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genocide
Sanders Says US Must End Support for UAE—’One of Trump’s Closest Allies’—as It Fuels Genocide in Sudan
"Trump’s good friend and staunch US ally, the United Arab Emirates dictatorship, run by one of the wealthiest families in the world—has financed and enabled this genocide for years."
Jul 14, 2026
As the world fears another massacre by the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, Sen. Bernie Sanders emphasized that the rebel group’s string of atrocities is being funded by a nation with deep financial ties to President Donald Trump—the United Arab Emirates—and urged an end to US military support.
"In the midst of the wars in Gaza and Iran, we cannot forget the atrocities in Sudan," Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday in a post to social media. "As many as 150,000 killed since 2023, 14 million driven from their homes, 30 million need humanitarian aid."
"All of this is fueled by the UAE—one of Trump's closest allies," the senator continued. "We cannot be complicit in genocide."
The warning came as RSF encircles El Obeid, a city of half a million people, including hundreds of thousands who have been displaced.
For weeks, the RSF has launched drone attacks that have killed dozens of civilians and damaged critical infrastructure including water facilities, markets, and hospitals. Food, water, and fuel supplies have been disrupted. Some civilians have begun to flee as many entry points to the city have been cut off.
The United Nations Security Council warned last month that there was an "imminent risk of mass atrocities" and demanded that the RSF halt its assault.
Human Rights Chief Volker Türk stressed that the siege tactics followed a familiar "playbook" to the RSF's October attack on El-Fasher in which at least 6,000 people were killed in just three days as part of a campaign that UN human rights experts said bore the "hallmarks of genocide," including ethnically targeted killings and sexual violence.
While the US State Department and other governments have similarly warned that the RSF could be on the verge of committing atrocities, Nicholas Kristof argued in a New York Times column this weekend that "officials won’t say openly... that the power behind the RSF is the United Arab Emirates."
Despite denials from Abu Dhabi, the UAE has been extensively documented as supporting the RSF through weapons shipments routed via Chad, financing the militia, and recruiting, training, and transporting mercenaries to fight alongside the group.
Kristof pointed out that the UAE "has particularly close financial ties to the Trump family," most notably the $2 billion investment by an Emirati firm last year that benefited his family's cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF), which has been a major source for the unprecedented growth of the president's wealth during his second term.
Recent financial disclosures reported this month by the Wall Street Journal show that Trump received $263 million from selling half his stake in WLF to a fund backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the UAE's most powerful royals and the brother of its president.
During his second term, Trump has rewarded the UAE with more than a billion dollars in weapons sales that were fast-tracked to get around holds imposed by Congress, and made an agreement giving the Emirates unprecedented access to hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips per year.
“Trump’s good friend and staunch US ally, the United Arab Emirates dictatorship, run by one of the wealthiest families in the world—has financed and enabled this genocide for years,” Sanders said in a statement last week. "And why is this happening? Billions of dollars of looted gold from Sudan is flowing straight into the pockets of Emirati oligarchs—making a multibillionaire family even richer."He added that "Congress must demand that the UAE cease its military support for the RSF and work with the international community and the Sudanese people to bring an end to this horrific conflict and provide the humanitarian aid that is desperately needed there."
As warnings about a brutal new RSF offensive have piled up, there has been a push in Congress led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) for restrictions on the United States' ability to provide weapons to the UAE.
Last month, with help from some Democrats, the GOP-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee blocked two amendments aimed at halting US weapons shipments to the UAE unless it stops supporting the RSF.
The committee has passed a weaker bill that allows the president to impose optional sanctions on individuals who supply weapons to Sudan's armed factions, which now awaits a full Senate vote. But the committee rejected Van Hollen's amendment prohibiting arms sales to the UAE.
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'Justice Has Failed Us Here in Guatemala': A Family Fights for Accountability
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia; every day since, her sisters have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of her life while demanding answers.
Jul 12, 2026
Under the beating sun on the morning of June 21, Mirtala del Rosario Hernández Agustín joins families of the disappeared and members of organizations including the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala, or FAMDEGUA, and Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence, or HIJOS, in Guatemala City’s Plaza de la Constitución to commemorate the National Day Against Enforced Disappearances.
“We dream of a different Guatemala, and we fight for it. We cannot sit back and cross our arms. We have a person detained and disappeared.” Mirtala’s voice carries across the plaza. Behind her sit more than 400 empty chairs, each bearing the portrait of someone forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict. “I am the sister of Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín,” she continues. “To have peace in my heart, to be able to say we’ve been heard, we need my sister's remains returned.”
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia on November 22, 1982. It was her 25th birthday. And it was the last time she was seen.
Yet her sisters, Marta and Mirtala, refused to let her vanish completely. Every day since, they have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of Luz Leticia’s life while demanding answers not only for her, but for the tens of thousands who were disappeared, tortured, and killed during Guatemala’s US-backed campaign of state terror and genocide.
No amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
Now, their case is finally being heard in court. Three days a week, the Hernández Agustín sisters climb the stairs to the fifth floor of Guatemala City’s Palace of Justice. They sit through hours of testimony and legal argument, filling notebooks with observations and listening for the answers that have eluded their family for decades. Some days sting with the reopening of old wounds. Others dissolve into procedural delays, technical difficulties, and bureaucratic legal wrangling. They often leave frustrated and exhausted.
