In a historic Senate vote on Wednesday, all but seven members of the Democratic caucus voted for at least one of two resolutions to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel’s military. Other prominent Democrats and potential 2028 presidential candidates, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and former Obama aide Rahm Emanuel have recently said the U.S. should halt all military aid to Israel for offensive and so-called defensive weapons. 

The idea of steering public funding to those responsible for the genocide in Gaza has plummeted in popularity, with polls consistently show a majority of Americans now oppose sending weapons to Israel. As Americans struggle with affordability amid the joint U.S.–Israel war on Iran, skepticism about military aid for Israel has only grown.

Yet amid this shift, a quieter debate is stirring in the American left over how far Democrats should go in blocking weapons to Israel. 

For anti-Zionist organizers, the goal has long been a total arms embargo. That wouldn’t just bring to an end U.S. public spending to support Israel’s military, but would also halt the commercial sale of weapons from U.S. companies to Israel’s government. Advocates for the embargo, which includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., view the policy as the most effective means in halting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its human rights abuses in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. Doing so, they say, would bring the U.S. into compliance with its own laws governing weapons transfers and human rights.

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Meanwhile, pro-Israel Democrats are beginning to speak out about holding Israel accountable for its abuses, but seek narrower arms restrictions that would still allow commercial weapons sales as a means to maintain Israel’s friendly relationship with the U.S. 

On Monday, J Street, an influential liberal Zionist lobbying group, released a memo outlining a significant shift in policy. Echoing growing demands to end Israel’s “blank check support from the United States,” J Street is urging legislators to instead make the Israeli government pay for U.S. weapons using its own funds. 

It’s a major departure for the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group, which had previously opposed a ceasefire in Gaza and backed Israel’s aggression in Gaza in the early months of the genocide. Since November 2024, J Street has supported a series of Senate resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. meant to block weapons transfers, including Wednesday’s joint resolutions of disapproval. But those measures focused on halting only the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel, such as bombs and firearms. J Street’s new policy memo calls for an end to government spending on both offensive and so-called defensive weapons, or missile interceptor systems, which power Israel’s Iron Dome. It’s a position that until recent months even Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna had not embraced.

Citing existing U.S. law, J Street’s memo calls for an end to providing Israel $3.3 billion in State Department funds to purchase U.S. weapons, along with $500 million earmarked within the Department of Defense for anti-missile systems.

“What we want to be doing is laying the groundwork for the next president to have the political backing to do the right thing to implement the right policies when they come into office in 2029,” Hannah Morris, vice president of government affairs for J Street, told The Intercept.

J Street’s position runs short of a complete arms embargo in that it would still allow Israel to purchase interceptor weaponry from U.S. companies. The group said the exception for anti-missile systems is meant to protect civilians in Israel. Critics say Israel’s defense systems enable the country to carry out its expanding wars in the Middle East without consequence. In addition, the new J Street memo calls for the U.S. to maintain “a strong security partnership with Israel,” including the sharing of intelligence and collaborating on researching and developing new military equipment when mutually beneficial to American interests. “They cannot become a backdoor for continued US subsidies to Israeli defense,” J Street wrote in its memo. 

J Street acknowledged its new position is partly intended to address the growing antipathy toward Israel among Americans. A Pew Research Center poll from earlier this month showed that a record high 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of all Democrats aged 18 and older and more than half of all younger Republicans. 

“Part of having this policy is to remove some of the discomfort that some of the American population has with the exceptionality of the relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, Morris said. “And that can lower the temperature or lack of sympathy for the Israelis versus Palestinians.” 

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Advocates for a total arms embargo view J Street’s evolution as a sign of mounting pressure amid the swing in American public opinion. “That did not just happen out of the blue,” said Beth Miller, policy director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action.“It’s the result of movement organizing for years and years.”

Some arms embargo supporters questioned the timing of J Street’s new position and whether it will hinder efforts to halt Israel’s expansionist wars. Yousef Munayyer, a longtime advocate of a total arms embargo on Israel, wondered whether the J Street memo could offer political cover for certain Democrats seeking to thread the needle by taking a stance against Israel’s abuses without suffering blowback from pro-Israel constituents.

Instead, Munayyer, who heads the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington D.C., said now is not the moment to give up ground. “There has never been a more defensible moment for Democrats to take such a position on an arms embargo, and it seems completely unnecessary for this hyper-calibrated messaging,” he said, referring to J Street’s policy position. “Maybe in a couple of districts and a couple of states, it may be useful, but in the broader sense the public has moved on, especially in the Democratic base.”

Disagreement between J Street and Palestinian rights organizers is not new in Washington. Some advocates for Palestine continue to condemn the group for opposing a ceasefire resolution in 2023, which opponents say helped pave the way for Israel’s genocide. Even before Israel’s war on Gaza, the group has been criticized for not taking strong enough positions on blocking weapons to Israel, including a bill in 2021 that sought to prohibit Israel from using U.S. aid to demolish Palestinian homes and annex Palestinian land in the West Bank. While J Street endorsed the bill, the group drew criticism from Palestinian rights groups who claim it didn’t do enough to drum up support with rank-and-file Democratic members. 

Morris said arms embargo advocates who are critical of J Street’s new policy memo “want to go from zero to one hundred in a way that I think is not only unrealistic but untenable.” She also questioned whether most Americans knew the definition of an arms embargo and suggested that, if given the full picture, fewer would support the premise.

Under the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. government is barred from sending weapons to any country that engages in “a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” or a country that blocks or restricts humanitarian aid. Another provision of the Foreign Assistance Act known as the Leahy law, along with provisions within the separate Arms Export Control Act, prevents military aid to specific units of any foreign security force that is found to violate human rights law. The U.S is also a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, international law meant to prohibit war crimes, crimes against humanity, including genocide. The conventions also have legal bearing on the transfer of weapons. 

Such laws make no distinction between weapons sales made with U.S. government support or sales through the commercial market. If Israel were to buy weapons directly from U.S. companies, Congress would still receive a notification and could vote to disapprove a sale.

When introducing his series of resolutions to block some arms sales to Israel, Sanders evoked both the Foreign Assistance and the Arms Export Control acts. The laws are also the legal basis for the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which has drawn support from a range of elected members — including ones backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and has become a litmus test for candidates taking a position on Israel and Palestine in the midterm elections. 

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At any point, either the president, through an executive order, or Congress, via legislation, can use these laws to enact some form of conditions on Israeli aid, whether halting all military support or a total arms embargo. 

Both a total arms embargo and the J Street model would bring to an end State Department spending ($3.3 billion annually), known as Foreign Military Financing, as well as the phasing out of Pentagon spending for Israel. Funds earmarked for Israel in the Pentagon’s budget are not classified under the Foreign Assistance and Arms Export Control laws. Instead, Congress must draft and pass a defense budget that excludes carveouts for Israel, or draft legislation that specifically targets Pentagon spending on Israel, most of which currently funds things like Israel’s Iron Dome.

Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., attempted to pass an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill in July 2025 that would have nixed the $500 million set aside for Israel defense spending, but it drew only six votes. Ocasio-Cortez was absent from the vote, which she said was to maintain Iron Dome funding.

While such cuts would be a blow to Israel’s ability to wage war, Israel still boasts its own major annual military budget of more than $45 billion. Israel also is home to a domestic weapons industry that sells to the Israeli government. Earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would want to “taper off the military” from the U.S. within the next decade. “We’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities,” he said. But both J Street and advocates for an arms embargo agree that banning subsidized weapons deals with Israel would still have a tremendous impact.

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Stephen Semler, who worked on Brown University’s Cost of War project that tracked U.S. military spending on Israel during its genocide, said halting access to American munitions stockpiles and U.S. weaponry would greatly diminish Israel’s ability to wage war at the rate it has in recent months in Iran and southern Lebanon. “If they’re forced to buy their own arms, then they’re going to have problems sustaining what they’re doing,” Semler said. 

In the first month of the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, the Israeli military said it carried out more than 10,000 separate strikes. Before the recent ceasefire, joint U.S. and Israeli strikes killed more than 2,000 people in Iran. Since early March, Israel has killed at least 2,100 people in Lebanon, including women, children, paramedics and journalists. The military has also leveled entire villages in the country’s south, similar to destruction seen in Gaza. Evidence of Israel’s human rights abuses are continuing to pile in both wars. 

“If you can make perpetual war and not have to pay for it, that becomes a much more attractive option,” Munayyer said. “But suddenly when you have to directly carry the costs, now you have to start thinking, ‘Do I want to be at war with all of my neighbors all the time, forever?’”

The post Democrats Are Split Over What It Means to Block Israel Weapons Deals appeared first on The Intercept.

“This is a moment for people to stand up and to decide who they are actually for — are they for the Constitution, are they for Americans, are they for Michiganders, or are they for Donald Trump?” McMorrow said to applause. She encouraged Democrats to consider invoking the 25th Amendment as an option to counter the president.

Later that evening, 17 miles to the west before a packed auditorium at the University of Michigan, McMorrow’s opponent Abdul El-Sayed also criticized the war — and a key distraction from it. 

“Our president is waging a genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable war with Iran that is torching our tax dollars to the tune of $1.5 billion a day,” El-Sayed said. And yet, “apparently the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were gonna campaign with Hasan.” He was referring to the popular political streamer Hasan Piker, who stood by his side at two 600-attendee university rallies that day, the largest of any campaign events in Michigan so far this year. 

The primary contest between McMorrow, a Michigan state senator, and El-Sayed, a physician and former candidate for governor, has turned into a referendum over the future of the Democratic Party and who should lead its insurgent left flank. The two are locked in a three-way race for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination with Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate with establishment backing who led the polls early on but has since seen her popularity slip. McMorrow and El-Sayed have both positioned themselves as outsiders to D.C. who promise progressive policies to help Michiganders struggling in an increasingly unaffordable economy — but the finer points, like debates over appropriate language and acceptable surrogates, reveal a deeper source of uncertainty: How far left is too far for the Democrats?

“This is almost like a proxy fight for 2028 in the presidential election,” said Adam Carlson, a political consultant and pollster behind Zenith Research. “It’s kind of like an AOC versus ‘insert more progressive center-left politician here.’ I think that whichever side comes out victorious will claim that as a mantle.”

Michigan is a state of key presidential importance. Its voters have backed the winner in every presidential election since 2008, swinging for Trump both times he won and against him the one time he lost. The 2026 general election for Senate is poised to be a close contest between the parties, too: In retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’s last election in 2020, he fended off Republican challenger John James by a slim 1.7 percent margin. Democratic Sen. Elisa Slotkin won her seat by an even slimmer margin, defeating Republican Mike Rogers by less than 1 percentage point in 2024. Rogers is running again this year.

As the Democratic Party seeks to consolidate support against Republicans, the fury over seemingly minor events like Piker’s appearance speaks to a growing gap between its establishment and the younger, more progressive part of its base. Piker, a leftist streamer who commands a massive audience in an online format often dominated by the far right, has been both held up as an essential asset for the left and shunned by centrists for his critical view of the U.S. and Israel’s role on the world stage.

Comparing Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes, McMorrow told Jewish Insider, “That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” a reference to a March 12 attack in which a U.S. citizen whose relatives the Israeli military killed in Lebanon rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue and opened fire before killing himself.

A McMorrow campaign staffer told The Intercept that the comments were given to Jewish Insider as a part of a longer feature story about the Temple Israel synagogue attack and her connections to the Jewish community; McMorrow’s husband and daughter are Jewish. But to El-Sayed, who released a lengthy statement decrying the synagogue attack, McMorrow’s comments revealed a disproportionate “hierarchy of pain,” in which the suffering of Jewish people matters more than that of the Arab and Muslim communities to which El-Sayed belongs. Piker, meanwhile, has objected to characterizations of his pro-Palestine politics as antisemitic.

“The south of Lebanon where a lot of communities in Michigan come from has a dire history of being destroyed by Israel,” El-Sayed said. “Israel right now is setting up to annex parts of southern Lebanon. If you have family who are dying or displaced in a war, that is deeply painful. There are a lot of people all over the state who are sad, but certainly, if you got family members who are running for cover because of Israeli bombs, you’re going to be pretty sad.”

That this ideological debate manifested in outrage over Piker — largely driven by the neoliberal think tank Third Way — suggests a fearful response from the party establishment to the surge of younger, progressive candidates, Carlson said. He sees the attacks as an attempt by the establishment to hold on to influence within the party, with the ultimate hope of sending a more moderate candidate into the presidential election.

Rallying with El-Sayed at Michigan State University, Piker criticized Democrats who spent the last several weeks attacking him rather than decrying Trump’s war on Iran, singling out McMorrow and Stevens by name, drawing boos and jeers from the crowd. 

“That’s exactly what’s wrong with politics in this day and age, and that’s why all of you came here,” he said, connecting the moment to the student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “For two-and-a-half years, they smeared people like myself and people like yourselves, and said that we were radical, said that we were wrong, and yet, we persevered, and we understood the violence that was taking place.”

“Mallory is about representing everybody,” a spokesperson for her campaign told The Intercept. “There’s a way to satisfy people who do have bold, progressive visions of what it is that they want to see in terms of policy, and meeting them there and saying, ‘This is how we get to your goal.’” 

This brand of progressivism has put her in a tricky position, seeking to appeal both to voters who want to see a stronger fight out of establishment figures like Stevens and those who view El-Sayed as too radical. Former Bernie Sanders speech writer and founder of The Lever David Sirota labeled her a “clickbait candidate” over a campaign ad against surveillance pricing, pointing out that she had not introduced legislation to halt the practice in the state Senate, and instead voted for tax incentives to build data centers in 2024. (The tax incentives also included environmental and consumer protection measures.) 

Such debates over progressive labels may have limited significance to actual voters, experts and analysts told The Intercept. 

“A lot of this division is a national Democrat division that regular voters don’t care about and/or are ignorant of,” said Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at Michigan State University.

Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, which backed McMorrow in her successful seat-flipping 2018 state Senate run, agreed that many people don’t vote based on ideological labels. 

“This conversation about progressive versus moderate, leftist versus centrist — that’s not how most people think,” Litman said. “They think my housing is really expensive and my child care bills are really high, and why the fuck is Congress fighting about like TSA and why are the lines at the airports long? That’s where voters are.” 

El-Sayed and McMorrow diverge in key areas where voters have pushed Democrats to be bolder. McMorrow has called for drastic reforms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; El-Sayed calls for ICE’s abolition. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All and co-wrote a book on the policy; McMorrow advocates for a public option, which her campaign said she sees as an initial step toward enacting universal health care. El-Sayed has called for ending all military aid to Israel — in line with a recent high-profile pledge made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and McMorrow has said she would halt sending offensive weapons to Israel, while maintaining other weapons, such as the Iron Dome. (Stevens has regularly voted in favor of sending weapons to Israel, called to lower Medicare costs, and pushed for ICE accountability measures.) 

“My opponents each have the same policy positions,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “One of them has better comms and more charisma. The other one has the DSCC establishment behind them.”

McMorrow’s campaign rejected the assertion that her platform is indistinguishable from Stevens, calling McMorrow’s plan a “21st century agenda to bring back the American dream and make it actually work for people.”

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She has decried the application of a “political purity test” over how to describe Israel’s genocide in Gaza. El-Sayed was the first among the candidates to use the word, joining the overwhelming international consensus among human rights organizations as well as the independent United Nations commission on Palestine. McMorrow embraced the term in October but maintained, in a January radio interview, that she finds litmus testing over it unproductive. She differentiated between the genocide of Palestinians and the Holocaust, which she said, “does mean something very different and very visceral.” 

“If you can’t call that what it is, a genocide, then I’m so sorry, but it’s very difficult to believe that you’re actually going to show up and do the things that you say you’re going to do,” El-Sayed told The Intercept, without mentioning McMorrow by name.

Basim Elkarra, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations Action, which has endorsed El-Sayed, said in places with large Middle Eastern and North African communities, especially swing states like Michigan, these issues will prove critical in elections as Israel continues its wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The Uncommitted Movement of 2024, which motivated 13 percent of Michigan’s Democratic primary voters to cast protest votes while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel, began in Michigan’s MENA community and snowballed into a national movement. 

“Folks are going to have to go through these communities in order to win in Michigan,” Elkarra said, “so it doesn’t help to alienate this growing voting bloc.”

With nearly four months to go before the August primary, McMorrow is leading El-Sayed in fundraising, pulling in $3 million to his $2.25 million since the start of this year, according to their respective campaigns. The Federal Election Commission has not yet verified the figures.

Both El-Sayed and McMorrow have sworn off corporate PAC money and American Israel Public Affairs Committee support. Yet McMorrow has received criticism over a leaked call reported by Drop Site News in which a donor spoke of an “outstanding” AIPAC position paper she submitted last year, and her candidacy has become ensnared in debate over the political role of self-described progressive Zionist groups like J Street, which backs McMorrow. AIPAC, for its part, has targeted McMorrow with fundraising emails — and is supporting Stevens. 

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Stevens is additionally backed by the AIPAC-aligned Democratic Majority for Israel and has also received donations through a less traceable money machine known for filtering pro-Israel donations. She appeared on a donation portal on proisraelnetwork.org, which AIPAC donors have used to fund other candidates that have sworn off AIPAC support. Stevens’s support is no secret, however: She has spoken at AIPAC events and released promotional videos for the lobby group.

Stevens, who has not released her fundraising numbers for the most recent quarter, has been running largely on her resume, which includes flipping her historically red congressional district blue in 2018. She did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Carlson, the pollster, thinks the more Michigan voters see of Stevens, the more support will coalesce around McMorrow and El-Sayed, leaving more space for the two to differentiate themselves. McMorrow has called for five debates before August.

Bill Lewis, a sophomore who helps run Students for Abdul at the University of Michigan, argued that El-Sayed was more captivating for young voters.

“Appealing to moderation is not always a winning strategy,” Lewis told The Intercept. “And if you go on campus and you ask people here, ‘Who are you excited for,’ they’re not saying Mallory, because that imagination, at least to me and to a lot of other people, is not there.”

Mari Manoogian, executive director of the nonprofit The Next 50, which supports Democratic candidates under the age of 50 and has endorsed McMorrow, said McMorrow and El-Sayed are already running in two distinct lanes, differentiated not just by substance, but also by style. She said while both have some populist policies, McMorrow espouses “authenticity,” while other candidate messaging “comes off as stilted and disjointed.”

Manoogian, a former Michigan state representative who also flipped her district blue in 2018 and campaigned alongside McMorrow, credited McMorrow for helping return the state’s Senate to Democratic control for the first time in 40 years in 2022, when McMorrow used the national attention from a viral speech that year to fundraise and campaign for other state candidates. 

She also pushed back on the notion that McMorrow is a progressive candidate, favoring the label of “pragmatic.”

“Mallory is not focused on slogans and simplifying policy in the fewest number of words,” Manoogian said. “She’s focused on speaking to voters about something she believes she can actually deliver on.”

El-Sayed frames his criticism of Israel and U.S. foreign policy in pragmatic terms, too. At the Michigan State University rally, El-Sayed countered Islamophobic attacks against him while criticizing the war in Iran, saying he wanted to instead reinvest public funds in services for Michigan.

“A lot of people say it’s because I’m Arab or Muslim,” he said, referring to his anti-war stance. “And I say no, it’s because I’m fucking from Michigan.”

The post The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer. appeared first on The Intercept.

Controversially, not all of that money comes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

“It’s as broad as possible, and that’s by design,” TrackAIPAC co-founder Casey Kennedy told The Intercept. Instead of just AIPAC, the group tracks spending from across the pro-Israel lobby. “We want to provide the most encapsulating picture that we can of who’s giving to the lobby and where they’re giving to,” Kennedy said.

TrackAIPAC started in 2024 as a scrappy bulwark to the powerful, conservative pro-Israel lobbying group for which it is named. Amid TrackAIPAC’s rise, U.S. voters’ support for Israel plummeted to historic lows as horrified Americans watched their government support genocide in Gaza, and AIPAC, once an indispensable ally for most federal politicians, transformed into an electoral liability. 

