The fifth installment in our series on Sudan’s War and Its Enablers — and the first of a strand tracing how modern wars weaponize sexual violence against civilians. What UN investigators documented in El Fasher was not a byproduct of battle. It was a tactic. The same tactic is now closing around another besieged city.

As the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces tighten their grip on El Obeid, a UN investigator delivered a sentence that ought to have stopped the world cold: El Obeid, she said, must not become “the next crime scene.” The dread behind that warning is not only of shelling, drones, and the starvation a siege brings. It is of a specific crime the RSF — and, though not to the same degree, the Sudanese army — has made central to the way this war is fought, and one that, unlike rifles and drones, no arms embargo was ever written to stop.

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In June 2026 the UN Human Rights Office published its most comprehensive accounting yet of what it terms conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan, and the finding was blunt: rape, gang rape and sexual slavery have been used “systematically as weapons of war,” on a scale the office called “unprecedented in terms of the scale, prevalence and brutality of its widespread use.” This installment opens a strand of reporting on that weapon — how it is deployed, who wields it, and who keeps the wielders armed. It begins where the evidence is heaviest: in Darfur, in a city that fell a year ago, and in the city the same forces are encircling now.

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A weapon, not a byproduct

The scale is documented, and it is deliberate. The UN Human Rights Office verified 546 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence affecting at least 838 victims — 539 women, 284 girls, eight men and seven boys — across 16 of Sudan’s 18 states between April 2023 and April 2026, and called those verified figures only “the tip of the iceberg,” obscured by stigma, insecurity, and collapsed health services. Around 87 percent of verified incidents were attributed to men in RSF uniforms, its affiliates and allied Arab militias; incidents were also attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces and other armed actors.

The impunity runs in more than one direction. In a detail that should trouble anyone inclined to see only one villain here, the UN documented a case in which a woman subjected to sexual violence under RSF coercion was later charged by SAF-aligned security forces with “collaboration” — and at least one woman was sentenced to death on such a charge. The RSF, for its part, denies the abuses, calling the accounts fabrications by its enemies.

El Fasher: the template

To understand what the warnings about El Obeid mean, look at what happened when the last siege ended. The RSF seized El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, in late October 2025 after an 18-month blockade. The UN Human Rights Office documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days. And in a February 2026 report reaffirmed and expanded in July, the UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded that the assault bore “the hallmarks of genocide” against the Zaghawa and Fur communities — a determination echoing the U.S. government’s own January 2025 genocide finding against the RSF, covered in this series’ first installment.

Sexual violence was not incidental to that campaign; it was woven through it. UN experts described widespread and “sadistic” sexual violence “as a deliberate strategy of domination and humiliation aimed at destroying communities,” with women raped in front of relatives and detained for days in conditions amounting to torture. Crucially, the mission found the violence was ethnically selective: women and girls from the Zaghawa and other non-Arab communities were targeted, while women perceived as Arab were often spared. Amnesty International, which titled its own report City Under Siege, Children Under Fire, documented rape, sexual slavery and the deliberate targeting of children; among its survivor testimonies was Tasneem, a 13-year-old Zaghawa girl abducted after RSF fighters killed her father, then held and raped.

That selectivity is why investigators now treat the rapes not merely as war crimes but as evidence of intent. The Fact-Finding Mission has said it is examining whether the pattern of mass rape, forced pregnancy and denial of reproductive healthcare could constitute a fourth genocidal act — “measures intended to prevent births within the group” under the Genocide Convention. In that framing, the weapon is not aimed only at the woman in the room. It is aimed at whether her people continue to exist.

The playbook moves east

The reason the El Fasher record reads as prophecy rather than history is that its authors say the same script is now being run 500 kilometres away. The Fact-Finding Mission warned in July that the RSF is “currently deploying tactics used in El Fasher” around El Obeid — encircling the city, striking its infrastructure, and choking off essential services; the Human Rights Council has tasked the mission with investigating the city. Türk was blunter still: “We have seen this playbook before. We know where it led then, and cannot allow a repeat of the preventable atrocities we documented in El Fasher and Zamzam.”

El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, holds about half a million people, including more than 100,000 already displaced from elsewhere — among them survivors of El Fasher, trapped once more before a force that has already tried to destroy them. Its demographics are not El Fasher’s, and analysts caution the ethnic dimension may be less pronounced; but they warn civilians could still face “looting, sexual violence and attacks on those accused of supporting the army.” The alarms are no longer only from rights groups: the UN Security Council warned in June of an “imminent risk of mass atrocities” and demanded the RSF halt its assault, and Al Jazeera reported that OHCHR had already documented, in the surrounding region, “widespread credible reports of ethnically targeted violence, including sexual and gender-based violence.”

The weapon with no embargo

Here this piece rejoins the argument that this series has made from its first installment: none of this runs on the RSF alone. Human Rights Watch states plainly that throughout the conflict, the RSF “has received military support from the UAE,” which has directly backed the group and facilitated the recruitment of hundreds of private military contractors on its behalf — support Abu Dhabi denies. Amnesty International, launching its El Fasher report, was broader: “Europe, the US, China and others sold the weapons that’s fueling the conflict.” The Fact-Finding Mission has gone so far as to set out the potential complicity of states that continued to arm or otherwise support the RSF.

