Challenge Airlines, a cargo hauler based in Israel, made three flights this spring carrying the bomb casings for BLU-109s — a 2,000-pound munition that has been tied to numerous mass-casualty attacks on civilian neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Iran in recent years — according to open-source data obtained by the Movement Research Unit and reviewed by The Intercept.

The airline also made more than 100 shipments of guidance kits known as joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs — which are used to convert so-called “dumb bombs” into GPS-guided munitions capable of striking a specific target — according to data shared with The Intercept. Many of the guidance kits were marked for use on the MK-84, another 2,000-pound bomb Israel used in its campaign to level Gaza, where fragments of JDAMs have repeatedly been found at the site of airstrikes.

The 2,000-pound bombs present a serious risk of civilian casualties, according to Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned at the outset of the war in Gaza to protest the Biden administration’s sale of weapons to Israel.

“If you look at historic U.S. use of 2,000-pound bombs, in the entire counter-ISIS campaign, there were just two that were dropped in the vicinity of the city of Mosul precisely because there is no way to use a 2,000-pound bomb discriminately in an urban environment,” Paul said, referring to an American air war during the final years of the Obama administration to end the Islamic State’s control of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Israel hasn’t shared the United States’s reservations. The country made extensive use of the weapons to attack targets in Gaza and Lebanon, including a deadly strike on Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp that killed dozens of civilians, according to an analysis by the New York Times.

“If you look at a picture of Gaza right now, I would say Israel’s use of these weapons is functionally indistinguishable from indiscriminate bombing,” Paul said.

Challenge Airlines, and the Israeli military did not respond to request for comment.

“We work closely with all airport partners to ensure the safety of public, neighboring communities, and airport personnel,” said a spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK Airport. “The federal government and commercial airlines have primary responsibility as to what is allowed to be shipped on aircraft. We are pre-empted under federal law from interfering with these activities.”

While the shipments of JDAMs and bomb bodies for BLU-109s did not include active munitions, previous shipments of weapons through JFK have included explosives, including 14 tons of nitrocellulose bound for Israel in May 2025.

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The Intercept verified the data showing all three shipments of bunker-buster bomb bodies, and verified a portion of the data showing shipments of JDAM kits. Movement Research Unit, an investigative outlet whose prior work has uncovered shipments of drone tech to Israel and the transport of fighter jet parts by United Airlines onboard civilian passenger flights, shared the data on the condition that some specifics of its methods be withheld to prevent a crackdown on the availability of such data.

In response to the flow of weapons and materiel through JFK, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been organizing a campaign to stop the flow of weapons to Israel through the airport.

“This is another example of a growing body of reporting that shows how civilian infrastructure is used for the genocide in Gaza,” said a DSA member named Henry, who asked to be identified without his last name in order prevent retaliation from his employer. “Civilian air travel should prioritize passengers, travelers, and the international community — not weapons — and no worker should be forced to serve the militarized supply chain.”

Tons of Pressure

Challenge Airlines shipped the bunker-buster bomb bodies on flights leaving JFK for Tel Aviv on March 12, April 30, and May 6, according to the data shared with The Intercept.

They shipped the guidance kits far more frequently, with 109 shipments leaving JFK for Tel Aviv between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026. Cargo documents indicate that most of the shipments were of JDAM kits designed for 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs but also included at least one shipment of kits for bunker-buster bombs.

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In total, the airline shipped 175,884 pounds of BLU-109 casings and more than 5 million pounds of JDAM kits between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026, according to the data obtained by Movement Research Unit.

JFK Airport is the main export hub for such munitions flying by air to Israel, according to federal data: More than half of all Israel-bound air shipments of weapons that fit the government export category for bombs and missiles was sent abroad from JFK.

It was not immediately clear where the bunker buster and JDAM shipments originated, but sales of military hardware to Israel typically either come from deals between the Israeli and U.S. governments or direct commercial purchases under a special export license made by the Israeli military from private companies.

In the first two years of Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, according to a study by analyst William Hartung. That has included multiple shipments of 2,000-pound bombs like the BLU-109 and the MK-84, as well as JDAM kits to equip the weapons with GPS guidance.

The Biden administration in May 2024 halted the shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, citing the potential harm to civilians, but President Donald Trump resumed shipments of the heavy munitions within weeks of retaking the White House.

News of the shipments comes just over a month after the Associated Press revealed plans in the works for the U.S. to ink a vast $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel that would include thousands of 2,000-pound bombs.

The ongoing sale of such heavy weapons to Israel underscores the need for a federal solution, according to Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who sponsored last year legislation dubbed the “Block the Bombs Act,” that would bar the U.S. from selling BLU-109s, JDAMs, and other munitions central to Israel’s war effort.

“It’s the only bill that prohibits these weapons transfers from happening, and the only bill that creates a comprehensive process of oversight,” Ramirez told The Intercept. “There’s been a big push, particularly in New York and around JFK, to block these transfers and it’s good that people are putting pressure locally, but ultimately it is Congress’s responsibility to make that happen.”

First introduced in May 2025, the bill has gathered more than 80 co-sponsors but has thus far languished in legislative limbo. With the House of Representatives soon to be under Democratic control, Ramirez said she plans to bring the bill to the floor next session.

The post Tons of “Bunker-Buster” Bomb Parts for Israel Go Through JFK Airport appeared first on The Intercept.

The World at a Crossroads

Three years on from the onset of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we are at a crucial hinge point. The world today, when it comes to Palestine, stands at the crossroads: meaningful support for liberation and decolonization, or the normalization of colonial expansion and erasure.

Since the 2021 “Manifesto of Dignity and Hope” and the unified call of Palestinians to confront Zionism, the Israeli political sphere has only continued to sustain and entrench its fascist trajectory and its racist laws. After 2023, Israeli settler colonialism and domination escalated into all-out destruction and elimination. Palestinians who had been enduring suffocating apartheid and siege for far too long were now subjected to genocidal assault. Though the context on the ground shifted, the urgent need for a better understanding and challenge to Zionism on political, legal, structural, and ideological grounds remained.

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It was a new generation of Palestinian activists who produced the Manifesto of Dignity and Hope, but their text was shaped by the legacy and spirit of Palestinian revolutionaries and anti-colonial thinkers from earlier periods. Common language echoes through the generations. A quarter-century ago, Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote the core of the issue of Palestine “is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid. We should concentrate our resistance on … fully confronting the apartheid provisions inherent in Zionism.” And as diplomat Fayez Sayegh captured it in 1965: Racism is not an acquired or incidental or passing feature of the Israeli state; it is “inherent in the very ideology of Zionism.” Today, we can draw inspiration from these intergenerational reverberations across Palestinian theory and activism, in their consonant commitments to confronting Zionism.

Part of our own task as anti-colonial legal scholars is to expand our analysis of the limitations of narrow liberal legal readings of apartheid and inequality, and to highlight how a radical critique of Israeli apartheid is essential to dismantling Israel’s apartheid regime. This requires scrutiny not only of Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism, but also of the concept of apartheid itself. Apartheid was previously understood in the context of the African anti-apartheid struggle, in a formulation originally coined by the South African Communist Party, as “colonialism of a special type.” By the late 1990s, however, apartheid had been stripped in mainstream understandings of its global character and colonial essence, and effectively reframed as “racial discrimination of a special type.”

One factor in this analytical shift was the domestication of racism in international law, which has obscured its relationship to global capitalism and transformed racism into a problem for individual countries to resolve through juridical reform or diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Racism is not merely abhorrent because people’s feelings are hurt or one feels unseen, however, but because it is entangled with power and economic structures, and because materially, the continuum of racist violence culminates in genocide, which is squarely understood as a global phenomenon. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to this in 1967 when he said: “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. … If one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”

International law attempts to capture this continuum. Three of the specific acts conducted to maintain apartheid are identical to the acts conducted to commit genocide under their respective legal definitions. In the former, they are done with the intent to dominate; in the latter, with the intent to destroy. These are not mutually exclusive, but rather interact with each other: Colonialism, apartheid, and genocide combine under the Zionist project in Palestine to produce a system of oppression based on conquest, structural racism, dispossession, and elimination.

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Palestinian opposition to Zionism and the imperatives of decolonization — for political emancipation, material survival, and cultural flourishing — are the central thrust of our work. The colonial origins and early legal mechanics of Zionist settler colonialism and Israel’s apartheid regime reveal how Zionism functioned both as a colonial initiative and a racializing project. This manifested in colonial institutions even before the state was established in 1948, after which they were enshrined in racist legal regimes. A broad structural analysis of the institutional and economic processes of land and capital accumulation that have occurred under settler colonialism in Palestine is necessary to understand the machinery of conquest and dispossession — and the role that racism has played in driving it forward. Drawing on the anti-colonial Palestinian intellectual tradition, we can see that an antiracist analysis has been organic to the Palestinian liberation struggle and is precisely what shaped U.N. initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s that condemned Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination alongside apartheid and colonialism.

Despite all the analysis of Israeli state racism and colonial violence since 1948 and all of the mass popular mobilizations and legal advocacy against Israeli apartheid, nothing substantive was done at an international, political, or institutional level to address or redress it. This inaction and the impunity afforded to Israel inevitably culminated in the situation that the world found itself in after October 2023: unsanctioned apartheid accelerating into unadulterated genocide — and given the green light by those who had the power to stop it. There was a decade of increasingly flagged warning signs leading up to this. But Palestinian scholars and international lawyers who had warned of a “prelude to genocide” or “slow-motion” genocide over the years were largely ignored, and in some cases castigated. The consequences have been catastrophic. The United States actively funded, armed, and cheer-led the butchery in Gaza. European Union leaders chose to “stand with Israel” as it announced its starvation policy and war of annihilation.

We would not have ended up in this present moment if the critiques of Zionism as colonialism and racism and the reality of Israel as an apartheid regime had been taken seriously. In 1975, the U.N., led by a Third World majority, declared “international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neocolonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination.” Against this, the Western world, led by the United States, has worked to normalize Israeli apartheid.

We see part of our task now as one of continuing to build on the recent “mainstreaming” of condemnations of Israeli apartheid and genocide, but in a way that decisively resists the drift toward narrower, liberal articulations and insists on the importance of radical, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial analysis and praxis. In our work as critical legal scholars, we situate apartheid and the shape it has taken as a category in international law, and we explore the limits and potential of legal tactics, arguments, and institutions to dismantle Israeli apartheid and end the genocide in Gaza. We argue that while legal actions should be pursued in the service of political and social movements, legal logic is insufficient in itself — and can risk narrowing or distorting the horizon of Palestinian liberation. In our view, the proliferating condemnations of Israel by major human rights organizations and mainstream figures in recent years have belatedly reflected the popular consensus and a political reality that Palestinian activism had made undeniable. They also fit, to varying degrees, within a wider pattern of containment.

As one example, take the case of European officials and states finally beginning to acknowledge the heinousness of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza in mid-2025, but doing so primarily in the form of calling for a Palestinian state. They did so only after almost two full years of enabling untold destruction, and refusing to impose any serious sanctions to stem the genocide. Their moves to recognize Palestinian statehood were not about any genuine support for Palestinian self-determination, but rather a way to stabilize the apartheid status quo and try to slow down the Israeli–U.S. drive to continue the erasure of Gaza and full annexation of the West Bank.

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With all of that in mind, it is important to situate the political moment we are in — the increasing focus on Israeli apartheid in recent years and subsequently on the genocide in Gaza — alongside the urgency of thinking about Palestine’s future and our collective responsibilities. In doing so, we have several core aims: to offer a deeper understanding of the nature and extent of Israel’s colonial rule over Palestinian lands and lives; to think through the relationship between the practices of Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide on the one hand, and the institutions and ideology of Zionism on the other; to situate Palestinian liberation and its global solidarity alliances as an antiracist struggle and an anti-colonial movement; and to insist on the need for systemic anti-imperial understandings and critiques of Zionism. To properly confront Zionism and avoid the pitfalls of neo-apartheid, we must be attentive to the necessities and practicalities of decolonization.

The decolonization of Palestine today continues a legacy of other liberation struggles — against European colonization globally, against domestic regimes of fascism, against apartheid in southern Africa, and against white supremacy in the United States and elsewhere. These are political orders that Third World, antiracist, partisan, and socialist movements have fought against throughout the past century and more. We must continue that tradition in the service of decolonization by fleshing out the political, legal, historical, and moral reasoning of anti-colonial and anti-Zionist thinking and movements. In our own writing, we feel we are merely providing footnotes to the political education and organizing that has fanned out from Palestine around the world, and that has shaped what millions of activists and people of conscience have viscerally felt: that Zionist colonial rule should and can be dismantled, and that Palestinians must be supported in their struggle to do so.

The stakes of confronting Zionist settler colonialism are high for the entire world: first and foremost for Palestinians’ own liberation, but also because their struggle is at the epicenter of wider global struggles against structures of domination and exploitation. Zionism is a colonial project in Palestine, but also a vehicle of imperialism in the region — agitating for U.S. war and intervention, acting as an antagonist of imperial aggression against Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen and beyond, and actively collaborating with reactionary geopolitical forces globally. Zionism has been further mobilized by ethnonationalists and imperial projects as a proposition on how to organize a society on a basis of racial hierarchy that leaves its excluded groups to perish. Palestinian revolutionary intellectual Ghassan Kanafani always insisted on the importance of understanding the Palestinian struggle in the context of “the alliance between Zionism and imperialism.” And in positioning Kanafani’s analysis in the context of global movements against imperialism today, educator and organizer Layan Sima Fuleihan reiterates the Palestinian cause is “a banner for all of humanity.”

Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian political cartoonist famous for his iconic Hanzala (or “Handala”) character who symbolizes Palestinian resolve and future return, was himself displaced from northern Palestine as a boy during the Nakba and grew up in refugee camps in Lebanon. Kanafani came across Al-Ali and his artwork in Ein al-Hilweh camp and began to publish his drawings in the early 1960s. Al-Ali went on to produce tens of thousands of cartoons over the next 25 years, and through his art was renowned as a voice of Palestinian and Arab political consciousness. In 1984, just a couple of years before he would be assassinated, Al-Ali reflected on what Hanzala and Palestine represented:

I feel that I can recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine. The character of Hanzala was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily towards Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense — the symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa.

In the decades since then, the idea of Palestine as the compass has resonated in struggles for justice around the world. Most recently, in 2025, the Palestinian Youth Movement and a coalition of solidarity groups brought thousands of activists together for the People’s Conference for Palestine, under the banner “Gaza is the compass.”

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A wide array of voices, from community activists to trade union organizers to political representatives, emphasized how central Palestine is to all of the social struggles they are engaged in.

Palestinian doctor Mohammad Mustafa articulated the perspective of the many involved in movements for justice across the globe: “Gaza is the measure of our humanity. It is the litmus test that reveals who we are; as individuals, as a nation, as a world. … The compass points in one direction no matter who you are or where you are. In this way it provides a mandate and direction towards freedom for everyone.”

Lawyer and organizer Huwaida Arraf echoed these ideas: “Gaza is our compass because it points us to the truth. … When we’re fighting for Gaza, we’re fighting for a world where no people live in cages or under siege, under the boot of militarism or of fascism.”

Monadel Herzallah from Gaza, who lost five family members in the genocide, insisted the same: “To fight for a free Palestine is to fight for a free Haiti, a free Congo, a free Sudan — a free and just world which will be molded by all of us.”

Palestine is the compass because of what it represents as a banner for all humanity, and because of the horizons it opens up everywhere in imagining and building a new world.

Excerpt adapted from “Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew,” coming from Haymarket Books on November 10, 2026.

The post Defeating Zionism to Free Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

In September 2025, Hinson — who is battling Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek in a tight race that could decide control of the Senate — tapped Abe Adams to lead her campaign’s digital efforts. 

Adams is a co-founder and managing partner of Targeted Victory, a digital consulting firm that has been used by high-profile Republican candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Targeted Victory shares an address and much of its staff with Targeted Communications Global — a related company with no discernible online presence. Both are subsidiaries of marketing company Stagwell Global.

Israel awarded Targeted Communications a $9.9 million contract in March 2025 focused on social media and paid advertising, documents show. By October 2025, the firm was at work pitching news content and guests on Fox News and CNN, and creating YouTube ads suggesting young Iranians have been educated to believe the “most sacred thing they do is stab a Christian in the heart.”

Hinson is endorsed by both President Donald Trump and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and has been supportive of Trump’s war in Iran. 

A June 2026 Department of Justice FARA filing from Targeted Communications details much of the firm’s work for Israel. The document lists 10 registered foreign agents working on the Targeted Communications contract for Israel. Six of them are identified as Targeted Victory employees on the company’s website or their LinkedIn accounts. Adams is not named in the filing.

Hinson, Adams, and Targeted Victory did not immediately respond to  requests for comment.

Adams is not the only Hinson campaign adviser with ties to Targeted Victory and the Israel lobby. Hinson’s current deputy campaign manager, Addison Lavis, worked at Targeted Victory before serving as Hinson’s campaign manager in her 2023 congressional run. Lavis was previously an intern at AIPAC. Lavis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Hinson has received more than $100,000 from AIPAC and related pro-Israel PACs in 2026, and as an Iowa state representative supported legislation that prohibited the state from working with any companies that boycott Israel. 

Hinson’s political action committee has paid Targeted Victory more than $1.6 million this election cycle for digital consulting and ads — 27 percent of its total expenditures, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Israel’s deal with Targeted Communications is part of a major public relations push that has pumped more than $100 million into swaying public opinion, particularly among young conservatives, back toward Israel.

The post Ashley Hinson’s Digital Chief Oversees Firm Paid Millions to Push Israeli Propaganda appeared first on The Intercept.

Several observers familiar with the case said the grand jury is likely related to the extradition effort.

The refusal of the grand jury witnesses to testify takes on added importance because the U.S. is pursuing Chambers’s extradition based on a criminal complaint, not an indictment, according to his Spanish lawyers. The criminal affidavit, signed by a single FBI agent, includes three charges related to his support for pro-Palestine causes.

The distinction, critics of the extradition case say, highlights how the case is hung on one agent’s complaint, which remains under seal, rather than a grand jury investigation to determine if the state had sufficient evidence to indict Chambers.

“The complaint is not only vague and weak, it’s not normal,” said Aitor Martínez, one of Chambers’s Spain-based lawyers. “In 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen a U.S. extradition request based on a criminal complaint.”

Martínez pointed to a statement from a summary of the complaint contained in an international arrest order reviewed by The Intercept and directed at Spanish authorities that says, “If Chambers’ extradition to the US is granted, another charging document called an indictment will be sought from a federal grand jury.”

Xavier de Janon, the executive director of the U.S.-based National Lawyers Guild and who is not working directly on the Chambers case, said, “Seeking an extradition without there being an indictment puts the cart before the horse.”

“If he is extradited under a criminal complaint,” said de Janon, “he can’t even fully challenge the charges, because he hasn’t been indicted.”

The State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

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Two of the three charges underpinning the extradition request against Chambers — riot and conspiracy to riot — are related to allegations that he helped fund a late-2023 protest in Merrimack, New Hampshire, against an Israeli weapons manufacturer, according to the summary of the complaint contained in the arrest order. The summary says Chambers provided funds for demonstrators used to purchase materials such as smoke bombs and to help cover protesters’ legal fees.

The third charge is international money laundering related to more than $7 million he transferred to bank accounts in Tunisia, where he was living in 2024. The Trump administration, according to the international arrest order, says the money was used to fund Hamas, which is a proscribed terror group in the U.S. The order does not say he is charged with material support for terrorism.

Chambers’s family and supporters and multiple representatives of Club Africain, a Tunisian soccer club, have said the money was used to pay the club’s debts and related expenditures such as training grounds. The club’s fan base has long supported Palestinians.

Grand Jury Refusal

Two women who participated in the 2023 protest against a factory operated by the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems recently announced their intentions not to cooperate with a November 4 grand jury hearing where they have been summoned as witnesses.

“If they are being summoned now, this suggests that the grand jury seems to be linked to Chambers’s case,” said Martínez, his lawyer. “It seems like a fishing expedition against him.”

Kira Kelley, an attorney for the two women, said, “Context clues suggest this is about Fergie.”

If the pair don’t answer questions from a federal prosector before the New Hampshire federal grand jury, they could risk a possible jail sentence for contempt.

Nonetheless, the two women — Bridget Shergalis and Sophie Ross — shared a statement with The Grayzone Thursday announcing their intention to refuse to testify. In an interview on the same day with The Intercept, the women recounted being under investigation for a year over the protest and being threatened with felony charges that carried potential sentences of decades in prison.

Shergalis and Ross said they turned down several deals for their cooperation. By the end of the ordeal, they were found guilty of misdemeanor offenses and received 60-day jail sentences.

Following that experience, said Ross, the pair decided to reject the subpoena to testify before a grand jury.

“It was an easy decision for both of us,” Ross said.

Shergalis and Ross are slated to testify on Wednesday, at which time they plan to assert their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions from the federal prosecutor.

At that point, a hearing before a judge may be scheduled, to determine whether to hold Shergalis and Ross in civil contempt, which could result in up to 18 months of prison, according to Kelley.

Martínez, who also worked on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s defense team, said the decision by Shergalis and Ross recalled that of Chelsea Manning, who twice refused to testify against Assange before a grand jury, serving time in prison in both instances. 

“It’s like Chelsea Manning, years later,” he said.

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Shergalis and Ross decided to go public with their plans after speaking with organizers behind the recently-launched NSPM-7 Defendants Union, a nationwide project for protesters targeted by the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize dissent as laid out in last year’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. The document, part of a broader effort to paint left-wing activism as terrorism, directs the FBI to go after “violent and terroristic activities” associated with “anti-fascism.”

The NSPM-7 Defendants Union is centered around signing a pledge to follow practices such as not cooperating with law enforcement, adopting collective legal strategy when possible, and publicly announcing those strategies — a goal that runs against the secrecy surrounding federal indictments.

While secrecy benefits prosecutors before a grand jury, said Shergalis, “It’s good for all of us to be as transparent as possible.”

Shergalis, Ross, and Chambers have each signed the pledge, and the grand jury decision appears to be the first public test case of the union’s ideas.

“We should celebrate people across the country deciding to assert their legal rights boldly against the federal government and its NSPM-7 policy,” said de Janon, of the National Lawyers Guild. “We’re seeing NSPM-7 result in unprecedented levels of prosecution against protesters.”

“This Is Bad Faith”

Meanwhile, Chambers remains imprisoned in Madrid, as the Spanish courts decide whether to grant the U.S. extradition request or not.

Chambers has applied for asylum in Spain and, if his application is granted, he would be released and the U.S. extradition request would be denied. He cannot be extradited until the asylum case runs its course.