Depending on whom you ask, TrackAIPAC is a hero for pushing pro-Israel spending into the forefront of voters’ minds, a scourge peddling antisemitic tropes, or a well-intentioned activist group with an imperfect, ever-evolving model. An advocacy group called Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption launched in May 2024 and soon merged with TrackAIPAC, giving the lobby watchers the power to endorse and fund candidates. TrackAIPAC’s graphics are easily digestible and often go viral, lending the group political weight in an era when online audiences want to consume information in as little time and with as little brainpower as possible — and turning its signature red card into a political scarlet letter.

TrackAIPAC’s growing influence has set off a debate over its messaging and methodology, part of a broader conversation about outside spending in politics refracted through the lens of Israel. This was especially felt in Illinois’ recent primary elections, where AIPAC funneled its financial contributions through front PACs, or its major donors gave as individuals. AIPAC’s more elusive strategy proves the necessity of lumping several kinds of pro-Israel money together, TrackAIPAC allies say, giving the group the responsibility of acting as an analyst rather than a conduit of information.

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“The work tracker accounts do is important because AIPAC and other dark money lobbies are intentionally very difficult to track,” said Morriah Kaplan, executive director of the progressive Jewish-led Palestinian solidarity organization IfNotNow. Calling AIPAC’s tactics “extremely antidemocratic,” she noted that major donors can have a range of political aims, favoring tech giants, weapons manufacturers, and fossil fuels in tandem with supporting Israel.  

“Without understanding how TrackAIPAC defines ‘pro-Israel,’” Kaplan said, “it’s not as valuable a tool for transparency as it could be.”

In the 9th District of Illinois, TrackAIPAC’s broad approach drew controversy when it deployed a red graphic not just for state Sen. Laura Fine, the congressional candidate AIPAC’s funders and front groups supported, but also for Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who campaigned and won as a progressive, said he would support the Block the Bombs Act, and was a main target of AIPAC-funded attack ads.

When TrackAIPAC posted a red graphic for Biss, the group pointed to his refusal to call Israel’s actions a genocide, his opposition to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, his support for U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, and $460,357 “spent by the pro-Israel lobby groups and their donors.” 

That money mostly came from J Street, which bills itself as a liberal alternative for Zionist American Jews who want to counter AIPAC’s hardline influence. In recent years, the group has supported halting some weapons transfers to Israel and opposed Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. But J Street was slow to label Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide — its president Jeremy Ben-Ami came around to the term in August— and it opposed initial calls for a ceasefire. 

Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, was frustrated by her group’s conflation with AIPAC, calling TrackAIPAC “intellectually dishonest” for the distance between its name and its methodology. TrackAIPAC does label the specific sources of pro-Israel funding that make up its sums on its website, along with a list of organizations it tracks in addition to AIPAC, but they seldom appear on the red cards that circulate on social media. Some critics have labeled this blurring of lines sloppy or confusing, while others on the left and right have accused the group of antisemitism over its generalized “pro-Israel” language.

“I think the candidates and members should be held to account for taking AIPAC support,” deGroot said, “but the way that [TrackAIPAC] is going about it is doing so much harm.”

A TrackAIPAC spokesperson said the group’s members “wholeheartedly agree” that J Street and AIPAC have significant differences, but said they would still classify J Street as part of the pro-Israel lobby.

“J Street might have some disagreements with AIPAC,” Kennedy said, “but they are both working in favor of a foreign government within our government.”

The group does appear responsive to some of the criticism. TrackAIPAC is planning to modify its anti-endorsement cards in response to recent controversies. They’ll still be red, but the graphics will now spell out how much a candidate has received from specific pro-Israel groups, or individual major pro-Israel lobby donors, as well as additional information about their policy positions on Palestine and Israel.

“Every graphic released regarding Daniel Biss stated clearly that the total of the donations reported were from the pro-Israel Lobby,” the TrackAIPAC spokesperson said. “It would be intellectually dishonest to call J Street anything but a member of that advocacy wing in the United States. That said — we will be breaking their donations out and labeling them separately for transparency purposes moving forward.”

Changing the Cards

As the founders tell it, the “AIPAC” in TrackAIPAC’s name was always meant as a synecdoche, with the lobbying giant serving as an eye-catching stand-in for the entire Israel lobby. The broad approach is intentional, said TrackAIPAC founders Kennedy and Cory Archibald, and their project is a work in progress.  

The group has made several changes to its methodology since its launch. Some of them are spelled out online, but others, such as how the group tracks individual donors, are not. At the beginning, TrackAIPAC relied on Federal Election Commission data compiled by the transparency organization OpenSecrets, which also groups the pro-Israel lobby as a whole. Last year, TrackAIPAC began to analyze the FEC data for itself and started adding individual expenditures, or money spent on campaign ads, which triggered jumps in some members’ totals. That was the case for Reps. Wesley Bell, D-Mo., and George Latimer, D-N.Y., who toppled progressive incumbents last cycle with massive amounts of AIPAC support. This year, the group began including bundlers and major donors ($200 or more) who have given to pro-Israel lobby groups and are donating directly to candidates, especially as AIPAC shields some of its spending. 

“They’re going underground, so we’re going to have to go underground too,” said Archibald, who worked as a consultant on the campaigns of former Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who were respectively unseated by Bell and Latimer in 2024. 

The approach still seems to rile candidates who find themselves on TrackAIPAC’s bad side, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who accused the group on Instagram of being “MAGA plants who are meant to disrupt and confuse” for giving her a red card listing more than $100,000 from “Israel Lobby” donors. TrackAIPAC told The Intercept that it stands by Crockett’s rating, and that it used FEC data to identify major donors who have given to pro-Israel lobby groups and gave directly to Crockett. (It also gave a red card to Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who beat Crockett in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.)

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The founders also said they have received a number of requests from members who want their red graphics taken down. TrackAIPAC is working on a new questionnaire that would give members a chance to get their cards changed if they make specific policy commitments, like committing to an arms embargo and opposing laws that would restrict BDS or promote a controversial definition of antisemitism that conflates the term with criticism of Israel. 

Some politicians have already had their cards changed. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who has received J Street funding, used to have a red card, but his photo now appears on TrackAIPAC’s website in its original coloring, earning neither the damning red backdrop nor the smooth green ring that indicates endorsement. Khanna, who last year exchanged kind words with TrackAIPAC on social media, is among the members of Congress who receive the label: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”

Kennedy said those lawmakers exist in the “squishy middle,” calling it “the most ambiguous part of what we do.” He said they removed their red graphics to avoid the members “getting harangued as an AIPAC supporter,” while nudging them toward continuing to vote in favor of Palestinian rights. 

One of the group’s enduring questions is “how do we still apply the pressure without kind of souring our relationship?” Kennedy said. “So it’s definitely, you know, there’s some politicking that goes on there.”

Archibald interjected with more precise terms. “But it’s still very much rooted in their record — we’re not ever picking winners or losers,” she said. “It’s all based on the scorecard … on the facts that are present.”

To round out its rating system, TrackAIPAC relies heavily on the Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker, a spreadsheet run by five volunteers who are members of Democratic Socialists of America. The spreadsheet uses a scorecard system the volunteers helped devise with the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. (It has a separate tracking system for Republicans.) For candidates who do not have a federal voting record, TrackAIPAC looks to public statements, public policy positions, or associations with pro-Israel lobby groups. If a candidate has pro-Israel positions but campaign finance data is not yet available, TrackAIPAC issues a red graphic with a “warning” label. 

In some cases, J Street and TrackAIPAC have backed the same candidate. Progressive Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., for example, is J Street-supported but has TrackAIPAC’s endorsement because of her policy positions on the genocide in Gaza, BDS, and blocking weapons to Israel.

“The money alone is not enough to get you a red graphic,” Archibald said.

A Political Force

The question of how TrackAIPAC assesses its more subjective measures — and whether its targeting is even-handed — has spurred controversy, too.

Last week, TrackAIPAC drew criticism for deploying a red card for Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate on a platform that includes backing Block the Bombs and calling for a two-state solution. McMorrow’s graphic stood out because of her two opponents for the nomination: Rep. Haley Stevens, a hard-line Israel supporter who has taken over $9 million from the pro-Israel lobby, by TrackAIPAC’s count, and appeared in an AIPAC promotional video earlier this month; and Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights who earned the endorsement of TrackAIPAC’s campaign arm, Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption.

McMorrow’s most recently issued red graphic cites $100,439 from the general “pro-Israel lobby groups & their donors.” El-Sayed’s green endorsement card, meanwhile, lists only the amount he has received from AIPAC: $0. McMorrow’s campaign argued that this reflected an uneven treatment, pointing to El-Sayed donors listed in FEC filings who have previously given to J Street.

After previously staying out of the race, a J Street spokesperson told The Intercept on Thursday that the group was endorsing McMorrow.

“It remains unclear how Track AIPAC has arrived at their number, and we invite them to share their methodology so as to not mislead voters,” a spokesperson for McMorrow’s campaign told The Intercept, adding that she had not taken any money from AIPAC and had opposed its involvement in the race.

TrackAIPAC acknowledged that some J Street donors had given to El-Sayed and said the different treatment between the two candidates was decided only by their differing policy positions on Israel and Palestine. Circulating McMorrow’s red card, TrackAIPAC cited McMorrow’s admission of having “returned policy papers to at least one Democratic pro-Israel group,” as well as reporting from Drop Site News that she had drafted an AIPAC position paper, but critics noted that the group was harsh on a relatively untested candidate running as a progressive. 

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A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists.

DeGroot objected to a similar dynamic in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, where the campaign side supported candidate and activist Kat Abughazaleh, who finished as the runner-up to Biss. To deGroot, the group’s dual work as a data project and a political action committee allows its “masquerading support for a chosen candidate – Kat – as journalism, as fact finding.”

Candidates in TrackAIPAC’s good graces, however, may have reason to appreciate the two-part approach. Angela Gonzalez-Torres, a Los Angeles community activist and congressional candidate in California, said Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption was among her earliest supporters, giving her campaign a boost months before the more established progressive group Justice Democrats got behind her. She said that she was initially drawn to challenge incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., because of his responses to local issues like the construction of a controversial housing project atop a toxic dump site and an adjoined trucking depot that posed health risks to neighboring residents, but when she dug into his campaign, she came across TrackAIPAC’s red graphics. 

“When we as a community saw those profiting off of our pain and contributing to the very issues hurting our district and other humans, I think we were immediately encouraged to find someone to challenge Jimmy Gomez,” Gonzalez-Torres said, citing his AIPAC connections.

In a statement to The Intercept, a Gomez campaign spokesperson called the congressman “a progressive champion and has delivered for working-class families on the Eastside, securing hundreds of millions in funding to address environmental injustice, expand parks and housing, improve transportation, and combat climate change. He takes local concern about cost of living and quality of life seriously.”

Gonzalez-Torres said some of her supporters told her they donated to her campaign after seeing her and Gomez in TrackAIPAC’s side-by-side graphics.

Update: March 26, 2026, 9:57 a.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Jimmy Gomez campaign, as well as the news that J Street is endorsing Mallory McMorrow.

Correction: March 26, 2026, 3:58 p.m. ET
The Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker is operated by volunteers who are members of Democratic Socialists of America; a previous version of this story said the spreadsheet tracker was run by the New York City chapter of DSA. Cori Archibald’s role on Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman’s campaigns has also been corrected; she was a consultant, not a staffer.

The post How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC? appeared first on The Intercept.

The temporary suspension of travel is the latest in a crushing set of restrictions that Israel has used to sever Gaza’s contact with the outside world, compounding food, fuel, and medical care shortages for a population subjected to more than two years of genocide. Large backlogs of patients in Gaza need specialized treatments and surgeries, so volunteer medical specialists come with much-needed supplies to relieve some of the demand.

“When you do something like this, it throws all of that to the wayside and we struggle with our ability to treat those patients,” said Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago-based physician who has previously volunteered in Gaza. “This continues to have really profound implications on Gaza’s most vulnerable people.” 

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Ahmad, who volunteered in early 2024 at Nasser and Al-Aqsa hospitals, has witnessed similar restrictions at other moments of high tension — past Israeli offensives against Iran, the collapse of past ceasefire deals, or the Israeli military’s siege of Gaza City last September. He has been denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli government four times since his medical mission, including in May 2024, when he and other doctors were turned away in Egypt as the Israeli military took over the Rafah border. 

The restrictions in Gaza are set to be lifted next Tuesday, according to messages United Nations aid coordinators sent Wednesday announcing the blockades to dozens of NGOs, two of which confirmed to The Intercept the border closures were affecting their medical teams. Physicians who remain trapped inside the territory have cast doubt on whether the dates will be honored given the multiple postponements. 

“There’s uncertainty around when we’re going to leave, are we going to leave? Are they going to try to push the dates even further?” said Dr. Salman Khan, an infectious diseases physician at Columbia University, who is among the trapped doctors.

Khan and six other American doctors were scheduled to return to the U.S. on March 10 following a two-week medical mission at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The group has been blocked twice from leaving the territory, with Israel’s border security officials citing a “security assessment” without further explanation. The physicians also expressed frustration with the World Health Organization, noting that the international body was partly responsible for coordinating the doctors’ safe passage.

Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, the Israeli military unit that controls the borders between Palestine and Israel, confirmed it had closed crossings into Gaza “due to the ongoing missile threat” and said the restrictions are temporary and meant to protect people’s safety. It refuted claims that it was blocking doctors from leaving Gaza to harm its civilian population.

The World Health Organization did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

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“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the military has weaponized blockades, preventing aid from entering the Strip, including food and medical supplies. In addition to systematically killing and imprisoning aid and medical workers throughout the war, the Israeli government has also blocked the movement of international medical missions, further straining an already decimated economy and health care system. Palestinians in the West Bank have also seen similar wartime blockades, including the lockdown of entire cities. 

Despite the October deal between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli government has continued to impose limits on food and medical supplies from entering the Strip. In February, the government reopened its Rafah border crossing into Egypt, allowing some Palestinians to seek medical care outside of Gaza. 

Once the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran, the Israeli government once again shut all aid crossings into Gaza. Food has been allowed through a single border entry point — the Kerem Shalom crossing — but the amount of aid allowed in is well below what is needed, according to the United Nations. The Israeli government had already barred some NGOs earlier this year, such as Doctors Without Borders, from accessing Gaza after the organization refused the government’s new requirements of handing over lists of Palestinian employees due to concerns the government would target the workers. 

Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency room physician based in Olympia, Washington, also knows these restrictions firsthand. In August 2025, she was prevented from entering Gaza while waiting for approval in Jordan for her third medical aid trip. During her previous medical trips to the Strip, she witnessed entire convoys of international doctors who were barred from leaving Gaza. 

The unpredictable and indefinite nature of the Israeli government’s restrictions hamper future medical missions, Syed said. 

“Healthcare workers like myself have jobs in the US that are full-time and we have to get back to our jobs/families,” Syed told The Intercept. “It creates another form of logistical difficulties and prevents and discourages many of us from returning or even attempting to go in.”

The Palestinian American Medical Association, which is facilitating Khan’s trip to Gaza, and Humanity Auxilium, a Texas-based NGO that also organizes medical missions, told The Intercept the recent border closures have hurt their ability to move medical supplies and teams in and out of the territory.

“It really puts us in a limbo in figuring out when to deploy surgeons who cannot take off for weeks,” said Faiza Hussain, executive director of Humanity Auxilium.

Khan, who remains inside Gaza, said he’s had to cancel his patients’ appointments at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center in New York due to the delays. 

“I was supposed to be back at work at my hospital today,” Khan said. “This is impacting people on the other side of the world.” 

Khan added that some of his colleagues were anxious to return to their children. One of them was running low on their personal medications, having only packed enough for two weeks. The group of doctors includes anesthesiologists Ashraf Abou El-Ezz of Indiana and Anas Rahim of Texas, neonatologist Ahmed Faisal Saleem of Arizona, emergency medicine physician Aizad Dasti of Maryland, and vascular surgeon Asad Choudhry of New Jersey. One other physician did not wish to disclose their identity. They are continuing their volunteer work at Nasser Hospital as they wait out the blockade.

Although Israel’s attacks on Gaza have slowed since the start of the war on Iran, the Israeli military continues to launch strikes in the territory, in violation of the so-called ceasefire deal. In the first week of Khan’s medical mission, he recalled receiving trauma patients from an Israeli bombing on an encampment one mile from Nasser Hospital. A four-year-old girl died at the hospital from her wounds, he said.   

After urging from Khan and advocates, the U.S. State Department had arranged flights for the doctors from Tel Aviv’s airport on Friday, Khan said, but has yet to clear a way for them to leave Gaza to make the flight. 

In a statement sent after publication, a State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem was coordinating with COGAT and “ready to assist” the doctors after the Israeli government gets them out of Gaza. “The Department of State’s current travel advisory, in place since October 2023, states that U.S. citizens should not travel to Gaza ‘for any reason due to terrorism and armed conflict,’” the spokesperson added.

Update: March 13, 2026, 3:15 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to include the names of more doctors stranded in Gaza.

Update: March 16, 2026

This story has been updated to include a State Department comment sent after publication.

The post Israel’s Deadly Blockade Traps 7 U.S. Doctors in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite being one of the most recognizable faces among the activists, however, Mahmoud Khalil still faces possible re-detention and deportation to Algeria, a country he’s never lived in.

Now, on the heels of a federal court ruling that delivered a blow to his case, Khalil is mounting a new fight in immigration court, where he is appealing his deportation order.

Earlier this month, Khalil and his legal team requested that the government move the case out of Louisiana, the conservative district where he was held for three months. The legal team asked the court to send the case back to New York, where Khalil was initially detained and where he lives with his wife, Noor Abdalla, and their 10-month-old son Dean, who was born when Khalil was incarcerated.

If they’re successful, the legal team plans to submit new evidence to show the government’s retaliation against Khalil in hopes of dismissing his deportation case, according to the February 13 motion exclusively obtained by The Intercept. The motion, filed in immigration court, lays out the inequities of how Khalil’s deportation proceedings were handled last year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

Khalil’s attorneys hope to use a raft of government documents that have become public since his initial hearings — documents that emerged after Louisiana courts denied him access to the materials in discovery.

“This is the bare minimum that immigration courts should do, to look at the evidence,” Khalil told The Intercept. “And it’s clear by the government’s statements, by ICE and DHS conduct, that these were brought in retaliation to our freedom of speech.”

Among the documents is a newly unsealed March 2025 legal memo from the Department of Homeland Security that shows the Trump administration lacked evidence to support its case.

In addition to the documents, Khalil’s legal team drew comparisons to the cases of other student activists who have won relief from the courts. Unlike the cases of recent Tufts University graduate Rümeysa Öztürk and former Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance, the immigration judge presiding over Khalil’s case has refused to rule on whether the Trump administration unconstitutionally targeted Khalil for his activism at Columbia while he was a graduate student.

Both Öztürk and Mahdawi relied in part on a landmark ruling in a separate case that the government violated the constitutional rights of pro-Palestinian activists, including Khalil, when it detained them last year. In late January, a judge dismissed Öztürk’s deportation case and cited the September ruling. Just last week, Mahdawi beat his own deportation case after the judge said the government failed to certify the document it used to detain the activist.

“At least some part of this immigration system is still functioning fairly,” said Khalil, whose legal team hopes to add to the string of victories.

The Khalil Exception

For nearly a year, the Trump administration has attempted to make an example out of Khalil as part of its harsh crackdown on advocacy for Palestinian rights. ICE agents detained Khalil last March at his New York City home and whisked him away to Louisiana.

Immigration detainees are frequently rushed to Louisiana; critics of the transfers say they serve to isolate immigrants from loved ones and communities that could aid them, and also takes advantage of more conservative judges who could be friendlier to administration positions. Yet Khalil’s attorneys said the swift nature of the transfer, flying him out of New York within several hours of his detention, was especially punitive.

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The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim

At the time of his detention and transfer, the Trump administration said Khalil should be deported because his campus activism harmed U.S. foreign policy, justifying the position by conflating his advocacy for Palestine with support for Hamas and antisemitism. The government later added a charge of immigration fraud to Khalil’s case.

Khalil and his legal team have long argued the Trump administration’s case against him was never about immigration, but about silencing Israel’s critics. That argument was never considered by Judge Jamee Comans, who declined to consider Khalil’s free speech claims.

