“I want to occupy,” he told The Intercept. “Yes, occupy, the word nobody likes. I want to occupy southern Lebanon. Move all the Arabs from there, up to the Litani River.”

We’re sitting in the command and control center in Moshav Netu’a, a village so close to the U.N.-brokered “Blue Line” separating Israel and Lebanon that one can see the physical barrier from the windows of many homes. Here, amid a temporary pause in fighting between the U.S.–Israeli alliance and Iran, there’s no sense of peace.

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Under muddied terms for the two-week ceasefire with Iran, Israel has kept fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching an all-out war on the country’s armed elements and civilians alike. The Israeli military bombed villages and ordered more than 1 million Lebanese civilians to evacuate from the south, territory that is often viewed as Hezbollah’s stronghold due to its significant Shia Muslim population and weapons caches. Israel blew up bridges linking the north and the south of Lebanon. In defiance of previous ceasefire conditions set in November 2024, Hezbollah forces that were supposed to retreat north have remained in the south, and Israeli forces continued to hold five “strategic” hilltops in the north, accumulating more than 10,000 total ceasefire violations.

For the residents of Netu’a, Hezbollah is a problem to be solved, and one to fix with military power.

“The Arabs’ only motivation to stop fighting is if you take their land,” Adom said. “You kill them, it doesn’t matter. You hurt them, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Only taking territories. This is the only thing that matters to them.”

At least seven Netu’a residents told The Intercept that they see the eviction of Lebanese civilians as the only sure way to prevent their own displacement. After October 7, 2023, fearing a follow-on attack by Hezbollah, the Israeli government evacuated kibbutzim and other settlements near its border with Lebanon, including Netu’a, scattering families in hotels across the country.

The evacuation was “like a piece of gum being pulled apart,” said Oranit Manasseh, a mother of four who lives in Shtula, another kibbutz on Israel’s border with Lebanon. “That is what happened to our community, day after day that we were living in hotels away from the kibbutz.”

Manasseh and her children have since been able to return to their home, which was not damaged during the evacuation. When she spoke to The Intercept, the family was staying at a villa in Shtula that would normally host tourists for holidays like Passover but has been sitting largely empty since October 8, 2023, with few Israelis wishing to visit the north for a vacation with incoming missile fire.

Manasseh’s hope, she told The Intercept, is that the Israeli military “depopulate the south, get rid of Hezbollah, and keep the terrorists out.”

Israel’s actions suggest it’s headed in that direction. On Wednesday, in the span of 10 minutes, Israel struck Lebanon more than 100 times, killing at least 300 people. This was the deadliest single incident since the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990. According to reporting from the Financial Times and confirmed by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, more than 100 women, children, and elderly were killed in the strikes, including two journalists and four Lebanese army soldiers.

Part of the justification for Israel’s war on Hezbollah is the view that it is the only way to establish a security buffer to protect communities in the north situated on Israel’s border with Lebanon.

Much like October 7th catalyzed Israeli society’s calls for the war on Gaza — in which Israel killed, according to conservative estimates, 70,000 Palestinians and over 700 more since the oft-violated ceasefire went into effect last year — there are calls to reduce southern Lebanon to rubble.

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They either “crush Hezbollah so that the Lebanese government can disarm, and keep the south free of terrorists,” said another member of Netu’a’s security patrol, or they will have to evacuate again in the future, and it will rip their communities apart.

Israel’s border communities are often referred to as the “periphery.” Looking out from Netu’a, one can see a string of Israeli military outposts situated on the Blue Line, which the U.N. established in 2000, erecting a border wall like the one that cordons off the West Bank. Far from the metropolitan centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, these communities occupy a particular place in Israeli politics, and according to residents who spoke with The Intercept in these communities, there is a consensus that they feel forgotten in the wake of October 7.

“I think the government doesn’t do enough for this area. Israel is like a golden cage,” Manasseh said. “You love it, but we are not safe here anymore.”

These “periphery” residents are working to leverage their political influence to end the “Hezbollah problem,” partly by staying in their communities during this war instead of evacuating, forcing the Israeli military to either protect them or admit they can’t.

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This is also part of what is driving the Israeli military to establish a “security zone” south of the Litani, in the words of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, to “protect” the communities in the north and spare them from another round of evacuation. Israel’s Home Front Command, which is responsible for setting civilian protection guidelines during wartime, announced that because of its strikes on Lebanon, the government would extend the time for Israeli civilians to enter shelters after an alert from zero seconds to 15, due to a partial withdrawal of Hezbollah forces north.

“We all understand that if they reach our borders, it won’t stop there,” said Hila Kronos, who just finished a round of reserve duty in the Israeli military and has been living in Adamit, another Israeli border community, for 20 years. “Maybe not now, but in five or ten years, they could decide everything is calm and use that opportunity to attack Israel.”

Do it now and once and for all is the consensus in these kibbutzim, whose residents insist that they will be staying. “There will be no more evacuations,” another resident told The Intercept.

The desire to establish a security buffer is driving not only Israel’s aerial bombardment campaign, which has claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Lebanese people since the start of the war, but also what used to be a fringe movement that has grown more mainstream in the past two years: the push, as in Gaza, to settle the south of Lebanon.

To do so would require a military commitment that even the most hawkish of Israeli military figures acknowledge Israel does not have. They are facing a manpower crisis and are short more than 15,000 soldiers.

The fringe Uri Tzafon movement, Hebrew for “North Awaken,” which advocates for the Jewish settlement of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, has put their words into action. In February, members of Uri Tzafon launched drones into southern Lebanon, urging residents to evacuate, and breached the security barrier as a demonstration in favor of settlement.

Adom, the Netu’a security official, said that his family does not belong to the Uri Tzafon movement. Still, he told The Intercept, “my middle son wants to establish a movement that would push the government to take control of the area, build settlements, and pass a law declaring it Israeli territory — like the Golan Heights — and formally annex it.”

But Israelis like Kronos are not so sure of this strategy. “They’re trying, but I think we’re losing too many young people,” he said. “There’s too much death for something I don’t believe can actually be achieved.”

Kronos has grown disillusioned living in Adamit, watching war after war claim civilian lives in the south and destroy her home community.

“We were young, without children when we first came here. We would sit on rooftops and watch the rockets, almost like a game, trying to guess where they would land,” Kronos said. “I remember sitting next to a woman. Today she must be around 18. She told me her story: Twenty years earlier, in 2006, she had been sitting in a shelter holding her baby son. She had been told that by the time he grew up, there would be no need for an army in Israel, no war in Lebanon, that things would be better. And now, 20 years later, she was sitting there again, and her son was in Lebanon, fighting.”

The post “I Want to Occupy”: Inside the Israeli Movement Pushing to Raze and Settle Southern Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

Goat meat goes down like big shards of glass when the symptoms set in. The local livestock, the main source of available nutrients, becomes nearly impossible to swallow. It feels, the sufferers say, like deep wounds have been sliced into their throats.

In Kargi, a remote desert village in the far north of Kenya, cancers of the digestive tract plague the population at unusually high rates. The disease most often attacks the esophagus, though stomach cancer is also common. Some patients think it’s a punishment from God.

The evidence on the ground suggests it’s more likely from a multinational oil company. In the 1980s, foreign work crews dressed like astronauts descended on the village of Kargi and the surrounding Chalbi Desert to drill for oil. They spent five unsuccessful years boring nearly a dozen wells thousands of feet into the ground. The men were from Amoco, an American oil company now owned by BP.

The crews then drove off their bulldozers, packed up their protective equipment, and vanished. One of the only traces to mark their presence was a dry white substance scattered on the ground, close to the water wells used by residents and their livestock.

An Intercept investigation drawn from on-the-ground interviews with dozens of Kargi residents, government and corporate reports spanning decades, court filings, and public hearings traces Amoco’s failure to clean up its waste to the ongoing pollution of Kargi. The substance the company left behind contained heavy metals and known carcinogens, but because of a lack of testing and thorough scientific study, it isn’t clear if the waste directly caused cancer in the community.

What is clear is that residents ate it.

Kargi has one of the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in Kenya, and when locals discovered the flaky substance around the wells, many believed it was natural salt and started using it to cook their food.

The water was contaminated. High levels of carcinogenic toxic chemicals, namely nitrates, had seeped into surrounding boreholes and wells — the only water supply in the desert. Animals began dying in the thousands. And people started getting cancer.

By the early 2000s, the cancer rate in the community was three times the national average. The area’s state representative asked the government to investigate the correlation between the disease plaguing his constituents and the drilling waste that had been left behind.

Now, across the manyattas — communities of traditional homes constructed from sticks and patchworks of old clothing — in Kargi and surrounding villages, everybody claims to know someone afflicted by the disease. The “salt” still remains scattered where Amoco, now part of British Petroleum, once searched for oil.

What’s clear now, from court records and environmental tests, is that the white clayey substance collected adjacent to Amoco’s wells was a tool the company used to help drill for oil, that it contained a variety of heavy metals, and that the wells were not properly sealed.

The pollution and disease inspired the first-ever lawsuit filed on the basis of Kenya’s constitutional right to a safe and healthy environment in 2020, when residents of Kargi and other communities in the Chalbi Desert sued the Kenyan national and county governments. They demanded a supply of clean water for people and animals, and they blamed Kenya for failing to police Amoco’s damage to the environment. Six years later, it’s still crawling through the court system.

The Amoco case was the start of a pattern of identifying environmental destruction across the East African country. In the last few years, similar cases have been popping up nationwide, accusing the local and national governments of failing to clean up the waste that other multinational oil companies have left behind, subjecting residents to drink contaminated water. 

A lack of adequate testing and general neglect of Kargi and its surrounding areas makes it difficult to directly correlate cancer to the waste Amoco left behind. But high levels of carcinogenic toxins, including nitrates and arsenic — both commonly used in drilling wells — have been found in the area’s drinking water over the years, in sporadic tests conducted by the Kenyan government and nonprofit organizations.

No official cleanup has ever been done. Neither BP nor the Kenyan government responded to repeated requests for comment.

In Kargi, residents told The Intercept that Amoco’s footprint has left them in a state of constant despair. 

Gumathi Galnahgalle, a village elder in his mid-40s, said the community began to notice people falling ill in the years after Amoco left. When his mother stopped being able to swallow food, he took her to the hospital multiple times.

“There was no treatment; we were just told to take her back home and wait for her time,” he said, standing in front of her grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.”

Amoco’s African Expansion

Amoco’s arrival in the 1980s was met with intrigue and excitement. As helicopters flew over Kargi, foreign crews came into the community to join traditional dances at night.

The company employed locals to cook for their crews. In such a remote area, with few educational opportunities and literacy rates around 25 percent, the work was well-received. Lebeku Mirgichan, now in his early 70s, worked as a cook for Amoco for three years — earning 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (equivalent to roughly $23 today). “At the time, that was a lot of money,” he told The Intercept.

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Oil exploration was a “welcome development for many communities because it came with a lot of promise and opportunity for development,” said Omolade Adunbi, director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. And it wasn’t just Amoco — Chevron and Total had also explored for oil in other parts of Marsabit, the more than 40,000-square-mile county that contains Kargi.

Then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who commissioned the Amoco project, reportedly visited Kargi to watch the drilling. Amoco’s managing director told Moi that “the rock formation made the prospects for striking oil very encouraging and exciting.” Moi said “he had hope that economically viable oil deposits would be found.”

Amoco, then a Midwest-based company, felt that it was on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s leading explorers and developers of oil — acquiring drilling rights in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. Alfred O. Munk, Amoco’s manager of foreign affairs, told The Chicago Tribune, “Heads of state and competitors alike are coming to the sudden, belated conclusion that Amoco is a major international player.”

With Moi’s blessing, Amoco drilled at least 10 oil wells that reached 10,000 feet deep. But in 1990, after five years and no real sign of oil, the project in Kargi was decommissioned. Amoco’s vehicles, guards, and land rovers abruptly left.

In court records and interviews with the community, dozens said they were never officially informed of the project’s end. And no one came to clean it up.

Mass Extinction

The failure didn’t seem to affect Amoco’s business. In 1998, British Petroleum bought it in a $48 billion deal, the largest takeover of an American company by a foreign firm at the time. It changed its name to BP Amoco, then just BP in 2001. Most Amoco stations in the U.S. were converted to BP’s brand.

But in Kargi and its surrounding villages, animals were dying. Across the Chalbi Desert — where over 90 percent of the population of 30,000 is considered impoverished — most people survive off their livestock, eating only the meat and milk of goats, sheep, and camels. Due to the area’s aridity, there is no piped water, and communities rely on groundwater from boreholes and shallow wells.

In the 1990s, after drinking water from a borehole next to an abandoned well that Amoco had drilled, a flock of sheep and goats died in the neighboring village of Balesa, court records allege.

Then, in the early 2000s, 7,000 sheep and goats died under similar circumstances, residents told The Intercept. According to court records, a water quality report conducted by the government immediately after the mass death confirmed that over 600 animals died within two hours of taking the water. The water was found to contain high levels of nitrates, a type of salt and chemical compound that gets dissolved into drilling material for a variety of purposes: as powerful explosives to locate oil, to stop bacteria from growing in wells, and as an additive to drilling mud to strengthen the walls of a well.

When consumed in high amounts, nitrates can be extremely toxic and stop mammals’ blood from carrying oxygen.

A government team was sent to the area on a fact-finding mission in 2003, according to court documents. They recommended that the community should not give the water to infants and that the veterinary department should carry out toxicology tests in Kargi. It also found that the wells had not been properly sealed. A 2004 government report concluded that “the claims of the presence of esophagus cancer in the region were everywhere the team visited and concern is overwhelmingly evident as reported by medical personnel and local community.”

Subsequent tests commissioned by a local nonprofit organization found that levels of nitrates and arsenic were high in Kargi waters.

Five years later, a prospective report by a Swedish oil company, Lundin, which was planning to look for oil and other mining materials, confirmed that a “white clayey substance used to cool drill bits by Amoco while drilling was collected adjacent to the well.” Lundin tested it and found extremely high alkaline levels — which can cause chemicals to be corrosive and destroy skin when spilled.

The former Amoco cook, Mirgichan, alongside two other community members who also worked for Amoco, told The Intercept that they remember watching workers’ skin start to peel off when they worked with drilling materials.

In its report, Lundin found the substance to be “extremely saline and sodic” and that it was related to “abundant” claims about related health issues by the local communities, including dying livestock and cancer cases.

Between 2007 and 2009, multiple tests on the water found that it was not meeting the World Health Organization recommended standards, according to court records. The Kenyan water resources authority declared that it was not safe for human consumption. A local nonprofit found that high levels of nitrates and arsenic were in the water, and they were the probable cause of the livestock deaths.

By then, people were dying.

In Search of Nutrients

In Kargi, where food is scarce, community members kept finding the white substance that Amoco left behind and decided to put it to use, packing it up and using it to cook. The area, littered with salt-like mounds, became so popular with residents that it was named kwa chuvmi, loosely translated to “where there is salt.”

There are conflicting reports over what exactly the “salt” was. According to Kenyan court documents, the salt-like substance was actually two heavy drilling chemicals: barite and bentonite. Barite is a mineral used in large quantities to increase the density of drilling fluids, and bentonite, a clay-like substance often referred to as drilling mud, helps in carrying cuttings to the surface and stabilizing boreholes. The chemicals can have “catastrophic effects,” on the environment and people, said James Njuguna, an engineering professor at Robert Gordon University.

According to tests undertaken by Lundin, Amoco used “a white material that could pass for salt like substance,” but was “essentially a special clay material used to cool the drill bits.” It contained high levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and electrical conductivity.

Between 2006 and 2009, records from the only health center in Kargi, a village area with only 10,000 residents, registered 65 cancer-related deaths — which health workers said was largely throat cancer — or a rate nearly three times higher than the national average, according to government reports.

In 2008, Safi Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer just after giving birth, leaving behind the baby and four other small children. There was no medicine or treatment available, and she was advised to stay at home. “There are many orphans here,” Mirkalkona told The Intercept. “And yet, we still do not understand this disease.”

The same year, Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, who represented Kargi and the surrounding area in Kenya’s national assembly, brought the issue to the Parliament.

“Strange diseases started occurring in the specific areas where oil was drilled,” he said. “I do not know how we can possibly explain the sudden emergence of cancer cases.”

“It is really embarrassing that we sit here and … years later people are still dying,” Lekuton continued in his speech. “We have a survey that has revealed shocking statistics of men and women who are ailing from throat cancer and many have died.” 

But leaders, including in the energy ministry, were dismissive and said no connection had been found between oil exploration and cancer cases.

By 2009, a community member was dying of cancer every month, according to a local news report. The symptoms and deterioration of residents were similar. The first was an inability to swallow meat. The patients were then referred for a biopsy, “but the majority prefer to go back home and wait to die,” the report said. Some tested positive for esophageal cancer.

Desert of Death

Years went by with no answers. In 2013, a documentary titled “Desert of Death” aired on Kenyan national television on throat and stomach cancer patients in the county, suggesting that waste left behind after failed oil prospecting had a connection to the disease. The youngest cancer patient featured was 3 years old. The documentary drew countrywide attention, prompting further discussions in the government.

“I come from Kargi Village, and I have about 150 names of those who have died as a result of that disease,” Godana Hargura, senator of Marsabit, said in a government hearing in 2015. “The situation is so desperate.”

In Kargi, there is only one health center serving the 10,000 residents. There is no doctor — just a clinical officer, a nurse, and a nutritionist.

“People normally come too late. Most of the people are sick, but they don’t even know that they are sick,” said Abraham Situma, the clinical officer. “We really need more human resources.”