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A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, Chambers is heir of the Cox family, owners of Atlanta-based telecom giant Cox Enterprises. As part of a settlement in which his family severed ties with him at the time, he sold stock back to them in mid-2023 worth about $250 million.

Since then, he has been funding an estimated 100 humanitarian and left-wing projects in 20 countries, according to his partner, actress and activist Stella Schnabel, including aid projects in the Occupied Gaza Strip.

As for the Trump administration’s case, Martínez, the Spanish attorney, underscored how the criminal complaint against Chambers raises charges related to the protest against the New Hampshire factory for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, but leaves out how federal prosecution efforts ended up with minor convictions for Shergalis, Ross, and other activists.

“The people who carried out the acts received a minor sentence,” he said. “They leave this out. This is bad faith.”

“Why don’t they tell this to Spain?” he said. “It’s likely that Spain won’t turn someone over based on actions that got 60-day sentences.”

Martínez said Chambers’s opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza is the real reason behind the case. “I believe this is part of the persecution against pro-Palestine protest. The U.S. has even sanctioned the International Criminal Court because of this.”

Of Chambers’s case, Martínez said, “This is one more attack.”

Correction: November 3, 2026
This story has been updated to correct an errant description of a charge brought against Fergie Chambers according to an international arrest order. The charge is conspiracy to riot, not incitement to riot.

The post Fergie Chambers Faces Extradition to U.S. Despite Never Being Indicted, Says Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

Imperial ambitions are ever-shifting under President Donald Trump. Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are oftentimes spoken about as one continuous train of complete victories and soon-to-be-complete-victories. With the midterms fast approaching, and the date for an apparent telegraphed return to the Iran war on its heels, talk of easily overthrowing regimes has returned, if it ever truly left.

At a rally in Florida last Friday, Trump laid out his grand vision, which he promised would come to pass once the Islamic Republic is neutralized as a threat to the world: “We’re going to come back from Iran. Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands, and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.”

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the descendant of Cuban immigrants who left under President Fulgencio Batista (though Rubio later tried to claim his parents fled Castro, who came to power three years later), has long put overthrowing the Communist government in Havana at the top of his agenda, with the hope of replicating the relative ease of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Rubio turned some heads last Friday when he publicly posted on X that those seeking “to create positive change in Cuba” could “seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”

The post was widely met with bewilderment (Bloomberg’s White House correspondent wrote: “Checked like four times that this was real”), but U.S. officials and members of Congress also shared the post, elevating the public call for collaboration. Recruiting in public might come across as strange and out of character to a public that imagines the CIA recruiting secret agents and informants through clandestine channels or hidden websites, as the agency had done to try and recruit agents inside Iran under Bush and Obama.

But public appeals of this kind are not wholly new. Under the Biden administration, the CIA recruited collaborators inside Russia via a public Telegram channel, as well as publishing videos on social media hoping to recruit Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean assets.

This kind of overt recruitment stems from the difficulties Western intelligence agencies face against adversaries who have built sophisticated surveillance networks of their own. A CIA official told ABC News in May 2025, “in today’s world of [universal technical surveillance], we can’t recruit sources the same way that we did 20 years ago, probably the same way you did 10 years ago.” This has not only affected intelligence operations targeting Beijing, but also Tehran and Havana, where both the U.S. and Israel’s lack of on-the-ground connections and limited official presence has led the CIA and the Mossad to try to recruit willing informants online.

While these limitations may govern the particulars of this strategy, those in power in their respective countries may not see it as evidence of constraints, but instead as evidence of the power of their new strategy: boasting about their national power, rather than keeping it behind closed doors where it supposedly remains useless. After all, what is the use of a deterrent if nobody knows it was you?

The scale of these public appeals, despite having started under Biden, has exploded under the second Trump term, but these moves were arguably preceded by Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to bring the Mossad’s operations much more into the public sphere. The Israeli prime minister’s bragging about numerous cyberattacks targeting Iran’s nuclear program in the late 2010s began to precipitate a shift in public discussion of the Mossad’s work, with many Netanyahu allies, like then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, praising the fact that Iran could now “know it is exposed and that Israel can reach anywhere in the Islamic Republic.” A former deputy director of the Mossad said after the unveiling of Iran’s stolen nuclear archive that Netanyahu’s move “goes against our nature,” and that “the prime minister insisted on publicizing this.”

Netanyahu’s pick in 2021 for the director of the Mossad, David Barnea, has been credited with institutionalizing that change, shifting the secretive intelligence agency’s operations toward appealing to larger masses, and reportedly concerning Mossad veterans who were shocked by the publicizing of agents inside Iran. Casting Israel as a superpower capable of exerting its power anywhere has become a popular refrain under Netanyahu. In an interview with “60 Minutes,” one Mossad officer said of the 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon, which injured more than 2,000 people, that “they are walking proof of our superiority all around the Middle East,” with another officer saying the operation’s complexity and success demonstrated “the world is our stage.”

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The U.S. has also gotten in the habit of flexing its superpower status under Trump, declaring the nation’s intent to conquer places like Greenland and Canada, to steal the natural resources of Venezuela and Iran to fill American coffers, and to openly and unabashedly place the Western Hemisphere under a Washingtonian protectorate known as the “Donroe Doctrine.” Rubio declared in Greece in early October, speaking in terms of civilizational battle against the backdrop of the Acropolis, that “we choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.”

Openly siccing the CIA on foreign adversaries and ICE on domestic ones has been part of that strategy of embracing imperial fervor at home and abroad. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a private security contractor who remains influential in Trump world, said he was “jealous” of the pager attacks and publicly urged the CIA to take a lesson from the Mossad, saying “we should be getting those kinds of results.”

While both countries have openly sought deep intelligence penetration in adversarial nations, there are limitations to the power of clandestine and overt operations, even by superpowers and wannabes. While the CIA asserted its power in May by openly having its director meet with Cuban officials in Havana to demand “fundamental changes” in return for relief from economic strangulation, the agency’s history of attempts to overthrow the Communist Cuban government are as storied as they are unsuccessful. Earlier hopes for Iran to be as quick and as clean as taking control of Venezuela’s government were dashed early on in the conflict, with the war that was supposed to only take a few weeks now all but certain to extend past the midterm elections for another devastating round.

Even if the war with Iran ends so easily that American ships are able to go through Cuba on the way back ready for more, both outside analysts and even internal U.S. intelligence assessments do not see as easy a way to overthrow the Communist state. The New York Times reported in August that American intelligence sources indicate it could be a situation closer to Iran, where even if Raúl Castro (who has held no official position in the country since 2021) were captured, “few pragmatic officials” are likely to take power in his stead.

While Cuba’s military lacks the kind of advanced equipment Iran has, and shows of readiness (like with Venezuela) are no indication of a country’s actual willingness to fight a protracted campaign, Cuba’s military structure is similar to Iran’s in that it is based on decentralization and redundancies in leadership. In addition, Cuba has a political power structure that, also similar to Iran, is not actually based around a single individual, despite popular claims to the contrary.

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Despite Trump’s constant bluster about the miracle of being able to take out Maduro without a single American death, the brazenness of that operation, and the openness with which the negotiations with Iran have been deceptive, appear to have had lessons for the Cuban leadership. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in June: “All these elements create a lot of distrust in the Cuban people when it comes to conducting any type of negotiation. We continue to express our willingness for dialogue, but it has to be a dialogue between equals, without pressure and with respect for our sovereignty.” American officials have yet to internalize that sentiment. Discussing Cuba in March, Trump joyfully mused: “Whether I free it, take it, I think, I could do anything I want with it.” At the time, he was saying similar things about Iran.

The post The CIA Is Resorting to an Open Casting Call for Would-Be Cuban Assets appeared first on The Intercept.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — When it opened in early 2024, Engage Men’s Health Clinic served as a free, one-stop shop for sexual health, gender-affirming medical care, and HIV prevention, testing, and treatment. Located within a short distance of seven universities, it was a place where many college students came before “they’d even had sex for the first time,” a former worker told The Intercept. This made Engage a “high-impact” clinic for distribution of the HIV prevention drug PrEP. 

The building, on a tree-lined stretch of Reserve Street in Johannesburg, was adorned with the logo for the President’s Plan For AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; a rainbow-colored mural of Simon Tseko Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who helped start one of Africa’s first Pride celebrations and who died of AIDS in 1998; and a sign for USAID saying the site was a gift “from the American people.”

Today, it would be very hard to get help here, despite the welcoming-but-outdated signage. The clinic, once staffed full-time by professionals, closed abruptly during the first hours of the second Trump administration. Its replacement, an unrelated volunteer clinic called USpace, is open a mere four hours a week. They can do HIV tests here. But they have no HIV treatment, HIV prevention, or gender-affirming medication to distribute. 

South Africans account for about a fifth of the 41 million people living with HIV around the world. Out of a population of nearly 64 million, some 8 million people in South Africa are living with HIV, which is roughly 1 in 8. Managing their healthcare is a matter of international concern and requires global coordination and an immense local network. In a nation with such high rates of HIV, public health workers can’t just wait for people to walk into clinics; they must proactively go to them. 

Yet over the last year and a half, this crucial work has been stymied. By Jacqueline Pienaar’s count, HIV prevention groups have lost track of approximately 20,000 people with HIV in the Johannesburg and Pretoria region alone since U.S. President Donald Trump came back to the White House. “It used to be if someone didn’t show up to get their medication, you’d go to them,” said Pienaar, a principal investigator and global health specialist at the Aurum Institute, an NGO that offers medical care and contact tracing for the region’s massive HIV-positive population. 

For years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded her work. Many of her patients were homeless, unemployed, and extremely poor. If they are unaccounted for and unmedicated, their viral loads will spike, all but assuring large transmission increases in a country that is already home to 20 percent of the world’s HIV-positive population.

With U.S. funding vanished, South Africa now finds itself at risk of unmitigated HIV spread. 

Now, at organizations like the Aurum Institute, interviews with Pienaar and other workers reveal how funding cuts have devastated the care apparatus. Employment in HIV care and prevention has become precarious, and resources to slow HIV transmission are increasingly scarce. As elsewhere in the world, this is creating a crisis of unemployment for Black LGBTQ+ workers, which itself creates higher risk for HIV. Gender-affirming care, which is a crucial tool for preventing HIV, has disappeared almost entirely. 

Until the second Trump administration, the United States government sent a bit more than half a billion dollars a year to the Republic of South Africa. Of the $580 million the U.S. sent in 2024, 78 percent ($455 million) went towards HIV/AIDS.

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But this money from America was hardly charity or lacking in self-interest. Because viruses know no borders, what happens with AIDS in the country with the most infections affects everyone on Earth. Controlling HIV in South Africa makes the entire world safer by preventing the emergence of dangerous viral mutations, reducing the global burden of infectious diseases, and strengthening health systems that detect future pandemics. Because viruses mutate rapidly when allowed to replicate unchecked, poorly controlled epidemics anywhere pose a direct threat to global health security.

South Africa also leads the world on another important front: medical research to address HIV. The republic is home to more clinical trials than any other country for seeing how medications of all kinds (including Covid vaccines) impact those with HIV. The profits of American drug companies depend on South Africans undergoing research trials. 

And after a year-and-a-half of dialing down HIV funding and only allowing it with many caveats which have caused major harm, the United States announced in June — during America’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month — that it will end all HIV funding in South Africa. 

The ramifications of this will be felt globally for years to come.

They are already being felt by the millions of South Africans for whom HIV care has become harder and harder to find. And the effects are most severe for those already on the margins of South African society: those already living with HIV/AIDS, immigrants, trans women, and the poor, including thousands of newly unemployed HIV prevention workers.

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed two executive orders: 14169, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” and 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Within hours of Trump taking the oath of office, the vast majority of workers for OUT LGBT Well-Being, which ran the Engage clinic, were told not to come in to work the next day nor to even open their work laptops again. According to one, 82 of 86 workers were let go. They would become part of the one-third of South Africans who are already unemployed.

Trump executive order 14155 formally pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in January 2026. Trump’s cuts came after the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden reportedly failed to pay some $130 million in 2024 WHO dues, leaving the organization with a $1.9 billion gap. As a consequence, WHO implemented a 30 percent reduction in its workforce.

South Africa’s response to HIV has been shaped by its two most famous citizens: Nelson Mandela and Elon Musk. 

Mandela, the first president of the republic, played a large role making sure combating AIDS was part of national policy, even guiding the writing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and even trans rights into the constitution (the first constitution in the world to do so). Musk, for his part, can take credit for exacerbating the plague. 

During Trump’s first term, with Musk merely cheering from the sidelines, U.S. funding for LGBTQ+ health and HIV did not decrease significantly, at home or abroad. But ahead of Trump’s second term, it was Musk who first recommended a U.S. “government efficiency commission” to Trump in 2024, planting the seeds for what was to come.

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HIV funding nationally and globally have plummeted in Trump’s second term through cuts largely enacted at the behest of Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. (These have been paired with an immigration policy so racist, over the last six months, literally the only refugees to enter the U.S. have been white South Africans.) 

Musk quit just a few months into his tenure in 2025, before DOGE shut down entirely. He reportedly took a swath of DOGE data with him, saw his wealth skyrocket, and became the world’s first trillionaire. Reporting on mathematical projections about how many people have been or will be killed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, cuts he pushed have ranged from hundreds of thousands to about 10 million to even tens of millions. (When Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., accused Musk of executing “a death sentence for an estimated 4.5 million children around the world,” Musk threatened to sue him.) 

But not all harm results in immediate, quantifiable fatalities. HIV-related deaths usually take many years to occur, and South Africans who die of HIV, or due to an increasingly transphobic healthcare system, are unlikely to be mourned in any numerically comprehensive database.

In South Africa, being trans is not a crime — it’s legally protected thanks to its 1996 constitution shaped by Mandela. And yet, as one trans HIV-prevention worker put it, “we have rights for trans women only on paper.” Because trans care was largely being financed largely by USAID, PEPFAR, and CDC research, when U.S.-money disappeared, trans care went away — along with a lot of the much-needed HIV prevention for everyone.

In South Africa, LGBT Pride celebrations happen in the fall to connect gay history to the September 24 Heritage Day national holiday. 

At last year’s Soweto Pride in the all-Black township where Winnie Mandela once lived, there were no corporate sponsors and zero presence from the U.S. Embassy or any U.S.-based NGOs. 

It was here The Intercept first met Sibonelo Ncanana Trower, the worker at OUT LGBT Well-Being which had run the now-shuttered Engage clinic. He and his partner were wearing matching rainbow sweaters. Nearly nine months after being laid off, he was still looking for work — and it was one of his first times going to a gay event.

Though he was no longer getting paid, Sibonelo still was doing a lot of public health work for free, out of a sense of communal responsibility.

“If you go on Grindr — and I don’t suggest that you do, it’s too dangerous,” Sibonelo said, “you will see many of my former colleagues offering services.” People who had been trained as social workers and peer educators to provide care to sex workers were now working as sex workers. In an email to The Intercept, Sibonelo said he is back to working at OUT as of early June.

As the festivities continued, the almost entirely Black crowd danced to a mix of hip hop, rap, and dance hall on a grass field, bordered on one side by tents. Under the banner “The Queer Nation Has No Borders,” a group of volunteers and workers at the SafePlace International tent welcomed LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees and offered help for finding housing and work.

While Europeans are routinely worried about African refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to Greece or Italy, SafePlace explained that most migrants in Africa are not trying to leave the continent at all — and most queer and African migrants fleeing legal persecution head down to South Africa. They try to go south because they’ve correctly heard that South Africa is legally good for queer Africans and that they can claim asylum. But they also come because they’ve heard — rather incorrectly — that South Africans welcome migrants. (In recent decades, migrants have faced great hostility in South Africa, especially in the lead-up to 2025’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, which Trump boycotted, and in increasingly bold xenophobic protests in 2026.)

Mpho is a lesbian from rural South Africa, and she spoke about a kind of refugee status few Westerners consider. Mpho explained that people who come from within South Africa to Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria or Johannesburg are often called immigrants, for their distinct cultures, languages (South Africa officially has 12 languages), and understandings of sexuality, gender, and being intersex. She herself knew she was different; but in her township, where there is not constant connectivity with mass media, she didn’t know anyone like her until she came to a big city. 

Masi has had an even more challenging route. He is a trans man born in Zambia who made his way to South Africa, after surviving an arranged marriage and a community shunning.

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Mpho and Masi have both known trans people who have experienced extreme body dysmorphia, including trans men who have started to have periods again once they lost access to hormone replacement therapy due to the Trump–Musk cuts. They know someone who has gone into the public health system, had their doctor leave the room in the middle of a genital exam — and then return with a group of colleagues to laugh at their body.

This has led to a wave of depression and suicides among their friends. Masi has made the difficult decision to only “socially transition.” He has chosen to dress and live as a man without hormonal or surgical intervention, because he does not want to begin any process that he can’t finish, or which could be taken away from him for any time.

A few days later, Masi and Mpho drove into Johannesburg in a car early on a Saturday morning, decked out in “the queer nation has no borders” swag. With them was Mandi, a trans woman from Uganda. While Mandi waits for surgeries she plans to have, she has found a way to get estrogen — and stay on it — despite “the cuts.”

The three friends were on their way to perform an “Act of Kindness,” a part of SafePlace’s program where queer and trans people perform service projects which confer dignity upon each other. (SafePlace is privately funded, and like other privately funded NGOs, its work and workers are stressed in trying to meet the profound additional need in the wake of U.S. and WHO cuts.) Masi, Mpho, and Mandi would be serving lunch at a shelter for displaced queer women in the Vaal area, south of Johannesburg.

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Mandi grew up assigned as a boy but knew she liked other boys. Uganda only made being gay a capital offense in the last couple of years, but it has been illegal in various forms since at least 2014. As in many places, Mandi’s legal problems did not come from random government surveillance; rather, she kissed a friend, whose parents found out, who told their school, who told the authorities, who arrested them both. This, in turn, outed Mandi to her family, who threw her out on the street. (She has never seen them again.)

Eventually, she made her way 5,000 kilometers by land to South Africa. 

Mandi had an idea that South Africa “accepted people like me,” and while living on the streets of Cape Town (and then in the back of a restaurant where she did unpaid labor), someone pointed her to SafePlace. They found her a home, helped her get healthcare, and supported her in starting to live as a woman.

After crossing the Mandela Bridge, the roads shifted from highway to unpaved, red-clay-earth roads. They arrived in the Vaal and approached Orange Farm, an area well known to AIDS researchers for its high prevalence of HIV and for hosting many research studies, including the world’s first trial to see how circumcision could affect rates of HIV transmission.

Mpho, Masi, and Mandi pulled up to a nice home, double wide in size, which had a rainbow flag on its fence. This was the shelter where they’d be serving lunch.

The group set up a precarious gas stove in the garage and began cooking massive amounts of chicken, vegetables, and pap, the South African grain dish that is akin to Cream of Wheat in America or polenta in Italy. 

Before the meal, Mandi got up in front of important community elders from the neighborhood and told her story. She implored them that the most important thing about having an LGBTQ+ child is to not kick them out and to stay connected. As a cautionary tale, she warned them that her elders now wanted her to return to Uganda to take care of them in old age — even after they’d abandoned her. 

Gwendolyn Dube lives in the Orange Farm section of the Vaal, in a tin-roofed shack with no running water or electricity, not far from the Steve Biko Elementary School. 

At 35, she has lived with HIV for more than 20 years; she was infected when she was raped as a child. She was among the first cohort of South African children to receive antiretroviral medication, or ARVs, in the early 2000s. 

For many years, she received free medical care and ARVs at a clinic across the street from Eyethu Orange Farm Mall. It encompasses many buildings across a large campus, and its rooms are simple and very crowded. A small pride flag hangs on a poll beside the South African flag — both are at half mast, for no discernible reason.

While this is not officially an HIV clinic, Orange Farm has one of the highest rates of HIV anywhere in the world, and HIV is part of most medical care here. In a room with racked, connected plastic chairs like a bus terminal, signs read: “Are you or your child on ARVs? Do you know your VIRAL LOAD?”

Moving through the hall full of hundreds of mothers with children carried on backs in baby wraps, Gwendolyn recalled how difficult it’s become to get medicine. She used to get three months of treatment at a time, then two, then one. Then she was told there was no file for her. 

“I think they say that when they’re overworked,” she said. 

One of the workers behind the check-in desk told The Intercept that things have gotten much harder since the cuts: “We don’t turn people away. But we don’t have enough staff. People will come here and wait for 8, 10, even 12 hours — and sometimes they don’t even get to see someone about what they need.” (For people living in abject poverty, the loss of a day’s earnings can be devastating — especially if they have HIV and have to face this risk regularly.) 

Another clinic worker shared that since the cuts, many visiting healthcare workers on U.S.-funded grants not only left, but also took their equipment with them.

The nurses of the clinic move with a military precision, even wearing military rank epaulets on their shoulders. The head of them is the “matron,” who, when asked by The Intercept, denied that they’ve run out of any medication, or that they turn people away (a claim Gwendolyn and others disputed). The matron conceded that sometimes people have to wait so long “they will leave” — and maybe don’t come back. She acknowledged that the clinic doesn’t always have the specific medication people need when they need it. She also bemoaned that it’s hard to keep staff, burnout and turnover are high, and that her mobile teams, which would go out into the townships, are severely limited. 

“I used to send teams out every day,” she said. “Now, it’s maybe once a week.” 

Shon, a Black trans woman living with HIV, is still working at the Aurum Institute — at least for now. Unlike at the shuttered Engage clinic in Johannesburg, some staff remain in Aurum’s Pretoria office, but they decreased in number. As a result, Aurum is offering fewer services and steering patients to the public health system, where trans people receive little necessary care.

Aurum used to be a “one-stop shop” for trans women, Shon said. But now, after the cuts, doctors visits are no longer free and hormone drugs aren’t available at Aurum’s popular Pop Inn clinics. “The ladies do come to get [HIV medication], others come to get PrEP, but they cannot get hormones,” Shon said. “They’re told to go to a public clinic,” but “they don’t know anything about trans women!” Shon added that patients will be addressed with derogatory and incorrect terminology at such locations. 

The stigma is too high to go to a public clinic, so Shon goes to a private doctor herself, when she can afford it. But getting hormones is now tough. While patients aren’t being blackmailed as they are in Uganda, “a pharmacist might say, ‘What do you need this for? No, I’m not giving it to you for that. I have other patients who really need it,’” Shon said.

Trans women are struggling, Shon said, recalling how she knew two “who were suffering from depression. One couldn’t take hormones, became really religious,” stopped hormones, and became suicidal. Another was suffering from liver problems after buying hormones on the contraband market, without the supervision of doctors.

