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mike huckabee
‘Incompetence Everywhere’: Fury as US Embassy Says Americans Stuck in Israel Are On Their Own
"The strike itself is illegal and disastrous but their lack of readiness for what comes next is unforgivable as well," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Mar 03, 2026
The US Embassy in Jerusalem sparked outrage on Tuesday when it said it was unable to help Americans stuck in Israel leave the country amid an escalating regional conflict with Iran.
In a message posted on social media, the embassy said it "is not in a position at this time to evacuate or directly assist Americans in departing Israel," and recommended seeking help from Israeli tourism officials.
"The Israeli Ministry of Tourism has begun operating shuttles to the Taba Border Crossing as of March 2," the embassy stated. "To be added to the passenger list for a shuttle, you must register via the Ministry’s evacuation form. The US Embassy cannot make any recommendation (for or against) the Ministry of Tourism's shuttle. If you choose to avail yourself of this option to depart, the US government cannot guarantee your safety."
The embassy's message came three days after the US and Israel launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, which has retaliated by launching drone strikes on US allies throughout the Middle East.
Many critics slammed the US embassy for being so unprepared to help its own citizens despite having advance knowledge that a large-scale attack on Iran was a real possibility.
"Mike Huckabee’s embassy is always ready to defend Israel," wrote Zeteo News editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan, "but not to help American citizens, it seems."
US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that the Jerusalem embassy's helplessness in the face of an emergency was evidence of "incompetence everywhere."
"So the State Department is forcing everyone to immediately leave the region but is also refusing to help people leave the region," he wrote. "The strike itself is illegal and disastrous but their lack of readiness for what comes next is unforgivable as well."
Murphy's criticism was echoed by former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a one-time ally of President Donald Trump who in recent months has become a staunch critic of the president's decisions.
"American tax payers are forced to give Israel $3.8 BILLION every single year," she wrote, "and here is our own US Embassy in Jerusalem telling Americans good luck getting out, you are on your own. The betrayal is unbelievable."
Tommy Vietor, former National Security Council staffer under President Barack Obama, expressed outrage at the Trump White House for leaving Americans out to dry.
"All those years demagoguing Benghazi and pretending to give a shit about Americans overseas," wrote Vietor, "and now the White House starts a reckless war with Iran and tells everyone trying to escape the chaos that you're on your own."
Sam Stein, a reporter at The Bulwark, observed that the US Department of State only put out an alert encouraging Americans to leave Israel and 13 other countries in the region on Monday, two days after the strikes against Iran began.
"This morning, the Embassy in Jerusalem says it can't help with that," Stein marveled.
Anti-gun violence activist Fred Guttenberg unleashed an angry tirade at the Trump administration upon seeing the US embassy's message.
"THEY HAD NO FUCKING PLAN!!!" he wrote. "Americans are at risk now because they had no FUCKING plan."
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Huckabee Accused of Inciting Murder After Israeli Settlers Kill Palestinian-American Teen
"The US ambassador to Israel is engaging in empowering and allowing for actions that lead to the targeted lynching and killing of US citizens," said one group.
Feb 23, 2026
Human rights defenders this week accused US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—who recently endorsed Israel conquering much of the Middle East—of inciting deadly violence after Israeli colonists in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine fatally shot a Palestinian-American teenager who was trying to stop settlers from stealing livestock.
Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, was shot dead last Wednesday by a masked Israeli settler armed with an M-16 rifle in the village of Mukhmas, where the 19-year-old Philadelphia native had been living and helping his father, Mohammed Abu Siyam, tend the family's livestock and cultivate their olive trees.
According to eyewitness accounts as reported by independent New York journalist and Palestine specialist Jasper Diamond Nathaniel:
At least four other local Palestinians were wounded by settler gunfire during the invasion of the village, including another young man whose foot may be amputated. Some were shot while carrying the wounded to safety. Many others were severely beaten with metal rods. Israeli soldiers, who accompanied the settlers into the village, responded to the shooting rampage by firing stun grenades and tear gas into the residential area, burning an elderly man. When it was over, settlers walked off with more than 300 of the village’s sheep and goats under the military’s watch. It was the first full day of Ramadan. As of this writing, no one has been arrested.
While human rights groups and some Democratic US lawmakers have called for a full investigation into Abu Siyam's killing, Huckabee has so far been silent. Last July, Huckabee responded to Israeli settlers' killing of 23-year-old Palestinian-American Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death while visiting relatives in the West Bank, as "a criminal and terrorist act" that Israeli authorities should "aggressively investigate." As is usually the case when Israeli settlers kill Palestinians, no one has been charged for killing Musallet.
Last Friday, Huckabee—who during his ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—sat for an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson during which he backed the realization of a so-called “Greater Israel” stretching from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, saying that "it would be fine" if Israel "took it all," as many Jews and Evangelical Christians believe their common deity figure "God" intended them to do.
