Among their targets was Alan Hostetter, a former California police chief who entered the Capitol grounds with a hatchet in his backpack on January 6, 2021. He was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison late last year, among the longest sentences so far out of more than 1,500 prosecutions stemming from the events of that day.   

Hostetter, who represented himself at trial, spouted a wide range of conspiracy theories during his closing argument, including that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The judge overseeing Hostetter’s case emphasized his experience as a police officer during the proceedings. “No reasonable citizen of this country, much less one with two decades of experience in law enforcement, could have believed it was lawful to use mob violence to impede a joint session of Congress,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in court last year. In July, Lamberth denied Hostetter’s request to be released from prison while he appeals his case, noting that it’s too risky for him to be freed ahead of the “looming” November election. (Hostetter did not respond to efforts to reach him before his conviction.)

Before his journey from police chief in La Habra, California, to insurrectionist, Hostetter spent 22 years at the Fontana Police Department, a small agency in the mostly working-class region southeast of Los Angeles known as the Inland Empire. The area has a history as a hotbed for white supremacist views most commonly associated with the deep South, which have earned it the nickname “Invisible Empire”— a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

For more than three years, filmmaker Stuart Harmon and I have investigated the culture of policing in Fontana. We spoke with several veterans of the local police department, including four whistleblowers who are featured in a new film published today by The Intercept. We also reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents, interviewed residents and attorneys, and made several attempts to speak with the police department’s leadership. They declined to answer our questions. 

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A Reformist Black Police Chief Faces an Uprising of the Old Guard

In the aftermath of the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which reignited nationwide protests against police racism and impunity, many departments across the country — including the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department — came under renewed scrutiny for officers’ misconduct and abuses. But there are thousands more small-town police departments across the country that are rarely scrutinized, an untold number of them run with near-absolute authority by police leadership whom few residents, let alone officers, have the courage to challenge. 

The Fontana Police Department, which in 2013 earned the grim nationwide record for “worst minority representation” among cities with more than 100,000 residents, offers a snapshot of how such departments are run. And as we learned, its history of violence and racism is deeply intertwined with that of the city itself.

Decades of industrial development — and later abandonment — transformed Fontana’s demographics and character from an orange farm town attracting white settlers a century ago, to a booming steel town after World War II, to a trucking hub for warehouses and low-wage shift jobs today.

Throughout the city’s history, demographic change was met with racist backlash. As recently as 1981, men in white hoods marched through downtown Fontana, near the police station — a moment captured in archival photos. A year earlier, a Black lineman was shot by members of the KKK and left paralyzed. The incidents echoed earlier ones, including the burning to death of a Black family in their home, in the 1940s, after they refused to leave their all-white neighborhood.

Today, Fontana is home to a majority Latino population. But the mansion of a former grand dragon of the KKK still stands, not far from the police department — underscoring a point that the late writer Mike Davis, who was born in Fontana, made in his monumental work “City of Quartz.” “The past is not completely erasable,” Davis wrote, “even in Southern California.” 

Rare, Unvarnished Testimony

I began looking into the Fontana Police Department days after the January 6 insurrection. Hostetter, who left the department in 2009 after climbing the ranks to deputy chief, had not yet been publicly identified as one of the law enforcement veterans involved, but one of his previous subordinates emailed me a tip about “a White Supremacy group operating at my former police agency.”

David Moore, a 25-year veteran officer who started his career at the LAPD before transferring to Fontana, had come across an investigation I had published years earlier, revealing the FBI’s longtime, quiet probe into white supremacist infiltration of police departments across the country. While the FBI’s involvement was news at the time, the infiltration itself had been an open secret in many of those departments. Moore, who is Black and currently works for a federal defense contractor, didn’t mention Hostetter in his email but wrote instead of widespread racism reaching all the way to the top of the department’s leadership. At times, Moore wrote, that racism crossed the line into white supremacist extremism.

Moore had already described the racism in horrific detail in a discrimination lawsuit he filed against the Fontana PD in 2016. (He amended the lawsuit to charge wrongful termination once he was fired in 2017 in what he says was retaliation for his whistleblowing. In a legal filing, the Fontana PD dismissed many of the allegations around racism as irrelevant to the case. The department settled with Moore and another officer earlier this year, and the case was dismissed in April.)

In his email, Moore laid out a long list of allegations, including that officers routinely used racial slurs to refer to both residents and colleagues of color, and that once, his co-workers had performed a mock lynching of a Martin Luther King Jr. figurine.

One claim in particular was shocking for its cruelty. In 1994, before Moore joined the department, a homeless Black man’s body was found outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken near police headquarters only half an hour after he was released from police custody. He had been fatally choked and later stabbed, according to an autopsy report. When he was taken in for the autopsy, someone placed a half-eaten chicken wing in his hand and took a picture. For years, officers at the department circulated the photograph, which they treated as a joke. An officer who spoke up about the incident told The Intercept he was later forced out.

As Moore grew increasingly disillusioned with department leadership, he began researching the emblems he saw his colleagues sport. He learned that the lightning bolts, runes, and the German eagle that were tattooed on their bodies or featured on their badges were symbols associated with neo-Nazi ideologies. The department’s Rapid Response Team, an elite and notoriously violent unit, displayed as its logo a Nordic owl, another symbol favored by white supremacists. 

Moore had denounced all this for years, first internally, then in his lawsuit, and eventually to a local writer, who published the allegations to a muted response. Fontana was a forgotten place, he told me, whose residents, many of them poor and undocumented, are too busy working multiple jobs and fearful of retaliation to openly criticize the department, despite knowing its abuses firsthand.

It is in small departments like this that extremism could fester in silence, he believed. “We must show people in California and the U.S. in general, that White supremacy is alive and active in law enforcement,” Moore wrote. “Very few Officers have the courage to speak out about it.” 

Moore, who spent the better part of the last decade embroiled in a fight against the Fontana PD at a huge personal cost, knows from experience why so few officers speak up. Others who denounced problems internally — including his co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, Andy Anderson — were also forced to leave their jobs or resigned out of fear and frustration. One even moved to a police department across the country to get away from Fontana. 

We spoke with Moore and Anderson long before they settled their lawsuit, an agreement that neither they nor the police department wanted to talk about. “While the City and its Police Department believe their conduct was in all respects proper and legal, the City’s insurer recognizes the uncertainty litigation presents, as well as costs associated with litigation,” Christopher Moffitt, a lawyer representing the police department, wrote in an email. “David Moore and Andrew Anderson believe a settlement is in their best interest for these same reasons. The Parties have agreed to limit our comments about the lawsuit to this statement.”

Moffitt also said that the police department could not respond to The Intercept’s other questions “in connection with your reporting on the litigation.”

As The Intercept has previously reported, police departments large and small are shrouded in a code of silence that rewards loyalty over ethics. And as a powerful 2021 USA Today investigation exposed, officers who denounce abuse and misconduct by colleagues are ostracized, forced out of their jobs, or worse. Many current and former Fontana officers, Moore cautioned back in 2021, would never speak about what they had witnessed. But he offered to connect me to three who would speak to me on the record, and more who would talk but would not want to be named. 

It was a rare offer of access to officers’ unvarnished testimony, now captured in a film that offers an unusually blunt perspective on policing from within — even as it comes from individuals who remain deeply committed to the institution itself.

“Sadly, the silent majority complacently stands by while rogue officers seem to take the lead,” Moore wrote. “This needs to stop.”

The Vital Projects Fund supported the reporting and production of this film.

The post An Insurrectionist Once Helped Lead This Police Department. Insiders Speak Out About Its Culture of White Supremacy. appeared first on The Intercept.

The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law suggested that members of Students for Justice in Palestine, the largest Palestine solidarity campus organization in the country, may have been violating a law that prohibits people from providing “material support” — a broad category that includes money as well as services or other assistance — to U.S.-designated terror groups. “We certainly cannot sit idly by as a student organization provides vocal and potentially material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization,” the ADL and the Brandeis Center wrote.

There is no evidence SJP has ever provided material support to Hamas, and the letter prompted widespread condemnation. The American Civil Liberties Union called on leaders in higher education to “reject baseless calls to investigate or punish student groups for exercising their free speech rights.”

The federal material support law has been the most frequently cited law in prosecutions throughout the U.S-led war on terror. And its invocation by the ADL was a full-circle moment for the group, which helped pass it three decades ago largely to undermine support for Palestinians in the United States. Long before 9/11, U.S. terror laws were shaped by a distinctly anti-Palestinian agenda and often promoted by pro-Israel organizations, a new report published on Wednesday reveals.

“In the history of U.S. terrorism law, Palestine is the elephant in the room,” said Darryl Li, an anthropologist and legal scholar at the University of Chicago and author of the report.

The legal analysis, co-published by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, a group that fights the legal harassment of pro-Palestine activists, draws on five decades of legislative history to trace how moments of upheaval in Israel and Palestine were exploited by Israel advocates in the U.S. to expand counterterrorism legislation and enshrine antidemocratic principles in a range of domestic laws.

“Many foundational antiterrorism laws arose during or were adapted to pivotal moments in the Palestinian liberation struggle, often pushed by Israel-aligned groups to reflexively cast the veil of ‘terrorism’ almost uniquely on Palestinians,” the report notes. “The same Zionist organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism laws — most notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — now brazenly tar all advocacy of Palestinian liberation as support for terrorism.”

Todd Gutnick, a spokesperson for the ADL, disputed the characterization as “false and a complete distortion of our position.” In an email to The Intercept, he wrote that the group’s advocacy of antiterrorism legislation was aimed at different organizations it was monitoring at the time, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and Hamas. “This advocacy did not extend to the Palestinian movement or its supporters broadly — unless those supporters were providing material support to a terrorist organization in violation of federal law,” Gutnick added.

He also dismissed criticism of the ADL and Brandeis Center’s letter to campus leaders. “We fully recognize and support students’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, even odious speech, and have made that clear,” he wrote. “But at a time when some SJP leaders were echoing the position of Hamas so closely and with such intensity, and in a manner that was tinged with threats of violence, we strongly believe that an investigation is warranted.”

Emma Saltzberg, the U.S. strategic campaigns director for Diaspora Alliance, an organization that fights “antisemitism and its instrumentalization,” told The Intercept that the ADL’s call for terrorism investigations is contrary to its stated mission as a civil rights group.

“Advocating this kind of investigation, criminalization against activists for Palestinian rights, is laying the groundwork for future repressive state activity.”

“It’s an active attempt to deny Palestinian students and students who are in solidarity with them — many of whom are Jewish — their civil rights to free expression and free speech,” Saltzberg said, “and to smear legitimate political activism as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse and to attach real material penalties to that.”

She added that the effort, while focused on advocacy for Palestinians, could have far-reaching implications. “Advocating this kind of investigation, criminalization against activists for Palestinian rights, is laying the groundwork for future repressive state activity,” Saltzberg said. “And that is something that should scare people.”

An Anti-Palestinian History

U.S. counterterrorism legislation and policies since 9/11 have predominantly targeted Muslims abroad and at home, but earlier efforts to codify terrorism in U.S. law specifically singled out Palestinians, according to the new report.

The earliest reference to “terrorism” in federal legislation dates back to the 1969 Foreign Assistance Act and involves the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which is once again under attack amid Israel’s current war on Gaza. Congress stipulated at the time that no UNRWA funding should go to “any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army … or who has engaged in any act of terrorism,” the report notes. The main sponsor of the provision, late New York Rep. Leonard Farbstein, singled out U.N.-run refugee camps, claiming — not unlike some legislators today — that “these camps are being used for training purposes and the young children for whom the schools are being built and who are being fed and clothed are being trained as terrorists in these refugee camps.”

While the bill offered no definition of terrorism, the reference “set down a decades-long pattern that legally inscribed the Palestinian — and especially the refugee — as the default terrorist,” the report notes.

Throughout the 1970s, Congress passed a series of laws aimed at restricting assistance to states that were hosting or otherwise supporting members of the Palestinian resistance movement. Zionist groups advocated for those laws, according to the report, and pushed for creating a mechanism to trigger such sanctions. In 1979, those efforts culminated in legislation that endowed the secretary of state with the authority to designate foreign countries as “state sponsors of acts of international terrorism.” Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly applied the label to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, excluding them from aid and trade and isolating them from the broader international community.

In 1987, weeks after the outbreak of the largely nonviolent First Intifada, Congress for the first and only time designated a nonstate group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, a “terrorist organization.” The move was part of an effort to oust the PLO from the U.S., including from the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where it had a mission as a nonstate “observer.” While the ouster endeavor failed, the congressional legislation also created the State Department’s “foreign terrorist organization” list, requiring the executive branch to make annual designations of terror groups. Within a year, the State Department added dozens of groups, many pro-Palestinian ones, to the list, which has since ballooned to include a wide range of primarily Muslim groups.

In the following years, U.S. lawmakers inscribed “terrorism” provisions in immigration and civil law, primarily in an effort to target members of the Palestinian resistance movement. In 1990, Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to list “terrorism” as a basis for deportation and the denial of entry into the United States. The legislation once again singled out the PLO, noting that any “officer, official, representative, or spokesman” for the group would be considered to be engaging in terrorist activity.

Two years later, Congress passed the Antiterrorism Act, incentivizing U.S. citizens to file civil suits over acts of international terrorism abroad. The law came on the heels of the 1985 killing by members of the Palestine Liberation Front of Leon Klinghoffer, a U.S. citizen who had been onboard the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship. A small conservative think tank drafted the bill, and several Zionist groups, including the ADL, advocated for it. The Klinghoffer family twice testified in favor of the bill on the behalf of the ADL, according to the new report. In the first decade after the law was passed in 1992, some 63 percent of the lawsuits citing it were related to Palestine, with the vast majority brought by dual Israeli American citizens in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the report notes.

Material Support

The ban on material support to foreign terrorist organizations alone accounted for more than half of federal terrorism prosecutions brought in the aftermath of 9/11, according to an Intercept analysis.

Federal courts have interpreted the material support statute broadly, chilling efforts to provide humanitarian aid in areas, like Gaza, where groups that the U.S. government deems to be terrorist entities operate. But while the legislation exclusively applies to support for foreign groups, it originated domestically, in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by the white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

The bombing — the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil at that time — prompted calls for sweeping counterterrorism legislation that would give the government ample powers to target domestic and foreign actors. And it was shaped heavily by the ADL.

“Responding to a deadly mass-casualty attack perpetrated by two white men with radically scaled up repression of Black, Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response.”

The Clinton administration supported a version of the legislation that included several elements from the ADL’s “counterterrorism agenda,” including bans on entry and fundraising for “members and supporters” of terrorist groups, the report notes. Members of the ADL testified in Congress in favor of the legislation, and when Republicans concerned about government overreach struck many of the terrorism provisions in the draft legislation, the ADL condemned legislators for “gutting” it. As Democrats and Republicans disagreed over expanded federal law enforcement authorities, the ADL led a campaign by a dozen pro-Israel groups to fuel fears that Hamas would fundraise in the U.S. and convince legislators to reintroduce the terrorism provisions aimed at foreign groups. In the end, the Oklahoma City bombing led to no legislative action against domestic extremism, but it set the legal foundations upon which U.S. prosecutors have targeted hundreds of people since 9/11.

“Responding to a deadly mass-casualty attack perpetrated by two white men with radically scaled up repression of Black, Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response,” said Li.

Understanding that history, he added, is essential to keeping the current war in Gaza from engendering even more draconian legislation. Already, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, the Biden administration has stepped up surveillance of Palestine supporters, while state governments have cited their own terrorism statutes in crackdowns against critics of Israel’s war. At the federal level, legislators have floated extreme proposals like expelling Palestinians from the U.S. and setting up a committee to investigate antisemitism.

“Since October 7, members of Congress have been trying to out-grandstand each other by proposing racist anti-Palestinian bills,” said Li. “While we must push back against the most outrageous initiatives, the proposals that seem innocuous may end up doing the most harm.”

The post How the ADL’s Anti-Palestinian Advocacy Helped Shape U.S. Terror Laws appeared first on The Intercept.

They would know. Rafah is the last available refuge for at least 1.3 million Palestinians who have fled their homes since October. They have been repeatedly displaced from across the rest of the occupied territory, making their way to an area that the Israeli military had designated a “safe zone.”

An Israeli military official described Monday’s bombing as a “diversion,” part of an effort to rescue two Israeli hostages. The intense assault appeared to be a prelude to many more horrors to come, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday that a long-feared ground invasion of the city is imminent. He ordered a mass evacuation of civilians there — a prospect that is, simply put, impossible, given the number of displaced people currently in Rafah and the fact that there is nowhere left to go.

Since the beginning of the war, Rafah has transformed into a tent city that United Nations officials warned is a “pressure cooker of despair.” As the number of people killed, missing, or wounded during Israel’s four-month war recently topped 100,000, some 1.9 million people — more than 85 percent of Gaza’s population — have been internally displaced. The vast majority of them are crammed at the border with Egypt, where they face an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe that has been compounded in recent days by the uncertainty of Rafah’s viability as the last refuge in Gaza.

In the days preceding Monday’s assault, humanitarian and human rights organizations, as well as the U.S. government, had issued urgent warnings that a full-scale attack on the city would be the most devastating yet.

“This escalation would significantly exacerbate the ongoing genocidal acts perpetrated by the Israeli military and authorities against the Palestinian population in Gaza,” a coalition of Palestinian human rights groups warned last week, noting that the feared ground invasion would be in violation of the measures ordered by the International Court of Justice last month.

International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan, meanwhile, issued a rare warning on Monday implying that the latest assault on Rafah might amount to war crimes under the court’s jurisdiction. It was a notable statement from Khan, who has mostly remained silent on Israeli actions during the current war in Gaza, and under whose leadership the ICC investigation into crimes committed in Palestine has largely stalled.

In recent days, as people currently seeking safety in Rafah braced for the incoming assault, a single question echoed across the city: “Where can we go?”

The prospect of more loss is unfathomable. Already, Palestinians are struggling to survive in Rafah, where food and water are scarce, and the city’s overburdened health infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. Even before Netanyahu announced the incoming invasion, life in Rafah had grown unbearable. In interviews conducted last month, people living in the city’s rapidly growing makeshift camps talked about all they had lost since October, their harrowing escapes and repeated displacements, and the uncertainty of their life in what has become the world’s largest refugee camp.

Dreams Destroyed

Shahad Abu Hussein and Ahmed Qadouha were ready for their wedding. She had her dress and he his suit, and the expenses for the seaside wedding hall were already paid.

Abu Hussein was looking forward to moving into their new home, which Qadouha, who worked in a television repair shop in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, had saved for years to buy. She carefully packed clothes and accessories ahead of the wedding. “My fiancé and I were supposed to begin our life together,” she said. “I couldn’t wait for this day. I had picked out my wedding dress and was so excited to begin a life with Ahmed, in our own home.”

Israel’s war on Gaza brought those plans to an abrupt halt. Their wedding, once scheduled for October 12, is indefinitely postponed. Much of the life they had planned for no longer exists: Abu Hussein’s neighborhood was “completely wiped out,” she said. She fled with her family on the first day of Israel’s assault, taking only documents and basic necessities. She heard early on in the war that her family’s home had been severely damaged. “Everything I had prepared for my new home has likely been destroyed,” she said.

Abu Hussein had dreamed of becoming a lawyer. She had recently graduated from high school and had plans to enroll at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. In November, the university was destroyed. Their wedding hall was another casualty of Israel’s bombs. Qadouha’s shop and the home he built to share with his future wife are also gone. “I worked very hard to save enough to pay for the house, the furniture, and the appliances. I spent years of my life working day and night for it, and my entire house was leveled to the ground,” he said. “All the work I did was for nothing.”

For some time, Abu Hussein and Qadouha thought they might have lost each other too. He fled the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood with some 130 members of his extended family, after Israeli forces ordered them to evacuate in October.

At first, Qadouha relocated to a refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, but he was forced to once again move south as Israeli forces advanced. With most communication lines down because of the heavy shelling, the couple went days without knowing whether the other was alive. “I could not reach Shahad,” he said. “I was terrified that something would happen to her.”

It wasn’t until they both reached Rafah that they were reunited.

Still unmarried, they now live with a dozen relatives across from a U.N.-run school turned shelter for thousands of displaced people. Their nylon tent has been reinforced with wood and staples to give it a semblance of structure. They sleep on the ground, in the freezing cold. When it rains, the tent gets soaked, and they look for shelter along the walls of the school.

Even without the prospect of the imminent Israeli invasion of Rafah forcing them to flee once again, it’s hard for them to imagine what their future may hold.

“I cannot fathom that we might have to endure life in this tent for a long time,” said Qadouha. “I feel utterly helpless.”

Another Nakba

At a different encampment for displaced people on the other side of Rafah, 71-year-old Riyad Al Afghani shares another tent with some 30 other people, including his wife and one of his sons. Rafah, where they arrived in late December, was the last possible stop in a weekslong exodus that began when Israeli forces destroyed their home in Gaza City in November.

