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collective punishment
Why the SanctionsKill Campaign Supports BDS
The BDS movement to end Zionist violence, and the SanctionsKill campaign to abolish US economic coercion, are not separate causes, but one movement for justice, sovereignty, and human dignity.
Sep 21, 2025
The SanctionsKill campaign was formed in 2019 to raise awareness of the human cost of the “sanctions”—actually economic coercive measures—imposed by the United States and its allies on over 40 countries, in which one-third of humanity lives. Our coalition of grassroots activists has exposed the suffering and death caused to populations targeted with these measures, particularly among children, the elderly, and people with health conditions.
We also strongly support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement advanced by Palestinian civil society as a legitimate way for grassroots activists around the world to pressure the settler-colonial state of Israel to comply with international law and recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination.
It is important to understand the distinction between BDS and imperialist economic coercive measures. While this includes legal differences, the most salient feature is that BDS is the peoples’ effort to end their governments’ complicity with Zionist colonial crimes, whereas US “sanctions” maintain imperialist hegemony by forcing countries to submit to US economic and political interests. The BDS movement comes from over a century of struggle for Palestinian liberation, with a global consensus of the world’s people that Zionist apartheid must end, while US-imposed “sanctions” are based on specious accusations of human rights violations to “continue the theft of wealth from the Global South, and preserve racial hierarchy in the international system.”
Some definitions and a bit of history can help to better understand the complementarity of BDS and SanctionsKill.
A Definition of Sanctions and Their Legality
The United Nations describes sanctions as restrictive measures imposed by the UN Security Council to enforce international law and maintain or restore peace and security, which may include “complete or partial interruption of economic, communications, or diplomatic relations.” Sanctions imposed unilaterally (without the UN Security Council) violate the UN Charter, and UN bodies are calling for the elimination of “unilateral coercive measures” such as those imposed by the US government.
This global consensus is shown in the fact that for over 30 consecutive years, the UN General Assembly has voted almost unanimously to eliminate the US blockade of Cuba; the usual dissenting votes are only those of the US and Israel. Even UN Security Council sanctions are often manipulated by the US to impose collective punishment on civilians, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
What Is BDS and How Does It Work?
BDS for Palestine is but one expression of a national liberation struggle that has been ongoing since the first Zionist settlement was established in 1878. Evoking the Great Revolt of 1936-39, the decades-long Arab Boycott initiated in 1945, the 1975 UN resolution that declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” the 1975 Organization of African Unity resolution that called for support of Palestine against “Zionist racist colonialism,” and the Intifadas, the international divestment movement started in 2000 and was relaunched as boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) in 2005.
It derives inspiration from the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) of South Africa which led hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens around the world to boycott goods from the apartheid state from the 1950s to 1994. Students, churches, trade unions, and local groups pushed governments and businesses to divest. There was a cultural boycott, and South Africa was banned from the Olympics and from FIFA competition between 1964 and 1992. "The strength of the international solidarity campaign was that it spoke directly to the ordinary citizen and challenged each one singly, and communities collectively, to take action.”
While the genocide takes the form of forced starvation, the world’s people are sickened to see that governments and international organizations are incapable of or unwilling to stop atrocities committed in plain sight.
UN sanctions were also imposed on South Africa (including an arms embargo undermined by Israel), and the country was suspended from the UN General Assembly from 1974 to 1994. By the 1980s individual countries, including the US, were imposing sanctions. However, it seems that the boycott movement was more impactful than official sanctions, causing a “privately induced financial crisis—the repercussions of which were substantially greater than any of the public sanctions that ensued.” BDS against apartheid South Africa was a complement to the most important factor in bringing down the apartheid regime—the resistance of Black South Africans on the ground, including armed struggle.
The movement for BDS against Israeli apartheid has been accelerating since the start of the live-streamed genocide in October of 2023. This grassroots movement, led by Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora, is inspiring millions to boycott consumer goods made in Israel and demand that Israeli weapons and surveillance companies be removed from their local economies, governments, and pension funds. Similar to the AAM of South Africa, billions of dollars have now been divested from the Zionist economy. Campaigns such as “Apartheid Free Communities” have moved public discourse toward an acknowledgement of the unjust, racist treatment of the Palestinian people. Divestment is again the rallying cry of students demanding an end to their universities’ complicity in human rights abuses, and there is an academic and intellectual boycott and call to ban the Israeli settler-colonial state from the Olympics and FIFA competition.