Comans also denied Khalil’s application for a waiver that would create another path toward remaining the country; usually the waiver applications are reviewed in a hearing, Khalil’s lawyers said, but Comans denied Khalil’s outright.

Comans upheld the Trump administration’s claims in the case and twice last year ordered Khalil’s deportation.

In the February 13 filing, Khalil’s attorneys said the rejection of his waiver was part of the government’s relation for protected speech, an opinion backed up by a declaration from a former immigration judge. Khalil’s legal team said it was “unprecedented” for a judge to deny a detainee the opportunity to make a case for a violation of free speech rights.

“The whole case has been an example of abnormal, from Mahmoud’s arrest until now,” said Johnny Sidonis, a head attorney on Khalil’s immigration legal team. “If this evidence had been available to us and set forth in the record immigration court, it would have affected the outcome of the case.”

In December, Comans, the Louisiana judge, was promoted to an acting assistant director position in the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Comans could not be reached for comment, but her office said it does not comment on immigration judge decisions or active cases. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil’s lawyers now hope to make the newly unsealed Homeland Security memo a major piece of their case. Drafted the day of Khalil’s detention, the memo was unsealed by a federal court in Massachusetts in late January as a part of litigation brought by The Intercept and other news outlets. The Trump administration acknowledged in the document that it lacked evidence to support its deportation case against Khalil beyond the rarely used foreign policy grounds provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The government said in the memo that it anticipated legal blowback.

A week after Khalil’s detention and after his initial lawsuit, the government added the immigration fraud charge to the docket, accusing Khalil of leaving information about his internship for a United Nations agency and membership in a pro-Palestine Columbia group off his 2024 green card application.

The new motion in Khalil’s case accuses the government of adding the second charge because the foreign policy-related “charge would not pass constitutional muster and therefore the government needed another reason to pursue Mr. Khalil’s removal, no matter how meritless and tenuous it would be to do so, due to its retaliatory animus.”

“I Could Be Deported Any Day”

Khalil’s legal fight is being waged in two courts: in federal court, where the adverse ruling came from on January 15, and in immigration court.

In immigration court, the Department of Homeland Security has until March 23 to file its response to Khalil’s filing at the immigration appeals board, after which the board will render its decision. And Khalil already has an ongoing case against his detention in federal court.

Last month, a panel of appeals court judges overturned a lower court’s order to release Khalil based on his First Amendment rights, saying the lower court doesn’t have jurisdiction over free speech aspects of the case. Khalil has until March 31 to appeal that ruling.

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In the meantime, Khalil has remained free from detention since last June, but he seldom gone outside since the federal appeals court ruling last month. A week after the ruling, an ICE spokesperson said the Trump administration was making plans to deport Khalil to Algeria.

Planning a future with his family is bogged down in uncertainty, he said. Before signing the lease to their new apartment, the first question he asked the landlord was: “What if I break the lease prematurely?”

“I can’t buy any piece of furniture,” Khalil said, “because I could be deported any day.”

Despite the stress of his possible deportation and security risks, Khalil has continued his advocacy for Palestinian rights and that of others to speak out, giving speeches at events and meeting with members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

He has also remained in contact with Öztürk, Mahdawi, and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, who was also detained for his pro-Palestine advocacy, as well as Leqaa Kordia, the last person who remains jailed after participating in the Columbia protests.

For Khalil, continuing to speak out, despite security risks, is his way of showing he will not be intimidated into giving what the Trump administration wanted: his silence.

“The administration wanted to make an example out of me,” Khalil said. “And this is the way that I’m making an example of this administration.”

The post Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom? appeared first on The Intercept.

It worked. “Fuck you,” Fuentes wrote back. 

This was Rectenwald’s shot. He apologized, calling Fuentes “a brilliant guy.” He reposted an uncannily gorgeous, computer-generated woman in a cross necklace and blazer encouraging the two men to “drop the beef.” She sat in front of an American flag and six light-up letters spelling “AZAPAC,” the acronym for Rectenwald’s new group. If Fuentes would just endorse it, Rectenwald promised, he’d “take it all back.”

Rectenwald launched the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee in August, vowing to fight to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and root out pro-Israel influence in Congress. AZAPAC aims to raise money to unseat pro-Israel legislators in the coming midterm elections, targeting some of the main recipients of cash from influential groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel.

It’s a goal that might sound appealing for the electoral left, whose members have long struggled to make meaningful progress on Palestinian rights in Washington, D.C., largely because of the strong grip the pro-Israel lobby holds on U.S. politicians. And as Israel’s genocide in Gaza stretches into a third year, AZAPAC’s policy goals may tap into a political energy currently unaddressed by either major party: growing anti-Israel sentiment on the right.

Though the Republican party loudly backs Israel and its war effort, far-right online spaces are growing increasingly critical of Israel. While accusations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel mainstream often dog Israel’s critics on the left, they appear as little cause for concern to far-right figures and their followers. As the nonpartisan AZAPAC works to sway the 2026 midterms, Rectenwald’s group will test whether candidates across the political spectrum will be similarly pressed on the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

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The AZAPAC founder has attempted to connect with openly antisemitic figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who famously praised Hitler. Rectenwald is a regular on The Stew Peters Show, which streams on the Peter Thiel and JD Vance-funded YouTube alternative Rumble, where the host has used slurs to describe Jewish and Black people — to no objection from Rectenwald. He’s courted support from popular manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed Jewish people are behind DEI policies, transgender identity, and “open borders.” AZAPAC is helping fund at least one candidate who is a Hitler apologist and another who has participated in white nationalist demonstrations.    

In a conversation with The Intercept, Rectenwald made clear he’s aware such affiliations could be detrimental to his cause. He said he is no longer seeking the support of Fuentes, though he remains interested in his fan base — they’re “more sincere than him on some things” — and that he was unaware of “the depth of” Bilzerian’s antisemitic views, which are well–documented online.   

Asked about Peters’s language, Rectenwald told The Intercept he would no longer appear on his show, then reversed and said he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.” Peters, Rectenwald added, has “helped us quite a bit.”

Affiliating with such figures perpetuates harmful and often violent rhetoric toward Jewish people, antisemitism and hate speech experts told The Intercept, and in the most extreme cases, conspiracy theories can motivate violence, as occurred when a white nationalist shooter massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.  

These antisemitic allyships also risk undermining legitimate criticism of the state of Israel — a heightened liability at a time when the federal government and its pro-Israel allies have launched largely spurious claims of antisemitism against advocates on the left who support Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide. 

“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders,” said Ben Lorber, an author and researcher of antisemitism and white Christian nationalism. “It stands to really harm the movement.”

Rectenwald appears to understand what he’s risking. After The Intercept reached out to AZAPAC-endorsed candidates for this story, two rejected the group’s backing and were scrubbed from the site, and a third threatened to do the same. Rectenwald accused The Intercept of trying to sink his PAC.

Rectenwald himself has used language commonly associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories of global Jewish control, and he argues that other Israel critics embrace similar language. Online, he regularly refers to “the Jewish mafia” and “Jewish elites,” and last April, he self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” as he said on a podcast, but Amazon barred him from using the title. 

“We don’t use the same language and talk about the same things with the same terms,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, referring to Peters. And yet, he said, “I do believe he’s doing pretty good work in terms of exposing the Zionist network and what it’s up to.” He said a significant portion of AZAPAC’s early donations arrived after his appearances on Peters’s show, which also runs commercials for the group.

During a September episode while introducing Rectenwald, Peters referred to Jewish people using a common antisemitic slur. A month earlier, he used an anti-Black slur to describe Department of Justice attorney Leo Terrell in another episode with Rectenwald. In that episode, Peters said the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad, satanic, Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” 

Rectenwald promised Peters in his August appearance that AZAPAC does not have “infiltrators,” “dual allegiances,” or “sneaky Jews coming in and running the show.” He closed out the episode by offering Peters an invite — which he told The Intercept has since been rescinded — to be a member of AZAPAC’s board.

The 2026 Slate

An AZAPAC ad launched in November and produced by the far-right company Dissident Media shows Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, Palestinian children killed by Israel, re-enactments of the American Revolution — and the red, clawed hands of a puppet master manipulating strings overlaying a mashup of the American and Israeli flags. 

Rectenwald told The Intercept that he was not aware “puppet master” was a well-known antisemitic trope and that the strings represented the pro-Israeli donor class’s influence on the Trump administration. Plus, the trailer was a success: Donations poured in as it drew attention online, Rectenwald said.  

AZAPAC had raised $111,556 by the end of December, according to recent FEC filings.  

Of AZAPAC’s 10 publicly endorsed candidates, six are running as Republicans with three Democrats and a Libertarian on its slate. The group is more focused on Republicans, Rectenwald said, because he aims to put a dent in the GOP’s pro-Israel base. AZAPAC is backing Aaron Baker, for example, an America First conservative who is running to unseat Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a vocal supporter of Israel and Netanyahu.

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At least one AZAPAC candidate drew national headlines five years ago. Tyler Dykes, a Republican candidate running for Rep. Nancy Mace’s congressional seat in South Carolina, was famously accused of performing a Nazi salute, which he denies, while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers with a stolen riot shield. (Trump pardoned Dykes on his first day in office.) Dykes also received a felony conviction for his participation in the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where organizers protested the removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”

Reached by The Intercept, Dykes said in an emailed statement he denounces “violence and extremism in all its forms.” He added that “Robert E. Lee was a hero, and deserves to be honored as such.”

Rectenwald told The Intercept that AZAPAC’s board had vetted Dykes and other candidates. He said he was willing to tolerate certain disagreements with the candidates and their views. The endorsements, Rectenwald said, are “a pragmatism of sorts.” 

“We don’t agree with all of these candidates,” Rectenwald said. “We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”

AZAPAC’s endorsement process is primarily based on a 19-part questionnaire, which Rectenwald shared with The Intercept. It asks things like whether a candidate would pledge not to receive campaign donations from prominent pro-Israel groups or “any other foreign lobby/PAC”; what they think of laws restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or imposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism; and whether they would vote to end military aid to Israel.

The group’s contradictions are perhaps best captured by two brief recent endorsements: two former American soldiers, Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, running for Congress as progressive Green Party candidates. As a contractor working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Aguilar, who is running in North Carolina, became a whistleblower alleging that GHF employees were firing into crowds of starving civilians at aid sites. Stoker, running in Texas, took part in last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, a humanitarian mission meant to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Their AZAPAC endorsements were short-lived. 

After receiving questions from The Intercept about Rectenwald’s language and AZAPAC’s associations with far-right figures, both Aguilar and Stoker rejected the group’s backing. Mentions of them had been erased from AZAPAC’s online presence by Tuesday.

In explaining his withdrawal, Aguilar’s campaign acknowledged that anti-genocide and anti-Zionist activists “are falsely accused on antisemitism on a regular basis” to discredit their work. “For that reason, we want to avoid being associated with any group whose statements or actions raise credible concerns of actual antisemitism,” Aguilar’s campaign manager said in a statement.

Stoker told The Intercept that “I have always used my platform to fight against racial superiority,” adding that AZAPAC’s narrow focus on “old conspiracy theories” and eradicating the pro-Zionist lobby “is not going to fix any of the larger systemic issues facing working class Americans.”

Christine Reyna, a professor at De Paul University who studies the psychology of extremism, questioned why AZAPAC would endorse candidates like Dykes and Casey Putsch, a racecar driver and AZAPAC-backed Republican candidate for Ohio governor. In August, Putsch posted a video asking Grok to list “all the good things Adolf Hitler did or was responsible for creating in his life” and railed against the Jewish right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whom he called “an annoying little rodent.” While there’s a growing number of other candidates who oppose sending military aid to Israel or have sworn off AIPAC donations, backing candidates like Putsch and Dykes could serve as a dog whistle, Reyna said, to some of the most extreme corners of the far right.

“When you package these really frightening and terrible and dangerous ideologies and you hide them behind this front-facing organization that gives them legitimacy,” Reyna said, “That can be extremely dangerous.”

Aligning with such America First nationalists, who tend to ignore the issue of America’s own ambitions of control and profit, can harm other communities, antisemitism researcher Lorber warned, because of their anti-Blackness, xenophobia, or anti-LGBTQ views. In the case of Israel, these far-right alliances can also injure the movement for Palestinian liberation, he said.

“If we get distracted chasing fantasies of Jewish cabals, it harms our analysis, it makes our work less informed and less effective,” Lorber said, “and it also divides our movements.”

Palestinian-American advocate and analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa, whose family is from Gaza, is acutely aware of the ways pro-Israel institutions have attacked anti-Zionist work for being antisemitic. He said those bad-faith attacks were why he was concerned about AZAPAC’s affiliations with the far right, which has long rooted its criticism of Israel in “actually racist and antisemitic” beliefs. 

“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel,” Kenney-Shawa said. “But neo Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”  

The day after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Putsch, who did not respond to outreach from The Intercept, doubled down on his support for ICE’s mass deportation campaign. On social media, Putsch, who is Christian, often attacks his opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith and Indian ancestry. On his campaign site, his platform includes anti-immigrant calls to “accelerate deportations” and limit the number of H-1B visas offered to immigrant workers.

His platform makes no mention of Israel or foreign policy.

The Founder’s Journey

“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, acknowledging that on occasion, he has used the words “Jew” or “Jewish” instead. A search of his X account turned up at least 43 references to the “Jewish mafia,” and he’s repeatedly invoked the “Jewish elite” on his Substack. He claimed to have borrowed the latter term from Norm Finkelstein, a pro-Palestinian author and activist who, unlike Rectenwald, is Jewish himself. 

“It’s not just an ‘israeli lobby.’ LOL. It’s a Talmudic Jewish mafia that runs the U.S. and the world,” Rectenwald wrote in one post in March. The same day, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia did 9/11.”

When The Intercept asked about Rectenwald’s use of the term “Zionist Occupation Government,” which has a history of popularity among white supremacists, he brought up AZAPAC-backed candidates like Bernard Taylor, a firefighter and Democrat hoping to unseat Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a former IDF volunteer. Rectenwald cited Taylor, who is Black, as proof that “we are not like bigots,” adding that AZAPAC planned to endorse other people of color.

Taylor, who accepted an endorsement from AZAPAC in December, said he also was not aware of Rectenwald’s rhetoric until approached by The Intercept for this story.

“I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s not concerning to me,” Taylor told The Intercept in a phone call, referring to Rectenwald’s language. In an emailed statement, he said his campaign rejects antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy, but would keep the AZAPAC endorsement based on policy. Taylor said that if he feels AZAPAC is “crossing the line” into overt antisemitism, he will reject its endorsement and refund donations from the group.

“If I made, you know, some slips here and there, it isn’t intentional — I’m not trying to dog whistle to anybody,” Rectenwald said. “I’m just trying to be precise, and sometimes, you know, precision is difficult.” 

In “The Cabal Question,” Rectenwald’s self-published novel, a former professor finds his worldview transformed when a friend “thrusts him into the JQ,” or Jewish question, as the book’s Amazon summary puts it, working with “a steadfast ex-occultist turned Christian nationalist to trace the strands of the cabal’s reach.” The story mirrors his own evolution of getting “J-pilled,” or “Jew-pilled,” Rectenwald has said, though he insists the novel is not about promoting antisemitism but rather “a Christian redemption story.”

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Rectenwald once identified as a leftist. He taught liberal studies as a Marxist at New York University — until a fallout that began in 2016, when it was revealed that he was behind the since-deleted Twitter account @AntiPCNYUProf with the screen name “Deplorable NYU Professor.” Rectenwald used the account to act “in the guise of an alt-righter,” as a way to argue against politically correct use of pronouns, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.  

He took a paid leave from NYU and claimed he was a victim of liberal censorship in a splashy op-ed and a sit-down on Fox & Friends. When he came back, Rectenwald invited far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class and later sued NYU for defamation. Court records indicate the case was dropped with prejudice, and Rectenwald said he settled out of court for a cash payment in exchange for his departure from the school in 2019.

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

The experience prompted Rectenwald to denounce the left and his several decades of Marxist scholarship, and in 2024, he launched a failed bid for president as a Libertarian, representing the conservative Mises Caucus.

It’s unclear when his fixation on Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories took hold. But on the right-wing podcast The Backlash in May, Rectenwald used the protagonist of “The Cabal Question” to describe how his views developed. 

In the book, Rectenwald said, the main character flees persecution and surveillance from the government controlled by “the Jewish mafia.” The character ends up finding refuge with “radical right wingers,” who help him escape the country. The more closely he affiliates with the right-wing network, however, the more he risks damaging his own reputation. 

“Art imitates life, right?” said the host. Rectenwald agreed.

The post A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists. appeared first on The Intercept.

The military, which routinely dismissed health ministry figures as Hamas propaganda, is analyzing the data to distinguish how many are combatants and how many are civilians, according to Haaretz. The report confirms past stories from the Israeli website Local Call as well as Vice.

The ministry is part of a Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, but human rights advocates, a prestigious medical journal, and the United Nations have said for years that its tallies of the dead have been found to be accurate. The ministry also periodically releases names and other identifying information about those killed in Gaza.

Despite human rights advocates’ reliance on the figures, the White House, members of Congress, pro-Israel pundits, and legacy media institutions have all cast doubt on the running death toll kept by the Palestinian health ministry.

The doubts sewn over the loss of Palestinian life laid the groundwork for persistent genocide denial that has helped to shield Israel from accountability.

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“The Biden administration, Congress, and the U.S. media played along with Israel’s lies and deception about the horrific death toll in Gaza — over 80 percent civilians; over half, women and children — so that they could gaslight Americans into continued support for Israel,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of human rights group DAWN. She said that, along with other debunked Israeli claims about the war, the denials of the death toll helped “ensure Israel can continue its crimes and the U.S. can continue to arm it.”

Hani Almadhoun, co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, whose brother Mahmoud was killed by an Israeli drone in November 2024, said it was difficult to defend against officials and media outlets dismissing the death tolls as “Hamas numbers.”

“To every government spokesperson, every news anchor, and every celebrity who repeated that denial — I hope you never know what it feels like to lose your family and then be told your loss is ‘disputed,’” Almadhoun told The Intercept.

With media and NGO workers barred by Israel from entering the Strip, the Palestinian health ministry’s count has been the only reliable source of the death toll during the genocide.

The latest health ministry figure estimates at least 71,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, a number that is still growing while Israel continues to strike the besieged territory at a near-daily rate in violation of the so-called ceasefire.

Here is a brief accounting of the people and institutions who have denied the Palestinian death tolls in Gaza throughout Israel’s genocide.

Biden Administration

About two weeks after October 7, 2023, then-President Joe Biden told reporters that he had “no confidence” in the death tolls kept by the Gaza Health Ministry.

“I have no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using,” Biden said. At the time, the Gaza Health Ministry death tolls estimated 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children, killed by the Israeli military. Biden’s National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby doubled down and said nothing from the health ministry, which he called “a front for Hamas,” could be taken “at face value.”

While the Biden administration later shifted toward confidence in the health ministry figures, their initial comments, which were widely reported, left lasting damage on the credibility of the Palestinian death tolls.

Congress

In June 2024, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Reps. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.; Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.; Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; Mike Lawler, R-N.Y.; and Carol Miller, R-W.Va., helped pass an amendment to a State Department spending bill that blocked the department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry data in its reports.

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Later that year, Congress passed a defense spending bill that similarly barred the Pentagon from publicly citing the Gaza Health Ministry estimates as “authoritative.”

“Will Congress now overturn its own ban on citing the [Gaza Health Ministry] data,” Whitson said, “now that even the Israeli government has conceded it’s accurate?”

Rep. Ritchie Torres

Days before the Senate vote on the defense spending bill, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., a staunch Israel supporter, circulated a report from a neoconservative U.K.-based think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, that accused the Gaza Health Ministry of inflating its death toll.

“Validating the public health arm of Hamas is like validating the public health arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS or the public health arms of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,” Torres said. “It is morally and intellectually corrupt.”

Steny Hoyer

Along with Torres and a host of other lawmakers, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., accused the Gaza Health Ministry of inflating the death tolls.

“They inflate casualty numbers and make false accusations to smear Israel’s reputation,” Hoyer said in October 2023. “We must treat their claims with the same skepticism we would those made by al Qaeda or ISIS.”