Still, they return. They do so because this case is about more than one family’s pursuit of justice. At a time when the United States is escalating violence at home and abroad, and governments like Guatemala’s continue to subordinate themselves to the imperatives of that long-standing imperial project, this trial carries particular significance. Most recently, this has included expanded military cooperation with Washington targeting alleged drug cartels in the country, a justification the US has invoked to extrajudicially kill more than 210 people over the past nine months.
The trial has therefore become a testament to all those who refused the silence imposed upon them. It is proof that those marked for erasure can reclaim their place in history. Above all, it is a reminder that no amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
The Long Shadow of Empire in Guatemala
The Guatemala into which the Hernández Agustín sisters were born bore the unmistakable imprint of empire. It was a country of staggering inequality, where generations inherited the desiccated remains of a nation picked clean by the vultures of foreign capital. The promise of reform had long since been extinguished. Gone was the Democratic Spring, the brief decade from 1944 to 1954 when popularly elected governments sought to expand democracy and direct the country’s wealth toward its people rather than multinational corporations and the landed oligarchy.
That dream was crushed with the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz. The coup sought not simply to remove a government but to restore the deeply unequal social order whose foundations had been laid under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. A pliant strongman who willingly auctioned off his country’s future to the highest bidder, Ubico granted sweeping concessions to US corporations while enriching himself. Under his rule, the Boston-based United Fruit Company became Guatemala’s largest landholder, acquiring more than 40% of its arable land and near-monopolistic control over not only its lucrative banana exports but also critical infrastructure, including the country's railroads and electrical network.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society.
Ubico’s regime collapsed in 1944 with a popular uprising. Under elected Presidents Juan José Arévalo and then Árbenz, Guatemala embarked on an ambitious reform program. Building on Arévalo’s efforts, Árbenz expanded labor protections, social security, and universal suffrage while pursuing economic modernization that sought to transform Guatemala from what he referred to as “a semi-colonial dependency into an independent nation” and “a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”
It was this challenge to entrenched economic power that placed Árbenz in the crosshairs of both Washington and Wall Street. The flash point was Decree 900, his sweeping agrarian reform. The measure authorized the expropriation of uncultivated large estates, including United Fruit’s vast holdings, for redistribution to hundreds of thousands of peasants. Remuneration would be based on the value the company itself had declared, a figure it had deliberately undervalued to reduce its tax burden. While the reform was rooted in economic nationalism and guaranteed compensation for the land, officials in Washington cast it as evidence of communist subversion.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, both closely tied to United Fruit, orchestrated Árbenz’s overthrow. The coup ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and ushered in decades of military rule, repression, and civil war.
A State Built on Terror
The dictatorship that emerged in the wake of the coup gave rise to a popular insurgency determined to reclaim the democratic aspirations that had been violently swept aside. It also ushered in a new era of repression. For Guatemala’s military rulers, the objective was to preserve their power. For their patrons in Washington, Guatemala became a Cold War proving ground, meant to demonstrate the consequences of challenging US political and economic power.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society. That lesson had to be unlearned. In its place, they sought to teach another: that any attempt to remake Guatemala would be met with overwhelming violence. Terror became the principal pedagogy of the state.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared.
Repression failed to extinguish resistance. In 1960, dissident military officers launched an uprising against the regime. After it was crushed, many of its survivors retreated to the countryside, where they helped form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the first of several guerrilla organizations. The state responded with a brutal, US-backed counterinsurgency waged through roving death squads, systematic torture, forced disappearances, and indiscriminate targeting of suspected dissidents.
Rather than destroying the insurgency, the violence pushed it deeper into rural Guatemala, where Indigenous Maya communities and peasant organizers assumed an increasingly central role in new guerrilla organizations. By the late 1970s, the military had embraced a genocidal scorched-earth campaign, particularly against the Ixil Maya. Entire communities were treated as inherently subversive. The objective was no longer simply to defeat guerrillas but to destroy the social fabric that sustained Indigenous life.
Villages were razed. Thousands were massacred. Survivors were displaced or forced into tightly controlled “model villages” under a policy known as Palestinianization, where military authorities sought to erase Indigenous languages, traditions, religious practices, and communal life in the name of anti-communist pacification and national modernization.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared. The bloodiest paroxysm of violence came between 1981 and 1983, when security forces killed an estimated 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Indigenous Maya, in a genocidal campaign that journalist Vincent Bevins has referred to as “the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.” The atrocities unfolded with US training and the material and diplomatic backing of the Reagan administration, which viewed Guatemala as a critical front in its campaign against leftist movements across Latin America, alongside its support for the Contras in Nicaragua and allied security forces in El Salvador and Honduras.
The Disappearance of Luz Leticia
Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín, or Leti, as her sisters call her, was one of the many lives cut short by the Guatemalan state during this period of extreme violence. As the eldest sibling, she occupied an outsized place in her family’s life. Marta and Mirtala remember her as hardworking, intelligent, and deeply compassionate. In a household, and community, marked by intense economic precarity and hardship, she assumed responsibilities well beyond her years, helping care for her younger siblings and easing whatever burdens she could.
This experience shaped Leti’s politics. She came to understand that centuries of colonial conquest had produced enduring systems of racism, dispossession, and exploitation that were still being felt. “Leti could see all of that,” Marta explains. “All the deep-seated wrongs that have persisted for so long.” She imagined a different Guatemala, one where those structures no longer defined people's lives and where everyone, regardless of ethnicity or social standing, could live with dignity.
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence.