Before the war started, Al Afghani lived in a 14-floor building in Rimal, a buzzy neighborhood in Gaza’s most populated city, once dotted with high-rises and bustling with restaurants and shops and now reduced to rubble.

In mid-November, Israeli forces called one of Al Afghani’s sons and ordered him to evacuate. Later, Al Afghani also got a call. He told the soldiers that there were many women and children living in the building, but they told him to just leave, he said.

The Israeli military targeted the building that night, and the smell of smoke filled the air. “We fled the tower with children crying and women screaming,” he recounted. As they ran, Israeli snipers fired on them, killing one of the women in the group, a mother of eight, in front of her husband and children. “My son Muhammed carried her and buried her body,” Al Afghani recalled. They sought refuge at a neighbor’s home, where they spent a “terrifying” night as bombs and gunfire relentlessly pounded the area. “Entire neighborhoods were completely devastated,” Al Afghani said.

Another of Al Afghani’s sons, Abdullah, a father of five, was also killed during the November assault. Al Afghani has few details about the circumstances of his son’s killing, and he has not heard of his grandchildren’s fate.

Al Afghani and his family made their way south from Gaza City on foot. He had trouble walking so his son carried him for a while, but they eventually separated so his son and wife could escape faster. Al Afghani joined a different group of thousands of people walking toward the Egyptian border. For hours they moved through a landscape of residential buildings reduced to rubble, cement blocks and dead bodies all around them, he recalled.

As they crossed what the Israeli military had declared to be a “safe passage,” an Israeli tank opened fire at the group, even as they waved a white flag and clutched their ID cards. Later, Israeli soldiers stopped the group and made people stand apart from each other, then proceeded to call young men out, beat them, and arrest them, Al Afghani recalled, echoing reports made by many others in Gaza and documented by human rights groups.

Al Afghani eventually made his way to Rafah in late December, where he was finally reunited with his wife and son. But he’s heard nothing from or about his five daughters and their families, who stayed in Gaza City after Israeli forces began shelling and later invaded the city. Because Israeli strikes have led to frequent communications blackouts, it’s virtually impossible to get in touch with people in Gaza City.

“We are scattered, each member of my family is somewhere in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “I do not know if they are alive or not.”

In Rafah, he and his relatives have little access to food and water, and the sound of Israeli airstrikes nearby is terrifying — a relentless reminder that beyond Rafah, there is nowhere else for people to run. “The danger of being bombed is constant,” Al Afghani said. He can’t afford the exorbitant cost of crossing into Egypt, with smugglers asking for up to $10,000 per person. Even if he could, he doesn’t want to leave Gaza, where he has endured decades of Israeli occupation and several wars, although none more devastating than the current one. 

Al Afghani’s family, like that of many Palestinians in Gaza, is originally from Yafa, a city that is now part of Tel Aviv. They were expelled, along some 750,000 other Palestinians, in 1948, when Israel established a state by forcibly displacing Palestinians in a manner reminiscent of today’s effort to drive them into Egypt. Al Afghani was born a refugee, and as a teenager, he witnessed the 1967 war that culminated in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “I lived through 1967 at the age of 15; my father has told me about the Nakba, when the Israelis expelled him from Yafa in 1948,” he said. “Still, I have never witnessed anything more horrific and cruel than this current Israeli aggression. This is genocide.”

More Than Emergency

UNRWA, the United Nations agency that’s been the primary service provider for Palestinian refugees since shortly after the establishment of the Israeli state, has struggled to keep up with the enormous humanitarian crisis in Rafah and across Gaza since the beginning of the war.

Israel launched an aggressive lobbying campaign against the relief agency several weeks ago, leveling yet unproven accusations that several agency employees were involved in the October 7 assault on Israel. Israel’s Western allies took the bait and suspended their funding. But even before the cuts, the crisis in UNRWA-run centers was dire. 

There are 15 UNRWA shelters in Rafah, set up after previous Israeli assaults and each with a capacity of about 3,000 people — a fraction of the number they are accommodating now. At one of them, a former school building with 40 classrooms that now houses some 25,000 people, the director described an untenable situation.

“We are not in a state of emergency; we find ourselves in a situation best described as a catastrophe,” said the director, who requested anonymity out of fear of being targeted by Israel.

“All the centers combined can only house 45,000 people. This falls significantly short of the over 1 million and a half people displaced from across the strip.”

Already before this week’s bombings, the crisis had forced agency staff to make dramatic decisions. At the beginning of the war, the director noted as an example, UNRWA allocated half a can of meat for each displaced person. Today, one can has to be shared among 10 people. “The conditions in the school are catastrophic,” he said. “The food we provide for the displaced is insufficient to cover even 5 percent of what they need.”

Only one doctor and one nurse are on site, and essential medicine is hard to come by, the director said. Despite that, they are doing their best to tend to people’s needs. At least 18 women have gone into labor while displaced at the school, the director said. Early on, the shelter’s staff drove them by ambulance to a hospital in Rafah, but as fuel grew scarce, many of them turned to donkey-drawn carts.

One of those women is Sahar, whose husband was killed in October while waiting in line to buy bread at a bakery Israeli forces bombed. Pregnant at the time, she fled to Rafah with her two children and made her way to the school, where she gave birth to a third. At the time, she had not heard from her parents and siblings since shortly after the war started. She now shares a classroom with 40 other women and children, and she was embarrassed because her baby wouldn’t stop crying. “I cannot find milk or diapers for him,” she said to the director.

He told her that the staff distributed one diaper at the time to stretch out supplies, but when Sahar came in, there were none left. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Sahar’s ordeal is a somber reminder that women and children are facing the brunt of Israel’s assault. They make up 70 percent of those killed, according to U.N. figures, and are at greater risk of starvation. “We can barely provide enough water for basic use,” the director said.

“I did eight years of training in disaster and crisis management but what we are currently enduring in Gaza, with Israel’s systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip, is beyond description,” he added. “No human can bear it.”

The post “Where Can We Go?”: Terror and Panic Set In as Israel Readies to Invade Rafah appeared first on The Intercept.

The comments came in a ruling in response to a lawsuit that accused President Joe Biden and senior administration officials of complicity in and failure to prevent Israel’s genocidal acts, as required by both international and U.S. law. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal organization, filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Palestinian human rights organizations and Palestinians in Gaza and in the United States. 

The judge, Jeffrey S. White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, dismissed the lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds —citing legal doctrine that prevents the judiciary from interfering in matters of foreign policy. But his strong-worded statement is unprecedented, as was his unusual decision to allow more than three hours of testimony from Palestinian plaintiffs during a powerful hearing last week, including a doctor calling into court from a Gaza hospital hallway.

During that hearing, which took place in Oakland just hours after the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel had plausibly engaged in genocide in Gaza, White described the case as the “most difficult” of his career.

“It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza, but it [is] also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope,” he wrote in his decision to dismiss the case. “There are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court. This is one of those cases.”

Justice Department attorneys had asked the judge to dismiss the case on a technicality, citing the jurisdictional question, but did not challenge the suit on its merits. In court last week, government lawyers did not cross-examine witnesses, with the exception of a scholar of the Holocaust who testified that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. 

At a press briefing on Thursday afternoon, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller declined to comment on the lawsuit and the judge’s ruling but said that “it remains our conclusion that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.”

Brad Parker, a senior adviser at Defense for Children International Palestine, one of the two organizational plaintiffs in the case, said that the decision was “disappointing,” but that the judge’s findings — and the fact that such a hearing could take place in a U.S. courtroom in the first place — were of “significant, historic meaning.”

“We know that U.S. weapons are integral in the genocide.”

“We know that U.S. weapons are integral in the genocide that we’re documenting as a Palestinian human rights organization,” Parker told The Intercept. “But similar to the historic ICJ decision and the increasing recognition that what Israel is carrying out is a genocide and the U.S. is complicit in those genocidal acts, I think the strong language from a U.S. federal court judge increasingly works to isolate Israel’s actions and also bring pressure on the Biden administration to change course.” 

“It’s clear what President Biden’s complicity is in the destruction of Palestinian life,” Parker added. “And we’re committed to doing everything that we can to end that complicity, and ultimately end the genocide.” 

Next Steps 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs responded to the ruling by stressing the judge’s “historic rebuke” of U.S. government support for Israeli crimes. They also disputed the court’s jurisdictional finding, indicating an argument for a potential appeal or request for the case to be reconsidered.

Ahmed Abofoul, a Palestinian attorney at Al Haq, the second organizational plaintiff, testified in court last week about the killing of more than 80 of his relatives since the beginning of the war. During a press conference on Thursday, he said that the dismissal on a technicality “doesn’t mean that this was not a victory.”

“The judge acknowledged that genocide is being committed,” Abpfoul said, “and basically what he was saying is just that his hands are tied.” 

Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at CCR and lead counsel on the case, said, “The legal conclusions are there: The U.S. is clearly on notice that its actions are in violation of both international and domestic law.”

In his opinion, White cited an earlier suit, also brought by CCR, against Caterpillar, the manufacturer that provided the bulldozer used by an Israeli soldier to kill American peace activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003. That case was also dismissed on the basis that policy decisions are exempt from judicial review, with an appeals court upholding the dismissal. CCR attorneys argued that their case against the Biden administration is different, pledging to explore all legal avenues. 

“There is a legal distinction,” Gallagher said during the event on Thursday. The Biden administration’s support for the war in Gaza is more than just “rubber-stamping or approving the use of foreign military financing for a direct commercial sale,” she said. “We have the president of the United States knowing that there is an ongoing genocide and continuing to provide ‘unflagging support’ to Israel.” 

Still, Gallagher implied that the lawsuit against Caterpillar could provide a road map for future legal action. “Companies are now on notice because of the ICJ judgment and the U.S. court judgment if they weren’t before, which they should have been. Those companies also have obligations to not further the genocide by continuing to sell and supply weapons that are being used to kill Palestinians every day.” 

The post After Historic Ruling, Lawyers Vow to Keep Fighting Biden Over Complicity in Gaza Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

The arguments came in a lawsuit that the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, filed in November against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, charging them with complicity and failure to prevent the “unfolding genocide” in the occupied strip. Testifying either in person at the Oakland, California, courthouse or remotely from Palestine, the plaintiffs spoke for nearly three hours about the deliberate devastation wrought by Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks. 

The hearing commenced hours after the International Court of Justice in The Hague found that it’s plausible that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza, in a case brought by South Africa. While the United Nations court fell short of ordering an immediate ceasefire, a panel of judges delivered a historic set of rulings and denied Israel’s request to dismiss the case. A final resolution in that case is expected to take years.

Lawyers involved with the lawsuit playing out in federal court said that the ICJ ruling bolsters their case. Their lawsuit argues that Biden, Blinken, and Austin are liable under U.S. law for failing to uphold their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza. In Oakland, dozens of people lined up outside the courthouse hours before the hearing on Friday, according to organizers on the ground, while the Zoom stream reached its capacity of 1,000 people tuning in.

The Biden administration has maintained that genocide allegations against Israel are “meritless” and “unhelpful” while on Friday, U.S. government attorneys argued the court has no standing to decide on what they say is a matter of foreign policy. Plaintiffs meanwhile, including several Palestinian Americans, spoke powerfully about the need for the U.S. government to take immediate action to save lives. 

In the last three months, Israel’s has killed at least 25,000 Palestinians — one in every 100 residents of Gaza. 

Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian American writer and one of the plaintiffs in the case, described her neighborhood being reduced to “a large pile of sand” and the killing of dozens of her relatives, including some who were buried in mass graves. 

“My family is being killed on my dime,” she told the court. “President Biden could, with one phone call, put an end to this.” 

Questions of Law

At the hearing, U.S. Judge Jeffrey S. White went to some length to state the impact of Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians and the U.S. government’s support for it but indicated the case might ultimately hinge on questions of jurisdiction. 

“The Palestinian people are living in fear and without food, medical care, clean water, or sufficient humanitarian aid. Defendants — the president of the United States and his secretaries of state and defense — have provided substantial military, financial, and diplomatic support to Israel,” he said. 

“However, the primary concern for this court is the limitation of its own jurisdictional reach.” 

He later described the case as one of the “the most difficult” of his career. “You have been seen, you have been heard by this court,” he told the plaintiffs. “I’m going to take it extremely seriously.”

CCR and Justice Department attorneys deliberated for more than an hour about the court’s standing to hear the case. Attorneys for the plaintiffs referenced a different legal case accusing Russia of violating the Genocide Convention in Ukraine, which the U.S. government has supported, to point to the Biden administration’s awareness of its responsibility to take steps to prevent genocide.

Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at CCR, stressed that the case is not a “wholesale challenge to U.S. military support to Israel.” 

“This case does not present the court with a political question,” she added. “These are not questions of policy. These are questions of law.”

Justice Department attorney Jean Lin, for her part, referenced a legal concept known as the “political question doctrine” to argue the court has no authority over foreign policy matters. “It’s a long-standing doctrine that the court has no jurisdiction to enjoin the president in his exercise of official duties,” she said.

“This court is not the proper forum,” she said in her closing remarks.

“Judges and courts have roles to play in enforcing and making real this duty that all of us in this world have to prevent a genocide,” CCR senior attorney Pamela Spees said in her closing remarks. “And the government’s only response is to say to this court that it can’t even engage with the question.”

“Everything Has Been Destroyed” 

The legal argument was followed by nearly three hours of testimony by the plaintiffs, which include the human rights groups Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq, as well as Gaza residents Ahmed Abu Artema, the founder of the 2018 Great March of Return; Omar Al-Najjar, a 24-year-old doctor; and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh, all of whom have lost many relatives since the war started. The plaintiffs also include Palestinian Americans whose families in Gaza have been subjected to a relentless bombing campaign by Israel.

Al-Najjar called into the hearing from a hospital hallway in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Wearing scrubs, he described a medical infrastructure that is overwhelmed and on the brink of collapse, heavy shelling and gun fighting near medical facilities, and medical workers coming under attack in areas the Israeli military had declared safe. 

“I have lost everything in this war … I have nothing but my grief,” he told the court. “This is what Israel and its supporters have done to us.” 

Ahmed Abofoul, a Palestinian lawyer and legal researcher at Al-Haq, testified from the courthouse that he lost 60 relatives on his father’s side of the family alone, 15 in a single airstrike, and that many of their bodies remain under the rubble. His cousin, he said, has been unable to retrieve the bodies of his five children, as the Israeli military fires at him whenever he tries to approach his destroyed home. Abofoul described not being able to get in touch with some family members after the war started and other relatives, including children, with no access to food and water. 

“People are struggling to have anything to survive on,” he said. “Those who survive the bombing most likely will not survive staying in this condition.” 

Abofoul also put the current onslaught in the context of the forced displacement of Palestinians since the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Pleading with his grandfather to evacuate to a different part of the territory after the war started, Abofoul’s relatives reassured the grandfather he would eventually return home. “That is exactly what they told me in 1948,” he responded, echoing fears by tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians that Israel is seeking to drive them out for good. 

Schools, universities, churches, and even Gaza’s archives were destroyed in the ongoing war, Abofoul added. “Everything has been destroyed,” he said, “The Gaza that we know no longer exists.” 

El-Haddad, the writer, told the court that she felt an obligation as an American to bring the lawsuit against the Biden administration and that hearing “our president not only actively support this, but cast doubt on the deaths of my family members and other college students in Gaza” had made her feel “dehumanized” and “completely invisible.”

“I felt it was my duty as an American whose taxes and government have been directly responsible for the deaths of my family,” she added. “My government is complicit in this ongoing genocide against my family and the destruction of everything that I knew and I loved.”

Barry Trachtenberg, a professor of Jewish history and author of two books about the Holocaust, testified as an expert witness in the case – over repeated objections from Justice Department attorneys. When he filed his declaration in the case in November, he said, some 11,000 Palestinians had been killed. Today, that number is far greater.

“Everything that we feared and more is unfolding,” he said, noting that often, legal actions about genocide happen long after the fact. “What makes this situation so unique is that we’re watching the genocide unfold as we speak. And we’re in this incredibly unique position where we can actually intervene to stop it using the mechanisms of international law that are available to us.”

A Historic Case 

CCR’s 89-page complaint lays out, in painstaking detail, statements of genocidal intent by Israeli officials, paired with affirmations by U.S. officials that they would back Israel’s war effort with every tool at their disposal. 

“The highest level of Israel’s senior political and military leadership made statements on October 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, laying out that they intended, in effect, to destroy Gaza,” Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at CCR and one of the lead attorneys on the case, said on Intercepted last week. “And as the statements of intent were being made, senior levels of the United States government — including President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin — were likewise making declarations about their intentions in the coming days, weeks, months … And that was to give unconditional and complete support to Israel.”

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined as the intention to destroy or partially destroy a group of people based on their ethnic, religious, racial, or national identity, either by direct killing or by the creation of conditions making life impossible. While Israel has for decades flouted international law standards and ignored rebukes, including by the ICJ, the Israeli government’s actions in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks were “qualitatively different,” Gallagher said. 

Two days after the attacks, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered mass war crimes when he announced “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said then, a threat that Israel has since largely delivered on. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

As Israel unleashed an onslaught that quickly outpaced any recent conflicts for the number and pace of deaths, human rights groups warned the Biden administration that its unconditional support for Israel risked making it complicit in the crime of genocide.

Josh Paul, a former senior State Department official who resigned over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza and filed a declaration in support of the CCR case, said on Friday morning, “Since October 7th, we’ve seen a sharp increase in the transfer of arms to Israel both through the speeding up of previously authorized transfers and through the ramming through Congress of so-called emergency sales of thousands of rounds of tanks, ammunition, and alternative shells.”

“The U.S. has likely transferred munitions totaling in the tens of thousands since October 7 to Israel,” he added, speaking at a briefing CCR hosted on Friday morning. “This also demonstrates, I think, the significant amount of leverage that we have if we wanted to push Israel to end or curtail its operations in Gaza.”

“None of this could be done without the U.S. government,” echoed Ata Hindi, a lawyer who helped draft an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit on behalf of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, at the event preceding the hearing. “It’s for the United States to say whether or not, through its weapons in particular, whether or not this genocide continues.” 

The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, he noted, was “drowned” in complaints by Palestinian Americans who accused the U.S. government of discriminating against them. “It’s unfortunate to see how little the U.S. government in particular has paid attention to these American citizens and their families,” said Hindi. “And we hope that the court will do something to change that.” 

The lawsuit has garnered significant international attention, with 77 legal and civil society groups from around the world backing it in a late December briefing to the court. They argued that the U.S. is violating its duties under international law to prevent and not be complicit in genocide, contributing to the erosion of “long and widely-held norms of international law,” like the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The U.S. federal case is one of a number of legal efforts stemming from Israel’s war on Gaza. In another U.S. lawsuit, Palestinian Americans have accused the administration of failing to protect U.S. citizens in Gaza and denying them equal protection, a constitutional right. That lawsuit argues that U.S. officials have not done as much to evacuate U.S. citizens trapped in Gaza as they did for Israeli Americans. 

One-third of Americans — and nearly half of the country’s Democrats — believe Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

In addition to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the ICJ, a group of South African lawyers have also indicated their intent, pending the court’s early rulings, to bring civil action against the U.S. and British governments over their support for Israel’s actions. Other countries have also filed separate complaints against Israel before the ICJ. 

The cascading cases against Israel are a remarkable development for a country that has for decades acted with impunity, largely thanks to unwavering U.S. support. In a further sign of waning support, a poll released this week issued its own verdict: One-third of Americans — and nearly half of the country’s Democrats — believe Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

Correction: January 30, 2024
This article was corrected to clarify that Ukraine’s case against Russia deals with an alleged violation of the Genocide Convention.

The post “I Have Lost Everything”: In Federal Court, Palestinians Accuse Biden of Complicity in Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

On multiple occasions, Biden administration officials have said that Gaza, which was ruled by the PA before Hamas took over in 2007, should be reconnected to the West Bank “under a revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority.” In a memo circulated to foreign diplomats this month, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh criticized the U.S. plan, arguing that “much of the current talk about the need to revitalise the Authority … is really just a cover for the failure of international community [to commit] Israel to a political solution.” Earlier, he was even more blunt: Shtayyeh said in November that PA officials would not be going to Gaza “on an Israeli military tank.”

Shtayyeh’s comment was rare recognition by a senior PA official of the authority’s overwhelming lack of support among Palestinians, who largely view their leadership as an illegitimate and increasingly authoritarian “subcontractor” for Israel’s occupation. In particular, the U.S.-backed Palestinian security forces’ role in the repression of Palestinian resistance and the PA’s security coordination with Israel — under a U.S.-managed arrangement — have long been a key factor in Palestinians’ anger at their representatives. Their disillusionment has only been exacerbated in recent years as PA forces have carried out a series of violent crackdowns, detaining, and often abusing, not only those perceived to pose a threat to Israel’s security but also critics of the PA itself, including hundreds of peaceful demonstrators.

Human rights advocates caution that American support for PA forces has enabled their growing culture of impunity. “When they do anything, they know the Americans are behind them and can protect them,” said Shawan Jabareen, director of Palestinian human rights group Al Haq, which has documented torture and other abuses by Palestinian security forces.