Situma often refers the cases to Marsabit county hospital, a two-hour drive from Kargi. Following that, many patients are then referred to a hospital in Meru, over 300 miles away. But, Situma said, most prefer to just stay in Kargi and pass away at home. So many people have died in their homes that they became labeled the “manyattas of death.”

In July 2024, separate from the court case, the community petitioned Kenya’s National Assembly to order a comprehensive and independent probe into cancer cases in the region. The community said they had documented close to 1,000 cancer-related fatalities in the last decade, all attributed to the consumption of contaminated water. The fatalities were reported in Kargi and other surrounding areas, but only 100 families had the victims’ health records, because their culture dictated that the dead be buried with documents.

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“I call it the social death of the environment,” said Adunbi, the University of Michigan professor. “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death, and there is no oversight on how many of these corporations have conducted their activities in these spaces.”

Meanwhile, the case filed in 2020 by the Kargi residents remains ongoing and continuously delayed.

The petition detailed accusations against nine Kenyan and county governments — including the attorney general; ministries of environment, water, and sanitation; as well as the National Oil Corporation of Kenya — of being accountable for failing to ensure that Amoco caused little damage to the environment; disposed of waste oil, salt water, and refuse; and did not cause fluids or substance to escape to the environment.

“The untold pain, suffering and hopelessness is exemplified by the rampant deaths that take place in the manyattas without the residents of Marsabit County having access to medical care, the long distance the resident have to travel seeking medical care and lack of financial capacity to carry the burden of the cancer scourge,” the petition reads.

There were also plans to sue BP, but it has proved to be too legally complex, according to John Mwariri, acting executive director of Kituo Cha Sheria, the Kenyan legal aid group leading the case. The company had also long diverted its interest away from the Marsabit region into more fruitful areas in countries like Angola, Egypt, and Algeria.

In Kargi, the community has lost hope in getting answers. In his manyatta, Galnahgalle, the village elder, awaits the same fate as his mother.

“I keep being told to go home as there is no treatment,” he said. “Amoco should come and explain what they did here.”

The post An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates appeared first on The Intercept.

When Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr talks about broadcast licensees serving the “public interest,” he loves to emphasize “localism.” 

Localism is the idea that powerful entities (in this case, broadcasters) should serve the needs and interests of the communities they service. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue with, especially at a time when news deserts are spreading, small-town outlets are folding, and, thanks to the administration in which Carr serves, local public radio stations are reeling.

When you look at the fights Carr actually picks with broadcasters over the “public interest” requirement, however, a curious pattern emerges. They aren’t local stories at all, unless you consider Tehran and San Salvador local. They’re national and global stories that upset not residents of underserved heartland communities, but President Donald Trump, the man whose gilded face Carr wears as a lapel pin. 

Sure, when he’s playing for the home crowd, Carr will openly admit, and even brag about, helping Trump reshape the national media to his liking. That’s what he did at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, bragging about such “wins” as the Paramount–Skydance merger in Trump’s ongoing feud against media adversaries. Carr’s FCC approved that deal only after unconstitutionally extracting editorial concessions from CBS News and helping Trump launder a multimillion-dollar alleged bribe though the courts.

But in less partisan settings, from congressional testimony to mainstream media interviews, localism has become Carr’s go-to talking point whenever he’s pressed on his unconstitutional efforts to police news content or confronted with his past statements railing against the partisan suppression of news. He’s not censoring the airwaves, he claims; he’s just sticking up for the little guy. 

Yet Carr has never threatened a broadcast license because a newsroom ignored city council meetings or local crime, or offered a biased take on a school board’s budget decisions. It would, of course, violate the First Amendment for him to do that too — the FCC, as Carr once said, “does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” But at least it would be consistent with his populist gimmick.

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In fact, his threats arise from coverage on national news networks, not their local affiliates, which actually hold the broadcast licenses he’s threatening to revoke. In other words, he’s threatening to punish local news stations for national content they don’t produce, and sometimes don’t even air, that angers Trump.

Let’s play back some of Carr’s greatest hits; see if you can spot the localism. 

• When Trump complained that news outlets were running “fake news” about Iranian missile strikes, Carr warned that broadcasters running “hoaxes and news distortions” would lose their licenses if they didn’t correct course.
• After MSNBC declined to carry a White House briefing on the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego Garcia, Carr accused Comcast of ignoring “obvious facts of public interest” and warned “news distortion doesn’t cut it.” MSNBC (now MSNOW) is not a local outlet — it’s a cable station that the FCC doesn’t even regulate. 
• Carr investigated KCBS, a San Francisco radio station, leading to rampant self-censorship in fear of retaliation. That might sound local, but the story that drew his ire was about a federal immigration enforcement operation. He didn’t care if the locals in the Bay Area wanted to know what immigration officers were up to — only that his boss does not want them to know. 
• Carr investigated CBS over the same interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that Trump sued over, despite experts’ virtually unanimous agreement that the claims were frivolous. Then he helped Trump shake down Paramount for the aforementioned palm-grease by waiting until two days after Trump’s settlement check arrived to approve CBS parent Paramount’s merger with David Ellison’s Skydance. He touted that merger as proof of Trump “winning” his war on the media at CPAC. 
• When Trump sued the BBC over a documentary about January 6, Carr wrote to the heads of PBS and NPR demanding transcripts and video of any American broadcast of the program, claiming the British broadcast about events in Washington, D.C., contained “news distortion.”
• After late night host Jimmy Kimmel commented on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Carr warned that if ABC and Disney did not “take action” against Kimmel, the FCC would act. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said, drawing comparisons to mafia movies.

Carr also likes to tell broadcasters what they should air, but he doesn’t implore them to report more or better local news. Instead, he launched the “Pledge America Campaign,” calling on broadcasters to meet their public interest obligations by airing “patriotic, pro-America content” celebrating “the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”

And in an expressly anti-local “public interest” intervention, Carr enthusiastically backed Trump’s directive to give the Army-Navy football game an exclusive broadcast window. Carr said in a press release earlier this month that “such scheduling conflicts weaken the national focus on our Military Service Academies and detract from a morale-building event of vital interest to the Department of War.” Because, of course, the hallmark of community broadcasting is not letting fans watch their local teams because the Pentagon needs a morale boost for its illegal, unpopular wars.

As a prior version of Carr knew, the FCC cannot police journalism for ideological bias. Localism is a Trojan horse Carr uses to legitimize his attack on the Constitution. 

His only serious effort to impact local news undermines it instead by consolidating more local licenses under conglomerates like Nexstar and Sinclair — companies that are ideologically aligned with Trump on national issues but have long track records of ruining local coverage through cost cutting. Carr even bent ownership rules to approve a $6.2 billion Nexstar–Tegna merger, which a federal judge halted Friday because of harms to local news consumers.

Nexstar is aggressively cutting jobs at flagship stations like WGN in Chicago and KTLA in Los Angeles, even as it lobbies for permission to expand further. Sinclair has decimated local newsrooms across the country, replacing them with centralized national programming — the exact opposite of the localism Carr claims to champion.

The real Brendan Carr is the unrepentant censorship czar who shows up at CPAC and openly threatens broadcasters on X, not the slicker version who rails against coastal elites to change the subject when questioned about his unconstitutional antics. 

Carr is among the most shameless bootlickers (or Florsheim dress shoe-lickers) in an administration full of sycophants. The only localities whose interests he serves are the White House and Mar-a-Lago. He’s the last person who should be policing the “public interest,” locally or anywhere. 

The post Trump’s FCC Chief Says His Censorship Protects the Little Guy. It Really Serves One Powerful Man. appeared first on The Intercept.

The communications, revealed in December 2025 meeting minutes reviewed by The Intercept, come as the administration has employed religious rhetoric in its military policies. Amid the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, some service members and political supporters have framed the war in religious terms, including describing it as part of “God’s divine plan.” Other federal agencies have also openly embraced white nationalist rhetoric and imagery, including a Department of Homeland Security recruitment post that used a neo-Nazi-associated anthem days after the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

When the White House announced Kirk’s appointment to fill her late husband’s seat on the board, it highlighted Charlie Kirk’s “bold Christian faith,” language critics say suggests religion was treated as a qualification for the role.

“The appointment of Erika Kirk to the U.S. Air Force Academy Board of Visitors goes hand in hand with Christian nationalist incursions into our armed forces, such as Pete Hegseth’s actions and statements promoting his fervent brand of evangelical Christianity at the Pentagon,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Critics warn the changes could reshape how the military’s premier officer training institution educates future leaders as it aligns with the administration’s “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” initiative, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s marquee plan to reverse the military’s diversity efforts and emphasize “lethality.”

Minutes from the meeting describe academy leaders briefing the board on steps taken to implement those directives, including removing DEI elements from the admissions process and reviewing curriculum and academy facilities for compliance with presidential executive orders.

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In public comments submitted to the Board of Visitors, included in the meeting materials, Doug Truax, CEO of the conservative Restoration of America Foundation, urged the board to review faculty and programs he said were aligned with “social justice” agendas. He also singled out Col. Candice Pipes, the academy’s admissions chief, for commenting on racial disparities in the Air Force, and claimed she said she pays a “diversity tax” as a Black woman.

The Air Force Academy has established four task forces to ensure compliance with the “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” plan, according to the minutes. One of them, focused on admissions, found that “with the changes being implemented, the Academy’s admissions process is merit-based and that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) elements have been removed.”

The Board of Visitors is a congressionally mandated oversight body that reviews cadet life, curriculum, faculty, finances, and discipline at the Air Force Academy, which commissions roughly half of the service’s new officers each year and plays a central role in shaping the culture of future military leadership. The board’s findings and recommendations are delivered to the secretary of the Air Force and forwarded to Hegseth and Congress. While the board cannot directly set policy, its oversight can shape Pentagon scrutiny and congressional funding decisions.

“The Board can influence congressional funding of the academy, so there’s definitely some power there,” said William J. Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught at the academy for six years. “More than anything, the appointment of Kirk to the board demonstrates the ongoing politicization of the service academies.”

Unlike earlier political appointments to the board, Kirk’s selection reflects a specific political and religious alignment rather than expertise in military affairs, said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a graduate and former instructor at the academy. She warned the move could encourage academy officials who share those views to shape internal reporting or programs in ways that reinforce them.

“The BOV only makes recommendations to the secretary of defense through the secretary of the Air Force, so its influence is typically quite indirect,” VanLandingham said. “However, given Secretary Hegseth’s alignment with Kirk’s group and connections to Ms. Kirk, this appointment could provide a backdoor directly to the secretary of defense, thus elevating its power.”

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The changes revive long-standing concerns about religion and ideology at the academy. The Colorado Springs institution has faced repeated allegations over the past two decades that Christian beliefs are favored within cadet culture and leadership structures. In 2005, the Air Force launched a major investigation after cadets reported pressure to attend chapel services and adopt evangelical Christian beliefs. The review found that academy leaders had struggled to fully accommodate the religious needs of non-Christian cadets and had blurred the line between permissible religious expression and coercion.

Later climate surveys continued to highlight the issue. One 2010 survey found that 41 percent of cadets who identified as non-Christian said they had experienced unwanted religious proselytizing at least once or twice in a year.

“USAFA has long struggled with unlawful religious viewpoint discrimination, institutionally favoring Christianity over other religions,” said VanLandingham. “This appointment is not helpful in that regard.”

Federal law governing the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors divides appointment authority among the White House and congressional leadership. The panel’s members are selected by the president, the House speaker and House minority leader, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate armed services committees.

Of the board’s 14 currently filled seats, 10 are held by members of Congress, including seven Republicans and three Democrats, compared to five Democrats and three Republicans in December 2022. The remaining four members are presidential appointees. Only a small minority of the board’s members have prior military experience.

Minutes from a December 2022 meeting during the Biden administration show that academy leaders briefed members on cadet welfare programs, admissions, and sexual violence prevention initiatives, a stark contrast to the priorities under Trump.

Astore, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said the board historically drew little attention from faculty focused on cadet education. But he said recent meetings and Kirk’s appointment suggest a growing focus on ideological priorities rather than professional military education.

“I don’t think Erika Kirk is going to question why cadets aren’t learning their Clausewitz and Sun Tzu,” he said.

“It is telling and highly inappropriate that the White House, in announcing Kirk’s appointment, brought up Charlie Kirk’s ‘bold Christian faith,’” Gaylor, of Freedom From Religion Foundation, said, “as if that were a qualification for his widow serving on it. The Constitution still bars any religious test for public office, but apparently the White House isn’t aware of that.”

The White House did not respond to questions from The Intercept asking why Kirk was selected for the position.

Turning Point USA, the conservative activist organization founded by Charlie Kirk where his wife is now CEO and board chair, also did not respond to questions about what role she is expected to play on the board.

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A spokesperson for the academy said the institution “thanks all members of the Board of Visitors for their service and commitment to our mission,” and that according to federal law, “the institution does not influence or take a position on the selection of individual Board of Visitors members.”

But critics and former academy officials warned the changes could shape a generation of officers more loyal to political ideology than to the military’s traditional commitment to constitutional, nonpartisan service.

“They aren’t serious about developing officers of character at USAFA who can critically think and defend our nation most effectively through wise leadership,” VanLandingham said. “They are interested in turning the military into a Christian nationalist praetorian guard.”

The post Air Force Academy Prepares Ideological Overhaul, With Erika Kirk Bringing “Bold Christian Faith” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli military had sealed the city off from the outside world. Just over a week after the U.S. and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Israeli settlers have ramped up their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli forces have imposed a near-total closure of municipal centers, shutting gates and restricting crossings without warning or perceptible logic.

“It’s so unpredictable,” said Shadya Saif, 40, a Palestinian mother of three who teaches at a private school in Ramallah. The Intercept rode alongside Saif as she traveled back to Ramallah from Nablus on Saturday, when the Israeli military closed all but one checkpoint out of the city, putting it under an effective blockade and forcing all traffic through a checkpoint called Shavei Shomron.

The unannounced closures left Palestinians scrambling. Many were visiting Ramallah to see family members during Ramadan, and they hoped to reach their destinations in time for iftar, the fast-breaking meal enjoyed at sunset. Others needed to enter the city to receive medical treatment they cannot obtain elsewhere. Saif had risked the journey to see her dying uncle and, knowing the risks of crossing, she’d left her chronically ill daughter in Nablus with him.

“I was worried I would get stuck here,” Saif told The Intercept inside a yellow “service” taxi, the only form of public transportation widely available in the West Bank. Even though nearly all of her family lives in Nablus, she has tried to avoid visiting since October 7, 2023, after which the Israeli military clamped its ubiquitous yellow gates over entry points throughout the West Bank.

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Israeli soldiers stopped each car to inspect Palestinians’ IDs. At their limit, drivers began pulling their cars onto roundabouts and driving the wrong way down the street, but the final say lay with Israeli forces, who allowed only one car at a time to approach the military installation. Some abandoned their cars to walk through checkpoints and reach their families on foot. An elderly Palestinian woman prayed aloud, saying that all she wanted was to make it safely to her family in Ein Yabrud, a village on the outskirts of Ramallah.

As we sat waiting at the checkpoint, Saif’s face was filled with worry. She opened her phone to show pictures of her daughter, dressed in pink and smiling at the camera.

Saif’s daughter has muscular dystrophy and requires specialized treatment and 24-hour supervision. Saif took a big risk visiting Nablus to see her dying uncle in the hospital, she said, because if she were to get stuck there due to a checkpoint closure — which did happen for three days last week — her daughter’s health would be put in jeopardy.

“I left her with my uncle just for the day, but I have to be there to care for her,” Saif said. “I know her medications and how to ensure she doesn’t get sick.”

Saif made it back to Ramallah, but she said it would not have been possible a few days earlier.

The day after the U.S. and Israel started attacks on Iran, the prevailing sentiment in Ramallah was anxiety. People wondered if there would be road closures and food and fuel shortages like during last year’s Twelve Day War, and whether the Israeli government would impose what Palestinians describe as collective punishment in the West Bank, even though they were not involved in the conflict.

“It has nothing to do with anything Palestinians in the West Bank are doing or not doing,” said Aviv Tatarsky, who leads an Israeli protective presence collective that organizes watches to deter settlers from invading Deir Istiya, a village outside Ramallah. “And still, there’s an Israeli decision, and life comes to a stop.”

Ramallah, which has long functioned as a relatively insulated bubble from the effects of Israel’s occupation, is also dealing with a struggling economy. Paired with the war, the economic downturn has muted Ramadan celebrations, according to residents who spoke with The Intercept.

“We are suffering,” said Faisal Taha, who drives taxis in Ramallah. “There is no money, no work. We are in debt, and I have four mouths to feed. What am I to do? I have been driving my taxi all day, and I have forty shekels.”

Unemployment in the West Bank is hovering around 40 percent — up from 13 percent two years ago — and GDP has contracted by 13 percent since October 7.

Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli NGO that monitors settlement construction in the West Bank, said he was not surprised by the restrictions imposed by Israel.

“They always use instances of violence to perpetuate more violence,” Etkes said. “This is what we have seen for years, since October 7, and now it is worse than ever.”

As during the Twelve Day War last year — after which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “historic victory” that would “stand for generations” against the Islamic Republic of Iran — there are already the beginnings of flour and fuel shortages in the West Bank as the Israeli Civil Administration, which runs the military occupation of the territory, imposes import restrictions.

“This is not something new. It happened in June during the Twelve Day War, and it’s kicking off again,” Tatarsky said. “But what’s different this time is that Israel is also blocking roads — not only disconnecting Palestinians from Area C, but also blocking roads between Palestinian villages.”

A week later, on March 7, there was still only one checkpoint out of Ramallah open, forcing all traffic through a bottleneck that passes by the Beit El settlement and through the Jalazone refugee camp. This is the only route for Palestinians living in Ramallah to access Route 60, the main thoroughfare connecting Palestinian communities in the south to those in the north.