Since its military accepted the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, neither Torres nor Hoyer have accused Israel of doing something similar to validating the Islamic State or Nazi Germany.

Anti-Defamation League

The Anti-Defamation League was one of a host of influential pro-Israel figures and organizations that sought to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll.

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The group released a list of news outlets that did not mention Hamas when reporting on the health ministry death estimates and called on outlets to “properly caveat data and information cited from the Gaza Health Ministry with clear mention that it is controlled by Hamas and that it has shared false and misleading information in the past.”

AIPAC

Another powerful pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the Palestinian death tolls a “myth” that “cannot be trusted” because it is controlled by Hamas.

Elliott Abrams

Figures at major think tanks also joined the denialism. From his perch at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams, a longtime Washington neoconservative, was among them. Abrams — who pleaded guilty in 1991 to counts related to the cover-up of the Iran–Contra affair — called the Gaza Health Ministry data “not credible” and “Hamas propaganda,” citing a United Nations death toll revision that listed fewer women and children killed in Gaza. The shifting number was due to achange in the U.N.’s methodology — to an MO that now relies solely on the Gaza Health Ministry for data.

Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Another think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an organization formed with the support of AIPAC and its donors, also used the U.N. revision as evidence of apparent misinformation, citing the shift as evidence that the figures “have lost any claim to validity.”

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the Gaza Health Ministry is “is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work” after the ministry acknowledged in a report that it was still working to identify about 11,000 of what at the time was a toll of more than 30,000 Palestinians killed. The foundation suggested the report was a “deliberate effort to downplay the number of terrorists” killed by Israel.

Alan Dershowitz

Former Harvard Law professor, celebrity attorney, and pugnacious pundit Alan Dershowitz has also called the civilian death toll in Gaza “among the lowest in the history of comparable warfare.” He dismissed the health ministry death tolls as “way, way exaggerated — the number of actually purely innocent civilians that have been killed are a tiny fraction.”

Eylon Levy

Among the pundits who went after the Gaza Health Ministry death tolls was former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy. As recently as this month, Levy expended his energies refuting early reports on the Israeli government’s acceptance of the health ministry estimates, calling such reporting “dead in the water.”

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“This myth exists for one reason: to launder Hamas data to support its war effort,” Levy said.

Levy has not made any statements on social media since the report that the Israeli military found Gaza Health Ministry data to be accurate.  

Abraham Wyner

A scholar of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Abraham Wyner, took to the pages of the right-leaning pro-Israel site Tablet to denounce the health ministry death toll as “fake” and “not real.” His evidence? A graph showing the steady increase in the day-to-day numbers of people killed by Israel.

“This regularity is almost surely not real,” he said. “One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day.”

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In a statement to The Intercept, Wyner said the ministry death toll totals “were never wildly wrong,” but said Palestinian officials in Gaza had produced “false” numbers. He claimed he only disputed the proportion of the numbers that the Gaza health ministry had claimed were women and children.

“You must make a clear distinction between [what] was produced early (when the information war was fought) and today (when it has been lost),” Wyner wrote in an email.

Wyner was the only death-toll denier in this story to offer comment.

Update: January 30, 2026, 3:56 p.m. ET
This story was updated with a quote from Hani Almadhoun.

The post Israeli Military Found Gaza Health Ministry Death Toll Was Accurate. Will These Deniers Admit It? appeared first on The Intercept.

In short, Khalil is safe from further detention — for about a month and a half, his legal team told The Intercept. Khalil is fighting two separate legal battles: one in federal court, and the second in immigration court.

“We understand there’s a lot of concern about whether ICE can go pick him up again right now,” said Brett Max Kaufman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and member of Khalil’s legal team. “Before the appeals process is over, that cannot happen.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Khalil, a green card holder, at his New York apartment in March and quickly flew him to a Louisiana detention center. He spent the next three months there while the government sought to deport him, missing the birth of his child.

Khalil was released in June after New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that the Trump administration’s detention of Khalil was likely illegal and violated his First Amendment rights. As a graduate student at Columbia University, Khalil had been a vocal participant in student activism opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza — putting a target on his back for the Trump administration, which has sought to crush advocacy for Palestine under the guise of combating antisemitism.

On Thursday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rules on appeals in New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, overturned the New Jersey federal court’s release order in a split 2–1 decision. The two majority opinion judges — appointees of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump — stated the lower court didn’t have jurisdiction over the free speech claims case, while the dissenting judge, a Biden appointee, argued it did and Khalil’s release should hold. 

Even though the appeals court tossed the order that bailed Khalil out of detention, the decision does not immediately go into effect, according to court rules.

Thursday’s decision goes into effect in 45 days, at which point Khalil would again be exposed to detention. Before that deadline, Khalil can appeal the 3rd Circuit’s recent decision. 

That doesn’t mean Thursday’s decision isn’t alarming, Kaufman said — both for Khalil personally and for free speech rights overall.

The decision essentially endorses the idea that even if someone’s free speech rights were violated, Kaufman added, the government can still detain and seek to deport them for their activism, making them wait in detention as they challenge their case in immigration court.

“That just defeats the entire purpose of the First Amendment,” Kaufman said. “If this decision stands, the government might be able to snatch you up for your speech and put you in detention for years.”

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In a statement released by the ACLU on Thursday, Khalil called the ruling “deeply disappointing” but reaffirmed his commitment to activism for Palestinian rights.

“The door may have been opened for potential re-detainment down the line, but it has not closed our commitment to Palestine and to justice and accountability,” he said. “I will continue to fight, through every legal avenue and with every ounce of determination, until my rights, and the rights of others like me, are fully protected.”

If Khalil pursues another appeal, it would allow all 14 judges — rather than the customary three — on the appeals court to weigh in on the case and possibly reverse Thursday’s decision, potentially reviving Khalil’s release order. 

Thursday’s appeals court decision also allows the Trump administration to resume its separate fight to get Khalil deported in immigration court. There, Trump administration attorneys have used an obscure immigration policy to argue Khalil’s activism for Palestine has adverse consequences for U.S. foreign policy. The government has claimed Khalil has ties to the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which attorneys assert is false. Trump attorneys have also accused Khalil of lying on his green card application.

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In April, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that the government does have grounds to deport Khalil, but attorneys appealed, and the decision which is now being reviewed by the Board of Immigration appeals. If the board, known as the BIA, sides with Khalil, the Trump administration’s immigration case against him would end. 

If the board sides with the government, upholding the immigration removal, Khalil could pursue an additional appeal in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs decisions in Louisiana. Such a process may take months to play out. Appeals courts, in such immigration cases, can also offer a stay, halting the government’s deportation order, even after a BIA decision.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a prominent ally of Khalil’s, condemned the court’s ruling in a statement on Thursday.

“Last year’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil was more than just a chilling act of political repression, it was an attack on all of our constitutional rights,” Mamdani wrote on X. “Now, as the crackdown on pro-Palestinian free speech continues, Mahmoud is being threatened with rearrest. Mahmoud is free—and must remain free.”

Other pro-Palestinian activists detained by the Trump administration, such as former Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is also a green card holder, and Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, are awaiting their appeals. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing similar arguments for Mahdawi and Öztürk, who were both released last year after federal judges also ruled their constitutional rights were violated. 

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who was arrested in 2024 while protesting outside Columbia University and was detained in March by the Trump administration, remains in immigration detention in Texas. The government continues to allege she also has ties with Hamas, which she continues to refute in court.

The post Despite Court Ruling, ICE Can’t Detain Mahmoud Khalil — For Now appeared first on The Intercept.

The driver, who a relative identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, can then be seen losing control of the car and slamming into another vehicle, with smoke billowing from her dark red Honda Pilot. 

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot the woman, calling her a “rioter” and claiming in a release that the agents felt their lives were threatened. DHS told The Intercept that the person in the car had died.

In the video, the red vehicle appears to be blocking federal agents in a roadway when federal agents approach the car, one reaching into the open driver’s side window. The agents can be heard saying “Get out of the fucking car.”

A separate video posted online from a different vantage point showed Good yielding to federal vehicles, waving them along, when the agents approached her car.

As the car appears to be leaving the scene, moving around another federal agent in the roadway, the agent fires at short range directly into the driver’s side, according to the video obtained by The Intercept. At least three shots can be heard in the video.

The video does not clearly show that Good was attempting to run over agents, as DHS claimed. Federal agents had been conducting “targeted operations” in the area when protesters began to arrive, the department spokesperson said, referring to protesters as “violent rioters.”

The video, however, shows protesters filming agents and telling them to leave the neighborhood. There’s a sound of blowing whistles, a common tactic to warn residents of the presence of federal agents. 

At a press conference on Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that DHS was trying to “spin” the shooting. “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self defense,” he said. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.”

Elected officials, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Minneapolis Council Member Soren Stevenson, referred to the individual who was shot as “a legal observer.”

The ICE agent shot Good as at least 2,000 federal agents flooded the Twin Cities over the past week following the release of a video by a far-right influencer and Republican operative alleging fraud and targeting the Somali American community. Minneapolis and St. Paul had already been hit with ramped up immigration operations, but the fraud video escalated tensions, prompting DHS to send more agents into the area.

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As the fraud video went viral, fueling anti-immigrant outrage among conservatives, DHS agents began to conduct investigations in Minneapolis into the alleged fraud, drawing concern from immigrant rights activists that the city’s undocumented residents would be swept up in the operations.

Federal efforts ramped up this week as hundreds of agents arrived in the area with the DHS sharing on social media on Tuesday the threatening message: “GOOD MORNING MINNESOTA.”

A CBS Evening News segment highlighted the raids, showing two dozen agents surrounding DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as they arrested a man. 

“The American taxpayer is grateful that the resource allocation has been put here,” Noem said. “We’ve never seen this kind of fraudulent and abuse of programs before in recent history.”

Omar, who has been the focus of many racist attacks on immigrants in Minnesota, called for ICE to leave the city. “ICE must stop terrorizing our communities and leave our city,” she wrote on X. 

Within hours of Wednesday’s shooting, hundreds of community members gathered to protest near the site, according to local media in Minneapolis. In footage shared on social media by a local reporter with Sahan Journal, a federal agent appeared to fire a chemical irritant into a protester’s face at point-blank range. 

Wednesday’s ICE shooting is just the latest example of federal agents brandishing firearms and firing live rounds at unarmed individuals during immigration-related operations. 

Last July, the Intercept documented a pattern of federal agents brandishing firearms at unarmed individuals, shooting less-lethal munitions and tear gas, and beating people who were the subject of immigration raids, as well as attacking people protesting them and onlookers documenting the operations.

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Since then, Customs and Border Protection agents have opened fire on a family in San Bernardino as they drove away during a traffic stop, narrowly missing an 18-year-old boy; in Ontario, California, an ICE officer shot Carlos Jimenez in the back as he tried to warn agents of the presence of children at a nearby bus stop; immigration agents shot TikTok streamer Carlitos Ricardo Parias in South Los Angeles; and in Chicago, an ICE officer shot and killed Silverio Villegas González at a traffic stop — in the first reported fatal shooting of the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. 

Others have been killed while fleeing ICE raids, such as the California cases of farmworker Jaime Alanís Garcia, who fell from a greenhouse roof and died from his injuries, and Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, who was struck by a car while running across a freeway as agents raided a Home Depot. 

This developing story has been updated.

Update: January 8, 2026
The article was updated to clarify how many ICE officers shot at Silverio Villegas González; it was one.

Correction: January 13, 2026
The story has been updated to note that it was Customs and Border Protection agents, not Border Patrol, who fired on the family in San Bernardino.

The post Video Shows ICE Agent’s Fatal Shooting of Civilian in Minneapolis appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. military attacked Venezuela early Saturday morning, abducting its leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, who now face narco-terrorism charges in a New York federal court. Eighty Venezuelan and Cuban citizens were killed by U.S. gunfire and airstrikes.

At least one U.S. missile struck an apartment building in the port city of Catia La Mar, killing an 80-year-old woman as she slept, seriously injuring another and displacing residents, according to The Associated Press. Trump described the attack as “successful” and “perfectly executed.”

A growing number of legal experts and lawmakers have called Saturday’s bombing of Venezuela and the abduction of Maduro illegal under both international law and the U.S. Constitution.

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And yet, the Trump administration is already threatening further military action against Venezuela and other sovereign nations in pursuit of his so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” the refashioning of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which American leaders with imperialist ambitions have used to justify U.S. occupations across Latin America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said Saturday at a press conference following the attack on Venezuela. “Under the Trump administration, we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way in our home region.”

Though Trump campaigned on the promise of ending foreign wars, even before the attack on Venezuela, his second term has been defined by a ruthless and interventionist approach.

He has already ordered military strikes in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria,Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Before abducting Maduro, the U.S. military attacked a Venezuelan port, and killed more than 100 civilians in bombings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In addition, Trump continues to arm Israel as it violates the ceasefire with Hamas, grinding the genocide in Gaza into a third year.

Mere hours before the U.S. bombed Venezuela on Saturday, Trump threatened to attack Iran over its violent crackdowns on protesters, writing on social media that the U.S. is “locked and loaded and ready to go.”

And since carrying out the Venezuela raid, the Trump administration has taken aim at Cuba and Colombia, hinted at intervention in Mexico, renewed annexation aspirations in Greenland, and reiterated threats to Iran.

Here’s what the administration is saying about some of the other nations where they’re threatening military action, annexation, or regime change.

Venezuela

In an Air Force One press gaggle on Sunday, Trump said further strikes on Venezuela remained an option if the country’s government does not cooperate with the Trump administration.

“If they don’t behave, we will do a second strike,” Trump said.

In a televised speech hours after Saturday’s attack, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez criticized the attack as “barbaric” and “illegal” and called for the release of Maduro, who she called the country’s rightful leader. She vowed to “defend our natural resources” and said that Venezuela “will never return to being the colony of another empire.”

Rodríguez’s defiance seemingly undermined Trump’s statements that the U.S. would “run the country” and that Rodríguez is “willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.” Trump did not take her comments lightly and told The Atlantic on Sunday, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

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According to the Miami Herald, Rodríguez herself played a key role in negotiations with Washington as the Trump administration pondered who should govern Venezuela, or if the U.S. should fully dismantle the current socialist government.

Rodríguez returned to a more conciliatory tone later Sunday, writing on social media that Venezuela would “invite the US government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence.”

Rodríguez — who was sworn in as Venezuela’s new president on Monday, despite Maduro’s claim in court that he remains president — addressed a portion of her statement directly to Trump, writing, “Our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war.”

Cuba

During the post-Venezuela attack press conference on Saturday, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio took turns answering a reporter’s question on Cuba, which has long shared close ties with Venezuela. Trump called Cuba “a failing nation” and that Cuba was “very similar” to Venezuela “in the sense that we wanna help the people in Cuba.” Rubio meanwhile took more direct aim at the Cuban government.

“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least, a little bit,” he said.

The following day, Rubio, a longtime opponent of the Cuban government and an anti-Communist child of Cuban immigrants, further hinted at possible military action in Cuba during an appearance on NBC News.

“I’m not going to talk to you about what our future steps are going to be and our policies are going to be right now in this regard,” Rubio said. “But I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro.”

Later that day, aboard Air Force One, Trump largely avoided questions about Cuba, preferring to discuss Venezuela. However, Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who stood alongside Trump, spoke in more hawkish terms, saying, “Their days are numbered.” If the U.S. were to tell the Cuban government to surrender, Graham said, “You better take the offer,” rather than suffer the same fate as Maduro.

Graham’s combative comments drew Trump to say, “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall.”

“I don’t know how they’re going to hold out,” Trump said. “Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it.”

However, when a reporter asked whether Trump is considering military action against Cuba, Trump said: “We’re not gonna, I think it’s just gonna fall. I don’t think we need any action. It looks like it’s going down. It’s going down for the count. You ever watch a fight?”

Colombia

Colombian President Gustavo Petro was among the first world leaders to denounce Trump’s attack on Venezuela, which he said was a violation of international law and “threatens international peace and stability, specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean, and puts the lives of millions of people at grave risk.”

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In the months leading up to the attack, Petro was a constant critic of the Trump administration’s airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean, including the killing of a Colombian fisherman. The Trump administration sanctioned Petro in October, accusing him and his family of ties to the illicit drug trade, an allegation he flatly rejects, pointing to his record on seizing shipments of cocaine.

On Saturday, Trump said Petro “better watch his ass,” referencing cocaine shipments to the U.S. from Colombia. Such allegations of profiteering off the illegal drug trade is the basis of its criminal case against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

When NewsNation’s Libbey Dean asked Trump aboard Air Force One on Sunday whether a military operation focusing on Colombia was coming, the president said, “Sounds good to me.”

Trump also told reporters on Air Force One that Colombia was being “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” referring to Petro. “He’s not going to be doing it for very long,” Trump added.

Petro struck a defiant tone on Monday, releasing a lengthy statement on social media, saying that he was not “illegitimate nor am I a narco,” while denouncing the prospect of U.S. attacks.

“I swore not to touch a weapon again,” said Petro, a former leftist guerilla fighter with former militant group M-19 which struck a peace deal with the Colombian government in 1989, “but for the homeland I will take up arms again.”

Petro said that if the U.S. were to bomb any of the cartel groups “without sufficient intelligence, you will kill many children,” referring to a cartel tactic of shielding leadership by surrounding themselves with children. Such bombings would motivate guerrilla fighters to return to the mountains in hiding, he added.

“And if you arrest the president whom a good part of my people want and respect, you will unleash the popular jaguar,” he said referring to the Colombian people.

Mexico

During the wide-ranging Air Force One meeting on Sunday, Trump threatened Mexico. “Mexico has to get their act together because they’re pouring through Mexico,” he said, referring to the drug trade, and claimed that “the cartels are running Mexico.” Since his first term, Trump has floated the idea of attacking Mexico’s drug cartels. In April, reports surfaced that the administration had been seriously considering drone strikes in Mexico.

“We’re going to have to do something,” Trump said on Sunday. “We’d love Mexico to do it, they’re capable of doing it, but unfortunately the cartels are very strong in Mexico.”

In early 2025, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she rejected Trump’s offer of sending U.S. soldiers to Mexico to help fight the country’s cartel groups. “Sovereignty is not for sale,” she said at the time. “Sovereignty is loved and defended.”

Sheinbaum on Monday reiterated her stance against foreign intervention in a speech, saying, “Unilateral action and invasion cannot be the basis of international relations in the 21st century; they lead neither to peace nor to development.”

“Therefore, we state clearly that for Mexico, and so it must be for all Mexicans, the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples are not optional or negotiable; they are fundamental principles of international law and must always be respected without exception,” she said.

Greenland

Before taking office, Trump expressed his desire to annex Greenland from Denmark, which currently controls the Arctic territory. The autonomous territory is rich in rare earth minerals, such as lithium and titanium, which are key to making phones and computer chips. But its location, the U.S. has claimed, is also militarily strategic — though some experts say Trump’s claims of Russian and Chinese warships near Greenland are overblown.

In March, Vice President JD Vance visited the territory to pitch the idea of annexation while offering reassurance. “We do not think that military force is ever going to be necessary,” he said. Last month, Trump ramped up his annexation efforts by appointing Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as a special envoy to Greenland. “We have to have it,” Trump said at the time.

Trump teased future action to seize Greenland on Sunday. “We’ll worry about Greenland in about two months,” he told reporters, later specifying he meant 20 days. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.”

When a reporter asked how he would justify a claim to Greenland, Trump said he didn’t want to talk about Greenland, despite having just offered a lengthy comment on Greenland. “I’ll just say this … the European Union needs us to have it, and they know that,” the president said.

Leaders from both Greenland and Denmark criticized Trump’s annexation plans. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday issued a warning that if the U.S. were to attack Denmark’s Greenland, an ally of the U.S. through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a strategic military alliance forged after World War II, the whole of NATO would collapse.

“I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland,” Frederiksen said in the interview, according to a translation from Bloomberg.

“But I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO,” she added, “and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”

Iran

It’s not just the Western Hemisphere that is the focus of the Trump administration. After talks in the U.S. between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the pair suggested further strikes on Iran could be coming as Israel continues to allege Iran is developing nuclear weapons, an assertion Iran rejects.