Whenever transgender patients are taking contraband hormones via syringes which might not be sterile, they are being exposed to increased risks of contracting HIV and hepatitis — all because DOGE cuts took sterile medical care away from them.

Amid the devastating cuts to global HIV care, a potential breakthrough treatment is just beginning to reach patients. Lenacapavir, a new medication, promises to prevent HIV for six months with just one injection. But it comes with a prohibitively expensive $28,000-a-year price tag, making it out of reach for those who need it most.

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Recently, the Global Fund for HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria struck a deal with pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences to produce the shot for $40 in limited quantities. Small amounts are headed to South Africa.

At an outdoor cafe under a massive tree in the picturesque city of Cape Town, Fatima Hassan, a legal and HIV scholar, blasted the pilot study coming to the republic.

The government’s approach was “making the same mistake” of excluding those who were most affected: sex workers and men who have sex with other men.

The plan is to bring a one-time shipment of 40,000 doses — a woefully inadequate number for a country of more than 60 million people where about 1 in 5 adults is living with the virus is living with the virus. 

Worse, only a tiny fraction — 5 percent, or 2,000 doses — is to be set aside for testing on men who have sex with men.

None are going to be set aside for sex workers. 

And another problem: So many of the people who would be needed to distribute lenacapavir to the people who need it most — to the gay college students who used the shuttered Engage clinic on Joburg’s Reserve Street, to the trans women who went to the Pretoria Pop Inn clinic — have been fired. Without those workers, can South Africa even distribute the medication?

Steps from the cafe, within sight of well-appointed apartments topped with electrified razor wire and the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, there is a shantytown of cardboard-and-wood dwellings, home to some 100 Black adults without anywhere else to live. 

A conservative estimate means that probably at least 20 of them were living with HIV, if not more. 

And because of Trump and Musk, the people who used to find them and treat them have been fired — and are at higher risk of HIV themselves.

The post How Trump Destroyed South Africa’s Effort to Slow HIV Transmission appeared first on The Intercept.

The Limits of American Might

The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration’s sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as “the Houthis” have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East. 

The long-standing conflict between Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen’s Ansarullah, or “Helpers of God,” led by the Houthi clan, heated up again in July 2026, when Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa International Airport to prevent a Houthi delegation from landing on its return from the funeral in Iran for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Ansarullah government launched its own attacks and, in October, managed briefly to close Saudi Arabia’s own airport. The renewed war has now expanded into a regional conflict, with Pakistan, Türkiye, and, recently, Egypt pledging to defend the kingdom from attack, though none of these regional powers appear eager to conduct operations in Yemen itself. Notably absent from the current conflict is Saudi Arabia’s most powerful ally, the United States, since President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to intervene on behalf of his Saudi allies.

The typical U.S. press framing of Ansarullah as an “Iran-backed militia” is inaccurate, since the movement has local, Arab nationalist reasons for its actions and is a full-scale government that rules some 80 percent of Yemen’s population. Still, it does receive surreptitious technical and military support from Iran, though nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech armaments — from kits turning 2,000-pound “dumb” bombs into precision munitions to advanced air-to-air missiles — that the U.S. provides the Saudis. Ironically, Trump’s war on Iran, fought in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weakened the Saudis and exposed their vulnerabilities to military attack by Iranian drones and missiles, impelling them to seek a symbolic win over a less formidable enemy in neighboring Yemen. But the weaknesses exposed by Iran’s drones helped encourage a vigorous Ansarullah rejoinder.

The Incredible Shrinking Superpower

The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia’s war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which housed 10,000 U.S. personnel. Thousands of ground troops were barracked in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The Pentagon admitted that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.”

The naval base at Manama, one of America’s most important naval facilities and headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, was destroyed by Iranian strikes. (Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”) The loss of Manama led to supply shortages and poor morale aboard the USS Lincoln and other ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, bedeviling Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The CIA offices at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh were annihilated. Iran struck al-Udeid’s evacuated Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, from which the Pentagon had directed its strikes on enemies as diverse as the Taliban and ISIL over recent decades, and rendered this facility inoperable. All U.S. troops were also withdrawn from Iraq, a process accelerated by the inability of U.S. missile interceptors to protect them from attacks by Iran and allied Shiite militias there.

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Iran’s deployment of swarms of Shahed drones caused the United States and Israel to use up much of their stock of interceptors, which are time-consuming and expensive to replace. A basic Shahed costs as little as $20,000, though new hardened versions are more expensive — whereas a Patriot interceptor costs $4 million. One reason the Trump administration may be reluctant to intervene in Yemen is that if the U.S. cannot fly missions from al-Udeid, and cannot be sure any new fighter-jet fleets stationed in the region will be safe from Iran, given the paucity of interceptors, the Pentagon will have a limited ability to rescue any U.S. pilots shot down over Yemen.

America’s Profound Weakness in the Middle East 

Saudi Arabia launched a war against the ascendant Ansarullah in 2015 when the latter staged a coup in the capital of Sanaa. The Ansarullah movement is rooted in Yemen’s Zaidi Shiism, though it is more radical than traditional Zaidism. (Zaidi Shiism differs substantially from Iranian Shiism, having no ayatollahs and having relatively good relations with Sunnis.)

About a third of Yemenis are Zaidis, who predominate in the north of the country, and many have long resented the dominance of their politics and culture by neighboring, oil-rich, Sunni Saudi Arabia, whose official ideology is hard-line Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabi proselytizing among the Shia enraged the Houthi clan and their followers began rebelling against the government of military dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2004. But when he was deposed by popular demonstrations during the Arab Spring in 2012, Saleh gradually allied with the Houthis, and by 2015 about half the Yemeni military rallied to their side, along with some major Sunni tribes.

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In response to the Houthis’ rise, a Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates began bombing Yemen in 2015. Until 2022, the U.S, then militarily dominant in the region, provided the Saudis with strategic advice, weaponry, and in-air refueling for their fighter jets in the Yemen war, though Riyadh’s tendency to bomb civilian infrastructure rather than confining themselves to military targets caused tension between the two allies. While the Saudis and their coalition pushed the Houthis out of much of the south of the country, including Aden, they were unable to dislodge them from the north. The Saudis implicitly acknowledged their failure with a United Nations-brokered truce in April 2022, which largely held until this past summer.

The Forever Wars Effect

America’s forever wars against Middle Eastern countries that decline to accept the Israel project or American corporate neocolonialism helped reignite the Saudi–Yemeni conflict. Iran is the last major state in the region that rejects Israel and is off-limits to U.S. corporate investment, a stance that inspires much of Washington’s animus. Netanyahu was therefore easily able to persuade Trump, as a privileged visitor to the White House Situation Room, to attack Iran in February.

The glib expectation of Netanyahu and of his Mossad chief at that time, David Barnea, that the Islamic Republic would crumble if Israel murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and around 50 other high-ranking regime figures proved wishful thinking. The notion that Iran was vulnerable to a tightened petroleum blockade was turned on its head by the hard-liners who ascended to power after Khamenei’s death. Largely veterans of the grueling eight-year Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, the country’s new leaders pursued a policy of “de-basing” toward the United States, taking out its main regional military facilities.

In addition, Iran launched precision strikes at the energy facilities of their Arab Gulf neighbors who had hosted those American bases. They struck Kuwait’s national petroleum company and its fields and refineries. They took out 17 percent of the production of Qatar’s Ras Laffan natural gas facility, even though Doha had good relations with Tehran and had mediated for Iran. Tehran also struck ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, using missiles and drones, scaring the major shipping insurers into withdrawing their contracts. Few shipping magnates would risk cargoes worth billions of dollars without insurance.

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Iran threw the world into an energy crisis reminiscent of the 1970s, which would have been even more devastating had China not released oil from its vast private and public petroleum reserves and cut its oil imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to under 9 million barrels a day, a move partially enabled by its turn to electric vehicles, which saved it 1.5 million barrels a day. High gasoline and diesel prices hurt Asia more than the United States, but prices rose globally. A third of the world’s helium, essential for cooling computer chips in the production process, comes from the Gulf, and that supply was also interrupted, increasing the price of electronics.

By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom’s ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable. By blockading the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the United States had difficulty undoing, Iran demonstrated the vulnerability of key world maritime arteries, something Ansarullah had already highlighted by striking at shipping in the Red Sea to protest the Gaza genocide. 

Blockade for Blockade

When the Saudis bombed Sanaa’s airport in July 2026, Ansarullah’s leadership appears to have decided that Riyadh posed an ongoing existential danger to their state and sought to strangle the Yemeni economy, just as Israel had done to Gaza. Moreover, they sensed that the kingdom could be rolled back in the wake of the failure of the Israeli–U.S. war on Iran. Just as Iran had weakened the Gulf Arab states with its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis believed they could seriously degrade the Saudi economy by blocking Riyadh’s shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, “the Strait of Tears,” between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Saudi exports through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen substantially. The kingdom did, however, have an escape valve: its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Ships loading at Yanbu then headed for Saudi Arabia’s major Asian markets through the Bab al-Mandab. If Ansarullah could make the tanker captains fearful of this transit, they could reduce Saudi Arabia’s income even further. The Houthi spokesperson, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, warned that the prohibition of Saudi shipping was only the first step in a tit-for-tat strategy of “blockade for blockade.” The idea wasn’t original. The Saudis and the U.S. had often attempted to blockade petroleum imports to northern Yemen during the seven-year Saudi–Yemeni War.

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In the subsequent three months, Ansarullah deployed missiles and drones constructed from Iranian models by military engineers trained by the old nationalist government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, many of whom had joined the Ansarullah military, in what has been called a Yemeni “military industrial complex.”

Just as the kingdom’s interceptors had proven unable to prevent Iranian strikes on targets such as the CIA section of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, they sometimes failed to halt the barrage of Yemeni missiles and drones. Refineries and oil installations, even the headquarters of the state oil giant, Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran, were hit. In October, Ansarullah closed Riyadh’s International Airport, just as the Saudis had attempted to close that of Sanaa in July. Ansarullah also surged out of their mountain strongholds and made a major push to Yemen’s southwest coast, taking the strategic port of Mocha overlooking the Bab al-Mandab. They also moved on Taiz, an inland industrial city of nearly 1 million inhabitants, one of the last major population centers not already under their control, in a campaign that tested the ability of the small Saudi-backed government of Rashad al-Alimi in Aden to resist it.

Highlanders and Oil Sheikhs

Just as the Vietnam War was one conflict among many fought in the Third World during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so the Saudi–Yemeni War of 2026 is part of the larger struggle between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. Still, just as Vietnam was more about Vietnamese anticolonialism, nationalism, and sovereignty than about Communism and the ownership of the means of production, so the Saudi–Yemeni War is about Yemeni autonomy more than it is about the loose Houthi alliance with Iran. The conflict is not primarily between Zaidism and Wahhabism, though religious tensions are part of the story, but is far more rooted in a struggle between desperately poor Yemeni highlanders and fabulously wealthy Saudi sheikhs.

The plutocratic Saudi ruling elite is closely tied to Washington and has secret dealings with the Israelis, with whom it shares a distrust of the poverty-stricken Palestinian resistance, and views Ansarullah as cat’s paws of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula and as radical republicans trying to overthrow the region’s oil monarchies in favor of populism. For its part, Ansarullah are Arab nationalists, anti-American, and seek to use oil resources for populist purposes. And they have been willing to attack Israel to defend the Palestinians of Gaza from genocide.

Last week, Ansarullah battered targets across Saudi Arabia, prompting a further pullback from the region by Washington. The Yemeni forces attacked King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. An Ansarullah spokesperson said the group also targeted the Saudi defense ministry in the capital, Riyadh, along with an Aramco site in Yanbu, and an airport in the southern city of Abha. Reports also emerged of an attack on another Aramco oil field.

“Houthis have increasingly engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure,” wrote State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott in an October 21 post on X, after the wave of attacks, ordering “non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members” out of Saudi Arabia.

It’s just the latest evidence of the most significant regional retreat by the U.S. in half a century and evidence of profound American military decline. The outcome of their war with the Saudis will not determine the issue of the U.S.–Israeli contest with Iran, but the very ability of Ansarullah to prosecute it points to the profound weakening of the American posture in the Middle East.

The post The Incredible Shrinking Superpower appeared first on The Intercept.

“I never thought about leaving the country,” Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator and son of the deposed, disgraced leader, told his 16 million Instagram followers on Monday. It was the day after he lost the presidential election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a margin of more than 4 million votes. 

Flávio promised to stay in Brazil to “organize the opposition” during Lula’s next term. 

“I’m the last obstacle to the Workers’ Party’s plan to destroy the country,” Flávio warned, referring to the party of Lula, who defeated his father four years earlier.

A few hours later, he left his mansion in Brasilia and sought asylum in the U.S. The Trump State Department told The Associated Press that it will grant him and his family visas.

“I didn’t take ​sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday, echoing Flávio’s election night talking points without providing any credible evidence that casts doubt on Lula’s come-from-behind victory — even as Flávio’s own party put out a statement acknowledging the results later that day.

It is no coincidence that the Trumps and the Bolsonaros are so fond of each other. Their modus operandi is nearly identical. 

Both wrap themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism and moral righteousness, while treating their political offices as personal get-rich-quick schemes. And, when their lies finally catch up with them, you can be sure that they will jump ship to save themselves first and abandon their followers.

The affinities become obvious when you watch Bolsonaro, his failsons, and co-conspirators all end up in Trump’s America, where Flávio is about to join his brother, and in the denialism and violence that follow their failures.

Coups and Flight Risks

Flávio Bolsonaro’s election denial and hasty escape are his version of Trump’s infamous January 6 speech: Rile up the troops to do your dirty work and get the hell out of the way.

It’s not the first time a Bolsonaro ran this playbook. After Jair Bolsonaro became the first modern Brazilian president to lose a reelection bid, he refused to attend the January 2023 inauguration ceremony. Instead, he also fled to the U.S., staying in a Minions-themed children’s bedroom in the Orlando, Florida, home of retired UFC fighter José Aldo.

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A week later, on January 8, the ex-president’s allies laid siege to the capital, Brasília, vandalizing Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court, as foot soldiers in a larger coup plotted to overthrow the Lula government. Nearly four decades of Brazilian democracy was only spared when key military leaders blinked before they could finish the job.

Jair Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading the plot, which included a plan to assassinate Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Allies, including top military brass, were also convicted. Jair remains under house arrest — widely thought to be pinning his hopes for freedom on a Flávio presidency that wasn’t to be.

Flávio, however, will not be lonely in the States. His brother, former Brazilian Congress member Eduardo Bolsonaro, just received green cards for his family and is living in a $1.2 million McMansion in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as we revealed in The Intercept Brasil earlier this year. Eduardo, who is a regular on the Trumpworld circuit, was sentenced in absentia to four years and two months in prison for lobbying the U.S. government to interfere in his father’s trial. 

Flávio, too, seems poised to receive news of his own prison sentence while sitting on a couch in a Texas suburb. In May, our reporting at The Intercept Brasil put the first nail in the coffin of his presidential campaign when we published chat logs and audio recordings of the senator negotiating $24 million — and being wired $10 million — from disgraced billionaire banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is a sort of Brazilian cross between Charles Ponzi and Jeffrey Epstein. 

The payments, wired to a U.S. account, were supposedly meant to finance “Dark Horse,” a biopic about Jair Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. Brazilian Federal Police, though, have already poked holes in Flávio’s story as they investigate whether the money was actually used to bankroll Eduardo’s treasonous lobbying of the Trump administration to sanction Brazil and help his brother’s electoral chances. 

Flávio is also being investigated for his alleged ties to a billion-dollar money-laundering scheme through an online betting company run by Willer Tomaz. The two are not only close friends but also business partners. Flávio even had unfettered access to one of Tomaz’s offshore bank accounts. You will not be surprised to learn that Tomaz left Brazil in August and is now living in Miami.

Police argued that, after losing the election, Flávio would pose a flight risk, especially in light of his closest associates’ recent actions. They asked the Brazilian Supreme Court to order Flávio to turn over his passport, which is permitted under Brazilian law. A top justice granted the request and, when the deadline passed, canceled the senator’s travel documents. 

By then, Flávio was already on his way to the U.S.

The post The Bolsonaro Family Playbook: Lose, Cry Fraud, and Run to Trump’s America appeared first on The Intercept.

Bankrolling Empire

During the Cold War, the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines was a key enabler of U.S. military operations in the Pacific and beyond. It served as a critical support facility for the U.S. war in Vietnam and a transit point for U.S. weapons destined for American military personnel in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That all changed in June of that year, when the Philippine Congress, under pressure from a grassroots anti-bases movement, refused to renew the lease for Subic Bay and other U.S. outposts in that nation.

After the closing of U.S. bases, military relations between the U.S. and the Philippines were conducted indirectly through arms transfers, joint training exercises, and deployments of Special Operations forces to aid Philippine counterinsurgency efforts, rather than by the permanent presence of tens of thousands of troops. The relationship was codified in 1999, when Washington and Manila entered into a Visiting Forces Agreement, which eased the movement of U.S. troops and equipment in and out of the Philippines and put U.S. personnel in the country under the jurisdiction of U.S. rather than Philippine authorities.

But now Subic Bay is back in play as part of a new expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines. And this time around, private capital is financing these empire games.

Military Might Versus Human Rights

The long-standing U.S. military ties with the Philippines have come at a high price for the residents of that nation. Washington’s military and economic interests there have prompted it to look the other way as repressive leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte engaged in systematic human rights abuses against their own people.

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To its credit, the Reagan administration eventually cut ties with Marcos — who was overthrown through peaceful protests known as the “People Power” revolt in 1986 — throwing its support behind his democratically elected opponent, Corazon Aquino. But there was no such shift with respect to Duterte, whose regime ruled the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, and engaged in extrajudicial killings of thousands of Filipinos, including journalists and land reform activists, all under the guise of a “war on drugs.” Duterte is now under indictment by the International Criminal Court, which has cited him for “the crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder.”

While Marcos and his family fled the Philippines in the 1980s, his son — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — returned and, in 2022, won the presidency in a landslide, in part by promising to continue some of the strongman policies introduced by Duterte. According to Human Rights Watch, since the younger Marcos took office:

Serious human rights violations have continued in the country largely unabated, including arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances by security forces. The murderous ‘war on drugs’ has continued, though with fewer killings. Leftist civil society activists, journalists, environmentalists, Indigenous leaders, trade unionists, and left-wing politicians remain under serious, at times deadly, threat.

During the Biden presidency, the U.S. expanded a 2014 pact — the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement — which gave the U.S. military access to five major sites in the Philippines. In 2023, the number of bases was expanded to nine. The State Department has described the scope of the EDCA as authorizing “U.S. forces access to agreed locations in the Philippines on a rotational basis, for security cooperation exercises, joint and combined military training activities, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief activities.” That official summary fails to admit the real reason for the signing of the EDCA: to give the U.S. access to territory that can be used in a future war with China.

The Privatization of Subic Bay

Building on his predecessor’s enhanced cooperation with the Philippines, President Donald Trump, who had been a staunch Duterte supporter, has pursued even tighter ties with Marcos’s government. This has been driven, in significant part, by the desire to use the Philippines as a platform for potential U.S. military interventions in the Pacific region and further economic penetration of Asia.

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As part of the accelerating security partnership between the U.S. and the Philippines, military activities at Subic Bay have resumed. But this time, formal access has been secured by a private investment firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which controls the area through a 50-year lease granted through collaboration with a Philippine company, Agila.

A report by the New York Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, a member of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, summarized current activities at Subic Bay:

In mid-2025, the U.S. Congress approved a plan to build a forward operating base and ammunition production facility in Subic Bay. It is projected to be the world’s largest weapons hub. … The shipyard [is home to] HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, deep sea fiber optic data cables manufacturer Sub Com, defense contractor V2X and the Philippine Navy, which operates a portion of the facility.

Cerberus has strong ties to the Trump administration, first and foremost through its founder, Stephen Feinberg, who is deputy secretary of the Department of War, second in command at the Pentagon behind Pete Hegseth. In that role, Feinberg oversees the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which makes loans to military tech companies.

Feinberg “earned” his position the old-fashioned way — by giving millions to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC devoted to supporting Trump, and hosting a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser, the proceeds of which also went to support candidate Trump in 2016.

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Bloomberg News has identified four other former Cerberus executives now in key positions at the Pentagon: David Lorch, director of the OSC; George Kollitides, a special government employee who is simultaneously a director of D. Boral Acquisition, a company that brokers mergers and acquisitions in the weapons sector; and senior Pentagon advisers John Gallagher and Tom Rakusan.

On the other side of the revolving door, Cerberus has hired major Republican figures like former Treasury Secretary John Snow and former Vice President Dan Quayle, who serves as chair of the company’s global investment unit. Given these connections, the Pentagon is all-in behind Cerberus’s activities in the Philippines. But this has prompted a backlash. Activists in the Philippines and beyond are speaking out against the role of Cerberus, calling for public pension funds to withdraw their investments in the company for underwriting the militarization of the Philippines.

Another important avenue of increased cooperation between the U.S. and the Marcos government is the Philippines’ participation in Pax Silica, a U.S.-initiated cartel that the State Department describes as its “flagship effort on AI and supply chain security, advancing new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners.” And by “supply chain security,” the declaration primarily means “reducing dependence on China” for critical minerals needed to feed and sustain the computing power now central to the Pentagon and the U.S. arms industry.

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In addition to the Philippines, there are 24 other participants in Pax Silica, including two other key Asian partners, India and Japan, as well as Taiwan, which is an associate member of the cartel. Jacob Helberg, a former adviser to military tech giant Palantir who now serves as the State Department’s point person on Pax Silica, has stressed that the initiative goes well beyond just securing the supply of specific critical resources. “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on [computing power] and the minerals that feed it,” he said. “This declaration [announcing Pax Silica] hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow — from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing models.”

The China Syndrome

Although it supplies many other benefits to U.S. corporations and America’s national security state, the enhanced effort to bring the Philippines more securely into the U.S. military, political and economic orbit is all rationalized as moves toward reining in China’s economic and military power and garnering Manila’s support in a possible war between China and the U.S.

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The policy of economic warfare and aggressively preparing for a military conflict with China could not be more misguided. The oft-cited “need” to posture U.S. forces to do battle with China over Taiwan ignores the fact that there are diplomatic means of preventing such a conflict.

What is needed is a joint understanding on the status of Taiwan. For over 40 years, peace in the Taiwan Strait has been maintained through the U.S.–China agreement that Washington will not take steps toward recognizing Taiwan as an independent state and China would agree not to resolve the issue of Taiwan by force — the so-called “One China” policy. That agreement has been weakened by actions taken during both the Biden and Trump administrations. The simplest and best way for Washington and Beijing to avoid a war over Taiwan would be to revert to the “One China” policy.