Her commitment extended beyond her immediate family. As Mirtala recalled, Leti was motivated certainly “by her own experiences, and the way our parents lived,” but equally “by the suffering she witnessed among our people.” Despite all the evidence seemingly to the contrary, she never surrendered her belief that Guatemala could become a more just society. That conviction would draw her into the resistance. She joined Nuestro Movimiento (“Our Movement”), an underground organization affiliated with the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).
In late 1982, Leti became involved in an effort to secure the release of a comrade, Ileana del Rosario Solares Castillo, who was illegally detained by the regime. On October 14, members of Nuestro Movimiento abducted Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, the nephew of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s de facto president who presided over the bloodiest phase of the genocide, for which he was convicted in 2013. The operation sought to force a prisoner exchange. Jorge Mario remained captive until November 21, when an intelligence unit, working alongside Israeli advisors, rescued him. In the process, Luz Leticia, Ana María López Rodríguez, María Cruz López Rodríguez, and Leandro Gabriel Calate Temu were all captured.
In that moment, Leti entered the opaque machinery of forced disappearance. She was taken into a clandestine detention system notorious for torture, sexual violence, and the systematic degradation of prisoners. Her family never saw or heard from her again.
The Struggle for Justice
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence. In 2001, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) concluded that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights to life, liberty, humane treatment, judicial protection, and a fair trial of Ileana, Luz Leticia, and Ana María. It recommended that Guatemala locate the women’s remains, compensate their families, and identify and prosecute those responsible.
Five years later, the Guatemalan government offered the Hernández Agustín family an “amicable settlement agreement,” consisting of financial compensation without accountability and without the return of Luz Leticia's remains. They refused on principle.
In 2023, prosecutors indicted Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano, the former commander of the National Police’s Fifth Corps Special Operations Reaction Battalion (BROE), on charges of crimes against humanity and enforced disappearance. After years of defense appeals aimed at delaying or derailing the proceedings, the long-awaited trial finally began on May 5.
Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability?
Justice, for them, means a broader reckoning with the collective trauma inflicted by enforced disappearance. The crime was designed to leave families trapped in cycles of hope and grief, producing what Marta described as the “strange sensation” that “[Leti] had died, yet was somehow still alive,” condemning them to “so much uncertainty, anxiety, and immense, constant stress.”
For Mirtala, that torment was central to the crime itself. “Enforced disappearance,” she explained, “is an act committed by the state against its own citizens, often in collusion with the very groups meant to guarantee the population's safety.” It extends far beyond the individual. “They don't just make the person disappear,” she said. “They do so in a way that instills terror and fear, and that is precisely what they have sought to do: to plunge us and our entire family into that terror.”
“It is a crime, an undeniable crime, but one committed in a sophisticated manner against our humanity,” she continued. The violence is directed not only at the disappeared but those left behind, condemning families to live with uncertainty while knowing their loved one is in the hands of the state. “It's agonizing to know that she's with these people.” “It’s powerlessness,” Mirtala said, “unable to do anything to pull [the disappeared] out of that cycle of violence and cruelty.”
Yet they have found meaning in the struggle. Their search for Leti has become inseparable from a broader fight over historical memory and for accountability. As Mirtala put it, it is a “story that reflects everything fractured in our country, all the underlying tensions and societal pain, and the struggles being waged on various fronts everywhere.”
Still, they approach that work with humility, believing that lasting change is built through small acts of collective resistance. “We are like an ant carrying a single grain of salt,” Mirtala explained. Yet she sees power even in the smallest acts. “This is how dust turns into sand, then into a gust of wind, and finally into a storm. We believe it will change many people’s perceptions.”
But this is not merely a struggle over memory. It is also a struggle over the present, over the ways impunity continues to shape Guatemala. In the decades since Leti’s disappearance, Guatemala has remained marked by stark inequality, corruption, violence, and rights abuses. The state continues to repress dissent, fueling recurring political crises rooted in its failure to meet the needs of its people. Mirtala sees in today’s situation the echoes of the violence that took her sister. “All these things,” she said, “they weigh on you, drop by drop, little by little.”
That is why pursuing Leti’s case has become about far more than one family’s search for justice. It is an act of resistance, a “vindication,” against a state that, as Mirtala put it, “has turned against its own people. Those who take power rob and take money from the people to enrich themselves" while the people “lack education, healthcare, food, and the chance for decent housing.” “To me,” she said, “it is a slap in the face, a punch to the gut of the state.”
The struggle has not been without risks. As documentary filmmaker Nancy Peckenham observed, “In Guatemala, to remember is dangerous.” Yet Mirtala and her sister remain resolute. “Sometimes I think about the risks,” Mirtala reflected, “but then I remember this isn’t just about asserting my sister’s rights. It is about the rights of thousands of people, both within Guatemala and abroad, because this is something suffered by all of us who lack power.”
Ultimately, she said, “that is what this has meant for us. It is a collective struggle.”
The case will continue through July. Its verdict will test not only Guatemala, but also whether we are doomed to live in a world, as the Trump administration architect of the United States’ ongoing nativist assault Stephen Miller put it, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability? The trial is one link in this broader struggle over whether a better world is possible: one free from the violence of impunity and imperialism, sustained by the conviction that those who commit atrocities will one day be held to account, from Guatemala to Venezuela, Palestine to Iran, and here in the United States.
All quotes from Marta and Mirtala Hernández Agustín are from a June 2026 speech and interview conducted by the authors and translated from Spanish.