The PA’s role in preserving Israel’s interests in the West Bank is precisely why the prospect of their return to Gaza has engendered much skepticism among Palestinians, who fear the arrangement would only outsource Israel’s repression, rather than offer them a legitimate representative to advocate for their interests.

“People know the PA is not going to liberate the place,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and former negotiator with the Palestine Liberation Organization, noting that confidence in the authority has deteriorated even further since Israel launched its war on Gaza. “But they do expect representation.”

“Post October 7, the PA was nowhere to be found. They haven’t been representing,” she added. “So when people talk about this revitalized PA, we have no idea what they’re talking about. What does it mean to revitalize it? The only thing that I can think that it means is more money going to the security forces, more money going to suppress.”

Liberation vs. Stability

The Palestinian security forces were established as part of the Oslo negotiations in the mid-1990s in lieu of a military for what was to be a Palestinian sovereign state. A combination of police, intelligence, and civil defense bodies funded and trained by the U.S. and European countries, PA forces carry out a range of law enforcement functions, many in coordination with their Israeli counterparts.

That coordination, which Palestinian leaders have repeatedly threatened to end during escalations in Israeli violence, is most controversial when Palestinian forces are deployed to target groups and individuals that Israel accuses of “terrorism.” 

“The security coordination is one of the chief obstacles to achieving Palestinian liberation,” Fadi Quran, a Palestinian activist and political analyst who has repeatedly been arrested by Palestinian security forces for participating in protests critical of the PA, told The Intercept in an interview last year. “This is a very sophisticated system of domination and control that was designed within Palestinian society. It’s a very systematic process of seeking to get Palestinians to help control their people.” 

The tension between the Palestinian public’s political aspirations and Palestinian forces’ role in undermining them was on display at a security forces base in the West Bank city of Jericho last year. During a two-day visit before the war started, The Intercept spoke with several recruits and mid-level officials at the base on condition of anonymity, as the visit was not authorized by senior leadership.

Young recruits in training spoke fervently of their commitment to the Palestinian national cause and dismissed questions about the PA’s contributions to maintaining the occupation. At the base, they practiced drills while chanting nationalist songs and slogans. On their barracks, hand-painted murals celebrated PA President Mahmoud Abbas and late PLO leader Yasser Arafat but also paid tribute to armed resistance and the Lions’ Den, a West Bank-based militant group that emerged in recent years and quickly became a primary target of the Israeli military. The rhetoric at the base echoed a time, during the Second Intifada of the early 2000s, when members of the Palestinian security forces joined militant groups in the fighting against the Israeli military.

In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the last major Palestinian uprising against Israel, the U.S. and European countries sought to regain control by investing heavily in economic and security stability in the occupied territories, seeking to depoliticize Palestinian forces, and indefinitely postponing a final resolution to the conflict.

“We work for stabilization,” Giuliano Politi, a member of the Italian Carabinieri, a paramilitary force, who instructed PA recruits at the Jericho base on protection for official figures, basic shooting, and public order. “Everything is aimed at that.”

“The liberation struggle is translated to them as this kind of maintaining peace and order of their own people.”

An overwhelming majority of the security forces’ leadership are affiliated with Fatah, the political party that’s ruled the West Bank since the Oslo Accords. Many are former fighters and political prisoners, giving them an aura of legitimacy with younger generations. But as an institution, the PA forces have traded a commitment to liberating the territories from occupation to maintaining order.

“To be fair to the younger recruits, they do when they enter believe that this is what their goal is,” said Quran, the activist. “People come in with this assumption that they’re going to be part of the liberation struggle, but then the liberation struggle is translated to them as this kind of maintaining peace and order of their own people.”

That’s in part due to pressure from the foreign governments funding the PA — particularly the U.S., which has heavily invested in the Palestinian security sector. The authority is also often at the mercy of Israel, which has long viewed the PA as a greater political threat than Hamas. The PA is the primary economic engine in Palestine, employing at least 150,000 people and serving as livelihood to some 942,000, including in Gaza. But to pay their salaries, the PA is at the mercy of foreign donors and Israel, which controls the flow of funds to the PA and frequently withholds them to exert pressure on the authority.

“They’re actually a crucial part to the continuing occupation,” said Quran. “Because without 150,000 young Palestinians being mobilized against their own people, for the sake of Israel’s security, if you had those 150,000 people mobilized for other activities that focus on Palestinian liberation, you’d have a much different ballgame, a much different type of struggle on the ground.”

“Security for Israel”

Some leaders of the PA security forces acknowledge the contradiction of their role maintaining order in the West Bank but insist the alternative would be catastrophic. “[Israel] will destroy our infrastructure again, destroy our institutions again, destroy our forces again — they can do that easily,” a senior member of the PA forces told The Intercept. “They will destroy everything we have built in the last 30 years.”

The official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with journalists, added that Palestinian forces were “standing on the edge of a sword.”

The Israelis “always try their best to provoke us to react violently so they can justify their crimes.”

“We are under huge pressure by the Israelis; they always try their best to provoke us to react violently so they can justify their crimes,” he said. “They are trying all the time to prove that we are a failure and cannot keep law and order and cannot keep the security of the place we’re supposed to be responsible for, to justify their daily incursions and killings of our people.”

In practice, that has meant PA forces standing down in the face of growing settler violence, and as the Israeli military has increasingly invaded parts of the West Bank that are nominally under the security control of the PA. It’s also led to the emergence of new militant groups seeking to fill the void left by PA forces. “If no protection is provided to you from a third party, from your own government, or from the occupying power,” said Jabareen, of Al Haq, “you will try to look for your own ways to protect yourself.”

The PA security forces’ repression of dissent has further cost them legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian public. In October, as anger mounted at Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestinian security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades at protesters in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Such crackdowns have grown more frequent in recent years, and reached a peak in the aftermath of Palestinian security forces’ 2021 killing of Nizar Banat, an outspoken critic of Palestinian leadership.

“Nizar wanted freedom for the Palestinian people, and in his view, the Palestinian people had lost that freedom for two reasons: Mahmoud Abbas and the PA and Israel,” Nizar’s brother Ghassan Banat told The Intercept at his office in Hebron, which he had turned into a shrine filled with photos and quotes from his late brother. “He said we must free ourselves of the PA, and then we must work together to free ourselves from Israel. And so the PA killed him.” 

“The PA security forces are not there for the security of Palestinians,” Banat said. “They are security for Israel.”

The post For Palestinians, U.S. Talk of a “Revitalized” PA in Gaza Is Code for Outsourced Oppression appeared first on The Intercept.

Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the dire warning to President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a 44-page emergency brief on Wednesday, on the heels of Biden’s trip to the Middle East. There, Biden reiterated his administration’s unwavering support for Israel — even as the Israeli government wages an unprecedented bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip in retaliation for a horrific attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israeli citizens.

“Israel’s mass bombings and denial of food, water, and electricity are calculated to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza,” Katherine Gallagher, senior attorney with CCR and a legal representative for victims in the pending ICC investigation in Palestine, told The Intercept. “U.S. officials can be held responsible for their failure to prevent Israel’s unfolding genocide, as well as for their complicity, by encouraging it and materially supporting it.”

“We recognize that we make serious charges in this document — but they are not unfounded,” she added. “There is a credible basis for these claims.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying, “As a general matter, we don’t offer public evaluations of reports or briefs by outside groups.” The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, the U.S. vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned all violence against civilians and urged humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. The U.S. opposed the resolution because it did not reference Israel’s right to defend itself.

Israel has invoked that right in its assault on Gaza, which has already killed more than 4,200 Palestinians and displaced more than 1 million. But collective punishment — including measures like Israel’s blockade on fuel, food, and electricity into the occupied territory — and the indiscriminate targeting of civilians constitute war crimes under international law. A number of legal experts have argued the actions may also amount to crimes against humanity and genocide, as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. On Thursday, a panel of U.N. experts issued a separate statement that condemned the bombings of schools and hospitals in Gaza as crimes against humanity and warned that there is a risk the crimes might escalate to genocide.

“We are sounding the alarm: There is an ongoing campaign by Israel resulting in crimes against humanity in Gaza,” the experts wrote. “Considering statements made by Israeli political leaders and their allies, accompanied by military action in Gaza and escalation of arrests and killing in the West Bank, there is also a risk of genocide against the [Palestinian] people.”

While warnings about a potential genocide have grown more numerous in recent days, some international law experts cautioned that the war crimes and crimes against humanity — including the crime of apartheid — of which Israel has long been accused are no less serious. As one international law scholar put it: “[T]here is no hierarchy of international crimes.” The problem is that Israel has not been held accountable for any of its past crimes, making accountability for its ongoing offensive unlikely.

Under international law, the crime of genocide implicates not only those carrying out the crime, but also those complicit in it, including by “aiding and abetting.”

“Rather than continuing to enable Israeli crimes, the U.S. should pressure Israel to stop its military operations and secure a ceasefire.”

According to the CCR brief, Israel is attempting to commit, if not already committing, the crime of genocide, specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The U.S. government is failing to uphold its obligation to prevent a genocide from happening, the brief adds. Additionally, there is a “plausible and credible case” to be made that ongoing and unconditional U.S. military, diplomatic, and political support for Israel’s military intervention against the people of Gaza may make it complicit in the genocide under international law. (The U.S. has its own version of the law, making it a crime for any U.S. citizen — including the president — to commit, attempt, or incite genocide.)

“Rather than continuing to enable Israeli crimes, the U.S. should pressure Israel to stop its military operations and secure a ceasefire, and to ensure the provision of urgently needed humanitarian assistance and basic necessities for life to Palestinians in Gaza,” Gallagher said.

The CCR briefing also calls on the government to address the root causes behind the recent violence, including Israel’s 16-year siege on Gaza, its 56-year-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, “and the apartheid regime across all of historic Palestine.”

Unconditional Support

As Israel continues to plan for a ground invasion of Gaza, the U.S. sent it a shipment of armored vehicles on Thursday, following shipments of U.S-made advanced weaponry earlier this month. Biden is expected to argue for greater military support for Israel in a Thursday night address.

Israel has historically been the largest recipient of U.S. military assistance — to the tune of $158 billion since the country’s establishment in 1948. That funding has increasingly come under scrutiny in the U.S., including following Israeli forces’ killings of several U.S. citizens. On Wednesday, a senior State Department official resigned from his post, citing the U.S. government’s ongoing provision of lethal arms to Israel.

“I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse,” Josh Paul, the former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, wrote in a letter. “If we want a world shaped by what we perceive to be our values, it is only by conditioning strategic imperatives by moral ones, by holding our partners, and above all by holding ourselves, to those values, that we will see it.”

Asked about the resignation on Thursday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “We have made very clear that we strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, we’re going to continue providing the security assistance that they need to defend themselves.”

This week, legal experts also testified before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, specifically calling on members of the international body to urgently address the unfolding crimes and particularly hold the U.S. accountable for its role in them.

“If such a body fails in this particular genocidal moment to reassert its commitment to the right to life our collective humanity will be profoundly diminished,” Ahmad Abuznaid, a human rights lawyer and director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told the committee.

He also warned against the rippling effects of U.S. support for Israel and dehumanization of Palestinians, referring to the killing of a 6-year-old in Chicago last week. “As U.S. politicians and mainstream media beat the war drums for genocide, repeating dehumanizing rhetoric and misinformation about our people, that has not only emboldened Israel’s genocidal acts but also had alarming consequences in the U.S.”

The post Going All-In for Israel May Make Biden Complicit in Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

Herzog’s remarks represent Israeli policymakers’ longtime conflation of Hamas with all Palestinians in Gaza and often with all Palestinians everywhere. Such attitudes have hardened in the past week. The Israel Defense Forces, for example, posted that “you either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.” Many U.S. politicians have issued similar claims. “Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Hamas, in that sense, has been a convenient presence for Israel, whose leaders have favored the militant group over the Palestinian Authority, or PA, the pseudo-government established during the Oslo peace process to administer the Palestinian territories until the details of a sovereign Palestinian state could be negotiated. While Hamas has been enemy No. 1 in Israeli rhetoric for years, offering a cover for Israel to maintain its blockade and periodically kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it has also offered Israel an alibi to avoid abiding by its supposed commitment to Palestinian statehood.

Israeli leaders seemed to believe this strategic calculation could hold indefinitely.

“They have determined that this situation of constant political instability and violence is preferable over making some kind of larger political agreement that would actually lead to a final status outcome to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Palestinian political analyst Yousef Munayyer told The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast this week. “And they’ve chosen this path over that, and I think we are seeing the results of that on full display in recent days.”

Indeed, some Israeli officials have at times been explicit about their preference for Hamas over the PA. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most extremist members of the most extremist Israeli government coalition to date, offered an unusually frank assessment of the government’s approach to Hamas in a 2015 interview.

“The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset,” Smotrich said at the time. “It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.”

The comments came as the PA, whose authority was effectively limited to the West Bank after a 2007 split with Hamas, was making strides on the international scene, winning U.N. recognition of Palestine and an ICC probe of Israeli crimes in Palestine. Israeli officials dubbed those efforts “diplomatic terrorism,” a more difficult sell to the rest of the world than the terrorism label they apply to Hamas.

Lamenting the “international delegitimization” of Israel, Smotrich talked openly about Israel’s need for Hamas to counter the diplomatic successes of the PA. “Abu Mazen is beating us in significant spaces,” he said in the interview, referring to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. “And Hamas at this point, in my opinion, will be an asset.” Elsewhere, as The Intercept recently reported, he argued that the PA was causing “great harm to Israel in international forums, and it is better for Israel to work towards its collapse.”

Others have long held the same view but expressed it more discreetly. A 2007 diplomatic cable reveals that’s been Israel’s tacit position since Hamas took control of Gaza. According to the cable, then-Israel Defense Forces intelligence chief Amos Yadlin — who this week said that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe” — said at the time that “Israel would be ‘happy’ if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” That is effectively what happened.

A Convenient Bogeyman

Israel has illegally occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967. For decades, it maintained both settlements and a regular military presence inside Gaza, as it continues to do in the other territories it occupies. That changed in 2005, when Israel dismantled the settlements in Gaza, withdrew the military, and embarked on what it called a policy of “disengagement.” Since then, Israel has often argued that it is no longer occupying the strip — even as it controls virtually all access of people and goods in and out of it. (Gaza is still considered occupied under international law, given Israel’s near-total domination over it, as evidenced this week by the announcement that it would cut off electricity, fuel, and food from the strip following Hamas’s attack.)

The so-called disengagement from Gaza, which was widely unpopular among some Israelis and has since fueled the growth of Israel’s far-right settler movement, was a strategic maneuver. “When the Israeli government decided to quote unquote disengage from Gaza, [it] effectively meant to change the nature of their occupation of Gaza,” Munayyer said, noting that adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had equated the withdrawal to “formaldehyde” for the peace process.

“It brings the idea of a peace deal to an end,” Munayyer added. “And, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite being opposed to disengagement at the time, has made a career out of saying, ‘If we withdraw from the West Bank, look at Gaza. That’s what we’re going to get.’”

Then, in 2006, Hamas — which is not just a militant group, but also one of the two largest political parties in Palestine — won a decisive majority in the Palestinian legislative election. Its victory was in large part a response to Palestinians’ frustrations with Fatah, the party that had governed the territories since Oslo and that many Palestinians viewed as corrupt. To this day, many Palestinians blame the PA for overseeing the collapse of their hopes for sovereignty and capitulating to Israel’s tightening occupation. 

At the time, some saw Hamas’s political victory as an opportunity for the party to distance itself from its more militant element. But the democratic victory was fiercely rejected by Israel and the United States. In 2007, after several failed bids at a unity government, a U.S.-backed coup — carried out in conjunction with Fatah — unseated Hamas. In the bloody civil strife that followed, Hamas ceded the West Bank and seized control of Gaza by force, effectively bifurcating Palestinian political authority between the two territories, already physically divided by Israel’s occupation.

“The U.S. directly intervened and tried to initiate a regime change,” Tareq Baconi, board secretary of the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told The Intercept. “There was a moment in time when Hamas was developing a political platform that could have ended us in a very different position. That was entirely blocked by the Americans, primarily the Bush administration. So the idea that this is something that was inevitable is untrue, and it removes American responsibility in landing us wherever we’re at.”

A Backfiring Strategy

Until last weekend, Israeli officials seemed to believe that the delicate balance with Hamas could last forever. The government’s strategy was to periodically “mow the grass” to repress Hamas’s militant efforts through regular ground invasions and bombing campaigns that have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians over the years.

“On the one hand, yes, Hamas, and Hamas’s governance of the Gaza Strip specifically, has been a great asset, mainly because it allowed Israel to believe that it can put two million Palestinians in a cage,” said Baconi. “There would be escalations of violence every now and then, but fundamentally, [Israel] would have successfully severed the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. And it could have done that only by having Hamas in power because it can claim that there’s this bloodthirsty terrorist organization that’s bent on its destruction that justifies the blockade and make the world forget that the blockade and efforts to strangulate Gaza started well before Hamas was even established.”

“In that sense,” Baconi said, “Hamas became a perfect excuse for Israel.”

But the strategy backfired. Regardless of the outcome of Israel’s quest for vengeance, Baconi said, the time for Israel viewing Hamas as an asset is over, as is the sense that a solution to the conflict can be indefinitely postponed. 

“There’s a before and after. I think that before, there was the idea that the Palestinians have been pacified and that Israeli apartheid is invincible, and now both of those things have shattered,” said Baconi. “Even if no one knows where we go from here — and the genocidal language is frightening — wherever we go, I just don’t think there’s a return to the status quo of thinking, ‘We can just continue to manage the Palestinians.’”

“Unfortunately, it’s going to unleash a lot more violence before they recognize and come to terms with what they aren’t able to see now,” he added, “which is that this is a political problem.”

The post Before They Vowed to Annihilate Hamas, Israeli Officials Considered It an Asset appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israel Defense Forces could not confirm a horrific claim that Hamas beheaded babies during a weekend assault, a spokesperson for the military told The Intercept on Tuesday. The claim went viral, becoming a headline-grabbing aspect of a massacre that left more than 1,000 Israelis dead.

“Women, children, toddlers, and elderly were brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action and we are we are [sic] aware of the heinous acts Hamas is capable of,” the spokesperson wrote in response to questions from The Intercept about the viral reports. “We cannot confirm it officially, but you can assume it happened and believe the report,” she reiterated in a follow-up phone call.

Despite the IDF’s inability to confirm the report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson Tal Heinrich repeated it on Wednesday — a window into how unverified reports become part of the historical record.

The claim about beheaded babies is the latest in a series of harrowing reports that have emerged over the last few days while Israeli forces regained control of communities attacked by Hamas militants. As Israeli officials responded by pledging vengeance and launching a mass bombing campaign over 2 million Palestinians living in the besieged Gaza Strip, reports of Hamas crimes against civilians fueled rage among the public, elected officials, and policymakers.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I never really thought that I would see…have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” only for the White House to later clarify that the president had not seen such photos and was basing his remarks on Heinrich’s comments and media reports. 

Claims that Hamas militants raped several Israeli women have also gone viral, though the allegation has not been thoroughly substantiated, and at least one news outlet has retracted a reference to it. In his remarks on Tuesday, Biden said that women had been “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.” 

The viral spread of dubious information at the same pace as credible reports has become a staple of modern warfare, exacerbated over the last year by the transformation of Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk. Once an important source for breaking news, Musk’s changes to the platform’s verification requirements have made it difficult to separate fact from fiction — making it all the more important for journalists and public officials to vet the information before repeating it. 

Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which tracks and studies how nonfactual narratives propagate online, said that viral lies and misconceptions tend to balloon during or in the wake of a war or other emergencies, reflecting a spike in concern and greater appetite for information. “People share content that they find compelling,” she said. “In crisis situations, often the viral content includes a lot of rumors — it’s unverified material right now, and it may turn out to be true.” 

As uncorroborated reports are broadcast alongside legitimate, equally horrific ones, the consequences of the rapidly escalating rhetoric are all too real and dangerous. 

“It’s been about four days since this incredible and tragic escalation of violence and the level of misinformation — even disinformation — seems near unprecedented,” media critic Sana Saeed told The Intercept. “We have seen journalists, in particular, spread unverified information that is being used to justify Israeli and even American calls and actions to annihilate an entire population.” 

“From unsubstantiated accusations of Palestinian fighters raping Israeli women to unsubstantiated accusations of Palestinian fighters beheading babies: These claims have spread like wildfire especially thanks to many journalists who are repeating things without any semblance of critical thinking or journalistic caution.” 

“What’s at stake here is literal human life,” Saeed added. “But Palestinian life matters so little, that spreading incendiary information that justifies Israeli war crimes isn’t a concern for those tasked to punch up to power by virtue of being journalists.”

Gunshots and blood stains are seen on a door and walls of a house where civilians were killed days earlier in an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza, on Oct. 10, 2023, in Kfar Aza, Israel.