China does not pose a direct military threat to the United States. Its last major war was its invasion of Vietnam in 1979, a conflict in which its troops were badly beaten by battle-hardened Vietnamese forces. The U.S. also spends almost three times as much on its military as China does, and is far ahead of Beijing in numbers of advanced combat aircraft, naval firepower, and nuclear weapons.

In areas where China might be a peer competitor with the U.S. military, like AI-driven weapons, there need to be some rules of the road on how such systems can be used. Using trade wars and military buildups as the primary U.S. tool for influencing China simply will not work. The likely result of persisting in such an approach will be a dangerous arms race and an increased risk of outright war.

A more productive approach to U.S.–China relations would be to seriously explore cooperation on central issues like arms control, addressing the climate crisis, and stabilizing the global economy. There would still be a U.S. military strategy for the Asia–Pacific region, but it should be genuinely defensive in nature, a posture that could save hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come.

Pursuing a more balanced policy toward China would open the way to developing more equal, less exploitative relations with the Philippines and other nations in the Pacific, and it would allow Washington to finally take a genuine interest in promoting human rights and opposing repression as central pillars of U.S. international relations.

At a time when armed conflict and threats of war are the bedrock of U.S. policy, from the Western Hemisphere to the Middle East, a shift toward diplomacy seems daunting. But it is the only way forward if we want to move toward a more peaceful world where no one nation or group of nations dominates, and where corporations aren’t bending foreign and domestic policies to their will.

Correction: November 3, 2026

An earlier version of this story overstated the quantity of military tech companies under the oversight of Steven Feinberg that are current or former Cerberus clients.

The post Bankrolling American Empire in the Philippines appeared first on The Intercept.

Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday in one of the most consequential presidential elections of the last decade. The run-off election will determine the future of the largest democracy in Latin America and the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is facing off against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Bolsonaro is currently on house arrest for his role in a failed 2023 military coup that intended to assassinate Lula, his vice president, and a Supreme Court justice. Despite his father’s attempted coup, Flavio Bolsonaro is currently the frontrunner, after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

“If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election,” says Andrew Fishman, a Rio de Janeiro-based investigative journalist. “So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Sound familiar? This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Fishman, president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about what’s at stake for Brazil and the planet in Sunday’s election.

“It’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity,” Fishman tells The Intercept. Jair Bolsonaro oversaw significant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, leaving the ecological and climate linchpin in danger of becoming a “savanna.” Now, he argues, his son can finish the job. “You’re going to have an international migration crisis,” says Fishman. “It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business.”

President Donald Trump has taken a particular interest in the race, as he seeks to expand U.S. influence and control across the Western Hemisphere. “Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line,” says Fishman. “But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up [the Trump administration’s] plans, doesn’t it?”

Big Tech is also looming large over the race. “There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to,” adds Fishman.

In a request for comment, Meta said, “Meta applies the same rules to every candidate, every party and every political viewpoint in Brazil, as we do in elections around the world. We do not suppress content to disadvantage one side, and we do not give preferential treatment to any side. Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … Brazilian voters deserve facts, not a political narrative built by combining unrelated technical issues. Meta will continue to enforce its rules, comply with Brazilian electoral law, fix mistakes when they occur and provide a level playing field for everyone who uses our services.”

As U.S. leaders attempt to mold Brazil into a satellite state, Fishman argues the United States is slowly becoming more and more like its southern neighbor.

“It’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil,” says Fishman. “You have just shrinking spheres of democracy while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.” 

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Jessie, what do our listeners need to know about this week?

JW: I’ve been following a pretty disturbing story that’s actually centered on a campaign ad. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what I would argue is the ugliest campaign ad of a dark season. That is, of course, a season of campaign ads filled with Islamophobic, transphobic, sexist rhetoric, and racist rhetoric as well. But in the ad, the mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton accuses her daughter of being a liar, claiming “she’s lied her whole life.”

 Now, what makes this really dark is that Acton was removed from her mother’s care at 12 years old, after she alleges she was raped by her mother’s then-40-year-old husband. 

AL: That’s horrible. Has Acton responded? 

JW: Acton responded to the attack ad saying, “My brother Phil and I endured abuse, hunger, and neglect. We were often kept in a dark basement, were frequent-fliers with child protective services, and lived in fear of our birth mother’s violent and erratic temper. I’ve always known that she was deeply sick and unwell, and it’s sad to see Vivek Ramaswamy exploit her all for his own political gain.”

 This is one, as I’ve said, of the darkest campaign ads in a really horrifying season of campaign ads. 

Akela, I know you’ve been tracking another big election story this week on a beat you’ve covered for a really long time, and that’s [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].

AL: So we have been covering extensively the way that AIPAC’s strategy has changed over the last few election cycles since they started spending directly on campaigns.

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If you’ve been following our reporting, you know that we’ve written a lot about both their super PAC, United Democracy Project, and this shell PAC strategy where there were a number of different groups that popped up throughout the midterm season, took money from AIPAC, spent against candidates that AIPAC didn’t like, and then — per filings that came out this week — shut down and gave all their money back to AIPAC. 

So the idea being that, they had been trying to shield what was an increasingly toxic reputation amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza from creating backlash against their activity in these races. 

Jewish Insider scooped on Wednesday that AIPAC announced that it will no longer endorse candidates or give PAC contributions through its AIPAC PAC. Now, this doesn’t mean that they will stop spending on elections. Their super PAC, United Democracy Project, will continue to spend, as it has been pouring record amounts of money into various races. But this is getting a lot of attention, both from the left and I would say from the center. 

The left, Justice Democrats in particular, and candidates who are no longer in Congress, but I saw Jamaal Bowman talking about this, saying that this is the culmination of the fight that the left has been putting up against AIPAC in elections. I don’t know that I would categorize this as a win necessarily, considering that the super PAC seems like it’s going to continue to spend a lot of money. But that was the big news in my campaign finance world this week. 

JW: You’ve done a lot of really interesting coverage of how AIPAC is moving their money around through these different PACs and trying to get around the fact that people really dislike AIPAC, and that it has really tarnished the reputation of candidates who take this money. Obviously, this is a maneuver to get rid of the reputational harm of AIPAC money while still giving people AIPAC money. 

I’ve actually been tracking a story completely off our election cycle, and that’s what’s going on in France. I know we touched on that a couple weeks ago but, really, these protests have taken on another life.

 For those who don’t know, in France, there were these protests that were initially launched by students primarily in the suburbs concerned about educational inequality. This meant staffing shortages and poor facilities. But it has exploded into a nationwide uprising about the cost of living and broader economic inequality. 

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, and not to bring it too quickly back to the U.S., but President Donald Trump has used this as an opportunity to rail against immigrants. So despite the fact that there is zero indication any of the violence has been spurred on by immigrants. At a campaign rally on Monday, he told the crowd, “If Europe doesn’t close its borders and bring the criminals out, like the people that are protesting, Europe is finished.”

 So yeah, that’s just one other example of how Donald Trump has inserted himself into international politics.

AL: Trump has also inserted himself into politics in a different region in the world. We have the Brazilian elections for president heading to a runoff this week. I know you spoke, Jessie, to Andrew Fishman, an investigative reporter and president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about those elections.

JW:  It’s a really interesting election with a ton of parallels to the political situation in the United States, as well as, as you’ve pointed out, a ton of influence from the United States. On Sunday, Brazil will have a run-off presidential election that will determine the future of not only Latin America’s largest democracy, but also — and this is really important — the fate of the Amazon rainforest, and one could argue, the planet. 

This is the first presidential election since former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was imprisoned on house arrest in an attempted military coup, a sentence that his son, the current frontrunner, Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to overturn.

 I talked to Andrew about the media landscape, the history of military leadership, and the outside influences that have made this a tight race, despite the fact that the perceived frontrunner is running on freeing the man who attempted a coup years prior.

President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva is running for reelection. He’s accused both President Donald Trump and Meta of attempting to sway the election in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro. 

The Intercept reached out to Meta for comment, and Meta denied interfering in the election process, saying they do not suppress content to disadvantage one side or give preferential treatment to the other.

But this is a really interesting conversation with Andrew, and I’m excited for people to get to hear it.

AL: As am I. Let’s hear it. 

JW: Andrew, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrew Fishman: Hi, thanks for having me. 

JW: On Sunday, Brazilians will head to the polls in a runoff presidential election between right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to determine the leadership of Latin America’s largest democracy and biggest economy.

Now, this is the first presidential election since former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Capitol in 2023 and attempted to overturn the election results. Now, Flávio Bolsonaro, his son and ally, is widely considered to be the frontrunner after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

But as of Tuesday, his lead in the polls has been narrowing. Andrew, big picture, what are the major issues at play in this election on Sunday? 

AF: If you want to be really direct about it, it’s the future of humanity.

You have one candidate who’s been responsible for record reductions of deforestation in the Amazon; and you have another one who’s saying, let’s chop it all down, and farmers should be able to do whatever they want on their land.

And under his father’s leadership, deforestation in the Amazon soared, as in the other regions in the area. Scientists think that there’s a major tipping point that we could be on the cusp of, that if we were to reach that, the Amazon will turn into a savanna. There would be no going back from that.

If that were to happen, all of the rain in South America comes from the Amazon, basically. [That would affect] the cattle ranching that’s doing the deforestation, no more of the soy that’s doing the deforestation — people would have trouble feeding themselves. São Paulo would probably run out of water, which it has done in the past.

It’s very precarious. So you would be having mass refugee influxes, migrations. I really do think that this election is on that scale; it’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity, very possibly. 

JW: To your point, his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration oversaw significant deforestation of the rainforest, which houses 10 percent of all [known] species on Earth, and his son appears to be moving in that same direction.

Flávio told reporters in August that he did not believe in climate change and that “the best way to address environmental issues is what we did during the Bolsonaro administration,” referring, of course, to the senior Bolsonaro’s administration.

What is at stake for climate change when we’re talking about this massive deforestation that could potentially be happening if Flávio wins?

AF: Every ecosystem in South America is interconnected and in the world. If the Amazon collapses and turns into savanna and the rainfall stops, and you have this massive drying out of the continent — which is one of the major exporters of food in the world — you’re going to have all of those issues locally, and that’s going to impact local markets and everything. You’re going to have an international migration crisis.

But on top of that, we have no idea what the ecological knock-on effects of that could be. With that, we could be having a more rapid increase in polar ice cap melting. With the temperatures increasing, it could be exacerbating the death of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which is the thing that would put Europe back into an ice age. It’s very possible that’s already happening right now.

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We’re at this really tenuous moment for the climate, for the Earth, for humanity. And you have a candidate that says very proudly [he] doesn’t believe in any of that and wants to slash all mechanisms that are used to have more responsible management of land and prevent this massive catastrophe in just this proudly Luddite sort of way.

It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business. It’s really self-defeating in this way for the Brazilians, and these very short-term benefits for massive long-term costs.

There’s estimates that the impact that the Amazon has for the global economy is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and that benefit is far larger than the profits that they get out of these extractive industries that they do with farming and mining. It’s really hard to overstate the potential impacts that this could have.

JW: Is that urgency resonating with voters? 

AF: Absolutely not. That is not what people are voting about, unfortunately. It’s what the people living in the heavy agricultural regions — where their local economy depends on that — they’re voting for Flávio for that reason. But the people who are voting against him, yes, there’s many people that care about the Amazon and want to preserve it, but it’s not the issue that’s being discussed day to day on TV, in the news, on the streets.

People are talking more about more human issues of corruption and who has better communication, security, economics. They’re not talking about the Amazon, unfortunately. 

JW: That’s hardly surprising in the U.S. context, which I’m a little bit more acquainted with. Certainly climate, the environment, have never been top issues for voters, even if they’ve resonated more so with young people.

I did want to talk about another issue in the election, and that is the fate of Jair Bolsonaro. His son, Flávio Bolsonaro, has promised to free him. Jair Bolsonaro has been imprisoned on house arrest since 2025 for plotting a military coup. How is that particular campaign promise landing with the electorate in Brazil, and are you at all surprised by the public’s response?

AF: It’s very clear that for the Bolsonaros, this is an all-or-nothing for them. If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election. 

For them, it’s been very clear, and they’ve even said it in moments, that’s what this is about for them: their ability to get their father out of prison and to get themselves off the hook. Also, if you’re elected president, the investigations on things you did before you got elected, they go away.

So then Flávio’s off the hook, and he’s so wrapped up in so many different schemes and accusations and active investigations, some of which that we have revealed, including U.S. and abroad and offshore bank accounts and money laundering and potential connections to organized crime and militias. So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card. To do that, they’re going to completely change the structure of the Supreme Court, and they’ll be able to put in a majority even without impeachment. They already have the Senate and the lower house of Congress.

They would control all of the executive branch. They have the majority of governorships that are in their coalition, and they run the local police. And the executive has control over the federal police and all the investigative and regulatory agencies. So they would have just absolute lockstep control over every branch of government federally and most of local government as well.

It would be a democratically elected coup. 

JW: And voters, do they care about that? Do they care about the preservation of democracy? Is this ranking as a top election issue? 

AF: It’s always double speak, right? Both sides say that they’re preserving democracy. The Bolsonaristas say that Lula and the Supreme Court are running a judicial dictatorship right now because they were getting censored and put in jail for actively plotting a coup, which included active planning to assassinate Lula after he was elected, his vice president after he was elected, and a member of the Supreme Court. So that’s what they’re [Jair Bolsonaro and military officials] in jail for. That’s why they were getting pushback, and they’re saying that having the pushback against that is a dictatorship. 

In the meantime, you have the Lulistas who are saying that what the Bolsonaros want to do is a coup because they actively have said year after year, over and over again, “We want a coup. We love the military dictatorship. The military dictatorship was great! When we were torturing everybody, that was good.” Jair said, “When I’m elected, we’re going to take a machine gun and shoot down all of the leftists, the petistas, the Workers’ Party [Partido dos Trabalhadores] supporters.”

Remember that the military government was going alive and strong into the ’80s. It happened in ’64, and it went through the ’80s. So it’s very recent.

The people that are in his orbit, they were actually part of the military coup government until very recently. And I think that Lula supporters are very, very concerned about this. They really do care.

The Bolsonarista supporters, which are about 30 percent lockstep — same as it is in the U.S. with Trump — they’re just in their own information ecosystem, and they want Bolsonaro to win. It doesn’t matter, and anything that he does is good because it’s him.

It’s not, there are people that support the Workers’ Party, and there are people that support Bolsonaro. The Bolsonaro movement is essentially anti Workers’ Party, anti-petismo. The Bolsonaros have been seen as the greatest vehicle for getting rid of the Workers’ Party, which has been so hard to do because they’ve been so popular because of all the policies they’ve put into place over the years.

But you’ve had the media saying for 30 years now, just drilling it in, that the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores] equals corruption, the PT invented corruption. The PT is everything that is bad in Brazil, and anything that is not the PT is everything that is good in Brazil. You’ve had a generation of this narrative being repeated over and over in all these different instances that it’s really hard to shake.

JW: Could you talk more about that legacy of military leadership in Brazil, and for Brazilians, how they feel about it on the day to day? I recognize that it’s a very large country, as we’ve mentioned multiple times. I assume not everyone feels the same way, but I am curious about that legacy and how people respond to it.

AF: Brazil has been a country of negotiated solutions. So when they were the last in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888, it was not some sort of civil war or uprising. It was a negotiation: “OK, I think it’s time that we do this, but let’s just make sure that everyone that did own slaves is in the best possible situation, and let’s make sure that we have some sort of semi-slavery going on afterwards.”

It was really the same thing with the dictatorship. It was a moment where the economy was going into the can. It was very unpopular. It wasn’t having the economic glory years of before, and so they said, “All right, we’ll step back. We’ll let you run some elections, but we’re going to make sure that we’re never held accountable, that we’re able to continue exercising power in the way we want.”

As part of that, they were able to help control the narrative. So during the military dictatorship, there was an impression — and it continues today — that there wasn’t corruption. The reason why they had that impression, it was actually very corrupt, very corrupt. But the impression exists because there was censorship of the media, so the corruption that existed just wasn’t exposed.

When the Lula government came into power the first time in the early 2000s, they started making the federal police stronger. They made the judiciary stronger and more independent. They increased the ability of the federal government to investigate and uphold the rule of law. As a result of that, many corruption schemes started coming out of the woodwork that were legacy of the military leadership. 

It was called a civil military dictatorship, technically, in Brazil, because it was the business elite together with the military that did the coup and ran everything.

So that business elite didn’t change. It’s still the same families. They were running the same corruption schemes back then. They were running it through re-democratization. Whether it’s a right-wing government or a left-wing government in power, they’re making sure that their interests are being served. That corruption is just this constant throughline. People don’t really see that because that’s not how it’s presented in the media and in the day-to-day in communications.

I know for a fact that there’s lots of people that really want us to go back to the dictatorship. There are people that really want us to go back to the monarchy because they see it as a better, simpler time when things were the way that they should be. Everyone was in the right place and things were safer and everything was just better, this idealized past, “Make Brazil Great Again” sort of thing. How far back do you want to go? 

Then there are the people that, like Dilma Rousseff, who was the successor to Lula after a second term — who fought against the dictatorship — that are currently active in politics, that are still around, and they were tortured. Their friends were murdered. They know exactly what a dictatorship means and what it means for people like them, anyone that stands against those entrenched powers of the old elites that go back for centuries.

That’s why you have a lot of older voters tend to vote PT [Workers’ Party] because they came up with the workers’ struggle with re-democratization. They understand what that means. It’s this interesting dynamic now where you have more younger people that are starting to tip more to the right because they don’t have this memory.

They don’t remember what it was like in the ’80s in the northeast when there was water shortages and food shortages, and the standard of living was so much lower. You have this new narrative being rewritten in real time online.

JW: The parallels to the United States and Brazil are just incredibly striking in what you’re saying. This kind of the “Make America Great Again” movement and the Make Brazil Great Again, even if they’re not using those exact same phrases. There are just so many points of similarity, especially with what we’ve seen with youth even in the United States, some of whom have taken a rightward tilt.

I want to get into the relationship between Brazil and the U.S. because that’s obviously been such a big issue in this election. In a Lula ad earlier this month, his campaign called Flávio Bolsonaro Trump’s candidate, arguing that, “What Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our riches, steal our future, and leave us in the dust.”

Now, this comes after President Lula confirmed that Brazil denied visas to two U.S. officials over election interference concerns. The State Department has denied any claims of election meddling, telling reporters, “Any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie.”

Andrew, is there any evidence that the Trump administration is attempting to sway this election? Does it veer into election interference as we generally understand it? 

AF: The answer is oh God, yes. So much so it’s overwhelming. Overwhelming evidence, and it’s the same thing they’ve been doing across the region, which is why there’s been this rightward swing in elections across Latin America.

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That’s why they’re so interested in Brazil right now because Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line.

But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up their plans, doesn’t it? The interference has been done on many levels. The reality is that we don’t know the full extent of it, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years. We’re still learning about things that happened in 1964 with the U.S. role in the coup.

There’s dirty tricks happening that’s being run through intelligence agencies. That’s absolutely positive. There’s very, very strong signs that they’re using U.S. companies, Big Techs like Meta, who’s been getting a lot of attention — a lot of flak — lately because of clear signs that its algorithm is favoring Bolsonaro and suppressing Lula.

Multiple instances that they even admit happens, “Oh, but no, but it was just a mistake. It was just a mistake.” Meta and the Big Techs in the U.S., they’re really concerned about what a Lula government could do for their profits. Maybe Lula wants to have more sovereignty and control over what they’re doing.

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The Brazilian government doesn’t even know how much money they make in Brazil, the Big Techs. They just know how much money they send out through the tax bills that they pay and the money they send out of the country. The Big Techs in the U.S. are really concerned about getting their access on rare earths and on lithium reserves, which Brazil has the largest deposits of rare earths after China. This whole trade war with China, Brazil becomes much more important. It’s a huge market.

So you have one candidate that is just completely submissive — like painfully, embarrassingly submissive — to U.S. interests. So much so that one of his former closest allies, a general, Santos Cruz, who’s a very famous well-known general, he came out recently and said, “I’m a conservative. I’m right-wing. This is not conservatism. This is not right wing. This is just ‘voluntary submissiveness.’”

They’re just absolutely scamming Brazilians with this level of supplicancy that we’ve never seen before, that the military dictatorship even didn’t do, which was hand in glove with the U.S. interests. This is completely next level, and it’s something that obviously the left is very concerned about. 

But people like Santos Cruz, Brazilians that actually believe in Brazilian sovereignty, and that it’s important for Brazil to be able to pursue its own interests rather than the interests of foreign powers — they’re very concerned about that, which is, some segments of the elite. 

Whenever you have a submissive local government in an imperialist relationship, there are people that benefit. There are local people that will get special contracts, that will get special treatment. They’ll be able to crush their enemies through these relationships. And that’s what they’re doing in Bolivia and in Peru and in Ecuador right now.

What they did in Venezuela, where they just came in and took all of the oil and said, “All right. We’re going to take 90 percent of the oil profits, and we’ll give you a couple billion a year.” People are seeing this in Brazil. They see what Trump has done. And they’re still saying, “Well, we like Bolsonaro, so we’re going with Bolsonaro. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

It’s a massive issue, and I really, I don’t think we know how bad it will be and how submissive they’ll be this time around. Because it always is the case that, with right-wing authoritarian governments, it’s the second term where they really take off whatever mask was left and decide, “We have a mandate and we can do whatever we want.”

You saw it in the U.S. with Trump. They saw it in Turkey with Erdoğan. They saw it in Hungary with Orbán. They saw it in India with Modi. This is what always happens. It’s the second term where they say, “OK. We showed them who we are, and everyone said it’s fine.” They’re able to smoke out all of their rivals in the first term. They map them out, and so when the second time comes around, it’s just bang, bang, bang. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s maximize our power and do whatever we want. 

The result’s not going to be positive for Brazil. That’s the thing: If I were a Brazilian billionaire — which I am not — it would be in my personal interest for Brazil to follow the economic path that the Lula government is following, much more than what Bolsonaro is proposing.

Lula’s not some left-wing radical. He’s center-right. He was left, then he became center-left, and he’s moving ever more to the right. This last election, his vice presidential candidate was his former presidential rival, the center-right guy. They’re very much doing what the big banks want. They’re helping the big agro get what they want. They give tons of subsidies to major industries. But the thing that they do, they take a little bit of that money, and they spread it around to the poorest people with public services with access to education, with some cash transfers. We’re talking about 60 bucks or 80 bucks a month to families, and that is what is making the economy grow. Because if you don’t have consumers in your economy, and you have domestic industries you’re trying to build, then no one’s going to buy the things. Your employees can’t buy the things.