Driving up the highway and passing village after village that had been closed off by the Israeli military, Etkes said it was clear the war with Iran was being used as a pretext for “a system that is meant to reduce as much as possible the area where Palestinians can move freely,” part of the settlement movements’ goal to alter the facts on the ground regarding de facto annexation.

Nabih Odeh, 63, who has been driving public transit taxis in the West Bank for more than 30 years, has watched what he describes as the slow annexation of the West Bank unfold. As he drove up Route 60, he pointed to village after village sealed off by the Israeli military.

“There, that’s Aqraba, closed,” Odeh said. “If you want to get in or out, you must walk. That’s Turmus Ayya — very wealthy — still closed.”

Eighty percent of Turmus Ayya’s residents have U.S. citizenship, yet the town was closed off, its yellow gate locked. Service taxis pulled up to drop residents off, leaving them to walk to the town center or be picked up by relatives. Its status as a wealthy American Palestinian village has no bearing on Israel’s decision.

At the same time, Israeli settlers have used the war with Iran as an opportunity to launch further attacks on Palestinian communities, largely in Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control — working in tandem with movement restrictions in Areas A and B, the Palestinian-administered population centers and villages created under the 1995 Oslo Accords.

Messages circulating in settler WhatsApp groups have called for violence against Palestinians to match Israeli airstrikes in Iran. One graphic depicting a roaring lion, to match the Israel Defense Forces’ name for the military operation against Iran, reads: “It is time to launch a preemptive attack in all arenas, until the enemy is expelled from the country and subdued outside it. This time we win, once and for all.”

“I mean, generally, when you’re speaking about Israeli society, it is torn apart in so many ways,” said Orly Noy, editor at Local Call and chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. “But there’s one thing that always unifies,  and I’m speaking about the Jewish section of society, of course, and this is war.”

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Netanyahu is willing to do anything to stay in power, Noy added, and during his time in office, he has worked effectively to paint the Iranian regime as an existential threat to Israel, working in tandem with the U.S. “He has taken advantage of it very well,” Noy said.

During Operation Rising Lion, this rally-around-the-flag effect has not only served Netanyahu’s interests but also those of settlers living in the West Bank.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, estimates that settler attacks have increased 25 percent since the start of the conflict. Israeli settlers have killed six Palestinians since the start of the war with Iran, including three in one incident in the West Bank community of Khirbet Abu Falah, east of Ramallah.

Israeli settlers shot Fare’ Hamayel and Thaer Hamayel, and a third man, Mohammad Murra, died of suffocation from tear gas deployed by Israeli forces.

As the world’s attention remains on Iran, solidarity activists said that Israeli settlers appear to feel they have additional impunity to conduct attacks.

“They will be treated as heroes by their supporters, by their society,” Etkes said. “And the government will do nothing about it.”

The post With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, movement is no longer a mundane part of daily life. Israel’s military assault and prolonged siege have dismantled Gaza’s transportation system so thoroughly that journeys that once took minutes by car now require hours of walking through rubble and grotesque debris. What used to be an ordinary act — leaving home, reaching a clinic, visiting kin — has now become a form of physical labor, a calculation of pain, and a risk weighed against necessity.

By late 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Transport and Communications reported that approximately 70 percent of registered vehicles — more than 50,000 cars, taxis, buses, and trucks — had been destroyed or rendered inviable. Between 68 and 85 percent of the road network suffered damage or total destruction, with some areas such as Khan Younis losing more than 90 percent of their routes. Israeli forces repeatedly bombed, cratered, and bulldozed major roads and intersections, instigating chaos that fragmented the Strip into isolated zones where movement between neighborhoods requires long detours or hours on foot.

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While the world turns its attention to Iran, daily life in Gaza has not returned to pre-genocide conditions. Since the U.S. and Israel began their joint assault on Iran, Lebanon, and the broader region, prices in Gaza have risen sharply as people rushed to buy essential goods and fuel. The sudden surge in demand and limited supply spiked the cost of food, water — and transportation. Border crossings were closed for 48 hours, further exacerbating shortages and contributing to the rapid rise in prices. In recent days, prices have begun to gradually decrease and stabilize, but the overall economic burden remains heavy for most households in Gaza, where many people are still struggling to cover basic needs.

Roads no longer connect neighborhoods, and transportation no longer guarantees access to health care, work, or sustenance. Even streets that remain technically passable are obstructed by rubble, vehicles, or collapsed infrastructure beneath the surface. Water and sewage lines burst under bombardment, flooding streets and turning mobility into an endeavor plagued by biohazards. In many areas, roads have become indistinguishable from ruins.

This collapse did not result solely from airstrikes. Israel’s blockade — which continues to restrict fuel, spare parts, tires, batteries, and heavy machinery — has undermined Gaza’s ability to repair or recover. Vehicles that survived bombardment often remain immobilized due to mechanical failures no workshop can fix. Even basic parts and equipment — filters, belts, brake systems — have become hard to find. Fuel scarcity has driven prices far beyond the reach of most families, while mechanics resort to dangerously improvised substitutes that destroy engines and emit toxic fumes across densely populated areas.

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As formal transportation disappears, residents rely on unsafe alternatives: tuk-tuks with no safety standards, animal-drawn carts, overcrowded cargo trucks not designed for passengers, or walking long distances across shattered streets. Asphalt has collapsed and fractured, mingling with rubble, sewage, twisted metal, and remnants of destroyed buildings, forming uneven, dirt-like paths. Movement through these spaces turns the act of walking into a physically punishing routine. The clatter of collapsing buildings and distant bombardment is constant, and the air feels opaque with dust and smoke.

Municipal authorities cannot clear the wreckage. The fuel shortages and lack of functioning equipment affect them too, preventing large-scale removal of debris. The result is a form of enforced immobility: Entire neighborhoods remain effectively cut off, not by checkpoints but by devastation. Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.

I have experienced this reality repeatedly. Over several weeks, I traveled with my brother, Mohammed, four times to reach a dentist in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, nearly 10 kilometers from our home. There is no reliable transportation between the two areas. The distance became an ordeal measured not in maps but in muscle fatigue, time lost, and pain that intensified with every uneven step.

On one of those days, rain fell heavily. Broken roads turned to mud layered over shattered asphalt and sharp stones. Water pooled in craters left by bombs. At times, I sprinted across short safe patches, only to be slowed again by mud and debris.

Transportation carried us only part of the distance. We always completed the journey on foot, adjusting our pace to the condition of the road and to the limits of our bodies. Without severe tooth pain, I would not have left my room. The road drained me more than the dental procedure itself. Each step felt like a negotiation between necessity and collapse.

I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way: a flowering tree growing beside rubble, a rose bush somehow still nourished, a building that had not yet fallen, the faint radiant glow of children playing in a distant schoolyard. I photographed the clouds, took pictures of myself simply to pass time, and paused whenever my body demanded it. These small acts were my survival mechanisms, attempts to assert that Gaza still contained something worth noticing.

This experience is not exceptional. It reflects a broader reality in which access to health care depends not on medical need alone, but on physical endurance. Patients miss appointments or abandon treatment altogether because they cannot reach clinics. Parents carry children for kilometers to medical points. Elderly people and those with disabilities remain trapped in place, dependent on others or forced to forego care indefinitely. The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.

Economic consequences intensify the crisis. Tens of thousands of drivers have lost their livelihoods as taxis, buses, and trucks were destroyed or immobilized. Commercial transport has slowed dramatically, disrupting supply chains and inflating the cost of basic goods. Workers arrive late or not at all. Students walk for hours or drop out entirely. For displaced families, transportation costs have reached apocalyptic levels, with some paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to move belongings short distances. Those without money walk, scavenge what they can, and leave the rest behind.

In the absence of regulation and fuel availability, informal transport operators dictate prices brazenly. Gaza’s local authorities acknowledge the exploitation, but under siege conditions, they have limited options to protect residents. Scarcity governs movement more than public need, reshaping social relations around access, endurance, and pent-up anger. Western‑run aid organizations vow to “maintain a steady and predictable flow of supplies,” yet recent reports note that while some aid has entered Gaza, the overall volume remains insufficient to meet basic needs, fueling frustration and despair.

The pattern of destruction reveals intent. Israeli attacks have repeatedly targeted intersections, bridges, and key road junctions, severing connections between neighborhoods and governorates. These actions obstruct ambulances, humanitarian convoys, and civilian movement, amplifying the effects of injury, hunger, and displacement. Gaza’s government estimates that losses in the transport sector exceed $3 billion, including the destruction of more than three million linear meters of roads. Mobility itself has become a casualty of war, leaving residents lurking between hazards and temporary shelters, pleading for safety.

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Local officials have proposed emergency rehabilitation plans focused on reopening critical routes linking hospitals, shelters, and aid distribution centers. These efforts prioritize survival rather than reconstruction. Without access to fuel, spare parts, and heavy machinery, even minimal recovery remains largely theoretical, constrained by political decisions beyond Gaza’s control.

Transportation in Gaza is not a technical issue or a matter of convenience. It defines the limits of daily life. It determines who can reach a doctor, who can work, who can study, and who must stay behind. As long as movement itself remains under siege, life in Gaza will continue to contract, measured not by distance but by pain, exhaustion, and loss. In the 21st century, Palestinians in Gaza navigate a landscape where walking through ruins has replaced the most basic promise of mobility, ceaselessly testing endurance, resilience, and the abiding human spirit.

The post Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Roads and Transit. Now, We Walk Everywhere. appeared first on The Intercept.

For nearly a decade, Air Force maintenance units spent more than $1.79 million in taxpayer funds buying 5,166 high-end knives and other luxury items, including switchblades and combat-style tactical knives with no legitimate maintenance use, The Intercept has found. It’s a drop in the bucket of a U.S. military budget creeping ever closer to a trillion dollars, about $300 billion of which belongs to the Air Force. But with a military budget so bloated, the knife-ordering frenzy illustrates how obviously frivolous spending can go unchecked.

“Everyone knew we didn’t need them,” said a former noncommissioned officer recently honorably discharged from Hill Air Force Base. “There was literally zero justification in any maintenance field.”

The Benchmade Infidel and Mini Infidel, the most popular choices, are sleek and black, with automatic blades that slide straight out the front. Their presence on the flightline, where maintainers work to repair and tune up airplanes between flights, is difficult to justify — and often outright banned. Procurement records obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests show that Air Force maintenance units have been buying the knives as far back as at least 2017 and as recently as June 2025, spanning multiple major commands.

Accounting for roughly a quarter of troops in the Air Force, maintainers are the technicians and mechanics responsible for upkeep of approximately 5,000 planes. They’re chronically understaffed and overworked, as The Intercept previously reported, and maintainers spanning nine bases and major commands said that some of the crucial supplies they need for maintenance — like safety wire, specialized hydraulic fluids, and calibrated test equipment — are difficult to obtain. Maintainers said that while essential tools and materials were often delayed or unavailable, nonessential items like high-end knives moved easily through the supply system, likely due to an apparent misclassification, as a procurement expert explained to The Intercept.

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“It always felt like we were just putting duct tape on these jets to keep them flying,” said an active-duty senior airman who previously served in the 57th Maintenance Wing at Nellis Air Force Base. “Jets would come back with the same broken parts or worse, just so we could meet flight numbers. We never had money for proper tools, but there would be brand-new computers, unit flags, or other items to make the unit look better.”

For some maintainers, the option to order a shiny combat knife for free is something of a silver lining. “This is one of the only good things that maintainers get,” said a former maintainer from Edwards Air Force Base.

In other cases, the knives were markers of inclusion. “Tech sergeants would come in for a short time and get a knife as a welcome present,” said the former maintainer from Hill.

Nine current and former Air Force maintainers who spoke to The Intercept for this story were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation. As is common in the military, maintainers who raise concerns about excessive spending can face ostracization or professional consequences.

 “It wasn’t like higher-ups would be mad if they caught you,” said the source from Hill. “They had knives too.”

“Supply Could Hook Them Up”

“We were told that if you wanted one, all you had to do was be friends with people attached to the supply line,” said a source who worked in the backshop at Nellis. “I knew plenty of people who would do favors for supply troops to get their hands on a knife.”

Six people stationed at Nellis between 2017 and 2024 confirmed that misuse of the supply system was common. One source said they still have six Benchmade knives, gifted by a noncommissioned officer in the 57th Wing. The source said they were never told how those knives were obtained.

More than 59 active-duty Air Force bases in the United States and numerous overseas installations operate under the same supply system. The Intercept submitted requests for procurement data to 28 Air Force bases and received responsive records from 12 installations. Every base that returned records showed similar knife-ordering patterns across its flightline maintenance units.

“Most things were done with handshakes, winks and nods. Definitely a good ol’ boys club,” said Micah Templin, a former weapons troop in the 57th Maintenance Wing at Nellis. “There were quid pro quos and IOUs. If you did someone a favor one day, maybe your chief or leadership would feel comfortable looking the other way on another.”

Sources from U.S. Air Force units in the continental United States, South Korea, and Germany said personnel routinely used the term “box cutters” as a euphemism for the knives. This made them sound simple and practical, several maintainers said, while the knives themselves were prized largely for their appearance, retail price, and the status of owning one rather than any maintenance-related use. Maintainers interviewed by The Intercept said the knives were popular largely because they “look cool.”

While Defense Logistics Agency records show how many knives were purchased overall, FOIA responses from individual bases offer only a partial picture of where those orders originated. But every installation that did provide records showed recognizable patterns, suggesting the practice was not limited to a single base or command.

Several maintainers said they believed leadership used unit funds to purchase high-end items that were later diverted for personal use, describing a culture in which “nothing was given out without a take.” Maintainers said those who resisted or questioned practices could find themselves scrutinized or under extra pressure, which discouraged reporting and allowed misuse of the supply system to continue unchecked.

“I feel like maintainer leadership will legally do everything they can to keep someone from speaking out and do anything to protect their careers. That’s the trend within senior leadership in maintenance,” the backshop source said.

Seven sources from domestic and overseas units said this often means senior enlisted personnel direct junior troops to place orders, move items, or handle deliveries on their behalf. For those with access, it’s easy to order items with minimal oversight. The practice, sources said, allowed leadership to benefit from questionable purchases while shielding themselves from scrutiny and leaving lower-ranking airmen exposed to potential disciplinary or legal consequences.

Knives were the most common example of the misspending, but maintainers described similar practices involving other high-end items. Five airmen who served in the 64th Aggressor Squadron’s maintenance units at Nellis Air Force Base between 2018 and 2020 said senior noncommissioned officers in the squadron’s Combat Oriented Supply Organization routinely ordered new flat-screen televisions for maintenance spaces, then placed the fully functional replaced sets into unit storage areas. According to the airmen, senior noncommissioned officers later removed some of the televisions from unit spaces for personal use.

“I remember a time when a tech sergeant ordered a ton of Yeti coolers and then told me to load them directly into his private vehicle,” said an active-duty avionics troop stationed in Europe, granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. “It was always ordered in ones and twos. Anything else would raise too much suspicion.”

According to Dallas Sharrah, a former staff sergeant who served at Nellis Air Force Base: “People were mainly ordering switchblades or Oakley sunglasses for their buddies. Supply could hook them up a bit before they got yelled at.”

Costly Debris

Outside of toolkits, knives are never allowed on the flightline. They’re considered Foreign Object Debris, according to former maintenance officers, meaning they’re at risk of being sucked into an aircraft intake and damaging the engine.

The Air Force Materiel Management Handbook says that all orders must be justified for official use, but classification issues in the procurement catalog blurred the lines that define what qualifies. The knives are broadly available through standard supply channels, making repeated or bulk orders easy to place. At Nellis, purchases often averaged 20 knives per order, with some as high as 47.

“In the aggregate, someone had to be doing an audit somewhere and said to themselves, ‘Why did we order so many knives? Why are those requisitions restricted to certain bases and certain units? What is going on here?’ Clearly, no one was looking,” said Steve Leonard, a retired senior military strategist, procurement expert, and professor at the University of Kansas.

The procurement catalog is divided into subsections, Leonard explained, and knives were listed as Class IX, a category shared with maintenance-related items. But in his view, the knives should have been considered Class II items, which are intended for individual issue and subject to stricter justification, approval, and accountability requirements.

Items classified as Class II are typically restricted from purchase with unit funds if they primarily benefit individuals, while Class IX repair parts move through maintenance supply channels with far less scrutiny. “Most people aren’t interested in stealing hydraulic valves,” he said.

Defense Logistics Agency procurement records show the knives carry a “J” security code, meaning they are treated as security-related items rather than maintenance equipment, a designation that undermines their classification as routine repair parts.

When asked about the findings, an Air Force spokesperson did not address specific allegations or installations. The Intercept provided the Department of the Air Force with FOIA records, national stock numbers, and other evidence of more than $1 million in suspect knife purchases across six installations.

“The Department of the Air Force takes all allegations of fraud seriously and has processes and procedures in place to investigate them,” the spokesperson wrote in response. “If service members or citizens have concerns or evidence of specific wrongdoing, they are encouraged to report the information to local law enforcement or their Office of Special Investigation.”

Benchmade, the manufacturer of the Infidel and Mini Infidel knives most named in procurement records and troop testimonies, declined to comment.

Limited Oversight

It remains unclear how many knives airmen have obtained in recent months. On June 9, 2025, The Intercept submitted FOIA requests to 28 Air Force bases. Twelve installations provided responsive procurement records, while the remaining bases delayed, obstructed, or did not meaningfully respond.