Unverified Reports

The claim about beheaded babies, which spread quickly online and was repeated by prominent journalists and politicians, originated with reporters who visited the community of Kfar Aza on Tuesday, the site of a horrific massacre of civilians by Hamas. Reporters with i24NEWS, an Israeli TV network, were among the first to report the claim, which they attributed to soldiers who recovered the bodies of victims. The Turkish news agency Anadolu first reported on Tuesday that the IDF would not confirm the claim. The IDF later told other outlets that it would not confirm the reports because it is “disrespectful for the dead.” 

According to Oren Ziv, a journalist who participated in the tour, “journalists were allowed to speak to the hundreds of soldiers on site, without the supervision of the army’s spokesperson team.” 

The IDF spokesperson told The Intercept that a soldier told journalists “that this is what he saw” but that the military had not independently confirmed the claim. 

“When we were there, all the bodies were in body bags. … We couldn’t see it with our own eyes, but obviously, it happened. We cannot confirm it officially from the military but you have seen, I guess, videos on social media, you’ve seen girls with blood over their thighs, it’s obvious that this stuff happens.” 

“Specifically about the beheaded babies report, we cannot confirm the amount and specific place and everything like that,” the spokesperson added. “There have been so many horrible situations and we don’t have time, and we’re currently busy fighting and defending our country. We don’t have the time to check every report.” 

Ziv also noted that while the scene was “horrific, with dozens of bodies of Israelis murdered in their homes,” he had not seen evidence of the beheaded babies. Other reporters on the ground said that an Israeli soldier told a BBC journalist that “some of the dead had been beheaded,” while at least two other journalists later deleted tweets referencing the reports. 

“Just looked at today’s UK front pages and I am horrified by the headlines claiming ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ in Kfar Aza,” Guardian reporter Bethan McKernan tweeted on Tuesday. “Yes, many children were murdered. Yes, there were several beheadings in the attack. This claim, however, is unverified and totally irresponsible.”

The uncorroborated reports were repeated by veteran journalists and politicians, from Fox News to CNN anchors, as well as U.S. politicians from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. Fox News reporters chased Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D- Mich., the only Palestinian American in Congress, saying that “Hamas terrorists have cut off babies’ heads” and asking her to comment on “terrorists chopping off babies’ heads.” On Wednesday, the reports continued to circulate, including on major news outlets like CNN.

New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel wrote on BlueSky on Wednesday that reporters should approach such claims carefully, try to verify their origin and sourcing, and seek to corroborate them in other ways. “Save the IDF coming out with an official statement (and it hasn’t, it’s declined to confirm) or someone confirming they saw it with their own eyes,” she added, “it’s a rumor being widely shared.” 

Fog of War

Online disinformation has become ubiquitous in recent conflicts, including in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. 

On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, firsthand accounts by journalists and others on the ground in Israel and Gaza were at times drowned out by verified users of dubious legitimacy. While some claims remain disputed, X is also awash in rapidly spreading incendiary posts that are patently false, many being used to justify increasingly violent rhetoric and potentially worsening an already grisly war. 

Attempting to even measure the volume of viral falsehoods currently spreading throughout X has become difficult, if not impossible, due to changes implemented under the new ownership of Musk. “It’s very difficult for academic research teams to gauge the volume question on X at this point because many, including us, no longer have API access,” said DiResta, of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Under X’s prior ownership, when the company was still known as Twitter, it provided research organizations like Stanford’s with software access to track public user activity on the platform, which made it easier to track how a hoax or online myth spreads.

DiResta said that X’s decision to sell account verification, which previously indicated some official association with an organization or news outlet, has exacerbated the trade in wartime rumors. “As curation algorithms have changed on Twitter/X, current blue checks” — those who purchased verification — “are prioritized in the feed and in replies,” she explained. “The composition of the blue check community has also shifted. There are many commentators, but fewer journalists.”

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, has pointed out different examples of false information spreading on the platform over the last few days, including by “multiple blue tick accounts repeating an unverified claim that had no evidence to back it up.” 

“Musk has created a fundamental issue with Twitter’s credibility in moments of crisis,” he wrote. 

On Wednesday, Bellingcat published other examples of misinformation surging online, including viral social media posts presenting years-old footage, or footage from other countries, as depicting the latest Israeli bombing of Gaza. “Misinformation is particularly nefarious in this case as it often entwines authentic information with hearsay,” the outlet wrote, “and may lead to something genuinely worthy of record — such as a military strike in an urban area — becoming associated with a viral falsehood.”

Others echoed that frustration. “As a journalist, I’ve been using social for news since, well, since that became a thing,” the journalist Barry Malone noted. “And I cannot recall ever seeing disinformation spread with such lightning speed around a big story as it is right now.”

Meanwhile, in Gaza, as besieged residents lost access to electricity and at least six journalists were killed in bombings, local writers who regularly report on life in the strip reported being unable to do so. 

“My phone and laptop have died. No electricity as we’re running out of fuel for the power generator, after Israel cut electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza,” one of them, Maha Hussaini, tweeted earlier this week. “I will be off until we find alternatives, This is what Israel wanted, to commit genocide against a silenced people.”

Update: October 12, 2023
This article was updated to note that President Joe Biden made a comment about the decapitated babies on Wednesday that the White House later walked back.

The post “Beheaded Babies” Report Spread Wide and Fast — but Israel Military Won’t Confirm It appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant used genocidal language and ordered mass war crimes in the occupied Gaza Strip on Monday in response to Hamas’s weekend assault and massacre of Israeli civilians, setting the stage for a large-scale escalation of the violence that has already led to the killing of at least 800 Israelis and more than 500 Palestinians.

Gallant said that he had ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

What Gallant ordered — the collective punishment of a civilian population — amounts to a war crime under international law, as well as potentially a crime against humanity and the crime of genocide, some international law experts have pointed out. Hamas’s massacre of civilians and taking of at least 150 hostages, whom it has reportedly threatened to execute in response to the targeting of civilians in Gaza, are also war crimes.

Hamas and Israel’s crimes against civilians, which are likely to escalate in the coming days, come after years of impunity for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. The historical lack of accountability has bred a culture of disregard for international law that directly resulted in the weekend’s violence, human rights advocates say.

“Deliberate killings of civilians, hostage-taking, and collective punishment are heinous crimes that have no justification,” Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The unlawful attacks and systematic repression that have mired the region for decades will continue, so long as human rights and accountability are disregarded.”

In the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on Saturday, the Israeli military launched a bombing campaign on Gaza. Israeli raids flattened residential buildings and targeted a densely populated refugee camp over the weekend. Humanitarian workers in the strip have also reported that hospitals are completely overwhelmed by the number of casualties and ambulances are coming under fire. A ground invasion of the occupied territory is also widely expected in the coming days.

Experts have noted that Israel’s practice of “warning” civilians — like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call on Gaza’s residents to “leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere” — is not sufficient. There is nowhere for people to seek safety in the strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, since Israel imposed an air, land, and sea blockade on the territory in 2007, effectively trapping them in. 

War crimes fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which, in 2021, opened an investigation on war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories. The investigation prompted fierce opposition by Israel and the United States — neither of which are members of the court — and it has largely stalled.

Human rights advocates quickly pointed to Gallant’s words as an “admission of intent” to commit crimes, calling on ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to take notice. But international officials’ responses to his comments were largely muted. The Biden administration has repeatedly stated its support for Israel since Saturday’s attack, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledging the U.S.’s “unwavering focus on halting the attacks by Hamas” but offering no immediate comment on Israel’s declared retaliation against Palestinian civilians.

A spokesperson for Khan’s office wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the ICC’s mandate in Palestine “is ongoing and applies to crimes committed in the current context.” The spokesperson called on those with information relevant to investigation to provide it to the office, but did not comment on Gallant’s words or on criticism that the stalling of its investigation might have contributed to recent crimes.

The Consequences of Impunity

As human rights advocates and international law experts have long warned, impunity for war crimes only leads to more. Last year, as Russia staged a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many pointed to the impunity for war crimes it committed in Syria and elsewhere and argued that the lack of accountability directly enabled similar crimes to be committed in Ukraine. The ICC, for its part, responded to Russian crimes in Ukraine by immediately dispatching investigators there, leading to charges implicating Russian leadership all the way up to President Vladimir Putin earlier this year. But there was no such response following Israeli crimes in Gaza, including after military campaigns in 2018, 2021, and 2022 that left hundreds of Palestinian civilians dead.

“If we’ve learned anything through prior escalations, it is that so long as there is impunity for serious abuses, we will continue to see more repression and shedding of civilian blood,” said Shakir. Human Rights Watch called on the ICC “to accelerate its investigation into serious crimes committed by all parties in Palestine.”

While both parties committed heinous crimes, Gallant’s call for a complete siege on Gaza revealed the underlying imbalance at play: While Hamas’s attack shocked Israelis and the world and amounted to the most serious attack on Israel in five decades, it paled in comparison to Gallant’s threat to starve 2 million trapped civilians. “This is why this never was and never will be a ‘war’ of equals,” media critic Sana Saeed noted on Monday. “Because one side has the power to entirely eliminate an entire population, to control whether they live or die.”

Gallant wasn’t the only Israeli leader to tap into genocidal rhetoric in response to Hamas’s attack, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declaring, “It’s time to be cruel,” and Knesset member Ariel Kallner calling for a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48,” a reference to the massacre and expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians upon Israel’s founding. 

Other observers denounced efforts by either party to use crimes committed by the other as justification for committing more crimes.

“Failure of one party to a conflict to abide by the laws of war does not absolve the other party from complying with the laws of war,” noted Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

“Israel certainly cannot claim the upper moral hand. Israeli government ministers now calling to kill, destroy, crush and even starve the residents of Gaza forget that this is already Israeli policy,” the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem echoed in a statement. “Intentional attacks on civilians are prohibited and unacceptable. There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” 

Palestinian and international human rights groups also called on the United Nations to address the underlying causes behind this weekend’s events.

“Israel has a horrific track record of committing war crimes with impunity in previous wars on Gaza,” Amnesty International wrote in a statement that called on Palestinian armed groups to refrain from targeting civilians. 

“The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.” 

Palestinian human rights groups echoed that call. 

“For decades, Palestinians have been calling on the international community to take concrete and meaningful actions, beyond statements of condemnation, to put an end to these violations,” Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights wrote in an open letter to the United Nations on Monday. “The international community’s lack of political will to hold Israel to account only emboldens Israel to continue committing crimes against the Palestinian people as a whole.”

Update: October 10, 2023
This article was updated to include a statement that the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor provided after publication.

The post Israel Responds to Hamas Crimes by Ordering Mass War Crimes in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

This article includes descriptions of sexual violence.

BUCHA, UKRAINE — The first Russian soldiers arrived several days after Bucha had fallen, looking for any men left behind. Anna, a widow, lived alone with her mother and teenage daughter.

“We have no men,” Anna told the soldiers, speaking in Russian. She warned her mother not to speak, worried that the soldiers would pick up on her distinct Western Ukrainian speech and mark her as a banderivka, a pejorative Russians often use to refer to Ukrainian nationalists or people they think of as such.

Anna showed the Russians her father’s death certificate, which noted that he had been born in Russia’s far east. “It’s what saved us,” she later told me.

She tried to appear welcoming, heeding a neighbor’s advice. “It’s going to be worse if you don’t let them in,” the elderly woman had warned. 

At first, the fact that they were three women alone did not feel uniquely threatening to Anna. Some of her neighbors were hiding male relatives in the basement — a far more dangerous proposition. In the early days of the occupation, Anna and her daughter, Maria, ventured into town, where they collected humanitarian aid from the local hospital and scavenged for melted ice cream in abandoned stores. They saw the mutilated bodies of men on the streets.

Anna’s friendliness seemed to appease the first group of soldiers — the “orcs,” as she and many Ukrainians routinely call Russian troops. After searching the home, they gave Anna and her daughter white armbands to wear, a signal that they had been “filtrated” and posed no threat to the occupiers. 

It wasn’t until the second group of soldiers barged into Anna’s yard when she realized that women, alone in the occupied ghost city, faced a different sort of risk. Their leader, a tall man in his early 20s, struck her temple with the back of his weapon and demanded oral sex. He also threatened to rape Maria, who was 13 at the time. Anna acquiesced to his threats to protect her daughter, she says, setting off a chain of events that would lead her own government to investigate her for collaboration with the Russian occupiers even as it eventually came to recognize her as a victim of wartime sexual violence.

I met Anna and Maria this summer at their home in Bucha: the city that first became synonymous with the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They spoke for hours, talking excitedly over one another, repeating a story they had told many times but rarely, it seemed, to a willing listener. (Anna and Maria are pseudonyms; I am withholding their full names to protect their privacy.) Well into the conflict’s second year, as Ukrainian forces seek to liberate territories that remain under Russian occupation, their story is emblematic of the fissures tearing through Ukrainian society. On the one hand, Anna’s ongoing ordeal is a product of enduring stigma around sexual violence. On the other, it reflects deep-seated social divisions that have plagued Ukraine for years and have only escalated amid the current conflict.

As survivors in each liberated town revealed fresh evidence of Russian atrocities, Ukrainians clamored for justice and nursed a growing vindictiveness against those perceived to have helped the occupiers. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set the tone, signing a sweeping and unforgiving law targeting collaborators just days after last year’s invasion.

In Bucha, neighbors summarily judged Anna’s wartime choices and shunned her as a traitor. But her interactions with Russian soldiers also posed a set of challenges for law enforcement officials, who have pledged that no crime stemming from the conflict will go unpunished. Local and international prosecutors have opened hundreds of investigations targeting Russian soldiers over wartime atrocities, including sexual violence. At the same time, local authorities have investigated thousands of Ukrainian citizens for collaboration.

At once a victim and a suspected collaborator, Anna was caught between overlapping quests for justice, facing neighbors — and a law enforcement apparatus — unable to reconcile those contradictions.

“People don’t understand exactly what collaboration is, and so they think that any contact with the enemy is collaboration.”

“At the beginning no one believed that the Russians were capable of such things. People believed that those under occupation were not exactly collaborators but were quite friendly with the Russians,” said Kateryna Ilikchiieva, Anna’s attorney, referring to the sexual assault her client described. “People don’t understand exactly what collaboration is, and so they think that any contact with the enemy is collaboration.”

The legislation passed last year further entrenched that belief. The law does not specifically prohibit relationships with Russians, but it does bar Ukrainians from sharing information that could have “serious consequences” with enemies of the state. In practice, any contact with Russians is fodder for speculation. “People understand even sex with Russian soldiers as collaboration,” said Alena Lunova, advocacy director at the Ukrainian human rights group ZMINA.

In Anna’s case, the suspicion alone prompted relentless questioning by multiple law enforcement agencies and the dismissal, for months, of her reports that she was abused. She is probably not alone; human rights advocates warn that some victims of Russian sexual violence are not speaking out because they fear being labeled and possibly investigated as collaborators.

In that sense, Anna’s story is a cautionary tale.

Anna walks in her backyard in Bucha, Ukraine, on July 6, 2023. During the occupation, Russian soldiers regularly came to her home and sexually abused her.

Pasha Giraffe

Long before Russian troops invaded Bucha in February 2022, Anna’s all-female household generated rumors. Neighbors had gossiped for years about her supposed drinking and promiscuity. They even whispered about Maria, who stopped going to school after the pandemic. The two lived with Anna’s 74-year-old mother in a disheveled house surrounded by a large, overgrown yard — on the margins of both the city and society, not caring much about what people said about them. Anna, with her blue hair and extravagant jewelry, looks at once much older than her 41 years and also like a sister to Maria, who dyes her hair bright red and wears artsy makeup.

While most of Bucha’s residents fled as the Russians advanced, Anna and her family stayed put. Her mother, who is largely bedridden, didn’t want to leave her home. Besides, they had little money and nowhere to go. They followed news of the incursion on TV until the power went out and the sky filled with smoke.

When the first group of soldiers came knocking, Maria noticed many of them seemed barely older than she was. She tried hard to seem friendly, thinking it safer.

The terror began in mid-March, when the leader of the second group of soldiers, called Pasha Giraffe by his compatriots due to his towering height, told Anna that some man would eventually have his way with Maria, so why not now. It had taken them three months to get to Ukraine, another soldier said; they missed women and “needed relaxation.” Anna insisted that Maria was a child and pleaded with the soldiers; she told them she knew they were good men. She agreed to sleep with them so they would not touch Maria. “I took everything on myself,” she told me.

After that, different groups of soldiers started coming by the house several times a day. They would announce themselves by firing shots in the air and hang around a pit fire in the yard, bragging about the people they had killed. Sometimes they would tell jokes and ask Anna and Maria to sing with them. Other times they were more menacing; Pasha Giraffe would cock his weapon when talking as if to remind them that he was in charge. Some of the soldiers were convinced that Anna and her daughter were spies for the Ukrainian army: They once burned Maria’s L.O.L. dolls — plastic figurines that are popular around the globe — because they believed that a laser light in the toys was a recording device. The soldiers were unpredictable and “twisted,” Anna and Maria said. They were always drunk, and most came to the house for sex.

Anna didn’t want her mother to know what was happening, so she never took them inside. Instead, one by one, they filed into a garage in the back of the yard, “like they were waiting in line for the bathroom,” Anna said. There were sometimes up to 10 men a day, she recalled, maybe 30 to 50 different soldiers in a two-week period.

Meanwhile, the other soldiers lingered in the yard with Maria. They put their arms around her waist, sometimes touched her legs, but never more, she said. She credits her mother, but also what she described as her wits. “I learned how to be around them,” she said. “We were playing nice, trying not to be rude. We played their game, said Zelenskyy is a jerk, Putin is great, telling them they were liberators.”

Anna believes most of the soldiers must be dead by now, but she said she would kill Pasha Giraffe herself if she could. She got to know some others by their nicknames as well: There was Sergeant, Shamil, Puppy, and Monarch, who broke down toward the end of the occupation and apologized to Anna. He didn’t know why they came to Bucha, he said, nor why they did what they did.

Her familiarity with the soldiers would come in handy, months later, when Anna was summoned to identify perpetrators of war crimes.

Maria sits in her backyard, where Russian soldiers would often linger during their occupation of Bucha, Ukraine.

Return to Bucha

Throughout the monthlong occupation of Bucha, Russian soldiers killed at least 501 people, according to a newly erected memorial that officials warn is incomplete. When the city was liberated in early April 2022 and residents returned, they found dozens of Ukrainian bodies in mass graves. There was a mound of partially burnt corpses in a shallow patch in Anna’s neighborhood. Others were scattered in the streets, some with their hands tied behind their backs, bearing signs of torture.

Not far from Anna’s home, on the leafy outskirts of the city, three brothers were found slain, at least one of whom had worked as a police officer. There was also a woman who taught the Ukrainian language, whom neighbors believe was targeted along with her husband and son for refusing to speak Russian to the occupiers. Some people who had fled found their homes looted and burnt; other homes were untouched.

Ira, a neighbor who lives down the street from Anna and asked me to use only her first name, was among those who returned. On April 4, the first day returning residents were allowed into the city, she walked through her yard, cradling her cat, as the executed bodies of her husband and two other male relatives lay on the ground nearby.

Ira remembers seeing Anna and Maria that day. Like other residents, she had heard rumors that the two were among those looting abandoned houses. Blurry photos and videos had circulated on social media, some taken surreptitiously through slits in neighbors’ fences. In one, Anna is pushing a wheelbarrow carrying a large piano. In another, she stands next to a resident whom neighbors also accused of looting; after the invasion, he killed himself because of the shame, Ira said. In yet another photo, Anna appears to be smiling.

The smile is what bothers Ira most. The day she returned to Bucha, she photographed Maria and Anna: the daughter flashing a wide grin, the mother a more subdued one. Ira said they had greeted her from down the street waving a victory sign. “We were so happy to see living souls,” Maria told me.

But to Ira and others, the fact that they were still alive, seemingly in good spirits, and that their house was mostly intact, were indisputable signs of their treason. “They are smiling at the same time that there are bodies in my yard,” she said. “Does a victim act like that?”

Rumors about Anna grew worse as more residents trickled back into the city. On social media, people referred to her as a “whore”; some asked for her address and threatened to kill her. Some neighbors said that she had been “in charge” of the looting, an offense they put on par with the actions of Russian soldiers. They also reported her to the police.

The looting is not all that neighbors blame Anna for. Some municipal workers who had stayed during the occupation and were beaten by soldiers accused her of riding in an armored vehicle with the Russians and guiding the soldiers to them. Neighbors speculated that two elderly residents, whose bodies were found piled among others not far from Anna’s home, were targeted by the Russians after yelling at her for looting. Some neighbors wondered how the soldiers had been able to identify the police officers, former members of the military, and community leaders they executed. “Someone told them,” said Ira. “Maybe it was Anna.”

As I spoke with Ira, an elderly woman stopped to listen, interjecting that the white armband the soldiers gave Anna was a sign “she was in their camp.” Another neighbor, who only gave her name as Svitlana, noted with scorn that Anna had taken to wearing earrings with a Ukrainian flag after the city was liberated. “She started working on her new image after the occupation,” said Svitlana. When residents hurled insults at her, she added, Anna told them that the Russians would be back. Her father was Russian, Svitlana stressed. “It’s in her DNA.”