That’s intolerable to some people in Brazil, and they can’t see that it benefits their own economic interests.

You’re in this kind of crazy situation where it doesn’t really make sense what they’re doing. And they saw it happen with Bolsonaro, with Jair! They all supported him, and then he crashed the economy. Then they all went back to Lula begrudgingly and said, “OK, we’re going to support you in ’22 because things aren’t going very well.”

Then Lula turned it around immediately, and now they’re forgetting again and going back to Bolsonaro. Logically, it doesn’t make sense. It’s more psychological. Freud has to explain what’s going on.

JW: Again, the parallels between the United States and Brazil are very apparent in terms of some of those economic choices. You’ve already gone over what the U.S. wants to gain from involvement in this election. But there’s another foreign power that’s also interested in the election. Flávio Bolsonaro has been cozying up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously in stark contrast to President Lula, who’s been an ardent supporter of the Palestinians. What would a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency look like for Brazil’s stance towards Israel? 

AF: You can’t say that Lula has been the heroic savior, but he has made statements saying, “This is a genocide. This is very bad. This shouldn’t happen.”

At the same time, he’s allowed Petrobras to ship petroleum products to the Israeli government that are being used in the genocide. He’s allowed one of the major steel manufacturers to ship steel and ore to the Israeli weapons companies that are using it to build rifles and bombs to use in Gaza.

It’s not like you’re dealing with the leader of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] versus Netanyahu’s best friend. It’s a run-of-the-mill European-style center-left social democrat leader that’s kinda disappointing on this issue, versus someone that just wants to be absolutely submissive to everything that Israel wants and does and just completely supports it.

Again, you said, there’s so many parallels to the U.S. The parallels in Brazil, why does this make sense? Why would they care about supporting Israel? Why would this be something that they would want to put their name on, like these horrible scenes that people have been seeing for years online?

Everyone’s seeing it. Why would they want to support it? They kind of want to do the same thing in Brazil. One of the things that Jair always complains about is that he’s jealous of the U.S. because their cavalry was more effective at exterminating the Indigenous population than the Brazilian cavalry was. They’re upset that they have these relatively small numbers of Indigenous people that have claims to these massive swaths of land, much of which in the Amazon, that they want to get their hands on so they can cut down the trees and throw cows in and do mining. So a colonial–settler project that involves extermination of the Indigenous population to benefit their economy.

That’s what Israel’s doing, and that’s what they want to do in Brazil: “Why don’t you give me all the fun, fancy tools of espionage and surveillance and war and suppression that you guys have developed and honed in Israel for the last decades, and let me get my hands on them too so I can do the same thing back here.”

I think that’s one of the main reasons ideologically. Plus the whole political, evangelical right-wing movement, which was a concerted project by the CIA to implant in Latin America, bringing in prosperity gospel to get rid of the Catholic Church and all their support of left and workers movements.

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This is all very well documented, that they brought it in because it’s more individualist ideology, and that individualist ideology also includes the idea that all the Jews need to go to Israel for the reckoning.

There are a ton of parallels between Brazil and the U.S., and that’s because almost all of the worst ideas in the United States have been intentionally exported to Brazil as a way to make Brazil a worse country that’s more in line with U.S. interests. 

That includes healthcare companies. The U.S. model of healthcare. They have free, independent public healthcare in Brazil called SUS [Sistema Único de Saúde]. It’s an incredible system that’s very popular. They want to privatize it. They want to get rid of it to create more profit. Prosperity gospel with all this right-wing ideological movements, they love it.

The NRA sent lobbyists down in 2002 to Brazil to work with the right-wing movements to say, “This is the game plan for how you create a gun movement in Brazil.” And what happened? It manifests itself in the Jair Bolsonaro administration, where they just opened up the floodgates for access to guns, increasing the number of guns you have, the type of guns that you could have, the number of bullets you could have, and getting rid of anything that could help prevent organized crime from getting massive amounts of assault rifles and unmarked bullets they can use in crimes. Under Bolsonaro, that’s one of the things that spread more than ever.

There’s all these little levers that they’re really just doing copy and paste, and we’ve seen these alliances with JD Vance and the Rockbridge [Network], which is a group that he created before he was vice president with a bunch of Peter Thiel and other billionaires in the U.S. They’ve created a subsidiary in Korea and now one in Brazil that they were using to do the same sort of alignment with the local elites that they did before, in the lead-up to the ’64 coup. I can go on for hours about all the different connections and ties. 

JW: To your point, you’ve talked about how this is much bigger than just Brazil.

To me, the “Donroe Doctrine” is hanging over all of this. Last November, President Donald Trump released what he described as a corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the “Donroe Doctrine,” which effectively calls for the U.S. to take an aggressive interventionist stance in Latin America under the guise of protecting the United States’ national security and economic interests in the region.

Andrew, from your perspective, what more should we understand about what the United States is doing in Brazil and kind of the wider context of the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America over the last two years? 

AF: It’s pretty simple. They are fighting the Cold War against China in Latin America, just like they used to do against the Soviets. As part of that war, they are aligning with far-right upstart leaders that are seen as anti-establishment, even though they’re usually tied to billionaires or even billionaires themselves, like in Ecuador.

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There’s this weird coincidence with all of them that they almost all have connections to organized drug trafficking. They’re almost all known drug smugglers or connected to them or have some sort of financial relations. While they’re doing that, they’re arguing that “We are working together with these local governments in South and Latin America to fight drug trafficking,” which is obviously a farce.

That’s what they did in Ecuador. The president of Ecuador, Noboa, he’s the son of a banana dynasty that does a lot of exporting bananas, and in those crates of bananas, they’ve also been known to export a lot of kilos of cocaine. Their allies in Colombia have always been this way, and the things that they’re doing in Bolivia, it’s the exact same thing. The [Bolivian] attorney general who was trying to push back against the corruption of this right-wing government that has allied with Trump, well Trump and Rubio came in and said listen, you need to go after this attorney general and get rid of him. So he was arrested because he was going after their allies.

They don’t care about drug trafficking, obviously. The U.S. government never cared about drugs. It’s always been a weapon or a tool for them. So they’re aligning with these people to create this lockstep union that they’re calling the “Shield of the Americas.” It’s this new alliance that they’re using instead of the existing, the U.N. or other mechanisms. They’re creating all their own, just like they did with the “Board of Peace.” They’re working to make sure that those economies just stay in their sphere of influence just a little bit longer. 

They know that China’s winning. China is the main trade partner with all of these countries now. They’re Brazil’s biggest trade partner. The United States cannot absorb all of the exports that Brazil produces that goes to China. They’re not going to get Brazil to stop trading with China or stop having relations with China. They compete on corn and ethanol and soy exports. They can’t absorb what China’s buying.

They’re really just trying to buy a little bit more time as their empire is slowly waning, but at the cost of what? At the cost of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives? It’s not clear what the indirect results of this will be. At the cost of destroying the democratic institutions in these countries that are already, many of them struggling and teetering, and potentially at the cost of massive ecological devastation, as would be the case in the collapse of the Amazon under a Bolsonaro government?

It’s uplifting, right? 

JW: Very uplifting. That is my first word that comes to mind. You’ve pointed out everything that Donald Trump is doing, but we also know that tech oligarchs are involved as well. Tech tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have taken a massive interest in Latin American politics.

What impact do you think that is having on the rightward shift we’re seeing throughout the Americas? 

AF: Oh, big time. Big time. I think the biggest tycoon that’s most in the news lately is Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the guy who runs Meta. Something like 99 percent of people in Brazil use WhatsApp as their primary form of communication. 

The idea of sending a text message in Brazil is like, “What are you, some sort of barbarian? What decade is this?” People only use WhatsApp. And for a lot of people, you get a cheap phone, and you get a prepaid phone plan because they didn’t have net neutrality like it was passed in the U.S. It’ll come with free credits for WhatsApp and Facebook, and it’ll come preinstalled on the phone even, and it’s part of the plan.

So for a lot of people, Facebook for many years and WhatsApp were the internet. Now Instagram as well. Instagram is really the main tool of political communication at this point. As we know, [it is] highly censored. You guys saw recently at the No Kings protests what Meta can do if it just decides to suddenly have a technical error that they fail to fix for eight hours.

That’s what they’ve been doing in Brazil for months now. So you have a young right-wing member of Congress named Nikolas Ferreira. He comes from a right-wing evangelical church, and he’s very charismatic, and he’s really good on social media, and he’s got something like 22 million followers or something. Brazil has 214 million people.

When Lula was having this dispute a year or two ago with foreign tech interests, including Meta’s interests, Nikolas Ferreira planted this fake news that Lula was trying to tax the main financial instrument that people use called Pix. It’s this free instant cash transfers that you can do that’s created by the central bank, and everyone loves it. Trump hates it because it competes against Mastercard and Visa.

So [Ferreira] created this fake news that what Lula was trying to do was tax all transactions and so therefore you were just going to get taxed even more, and you, the poor working man, was going to get screwed. In reality, there was no tax involved, and it was an anti-money laundering initiative that any transactions over 1,000 reais [Editor’s note: 5,000 Brazilian reais] would be immediately reported so they can trace questions of money laundering, which is a huge problem in Brazil.

That video was seen, the last time I checked, over 300 million times in a country that has 214 million people, and not all of them are on Instagram. That’s just Instagram — not including the other social networks. And in the last few weeks of the election, Nikolas Ferreira’s account has had greater engagement and views than every global celebrity you can name. I don’t know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but three times more than Beyoncé. Just think of the most famous person that you can think of in the world and their account, and Nikolas Ferreira — who you hadn’t heard of until I said his name just now — is crushing them.

That’s being seen as probable algorithmic manipulation by Meta in favor of the right-wing movement. OK, that’s one example, we don’t have access to the algorithm, we can’t be sure about that. Well. if you go onto the Meta’s AI in WhatsApp, and you say, “Create me a political poster for Flávio, vote Flávio,” it’ll do vote Flávio, and they’ll use his election number, 22.

And you say, “Vote for a capybara, vote for a flamingo,” They’ll say, “Vote 22.” They’ll use Flávio’s number. And then if you say, “Do another poster, but say vote Lula,” it’ll say, “We can’t do that. That’s an election interference, and we’re not allowed to do that.” And say you just did it for Flávio,” and then the AI will be like, “Oh, you’re right. That’s a mistake.” But then it keeps happening, and it’s been happening for weeks now. People have been pointing it out for weeks. 

They blocked Lula’s Meta account from being able to run paid ads like 10 days before the first round of the elections. They said, oh, that was a mistake. It was my bad. Lots of left-wing accounts have seen these weird number shifts.

So they’ll have, let’s say, 20,000 comments, but it’ll say zero shares, or the views will go down to zero, or people have been talking about, “My engagement just has been completely in the tank since this election has started.” Not everybody, but some people. 

There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to.

So that’s just one case. That’s just Mark Zuckerberg.

JW: Cutting in here, from the future. After our conversation with Andrew. We requested comment from Meta who sent a lengthy response, but in summary, they said, “Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … None reflects political targeting. None reflects manipulated distribution. None reflects an effort to influence the election.”

Meta said Lula’s campaign ad account was disabled for one hour by mistake, not for political reasons. The company also claimed that issues with ad creation and video view count were global errors, and not politically motivated. 

On Monday, a Brazilian court gave Meta 24 hours to prove that it was not favoring Flávio Bolsonaro over President Lula in its feeds, or it would face an escalating fine. This comes after that same judge ruled that while he could not find evidence of deliberate interference, the company had 24 hours to prove that the issues affecting the Lula campaign were solved and would not reoccur. 

OK, now back to Andrew. 

AF: Elon’s coming down here. Peter Thiel was just down in Argentina to hang out with Javier Milei, who’s the president who’s been destroying the economy and businesses are shuttering, unemployment’s up, costs of living have gone through the roof, but he’s this anarcho-capitalist, hyper-libertarian that’s just been cutting everything with a literal chainsaw. He came on stage with a chainsaw saying, just like Elon Musk did, I’m going to cut through all the regulations and the red tape.

That’s what they want, and Flávio Bolsonaro said, I’m going to do that. I want to follow the Milei model. In the last debate that they had, the first debate, which was just the other night, Lula asked Flávio about this: Are you going to be Milei?

He was just sort of refusing to answer the question. Eventually OK, what model are you going to follow? [Lula] said, I’m going to follow the Lula model, the one that I’ve been doing that’s been working. What are you going to do? Answer the question. But, outside of that debate, [Flávio] had been saying that he loves Milei.

Milei gave him an official endorsement, just like Benjamin Netanyahu did an official endorsement for Flávio, which is something that doesn’t happen in international relations. Foreign leaders just as a matter of course don’t endorse a candidate in a foreign election. So they’re being very overt in this, and they’re all working together with their billionaire buddies who have controls over huge levers of power in Brazil because of how Big Techs work in the world.

That’s one of the main issues for leftist voters in Brazil right now. They want sovereignty for their country. They want Brazil to be able to govern Brazil under Brazilian law and have control over Brazil to serve Brazilian interests.

Flávio Bolsonaro does not care about that. Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg do not want that because it would be a limitation on their ability to exert power in Brazil and in the world. They don’t want it to be a model for the rest of the world. 

JW: Listening to everything you’re saying, obviously, we’re not going to fix the issue of tech oligarchs meddling in foreign elections by Sunday. But are there any final thoughts that you have just about this election? 

AF: I would say that this election is so important and relevant for the United States and for the world. For many years, there’s been this concept called the Brazilification of the United States.

Brazil wants to become, or, people that vote for Flávio at least, they want Brazil to become the United States. They see the U.S. as the country where everything works, where everything is perfect and goes well, and they don’t see all the bad stuff that listeners and readers of The Intercept know all about far too well.

But in reality, it’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil.

The middle class is getting squeezed and disappearing. In Brazil, 90 percent of the country makes $1,200 or less a month. The middle class would be considered extremely poor by U.S. standards, and what it does exist of a U.S.-style middle class is just teeny-tiny. You have just shrinking spheres of democracy, while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for the society, bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.

It’s just this more polarized, divided, K-shape economies, what you guys call it in the U.S. That’s where things are going. So you should really pay attention to this Brazilian election because the things that are happening here and the things that are going to happen in the next few days are very likely to be happening in the United States in the near future, if they’re not already happening.

JW: The Brazilification of the United States is a really good way to put it. I think so often people in the U.S., and, I can include myself, we think about the impact that the United States has on other countries, but we rarely think about the mutual shared relationships and larger shared ideas that people have between countries, between continents. So I think that’s a really good point. 

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Andrew Fishman’s reporting at The Intercept Brasil. 

AF: Thank you. Keep up the good work.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington. 

The post The Stakes of Brazil’s Presidential Election  appeared first on The Intercept.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has routinely cast Somalia as lawless and Somalis as violent. Meanwhile, his administration has, largely without public knowledge, killed hundreds of people in Somalia, claiming they belong to terror groups. Trump personally ordered the death of a Somali man within days of regaining the White House, according to his counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka. The administration claimed, without offering any evidence, that the man was connected with the Islamic State terror group. Trump has sought to do the same with Omar.

Homeland Security agents raided Omar’s Washington, D.C., home last Monday, three weeks before the midterms, in which she is seeking reelection. The Trump administration reportedly launched the investigation to build a case to strip Omar of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her. (Omar fled war in Somalia with her family when she was 8 years old, later immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee, and became a citizen in 2000.) The administration has also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives. On Monday, conservative media outlets reported that federal prosecutors obtained Omar’s DNA as part of their investigation.

“This is what happens in a dictatorship. The leader identifies his political, ethnic and religious enemies, and his agents scramble to do his bidding and make him happy,” Zaynab Mohamed, a Somali immigrant who represents Minneapolis in Minnesota’s state Senate, told The Intercept. “Representative Omar is the latest subject where Trump identifies the target and his minions go looking for a crime. The cases always fall apart, and this one will, too.” 

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Trump claimed not to have ordered the raid, but throughout his second term, his Justice Department has repeatedly targeted his political enemies — from New York’s attorney general, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said to reporters. “I have nothing to do with it.”

Omar called it “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” She added: “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.” Omar’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Intercept.

With the Somali community, Trump found a target that he could attack with Islamophobic, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric, without incurring much mainstream backlash, said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“As immigrants, Muslims, and — most importantly — Black people, it’s the trifecta,” he told The Intercept. “None of us expected the scale and level of the vitriol. But despite this, it’s at the point that the traditional media almost ignore the attacks on the Somali-American community because it’s not a large constituency. Trump says these things, and people just move on.”

Trump’s War on Somalia

Over the last decade, Trump has overseen the killing of as many as 1,500 Somalis in more than 400 attacks, according to a count by New America, a D.C.-based think tank. During his second term alone, the Trump administration has conducted more than 200 airstrikes in Somalia, including close to 90 this year, claiming to target terrorists.

The U.S. military has been at war in Somalia for almost a quarter-century, conducting air attacks and commando raids aimed at the terrorist group al-Shabab as well as the Islamic State group, while the CIA and special operators created local proxy forces to conduct low-profile operations on behalf of America. At the same time, the U.S. has provided Somalia with billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance.

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U.S. attacks in Somalia have skyrocketed during Trump’s terms in office. From 2007 to 2017, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. military carried out 59 declared airstrikes in Somalia. The Biden administration conducted 51 declared strikes over four years. During Trump’s six years in office, the U.S. has launched more than 400 attacks against purported militants.

The U.S. rarely offers any evidence that those killed are members of terrorist groups, much less leaders. A New America analysis found militant leaders comprised just 1.7 percent of those killed. Africa Command refused to provide requested evidence that any of those killed in airstrikes in Somalia this year were militants. “All U.S. strikes in Somalia are conducted in close coordination partners [sic] against designated terror groups,” an AFRICOM spokesperson told The Intercept by email.

“Trump has conducted more drone strikes in Somalia than Bush, Obama, and Biden combined. And so many civilians have died,” historian Elizabeth Schmidt, the author of “Foreign Intervention in Africa After the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror,” told The Intercept. “They were often just young men living in an area where it was easy to label them jihadis. And it turns out they had nothing to do with terrorism.” 

The U.S. claims that it has only killed six civilians over almost two decades of war in Somalia. A count by the airstrike monitoring group Airwars put the number at as much as 2,600 percent higher. A 2023 investigation by The Intercept determined, for example, that a drone attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time of the attack, the U.S. announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” 

Trump calls Somalia a “third-world” or “fourth-world nation,” says that it “stinks,” and disparaged Somalis who come to the U.S., saying “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

His most xenophobic consigliere also claims Somalia is responsible for violence that has caused people to flee the country. “The entire Somali refugee program is predicated on a lie,” wrote Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, late last year. “Destroying your own country does not give you the right to become a citizen in ours.” But this faux history disregards America’s decadeslong role in fomenting violence in Somalia and destabilizing the country.

A casualty of the Cold War geopolitics that led to widespread conflict, political repression, and millions of deaths across the developing world, Somalia has experienced persistent political instability and strife since the late 1960s. In recent decades, the country has suffered civil war, famine, droughts, a longtime al-Shabab insurgency, and persistent humanitarian crises.

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Over the last quarter century, the U.S. has intensified conflict in Somalia through direct attacks; training, funding, and running proxy forces; and funneling in weapons and other military assistance to one side of a civil war. As early as 2007, the Pentagon was aware that there were fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa, and Somalia devolved into another forever war stalemate. This has continued, despite the record number of airstrikes in Somalia under Trump.

Before Trump took office, in 2016, Islamist militants in Somalia killed 4,281 people, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. By August, this year’s total hit 6,731 deaths, a 57 percent increase. An analysis by the Costs of War project at Brown University found that instead of eliminating militant groups, the U.S. counterterrorism campaign in Somalia was “ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity.” An AFRICOM spokesperson said the command’s “operational focus remains on working with partners to degrade terrorist organizations to create the space required for Somali-led governance and stability.” But Trump claims Somalia has no government, no military, and is “not even a country.”

The Intercept interviewed people displaced by the forever war in a camp on the outskirts of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in 2023. “We had to leave because of the drought and the conflict,” a mother of seven told this reporter. She was one of more than a dozen women from the Lower Shabelle region of southwest Somalia who spoke to The Intercept after fleeing the front lines of an offensive by the U.S.-backed Somali government against al-Shabab. Since Trump first took office, the number of Somalis forced from their homes has almost doubled from 2.4 million to 4.4 million.

“I don’t think most Americans realize that the presence of Somalis in the U.S. has a lot to do with U.S. wars in Somalia. U.S. military intervention made a bad situation worse. This led to a surge of refugees and asylum-seekers to the U.S.,” said Schmidt. “They weren’t coming because they wanted a better job. It’s because they feared for their lives and their children’s lives.”

During Trump’s first term, his administration acknowledged “the ongoing armed conflict” as a reason to extend temporary protected status — which grants legal status, work authorization, and protection from deportation — to Somalis in the U.S., noting the security situation was “fragile and volatile, with ongoing armed conflict among government forces, clan militias, African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops, and al-Shabaab.”

Bringing the War Home

Despite the increase in violence, according to Pentagon statistics, the administration terminated Somalia’s TPS designation earlier this year. More than 1,000 Somali asylum-seekers have been ordered deported since February; more than half the deportation orders involve Somalis living in Minnesota, a nearly tenfold increase from 2025, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune investigation.

About 84,000 of the 260,000 people of Somali descent in the U.S. live in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, according to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. The overwhelming majority are American citizens. Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S. and 87 percent of foreign-born Somalis are naturalized citizens.

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The administration targeted that Somali community during a violent immigration crackdown in and around Minneapolis known as “Operation Metro Surge” during late 2025 and early 2026. “I don’t want them in our country,” Trump said in December 2025. The next month, he said: “Every one of them should be forced to leave this country, including Ilhan Omar.”

During Metro Surge, federal agents shot and killed protesters Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. They, like Omar and hundreds of drone strike victims in Somalia, were labeled as terrorists by the administration without providing evidence.

During Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have also arrested hundreds of Somali people, with reports of assault and mistreatment at the hands of federal agents.

Trump recently seemed to call for vigilante violence and threatened to back it with federal force. “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this month. “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Hussein, of CAIR-MN, said Trump’s rhetoric was endangering the Somali community. “Every few weeks, he’s literally going on a tirade. And I don’t think he’s ever spoken about other people the same way. He literally put out the message saying, ‘go fight them. I’ll come and help’ on social media,” he told The Intercept. “We’ve seen bullying. We’ve dealt with harassment. We’ve have some assaults.”