At Hill Air Force Base, officials falsely claimed records from another installation were their own. Davis–Monthan Air Force Base admitted it had gone months with no staff to process FOIA requests. Joint Base San Antonio–Randolph reported spending only 30 minutes searching eight years of procurement records before declaring no knife purchases existed. At Luke Air Force Base, an officer sent conflicting messages about whether a request had been received, then attempted to delete an earlier acknowledgment email.

Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said she had not previously been aware of the purchases or inconsistencies in the bases’ FOIA replies. “I am literally trying to understand what to look for and who to ask,” she wrote in an email.

The Defense Department’s inspector general system, responsible for oversight of potential fraud and other misconduct, declined to comment on the knife purchases. An inspector general spokesperson said the office does not comment on active investigations and would not say whether any investigation related to the purchases was underway. The IG system is undergoing a major overhaul, with many positions open under the second Trump administration.

At the same time, Air Force inspector general complaint records obtained by The Intercept through FOIA requests show that from January 2016 through December 2022, maintenance and munitions units at Nellis Air Force Base generated at least 274 complaints. The allegations included abuse of authority, reprisal, potential contracting fraud, and hostile work environments.

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Many of the complaints were recorded as “assisted” or closed within days, averaging roughly three complaints per month over six years from the same units later tied to irregular knife purchases documented in this reporting.

Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog, said the pattern reflects broader concerns about misuse of government funds and poor oversight. “While every instance might not be fraudulent, I’ll expect many of the knives purchased are for personal use with taxpayers picking up the tab,” he said. “Wasted money and unauthorized use is a bad mix, and only the tip of the iceberg.”

At Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, FOIA-obtained records describe a “recurring problem with physical location and quantity consistency” of supply items and note that “thievery is not out of question.” As a corrective step, the documents say leadership submitted an unfunded request for surveillance cameras through the procurement system.

The post Air Force Maintenance Staff Can’t Stop Buying Fancy Knives With Tax Dollars appeared first on The Intercept.

Two FBI agents, one from New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, told a former member of Extinction Rebellion NYC they wanted to ask him about the group at his home upstate on Friday, an attorney for the group told The Intercept. The visit followed a prior attempt to reach him at his old address.

The FBI’s apparent probe of Extinction Rebellion NYC comes as the Justice Department ramps up its surveillance of activists protesting immigration enforcement and the Trump administration creates secret lists of domestic enemies under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.

“I believe this to be a significant escalation of the criminal legal system against XR and find it very troubling,” said Ron Kuby, the Extinction Rebellion attorney. “This is usually the way we find out an actual investigation is underway and is often followed by other visits and other actions.” 

The former Extinction Rebellion member, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his safety, said that the visit came after a phone call in January from a special agent that he assumed was a scam.

“I was skeptical the phone call was really from the FBI, but after I declined to speak with the agent, she said that she was standing outside my door,” he said. She was actually at the activist’s former address, which he said made him additionally dubious. But last week, when the agents showed up at his current address, he said he saw the agent’s business card through his door.

Kuby confirmed that the agent’s business card information corresponded to a current member of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force. A text message from the agent, reviewed by The Intercept, shows she identified herself and stated that she was at the former member’s house to question him about Extinction Rebellion. Her name, title, and phone number match a known special agent on the task force, according to court records.

Reached by The Intercept, a public affairs officer for the New York FBI field office said, “Per longstanding DOJ policy, we cannot confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of any investigation.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Extinction Rebellion NYC is a chapter of a loose international climate justice movement that does highly public direct actions, like an April Earth Day spray-painting over the presidential seal inside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Kuby said none of the group’s actions are violent or rise above the level of misdemeanors, and would not typically be of interest to federal counterterrorism investigators.

The former member said he had not been involved in any Extinction Rebellion actions in two years and hadn’t participated in anything that he thought would send the FBI to his door. 

“All of our actions are incredibly public,” he said. He recalled that the agent said she had some questions about Extinction Rebellion NYC, and that he wasn’t in any trouble, before the activist declined to speak and closed his door.

Why the FBI’s counterterrorism task force would investigate Extinction Rebellion is unknown, Kuby said.

“Often, the FBI starts with former members of a group, or less central people, to begin investigations,” Kuby said. “The fact that they repeatedly pursued this member, and traveled hundreds of miles from his old address in NYC – this suggests a real investigative effort.”

Trump’s September presidential memorandum, dubbed NSPM-7, called for the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices to investigate a broad spectrum of progressive groups and donors for “anti-fascism” beliefs. 

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A November FBI internal report obtained by The Guardian revealed that there were multiple active FBI investigations related to NSPM-7 in 27 locations, including New York, where the agent investigating Extinction Rebellion works. Trump’s directive instructed Joint Terrorism Task Forces to proactively investigate groups and activists with vague language that civil liberty watchdogs say could easily criminalize protected speech and protest.

FBI agents also visited several activists affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups in the Boston area last March, according to a local news report. The reasons for those visits remain unclear, and the activists involved said nothing came of them. The FBI’s Boston Division declined to comment to the press at the time.

After Extinction Rebellion NYC members protested New York Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s town hall at a Long Island synagogue last month, objecting to his vote to increase ICE funding, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted on X that she would be investigating the protest to see “whether federal law has been broken.”

None of the activists involved in the Suozzi protest have been contacted by federal investigators, representatives for the group told The Intercept. Suozzi did not reply to messages. 

In 2023, then-Florida Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote a letter to then-FBI Director Christopher Wray and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking them to bar members of Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. from the U.S. in response to a report that the group planned to protest at federal properties.

“Among other things, the group will allegedly block highways and disrupt federal properties, but violence and terrorist acts cannot be discounted given the group’s past threats,” Rubio wrote in the 2023 letter. He also used similar language in proposed legislation against “antifa” protests in 2022.

Nate Smith, an Extinction Rebellion activist who took part in the Suozzi protest, objected to characterizations of the group’s activism as terrorism.

“Is petitioning an elected official at a public event what makes America great, or a federal offense?” Smith said. “I get if you don’t like it. That’s half the point, but ‘terrorism’?” 

There have also been scattered reports of FBI agents visiting anti-ICE protesters around the country. While the FBI’s interest in Extinction Rebellion remains unclear, the group pointed to Trump’s NSPM-7 directive. 

“We did not anticipate that we would be among the first groups of those who speak inconveniently to be targeted,” Extinction Rebellion NYC said in a public statement. “We did not anticipate the level of capitulation from our country’s hallowed institutions and political opposition.” 

The post FBI Counterterrorism Agents Spent Weeks Seeking a Climate Activist — Then Showed Up at His Door appeared first on The Intercept.

Saari, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, went to the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis less than an hour after federal agents fired the fatal shots. He was wearing his Marine camouflage and carrying a lawfully owned 9mm Glock handgun on his right hip, as he does every day, he told The Intercept. Agents on the scene “thought I was undercover,” Saari said. “They kept asking what agency I was with.”

When Saari told them he was not with any agency, their demeanor shifted. Federal immigration agents soon aimed M4-style rifles at his head, footage reviewed by The Intercept shows, their fingers on the trigger less than a minute’s walk away from where Pretti was killed.

“More and more Border Patrol and ICE agents gathered around me,” Saari said. “Then they moved in with rifles and handguns drawn.”

The encounter raises questions about how federal agents assessed threats, used force, and made arrest decisions in the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing. In Saari’s case, he and his attorney told The Intercept, federal agents took scans and samples of his biometric data and made a copy of his phone — without obtaining a warrant.

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Before the agents apprehended him, Saari said he was standing on the sidewalk observing events — not recording, protesting, or engaging with federal agents until they approached him. When they did, Saari said agents issued conflicting commands and attempted to handcuff him without first securing his firearm. He said officers briefly positioned his right hand on his handgun while pulling his arms behind his back, leaving him unsure how they expected him to comply.

Standard law enforcement firearms training typically emphasizes securing a weapon before attempting to restrain an armed person.

Saari said he feared agents might shoot him when his hand brushed the gun, even though he said officers, not his own movements, placed it there.

Agents arrested Saari and brought him to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, where he was detained for at least six hours before being released without charges.

Reached for comment, ICE referred The Intercept to Customs and Border Protection. Neither CBP nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment.

Inside the federal building, Saari said agents shackled his hands and feet, photographed him, scanned his face, and forced him to provide a DNA sample by depressing his tongue and swabbing the inside of his mouth. He said agents denied him access to an attorney, even though they were present elsewhere in the building and in contact with civilians and federal officials that day.

“I asked for an attorney probably a hundred times and was never given one,” Saari said. “I was never told why I was being arrested.”

Then, Saari said, “They took my cell phone and cloned it. They actually told me they did that.”

Saari said agents did not ask him to unlock the device, nor did they provide a warrant, paperwork, or explanation authorizing the search.

“Every step of this process raises red flags,” said Shauna Kieffer, the vice president of the Minnesota Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who is now representing Saari. “You don’t get to detain someone without cause, deny them access to counsel, seize their phone, and then search or copy it without a warrant.”

Law enforcement may seize a phone during an arrest, but officers generally cannot access or duplicate its data without judicial authorization, said Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He said the only exception involves narrow emergency circumstances, which typically do not apply once both a person and their phone are already in custody.

“Once the phone is secured and the person is secured, it’s very hard to imagine what kind of emergency would justify searching or copying it without a warrant,” Wessler said.

Failure to get a warrant raises serious concerns of violating the Fourth Amendment, Wessler added, pointing to the 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California, in which the court found police are generally not allowed to search an arrested person’s cell phone without a specific warrant.

“The government needs a warrant to search or copy the contents of a phone, just as it would need a warrant to look through it,” Wessler said. And that warrant “has to be particularized to the evidence the government actually has probable cause to seek,” he added. “You don’t get a blank check to rummage through someone’s digital life.”

About seven hours after his arrest, Saari was released into sub-zero temperatures without transportation, unsure of where he was. He said he didn’t know if he remained under investigation, nor whether the government would retain copies of his phone data or DNA sample.

“Finding out that someone who served our country was being denied access to counsel was heartbreaking,” said Kieffer, who was connected with Saari two days after his detention through a colleague. “He should never have been invisible to us.”

While he was in detention, Saari said, agents provided minimal food and water, and detainees with visible injuries did not receive timely medical care.

“I asked for water about a dozen times,” he told The Intercept. “At one point they brought three bottles of water for seven people.”

Saari said detainees had to use their drinking water to clean blood off of their injured peers, which is consistent with accounts from another civilian arrested that day and previously reported by The Intercept.

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“There was a man with a golf-ball-sized contusion on his head who didn’t get medical attention,” Saari said. “There was a 70-year-old Marine Corps veteran with a deep gash on his elbow who was bleeding.”

Saari said the treatment he received stood in sharp contrast to how he handled detainees during his own military service, including during combat operations in Iraq.

During one raid in Fallujah, Saari said his unit detained men who surrendered without resistance. After the operation, he said, they reviewed video footage showing the detainees had recently planted an improvised explosive device targeting a U.S. convoy.

Despite the brutality of some operations in Fallujah, where U.S. forces repeatedly killed Iraqi civilians, Saari said his unit restrained, searched, and turned over the detainees without abuse or humiliation.

“We still treated them as humans,” Saari said. “To be treated worse here, at home, than people who had attacked our unit in a war zone, it’s been hard to understand.”

The post Marine Detained in Minneapolis Says Feds Copied His Phone Without a Warrant appeared first on The Intercept.

The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department’s largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records, according to an online federal database that covers the last 18 years. In a reversal of the more commonly seen direction for weapons transfers between the countries — in which the U.S. sends its weapons to Israel — the U.S. will pay the Israeli weapons firm Tomer over a period of three years to produce a new 155mm munition. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations.

The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning.

“The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying,” said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion, which pushes to ban cluster munitions. She recalled speaking with a 17-year-old boy who found an unexploded cluster bomblet in his neighbor’s garden in the aftermath of the Bosnian War.

“He said he played with it for quite a while. Suddenly it exploded. It blew up both of his hands; it blew away part of his face as well,” she said.

Known as the XM1208 munition, America’s new cluster shells are designed to have a dud rate — or risk of failure to explode — of less than 1 percent. They rely on more complex fuses and self-destruct features to reduce long-term danger to civilians, according to army procurement documents and weapons experts. But researchers say those low failure rates in testing do not reflect real-world performance, and advocates argue that cluster weapons’ battlefield effectiveness cannot justify their humanitarian costs.

“They are inherently indiscriminate,” said Brian Castner, an Amnesty International weapons investigator and former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer. “There’s not a way to use them responsibly, in that you can’t control where they land, and with this high dud rate you can’t control the effect on the civilian population afterwards.”

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The Cluster Munition Monitor has documented more than 24,800 cluster munition injuries and deaths since the 1960s, three-quarters from unexploded remnants. In 2024, cluster munitions killed at least 314 civilians, the majority of them in Ukraine.

Both the XM1208 and the deal to buy them are atypical. The DOD awarded the contract without public competition under a “public interest” exception to federal contracting law, using recent amendments that loosened rules for awarding no-bid defense contracts involving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

“I found this to be rather unusual,” said Julia Gledhill, a military contracting researcher for the Stimson Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank. “I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million.”

Federal agencies are legally required to create a “determination and findings” document justifying the award of a no-bid contract, which can be requested from the agencies under public records law. The Army has not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for that documentation.

Tomer did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the new munition’s failure rate, U.S. Army public affairs officer Shahin Uddin wrote it has “has undergone all required testing to ensure it meets all performance requirements, including compliance with the DoD Cluster Munition Policy.”

A Weapon for the Next War

The Pentagon’s efforts to field the XM1208 comes against the backdrop of the Russia–Ukraine war, where both sides have blanketed battlefields with older cluster munitions — including some given to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Some Eastern European countries have considered withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions amid fears of conflict with Russia, and in 2024, Lithuania became the first country to abandon the treaty.

As a result, Castner said, “Both the cluster munitions convention and the anti-personnel land mine convention are under threat.” 

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But major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons. Rather than sign the 2008 pact, the U.S. enacted a policy that year to stop using its old, failure-prone cluster munitions by 2019 and develop new weapons with a dud rate of less than 1 percent. 

Progress was slow, and in 2017, the U.S. weakened its policy to allow continued use of older cluster bombs until it had sufficient stockpiles of safer models. That year, the U.S. military began testing the M999 cluster munition: a new shell developed by another state-owned Israeli arms company, IMI Systems.

“The U.S. wants all options,” said William Hartung, an arms industry researcher with the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft. “One of their arguments was it’s good if you’re in a close-packed artillery situation — a ground war. It clears more of an area.”

During its 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel drew international criticism for using cluster bombs, and IMI promised a new weapon that would lower collateral damage — both to civilians and Israel’s flagging global reputation. In 2018, IMI Systems was acquired by Elbit Systems, a privately owned Israeli defense contractor which has faced recent boycotts for arming Israel’s forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

After backlash from investors in countries that had signed the convention, Elbit canceled production of the M999 and pledged not to build any cluster weapons.

But the M999 program did not stay dead. The Israeli government established a new state-owned arms company, Tomer, in 2018, with no limitations on cluster weapon production. The U.S. Army then adopted the M999 as its new cluster shell for artillery, renaming it the XM1208. According to a 2024 army munitions publication, the XM1208 is designed to release nine bomblets which then detonate in the air, each containing 1,200 pieces of tungsten shrapnel.

That same document lists Elbit as a production partner for the XM1208, despite the company’s pledge to abide by the cluster convention. Elbit did not immediately return a request for comment, and the Army did not respond to an inquiry about whether Elbit was working on the munition.

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Business at Tomer has been booming, due to both the genocide in Gaza and foreign arms sales, according to the Israeli tech news site Calcalist. It recorded $173 million in sales last year, making the DOD’s $210 million contract a massive windfall compared to its historical revenue. Tomer pays the Israeli government a 50 percent dividend on its profit, Calcalist reported.

The XM1208 is designed with multiple fail-safe fuses to reduce dud rates, according to U.S. Army documents published online. But little is known about how it actually performs in the field. Last year, The Guardian published photos showing an expended M999 shell in Lebanon, suggesting Israel had used the weapon in its recent attacks on Hezbollah. But there is currently no public data on its real-world failure rate, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the munitions analysis firm Armament Research Services.

Real-world dud rates are generally much higher than those found in controlled testing, which does not account for battlefield conditions like soft soil or older, degraded fuses, said Taslidžan, of Humanity & Inclusion. The manufacturer of Israel’s M85 cluster munition, which includes a self-destruct feature to reduce long-term risk to civilians, touted a “hazardous dud” rate of less than 0.1 percent. But researchers with Norwegian People’s Aid who analyzed the aftermath of M85 strikes from the 2006 war in Lebanon found that about 10 percent failed to explode.

And even if the XM1208 meets its 1 percent failure rate target, it would still be inhumane, said Taslidžan, leaving large numbers of lethal duds behind.

“That’s why the Convention on Cluster Munitions bans these weapons as a class,” she said. “The area effects and residual contamination are fundamentally incompatible with protecting civilians.”

The post Pentagon Makes Largest Known Arms Purchase From Israel — For Banned Cluster Weapons appeared first on The Intercept.

It was May 2023, the third year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Alvarado, his relatives and legal counsel told The Intercept, is still incarcerated in El Salvador.

Two years before the second Trump administration targeted Kilmar Ábrego García over his tattoos and sent him to a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Biden State Department was made aware of Alvarado’s detention — and, for reasons of diplomacy and optics, did nothing. Today, the world has seen the viral images of men lined up at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT — heads shaved, crammed front-to-back and forced to straddle each other — as a result of Donald Trump’s brutal deportation regime. But according to lawyer Jorge Palacios, the total number of U.S. citizens and residents detained in El Salvador’s less prominent prisons and jails is unknown.