Correction: The name of General Efraín Ríos Montt's nephew was Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, not Mario Ríos Montt. The piece has been updated to reflect this.
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'Unspeakable Horror' in Gaza Sends Democratic Voter Support for Israel Plummeting: Survey
Over half of Democratic voters in the US believe Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, and nearly 60% feel the American government is "too supportive" of its top ally in the Middle East.
Jul 07, 2026
A survey published Tuesday offered the latest evidence of US public opinion souring on Israel, with more than half of Democratic voters and a nearly third of all American adults saying they believe the 1,000-plus-day assault on Gaza amounts to genocide.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, conducted between June 11 and June 17 of this year, found that 52% of Democratic voters "say Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians." Thirty-one percent of all US adults—and 30% of Jewish adults—believe the Israeli military has committed genocide in Gaza, which has been obliterated with the help of American weaponry and diplomatic support from both a Democratic and Republican administration.
Harold Kalmus, a 69-year-old Democratic voter from Arden, Delaware who is Jewish, told The Associated Press that the Israeli military has inflicted "unspeakable horror" on the Gaza Strip, where Israel's massive bombing campaign and ground attacks have killed more than 70,000 people—including tens of thousands of children—since October 7, 2023.
"They’re trying to wipe out a civilization as far as I’m concerned,” said Kalmus.
The new survey found that nearly 60% of Democratic voters—including 51% of Jewish Democrats—now believe the US government is "too supportive" of Israel, up from 45% percent in a January 2024 AP-NORC poll.
AP described Americans' increasingly negative views of Israel as a "dramatic erosion of support for the longtime US ally, with rising opposition from Democrats and signs of division among Republicans."
"Younger Democrats—those 45 and younger—are still more likely than older ones to say that the United States is 'not supportive enough' of the Palestinians, but older Democrats are catching up to their younger counterparts," the outlet noted. "About 57% of older Democrats now say the US should do more for the Palestinians, up from 39% two years ago."
The findings came amid internal Democratic Party turmoil over a House amendment that aims to strike $3.3 billion in US military aid to Israel from annual defense policy legislation. Leading progressive lawmakers, including top members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have spoken out in support of the amendment, with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) calling it "a no-brainer."
But top Democrats, including the ranking members of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, have expressed opposition to the amendment, which stands little chance of passing the Republican-controlled House.
“I don’t want Israel to be without what they need,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said last week.
In the Senate, a small number of leading Democrats—including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)—joined Republicans in April to block resolutions aimed at preventing the Trump administration from transferring more bombs and bulldozers to the Israeli government.
A poll released last month found that 82% of Democratic voters in New York oppose US weapons transfers to Israel, leaving Schumer and Gillibrand far out of step with their constituents.
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2026 Democratic Primaries Prove Failings of the 2024 DNC Autopsy
The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure, it smothered it.
Jul 05, 2026
The Democratic National Committee's 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled "Build to Win. Build to Last," failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?
The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party's old guard. It calls for renewed focus on "Middle America," criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points, but these points alone is not what cost the party so dearly.
The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable if the interviews were of local party leaders, or general democratic voters? Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Did it account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020 but refused to support Harris in 2024? Where did they go and why?
There was no breakdown of Harris's collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.
This was not a methodological oversight. This is how the autopsy was engineered. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘Genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza, did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged that this question even existed.
Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris "was not well prepared"; Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab-American vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.
The autopsy's authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party's youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation—and the base at large—when it comes to Israel.
Recent primary results could not be clearer exposing the failure of the DNC autopsy. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters’ regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned, it is a whitewash.
The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”
This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When the contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that the finding is edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.
The autopsy's Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.
The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure, it smothered it. Fifty-thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voters they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.
Without an honest accounting of the party's failures in 2024, and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-genocide democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.
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1,022 Babies Among 21,500+ Children Killed by Israel in 1,000 Days of Gaza Genocide
“We could die at any moment. I hope the war stops for us,” said one 14-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza. "I would like to live with love, peace, and an easy life."
Jul 02, 2026
Over 21,500 children—1,022 of them babies—are among the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since it launched the US-backed genocidal war on Gaza 1,000 days ago, including hundreds of minors slain since a one-way ceasefire took effect nine months ago, Gaza's Government Media Office said Thursday.
In updated figures, the GMO said that at least 73,066 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its war and siege on the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. A separate analysis published in mid-April by UN Women found that at least 38,000 women and girls were killed between October 2023 and December 2025.
The GMO said Thursday that at least 173,514 others—including more than 44,500 children—have been wounded, and 9,500 Palestinians are still missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed-out buildings in the coastal strip, more than 90% of which has been destroyed and 80% of which is under Israeli control, according to officials.
(Source: Gaza Government Media Office)
More than 11,000 Gazan children have suffered what the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) called "life-changing injuries," including as many as 4,000 amputations, many of them performed without anesthesia.
“Every day for the past 1,000 days, the world has failed 1 million children in Gaza by not intervening to stop the killing and maiming of children," Ahmad Ahendawi, regional director at the charity Save the Children, said Thursday. "As their young, fragile bodies were blown to bits and pieces by bombs and missiles, the world sold those same weapons to the government of Israel [and]... continued trade agreements with the government of Israel."