While the genocide takes the form of forced starvation, the world’s people are sickened to see that governments and international organizations are incapable of or unwilling to stop atrocities committed in plain sight. In response, many have taken matters into their own hands through boycott and divestment. And as in South Africa, BDS is a complement to the main struggle on the ground in Palestine.
The BDS movement says that boycott and divestment necessarily come before sanctions, in order to build “a crucial mass of people power to make policymakers fulfill their obligations under international law.” It is an effort to move toward binding UN Security Council sanctions to oblige Israel to comply with the many General Assembly resolutions and International Court of Justice rulings demanding an end to Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
How Do US “Sanctions” Work?
In contrast, the unilateral coercive measures (“sanctions”) promoted by the US are not intended to uphold international law or support peace and security, but rather to deliberately impose collective punishment on civilian populations in order to bring about regime change. This was revealed in a 1960 memo by a US diplomat explaining that a blockade of Cuba would “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” The United States government imposes these measures on countries that try to develop economic or political systems independent of US domination. And given the US’ “exorbitant power to sanction” due to the dominant role of its dollar in international trade and banking transactions, these measures are very impactful.
Economic coercive measures punish populations by impacting global trade, thus making it hard to import food, fuel, medicines, and parts to maintain civilian infrastructure. One consequence is the inability to import chemicals and parts to maintain water supply systems, causing severe shortages of clean drinking water, leading to massive child deaths.
Even UN sanctions can be manipulated for imperialist purposes. As Doa Ali said in How to Kill an Entire Country, “Iraq is a case in point of how the US has captured the UN Security Council’s sanctioning capacity using it to impose its own ‘rules-based global order’ and further its imperialist interests, regardless of the human cost.” In 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the US was able to engineer and oversee the imposition of severe UN sanctions on Iraq. These led to the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children from water-borne illnesses, vaccine-preventable diseases, and hunger—in a country that had achieved one of the highest per capita food production rates in the region. In the US-controlled committee that oversaw enforcement of the sanctions, the US ensured that “humanitarian exceptions” were denied and that “food itself was not considered a humanitarian necessity.”
US-promoted sanctions have killed over 100,000 Venezuelans since 2017, and 12% of child deaths in Palestine prior to October 2023 were from lack of clean drinking water due to the US-supported Israeli blockade. Further evidence that sanctions kill is the new report in the medical journal The Lancet, which found that sanctions cause some 564,000 deaths annually—similar to global mortality from armed conflict—with 51% of the victims under age 5.
US-imposed coercive measures are based on extractive interests, dubious accusations of deficient democracy, and spurious charges of human rights violations, such as the allegation that Cuba is “trafficking” its doctors (they are actually proud participants in a renowned humanitarian project) and that Cuba is a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) because it hosted peace talks for Colombia. The SSOT allegation makes it extremely hard for a country to conduct any banking transactions, and together with the 63-year blockade, has caused a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. Such sanctions supposedly imposed to protect human rights are in fact the worst violators of human rights.
Conclusion
As hope grows for a Free Palestine sooner rather than later, it is time to lift the siege on Gaza that has been blocking desperately needed supplies since 2007. The “exorbitant sanctioning power of the US” on all the countries of the region—including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Libya—will also end as these countries find alternative trade and financial arrangements, such as the BRICS, and a new multipolar order emerges.
The BDS movement to end Zionist violence, and the SanctionsKill campaign to abolish US economic coercion, are not separate causes, but one movement for justice, sovereignty, and human dignity. Together they embody grassroots power against imperialist violence. They are people-led projects of hope and liberation, demanding a future free from the economic coercion that results in genocide, collective punishment, and colonial domination.
Differences Between Imperialist Economic Coercive Measures and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
IMPERIALIST ECONOMIC COERCIVE MEASURES | BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, AND SANCTIONS |
Seek to coerce other countries to succumb to US interests. | Called for by the grassroots in the targeted country to end the world’s complicity with an apartheid, settler-colonial regime. |
Based on spurious accusations of human rights violations. | Based on a consensus of the world’s people about grave human rights violations. |
Cause as many deaths as armed conflict. | Seeks to end deaths from Zionist genocide. |
Illegal under international law if unilateral or if they impose collective punishment. | A grassroots response to demand compliance with international law. |
Produces net transfer of wealth from Global South, consolidating US and Western capitalist hegemony. | Seeks to end settler colonial, white supremacist Zionist project that upholds US-Western capitalist hegemony. |
A tool of US imperialism. | Confronts US imperialism. |
Undermines national sovereignty. | Anti-colonialist movement for democratic-national liberation. |
A project of death. | A project of liberation and hope for the future. |
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'The Howl That the World Doesn't Hear': A Gaza Teacher in Her Own Words
At 28, Reham Khaled has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known.