The Paradox

The world knows how to write an arms embargo: one has existed over Darfur for years, and the G7 and EU have urged extending it to all of Sudan. In July the European Parliament voted to designate the RSF a terrorist organization and to sanction those responsible for attacks on civilians, including a UAE-based company, condemning “any foreign interference fueling the war.” Embargoes can name the drone and the rifle. But there is no embargo on the weapon that defined El Fasher and now shadows El Obeid — because that weapon runs not on shipments but on impunity, and the impunity holds precisely because the shipments, and the diplomatic cover behind them, keep coming.

Closing

Sexual violence in Sudan is a weapon.

A UN fact-finding mission, the UN Human Rights Office, Amnesty International, and the survivors themselves have said, in the plainest language their institutions permit, that sexual violence in Sudan is a weapon — coordinated, ethnically aimed, and, in El Fasher, part of what investigators call genocide. The Fact-Finding Mission still calls this a matter of a closing window, insisting there is time to prevent El Obeid from becoming “the next crime scene” if the Security Council acts and the arming states relent.

This strand of our reporting will follow that weapon — in Sudan first, and wherever else it is wielded — because it is among the oldest instruments of war and the least often punished.

The women of El Fasher were told the world was watching. The women of El Obeid are being told the same thing now. The difference between a warning and an epitaph will be decided, once again, by whether the governments that supply this war decide to stop.

This ongoing investigation into Sudan’s war and the powers sustaining it — and this new strand on how that war is waged against (mostly) women’s and girls’ bodies — runs at Manufacturing Dissent, cross-posted from my home base at Shadows of Empire; a free or paid subscription at either helps keep the series operating. The full series, The Sudan War and Its Enablers, is now collected on one page for easy reading: The Sudan War and Its Enablers. If you’d like to fund the sourcing behind work like this directly, you can buy me a coffee. And share it — the people of El Obeid were promised the world was watching.

by Dede Bell

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Notes

¹ A note on sourcing and care. The accounts here are drawn from the published findings of the UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), and Amnesty International, and from survivor testimony those bodies documented; “Tasneem” is a pseudonym used by Amnesty. Verified incident and victim figures are minimums — the UN describes them as “the tip of the iceberg.” The RSF denies committing these abuses. Sexual violence in the war has been attributed overwhelmingly to the RSF and allied militias but also, in a minority of verified incidents, to the Sudanese Armed Forces and other actors; this piece reflects that. “Genocide” is used here as the finding of the UN Fact-Finding Mission (and, as to the RSF, the U.S. government’s January 2025 determination), not as a settled judicial verdict; the ICJ dismissed Sudan’s separate genocide-complicity case against the UAE on jurisdictional grounds, as covered in this series’ first installment. The UAE denies arming the RSF.

Works Cited

• “Sudan: ‘El Obeid must not become the next crime scene’ warn UN investigators.” UN News, 8 July 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1167897

• “UN report documents widespread and brutal use of sexual violence in Sudan.” OHCHR, 23 June 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/06/un-report-documents-widespread-and-brutal-use-sexual-violence-sudan

• “Sexual violence as a weapon of war in Sudan’s three-year conflict.” OHCHR, June 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2026/06/sexual-violence-weapon-war-sudans-three-year-conflict

• “UN: RSF used rape and sexual slavery as weapons of war in Sudan since 2023” (87% figure; SAF ‘collaboration’ death sentence; coordinated-operation pattern). Middle East Eye, 24 June 2026. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/un-rsf-used-rape-and-sexual-slavery-weapons-war-sudan-three-years

• “Sudan: RSF violations in capture of El Fasher amount to war crimes.” OHCHR, 13 February 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/02/sudan-rsf-violations-capture-el-fasher-amount-war-crimes

• “Sudan: ‘Hallmarks of genocide’ found in El Fasher, UN investigators detail mass killings and ethnic targeting.” UN News, 13 February 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166997

• “Sudan: UN experts appalled by reports of mass atrocities, unlawful killings and sexual violence in El Fasher.” OHCHR, November 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/11/sudan-un-experts-appalled-reports-mass-atrocities-unlawful-killings-and

• “Sudan: RSF atrocities in El Fasher ‘a stain on the conscience of humanity’ – new report.” Amnesty International, 30 June/1 July 2026. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/07/sudan-rsf-atrocities-in-el-fasher-a-stain-on-the-conscience-of-humanity-new-report/

• “’City Under Siege, Children Under Fire’ — Report Launch, Nairobi, introductory speech.” Amnesty International, 1 July 2026. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/07/rapid-support-forces-crimes-against-humanity-north-darfur-introductory-speech/

