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War & Peace
Trump Under Pressure to Ditch Nuclear Plans as Putin Preps for Possible Tests
“To limit new weapons development in China or Russia, one of the best things the US can do is maintain the taboo on testing and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," said one expert.
Nov 05, 2025
More than a dozen US senators on Wednesday urged President Donald Trump to abort plans for a resumption of nuclear weapons testing, a call that came as Russian President Vladimir Putin directed his senior officials to draft proposals for possible new nuke tests in response.
“We write to you today to express grave reservation about any action to resume nuclear weapons testing," 14 Democratic senators led by Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a letter to Trump.
"We request that you personally provide clarification," the lawmakers added. "The decision to resume nuclear weapons testing would be geopolitically dangerous, fiscally irresponsible, and simply unnecessary to ensure the ability of the United States to defend itself."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—who signed the letter—also introduced emergency legislation last week aimed at preventing Trump from resuming nuclear weapons tests.
Although no country is known to have tested a nuclear weapon since North Korea last did so in 2017, Trump last month ordered the Pentagon to prepare for a resumption of reciprocal testing.
“The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country,” Trump falsely wrote on social media. “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
TASS reported Wednesday that Putin instructed the Russian Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, intelligence agencies, and civilian bureaus to submit proposals "on the possibility of preparing for nuclear weapons tests" in the event that other countries resume testing.
Russia has not tested a nuclear weapon in its modern history. The former Soviet Union's final nuclear test took place in 1990 and the successor Russian state has adhered to a moratorium ever since.
Last week, Congresswoman Dina Titus (D-Nev.) introduced a bill to prohibit new US nuclear weapons testing. Titus accused Trump of putting "his own ego and authoritarian ambitions above the health and safety of Nevadans."
Supporting Titus' bill, Tara Drozdenko, director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement Wednesday that “there is no good reason for the United States to resume explosive nuclear testing and it would actually make everyone in this country less safe."
"We have so much to lose and so little to gain from resuming testing," she continued. "New explosive testing by the United States would be to make a political statement, with major consequences: It would shatter the global freeze on nuclear testing observed by all but North Korea and give Russia, China, and other nuclear powers the green light to restart their own nuclear testing programs."
“The United States has not conducted a nuclear detonation test since 1992," Drozdenko noted. "Even those advocating for testing acknowledge there is no scientific need to test to maintain the US nuclear arsenal. In fact, Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently said that the updated systems can be tested without conducting full nuclear detonations."
“To limit new weapons development in China or Russia, one of the best things the US can do is maintain the taboo on testing and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," she added. "This treaty with on-site verification measures would be the best way to ensure that countries are not clandestinely testing nuclear weapons.”
The United States and Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear war on multiple occasions during the Cold War, most notably amid the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and, later, during then-President Ronald Reagan's first administration in the early 1980s.
Weeks after becoming the first country to develop nuclear weapons in 1945, the United States waged the world's only nuclear war, dropping atomic bombs on the defenseless Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians.
According to the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, Russia leads the world with 5,449 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, followed by the US with 5,277 warheads, China with around 600, France with 290, and the United Kingdom with 225. Four other nations—India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—also have nuclear arsenals of between 50-180 warheads each.
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YouTube Removed Hundreds of Videos of Israeli Human Rights Violations to Comply With Trump Sanctions
"YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” said a spokesperson for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose channel was deleted.
Nov 05, 2025
In compliance with a Trump administration effort to punish critics of Israel's genocide in Gaza, YouTube has deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian rights groups, wiping several hundred videos documenting Israeli human rights violations in the process.
According to The Intercept, the video hosting website, owned by Google, quietly removed the accounts of three groups, Al-Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in October.
These are the same three groups that the State Department hit with sanctions in September because they helped to bring evidence before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The court would issue arrest warrants for the pair in 2024.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said explicitly that the groups were sanctioned because they "directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”
YouTube deleted the groups' channels, as well as their entire archives, which contained over 700 videos that documented acts of brutality by the Israeli military against Palestinians.
According to The Intercept, these included an investigative report about the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops, the military's destruction of Palestinians' homes in the West Bank, and a documentary about mothers who'd survived Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Google confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the videos to comply with the State Department sanctions.
“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.
Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said it was "outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view."
