Begin on October 7, 2023.

Nothing important happened before this date.

History began on October 7.

Never say the word “occupation,” and avoid using terms like “apartheid,” “segregation,” and “illegal settlements.”

Avoid writing about the wall. If you do, preface its existence by talking about terrorism and security.

Terrorism and security are very important words. Use them a lot in reference to Palestinians.

Remind your audience that Palestine is a “complicated” situation.

Avoid the word “genocide” — for legal and technical reasons, of course.

If you must use the word, put it in quotes.

Do not describe the escalation of Israeli hostility as an assault on the people of Gaza.

Instead, use words like “war,” and “conflict,” because that makes it easier to avoid the g-word.

When reporting on the dead, always use the passive voice, and don’t mention how they were killed or by whom.

As often as possible, remind your readers of October 7.

When writing about Palestinians, do not forget to center Israeli feelings. Although the Israeli military is dropping bombs and killing Palestinians, the real story is about the persecution of Israelis in the wake of October 7.

Avoid making everything even more complicated pointing out that antisemitism is a European invention.

Writing about Palestine mainly involves writing about Hamas.

Writing about Hamas is almost as important as writing about October 7.

Hamas is a person, a thing, a monster, a ghost.

Hamas is in every home.

Hamas is in tunnels and hospitals.

Hamas is in tents sleeping next to patients in wheelchairs.

Hamas is in ambulances that are buried with paramedics.

Hamas infiltrated World Food Kitchen and all the soup kitchens and schools; even the children’s souls have been infiltrated by Hamas.

The October 7 Hamas attack can be described in any of the following ways:

• horrific
• brutal
• gruesome
• murderous
• shocking
• atrocious
• harrowing
• graphic
• terrifying

On the other hand, when writing about attacks on Palestinians, no adjectives should be used.

It’s better to simply write something like “More than 90 killed in Gaza strikes.”

You do not want readers to think you’re taking a side.

When writing about Palestine, do not let facts get in the way of telling a good story. To this end, ignore Palestinian sources. They may be biased.

On the other hand, the Israeli military is a highly credible source of information.

If the Israeli army says nothing happened, then nothing happened.

When the army claims their troops didn’t rape Palestinian women or use civilians as human shields, or shoot children or journalists in the head with sniper guns, continue to publish their denials without comment.

Linking countries that fund weapons to the armies that use them fosters transparency.

So, when you write about attacks on Tel Aviv, it is important to mention that the missiles were fired by Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Do the same when you write about the Houthis.

Do not follow the same protocols when it comes to Israel.

The American-backed Israeli army makes its own decisions about when to drop American and British bombs.

When talking about Muslim communities, throw around phrases like “terrorist hotbed” and “Hamas sympathizers.” This works even when those communities are in the U.K. or America.

Repeatedly demonize people who peacefully protest for Palestine.

Center the voices of people living in Western countries who feel unsafe when they hear the phrase “from the river to the sea.”

Don’t ask your readers to imagine how unsafe children actually living, wounded, and dying in Gaza and the West Bank feel.

Do not ask them to think about whether mothers feel safe as they enter labor.

Do not write one single paragraph asking whether fathers burying their children have a right to feel unsafe in Gaza.

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When writing about Palestine, try not to zoom into individual stories or write about the intimate details of people’s lives. Keep your focus on Hamas militants.

In fact, when writing about Palestine, try not to interview Palestinians at all. They might be Hamas or Hamas sympathizers.

If you must interview a Palestinian, always begin by asking them to condemn October 7.

After this, be sure to ask them to confirm that Israel has a right to exist.

Ask the same leading questions of anyone who looks like an Arab, or is Muslim, or who seems to sympathize with Palestinians.

Sometimes they will throw the question back at you and ask if you think Palestine has a right to exist. Ignore this line of questioning as it only leads to trouble.

When all else fails, remember:

Begin on October 7, 2023.

Nothing important happened before this date.

History began on October 7.

This piece borrows its satirical form from “How to Write About Africa” by the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. Many of the details and critiques of the media examples are from the excellent report put out by the Australian Islamophobia Register in December 2023. Written by Dr. Susan Carland, “A War of Words: Preliminary Media Analysis of the Gaza War” is a great resource. There are many articles online that can help you read more critically. Search “media bias Palestine,” and you’ll find dozens of reports.

The post How to Write About Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Continued campus protests against the Gaza war have sparked heated debates around free speech, academic freedom, and the role of universities in addressing global issues. 

This spring saw an outpouring of students demanding that their institutions divest from Israel. Since then, universities have taken sometimes draconian measures to stop protests before they even begin.

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporters Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez, who have been following the protest movements for months, discuss the latest developments and how college administrators are responding. 

Lacy followed one such case at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where students were hit with severe charges for vandalism. “The school is trying to make an example of student leaders in the movement for Palestine to chill further speech,” Lacy says. “I want to emphasize the fact that these are felony charges for undergraduate students for a nonviolent offense that is putting paint on a building.”

Students and organizers who spoke with Valdez anticipate even greater hostility for protesters of every kind once Donald Trump takes office again in January. “This is what a lot of organizers were telling me leading up to Election Day was that there’s going to be so many other attacks on the rights of many other people,” he says, “whether it’s reproductive rights, rights of trans people, LGBTQ community at large, rights of immigrants, all on top of the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.”

To hear more about the chilling effects on free speech and protest, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.

The post The “Palestine Exception” appeared first on The Intercept.

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems U.K. factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the U.K. in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: The defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International U.K.’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the U.K., including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

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For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the U.K. provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the U.K.’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the U.K. government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials; a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

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It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

And then there’s the issue of medication. 

“My doctor told me that the antiretrovirals have been consumed completely and there is nothing left in store,” said E.S., who is HIV-positive and agreed to speak with The Intercept using a pseudonym to avoid community stigma and targeting by the Israeli authorities. 

He needs tenofovir, a common HIV medication, and lopinavir/ritonavir, a much more rarely prescribed one. At times, E.S. has had so little left that he dangerously began rationing his pills by skipping morning doses. “There are no more supplies coming in or there hasn’t been any supplies at all coming in to the south or to the north,” he typed in a direct message. While Israel has denied blocking medication, international aid groups like Glia have told The Intercept that HIV medication specifically has been blocked from entering the Gaza strip. 

Without these medications, E.S. — who already uses a walker for mobility — would see his health deteriorate rapidly. Within a short span of time, he would begin to move even more slowly, and he might lose the ability to walk altogether. With soldiers mandating mass displacement and sniping Palestinians as they try to evacuate, this could mean a death sentence. 

As Israel’s war on Gaza rages around him, E.S. has spent most of his time at home with his two cats. While many of his neighbors moved south to Rafah, he stayed put with his brother and mother, who is a cancer survivor. His limited mobility, the result of a viral infection exacerbated by HIV, made leaving more dangerous than staying. 

So they chose to stay north — despite warnings from the occupation military to evacuate. His home, while offering more protection than a tent, hasn’t exactly been safe: “I saw people get sniped right across the street from me. It was a family of five trying to cross the road after they were ordered to evacuate their building before it was bombed.” He said the parents died and the children survived.

E.S. used to get his medication from Al Rimal Martyrs Clinic, but it was evacuated and then reinhabited by displaced Palestinians. 

“Now, with the genocide happening, I fear not only my health deteriorating, but also how my family will respond,” he wrote. For years, his family didn’t acknowledge his HIV status; now he worries that his condition will be a liability for them.

There is an added terror for Palestinians in Gaza who must hunt down vital medications. It’s especially hard for those few dozen looking for stigmatized HIV meds.

According to “HIV/AIDS in Palestine: A growing concern,” a 2020 article in the International Journal of Infectious Disease, there have only ever been about 100 cases of HIV officially documented by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Still, the report found, “the Middle East and North Africa region is considered an area of increasing concern for HIV infection due to high mortality associated with AIDS” in general, and “Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) is part of this concern.” 

This is because HIV incidence is slowly increasing, and untreated HIV-positive Palestinians are progressing toward cases of AIDS. Similar to HIV dynamics among Black queer men in the Mississippi Delta, in Palestine, “within a short time patients become susceptible to opportunistic infections, probably due to the late diagnosis and presentation of the cases.”

And as outbreaks in America and Greece have shown, without adequate testing and screening, even a few cases of HIV can rapidly increase. 

As recently documented in Ukraine and Russia, wars have long exacerbated HIV transmission. In Gaza, the universal protocols needed to prevent blood-borne infections simply cannot be followed. 

The Gaza Ministry of Health told The Intercept that it contacted HIV patients at the beginning of the war, urged them to visit specific health facilities, “and their treatments were dispensed for a period of 3 months.” 

“Now, unfortunately, their treatments are not available,” the ministry added.

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Bombings routinely cause Palestinians with no training (let alone latex gloves) to desperately try to save their wounded neighbors, hospitals lack water for washing hands or surfaces, and patients with gaping wounds are treated on blood-soaked floors. 

With Gaza’s few hospitals targeted and largely destroyed — and with more than 1,000 of its health care workers killed and others detained — this is not an environment where any virus can be contained.

E.S. was born and raised in Gaza. He grew up Muslim but doesn’t practice the religion anymore. He describes himself in many ways: as someone who is very spiritual, with a deep connection to the divine. As an artist, with a focus on mixed-media work related to gender expression and Gaza. As someone who is HIV-positive. As Palestinian. As queer. 

“I like ‘queerness,’ it kind of represents my wanting to be free and, like, fluid,” he wrote.

E.S. grew up exploring sexuality with his classmates and neighbors. Many of them are married to women now, he explained. He also had unfortunate experiences that he didn’t consent to with some men. 

E.S. spent a year in the United States as an exchange student in high school. He applied to colleges there afterward but, while waitlisted, began his studies in Turkey in early 2014 as a scholarship student. It was then that he first felt symptoms which he worried might mean he had HIV. In the same year, he got a scholarship to study at an American college, and by the end of 2016, he moved to the Midwest, where he was first diagnosed with HIV and syphilis and treated with antiretroviral medication. Feeling he could no longer deal with his illness alone, he left the United States in 2019 and returned home to Gaza.

Gaza has been the love of his life, the beach most of all. “It’s the only place where I feel at peace with myself.” 

But when he returned, E.S. didn’t know a single other queer person, let alone anyone else with HIV. When his parents found out about his HIV status, they told him it was his fault and they were worried it would bring shame to the family.

E.S. found it easier to avoid the subject, which meant he ran out of the medication he had been getting in the U.S. He didn’t know he could talk to the Ministry of Health to get more. His physical health deteriorated. “It was very complicated, because my mom was dealing with cancer,” he said. “She always justifies it by how there was so much happening. Because she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through the treatment at around the same time.” 

People newly infected with HIV might not feel anything, and they may appear asymptomatic for many years. But E.S. also had syphilis. The delayed treatment for that and for his HIV (which suppressed his immune system) allowed the syphilis to progress into neurosyphilis, which damaged his nervous system, left him with chronic pain, impeded his ability to walk, and thrust him into severe depression and anxiety.

He felt like he wasn’t in a position to advocate for himself to his parents to help him, because the subject of his sexuality and his HIV status and viral infection were already so taboo.

“For them it is just like, no, like the natural way to go about it is dick and pussy. And like, if it’s dick and dick, you will go to hell. And before you go to hell, you’re gonna destroy the reputation of our family.” His parents had gotten divorced a few years earlier. “‘If anyone knows about your HIV status, there’s gonna be an apocalypse that’s gonna just destroy the entire world.’ This is what they made me feel like.” 

For years, E.S. suffered painfully without support. “I was complaining about pain in my legs. My dad would take me every month or so to the beach to lecture me and remind me to change my life.” When his father saw the infection was impeding his ability to walk, he took him to see a neurologist — but, according to E.S., told his son to lie about his condition. The neurologist couldn’t help E.S. without knowing the truth.

Eventually, in 2022, his father consulted with a close friend who was a doctor. This time, he confessed that his son was potentially dealing with a sexually transmitted disease. 

“To my dad’s shock,” E.S. said, “the doctor friend sympathized with my case in complete understanding and advised my dad to urgently rush me to the infectious disease department to get me registered (anonymously) and have me put on antiretrovirals and other needed treatment.” E.S. believes that his dad’s friend saved his life.

His parents’ response to his condition strained their relationship. “I kind of blame my parents for my disability,” E.S. said “I should not blame them, because this is from God and I respect it. I accepted surrender to it.”

But he still carries so much love for them. “What you would expect is like a supportive family — that would be the most important thing for you. Or like a solid group of friends, chosen family. But I had no one.”

Still, he has seen signs of other seemingly queer people. In one voice note, E.S. described getting food at the market in Gaza City. He was with his mom, and there was “this guy that had short hair, and his outfit was fully coordinated. And he had, you know, these mini purses in the way the bags that would hang from your shoulder, like no man wears that in Gaza, at least. And the walk was a bit flamboyant.”

A few weeks later, he said he saw another two guys, who were “straight looking or dressed in a straight way, wearing caps. Arab guys in Gaza, they like to wear tight jeans. But these two guys, when I was walking, we locked eyes and I just felt it. These motherfuckers sleep together.” 

E.S. says that there is an excitement to “clocking” other people in Gaza who might be queer. But it also brings with it other emotions. “I am just presuming their sexuality. I am presuming from how they walk fast or what they are wearing, but the biggest feeling I get is insecurity. What if that person perceives me? I’ve noticed them, so does that mean they are perceiving the queerness in me? So then, I feel this sense of shame and judgment or disapproval almost immediately.” 

E.S. likes to express himself by bleaching his eyebrows. “When I was a baby I had blonde hair. It is pretty much a ritual at this point. I usually get shy and ask my mom to buy the products for me. It’s weird when I buy them myself.”

Any identity, aside from being a Palestinian surviving, is hard for him to prioritize right now. 

By the time doctors began properly treating E.S.’s HIV, “it was super late.” The disease had progressed to AIDS at that point, since the level of his T cells — a type of white blood cells necessary to ward off infections — were dangerously low. An MRI suggested an opportunistic infection might have already gotten to his brain. 

By restarting HIV medication, E.S. eventually improved and got out of his deep depression. “I just started to figure out how to get back into life. One of the first things I did was start to wear colorful clothes instead of all black. I would also record Instagram stories, mostly for myself to be saved in the archive. But my dad didn’t like that and sensed I was ‘going down that path again’ and assumed I was communicating with some guy online.” 

By early 2023, E.S. said his father would continue having intimidating “pep talks” with him. He threatened to kill him if he kept “acting like a faggot.” Another pressure was the cost of his treatment — something E.S. said his father would not let him forget. Instead of prioritizing rehabilitation, E.S. threw himself into work as an English tutor, working seven days a week. The grueling schedule hindered his recovery. When he was diagnosed with neurosyphilis, his doctor said the physical complications would be temporary if he received proper physical therapy and rehabilitation. But since such facilities didn’t exist in Gaza, he planned to work hard for a year and save money to travel for treatment.

Months later, with a rare Saturday off work, E.S. agreed to go swimming at a local pool with his brother, father, and little half-brother. He was excited — he hadn’t gone swimming in a long time. The night before, he talked to his dad about where they could get one of those “round, tire-like floaties” because, with his disability, he said he “wouldn’t stand a chance in the water without one.” His dad reassured him they could buy one on the way.