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Trump has routinely demonized Somalis by tying the broader community to a high-profile fraud case: the alleged theft of $250 million from a pandemic-era program that provided food for children. The former leader of Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the case, is white, although most of the defendants in the related cases are of Somali descent. “The Somalians, they’re crooked as hell,” Trump ranted at a Cabinet meeting in May, with the administration offering escalating and unverified claims, including reference to a “$19 billion Somali fraud scandal.” 

The Trump administration’s effort to denaturalize and deport Omar is part of a broader push to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, with those of Somali descent specifically singled out. “I would do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview earlier this year. “I think that many of the people that came in from Somalia, they hate our country.”

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said on Saturday that he had been “told they have a strong case” against Omar. “Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We’ve done it before,” he told Fox News. The rarely used denaturalization statute has been most famously employed to strip citizenship from Nazi war criminals, like John Demjanjuk, a former death camp guard and retired U.S. autoworker convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder.

Mohamed, who in 2022 became the first Somali woman elected to the Minnesota Senate, called out Trump’s push to expel Omar as a grave threat to the country. “If the president can threaten to denaturalize and deport a member of Congress, no one is safe,” she told The Intercept. “This is a test of our democracy, and even Republicans should be speaking out about it. If we don’t defend the rights of Ilhan Omar, Somali-Americans, immigrants, and Trump’s political targets, we lose everything.”

The post Trump’s Obsession With Somalia Isn’t Just Racist. It’s Been Lethal. appeared first on The Intercept.

The 58-year-old had lived with kidney failure for two years, and his doctor had prescribed dialysis twice a week.

Since the siege, however, the fighting stood between al-Eissi and the dialysis center in Taiz city that kept him alive. Al-Eissi wouldn’t let his family risk their lives to take him to the center.

“My father’s condition deteriorated badly,” said his son, Muadh, 38. “We couldn’t move him to Taiz because the fighting had intensified.”

About a week ago, al-Eissi died at home in his bed.

“When I saw my mother weeping for her husband, I felt helpless,” Muadh said. “It might have been avoided if my father had reached his dialysis sessions on time.”

Abdullah is one of at least 10 dialysis patients who have died since the siege on Taiz began because they could not reach treatment, according to Dr. Issam Mahyoub, director of the kidney dialysis center at al-Jumhuri Hospital in Taiz. Doctors warn that many more could follow.

“About 60 percent of kidney failure patients in Taiz face the risk of death because they cannot reach the dialysis center,” said Dr. Fouad al-Haddad, the hospital’s director. “Behind every number is a human being and a family living in anxiety, waiting for a chance to continue treatment that may never come.”

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The kidney-failure deaths are part of the toll of a wider regional war set off by an unprovoked February attack against Iran by Israel and the United States. Estimates hold that 10,000 or more people have died during the war, including both military and civilian deaths across the region. Since the regional war reignited in Yemen this summer, according to the World Health Organization, at least 800 people have been killed, with thousands wounded and tens of thousands displaced.

“The plight of dialysis patients in Taiz illustrates how geopolitical struggles over deterrence, energy security, and regional leverage translate into blocked transit, disrupted medical care, and preventable deaths,” said Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy. “Yemen’s population has already endured more than a decade of devastating war, and the tragedy is that this wider regional conflict is now threatening to plunge it back into another humanitarian catastrophe.”

Yemen in the Iran War

Yemen entered the war in March, when the Iran-aligned Ansarallah armed group, more commonly known as the Houthis, began firing missiles into Israel in retaliation for its attacks on Iran. The Houthis, who gained control of various portions of Yemen during a two-decade-long insurgency, including the capital of Sana’a, saw their prominence in the Iran war grow with attacks against shipping channels surrounding the Arabian Peninsula.

The Yemeni civil war itself had been a long-simmering conflict when the Iran war broke out, straining a 2022 truce signed by the Houthis and their rivals, including Saudi Arabia, which was broken this July when the Houthis attacked a regional Saudi airport. Throughout August, the Houthis launched missile, drone, and ground attacks across the front lines against the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

In September, the Houthis seized strategic areas on Yemen’s coast and imposed a naval blockade that cut off the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, while firing missiles deeper into Saudi Arabia.

In early October, Yemeni government forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition launched an operation aimed at retaking the coast and pushing into Sana’a.

As they moved inland to consolidate their coastal gains, Houthi forces pushed into the highlands around Taiz, a strategically located city controlled by the government. In short order, the insurgents severed the main mountain road linking Taiz to Aden, another city also controlled by the government.

The blockade trapped more than 600,000 residents and sent food and fuel prices soaring. The U.N. World Food Program warned that Taiz’s wheat and flour stocks are close to running out.

“We have confirmed cases of death and cases of severe impact,” said Tawfiq al-Humaidi, head of the SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties, a Geneva-based international body monitoring violence in Yemen, who said fighting on roads near Taiz has cut off medical supplies from the city. “Those who are dying and suffering are among the victims of the Iranian war, which drove the Houthis to expand toward Taiz and Bab al-Mandeb.”

On October 14, the Yemeni government formally petitioned the U.N. Security Council for immediate, practical intervention to lift the “suffocating siege.”

Any action would be too late for families like the al-Eissis.

Cut Off From Care

Taiz is Yemen’s cultural capital and its third-largest city. Healthcare facilities there serve a huge geographical area. Al-Haddad, the head of the al-Jumhuri Hospital, said patients hail from across the governorate.

“They come from the West Coast, al-Mawasit, Jabal Habashi, al-Shamayatayn, Sama, al-Silw, al-Misrakh, and al-Maafer areas,” he said, “where distances are long and the hardship of travel is multiplied by rough roads and security conditions.”

The kidney dialysis center has 270 registered patients.

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“That doesn’t count the patients from outside the city who haven’t been able to reach us,” said Mahyoub, the head of the dialysis center. “Patients from al-Misrakh, al-Aqroud, al-Shamayatayn, al-Hujariya, al-Turba, and Jabal Habashi localities used to come to us. Now getting here has become extremely difficult, with the fighting and the restrictions on movement into the city.”

Ahlam Ali Abdo, 33, walks about 30 kilometers from her village in Jabal Habashi to reach the center, crossing rough roads and areas where gunfire and shelling ring out. The walk, extremely risky for a kidney failure patient, takes between 5 to 9 hours. After treatment, she faces the same distance back, uphill, to her three children. Some days the road is too dangerous, and Abdo waits for hours in the city.

“I cry constantly of pain and exhaustion and worry that I wouldn’t be able to see my children again. My condition is miserable,” she said.

Her husband stays home with the children. Bringing any of them with her, she said, would put the whole family in danger.

Mahyoub’s center tried and failed to find her housing in the city. Yesterday, on Friday, another dialysis patient took her in, for fear she would be killed on the road.

Reaching the center doesn’t guarantee treatment.

“The shortage of diesel needed to run the generators forced us to cut dialysis sessions from 4 hours to 2,” said Mahyoub. Supplies from the Ministry of Health in Aden “no longer arrive regularly, and the remaining stock is nearly gone.”

“Dialysis is a lifeline for these patients,” he said.

Haddad, the hospital director, said of the dialysis center doctors: “They are expected to save patients, but the means available are not always enough.”

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The Office of Public Health and Population in Aden has warned of an imminent health and humanitarian catastrophe in Taiz caused by the continuing siege and the obstruction of supplies.

In a statement, it said “medicines, solutions, medical supplies and fuel in the city’s health facilities were close to running out. That threatens emergency services, surgery, intensive care, dialysis and neonatal incubators.”

No Road to Aden

For patients who can no longer reach Taiz’s center, Aden is the fallback, whether for treatment or for its airport to travel abroad. The Taiz–Aden road, however, is unusable, according to patients and Mahyoub. The detours wind through mountain bends and rough terrain, add hours and transport costs, and in places run through active clashes.

The crisis extends beyond Taiz.

Dr. Anis al-Asbahi, spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Sana’a, said that “more than 8,000 kidney failure patients in Houthi-controlled governorates are suffering because hemodialysis machines and dialysis medicines can’t get in.”

He blamed the blockade and the closure of Sana’a airport.

“Kidney failure knows no political barriers,” Mahyoub said. “Patients cannot wait for disputes to be settled or for circumstances to change before they get treatment.”

For Muadh al-Eissi, whose father died from kidney failure, the question is simpler.

“How can the parties using heavy weapons in populated areas ignore what the fighting does to patients,” he asked, “to the children, women and elderly people who need medicine and treatment? People, like my father, are losing their lives for what?”

The post Yemenis Unable to Reach Hospital Are Part of the Iran War Death Toll appeared first on The Intercept.

The 35-year-old from the West Bank city of Nablus was newly married and had just spent her first night in an Israeli prison. Israeli forces had arrested her without charges and put her under administrative detention, an arbitrary condition for holding Palestinians hostage. She lost consciousness in front of Israeli soldiers at Sharon Prison, a temporary detention facility in the city of Netanya, and they took her to a hospital blindfolded. There, with her hands and feet bound in chains, she was given a pregnancy test that came back positive.

Joudeh would never get to experience the joys and travails of pregnancy outside of prison. She was in Israeli custody from the moment she found out, until she gave birth.

Like Joudeh, pregnant Palestinian women arrested by Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, are forced to endure a physically and medically complex process in conditions characterized by inadequate access to food, family visits, and medicine, as well as frequent reports of violence.

The total number of pregnancies in custody among the hundreds of women seized since October 7 is unknown, but Joudeh is only the second documented example of a woman who gave birth while under Israeli detention in nearly 17 years, according to Palestinian prisoners’ rights advocates. Many cases, advocates say, may have gone unreported.

The Intercept spoke to Joudeh through her sister, Maram, who sat with Joudeh by her side while sharing a detailed account of her sister’s six-month pregnancy, which ended in a premature cesarean section.

Corroborated by statements and reports published by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, among others, Joudeh’s story offers a glimpse into what it’s like to go through pregnancy while locked in Israel’s prison system, where she struggled to obtain basic prenatal care and relied on other prisoners to share their already limited food.

“She went through every kind of suffering in there,” Maram said.

Israeli forces used sound grenades inside the prison, according to Joudeh’s family and her lawyer, Hassan Abbadi, who provides volunteer legal support for detained Palestinians. They said soldiers would force the women to lie face down on the floor.

“Female prisoners are subjected to all forms of violence and are deprived of the most basic rights,” said Abbadi, who regularly visits Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. He described shortages of underwear, attacks by police dogs, and strip searches, among other forms of mistreatment.

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Joudeh’s pregnancy unfolded against a broader surge in Israeli arrests and violence across the occupied Palestinian territories. As of September, Israel was holding roughly 9,350 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 90 women and more than 350 children, according to Palestinian prisoners’ organizations. More than 3,100 of them are being held under administrative detention, without charge or trial.

For Joudeh, who was transferred to Damon Prison in Haifa soon after discovering she was pregnant, there was little effort to make accommodations for her pregnancy. According to Maram and Abbadi, the food was scarce and of poor quality, consisting usually of a slice of toast and lentils, chickpeas, or hummus. Sometimes, the prisoners received a few olives, and the other women incarcerated with Joudeh would offer a part of their own meager portions and give it to her.

In a small cell she shared with 13 other women, she discussed baby names with Manar Karaja, another detainee who was pregnant at the same time. According to Amany Sarahneh, the media director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Karaja was still pregnant and still in Israeli detention as of October 6.

As her pregnancy progressed, Joudeh grew increasingly worried about her baby. She repeatedly asked for medical tests to make sure that both she and the fetus were healthy, Maram said, but her requests were refused.

“I would reassure myself by the baby’s heartbeat, and later, when I started feeling her move,” Maram relayed on behalf of her sister, who sat next to her at Maram’s home in Ramallah. “I needed vitamins and folic acid, but they refused to give them to me.”

In response to outreach from The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Israeli military directed queries to the Israel Prison Service. An Israel Prison Service spokesperson said the agency could not comment on individual detainees’ cases, but described a detailed list of Joudeh’s experiences as “false.”

Palestinian women have faced pregnancy and childbirth inside Israeli prisons for decades, often under harsh conditions and with limited medical care. The first documented Palestinian woman to give birth in Israeli custody was Zakia Shammout, who delivered her daughter Nadia in 1972 at Neve Tirza prison in Ramla, assisted by fellow prisoners. The last documented case before the start of Israel’s ongoing genocide was Fatima al-Zaq, who gave birth to her son Youssef in prison in 2008; the 17-year-old was killed in July 2025 after an Israeli drone hit his family’s apartment on Al-Thawra Street, in central Gaza City.

In September 2025, Tahani Abu Samhan gave birth to her son Yahya while in Israeli custody. Then, a year later, there was Joudeh.

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Joudeh suffered from debilitating headaches while pregnant, but basic pain relief was difficult to obtain. Prison authorities refused to give her Acamol, a common brand of acetaminophen, which is generally considered safe for use during pregnancy despite recent guidance to the contrary from health officials in the U.S.

The other women found ways to help. One prisoner would sometimes pretend that she had a headache herself, ask for a painkiller, and secretly give the tablet to Joudeh.

“She was crying most of the time,” Maram said.

By July, Joudeh had contracted scabies, a rash caused by highly contagious mites that results in severe itching and pain. The women were given a single container of a topical treatment to share among the entire cell, and it wasn’t enough for everyone who was infected. They resorted to mixing the treatment with chlorine to make it stretch further, Maram said.

Months into the pregnancy, Joudeh began suffering severe pain and bleeding. She was taken to the prison clinic, where she was told that her condition was stable and that there was no need to send her to a hospital. She learned she was carrying a girl.

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By then six months pregnant, Joudeh was having her first medical examination since her positive test, Maram said. World Health Organization guidelines recommend that a pregnant person would have had at least three prenatal appointments by that point, though many doctors recommend more frequent visits to monitor the development of the fetus and identify potential complications. Joudeh had received none.

In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, an Israeli Prison Service spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The allegations described are false, entirely without factual basis, and form part of a broader campaign to defame the State of Israel and its lawful institutions.”

“All prisoners and detainees held by the Israel Prison Service are held in accordance with the law and receive the rights and care to which they are entitled,” the spokesperson added, including medical care in accordance with Israeli standards. They wrote that the prison agency would not provide medical information specific to any particular detainee.

Israeli officials have shown an interest in following the most limited interpretation of the law. In an interview last week, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said prisoners “will not receive a single grain more than the legal minimum.” He recalled making a monitoring visit to Ketziot prison because, he claimed, he’d heard prisoners had received two extra olives on their plates.

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Outside the prisons, access to prenatal and other medical care has been pulled further out of reach for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By the end of 2025, the United Nations had documented 925 Israeli checkpoints, road gates, and other movement obstacles across the territory, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians and making it harder to reach health services. And in Gaza, where Israel keeps bombing despite the ceasefire announced last October, the health system has been destroyed, with severe shortages of basic necessities and a lack of functioning medical facilities making pregnancy particularly dangerous.

Around 50,000 women are pregnant in Gaza, according to UNFPA. One in 3 pregnancies are considered high-risk. Nearly 4,000 pregnancy losses were reported in the first half of 2026, three times the number recorded in the previous six months.

In the prison, Joudeh’s bleeding would not stop.

It continued for two weeks, Maram said, and Joudeh’s hemoglobin level eventually fell to 9 grams per deciliter, which the WHO classifies as anemic during pregnancy. As her condition deteriorated, she was taken to Rambam Hospital, again blindfolded and with her hands and feet shackled. There, doctors decided that the baby needed to be delivered prematurely.

On September 12, Joudeh gave birth by C-section under local anesthesia, watching the operation as it was happening. Maram said that Joudeh’s hands and feet were shackled while she was cut open, and female Israeli soldiers surrounded her with guns in the operating room, standing guard.

She saw her daughter only briefly in the first 72 hours after giving birth, Maram said, because the baby, born prematurely at around six months, needed to be cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Joudeh’s doctor was Israeli, and she recalled him speaking to her in cruel, degrading terms, according to Maram. “The terrorist has arrived,” she remembered him saying about the fragile newborn. Joudeh named her Lia.

Some of the nurses caring for Joudeh were Palestinian citizens of the 1948 occupied territories, Maram said. They looked for small ways to help her, like secretly bringing the baby to Joudeh’s bedside while she remained handcuffed to the hospital bed. They dressed Lia in a pink onesie. And they asked the Israeli soldiers guarding Joudeh to remove her handcuffs so she could walk around, but the soldiers refused, Maram said.

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Officials at Rambam Hospital did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Joudeh and Lia were supposed to be released on September 15, according to Maram, but on September 14, just two days after the birth, Israeli authorities took Joudeh and her newborn daughter from the hospital back to the prison to process Joudeh’s release. An ambulance was waiting outside with Joudeh’s husband, Maram said, and as soon as Joudeh and Lia were released, the baby was taken by ambulance to Hclinic Specialty hospital in Ramallah. Before they left, Lia’s pink onesie was replaced with a gray outfit.

Maram believes her sister was released a day early to prevent the family from preparing a celebration to welcome them home.

When Joudeh’s sisters were finally able to hug her, they were shocked by how frail she seemed. “She was exhausted. She had lost so much weight,” Maram said. “She was physically and psychologically devastated.”

She was still suffering from scabies, but her family embraced her anyway. “I didn’t care about anything except hugging her,” Maram said. “I had missed her so much, and I had been so worried about her.”

Joudeh is now staying with Maram at her home in Ramallah, where she’s recovering from her pregnancy and incarceration. Lia remains in the neonatal unit at Istishari Arab Hospital in Ramallah.

Sometimes, Maram said, Joudeh breaks down when she remembers the trauma of giving birth in detention. But when the mother and baby are both well, Joudeh wants to hold a small celebration, bringing relatives and loved ones together to welcome Lia. She’s already begun thinking about the food and sweets she wants to serve. Despite all she’s been through, Maram said, when the family talks about the celebration, Joudeh smiles.

The post A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

The veteran had served with roughly 20 mortarmen and scouts from a platoon in the 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment assigned to Combat Outpost Ware in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley in 2010. A lush land of grape groves and pomegranate orchards, towering sunflowers and marijuana plants, the Arghandab was crisscrossed by canals and was a flashpoint in Kandahar Province, the spiritual homeland of Afghanistan’s once and future rulers, the Taliban. 

The soldiers from the 82nd Airborne played a cat-and-mouse game with the Taliban. America’s official policy was counterinsurgency, or COIN: a re-tread of a failed strategy of the Vietnam War that promised a kinder, gentler brand of warfare aimed at winning Afghan hearts and minds. But in the Arghandab Valley, the COIN of the realm was kinetic.

The Taliban seeded the orchards with improvised explosive devices set off by a foot on a pressure plate, a boot on a tripwire, or Taliban hands gripping a remote control. The Americans countered with overwhelming firepower: attack helicopters, armored gun trucks, and infantrymen toting M4 carbines. It was a “rough time for the unit,” another veteran of the platoon remembered. They saw a great deal of “contact,” engaging the Taliban more times than another unit member could recall.

But the former mortarman in Banning had come to talk about one particular incident that, more than a decade later, he could not forget.

The CID agent gave the veteran a “cleansing waiver of rights” to read and sign. It advised the veteran that he had the right to remain silent, that any statement he made could be used against him at trial, and that he was providing testimony “freely and voluntarily.” The veteran waived his rights and signed the document on March 28, 2023 at 1:31 p.m. He acknowledged, according to exclusive criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept, that he killed an unarmed man and wounded a woman. More than that, he said that he “needed to be held accountable for his actions.” He told CID that he had “committed a war crime.”

Twenty-five years ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, an angry America went to war in Afghanistan. The conflict would become, by some counts, the longest in U.S. history, stretching across four presidential administrations. It ended where it started, with the Taliban in control of the country after a crushing 2021 defeat for the U.S. and the Afghan allies it propped up for two decades.

The U.S. lost around 2,400 troops in Afghanistan at a staggering cost of around $2.3 trillion. Afghans suffered far worse. In October 2001, President George W. Bush announced that “the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America.” But from almost the opening American salvo, they began dying at U.S. hands.

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During just the first five months of the conflict, there were no fewer than 136 media reports of U.S. attacks that killed between 1,200 and 3,155 civilians. Year after year, U.S. and coalition airstrikes killed Afghans – sometimes scores of civilians, sometimes hundreds. The deaths continued to the war’s final moments when an August 2021 drone strike targeting a suspected terrorist in the country’s capital, Kabul, instead killed 10 civilians, seven of them children. More than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.

While the carnage of the American air war garnered the biggest headlines, Afghans were also gunned down, again and again, by U.S. ground troops. Following a 2007 ambush, Marines killed 19 civilians and wounded 50. An initial investigation found the Marines used excessive force when they killed civilians after a suicide bombing. Later, the Americans were recast as victims. In 2010, a “kill team” from the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade slew at least three civilians over four months and mutilated the dead for war trophies. Eleven of the 12 soldiers charged were convicted of crimes, but most were released from prison by the mid-2010s. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales massacred 16 Afghan civilians in 2012. A Special Forces A-Team was accused of killing close to 20 civilians in 2012 and 2013. The remains of 10 victims were later found buried outside their base. A U.S. investigation exonerated the Americans of any wrongdoing. Only one man was punished: Zikria Kandahari, the unit’s Afghan interpreter. 

Pete Hegseth, now the self-styled Secretary of War, served with the Army National Guard in Afghanistan during that era. In Trump’s first term, when he was a Fox News personality, Hegseth lobbied on behalf of three men who were convicted or facing charges related to war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump intervened in all three cases, granting two pardons and reversing a demotion.

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During his confirmation hearing last year, Hegseth complained that “restrictive” rules of engagement had made it “difficult to actually do your job on the battlefield,” repeatedly recalling his own service. “I was the senior counter-insurgency instructor in Afghanistan. My job was to understand how the Taliban and Al Qaeda operated,” he explained. “They knew our rules of engagement, and when they were more restrictive, they took advantage of them.” He continued: “We don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars.”

But what the veteran in Banning described to CID agents was anything but burdensome.

In April or May — he couldn’t recall which — of 2010, that veteran said he was carrying an M4 carbine as his unit moved about 3 kilometers into the Arghandab and occupied an abandoned building at the edge of a village. When the Americans were attacked, they returned fire, killing a couple Taliban members.

The unit readied themselves, expecting the Taliban to regroup and mount another assault. The Americans intercepted a radio transmission. A translator told them that a single male militant on a motorcycle, transporting rocket-propelled grenades, was headed toward them, according to the documents. The unit’s chain of command authorized the use of force.

When a motorcycle rider came into view, a sniper took aim and fired off one round. He missed.

The respite for the motorcycle man was short-lived, however. About 500 feet away, close to 20 Americans raised their rifles.