Palacios, who brought Alvarado’s case before the United Nations, said that members of his group, Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, “have had people come to them saying their detained relatives are U.S. citizens who were visiting,” as was the case with Alvarado. Families often lose touch with their loved ones after their arrests, so “exact details are limited.”

In Alvarado’s case, a Salvadoran police report, testimony from two of his closest relatives, and insight from legal experts offer a relatively clear picture of what happened. At the police station in Moncagua, officers disregarded his American citizenship and stomped on his passport, telling him it was worthless. Alvarado had a tattoo of the letters “L.A.” — the city of his birth — but officers insisted it represented the city where MS-13 was formed. A “W” — his first initial — was actually an inverted “M,” they said, and a dollar sign was an obscured “S.”

The police report says Alvarado’s tattoos were “ambiguous, and there is no documentary or evidentiary support indicating that Mr. Huete Alvarado belongs to any gang, organization, or structure involved in the commission of criminal acts.” It was determined that “the police procedure may have been dysfunctional due to the lack of certainty regarding the individual’s belonging to or links with gangs.” 

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Alvarado has been shuffled between a handful of prisons and penal institutions in the nearly three years since then, never receiving a trial. His situation is in many ways exceptional, given his nationality, but it reflects the broader crisis facing countless families in El Salvador struggling to understand their loved ones’ perpetual, often inexplicable detentions. As similar models of criminalization are being rolled out across Latin America, Alvarado’s case may offer a preview of things to come. 

When Alvarado was detained, the country of his birth was led by a Biden presidency that had, from the beginning, pitched its commitment to “upholding universal rights” as the “grounding wire of our global policy, our global power.” But since the Biden administration neglected to intervene in Alvarado’s detention, the authority with the best shot at saving him now is the second Trump administration, ideologically aligned with El Salvador’s reactionary leadership and its sweeping gang crackdown. Now, the Salvadoran regime that has effectively disappeared thousands into an opaque network of prisons without trials is more emboldened than ever. 

Alvarado’s family was initially supportive of Nayib Bukele, the bearded, grinning, bitcoin-boosting millennial and self-described dictator who rose to power the first time Trump was in office and has held onto it, despite a Salvadoran constitutional prohibition, into a second consecutive term. Murder was declining when Bukele became president in 2019, but many Salvadorans still felt trapped by widespread gang violence and drug trafficking. Bukele, like his predecessors, at first brokered a clandestine truce with gang leaders — providing “financial incentive” to artificially reduce the number of homicides. 

The pact fell apart in early 2022, and murders hit a 30-year high in a single day. Bukele enacted his “state of exception,” which allowed his government to suspend constitutional rights for 30 days, paving the way for an unfettered war on organized crime. Bukele and his governing Nuevas Ideas party have renewed the suspension 39 times. 

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El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Bukele’s government has arrested more than 90,000 Salvadorans, close to 2 percent of the population, including thousands of minors. Human rights experts and lawyers estimate that as many as half of everyone detained under the state of exception have no known gang connections. Prisons are overflowing, with the cumulative system operating at over 300 percent capacity.

By some standards, El Salvador is now considered one of the safest countries in Latin America. Bukele touts record lows in homicide and last year claimed 861 consecutive days without a murder — though, as the Washington Office on Latin America noted, the tally did not include the more than 427 people who have died in custody since the state of exception was decreed. Voters, in turn, have expressed overwhelming support: Bukele had an 85 percent approval rating as of June 2025. 

Others, like Alvarado’s family — with members in both El Salvador and the U.S. — soured on the regime once their relatives disappeared under the state of exception.

The Biden administration soured on Bukele, too. Initial optimism that the young right-wing leader would bring much-needed reform soon turned to criticism of El Salvador’s “democratic backsliding.” In May 2021, then-Vice President Kamala Harris denounced Bukele’s illegal removal of the country’s attorney general and the dismissal of five of its Supreme Court judges who had tried to stop him from overriding the constitution. The State Department sanctioned several members of Bukele’s inner circle for bribery and undermining democratic processes, and the Treasury Department sanctioned two more for their role in the secret gang truce. 

Bukele came into conflict with the interim U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Jean Manes, claiming on social media that Manes had tried to pressure him into freeing a politician charged with corruption. In November 2021, Manes temporarily suspended diplomatic relations with El Salvador.

Yet Alvarado’s case didn’t get the treatment of a high-profile American detained by an authoritarian pariah state, like Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, imprisoned in Russia just two months before Alvarado traveled to El Salvador. By May 2023, the Biden State Department had decided that Bukele’s mercurial nature and tendency to lash out warranted a softer touch. No longer would they scold out in the open. Instead, according to a former State Department official familiar with the matter, the National Security Council emphasized back-channeling over public condemnation.

State Department apparatchiks hoped that smoothing relations with Bukele would help them maintain El Salvador’s cooperation on immigration enforcement and counternarcotics, an official who worked under the Biden administration explained to The Intercept, and that an impending loan from the International Monetary Fund would trigger more transparency. The Bukele administration maintained that the state of exception would at some vague point be wound down, and Manes’s replacement, William H. Duncan, insisted on handling any concerns about the country’s punitive turn behind closed doors. 

Duncan, per two former State Department employees who asked not to be named for fear of professional consequences, “was very difficult to work with.” He insisted on being the only point of contact to Bukele. Efforts by members of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, or WHA, to bring attention to Alvarado’s case proved ineffective. Duncan’s embassy was aware of the case, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about efforts to push for more visits from embassy legal counselors for Alvarado. Duncan shut down anyone who tried to push for any other lateral communication, “especially any criticism,” one of the State Department sources said.

These tactics would culminate in an almost subservient brand of appeasement. In June 2024, after Bukele had successfully run for a consecutive (and constitutionally prohibited) term as president, a robust delegation of Biden officials led by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas — and flanked by Duncan and the WHA’s Assistant Secretary Brian Nichols — attended the Salvadoran strongman’s second inauguration. (Duncan and Nichols did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

“During the visit, Secretary Mayorkas met with President Bukele to discuss the many cultural, and economic ties our two countries share and reaffirmed the mutual commitment to address our common challenges,” a DHS press briefing reads. 

Alvarado had spent just over a year behind bars.

Alvarado’s absence has been especially difficult for his daughters. His stepdaughter “feels guilty,” said a relative, who requested anonymity for fear of targeting by the U.S. government. “At first it was really, really hard, because she was like, ‘I feel like it’s my fault.’” After getting support at school, she showed signs of improvement, the relative said, but “when she turned 15, she was like, ‘I don’t want to have anything, because Walter’s not here.’” 

His youngest daughter was just 2 when her father was arrested. She has started asking if Alvarado has passed away. 

Bukele’s army of internet trolls has mocked the family, expressing loyalty to a president they see as an effective leader against gang violence. When they posted about Alvarado’s detention, the family told The Intercept, they would be greeted by accusations that he was, in fact, a gangster who deserved to be punished.

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The Salvadoran president’s popularity can be explained, in part, by previous administrations’ inability to reckon with the country’s post-war contradictions. El Salvador’s reconciliation process in the early 1990s, overseen by the United States and the ultra-conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA, party, paved the way for the selling of the country’s telecommunications, banking, and energy infrastructure off to the highest bidder and exported the country’s natural commodities through the use of cheap labor. 

The austerity regime made prime breeding ground for an intricate network of organized crime in the country. The U.S. expelled Salvadoran refugees who had gotten caught up in Los Angeles drug trafficking scene, allowing La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, to blossom in El Salvador’s urban centers. Successive governments implemented tough-on-crime policies dubbed mano dura, Spanish for “iron fist,” to no avail, and populist, left-wing politicians found it difficult to unravel this Gordian knot through redistributive politics alone. 

“It’s perfectly understandable that people support Bukele because he resolved an issue that was really hurting people,” Vicki Gass, the executive director of the Latin America Working Group, told The Intercept. “You’re not making a lot of money. You get remittances from your dad living in the United States. It gets extorted. A friend of mine had his whole workshop and tools stolen. You know, his livelihood, right? It was tough, but replacing gang violence with state violence is not the answer.”

Boosting the image of state violence has become a useful propaganda tool of the Bukele government. The strategy is most clearly captured by CECOT, the state-of-the-art supermax prison where Ábrego García was sent last year. But it is only one of 24 prisons in the country.

Alvarado was first sent to the Centro Penal de Izalco, an older prison where detainees are fed a spartan diet and beating and medical neglect are common. These carceral facilities, where a majority of the individuals caught up in the state of exception have been sent, have been the site of hundreds of deaths from violence and lack of medical care. In 2024, Socorro Jurídico Humanitario reported that of the 235 deaths they had recorded in prisons like Izalco, 94 percent of those who died were not affiliated with any gangs. 

According to the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, “torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions” were rampant in Izalco. 

Alvarado smuggled messages to his family through the U.S. embassy in El Salvador, saying he cried every night and that he could not stomach the food. He told his infant daughter to behave herself, and mentioned he was forced to sleep on the concrete floor in only his boxers. His family would send him food to supplement his nutrition, but he would report often not receiving the goods — reflecting a common practice in Salvadoran prisons, according to the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal, which found that goods sent to the country’s detention centers are often diverted by prison staff.

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After the Biden era cool-off period, Democrats are again incensed by “the world’s coolest dictator.” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen made a personal trip to El Salvador to lay eyes on Ábrego García, who was a Maryland resident, and the party has lambasted the cruelty of so-called “third-country” deportations under Trump. Some have been pursuing their efforts since Biden was in power: In November 2023, a group of Democratic congress members petitioned the State Department to determine how many Americans had been detained under El Salvador’s state of exception. It remains unclear if they received a response.

Bukele, meanwhile, again renewed the decree in August that allows his government to detain those captured under the state of exception without trial. The tentative date for those hearings was pushed back to 2027. 

Just four months into his incarceration, Alvarado became so ill that he was transferred to the Granja Penitenciaria de Rehabilitación de Zacatecoluca, a lower security facility just a 15-minute drive from CECOT. Since then, he’s been moved multiple times, most recently to the Centro Industrial de Cumplimiento de Penas y Rehabilitación, where the state holds many political and foreign prisoners. Primarily, the facility is a work camp for detainees who are considered free of any gang associations.

The post An American Citizen Has Been Stuck in El Salvador’s Prison System Since the Biden Administration appeared first on The Intercept.

The incident, a video of which The Intercept reviewed and corroborated with an independent eyewitness, occurred not long after Kelly and his wife arrived in the area where Pretti was killed. With protesters amassing and agents from Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement flooding the area, the couple told The Intercept, they just wanted to observe the scene. 

“All of a sudden,” Kelly said, a federal agent “started running toward me, pointing and yelling, ‘That’s him. Get him.’” 

Ten days earlier, Kelly had watched as an immigration agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during a federal enforcement action in north Minneapolis. As Kelly told the local outlet Sahan Journal, an SUV with police lights chased another vehicle, and then, “They went into a house. … I heard two shots before the area was just being swarmed by ICE immediately.” Sosa-Celis was injured — and Kelly’s account contradicted the official narrative released by the Department of Homeland Security.

At the scene of Pretti’s killing, Kelly told agents they would find themselves “on the wrong side of history,” he recalled. After the exchange, he and his wife, Alana Ericson, began walking toward another section of Nicollet Avenue where people were congregating, and as soon as Kelly turned his back, that was when agents began shouting and running toward him.

“I had my hands up. I kept saying, ‘I’m leaving. I’m leaving,’” Kelly said.

Kelly is far from the only civilian to be brutalized by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. But his detailed account of his beating and detention offers a clear example of how the agents, ostensibly deployed to carry out immigration enforcement, have instead shifted their purpose to encompass a crackdown on dissent. In Kelly’s case, it raises the question of whether he was facing retaliation for acting as a witness.

In December 2025, a group of Minnesota residents and the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed a federal class-action lawsuit, Tincher v. Noem, alleging that federal agents participating in Operation Metro Surge used excessive force, intimidation, and arrests to deter civilians from observing, recording, or protesting immigration enforcement. 

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The complaint alleges retaliation against people engaging in constitutionally protected conduct, including arrests of observers who were not interfering with federal operations. In January, a federal judge issued a limited injunction barring agents from retaliating against peaceful protesters and observers.

While federal agents pinned Kelly down, given Pretti’s recent shooting, Ericson feared they could kill her husband.

“I kept telling them he’s a U.S. citizen. They said, ‘We don’t give a f—,’” she said.

Kelly had previously undergone fusion surgery in his thoracic spine, a procedure that permanently joins vertebrae to stabilize the back. “Several agents piled on top of me,” Kelly said, and one put his knee on the site of his surgical wounds. “They were sitting directly on my spine.”

“I was screaming that I couldn’t breathe, but I had almost no air left,” Kelly said. “An agent pushed the pepper spray nozzle right into my left eye and sprayed. I turned my head so I wouldn’t get it in both eyes, but my left eye was completely burned.”

Pinned beneath multiple agents, Kelly said panic quickly gave way to fear that he might not survive. He said he was unable to catch his breath and felt his limbs go limp beneath the weight on his body.

Kelly was then forced to his feet and handcuffed, leaving deep indentations on both wrists that were still visible in photographs taken three days later and shared with The Intercept. At some point, his phone fell out of his pocket. He was dragged to a vehicle and placed in the back seat, where he said agents told him he was being taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis for detention.

After being pepper-sprayed, Ericson said she was unable to drive. A bystander offered her a ride home, where she and her mother-in-law spent the day calling attorneys and trying to determine where Kelly had been taken and whether he was alive.

An independent eyewitness who said they did not know Kelly or his wife said they were standing nearby when agents rushed Kelly, tackled him to the ground, and deployed pepper spray, corroborating Kelly’s account of the arrest. After Kelly and Ericson were gone, the witness remained near Nicollet Avenue as federal agents continued clearing the area.

Moments later, the witness said they were grabbed from behind, thrown to the pavement, and sprayed in the face. Medical records from Hennepin County Medical Center reviewed by The Intercept show the witness sustained a fractured shoulder. According to the documentation, the injury will require surgery and months of physical therapy.

The Intercept reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and ICE with detailed questions about the use of force by federal agents in Minneapolis, the detention and processing of civilians, the seizure of phones and other personal property, and policies governing crowd control. DHS, CBP, and ICE did not provide responses by publication time.

Kelly was transported to the federal building in downtown Minneapolis, a facility commonly used by immigration authorities for detention and processing.

Several of the people detained alongside him, Kelly said, had directly witnessed or recorded the fatal shooting of Pretti earlier that morning.

Kelly said detainees were never told why they were being held and were not informed of any charges. He said federal officials discussed possible criminal violations but ultimately filed none.

Shauna Kieffer, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who is now representing Kelly, said her client was never read his Miranda rights. They’re required only when law enforcement seeks to obtain a statement, she said, so a person may be detained without being advised of those rights if officers are not questioning them and no statement is taken. At one point, Kelly said, ICE agents asked whether detainees would be willing to give interviews. All declined and invoked their right to remain silent.

According to Kelly, no medical care was provided upon arrival, even though multiple detainees had visible injuries and repeatedly asked for assistance. One older man, Kelly said, was bleeding from his elbow when brought into custody. Kelly said detainees used their drinking water to clean blood from the man’s arm while the staff ignored their requests for assistance, and that the man didn’t receive treatment until after a shift change.

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Kelly and his family have been unable to recover his phone. At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Kelly said agents later showed him the phone, asked whether it belonged to him, and told him he would not be getting it back. According to Kelly, no one listed the device on his property inventory, and agents told him they would seek a warrant to access its contents. 

A copy of the property inventory receipt reviewed by The Intercept does not list a cellphone among Kelly’s belongings. Additional photographs show his belongings placed in an ICE-labeled property bag bearing his name and a U.S. citizen designation.

In an affidavit he signed with his attorney, Kelly said the confiscated phone contained photos he took of the January 14 shooting of Sosa-Celis that he witnessed, a detail he says underscores its evidentiary value and why he wanted it returned.

Attorneys representing several detainees said federal officials told them they were considering charges of assaulting, interfering with, or resisting federal officers, according to Kieffer and another detainee’s attorney. Kieffer said the statute is often interpreted broadly, but verbal objections, mere presence at a scene, or passive conduct alone do not meet its standard.

In Kelly’s case, “any movements of his body are simply because a bunch of grown men are pummeling him,” Kieffer said, referring to the video of his arrest.

Kelly estimated he was detained for roughly eight hours before being abruptly released. After a brief stop at home, he sought medical treatment at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park. Discharge paperwork from that visit, reviewed by The Intercept, documents his injuries as assault-related.

Kelly said he continues to fear retaliation following his detention.

The following morning, he said, several federal vehicles drove slowly down the residential street where he and his wife live, an occurrence he described as highly unusual for their area.

Kieffer said her client’s fears are not unfounded.

She described instances in Minneapolis in which attorneys and civilian observers reported being followed by federal vehicles after monitoring immigration enforcement activity, and in some cases later saw federal agents parked outside their homes. One attorney shared video of ICE agents following him and parking outside his house with The Intercept.

In Kieffer’s view, the sheer number of people taken into custody while observing or documenting federal activity has made Minneapolis stand out.

The emotional toll of the arrest, Kelly and his wife said, has not ended with his release.

“I’ve been having nightmares. This doesn’t feel like real life. It feels like a really bad dream that I can’t wake up from,” Ericson said. “After he spoke publicly about that shooting, I felt like he was already on their radar.”

The post He Witnessed an Earlier Shooting. Feds Arrested Him at the Scene of Alex Pretti’s Killing. appeared first on The Intercept.

“As President Trump has said, nobody wants to see chaos and death in American cities,” wrote Doug Collins, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, on X Sunday. “Such tragedies are unfortunately happening in Minnesota because of state and local officials’ refusal to cooperate with the federal government to enforce the law and deport dangerous illegal criminals.”