Numerous observers said the envoy's remarks inherently endorsed violence and forced displacement akin to what's happening to Palestinians living under occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, apartheid—and in the case of Gaza, genocide.
"Shortly after the lynching murder of an American citizen, footage aired of the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee justifying the very structure of occupation, and rhetoric of ethnic cleansing, that led to the murder and continuing attacks on the occupied West Bank," the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said in a statement Monday.
ADC said Huckabee's endorsement of Greater Israel "signals permission and the green light for Israeli forces to use violence and empower settlers for further annexation and dispossession."
The group continued:
The United States continues to fund, shield, and excuse Israeli violence, forced displacement, and mass atrocity across Palestine. Now the US ambassador to Israel is engaging in empowering and allowing for actions that lead to the targeted lynching and killing of US citizens. At the same time, Congress continues to put Israel first by sending American taxpayer dollars to Israel.
Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed at least a dozen Americans since 2022. Time and again, our government refuses to defend the rights, dignity, and safety of its own citizens simply to appease the demands of a foreign government and give impunity to Israel.
"The impunity cannot continue," ADC added.
Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—have publicly declared their support for Greater Israel, sparking widespread condemnation throughout the Arab world and beyond.
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'All Eyes On Gaza City' as Israel Ramps Up Campaign of Conquest and Ethnic Cleansing
"The explicit goal of turning Palestine's largest city into a wasteland has nothing to do with hostages or Hamas and everything to do with genocide," said one critic.
Aug 21, 2025
Operation Gideon's Chariots 2—Israel's plan to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse Gaza—intensified Thursday, with fugitive Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying Israeli forces will take over all of the embattled strip even if Hamas agrees to a ceasefire and one of his far-right ministers vowing to continue the genocidal war even "at the expense of the hostages' lives."
"We have begun the preliminary actions and the initial stages of the offensive on Gaza City, and already now [Israeli] forces are holding positions on the outskirts of Gaza City," Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Effie Defrin told reporters. "We will intensify the strikes on Hamas in Gaza City, the political and military stronghold of the terror organization."
Defrin added that the IDF is warning residents to evacuate in a bid to "minimize harm to civilians." However, critics say "evacuate" is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, the stated goal of Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said earlier this month: "We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed. On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
Arutz Sheva reported that Operation Gideon's Chariots 2—which ultimately aims to force much of Gaza's population into a concentration camp in order to make way for possible Jewish recolonization of the strip—will involve five IDF divisions, two of them reserves. The news site said that the IDF will issue new emergency draft orders to 60,000 reservists, who will augment the 70,000 who are already activated.
IDF Col. (Res.) Marco Moreno said Thursday that the only way to achieve security is via the "voluntary migration" of everyone in Gaza—another euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' unwillingness to voluntarily abandon their homeland.
"Even if Hamas disarms, raises a white flag, and disappears, it won't be long before a new organization rises in Gaza with the same agenda to destroy the state of Israel," Moreno said during a TV interview. "The only way to ensure true security is through the voluntary migration of all Gaza residents."
Israeli Settlement Minister Orit Strook, a member of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, told the radio station Kol BaRama Wednesday that she favors continuing the war "even if it is clear that Hamas will execute the hostages," 20 of whom remain imprisoned since the October 7, 2023 attack.
"Of course, it is not only me who will vote to continue the war at the expense of the hostages' lives," added Strook, who is known for her extreme support for illegal Israeli settler colonization of Palestine and for allegedly filming her and her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter for pornographic videos.
Hamas condemned the Israeli operation in a statement accusing the Netanyahu government of "continuing its brutal war against innocent civilians, escalating its criminal operations in Gaza City with the aim of destroying it, and displacing its residents in a full-fledged war crime."
The United Nations human rights office said Wednesday that "Israel's reported decision to take full control of Gaza City and to forcibly displace its population will lead to mass killings of civilians and destruction of infrastructure vital to the survival of the population."
Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said President Donald Trump—who has said he wants to empty Gaza of Palestinians and transform the strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East"—is "fully supportive" of Israel's campaign.
Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, while Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.
The Gaza Health Ministry said that at least 50 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces Thursday, including nine aid-seekers and five family members massacred in a drone strike in Khan Younis. Two massacres in Gaza City's Sabra neighborhood killed four and eight people respectively, while four people were killed in a separate strike on a family home in the al-Shanti area.
Two more Palestinians also reportedly starved to death in Gaza, where at least 271 people including 112 children have died from malnutrition driven by Israel's "complete siege."
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed at least 62,122 Palestinians—most of them women and children—and wounded more than 156,700 others, with thousands more missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Expert analyses including multiple peer-reviewed studies have concluded the official Gaza Health Ministry death toll is likely a vast undercount.
As Common Dreams reported Thursday, a joint investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that, contrary to Israeli claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, a staggering 5 out of 6 Palestinians killed in the strip between October 2023 and May were noncombatants.
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