But as he made coffee the next morning at around 6 a.m., he began to see and hear a “whopping number of rockets being launched across the horizon. I instantly knew something was off. I had never seen anything like that before. I rushed inside to wake up my mom and brother, then called my dad. We didn’t even need to call off our plans for the day — it was clear they were already off.” 

It was October 7, 2023. E.S. turned on the TV and quickly realized that people had managed to break the siege and enter the occupied territories. Before fully processing the implications, he said “it felt like breaking out of prison — quite literally.” 

But then, reality set in. What at first seemed like a jailbreak for Gaza, eventually transformed into a more intense prison sentence.

Months of Israeli military violence occurring outside of his house and inadequate food exacerbated his disability. The longer E.S. went without proper rehabilitation or food, the more his mobility deteriorated. 

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And if the syphilis came back, “I don’t think there will be any doctors left to help.” E.S. has been running out of his HIV medication and knows it could be his death sentence. He understands he eventually must begin prioritizing his health over the fear of being outed. In one written message, he typed, “silence equals death remains painfully true,” evoking a phrase coined by the activist group ACT UP in the 1980s. 

So he started reaching out to people online who he believed could help. Around the same time, a controversial story was getting attention on Instagram about someone going off HIV medications under very different circumstances.

On December 1, 2023, playwright Victor I. Cazares had to hastily leave for the airport to travel to their birth state of Texas when their grandmother became ill. Their “artistic home” at the time was the New York Theatre Workshop, where they’d completed a two-year fellowship and taught a class. 

“I forgot my HIV pills. The cab was here, and I forgot them,” Cazares recalled. But as they sat on the plane, a vivid scene played out in their head. “I got the image of Palestinians fleeing their homes, and realizing, or forgetting, or not having access to their medicine. And it was World AIDS Day.”

An idea formed: “I am not going to take my medicine until the New York Theater Workshop calls for a ceasefire.” The company is well known for work about AIDS, like the hit musical “Rent,” but like many nonprofit organizations in the arts and other fields, it had stayed silent about the mounting death toll in Gaza. 

Cazares’s pill strike, documented on their Instagram account and the subject of a widely read Vulture story, recalls a history of HIV medication refusal as a form of activism. In post-apartheid South Africa in 2002, Treatment Action Campaign co-founder and activist Zackie Achmat infamously refused to take antiretrovirals until such medications were widely available to everyone.

Cazares told Vulture they were prepared to refuse their meds until New York Theatre Workshop called for a ceasefire, there was a ceasefire, or they became hospitalized.

Then, “the night sweats began. I could feel the PH level in my skin changing. It took about two months for me to become detectable.” 

“I started having these neurological symptoms. I got scared,” they recalled to The Intercept. Cazares had moments where they lost clarity in their thinking and became alarmed at the “faulty” thoughts and “pathways that my mind would go” down. As a playwright, Cazares became worried about what would happen if these symptoms grew worse and if they suffered from permanent neurological damage.

Told about E.S. and his trials to obtain the kinds of medication he’d voluntarily refused, Cazares began to cry — then weep. 

“It’s not that I couldn’t imagine a person like E.S”; they just hadn’t known exactly who they were. In Cazares’s 14 years with HIV, “I had nights where I was really scared, and I had access to meds, and I can’t imagine on top of everything else, what that must be like for E.S.” Cazares noted how the “propaganda, the pinkwashing” and stigma “vanishes” people living with HIV. 

Ultimately, what made Cazares end the strike after 125 days and resume taking their medication was when they gave up believing the New York Theatre Workshop would speak out. They came to this realization as the company mounted a production of the World War II Nazi-era play “Here There Are Blueberries,” which Cazares described as “a play about people who do nothing during a genocide” — and New York Theatre Workshop still did not speak out against the violence in Gaza.

When an HIV-positive patient stops antiretrovirals, “the virus can replicate in their body very rapidly,” said Dr. Oni Blackstock, an HIV primary care physician and former assistant commissioner at the Bureau of HIV for the New York City Department of Health. The biggest barrier to managing an otherwise treatable virus, she said, is when access to care is disrupted by racism, homelessness, or war. The next greatest challenge is when the stigma of seeking treatment keeps patients away. 

“While how long it takes to feel the effects of” antiretroviral discontinuation varies, Blackstock said, it can happen in “weeks or days” and has a lot to do with a patient’s “baseline” of health.

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Given that E.S. has had neurosyphilis, is usually eating just one meal a day, and is trying to survive a genocide, he doesn’t have much of a baseline to begin with. Even a brief interruption to his HIV medication could make his neurological symptoms and mobility deteriorate.

“HIV destroys CD4+ T-cells that protect us from infection. Without medication, the virus increases, makes more copies of itself, and the immune system gets weaker — and then the person becomes vulnerable to different types of infections and cancers,” Blackstock warned. “Even minor infections can become threatening.” The risks in Gaza extend far beyond minor infections. Wounds from debris and bombings are common, Hepatitis A and cholera are rampant, and war zones breed antibiotic resistance.

Even polio, once eradicated, is back.

Compared to people living with HIV around the world, what E.S. is experiencing is both universal — stigma has been a huge barrier to his health — and geographically specific to the yearlong genocide in Gaza and the decadeslong occupation of Palestine. 

Around November 2023, E.S.’s doctor’s brother got access to the infectious disease health department’s storage in northern Gaza, and moved the medication E.S. needed to his own home. “They feared they would be destroyed had they left them at the health clinic,” E.S. said. He received a three-month supply — enough to buy him a bit of time. 

For months, E.S. had avoided asking for help publicly because he didn’t want to acknowledge his dwindling supply while the Israeli military killed his neighbors. It felt awkward to ask for help when others were starving or becoming orphaned. He also surmised that there was an outside chance the stock could get replenished somehow.

But in March 2024, he began to reach out. (He contacted Afeef, one of the co-writers on this story, because of his reporting on queer Arab stories on his Instagram page.) E.S. wrote, “I have about two months of HIV — medication. And I’m definitely on the lookout for possible ways to access my meds.” 

By June, the situation where E.S. was living had gotten drastically worse. Borders had been closed for over a month. In his correspondence, he said that the Northern Gaza Strip was being starved: “We are lacking any humanitarian aid,” he wrote. “We haven’t had any fresh produce/poultry/meat/dairy products for as long as I could remember. Whatever canned processed food that is left is being sold at much higher prices.” People were running out of cash, and no banking services remained operational. “It feels like a forever loophole,” he typed into the chat box. 

On top of all of this, he saw Israeli forces using quadcopters to attack civilians. “We were once at the market where a group of people were fired at, killing at least three people. It’s very terrifying to say the least.”

In July, E.S. asked his brother to make a trip to pick up more medication from the cache at the home of his doctor’s sibling. Although it was a big risk, he returned with enough to last E.S. until October. It was a relief that there were more pills left, but he wrote “after this runs out, I WILL ABSOLUTELY need to figure out another way to access them because there isn’t any left here up north as far as I know. And I don’t know if they will even be able to send more up north.”

E.S. decided the best course of action was to begin rationing his medication and skipping doses. “I did that for a couple of days. But my doctor told me that I can’t under any circumstances do that. It’s better to be cut off than to ration/split or mess around with the doses.”

As the months passed, the stress was becoming too much to bear for E.S. “I’m trying to hold on, relying on my faith and doing my best to figure a way out, even though working under pressure has never been easy for me. I’ve reached out to organizations to try and get medication into Gaza, but every door I knock on gets shut. The only door that never closes is God’s, and maybe by sharing my story, I can finally get the help I need.” 

On July 10, E.S. wrote, “it’s been crazy here. Violent clashing has been super close. It’s been going insane the past couple of days .” The raging conflict made it impossible to imagine when his dwindling pill supply could be replenished. 

By August, E.S.’s original doctor stopped answering him. “Hope nothing bad happened to him,” he wrote. On September 15, E.S. wrote, “For the past ten months, I was lucky. I had access to my HIV medication because I stayed in the north of Gaza. But now, I’m running out. I took the last doses in the north,” and he’d been told “there are no more supplies coming in. No more meds for me.” 

By then, Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian Canadian emergency physician representing a medical organization called Glia, had seen E.S.’s story on Instagram and reached out to help. Loubani has been on more than 20 medical rotations to Gaza since 2011, and continues to go, even though he was shot in 2018, a fact he downplays (“it was the cleanest shot possible”).

On its first scheduled mission after the October 7 attack, Loubani’s group brought various medications in anticipation of shortages, including 100,000 units of insulin. But when it came to HIV medication, Loubani said that the first problem he ran into was that E.S. uses “a very, very, very special medication, such that most people with HIV don’t use this medication.”

Still, Glia did everything it could to procure the medications, only to be stymied in multiple countries. “I thought we could just buy it in Jordan, but in Jordan the medication was absolutely forbidden to access for anyone who wasn’t Jordanian.”

“Some not so great news,” Loubani wrote to E.S in early October, along with a photo of three bottles of the desperately needed lopinavar/ritonavir pills procured in Canada. “Everything is ready to enter in Jordan, but the entire team was denied entry on Tuesday. They’ve been rescheduled for 22 October. If you know anybody else entering, happy to give it to them.”

But when Glia transported a three-month supply of meds to the Gaza border, the shipment was confiscated. Then, Glia was banned from entering Gaza, along with several of its medical volunteers. The organization believes it was in retaliation for their participation in a New York Times essay published on October 9 called “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.”

Asked for a response, the Israeli agency for the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories replied that “Israel neither blocks nor limits the entry of medications, including those for HIV, which can be brought in without quantitative restrictions.” COGAT did not directly address a question about whether Glia had been retaliated against for the Times essay, merely describing an article about its suspension as “outdated” and saying “the organization’s activities have been approved.”

Loubani said Israel has treated the medical caches “basically like weapons depots,” and alleged that the military “burned many of the medication warehouses that they found.” Loubani said the Israeli military “would station a sniper outside some of the depots.” One pharmacist “made a run for it, tried to get the medication and got shot in the neck, and miraculously survived,” Loubani said.

Then in mid-October, E.S.’s home was struck with a missile. He, his brother, and mother barely survived. On his Instagram stories, he shared a picture of a blown-out wall. His brother had been sleeping against it, E.S. said. But his constant feline companions were found dead under rubble. In one video that E.S. shared, a female emergency worker says “Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah” as she guides him out of his destroyed house as he wipes his teary eyes with his walker in front of him. 

E.S. moved with his family from his damaged home to a friend’s place they are renting in another part of Gaza City. “I haven’t had any rest lately. It’s been 4 days but all my psyche needs is to go back home and rest but I can’t do that,” E.S. explained. 

On October 26, E.S. finally reconnected with his original doctor from the Ministry of Health in the south, who had good news: He had secured more of his medication. One of the medications is made for children, “So I have to take 2.5 pills instead of the one pill I used to take.”

On December 3, Loubani messaged: “Good news, 3 months of Lopinavir/Ritonavir finally entered on Tuesday. Now we have to get it to Gaza City.” Many people around the world worked to make this happen because, as he put it: “Everybody cares about HIV medication. It occupies a special place in people’s hearts.” 

For now, E.S. has a few months before having to worry again, and he says that his mental health has vastly improved but still desperately hopes he can evacuate Gaza before running out of medication again. 

“No matter how tirelessly Israel works to ensure that nothing works for us who are suffering in Palestine, the magic and power of God defy those efforts,” E.S. said. “It’s in the small mercies — the kindness of strangers who expressed concern and offered help, and the miraculous arrival of my medication through a plan I could never have foreseen. These acts of grace are what keep us steadfast in Gaza.”

The post Queer, HIV-Positive, and Running Out of Medication in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Israeli human rights groups and scholars for the first time called the bombardment and siege of the Palestinian territory a genocide. The governments of France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all signaled they are prepared to join the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing Palestinian statehood. A majority of Senate Democrats voted last week in favor of blocking the U.S. from selling weapons to Israel, an historic first. Even the right-wing lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., now calls Israel’s actions a genocide, the first Republican lawmaker to do so.

A recent Gallup poll showed that just 32 percent of Americans approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza: a new low. The majority of Americans — 60 percent — disapprove of the offensive, and, for the first time, a majority said they disapprove of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Such shifting attitudes were most prominent among younger Americans.

These recent swings have yet to materialize into policies that exert actual pressure on Israel and save Palestinian lives. Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza continues unabated, with the death toll topping 60,000 last week — though the number is likely 40 percent higher, according to a Lancet study. A slight loosening of Israel’s aid blockade has done little to ease famine conditions. At least 175 people — 92 children and 82 adults — have died of hunger in Gaza in recent weeks; killings continue near the few available aid sites; and airdrops have been criticized as ineffective, expensive, and dangerous, resulting in the death of one Palestinian on the ground and injuries for at least a dozen others.

Yet there is a growing belief among organizers and advocates that a new groundswell of outrage may translate into lasting consequences for U.S. foreign policy on Israel and Palestine.

“It’s too late obviously to impact policy in a way that would save Palestinian lives now,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “But I think that the picture the current moment paints for a future of a pro-Palestine movement in the U.S. is significant.”

A Historic Senate Vote

A major flashpoint of the past week in U.S politics was a vote in the Senate on a pair of resolutions, authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,to block sales of certain U.S. weapons to Israel. Since November, Sanders has introduced several similar resolutions. With a Republican-controlled Senate, Sanders’s resolutions have largely been symbolic chances for lawmakers to signal to voters and lobbies where they stand on Palestine and Israel.

One of the recent resolutions aimed to bar the sale of more than $675.7 million worth of bombs — including hundreds of MK 83 1,000-pound bombs and BLU-110A/B General Purpose 1,000-pound bombs — as well as block the sale of tens of thousands of automatic assault rifles.

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With tallies of 27-70 and 24-73, the resolutions failed to pass the Senate. But they drew the largest showing of support for blocking weapons deals with Israel so far. Among the new Democrats who joined in the vote were ranking members Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (Foreign Relations Committee), Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island (Armed Services), and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington (Appropriations). Another supporter was Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who had voted in favor of a similar resolution in November but opposed another arms embargo attempt in April after considerable pushback from the powerful lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In his vote to prohibit assault rifle sales, Ossoff cited “the extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza, including the intolerable starvation of children, that have resulted from the policies” of Israel. This stood out to Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, especially since Ossoff is up for reelection next year amid the AIPAC pressure.

Friedman and her organization have monitored statements from members of Congress on issues related to Israel and Palestine since 2017. Although many lawmakers doubled down on their support for Israel last week and blamed the lack of aid on Hamas, she noticed a shift in the number of lawmakers making statements of support for Palestinians. Many, she said, were voicing their disgust at Israel’s starvation policy. Whether they would back up their statements with votes on the floor to pressure Israel, however, remains in question.

When Friedman previously worked as a lobbyist advocating for the human rights of Palestinians, she said there was an open joke about the futility of trying to sway Hill lawmakers on the issue. Behind closed doors, she said, members of Congress would tell her and her colleagues: “I agree with you on everything you’re saying, thank you so much for your doing, but don’t ask me to do anything unless you can get my constituents to defend me because otherwise AIPAC will take me down.”

The recent Senate votes may signal a shift.

“Is it that the members are suddenly more courageous, or do they suddenly feel like somebody’s got their back more and have more room to maneuver? Maybe it’s a combination,” Friedman said. “Something is changing in the calculation, and that is only good.”