• “UN investigators submit additional evidence of genocide by RSF in Sudan’s el-Fasher” (fourth-genocidal-act analysis; complicity of arming states). Middle East Eye, July 2026. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/un-investigators-detail-new-evidence-mass-rape-and-genocide-sudan-el-fasher

• “El-Obeid under siege by RSF: Could this be Sudan’s next el-Fasher?” Al Jazeera, 6 July 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/6/el-obeid-under-siege-by-rsf-could-this-be-sudans-next-el-fasher

• “Sudan: Urgently Address the Situation in and Around El Obeid…” (UAE support for RSF; UNSC statement; Türk ‘playbook’ warning). Human Rights Watch, 26 June 2026. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/26/sudan-urgently-address-the-situation-in-and-around-el-obeid-take-bold-steps-towards

• “El-Obeid battle threatens to cement RSF control in western Sudan.” The Africa Report, July 2026. https://www.theafricareport.com/423304/el-obeid-battle-threatens-to-cement-rsf-control-in-western-sudan/

• “EU parliament calls for terrorist listing of Sudan’s RSF over El-Obeid siege.” Sudan Tribune, 9 July 2026. https://sudantribune.com/article/316049

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Every time I sit down to write, I look at the screen and wonder how to even start explaining what life feels like here right now. Because when you try to put a whole catastrophe into words, it feels impossible.

They call it a "yellow line." It sounds so boring, right? Like some bureaucratic term from a map in an office somewhere far away. But here, that line is a wall of death.

If you want to know why everyone is talking about a third Intifada lately, not like some political theory, but as this heavy, inevitable thing hanging in the air, you just need to look at what happened over the last 24 hours. Everything is boiling over.

That "Yellow Line" and the cage

Look at what's happening in Gaza. Over the last few days, maps and reports have shown something terrifying: the military keeps pushing that line deeper, taking more and more land, digging huge dirt mounds, and cutting everything into pieces.

This isn't about security. It’s land theft, plain and simple. About 65 percent of Gaza is basically under their direct control now, and people are squeezed into these tiny, crowded corners where finding clean water or a safe place to sleep is a full-time job. Every single day, they move the invisible borders a bit further, pushing people out of their homes. It’s an open-air prison getting smaller and smaller every hour.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank

And while Gaza is under fire, the West Bank is a powder keg.

Today, towns up north are locked down tight. After clashes in places like Tell near Nablus, where armed settlers just walked into Palestinian land and people tried to defend their homes, the response was brutal. Four people dead in just one raid, soldiers everywhere, and ministers on TV basically calling for villages to be wiped out.

Let's be honest about the settlers: they aren't just random thugs. They are backed by the state. They burn olive groves, smash cars, and terrorize families while soldiers stand there and watch. They want everyone scared and broken.

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The spark

Every single day and night, they test us. They bomb us, they shoot at the spaces where our kids try to learn and play, and they let armed militias run wild.

They seem to forget one basic thing: you can't keep caging people forever without a reaction. What happened today in the West Bank, people fighting back, refusing to bow down, that's what a breaking point looks like. We are tired. God, we are so tired of counting the dead. But tiredness turns into something else when you have nothing left to lose.

The world just watches and writes statements. But history shows that Palestine doesn't wait for permission. The fuse for a third Intifada isn't being lit by leaders in rooms; it's being lit by every bulldozer pushing past the yellow line, every burned tree, and every sleepless night under the bombs.

We are still here. We're still breathing. And no line on a map is ever going to change that.

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There is a comforting myth — beloved by civics teachers, true crime podcasters, and people who genuinely believe in the phrase “no one is above the law” — that when powerful people do terrible things, something eventually happens to them. Justice, delayed but not denied. The arc bending, slowly, toward accountability.

This article is not about that myth. This article is about what actually happens, which is: nothing. Or more precisely, something happens — to the wrong people. The whistleblowers get prosecuted. The journalists get car-bombed. The survivors get defamed. And the people who ran the scheme, signed the papers, or attended the parties go on to collect honorary degrees and give keynote speeches at conferences about ethical leadership.

What follows is not a comprehensive list. A comprehensive list would be a library. This is a curated top ten — a highlight reel, if you will, from the ongoing festival of impunity that we have collectively agreed to call “Western democracy”.

Pull up a chair. Pour something strong. Try not to throw your phone.

10. The Iraq War (2003–Present Consequences: Zero)

In 2002 and 2003, the governments of the United States and United Kingdom told their populations, the United Nations, and anyone else within earshot, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction so numerous and so imminent that the only possible response was a full-scale military invasion. This turned out to be — and there is no polite way to put this — a lie. Not a mistake. Not an intelligence failure, as the preferred euphemism goes. A coordinated, deliberate, documented lie, supported by fabricated evidence, suppressed dissent, and the deliberate destruction of careers of anyone who questioned it.

The result: approximately 200,000 civilian deaths, the destabilisation of the entire Middle East, the creation of the power vacuum that birthed ISIS, and the displacement of millions of people whose lives have still not recovered twenty-three years later.