On Friday, as demonstrations sprouted up across Iran over the country’s faltering economy, Trump said the U.S. military was prepared to attack Iran if its government killed protesters.

“If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Thursday. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Around the time Trump made the statement, security forces had killed at least seven people at the rallies, according to Iranian authorities. In the days since, the death toll has risen to at least 19 people, with some estimates as high as 29.

In a vacuum, Trump’s comments appeared to stand in defense of the human rights of Iranian protesters facing brutal government repression. But the Trump administration’s heavy-handed response to protesters in the U.S. highlighted the stark contradiction between the president’s rhetoric abroad and actions.

This hypocrisy was quickly pointed out by the very Iranian leaders deploying violence against their own citizens. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi used Trump’s words to justify his own regime’s brutal crackdown. “Given President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard within U.S. borders, he of all people should know that criminal attacks on public property cannot be tolerated,” he wrote.

Trump doubled down on his willingness to attack Iran over the protests, telling reporters on Sunday, “We’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re gonna get hit very hard by the United States.”

In recent decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been rocked by waves of popular protests, all of which have been met by brutal force, killings, surveillance, and widespread arrests. Personal freedoms have ebbed and flowed in tandem with increasing political repression. The Iranian regime frequently uses external pressure for regime change to justify its repression.

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The recent marches have focused on inflation, the rising cost of living, and soaring food prices as the Iranian currency lost half of its value to the U.S. dollar over the past year. While placing some blame on foreign interference, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian took the unusual step of nodding to government missteps as he moved to replace the country’s central bank chief.

Along with economic mismanagement, draconian sanctions by the U.S. and its Western allies have significantly contributed to Iran’s tanking economy, making it difficult for Iranian companies to do business internationally. Some of the U.S. sanctions ordered by the Biden administration stem from Iran’s violent response to a previous round of nationwide demonstrations in 2022, when Iranians protested the government killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not wearing a hijab.

The post The List of Countries Trump Is Threatening With War Keeps Growing appeared first on The Intercept.

The video, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube and millions more on other platforms, sparked a renewed crackdown in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security announcing on Monday it would visit 30 sites suspected of fraud across the city. A DHS official told CBS News Minnesota its agents would focus on a “little of everything,” when asked whether immigration enforcement would be a part of the crackdown. Threatening arrests, the agency posted a video to X in which agents enter a smoke shop and question an employee about a nearby day care center.

This isn’t the first time the conservative YouTuber has gotten the attention of the Trump administration. Shirley participated in President Donald Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa” in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. At age 23, his videos aren’t merely influencing his audiences — they’re also influencing government action.

This worries immigrant rights advocates, who fear that the fallout from Shirley’s video will only worsen the harm already being done to Minnesota’s immigrant communities at a time when Trump has taken to calling Somali people “garbage” at his rallies.

“The very real-world consequence is that it’s going to exacerbate the situation that we have in Minnesota right now where we have a lot of people, including U.S. citizens or people with lawful status being arrested and detained by ICE,” said Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School.

The video, she said, reinforces xenophobic tropes about the Somali community, specifically tying the community to fraud. Pottratz Acosta said she was worried the increase in DHS visits to day cares could be a pretext to simultaneously conduct immigration detentions.

“They’re doing these visits at day care sites under the auspices of conducting a fraud investigation, but if they happen to see anyone who fits a profile, they might be arrested,” Pottratz Acosta said.

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Shirley’s video builds off of the growing interest in a nonprofit fraud scandal in Minnesota involving a pandemic-era program focused on child hunger, which has resulted in dozens of guilty pleas. The Trump administration claims Minnesota’s fraud issue is much larger, to the sum of $9 billion worth of government funds being fraudulently funneled from social services. Republicans have painted Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats up for reelection, as responsible for an alleged lack of oversight. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Somali American and Muslim, has also been the target of right-wing and xenophobic attacks. Among other racist stereotypes and false claims, Trump said, “We gotta get her the hell out” of the country at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month.

State regulators said Monday that inspectors had visited the day cares mentioned in the video in the past six months, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, that there was no evidence of fraud at the sites during those unannounced visits, and some of the centers have already been closed or suspended. According to Minnesota Public Radio, state Republican lawmakers had steered Shirley toward the day care centers he visited in the video.

Shirley defended his video and said people have been silent about “Somalians committing this fraud” because “people are scared to be called Islamophobic, racist.”

“Fraud is fraud — it doesn’t matter if it’s a Black person, white person, Asian person, Mexican,” Shirley told Fox News. “And we work too hard simply just to be paying taxes and enabling fraud to be happening.”

Despite Shirley’s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread xenophobic and Islamophobic beliefs and conspiracy theories. While Shirley’s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a growing threat taking over the country. Combined with sensationalized headlines — “Exposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers” or “The UK’s Insane Migrant Invasion” — the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.

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

In 2019, Shirley began to post prank videos with friends on YouTube while attending a public high school in Farmington, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. At first, his focus wasn’t especially political. He garnered a large number of his 1 million subscribers after sneaking into influencer Jake Paul’s wedding in Las Vegas.

But amid his comedic stunts, he documented the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in 2021, where he interviewed far-right commentator and InfoWars founder Alex Jones and infamous rioter Richard Barnett. Shirley said he did not take part in the violence and filmed himself leaving without entering the building. Later that year, Shirley took a two-year hiatus from YouTube to go on a mission in Santiago, Chile, as part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In late 2023, after his return to the United States, Shirley shifted from prank videos to focus on political topics, such as immigration and crime. In May 2024, he orchestrated a stunt in which he paid day laborers $20 to jump into the back of a U-Haul van, drove them to the White House, and gave them signs demanding a meeting with Biden.

Shirley’s mother, Brooke — herself a right-wing influencer who goes by Brooker Tee Jones on TikTok, where she has more than 250,000 followers — occasionally joins her son in the videos. It was Brooke who pushed her son to start covering immigration at the southern border after his mission trip, according to an interview with Columbia Journalism Review. Early on, she’d feed him questions to ask and lines to say in the videos, she recalled. Her content has similarly focused on immigration in recent years, including other videos that accuse Somali residents in Minnesota of health care fraud without providing evidence.

Reached by The Intercept, Brooke did not answer questions about her work or the work of her son.

Shirley has made a habit of visiting cities and countries that are settings for right-wing, anti-immigrant conspiracies, such as Aurora, Colorado, amid the manufactured crisis around the Tren de Aragua gang.

During a visit to El Salvador in 2024, Shirley filmed a series of videos sympathetic to President Nayib Bukele’s violent anti-crime crackdown on his citizens, including a video from the notorious CECOT prison. It’s his most-viewed video to date, with 6.6 million views. In another video from El Salvador, Shirley recorded from the Centro Industrial prison, which has become a manufacturing hub where incarcerated men build school desks and vegetable market display racks, a form of forced labor. “It’s pretty amazing if you think about what Nayib Bukele has been able to do with this country — the streets are as safe as they’ve ever been, because all these guys are out,” Shirley said while inside a CECOT cell block, gesturing to the incarcerated men. At no point in the video does he mention the stories of torture and abuse within the country’s prison system.

Shirley was recently awarded a “citizen journalist of the year” prize by far-right media figure and Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, in large part because of his CECOT video.

In other videos, Shirley himself has become a part of the story.

In September, Shirley and a small crew filmed a video antagonizing street vendors in New York City’s Chinatown, referring to them as “Dangerous Migrant Scammers.” Vendors could be seen scrambling away while Shirley strolls down Canal Street. At one point, one man tells Shirley to leave and asks why he’s filming, leading to a physical confrontation with Shirley’s cameraman.

Several weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the street, detaining nine individuals. Shirley praised ICE for the raid that left the street “completely clean of illegal activity” and taunted an individual who was detained as a “scammer [who] got ICED.”

Shirley has accompanied federal agents during immigration raids in Chicago, interviewing a detained man in the backseat of a federal vehicle. Since Trump’s election, media access at raids has largely been given only to outlets or individuals sympathetic to the administration’s mass deportation campaign.

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Alongside other far-right influencers such as Andy Ngo and Cam Higby, Shirley landed an invite to participate in Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa,” a White House event where the administration advanced its campaign against antifascist activists. “People may wonder, ‘What’s the threat to us as Americans?’ You’ll be labeled as a fascist, you’ll be labeled a Nazi, and they’ll wish death upon you as they wished death upon me,” Shirley said of the decentralized protest group at the event.

Leading up to the Minnesota day care video, Shirley released a video about “the rise of Islam” in the U.S. and what he called “Minnesota’s Somali Takeover.” The July video makes a spectacle of the call to prayer and individuals praying inside a mosque and singles out Omar, as well as an Islamic center that converted from a Lutheran church to illustrate his point of the apparent takeover.

In October, Shirley published an hour-and-a-half sitdown interview with British far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, during which he repeated the false claim that there are “40,000 British Muslims” on the United Kingdom’s terror watchlist living in Britain. The figure is a misreading of a real list by British intelligence agency MI5, which does not include religious identifiers and contains the names of many people who have never traveled to the U.K. “At what point does this break out from a revolution to a civil war?” Shirley asked.

Shirley’s recent viral video in Minnesota was a continuation of this narrative.

In an attempt to lure people into gotcha situations, Shirley visited day care centers and health care facilities that he claims are operated by Somali Americans. Taking a page out of his prank days, he poses as a parent looking for child care for his fictitious son, “Joey.” Throughout the video, Shirley approaches individuals with dark skin or women wearing hijabs, peppering them with questions about supposed “missing” children and whether they were aware of fraud.

Police are called on Shirley and his team twice in the video, including while at one health care complex where a woman explains to a responding officer, “He’s trying to assume because they’re Somalian providers everyone here is fraudulent — he’s here with some kind of propaganda.” He claimed to be “checking rates” for health and child care. Police eventually escorted him out of the building.

The video’s claims of fraud rely heavily on a Minnesota resident and apparent whistleblower who is identified in the video as David. Toward the end of the video, David claims he was attacked by Somali men who he had confronted about the alleged fraud, describing the men as “very, very violent people.”

Since early December, federal agents have increased their presence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, profiling and detaining individuals who appear to be Somali, including individuals who are U.S. citizens. The crackdown has also led to the targeting of Latin American immigrant communities in search of undocumented residents. Trump and other right-wing figures have propped up their campaign by falsely depicting “Somalian gangs” who are “roving the streets” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, “looking for prey,” the president said on social media.

Even though Shirley’s video claims to have exposed new truths about fraud in Minnesota, the day care facilities highlighted in the video have previously been spotlighted as problematic by local ABC News affiliate, KSTP, as well as the state government, which earlier this year began to increase oversight of funding to day care facilities over similar fraud concerns.

The most effective way to combat fraud is increased oversight, said Pottraz Acosta. The recent crackdown in Minnesota, which has been exacerbated by Shirley’s video, she said, is not the kind of oversight that will prevent bad actors from exploiting public funds. The issue of anti-Somali sentiments is also a problem within Minnesota, she said, with residents facing demeaning stereotypes and unsubstantiated speculation that they are sending money to al-Shabab, the Somali militant group on the U.S foreign terror list.

This narrative, perpetuated locally and nationally, “feeds into larger narratives around certain immigrant communities,” Pottraz Acosta said. “There are bad actors in every community and just because certain people commit fraud, it doesn’t mean that every person who fits that same demographic profile is a bad actor.”

The post Right-Wing YouTuber Behind Viral Minnesota Fraud Video Has Long Anti-Immigrant History appeared first on The Intercept.

By early October, however, with the enactment of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan — which world leaders call a “ceasefire” or “peace plan,” despite ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza — such concern seemed to evaporate. Mounting international pressure was replaced with an eagerness from many governments, lawmakers, and institutions to return to the status quo.

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Exactly one week after the Gaza plan went into effect, EU parliamentarians tabled its proposals to sanction Israel over its human rights violations in Gaza. One month later, the German government, Israel’s second largest supplier of weapons, announced it would lift its arms embargo on its longtime ally; last week, Germany’s parliament approved a $3.5 billion deal to expand its missile defense systems to protect Israel. Earlier this month, Eurovision, the popular singing competition, cleared Israel to continue competing, despite pledges to boycott from Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland. The U.N. Security Council also authorized Trump’s plan, agreeing to help form a so-called International Stabilization Force.

In Congress, even as polls show most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, lawmakers and advocates behind the Block the Bombs to Israel Act in Congress have struggled to build on its summertime momentum, garnering only two new co-sponsors since Trump declared he had achieved peace.

What happened?

“Now that there is technically a ‘ceasefire’ in place, that alone has had a big immobilizing effect on activists, advocates, and — I think more importantly — just the general public,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka. Calls for a “ceasefire now” had a galvanizing effect for public pressure to end the killing — so the Gaza deal served as a release valve.

The Israeli military continues to violate the agreement, launching strikes into Gaza on a near-daily basis and continuing its partial, yet illegal blockade on humanitarian aid. The United States, for its part, has so far been unwilling to enforce the truce in any meaningful way beyond strongly worded letters.

Under the Gaza deal, gunfire and bombings have slowed but not ceased, with the Israeli military striking Gaza more than 350 times since, killing at least 394 people and wounding more than 1,000 others across the Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations. Israel continues to occupy 58 percent of the territory, establishing a largely imaginary yellow line within which the military demolishes buildings and civilian infrastructure and shoots Palestinians along the indefinite border — including two children, Fadi Abu Assi, 8, and Jumaa Abu Assi, 10, who were killed by an Israeli drone while gathering wood. The Israeli military also continues to launch daily attacks beyond the yellow line, including the assassination of Hamas commander Raed Saad on December 13, which drew the ire of the White House.

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In tandem with its ongoing strikes in Gaza, Israel launched a new military operation in the West Bank, raiding refugee camps, conducting mass arrests of Palestinian civilians, and killing unarmed individuals, including at least 14 children during confrontations with Israeli soldiers, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. One boy, 13-year-old Aysam Jihad Labib Naser, died of tear gas inhalation one month after Israeli soldiers attacked him and his family while they were picking olives.

Trump’s Gaza plan “has given a convenient excuse to members of Congress to look away from the situation,” said Josh Ruebner, policy director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. He supports the Block the Bombs bill, originally introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., in May, and acknowledged that it had stalled in recent months. “But the reality is that U.S. weapons are still being used on an almost daily basis by Israel to kill Palestinians.”

The Israeli government has allowed a trickle of aid into Gaza but continues to block most international and Palestinian aid groups from delivering supplies, a violation of both the 20-point plan and international law. Stuck at the border is $50 million worth of aid, such as food, maternal and newborn care supplies, much-needed treatments for malnutrition, and shelter goods.

On Friday, the global hunger monitor IPC declared Gaza is no longer experiencing famine, but warned the majority of Gazans still face “high levels of acute food insecurity.” Half a million people remain in “emergency” levels of acute malnutrition, risking death, the monitor said. Around 2,000 people are still experiencing famine conditions. Exacerbating the hunger crisis, winter storms blowing through the Strip have ripped through and flooded tent cities and war-torn homes where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. At least 13 people have died as a result of the weather, according to Gaza health officials. Among them is one-month-old Saeed Eseid Abdeen, who died last week due to hypothermia.

As attention and outrage have waned, Israel and its defenders have attempted to regain control of the narrative that they have struggled to wield over the last two years of genocide.

At the Jewish Federations of North America conference in November, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz blamed Israel’s losing public relations battle among young Americans on TikTok, which is “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

“And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews,” said Hurwitz during a panel discussion in which she also blamed the backlash against Israel on backfiring Holocaust education. “Because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage.”

Several weeks later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — speaking at a conference hosted by the Israeli news outlet Israel Haymon, owned by right-wing, pro-Israel, pro-annexationist megadonor Miriam Adelson — also blamed young Americans’ concerns over Gaza on TikTok and social media, dismissing livestreamed genocidal violence as “pure propaganda” and as “threat to democracy.”

Hurwitz and Clinton failed to mention how such dismissals of Israel’s atrocities have been powered by massive crackdowns on the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity advocates in the U.S. and abroad — and how legitimate concerns for the safety of Jewish people have been weaponized to crack down on pro-Palestine speech.

After the mass shooting at a Hannukah event in Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach, where two gunmen killed 15 people, mostly Jewish festival goers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized on the moment to tie the violence to Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood earlier this year following widespread anti-genocide protests in the country. In a CBS Mornings segment covering the shooting, Israel’s former special envoy for combatting antisemitism Noa Tishby advocated for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which considers criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic.

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Lawmakers in Australia’s New South Wales, where Bondi Beach is located, are now considering a ban on all protest for up to three months. In the United Kingdom, police agencies in London and Manchester responded last week to the Bondi Beach shooting by criminalizing the chant “globalize the intifada,” a call for popular resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, commonly misinterpreted to mean violence against Jewish people. The Trump administration, meanwhile, issued a travel ban on all Palestinian Authority passport holders, citing concern over “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.”

Despite the recent measures taken against the pro-Palestinian movement, Kenney-Shawa said he believes Israel and its backers will still fail in the long term to retake the narrative.

“They’re not going to be successful in restoring Israel to its former untouchability in U.S. politics — that train has left the station,” he said. “The Biden generation obviously grew up with all these myths about Israel and those myths were shattered by this generation who’s growing up with new facts about Israel, the reality of Israel.”

A growing body of polling shows Americans, mostly on the left but increasingly on the right, are beginning to reject the government’s special relationship with Israel — signaling a major role for such shifts in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

The Trump plan itself remains uncertain. Its second phase would see the disarmament of Hamas, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only give up its weapons if there is a path toward Palestinian statehood. Israeli officials, however, continue to reject calls for a Palestinian state. Instead, Netanyahu’s cabinet has been open about its stated policy of totally erasing Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of forming “Greater Israel.”

Whether the rising awareness will amount to material improvement for the people of Palestine is also unclear. Some protesters aim to make their efforts tangible by interrupting the global supply chain of weapons sent to Israel, as new campaigns by the Palestine Youth Movement have sprouted at docks and warehouses in Oakland and New Jersey. In the United Kingdom, imprisoned Palestine Action members are undergoing a weekslong hunger strike; among their demands is the closure of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit System’s factories in Britain. The Hind Rajab Foundation, meanwhile, continues to file legal complaints and investigation requests across the globe aiming to hold Israeli soldiers and commanders accountable for war crimes.

And in Congress, public pressure still seems to be having some influence on lawmakers. A recent resolution introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., which recognizes “the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza” and underlines the U.S. responsibility in upholding the Genocide Conventions, has drawn support from 20 other members of Congress — including Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who was elected with significant support by pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.

“I will not continue to willingly be part of that complicity,” Dexter said during her speech on the House floor to back the resolution. Dexter is one of several lawmakers who have altered their public stances on Israel after sustained protest from their constituents at town hall meetings and in front of their district offices.

“Public opinion has shifted in permanent and dramatic ways,” Ruebner, of the IMEU Policy Project, said. “People cannot unsee what they have seen over the past two years.”

The post International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened? appeared first on The Intercept.

Lewis was shocked, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept, as were her colleagues and students. The school did not give any explanation for why they did not renew her contract. Unbeknownst to Lewis, the pro-Israel blacklist organization StopAntisemitism had recently launched an online campaign against her, framing her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as “using her platform to spread vile antisemitic hate online.”

Lewis is one of at least 400 people StopAntisemitism has taken credit for getting ousted from their jobs in its online crusade, which has drawn widespread attention for targeting more prominent figures — including right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, progressive actor-turned-activist Cynthia Nixon, and the popular children’s educator Rachel Accurso, known by her stage name Ms. Rachel. Lewis, without her own platform or mass audience, is one of only two recent StopAntisemitism targets pursuing active federal lawsuits against the blacklist organization.

“I really thought we had free speech and this wouldn’t be a problem — that’s what social media is for, is that you can vent,” Lewis told The Intercept. “It wasn’t like I was saying anything above and beyond what other critics of Israel were saying.”

She sued StopAntisemitism for defamation in an Oregon state court over the summer, and the case was elevated to federal court last month. Her suit faces long odds, legal experts told The Intercept, but serves as a rare chance to register public dissent in the courts against the group’s targeting.