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sanders, has been in touch with congressional offices where staffers are reporting an uptick in constituents calling about Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza.

Behind some of that pressure has been IfNotNow, a Jewish-led group that organizes within the American Jewish community against U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

In the 24 hours leading up the weapons Senate vote, IfNotNow interim executive director Morriah Kaplan said her group organized several thousand people to send letters to Senate offices in support of the resolutions.

“There’s possibility that Democratic lawmakers are also willing to step out against the AIPAC party line in a way that I think could fundamentally realign some of the politics around this issue,” Kaplan said. “And I hope that makes the Israeli government very nervous.”

Combating Israel’s Propaganda

There is tension for pro-Palestinian organizers and advocates grateful to see what feels like a wave of new support for Palestine within the U.S. and in other Western nations, while also questioning why it took so long.

“As someone who’s been a witness for 22 months of livestreamed genocide every day, what is it that made it a tipping point?” Friedman said. “I would have thought that the pictures of babies and kids killed with bombs, bullets, and deprivation of medical care over the past 22 months would have done it — it wasn’t.”

She and others pointed to the images of starvation in Gaza — emaciated babies, mothers holding their dying children, aid-seekers running from gunfire at aid sites laced with barbed wire — has forced a different kind of reckoning.

“Before, you could obfuscate. You could say, ‘There were 80 civilians killed because they wanted to go after one Hamas guy,’ or ‘Hamas is using human shields and hiding in tunnels behind civilians,’” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. “But that obfuscation is no longer feasible. There’s a realization that Israel is in fact intending to harm civilians. It’s taken literally starved babies, babies dying of hunger to get to this point. And that is a very sobering concept if you’ve spent the last two years telling yourself that Israel is doing its best to minimize civilian harm.”

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The mainstream news organizations that have repeatedly run Israeli disinformation around aid shortages for months leading up to the current famine in Gaza are now publishing front-page stories and television broadcasts featuring images of starving Palestinians. Such images even drew sympathetic comments from President Donald Trump, who has a long record of dehumanizing Palestinians.

The images are circulating widely, perhaps reaching Americans who could previously overlook the war’s human toll. Powerful images have a history of shifting perspectives, such as an image of the drowned Syrian boy Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Mediterranean Sea beach amid the Syrian civil war, a photograph of children running from a U.S. napalm strike on Trảng Bàng village during the Vietnam War, and pictures of the dead and malnourished survivors at Nazi death camps.

“Images that are coming out of Gaza right now, those are reminiscent of the Holocaust,” Al-Shabaka’s Kenney-Shawa said. “Moments like that hold a lot of space in the American psyche.”

A Bigger Umbrella

Advocates and organizers say there must be accountability for Democratic leaders, such as President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for their role in creating the conditions that have allowed the genocide to devolve to this point of mass starvation. But those who spoke with The Intercept were in favor of postponing such reckoning for a big-tent approach. Building a larger coalition, they say, will be more fruitful in getting aid to starving Palestinians, halting the war in Gaza, and ending U.S. support for Israel.

“There’s a very desperate situation on the ground, there is a huge imbalance of power, and you need as many people as you can involved in pushing in the right direction,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC and former executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

On top of the billions in taxpayer money earmarked for Israel to buy new weapons, the U.S. government each year sends military weapons, vehicles, and munitions from existing American military stockpiles to the Israeli military — typically with the approval of Congress. The U.S. also helps finance Israel’s own domestic arms manufacturing industry. Munayyer and others hope this new groundswell might pressure legislators to end such unchecked financing of Israel and put sanctions on the country’s military leaders.

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Other activists urged those who have newly taken up the pro-Palestine cause to call their elected representatives; protest arms transfers at ports; and embrace the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led campaign seeking to halt financial support for corporations and institutions complicit in Israel’s apartheid and genocide.

Duss, of Center for International Policy, said he was familiar with several former members of the Biden administration who are using their credibility and influence to pressure elected officials around Gaza. But he was disappointed at how few are doing so and called for more action from his colleagues. “Successful movements don’t scold people for being late, they welcome converts — that’s just successful politics,” he said.

“We may reasonably ask, what took you so long?” he said. “But we need to make it attractive for people to join this movement and to take the right position, even if they’re doing so belatedly.”

IfNotNow’s Kaplan said that she and other organizers have reported shifts in conversations with family members who previously had doubled down on supporting Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attack. These people, she said, are now more willing to break from their unconditional support for the Israeli government. She hopes those conversations spark a longer-term reckoning within the American Jewish community, but her group’s current priority is pushing for an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza. 

“We can’t afford to push people away who are joining us for the first time now,” Kaplan said. “Those who are just now joining us have a responsibility to do everything that they can and take the most courageous action that they can to leverage the power they have to end the genocide. Right now, we need to embrace them when they want to join us. It’s our responsibility to do so if we actually want to win and if we actually want to build our power.”

Elections and Beyond

While Munayyer applauded the growing number of votes in the Senate as an important sign of progress, he also said it was “insufficient” considering how many Democrats continue to support arming Israel. The vote, however, can serve as a record for Americans to consider in future elections, exposing a disconnect between elected officials and their constituencies.

“You have half the Senate Democrats still voting to support weapons to Israel even though upwards of 80 percent of Democrats in polls oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza,” he said. “It exposes that these senators are not even representing their constituents.”

A chasm between Democratic lawmakers and their constituents on Israel and Palestine is nothing new, said Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Friedman. But what’s novel is that progressives are no longer willing to make exceptions for Israel and are noticing the ways attacks on the pro-Palestine movement intersects with campaigns against free speech, racial justice, LGBTQ+ communities, and other efforts to curtail the rights of Americans, such as with the detentions of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk.

And this moment of outrage around Gaza may actually spell consequences for Democratic lawmakers who continue to unconditionally support Israel.

“The problem with U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine is that there’s only been costs for holding up Palestinian lives as valuable,” Duss said. “There need to be cost imposed from the other side now, as well, and I think that’s happening. That’s part of what’s changing the equation.”

Experts and advocates point to the New York City mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani as a sign of a shifting base among young voters. Mamdani is an outspoken critic of Israel, decrying its offensive in Gaza as a genocide, voicing support for the BDS movement, and pledging to arrest Netanyahu if he were to visit New York in response to war crime warrants from the International Criminal Court. Mamdani outlasted attacks from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who campaigned by conflating anti-Zionism with attacks on Jews. With Mamdani’s decisive victory and a new poll showing his popularity among Jewish voters in New York, there are already signs the Democratic Party is accordingly adjusting.

“That does show us is that come next presidential election, a smart Democratic candidate would take into account the fact that a majority of Democrats see what Israel is doing as genocide, and factor that into their thinking of how to message on Israel–Palestine,” Kenney-Shawa said.

With eyes ahead to the 2028 election, Munayyer likened the lead-up to that election to the 2008 Democratic primary in which then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama distinguished himself from then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton by reminding voters he had long been a critic of the Iraq War while Clinton had voted in Congress to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Obama’s opponent in the general election, Sen. John McCain, was a staunch supporter of the war.

The growing support for Palestine amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza particularly among younger voters mirrors other key political shifts after 9/11 or the Arab Spring, Kenney-Shawa said.

“That’s what’s extremely important because, in five, 10, 15, 20 years down the line, no longer is Israel kind of this untouchable subject in U.S. politics,” Kenney-Shawa said, “where you kind of can’t really talk about it or its political suicide to be supportive of Palestinians or critical of Israel.”

How Will Israel Respond?

It’s unclear how Netanyahu will respond to the current pressure. He has prolonged Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to maintain power by satisfying his right-wing, religious nationalist coalition, which includes leaders like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have been calling for the mass displacement of Palestinians and the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza. But Munayyer pointed out that with Israeli’s Parliament on break until October, Netanyahu is presented with a window to act on ending the genocide with little immediate political blowback.

Netanyahu, however, appears to be doubling down. Reports suggest that the Israeli government plans to expand its operations in Gaza, pursuing a full occupation of the Strip. This spurred some 600 former Israeli security officials to write to Trump on Monday, demanding he end the war in Gaza. The officials, including former heads of Mossad and Israel’s military, said “that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel,” and asked Trump to “steer Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government in the right direction” in order to “end the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering.” Israel had already said it achieved its goal of dismantling Hamas’s military last September. In the letter, the officials added that the return of the remaining hostages captured by Hamas on October 7 can only come through a deal and not extended fighting.

Outside the U.S., pressure is also mounting from the other European countries that are calling on the European Union to halt trade to Israel over its starvation campaign. The EU, Israel’s main trading partner, is also considering a suspension of its research funds to Israel.

The Hague Group, a bloc of countries founded in January, met in Bogotá, Colombia, last month, to strategize how to pressure Israel into ending the genocide. At the conference, 13 countries pledged to block weapons transfers to Israel, including a ban on allowing their ports to be used by vessels carrying arms meant for Israel; review public contracts to prevent funds from supporting unlawful occupation of Palestinian land; support war crimes investigations of bodies such as the ICC and the International Court of Justice; and support universal jurisdiction, which allows for the prosecution of suspected war criminals in a third-party country’s judicial system, even if the crimes were committed in another jurisdiction, such as in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Advocates in the U.S., however, don’t expect any such pressure from its government in the near term, despite the escalating outrage. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have routinely allowed the Israeli government latitude to make adjustments to its military campaign to ease public pressure. In fact, the Trump administration last week sanctioned the Palestinian Authority, the government body that rules over the occupied West Bank, due to its efforts to hold Israel accountable for alleged war crimes. Members of Congress have recently pushed for legislation to do the same against South Africa for its role in the genocide case against Israel in the U.N.’s top court.

Throughout the past 22 months, there have been various moments of increased attention on Gaza, from the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers last April, the “All Eyes on Rafah” campaign as Israel began its bombardment of southern Gaza, or when Israel broke its ceasefire agreement in March. Those moments passed with officials doing little to change the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.

But each moment is a part of a longer arc of change, Kaplan said. Next comes the challenge of translating such fever-pitch moments into something lasting.

“I’ve been working on this issue for 15 years and I can’t count the number of times when it felt like we’re at a tipping point and that something big is going to change and then it doesn’t,” Kaplan said. “And so I don’t really view moments in that way — I think we just have to keep at it, and I think organizing is how we win.”

The post The Week the World Woke Up to the Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Remittances like these are a typical part of the financial lives of immigrant families. But since Kordia, 32, was arrested in March by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration has pointed to these wire transfers as evidence that she potentially supports Hamas, in a bid to keep her at an ICE detention center in Texas.

“It was quite upsetting to hear the government claim that any transfer of money to Palestine and/or Palestinians was inherently suspicious,” Kordia’s mother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, wrote in another affidavit.

Kordia’s arrest came days after immigration agents grabbed Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil in New York City. In error-riddled statements and social media blasts, the Department of Homeland Security emphasized Kordia’s participation in a pro-Palestine protest a year earlier, near Columbia.

Unlike Khalil and other high-profile activists targeted for deportation, however, Kordia remains in custody despite findings from two different judges — one in immigration court, one in federal district court — that she should be released. She’s lost significant weight while in the Prairieland Detention Facility, near Dallas–Fort Worth, which has roaches, broken showers, and barely any halal food suitable for a practicing Muslim, Kordia alleged in a habeas petition.

To keep her at Prairieland, government attorneys tried to paint Kordia as a potential Hamas supporter and thus a danger if released on bond. In immigration court, they pointed to wire transfers Kordia sent to Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East over the years, without any evidence that these funds were for anything other than fuel, water, or medical expenses for her family members.

“She didn’t always have a lot of money to send, but she sent whatever she could,” wrote one of Kordia’s cousins, who lives in Florida, in another affidavit.

It took weeks for Kordia’s legal team to track down family members who received remittances as far back as 2017. Some were still in Gaza and the West Bank, while others had evacuated to Egypt and Dubai.

“In 2022, during one of the aggressions in Gaza, my building was destroyed and we needed money to rebuild,” wrote Kordia’s aunt, who ran a hair salon out of her home in Gaza before fleeing to Cairo. “My sister was in great need after that incident, so I asked Leqaa for her assistance in sending money,” Kordia’s mother explained.

After Kordia’s attorneys submitted these sworn statements, ICE attorneys switched arguments, and they barely addressed her wire transfers at a hearing in late August, according to Sarah Sherman-Stokes, one of Kordia’s attorneys.

“In the blink of an eye, it became a non-issue,” Sherman-Stokes, a professor at Boston University’s immigrants’ rights clinic, told The Intercept. “Because it was such a charade from the beginning.”

From the start, the Trump administration’s case against Kordia has been slippery and ever-changing.

“What we’re seeing is that the Department [of Homeland Security] is throwing whatever they can at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Sherman-Stokes said.

The sole formal claim against Kordia in immigration court is that she overstayed her student visa, which she let expire in 2022 on the mistaken belief that her mother’s family visa petition gave Kordia lawful status. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved this petition in May 2021, according to court filings, which Kordia thought meant she was close to getting a green card.

But soon after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of ICE, devoted considerable resources to investigating Kordia for purported “national security violations,” according to court records.

Starting in early March, agents from HSI’s Newark office put a trace on Kordia’s WhatsApp account, interviewed her family and friends in Paterson, and even got a four-page report from the New York City Police Department about her arrest at a protest in April 2024, along with dozens of other people.

Since the charges were quickly dropped, Kordia’s arrest report was supposed to be sealed, and New York laws prohibit NYPD from assisting federal agencies with civil immigration enforcement. The city’s Department of Investigation told The Intercept that its inquiry about NYPD’s sharing of records with HSI is ongoing, and a public report should be issued by the end of the year.

HSI also subpoenaed Kordia’s records from Western Union and MoneyGram, which showed Kordia sent money abroad as recently as February 2025.

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Once in ICE custody, it was Kordia’s legal burden to prove to an immigration judge that she should be released on bond. At a hearing in April, ICE attorneys pointed to her protest arrest and remittances to argue that she was a danger to the community and potentially a Hamas supporter.

“They first tried to argue that exercising her free speech rights by attending a protest somehow made her a danger to U.S. security,” Sherman-Stokes explained, and when that didn’t work, “they moved on to suggesting that she was sending nefarious money transactions to people in the Middle East.”

From the start, the immigration judge didn’t buy it.

“In the absence of evidence of any connection to terrorist organizations, the Court cannot find that [Kordia] is supporting a terrorist organization by sending money to a family member in Palestine,” wrote Immigration Judge Tara Naselow-Nahas in an April ruling that ordered Kordia released on a $20,000 bond.

ICE attorneys appealed that order to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which, like immigration courts, sits within the Department of Justice rather than the federal judiciary, and Kordia remained at Prairieland.

While the BIA deliberated, a magistrate judge in federal court found in late June that Kordia’s due process rights were likely violated by her ongoing detention and recommended that she be released. But a district court judge ordered the magistrate judge to hear additional argument from the government.

In early August, the BIA remanded the bond order back to the immigration judge for “more complete findings of fact” about Kordia’s money transfers.

“It is a testament to the entrenched nature of anti-Palestinian sentiment that the mere fact of sending remittances to family abroad was enough for DHS and the immigration appeals body to aver that Leqaa was supposedly a threat,” said Naz Ahmad, co-director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project at CUNY law school, which also represents Kordia.

The BIA’s remand order set off the quest to track down Kordia’s family members for affidavits swearing they had not used any of her money to support Hamas.