The consequences for Tony Blair and George W. Bush: a series of extremely lucrative memoir deals, speaking fees ranging into the hundreds of thousands per engagement, and in Blair’s case, a fucking knighthood. Bush took up painting. He seems to be enjoying it.

The one person who faced genuine legal jeopardy for the Iraq War was Chelsea Manning, for telling the public it was happening.

9. The 2008 Financial Crisis (Accountability Score: 0/∞)

In the years leading up to 2008, the major banks of the Western world constructed an elaborate pyramid of fraudulent mortgage products, sold them to pension funds and ordinary investors as safe assets, collected enormous bonuses for doing so, and then — when the pyramid inevitably collapsed — triggered the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, wiping out the savings, homes, and retirement funds of millions of people who had nothing to do with any of it.

The response of Western governments was to give the banks several trillion dollars of public money to make them solvent again, describe this as an unfortunate necessity, and then spend the next decade imposing austerity on the public whose savings had just been used to bail out the institutions that robbed them.

Number of senior banking executives criminally prosecuted in the United States for causing the 2008 financial crisis: one. His name was Kareem Serageldin. He was a mid-level trader at Credit Suisse. He served two and a half years. The CEOs who ran the institutions, designed the products, and collected nine-figure bonuses while the whole thing burned: all fine. Several of them were appointed to government advisory panels on financial reform. You genuinely could not make this up, and yet here we are.

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8. The Catholic Church (Est. Impunity: Approx. 1,700 Years)

The Catholic Church, operating across every continent on earth, maintained for decades — and in many documented cases, centuries — a systematic internal protocol for handling priests who sexually abused children. That protocol was: move them to a different diocese, suppress any complaints, threaten victims with spiritual consequences if they spoke out, and under no circumstances involve law enforcement.

This was not the behaviour of rogue individuals. It was institutional policy, documented in internal memos, carried out by bishops, cardinals, and in multiple cases directly overseen by people who subsequently became Pope. The scale, when investigators finally started pulling at the thread, was almost incomprehensible — tens of thousands of victims across Ireland, the United States, Australia, Germany, France, Chile, and beyond.

Some local prosecutions followed. Some compensation funds were established, generally after decades of legal warfare against the survivors making claims. The institution itself: intact. Still diplomatically sovereign. Still collecting tax exemptions. Still lecturing the rest of us about moral frameworks.

The Vatican did release a lengthy report on one case. It was 461 pages long and concluded that the matter had been handled “with great discretion.” Great discretion. That’s the phrase they chose.

But it is in Australia — and specifically in a ruling handed down in November 2024 — that the Catholic Church produced its most philosophically audacious legal manoeuvre yet. Ballarat, Victoria, was one of the most catastrophic sites of abuse documented by Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Survivors told the inquiry that the suicide rate was “through the roof” — one prominent campaigner believed it exceeded the road toll — driven in significant part by what the clergy had done to the children of that city across decades.

In 2020, a survivor known only as DP — who had been five years old when he was sexually assaulted twice in his family home by Father Bryan Coffey during pastoral visits in 1971 — commenced proceedings against the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat, seeking compensation for psychological injuries. The trial judge believed him. The Victorian Court of Appeal believed him. Both courts found the Diocese liable. The case went to the High Court of Australia, which overturned them both.

On 13 November 2024, the High Court unanimously ruled that vicarious liability could not exist in the absence of an employer-employee relationship. The priest was not an employee or agent of the Diocese. His actions were not done with the express or implied authorisation of the Diocese. The abuse happened. The courts accepted it happened. There was simply, in law, no one responsible for it.

The question this raises — who, then, employs a Catholic priest? — was answered with admirable directness by Judith Courtin, a lawyer and advocate who has spent years representing institutional abuse survivors in Australia. “The church has always argued that priests, brothers and nuns are not employed,” she said. “They are employed by God, if you like.”

Employed by God. Which means, in the practical application of Australian common law as it currently stands, that you cannot sue. DP left the High Court without compensation. The abuse was real. The harm was real. The institution responsible for moving abusive priests between parishes for decades: not liable. The Church: tax-exempt. Still running schools.

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7. The Epstein Network (Justice Served: One Convicted Accomplice, Approximately 0 Clients)

Jeffrey Epstein, a financier of contested and largely unexplained wealth, ran for decades a systematic operation to traffic minors for the sexual abuse of powerful men. This is not contested. This is established. There are names in the flight logs. There are names in the little black book. There are civil depositions. There are photographs. There are victims who have given testimony under oath, at considerable personal cost, about who was present and what happened.

Epstein himself died in a maximum-security federal facility under circumstances that the official record describes as suicide and that a meaningful portion of the forensic pathology community describes as inconsistent with suicide. His primary accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving twenty years.

The clients — the politicians, the royals, the billionaires, the academics, the financiers who appear in the documentary record as having participated in or benefited from this operation — have, with vanishingly few exceptions, faced no criminal consequences whatsoever. Several have received enhanced legal settlements that sealed relevant records. At least one reached a non-prosecution agreement with the federal government so sweeping that a judge later found it had been illegally concealed from the victims.