Sep 20, 2025
So begin the words of a Gaza teacher's recent post after being forced to flee her home in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City and the school she'd set up in a tent. A bomb tore apart the tent next to the one where Reham Khaled taught her students. Two were killed:
Pain is not a passing sensation, but a being that resides within. It has fangs and fingers. It presses on the heart, weighs down the chest, and makes the breath hesitate like a hole in the air. There is a moment, just one moment, when all the internal walls we have tried to build crumble and we reach what is called the threshold of pain. At this threshold, pain is no longer just an echo or a tremor. It turns into a howl.
Skilled at weaving the horror that is war-torn Gaza with evocative imagery of far sweeter things, Khaled says that before the bomb tore apart the tent, she and her father-in-law were dreaming of eating mangoes and chicken. “And then the rocket exploded. One moment. A collective scream. A small lake of blood begins with two children whose greatest ambition was to eat chicken and mango. It is a moment, but inside me it is years.”
Born in Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, her grandparents were displaced from the Palestinian village of Najd which was ethnically cleansed in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. The Israeli town of Sderot was later constructed over the site of the village, as well as the nearby village of Huj, according to Working Class History.com.
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day."
In Gaza, Khaled studied in UNRWA schools, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established by the UN in December 1949, to provide relief and humanitarian assistance to Palestine refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
At 28, she has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known. She and her extended family have been displaced 15 times.
The howl is “not a loud, audible scream”, explains Khaled, “but the howl of the soul, that subtle sound that the ear cannot pick up but shakes the entire body from within. It's like the wind sweeping through an empty house, or the emptiness exploding in the head. In Gaza, this howl has become the secret language of everyone. The child who smiles so as not to cry in front of his mother, the mother who hides her tears from her child, the man who stands silently before the corpse of his son. They all howl from within, with a voice the world does not hear.”
A teacher of language and literature, Khaled is not overtly political and shies away from assigning blame for what is happening to her people once again. All she knows, she tells me when we exchange more messages, is that “the language of killing and violence is the biggest mistake that my people have been paying the price for two years or more.... The world is mean, cruel, and dull to the point of melting the nerves. I try to keep up with it, but I break. I try to look at it, but I find its eyes devoid of any glimmer of humanity.”
At this writing, Israeli forces have destroyed an estimated 70% of Gaza City. Airstrikes have turned entire apartment blocks and tent encampments into rubble. The Israel Defense Forces claim, without evidence, that Hamas has been using the buildings for surveillance; justifying collective punishment of Gaza City's entire population. While collective punishment is a war crime and prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, this has done nothing to protect innocent civilians throughout Gaza from October 2023 to the present. An estimated 65,000 have been killed to date, with upwards of ten thousand trapped under the rubble.
“Howling,' writes Khaled, “doesn't always manifest in screams or tears. Sometimes it manifests as cold dullness. Evacuation notices drop on doors like inane announcements, read by people with blank eyes and then go on with their lives: a man arguing with his neighbor over a gallon of water, women fighting over a turn at the oven, a young man fixing a crack in the wall. It's as if the announcement of the city's destruction means nothing, as if the preordained mass exodus is just another rumor.”
“This isn't true indifference,” she believes, “but another form of howling: a hidden protection against total collapse. When a person is unable to face the naked truth, they hide in the small details, clinging to crumbs to prevent their souls from disintegrating. Politics isn't content with killing bodies; it seeks to break the inside, to make people treat their end as secondary news. It wants evacuation itself to become a habit, a weightless piece of paper, part of the daily noise.”
Israel has ordered everyone in Gaza City to evacuate to the al-Mawasi tent encampment in the south. But the camp is severely overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Rafah, Khan Younis, and other areas and there is no available land. Nor is it rent free, as others I am in touch with tell me. The entirety of Gaza's most southern city, Rafah, once home to 250,000 people, was razed to the ground earlier this year. Khan Younis was razed in part, but some neighborhoods remain.