Founded in 2018 by social media influencer Liora Reznichenko and funded by the California-based real estate millionaire Adam Milstein’s foundation, StopAntisemitism targets public figures and private individuals over their criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights — forming a single-issue Rolodex similar to Canary Mission. The blacklists supplement the fierce crackdowns and censorship against Palestine solidarity activism increasingly seen at schools across the U.S. since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza.

StopAntisemitism elevated its own profile by targeting Accurso, who has used her platform to advocate for Palestinian children who have been killed, wounded, or starved by the Israeli military in Gaza, especially after she posted videos with a Palestinian 3-year-old who had lost her leg. In April, StopAntisemitism requested that the Department of Justice investigate her for alleged ties to Hamas, despite no evidence of such connections, and this month named her a finalist for “Antisemite of the Year,” on a list that also included Carlson and Nixon.

Accurso has faced an increase in online harassment, including physical threatening letters to her and her family members, she said in an Instagram post after StopAntisemitism released the “Antisemite” list. Her audience of nearly 5 million on Instagram and more than 18 million on YouTube has largely rallied around her — offering backing that hundreds of people like Lewis don’t have.

Reznichenko said that since October 7, 2023, her group has profiled 1,000 employees and students, often sharing their work or school information, encouraging their followers to contact their employers and at times calling for their firing, according to an October interview with the right-leaning Zionist media outlet Jewish News Syndicate.

When StopAntisemitism shared screenshots from Lewis’s personal Facebook page last August, it amplified the posts to a far larger audience than Lewis’s 2,000 Facebook friends. Lewis had criticized Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians, its genocide in Gaza, and Western support for the war. StopAntisemitism listed an email address for Valley Catholic School and encouraged its followers, who currently number more than 300,000 on X, to contact Lewis’s employer. “Warning to parents of students in Beaverton,” the post read. “Students at [Valley Catholic] are in grave danger under Sue Lewis.”

What followed was a flood of messages demanding her firing and a slew of personal attacks. “Their phones are ringing off the hook,” one user commented below the post, sharing the school’s phone number and listing school administrators’ names. “Keep trying.”

In one post highlighted by StopAntisemitism, Lewis reshared a statement pointing out the false reports of “babies beheaded” by Hamas and exaggerated claims of systemic rape to “mobilize Western support for the Palestinian genocide.” She had quipped in a separate post that Hamas would “wipe out Israel with their homemade bombs, small arms, hang gliders, grenades and sling shots,” and later clarified the post was sarcastic, given Israel’s clear military advantage thanks to billions of dollars’ worth of military aid each year from the U.S. and allied nations.

The following month, StopAntisemitism posted again: “Update: antisemite Sue Lewis is thankfully no longer teaching at Valley Catholic High School.”

In her lawsuit, Lewis is alleging that StopAntisemitism and Reznichenko defamed her, invaded her privacy, interfered with her work contract, and inflicted emotional distress.

Valley Catholic School did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

In court filings seeking an immediate dismissal, the organization has claimed its statements are true and protected by the First Amendment as opinion.

Groups like StopAntisemitism have free speech rights too, said Aaron Terr, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “even when it’s harsh, unfair, or deeply offensive.”

StopAntisemitism declined to comment on Lewis’s lawsuit and instead doubled down on its criticism of Accurso.

“Regarding Ms. Rachel, it is disturbing that the media continues to pretend she merely advocates for Palestinian children,” Reznichenko said in a statement to The Intercept, claiming that she attempted “to pass off pictures of children with birth defects as victims of Israeli aggression” and had inspired “an army of antisemitic lunatics” to make threats against the group.

A spokesperson for Accurso called Reznichenko’s accusations false and dangerous. In a statement, Accurso said that her “compassion and care for children doesn’t stop at any border” and that her advocacy for children in Gaza is no exception.

“I want every child to be fed, safe and able to attend school,” Accurso said. “I know that everyone benefits when we help children reach their full potential and grow into thriving, healthy adults. I also know that it’s not right for children to suffer like they are currently in Gaza, Sudan, the Congo and beyond.”

While her project’s main currency lies in the mass ire of social media, Reznichenko has also been a recurring guest on broadcast TV, including Jake Tapper’s CNN show, Fox News, and NewsNation. In a recent segment on Fox, she blamed the recent Bondi Beach mass shooting on the Palestinian liberation movement, calling for the deportation of “radicals” who want to “globalize the intifada,” a historical reference to Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, often framed by pro-Israel advocates as a call for violence against Jews.

The Encino, California-based nonprofit Merona Leadership Foundation, of which Adam Milstein is president, paid Reznichenko $142,722 in 2023 while she worked for StopAntisemitism, according to the group’s tax filing. The foundation, which helps cover StopAntisemitism’s operating costs, serves as one vehicle for Milstein to support efforts to crush Palestinian solidarity work, as first reported by the Washington Post.

The Milstein Family Foundation, which Milstein operates with his wife Gila, helps fund the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, as well as the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. Milstein, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2008, has also been tied to blacklist group Canary Mission and has praised their work, but rejected claims that he funds the group. StopAntisemitism, however, is listed as among the Milstein foundation’s supported groups.

The Milsteins sit on the board of Impact Forum Foundation, a network of dozens of pro-Israel philanthropists who support nonprofits that include StopAntisemitism. The supported companies include media organizations such as Jewish News Syndicate, pro-Israel think tanks like Middle East Forum and Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and advocacy groups such as Students Supporting Israel, Parents Defending Education, and ELNET, which has described itself as the AIPAC of Europe. The network’s website said the coalition’s aims are to “fight antisemitism, strengthen the State of Israel, and advance the U.S. – Israel alliance.”

The Milsteins did not respond to a request for comment.

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Lewis’s lawsuit against StopAntisemitism represents a rare legal challenge against pro-Israel doxxing groups, and it faces long odds because of First Amendment protections. Former Cabrini University professor Kareem Tannous, a Palestinian American who lost his job in 2022 after StopAntisemitism blacklisted him over social media posts critical of Israel, sued the group for defamation but had his case dismissed when a federal judge in Pennsylvania found that StopAntisemitism’s statements were protected opinion.

A federal judge in Michigan made a similar free speech ruling in a lawsuit filed against StopAntisemitism in 2024 by a former University of Michigan hockey player, John Druskinis, who the group had falsely accused of painting a swastika on the sidewalk in front of the Jewish Resource Center when he had instead painted a male genitalia and a homophobic slur. Although the court upheld Druskinis’s defamation claim, he dropped his suit earlier this year.

Aside from Lewis’s suit, the only other active lawsuit against StopAntisemitism was filed by Abeer AbouYabis, a physician and former professor at Emory’s medical school, who was fired after the group doxxed her over a social media post expressing “hope” in a free Palestine and praising the “glory” of Palestinian “resistance fighters” on October 7.

Unlike previous lawsuits, AbouYabis, who is an Arab Palestinian and Muslim, alleges discrimination based on race, religion, and nationality, as well as retaliation allegations under the American Disabilities Act. In a 213-page complaint, AbouYabis alleged Emory fired her while she was on medical leave for post-traumatic stress disorder after 37 members of her family were killed in the first month of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. The suit, originally filed in May, names the school, the Milsteins, StopAntisemitism, and Canary Mission, accusing Emory of collaborating with the latter two to silence AbouYabis’s protected speech. In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, attorneys for the Milsteins did not deny its financial support for StopAntisemitism, but said the couple cannot be held liable “for the acts of these third party websites.”

Central to Lewis’s complaint against StopAntisemitism is the group’s email campaign against Lewis as part of a series targeting educators called “Corrupting the Classroom,” in which they labeled her “a raging antisemite.” A link on the campaign’s site, which remains active, leads directly to a pre-written email message addressed to Valley Catholic School’s principal. The email calls Lewis “a grave threat to the safety and well-being of your students” whose “presence in the classroom cannot be tolerated” and called on the principal “to take immediate and decisive action to address this situation.” Lewis’s lawsuit frames the campaign’s message as “false and malicious statements” about her personal views on the Israeli government’s policies. The campaign, the suit alleges, is full of “mischaracterizations and distortions” of her social media posts.

In a motion to dismiss Lewis’s case, attorneys for the Reznichenko and the organization defended the “Corrupting the Classroom” campaign as having used Lewis’s own “quotes and screenshots from Plaintiff’s publicly available social media profile,” arguing that the group “simply framed them as an example of dangerous antisemitism, a conclusion StopAntisemitism is entitled to reach and express under the First Amendment” and Oregon law.

FIRE’s Terr, who is familiar with cases involving StopAntisemitism, said he agreed with the court’s previous decisions in other cases where judges ruled to protect StopAntisemitism’s free speech rights, even if he disagreed with the group’s tactics. It would be worse, he said, if the government could decide what speech is or is not acceptable.

The second Trump administration, however, has tested the limits of such constitutional protections by passing executive orders inspired by the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which aims to target the pro-Palestinian movement by accusing them of being Hamas supporters. The orders have only emboldened groups like StopAntisemitism.

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Earlier this year, the administration began detaining and attempting to deport high profile pro-Palestinian activists Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mahmoud Khalil — the latter of whom Reznichenko regularly attacks online. The right-wing Zionist group Betar has openly collaborated with the Trump administration, providing lists of pro-Palestine activists in the U.S. for deportation. StopAntisemitism has cheered on such deportation efforts. A Palestinian woman who joined a pro-Palestine protest in New York, Leqaa Kordia, has been in immigration detention since early March despite a judge twice ordering her release. The Trump administration and groups like StopAntisemitism have accused her of being a “pro-Hamas extremist” while failing to present evidence.

While Terr said StopAntisemitism is protected by the First Amendment, he criticized blacklist groups like StopAntisemitism for punishing people who say things the group disagrees with by “trying to inflict devastating consequences on people, like depriving them of their livelihoods,” which he said chills further speech.

“When an organization like Stop Anti-Semitism not only amplifies someone else’s social media posts to criticize their views, but also organizes a campaign to get them fired, it’s right to call that out as illiberal,” Terr said.

Calling out StopAntisemitism is perhaps the best recourse people have in seeking accountability, said Dylan Saba, an attorney at Palestine Legal, which has supported students and faculty who have been censored by schools due to their advocacy for Palestine.

“Because the speech protections are so strong, it’s really a situation in which sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Saba said. “The more that people understand who and what these organizations are, that there is this mass campaign to propagate smears and to stamp out any criticism of Zionism or criticism of U.S. support for Israel, the less effective those smears will be — especially as more people are becoming familiar with the issue of Palestine.”

Hundreds of comments by supporters of StopAntisemitism were leveled at Lewis, some of which her attorney described as as “violent and threatening” in court filings. They ranged from misogynist attacks to others calling for her to get a pager, referencing an attack in Lebanon in which the Israeli military detonated thousands of pagers and handheld walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members, killing 42 people, including 12 civilians, and injuring more than 4,000 others. Another user suggested Lewis should be “teached” by Mossad, according to a police report she filed with the Portland Police Department last year, a reference to Israel’s intelligence agency, which has a long history of assassinating its political enemies.

Lewis said the attacks strained her marriage and her livelihood. She said she has retained some of her students for private lessons, teaching from her home studio, but she misses the camaraderie with her co-workers and helping build the school’s music program.

Lewis, who is self-funding her case through her savings and a GoFundMe, said she is motivated by the many students who have been blacklisted by the group and whose lives have been interrupted because of StopAntisemitism’s blacklist.

“I’m a teacher, that’s what I do — I try to help my students reach their full potential,” she said. “Their whole career could be just snuffed out, you know? They may never be able to work in their chosen field. They got student loan debt, they got to pay the rent.”

The post StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing. appeared first on The Intercept.

The findings show it’s not just left-leaning voters who now object to Israel’s war on Gaza — a growing share of Republicans are souring on the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israel as well. That creates an opportunity for Democrats who want to flip Republican seats in upcoming elections, said Margaret DeReus, executive director of the IMEU Policy Project.

“Democratic leadership has so far refused to acknowledge Israel’s growing unpopularity with voters and offer voters a real alternative, the same disastrous mistake they made in 2024,” DeReus said. “If Democratic leadership can summon the political will to call for an end of weapons to Israel so those billions can be reinvested in the programs Americans need, our polling finds it won’t just boost support with the Democratic base — it will persuade Republican voters to cross over as well.”

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It depends in part on which Republicans a Democratic candidate wants to court. Similar to trends seen among Democratic voters about a decade ago, the Republican opposition contains a notable age gap: Among Republicans ages 18 to 44, the new IMEU poll said, support for a candidate who favors reducing arms transfers to Israel jumps to a majority, 51 percent.

The poll was taken from a sample of 1,287 self-identified Republicans who YouGov surveyed online in November. With a 3 percent margin of error, the results are consistent with findings from an August Quinnipiac University poll that found more than a third of Republicans oppose sending more military aid to Israel, and an October Pew Research Center poll finding that as many 41 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Israel, a jump from 27 percent only three years ago. A Gallup poll in July showed that a majority of all Americans — 54 percent — disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, a new high in dissatisfaction.

As the 2026 congressional primaries draw near, the Democratic Party is continuing to grapple with how to respond to mounting pressure to support Palestine among its voter base. Some Democratic candidates have sworn off support from conservative pro-Israel groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee after previously receiving funding, and are committing to a House bill that would block offensive weapons transfers to Israel; others remain committed to the pro-Israel cause.

Asked if they would rather support a Republican or Democratic candidate running on identical pro-Israel messages — that Israel should “do whatever its leaders say is necessary to defend itself” and that “the United States should always be there to provide weapons and logistical support to Israel when its leaders ask” — only 4 percent of the polled Republicans said they would vote for the Democrat.

But asked to pick between the pro-Israel Republican or a Democratic candidate whose priority is to “focus on Americans first, by ensuring our tax dollars are used to bring down prices here instead of paying for weapons and support for wealthy nations like Israel,” 17 percent of Republicans flipped left and said they would rather vote for a Democrat critical of Israel.

DeReus interpreted the results as indicative of frustration with President Donald Trump.

“Americans of all backgrounds are confounded that President Trump always finds billions of dollars to fund Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, while saying there’s not enough money to fund affordable healthcare for Americans,” she said.

The IMEU poll also found that among Republican voters, more than a third said they would rather support a Republican primary congressional candidate who rejected money from AIPAC, compared to 19 percent support for a candidate who accepts AIPAC donations.

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When asked specifically about U.S.-funded weapons deals with Israel, Republican voters signaled significant disapproval. The arms transfers between the two countries operate within a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama that expires in 2028. Last month, Axios reported that Israel is seeking a new 20-year MOU with the Trump administration, committing about $4 billion to Israel each year. The proposal reportedly asks for a reduction in the amount of money used for direct military aid with plans to instead spend such money on defense-related research, a possible concession to growing frustrations with Israel among Trump’s base, especially as the economy worsens.

The IMEU poll confirms some of that frustration, showing that 42 percent of Republican voters want the current U.S.–Israel military MOU to lapse in 2028 rather than renewing another 10-year agreement. Disapproval for the 20-year agreement slightly increases to 43 percent. A majority of Republicans below the age of 44 opposed a 10- or 20-year agreement, at 53 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

Amid Israel’s war on Gaza, former President Joe Biden approved a 2024 emergency bill sending $14.1 billion in military aid to Israel, in addition to the ongoing MOU. A new congressional defense bill released last week, which asks for a record $901 billion, also includes carveouts for the U.S. to fill any of Israel’s gaps in military aid created by arms embargoes by other nations, such as Spain, Italy, and Japan, according to a Zeteo report.

Some on the left who support Palestinian human rights are beginning to capitalize on their overlap with conservatives — like Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, who last week met with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who is resigning in January and has been seen as an avatar for growing dissatisfaction toward U.S. support for Israel among Trump’s supporters.

That’s not to say right-wing criticism of pro-Israel spending is necessarily born out of concern for Palestinian people. The strain of conservatism that gave rise to Greene and other “America first” Republicans relies on a nationalist logic that privileges U.S. citizens above all other people, and right-wing criticism of Israel often peddles in antisemitic tropes. The influential right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson has criticized U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and recently drew criticism for platforming Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who often spews antisemitic beliefs.

Brett Cooper, another popular conservative personality and regular Fox News contributor, attempted to untangle this concern in a recent interview on NPR. When host Steve Inskeep asked Cooper whether she agreed with Fuentes’s peddling of an antisemitic idea that the U.S. is run by “Jewish gangsters,” Cooper, 24, said she rejected Fuentes’s antisemitic claim and instead insisted her generation’s concern with Israel had more to do with spending priorities in a struggling U.S. economy.

“Young people’s biggest concern right now, both sides of the aisle, is the economy — we are concerned about being able to buy homes, we are concerned about affordability,” Cooper said. “And so when we see the news, when we see how much money is being sent overseas, to Ukraine, to Israel … my generation is concerned, we are upset.”

The post Republicans Are Splitting Over Israel. Will Democrats Take Advantage? appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misdirection and Lack of Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Pattern of Censorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State-Sponsored Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing the Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another way of measuring GHF’s achievements is by counting the hundreds of Palestinians killed while trying to access such aid and the hundreds more who died of starvation-related conditions amid famine when GHF was the only organization allowed to deliver aid.

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Since May, when Israel ousted long-standing aid providers and made GHF the lone distributor in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and American subcontractors have killed nearly 3,000 Palestinians seeking aid, according to a September tally by Gaza health officials. The vast majority were killed at GHF sites. Doctors Without Borders dubbed the GHF distribution points as “sites of orchestrated killing” after its medical teams cared for nearly 900 patients wounded at the four GHF hubs.

In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared a famine in Gaza City. GHF did not expand its operations beyond its four distribution sites. Within the famine’s first month, at least 175 Palestinians died of starvation, a likely undercount.

“The GHF model is one of the worst ‘aid’ — and I use ‘aid’ in quotes — models that’s been tried in the 21st century, if not longer than that,” said Anastasia Moran, advocacy director at MedGlobal, a Chicago-based medical aid organization that has teams inside Gaza. “On every dimension, on every indicator, I’d consider it a failure.”

Since March, Israel’s government has blockaded the entire Gaza strip in violation of international law, creating famine conditions across the territory. The Israeli government, with funding from the U.S. government, appointed the newly formed GHF to oversee all aid distribution in the territory in May. The Swiss-based organization was first run by Jake Wood, a former American sniper turned aid worker, who quit within two weeks after stating the foundation did not adhere to basic humanitarian principles of neutrality. GHF’s chair is Johnnie Moore, an evangelical minister and former religious adviser to the Trump administration.

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Built on the Israeli misinformation campaign claiming Hamas was seizing and controlling most aid in Gaza, debunked by both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the GHF model cut out the United Nations and all international NGOs, insisting it could deliver enough food to slow the worsening starvation conditions. The U.N. previously operated 400 aid sites throughout Gaza.

Rather than maintain the existing model of bringing food and supplies to individuals with most need by delivering goods directly to communities, GHF established four distribution sites. The foundation also hired two American logistics and security firms — UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, led by a Green Beret veteran and former CIA officer, respectively — to oversee distribution. The result was the funneling of thousands of desperate people who traveled long distances into aid sites where long lines often devolved into stampedes. Gunfire from Israeli soldiers, or private American contractors, largely former U.S. special forces, was a near-daily reality. While some of those who survived the deadly queues managed to bring home boxes of food, the supplies failed to slow the famine conditions across Gaza which only worsened. The food provided by GHF was widely criticized by nutritional experts and aid groups as inadequate to prevent hunger and difficult to prepare (most items needed water to boil, itself a scarce resource in the territory).

The model amounted to simply another tool of war by the occupying Israeli forces.

“The GHF is a symptom, it’s not the problem,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director of peace and security. “The GHF is only relevant because people weren’t allowed access to food in ways that were safe and humane. In this way, the GHF is an entity occupying negative space, and the negative space is the deadly siege that the government of Israel has imposed for most of this year.”

The Israeli government continues to block aid into Gaza in violation of the recent ceasefire agreement. While the U.N. has been able to deliver some aid into the territory, Israel continues to restrict major NGOs from delivering aid, blocking more than 100 aid delivery requests in the first month after the ceasefire started on October 10, according to the U.N.

Oxfam, for instance, has $2.5 million worth of goods, including food and supplies to make water safe to drink, waiting inside a warehouse in Jordan, Paul said. Similarly, MedGlobal has said its shipments of medical goods are being prevented from entering Gaza.