An M4 carbine — a magazine-fed, gas-operated, air-cooled, shoulder-fired weapon — shoots lightweight bullets at extremely high speeds. In the spring of 2010, M855 5.56-mm bullets were de rigueur for U.S. forces. Fast with low mass, the rounds produce a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. When they slam into a human body, that energy is transmitted to the soft tissue of the victim creating a “wound channel” that causes massive blood loss.

The Banning mortarman fired off one round. Others from the unit opened up, too.

The motorcycle man never reached his destination. If someone was waiting for him to arrive on that spring day in 2010, they still are.

The Banning veteran and others walked up to the Afghan man and “witnessed a military aged male deceased with multiple gunshot wounds to the face and other areas of his body,” wrote the CID special agent, transcribing the mortarman’s testimony. “No RPG’s were present.”

Nobody knew how many rounds hit him, but the damage to the Afghan man’s body was so extensive that he was “unidentifiable,” according to another witness. The mutilation was so devastating that the Americans were unable to even collect his “biometrics”: fingerprints, iris scans, facial images.

The dead man, said the veteran, wasn’t alone. There was a wounded woman, too. He told the CID agent that the “woman was crawling on the ground.” There may also have been a baby or child present as well — CID’s redactions make it impossible to know for certain.

After the veteran made his confession, in late March 2023, Army criminal investigators started consulting U.S. sources. Despite detailed unit records for more than 100 notable incidents in April and May 2010, an Army historian could locate none for the killing of the motorcycle man.

When CID began interviewing unit members, the company commander — by then a lieutenant colonel — said the incident did not sound familiar to him. The unit’s first sergeant told CID that while he saw most “troops in contact” reports, he didn’t recollect the incident. He acknowledged that the details “sounded plausible.” 

Others recalled the incident in detail but excused it. One soldier who never saw the motorcycle man before he was killed said, for example, that it “sounded like” the man handed off the RPG to someone before he was shot. Another former specialist — who by 2023 was a warrant officer — told CID that unit members “fired on the military age male on the motorcycle.” He also recalled that “a woman was on the motorcycle,” too. He told the Army investigators that it was “unfortunate that no RPGs were present” but believed “the incident was handled properly” since “they were authorized to fire from their command team.”

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Having never even attempted to identify the Afghan man, the woman on the scene, or the possible child; having never sought out any evidence beyond the testimony of members of the unit; and despite a signed, sworn confession by one of the shooters, Army CID concluded — within six weeks — that there was not “probable cause to believe that any soldier committed the offense of murder.” 

CID refused to make the special agent in charge of the case available for an interview. “Unfortunately, we are unable to support your request to interview DACID personnel involved,” Special Agent Mark Lunardi told The Intercept, before leaving his job. More than a year ago, after multiple follow-up requests for information, Thomas Hamilton of CID’s press office wrote: “I will get back to you as soon as I can.” He has, despite repeated follow-ups, failed to respond.

For more than a century, the U.S. military has shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable.

A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found most have gone uninvestigated. When they did come under official scrutiny, the “military too often relies solely on its internal records and sources —which can be flawed and incomplete — to assess civilian harm,” the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute reported.

These findings were bolstered by the groundbreaking work of the podcast “In the Dark.” Their 2024 investigation — a corollary to a reexamination of the 2005 killings of civilians in Haditha, Iraq — found U.S. troops had committed 781 possible war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that the U.S. military actually investigated. In at least 65 percent of cases analyzed by “In The Dark,” investigators didn’t believe that a crime had taken place — even in cases where perpetrators had, like the Banning veteran, confessed. The 2010 killing of the Afghan motorcycle man is, however, not one of the cases in their database.

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In the 151 cases in which investigators found probable cause that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn’t been justified, true accountability was rare. While 572 alleged perpetrators were involved in these cases, only 130 were convicted; the records show they rarely received significant prison terms. Much more often, their cases were dealt with by commanders with broad discretion to punish their troops with extra duty, demotions, or reprimands, in lieu of formal prosecutions. Fewer than 1 in 5 perpetrators, investigators found, appeared to have been sentenced to any type of confinement. The median sentence was just eight months.

Todd Huntley, an active-duty Judge Advocate for more than 23 years who deployed to Afghanistan twice with a Joint Special Operations Task Force, believes killings like the one described by the Banning veteran were a common occurrence. “There were probably hundreds of incidents that were just like it that we’ll never know about,” he told The Intercept. A current government official, who was involved in the wars in the Greater Middle East, said the total could reach into the thousands.

Since taking the helm of the Pentagon last year, Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict zones — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants, and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force, to pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.

The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of civilian harm mitigation and response efforts. In late April, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime. A recent report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones. This was driven home at the outset of the Iran war when the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, killing more than 150 people, most of them children.

The CID records of the motorcycle man investigation are redacted in ways that make it impossible to ascertain key facts about additional civilian harm. “An [REDACTED] woman was on the motorcycle with the military aged male and [REDACTED] from the engagement,” according to the summary of a statement by one unit member. The Banning veteran also “stated he [REDACTED] an unarmed [REDACTED] woman during his deployment.”

The redactions also prevented The Intercept from identifying the veteran and fellow unit members to gather additional information. “If it wasn’t for the soldier involved coming forward, this incident would never have come to light,” Huntley, now the director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown University Law Center, told The Intercept. “The 13-year delay in reporting made any investigation difficult as others involved couldn’t remember details and the redactions in the report make it impossible to learn anything else about the incident.”

Only one member of the unit contacted by The Intercept agreed to speak about the incident. The veteran acknowledged, on background, that the incident occurred, but would not say if he was one of those interviewed by CID.

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Still, the case of the motorcycle man offers a stark counter-narrative to Hegseth’s assertions about the war on terror — and the basis for his efforts to undermine protections for civilians today.

The rules of engagement in Afghanistan in 2010 were so lax that a man was killed for no reason and with no repercussions.

It was so unremarkable that no record of the engagement could be located. It was so commonplace that senior unit members couldn’t recall it.

It was so typical that only one man even thought to report it — and he waited 13 years.

It was so characteristic of U.S. military policy that no inquiry was conducted into the rules of engagement in force at the time.

And the incident was so in keeping with U.S. military tradition that, despite a murder confession and little question that an unarmed man was gunned down, Army CID and the 82nd Airborne’s chief of military justice quickly concluded there was no probable cause for charges, and the investigation was closed.

The post He Confessed to an Afghanistan War Murder. The U.S. Military Promptly Closed the Case. appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 25,000 people have had their lives upended and been forced into unfamiliar cultures, governments, and legal systems when the Department of Homeland Security deported them to so-called “third countries,” places where immigrants previously living in the United States have no connections and few rights — and where a deportation business booming under the second Trump administration finds its murky endpoints.

“The point is to scare people,” said one Trump administration official, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report. “With countries like Palau or Eswatini, the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere.”

As is the case for many tools of its cruelty, the Trump administration did not invent third-country removals — it refashioned them to serve its own excesses. In the past, the U.S. used the obscure administrative compromise for people who could prove they would face persecution or harm if returned to their home country yet did not meet other requirements for asylum. The U.S. had to meet humanitarian and legal obligations, such as ensuring third countries would not turn around and deport migrants right back to their home countries. It was a last-resort tool that still left people displaced from their homes and communities in service of the country’s arcane immigration laws. But the current Trump administration’s policy, premised on agreements with at least 35 countries, has been anything but humane.

Nor has it been particularly legal. After the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the third-country deportation scheme, DHS scheduled a flight to deport migrants involved in a class-action lawsuit challenging the policy to Burundi, Rwanda, and the Central African Republic. Despite a successful emergency motion their lawyers filed last week, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jet flew to two African countries that hold third-country removal agreements, according to the American Prospect. It is not yet clear who was on the plane or whether ICE carried out third-country removals in violation of a federal court order, and the Trump administration is now aiming to take the legal fight to the Supreme Court.

The saga illustrates the Trump administration’s proclivity for obfuscation, secret contracts, nondisclosure, and dealmaking of the backroom variety. Whether digitally disappearing people from ICE’s online detainee locator tool last week, or inking multimillion-dollar sole-source contracts with inexperienced companies of questionable provenance, the Trump administration has pursued its immigration goals under the cover of darkness, often justifying the secrecy with invocations of national security, all while attempting to shield itself from public scrutiny and accountability in the process.

“Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” an ongoing investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research, in partnership with The Intercept, examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power — where contracts, capital flows, and institutional incentives increasingly govern detention, deportation, and surveillance. The project joins other efforts to shed light on the often invisible economy of immigration enforcement, including the Berkeley Human Rights Center, Human Rights First, Third Country Deportation Watch, and others.

The first installment, released last December, focuses on the business of migrant detention and profit motive underpinning the brutality of privately run ICE detention facilities. The second chapter, out today, looks at the network of flights shuffling migrants between those facilities, as well as the shady deals brokered with the governments of deportation destinations.

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Many details of these bilateral third-country removal agreements are not public, but the logic is transactional: Countries accept asylum-seekers and other immigrants from the United States in exchange for aid or other forms of financial compensation. Many of the countries involved in what The Intercept’s Nick Turse has called Trump’s “global gulag” are so dangerous that the State Department includes them on its “Level 4 Do Not Travel” list, “the highest advisory level due to life-threatening risks. And the very fact that these people are sent to a third country, rather than repatriated, means they have at least a viable asylum case.

Some but not all of the underlying texts of these agreements have come to light, often popping up in far-flung corners of the internet. This is not only a bad practice in government transparency, but a potentially illegal one as well. Lawfare, where I serve as managing editor, has argued as much in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., where the publication has sued the State Department over its failure to disclose international agreements into which the Trump administration has entered — in violation of the Case-Zablocki Act.

Though accelerated by the Trump administration, the secrecy that has enabled the growth of the vast, invisible economy of immigration enforcement traces back to at least 2001 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Following the September 11 attacks, the new Cabinet-level department, along with other federal reforms, for the first time linked immigration with national security, which resulted in massive budget increases, new abilities to shield immigration information from the public, and general judicial deference to the executive branch that accompanies matters of foreign policy and national security.

Even the current Trump administration’s third-country deportation apparatus is beginning to build up its own record of cruel precedent. In the same class-action case last year, the Department of Homeland Security attempted to deport class members to Libya and South Sudan, in apparent violation of a temporary restraining order granted by a federal judge only weeks prior. During a hastily arranged hearing, a federal judge asked a Justice Department lawyer about the plane’s whereabouts, to which the government attorney responded, “I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified.” Asked under what authority the government had classified the location, the Justice Department lawyer did not have an answer.

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From the start, the Trump administration conceived of its third-country removal policy as another tool to inflict wanton abuse on irredeemable “illegal aliens.” As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained last year during a Cabinet meeting, “We are working with other countries to say ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries.’” What he failed to mention is that the people he’s demonizing have human rights, and that the countries he negotiated deals with have extensive records of violating them.

For the first time, “Deportation, Inc.” aims to render visible the dark web of agreements, transactions, and private contractors that make these grave abuses possible.

Correction: September 29, 2026, 12:50 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the premiere date of the first installment of Deportation, Inc.

The post Inside the Business of Trump’s Third-Country Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli documentary “NAZA” will make its North American premiere tomorrow at the New York Film Festival on the heels of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vitriolic speech at the United Nations, which was met by mass protests, arrests, and diplomats walking out. Other Israeli documentaries have screened at Lincoln Center, including one at the New York Jewish Film Festival in January on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights or another about an October 7 hostage. But this film, co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has proven extraordinarily controversial in its home country, reviled by nearly every sector of media and politics.

The documentary, which is composed of anonymous interviews with those active in Israel’s military and intelligence service during the war against Gaza, depicts extensive, highly detailed confessions of their participation in the mass targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians. The film’s title comes from the Israeli military’s system for assessing collateral damage, an interface that one of the anonymous confessors says can map out every building in the Gaza Strip and predict what civilians may be killed in an airstrike. One man who used the NAZA interface remarks in a clip from the film that the military once approved a single strike the system calculated would kill 500 Palestinians, and said the system makes no distinction between adults and children.

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The revelation of the film’s existence — its world premiere was at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month after being produced in secret for three years — sent shockwaves through Israeli society. Two contradictory claims have begun to dominate discussions of the documentary, at the highest levels of both the Israeli government and the military brass, both aiming to neutralize the film’s reach and the ability of its filmmakers to continue working. The first is that the film released highly sensitive and classified information about the Israel Defense Forces’ operations in Gaza, contravening the law. The second line of attack claims the film is a complete fabrication, a hoax, and in the words of IDF Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir, a “blood libel.” Key Israeli politicians argue Abraham and Szor are aiding the enemy in wartime, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling them  “friends” of Hamas who should be held accountable as such.

While some opponents of the current Israeli government, such as Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, have attempted to tack in a more liberal direction by saying “criticism is legitimate” — while also decrying the film for “present[ing] a distorted and one-sided picture” at a time when “the State of Israel [is] in a time of distress” — both the Israeli state and the army have begun proposing legal action be taken against the filmmakers, with their citizenship in particular coming under attack from not only Culture Minister Miki Zohar, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

In an unprecedented move, Netanyahu announced on September 16 in a video message posted on social media that his government would “revoke citizenship from anyone who defames IDF supporters abroad” in addition to raising the fine for defamation “twentyfold” to 1 million shekels (nearly $330,000 at the current exchange rate) to punish them further. Calling out the “NAZA” filmmakers specifically, Netanyahu went on to say “their place does not belong with us.”

The phenomenon of revoking Israeli citizenship is not novel. Earlier this year, two Palestinians from East Jerusalem were convicted of security offenses and stripped of their Israeli nationality, which paved the way for their deportation to either the occupied West Bank or even the Gaza Strip. But revoking the citizenship of Israeli Jews on any kind of similar grounds is without historical precedent. Both Abraham and Szor — who also co-directed the documentary “No Other Land” — are Jews born in Israel, have no Palestinian ancestry, and no public record of citizenship for any other country.

Proposals have been made in the past for the revocation of Israeli citizenship from certain Jews, most notably Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The far-right assassin, who is from an Orthodox Jewish family, was the subject of a public petition demanding his citizenship be revoked. But the Israeli Supreme Court rejected it on the grounds that “the dignity of the right” for every Jew to acquire and have Israeli citizenship overruled the “dignity of the murderer.” Now, for the first time, a sitting Israeli leader is advocating for the so-called “dignity of the right” to be overturned, not for murder, but for mere “slander,” in Netanyahu’s description, against the Israeli military.

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Although Israeli politicians and other officials have categorized the filmmakers as antisemites spreading lies about the Jewish people, Abraham and Szor are not explicitly anti-Zionist in the way that other prominent critics of Israel, like the historian Ilan Pappé and the architect Eyal Weizman, have defined themselves, or even how a Communist member of Israel’s Knesset, Ofer Cassif, has defined himself. Both co-directors have openly stated their belief in a future where both Israelis and Palestinians “are equally sovereign and free.” Abraham himself has said Israelis have a “right” to “sovereignty and security in this land,” just as Palestinians do.

Despite these threaded needles, the Jewish filmmakers of “NAZA” now find themselves in the position of being treated much the same way Palestinian citizens of Israel are: as though their citizenship was bestowed upon them in error, a mistake of history where convenience trumped logic, a catastrophe that needs to be rectified immediately.

The Law of Return — the idea that every Jewish person, even those who converted to the religion and have no ancestral ties to the land of Palestine, should be allowed to “return” to their homeland, to settle, to live, and to be treated as an equal alongside every other Jewish person, no matter their birthplace — was one of the fundamental building blocks of the Zionist project. But the Law of Return did not become law until 1950, and the Citizenship Law, which defined the terms of its larger eligibility, did not become law until 1952, four years after the State of Israel’s founding.

For a short period in Israel’s history, citizenship had no clear definition, but it required quick clarification, not just because it is a key part of any fledgling state, but because they needed to be able to define which Arabs, who remained inside Israel’s new borders on temporary “red card” permits after the Nakba, could be allowed to stay, and who could be removed as an illegal infiltrator. Then-Agriculture Minister Dov Yosef remarked plainly during a cabinet debate in 1949: “When we publish the citizenship law and a person is found not to be a citizen, we can then deport him.”

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Citizenship was granted in limited quantities to the Palestinians who had been able to remain inside the newly established Israel and did not confer all the rights it supposedly guaranteed. Palestinian citizens of Israel remained under control of a military governance system up until 1966, with their movements strictly controlled and their political activities restricted to rein in criticism of the Jewish state they now found themselves living under. 

The Law of Return, considered “inalienable” by many politicians, where any concrete restrictions must entail tearing of the law in its entirety, contained seemingly contradictory restrictions within its formally expansive framework. Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner noted back in 1950, during discussion of the Law of Return in the Knesset, that even though Jewish citizenship was technically expansive, it still entailed restrictions to those who “endangered … the security of the state,” a vagueness that Vilner opposed on the grounds that it could be used by the government “against sections within the Jewish people.” The Polish-Israeli anti-Zionist intellectual Israel Shahak noted in 1975 that all the punishments normally doled out against Arabs, including losing their citizenship, remained theoretically possible against Jewish dissenters under Israeli law, but only “racism” against Arabs had prevented setting that precedent.

As the United States became Israel’s primary benefactor in the 1960s and 1970s, previously dormant discussions about the grounds for revoking Israeli citizenship from Jews began to reemerge. They coalesced around insufficient connection to Israel, with some aiming to establish a system of permanent residency, disallowing citizenship for Jews who did not spend enough time inside the Jewish state. After 9/11, these proposals took on a much more ideological, and much more far-right, character. 

The Israeli right was soon overtaken with the possibility of revoking the citizenship of those it considered to be aiding the enemy, with Arab citizens of Israel being the primary target. But anti-Zionist Jews were also in their crosshairs, including members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish fringe sect Neturei Karta, or Jews who were insufficiently supportive of Israel, like Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Calls for “loyalty oaths” from both Arabs and Jews became a cause célèbre for people like then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in the late 2000s, who would insist on the equality he advocated for by saying, “It’s not racism. The test is loyalty, not their religion.” 

A certain McCarthyist strain familiar to Americans under the Bush administration, looking anywhere and everywhere for national disloyalty, was confirmed in 2007 by Likud MK Gilad Erdan, who would later become Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United Nations during the height of the war on Gaza in 2023. Erdan claimed revoking citizenship would not be wrong because the U.S. also had a basis for revoking citizenship based on “disloyalty to the state,” which included “citizens by birth,” and that there was a threat that needed to be dealt with, even from Jewish people inside the State of Israel, who did not recognize Israel’s “sovereignty.”

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The Second Intifada and the disintegration of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process preceded these events, but now, the discourse about citizenship has taken on an unmistakably Americanized character, one defined by a larger “love it or leave it” mentality that allows for officials like Ben-Gvir to post about putting Jewish and Arab politicians who oppose the unfettered expansion of Zionism on planes to be deported.

By virtue of their criticism of Israel, the self-proclaimed representative of the Jewish people, they become enemies of the Jewish people, and therefore in the minds of the state’s most ardent defenders, politically Arab, and therefore able to be viewed as an existential threat just the same.

Netanyahu’s proposal to strip the “NAZA” filmmakers of their citizenship is unlikely to come to pass. It is undeniably being utilized as a political cudgel, with Netanyahu also calling for the revocation of political opponent Yair Golan’s citizenship on the same grounds, despite Golan having been a major general in the IDF. Israeli President Isaac Herzog has, in turn, dismissed the plan, calling it “completely irrelevant.” But as Shahak said in 1975, the grounds for expanding the revocation of citizenship from Jewish Israelis is there in the law, even if the precedent has not yet been set. In 2022, the court upheld a law that allowed for revoking citizenship from Israelis who “carry out actions that constitute a breach of trust against the state.” Earlier this year, in a move met with much less controversy, Netanyahu began initiating proceedings to strip citizenship from those who allegedly aid Iran through espionage, cases which have involved Jews as well as Arabs.

While the chances of the Supreme Court upholding the stripping of citizenship in this particular case are almost nil, a future Israeli administration, one that does not recognize the court’s powers, or an administration that serves alongside a court far more aligned with disqualifying the insufficiently Zionist from politics, could tell a much different story.

A future government where Israel can strip anyone’s citizenship for not only being Palestinian, but also for speaking out in any way against the state, a future where Ben-Gvir is defense minister, or even prime minister, may be closer than many defenders of the “only democracy in the Middle East” imagine.

The post The Backlash to “NAZA” Shows How Little Israeli Citizenship Really Means appeared first on The Intercept.

On Wednesday evening, United is scheduled to transport five shipments of military cargo onboard United Airlines flight 90, a passenger route from Newark Liberty International Airport, in New Jersey, to Tel Aviv, Israel, a day after resuming the route and another direct flight to Israel, records show. 

The shipments, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, include one transport to the “electro-optics” wing of the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems, in Rehovot, Israel, where the arms maker has a major campus. Another shipment is bound for Elbit Systems Land, a division of the company formerly known as IMI Systems, located in Ramat Hasharon, Israel. And a further three shipments are scheduled to go to an Elbit Systems facility in Karmiel, Israel.

At least one of the shipments to Karmiel was specifically labeled as “FMS,” or foreign military sales, the records show, though all the military hardware bound for Israel on the Wednesday flight is destined for defense firms under Elbit’s umbrella.

The shipments appear to be a return to status quo for United, which had used civilian passenger flights to transport thousands of shipments of military cargo to Israel amid its wars in the occupied Gaza Strip and Lebanon and in the run-up to its joint attack on Iran alongside the U.S., according to a new report released this week by Movement Research Unit, Palestinian Youth Movement, People’s Embargo for Palestine, and the Democratic Socialists of America. (A spokesperson for United declined to comment. Representatives of Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.)

The report, based on open-source data, found that United transported nearly 3,000 loads of military materiel over a seven-month period in 2025 and early 2026. The cargo ranged from critical components for fighter jets and tanks to helmet displays, electronics, and nuts and bolts. The transfers stopped only amid the outbreak of war with Iran.

“This report shows that United, consistently and on a regular basis, ships military materiel that is used by the Israeli military for its operations in Gaza, in Lebanon, and against Iran,” said Griffin Mahon, a co-chair of the national labor committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the groups behind the report. “These parts are shipped on civilian passenger flights, and they represent one way that American companies enable the Israeli government’s war crimes.”

2,761 Shipments

Using open-source methods to find publicly accessible cargo documents, researchers with the Movement Research Unit — a group that provides investigative muscle for left-wing groups and causes — said they tracked 2,761 shipments to weapons manufacturers transported by United aboard 160 civilian passenger flights between July 24, 2025, and February 27, 2026.