A Border Patrol agent with eight years of experience shot Pretti on Saturday, commander-at-large Gregory Bovino said over the weekend. According to a New York Times analysis, multiple agents wrestled Pretti to the ground, and two agents shot him at least 10 times in total. Department of Homeland Security officials claim the shooting was a defensive response after Pretti approached agents with a firearm, but videos from the scene suggest that agents had removed Pretti’s gun from his hip before killing him.

Sworn eyewitness declarations from the scene also contradict DHS’s narrative. Two witnesses swear that Pretti, a U.S. citizen, was filming agents with a cellphone when he was forced to the ground and shot multiple times. One declaration was submitted by a licensed pediatrician who said they attempted to render medical aid after agents initially blocked access to the victim.

When The Intercept reached out to the VA for a statement about Pretti’s killing, press secretary Peter Kasperowicz directed inquiries to Collins’s post, which offered condolences to Pretti’s family before shifting blame to Minnesota officials. The secretary’s post did not acknowledge that federal agents fired the shots.

The Intercept also asked whether the VA was providing counseling or support services to Pretti’s co-workers or family, and whether the department had initiated any internal review following the violent death of a federal employee.

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Kasperowicz did not answer those questions, nor did he respond to follow-up questions asking whether the VA had contacted Pretti’s family, notified staff at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, or taken steps to provide employee assistance services.

Pretti’s death has prompted public expressions of grief from co-workers. In a social media post, Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, who identifies himself as a physician at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, wrote that he had known Pretti since nursing school, before Pretti became an ICU nurse caring for critically ill veterans.

“We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together,” Drekonja wrote. “Will never happen now.”

The shooting has prompted multiple investigations and legal actions. Minnesota officials have accused federal agents of restricting access to the scene, detaining witnesses, and seizing cellphones before leaving the area.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

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Walz, who earlier this month announced he would not seek reelection amid a statewide fraud scandal spurred by right-wing influencers, wrote on X Sunday that “Minnesota believes in law and order. We believe in peace. And we believe that Trump needs to pull his 3,000 untrained agents out of Minnesota before they kill another American in the street.”

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office have sought a temporary restraining order to preserve evidence related to the shooting.

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly addressed the sworn declarations or released body-worn camera footage from the agents involved.

The post After CBP Killed Alex Pretti, His Federal VA Boss Blamed Minnesota Leaders appeared first on The Intercept.

The post is part of a growing trend in which the federal government openly embraces the visual language of white supremacy and pop culture cited in instances of racial violence. Over the past year, DHS and its component agencies leaned on mainstream pop music in their social media outreach, pairing enforcement footage with recognizable songs. The approach backfired repeatedly, and the department now appears to be leaning on niche, neo-Nazi-beloved music.

“There was a sense of plausible deniability before,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society. Anti-immigrant backers of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement have long been known to spread extremist language and media, but in the past, “those dog whistles were being done by supporters,” she said. “Now they’re being done directly by the administration.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lyrics from “We’ll Have Our Home Again” opened the manifesto of Ryan Christopher Palmeter, a 21-year-old white supremacist who entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2023, and killed three Black people. Palmeter’s 27-page document echoed the writings of other mass killers, including Brenton Tarrant, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, had praised the former white ethnostate of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and framed his attack as part of a broader racial struggle.

Many recent attackers have been shaped by online extremist culture, Marwick pointed out. “These are young men who were embedded in online communities where memes and songs and books and slogans become part of this cultural fabric,” she said.

The decision to pair official recruitment messaging with music so closely tied to extremist identity politics, just days after one of its agents fatally shot a civilian, raises questions the department’s cultural awareness and basic judgment.

Brian Hansbury, a social media commentator who tracks far-right activity and posts through his Substack, Public Enlightenment, said the timing of the post stood out as particularly jarring. In online extremist spaces, he said, such juxtapositions are often read not as mistakes but as signals. 

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“When something like this appears immediately after a high-profile killing, it’s understood as intentional,” Hansbury said. “It reads as a message about who the agency is speaking to and the audience it is trying to reach.”

In other cases, the department has faced backlash for its attempts to use less controversial works of music. Pop singer Sabrina Carpenter condemned a White House/ICE video that used her song “Juno,” calling it “evil and disgusting”; the backlash prompted its removal. Olivia Rodrigo blasted DHS for using her song “All-American Bitch” to promote self-deportation, calling the move “racist, hateful propaganda.” Grammy winner SZA rebuked the Trump administration after her track “Big Boys” was used without permission in a recruitment video. And rock group MGMT had an ICE video featuring “Little Dark Age” removed from X after a copyright takedown request.

Even while making use of mainstream pop music, DHS’s official social media accounts were experimenting with language and imagery centered on national decline, territorial reclamation and cultural threat over the past year. In July 2025, the agency shared an image titled “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending” alongside the 19th-century painting American Progress, a work frequently cited in white nationalist and “great replacement theory” circles for its depiction of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement. The painting is closely associated with the ideology of manifest destiny.

In December 2025, DHS shared a meme bearing a watermark from iFunny, a platform that has faced repeated criticism and removal from major app stores for hosting racist and extremist content. It mirrored themes that appear in so-called “Agartha” memes, a niche strain of far-right fantasy content that imagines a hidden, racially pure civilization beneath the Earth’s surface. Researchers who track extremist visual culture note that such narratives often romanticize white isolationism and technological superiority. 

“Memes are often used to mainstream white supremacist ideas by starting with beliefs that are more socially acceptable, and then gradually pushing boundaries,” Marwick said.

Those strategies are often deployed with precision. “You see something like a micro-targeted advertising campaign where they test out messaging that they believe will be more palatable to different demographics,” Marwick said.

The imagery in the post aligns closely with “collapse and reclamation” memes that circulate in far-right online subcultures. Those memes frequently depict floating monuments, pyramids, and hidden homelands as symbols of civilizational rebirth. Researchers who track extremist visual culture have documented how such motifs are commonly used in racist and accelerationist meme ecosystems to frame narratives of decline, replacement, and territorial recovery.

Originally written by the Männerbund, a nationalist group associated with Germany’s Völkisch movement, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” has found a second life in modern far-right online culture, reposted and remixed by accounts with names like “Patriot Archive” and “Visigothia” and circulated across YouTube and platforms popular in far-right circles, where versions and videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views with endless comments referencing Rhodesia.

Members of the Proud Boys have been recorded chanting “By God, we’ll have our home,” the song’s refrain, at rallies in Northern California. 

DHS isn’t the only department in the Trump administration to openly embrace white nationalist rhetoric. Earlier this week, the Department of Labor drew flak for a post that mirrored a Nazi slogan.

It isn’t new to see extremist right-wing ideology perpetuated in online culture. What is new is seeing it echoed in official messaging from a federal law enforcement agency with the power to detain, deport, and use lethal force. 

“Now there is no plausible deniability,” said Marwick. “It’s really clear that the message they’re trying to send is meant to be read one way.”

The post DHS Used Neo-Nazi Anthem for Recruitment After Fatal Minneapolis ICE Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.

The news offers an answer to a mystery that had puzzled the Air Force community since April, when Green was removed from his position as the top enlisted leader of AFSOC “due to a loss of confidence in his ability to fulfill his duties,” according to a press release put out at the time. The Air Force did not publicly elaborate on the reasons for his removal, leaving service members and observers to speculate.

The upcoming February 10, 2026, hearing follows a formal investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the service’s criminal investigative agency responsible for probing serious offenses. It will determine whether Green faces a general court-martial, and an Air Force spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that Green has already been formally charged. According to a notice the Air Force quietly posted on its website Wednesday, without issuing a press release or broader disclosures to the force, Green faces charges of “indecent recording” and “obstruction of justice” in addition to “possession, viewing, and producing child pornography.”

Cases involving senior military leaders are rare, and criminal allegations of this magnitude draw scrutiny of former leaders’ decisions, particularly in opaque military environments where Green directly led some of the Air Force’s most lethal warfighters.

As command chief of AFSOC, Green held one of the most powerful positions within one of the Air Force’s most sensitive major commands. He advised commanding officers on enlisted troop matters, including discipline and readiness within special operations units. AFSOC encompasses several major personnel wings across bases such as Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico; Royal Air Force Mildenhall, United Kingdom; and Kadena Air Base, Japan.

Green’s position placed him at the top of the enlisted structure for the major command, giving him significant influence over special operations culture. According to the Air Force, the term “Air Commando” honors a lineage of Air Force units performing unconventional, combat-oriented operations, reflecting the elite mission and ethos over which Green had authority. In 2023, he became the 11th command chief of AFSOC, overseeing about 22,000 total force and civilian Air Commandos worldwide.

The Air Force spokesperson confirmed Green was still on active duty, working a desk job as a special assistant at the 96th Test Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He could not be reached individually for comment.

The child sexual abuse material allegations against him violate multiple articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which govern legal conduct for military personnel, as well as several federal and state criminal statutes. The alleged offenses occurred at Hurlburt Field, Florida, home of Air Force special operations.

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Green joined the Air Force in 1995 and spent much of his career in C-130 maintenance, a career field The Intercept previously covered for rampant hazing, troop abuses, and suicides. Interviews with former maintainers often cite inappropriate sexual conduct or conversation by senior leadership while on duty. His rise from the operational maintenance ranks to a top enlisted leadership role underscores the range of his authority and the reach of his influence over enlisted personnel in the Air Force.

While Green was under investigation, members of the Air Force were left in the dark about why he was removed, with some taking to Air Force social media pages to question whether the removal was a political move under the Trump administration, for which there is currently no evidence.

At the preliminary hearing, conducted under Article 32 of the UCMJ, a hearing officer will review evidence and evaluate witnesses, allowing the accused to be represented by counsel, and recommend whether the case should proceed. AFSOC said no further court documents or updates will be made public before the hearing.

The post Ousted Air Force Special Ops Command Chief Faces Child Sexual Abuse Material Charges appeared first on The Intercept.

Ten residents from four working-class neighborhoods controlled by MS-13, including volunteer election workers and local journalists, told The Intercept they saw firsthand gang members giving residents an ultimatum to vote for the Trump-endorsed conservative candidate or face consequences. Six other sources with knowledge of the intimidation — including government officials, human rights investigators, and people with direct personal contact with gangs — corroborated their testimony. Gang members drove voters to the polls in MS-13-controlled mototaxi businesses, three sources said, and threatened to kill street-level activists for the left-leaning Liberty and Refoundation, or LIBRE, party if they were seen bringing supporters to the polls. Two witnesses told The Intercept they saw members of MS-13 checking people’s ballots inside polling sites, as did a caller to the national emergency help line.

“A lot of people for LIBRE didn’t go to vote because the gangsters had threatened to kill them,” a resident of San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, told The Intercept. Mareros, as the gang members are known, intimidated voters into casting their ballots for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, known as Papi a la Órden or “Daddy at your service.” Multiple residents of San Pedro Sula alleged they were also directed to vote for a mayoral candidate from the centrist Liberal Party.

Miroslava Cerpas, the leader of the Honduran national emergency call system, provided The Intercept with four audio files of 911 calls in which callers reported that gang members had threatened to murder residents if they voted for LIBRE. A lead investigator for an internationally recognized Honduran human rights NGO, who spoke anonymously with The Intercept to disclose sensitive information from a soon-to-be published report on the election, said they are investigating gang intimidation in Tegucigalpa and the Sula Valley “based on direct contact with victims of threats by gangs.”

“People linked to MS-13 were working to take people to the voting stations to vote for Asfura, telling them if they didn’t vote, there would be consequences,” the investigator told The Intercept. They said they received six complaints from three colonias in the capital of Tegucigalpa and three in the Sula Valley, where voters said members of MS-13 had threatened to kill those who openly voted for the ruling left LIBRE party or brought party representatives to the polls. The three people in the Sula Valley, the investigator said, received an audio file on WhatsApp in which a voice warns that those who vote for LIBRE “have three days to leave the area,” and “If you don’t follow the order, we’re going to kill your families, even your dogs. We don’t want absolutely anyone to vote for LIBRE. We’re going to be sending people to monitor who is going to vote and who followed the order. Whoever tries to challenge the order, you know what will happen.”

The MS-13 interference took place as the U.S. president, who has obsessed over the gang since his first term, extended an interventionist hand over the elections. On November 28, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if voters didn’t elect Asfura while simultaneously announcing a pardon for Asfura’s ally and fellow party member Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras convicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking and weapons charges last year.

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“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.”

The election remains undecided over a week after the fact: Asfura holds a narrow lead over centrist Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, while Rixi Moncada, the LIBRE party candidate, remains in a distant third. As people await the final results, one San Pedro Sula resident said, “there’s been a tense calm.”

It’s unlikely the MS-13 interference led to LIBRE’s loss, since the ruling party had already suffered a significant drop in popularity after a lack of change, continued violence, and corruption scandals under four years of President Xiomara Castro. But the LIBRE government pointed to a raft of other electoral irregularities, and a preliminary European Union electoral mission report recognized that the election was carried out amid “intimidation, defamation campaigns, institutional weakness, and disinformation,” though it ignored LIBRE’s accusations of “fraud.” The Honduran attorney general announced their own investigation into irregularities in the election last week, and on Monday, two representatives for the National Electoral Council informed Hondurans that the electronic voting system wasn’t updated for over 48 hours over the weekend, while results are still being finalized.

“There is clear and resounding evidence that this electoral process was coerced by organized crime groups,” said Cerpas, who is a member of the LIBRE party, “pushing the people to vote for Nasry Asfura and intimidating anyone who wanted to vote for Rixi Moncada.”

Gerardo Torres, the vice chancellor of foreign relations for the LIBRE government, told The Intercept via phone that manipulation of elections by maras is a well-established practice — but that the timing of the threats was alarming given Trump’s simultaneous pardoning of Hernández and endorsement of Asfura. “When, a day before the elections, the president of the United States announces the liberation of Hernández, and then automatically there is a surge in activity and intimidation by MS-13,” Torres said, it suggests that the gang members see the return of the former president as “an opportunity to change their situation and launch a coordinated offensive.”

“It would seem like the U.S. is favoring, for ideological reasons, a narco-state to prevent the left from returning to power,” he said.

The White House, Asfura, and the National Party did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

All witnesses who alleged election interference have been granted anonymity to protect them from targeting by MS-13.

“They Control These Colonias”

Bumping over potholed dirt roads on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula the day before the presidential election, a motorcycle taxi driver informed their passenger of MS-13’s latest ultimatum: The mototaxis “were strictly prohibited from bringing people from LIBRE to the voting stations on election day,” recalled the passenger. “Only people for the National Party or the Liberal Party — but for LIBRE, no one, no one, not even flags were allowed.”

Gangs like MS-13 “control the whole area of Cortés,” the passenger said, referring to their home department. “Total subjugation.”

The gang members closely monitor the movements of those within their territories, in many cases by co-opting or controlling mototaxi services to keep track of who comes and goes. Three other sources in San Pedro Sula and one in Tegucigalpa confirmed MS-13’s co-optation of mototaxis in the area; another source with direct, yearslong contact with gang members on the north coast of Honduras confirmed that MS-13 was pushing residents in their territories of San Pedro Sula to vote for Asfura by the same means. When members of MS-13 passed through Cortés warning that those who voted for LIBRE “had three days to leave,” the mototaxi passenger said, residents surrounded by years of killings, massacres, and disappearances by the gang knew what might await them if they defied.

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MS-13 was formed in the 1980s in Los Angeles, California, among refugees of the Salvadoran civil war who the George H.W. Bush administration then deported en masse to Central America. In the ’90s, local gangs of displaced urban Hondurans morphed with the Salvadoran franchise. Over the years, the Mara Salvatrucha, which MS stands for, evolved into a sophisticated criminal enterprise: first as street-level drug dealers, then extortionists, assassins for hire, and cocaine transporters who have been documented working in league with high-level traffickers and state officials for at least two decades.

If Honduras has been a home turf of gangs, the country is also an anchor for U.S. power in the region, hosting the second-largest U.S. military base in Latin America and a laboratory for radical experiments in libertarian far-right “private cities.” In 2009, the Honduran military carried out a coup under the passive watch of U.S. authorities, ousting then-President Manuel Zelaya, a centrist and husband of current President Xiomara Castro. The homicide rate skyrocketed, turning the country into the world’s most violent, per U.S. State Department rankings, by the 2010s.

The chaos gave rise to ex-president Hernández, whom U.S. prosecutors later accused of turning Honduras into a “cocaine superhighway” as he directed the country’s military, police, and judiciary to protect drug traffickers. Last week, Hernández was released from a West Virginia prison after a pardon from Trump, and on Monday, the Honduran attorney general announced an international warrant for his arrest.

As Honduran voters processed the latest cycle of U.S. influence over their politics, the more immediate menace at the polls extended to the local level. “Gangsters were going from house to house to tell people to vote for Papi [Asfura] and el Pollo,” said a San Pedro Sula resident who volunteered at a voting booth on election day, referring to the city’s mayor, Roberto Contreras of the Liberal Party. Two other sources in the city, and one government source in Tegucigalpa, also said gang members were backing Contreras.

“The team of Mayor Roberto Contreras categorically rejects any insinuation of pacts with criminal structures,” said a representative for the mayor in a statement to The Intercept. “Any narrative that tries to tie [support for Contreras] with Maras or gangs lacks base, and looks to distract attention from the principal message: the population went to vote freely, without pressure and with the hope of a better future.”