Then there was the sex with soldiers. Her neighbors accused her of enjoying it. They told me about rumors that she drank with the soldiers, danced with them, and even fired their weapons.

Anna doesn’t deny taking the piano, which she said she found in the street and took into her home, with the help of some neighbors, after the Russians left the city. Many residents who remained in Bucha looted, she added, thinking that those who fled wouldn’t return. But she said she never gave the soldiers information about her neighbors, nor did she fire their weapons. She laughed when I told her what the neighbor said about her riding in an armored vehicle. And she says she spoke openly to her neighbors of having slept with soldiers, telling them she had done it to protect her daughter.

Ira doesn’t believe her. She noted that several other women in Bucha who were raped by soldiers had been killed afterward, while another woman who emerged from a cellar after the invasion looked barely alive and was unable to speak of the abuses she had survived. “That’s an example of how a person goes through violence, not smiling,” Ira said. Anna, she insisted, “either is a very good actress, or has a mental problem, but it’s not sexual violence.”

Anna next to the garage where she was sexually abused by Russian soldiers, in Bucha, Ukraine, on July 6, 2023.

Our Orcs

As Anna’s neighbors whispered, Ukrainian authorities began to investigate her. 

For several weeks, a steady stream of law enforcement officials came to her house. Throughout the visits, Anna took every chance to report the soldier’s abuses, repeatedly asking for a lie detector test to prove she was telling the truth. Nobody believed her, she said, because she wasn’t beautiful and because her clothes were dirty. “If you survived the occupation, you were a collaborator,” she said. “People who were not in the occupation just do not understand what happened here and what it was like.”

Ukrainian soldiers were the first to stop by, looking for weapons the Russians might have left behind. After that, most of the officials who came didn’t explain what they were looking for, and Anna didn’t always know what agency they were with. Photos Maria took on her phone show that several worked for the Department of Strategic Investigations, a special unit of Ukraine’s national police.

“If you survived the occupation, you were a collaborator.”

Someone from the local prosecutor’s office came too. Anna is not sure how the office learned of her ordeal but said the prosecutor, Roman Pshyk, was the only one who appeared to take her account of the sexual violence seriously. Pshyk accompanied her to a gynecological exam shortly after the city was liberated, where she was horrified to see many elderly women. In the waiting room, she thanked herself for having protected her mother in addition to Maria.

Pshyk, who has since left the office, told The Intercept that Anna’s case was one of more than 100 investigations into Russian crimes the prosecutor launched after Bucha’s liberation. “Any report of sexual harassment prompts a criminal prosecution investigation,” he said. “We can’t only take the position of the victim. We need evidence.” He added that his office had not yet heard the rumors about Anna and focused only on her testimony. He said the office later referred the case to national police and to Ukraine’s intelligence services, the SBU, though Anna didn’t hear from them until several months later.

When the local police came to her house, they found cans of spray paint in the garage and claimed that it was used by Russians to mark the homes of allies. Other officers searched every room in the house, rummaging through drawers and asking for receipts to prove that items weren’t stolen. Svitlana, the neighbor, told me that police shared photos of items they discovered at Anna’s home with other residents, in an effort to identify stolen property. The police did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Some of the officers were rough. In June last year, they demanded all the phones in the house, with no explanation. When Maria yelled at them and tried to film them, they snatched her phone and shoved and handcuffed her. Vitaliy Pelehatiy, a senior investigator with the Department of Strategic Investigations who was in charge that day, told The Intercept that officers were searching for stolen property and confiscated the phones as part of the investigation.

“They behaved like orcs,” said Anna. “Our orcs.”

A Slow Reckoning

Sexual violence goes substantially underreported virtually everywhere, but in conflict zones, the stigmatization of victims can be exacerbated. As Ukrainian forces seized back control of occupied territories last year, reports began to emerge of widespread sexual violence by Russian troops. The true toll may never be known, particularly in large swaths of the country that remain under occupation. Even in liberated areas, advocates caution that fear and persistent taboos about sexual violence make the scale of the abuses virtually impossible to assess. Often, they say, law enforcement agencies’ own biases and failures only compound the problem.

“Because it is a shame to talk about sexual violence, our society charges these people as if they’re not a victim but more of a perpetrator,” said Gyunduz Mamedov, a deputy to Ukraine’s previous prosecutor general and a rare, outspoken critic of the collaboration law. The suspicion with which sexual violence victims are routinely treated, he said, amounts to “a double victimization.”

Seven months into the war, in September 2022, Ukraine’s prosecutor general opened an office within the war crimes division to investigate and prosecute conflict-related sexual violence, or CRSV. It was a formal recognition of systemic abuses — and the fact that an array of Ukrainian agencies has failed to adequately support survivors.

It was around this time that Anna’s interactions with the authorities took a turn. “After that, they started to work on the sexual violence case more sensitively, or to work on it at all,” said Ilikchiieva, her attorney, a volunteer who was connected to Anna by a legal nonprofit earlier this year.

Late last summer, two SBU officers came to Anna’s house and handed her a document recognizing her status as a victim. In the months that followed, they asked more questions about her contacts with soldiers, and last November they finally gave her the polygraph she had been demanding for months.

In a two-hour interview with the SBU officers, she told me, they asked her a wide range of questions: Was she raped? By how many people? What about the looting? Did she work with Russia’s security services or kill anyone? It felt just as much an investigation into war crimes by the Russians as a probe into Anna herself. The officers warned her she would go to jail if she lied, and she answered all their questions. Afterward they drove her home, and a few days later an officer called to say she had passed the test.

The officers’ questions were the closest Ukrainian officials came to acknowledging that they suspected Anna of collaboration. The SBU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Anna’s lawyer said she was never notified of a formal investigation, though Anna’s various interactions with law enforcement authorities pointed in that direction. Despite the lack of formal charges against her to this day, Anna’s neighbors in Bucha have no doubt about her guilt. 

Iryna Didenko, the prosecutor in charge of conflict-related sexual violence at the office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine, acknowledged in an interview that “huge mistakes” were made in the first months after the invasion and that law enforcement officials were unprepared to deal with victims. Investigators often didn’t keep information confidential, she noted, at times sharing it widely within the community. When she came in, she took over cases involving sexual violence from other agencies and overhauled the investigative interview process. Now, there must be a woman on every team, and investigators have been instructed to speak to witnesses and victims more empathetically. Didenko launched pilot programs in Kherson and Kharkiv, territories that Ukrainian forces liberated last year, where multiagency teams were trained by international experts on best practices when dealing with conflict-related sexual violence.

Changing the culture of law enforcement, Didenko said, will take time. She also said there is a need for greater public education about sexual violence. She cited a USAID-led survey, published in May, in which most respondents noted that survivors of sexual violence “constantly face biased attitudes from Ukrainian society,” discouraging them from seeking help. “People will sometimes say a victim of rape may not have been against it,” she said. “But we are seeing changes; there is stronger support for victims.”

Didenko declined to comment on Anna’s case specifically, citing confidentiality, but Anna said Didenko visited her earlier this year and was shocked to learn about how investigators had treated her. A week later, the phones Anna had been trying to get back from police for nearly nine months were returned to her. 

By the end of last year, Didenko’s office had opened more than 220 sexual violence investigations; the office ultimately filed charges against Russian soldiers in 62 cases. Didenko acknowledged that there are likely many more incidents that are not on her office’s radar because of the stigma associated with sexual violence and fear, in some liberated areas, that the Russians might return. Earlier this summer, Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin introduced a new plan to strengthen protections for victims of wartime sexual violence. Russia often uses such violence, he wrote, “as a form of torture, a way to humiliate and break resistance.”

Bodies of civilians lie on Yablunska Street in Bucha, Ukraine, after the Russian army retreated from the city on April 2, 2022.

Splitting Society

The first calls for legislation to punish Ukrainian collaborators came on the heels of the 2014 Donbas conflict, during which Ukrainian separatists, backed by Russian troops, seized large swaths of land in the country’s east, in a precursor to the current war. Russia went on to unilaterally annex those lands following last year’s full-scale invasion. 

Vitaliy Ovcharenko, a prominent blogger-turned-soldier from the Donbas’s Donetsk region, helped draft a law in 2017 that would have imposed civil penalties on officials and administrators who had supported the separatist effort, including banning them from holding public office. In towns that remained under Ukrainian control, he told me, residents who had aided pro-Russian forces, at times leading to the abuse or death of their neighbors, roamed freely. It wasn’t uncommon for people who had been tortured to run into their torturers at local shops. “There was a crisis of justice in Ukrainian cities, and no one cared, no one was taking responsibility, and no one knew how to bring these collaborators to justice,” Ovcharenko said.

Ovcharenko’s proposal stalled after being introduced in Parliament in 2018. He and other local activists believed there was no appetite among Ukraine’s political leadership for criminalizing collaboration. He said that human rights advocates in Kyiv, some 500 miles away, accused him of being a traumatized veteran out for vengeance and warned that the proposed law had a violent, “vigilante” connotation to it. “They said, ‘We don’t need this confrontation in society.’ I told them, ‘If you left Kyiv and got to the ground, you would see that there are already confrontations,’” he said. “When society feels that there is no regulation from the government, it starts mass regulation by the people — and that ends with broken tires, broken windows, Molotov cocktails, and violence.”

Several parties, including Zelenskyy’s, introduced similar proposals in later years, but they never came up for a vote, partly because of Ukrainian legislators’ concerns that they would enflame social divisions. It was also unclear how collaboration would overlap with existing laws, including on treason.

Until last year: After the invasion, legislators voted Zelenskyy’s version into law so hastily that the legal advisers who evaluated the bill noted that they had done so under time pressure and “in extraordinary circumstances.” The result, many critics charge, was a “bad law” whose overly vague contours effectively criminalize a much broader range of behavior than originally intended. In some parts of the country, it could potentially apply to tens of thousands of people.

The law prohibits participation in political, legal, and law enforcement activities under the occupying authorities and the transfer of resources to them, as well as acts that lead to the “death of people or other serious consequences.” It bans Russian propaganda in educational institutions and the “public denial by a citizen of Ukraine of the armed aggression against Ukraine.” Penalties range from bans on holding government jobs to confiscation of property and prison sentences of up to 15 years.

The legislation leaves little room for the complexities of war and people’s need to survive it.

While its proponents argue that it serves as a deterrent, the legislation leaves little room for the complexities of war and people’s need to survive it. The law applies to Ukrainians providing Russian forces with information about military or civilian targets — as was the case with the agent who helped direct a Russian missile attack on a crowded café earlier this summer that killed 13 people. But it has also been used against local officials who remained in their posts under the new authorities, teachers showing up for work in occupied areas, and private citizens selling hogs or other goods to Russians or expressing opinions, including via social media, that are seen as supportive of the invasion.

So far, prosecutors have investigated more than 6,000 cases of alleged collaboration, according to Ukrainian government records. While many were tried in absentia, scores of people have been convicted already.

Some civil society groups and officials have called on the government to amend the law and apply it more selectively. Iryna Vereshchuk, the Ukrainian minister responsible for reintegration, warned against branding “everybody” who remained in occupied territory a collaborator. “Many people look to the future with fear because they don’t know if they fall under those categories,” she said last year. Tamila Tasheva, the government’s permanent representative for occupied Crimea, also called for a separate approach for Ukrainians who have lived under occupation for years.

But lawmakers have so far refused to budge, with few politicians willing to be seen as soft on those who are considered traitors in the popular imagination.

“The government is pretty understanding of what’s going on. It’s not a secret for those who are working with the issue, but the problem is that you need to explain to society why we need to change this law,” said ZMINA’s Lunova. “They can split society with this issue of collaboration.”

The phenomenon is hardly unique to Ukraine. “Every war has its collaborators, and every war has an often brutal response to those collaborators,” said Shane Darcy, deputy director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, who has researched the issue globally. Still, models for how to address it are scarce. Even international humanitarian law — the body of law that rules conduct in armed conflict — has a “blind spot” when it comes to collaboration, Darcy added.

International law posits that life should continue as normally as possible under occupation and requires occupying authorities to continue providing administrative services to civilians, allowing them to recruit former public servants to keep running them so long as it is not by coercion. “Of course, in a situation of occupation, it’s very hard to draw a fine line between what’s coercive and what’s not,” said Darcy. At the same time, international law also allows states to punish collaborators, provided they do so humanely. “Ukraine — to their credit — seem to be subjecting everyone to a legal process,” he added. “They’re not stringing collaborators from lampposts.”

Ukraine’s justice system is grappling with how to handle some 80,000 alleged crimes by Russian forces. Critics of the collaboration law argue that, at best, it’s impractical because it places more strain on a system that’s already overburdened. “We understand the situation, but you can focus on those whose crimes are really critical, against state security, whose actions really have heavy consequences,” said Lunova. “You shouldn’t prosecute those who put a like on Facebook.”

“They are pitting people against each other.”

Nadia Volkova, a human rights attorney and director of the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group, who helped draft a never-implemented transitional justice plan after the 2014 conflict, argued that the mass prosecution of low-level collaborators risks causing long-term harm. Already, last year’s invasion deepened divisions that had long split Ukraine. “They are manipulating these differences that have always existed in Ukraine, because it was never a unified nation in a way,” she said. “They are pitting people against each other. One might think that they want to show everybody that if you’re not going to be supporting Ukraine, this is what is going to happen to you, you’re going to be held responsible. But if they want to unify the nation, it’s not really the way to go.”

Neighbors and Traitors

As Ukrainian forces wrestle territory back from Russian control, accusations of collaboration have become ubiquitous across the country. Old conflicts are sometimes recast in light of the ongoing conflict. Victims turn on victims.

“Sometimes it’s real cases, with real records, real evidence,” Leonid Merzlyi, the chief judge in Irpin city court, whose jurisdiction includes Bucha, told me when I visited his courtroom. “In other cases, it is neighbors’ fights.”

Though collaboration cases are usually investigated by national authorities and heard before higher courts, Merzlyi was well aware of their nuances. “If someone didn’t leave an occupied area, we need to know, why? And if someone had Russian soldiers visiting their house, why?” he said. “We need to analyze every case. It’s very crucial for Ukrainian society.”

While some Ukrainians in occupied areas “were supporting the enemy before, and it was clear,” he continued, others may have been “protecting their children, and they were forced by this natural feeling of protection, and it’s hard to judge in that case.”

Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha for 24 years, noted that there were fewer allegations of collaboration there as compared to other areas that were occupied for longer periods of time, but he acknowledged that long-standing hostilities between neighbors were exacerbated by the conflict. “Often, people on the same street or even in the same family are ready to eat each other,” he said. “We are a civilized society and we do not prove things by conjecture: There should be evidence — whether of collaboration or of rape — not rumors.”

When we met, Fedoruk said that he wasn’t familiar with Anna’s case and couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations. The next day, however, a team of municipal workers came to inspect Anna’s rooftop. It had been damaged by shelling, and she had been asking the city to repair it for months. (They still haven’t fixed it, she recently told me.)

Anna and Maria’s war crimes case is currently in the pretrial phase, Ilikchiieva told me. As part of the prosecutor general’s investigation, the two have traveled to Kyiv in recent months to identify soldiers in hundreds of photos authorities pulled from Russian social media. During one visit, Pelehatiy, the senior police investigator who had repeatedly visited Anna at home and who had been in charge when police handcuffed Maria, stood on a side of the room, watching skeptically. Pelehatiy told The Intercept he had heard about Anna’s reports of sexual violence by soldiers, but that she had never told him directly about them. “He does not believe her,” Ilikchiieva said.

He’s not the only one. According to Ira, she and other neighbors have spoken with officers who agree that Anna is a liar, playing the part of the victim. “Everyone can see it,” she said, “but they can’t do anything with it.”

For Anna, it makes little difference whether she will ever face criminal charges for looting or collaboration. Either way, she is now an outcast in Bucha.

Last winter, someone vandalized her fence. On Christmas Eve, while she and Maria were out, two young men from the neighborhood smashed their windows with baseball bats, stole a TV, and beat her mother, she said. After she reported the attack to police, one of the men returned to fix the fence and brought a different TV; he told Anna that he had not touched her mother. In January, the same men attacked Maria as she walked home, threatening her with a knife. Again, Anna reported the incident to police. She said they did nothing.

Anna has come to resent her neighbors and the Ukrainian officials who failed her just as much as she hates the Russian soldiers who abused her. “The worst part,” she said, “was not the orcs.”

The post A Ukrainian Woman Protected Her Daughter From Russian Soldiers — and Was Accused of Collaborating With the Enemy appeared first on The Intercept.

Abbas, whose spokesperson disputed that his remarks were antisemitic, was one of the architects of the Oslo peace process, which commenced with a historic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn 30 years ago this week. Oslo has long been dead to Palestinians, whose hopes in the statehood promised to them under the deal collapsed years ago.

Now, faced with the most far-right extremist Israeli government to date, escalating settler and military violence that have laid bare the PA’s inability to protect its people, and Abbas’s increasingly authoritarian rule, many Palestinians have also begun to question the future of Oslo’s most enduring legacy: the PA itself. As Palestinians look with growing concern to an unclear succession path following Abbas, who is 87 and has ruled since shortly Arafat died in 2004, they are also asking whether the institution itself can — or should — survive a political moment so profoundly distant from that of its establishment.

“There’s a very big question mark about the sustainability of the Palestinian Authority,” said Ammar Dwaik, director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine’s official rights ombudsman.

It was a question I heard from many Palestinians across class, generation, and political allegiance during a trip to the occupied West Bank earlier this year.

“What’s the point of the PA?” asked Ehab Bseiso, a former minister of culture whom Abbas fired in 2021 after he publicly criticized Palestinian security forces’ killing of an outspoken critic of the PA. “What’s the point of having a PA if we still have expansion of settlements, incursions, killings, shootings, and so on? There’s nothing that the PA can offer. It’s been trapped in one function: maintaining order, condemning Israeli violations, addressing the international community. It doesn’t match the anger and frustration on the ground.”

Bseiso pointed to Abbas’s rule-by-decree governance, with no elections held in a generation and Parliament dissolved years ago. “The whole Palestinian political future is linked to, ‘What’s going to happen after Abbas is gone?’” Bseiso said. “That’s a failure in itself, because if we had institutions, this question wouldn’t have been emerging. In a healthy political system, one president goes and another comes. But we have no institutions, there is no Parliament, no elections for the last 18 years.”

The authority has become “irrelevant” to many Palestinians, echoed Mustafa Barghouti, a co-founder of the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, a third party aiming to overcome the split between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, Abbas’s party.

Abbas Zaki, a veteran Fatah member, put it more bluntly. “The PA is over, they are finished,” Zaki said. “We need to reorganize ourselves.”

Subcontractors for the Occupation

The Palestinian Authority was established as part of the Oslo agreements as a transitional body to administer the territories Israel has illegally occupied since 1967: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement until the contours of a sovereign Palestinian nation could be finalized in negotiations. That, of course, never happened. Instead, Israel has spent the last 30 years seizing control of most of the territory that was intended to constitute the basis for a Palestinian state. In the five years that Oslo set aside for negotiations, the population of settlers in the occupied territories more than doubled, ballooning to some 700,000 today.  

With prospects of a two-state solution all but vanished, so has the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority itself. While Abbas is deeply unpopular, his potential successors fare hardly better, a clear sign that the institution, more than the man himself, is the problem.

Still, even the PA’s most outspoken critics stress that its failures must be understood in the context of an Israeli occupation of which the authority is but an extension. From the start, the PA had no real sovereignty or power. While a series of agreements technically gave it administrative and security control over 17 percent of the West Bank — the most densely populated areas known as Area A— Israeli forces frequently invade those lands, exposing the meaninglessness of those arrangements. Meanwhile, the PA has virtually no control over the majority of the West Bank, what’s known as Areas B and C.

The PA is charged with running the functions of local government — such as education, health care, trash collection, and policing — even though under international law, the occupying power is responsible for the care of the people under its control. Israel, meanwhile, controls all movements outside and within the West Bank, its natural resources, and its economy.

The Oslo agreements also resulted in one of the most fraught features of the authority’s existence: its obligation to a deeply controversial security coordination with Israel. While PA officials need to coordinate with their Israeli counterparts to administer a host of services, including policing, the security coordination also sets up Palestinian security forces, trained and funded largely by the United States and European countries, to work with the Israeli military to suppress Palestinian resistance. That, in addition to the PA’s inability to protect Palestinians against violence by the military and settlers, has deepened its delegitimization in the eyes of Palestinians.

A growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations.

At the same time, the authority’s role as civic administrator has made it indispensable to maintaining a modicum of normalcy and services for the population. Crucially, the donor-funded PA has become the primary economic engine in Palestine, employing at least 150,000 people in a bloated bureaucracy designed to inject liquidity in an otherwise strangled economy. (Some 942,000 Palestinians, a quarter of the population, are entirely dependent on PA salaries). But even those economic benefits are subject to Israel’s whims. Israel collects taxes and tariffs from Palestinians and transfers them to the PA, frequently withholding funds to apply political pressure and leaving tens of thousands of people without income.

