to protect individual liberty, medical freedom, and ethical boundaries in science and public health.”
“The lesson here is simple: vigilance is necessary when governments claim authority over the human body and mind,” Tapper said.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Israel designates five Palestinian media outlets as ‘terrorist organizations’
The Cradle | February 23, 2026
Israel’s Defense Ministry has designated five Palestinian news platforms in occupied East Jerusalem as “terrorist organizations,” alleging “incitement” and links to the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on 22 February.
“Defense Minister Israel Katz signed an order designating these platforms as terrorist organizations, and the Attorney General confirmed that there is no legal obstacle,” Channel 12 reported, adding that the outlets “are accused of incitement by focusing on developments in (East) Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it added.
The order targets Alasima News, M3raj Network, Al-Quds Albawsala Network, Maydan Al-Quds, and Plus Quds Network, none of whom maintain offices in occupied East Jerusalem.
Alasima News said it was suspending all media activities until further notice, while the other four platforms issued no immediate comment.
“In a new step added to Israel’s record of repression and gagging, the occupation has banned the work of several Jerusalem-based news networks in an attempt to isolate Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, monopolize them, and suppress their news from the world,” Alasima said in a statement.
The outlet expressed pride in “what it has achieved over the past years,” stressing that its motto “has always been to make Jerusalem the focus and compass of the (Palestinian) cause.”
“The Israeli ban will not hide the truth. Silencing the camera will not silence Jerusalem. The narrative written in blood and resilience is stronger than any prohibition,” it added.
Rights groups have identified Israel as the single deadliest country for journalists in recent years, with more than 250 media workers killed since the start of the Gaza genocide across Israel’s various theaters.
Meanwhile, independent foreign reporters remain barred from entering Gaza except through the Israeli military.
Israel’s crackdown on Palestinian freedoms has intensified in parallel with a marked rise in violent settler attacks across the occupied West Bank.
Over the past year, Israeli attacks and crackdowns have displaced around 25,000 Palestinians from the Tulkarem and Nour Shams refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, according to local authorities, with raids, infrastructure destruction, and prolonged closures forcing families from their homes.
The broader campaign of aggression, launched in January 2025 and centered on refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem, has uprooted roughly 40,000 people across the occupied West Bank this year alone, while satellite imagery shows nearly half of Nour Shams Camp buildings damaged or destroyed since early last year.
The most recent settler attack saw part of the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Mosque in the village of Tell, near Nablus, set ablaze and defaced with racist graffiti.
Since 7 October 2023, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank.
Official data cited by the Times of Israel shows that over 99 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians against Israeli soldiers in recent years were closed without indictment, with just 23 indictments out of 2,427 complaints recorded between 2016 and 2024.
Israel’s security cabinet approved on 8 February new measures aimed at drastically overhauling the occupied West Bank’s legal and civil framework, allowing Tel Aviv to further expand illegal settlements and strengthen its grip on the territory.
During the month of Ramadan, Israeli authorities greatly restricted the entry of West Bank Palestinians to Jerusalem to 10,000 worshippers for the first Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa mosque, far below the 250,000 seen in previous years, enforcing age and permit restrictions that left hundreds stranded at checkpoints.
Israeli troops executed Palestinian aid workers at ‘point blank range’: Report
The Cradle | February 23, 2026
Israeli soldiers massacred 15 Palestinian aid workers, targeting them with nearly a thousand bullets, including at least eight at point-blank range, in Tal al-Sultan in southern Gaza on 23 March 2025, a joint investigation by the independent research groups Earshot and Forensic Architecture has shown.
The report, based on eyewitness testimony and audio and visual analysis, shows that Israeli troops executed many of the aid workers, including shooting one from as close as a meter away.
The victims included eight aid workers with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six from the Palestinian Civil Defense, and a UN relief agency staffer.
After ambushing the aid workers, the Israeli troops crushed the ambulances and buried them along with the bodies in a mass grave.
The report by Earshot and Forensic Architecture reconstructed the details of the massacre using video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers before their deaths, open-source images and videos, satellite imagery, social media posts, and other materials, as well as in-depth interviews with two survivors.
On 23 March 2025 at 3:52 am, the PRCS dispatched two ambulances from two different areas to the scene of an Israeli airstrike in Al-Hashashin near Rafah on the Egyptian border.
Israeli soldiers ambushed the Palestinian aid workers, firing at them 910 times in a near continuous assault lasting over two hours.
At least 93 percent of the gunshots were fired directly towards the emergency vehicles and aid workers by a group of at least 30 soldiers.
Israeli soldiers began firing on the aid workers from an elevated position on a sandbank. They then began walking toward the defenseless aid workers while continuing to shoot.
Once they reached them, they walked between the ambulances, carrying out execution-style killings at point-blank range.
“The soldiers could clearly see the aid workers, shot at them continuously and deliberately from this position and then approached to execute them one by one at close range,” Samaneh Moafi, assistant director of research at Forensic Architecture, told Drop Site News.
“Locating the massacre within the evolution of Israel’s campaign in Gaza shows that it was not an isolated incident but part of the genocide,” Moafi added.
The 15 aid workers killed were: Mustafa Khafaja, Ezz el-Din Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Refaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Libda, Muhammad al-Hila, and Raed al-Sharif with the PRCS; Zuhair Abdul Hamid al-Farra, Samir Yahya al-Bahapsa, Ibrahim Nabil al-Maghari, Fouad Ibrahim al-Jamal, Youssef Rassem Khalifa, and Anwar al-Attar with the Civil Defense; and Kamal Mohammed Shahtout with UNRWA.
After the mass grave was discovered and news of the massacre emerged, Israeli authorities attempted to cover it up.
“Following our discovery of the mass grave, the narrative from Israeli forces shifted multiple times; we were fed several versions of a blatant lie,” stated Jonathan Whittall, a senior UN official in Palestine between 2022 and 2025.
“The men we retrieved on Eid last year were medics. We found them in their uniforms, ready to save lives, only to be killed by Israeli forces, fully aware of their protected status.”
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From the Archives
Clash of Civilization, Iran Part II
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist. … continue
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