Early in the war, UNICEF called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”
Classified Israel Defense Forces (IDF) data leaked last August suggested that 5 in 6 Palestinians, or 83%, killed during the war's first 19 months were civilians. Experts attribute the high civilian death toll to Israel's use of artificial intelligence in target selection, its dropping of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many of them supplied by the US—in densely populated urban zones, and relaxed rules of engagement allowing for an unlimited number of noncombatant casualties in airstrikes targeting a single Hamas operative, no matter how low-ranking.
Last month, a United Nations commission of inquiry found that 30% of those killed by Israel in Gaza have been minors, and that “the deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza."
The commission, which separately concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, used language consistent with Article II of the Genocide Convention, the international treaty against which Israel's actions are being weighed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In December 2023, South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ that is now formally backed by around 20 nations.
IDF troops have admitted to witnessing alleged war crimes, including indiscriminate murder of women and children. Doctors and other international volunteers who worked in Gaza's besieged hospitals during the genocide have reported the apparently deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians, including children shot in the head and chest by Israeli snipers.
Palestinian survivors and witnesses have also accused IDF troops of summarily executing women and children.
“Every day for the past 1,000 days, the world has failed 1 million children in Gaza."
The new GMO figures note 460 deaths from malnutrition—164 of them children—and 28 Palestinians, mostly children, who perished from hypothermia in camps housing many of the approximately 2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.
According to figures published last month by UNICEF, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including at least 265 children, have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect. UNICEF called the purported truce a "cruel and deadly illusion."
All this in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack in which approximately 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed—some by so-called “friendly fire” and under the fratricidal Hannibal Directive—and 251 others abducted.
In the aftermath of the deadliest attack on Israel in its 75-year history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation—exhorted Israelis to "remember what Amalek has done to you."
According to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose total extermination—"man and woman, infant and suckling"—was commanded by the Abrahamic deity figure God.
Numerous Israeli leaders made similarly genocidal statements, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who asserted that there are no innocent people in Gaza, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who is also wanted by the ICC for ordering the "complete siege" of Gaza blamed for fueling deadly famine and disease—and the influential far-right politician Moshe Feiglin.
"Every child in Gaza is the enemy," Feiglin said last year. "We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there."
According to the new GMO figures, 39,022 families in Gaza have suffered Israeli massacres, with more than 2,700 families entirely wiped out and another 6,020 left with only a single surviving member. More than 58,800 children have been orphaned, including 2,700 who lost both parents, while 26,370 women are now widows.
In 2024, Save the Children published a report detailing how Israel's onslaught has caused the "complete psychological destruction" of Gazan children. A subsequent study found that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believed that their deaths were imminent—and nearly half of them said they wanted to die.
“We could die at any moment. I hope the war stops for us,” a 14-year-old girl identified as Amani told Save the Children in a report published Thursday.
“I hope the war stops so that I can continue my education in Gaza and live my rights as a human like any girl in other countries," she added. "I would like to live with love, peace, and an easy life."
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30% of Those Killed in Gaza Genocide Were Children, Many From 'Deliberate' Targeting: UN Commission
“By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future," said the commission's head.
Jun 23, 2026
About 30% of those killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, have been children, according to a United Nations inquiry on Tuesday, which found the "deliberate" targeting of kids to have furthered a genocide against Palestinians.
The report, authored by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, follows a previous finding in September that Israel's actions in Gaza constituted genocide.
"The deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza," the commission said.
Between the start of Israel's military campaign in October 2023 and the "ceasefire" agreement in October 2025, the report found that more than 20,000 children were killed, while more than 44,000 were injured. Among those killed, more than 5,000 were under the age of five, more than 1,000 were under the age of one, and more than 400 were newborn babies.
The report highlights documented instances in which Israeli forces directly fired upon children, with medical professionals testifying that they treated kids with "direct gunshot and sniper wounds, often to the head and abdomen." One sample of 168 children killed by gunshots found that 73 were shot in the head and 22 were shot in the chest, which the commission argued was evidence of intentionality.
"Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that the Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice—a different body part being targeted on different days… There is a very clear pattern that suggests this is a deliberate aiming of different body parts [of children]," one doctor told the commission.
They also cited dozens of cases of children being targeted by snipers and quadcopters. The report quotes one Israeli soldier who appeared anonymously in a documentary about the war and described operating drones like a video game.
"The drones, in my opinion, are what most dehumanize the other side," he said. "You see everything on a screen. You drop the bomb. It feels like a game. You can sit in some basement of a house, safe, with your helmet off, scratching your balls, half-dressed, and kill Palestinians.”
The report also argues that the deaths of children in airstrikes were not mere collateral damage, as Israel often asserts, but the foreseeable result of Israel's use of high payload weapons against densely populated areas, which resulted in massive numbers of civilian casualties.
"These deliberate attacks wiped out entire families across two or three or even four generations, with the Israeli security forces fully aware that children would be present and that children, with their small, fragile bodies, have a higher chance of death and serious injury in such attacks," the report said.
"The Israeli security forces continued and repeated these attacks over a two-year period, without amending targeting criteria or selection of weapons, while child casualties mounted," it continued. "This indicates that such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional."
Adding to evidence of intentionality, the report said, was the direct targeting of neonatal and maternity care centers, which it said "directly endangered" the ability of newborn babies to survive and contributed to miscarriages and birth defects. In the first half of 2025, Gaza experienced a 41% decline in live births compared with the same period in 2022, the report found.
The report notes that numerous Israeli politicians have explicitly justified the targeting of children since the early days of the genocidal onslaught.