“Not only do we have to contact them to prove they are who say they are, and that they received money for a medical procedure or because their house was bombed during the Israeli military campaign,” said Sherman-Stokes. They also had to ask each one a “horrible question,” she said: “Can you prove to me that you’re not a terrorist?”

Kordia’s brother, a tailor in Ramallah in the West Bank, wrote in an affidavit that the money she sent helped him open his shop in 2021, where he sells curtains. Other transfers helped cover rent, gas, electricity, and hospital bills for Kordia’s niece.

A cousin, who now lives in Dubai, wrote that a February 2025 transfer helped pay for a medical procedure. Three other cousins in Gaza and Cairo attested that Kordia’s transfers helped cover living expenses and medical bills.

“To further insist that Leqaa justify every single penny sent to a family member overseas, at a time when some of the same are living through a genocide, only underscored the pernicious nature of the government’s empty allegations,” said Ahmad.

In her own affidavit, Kordia wrote that, since 2023, she’s lost “nearly 175 family members — almost an entire generation — to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

In late August, the immigration judge again found that Kordia’s remittances were not grounds to keep her at Prairieland.

“The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the money was sent to [Kordia’s] extended family members who were in desperate need of financial assistance,” wrote Naselow-Nahas.

Again, Naselow-Nahas ordered Kordia’s release on a $20,000 bond, and again, the Trump administration appealed to the BIA. Now, ICE attorneys argue she’s a flight risk because she consulted with an attorney before surrendering in March.

“Adding insult to injury, the government abandoned its ‘dangerousness’ claim based on the remittances and swiftly pivoted to a flimsy ‘flight risk’ argument to prolong Leqaa’s confinement punitively,” said Sadaf Hasan, an attorney at Muslim Advocates, another legal nonprofit that represents her. “These tactics reflect the dehumanizing and racist imperatives of the administration to weaponize immigration laws to punish Palestinian identity and the growing movement for Palestinian advocacy.”

Sherman-Stokes said that, based on more than a decade working in deportation defense, it’s not unusual for the government to make spurious arguments or offer little evidence.

“What’s uncommon here is the government’s unwillingness to admit defeat,” she said. “They have so little evidence, yet they continue to appeal and appeal and appeal in the face of an immigration judge finding not once but twice that she should be released,” Sherman-Stokes said.

The government’s targeting of Palestinian people or Muslim immigrants is also hardly new. From the post-9/11 “Muslim registry” to the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban,” Middle Eastern immigrants have faced additional scrutiny for decades.

“But it certainly seems to have escalated,” said Sherman-Stokes, who called the government’s arguments about Kordia’s money transfers “vague and spurious claims that are really grounded in racism and xenophobia.”

Sherman-Stokes said it was also unusual for Kordia to be held in detention indefinitely based just on her overstayed visa, without any criminal conviction.

“She exercised her First Amendment rights along with thousands of other people,” Sherman-Stokes said. “This is someone we should welcome into the country, not demonize.”

Kordia’s habeas petition for release is currently pending in federal court, and on Tuesday she filed a brief urging her immediate release despite the government’s “procedural gamesmanship.” Briefs are due to the BIA next week, and Kordia’s next hearing in immigration court is scheduled for October 23.

After more than six months in Prairieland, Kordia is eager to be back with her family in New Jersey. Before moving to the U.S., she and her mother were apart for nearly two decades, since Kordia stayed with her father in the West Bank after her parents divorced. On top of working multiple jobs and collecting money for family abroad, Kordia helped look after her half-brother, Omar, who has autism, and helped her mother, who has limited mobility and other health issues, with errands and cleaning.

“Against my will, I was separated from my mother for nearly twenty years,” Kordia wrote. “Being separated from her again is unbearable.”

The post She Sent Money to Family in Gaza. ICE Claimed It’s Evidence She Supports Hamas. appeared first on The Intercept.

On March 6 of last year, two days before unidentified officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted and arrested Khalil at his home, the FBI received an anonymous tip claiming that Khalil, listed incorrectly as a 22-year-old, had called for “violence on behalf of Hamas.” 

According to the heavily redacted documents, as of March 19, 2025, the FBI had closed an investigation into the tip and determined that Khalil “does not warrant further FBI investigation.” But by then, ICE had already secretly taken Khalil, now 31, thousands of miles away to a detention center in Louisiana. Despite the FBI’s decision to close the tip, the Trump administration continued to paint Khalil as a “Hamas supporter” and a threat to national security. 

It’s unclear if the FBI tip was directly related to Khalil’s ICE arrest, and the FBI did not respond to The Intercept’s question about whether the tip was shared with ICE. But Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has worked with Khalil since his arrest, said the timing reflects “a threat to us all.”

Though the FBI document says Khalil did not warrant further investigation, “that didn’t stop ICE from holding him in a detention center and separating him from his wife and newborn son for months,” Bendaas said. 

The document comes to light as the Trump administration has fast-tracked Khalil’s deportation case, which Khalil’s legal team argues is a form of retaliation against his protected political speech in support of Palestine. Khalil’s team received the FBI document, which has not been previously reported, via a lawsuit over a public records request and shared it exclusively with The Intercept.

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Khalil was the first of thousands of students the Trump administration targeted for deportation over First Amendment-protected speech in support of Palestine or criticizing Israel. The Trump administration exploited an obscure provision in immigration law to claim that Khalil and other students, including Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, presented a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ordered Khalil to be deported, has repeatedly claimed that he sympathized with terrorists, echoing claims from far-right doxing groups that had targeted Khalil in the months leading up to his arrest. Trump’s unprecedented crackdown came after years of similar attacks on pro-Palestine students that gained speed under former President Joe Biden. 

“Under Trump’s rogue presidency being led by extremists and conspiracy theorists,” Bendaas said, “any of us can be kidnapped by federal agents in the middle of the night simply for speaking against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, no matter what the facts or Constitution says.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights, part of Khalil’s legal team, submitted a request for public documents related to his arrest nearly a year ago, on May 29, 2025. After denials and delays, CCR filed a lawsuit on November 20 claiming that federal agencies, including the FBI, had improperly withheld the records. CCR said it has since received other documents from the Department of Justice and is expecting more from other agencies in the coming months.

“Despite the FBI closing its investigation with no findings to support the accusation, the Trump administration continued to label Mr. Khalil a supporter of Hamas in public comments,” said CCR staff attorney Samah Sisay. “This document further supports our argument that the Trump administration had no legitimate reason to target Mr. Khalil besides his free speech in support of Palestine.”

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In a statement to The Intercept, an FBI spokesperson said, “We let documents obtained through the FOIA process speak for themselves and decline to comment further.”

Reacting to the FBI file, an attorney at Palestine Legal condemned the Trump administration’s approach but called it “representative of the tactics used more broadly against Palestine activists.”

“Revelations that false reports were made against Mahmoud prior to his government sanctioned kidnapping, and that the administration continued to make false claims that Mahmoud posed a danger, even though the FBI found these claims to be unsubstantiated, are highly representative of this administration’s broader approach of acting first and making up justifications later, with no regard for truth or the findings of the administration’s own experts,” said Zoha Khalili, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal. “Around the world, people who demand freedom, equality, liberation, and the basic necessities of life for Palestinians have been smeared, silenced, investigated, and even imprisoned for their advocacy.”

Khalil’s team also plans to appeal the Board of Immigration Appeals order rejecting Khalil’s appeal to terminate his deportation proceedings. He is still fighting a separate federal habeas corpus case and cannot be deported while the case proceeds.

Update: May 12, 2026, 4:06 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from an attorney at Palestine Legal sent after publication.

The post FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Both the French and British heads of state said that they decided to recognize Palestine in order to pursue peace. “The time for peace has come because we’re just a few moments away from no longer being able to seize peace,” said French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday before the U.N. A day earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a recorded speech, “In the face of growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace.”

What Macron and Starmer failed to mention, however, is that they — and many of their fellow nations now pushing for Palestinian statehood — continue to supply weapons and military support to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is leading an intensification of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and an expansion of settlements and annexations of Palestinian land in the West Bank, responded with defiance to the statehood calls of Western nations: “There will not be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan.”

Last week, a U.N. human rights commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The commission’s chair, Navi Pillay, said the international community is under the “legal obligation to use all means that are reasonably available to them to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

Yet the nations whose leaders are calling for peace keep the flow of armaments moving.

“The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity,” Pillay said.

Who Recognizes Palestine as a State but Still Arms Israel? 

Currently 157 of the 193 U.N. member states recognize a Palestinian state. The U.K., France, Canada, Luxembourg, and Australia have recently recognized Palestinian statehood but continue to send arms and military equipment to Israel. 

In September 2024, following widespread pressure and protests, the U.K. government enacted a partial arms embargo, halting export licenses on some weapons to Israel out of concern they were being used by the Israeli military to commit human rights violations. The embargo was limited to only 30 of the total 300 export licenses to Israel, but the U.K. pledged to no longer send F-35 fighter jet parts directly to Israel. F-35 jets have been used to drop bombs in Gaza, including operations that have killed civilians in so-called “safe zones.”

However, a May report — led by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Workers for a Free Palestine, and Progressive International — found that the U.K. government continued its direct shipments of F-35 components to Israel. The report also found the U.K. had shipped thousands of bombs, grenades, missiles, tanks, and firearm components to Israel over the past year.

A recent media report by Israeli publication Ynet also indicated that the British government is continuing to send arms to Israel despite its Palestinian statehood announcement. 

In early 2024, Canada’s government said it would halt granting export licenses to Canadian weapons manufacturers looking to sell to Israel. Then, in March 2024, its legislature passed a non-binding measure to halt government sales of weapons to Israel. 

However, despite claims by the Canadian government that only “non-lethal” goods are being sold to Israel, weapons exports continued through several loopholes. The government continued to honor export licenses granted before January 2024, allowing for more than $94 million in military goods to be sold to Israel from Canada, and $83 million more in explosives made in Canada but sold to Israel through a U.S. government deal, according to reporting by The Maple. 

A separate Palestinian Youth Movement report from July further detailed the continued flow of weapons from Canada to Israel, highlighting dozens of shipments between October 2023 and July 2025, carrying more than 400,000 bullets, cartridges, and aircraft components, including F-35 fighter jet parts. 

The French government similarly contradicts its public statements on apparent halt to arms sales and shipments to Israel, according to a June report from Palestinian Youth Movement and other organizations. 

During an October 2024 radio interview, Macron said, “The priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza” and added that “France is not delivering any” weapons to Israel. The June report – published by Progressive International, Palestinian Youth Movement, the French Jewish Union for Peace, BDS France, and Stop Arming Israel France – revealed that between October 2023 and April 2025, France had delivered $10 million worth in military goods, including 15 million bombs, grenades, torpedoes, missiles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, artillery, and rifles.

The French government has insisted that military goods sold to Israel are used only for the Iron Dome’s defensive missile systems. However, critics have noted that such defensive weapons enable Israel to continue its genocidal campaign in Gaza and its annexation in the West Bank. 

Luxembourg, which also recently recognized Palestinian statehood, has said it exports weapons to Israel but only sends defensive weapons, according to reports.

Australia has also been adamant that it does not send weapons for use by the Israeli military, with its acting Prime Minister Richard Marles calling claims that it does as “misinformation.” But political opposition leaders and rights groups have been quick to underline the country’s role in manufacturing components of F-35 jets, and is a crucial part of the supply chain to manufacture the fighter planes. 

Some European nations, however, have followed up their words with action. Belgium, which also joined the recent statehood calls, recently moved to enact a total arms embargo on military goods to Israel and is lobbying for the European Union to do the same.

Spain, which moved to recognize a Palestinian state in May 2024, this week enacted a total arms embargo on Israel (with some exceptions), banning the transfer of all weapons, dual-use technology, and military equipment to Israel, including the use of its ports or airports for such exports. It also banned imports of goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Spanish government had already begun to cancel arms deals with major weapons manufacturers who are selling arms to Israel.

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Norway, which also recognized Palestine as a state in May 2024, divested parts of its $11 trillion sovereign fund from 11 Israeli companies tied to the Israeli military’s jet program after global pressure, including from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

The largest exporter of weapons to Israel remains the United States, which criticized calls to recognize the Palestinian state a “reward for Hamas” this week.

A “Performance of Justice”

President and CEO of the Center for International Policy Nancy Okail welcomed the new calls for Palestinian statehood as a crucial step in the right direction, saying that such gestures further isolate Israel diplomatically. But she criticized what she called an “accountability gap” between these governments’ words and their actions with respect to Israel.

She pointed to countries such as the U.K., which is failing to uphold its own human rights laws in continuing to send weapons to Israel and has also been an obstacle to the International Criminal Court’s war crime proceedings against Israeli leaders.

“Such recognition of Palestinian statehood is largely symbolic unless it’s paired with halting arms transfers that actually fuels the genocide, otherwise, that would be like a performance of justice while complicit in violence,” she said. “And this is what creates an accountability gap, where you have states that are upholding the law in theory while breaking it in practice.”

Amnesty International USA has been calling for a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel even prior to the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Their proposed embargo would include the transfer of all arms, whether for military or security purposes, including surveillance equipment and infrastructure. It also calls for an end to military and security training relationships between Israel and other governments. The group views such embargo as necessary to end the genocide, the blockade on Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian territory, and Israel’s apartheid system. 

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“If governments want to put meaning behind these gestures or words of condemnation, then these are the type of actions that need to be taken,” said Elizabeth Rghebi, the Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International USA. Rghebi also said countries need to uphold the arrest warrants put forth by the ICC. 

Okail called the unconditional U.S. support of Israel “one of the biggest hurdles” toward meaningfully recognizing a Palestinian state. 

Okail maintained that the concessions by governments like the U.K. do show that the ongoing demonstrations across the globe, from Europe to the U.S., are having an impact internationally but also domestically within Israeli politics. 

“Because the people are seeing how their image is being portrayed globally, they’re seeing all the protests against them,” she said. “They’re seeing that they are losing the unwavering sympathy that they used to have.”

The post These Countries Recognized Palestine, but Still Send Arms to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

What the students didn’t know at the time was that the University of Houston had contracted with Dataminr, an artificial intelligence company with a troubling record on constitutional rights, to gather open-source intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. Using an AI tool known as “First Alert,” Dataminr was scraping students’ social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.

This is the first detailed reporting on how a U.S. university used the AI technology to surveil its own students. It’s just one example of how public universities worked with private partners to surveil student protests, revealing how corporate involvement in higher education can be leveraged against students’ free expression.

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This is the final installment in an investigative series on the draconian surveillance practices that universities across the country employed to crack down on the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments and student protests. More than 20,000 pages of documentation covering communications from April and May 2024, which The Intercept obtained via public records requests, reveal a systematic pattern of surveillance by U.S. universities in response to their students’ dissent. Public universities in California tapped emergency response funds for natural disasters to quell protests; in Ohio and South Carolina, schools received briefings from intelligence-sharing fusion centers; and at the University of Connecticut, student participation in a protest sent administrators into a frenzy over what a local military weapons manufacturer would think.

The series traces how universities, as self-proclaimed safe havens of free speech, exacerbated the preexisting power imbalance between institutions with billion-dollar endowments and a nonviolent student movement by cracking down on the latter. It offers a preview of the crackdown to come under the Trump administration as the president re-entered office and demanded concessions from U.S. universities in an attempt to limit pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses.