As for Khaled and her family, refusing to be broken or adhere exactly to Israeli orders, they moved to Deir al-Balah, a city about 10 miles south of Gaza City. They're not safe there, but at least they found land to set up tents. Khaled has already started looking for a new place to establish a school. This morning she reposted a link for the school, which is backed by the Chuffed Project, a nonprofit whose goal is to support children's education in Gaza
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day. Plant a rose on the tip of every gun. Prevent killing. Spread love and peace and never allow war to continue for long.”
It doesn't mean she's not always hungry or trying to recover her voice or understand why such hell has been unleashed on her people. But that she refuses to surrender to the “twisted logic that turns life into a farce. My voice has been extinguished, not because it disappeared, but because the echo no longer returns. And my being? I've scattered like dust, like a ravening beast that isn't satisfied with flesh and bones, but burrows deep within me in search of something I no longer know the name of. Yes, I'm hungry, but not just for bread. I'm hungry for the security that has become a myth, for the meaning that has become a mirage, for a slice of life that resembles life, not this mockery I live.”
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'Immoral and Indefensible': Study Reveals Deadly Consequences of US Sanctions
"It is well past time that the U.S., E.U., and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism," said one of the study's authors.
Jul 23, 2025
A study published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health revealed that unilateral economic sanctions cause more than 500,000 excess deaths annually, prompting renewed calls for the United States to end its use of a form of collective punishment that claims roughly as many lives as all the world's current wars combined.
The study, authored by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is the first to examine the "effects of sanctions on age-specific mortality rates in cross-country panel data using methods designed to address causal identification in observational data."
Studying the effects of sanctions on 152 countries between 1971 and 2022, the researchers "showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality," with "the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and U.S. sanctions."
"We estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths," the study's authors noted, "similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict."
🚨 NEW REPORT: The myth that sanctions are a humane alternative to war is shattered. Sanctions imposed by single countries cause massive civilian deaths, with children under 5 hit hardest. bit.ly/Sanctions_Study
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— Center for Economic and Policy Research (@ceprdc.bsky.social) July 23, 2025 at 6:14 AM
Weisbrot, CEPR's co-director, said in a statement: "It is immoral and indefensible that such a lethal form of collective punishment continues to be used, let alone that it has been steadily expanded over the years. And sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost nonviolent, policy alternative to military force."
The researchers found that children younger than 5 years old made up 51% of all sanctions deaths during the three-decade study period. More than three-quarters of all sanctions deaths between 1971-2022 were of children under age 15 and people over 60.
The study also noted the repeated failure of U.S. sanctions to deliver policy goals like regime change. However, such measures have caused economies to collapse, harming everyday people far more than ostensibly targeted leaders, who have the power and resources to shield themselves from the worst effects of sanctions.
"Sanctions often fail to achieve their stated objectives and instead only punish the civilian populations of the targeted countries," said Rodríguez. "It is well past time that the U.S., [European Union], and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism."
For six decades, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that has adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. United Nations member states have perennially—and overwhelmingly—condemned the embargo.
In Venezuela, as many as 40,000 people died in 2017-18 due to U.S. sanctions, CEPR researchers found.
Some critics have noted that civilian suffering appears to be more than an incidental cost of U.S. sanctions—it is apparently often their very intent. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—a confidant of former President John F. Kennedy—claimed that JFK sought to unleash "the terrors of the Earth" on Cuba following Fidel Castro's successful overthrow of a U.S.-backed dictatorship, because "Castro was high on his list of emotions."
While the new study "found no statistical evidence of an effect" for United Nations sanctions, Mary Smith Fawzi and Sarah Zaidi conducted research for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization that was published in The Lancet in 1995 and revealed that as many as 576,000 Iraqi children died prematurely as a result of sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council—whose sanctioning capacity was heavily influenced by the United States—to target the regime of longtime Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"Discussions in the 1990s on the effects on child mortality of sanctions on Iraq strongly influenced policy debates and were one of the main drivers of the subsequent redesign of sanctions on the government of Saddam Hussein," the authors of the new study wrote, citing Fawzi and Zaidi's research.
With Hussein's regime unmoved by the sanctions, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, was asked if the human cost was too high. Albright infamously replied that "the price is worth it."
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