On October 9, 2023, Nissim Vaturi, the deputy Knesset speaker, called on the army to "Erase Gaza... Do not leave a child there. Expel all the remaining ones at the end." In January 2025, he said, “Gaza is full of terrorists and every child born there is already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.”
Amid Israel's attack on the Al-Shifa hospital in July 2024, Israeli Knesset Member Amit Halevi stated that the hundreds of babies in its maternity ward were "all born terrorists."
This was part of a “systematic and complete destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza,” the report said, that fell heaviest on children. Attacks on pediatric hospitals forced sick and injured kids into smaller facilities without the necessary supplies or pediatric staff.
Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, meanwhile, turned survivable injuries into ones that caused death or permanent disability. Doctors said children were forced to undergo "horrific amputations" without anesthesia, while others who'd suffered burns and other traumatic injuries were left without painkillers.
The destruction of medical infrastructure, the report said, was not incidental. It said Israel had "operational plans and procedures for attacking healthcare facilities.” The result, it said, was preventing Palestinians' “capacity and possibility to heal, recover, and live.”
The report points out that since the ceasefire went into effect, more than 100 children had been killed and hundreds more wounded as of mid-January, with many being shot near the so-called "yellow line" that marks the edge of Israel's occupation area in Gaza, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been gradually advancing forward.
Israel dismissed the findings of the commission, rejecting what it called a “second defamatory advocacy report."
“Israel dismisses this libelous sham,” it said in a statement and added that while “every child deserves protection,” the report ignored “the brutal tactics of Hamas.”
Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the UN commission, said, "The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces."
“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire," he said, "children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.”
Beyond Gaza, the commission reported that Israeli forces have killed more than 200 children in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023. Hundreds more have been detained, often without any charge, and many have been subjected to systemic mistreatment in detention, including the deprivation of food and medical care, torture, and sexual abuse.
“Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight,” said Muralidhar. “The destruction of their health, education, and development is irreversible.”
“The protection, care, and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” he continued. “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.”
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Fatalities From Israel’s Vast Gaza Genocide Deliberately Undercounted
Shameful US newspapers, magazines, television, and radio disrespect the Palestinians in both life and death.
Jun 20, 2026
The mainstream media has no problem guesstimating the deaths (500,000) from the Assad Dictatorship’s Civil War in Syria, nor the estimated deaths in the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, or Iran.
Somehow, media editors do not let their investigative reporters assess the extent of Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Gaza—an exposed, defenseless population of 2.3 million people in an enclave the geographic size of Pennsylvania. The Associated Press notes that U.S. military historian Robert Pape believes, “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history” and that, “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
Why? One reason is that the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health certifies deaths in Gaza based on reports from hospitals and morgues that were mostly blown up well over a year ago. (They report presently around 73,000 fatalities.) But Hamas has admitted that there are tens of thousands of bodies under the rubble, thousands more blown into bits or incinerated and unidentifiable. They also say their figures do not include the collateral deaths (e.g., spreading fires) from the Israeli military F-16 bombings and relentless shelling of the people of Gaza or the deaths caused by the Israeli government-imposed blocking of food, medicine, healthcare, water, fuel, electricity and shelter. From other conflict zones around the world, the ratio of collateral deaths is anywhere from 3 to 13 times the deaths by violent weaponry.
The Israeli regime is fine with the Hamas undercount because they and the U.S. State Department know the real death toll (along with the injury count) is much, much higher. Hamas knows that on October 7, 2023, the multi-layered Israeli border security apparatus was shaky. They then launched what turned out to be a suicide-homicide assault over the border, resulting in some 1400 deaths as compared with the nearly 1200 people—about 400 of them soldiers and police—shot by the Hamas raiders. To this day, with most Israelis skeptical, Netanyahu has blocked an independent official investigation of the mysterious collapse of the multi-tiered Israeli border security complex.
Netanyahu attributes it to negligence. There were, however, too many separate warnings, including 24-hour Israeli spotters from the Israeli side, plus Israel having the Hamas plans a year earlier, to accept that improbable pretext.
Hamas, on the other hand, doesn’t mind the world media repeating again and again their minimal, identifiable death count. They certainly do not want the realistic estimate death count to further outrage their subjects because Hamas did not protect the civilian population, and did not have any air-raid shelters. Hamas certainly knew what was coming from the ultra-modern, savage Israeli military backed by co-belligerent Joe Biden’s U.S. ultra-modern and lethal military industrial complex.
There is another media reluctance operating. The reports by eyewitnesses, and scholarly and military weaponry specialists, who arrive at minimum and maximum ranges of deaths (most of whom are children and women) bring repulsive denunciations and charges of anti-Semitism.
Moreover, apologists for endless Israeli slaughter, like Bret Stephens, the mouthpiece of Netanyahu on the New York Timesopinion page, have used the low Hamas figures to counter charges of Israeli genocide. If it was genocide, they inaccurately claim, the death toll would be much higher. In 2025, two major Israeli human‑rights organizations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel – each issued reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza (see reporting from Amnesty International).
Well, the death toll is much higher, over 600,000 lives destroyed or over 25% of Gaza’s original population. This leaves an improbable nearly 75% still alive, though most are sick, injured, or dying. Reporting reality would intensify the political, diplomatic, and civic determination to stop the killing, let in adequate humanitarian aid, and move toward resolving this conflict.
Analysts reported by The Lancet, international relief organizations, universities, and UN agencies all estimate hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians from violent bombs, artillery, snipers, and the resultant, related secondary effects noted above.