“Universities have a duty of care for their students and the local community,” Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. “Surveillance systems are a direct affront to that duty for both. It creates an unsafe environment, chills speech, and destroys trust between students, faculty, and the administration.”

At the University of Houston, the encampment was treated as an unsafe environment. University communications officials using Dataminr forwarded the alerts — which consist of an incident location and an excerpt of the scraped text — directly to the campus police. One alert sent by Dataminr to a University of Houston communications official identified a potential pro-Palestine incident based on chat logs it scraped from a semi-private Telegram channel called “Ghosts of Palestine.”

“University of Houston students rise up for Gaza, demanding an end to Genocide,” the chat stated. First Alert flagged it as an incident of concern and forwarded the information to university officials.

According to Dataminr’s marketing materials, First Alert is designed for use by first responders, sending incident reports to help law enforcement officials gather situational awareness. But instead of relying on officers to collect the intelligence themselves, First Alert relies on Dataminr’s advanced algorithm to gather massive amounts of data and make decisions. In short, Dataminr’s powerful algorithm gathers intelligence, selects what it views to be important, and then forwards it to the paying client.

A follow-up public records request sent to the University of Houston returned records of more than 900 First Alert emails in the inbox of a university administrator, only in April 2024.

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The AI company has been implicated in a number of scandals, including the domestic surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and abortion rights protesters in 2023. The Intercept reported in April that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine demonstrations in LA. First Alert is one, but not the only, service that Dataminr offers. For newsrooms to corporate giants, Dataminr’s powerful algorithms power intelligence gathering and threat response for those willing to pay.

“It’s concerning enough when you see evidence of university officials scrolling through individual student social media, that’s going to chill people’s speech,” said Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But it’s a whole other level of concern when you start contracting with these companies that are using some kind of algorithm to analyze, at scale, people’s speech online.”

The University of Houston and Dataminr did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While the University of Houston leaned on Dataminr to gather intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine, it is just one example of the open-source intelligence practices used by universities in the spring of 2024. From screenshots of students’ Instagram posts to the use of on-campus surveillance cameras, the documents obtained by The Intercept illustrate how the broadening net of on-campus intelligence gathering swept up constitutionally protected speech in the name of “social listening.”

University communications officials were often left to do the heavy lifting of hunting down activists’ social media accounts to map out planned demonstrations. Posts by local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters of upcoming demonstrations were frequently captured by administrators and forwarded on. In other cases, university administrators relied on in-person intelligence gathering.

One set of communication in the documents suggests that at one point, University of Connecticut administrators were watching the students in the on-campus encampment sleep. “They are just beginning to wake up. It’s still very quiet. Just a couple of police cars nearby,” a UConn administrator wrote to other officials that April.

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U.S. universities, faced with the largest student protest movement in decades, used open-source intelligence to monitor the student-led movement for Palestine and to inform whether or not they would negotiate, and eventually, how they would clear the encampments. Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, situated the development as part of the broader corporatization of U.S. higher education.

“ Institutions that are supposed to be for the public good are these corporate products that make them into vehicles for wealth extraction via data products,” Tucker told The Intercept. “Universities are becoming more like for-profit branding machines, and at the same time, digital capitalism is exploding.”

At UConn, the relationship between the corporate world and higher education led to a brief panic among university administrators. After protesters, including members of UConn’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a campus group called Unchained, blocked access to a military aircraft manufacturing facility about 25 miles from campus, administrators went into a frenzy over what the military contractor would think.

“Ok. The P&W CEO is pretty upset with us about it right now and is pressing [University President] Radenka [Maric] for action,” wrote Nathan Fuerst to Kimberly Beardsley-Carr, both high-level UConn administrators. “Can you see if UConn PD can proactively reach out? If we can determine that no UConn Students were arrested, that would be immensely helpful.”

Fuerst was referring to a contractor for the Israeli military called Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of the $235 billion company formerly known as Raytheon — and a major UConn donor. Both UConn and Pratt & Whitney denied that the request occurred, pointing out that the military contractor has no CEO. Fuerst, Beardsley-Carr, and Maric did not respond to requests for comment.

Beardsley-Carr, in her own email sent four minutes after Fuerst’s, repeated the request: “As you can see below, the President is getting pressure from the CEO of Pratt and Whitney.”

Whether the company made the request or if it was, as UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz told The Intercept, “a misunderstanding,” it’s clear from the communications that UConn administrators were concerned about what the weapons manufacturer would think — and sprang to action, gathering information on students because of it.

Pratt & Whitney has donated millions of dollars to various university initiatives, and in April 2024, the same month as the protest, it was announced that a building on campus would be rededicated as the “Pratt & Whitney Engineering Building.” A partnership between the school and the company received an honorable mention from the governor’s office, prompting a Pratt & Whitney program engineer to write in an email: “It’s wonderful! P&W and UCONN have done some great things together.”

After a flurry of emails over the Pratt & Whitney arrests, on April 25, the UConn administrators’ concerns were lifted. “Middletown PD provided me with the names of the 10 individuals arrested during the below incident. None of the arrestees are current students,” UConn Police Lieutenant Douglas Lussier wrote to Beardsley-Carr.

“You have no idea how happy you just made me,” Beardsley-Carr wrote back.

It’s not just UConn, but U.S. higher education as a whole that has a deep and long-standing relationship with military weapons manufacturers. Whether it is endowed professorships, “Lockheed Martin Days,” defense industry presence at career fairs, or private donations, the defense industry has a hold on U.S. higher education, especially at elite universities, which serve as training grounds for high-paying and influential careers.

“These universities are the epicenter, the home base, of the future generation of Americans, future policy makers,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. Policy Fellow. If universities “were so confident in Israel’s narrative and their narrative being the correct one,” Kenney-Shawa added, “they would let that debate in such important spaces play out.”

Some students who spoke with The Intercept emphasized that as a result of the surveillance they encountered during the protests, they have stepped up their digital security, using burner phones and limiting communication about potential demonstrations to secure messaging channels.

“ The campus is waiting and watching for these kinds of things,” said Kirk Wolff, a student at the University of Virginia who said he was threatened with expulsion for a one-man sit-in he staged on campus and expressed fear that university administrators would read his emails.

The surveillance had a “chilling effect,” in his experience, Wolff said. “ I had so many people tell me that they wanted to join me, that they agreed with me, and that they simply could not, because they were scared that the school would turn over their information.”

The University of Virginia did not respond to a request for comment on Wolff’s claims.

The surveillance detailed in this investigation took place under the Biden administration, before Trump returned to power and dragged the crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent into the open. Universities have since shared employee and student files with the Trump administration as it continues to investigate “anti-Semitic incidents on campus” — and use the findings as pretext to defund universities or even target students for illegal deportation.

Any open-source intelligence universities gathered could become fair game for federal law enforcement agencies as they work to punish those involved in the student-led movement for Palestine, Mir noted.

“A groundwork of surveillance has been built slowly on many college campuses for decades,” he said. “Now very plainly and publicly we have seen it weaponized against speech.”

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How Corporate Partnerships Powered University Surveillance of Palestine Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

The proposal from Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., sparked a backlash from civil society groups after he introduced it as part of a larger State Department reorganization bill last week.

On Sunday, after The Intercept’s coverage sparked widespread opposition, Mast introduced a manager’s amendment that would strip the provision from the bill he introduced days before. The manager’s amendment itself must still be approved at a Wednesday hearing to apply to the larger House bill, which itself faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

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Civil liberties supporters celebrated Monday, after warning last week that the bill endangered the right to travel freely. One advocate had warned that it essentially granted the secretary of state “thought police” power.

“It’s a really great thing that this provision got struck” said Kia Hamadanchy, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It was hugely problematic, created a huge risk of abuse, of politicized enforcement.”

A Foreign Affairs Committee spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept that the language “shouldn’t be controversial.”

“This provision is just one small part of a larger comprehensive, State Department Authorization Act that the House Foreign Affairs Committee introduced last week,” the spokesperson said. Confirming the move to withdraw the provision, the spokesperson said that “the committee will not allow this distraction to overshadow the bipartisan effort to restore command and control of the State Department to the Secretary.”

Under Mast’s original proposal, the secretary of state would have been empowered to refuse or revoke passports of people they deem to have materially supported terrorists.

Activists were especially concerned the provision could be used against critics of Israel, given Rubio’s aggressive move to revoke green cards and student visas from noncitizens who have publicly demonstrated support for Palestinians.

Mast’s amendment would also remove a provision that would allow the secretary of state to revoke passports for people who have been convicted or charged of material support of designated terror groups.

Update: September 15, 2025, 4:27 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a statement from a House Foreign Affairs Committee spokesperson that was received after publication.

The post GOP Rep. Backtracks on Bill That Could Let Marco Rubio Revoke Passports From Israel Critics appeared first on The Intercept.

The troubling lack of transparency extended to court battles, too. In the cases of both Öztürk and Mahdawi, an obscure court rule required an in-person visit to a Vermont federal courthouse to review key materials, including the Trump administration’s briefs and exhibits defending their detention.

These cases are critical tests of free speech and the constitutional limits on targeting noncitizens over their dissent. So The Intercept fought to make the full dockets public. So far, we’ve been successful in eight federal courts, six districts, and two federal appellate circuits — and we’re doing the same in other cases across the country.

Here’s how we’re doing it.

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In every case, The Intercept started by reaching out to the plaintiff’s legal team.

The docket access restrictions in these historic court cases come from Rule 5.2(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which aims to protect immigrants’ privacy as they challenge detention and deportation orders in court. This means that the strongest argument in favor of lifting the restrictions is that the plaintiffs themselves want the public to have full access to court filings, or at least don’t oppose it. In some cases, the plaintiffs and their legal teams were already publishing court documents online, although there was often a lag between when a document was filed in court and when it was accessible to the press.

After The Intercept reached out, many plaintiffs filed motions to lift the docket restrictions, including Öztürk and class-action plaintiffs challenging their deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Judges quickly granted many of these motions. 

In other cases, The Intercept sent letters to the judges and clerks to underscore the importance of court transparency and urge them to lift the restrictions. Some judges and clerks ignored these letters, while others took these concerns quite seriously.

In one pivotal case regarding arbitrary visa revocations, for example, federal district judge Ana Reyes noted The Intercept’s request on the case docket and asked if there was any opposition to making records in the case available to the public. When the plaintiff and the government confirmed there was no objection, Reyes ordered the clerk to lift the docket restrictions.

In May, The Intercept sent similar letters to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals about the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases. Öztürk had previously asked the trial court to lift the restrictions, but the judge didn’t rule on that request before the Trump administration appealed. The Second Circuit clerk’s office quickly docketed The Intercept’s letters, and within two days the full appellate record was publicly accessible in both cases. Soon after, the trial court judges lifted the restrictions in both cases, too.

Finally, in some cases, opening dockets to the public required The Intercept to file formal court motions.

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In the case of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who is still in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Texas, The Intercept filed a motion with pro bono representation from the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. In Massachusetts federal court, The Intercept filed a motion in the case of Efe Ercelik, a Turkish student at Hampshire College, with pro bono representation from Albert Sellars LLP. And most recently, in late June, The Intercept filed a motion in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the case of Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, with pro bono help from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In each case, judges quickly lifted restrictions following The Intercept’s motions.

As the Trump administration continues its historic deportation campaign and targets immigrants for their dissent, new cases are being filed everyday with similar docket restrictions under Rule 5.2(c). And The Intercept is working to ensure the public and other members of the press have full, transparent access to court records in these historic battles over dissent, immigrants’ rights, and state power.

The post How The Intercept Fought to Reveal Key Evidence in Student Deportation Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

The suppression of the speech came as Harvard University received public praise for refusing to abide with demands from the Trump administration in its stated crusade against antisemitism at the nation’s universities, which the administration has used to justify a crackdown on speech advocating for Palestinian rights. Earlier this week, Trump again threatened to cut Harvard’s federal funding — this time, all of it — after the administration found that the school had violated the Civil Rights Act and tolerated antisemitism on campus. 

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The school had “been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism argued in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday. Harvard said it disagreed with the administration’s findings and took allegations of antisemitism on campus seriously.

It was the latest development in a monthslong, multiagency battle between President Donald Trump and Harvard over his sweeping demands for changes at the school, including an end to all practices designed to address diversity and equity, censorship of its curriculum, and punishment of pro-Palestine student protesters. The school has been hailed for its proclaimed resistance to these efforts and for its lawsuit against the Trump administration over the president’s order to bar would-be international students, which a judge indefinitely blocked earlier this week. 

In private, however, Harvard has quietly capitulated to Trump’s threats. Students and staff at the Divinity School who spoke to The Intercept connected the school’s refusal to publish the commencement speech to its efforts to dismantle a program that offered a trip to the West Bank and coursework on Israel and Palestine, among other topics. While the U.S. government and much of the mainstream media fixates on Harvard’s handling of antisemitism, findings from a concurrent investigation into anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias at the school have received far less attention. In January, Harvard settled a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the school against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.

Harvard declined to publish the video of Imam’s speech due to “security concerns,” as The Intercept previously reported, and made a password-protected version temporarily available to users with Harvard logins. Students and staff at the Divinity School called the decision unusual, noting that past speeches had been made public. Several raised concerns that the school was forsaking its pledges to address anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias on campus in the name of fighting antisemitism. 

Imam told The Intercept that her goal was to shift attention to unlivable conditions that Palestinian people continue to suffer in Gaza, and said it was the responsibility of Divinity School students studying religion and the world not to look away. Despite Harvard’s decision not to publish its video of Imam’s speech, clips quickly circulated online and on social media. The Intercept has chosen to publish the video and full transcript of her speech, which discusses centuries-old Islamic history alongside the contemporary experiences of Palestinian students and children.

“There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide,” Imam said in her commencement speech in May. “I center these students with urgent desperation because time is running out — no meaningful aid has entered Gaza since March 2, and this is on our account. I center Palestine today not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it.”

Imam’s speech is below.

Bismillah ir rahman ir raheem — in the name of God the most beneficent the most merciful

Who are the people who accompany you when you find yourself in the wilderness? Who are the people who hold you accountable when you have wronged someone? Who are the people who remind you of your worth and give you the courage to try again? And who are the people who sit with you as we witness the moral injuries of our time? From Somerville and Cambridge to Palestine, Congo, Kashmir, Arakan, Armenia, Sudan and beyond. 

For me, it is my students. For me, it is my grandmother. 

When I was a child, during the holy month of Muharram, my grandmother would lead me by the hand to gatherings that would become a gift for me in moments of moral chaos, teaching me what it means to grieve extreme loss and how to stand with those who long for justice, even if you find yourself standing alone on the sand dunes of a final destination called Karbala.

On 10 October, 680 CE, in that place called Karbala, there was a family that refused to be ruled by a tyrant. Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and his family did not submit to a political power because his conduct was unjust and unethical. For this, 72 members of the Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) family were martyred in battle by an army of thousands. 

And yet, even in facing these odds, Imam Hussain gave water to his enemies.

Moved by this act of humanity, Hurr, the commander of the army on the opposing side, sought out Imam Hussein that night.

Imam Hussein rose to greet him, saying, “I had been waiting for you to arrive.”

And Hurr, whose name means freedom, switched sides. 

A full accounting of the Battle of Karbala is this: Seventy-two lives lost. But one soul gained.