Against that backdrop, a growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations. 

“The people look at it as a subcontractor,” said Shawan Jabarin, the director of the prominent Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, echoing a common refrain. “The PA, at the end of the day, is not an independent state, it’s still not a sovereign state. We don’t like to say that, for national reasons, not to harm them, but purely speaking, it is a subcontractor.”

The End of the PA

In Ramallah, the authority’s de facto capital, foreign-sponsored ministry buildings bear the insignia and flags of a “State of Palestine.” That statehood was recognized by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ General Assembly in 2012, perhaps Abbas’s greatest political accomplishment, but it does not exist in practice.

In fact, mostly powerless at home, the PA’s leadership has staked its hopes in international forums and mechanisms, including bids to bring Israeli crimes before both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. It’s a strategy that has slowly earned Palestinians global solidarity while also angering Israeli officials, who dubbed the efforts “diplomatic terrorism.” But it also put the fate of Palestinians in the hands of fickle global trends and left many of them feeling alienated by efforts that have no real impact on their daily lives.

“We cared more about the outside. We worked so hard in the international arena to get some recognition and support,” said Zaki, the Fatah veteran. “Now we’re shifting, we’re turning inside. We need a plan to protect our people and help people confront the settlers. We need to focus on national unity and reorganizing the Palestinian household.”

He and others pointed to the current moment in Israeli politics, with the country’s most extremist government to date — headed by third-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in coalition with some of the country’s most far-right parties — attacking its institutions and enflaming internal divisions, as one of great danger but also of opportunity for Palestinians. “The big difference between the Israeli governments of the last 20, 30 years is that some of them were working under the table, and this one is working in front of the whole world,” Mousa Hadid, the former mayor of Ramallah, told me. “This government will take us to a place that the whole world must stop and start thinking about.”

Israeli leaders have relied on the PA for the last 30 years, understanding the strategic need for maintaining its administrative role and security cooperation. Yet the current Israeli government has shown little interest in its survival. Instead, the country’s leadership has made no secret of its disdain for the PA. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, for instance, has called on Israel to “work towards its collapse.”

Whether that will happen or not, many Palestinians have already begun to think about a future not only after Abbas, but also with leadership and a political process that is more representative of their aspirations. With some 70 percent of the population younger than Oslo, many Palestinians are also pushing for different goals and frameworks than those laid out by the agreements.

“I do believe our goal as Palestinians should not only be fighting the occupation, I think we should call for ending and bringing down the whole system of apartheid and racial discrimination in the whole of Palestine,” said Barghouti, the Palestinian National Initiative secretary. “They’re killing the two-state solution? We can have a one-state solution. But we will not live as slaves in a system of apartheid.”

The post Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust Controversy Spotlights Deep Disillusion With Palestinian Authority appeared first on The Intercept.

As the U.S. and its allies airlifted people out of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, they helped set up what were supposed to be temporary processing sites in third countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kosovo. Two years later, thousands of Afghans are in effective detention at those sites, which are largely closed off to visitors, according to human rights lawyers, amid deteriorating conditions and with no updates about their refugee, humanitarian parole, or other pending applications for entry to the U.S.

“It’s extremely concerning that people have just been waiting in limbo for two years now, and it is extremely difficult to receive further information, because there is a denial of access to visitors,” Sadaf Doost, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, told The Intercept. “That creates a situation where much of the information that we’re relying on depends on those who are able to provide a sneak peek of what’s going on in the camps.”

CCR and Muslim Advocates, another legal nonprofit, sued the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security on August 30 over the agencies’ failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act laws. Earlier this year, the groups had filed public records requests with each agency seeking to establish the exact number of Afghans awaiting resettlement to the U.S., as well as the terms of their confinement and the exact role played by the U.S. government in running the sites where they are being held. According to the lawsuit, the Departments of State and Homeland Security did not respond to the records requests at all. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, agreed to release some of the records but has so far failed to do so.

The lawsuit also raises humanitarian and human rights concerns at three of the processing sites: Camp Liya, in Kosovo, which is inside a U.S. Army base; Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, which is on a former U.S. Army base; and Humanitarian City, in the UAE, which U.S. officials say is “solely” controlled by the Emirati government, though State Department representatives reportedly visit the camp twice a week.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on pending litigation, while a spokesperson for the State Department did not answer questions about the lawsuit or the status of Afghans awaiting resettlement at processing sites abroad. The Pentagon did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“There’s just no information as to how much longer these Afghan civilians have to wait.”

Advocates say that the Biden administration has a responsibility to provide an accounting of the conditions facing the Afghan evacuees — and the status of their applications — rather than forcing the public to rely on information that is leaked out of the camps in a piecemeal way. “There’s just no information as to how much longer these Afghan civilians have to wait,” Doost said. “And there’s no oversight, really, because of the lack of information.”

Mursel Sabir, a co-founder of the community organization Afghans Empowered, works with several groups supporting Afghan refugees that have also been trying to get information about the camps — and are frustrated with the lack of transparency by the U.S. government.

“They’ve been very quick to move on from the situation in Afghanistan,” she told The Intercept. As for the Afghans who are stuck at the processing sites, she said, “they’re at the hands and mercy of United States government and Western powers essentially, that are trying to pick who is loyal and who is worthy of coming to this country.”

“Like A Prison”

According to the lawsuit, family members, counsel, and media have been largely denied access to the camps, making it harder for advocates to assess conditions there. Recent human rights and media reports, however, indicate a growing humanitarian crisis, with evacuees facing human rights abuses including rape, medical neglect, and the denial of food and water. 

Human Rights Watch warned in a report published in March that at least 2,400 people had been held “in cramped, miserable conditions” for more than 15 months at “Emirates Humanitarian City,” a temporary site in Abu Dhabi. People who had been held at the camp described constraints on their freedom of movement, lack of access to refugee status determination processes, and inadequate education services for children. They also denounced overcrowding, decay of infrastructure, insect infestation, and deteriorating mental health conditions for many of those held there, according to the report.

One interviewee described the refugee facility as “exactly like a prison.”

At Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, some evacuees have attempted suicide and staged hunger strikes, according to reporting in Middle East Eye. Kosovo’s Camp Liya has earned the nickname “little Guantánamo” because individuals held within its confines were told that if they left the premises their humanitarian parole applications would be disqualified, according to the lawsuit. “They are constructively confined in the camps,” Doost said.

It’s unclear what responsibility the U.S. government bears at each site, and the advocates have requested records concerning the agreements made between U.S. officials and the host governments.

The U.S. government is responsible for the delay in processing the evacuees’ resettlement, with homeland security officials effectively stonewalling the applications of many of those held in confinement abroad. More than 1.6 million people have left Afghanistan in the last two years, with U.S. officials coordinating the evacuation of some 124,000, including former officials, human rights advocates, and scores of individuals who had worked for the U.S. government and military.

A year after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security division charged with reviewing applications, had processed only 8,000 of the 66,000 humanitarian parole applications it had received from Afghan citizens, according to an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. It had approved only 123. Other resettlement avenues, including a special visa category known as SIV for Afghan nationals who worked for the U.S. government and military, have also been marred by uncertainty and delays.

The DHS spokesperson did not address questions about Afghans stuck abroad as they await resolution of their immigration applications. With regards to Afghans who have already arrived in the U.S., the spokesperson said that USCIS had approved 9,000 of the 24,000 SIV applications as well as 5,000 of 19,000 asylum applications.

Chris Godshall-Bennett, a staff attorney at Muslim Advocates, told The Intercept that while the U.S. government has failed to address most of the questions raised by advocates, the treatment of Afghan evacuees and lack of transparency about it are in line with other U.S. policies targeting predominantly Muslim populations, including the no-fly list and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

“It is unsurprising, unfortunately, that a predominantly Muslim population ends up trapped in these sort of never-ending, unclear processing cycles, where nobody’s giving them any information,” he said.

The groups behind the lawsuit hope that it will force the U.S. to be transparent not only about the conditions at the sites, but also the steps the government is taking to process the Afghans’ applications for resettlement. “This information is desperately needed to facilitate a bigger conversation about how the U.S. government is treating these people, and what we owe to the Afghan people that have been displaced by what is at the end of the day our own actions.”

The post The Biden Administration Is Keeping Thousands of Afghans in Limbo Abroad appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin, who was Putin’s close associate before he attempted a mutiny against him two months ago, was reportedly on board his private plane when it crashed outside Moscow on Wednesday. On board were nine other senior members of the Wagner Group. The mercenary outfit that made Prigozhin a household name worldwide is infamous for having committed widespread atrocities in multiple countries and most recently for having fought alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, where it sacrificed tens of thousands of hired fighters as cannon fodder. In June, Prigozhin, long an outspoken critic of Russian military leadership’s performance in Ukraine, marched some of his forces toward Moscow in a spectacular but short-lived rebellion.  

Prigozhin explained the mutiny by saying he “had a meltdown,” and Putin publicly pardoned his rebellion in a Belarus-brokered deal aimed largely at demobilizing Wagner forces. Still, few believed there would be no consequences for the former ally Putin labeled a traitor — with the exception perhaps of Prigozhin himself, who seemingly continued to move and speak with relative freedom. Earlier this week, he turned up in what appeared to be an undetermined African country to boast of Wagner’s plans of “making Russia even greater on all continents.” It was his last public appearance.

Little is known about what led to the plane crash, but there seems to be little doubt about its mandate, with some commentators referring to it as a “very public execution.” While U.S. officials have only tentatively confirmed reports of Prigozhin’s demise, President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that “there’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”

“I think we all realize who is responsible for this,” echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who also noted “probably this will also help [Ukraine] in some sense.”

For those who expected Putin to avenge the humiliation of Prigozhin’s attempted coup, the mercenary leader’s killing appears to be a message to others, particularly among Russia’s elites, who may attempt to replicate it.

“Everyone will see this as an act of retaliation and retribution, and the Kremlin won’t particularly counteract this view. From Putin’s perspective, as well as many among the security and military officials, Prigozhin’s death should serve as a lesson to any potential successors,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “A lively, energetic, and idea-filled Prigozhin was undoubtedly a walking issue for the regime, embodying Putin’s political humiliation.”

The method by which Prigozhin was apparently killed — by downing his plane, rather than poisoning his food or causing an accidental fall from a window, both practiced ways for Russian leadership to dispatch with internal rivals — also had the effect of eliminating a potential successor to Prigozhin. Among those believed killed in the crash was Wagner’s co-founder Dmitry Utkin, a former member of Russia’s intelligence services who reportedly named the group after Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. The crash came just hours after Russia sacked Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a high-level military commander close to Prigozhin who is believed to have had advance knowledge of the June mutiny.

But it’s not clear that Prigozhin’s death will restore Putin’s hold on power after it was so publicly challenged earlier this summer.

“The Russian elites are likely to see this as evidence not that Putin is strong but that he is increasingly and murderously erratic,” wrote Mark Galeotti, an analyst specializing in Russian politics and security. “That he flip-flopped so quickly from lambasting Prigozhin as a traitor to inviting him to his recent Africa summit to murdering him will do nothing to calm nerves about Putin’s state of mind and grip on the system.”

“The mark of a well-organised authoritarianism,” Galeotti added, “is that the regime does not need so openly to kill insiders, because they are deterred from breaking the rules of the system in the first place.”

Prigozhin’s death — and the weakening of Wagner — is unlikely to have an impact on the battlefield in Ukraine, where 120,000 Russian troops and 20,000 Wagner fighters are reported to have died. The mercenary group’s role in Ukraine diminished after the failed mutiny, when its troops redeployed to Belarus. There, they trained alongside Belarusan forces, a development that raised alarm among other countries in the region, which fear potential Belarusian involvement in Ukraine. In recent weeks, Wagner also signaled it would double down on its already established presence in multiple African countries, where it has committed large-scale atrocities against civilians. Even with Prigozhin out, some analysts caution, Wagner will continue to operate so long as the business interests behind it endure.

If anything, Prigozhin’s most lasting legacy is likely the manner in which Wagner — hardly the first mercenary outfit of our times — has normalized the outsourcing of state conflict to private groups. An array of other paramilitary groups — including some effectively, if unofficially, acting at the behest of governments — have expanded their influence in recent years. 

“The world is better place without them,” said Jack Margolin, an analyst who has spent years investigating Prigozhin and Utkin. “Wagner will change fundamentally, but [private military companies] aren’t going away.”

The post Prigozhin’s Legacy Is the Global Rise of Private Armies for Hire appeared first on The Intercept.

But his greatest challenge came six months later, when the Taliban seized back control of Afghanistan, two years ago this month. Since then, the Taliban have shut down the attorney general’s office and freed thousands of people who had been locked up, sending many former prosecutors into hiding. Targeted by the people they helped convict, some 29 prosecutors have been killed in the last two years, including three in the last two weeks.

“They were released,” said Hamidi, referring to scores of individuals his office had prosecuted, including many Taliban members, “and they are looking to find the prosecutors who tried them.”

All along, Hamidi has been trying to help his former colleagues; last month, with the U.S. Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, or APA-US, he helped launch the “Prosecutors for Prosecutors” campaign, which aims to get 1,500 Afghan prosecutors and their families to safety. APA-US and its Afghan counterpart, now operating in exile, have partnered with a number of organizations to raise $15 million to fund nongovernmental organizations that can relocate them to safe countries. Their partners include Jewish Humanitarian Response, the International Association of Prosecutors, and No One Left Behind, as well as a number of local district attorneys across the U.S.

“They stood for law and justice in Afghanistan for the past 20 years, shoulder to shoulder with the international community, with the people of Afghanistan, with the government of Afghanistan,” Hamidi told The Intercept. “Withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t be a withdrawal from all promises, all ethical obligations, human rights obligations.”

More than 1.6 million Afghans fled the country in the last two years, with more than 100,000 resettling in the U.S. In the chaotic weeks following the dramatic collapse of the former Afghan government, foreign states and international organizations helped evacuate Afghans they had worked with, prioritizing those they deemed at the highest risk, including women activists, human rights defenders, and members of the former government and military.

No such priority group was carved out for Afghan prosecutors, who also did not qualify for the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program, reserved for Afghans who had been employed by the U.S. government. While some prosecutors were able to flee through personal connections, thousands were left behind.

There was “no plan” by U.S. officials to get prosecutors to safety, Hamidi said, even as they had been targets of attacks for years. “They knew many people like prosecutors would be in danger. And there was no plan or program to provide them any opportunity to be included in any of these categories, SIV, P-1, P-2,” he said, referring to priority refugee status for certain categories of vulnerable Afghans.

That makes no sense to David LaBahn, president of APA-US, which had helped train Afghan prosecutors. “Here are the prosecutors who put terrorists and drug smugglers in prison — who have now been released from prison — and because they didn’t have a government contracting card, they are at the bottom of the list,” LaBahn told The Intercept. “It defies all logic.

“They’re being hunted right now,” he added. “People who are begging for their lives and who feel completely deserted.”

An Ongoing Emergency

Hamidi was in the U.S. when Kabul fell. He immediately knew that years of his work would be wiped out, that he wouldn’t be able to return home, and that the lives of thousands of his colleagues were at risk. As soon as the Taliban seized the capital, he started writing to all the international agencies that had worked alongside his office over the years, including the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

USAID and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had funded his office’s initiative to train 250 female prosecutors, but now that those women were in hiding, he heard nothing from them. “They financed this program, and we implemented it. I sent letters to USAID and mentioned this, but no response,” he said. “The U.S. government, U.S. entities, the U.S. people — they have a responsibility to support the people of Afghanistan and those people who are at risk and in danger because of their work, because of their dedication to law and justice.”

The U.S. government, he stressed, did “nothing” for them.

That’s despite the fact that Afghan prosecutors had been responsible for jailing thousands of Taliban members, as well as narcotraffickers and members of other extremist groups and organized crime networks who helped fund the Taliban insurgency. Hamidi said that some 50,000 Taliban and Islamic State members were imprisoned between 2001 and 2021. “The fight against terrorism was in two main areas: One was in the battlefield, and the other was when the Taliban were arrested and handed over to the attorney general’s office for investigation,” he said. “Many ministers, commanders, governors who are now holding positions of power in the country were in jail at a time or another.”

Asked about Hamidi’s outreach to the U.S. government, a spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email to The Intercept that “the Biden-Harris Administration continues to demonstrate its commitment to the brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with the United States over the past two decades.” The spokesperson added that the agency “does not comment on who is in the refugee processing pipeline due to privacy and protection reasons” but that the resettlement of eligible Afghans is one of its “top priorities.” USAID did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the last two years, the plight of Afghans in the country and outside has largely fallen off the news cycle as fatigue and new conflicts have replaced global shock at the country’s unraveling. That indifference stands in stark contrast with the sense of emergency that still dominates countless Afghans’ lives. APA-US continues to field desperate requests for help from dozens of former prosecutors still in Afghanistan. Through its Afghan counterpart, the group compiled a verified list of 3,850 former prosecutors and other staff and shared it with U.S. officials. But because there’s no visa path available to them in the U.S., the groups are looking to fund private efforts to relocate the prosecutors and help them secure employment. Already, some U.S.-based prosecutors have answered the call, promising help with relocation efforts and jobs for Afghan prosecutors arriving in the U.S.

“People are being killed, and there appears to be no action, or limited action, by those who should be acting.”

For the time being, LaBahn stresses, the need is urgent and short-term.

“People are being killed, and there appears to be no action, or limited action, by those who should be acting,” he said. “What we’re trying to do right now is just get people to safety, get them food, and get them housing, and then we can worry about the process of what country will ultimately protect them.”

One Prosecutor’s Escape

Najia Mahmodi was one of the women Hamidi hired into the attorney general’s office. She was born before the U.S. toppled the Taliban in 2001 and remembers seeing them beat women in the street when she was a child. But she was part of a generation of Afghan women who grew up during a time of opportunity. She received a law degree from the American University of Afghanistan. While a student, she survived a Taliban attack that killed 16 of her classmates. Later, she became chief prosecutor for crimes against women and survived other attacks near the prosecutor’s office. Her role involved investigating crimes such as rape, battery, forced marriage, and prohibiting a woman or girl from going to school or work. Many of those offenses were criminalized under the U.S.-backed former Afghan government, and the Taliban rescinded the laws when it returned to power.

As the Taliban seized province after province two summers ago, Mahmodi’s 3-year-old son would greet her when she came home from work with updates on which part of the country had fallen. Her friends and family urged her to leave Afghanistan, knowing she would be an immediate target. She delivered her second child, a daughter, just as the Taliban advanced on Kabul, choosing to have an early C-section because she wasn’t sure she would be able to access a hospital when the time came. Thousands of the men her office had helped convict were being freed, and she began to have nightmares about them.

On August 15, she went into hiding. For 10 days, she tried to make sure her toddler wouldn’t be too loud because she feared being discovered and handed to the Taliban. Meanwhile, she reached out to all her foreign contacts for help. Eventually, she got a call back and was told to head to the airport immediately, instructed to wave her phone at U.S. Special Forces so they would recognize her. Her contact told her that the soldiers would shoot toward the crowd to disperse those around her but that she should not run and keep walking toward them.

Hours later, she was in Qatar with her children; she eventually resettled in the U.S., where she is enrolled to start a master’s in law program in the fall.

After leaving, she was able to rile up international support to get some of her colleagues from the elimination of violence against women division of the attorney general’s office moved to Pakistan through a private sponsorship. But only women benefited from that initiative, and many more remain in Afghanistan. They are struggling to survive without jobs in a country where more than 15 million people are currently facing food insecurity. Passports are hard to obtain, particularly for those who are trying to hide their identity.

“They are in constant fear for their lives,” Mahmodi said. “They are a target.”

The post As the Taliban Hunts Prosecutors, Afghan and U.S. Lawyers Team Up to Bring Their Colleagues to Safety appeared first on The Intercept.

Spending too much too fast, with little oversight, would lead to “unanticipated consequences,” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said at an event sponsored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft last week. The U.S. has sent more money to Ukraine in one year than it spent in Afghanistan over 12 years, Sopko pointed out. “I’m not opposed to spending that. I just want to make sure it’s done correctly and there’s oversight,” he said.

Sopko especially warned about the risk of fueling corruption, perhaps the most damaging legacy of the billions the U.S. spent in Afghanistan and a major factor in the collapse of its effort in the country. “If that much money is coming in, you know some of it is going to be stolen,” he said. “In Afghanistan, corruption was the existential threat. It wasn’t the Taliban. It was corruption that did us in.”

Debate over installing a special inspector for Ukraine modeled after SIGAR began swirling on Capitol Hill as it became clear that U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion would reach unprecedented levels. The push for a special inspector for Ukraine aid has been heralded by some of the Biden administration’s most vocal opponents, including Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; and J. D. Vance, R-Ohio; and Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.; and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. That factor, as well as a conflation of calls for greater oversight with opposition to sending the aid in the first place, has made the idea of a watchdog to oversee all aid to Ukraine somewhat toxic for many Democrats.