For example, Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, back in April 2025 estimated the tonnage of explosives dropped on Gaza was the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombs, but more lethal because these daily projectiles are more targeted. Tarek Loubani, a Canadian physician who has served tours of duty at crumbling Gaza hospitals, puts the estimate at “hundreds of thousands of dead.”
In a detailed, footnoted series of reports (“The Truth About Gaza’s Dead”), Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon who worked in Gaza’s killing fields, has published much probative evidence by dozens of other health workers who experienced the ghastly horrors. These included the deliberate targeting by Israeli terrorist snipers of little children receiving bullets in their brains and hearts. (See Foreign doctors say Israel systematically targeting Gaza’s children: Report – Al Jazeera, September 14, 2025).
The recent report by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, referred to a consensus of 680,000 deaths.
The respected chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Devi Sridhar, long ago was offering estimates far higher than those of Hamas.
The Hill reported that in November 2023, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf testified to a House committee that the actual number of Palestinians killed in Gaza was likely higher than the figures then being reported by Gaza health authorities at that time. She was immediately silenced and never again spoke about Israel’s genocidal casualties. The State Department has been blocking a Freedom of Information demand for two years.
The huge Israeli bloc in Congress, of course, has allowed no hearings on the toll made possible by deadly U.S. weapons (including shipping over white phosphorus artillery shells)— costing billions of dollars paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported that Israel used white phosphorus munitions in military operations in Gaza and along the Israel–Lebanon border shortly after the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Reporters could have gotten informed assessments and estimates about the Israeli-inflicted carnage in Gaza from Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, the World Central Kitchen, and other aid groups. Scores of infants and children in Gaza are dying every day from disease, malnutrition, and untreated injuries. There are no healthcare facilities for them. The shameful U.S. newspapers, magazines, television, and radio disrespect the Palestinians in both life and death, something they would never dare to do if the shoe were on the other foot!
Why aren’t brave reporters like Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, and Sy Hersh looking deeply into the ghastly indifference to the undercount in Gaza? Truth and the mournful survivors need you!
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From Darfur to Gracie Mansion: Genocide and the NBA
Companies, sports teams, and elected officials should stop partnering with the UAE or wearing Emirates-emblazoned swag until the country stops arming genocide in Sudan.
Jun 10, 2026
While little is reported about the role of the United Arab Emirates in provoking and supporting genocide in Sudan, the sheikdom is being celebrated at major sporting events here and abroad. I was reminded of this watching an interview with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani about the Knicks in the Athletic The New York Times sports website. During the interview I was alarmed to see he was wearing a sweater emblazoned with “Fly Emirates.”
I'm rooting for the Knicks and am a huge Mamdani fan, not only of the mayor but of his parents for many decades before Zohran caught my attention. It turns out that the sweater he was wearing is one a several outfits he wears in support of Arsenal, his favorite English Premier soccer team. During an Eid al-Adha celebration in the Bronx, he wore a kurta in the team’s blue and black colors. On it inscribed in large letters was “ Emirates—Fly Better.”
Emirates, the airline of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has its major hub in Dubai linking a vast network of connections to Asia and Africa from Europe and the USA. The NBA and Emirates entered into a multiyear global marketing agreement. It is the official airline and a major sponsor of the NBA. The league’s annual in-season tournament is now called the Emirates NBA Cup and referees at NBA games wear EMIRATES on the back of their uniforms.
Numerous international organizations and media have identified the UAE (aka The Emirates) as a major supplier of arms, training, mercenaries, and material support for the Rapid Support Forces. The New York Times stated that, “under the guise of saving refugees, the United Arab Emirates is running an elaborate covert operation to back one side in Sudan’s spiraling war—supplying powerful weapons and drones, treating injured fighters, and airlifting the most serious cases to one of its military hospitals, according to a dozen current and former officials from the United States, Europe and several African countries.”
Refugees International wants prominent companies and organizations like the NBA, Disney, and Warner Brothers to suspend their partnerships with the UAE until it has ended its armed support for the RSF.
Mayor Mandani while condemning Israeli genocide in Palestine wears apparel endorsing the foremost sponsor of genocide in Darfur. The UAE supplies arms, equipment, and finances for the Rapid Support Forces who have committed countless acts of brutality including genocide and systematic rape. United Nations’ Secretary General António Guterres described the Sudan civil war as a “crisis of staggering scale and brutality.” He told world leaders that “the external support and flow of weapons must end.”
US-based Refugees International “calls for immediate accountability for the United Arab Emirates as new evidence emerges that it continues to fuel genocide in Sudan.” The Conflict Insights Group (CIG) report, “BLOOD MONEY: How UAE Support and Foreign Mercenaries Enabled the Fall of El Fasher,” uncovers the extent of Emirati operational involvement in the war.
The investigation documented “how a UAE-backed network of Colombian mercenaries provided critical military support to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), enabling the October 2025 capture of El Fasher, North Darfur. Colombian mercenaries flew drones, trained soldiers, and were present during the RSF’s takeover of El Fasher, where the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has concluded that war crimes and crimes against humanity took place.” The report states that these mercenaries were associated with Global Security Services Group, a UAE company with documented ties to senior Emirati government officials, including links to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Donald Trump hosted a dinner for Sheikh Tahnoon on March 18, 2025. The sheikh met with the head of the CIA, various cabinet members, and CEOs including Jeff Bezos. The New York Times reported that leaked information indicated that Tahnoon sought Trump’s support “to shield the UAE from potential international sanctions and an ICJ (International Court of Justice) investigation into its alleged support for the RSF militia in Sudan.”