Gang intimidation of voters isn’t new in Honduras, where, within territories zealously guarded and warred over by heavily armed gangs, even the threat for residents to vote for certain candidates is enough to steer an election in their district. “Remember that they control these colonias,” said one of the San Pedro Sula residents. “And given the fact that they have a lot of presence, they tell the people that they’re going to vote for so-and-so, and the majority follow the orders.”

The human rights lawyer Victor Fernández, who ran for mayor of San Pedro Sula as an independent candidate but didn’t get on the general election ballot, said he and his supporters also experienced intimidation from MS-13 during his campaign. After his own race was over, he said he continued to see indications of gang intervention in the presidential campaign for months leading up to election day.

“Both before and during the elections on November 30, gangsters operating here in the Sula Valley exercised their pressure over the election,” he said, explaining this conclusion was drawn from “recurring” testimonies with residents of multiple neighborhoods. “The great violent proposal that people have confirmed is that gang members told them they couldn’t go vote for LIBRE, and that whoever did so would have to confront [the gang] structure.”

“Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden”

Minutes after submitting a highly publicized complaint to the Public Ministry on Monday, Cerpas, of the National Emergency call system, told The Intercept that her office received 892 verified complaints of electoral violations on election day. “In those calls,” she said, “there was a significant group of reports regarding intimidation and threats by criminal groups.”

Four audio recordings of residents calling the emergency hotline, which Cerpas shared with The Intercept, reflect the wider accusation that mareros used murderous intimidation tactics to prevent people from voting for LIBRE and vote, instead, for Asfura.

In one of the files, a woman calling from Tegucigalpa tells the operator that members of MS-13 had “threatened to kill” anyone who voted for LIBRE while posing as election observers at the voting center. “They’re outside the voting center, they’re outside and inside,” she says, referring to members of MS-13, her voice trembling. “I entered, and they told me, ‘If you vote for LIBRE, we’ll kill you and your whole fucking family.’”

For days before the election, a resident from a rural region of the country, whose time in a maximum-security prison called La Tolva put him in yearslong proximity to gang members, had received messages from friends and family members living in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. They all reported a variation of the same story: Gang members on mototaxis informing everyone in their colonias, “Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden.” (“We’re going to vote for” Asfura.)

A former mid-level bureaucrat for the LIBRE government told The Intercept that, during the lead-up to the election, “LIBRE activists who promoted the vote … were intimidated by members of gangs so that they would cease pushing for the vote for LIBRE.” The former official didn’t specify the gangs, though they said the intimidation took place in three separate neighborhoods.

“All day, the muchachos [gang members] were going around and taking photos of the coordinators,” read messages from local organizers shared with The Intercept. The gang members “said that they needed to close themselves in their houses.”

Testimony at Hernández’s trial indicated that members of MS-13 were subcontracted as early as 2004 through the corrupt, U.S.-allied police commander Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla to provide security for caravans of cocaine alongside soldiers. Evidence presented in the trial of Midence Oquelí Martínez Turcios, a former Honduran soldier and longtime congressional deputy for the Liberal Party who was convicted of drug trafficking charges last week, revealed that he trained sicarios for MS-13 to carry out high-level assassinations on behalf of the drug trafficking clan known as the Cachiros. Testifying at Hernández’s 2024 trial, the imprisoned Cachiros leader claimed to have paid $250,000 in protection money to the former president.

Trump wiped away Hernández’s conviction, calling it political theater, but he sees MS-13’s sicarios in a different light. To Trump, the gangsters are human “animals,” their gang a “menace” that “violated our borders” in an “infestation” — justifying militarized crackdowns on caravans of Hondurans fleeing violence under Hernández and the categorization of the gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Announcing the designation in February, a White House press release reads: “MS-13 uses public displays of violence to obtain and control territory and manipulate the electoral process in El Salvador.”

“It’s known that MS-13 will do vote buying,” the investigator examining voter intimidation said. “This is a recurring practice. But we used to think this was just to influence the mayors, not the presidency.”

In El Salvador, gangs like MS-13 have intervened in favor of another Trump ally, Nayib Bukele, whose government has been embroiled by scandal over alleged collusion with MS-13 and other gangs — meaning that the in Honduras wasn’t the first time that the same candidate Trump endorsed was promoted by a gang he now designates a terrorist organization.

For Cerpas, the coincidence of that voter intimidation with Hernández’s release is cause for alarm. “The people in Honduras are afraid,” she said, “because organized crime has been emboldened by the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández.”

Correction: December 10, 2025

This story previously stated that Victor Fernández lost a primary race for mayor of San Pedro Sula. He collected signatures for the general election but electoral authorities rejected his candidacy, which prevented him from appearing on the ballot.

The post MS-13 and Trump Backed the Same Presidential Candidate in Honduras appeared first on The Intercept.

“We will advocate relentlessly for programs like the F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft as well as nuclear force recapitalization through the Sentinel program and the B-21,” Wilsbach wrote in a memo dated November 3, referring to planned upgrades to nuclear missiles and stealth bombers.

Experts who spoke to The Intercept said the language signals a doctrinal pivot, prioritizing displays of strength and the buildup of nuclear weaponry over internal repair — an approach that may appeal politically to the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but does little to ease the fatigue and distrust spreading among airmen.

“This memo of unity and warfighting spirit reflects current Department of War and Pete Hegseth language, but that language is also inadequate because it assumes U.S. military capability is the best in the world and getting better, a dangerous and flawed assumption,” said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon analyst who exposed the politicization of intelligence before the Iraq War.

The Sentinel program Wilsbach referenced is intended to modernize the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, with new missiles, hardened silos, and updated command-and-control infrastructure across missile fields in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. It’s the Air Force’s planned replacement for aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile systems. The B-21 Raider is the next-generation stealth bomber designed to replace older strategic bombers like the B-2 and B-1, delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads.

Critics say framing these nuclear modernization efforts as “recapitalization” obscures the ethical and strategic implications of expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities amid declining morale and retention.

“The chief of staff’s emphasis on weaponry is disheartening. His description of nuclear weapon ‘recapitalization’ is an abomination of the English language. You don’t ‘recapitalize’ genocidal weaponry. Both the Sentinel missile program and the B-21 bomber are unnecessary systems that could cost as much as $500 billion over the next 20 years,” said William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and military historian.

John Gilbert, a member of the Scientists Working Group at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, noted “a very significant omission” in Wilsbach’s rhetoric.

“He basically ignored the U.S. Air Force’s role in maintaining our national intercontinental ballistic missile force as a day-to-day ready-to-launch deterrent,” meaning that it’s not supposed to be used for offensive purposes, said Gilbert, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with decades of experience in strategic missile operations, inspections and arms control.

In a statement to The Intercept, an Air Force spokesperson denied that the memo reflected a change in strategy. “The Air Force will organize, train and equip its forces in support of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy,” the spokesperson wrote.

Wilsbach has long been a proponent of bolstering U.S. nuclear capabilities. While leading Air Combat Command, he pushed to restore Pacific basing — including Tinian’s North Field, the Enola Gay’s departure point — to support nuclear-capable B-2 bombers. The effort underscores how current planning focuses on rapid strike and deterrence against China and other adversaries.

“Our main purpose has never changed: We fly and fix to fight and win our nation’s wars,” Wilsbach said during a speech at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to senior Air Force leaders on November 18. He reinforced his message by referencing Operation Midnight Hammer, the controversial June airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities involving about 125 aircraft, including seven B-2 stealth bombers in a 36-hour global mission.

“It is our core responsibility as airmen to stay ready, be credible and capable every single day,” he said.

When he became chief of staff, Wilsbach made his first base visit to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the headquarters of Air Force Global Strike Command and the center of the Air Force’s nuclear mission, suggesting that his initial focus was on the nuclear enterprise.

Analysts who spoke to The Intercept framed Wilsbach’s focus as part of a broader departure from the military’s stated apolitical role, aligning service culture with partisan priorities rather than institutional needs.

Wilsbach’s rhetoric “echoes the Trump administration’s emphasis on warrior culture and lethality,” said Astore, who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. “What stands out is that the chief of staff does not mention the Air Force’s core values, integrity, service, and excellence, or the oath to support and defend the Constitution. He doesn’t address operations tempo, stress, or the rising suicides among maintainers. Instead, he reduces complex issues to jargon about ‘combat power’ and ‘full-spectrum readiness.’ He ends with ‘Fight’s on,’ but never explains who we are fighting or why.”

For five Air Force veterans and active-duty members, the rhetoric comes at the expense of addressing manpower shortages, aging aircraft, and a mental health and morale crisis within the Air Force. Many of the Air Force’s core aircraft date back to the Cold War, including KC-135 tankers and B-52H bombers that are more than 60 years old, and F-15C/D fighters first fielded in the 1970s. Their age demands costly maintenance and contributes to significant environmental harm through chronic fluid leaks and poor fuel efficiency.

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“The Air Force keeps repeating the same cycle. Leaders like this are too focused on pleasing Hegseth and his obsession with lethality and ‘warrior culture’ to deal with what is killing their people,” said retired Air Force Master Sergeant Wes Bryant, pointing to a previous story from The Intercept that revealed a suicide crisis within the Air Force. The previous story, published days before the memo was released, highlighted how the force failed to comply with a congressional mandate to release detailed death data.

The current leadership’s approach is “disgusting,” added Bryant, a defense and national security analyst who formerly worked at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

Adding to the stress is that weapons troops, who load bombs and missiles onto aircraft, are expected to load missiles without knowing target configurations — and with the knowledge that objecting would carry serious consequences.

“We simply follow orders. Now, on the bomber side of things, I can confidently say we are not informed about what an operation entails beyond loading configurations,” said an active-duty source with direct experience training new weapons troops at tech school.

Service members throughout the U.S. military carry out lawful orders without being briefed on strategic intent, but for weapons loaders, the consequences are stark due to the lethality of the munitions they are ordered to prepare. That arsenal includes Joint Direct Attack Munitions, used in strikes that have produced high civilian death tolls; cluster munitions, which scatter bomblets that often fail to detonate and later kill civilians; and, in some units, nuclear warheads — weapons whose potential consequences exceed anything a loader or pilot is ever told.

“If people don’t follow these orders, there are going to be consequences,” said former weapons troop Alan Roach.

At the top, even the naming of new airframes signals political alignment within the Air Force, Astore said. “The new F-47, yet another expensive fighter program, was apparently numbered ‘47’ to flatter President Trump,” he said.

In remarks praising Wilsbach, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said he “understands the criticality of current readiness on a personal level,” adding, “We must be ready at a moment’s notice to meet the most challenging adversary that we’ve seen in generations. That means our systems need to work — fly, fix, fight.”

But “‘Readiness’ to fight is not the Air Force’s first responsibility,” Astore said. “The first responsibility is to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. We are guided by the law of the land, not the beauty of our weapons or a warrior’s urge to use them.”

Update: December 8, 2025, 9:56 a.m. ET

This story has been updated with a statement from the Air Force sent after publication.

The post New Air Force Chief Boosts Nuclear Buildup, Moving Away From Deterrence, Experts Warn appeared first on The Intercept.

Al-Shaghnobi’s Gaza Civil Defense force team pulled two dead young girls from the bombed house and kept digging, crawling under collapsed floors. “We don’t go under unless someone is alive,” he told The Intercept. “Otherwise, we dig from above — ceiling by ceiling.” What followed was a descent into something dreamlike and horrifying.

“We walked 12 meters under the rubble,” he said. “Every meter, the air grew less. I crawled past legs, arms, the body of a child hugging his dead mother. I felt the ground shake from bombings above.”

From deep inside the wreckage, the team heard a young girl calling, “I’m here. I’m here.”

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The Civil Defense force is an emergency and rescue operations group administered by the Palestinian Minister of Interior. After two years of Israeli genocide, it has an estimated 900 personnel and has lost roughly 90% of its operating capacity, Civil Defense workers told The Intercept. In the absence of heavy equipment, the civil defense teams use simple tools like hammers, axes, and shovels. Without excavators or heavy equipment, a single recovery can take days.

Local civil defense workers estimate there are still 10,000 bodies buried under the rubble.

“What motivates us,” al-Shaghnobi said, “is that when you hear a voice — even one — you know there is life. That’s enough to make you risk your life to recover this alive soul.”

By the time al-Shaghnobi finally reached Malak, she was unconscious with no pulse. Her eyes open, her legs blue, she had passed away.

“I tried to wake her up, but it was too late,” al-Shaghnobi said. “I was in a moment of utter stillness, and I could hear nothing but my own breath.”

24-year-old al-Shaghnobi has already spent seven years working for Gaza’s Civil Defense force. Like many of his colleagues, he eats and sleeps at his workplace. His family’s home in the Tal Al-Hawa area of western Gaza City was destroyed in the final days of the war, and his family remains displaced in the south.

“People think the ceasefire means we can breathe,” he said. “But for us, the end of the war is the beginning of the real war: pulling out the dead.”

Al-Shaghnobi believes his aunt’s corpse is among the 10,000 bodies that remain unrecovered. Large regions like Shujayaa and parts of Rafah are still inaccessible. Israeli forces are stationed there, marking the areas “yellow zones.” Civil defense crews cannot reach them.

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“We barely recovered some bodies during this ceasefire,” al-Shaghnobi said. “We have no machinery. Some areas, we know there are hundreds under the rubble, we simply can’t go.”

Alaa Khammash, 25, said he feels terrible when his Civil Defense team is unable to rescue someone.

“When I am dispatched on a mission, I feel a responsibility to finish it completely. I cannot simply stop midway,” he said. It can take 10 to 12 hours to retrieve a single body if it’s under a collapsed ceiling or wall. “Sometimes we can’t recover the body since it needs heavy equipment.”

The years of genocide have left al-Shaghnobi feeling numb.

“In the beginning of the war, we couldn’t look at the bodies,” al-Shaghnobi said. “We would close our eyes when retrieving them. By the middle of the war, we were wrapping them in white shrouds like it was daily routine. By the end of the war, my emotions became more defeated. The accumulation of pressure made it difficult to touch the bodies.”

“Bodies are found in various states: decomposed, non-decomposed, burnt, or even evaporated, sometimes just a skull or a skeleton,” he added, “The body’s texture is soft and smooth when found.”

Civil defense team members wear a special uniform, gloves, and masks because of the smell of the decaying bodies. The bodies decompose rapidly when they’re in the sun, Khammash said. “This occurs when a body lies exposed outdoors, subject to sun and air. Slow decomposition happens when the body is under a roof or shielded from air and sunlight.”

The smell can make al-Shaghnobi lose his appetite for days. For six months, he has struggled with digestive issues. Once, during Ramadan, “I was fasting,” al-Shaghnobi said, “We pulled a body that had been under rubble for a year in Al-Shifa hospital. It was half-decomposed. The smell hit me, my vision blurred, I nearly collapsed.”

“We identify locations of martyrs during the day based on blood stains, bones, and skulls,” al-Shaghnobi explained. “We rely on families of the martyrs. … They call our team, often providing the equipment at their own personal expense to honor and bury their loved ones.”

Without DNA tests, the workers identify bodies from clothes, shoes, rings, watches, metal implants, IDs, and gold teeth. The unknown bodies — often only skulls or skeletons — go to a cemetery for the unnamed.

After retrieving bodies, the Civil Defense workers write a detailed paper describing the area, angle, building, height measurement, and burial location, all written on the shroud so families can potentially identify the body later.

Sometimes, families insist on seeing the remains to believe their loved one is gone. “People accept death more easily,” al-Shaghnobi explained, “when they see the body.”

“I moved my friend from one grave to another,” he said, recalling a reburial. “He was just a skull. I kept thinking — this is the end of every person. Bones.”

Recovering a person’s body entails a strange emotional paradox, said 27-year-old Mohammad Azzam.

“It feels good because you found them,” he said, “but bad because they are decomposed. A feeling I cannot explain.”

Families often wait nearby, and when the team brings out the body, their reactions are marked by intense, overwhelming grief.

“When we find someone, they’re usually half-decomposed,” Azzam said. “The face is unrecognizable. Only a shoe, a wallet, a bracelet tells you who they were.”

The workers navigate these traumatic moments while living through the horrors of genocide in their own families and homes. Khammash, like al-Shaghnobi, now lives at work: His house in eastern Gaza City sits dangerously close to the Israeli military presence.

At work one day, Khammash said he got a dreaded call from a friend: “They told me my brother had been injured in the south, near the American aid distribution point, and taken to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. I called a friend of mine who works as a nurse there, and he told me my brother had died.”

It was unbearable. “My brother was not only my sibling — he was my closest friend, only a year younger than me,” he told The Intercept. “We shared everything, understood each other without speaking. We went everywhere together. That kind of loss never leaves you, and the separation is the hardest pain.”

“Death is certain,” Khammash said. “As Allah said: Every soul shall taste death. And as Muslims, we understand that what comes after is far better than what we endure here.”

During the ceasefire, the rescue teams receive constant calls: A neighbor reports a smell, a family begs for help to retrieve their loved one, a building is collapsing, a limb has surfaced through the rubble, flies gathering in a corner reveal what lies beneath.

Khammash has begun to feel death as a presence, not an event. “It surrounds us,” he said. “Maybe we are the next ones. We accept Allah’s plan, but still — inside us — we love life.”

One of the hardest missions Khammash has had under the ceasefire was in a bombed tower in the al-Rimal neighborhood. A woman was alive somewhere under the collapsed top floor, calling out, but the rescuers couldn’t locate her.

“It was pitch black,” he recalled. “I kept moving my light, trying to understand where her voice was coming from.”

Suddenly, she was beneath him. “I had put my foot next to her head without realizing. We took her out alive.”

The longest recovery Khammash ever worked took a full day — pulling out Marah al-Haddad, a girl buried beneath several floors in al-Daraj area a month ago.