The relevant prosecutor who signed that agreement went on to serve as Secretary of Labor. He resigned eventually — not because of the non-prosecution agreement, but because journalists kept asking about it.

6. Hillsborough, U.K. (Thirty-Year Cover-Up, Consequences: Administratively Tiresome)

On 15 April 1989, ninety-seven Liverpool football supporters were killed in a crush at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, in a disaster caused by catastrophic failures of police crowd management. Within hours of the disaster, South Yorkshire Police began constructing a false account placing blame on the victims — accusing them of arriving drunk, of forcing gates, of picking pockets of the dying.

This lie was fed to the press, including most notoriously, Murdoch’s The Scum — AKA: The Sun, which ran it on its front page. It was repeated in official inquiries. It was used to deny justice to the victims’ families for over thirty years. The families, led by people like Anne Williams and Margaret Aspinall who simply refused to stop asking questions, eventually forced multiple reinvestigations, a new inquest, and in 2016 a jury finding that the ninety-seven had been unlawfully killed.

Criminal prosecutions followed. They collapsed. The officers involved were acquitted or had cases discontinued. The match commander, David Duckenfield, was found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter in 2019. Thirty years. Ninety-seven dead. A documented, coordinated cover-up by a police force. Nobody in prison.

The families are still fighting.

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5. HSBC’s Drug Cartel Money Laundering (Fine Paid, Brunch Resumed)

In 2012, the United States Department of Justice announced that HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, had spent years laundering money for Mexican drug cartels — including the Sinaloa cartel — as well as processing transactions for states under US sanctions including Libya, Sudan and Iran. The figures involved ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars. HSBC had, in the literal sense, been the financial infrastructure of international drug trafficking.

The penalty: a fine of $1.9 billion, roughly five weeks of profit for the bank at the time. No criminal charges against any individual executive. The Department of Justice explained that prosecuting the bank itself could have caused “collateral consequences” to the financial system.

So to be clear: if you are caught with a small quantity of drugs in the United States, you go to prison. If you are a bank that laundered the money of the people who produced those drugs at industrial scale, you pay a fine that your shareholders can absorb, your executives keep their bonuses, and the DOJ issues a press release describing this as “a landmark enforcement action.” No executives were charged. Not one.

The phrase “too big to jail” entered the political lexicon around this time. It was meant as a criticism. It is now simply an accurate description of policy.

4. The Sackler Family and the Opioid Crisis (Philanthropy Ongoing)

The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures OxyContin. Beginning in the 1990s, Purdue ran an aggressive and deliberately deceptive marketing campaign to convince doctors that OxyContin was a safe, non-addictive painkiller suitable for a wide range of patients. This was false. The company knew it was false. Internal documents, when they eventually emerged, showed explicit awareness of the addiction potential and deliberate suppression of that information.

The result was an opioid crisis that has killed, by the most conservative estimates, half a million Americans since 1999. Entire communities were hollowed out. Life expectancy in parts of the United States dropped measurably. The human cost is, in the technical sense, incalculable.

Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy. The Sackler family negotiated a settlement that initially included sweeping immunity from future civil lawsuits — a provision later struck down by the Supreme Court on the basis that you cannot, in fact, buy immunity from justice for mass death. The family has paid significant sums in various settlements. Individual family members remain wealthy, free, and, in a detail that should make you question the entire concept of institutional reputation, still listed as donors on the walls of museums and universities that accepted their money during the years the opioids were flowing.

The Louvre. The Tate. The Met. The Guggenheim. Several of them eventually removed the Sackler name from their walls, which is the art world’s version of a life sentence.

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3. The News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal (Murdoch Empire: Structurally Intact)

For years, journalists and private investigators working for another of Rupert Murdoch’s trash rags, the News of the World hacked the voicemails of politicians, celebrities, crime victims, and — in the case that finally broke the story publicly — murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose family spent years believing she might be alive because someone was deleting messages from her phone to make room for new ones. The staff at the paper were intentionally deleting messages from a dead girls phone so they could hear the new ones as they came in. To be clear, they were deleting evidence in a murder case for scoops. Evidence the police never got to hear.

The scandal brought down the 168-year-old newspaper. It led to the Leveson Inquiry. Several journalists went to prison. Private investigator Glenn Mulcaire served time. Rebekah Brooks, the editor at the height of the hacking, was arrested, tried, but then she was acquitted, and subsequently rehired by News UK as chief executive. She is still running the company.

Rupert Murdoch appeared before a parliamentary select committee, described it as “the most humble day of my life,” and was then hit in the face with a foam pie by a protestor, which his then-wife Wendi Deng deflected with a speed and commitment that suggested she was the only person in that room genuinely looking out for Rupert Murdoch’s interests. Sweet.

His media empire continues to operate on four continents. His papers continue to tell you which politicians to trust.

2. The VW Emissions Scandal (Or: How To Lie To Every Government On Earth And Pay A Manageable Fine)

In 2015, it emerged that Volkswagen had spent years installing software in eleven million of its diesel vehicles specifically designed to detect when the car was being emissions-tested and reduce pollution output accordingly. During actual driving conditions, the same cars emitted nitrogen oxides at up to forty times the legal limit.