YouTube's censorship of content deemed too supportive of Palestinians predates President Donald Trump's return to power. In 2024, officials at YouTube and other social media companies were found to have cooperated through secretive back channels with a group of volunteers from Israel's tech sector to remove content critical of Israel.
Following news of the three human rights groups losing their channels, documentarian and journalist Robert Inlakesh wrote on social media that in 2024, YouTube removed his channel without warning, deleting all his content, including several documentaries he'd produced in the occupied territories.
"YouTube deleted all my coverage of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including children targeted on a live stream, along with my entire account," he said. "No community guidelines were violated, and three separate excuses were given to me. Then Google deleted my email and won’t respond to appeals."
Groups sanctioned by the US for supporting the ICC have previously received preliminary injunctions in two cases, in which courts said the State Department violated their First Amendment rights.
But even with the sanctions in place, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said there was little legal reason for YouTube to capitulate.
"It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions," she said. "Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”
Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that YouTube has not made it clear what policies his group's channel violated.
“YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people, especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on October 7," he said.
"By doing this," he added, "YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims."
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ICC Collecting War Crimes Evidence Against Sudanese Militia After Darfur Massacre
The court said the actions of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, who are backed by a US ally in the UAE, "may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Nov 04, 2025
The International Criminal Court said it is collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region following a massacre committed by a militia group and amid reports of widespread starvation.
In a statement published Monday, the ICC—the international body charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity—expressed "profound alarm and deepest concern over recent reports emerging from El-Fasher about mass killings, rapes, and other crimes" allegedly committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which breached the city last week.
According to the Sudan Doctors Network (SDN), a medical organization monitoring the country's brutal civil war, the militants slaughtered more than 1,500 people in just three days after capturing El-Fasher, among them more than 460 people who were systematically shot at the city's Saudi Maternity Hospital.
The ICC said that "such acts, if substantiated, may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute," the court's founding treaty, which lays out the definitions for acts including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The court said it was "taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in El-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions."
The announcement comes shortly following a new report from the UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's leading authority on hunger crises, which found that famine has been detected in El-Fasher and the town of Kadugli in Sudan's South Kordofan province. Twenty other localities in the two provinces—which have seen some of the civil war's worst fighting—are also in danger of famine, according to the report.
The two areas have suffered under siege from the RSF paramilitary, which has cut off access to food, water, and medical care. The IPC says it has led to the "total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition and death."
According to the UN's migration authority, nearly 37,000 people have been forced to flee cities across North Kordofan between October 26 and 31. They joined more than 650,000 displaced people who were already taking refuge in North Darfur's city of Tawila.
Sudan's civil war, which began in 2023, has created the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with potentially as many as 150,000 people killed since it began. Over 12 million people have been displaced, and 30.4 million people, over half of Sudan’s total population, are in need of humanitarian support.
The recent escalation of the crisis has led to heightened global scrutiny of RSF's chief financier, the United Arab Emirates. In recent days, US politicians and activists have called for the Trump administration to halt military assistance to the Gulf state, which it sold $1.4 billion in military aircraft in May.
On Tuesday, Emirati diplomats admitted for the first time that they "made a mistake" supporting the RSF as it attempted to undermine Sudan's transitional democratic government, which took power in 2019 after over three decades of rule by the Islamist-aligned dictator Omar al-Bashir. Those efforts culminated in a military coup in 2021 and an eventual power struggle for control over the country.
However, as Sudanese journalist Nesrine Malik wrote in The Guardian on Monday, the UAE "continues to deny its role, despite overwhelming evidence."
"The UAE secures a foothold in a large, strategic, resource-rich country, and already receives the majority of gold mined in RSF-controlled areas," Malik wrote. "Other actors have been drawn in, overlaying proxy agendas on a domestic conflict. The result is deadlock, quagmire, and blood loss that seems impossible to stem, even as the crisis unravels in full view."
"Sudan’s war is described as forgotten, but in reality it is tolerated and relegated," she continued. "Because to reckon with the horror in Sudan... is to see the growing imperialist role of some Gulf powers in Africa and beyond—and to acknowledge the fact that no meaningful pressure is applied to these powers, including the UAE, to cease and desist from supporting a genocidal militia because the UK, US, and others are close allies with these states."