Following multiple failed efforts to pass standalone legislation on this issue, Republican lawmakers tried to include such a provision in the annual defense budget, the National Defense Authorization Act. 45 Democrats, joined by Sens. Angus King, I-Maine; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Rand Paul, R-Ky.; voted against it last Wednesday, blocking its passage. The provision was also opposed by the White House, which wrote in a statement to lawmakers that the Pentagon Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.”

Opponents of a special inspector for Ukraine have argued that existing agency-specific oversight mechanisms are sufficient, with Elizabeth Hoffman, director of congressional and government affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, telling VOA last month that the special inspector office could have “a chilling effect.”

For proponents of the office, the unprecedented rate of aid to Ukraine naturally calls for greater oversight. Sopko has called for a holistic “whole-of-government” approach, focused on a broader evaluation of U.S. overall spending, rather than one limited to each agency’s scope and to tracking how much money was spent and on what. “The U.S. government,” he said, “whether it’s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.”

In Ukraine, many of the same groups lobbying for greater international support against Russia’s invasion are also speaking out about the need to make sure that money gets to its intended recipients. “Huge money always comes with corruption,” said Vita Dumanska, leader of the Chesno movement, a Ukrainian anti-corruption group. “We can’t keep silent on this.”

Lessons From Afghanistan

U.S. involvement in Ukraine is fundamentally different from the role it played in Afghanistan. Reconstruction and state-building efforts came to Afghanistan after the U.S. and its allies invaded a country that was roiled by civil conflict and remains so after a two-decade U.S.-led war there. In Ukraine, U.S. assistance has so far been primarily of a military nature and has come largely in an effort to keep the U.S. from getting more directly involved — this time in support of the sovereignty of a nation that was invaded by another. If in Afghanistan the U.S. spent billions in an effort to establish, train, and equip a local military that ultimately faltered amid political failures, in Ukraine, it is responding to local calls for help bolstering a highly motivated military that is defending its country against what many Ukrainians see as an existential threat.

Still, there are important parallels, said Sopko, whose office tracked at least $19 billion that was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse over the last decade in Afghanistan. In response to requests from senators advocating for more oversight, he has suggested how lessons learned in Afghanistan may serve U.S. efforts in Ukraine. SIGAR was established in 2008, nearly eight years after the U.S. first invaded the country and after it had already spent – and lost track of — billions in reconstruction money there. Given those experiences, Sopko, who was appointed to the role in 2012, has stressed the importance of starting the monitoring in Ukraine early in the process. “No matter who is doing the oversight, it’s important to start now, not eight years from now,” he said.

Already, U.S. assistance to Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s aggression and relentless bombing campaigns has reached unprecedented levels, though the money, equipment, and other assistance is not always easy to track. Congress approved some $113 billion in aid to Ukraine last year, and some analysts put the full figure to date at closer to $137 billion.

By comparison, the U.S. spent some $146 billion in reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2022 (although it spent far more going to war there in the first place). “By the end of this year, we will have spent more money in Ukraine than we did to do the entire Marshall Plan after World War II,” Sopko said.

“By the end of this year, we will have spent more money in Ukraine than we did to do the entire Marshall Plan after World War II.”

SIGAR issued dozens of audits and assessments over its ongoing mandate, often despite stonewalling by government agencies that are legally required to disclose information to its investigators. While the reports occasionally made headlines for the exorbitant waste they exposed, they did little to change the trajectory of U.S. spending in Afghanistan, in part because there were plenty who benefitted financially from it and because of a short-sighted system — including annual appropriations schedules and brief deployments — that incentivized fast spending over effective investment.

In Afghanistan, Sopko said, the U.S. never developed a workable, coherent strategy as priorities and approaches kept shifting. There was also no coordinated effort between agencies, he added, noting that, that is likely going to be an even greater problem in Ukraine, where more actors, states, and international organizations are involved.

Currently, individual agencies are tasked with monitoring different elements of the U.S. government’s assistance to Ukraine. Speaking alongside Sopko last week, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, noted those offices are under-resourced and have a poor track record. “In order to ensure that the Ukrainian people receive the support that the U.S. are sending them, we need far stronger systems in place here in the U.S.,” she said.

It’s not just the money that needs monitoring: In Afghanistan, the U.S. lost track of expensive and dangerous equipment, including some $7.1 billion worth of defense articles the Pentagon left behind when it pulled out of the country. In Ukraine, there has been some reporting of misplaced equipment, but because most U.S. monitoring programs were not designed for war zones, there are few people on the ground who are able to track it.

Brian called out the Defense Department’s abysmal oversight, with the Pentagon unable to account for some 61 percent of its assets in 2021. Earlier in the war in Ukraine, she noted, defense officials learned that U.S.-issued small arms and bulletproof vests had ended up in the hands of criminals only after Ukrainian intelligence services discovered that. She also noted that key oversight positions at other agencies have long remained vacant, hindering individual agency efforts at better monitoring aid in the absence of a more comprehensive approach. (The White House just announced nominees for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development watchdogs last week.)

Brian contrasted lawmakers’ opposition to an inspector general for Ukraine to their passage of emergency procurement powers in the annual defense budget, allowing the Pentagon to enter into multiyear contracts to buy munitions to send to Ukraine.

“More money does not solve acquisition issues. It exacerbates existing ones and creates a path for more waste, fraud, and abuse,” she said. “Lawmakers cannot allow the war in Ukraine to become another pathway for contractors to pursue excess profits at the expense of the Pentagon and taxpayers.”

Fighting Corruption

While Ukraine has a long history of corruption, over the last decade, the country has developed a strong infrastructure to fight that corruption, leading, for instance, to the creation of a system of tracking public procurements that some watchdogs note is far more transparent than its U.S. counterparts. Chesno, Dumanska’s group, is part of a burgeoning Ukrainian civil society that’s grown exponentially in the aftermath of the Maidan Uprising in 2013.

But following Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, many Ukrainian groups found themselves softening their criticism of their own government in order to focus on Russia’s crimes and avoid feeding Russian propaganda. It was “self-censorship” in a moment of crisis, Dumanska told me during a recent interview in Kyiv. “We had in civil society some kind of consensus not to criticize the government. We were working together with the state, begging for military help, closing the sky and everything, so there was unity there, and we were trying not to focus on troubles inside the country.”

With the war now well into the second year and no clear end to the fighting in sight, however, Dumanska noted that Ukrainian civil society is beginning to once again focus on internal corruption and abuses of power, even as they fear alarming the international donors the country desperately needs.

“If nobody is saying anything, then the situation becomes even worse, and those in power can feel that nobody’s watching corruption, nobody is monitoring them,” said Dumanska. “We do understand that it might influence the position of international partners, because at every international meeting, they are asking us about corruption, and if they understand that we have a lot of corruption scandals, a lot of money stolen, and that money is coming from their taxpayers, that’s not very good.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also taken a hard line on corruption, firing some senior officials and issuing increasingly stern warnings that there will be no tolerance for those seeking to profit from the conflict. But Zelenskyy himself has faced corruption scandals in the past, and despite significant improvement over the last decade, Ukraine remains low on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

That’s not an argument against aid as much as in favor of stronger guardrails to ensure it reaches the Ukrainian people it is actually intended for, something Ukrainians themselves are increasingly calling for. In the devastation brought by Russia’s invasion, and as the country prepares to embark on what will be a massive reconstruction effort, some there see an opportunity to rebuild the country more equitably.

“With the war, we had huge changes in our oligarch structure: some oligarchs lost their assets, some oligarchs moved, some were prosecuted,” said Dumanska. “We can expect that during reconstruction, we will see new oligarchs. Those who are close to the president, they might create a new pool of oligarchs. Now the question is, do we build a new oligarch structure? Or do we refuse the oligarch approach and develop something else?”

The post Senate Democrats Blocked Watchdog for Ukraine Aid — Ignoring Lessons From Afghanistan appeared first on The Intercept.

Prigozhin’s sprawling businesses include not only the Wagner mercenary group that became a household name when it joined Russian forces in Ukraine — before launching an armed insurrection against Moscow last week — but also an online army that has fought wars over information from Sudan to the United States, where Prigozhin remains under federal indictment over his alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“The misinformation piece is a huge part of the narrative,” Raphael Parens, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program who has long researched Prigozhin and Wagner, told The Intercept. He added that influencing public discourse is one of Wagner’s “top tools.”

Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the government of his once close associate Vladimir Putin played out online as much as on the ground, as he successfully utilized the messaging service Telegram to communicate with the public. Social media’s prominent role in the rebellion echoed Prigozhin’s earlier online battles, where he often seized on a vacuum of reliable information to seek to control the narrative or actively worked to sow doubt and chaos around what was happening.

Over the weekend, as the world’s intelligence agencies and pundit classes scrambled to analyze rapidly shifting developments, Prigozhin himself was often the source of the little information around the attempted coup, which he said was not a coup but a “march for justice.”

Prigozhin launched his short-lived insurrection against the Russian government in a series of social media posts on Friday, in which he accused Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering deadly airstrikes on Wagner mercenaries. (Some analysts concluded that the video he posted purportedly showing evidence of such an attack was likely staged.) He also challenged Putin’s official narrative for launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year — a significant act of defiance in a conflict Prigozhin and his forces have actively participated in. 

Prigozhin’s brief rebellion and ongoing rhetoric against the Putin government played out online as much as on the ground.

“There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” Prigozhin said in a Telegram video on Friday. “The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block.”

For the next 36 hours, Prigozhin kept posting online. Telegram channels that often share Wagner-related content circulated videos of Wagner men who had seized control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub near the Ukrainian border. On Saturday, Prigozhin turned his men around 120 miles outside Moscow after reaching a deal with Putin brokered by Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko.

For an episode with the potential for monumental global repercussions, accurate, reliable information remained wildly elusive even days after Prigozhin’s forces retreated. That is in part due to the Russian government’s tight control of the media, with independent outlets forced to shut down or move abroad since last year’s invasion and foreign media still in the country operating in extremely difficult circumstances. Within hours of the uprising starting, Russian internet service providers began to block access to Google News, while observers outside Russia rushed to verify whether reports and videos emerging on social media were real. 

Eventually, Russian officials spoke publicly, with Putin addressing the nation on Saturday and then again on Monday. But by that point, Prigozhin’s message had already spread through Russia, where people are increasingly turning to Telegram for alternative — if hardly more reliable —  information than that coming from official state sources.

“He kind of hit this media space that has eroded in the last 10, 15 years,” said Parens, referring to a Russian media landscape that has shrunk under Putin’s rule, but also to a phenomenon — the rise of disinformation — hardly unique to Russia. “He and the organization managed to hit a gap in Russian society, and you could also say a gap in Western society and the way that we are able to deal with misinformation.”

Criminal to Chef, Warlord to Mutineer

Born in 1961 in Leningrad — today’s St. Petersburg — Prigozhin was once sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony following a conviction on charges ranging from armed robbery to fraud to “involving minors in criminal activity,” according to a leaked resume published by The Intercept earlier this year. Once released, he launched a fast-food chain that soon boomed into a sprawling catering business serving the Kremlin, which earned Prigozhin the nickname “Putin’s chef” and brought him face to face with dozens of heads of state. 

As he grew closer to Putin following his 2012 reelection to the presidency, Prigozhin expanded his relationship with the Kremlin by financing the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” behind a series of online disinformation campaigns, including a bid to influence the 2016 U.S. election. And he built Wagner — a successor of the Slavonic Corps, a paramilitary group involved in the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine — into an infamous and brutal mercenary force that has been accused of widespread atrocities across multiple continents.

Until last year, Prigozhin denied any involvement in the more shadowy businesses he is today most known for, fiercely fighting U.S. and European Union sanctions against him and suing journalists who reported on his connections to Wagner. But he abruptly switched course last year, as the war in Ukraine raised his global profile and that of his mercenaries. Since then, he has embarked on an intensive media offensive: appearing in videos that showed him recruiting prisoners in Russian prisons, on the battlefield in Ukraine, and alongside dozens of corpses of Wagner fighters whose deaths he blamed on the incompetence of Russian military leadership.

The social media blitz around the weekend insurrection was a culmination of Prigozhin’s monthslong campaign to dominate the narrative about Wagner and its role in Ukraine. As his name became as recognizable as Putin’s over the last year, leading to speculation that he might be angling to replace him, Prigozhin issued dozens of often bombastic statements to journalists — including to The Intercept — through the PR arm of his catering business, while also increasingly turning to Telegram to launch screeds against his rivals in Russia and finally, to chronicle his rebellion against them in real time.

“He likes to be in the limelight. It does feel like he’s playing into the whole theater of the moment.”

“He’s certainly one of the people who is more plugged in than others with the Russian government and who has recognized the use of Telegram and social media and that actually uses that to get what he wants,” John Lechner, an independent researcher and author of an upcoming book about the Wagner Group, told The Intercept. “Prigozhin has been at the forefront of really effectively using Telegram and social media to advocate for his own objectives vis-à-vis other rivals in the Russian government who either don’t have the permission or the ability to pull that off.”

Prigozhin’s online persona — and his skill at commandeering attention to himself by frequently issuing over-the-top statements — is also a product of the time.

“He likes to be in the limelight,” said Parens. “It does feel like he’s playing into the whole theater of the moment. In order to get the attention, and in order to get retweets are reposting and all that, you have to kind of go to the extreme. It’s the social media effect of — the way the military and political spheres look to the public now is just completely different than the way it looked maybe 10 years ago; there’s just this need to dramatize things to show your point of view.”

Prigozhin’s Playbook

Prigozhin’s mastery of social media to serve his business and political goals goes at least as far back as the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. federal grand jury indicted him in 2018 in one of the highest-profile prosecutions to emerge from the two-year Mueller investigation. Prigozhin was accused of “conspiracy to defraud the United States” along with 12 other individuals, two companies he controls, and the Internet Research Agency. At a press conference announcing the charges, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein accused Prigozhin and his co-defendants of seeking to spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

Last year, Prigozhin boasted of having been involved in that interference. “We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012,” Prigozhin wrote through a representative in an email to The Intercept. “50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass. And we will continue to do so as many times as needed.” The charges against him remain active, though prosecutors dropped the charges against his companies in 2020.

In several African countries, too, where Wagner has worked with local governments to quash rebellions or political rivalries —committing widespread human rights abuses in the process — it has also engaged in information warfare. In Mali and the Central African Republic, Wagner has promoted social media pages as well as local radio stations advancing its clients’ interests, for instance by amplifying rhetoric against the French and United Nations presence in those countries. “They’re very media savvy,” said Lechner, noting that those efforts vary from country to country. “They’re turning out these narratives that are specifically crafted to the local environment.”

At times, Wagner’s media campaigns seemed aimed at bolstering its business, creating an opportunity for a formal relationship with various governments. In Mali, for instance, the Foundation for National Values Protection, a Russian think tank under U.S. sanctions over its role disseminating disinformation, released an opinion poll just before Wagner finalized a deal with the Malian government claiming to show widespread popular support among Malians for such an involvement. The think tank, headed by Maxim Shugaley, a close associate of Prigozhin, had run and promoted similar polls in the Central African Republic.

In Burkina Faso last year, hours after a military coup, crowds cheering the takeover waved Russian flags. Months later, Wagner forces were reported to be supporting the military junta in the country. (This year, Burkina Faso’s government denied contracting with Wagner, but said it would work with “Russian instructors” to train soldiers using equipment purchased from Russia, a phrase often used by Russian officials themselves to obliquely refer to the mercenaries). In Sudan, before the ousting of former President Omar al-Bashir, Wagner, which had business dealings in the country’s mining industry, was also involved in disinformation campaigns against regime rivals.

“They’re definitely experimenting with disinformation in these different contexts,” Parens said, “and trying to figure out how to influence populations.”

The post Information Warfare Was Key to Prigozhin’s Mutiny Against Putin appeared first on The Intercept.

In the months since then, as Ukraine has sought to liberate more territory occupied by Russia, the Ukrainian government has intensified its efforts to control the narrative of the war by tightening journalists’ access to the conflict. “After that, things started getting worse. … They have tried to place more control on journalists,” Katerina Sergatskova, editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, an independent Ukrainian publication, told The Intercept. “Now it’s really hard to make reports from Kherson, for example.”

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian authorities have threatened, revoked, or denied press credentials of journalists working for half a dozen Ukrainian and foreign news outlets because of their coverage, the news outlet Semafor reported earlier this month. In one recent example, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense did not renew the press credentials of a Ukraine-based photographer who accused the country’s security services of subjecting him to interrogations, a lie detector test, and accusations that he was working against Ukraine’s “national interest.” Government officials restored Anton Skyba’s accreditation last week, following a pressure campaign by colleagues and press freedom advocates, who have been denouncing tightening restrictions on media access to the front lines. But the episode put a spotlight on tensions between Ukrainian authorities and the journalists covering the conflict that have quietly escalated in recent months. Veteran war correspondents, for their part, are accusing Ukrainian officials of making reporting on the reality of the war, with rare exceptions, nearly impossible.

“The Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”

“I’ve covered four wars, and I’ve never seen such a chasm between the drama and intensity and historic import of the reality of the conflict on the one hand, and the superficiality and meagerness of its documentation by the press on the other,” Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer for the New Yorker, told The Intercept. “It’s wild how little of what’s happening is being chronicled. And the main reason, though not the only one, is that the Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”

Mogelson added that the restrictions come from military and political brass and run counter to rank-and-file soldiers’ desire to share their experiences. “The guys who are actually out doing the killing and dying and enduring the misery of the front are almost always thrilled to have journalists witness what they’re going through,” he added. “It’s not just politically or ethically problematic for Ukraine to prevent journalists from seeing the war. It’s also quite cruel to the Ukrainian men who are being forced to conduct it in total silence and obscurity.” 

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, which issues press accreditation and controls journalists’ access to the front lines, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Some Ukrainian journalists have also warned that military handlers’ tight oversight of journalists is skewing coverage of the war. “If a soldier tells me, ‘I hate this war so much,’ the press officer asks him to reply, ‘Yes, the war is hard, but we are keeping our spirits up,’” Skyba, a freelancer who regularly works with Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

That is the narrative much of the Ukrainian public is getting. Following Russia’s invasion, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered a 24-hour, unified “news telethon” in which some of the country’s major broadcasters — two that are public and the rest owned by oligarchs — provide war coverage in alternating, six-hour blocks. Late last year, Zelenskyy also signed legislation giving the government vast powers over the media; the European Federation of Journalists had called an early draft of the bill “worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.”

Sergatskova said that it has become increasingly difficult for independent publications like hers to cover the war — at a time when Ukrainians are increasingly turning to the news seeking coverage of the war ravaging their country. A survey published earlier this year suggests that trust in media among the public is currently at 57 percent, up from 32 percent before the invasion. “This is good for journalism,” said Sergatskova. “But it’s a big responsibility.”

In a recent op-ed, Sergatskova accused authorities of manipulating an opaque accreditation system to limit coverage of the conflict and of favoring foreign media while overlooking local outlets. (Zelenskyy, for instance, has given plenty of interviews to international news organizations but none to Ukrainian ones, she noted.)

“Ukraine has been fighting two wars for a long time. One is against Russia and Russian colonialism. The second is the war for democracy,” she wrote. “Many people are sabotaging this war for democracy. This is particularly evident in the relationship between the government and the media.”

“Transparency Is Messy”

The clash between reporters and Ukrainian authorities burst into open view just as the Ukrainian military embarks on a much-anticipated counteroffensive, a phase of the conflict that some journalists warn risks only being told through official accounts and tightly controlled access. While lobbying for greater military assistance throughout the war, Ukrainian authorities have carefully managed what is disclosed about their performance on the field: for instance, keeping a tight lid on the number of casualties among their forces. Such effort to control the narrative is not comparable to Russia’s full-scale propaganda campaign or its crackdown on journalists, including the March arrest and ongoing detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Many Russian journalists have also been forced to flee the country.

But some journalists warn that the Ukrainian government’s approach to the press is growing increasingly authoritarian. The Ukrainian military doesn’t have a formal embed system — the process by which war journalists cover conflicts by tagging along troops in the field — and most press access consists of short, chaperoned visits to military positions further back than the actual front lines. As a result, stories about the front lines are often told by journalists visiting recently liberated areas or as secondhand accounts relayed by military leadership.

The war has largely been waged using long-range missiles, artillery, and airstrikes, and it’s true that the release of information from the field could pose serious operational risks for the Ukrainian military, some journalists who have reported from the country concede. But seasoned war reporters know how to navigate such complexities, and it would be easier for them to avoid careless exposure of sensitive information if they had better access to the military.

“If the Ukrainians had an embed system, that would actually give them much more supervision over operational security concerns,” Mogelson said. “But they don’t have anything like that. All they have are these press officers who aren’t really press officers, who are there not to facilitate, but to prevent journalists from seeing, writing about, and photographing what’s going on.”

Some exceptions, like Mogelson’s own vivid account of life in the trenches published by the New Yorker in May, were not authorized by officials with the Ministry of Defense, who threatened to revoke the credentials of both Mogelson and Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk after the story was published. (Natalie Raabe, a spokesperson for the New Yorker, wrote in a statement to The Intercept, “Our writer and photographer had permission from the battalion commander; their press credentials remain in place.”)