“She was alive when we reached her,” he said. “She had been breathing dust and explosives. My colleague Abdullah Al-Majdalawi and I kept calling, ‘Where are you, Marah?’ And she answered, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’”

“When she saw us, hope came back to her face,” he said. “To bring someone back from death — this is what keeps us going.”

The post Gaza’s Civil Defense Forces Keep Digging for 10,000 Missing Bodies appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s not about them,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “It’s just about the opportunity that Michiganders need and deserve — to elect a Democrat who is pretty clear on what our ideals ought to be.”

Echoing the same promises he made when he ran unsuccessfully for governor seven years ago — providing universal health care, getting money out of politics, and supporting the working class — El-Sayed entered the race as the progressive darling and quickly snatched up the endorsement of his longtime ally Sen. Bernie Sanders. He’s been hailed as Michigan’s analog to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. And he has an inarguably stronger edge now than when he lost his last statewide race to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2018.

Despite the positivity, El-Sayed has entered a tough contest for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination. He’s up against Rep. Haley Stevens, a fourth-term congresswoman who has been endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Mallory McMorrow, the state Senate majority whip. While Stevens has the establishment backing — and the attendant American Israel Public Affairs Committee cash — McMorrow is competing with El-Sayed to claim the progressive mantle.

All three major Democratic candidates so far have largely shied away from openly attacking each other. All three have vowed to build a better economy and stand up against the Trump administration. But on some key issues like health care and foreign policy, the candidates split. El-Sayed wrote the book on Medicare for All. McMorrow supports creating a public option. Stevens, who last week opposed the government funding bill that put ACA benefits in limbo, supports expanding the Affordable Care Act.

But perhaps their largest divide relies on a hinge point in the looming 2026 midterms: the state of Israel and its genocide in Gaza.

El-Sayed was the first of the Michigan Senate candidates to call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide. McMorrow at first avoided the term, then started using it last month, as the Trump administration closed in on a ceasefire deal. And while some pundits are eager to argue that foreign killings are not kitchen-table issues, the genocide was a defining force for voters in parts of southeast Michigan last year, where some lifelong Democrats opted not to vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris over their ire at their party’s complicity in Israel’s violence.

“I think Gaza was a Rorschach test on your values,” El-Sayed said in an interview at a local cafe in the bustling college town of Ann Arbor. “Do you actually believe the things that you say you believe?”

“The Democratic Party is somewhat in flux on some of the issues that will be key in Michigan,” said Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson, a political science professor at Wayne State University, putting it lightly.

“Given the size of the Arab American population in the state, the situation in Gaza will be an issue in the Democratic primary, and Democratic voters, the polls show, have moved very dramatically in the last year or so away from support for Netanyahu,” Sarbaugh-Thompson said.

As the world watched two years of genocide unfold in Gaza, the party convulsed, sending politicians scrambling to adapt to their constituents’ plummeting opinions of the state of Israel.

McMorrow appears to be among them. In late August, she updated her campaign site to include a statement on Israel’s assault on Palestine, according to archived versions of the webpage, which made no mention of Gaza as late as August 19. Her site currently calls for Hamas to return the remains of hostages and disarm, and for Israel to allow the flow of humanitarian aid and stop its ceasefire violations. Her campaign did not answer questions about what prompted the change.

“My view on this is we have completely lost the humanity of this issue,” McMorrow said at a campaign event on October 5, when she first began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. “It is talked about as like a third-rail litmus test without acknowledging these are human beings. They’re people. And our position should be that there is no individual life that is worth more than another individual life.”

In public, McMorrow has disavowed AIPAC and sworn she would not take the Israel lobby’s contributions. On a recorded McMorrow donor call obtained by Drop Site News, her campaign manager says that the campaign has been open to “every organization” that wants to discuss Israel policy, and supporter and former local official Rob Kalman says that McMorrow has privately produced an “AIPAC position paper.”

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AIPAC, which claims that siding with Israel is “good policy and good politics,” asks candidates to privately share their positions on Israel before they hand out an endorsement. Drop Site reported that candidates go through a “series of litmus tests” that include support for the Taylor Force Act, which has halted U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority; a willingness to say that “all options are on the table” when it comes to Iran; support for outlawing boycotts of Israel; and opposition to any conditions on aid to Israel.

A spokesperson for McMorrow denied to Drop Site that Kalman spoke for the campaign. The McMorrow campaign did not respond to questions about the reported donor call when reached by The Intercept.

Stevens, meanwhile, has received over $341,000 from AIPAC PAC donors in 2025, according to FEC filings. Arguably, AIPAC kept Stevens in the House in a recent race. In a previous House primary bid against Andy Levin, a progressive Jewish congressman who advocated for Palestinian rights, the Israel lobby spent over $4 million in favor of Stevens — $3.8 million of it from the United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC. (On Tuesday, Levin endorsed El-Sayed.)

Earlier this year, McMorrow publicly asked the Israel lobby to stay out of the race altogether. El-Sayed, for his part, said: “Have at it.”

“I’ve been very consistent about my principles and my values, and I think in a lot of ways, the community has come to understand,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “I lead with principle, and I’m willing to say hard things to people when I disagree with them.”

In the 2024 presidential primary, El-Sayed supported the Uncommitted Movement, which criticized the Biden administration and Democratic Party’s complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza, but he ultimately endorsed Kamala Harris in the general election.

Trump ended up winning 42 percent of the vote in the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan; Harris trailed behind by about 6 percentage points. Jill Stein — who took a firm pro-Palestine stance in her campaign — received a whopping 18 percent, compared to 0.8 percent statewide.

Sarbaugh-Thompson anticipates the genocide in Gaza will be a contentious issue in this race even if it becomes less prominent in the national picture, given Michigan’s sizable Arab population of over 300,000 people. Nationwide, a Gallup poll found in July that Americans’ approval of Israel’s campaign reached 32 percent — the lowest rating since Gallup began polling on the question in November 2023.

Asked about her stance on Israel and Palestine, Stevens’s campaign referred The Intercept to an X post calling for food aid to enter Gaza and for Hamas to return the hostages. The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether Stevens will recognize the conflict as a genocide. Her campaign site does not include a section on her stance on Israel, nor on her priorities overall.

“There is a word for annihilating 60,000-plus people, which is almost certainly an underestimate, 18,500 of them children,” El-Sayed said. “The idea that it’s a litmus test to use the actual word for the thing says everything you need to know about where the Democratic Party is.”

Still, he did not criticize any of his opponents by name.

The Midwestern niceness for now reflects savvy politics, according to David Dulio, a professor of political science at Oakland University in southeast Michigan. He praised the strategy, noting that now is the time to focus on building war chests and fostering connections. But the contest could get tense quickly.

“Michigan is going to be front and center on the national stage,” Dulio said, pointing out that with the open Senate seat and 13 House races, the state could help determine the balance of power in both chambers of Congress next year. All of its state executive branch roles will be open too.

But to Adrian Hemond, a Michigan political strategist and CEO of campaign consulting firm Grassroots Midwest, El-Sayed and McMorrow are only hurting themselves by not criticizing each other.

“At some point he’s going to have to really step out and differentiate himself, especially from Mallory McMorrow,” Hemond said of El-Sayed, and it should be “sooner rather than later.”

If both El-Sayed and McMorrow are still in the race come August, Hemond forecasts they will split the progressive vote — and Stevens will come out in front.

At the moment, the establishment pick appears to have a narrow lead in the race. A poll published this month by Rosetta Stone put McMorrow and Stevens head-to-head at 25 percent to 26 percent, respectively, and El-Sayed at 20 percent.

But of the three experts The Intercept interviewed for this story, all agreed that with the better part of a year to go until the primary, anything could happen. One piece of evidence? Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed rose to prominence seven years ago when he surged in the polls toward the end of his 2018 gubernatorial race against Whitmer. A year out from the election, he was virtually unknown and polling at 4 percent, but he walked away with 30 percent on primary day. That left him still behind Whitmer, who won with 52 percent of the vote, but ahead of Michigan businessman and now-U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar’s 18 percent.

“By the time we got into the thick of that race, there was a perception of inevitability about her winning the primary, and so even some people that might have considered a vote for Abdul El-Sayed just got on the Whitmer bandwagon because … it seemed like she was going to win,” said Hemond.

He noted the Michigan governor is a masterful communicator, making her a tougher opponent than Stevens, who is more of a “policy wonk.”

Around the same time in this race, El-Sayed was already head-to-head with Stevens. Whichever candidate prevails will likely go up against Mike Rogers, a former Army lieutenant and FBI special agent who served in the House from 2001 to 2015. Last year, Rogers ran against Elissa Slotkin — and lost by just a third of a percentage point.

El-Sayed’s hope is that he can get ahead by addressing an issue he sees as the core of Washington’s problems: money in politics. He is the only candidate in the race who has never taken funding from corporate PACs in his career, though McMorrow notes she has not taken any this cycle. In previous state-level races, McMorrow took nearly $80,000 from PACs including those associated with General Motors, DTE Energy, and Rock Holdings.

Beyond AIPAC, Stevens has received contributions this year from Fortune 500 corporations and unions including Ford Motor Company, General Motors, UnitedHealth, Walmart, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

A campaign spokesperson said Stevens has received grassroots support from across Michigan, and 93 percent of her donations are under $100. The spokesperson said Stevens supports campaign finance reform such as eliminating dark money from elections, reducing influence of super PACs, banning members of Congress and their spouses from trading individual stocks, and overturning the Citizens United decision, the infamous 2010 Supreme Court ruling that found limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions to be unconstitutional.

In the first nine months of 2025, Stevens’s campaign solidly outraised her opponents at $4.7 million. Of the two progressive candidates, McMorrow has a slight edge at $3.8 million compared to El-Sayed’s nearly $3.6 million.

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The influence of corporate power is one of many problems that plagues Democrats as well as Republicans, leaving voters with the impression that neither major party offers an opportunity for meaningful change. While the opposition party usually benefits from backlash toward the party in power, a CNBC poll conducted in April found that the Democratic Party appears to have the lowest approval rating for either party going back to at least 1996, with just 22 percent of respondents saying they feel very or somewhat positive, compared to 36 percent for Republicans.

“The Democratic Party has an opportunity for redemption, and I think it’s going to be because its voters decide to rethink what the party is,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “I’m expecting that, you know, this race, it won’t just be we eked it out. I think if we succeed, it will be a phenomenon, and it’s going to be because we turned out voters that nobody saw coming.”

Among them could be Rich Perlberg, a 75-year-old retired local newspaper publisher and self-described moderate Republican who told The Intercept at El-Sayed’s campaign event that he was longtime friends with the Rogers family before MAGA politics drove a wedge between them.

“I knew [Rogers] was conservative and very politically minded, but I always thought he had a core of decency and principle. So I’ve been really disappointed with how he’s acted since he left Congress,” Perlberg said.

Rogers sharply criticized Trump’s “chaotic leadership style” after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot but has since aligned himself with the MAGA party and received the president’s endorsement for both of his Senate campaigns.

“Once he saw that Trump wasn’t going away, and apparently he’s still got designs on greater things, he changed his tune totally,” Perlberg said. “So he’s saying and doing things that I know, at least I hope in his heart, he doesn’t believe, but that’s almost worse.”

The Rogers campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

EL-SAYED’S TEAm has been eager to compare him to another Muslim insurgent who pushed ahead on a positive message and whose candidacy seemed to scare the Israel lobby. After Zohran Mamdani won a crowded Democratic primary for New York City mayor, El-Sayed’s campaign pushed out a campaign email celebrating Mamdani’s win — and drawing a few parallels.

“Another Muslim American public servant unapologetically standing up to corporate power — and prevailing, despite his campaign being originally called a ‘long shot,’” the email read. “As someone who knows firsthand what it means to be the candidate with a funny name and a bold vision for justice, I’m feeling this one in my bones.”

An outraged MAGA party leapt in the opposite direction. The National Republican Senatorial Committee used Mamdani’s victory to raise alarm about El-Sayed and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a progressive running for Senate in Minnesota.

Despite the parallels, El-Sayed notes he is not Mamdani, and Michigan is certainly not New York City.

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While both areas shifted toward Trump in 2024 compared to previous cycles, New York City remains an overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold with a diverse electorate. This time last year, Michigan handed Trump 15 electoral votes. More than immigration, foreign policy, or any other hot-button issue, the economy was by far the largest deciding factor in the 2024 general election. An AP VoteCast poll found 41 percent of Michigan voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the nation.

Mamdani and El-Sayed’s races call for vastly different expectations — a hyperlocal agenda for a citywide executive compared to a federal legislator with broad national influence, including foreign policy.

But they have both relied on expanding the electorate by pushing economic issues and turning out voters who might not otherwise have connected with a candidate.

“My point has always been that if you talk about the future that young people see themselves in, they will show up,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “And there was a validation point in New York, and I think we’re going to build an even bigger one here in Michigan.”

Correction: February 23, 2026

An earlier version of this article misstated amount that AIPAC PAC donors contributed to Haley Stevens in 2025. It was $341,000, not $678,000.

The post Abdul El-Sayed Wants to Be the First Pro-Palestine Senator From Michigan appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, where universities lie in rubble and classrooms have been replaced by screens, education has refused to die. Amid the constant hum of drones and power outages, students and educators have fought to keep learning — and to restore their campuses for the next generation. 

Studying was “an escape,” amid the genocide, said Aseel, a student of English translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, “a small space of hope and achievement that gave me motivation to keep going.” 

Students and faculty at the Islamic University of Gaza, where I study English literature, described in interviews how they kept studying throughout two years of genocide by charging their laptops with solar energy, watching recorded lectures, and meeting in improvised study groups. The stopgap measures have allowed education to continue amid the most extreme conditions, but Gaza’s universities now need millions of dollars to rebuild the educational system. The Islamic University recently announced that it had begun initial renovations.

Samah, a 21-year-old translation student at the Islamic University, said studying online felt like “a desperate attempt to keep learning despite everything.”

“It was frustrating,” she said. “The internet was weak, and I’d lose time reconnecting. But after every exam I managed to pass, I felt an achievement — it gave me strength to continue.”

Israel’s destructive campaign often cuts off internet access entirely. “If I had the slides and books printed, I could study temporarily until power and the internet came back,” said Aseel. “We depended mainly on recorded lectures — they were comprehensive, but there was little engagement.” 

These measures were necessary in part because Israel has engaged in scholasticide, the intentional destruction of a society’s educational infrastructure. According to figures released by the European Training Foundation, by the spring of this year 95 percent of all school buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed — including every university. The Islamic University announced in November 2024 that extensive genocide damage had destroyed 16 of its buildings, the central library, and over 240,000 books, 8,000 periodicals, and more than 16,000 master’s and doctoral theses — an estimated $141.9 million value. 

“We lost equipped labs, classrooms, and office work materials — much of our physical resources vanished,” said Tawfiq, the former dean of the Faculty of Information Technology.

The university has developed a reconstruction plan requiring approximately $15 million for rebuilding campuses, purchasing equipment and furniture, and other student resources. According to a recent university announcement, limited renovations have begun on the Faculty of Medicine and other colleges. But for most of the necessary work, said Ismail, director of the engineering office, there is “no funding yet.”

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Besides the destruction, the university waived tuition fees during the first year of the genocide — making it easier for students to continue learning but meaning the institution would miss out on its already limited revenue.

But the human toll was the most devastating. From 2023 to 2024, 56 academic and administrative employees at the Islamic University of Gaza were killed, according to the university’s public figures. Approximately 1,500 employees did not receive salaries in the same period. And 17,000 students dropped out of their studies due to the genocide.

Because the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted Gaza’s educators, the students and faculty interviewed for this story are being identified by their first names only for their safety.

When I graduated from high school in 2023, I was excited to major in English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. I was less than a month into my first year of university when Israel’s genocide made physical classrooms inaccessible.

Charging my laptop and phone added to the existing challenges of studying amid genocide — especially during winter, when solar energy wasn’t available — and internet outages were constant. When there was bombing or when Israel deliberately cut communications, everything stopped. You could study all day and night, but sometimes your exam gets ruined by an internet cut — all your effort gone in seconds.

We learned to adapt. Whenever I had electricity and internet, I downloaded all the lectures and materials in advance, so I could study offline later.

“Online learning was just a way to get through the courses,” said Hala, a student of Islamic law, who said she wants to use her law degree to fight for justice. “It lacked the soul: the early walks to class, the debates, the cafes, the sea road to university … that was real learning.”

For some students, the brutalities of genocide coincided with the typical mundanities of schooling. Mo’min, a web computing student, described his experience as a battle with both genocide and procrastination.

“Because nothing was mandatory, it was easy to delay things,” he admitted. “But I charged my phone early every morning, downloaded lectures, and followed along with the chapters.”

He said some professors “deserve to be saluted,” while others disappeared under the strain of genocide. Despite psychological exhaustion, faith kept him grounded. “I comforted myself with the Qur’an,” he said. “I learned to depend on myself — completely.”

“Education played a vital role in supporting the psychological and social endurance of students, faculty, and families alike,” said Sulaiman, a professor and specialist in educational foundations and administration. He stressed that professors worked hard to keep in touch with students under “extremely difficult circumstances.”

Related

Students and Teachers in Gaza: “Education Itself Is a Form of Defiance”

As Gaza rebuilds, professors are hoping to gradually reopen classrooms with essential furniture and equipment. They plan to prioritize laboratories and smart classrooms for hands-on training. And as soon as reconstruction allows, they hope for a full return to face-to-face education.

“The university’s future is tied to the country’s reconstruction,” Sulaiman said. “When Gaza rebuilds, the university will rise architecturally and become a leading institution. Curricula should also evolve to meet contemporary demands and develop students capable of thriving in modern life.”

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