Who are the people we are giving water to? Who are the people we are withholding water from?

Last year, I had the privilege and honor of offering a class called “Poetry of the Camps” to students in besieged Gaza. We came together to write poetry as fires raged across the north of Gaza, ignited by an onslaught of Israeli airstrikes. In the wilderness of their genocide, working with these students was the only thing that got me out of bed because it was one small way I could grieve their extreme loss and stand with each of them as we continue to fight for their freedom and justice. 

One of them, Hend, is a medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. Like us, Hend loves learning. “I was raised to love books,” she wrote, “I never thought I would have to feed them to a fire so I could have a meagre meal. Genocide has pushed us to do things we never imagined in our darkest nightmares.” 

Israel has bombed every university in Gaza.

This week, I witnessed a 6-year-old Palestinian girl named Ward — a flower amongst the flames — run to save herself after Israel bombed every family member she knew at a school serving as a shelter. 

Earlier this month, as Pakistan faced airstrikes from Israeli-made drones, it was Esraa from Gaza who checked in with me about my family’s safety. When I thanked her, she said, “Living through hardships and suffering doesn’t mean that we can underestimate other people’s suffering. I wish you safety.”

There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide. 

I center these students with urgent desperation because time is running out — no meaningful aid has entered Gaza since March 2, and this is on our account. I center Palestine today not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it.

Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for you to arrive. And you must be courageous enough to rise to the call because Palestine will keep showing up in your living rooms until you are ready to meet its gaze. 

Here, I must acknowledge that, together in the wilderness, we have witnessed the risks that have come with speaking up for this very genocide to be far-reaching. Yet no matter how charged with punishments the scroll, again and again, we witness too the enormous hearts, unwavering courage, and profound wisdom of students like Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and countless others who are in this very audience with us today, such as Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, our friend and classmate who continues to show up not just for Palestine but for each of us by extending to us the water we need in our most vulnerable moments. 

Together, we must refuse to be ruled by the tyrants of our time because our liberations are intertwined.

We gather now to take our second census. 

The three of us stand before you not because it was easy to do this together but because it was absolutely vital in a world that has given us chasms so wide no bridge seems to want to meet us along the path. We chose to do this anyway and carve our own path by not lying to one another on the journey. These moments when we dream together in the wilderness are when we absolutely need each other. An honest reckoning is what can prepare us for those dreams of humanity that will endure.

My final poetry session with students in Gaza was on freedom. I asked them: What would the first day of freedom look like? How would it feel on a sensory level? What colors would the day bear; who would they embrace; what scents would come alive on this day of liberation; what tastes would be fulfilled? I leave us with a response from my student and Palestinian writer Duha Hasan’s dream of freedom: 

I had a dream 

I went back home 

Slept on my bed 

Felt warmth again 

I had a dream 

I went to college 

Nagged all day 

How hectic it was 

I had a dream 

I wanted to live

I had a dream 

I had my favourite meal 

I had a dream 

My ears forgot the war’s sounds 

shouting, bombardment, mother’s sobs, and losses 

I had a dream 

My eyes forgot the blood, the loss, the patience 

Obligatory patience 

My nose forgot the smoke smell, the deaths, the corpse rotten 

My hands stopped shivering 

My body skipped what I had lived 

I had a dream 

Not panicking 

Not imagining death everywhere

I had a dream

The post We’re Publishing the Speech That Harvard Suppressed for Mentioning Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” took place Monday evening at Young Israel of Midwood, an Orthodox synagogue in southern Brooklyn. Event organizers confirmed the location in an automated response to The Intercept’s request for comment, but they did not comment on the event itself.

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The roving expo is co-sponsored by several real estate companies with ties to Israel, and it is typically held at synagogues and other centers of Jewish life. At the event held last week at Park East Synagogue, The Intercept saw at least one table advertising land sales in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — sales considered illegal under international law.

The event presented a test for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has caught flak from the pro-Israel side for condemning the illegal land sales, and from pro-Palestine groups and free speech advocates for allowing the NYPD to maintain “buffer zones” that keep protesters away from houses of worship.

Compounding the mayor’s entanglement is the fact that Young Israel of Midwood, the synagogue where Monday’s event took place, is home to a city-funded senior center called Young Israel Senior Services. The senior center received more than $800,000 from the Department for the Aging in 2024, according to a city budget document.

A spokesperson for Mamdani, who campaigned on his pro-Palestine bona fides, declined to comment on the latest real estate event, pointing instead to comments about last week’s expo.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” spokesperson Sam Raskin told The Intercept last week.

The mayor has also affirmed attendees’ rights to go to and from synagogues without interference, in line with a controversial “buffer zone” bill the New York City Council passed last month. The new law, sponsored by the council’s moderate speaker, requires the New York Police Department to address physical obstructions and interference at houses of worship — which opponents see as a means to crack down on protests.

By late afternoon on Monday, the NYPD had blocked off the street for a block in each direction from the synagogue, but allowed protesters to congregate within sight of the building.

Groups of pro-Palestine demonstrators marched through the neighborhood on side streets, followed by a swarm of pro-Israel counter-protesters. Among the pro-Israel demonstrators, a large number of young men on scooters hurled slurs at the pro-Palestine protesters and at times almost came to blows as police struggled to keep them apart. Members of the pro-Israel crowd threw eggs, and one protester told The Intercept a pro-Israel counter-protester had pepper-sprayed him.

Police appeared to make at least one arrest. A spokesperson for the NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Last week’s event, held Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, prompted heated protests from Pal-Awda and other pro-Palestine activists, which in turn drew a counter-protest from pro-Israel groups including members of the extremist group Betar U.S. The NYPD kept the groups separate and kept protesters, members of the media, and members of the public alike away from the synagogue with a tight cordon of security barriers that impeded movement along numerous city blocks in the vicinity of the synagogue.

After last week’s event, Mamdani praised the NYPD’s handling of the crowd at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.

“We in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship and that access never be in question while we also protect the First Amendment, and I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday,” he said. “I think that critique of the policies of a government is very much separate from bigotry toward the people of a specific religious faith. And there is no tolerance for antisemitism.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, by contrast, offered a rebuke for the police force, calling the NYPD’s barricaded area a “no-speech zone.”

“When politicians use Freedom of Religion as a pretext to impose severe restrictions on speech, they undermine all New Yorkers’ rights,” said Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU’s executive director, in a statement released Wednesday. “The subject of last [week’s] protests was not a religious service but a private, politically-charged real estate event held at a synagogue.”

Correction: May 11, 2026, 4:59 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story previously stated that Mamdani signed the City Council’s new “buffer zone” law. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, and Mamdani allowed it to become law without his signature.

Update: May 11, 9:31 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with details about the protest outside Monday’s event.

The post Israeli Real Estate Expo Advertising West Bank Settlements Returns to NYC appeared first on The Intercept.

In California, the Law Enforcement Mutual Aid Fund sets aside $25 million annually to let law enforcement agencies work across jurisdictions to fight natural disasters and other major emergencies. In a briefing obtained by The Intercept, acceptable LEMA use cases are listed as fires, storms, flooding, earthquakes, natural or man-made disasters, and “other extra ordinary events requiring emergency law enforcement mutual aid on a case by case basis.”

Leadership at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — part of the California State University public school system — was able to tap these funds to bring outside law enforcement onto campus, The Intercept found in an investigative series on the university playbook for crushing pro-Palestine protests. Among more than 20,000 pages of documentation The Intercept obtained via public records requests, email after email from April and May 2024 show chiefs of police and administrators in California’s public universities asking outside law enforcement agencies to enter their campuses and clear encampments.

As “Gaza solidarity” encampments popped up across college campuses in April and May 2024, Jodi Lopez, staff services manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services, informed the leadership of at least 30 public universities — including Cal Poly Humboldt — that if they were to require mutual aid assistance, LEMA would be available to reimburse their expenses, attaching a flyer that detailed eligible costs.

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Cal Poly Humboldt students first entered and staged a peaceful sit-in at Siemens Hall on April 22. According to the documents obtained by The Intercept, leadership at the university was promptly in contact with local police departments about bringing the demonstration to an end. That day, police in riot gear attempted to enter the building and clear out the protesters, but students held them off. In an incident that would go viral on social media, a student could be seen on surveillance footage hitting officers on their helmets with an empty plastic water jug. The cops eventually withdrew from the building, marking the start of what would turn into an eight-day occupation.

Enlisting the help of Humboldt County’s Office of Emergency Services, the Eureka Police Department, and the University of California Police Department, Jackson’s email on April 25 requested assistance with “Reestablish[ing] control of university buildings and other property” and “eliminating the threat of domestic violent extremism and criminal behavior” on the part of the students — setting into motion the plan with which the cops ultimately cleared the hall. Ryan Derby, then head of the county OES, added in his mutual aid request that Cal Poly Humboldt would require the assistance of a total of 250 law enforcement officers, with “personnel for entry team trained in tactical room clearing and arrest and control.”

In a statement emailed to The Intercept, Cal Poly Humboldt spokesperson Aileen S. Yoo confirmed that the university “formally requested from the state Law Enforcement Officer support through the LEMA request process” and noted that “Cal Poly Humboldt remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

A Cal OES spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Intercept that “Local law enforcement who provided that support to Cal Poly Humboldt were reimbursed through the LEMA Fund program.” The statewide office “is committed to protecting Californians and supporting local partners in times of crisis, regardless of political views or affiliation,” the spokesperson wrote.

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If there were ever a social contract between students and administrators at U.S. universities that allowed for the operation of insulated, on-campus police departments thought to be better attuned to the needs of students, that contract was shattered when universities nationwide brought in outside law enforcement to crush the student-led movement for Palestine, argued civil liberties advocates who spoke with The Intercept. A year before the Trump administration would step up efforts to use police power against public protest, the Palestine solidarity encampments made universities a test case for the tolerance of dissent — one that universities overwhelmingly failed.

“ I don’t even know if we can talk about the trust that students have in their universities. But if there was any trust, you ruin it when you bring in outside police to harm your own students,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

As Jackson stated in his email, Cal Poly Humboldt’s budget was at stake. “Three large events and a dozen smaller events on campus have been canceled. Athletic events have been either canceled or moved off main campus,” he wrote. “If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

University and outside law enforcement would go on to arrest 25 students at Siemens Hall. Alongside over a dozen wildfires — including the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed more than 6,000 homes — the raid is currently listed on the LEMA website as an example of a case for which funding can be requested.

While it is far from a secret that outside law enforcement agencies were involved in the clearing of university pro-Palestine encampments, these terms of operation — and compensation — have never previously been reported on in detail. Communications between university officials and the outside agencies show that the process took shape in the smooth functioning of bureaucracy, with polite, breezy exchanges preceding violent crackdowns and raids.

As the pro-Palestine demonstrations continued, the practice of bringing outside law enforcement officers onto campus became increasingly normalized in the University of California system. On May 5, 2024, Lamine Secka, chief of police at UC San Diego, wrote to the California Highway Patrol: “Attached, please find a request for assistance to clear out a protest encampment on the UC San Diego campus.” CHP, acting with UCSD and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, would enter the campus in full riot gear on May 6, arresting dozens of student protesters. (It was not clear if LEMA funds covered that deployment, and UCSD did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

The presence of outside law enforcement officers on campus fundamentally alters the power dynamics of a protest, said Ahamed of Palestine Legal. “ These police officers who are trained in violent tactics, you bring them to campus and they’re deploying those tactics against students. That is really dangerous,” she said.

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In some cases, that meant radicalizing students who watched militarized police forces haul their classmates away. In others, it meant injuring peaceful protesters — especially at the University of California Los Angeles, according to students and faculty who spoke with The Intercept. At UCLA, university administrators tapped state emergency services funds to bring in outside law enforcement officers and arrest countless students, with many injured. UCLA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“They were showing us the level of militarization within these departments,” Dylan Kupsh, a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UCLA, told The Intercept. “Even since the encampment, they’ve been more and more present and bringing in other departments.”

In the face of this repression, said Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at Council on American-Islamic Relations, “This generation of college students is extraordinarily brave and principled. They’ve been willing to sacrifice education and career to stand on a very simple human value that genocide is wrong, that occupation is wrong, that apartheid is wrong.”

The pro-Palestine encampments presented university leaders with a publicity crisis, forcing them to choose between options ranging from letting the peaceful protests play out to quashing them with the full force of the police. Universities almost exclusively chose the latter. With encouragement from the state government, California public universities responded to the student protests less like dissent and more like a natural disaster.

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

David Suarez, a city commissioner for Miami Beach, is accused of hiring the trucks to drive past a Jewish Voice for Peace demonstration outside the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach in December. The trucks accused JVP of being an “extremist group” and singled out members Alan Levine and his wife, Donna Nevel, with the label “Jew Hater,” according to court documents that Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed on Wednesday.

The trucks arrived while JVP and other Palestine solidarity organizations were protesting Art Basel in what has become an annual tradition since 2023. Activists have picketed each year outside the annual art fair, calling for a boycott over financial ties between Art Basel sponsor UBS and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Nevel, a native of Miami Beach who described her early education in Jewish ethics as a driving force behind her activism, accused Suarez of targeting her and her husband over their clashing views of Judaism and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“The Commissioner has targeted me and called me a Jew hater because I differ with his views on Israel,” Nevel said. “When we saw the billboards, we didn’t know Commissioner Suarez was the one who created and paid for them, but having watched his destructive, taunting behavior in City Commission meetings over and over again, I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was him — though, even for him, it was extreme.”

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Supporting exhibits filed alongside the motion include an invoice from Mobile Billboards of Miami dated December 6, 2025, charging Suarez $4,000 for the rental of three trucks, and an email from the company to a Gmail account that JVP claims is the commissioner’s personal email address.

After publication, Suarez sent The Intercept an email doubling down on his accusation. “You can use this response, only in its entirety,” Suarez wrote, “as a jew, I can spot a jew hater a mile away.”

The motion, filed in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday, requests that the court compel Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, and others to produce documents related to a larger court case brought by JVP over a city ordinance that the group claims was passed to stifle its protests against the genocide in Gaza.

“In the months since October 2023, the Mayor and the Miami Beach City Commission have become active supporters of Israel’s campaign of relentless destruction in Gaza,” the group wrote in its broader complaint filed in September of last year. “At the same time, the Defendants have aggressively sought to silence critics of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, first by adopting a resolution that prohibited the City from hiring contractors who refused to do business with Israel, then by publicly castigating Israel’s critics for their views, and finally by passing an unconstitutional anti-protest Ordinance explicitly designed to silence criticism of Israel.”

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The city government of Miami Beach has come under fire recently for allegations that it targeted pro-Palestine residents, including Raquel Pacheco, a local artist who in January received a visit to her home by police after writing a Facebook post criticizing Meiner for his pro-Israel views. In March, Pacheco sued the city, Meiner, and police chief Wayne Jones in federal court alleging that the visit to her home violated her First Amendment rights.

A spokesperson for Meiner told The Intercept that the police visit was motivated by legitimate security concerns and denied that it took place due to disagreement with Pacheco’s political speech.

Similar stunts to the Miami Beach billboard trucks have become a hallmark of pro-Israel groups seeking to discredit and attack pro-Palestine activists. Accuracy in Media, a pro-Israel pressure group focusing on allegations of antisemitic media bias, has hired so-called “doxxing trucks” on multiple occasions to personally call out members of the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia University and other college campuses. In January, a state court in New York ruled that a defamation lawsuit over the tactic could proceed.