Those critical of the limitations imposed on journalists argue that they have less to do with operational security than with an effort to control the narrative. Authorities have retaliated against journalists who have offered a more honest, if unflattering, view of the impact of the war on troops, and against at least one military commander who shared a frank but pessimistic view of the war effort, even as some Ukrainian officials have argued that such authentic assessments are needed to pressure allies into providing the aid the country desperately needs.

“Their posture toward the press is very short-sighted, and ultimately, beyond whether or not it’s anti-democratic, I don’t think it’s in their interest,” said Mogelson. “Transparency is messy. Not every story is going to have immediate practical benefits for Ukraine or its armed forces, and that’s what they want. That’s why they’re so obsessed with controlling the narrative. But that control comes at a long-term cost of an erosion of trust in any news about the conflict, both among Ukrainians and, crucially, among the Americans and Europeans on whose continued support and solidarity the war effort depends.”

Closing In on Journalists

Ukrainian military authorities rushed to accredit thousands of media workers covering the conflict in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. It was an especially dangerous assignment, with 17 journalists killed so far, the vast majority of them in the first few weeks of the war.

Within a couple months, Ukrainian authorities began to pull credentials from reporters whose coverage they didn’t like, including Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times, who was the lead reporter on an April 2022 story about Ukrainian forces using banned cluster munitions, and New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks. Yet the revocation of credentials really ramped up after Ukraine regained control of swaths of Russian-occupied territory late last year.

Many of the journalists whose credentials were revoked more recently had at some point worked in Russian-held territories, sometimes as far back as 2014, when Russia first invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities prohibit travel to occupied territory from Russia, even as it is virtually impossible to get there from Ukraine today.

That appears to have been the justification for authorities to revoke the accreditation of Italian journalists Andrea Sceresini and Alfredo Bosco in February, although officials never provided the two with an explanation. Instead, the freelancers, on assignment for the Italian broadcaster RAI, were traveling from Bakhmut to Kramatorsk when they received an email from the Ministry of Defense, warning them that their credentials had been suspended. The journalists, who had covered the conflict on and off since February 2022 and who had previously reported in Ukraine following the 2014 invasion, later learned from local colleagues that authorities had accused them of being collaborators and propagandists for the Russians. That day, a local journalist they had hired for an assignment canceled last minute, citing the same rumor.

Sceresini said he and Bosco were told by the Ministry of Defense to wait for an interview with the Security Service of Ukraine that never materialized. They barely left their apartment in Kramatorsk, wary of the risks of being labeled collaborators in an active war zone, until Italian Embassy officials told them to move to Kyiv for their safety. There, they contacted colleagues, lawyers, and diplomats to try to understand why their credentials had been suspended; informally, Italian authorities told them that Ukrainian officials had taken issue with trips the two had made to Russian-held territory after 2014. Sceresini reported from both sides of the conflict at the time. In particular, he worked on an investigative documentary about the 2014 killing of an Italian photojournalist by Ukrainian forces, and on a 2015 dispatch that highlighted the divide in communities split by their allegiances to Russia or Ukraine.

“They are running a check on all journalists. And one by one, those who are not perfectly dutiful to the directives and Kyiv’s political line are out.”

“At the time, you could go from Kyiv to Donetsk by bus,” Sceresini noted, but even though he had traveled there legally, Ukrainian authorities banned him from the country for five years in 2015, and he did not return until last year. After his and Bosco’s credentials were revoked this year, they learned of half a dozen Italian journalists and others dealing with revoked or denied credentials.

“They are running a check on all journalists,” Sceresini said. “And one by one, those who are not perfectly dutiful to the directives and Kyiv’s political line are out.”

In February, Ukrainian officials introduced additional restrictions on journalists: a controversial zone system divided the country into green, yellow, and red areas, with the latter accessible to civilians but off limits to journalists. Media advocates condemned the policy, warning that it unduly restricted access to relatively safe areas while also creating confusion about where it was actually dangerous for journalists to work. Two journalists were killed after the zone system was introduced; there had been no journalist deaths for nearly a year prior to that. 

The authorities later quietly revised those restrictions, substituting them with a process that critics say is both arbitrary and confusing. Now regional commanders make decisions about press access on a case-by-case basis. In May, military authorities also canceled all existing credentials and made journalists apply for new ones; several journalists said their new credentials were denied.

“It’s chaos,” said Sergatskova, the editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, “and it’s getting more complicated.”

A Narrative War

Until recently, local and foreign journalists alike have been reticent to openly discuss their conflict with authorities, for different reasons. Local journalists — many of whom have joined the military or left the country — have, at times, hesitated to criticize the government, split between allegiance to their profession and to their nation.

Ukrainian journalists “feel that they are part of this, part of the Ukrainian nation struggling for survival,” said Kyrylo Loukerenko, executive director of the independent Hromadske Radio, “so this is a very difficult situation for us.”

He stressed that some journalists are choosing to scale back their criticism rather than responding to top-down pressure to do so, out of concern that any criticism would feed into Russian propaganda efforts.

“It’s more about self-control,” he said. “When you are trying to be critical, people just ask, ‘Are you patriotic?’”

Karol Luczka, Eastern Europe monitoring and advocacy officer with the International Press Institute, said that, in addition to self-censorship stemming from a “moral obligation towards your country,” journalists are also aware that certain topics will earn them additional scrutiny from the authorities. “Ideas like, there’s a civil war, or there are people who are pro-Russian … these are very touchy issues,” he said. “If a reporter either knowingly or unknowingly starts using these kinds of talking points in their report, it’s going to be something that Ukrainian authorities look at.” 

Sergatskova added that for Ukrainian journalists, the choice of stories is also a function of priorities. While she noted that there has been some investigative journalism by local outlets exposing corruption among military leaders, many Ukrainian journalists are consumed by documenting Russian crimes. “This is something that is really important for us,” she said.

The government’s restrictions put foreign journalists in a similarly delicate position, with some publications prioritizing access at the cost of pushing back against the rules imposed by officials. “Some of us are not guiltless in this either. Some are kind of going along with it,” said Mogelson. “There’s a general reluctance to alienate the Ukrainian government because what little access we do have is contingent on staying in its good graces.”

The post Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship appeared first on The Intercept.

It was a vivid opening to the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, a member of the Ansar Dine Islamist group, which took over swaths of northern Mali in a 2012 coup. Al Hassan stands accused of leading the Islamic police and committing widespread crimes, including torture, rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriages.

“Mr. Al Hassan’s work was not confined within the four walls of his office,” the prosecutor, Sarah Coquillaud, said in her opening statement, as Al Hassan watched quietly, his reactions hidden behind a face mask. “His work did not only consist in dispatching men and writing reports at his desk; he took it outside in open places and preferably places where his idea of justice could be seen and taught to everyone.”

The trial against Al Hassan ended late last month, with a verdict expected in the coming weeks. It will not only determine the fate of a man whom prosecutors accused of being an “enthusiastic” war crimes perpetrator, but will also answer a key question facing human rights advocates: Can sophisticated digital evidence platforms, part of a rapidly growing arsenal of technology deployed in the documentation of human rights abuses, help secure convictions?

“Many of us are watching to see how visual and other forms of digital evidence become useful or are challenged, what the judges think,” said Alexa Koenig, a co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and a leading expert on the use of emerging technologies in human rights practice.

The Al Hassan case marks the first use of an immersive virtual environment — or IVE, in the court’s lingo — in an international criminal trial. (SITU, the visual investigations team that built the model, developed a simpler platform for a 2016 war crimes prosecution that was resolved with a guilty plea before trial.) Yet these types of tools — which are increasingly being used by human rights groups and media organizations, and have even contributed to landmark settlements in cases involving police violence in the U.S. — are likely to become a critical part of international justice efforts moving forward.

Take Ukraine, where scores of alleged crimes have been documented almost in real time by an unprecedented number of actors. As prosecutors increasingly rely on digital evidence and reconstructions in their work, they will face the challenge of sorting through massive amounts of data efficiently, a process that experts say will inevitably need to become automated in some way. Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor’s office launched what it called “the most ambitious technical modernization initiative in its history,” including a new evidence management platform to handle the influx of large amounts of digital evidence.

The proliferation of such tools and their expected contribution to criminal accountability efforts raises a number of pressing questions, human rights experts caution, like issues of fairness in judicial proceedings, particularly as prosecutors’ teams in international criminal tribunals are often better resourced than the defense. It also raises ethical questions, for instance about the re-traumatization of victims.

“Will this be in any way prejudicial to the accused and violate some fair trial norms that are so important to the effectuation of justice? What does it mean for the psychosocial well-being of the people in the courtroom, let alone the survivors of something so horrific, if you are able to immerse yourself in the scene of an atrocity?” asked Koenig.

“They can be really helpful for people to situate themselves at the scene of a series of atrocities and be able to explore what that atrocity means to the surrounding community,” she added. “But there are a lot of unknowns still in the field about how we control to give ourselves the best that can come from these digital platforms while at the same time minimizing the risks and the harm.”

Is Seeing Believing?

SITU researchers assembled the Timbuktu reconstruction through a combination of satellite imagery, drone footage, and other materials. They populated the reconstruction with evidentiary videos, some that witnesses provided directly to prosecutors and others that prosecutors collected from the internet. During the trial, prosecutors used the platform to show some instances of violence — like the floggings of a couple accused of adultery and of two young men accused of drinking alcohol, both of which Al Hassan allegedly participated in — as well as the places where other alleged crimes, which were not caught on video, took place.

In exchanges with the court, Al Hassan’s defense team raised concerns about the platform. “Unfair prejudice arises from the inherently persuasive and unduly demonstrative nature of the material,” they wrote in one email. They cited research that argues that “at first glance, these graphical reconstructions may be seen as potentially useful in many courtroom situations,” but cautioned against “the undue reliance that the viewer may place on the evidence presented through a visualisation medium, this is often referred to as the ‘seeing is believing’ tendency.” The court overruled the defense team’s objections. Al Hassan’s lawyers did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Gilles Dutertre, the lead prosecutor in the case, referred questions to the ICC’s office of the prosecutor, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

The team at SITU — with which The Intercept has collaborated in the past — said that while they worked with evidence provided by the prosecution, the platforms are designed to be used by all parties to the proceedings, including the defense. “It’s not a linear narrative that walks a viewer through specific sets of events, tries to make an argument and to thread a line through all of the pieces of evidence,” Bora Erden, a senior researcher and technical lead at SITU, told The Intercept. “Instead, it allows any user to query the platform for their own purposes.”

Koenig, who advised the former ICC prosecutor’s office on the use of emerging technologies, told The Intercept that the office’s interest in such tools was inspired in part by the realization, a decade after the court first started operating in 2002, that many of its cases were falling apart early on because prosecutors were not bringing enough corroborating evidence to support what witnesses were saying. The growing availability of a range of digital evidence sources — from geospatial imagery and drone footage to the spread of the smartphone and the rise of social media — offered not only new ways to corroborate witness testimony, but also ways to link evidence of crimes on the ground to the higher-level perpetrators the court was tasked with pursuing. “All of these were tools that the prosecutor needed to become more effective and efficient,” she said.

Still, the new tools were met with some resistance, in part because those developing them worked in fields — from architecture and design to computer programming — that fell outside the disciplines more traditionally associated with forensic work. “When you’ve been doing your job for decades, and you have a set methodology for how you find the evidence, verify the evidence, introduce it into court … there’s a very healthy skepticism that comes with introducing new ways of working with evidence,” Koenig added. “I have definitely seen some reticence to engage with these newer methodologies.”

More Accessible Courtrooms

The immersive nature of these platforms can make them a more effective way to engage survivors and eyewitnesses, proponents say.  

Anjli Parrin, a Kenyan human rights advocate and lawyer and director of the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic, told The Intercept that in many countries, courtrooms are elitist settings, “not an environment where victims groups, survivors, and impacted communities are going to feel welcome.”

But when they can see a recreation of places they know and experiences they lived through, “it helps make the courtroom accessible,” she added, drawing a contrast to technical reports that can be difficult for the layperson to understand.

“What is actually exciting and revolutionary about this is how it can simplify the problem, not how it’s an exciting, shiny new thing that looks cool.”

Yet these tools are not a panacea, cautioned Parrin, who has investigated mass atrocities and served as an expert witness in international criminal proceedings, especially when it comes to communities without access to certain technology. She cited a recent visit to a Central African Republic village where she interviewed witnesses after 30 people were massacred. “Not one person had a smartphone,” she said.

“What is actually exciting and revolutionary about this is how it can simplify the problem, not how it’s an exciting, shiny new thing that looks cool,” Parrin said. “It’s about how you actually make this meaningful to the people who are affected.”

Update: June 14, 2023
This article has been updated to clarify the accusations against Al Hassan.

The post How 3D Models and Other Technology Could Make it Easier to Convict War Criminals appeared first on The Intercept.

Her words, which the university administration condemned as “hate speech,” kicked off a new round of public debate about the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Republican members of Congress responded by introducing legislation that would deny federal funding to academic institutions that “authorize Anti-Semitic events.”

The bill cites a definition of antisemitism that the Israeli government and its supporters have been pushing in the United States and elsewhere, one that conflates prejudice toward Jews with criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel. And it comes on the heels of President Joe Biden nodding to the definition in the White House’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, released in late May.

In the 60-page document, the Biden administration referred to the IHRA definition — named after the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which promotes it — as the “most prominent” of several definitions of antisemitism and one the administration has “embraced.” But it emphasized that it has no legal value and does not supersede existing laws or constitute binding guidance for public agencies and local government.

Still, by providing neither a rejection nor a full endorsement of the definition, the Biden administration left room for further lobbying for its adoption. Indeed, conservative and pro-Israel groups hailed the strategy as a victory, even as the single reference fell far short of what they had lobbied for: a full-throated endorsement of the IHRA framework as the “sole definition” of antisemitism and as the foundation for federal policy.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The Intercept that some of those groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, were already treating the document “as if it had wholeheartedly adopted” the IHRA definition.

“So that what the text actually says will be made irrelevant,” Friedman said. “And we see this happening already with the CUNY case.”

The push for U.S. entities to adopt the IHRA definition has had limited success so far. While 31 states and dozens of counties and municipalities have embraced it in resolutions, strong constitutional protections for free speech have made more meaningful implementation challenging. In Europe, meanwhile, where the definition was first drafted, many states and institutions have adopted it, leading to dozens of human rights violations, according to a report published Tuesday by the European Legal Support Center, a group fighting legal attacks on groups and individuals advocating for Palestinian rights in Europe.

The ELSC recorded some 53 instances between 2017 — when the European Parliament first called on member states to adopt the IHRA definition — and 2022 in which the definition, despite its nonlegally binding nature, was cited as the premise for firings, withdrawn job offers, canceled public events, and disciplinary procedures in Germany, Austria, and the U.K. The report noted that all of those facing accusations of antisemitism were advocating for Palestinian rights and stressed that when legally challenged, the allegations were almost always dismissed as unsubstantiated. Still, by repeatedly endorsing the definition as part of their policy platform, European officials gave it “soft law” power, Alice Garcia of the ELSC told The Intercept.

“The EU basically has been repeating for years that this definition does not violate free speech because it’s not binding,” she said. “But if you give it the power that you are actually giving it, it creates concrete effects on people which actually concretely restrict freedom of expression and freedom of assembly fundamental rights, and then it becomes de-facto binding.”

The European Union coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, Katharina von Schnurbein, did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, she has defended the definition when challenged about its impact on fundamental rights. It “does not stifle free speech as hate speech laws remain unchanged,” she once wrote, adding that the potential for the definition to be politicized “does not mean that the tool is flawed.”

Anti-Zionism vs. Antisemitism

The IHRA definition was first drafted in the early 2000s in an effort to standardize data collection on incidents of antisemitism. The definition codified a notion espoused by proponents of the so-called new antisemitism theory, which argued anti-Zionism — opposition to the ethnonationalist project behind the state of Israel — amounted to antisemitism. Since then, the definition has been condemned by a growing number of critics, including its original author, for conflating the two concepts, threatening academic freedom and free speech, and seeking to silence criticism of Israel.

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia originally drafted the definition, but by 2013, the Fundamental Rights Agency, its successor body, had abandoned it. In 2016, the IHRA, a 35-member organization promoting education about the Holocaust, adopted a reworked version of it.

In addition to defining the term, it lists 11 examples of what constitutes antisemitism, including denials of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, claims that the state of Israel is a “racist endeavor,” and comparisons of contemporary Israeli state policy to that of the Nazis.

The examples effectively change the nature of the definition from a tool intended to address hatred and harassment to one designed to intervene in a political debate. Its proponents, critics have long charged, have used it to silence Palestinians and their supporters by seeking to deny them the right to speak about their oppression. Lina Assi, advocacy manager at the U.S.-based Palestine Legal, noted that efforts to inflate the definition’s authority have already done damage, particularly on U.S. campuses where accusations of antisemitism referencing the definition are most frequently wielded.

“The IHRA working definition is a culmination of lobbying efforts to instrumentalize and accelerate the use of false accusations in order to censor protected speech, to target any sort of viewpoint that is critical of Israel, and to chill one side of an important political debate by saying that anyone who supports Palestinian rights is antisemitic,” Assi told The Intercept. “It has always been used as a propaganda tool and Israel groups want to give it the veneer of the law.”

Critics of the IHRA definition note that it also endangers the fight against antisemitism itself by diverting resources that could be spent toward targeting real hatred and by confounding the public about what antisemitism is. The ADL for instance, one of the most vocal proponents of the IHRA definition in the U.S., tracks reports of antisemitic incidents and has warned that they have been on the rise. But the group’s tally includes dozens of references to Israel and Zionism, particularly on college campuses. While the ADL notes that it does not count all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, it says that “public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the Audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”

“It makes people unsure about what antisemitism is or isn’t, and then it starts to feel like maybe it’s not real.”

That conflation creates confusion and skews data, said Carinne Luck, international director of Diaspora Alliance, a group dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its politicization. “It makes people unsure about what antisemitism is or isn’t, and then it starts to feel like maybe it’s not real,” she told The Intercept. “I’m being told it’s real, but actually what I’m seeing is criticism of Israel, or kids on college campuses being pro-[boycott, divestment, and sanctions], or hosting apartheid week, and that doesn’t strike me as antisemitic and so, is antisemitism real? And of course we know it is.”

She added, “This is essentially a political conversation about Israel and Palestine, and not actually about antisemitism.”

Attacking Critics

The ELSC report offers a detailed assessment of the consequences of adopting the definition in Europe, where critics of the IHRA definition have long questioned officials about its impact on fundamental rights like freedom of expression and assembly. In dozens of case studies, individual accused of antisemitism based on the definition described consequences ranging from damaged career prospects to severe mental health repercussions.

“It has become impossible to voice any critical opinion about Israeli policies in public or in academia without the risk of losing your job, contract, funding or future employment opportunities,” Anna-Esther Younes, a German Palestinian critical race scholar, told the report authors. Her invitation to a panel was rescinded following allegations of antisemitism, based on her support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement; the abstract of a paper she wrote about the women’s movement in Hamas; and a number of academic petitions she signed.

“I had crippling anxiety of who I could even trust, as it felt like the IHRA definition was a mode of surveillance in my day-to-day life,” one of several British students who was investigated by her university after her social media posts supporting Palestinians were flagged as antisemitic told the authors of the report.

The report also cites the example of Deutsche Welle, a prominent German broadcaster that fired seven Arab employees who were accused of antisemitism based on the IHRA definition. According to the ELSC, the employees were not given specific examples of their alleged misconduct, but in the investigation preceding their dismissal, they were quizzed about their “upbringing, what I thought about Hamas, and, most troublingly, how I felt about Israeli children getting killed,” one of the employees later told reporters. (Some of those fired sued the broadcaster, and the case is pending.)

Both in Europe and the U.S., critics of the IHRA definition stress that efforts to codify it have intensified in response to growing recognition and condemnation of Israeli human rights abuses. The Israeli government itself has recognized that, and it has promoted a more proactive approach to countering criticism. In a presentation published this year, for instance, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs referenced the IHRA definition and called for an “offensive” strategy to fight what it described as “demonization, delegitimization, [and] double standards” toward Israel.

“This shift recognizes that ‘defending’ Israeli policies is not working since more and more people are recognizing the horrific treatment of Palestinians for the fundamental injustice that it is,” Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, recently tweeted, referring to the ministry’s platform. “Instead of defending these policies, the strategy calls for attacking critics of them.”

While global solidarity with Palestinians has been rising for years, public opinion in the U.S., Israel’s staunchest ally, has also begun to change, with a Gallup poll showing earlier this year for the first time that more Democrats sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, while overall U.S. support for Israel is on the decline.

“The tide is definitely shifting, embracing more pro-Palestinian views at universities and in the media, and also, Israel has embraced its most fascistic government yet, and violence against Palestinians has only escalated,” said Assi of Palestine Legal. “In this context, it should be especially clear that anything like the IHRA definition, restricting what Palestinians can say about their conditions, is clearly not viable as a policy.”

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