While it wrapped its operations in Gaza, GHF said Monday it would not forgo its NGO status and pledged to “maintain readiness to reconstitute if new humanitarian needs are identified.” The foundation added that it is working to expand its model with the the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a base in southern Israel operated primarily by the U.S. military, meant to oversee aid distribution and the rebuilding of Gaza. The joint command base, or CMCC, is seen as the precursor to the eventual Trump-led Board of Peace that will govern Gaza’s rebuilding. The plan to form the Board of Peace, a key part of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, was codified into international law last week in a controversial U.N. Security Council vote and excludes Palestinian voices from the process. The plan ignored a previous U.N. resolution that called for the end of Israel’s occupation and creating a path to Palestinian statehood.

Aid groups are concerned that the GHF’s tactics would be replicated by the Board of Peace in Gaza and in other conflict zones across the world. They fear it normalizes private logistics and security firms managing humanitarian aid to turn a profit. In June, an American contractor group comprised of American military veterans airdropped supplies in South Sudan. And in Gaza, UG Solutions, an American contractor group that guarded GHF sites, inked a new deal with lobbyists tied to Trump. The group said it intends to remain in the region to continue its work. Among U.S. plans leaked in recent weeks includes the construction of Israeli-controlled, fenced “alternative safe communities” — essentially camps — within Gaza where displaced Palestinians would be moved into housing with access to aid.

“My biggest fear,” Moran said, “would be if anyone looked at GHF and thought this is a model that should be tried elsewhere.”

Update: November 25, 2025, 12:34 p.m. ET
The story was updated to include more information on the food supplies provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The post Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Calls It Quits After Thousands Die Seeking Its Aid appeared first on The Intercept.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian groups’ YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians.

“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”

After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants and charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant with war crimes in Gaza, the Trump administration escalated its defense of Israel’s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court.

“YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.”

“It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Congress did not intend to allow the president to cut off the flow of information to the American public and the world — instead, information, including documents and videos, are specifically exempted under the statute that the president cited as his authority for issuing the ICC sanctions.”

“Alarming Setback”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.

“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.

According to Google’s Sanctions Compliance publisher policy, “Google publisher products are not eligible for any entities or individuals that are restricted under applicable trade sanctions and export compliance laws.”

Al Mezan, a human rights organization in Gaza, told The Intercept that its YouTube channel was abruptly terminated this year on October 7 without prior notification.

“Terminating the channel deprives us from reaching what we aspire to convey our message to, and fulfill our mission,” a spokesperson for the group said, “and prevents us from achieving our goals and limits our ability to reach the audience we aspire to share our message with.”

The West Bank-based Al-Haq’s channel was deleted on October 3, a spokesperson for the group said, with a message from YouTube that its “content violates our guidelines.”

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“YouTube’s removal of a human rights organisation’s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression,” the Al-Haq spokesperson said in a statement. “The U.S. Sanctions are being used to cripple accountability work on Palestine and silence Palestinian voices and victims, and this has a ripple effect on such platforms also acting under such measures to further silence Palestinian voices.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which the U.N. describes as the oldest human rights organization in Gaza, said in a statement that YouTube’s move “protects perpetrators from accountability.”

“YouTube’s decision to close PCHR’s account is basically one of many consequences that we as an organisation have faced since the decision of the US government to sanction our organisations for our legitimate work,” said Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the group. “YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on 7 October.”

“By doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” al-Sourani added.

Looking Outside the U.S.

The three human rights groups’ account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos, according to an Intercept tally.

The deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like “The Beach,” about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike.

Some videos are still available through copies saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or on alternate platforms, such as Facebook and Vimeo. The wiping only affected the group’s official channels; videos which were produced by the nonprofits but hosted on alternate YouTube channels remain active. No cumulative index of videos deleted by YouTube is available, however, and many appear to not be available elsewhere online.

Videos posted elsewhere online, the groups fear, could soon be targeted for deletion because many of the platforms hosting them are also U.S.-based services. The ICC itself began exploring using service providers outside the U.S.

Al-Haq said it would also be looking for alternatives outside of U.S. companies to host their work.

YouTube isn’t the only U.S. tech company blocking Palestinian rights groups from using its services. The Al-Haq spokesperson said Mailchimp, the mailing list service, also deleted the group’s account in September. (Mailchimp and its parent company, Intuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Caving to Trump’s Demand

Both the U.S. and Israeli governments have long shielded themselves from the ICC and accountability for their alleged war crimes. Neither country is party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the court.

In November 2024, the ICC prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, charging the leaders with intentionally starving civilians by blocking aid from entering into Gaza. Both the Biden and Trump administrations rejected the legitimacy of the warrants.

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Since his reelection, Trump has taken a more aggressive posture against accountability for Israel. In the early days of his second term, Trump renewed sanctions against the ICC and issued new, more severe measures against court officials and anyone accused of aiding their efforts. In September, in a new order, he specifically sanctioned the three Palestinian groups.

The U.S. moves followed Israel’s own designation of Al-Haq as a “terrorist organization” in 2021 and an online smear campaign by pro-Israeli activists attempting to link Palestinian Centre for Human Rights with militant groups.

The sanctions freeze the organizations’ assets in the U.S. and bar sanctioned individuals from traveling to the country. Federal judges have already issued preliminary injunctions in two cases in favor of plaintiffs who argued the sanctions had violated their First Amendment rights.

“The Trump administration is focused on contributing to the censorship of information about Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the sanctions against these organizations is very deliberately designed to make association with these organizations frightening to Americans who will be concerned about material support laws,” said Whitson, of DAWN, which joined a coalition of groups in September to demand the Trump administration drop its sanctions.

Like many tech firms, YouTube has shown a ready willingness to comply with demands from both the Trump administration and Israel. YouTube coordinated with a campaign organized by Israeli tech workers to remove social media content deemed critical of Israel. At home, Google, YouTube’s parent company, secretly handed over personal Gmail account information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to detain a pro-Palestinian student organizer.

Even before Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, YouTube had been accused of unevenly applying its community guidelines to censor Palestinian voices while withholding similar scrutiny from pro-Israeli content. Such trends continued during the war, according to a Wired report.

Earlier this year, YouTube shut down the official account of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. The move came after pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel, which wrote to YouTube to point out that the organization had been sanctioned by the State Department.

Whitson warned that YouTube’s capitulation could set a precedent, pushing other tech companies to bend to censorship.

“They are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience,” she said. “It’s not going to end with Palestine.”

The post YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations appeared first on The Intercept.

Among Palestinians in Gaza who survived Tuesday’s attacks, however, there is a growing belief that the ceasefire agreement exists only on paper, providing diplomatic cover that allows Israel to continue to kill. 

The Intercept asked 60 residents in Gaza, many of them students living in Gaza City, whether they believed the ceasefire still held. Fifty said no. Four said the ceasefire was still in place, but it was fragile and at risk of falling apart. Six expressed hope that the ceasefire would remain.

Residents described nights filled with explosions and mornings shadowed by tension, as Gaza braced itself for what may come next. 

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“I panicked and my body shook violently,” said 20-year-old Aya Nasser, a university student who recalled Tuesday’s attacks to The Intercept. She was in bed when, just after midnight, she heard an Israeli missile explode 30 meters from her home. A second followed shortly after. 

Nasser said she later learned that the Israeli strike had hit a nearby home and killed nine people from a single family: a grandmother, a father, a daughter-in-law, four children, and two grandchildren. 

Nasser said this was the third time an Israeli attack had targeted her neighborhood in the Al-Nuseirat camp since the ceasefire went into effect. She did not think it was still in place. “The fear is indescribable,” she said, anticipating further attacks.

When Israel announced its strikes on Tuesday, Hala, also 20, had been shopping at a market for her upcoming wedding. She rushed back to her home in Nuseirat and eventually fell asleep to relative calm. But she was jolted awake when a missile struck their neighbor’s home, which caught on fire. Hours later, she received word that another strike had killed her fiancé’s cousin, along with his wife and children. Only their 7-year-old son survived. 

For now, Hala said the wedding has been postponed while their neighborhood remains under threat of future attacks. 

“There is no ceasefire,” she said. “The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives.”

Israel claimed its attacks on Tuesday had targeted senior Hamas fighters. However, the vast number of children killed and wounded in the strikes told a different story.

Morten Rostrup, a physician working with Doctors Without Borders at al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza City, said after Israel’s airstrikes, he treated many wounded children in the hospital’s emergency room.

“There is no doubt this is an attack on civilians,” he said. “Do we really call this a ceasefire?” A Doctors Without Borders spokesperson said their teams had treated 242 patients wounded from the attacks, with 49 later dying in treatment.

Tuesday’s bombing forced 28-year-old teacher Esraa and her small children out of their home in Al-Zawaida, which had already been damaged by previous attacks. In the middle of the night, she and her children went to stay in a tent with her parents and other relatives. She said they spent the evening with no access to water. “My baby clung to me tightly the whole time, crying,” she recalled.

A 20-year-old writer and student, also named Esraa, called the ceasefire “just a declaration, not reality.” The bombs on Tuesday woke her up late at night while in her home in Nuseirat, triggering memories of the previous two years of war.

“They keep bombing and killing people and then declare that the so-called ceasefire is still going on,” she said. “How so, while lots of people are still losing family members?”

Even after the Israeli military said it resumed the ceasefire on Wednesday morning, it carried out another airstrike in Gaza’s Beit Lahiya area in the evening, killing two more people. In addition to its military barrages, Israel continues to restrict the amount of humanitarian aid to enter the Strip, choking its depleted markets, leaving food unaffordable for many.

In the first few weeks of the previous ceasefire deal brokered in January, Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza, before shattering the deal completely by killing more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. What 20-year-old student Ali Skaik fears most, he said, is that the situation in Gaza would mirror the ceasefire in Lebanon, where despite having a supposed peace deal with Hezbollah in place for almost a year, Israel has continued to attack and has killed more than 100 civilians. 

After the ceasefire, Skaik moved into his grandfather’s home in eastern Gaza City to the Al-Zaytouna neighborhood, which sits near the border of Israel’s yellow line. The Israeli military maintains control of portions of land on the other side. Every night for the past week, Skaik said, he’s heard explosions stretching from 10 p.m. until the morning. 

“For that reason, I never really felt that there was a complete ceasefire in place,” he said.

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The 109 Gazans killed Tuesday represent roughly half of the 200 Palestinians Israel has killed since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10. Throughout the genocide, Israel has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to official numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry — though the true count is likely much higher. As many as 14,500 others also remain missing, whether killed in airstrikes and buried beneath rubble, abducted by Israeli military forces, or disappeared under other circumstances.

Bodour, 20, a university student, said he has grown accustomed to living through Israel’s ceasefire violations and has learned to mistrust Israel’s “speeches and pursuit of peace,” finding “strange comfort” in always expecting the worst from Netanyahu’s government.

“What ceasefire are we talking about?” Bodour said. He laughed when asked the question about whether there was still a ceasefire in Gaza. “The scattered bodies? The destroyed houses? The orphaned children?”

Israel reportedly notified the Trump administration before conducting its strikes on Tuesday, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused Hamas of failing to return the remains of deceased Israeli hostages and firing on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza. Hamas has denied responsibility for the attacks.

As bombs began to rain down on Gaza, Trump, on a trip to Japan, told reporters inside Air Force One that he supported Israel’s strikes. “The Israelis hit back and they should hit back,” Trump said, blaming Hamas for an Israeli soldier’s death. At the same time, he insisted that “nothing’s going to jeopardize” the ceasefire. Vice President JD Vance minimized Tuesday’s bombings as “little skirmishes here and there.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously predicted there would be “bumps along the road, but we have to make it work.”

“Those ‘bumps’ are ‘Israel gets to violate the ceasefire wherever it sees fit,’” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “As long as it doesn’t return to that full-blown, full-on assault or a full-on blockade.”

Trump has much to gain from continuing to tell the public that the ceasefire is holding, even while Israel kills dozens of Palestinians in Gaza. Throughout his second term, Trump has positioned himself as a so-called “peacemaker,” and his inner circle, including his son-in-law and ceasefire negotiating team member Jared Kushner, have voiced interest in development projects in Gaza to reap a profit in the wake of Israel’s destruction. Trump has further expressed interest in leveraging the ceasefire in an attempt to finish the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israel’s relationships with Arab countries — and fast-track Trump’s policy goals and personal financial interests. 

“For Trump and for the Israelis, what matters is the appearance of a ceasefire,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. 

The ceasefire plan, in many ways, was Trump’s way for providing diplomatic cover for Israel, which had been under increasing pressure from the international community amid images of famine and genocide, to allow it to continue its military control over the Strip, Kenney-Shawa said. 

“I think none of us should be surprised that Israel has continued breaking the ceasefire,” Kenney-Shawa said. “It very much still fits into the Trump administration’s bigger picture, because as long as they can kind of say that there is a quote-unquote ‘ceasefire’ in effect, as long as they can say, ‘At least it’s better than before,’ that enables the U.S. and the rest of the international community to let up on the pressure on Israel and to return to business as usual.”

Israel has also spent the ceasefire demolishing structures within parts of Gaza it continues to occupy. Kenney-Shawa said such tactics are meant to make the Strip even more uninhabitable to ultimately force Palestinians out of Gaza, the ultimate goal of Israel’s campaign.

The morning after Tuesday’s bombings, Tasneem, a 25-year-old homemaker in Gaza, accused Trump of lying, asking, “Where is the ceasefire they talk about?” 

Said, 26, an English teacher in Gaza, said that even with the ceasefire in place, he has felt “constant exhaustion and misery,” given the ongoing attacks. He dismissed the term “ceasefire” as “just a media trick.”

There is still recognition in Gaza that the frequency and scale of Israel’s attacks since the ceasefire have decreased from the two previous years of genocide. Tuesday’s bombings, however, returned things back to the pre-ceasefire average daily death toll of 100, shattering illusions of peace. The uncertainty is crippling for many.

Mervat, a 51-year-old homemaker, said she feared the resumed attacks would again displace her and her family, and that they would again face famine conditions. She said as long as Israel’s occupation continues, “there is no safety.”

“Simply knowing that the agreement is still in place offers a psychological reassurance,” said Aseel, a 20-year-old university student in Gaza. “Yet, news of its violation or the return of genocide imposes an unimaginable weight and traps you in an endless cycle of worry.”

Believers in Islam are encouraged to maintain hope and trust in Allah’s mercy, and many people who spoke to The Intercept said they had hope that Allah would restore the ceasefire, but currently they don’t see it as in place.

Hend, 21, another university student, said she’d lost trust in the agreement. Though she felt the ground shake during Tuesday’s bombings, she said she still has “hope for peace, and that we can feel safe.”

Such hope began to fade after Tuesday’s attacks, said Marah, a 22-year-old English literature student at Islamic University of Gaza. She said there can only be peace in Gaza with the removal of Israeli occupation in the territory.

When the ceasefire went into effect, she said, “I tried to reclaim even a small part of life before October 7, but everything collapsed again in an instant. Fear returned, along with the sounds of bombing and the smell of death.”

The post We Asked People in Gaza What They Think of the Ceasefire: “Just a Declaration, Not Reality” appeared first on The Intercept.

The bombing killed over 100 people as of early Wednesday, according to Gaza officials. It came just four days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio toured a new U.S. military base in Israel, a rare deployment of U.S. forces meant to signal that President Donald Trump was serious about maintaining the end to the bombardment of Gaza. 

“There is no plan B,” Rubio said on the tour, rebuffing an Israeli reporter’s question of whether Israel needed Trump’s permission before resuming its attacks on Gaza. “This is the best plan, it’s the only plan, it’s one that we think can succeed.”

According to The Associated Press, Israel notified the Trump administration before conducting Tuesday’s strikes — presenting the question of whether the U.S. would hold Netanyahu accountable for the latest round of ceasefire violations.

“All eyes now are going to be on Washington,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC. “Would they really be a referee that calls balls and strikes fairly? Or were they just there for decoration and were they just going to allow the Israelis to get away with murder, as they always have?”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance signaled that they would opt for the latter. He described the attacks as “little skirmishes here and there” and said that “the ceasefire is holding.” 

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“We know that Hamas or somebody else within Gaza attacked an [Israeli military] soldier,” Vance said. “We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president’s peace is going to hold despite that.”

Israel’s strikes on Tuesday and stretching overnight into Wednesday mostly targeted Gaza City, including the courtyard of the al-Shifa Hospital, the Strip’s largest medical complex, and apartment complexes throughout the city, according to Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. Other strikes hit Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. The attacks killed least 104 people, including 46 children, the Gaza Health ministry announced early Wednesday.

Israeli officials claimed Tuesday that Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza, while Hamas denied responsibility for the attacks.

It was the latest of several instances in which the Israeli government pushed the notion that Hamas was the one in violation of the ceasefire agreement. Israeli officials have accused Hamas of intentionally delaying the return of the remains of Israeli hostages, a claim on which even the U.S. has cast doubt. Speaking to reporters on his own visit to the new U.S. base in Israel last week, Vance urged “a little bit of patience,” citing the difficulty of uncovering bodies buried under tons of rubble of destroyed buildings.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is assisting and overseeing the return of hostages, continues to work with Hamas’s search crews — though the group issued a statement on Tuesday reacting to drone footage Israel released, which it purports to show Hamas reburying hostage remains to stage a recovery for the Red Cross. The video and the claim have not been independently verified. The Red Cross said it was “raising its concerns directly with the parties” and called on both sides to follow international humanitarian law while handling remains. Many of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel, meanwhile, have shown signs of abuse and torture.

Hamas returned all living Israeli hostages within the required 72 hours and has since returned the remains of 15 of the 28 deceased Israelis. The ceasefire deal included a stipulation that allowed Hamas leeway beyond the initial 72 hours to continue its search for the remaining bodies, as long as it continues to communicate with the Red Cross. 

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has gone to lengths to undermine the peace process. Israel is still limiting the amount of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza; it has continued to block the Rafah border, an essential crossing for aid transfers; and it has continued a range of attacks on Palestinians, including a wave of airstrikes on October 19 that killed at least 26 Gazans, including civilians. One of the attacks struck a school sheltering displaced families in Nuseirat. Israel has also continued to demolish large swaths of city infrastructure within the more than 50 percent of the Strip that remains under its military control. Beyond Gaza, Israel has conducted mass military raids and an airstrike in the West Bank, where daily settler violence against Palestinians continues unabated.

“They are trying to push the Palestinians to react,” said Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza. “This is their strategy, they want Palestinians to do anything to react just to complete their mission.”

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Abdu said he thinks Israel was never serious about holding to the ceasefire agreement but rather has looked for reasons to resume its attacks. On Tuesday, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir claimed that Hamas “continues to play games” in a social media post on X, calling on Netanyahu to resume the bombing. 

“If Israel has the genuine intention to bring their hostages back, then it will facilitate every effort to get them back, not articulating these kinds of stories and fabricated images,” Abdu said.

Hamas, for its part, maintains it is committed to upholding the deal and has accused the Israelis of barring entry to teams and heavy machinery to complete the digging.

Israel’s resumed aggression fits into a pattern that we’ve seen before, Munayyer added. During previous ceasefires in November 2023 and this January, Israel retrieved as many hostages as it could to soften blowback from its citizens, then restarted attacks on Gaza, Munayyer pointed out.

And while the U.S. is the major player, it’s not the only one with sway. Leading up to the ceasefire deal, the European Union and several major Western countries — the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia — began to threaten Israel with sanctions or the formal recognition of a Palestinian state if it did not halt its genocide, likely responding to mass protests from their citizens. 

“The Israelis are now trying to create a narrative that Hamas violated the ceasefire and therefore the agreement’s off,” Munayyer said. “Is the international community going to buy that?”

Update: October 29, 2025
This story has been updated to increase the death toll from Israel’s latest airstrikes on Gaza as new numbers emerged.

The post Netanyahu Is Blowing Up the Gaza Ceasefire — and Trump Is the One Losing Face appeared first on The Intercept.