This was not a corner cut, an oversight, or a rounding error. It was a sophisticated, multi-year, company-wide fraud against regulators in the United States, Europe, and beyond — a deliberate deception of every government that had set emissions standards, and of every consumer who had bought a diesel car believing it met those standards.

VW paid approximately $33 billion in fines, settlements, and vehicle buybacks — a genuinely substantial sum by any normal measure, and one that nonetheless left the company profitable and operational. Several executives were charged in the United States; most faced trial in Germany, where proceedings moved at the pace of a particularly unhurried glacier. VW’s then-CEO Martin Winterkorn was charged with fraud in Germany in 2019. His trial, at time of writing, remains ongoing, having been delayed repeatedly on grounds of his health.

The cars are still on the road. So, as it turned out, was everyone else’s.

Because what the VW investigation exposed — when regulators, stung into action, actually started testing other manufacturers’ vehicles under real-world conditions — was not a German aberration. It was an industry. Opel (GM) was caught in 2015 using defeat device software that changed engine behaviour depending on whether two or four wheels were rotating — software that could detect a test stand by the simple fact that the rear wheels weren’t moving. Fiat Chrysler received an EPA notice of violation in January 2017 for over 100,000 diesel vehicles — including the Dodge Ram 1500 and Jeep Grand Cherokee — fitted with software allowing them to exceed nitrogen oxide limits undetected by standard testing. Mitsubishi. BMW. Renault. Nissan. In December 2023, American engine manufacturer Cummins was fined $1.675 billion by the US Department of Justice for installing defeat devices on 960,000 Dodge and Stellantis RAM pickup truck engines across a decade of production. Nearly 850,000 claimants are currently before the UK High Court alleging that Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Nissan, Renault, Peugeot, and Citroën did the same, with NOx emissions reportedly running in some cases at up to twelve times legal limits under real driving conditions.

In each case, the pattern was the same as with VW: fines issued to the company, paid by shareholders, absorbed as a cost of doing business. Opel paid €64.8 million. Mitsubishi paid €25 million. BMW paid €875 million. Large numbers. Manageable percentages of revenue. No senior executive at any of these companies served prison time for what was, in each case, a deliberate, multi-year fraud against governments and consumers across multiple continents. The software didn’t write itself. Someone commissioned it, approved it, and signed off on it at every model year for years running. That person — at every one of these companies — is fine.

What VW revealed, in other words, was not a scandal. It was a standard. A continent’s worth of governments had actively incentivised diesel vehicles on the basis of emissions figures that turned out to be fiction. The air quality data from a decade of European cities — the respiratory illness, the premature deaths attributed to NOx pollution — was built on numbers that the manufacturers knew were false when they submitted them. The fine is how you close the file. The executives are how you keep it closed.

1. The Panama Papers (Crime: Exposed. Journalist: Assassinated. Criminals: Fine.)

In April 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers — 11.5 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, revealing in extraordinary detail how the wealthiest individuals and institutions on earth had constructed a global infrastructure of shell companies, offshore accounts, and legal fictions specifically designed to hide wealth from taxation and, in many cases, from any regulatory scrutiny whatsoever.

The list of names included heads of state, royalty, oligarchs, arms dealers, sanctions-busters, and a supporting cast of the globally comfortable so extensive that it read less like a scandal and more like a directory of how the world actually works. The documents showed not isolated tax avoidance but a coordinated, industrialised system — with major Western banks, law firms, and accounting practices as its willing and profitable infrastructure.

The consequences: Iceland’s Prime Minister resigned after being named. Pakistan’s Prime Minister was disqualified from office. A handful of other political figures faced domestic pressure. The vast majority of individuals named: nothing. The financial system that made it possible: intact and operational. The law firm at the centre of it: eventually dissolved, though its principals were not prosecuted.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist who had spent years exposing the corruption documented in the papers — and who was one of the contributors to the Panama Papers investigation — was murdered in October 2017 when a bomb placed under her car detonated as she drove away from her home. She had filed a police report about death threats seventeen days earlier.

Three men were convicted of her murder. The businessman alleged to have ordered it has faced trial in Malta; proceedings have been characterised by delays, legal challenges, and an atmosphere that many observers have described as consistent with a country in which powerful people do not expect to face consequences.

Her sons continue to publish her work.

The Pattern Is The Point

It would be comforting to read this list as a collection of failures — moments when the system stumbled, when justice was delayed or botched or poorly resourced. It would be comforting, and it would be wrong.

The pattern is not failure. The pattern is function. These are not cases in which accountability was attempted and fell short. These are cases in which the mechanisms that might have produced accountability — criminal prosecution, regulatory enforcement, asset seizure, institutional reform — were either not deployed, or were deployed at a level calculated to produce the appearance of consequence rather than consequence itself.