Update: May 13, 2026, 6:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Miami Beach mayor’s office.

Update: May 14, 2026
This story has been updated with a statement from city commissioner David Suarez.

The post Miami Beach Official Hired Billboard Truck to Call Pro-Palestine Activists “Jew Hater,” Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

Founded in the wake of 9/11 to facilitate information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, fusion centers like Ohio’s Statewide Terrorism Analysis and Crime Center, or STACC, have become yet another way for law enforcement agencies to surveil legally protected First Amendment activities. The 80 fusion centers across the U.S. work with the military, private sector, and other stakeholders to collect vast amounts of information on American citizens in a stated effort to prevent future terror attacks.

In Ohio, it seemed that the counterterrorism surveillance hub was also keeping close tabs on campus events.

It wasn’t just at Ohio State: An investigative series by The Intercept has found that fusion centers were actively involved in monitoring pro-Palestine demonstrations on at least five campuses across the country, as shown in more than 20,000 pages of documents obtained via public records requests exposing U.S. universities’ playbooks for cracking down on pro-Palestine student activism.

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As the documents make clear, not only did universities view the peaceful, student-led demonstrations as a security issue — warranting the outside police and technological surveillance interventions detailed in the rest of this series — but the network of law enforcement bodies responsible for counterterror surveillance operations framed the demonstrations in the same way.

After the Ohio fusion center’s tip-off to the upcoming demonstration, officials in the Ohio State University Police Department worked quickly to assemble an operations plan and shut down the demonstration. “The preferred course of action for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass and other building violations will be arrest and removal from the event space,” wrote then-campus chief of police Kimberly Spears-McNatt in an email to her officers just two hours after the initial warning from Ohio’s primary fusion center. OSUPD and the Ohio State Highway Patrol would go on to clear the encampment that same night, arresting 36 demonstrators.

Fusion centers were designed to facilitate the sharing of already collected intelligence between local, state, and federal agencies, but they have been used to target communities of color and to ever-widen the gray area of allowable surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long advocated against the country’s fusion center network, on the grounds that they conducted overreaching surveillance of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement to environmental activism in Oregon.

“Ohio State has an unwavering commitment to freedom of speech and expression. We do not discuss our security protocols in detail,” a spokesperson for Ohio State said in a statement to The Intercept. Officials at STACC didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

The proliferation of fusion centers has contributed to a scope creep that allows broader and more intricate mass surveillance, said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Between AI assessments of online speech, the swirl of reckless data sharing from fusion centers, and often opaque campus policies, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Mir said.

While the Trump administration has publicized its weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against pro-Palestine protesters — with high-profile attacks including attempts to illegally deport student activists — the documents obtained by The Intercept display its precedent under the Biden administration, when surveillance and repression were coordinated behind the scenes.

“ All of that was happening under Biden,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, “and what we’ve seen with the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025 and Project Esther is really just an acceleration of all of these tools of repression that were in place from before.”

Not only was the groundwork for the Trump administration’s descent into increasingly repressive and illegal tactics laid under Biden, but the investigation revealed that the framework for cracking down on student free speech was also in place before the pro-Palestine encampments.

Among other documentation, The Intercept obtained a copy of Clemson University Police Department’s 2023 Risk Analysis Report, which states: “CUPD participates in regular information and intelligence sharing and assessment with both federal and state partners and receives briefings and updates throughout the year and for specific events/incidents form [sic] the South Carolina Information and Intelligence Center (SCIIC)” — another fusion center.

The normalization of intelligence sharing between campus police departments and federal law enforcement agencies is widespread across U.S. universities, and as pro-Palestine demonstrations escalated across the country in 2024, U.S. universities would lean on their relationships with outside agencies and on intelligence sharing arrangements with not only other universities, but also the state and federal surveillance apparatus.

OSU was not the only university where fusion centers facilitated briefings, intelligence sharing, and, in some cases, directly involved federal law enforcement agencies. At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where the state tapped funds set aside for natural disasters and major emergencies to pay outside law enforcement officers to clear an occupied building, the university president noted that the partnership would allow them “to gather support from the local Fusion Center to assist with investigative measures.”

Cal Poly Humboldt had already made students’ devices a target for their surveillance, as then-President Tom Jackson confirmed in an email. The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall,” a university building that students occupied for eight days, Jackson wrote. With the help of the FBI – and warrants for the search and seizure of devices – the university could go a step further in punishing the involved students.

In one email exchange, Kyle Winn, a special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco Division, wrote to a sergeant at the university’s police department: “Per our conversation, attached are several different warrants sworn out containing language pertaining to electronic devices. Please utilize them as needed. See you guys next week.”

Cal Poly Humboldt said in a statement to The Intercept that it “remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

“The pro-Palestine movement really does face a crisis of repression,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow. “We are up against repressive forces that have always been there, but have never been this advanced. So it’s really important that we don’t underestimate them — the repressive forces that are arrayed against us.”

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In Mir’s view, university administrators should have been wary about unleashing federal surveillance at their schools due to fusion centers’ reputation for infringing on civil rights.

“Fusion centers have also come under fire for sharing dubious intelligence and escalating local police responses to BLM,” Mir said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “For universities to knowingly coordinate and feed more information into these systems to target students puts them in harm’s way and is a threat to their civil rights.”

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How Universities Used Counterterror Intelligence-Sharing Hubs to Surveil Pro-Palestine Students appeared first on The Intercept.

This past July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.

The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.

However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.

YouTube declined to provide evidence to support this claim, stating that the company doesn’t discuss how it detects influence operations. Inlakesh remains unable to make new Google accounts, preventing him from sharing his video journalism on the largest English language video platform.

Inlakesh, now a freelance journalist, acknowledged that from 2019 to 2021 he worked from the London office of the Iranian state-owned media organization Press TV, which is under U.S. sanctions. Even so, Inlakesh said that should not have led to the erasure of his entire YouTube account, the vast majority of which was his own independent content that was posted before or after his time at Press TV.

A public Google document from the month Inlakesh’s account was deleted notes that the company had recently closed more than 30 accounts it alleged were linked to Iran that had posted content critical of Israel and its war on Gaza. The company did not respond when asked specifically if Inlakesh’s account was among those mentioned in the document.

Inlakesh said he felt like he was targeted not due to his former employer but because of his journalism about Palestine, especially amid the increasingly common trend of pro-Israeli censorship among Big Tech companies.

“What are the implications of this, not just for me, but for other journalists?” Inlakesh told The Intercept. “To do this and not to provide me with any information — you’re basically saying I’m a foreign agent of Iran for working with an outlet; that’s the implication. You have to provide some evidence for that. Where’s your documentation?”

Misdirection and Lack of Answers

Over the past couple years, YouTube and Google’s explanations given for the terminations of Inlakesh’s accounts have been inconsistent and vague.

YouTube first accused Inlakesh of “severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.” When a Google employee, Marc Cohen, noticed Inlakesh’s public outcry about his account termination in February 2024, he decided to get involved. Cohen filed a support ticket on Google’s internal issue tracker system, “the Buganizer,” asking why a journalist’s account was deleted. Failing to get an answer internally, Cohen went public with his questions that March. After drawing the attention of the YouTube team on Twitter, he said he eventually received an internal response from Google which claimed that Inlakesh’s account had been terminated owing to “scam, deceptive or spam content.”

Cohen, who resigned from Google later that year over its support of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, said had he not gotten involved, Inlakesh would have been left with even less information.

“They get away with that because they’re Google,” Cohen said. “What are you going to do? Go hire a lawyer and sue Google? You have no choice.”

When Inlakesh’s Gmail account was deleted this year, Google said his account had been “used to impersonate someone or misrepresent yourself,” which Google said is a violation of its policies. Inlakesh appealed three times but was given no response.

Only after The Intercept’s inquiry into Inlakesh’s case did Google shift its response to alleged Iranian influence.

“This creator’s channel was terminated in February 2024 as part of our ongoing investigations into coordinated influence operations backed by the Iranian state,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Intercept. The termination of his channel meant all other accounts associated with Inlakesh, including his backup account, were also deleted, YouTube said.

When The Intercept asked YouTube to elaborate on the reason behind the account deletions, such as which specific content may have flagged the account as being linked to an Iranian state influence operation, a YouTube spokesperson replied that YouTube doesn’t “disclose specifics of how we detect coordinated influence operations,” and instead referred The Intercept to Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s quarterly bulletins. TAG is a team within Google that describes itself as working “to counter government-backed hacking and attacks against Google and our users.”

Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s bulletin from when Inlakesh’s account was first terminated states that in February 2024, a total of 37 YouTube channels were deleted as a result of an “investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to Iran.” Four of these accounts, the document notes, were sharing content which “was critical of the Israeli government and its actions in the ongoing Israel-Gaza war” and had “shared content depicting alleged cyber attacks targeting Israeli organizations.” Google said in the document that the other 33 terminated YouTube channels had shown content “supportive of Iran, Yemen, and Palestine and critical of the US and Israel.”

A Pattern of Censorship

Google has a long-standing and well-documented practice of censoring Palestinian content or content critical of the Israeli government, in addition to evidence of human rights abuses in other conflicts. Such censorship has only exacerbated during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza,

The company deploys various methods to censor content, such as teams of experts who manually review content, automated systems that flag content, reviews of U.S. sanction and foreign terror organization lists, as well as takedown requests from governments.

For the past decade, Israel’s Cyber Unit has openly run operations to convince companies to delete Palestine-related content from platforms such as YouTube.

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Among U.S. allies, Israel had the highest percentage of requests resulting in takedowns on Google platforms, with a nearly 90 percent takedown rate, according to Google’s data since 2011. This rate outpaces countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Google’s home country, the United States. Absent from Google’s public reports, however, are takedown requests made by individual users, a route often weaponized by the Israeli cyber unit and internally by pro-Israel employees.

The scale of content deleted specifically due to U.S. sanctions is also difficult to quantify since such decisions happen without transparency. A recent investigation by The Intercept revealed that YouTube quietly deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights organizations due to the Trump administration’s sanctions against the groups for assisting the International Criminal Court’s war crimes case against Israeli officials. The terminated pages accounted for at least 700 videos erased, many of which spotlighted alleged human rights abuses by the Israeli government.

Dia Kayyali, a technology and human rights consultant, said that in the past several years, as Big Tech platforms have relied more on automated systems that are fed U.S. sanction and terror lists, rights groups have seen an increase in the number of journalists within the Middle East and North Africa region who have had their content related to Palestine removed from YouTube, even when the content they post does not violate the company’s policies. The same could have happened with Inlakesh’s account, Kayyali said.

“And that’s part of the problem with automation — because it just does a really bad job of parsing content — content that could be graphic, anything that has any reference to Hamas,” Kayyali said. Hamas is included within the U.S. foreign terror organization list and Iran remains one of the most sanctioned countries by the U.S. government.

Google and other Big Tech platforms rely heavily on U.S. sanction lists in part to avoid potential liability from the State Department. But such caution is not always warranted, said Mohsen Farshneshani, principal attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based Sanctions Law Center.

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Multinational corporations like Google tend to lean toward “overcompliance” with sanction regulations, often deleting content even when it legally is not required to do so, harming journalists and human rights groups, said Farshneshani.

Under U.S. law, in the Berman Amendment to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, informational materials — in this case, reporting and journalism — are exempt from being subject to sanctions.

Such a carveout should have protected Inlakesh’s page from being deleted, Farshneshani said. Google likely could have taken down specific videos that raised concern, or demonetized specific videos or the entire account, he said. (Inlakesh said that years before terminating his videos and account, YouTube had demonetized some of his content depicting Israeli military violence.)

“Deleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of U.S. entities,” Farshneshani said. “The exemption is meant for situations like this. And if these companies are to uphold their part of the bargain as brokers of information for the greater global community, they would do the extra leg work to make sure the stuff stays up.”

State-Sponsored Media

While YouTube and Google have not stated whether Inlakesh’s history with Press TV played a factor in the deletion, the Iranian state-funded outlet has long been under Google’s scrutiny. In 2013, Google temporarily deleted Press TV’s YouTube account before permanently deleting the channel in 2019 along with its Gmail account amid the first Trump administration’s sanctions campaign against Iran. The Biden administration in 2021 seized and censored dozens of websites tied to Iran, and in 2023 placed sanctions on Press TV due to Iran’s violent crackdown on anti-government protesters after the in-custody death of Mahsa Amini.

Press TV also has been accused by rights groups and journalists for filming and airing propaganda videos in which individuals detained by Iran are coerced to “confess” to alleged crimes in recorded interviews, as a part of the government’s attempts to justify their imprisonment or execution.

Press TV did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Out of the many videos on his YouTube account, Inlakesh recalled only two being associated with his work for Press TV: a documentary critical of the 2020 Trump deal on Israel–Palestine and a short clip about Republicans’ Islamophobic attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in 2019. The rest either predate or postdate his stint at Press TV.

Press TV’s U.K. YouTube channel at times appears listed as an “associated channel” in archival versions of Inlakesh’s personal YouTube page. A YouTube spokesperson stated that YouTube uses “various signals to determine the relationship between channels linked by ownership for enforcement purposes,” but did not clarify what the specific signals were.

Inlakesh maintained that he had editorial independence while at Press TV and was never directed to post to his personal YouTube page.

Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she understood Google’s need to moderate content, but questioned why it deleted Inlakesh’s account rather than using its policy of labeling state-sponsored content, a system that itself has been plagued with problems. “More labels, more warnings, less censorship,” York said.

“The political climate around Palestine has made it such that a lot of the Silicon Valley-based social media platforms don’t seem particularly willing to ensure that Palestinian content can stay up,” she said.

Killing the Narrative

Inlakesh said he lost several documentaries about Israel and Palestine that were hosted exclusively on YouTube. However, what he lamented most was the loss of footage of his independent coverage from the West Bank, including livestreams that document alleged Israeli military abuses and were not backed up elsewhere.

One such video, he said, was a livestream from a protest at the major Israeli settlement of Beit El on February 11, 2020, against President Donald Trump’s lopsided annexation plan for Israel and Palestine.

Through the haze of tear gas, Inlakesh filmed Israeli soldiers camped out at a nearby hill, aiming their guns at the crowd of mostly children throwing rocks.

“And then you see the children drop,” Inlakesh recalled, followed by the bang of a gunshot. Paramedics rushed over to retrieve the children as Inlakesh followed behind. In all, Inlakesh said he filmed Israeli military gunfire hit three Palestinian children, a likely war crime violation, leaving them with wounds to the arms, legs and torso.

“You’re killing part of the narrative,” Inlakesh said. “You’re actively taking away the public’s ability to assess what happened at a critical moment during the history of the conflict.”

The post A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent. appeared first on The Intercept.

Khanna, a Democrat representing parts of San Francisco’s Bay Area, is the first member of Congress to go from a target of TrackAIPAC’s online fury to the winner of its endorsement. Though Khanna never took money from the pro-Israel lobby giant, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he received a red anti-endorsement card from TrackAIPAC in 2024 largely due to his legislative record. Khanna has taken money from the liberal Zionist group, J Street, which opposed Gaza ceasefire attempts in 2023 but has since pushed for conditions on military aid to Israel. 