Ironically, on November 14, 2025, the BBC reported that “US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for international action to cut off the supply of weapons to Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who are accused of mass killings in el-Fasher. At the end of a G7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, Rubio said the RSF had committed systematic atrocities, including murder, rape and sexual violence against civilians.”
Refugees International wants prominent companies and organizations like the NBA, Disney, and Warner Brothers to suspend their partnerships with the UAE until it has ended its armed support for the RSF. Hopefully, in that spirit, Mayor Mandani will denounce the UAE and offer a mea culpa for wearing genocidal swag.
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'Schumer Is Far Out of Touch': 80% of New York Democrats Oppose US Weapons Transfers to Israel
“If current party leadership is unwilling to represent their own voters and the majority of Americans, then it is time for new leadership."
Jun 08, 2026
A poll released Monday shows that around 80% of Democratic voters in New York oppose US weapons transfers to Israel, putting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—a stalwart supporter of Israel—way out of step with his voter base.
The survey, conducted by Data for Progress and published by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, found that 82% of New York Democrats—and 60% of the state's voters overall—believe the US "should restrict taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel until it stops attacking civilians in Gaza." The poll also found that 76% of Democratic voters in the state would favor the US Senate voting to halt the transfer of US bombs to Israel, which has repeatedly used American weaponry to commit grave war crimes.
The poll was conducted roughly a month after Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) broke with the overwhelming majority of their Democratic colleagues in voting against two resolutions aimed at blocking Trump administration sales of 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers to the Israeli government.
The resolutions were spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who polled more favorably than Schumer among New York voters overall—as did New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has been floated as a possible primary challenger to Schumer in 2028.
"New York State voters, especially Democrats, aren’t being represented by their senators," the IMEU Policy Project wrote on social media, adding that "Schumer is far out of touch with New York voters on funding Israel."
A majority of New York voters (51%), and 70% of Democrats, believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the new poll, a position that Schumer has rejected—putting him in conflict with both his own constituents and leading Holocaust scholars and human rights organizations.
“When Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand voted against blocking the bombs and bulldozers Israel is using to destroy Palestinian and Lebanese homes, they were not just voting against the vast majority of their own Senate caucus and Democratic voters, but they were voting against the majority of New Yorkers they’re elected to represent,” Margaret DeReus, the IMEU Policy Project's executive director, said in a statement. “If current party leadership is unwilling to represent their own voters and the majority of Americans, then it is time for new leadership."
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We Need More Brave Flotillas to End Israel's Genocide in Gaza
The genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz Strait crisis, but history will not absolve those who stood by as a people were starved and slaughtered.
May 23, 2026
The raft of condemnations by Western governments of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s taunts of flotilla volunteers whom the Israeli military illegally kidnapped from international waters was attended by a good deal of hypocrisy, since the US government despises them as well, and few European governments support them.
What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis.
IMEMC reports that on Wednesday the Israeli military launched numerous assaults on the Gaza Strip, despite the supposed ceasefire enacted last October.
In the north of the Strip as well as in the center shelling was heard, “with explosions heard near Gaza City and in the areas surrounding the Al‑Bureij and Al‑Maghazi refugee camps, in central Gaza.”
The Gaza Ministry of Health said Israeli attacks had killed one Palestinian whose body was taken to a hospital, and had wounded sixteen others.
Families that came under fire in the north had to flee to central Gaza but had no place to take refuge, huddling in the debris of former schools or apartment buildings. These internally displaced families lack sewage or reliable potable water, putting them at risk of disease.
Rescue teams could not reach several of these areas because the Israelis had destroyed the roads and the rubble proved an obstacle to ambulances. Since the rescue workers could not reach the bombed sites, they could not ensure that people trapped under the destroyed buildings would be extracted.
IMEMC writes, “Humanitarian agencies reported that several neighborhoods in Gaza City and Khan Younis have gone more than ten days without running water. With pumping stations unable to operate due to fuel shortages and damaged infrastructure, sewage overflow has been recorded in multiple districts.”
Surgeons had to put off performing operations. They appear not even to have had alcohol or other antiseptics, so they could not establish a sterile field around patients. They also lacked other essential medicines.
IMEMC continues, regarding health care, “Hospitals across the Strip continued to report severe shortages. Medical teams at the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza and the European Gaza Hospital said they were running critically low on anesthesia, antibiotics, blood products, and basic surgical supplies.”
Many areas in the strip get only 4 hours a day of electricity, since the Israeli military has damaged power lines and prevents enough fuel from getting into the besieged Strip to run generators. That goes for hospitals, too.
Insecurity Insight reports that in the wake of the ceasefire concluded with Iran on April 8, 2026, the Israeli military has increased its assaults in such a way as to harm health facilities and to decrease the ability of patients to get treatment throughout Gaza. The outlet gathered credible information on seven such incidents from April 8 to April 24, whereas in the previous two weeks, when Israeli was bombing Iran, there were four such reported Israeli attacks in Gaza on or near health care facilities.
Israeli troops have been shelling targets near hospitals and at one point directed live fire at a United Nations-administered health center. Insecurity Insight also notes that on April 11 a hospital was forced to shut down one of its main generators due to fuel shortages, leaving vital departments dependent on lower-capacity backup generators operating only for limited hours.
Gaza has also seen a steep fall in bread production as the Israeli government has interfered with flour imports since early April.
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