The system does not fail to punish the powerful. The system protects the powerful. It has always done so. The difference now is that we have the documents. We have the flight logs. We have the shell company registrations. We have the emissions test defeat software. We have 11.5 million files from a law firm in Panama.

And we have journalists who die in car bombings, and whistleblowers who go to prison, and victims who spend thirty years demanding that someone, somewhere, acknowledge what happened to them.

The arc of history does not automatically bend toward justice. It bends in the direction that powerful people push it. And powerful people, as this list illustrates with some thoroughness, push it in a very specific direction.

Away from themselves.

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I know what you’re thinking…

You’ve read ten entries. You’ve nodded along. You’ve possibly felt a mounting, clarifying rage. And somewhere around entry six or seven, a nagging voice in the back of your head — the voice that reads the news, that watches the footage, that has been watching the footage every day for the better part of three years — started asking an obvious question.

Where is Israel?

It’s a fair question. It is, in fact, the question. Because everything on this list — the protected institutions, the ignored courts, the dead journalists, the laundered money, the fines instead of prosecutions, the cover-ups dressed as investigations — all of it is, in some sense, a rehearsal for the main event. A warm-up act for the single most comprehensive, most documented, most publicly visible, most thoroughly ignored exercise in consequence-free criminality in the history of the modern international order.

I left it off the list not because it doesn’t belong. I left it off because it doesn’t fit in a list. It is the list. It is the thing the list was invented to describe. It is the reason that every other entry on this list was possible — because if you can do what Israel has done, in full view of every court, every camera, every rapporteur, every satellite, every legal framework the post-war world constructed specifically to prevent exactly this, and face no meaningful consequence, then the message is clear. The message has always been clear.

The rules don’t apply to the right people.

The Entry That Gets Its Own Section: Israel and the Complete and Total Non-Enforcement of Everything

Let’s begin with the legal architecture, because the legal architecture is important. The post-1945 international order was built — explicitly, deliberately, in direct response to specific atrocities — on a set of frameworks designed to make certain things impossible. The Genocide Convention. The Geneva Conventions. The Rome Statute. The International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court. These institutions exist because human beings, after the second catastrophic world war in thirty years, looked at what had happened and said: never again. We will build mechanisms. We will create courts. We will write treaties. We will make it structurally impossible for states to commit mass atrocities and simply walk away.

Every single one of those mechanisms has been activated with respect to Israel’s conduct in Gaza since October 2023. And every single one of them has, in practice, been neutralised — by political veto, diplomatic silence, delayed enforcement, or the blunt refusal of the world’s most powerful states to do what international law requires.

Here is the state of play.

The ICJ. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued interim orders instructing Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide, and in April 2024, the same court issued a second order unanimously ruling that “famine is setting in” in Gaza and ordering Israel to increase aid flow without delay. Israel did not increase aid flow without delay. Israel decreased it. A conservative assessment would lead to the conclusion that, at a minimum, the ICJ’s orders should have triggered an immediate duty to act. Instead, genocidal violence continued in Gaza with serious risk of expanding to the West Bank. No one has been investigated or prosecuted, let alone punished.

The ICC. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. All 125 ICC member states, including France and the United Kingdom, are required to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter the state’s territory. Multiple countries have since allowed Netanyahu to fly through their airspace. Hungary hosted him. Italy waved him through. France initially claimed he enjoyed immunity. The United Kingdom muttered something about obligations and then said nothing else. The United States called the warrants “outrageous” and Trump issued an executive order imposing penalties on ICC officials involved in “targeting” Israel.

To be absolutely clear about what this means: the sitting prime minister of a country allied with every major Western power has an active arrest warrant from the international court established specifically to try heads of state for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is travelling the world. He is meeting with leaders. He is attending functions. The warrant is, in practice, decorative.

The UN Special Rapporteur. In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council titled “Anatomy of a Genocide”, stating “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel had committed at least three genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza. The response of Western governments was to call for her dismissal and accuse her of antisemitism. The response of the United States was more direct: in July 2025, the Trump administration placed sanctions on Albanese, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio citing her push for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials as the legal basis. After the sanctions were imposed, Albanese’s bank cards stopped working. A hotel reservation booked by the European Parliament was cancelled. Medical insurance was denied.

So: a UN legal expert presented documented findings to a UN body that an ongoing genocide was being committed. She was sanctioned by a major world power for doing so. She described it as “mafia-style intimidation.” She kept working anyway. The genocide continued.

The Journalists

As of April 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ preliminary investigations show that at least 262 journalists and media workers have been killed across Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran since the Israel-Gaza war / genocide began on October 7, 2023. Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting data in 1992, making this war the deadliest on record for journalists.

Read that again. More journalists than any other government. In the history of CPJ’s records. By a significant margin.

According to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the war in Gaza has led to the deaths of more journalists than the combined total killed during the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.

Combined. All of them. More.

CPJ has documented instances in which journalists targeted by Israel in Gaza were known to have reported at length on apparent Israeli military conduct before their deaths. In 2025, the Israeli army created a special unit known as the “Legitimization Cell” to link Palestinian journalists to Hamas in order to justify their killings. First, kill them. Then explain why they deserved it.