Khanna’s TrackAIPAC endorsement, first reported by The Intercept, came after the lawmaker on June 10 became the initial signatory of a new pledge from TrackAIPAC called PEACE to enforce American law, counter foreign influence, and end war crimes. Among other commitments, candidates who sign the pledge swear off money from AIPAC and aligned groups, acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza, oppose military aid to any country that commits human rights violations, and agree to stand against efforts in Congress to enmesh the U.S. and Israeli militaries. 

“I’m proud to be the first member of Congress to sign the PEACE Pledge to reject campaign contributions and political support from AIPAC, DMFI, and other groups that promote unconditional support for Israel,” Khanna told The Intercept in a statement. “The pledge also affirms my opposition to the genocide in Gaza and my commitment to voting against future military assistance to any country whose security forces are committing human rights violations. Rejecting AIPAC money isn’t enough — every member of Congress must be clear on these issues.”

With the endorsement and the new pledge, TrackAIPAC is flexing its growing influence on the Capitol. Its viral social media posts have played a large role in making AIPAC into a politically toxic entity, helping drive underground much of its campaign giving in the midterms. Those posts have also compelled lawmakers, including Khanna, to seek meetings with the group in hopes of removing their red cards. With its political arm, Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, TrackAIPAC has also been endorsing and funding candidates. 

TrackAIPAC’s founders said they want to offer a good-faith offramp for members of Congress looking to evolve on Israel and Palestine. Beyond tracking the pro-Israel lobby’s political spending, the group also serves as an advocacy organization pushing for Palestinian rights in the Capitol. It has claimed major midterm primary victories in races it has endorsed a candidate, such as in New Jersey with the victory Adam Hamawy, a former Army surgeon who volunteered in Gaza during the war; Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania; and Mai Vang in California. 

“We’ve been really effective at building a megaphone and bringing accountability to folks who are on the wrong side,” TrackAIPAC co-founder Casey Kennedy, told The Intercept. “But with that success we’ve had, now we have a responsibility to offer a bridge to folks to chart a new path forward.”

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The group has attracted controversy over its methodology, which examines campaign financing as well as lawmakers’ legislative record on policies relating to Israel and Palestine. TrackAIPAC has at times assigned its red card to lawmakers and congressional candidates who do not take AIPAC money, which critics have called unnecessarily confusing or misleading. 

Last June, Khanna became the first lawmaker to meet with TrackAIPAC, according to the group, and asked why TrackAIPAC had initially assigned him a red card. By the time they met, the group had removed the red card but did not grant him its green seal of approval. Instead, it appended a label that remains on his page today, stating: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.” 

In contrast, Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has a green card and a positive label stating: “This candidate rejects Israel lobby contributions. This representative has a strong legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”

Khanna had previously appealed to TrackAIPAC on social media, doubling down on his rejection of AIPAC support. The posts drew the ire of AIPAC, which relentlessly attacked him on social media, at times using TrackAIPAC’s own red card graphic. 

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Khanna’s stances on Israel and Palestine have shifted in recent years. In the immediate weeks after October 7, 2023, Khanna voted in favor of a string of pro-Israel House resolutions, including reaffirming Israel’s “right to self-defense” on October 25. A week later, he signed a resolution that condemned antisemitism and “the support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations” in colleges and universities. Khanna was also notably absent on early resolutions calling for a ceasefire.

Khanna has since become a loud critic of Israel and has voted against a bill that sought to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has been used to silence criticism of Israel. In the summer of 2025, he co-sponsored the Block the Bombs bill and signed on to a pair of resolutions by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., acknowledging Israel’s offensive in Gaza as a genocide and recognizing the Nakba. Earlier this month, Khanna attempted to strike a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act that would codify Israel’s joint development of weapons with the U.S. 

It was also this month when Khanna’s office reached out again to TrackAIPAC to revisit the possibility of gaining the group’s endorsement, the group said. His office had been receiving inquiries about his “continue improving” label on TrackAIPAC’s presidential candidate list. At the time, TrackAIPAC had already been developing its pledge and offered it to Khanna’s office.

“Groups like AIPAC are pouring money into our elections and are influencing policies that undermine human rights,” Khanna told The Intercept in a statement. “When Track AIPAC offered, I was proud to sign the pledge.”

While Khanna has not formally announced a run for president, he is positioning himself to the left of the Democratic establishment on Israel. In April, he announced he supports the halt of both offensive and so-called defensive weapons to the country due to its human rights abuses.

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Adam Carlson, a political consultant and pollster behind Zenith Research, who has been critical of TrackAIPAC’s methodology in the past, has said he expects other congressional and presidential candidates courting the left to sign on to the new TrackAIPAC pledge. But he doesn’t expect a shift from the kinds of establishment Democrats often in the crosshairs of TrackAIPAC over their support for Israel.

“It’s a flex — the more people they get to sign this pledge, the stronger they are,” Carlson said of TrackAIPAC. “But it won’t change the dynamic broadly.” 

He cautioned of potential pitfalls, such as how the group will hold legislators who sign the pledge accountable and warned of the risk of purity tests on the left that could hurt certain candidates’ election chances in swing districts.

TrackAIPAC said anyone who abandons the pledge would again receive a red graphic and be targeted in the group’s intense social media campaigns. Cory Archibald, a TrackAIPAC co-founder, also resisted the premise of a purity test. “If you’re gonna have a litmus test,” Archibald said, “I think genocide is certainly a good one.”

The post Once a Target of TrackAIPAC, Ro Khanna Gains Its Endorsement appeared first on The Intercept.

The university has not given an official reason for ending its relationship with the professors, who all taught at Brooklyn College, and did not clarify their decision in a request for comment from The Intercept. The university terminated one professor and did not reappoint three of them. 

“We’re filling in the blanks because they’ve told us nothing,” said one of the four affected professors, who requested anonymity for fear of being doxxed and harassed. “The only reason we know it’s related to Palestine is because that’s the only thing we have in common.” She and three others are fighting for reappointment and have filed grievances with Brooklyn College. 

When she first received a notification in June from human resources that she would not be reappointed to teach, she flagged the person in her department who assigned her classes. “He thought it was a mistake — and that we must have checked the wrong box,” she said. That confusion made her believe the decision had nothing to do with her teaching ability. “The decision made by our departments was to hire us. The decision made by the Administration was to fire us,” she said. “It’s just sending a message that no one’s job is safe.” 

The Professional Staff Congress, or PSC — the main labor union for CUNY faculty — and the CUNY chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine have both said the professors’ removal violates due process and free speech rights. The union said it has written at least four times to the college administration requesting more information and has not received clarity on why these professors were let go. 

In a June 30 letter to CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, PSC President James Davis demanded the professors’ reinstatement and noted their non-reappointment and termination as “highly irregular.” Davis noted that the classes remained on the schedule, even when the instructors were let go. “In no case was the job performance of the instructor evaluated as unsatisfactory. In no case did the college inform the instructor or the department chair of a misconduct finding that could warrant such an action. In no case was it the department chair who notified the instructor of the non-reappointment, nor was the chair notified in advance,” he wrote. “While the unexplained nonreappointment of teaching adjuncts is not unusual at CUNY, this fact pattern is deeply concerning. What the four instructors who lost their CUNY jobs at the same time have in common is their public protest against Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”

A separate letter from more than 100 Jewish CUNY faculty and staff, addressed to Matos Rodríguez, condemned the removal of the four professors and argued that the decision violated departmental academic autonomy to determine staffing for scheduled classes. “Firing them does not make CUNY, New York City, New York State, nor the United States safer for Jews,” they wrote. “Firing our colleagues is an abhorrent act setting a dangerous precedent.”

The staffing changes at CUNY came in the lead-up to a congressional hearing Tuesday morning probing claims of antisemitism on college campuses. University leaders from CUNY, University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee. 

On July 9, New York City Councilmember Inna Vernikov called the termination of the four professors and the recent suspension of student organizer Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik, who leads City College of New York’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, a “last ditch attempt … to save face.” In 2023, Vernikov was arrested after she openly carried a gun at a pro-Palestinian protest at Brooklyn College; the charges were later dismissed. Both she and Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., accused CUNY’s chancellor of trying to back out of testifying.

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At Tuesday’s hearing, Stefanik launched baseless attacks on other CUNY faculty members. She pushed for disciplining law professor Ramzi Kassem on the grounds that he represented Mahmoud Khalil, and Saly Abd Alla, the university’s chief diversity officer, over her past work as a civil rights director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota. “Does it concern you that New York taxpayers are paying for the legal defense fund of Mahmoud Khalil?” she asked Matos Rodríguez.

Matos Rodríguez said he was not familiar with those individual employees, but stressed that any employee who violates CUNY’s rules will be investigated. He said CUNY had no complaints related to Abd Alla and that she is not directly involved with handling cases related to students and faculty.

Pro-Palestinian protesters repeatedly interrupted the hearing. As Matos Rodríguez spoke, one person yelled: “Israel is burning children alive.” Later in the hearing, another protester also shouted to disrupt Matos Rodríguez’s remarks, prompting Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., to say: “Shut up and get out of here … get out of here you loser.”

Matos Rodríguez emphasized the university’s zero tolerance policy for encampments and said it had hired 150 full-time security employees and contracted with 250 security personnel. He said the university disciplined three students as a result of the encampments.

Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., relayed to the chancellor CUNY faculty members’ concerns about professors who were not reappointed despite having fully enrolled classes scheduled for the fall. “As a former professor myself and a department chair — somebody who believes deeply in transparency and fairness — I want to ask you: would you be willing to follow up with my office and provide more information on the policies and procedures that guide faculty appointments and reappointments at CUNY?” she asked. Matos Rodríguez said he was willing to cooperate fully with the committee.

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This was the ninth event held by Congress focused on claims of antisemitism on campus since October 7. None have been held to address Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian discrimination. Earlier high-profile hearings probed leaders from Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania; the presidents of those schools all resigned after testifying.

The CUNY, Georgetown, and UC Berkeley chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine signed off on a letter before the hearing calling on their respective presidents to “defend their institutions from baseless attacks and affirm principles of academic freedom and free speech.” 

“They must oppose the weaponizing of antisemitism through the equation of Jewish safety with the silencing and exclusion of those who speak up for Palestinian freedom and an end to genocide,” the statement read. The faculty argued in the letter that these congressional hearings have routinely shown university administrators inaccurate examples of antisemitism — and used that to pressure them to crack down on students and employees.

Free speech experts agree with that assessment. “These hearings are political theater. That’s all they are,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who testified in his capacity as an expert on the First Amendment at an earlier hearing in May. “It almost doesn’t matter what the university presidents say … there is no effort to even determine what the truth is, what actually happened, or whether any legal lines have been crossed.”

Professors across the country are worried about their speech and actions being policed under an overly broad definition of antisemitism. The American Association of University Professors, a union representing about 45,000 members nationwide, has criticized the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

In the meantime, the professors who can no longer work with CUNY are scrambling to find another source of income and protect themselves from doxxing and harassment.  

One of the four CUNY professors said it feels as though CUNY’s administration is opposed to protecting student safety. She recalled trying to protect students at Brooklyn College’s encampment in May as faculty placed themselves strategically between police and students. 

“We just knew that something really bad was going to happen,” she said. Now, she’s scared to speak publicly. She also misses teaching. “It was not only the way I made my living but also what gave me purpose,” she said. Despite the costs, she is still committed to the Palestinian cause. “The reality is, it is working. What they’re doing is working,” she said. “This repression is repressive, but I feel strongly that I can’t let it stop me. The situation in Gaza is so extreme, we have to continue to fight — and I think it’s shameful for anyone to be fired for opposing a genocide … History will not treat this period kindly.”

Another of the professors is worried about covering their oldest child’s college tuition. “I don’t know if my family will have to move, what we’ll do about health insurance, or whether the right-wing groups now doxxing me will escalate their harassment,” they said.

“Though no reason was given for my firing, it’s impossible not to see this as retaliation — for supporting students and for exercising my lawful political expression outside the classroom,” they said.

They have no plans to slow their activism around Palestine. “Absolutely not. In the face of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, entire families wiped off the earth, every university destroyed, and the widespread obliteration of agricultural land and hospitals, I cannot and will not be silent.”

Correction: July 21, 2025
This story has been updated to correct the party affiliation of Rep. Stefanik. She is a Republican lawmaker, not a Democrat.

The post Four CUNY Professors Say They Were Fired for Supporting Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

The letters, which were sent on October 14 to the presidents and provosts of Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Minnesota State, and Tufts universities, called out school officials and U.S. law enforcement agencies for cracking down on student protesters and subsequently using immigration authorities to single out foreign students for detention and deportation.

“We are highly concerned over reports that students were arrested, suspended, and expelled, and lost their university accommodation, campus access, and their immigration status merely because of assembling peacefully to express their solidarity with victims of the conflict in Gaza,” wrote the group of U.N. special rapporteurs, independent experts who monitor human rights violations. “We fear that such pressure and public attacks on scholars and institutions can result in repression of free expression and in self-censorship, thus damaging academic freedom and the autonomy of universities.”

The letters suggest the international body has taken notice of domestic protest repression on U.S. campuses. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has weaponized immigration authorities against international students and investigations over alleged antisemitism at universities across the country — ratcheting up a crackdown on student protests for Palestine that began under former President Joe Biden.

The letter to Columbia highlighted the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia, as well as the attempted arrest of Yunseo Chung. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil and Mahdawi both spent months in detention earlier this year. Kordia, a Palestinian student who was arrested on March 8, was still in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as recently as December 8, according to a report by Drop Site News.

“It has been reported that the conditions of Ms. Kordia’s detention are particularly severe. Due to overcrowding, she sleeps on the floor where cockroaches and other bugs abound, and many showers and sinks do not work,” the authors wrote. “She is also not given materials her faith requires to have to pray, and she is not allowed to wear a hijab in the presence of men as her religion requires.”

The authors of the letter include Mary Lawlor, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Farida Shaheed, the special rapporteur on the right to education; Irene Khan, the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; Gina Romero, the special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association; and Gehad Madi, the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Representatives of the U.N. rapporteurs who drafted the letters did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The U.N. letter also highlighted the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts who was snatched by masked ICE agents on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25; Badar Khan Suri, the Indian-born researcher at Georgetown arrested on March 17; Momodou Taal, a Cornell grad student with dual citizenship from the United Kingdom and Gambia who was ordered to turn himself in to ICE agents on March 22; and Mohammed Hoque, a Minnesota State student arrested at his home on March 28. (Cornell, Minnesota State, and Tufts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

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In the letter, the authors singled out Columbia for bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, which they said set a standard that chilled speech nationwide.

“The restrictive measures at Columbia University reflect nationwide structural changes at universities to suppress Palestine solidarity movements,” the authors wrote.

In each letter, the authors asked the universities to provide information on the allegations of mistreatment, any measures taken by the schools to protect the rights of its students and scholars, and details on how the schools plan to safeguard the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

“Students report self-censoring political expression, and particularly international students are withdrawing from activism due to deportation fears,” the authors wrote. “Campus organizing has diminished significantly, with activists reporting less attendance from international students who had to quit their activism because of the potential risk of repercussions. This intimidating effect extends beyond issues concerning Israel and Palestine, with students reporting reluctance to engage in any political activism.”

The post U.N. Experts Blast U.S. Universities for Human Rights Violations Against Gaza Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.