Zaher’s son, Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old Palestinian American, was swept up by Israeli forces during a dawn raid at their home in the village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya in February. The Israeli military charged Mohammed with throwing a rock and striking a car driven by an Israeli settler, an accusation he and his family deny. While Israel has not publicly provided evidence, Mohammed has spent the last eight months in Israeli prisons awaiting a trial that has been repeatedly postponed. Mohammed has been barred from speaking with his family, who have continued to push for his release. And after learning that he suffered a scabies infection and severe weight loss, Mohammed’s family has begun to fear for his life.

The U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, which freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians from detention, appeared to be the breakthrough Zaher and his wife Mona Ibrahim had so desperately awaited.

On the morning of the releases, Zaher rushed to Beituna and carefully watched the buses empty. Mohammed wasn’t a part of the caravan. Zaher then got word that some of those released were being taken to local hospitals for treatment. He hurried from hospital to hospital. Back at home, Mona prepared to celebrate Mohammed’s return by cooking maqluba — a pot of rice, vegetables, and meat served upside down — her son’s favorite dish. 

Hours later, Zaher returned home alone. 

“I just waited and waited and waited,” Zaher recalled, “and still waiting.”

Mohammed Ibrahim is among an alarming number of children overlooked by the ceasefire agreement. More than 300 Palestinian children remain in Israeli prisons, according to Defense for Children International–Palestine. Nearly half are being held without charges — the highest number since 2008, when DCIP began tracking cases. The rest of the children are serving sentences or, like Mohammed, are still awaiting trial. The most common charge among children is throwing rocks, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. This tally doesn’t include the unknown number of children held inside Israeli military facilities.

While Mohammed’s detention is a single case among many, his story offers a window into Israel’s deadly and unlawful carceral system. Through The Intercept’s interviews with family members and advocates for imprisoned Palestinians, review of medical records, and legal testimony and footage of the Israeli police’s interrogation of Mohammed in February, it became clear that Mohammed’s case fits within the Israeli government’s long-standing patterns of detention, abuse, and deprivation of basic human rights.

Mohammed’s case has received widespread attention over the past week, largely due to his status as an American citizen, but also because of a tireless campaign led by his family. In the U.S., Zaher’s cousin, Zeyad Kadur, has met privately with lawmakers in Congress, alongside parents whose American children were killed by Israeli forces or settlers, calling on the U.S. government to secure Mohammed’s release. In September, the State Department assigned a diplomat to handle Mohammed’s case. And on Wednesday, after two days lobbying in D.C. — Kadur’s second visit to the Capitol in as many months — 27 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter calling on U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to exert pressure to free Mohammed.

The campaign arrived as details of Mohammed’s prison conditions came to focus this week with the release of a firsthand testimony relayed to a lawyer with DCIP. In the account, Mohammed tells of living in a cell with four bunk beds, shared with at least eight children, forcing some to sleep on the floor. The only items in each cell are thin mattresses, blankets, and a single copy of the Quran, he said.

He and other children are served two meals a day: three small pieces of bread and a spoonful of labneh for breakfast; a small cup of rice and a single sausage with pieces of bread for lunch, he said in the document. Every two to three days, they receive a spoonful of jam and occasionally a small cucumber or tomato. The prison does not serve dinner. 

Mohammed also recounted the night of his detention. He said Israeli soldiers burst into his home, blindfolded him, and zip-tied his hands, before hauling him into a military vehicle where he lay flat on its metal surface as soldiers beat him with the butts of their rifles. At the Ofer military base, the beating continued, he recalled. Mohammed then told of being taken to a police station where a masked interrogator threatened to instruct soldiers to beat him again if he didn’t comply. “Out of sheer fear, I ultimately confessed,” he said in the testimony.

Such details have begun to spark the outrage of many in Washington and across the world. Advocates for imprisoned Palestinians who have been following the case were disturbed by the alleged abuse Mohammed has suffered at the hands of the Israeli military. But perhaps what has troubled advocates most about Mohammed’s case is how familiar it sounds. 

“It breaks my heart to say that his case is not exceptional,” said Miranda Cleland, an advocate with DCIP. “His case is so similar to what we’ve heard from so many Palestinian children and families, not just in the last two years, but in the last 30 years — this is exactly how the Israeli military targets Palestinian children and their families.”

Since Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, indefinite detentions have been a tool used to control Palestinians. Palestinians are subject to military law and military courts, where prosecutors and judges are Israeli soldiers and Palestinians lack due process rights. United Nations experts last July called for the dismantling of Israel’s military court system, saying that it violates humanitarian international law and cannot be improved. They criticized the role of military judges providing “legal and judicial cover for acts of torture, cruel and degrading treatment against Palestinian detainees” by Israeli soldiers and police. The experts specifically mentioned their concern that such practices extend to children.

The Israeli military declined to comment for this story, referring to the Israeli Prison Service. The IPS and Israeli police did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The Israeli military court system prosecutes as many as 500 children each year, with a conviction rate of around 99 percent, according to DCIP. The most common charge against Palestinian children in the military court system, like Mohammed’s case, is throwing a rock. Nearly all of the convictions result from a plea deal, which is often the only chance a child has toward being released.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, delays in trials and hearings have been increasingly common in military court, and plea deals have been harder to come by, with prosecutors pursuing more aggressive sentencing, said Sahar Francis, a Palestinian human rights attorney who has decades of experience representing Palestinians in Israel’s military courts. Before the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, she said children in similar situations as Mohammed would typically be released on bail and would spend around four to five months in prison. Children are now regularly held for longer periods.

During her 30-year career, Francis came to realize a pattern: Even in cases where children throwing rocks didn’t cause any harm, prosecutors would pursue lengthy sentences. Meanwhile, she noted, cases where Israeli children threw rocks at Palestinians went unpunished. 

“There is a huge discrimination policy and it’s intentional — they know they can affect the whole generation,” Francis said. “This is why we are saying it’s a collective punishment because it’s also against the family, in order to intimidate, in order to cause fear within other children, that you could be arrested, you could be punished.”

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In 2014 and 2015, the Israeli government enacted a slew of laws to further criminalize stone throwing, including harsher sentences and fines, as well as permission for police to fire live ammunition at individuals throwing stones, including minors, if officers believe the stones pose a danger to anyone. In its press releases and public statements, the Israeli government regularly labels Palestinians who throw rocks as “terrorists,” even during protests against illegal Israeli settlements that are often guarded by heavily armored military units. 

Throwing stones carries both a tactical and symbolic significance to Palestinian resistance, illustrated by the emblematic photo of a Palestinian woman in Beit Sahour throwing stones at Israeli soldiers with one hand while carrying her yellow heels in another during the First Intifada in the 1980s. Another image captured during the Second Intifada in 2000 shows 14-year-old Palestinian boy, Faris Odeh, throwing a stone at an Israeli tank. The following day, an Israeli soldier fatally shot Odeh in the neck as he protested the military, transforming Odeh into an international symbol of Palestinian resistance.

An Israeli military charge sheet, obtained by the family and reviewed by The Intercept, accuses Mohammed of throwing stones toward Israeli vehicles that were traveling on Highway 60 near the Israeli settlement of Kochav Hashachar. One of the stones, the military alleged, struck and damaged the vehicle. The document stated that the stones endangered the lives of the drivers. The charge sheet cited a military patrol unit that had reported stone-throwing incidents in the area, and mentioned that an Israeli vehicle driven by an Israeli settler was damaged.

Since there have been no court proceedings in Mohammed Ibrahim’s case, it’s unclear whether the Israeli military has evidence to back its charges. He and his family reject Israel’s charges. 

The military leveled the charges following an interrogation with masked, armed soldiers and no attorney present, which advocates said is a common practice for detained children.

According to footage of the interrogation obtained by The Intercept, Mohammed sat alone at a table on a swiveling chair with a blindfold lowered to his neck. He spoke to an interrogator who was outside the frame. Video of a separate interrogation with another child implicated in the case shows the interrogators are masked. 

In the six-minute video, which The Intercept translated from Arabic, the interrogator prompts Mohammed to “Tell me everything you did, and say it specifically.” At times, the interrogator seems to feed him lines, stating, “Tell me: ‘I went down and I ate, me and my friends, at 8 p.m., we walked, we got into a car.’”

Mohammed responds by saying he and his friends ate and then went for a walk down toward a highway referred to as “Iltifafy.” The highway is known as a road exclusive to Israelis that connects Israeli settlements throughout the occupied West Bank, slicing through and effectively dividing Palestinian towns. While there, he says “they started striking.” The interrogator, referring to the distinct license plate colors — yellow or white — that denote Israeli and Palestinian identity, asks if they saw “cars for the Arabs and cars for the Jews.” Mohammed acknowledges he did. 

When the interrogator presses further, Mohammed says he and his friends began to throw rocks at “any” cars as “horseplay.” When asked why, he says: “We just did it. We wanted to try.” 

“What if your parents were driving by? They’d throw it at them?” the interrogator continues to press. Mohammed says yes and that they were not able to see who was driving the cars.

At one point, Mohammed admits to blindly throwing a rock toward the road “from far away,” but says that the stone didn’t hit anyone or anything. “It just landed on the street.” The interrogator exclaims, “But you threw one!”

“I mean I threw a rock; wherever it would land, it would land,” Mohammed responds. 

The video ends with the interrogator questioning where Mohammed was that morning — “asleep” — and where he was on that Friday – “at work.”

DCIP’s Cleland criticized the forceful nature of the interrogation and lack of due process rights. 

“Mohammed Ibrahim was subjected to a very coercive interrogation,” she said, adding that the practice is common in cases of detained children, “and all interrogations are designated to extract a confession.”

The short video does not corroborate Mohammed’s claim in his testimony that an interrogator ordered soldiers to beat him if he didn’t comply.

For decades, Palestinians in detention have routinely reported poor living conditions, abuse, and even instances of torture. Since October 7, such abuse grew in scale, becoming a more systematic policy of collective punishment, according to human rights advocates as well as a recent Israeli court ruling acknowledging forced starvation in detention centers. 

Due to threats of violence from Israeli authorities, many children have been afraid to speak about their abuse after their release, advocates said. Despite these threats, child prisoners have reported abuse, torture and sexual assault — claims that echo reports by adult detainees. One teenager from Jenin, released as part of the November 2023 ceasefire agreement, recalled beatings that broke his fingers in both hands.

Treatment against both adults and children from Gaza were especially brutal, Francis, the human rights attorney, said. Children from Gaza spoke of having their hands continually shackled for consecutive months. Others from Gaza told Francis they were beaten and sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers, who shoved batons up their anuses through their clothes.

“Lots of the prisoners described for me in the visits that they feel they are animals,” Francis said. “They were saying, ‘We believe they treat their pets in their homes better than us.’”

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Pinning down exactly how many Palestinian children are in Israeli custody is difficult. The official count — 360 — could be lower, given the release of several children back to Gaza as part of the recent ceasefire agreement (the Israeli Prison Service has also delayed its quarterly release of updated figures). That figure is likely an undercount since an unknown number of Palestinian children, along with adults, are believed to be imprisoned within Israel’s military facilities, such as the notorious Sde Teiman. Unlike the facilities under the Israeli Prison Service, the military does not share data on Palestinians held inside its military bases. Newly freed Palestinians, including children, are also commonly re-arrested within weeks of their release. Throughout the war, families from Gaza have reported witnessing their relatives detained by Israeli soldiers, only to be told later by Israeli officials that their relatives are not in custody. Last November, Israel-based human rights organization HaMoked documented 400 of such cases of missing Palestinians.

“What is the fate of these hundreds, we don’t know,” said Naji Abbas, an advocate for Palestinian detainees with Physicians for Human Rights Israel, referring to the missing names. “Sadly, we believe most are not alive.”

At least 75 Palestinians have died within Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, according to a tally of publicly reported cases by the United Nations. In the weeks since the U.N. count, three more Palestinians have died in Israeli custody. 

Due to lack of access to hygiene products and overcrowding, scabies has spread rapidly throughout Israel’s prisons. Abbas and journalists have accused Israeli prison officials of allowing the highly contagious skin disease to spread unabated throughout its facilities as another form of punishment. The disease, spread by microscopic mites that burrow into skin, causes extreme itchiness and can lead to psychological distress from lack of sleep, as well as injury from scratching.

A court petition filed by PHRI, along with other organizations, in July 2024, led to medical treatment given to some incarcerated Palestinians. But without changes to their living conditions, reinfection is rampant. 

When a U.S. embassy official notified Zaher that Mohammed had contracted scabies in July, his family began to fear for his life. The IPS said that he had received treatment for the disease and was placed in medical isolation for 17 days before symptoms had subsided. But memories of recent prisoner deaths fed their concern.

In March, Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad, a 17-year-old Palestinian from Brazil died in Megiddo Prison, the same prison where Mohammaed was held at the time. He was the first known child to die within Israel’s prison system since October 7. Walid was arrested in September 2024 in a village neighboring Mohammed’s and was held in administrative detention without charges. While spending time outside of his cell, Walid collapsed in the prison yard, hit his head, and died. According to an independent autopsy conducted by a doctor and Abbas’s organization, which was granted after PHRI requested a court intervention, Walid showed signs of scabies across his entire body, as well as signs of severe weight loss and malnutrition. The doctor found that Walid, a former athlete and soccer player, had little to no muscle mass left on him, Abbas said. Medical records noted Walid had been complaining about lack of food and being hungry for three months leading up to his death. 

“Whether you are beating people until death, or denying people who you are holding in custody from medical care, you are killing them,” Abbas said.

Since family visits and phone calls have been prohibited in Israeli detention facilities — another post-October 7 measure — Mohammed’s family haven’t heard their child’s voice since he was taken in February. Instead, for information about Mohammed’s well-being, the family has relied on attorneys and the U.S. Embassy.

On rare occasions, attorneys and U.S. embassy officials have been allowed to visit Mohammed, who was 15 at the time of his detention and spent his 16th birthday in prison. In the visits, they reported that Mohammed has lost at least 30 pounds. One medical report provided by the IPS to the U.S. Embassy and reviewed by The Intercept noted Mohammed as having a low body mass index. 

Every month and a half, Mohammed has a scheduled court date. Each time, prosecutors postpone the hearings. Even so, his family has attended every one, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mohammed through the CCTV cameras fixed onto a holding cell. During a hearing in August, Mohammed’s older brother, along with the mothers of the three other children detained alongside Mohammed in their village, watched the monitor as their sons shuffled into the holding cell. The mothers didn’t recognize their children — all of them with shaved heads and skinny bodies. They were shocked when they saw Mohammed. While sitting in the cell, Mohammed noticed the camera and raised his cuffed hands toward the lens to reveal his arms covered in rashes and scabs. His face was gaunt and dark rings encircled his eyes, family said. Mohammed’s brother returned home, shaken, before sharing his condition with his parents and uncle.

That same month, his parents were able to pass Mohammed a message through the embassy official, assuring him that they were doing everything they can to free him. He responded by asking whether his older sister had passed her final exams needed to graduate high school. After the official told him yes, he said to tell his father to buy a gold necklace as a gift for his sister and that he would work to pay him back once he gets out.

Other messages remain undelivered. 

Mohammed’s family have yet to tell him about the killing of his cousin Sayfollah Musallet, 20, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers on July 11. He had been trying to protect his family’s land from the mob of settlers, his family said. The mob prevented an ambulance from reaching him and his younger brother eventually carried him to paramedics, but he died before making it to the hospital.

A tight-knit family, Mohammed and Sayfollah were close. Sayfollah had been visiting family in the occupied West Bank, processing the ongoing detention of his cousin. The pair had planned to spend the summer working together at the family’s ice cream shop, Ice Screamin, in Tampa, Florida. Sayfollah had managed the shop after his family bought it one year earlier, introducing a popular Dubai chocolate sundae to the menu. 

Zaher wanted the news of his passing to come from a family member or family friend, not through the lips of a third-party official or attorney. 

Back in the U.S., Kadur, Zaher’s cousin, is careful how he describes Mohammed’s plight. He is cautious not to frame the push for Mohammed’s release within the context of the Israeli occupation. He’s aware of how polarizing the issue may be while lobbying a U.S. government that has remained a staunch supporter of Israel even as it commits genocide in Gaza. Kadur received a call from a concerned rabbi from Florida who lamented, “It’s just sad that if his name was closer to mine, he probably wouldn’t be there.” 

Instead, Kadur has attempted to appeal to officials from a “more human and humanitarian” perspective. “We can’t resolve a 75-year conflict,” he said, “this is just a 15-year-old kid that needs to come home.”

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Despite what the family says were private promises from Trump administration officials, they have yet to lead to signs of progress toward Mohammed’s release. It illustrates the limitations of the expected privileges U.S. citizenship affords, particularly if you are Palestinian, and especially if you are on Israeli soil. Among those who called the family to intervene is longtime diplomat Richard Grenell, a former Bush administration adviser who has been Trump’s envoy for special missions, who was key in securing the release of six American prisoners from Venezuela in January. Since the initial call, however, the family said they have not heard of progress. 

After Sayfollah’s killing, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited their family in their village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, known as Miami of the West Bank due to its large population of American Palestinians who own land there, often building luxurious homes. Also at the hourlong meeting, was Mohammed’s family, along with the family of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, a 17-year-old Palestinian American from New Orleans, who was fatally shot by Israeli settlers, military, and police in January 2024. He was the first American killed in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza.

The parents of Tawfic and Sayfollah told Huckabee that while their children are dead, the U.S. can still bring Mohammed home, Zaher and Kadur recalled. 

“Our family, our village, our city can’t take another American funeral here,” Sayfollah’s father added, according to Kadur.

Huckabee told the group that he would also contact Israeli officials to help free Mohammed, according to Zaher and Kadur.

Israeli authorities have yet to make an arrest or charge any suspects in the killing of Sayfollah or Tawfic. And Zaher said he’s begun to give up hope that the U.S. government would intervene on behalf of Mohammed.

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A State Department spokesperson told The Intercept that it is “tracking Mr. Ibrahim’s case closely and working with the government of Israel on this case” and said it is providing consular assistance to Mohammed and his family. The department declined to comment further on what actions they have taking in trying to free Mohammed, citing privacy and “other considerations.” With much of the focus on ensuring the ceasefire deal holds in Gaza, Rubio briefly addressed Mohammed’s case during a press conference in Israel, saying that they are working through their embassy and diplomatic channels.

“The U.S. government is just closing their eyes,” Zaher said. “If this happened in Venezuela, [Trump] would probably send a warship, just because he wants to attack it anyway. But when it comes to the Palestinian cause, they close their eyes and they laugh. They just close the phone, they act like they care, then they forget about it.”

In a sign of increasing pressure, Tuesday’s letter by Democratic lawmakers to both Rubio and Huckabee called on the State Department to begin “engaging the Israeli government directly to secure the swift release of this American boy.” Signatories included Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley, who also visited Mohammed’s family in the West Bank; Mohammed’s U.S. representative, Kathy Castor, who has been in regular contact with his family; and prominent senators including Adam Schiff, Raphael Warnock, and Bernie Sanders.

There is little precedence for the U.S. applying pressure to compel an early release of a Palestinian American imprisoned by Israel. If an individual faces charges, typically the only way to be released is to take a plea deal from military prosecutors and serve a reduced sentence, said DCIP’s Cleland.

Back in the West Bank, Zaher continues to text the U.S. Embassy everyday, asking for updates; he watches the news and scours the internet for any sign of other possible releases. Zaher said he’s been losing track of time. Days without his son have felt like months. He said he misses Mohammed’s quiet presence, describing him as sweet and gentle and a family boy. Like many his age, he spent much of his time playing “Fortnite” or watching soccer — his team is Real Madrid. Mohammed also loves photography and spent his weekends working part-time at a coffee shop.

“When you talk about eight months of every day trying something and you don’t get nowhere, you’re just hopeless,” Zaher said.

Mohammed’s next court date is scheduled for October 29. His family has little faith prosecutors will actually hold the hearing, but they plan to attend. Zaher said he and his wife know the routine well: Waiting at the courthouse, at times as long as 15 hours, only for the judge to announce that the hearing is postponed. But if that means a chance to spot Mohammed through the CCTV monitor, it will have been worth it. 

“We’ll waste the whole day,” he said, “but we go there, just so one of us can see him for that 30 seconds.”

This story includes translation from Arabic to English by Rayan El Amine.

The post This 16-Year-Old American Is Among Hundreds of Palestinian Children Jailed in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.