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Due to the volume of data, the authors were only able to analyze a subset of the overall shipments, but after analyzing the product descriptions of a sample of 546 of those shipments, the group found 28 shipments of tank parts, 131 shipments of parts for weapons maker Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets, 67 shipments of components for other aircraft, and more than 100 other shipments of radio and communications equipment, nuts and bolts, and helmet-mounted display systems. 

Many of those parts include key components to some of the most critical military vehicles in Israel’s arsenal, many of which have been documented in the commission of alleged war crimes on numerous occasions, according to Belal Elsiesy, a spokesperson for Palestinian Youth Movement.

“We’ve seen parts directly tied to the carrying out of the genocide, from armored tank sights and gunner display units to the bomb-release units of the F-35,” Elsiesy said. “We often have seen videos of Israeli occupation forces on social media recordings from inside of a tank, the demolition of schools, mosques, and other buildings, and often the screen that they are recording on is a gunner display unit — the same gunner display unit that is transported by United Airlines. It’s not an abstract connection.”

The report found no evidence that United transported any explicitly hazardous material aboard passenger flights. The use of civilian infrastructure to carry weapons components to a belligerent in the midst of open conflict, however, raised ethical questions for the researchers, according to Abdullah, an investigator with Movement Research who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that he be referred to by his first name only due to the sensitive nature of his work.

“We all get on our flights and have to worry about taking too much water in our water bottles, and meanwhile, there are ammunition handling systems and F-35 parts and tank sites that are being transported on these flights, without us actually knowing,” Abdullah said. “Crimes are being committed in Gaza, so United needs to do a full and thorough review of their policy related to the transport of these components that might be violating international law.”

Weapons Parts on Domestic Flights

The cargo shipments were not just stowed away on flights bound for Israel, the report found.

While the majority of cargo documents for shipments did not reveal a domestic origin point other than Newark, 235 shipments were shown to have arrived at Newark on domestic flights from cities across the U.S., including flights from Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, Houston International Airport, Atlanta International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, along with Washington’s Dulles International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

The domestic route with the most shipments in the period analyzed was a United flight from Dallas–Fort Worth to Houston, aboard which the airline transported 128 shipments, according to the report. That was followed by 90 domestic shipments onboard a United flight from Houston to Newark.

Most of the shipments going directly to Israel — 2,565 in total — appear to have been carried aboard United flights 84 and 90, passenger flights that travel directly from Newark to Tel Aviv. Data obtained by the report’s authors showed that Newark served as the primary hub for United’s shipments to Israel, with all but 45 of the shipments in the documented period arriving in Israel from there. Of the remaining 45 shipments, 36 left the U.S. from Chicago, and nine from Washington, the report found.

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Most of the shipments — 2,070 in total — were destined for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer and a frequent target of Palestine solidarity activism, according to the report. A total of 78 shipments were transported to the Israeli headquarters of Lockheed Martin, while hundreds more were destined for the Israeli Ministry of Defense and to several military airbases in Israel, including the operational hub of the country’s fleet of F-35I jets, the Israeli version of Lockheed’s flagship stealth fighter, the report found.

While information on the senders of the shipments was only available in some cases, a portion of the transfers were shipped by Lockheed Martin and by Elbit System’s U.S. branch, according to the report’s authors.

A New Report

The Intercept reviewed a portion of the underlying data in the report, including cargo documents that showed the transport of F-35 parts and weapons systems for armored personnel carriers, but has not independently corroborated every claim made by Movement Research Unit and its partners.

Movement Research investigators provided a detailed explanation of its methodology to The Intercept, which agreed to withhold some details to prevent a clampdown on the research that made the report possible. Previous work by the group has exposed a multi-ton shipment of explosive material out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and a Portland drone company shipping hardware to Israel.

Work on the report began last summer, after an investigative story by the Irish publication The Ditch revealed several shipments of military hardware aboard passenger flights passing through Irish airspace.

Suspecting the practice might be more widespread than the limited samples in The Ditch report, Movement Research delved deeper into the airline’s shipments to Israel over the ensuing seven months.

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The shipments appear to have mostly stopped in February, when U.S. direct flights to Israel were suspended amid the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran. With those flights set to resume this week, the report’s authors hope to pressure United to cease its practice of moving military cargo onboard, according to Abdullah, the investigator with Movement Research.

“This is very timely, because United needs to commit to not shipping military cargo on those passenger flights,” Abdullah said. “Not only on the ones that are going directly to Tel Aviv, but also on flights within the U.S.”

The post United Airlines Ships War Materiel to Israel Aboard Passenger Flights appeared first on The Intercept.

“A Mexican president is Mexican and does not represent another country,” Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference on August 25. If adopted, her proposal would make Mexico’s presidency qualifications in some respects more restrictive than those of the United States, where a president must be born in the country but there is no explicit ban on dual citizenship.

Sheinbaum’s proposal marks the latest in a suite of changes that her critics deem authoritarian. In May, for example, Sheinbaum gave the National Electoral Institute, Mexico’s highest electoral authority, the power to annul presidential elections deemed to have been influenced by foreign actors.

But Sheinbaum argues the reforms are necessary to stave off the growing influence of the far right in Latin America, where now two heads of state — Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa — are also U.S. citizens.

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De la Espriella, the far-right Colombian president who received strong support from Trump during his campaign and took office in June, is a U.S. and Italian citizen and a registered member of the Republican Party. Noboa, who assumed office as Ecuador’s president in 2023 at the age of 35, was born in Miami, Florida, and is the son of one of Ecuador’s richest men. (His father, Álvaro Noboa, also ran unsuccessfully for president five times.)

It’s clear that Latin America has an ascendant right wing under U.S. influence, said Pamela K. Starr, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Morena, the party that Sheinbaum leads, genuinely seems to believe there’s an international far-right movement that has taken over most of Latin America and that efforts to weaken Mexico’s left-wing political leadership come from Washington. How Mexican observers view Sheinbaum’s protectionism, meanwhile, is something of a political Rorschach test.

“Those who trust her trust that her efforts are legitimate, that she’s not trying to establish authoritarianism,” Starr told The Intercept. “Those who oppose her have the exact opposite read: that this is simply an extension of the Fourth Transformation’s effort to recreate an authoritarian government in Mexico. The truth obviously is somewhere in between.”

The Fourth Transformation is the political project launched by former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the founder of the Morena party who swept to the presidency in 2018 promising to break with Mexico’s political establishment, reduce inequality, and root out corruption. López Obrador cast his movement as a historic transformation of the country, and his successor, Sheinbaum, has pledged to protect it.

Her strategy raises an uncomfortable question inside Mexico: whether measures designed to shield the country from foreign political influence could themselves be used to consolidate Morena’s power.

“I don’t think it is an absurd idea,” said Damián Zepeda, the former president of Mexico’s conservative party PAN, of Sheinbaum’s proposed dual-citizenship ban. “But we cannot lose sight of the context of the authoritarian government we are living under.”

For Cynthia López Castro, a Morena senator, the initiative seems fundamental. The logic behind it is that someone who holds dual nationality has a legal bond with another state, López Castro said, while whoever holds the presidency can only represent the Mexican people.

“What is being done is protecting Mexico from leaders who would sell out their own country,” said López Castro, who told The Intercept that the measure was discussed in parliament this week. “President Claudia Sheinbaum argues that dual nationality is incompatible with serving as president or governor because these positions require exclusive representation.”

Sheinbaum’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

There are people within and around the U.S. administration who see Sheinbaum’s government as hostile to American interests and are seeking to see Mexico governed by conservatives, Starr said. The irony, she added, is that “the United States has never, literally never, had such good security cooperation from Mexico.”

The State Department and U.S. military are highly supportive of the Mexican president because of the level of security cooperation her government has provided Washington.

“There are two messages coming out of the United States, and Donald Trump just depends on what day it is, which side he apes in his rhetoric,” Starr said.

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Framing Sheinbaum’s proposal as an authoritarian measure, Zepeda, the conservative, also presented it as an attack on a critical target for the Trump administration: the rights of millions of Mexican immigrants.

“A great deal of progress has been made on the migration agenda to recognize the rights of our fellow Mexicans abroad, and this proposal would prevent anyone who was born in the United States because of their family’s migration circumstances from aspiring to certain public offices,” Zepeda said. “It is a double narrative: On the one hand, we support migrants, and on the other, we restrict their rights in order to protect those in power.”

In Starr’s view, while the U.S. president is clearly an influential force, he’s inflating his own role in Latin American politics.

“There’s no question that Trump thinks that he has created a conservative coalition in Latin America, and it supports him. He’s right that it supports him, but he’s not right that he created it,” Starr said. “Latin Americans are voting on Latin American concerns.”

The post Claudia Sheinbaum Wants to Ban Dual Citizens From Office to Shield Mexico From Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

The Toxic Inheritance of America’s Wars

Esmaeil Baqaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, recently warned of the increasing environmental damage caused by the U.S. war, drawing attention to oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing up on Iranian shores. “This incident is only one visible example of the extensive pollution — both overt and concealed — that has degraded the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” he wrote on X. “Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages? Is it the nations that consume the inexpensive energy exported from our region, the shipping insurers, or the aggressors and their partners who have transformed the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman into a theater for military operations and the testing of highly destructive weaponry?”

Alongside death and destruction that has killed or wounded tens of thousands of Iranians, the U.S.–Israeli war has caused massive environmental devastation. By March, attacks had already resulted in more than 300 incidents of potential environmental harm, documented across 12 countries in the region, according to a report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory. These toxic exposures threaten not only today’s war victims, but also future generations who will grapple with the knock-on effects.

Major commercial satellite companies have restricted or delayed the publication of their Middle East data at the behest of the U.S. government. Likely intended to obscure the true extent of damage inflicted on U.S. military facilities across the region, the ongoing satellite blackout has also hindered the work of those tracking the environmental devastation that has accompanied the conflict since it began in February. Even with the limited data, the Conflict and Environment Observatory has concluded that “[a]ll parties to the conflict” have appeared to target “environmentally risky facilities,” including oil infrastructure and water desalination plants.

According to research by the Climate and Community Institute, U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in the first 14 days of the war emitted roughly 5 million metric cubic tons of greenhouse gases. Put another way: In two weeks, coalition strikes produced roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the country of Iceland does over the course of a year. And as the war dragged on, missile facilities, weapons depots, oil infrastructure, nuclear facilities, dual-use and civilian infrastructure including power stations and desalination plants were also increasingly struck.

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The environmental threats these targets pose is enormous. Damaged desalination plants jeopardize the civilian water supply and flood nearby land and marine environments with harmful chemicals like sulfuric acid. Bombed infrastructure fills urban streets with asbestos-contaminated rubble and dust, heightening the risk of respiratory illness and cancer among exposed populations. Damaged weapons facilities pollute surrounding areas with explosives, highly toxic liquid propellants, and heavy metals. And the targeting of nuclear facilities risks radiation exposure or worse, an uncontrolled nuclear disaster, like a meltdown.

Fossil fuel infrastructure has also remained a key military objective for all belligerents. Israeli strikes on more than two dozen Iranian oil depots in early March engulfed the capital city of Tehran in a cloud of toxic smoke that rained black carbon and sulfuric acid on the city’s 9 million residents. Attacks on oil tankers and other commercial vessels have leached oil and spilled fuel into myriad waterways from the Egyptian port of Damietta, where Iran struck two liquefied natural gas vessels, to the coast of Sri Lanka, where the U.S. sank an Iranian frigate. And such environmental damage is likely to increase as the conflict continues to sporadically flare up.

The U.S. has a long history of starting wars that leave deep environmental scars. And for decades, U.S. troops have paid for it with exposures to toxic substances, including defoliants like Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. sprayed across Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s; smoke from oil depot fires that dotted the landscape in and around Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War; and the military base burn pits of the post-9/11 forever wars. The PACT Act of 2022 extended healthcare access to millions of veterans who served from the last half of the 20th century to today and now suffer from a wide range of conditions related to such wartime exposures, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and reproductive issues likely caused or exacerbated by their military service.

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Health problems among U.S. veterans often mirror those of local communities in war zones as they are exposed to the same toxic substances. Just as American troops returned home from Iraq with higher rates of diseases like urinary and blood cancers, doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, reported higher birth abnormalities and miscarriages among the local population.

Fallujah offers a glimpse of the environmental fallout that the people of neighboring Iran may face in the years to come. More than half of Fallujah was leveled in a U.S. Marine-led siege of the city in 2004. Hospitals, water systems and electrical grids were destroyed. A similar wave of destruction accompanied the ISIS takeover of the city in 2014. Fallujah was then besieged and heavily bombed in 2016 during the U.S.–Iraqi military operation that retook the city. Iraqis in Fallujah fled en masse in both 2004 and 2014. Those who returned were greeted by demolished homes, bomb craters, chemical spills, and houses with ash covered walls littered with bullet holes.

Since 2004, Fallujah has seen a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer rates and similar spikes in early onset cancer and respiratory diseases, according to a study co-authored by local physicians. Elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal birth defects that followed the initial U.S. invasion have never diminished. Reports on these poor health outcomes by doctors at Fallujah Women and Children’s Hospital led to the creation of a multidisciplinary study steered by researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. and Britain’s Newcastle University which tracked the intergenerational health effects of heavy metal exposure.

Depleted uranium munitions — which shatter and ignite on impact, allowing them to penetrate heavy armor plating — have been used by the U.S. in combat since the Gulf War. Spent rounds then release particles of radioactive uranium and other heavy metals, like titanium, into the surrounding earth, water, and air. Heavily bombarded areas in Fallujah were left with a greater percentage of heavy metals in their soil as a result.

Those who returned to the city after the battles, rebuilt their homes, reseeded contaminated farmlands, and drank and bathed in local waters now carry higher levels of radiation and heavy metals in their bodies. Indeed, uranium was found in the bones of one-third of study participants, all of whom were children during the 2004 siege — at levels roughly 300 times higher than their generational peers in America.

While highly toxic on its own, uranium levels are also often a marker for exposure to heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury, which have been known to harm virtually every organ in the human body. Today, elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal congenital anomalies plague families in Fallujah.

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“War itself is always about combustion,” explained Kali Rubaii, a cultural anthropologist and Purdue University assistant professor who led the study on Fallujah. “The combustion of generally toxic materials redistributes these toxicants into people’s air, water and food. Every time someone breathes in everything in the air, they are inheriting the pollutants of war.”

Post-war surges in birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers in Fallujah have now been directly linked with exposure to the weapons of war. As the pollutants of war are largely universal, the study’s implications lie far beyond Fallujah. Recommendations for those returning to bombarded areas are included in the study’s appendix in both Ukrainian and Arabic. When I spoke to Rubaii in March — two days after Tehran was drenched in black rain — she hoped the study’s finding, and its recommendations for returnees, could be of help to those living near the Persian Gulf.

The U.S–Israeli war on Iran has only exacerbated ongoing environmental crises in the Middle East, including a five-year-long drought, brought on by years of insufficient rainfall linked to human-induced climate change, that poses a severe threat to Tehran’s water supply. The Persian Gulf’s fragile coral reefs and mangrove forests have also, for years, suffered under rising water temperatures, intensive vessel activity, and growing industrial pollution.

The Persian Gulf’s ecosystems still bear the scars of oil spills from the U.S. battles with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, according to a recent study from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, oil spills in the Gulf have increased dramatically since the beginning of the war to cover roughly four times the area in March 2026 as they did one year earlier. Though it is still too soon to calculate the full extent of the environmental harm imposed by the ongoing conflict, the toxic airborne pollutants, land contaminated with heavy metals, and oil-soaked waterways will pose a threat to life for decades to come.

As Rubaii’s study concludes, “the most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.” While we live in an age where threats to civilian infrastructure are espoused and ordered by prime ministers and presidents alike, the illegality of these attacks — and their grave ecological consequences — cannot be ignored. The targeting of a country’s energy infrastructure, waterways, bridges, and homes makes it more likely that the attacked nation will respond with attacks on similar targets, placing civilians at risk in the present and, due to environmental contamination, for following generations.

The International Committee of the Red Cross — which works to uphold the laws of war — has repeatedly affirmed that the environment itself is a civilian object and must be protected. Under the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, to inflict disproportionate widespread and severe environmental damage is a war crime.

The Iran war has already sparked a global fuel crisis, threatened future harvests, and placed tens of millions of people at risk of hunger, imperiling this generation and the next. It has also subjected civilians to toxic smoke, black carbon rain, and other public health hazards. People can’t be healthy if they live on sick lands. Even after the final bomb of the Iran war has dropped, the ecological devastation and health hazards will haunt U.S. service members and local residents alike. Fallujah has shown that even long after the guns fall silent, war victims continue to suffer with the fallout of conflicts that have, quite literally, seeped into their bones.

The post Ecocide in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

By then, settlers had already been attacking the house for months. The Abu Ridi family had hired contractors to install an additional fence around their property, and when the settlers drove up to the home on an ATV on August 4, workers were busy erecting the fence.

“We called the Israeli police so they would protect us from them,” Qusai Abu Ridi, Loui’s brother, told The Intercept. “The army came after half an hour.” 

About two and a half hours after the settlers’ arrival, the Israeli military did take action — but not against the settlers. 

The workers installing the fence would end up arrested and taken away by Israeli soldiers while the settlers who were trespassing roamed around the property freely, according to security camera footage reviewed by The Intercept.

The Israeli military’s actions that night against the workers stand as an example of the Israeli government’s broader role in and response to settler violence in the occupied West Bank — emboldening the settlers’ lawless behavior as they forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and land. 

Just a few days later on August 9, settlers began a siege on three homes in Qusra, including the Abu Ridi’s, blocking the main road and trapping families inside their houses with limited water and food.

Despite claims by the Israeli military that it has removed Israeli citizens since the siege began in Qusra and that they are minimizing the impact of operations on Palestinian civil life, the videos from before and during the siege show a village that remains under threat from settlers — with Israeli soldiers doing little to stop them.

“We are still under siege. There’s military all around the house,” said Abu Ridi, after traveling from Ohio last week to protect his home in Qusra. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “presence is not helping the situation. It’s not giving us the freedom to go in and out.”

The siege has led to international condemnation of the impunity afforded to settlers — including rare, harshly worded remarks from the far-right U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. 

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In statements to The Intercept, the Israeli military referred to the settlers as “rioters” but did not answer questions about the incident on August 4.

“IDF soldiers are currently permanently stationed in the area until further notice, in order to protect its residents and prevent friction,” an Israeli military spokesperson said. “The IDF is operating with the tools at its disposal and will continue to work to restore order in the area, prevent disturbances, and ensure the security of all residents of the area, both Palestinians and Israelis.”

“Complicit With the Settlers”

On August 4, Qusai Abu Ridi said he called the police for help when the settlers arrived.

In a security video just a few minutes before midnight, Israeli soldiers can be seen approaching the gate before some of the settlers walk up to them and talk. About two minutes later, the soldiers and settlers walk together through the gate and up to the house.

“The settlers entered with them and were talking to each other and praising each other,” Qusai Abu Ridi said. Video from around 12:12 a.m. shows the Israeli settlers moving around the property freely and unescorted as they exit through the gate.

Abu Ridi and the workers were eventually taken to one side of  the house where security video shows them facing the wall with their hands up to be searched. Just after 2 a.m., video shows two workers being taken by Israeli soldiers. Both men are blindfolded with their arms tied behind their backs. 

Qusai Abu Ridi said that they tried to tell the soldiers that they had called because they wanted protection from the soldiers. 

“One of the soldiers replied, ‘Shut up, not a word, do not say a word,’” he recalled of the incident. “The army was complicit with the settlers. They were the ones who attacked us, and we were the ones who were mistreated.” 

From the U.S., Loui Abu Ridi had watched the incident unfold live through the security camera feed until it cut out. 

“It truly was a terrifying moment,” he said. “Imagine you’re watching your brother for two hours, and then they cut off the camera.” He added, “Then you start imagining what they’re doing.” 

The workers were held for a few hours before being released without charge, according to Loui Abu Ridi.

He said, “Their crime was trying to protect my house from the settlers.”

Months of Attacks

The attack on Qusra is the latest in an escalation of violence by Israeli settlers this year across the occupied West Bank. According to the United Nations, there were about 190 attacks in each of the first four months of this year. This has been coupled with the Israeli government increasing money for and approvals of settlements, which are illegal under international law.

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Human rights groups have documented both the rise of settler violence and criticized the Israeli government for its lack of action and even complicity in the attacks. According to a recent U.N. report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, “the increasing participation of Israeli security forces in settler attacks amounts to a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers.” 

Before the current siege on Qusra, attacks by Israeli settlers on the village had been ramping up for months. Loui Abu Ridi told The Intercept that the first attack on his home was in January of this year.

“When they first came, they were about half a mile away from my house,” Abu Ridi recounted. “They started coming down every night to check the area, and they started trespassing and vandalizing the house until they managed to break in and made a lot of damage. Anything that can make this house livable, they destroy — water, electricity.”

Abu Ridi hoped that, by traveling to Qusra earlier last week, his American citizenship could provide some kind of help or protection, but he said that little has changed. Instead, soldiers took over the home of one of his neighbors, who then moved in with him.

On Thursday, Abu Ridi recorded a video of Israeli soldiers in the house next door, tossing the clothes of women and children out the window. “I am the owner,” a soldier shouts to Abu Ridi after being told the clothing belonged to his neighbor. 

By Sunday, the soldiers appeared to have left the home, leaving trash thrown around and damage to the property, according to photos of the scene released by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.

An Israeli military spokesperson said that after an initial occupation of Palestinian homes, soldiers had been instructed that villagers could remain in their residences.

The spokesperson said, “The conduct of the soldiers and the statement heard in the video are inconsistent with the standards expected of IDF soldiers.”

U.S. Condemnation

U.S. officials have condemned the settlers, with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offering a rare rebuke, calling them “terrorists” last week. He repeated the characterization this week in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 and said that, because what was happening involved an American citizen, likely referring to Loui Abu Ridi, it “invoked our involvement.” 

For Abu Ridi, that involvement has not led to him feeling safer or an assurance that his home and land won’t be stolen.

“My neighbors, they’re not American citizens. We are in the same boat here,” he said. “I heard U.S. officials talk about it, but it’s not helping on the ground. I’m under siege, I’m speaking with you inside my house, I’m unable to leave.” 

The State Department did not answer specific questions from The Intercept about the siege in Qusra, but in a statement said, “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank.”

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It’s unclear when the military will end their operation and reopen the area. The day after Loui Abu Ridi arrived in Qusra, he said a settler approached him.

“He claimed the area is his,” Abu Ridi said. “If a settler was able to walk toward me and actually made it to stand in front of my face, trespass on my property and in front of the IDF and tell me I need to leave, that’s his area — that’s terrifying.”

The post Palestinians Asked for Help Against Settlers. Israelis Detained Palestinian Workers Instead. appeared first on The Intercept.