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Ex-IDF Legal Chief Who Leaked Sde Teiman Rape Video Arrested After Going Missing
"Meanwhile, the soldiers seen sexually assaulting and abusing Palestinian detainees are still free," said one Palestinian observer.
Nov 03, 2025
Israel's former top military lawyer, who admitted to leaking a video apparently showing Israeli reserve soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman torture prison, was arrested late on Sunday following her disappearance most of the day.
After being reported missing Sunday morning, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Advocate General Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, 51, was found "safe and in good health" that evening following a massive search in the coastal area of Herzliya, Israeli police said. She was subsequently arrested and on Monday faced charges of fraud and breach of trust, abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and disclosure of information as a public servant.
Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned Friday and admitted that she "authorized the release" of video footage showing IDF reservists at Sde Teiman from a unit called Force 100 brutally attacking a Palestinian prisoner, who was allegedly sodomized with a metal baton while other soldiers held up shields to conceal the assault.
"I bear full responsibility for any material that was released to the media," Tomer-Yerushalmi wrote in her resignation letter, in which she explained that her motivation for leaking the footage was "to counter false propaganda" against her office by far-right figures who denied the torture as a "blood libel"—a common Israeli tactic used to falsely smear criticism as "antisemitic."
Citing fears that Tomer-Yerushalmi may have tried to kill herself during her disappearance on Sunday—which were matched by concerns that she could be in danger of assassination—Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Israel Prison Service (IPS) Chief Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi said they ordered her placed under increased prison supervision.
According to The Jerusalem Post, this means that Tomer-Yerushalmi will be forced to remain in her cell under the supervision of additional IPS guards and security cameras.
Former military prosecutor Matan Solomesh was also arrested Sunday night in connection with the leaked video.
"Meanwhile," Palestinian human rights activist Ihab Hassan noted on X, "the soldiers seen sexually assaulting and abusing Palestinian detainees are still free."
On July 4, 2024, members of Force 100 attacked the Palestinian prisoner for approximately 15 minutes behind riot shields so cameras could not see, leaving him hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage, according to Dr. Yoel Donchin, an Israeli physician at the facility.
Footage of the assault was aired on Israeli television following Tomer-Yerushalmi's leak. While human rights groups called for an investigation into the attack, Israeli leaders including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich furiously demanded a probe not to seek justice for the victim, but rather to find and punish whoever leaked the video.
After a group of alleged participants in the attack were subsequently arrested, a mob of far-right Israelis including senior government officials stormed a pair of military bases in an attempt to free the suspects. While many Israelis condemned the alleged rape, others rallied around the accused reservists.
Ben-Gvir called suspects "our best heroes" and slammed their arrest. Smotrich lauded them as "heroic warriors."
Many right-wing Israeli politicians, pundits, and others publicly argued that IDF troops should have free reign to rape, torture, and murder Palestinians as revenge for the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Former Palestinian prisoners, IDF soldiers, and Israeli medical professionals have all said they witnessed torture and other abuse of detainees at Sde Teiman and other facilities. Victims ranged in age from children to octogenarians.
Israeli physicians who served at Sde Teiman have described widespread severe injuries caused by 24-hour shackling of hands and feet that sometimes required amputations. Palestinians taken by Israeli forces have recounted rape and sexually assault by male and female soldiers, electrocution, maulings by dogs, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, and other torture.
At least scores of detainees have died or been killed in Israeli custody, including one who expired after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton. Many bodies of former Palestinian prisoners returned by Israel have shown signs of torture, execution, and mutilation.
The IDF said in February that it had filed charges against five reservists suspected of abusing Sde Teiman prisoners.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—was among those who condemned Tomer-Yerushalmi for exposing IDF abuse.
“This is perhaps the most severe public relations attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment," the prime minister said Sunday, a statement that came amid ongoing deadly attacks against Palestinians during a 759-day genocide that's left at least 249,000 Gazans dead, maimed, or missing and many more forcibly displaced, sick, and starving, according to local officials and international rights groups.
While some observers believe that Tomer-Yerushalmi is a heroic whistleblower for leaking the Sde Teiman video, others noted that she has approved and supports Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, pointing to her resignation letter's claim that "the IDF is a moral and law-abiding army."
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