The Committee to Protect Journalists stated that Israel is “engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.”

And the foreign press? In May 2024, Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a “threat to national security.” In September 2024, Israeli forces stormed Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank, confiscating equipment and documents. The Israeli parliament subsequently approved an extension of the law for two more years.

Israel did not merely ban Al Jazeera. Israel also sanctioned the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz over coverage considered critical of its actions, and throughout 2024, Israel’s military censor fully blocked 1,635 articles from being published and imposed partial restrictions on another 6,265 — an average of roughly 21 interventions per day, more than twice the highest previous daily tally.

Israel is conducting what the UN’s own legal experts describe as a genocide. It has banned the primary international broadcaster covering it. It has killed more journalists than any government in modern recorded history. It has created a special military unit to posthumously designate those journalists as terrorists after killing them. And foreign press, when permitted to enter at all, must submit their material to Israeli military censors before publication.

The information environment surrounding the single most documented conflict in history has been methodically dismantled. This is not incidental. It is policy.

The Aid Workers

On 1 April 2024, Israeli drones targeted a three-car convoy belonging to World Central Kitchen in the Gaza Strip, killing seven aid workers. Those killed included a dual US-Canada national, as well as people from Australia, Poland, three from the United Kingdom, and a Palestinian. The WCK team was travelling in a “deconflicted” zone in two armoured cars branded with the WCK logo and a soft skin vehicle. Despite coordinating movements with the IDF, the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse, where the team had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza on a maritime route.

The cars were marked. The route was pre-approved and coordinated. The IDF knew exactly who was in those vehicles and where they were going. The destroyed cars were clearly marked on the roof and sides and travelled along a route preapproved and coordinated with the IDF, but the war room of the unit responsible for security of the route ordered the drone operators to attack. This is all confirmed by Haaretz.

Netanyahu described it as unintentional. Two Israeli officers were subsequently dismissed. No criminal charges were filed. World Central Kitchen, after pausing operations, eventually returned. On 30 November 2024, an Israeli airstrike on a World Central Kitchen vehicle in Khan Yunis killed five more people, including three aid workers.

This is the pattern. Commit. Describe as regrettable. Investigate internally. Dismiss a junior officer. Repeat.

Starvation as Strategy

In August 2024, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that starving the entire Gaza population was “justified and moral”, even if two million people consequently died. This statement was made publicly. On record. By a senior member of the Israeli cabinet. It was not followed by his resignation, his prosecution, or any formal censure from Western governments whose aid agreements with Israel contain explicit human rights clauses.

On 6 May 2025, Smotrich said that Gaza would be “entirely destroyed” and that Palestinians would “leave in great numbers to third countries.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed this, calling for Israel to block all humanitarian aid into Gaza and referring to expulsion of Palestinians as “voluntary migration.”

These are members of Israels sitting government. Speaking publicly. Describing the deliberate starvation and displacement of a civilian population as policy objectives. The response of Western capitals: carefully worded concern. Strongly worded letters. The occasional summoning of an ambassador for what diplomats call a “frank exchange of views,” which is the international relations equivalent of tutting at someone.

The Ships

If you want a single image that captures the current state of international law, consider what has happened in international waters since 2025.

In June 2025, Israeli Navy forces from Shayetet 13 seized the vessel Madleen about 185 kilometres from Gaza in international waters, and towed it to Ashdod. Among the twelve people on board were Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and French MEP Rima Hassan. The ship was carrying baby formula, flour, rice, nappies / diapers, medical kits, and children’s prosthetics.

A UN expert stated: “This attack against unarmed civilians on the high seas is yet another violation of international law by Israel.” The interception was understood to have taken place in international waters, contrary to international law.

In July 2025, Israel boarded and seized a second vessel, the Handala, in international waters. In October 2025, Israel intercepted about 40 vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla, abducting and detaining more than 450 activists in another aid convoy also attempting to deliver supplies to Gaza. Among those detained: the grandson of South African leader Nelson Mandela. Several activists reported physical and psychological abuse in Israeli custody.

And then, just days before publication, it happened again. Israel intercepted a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in international waters near Greece, arresting 175 activists, with officials saying blockade enforcement was vital to stop weapons reaching the territory. Turkey called the event an “act of piracy.” Spain labelled the seizure “illegal.” Germany and Italy expressed “grave concern.” The European Commission’s spokesperson stopped short of condemning the interception or explicitly calling it a breach of international law — a cautious line that underscores the EU’s reluctance to directly confront Israel over the operation.

To summarise: Israel is boarding civilian aid ships — flagged under European nations, crewed by activists, journalists, doctors, and elected parliamentarians from allied countries — in international waters, using drones and armed naval commandos, hundreds of miles from Gaza, and detaining the passengers. This is being described by Turkey as piracy. It is being described by Spain as illegal. It is being described by the European Commission as a matter of concern. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said: “These repeated attacks on unarmed civilians demonstrate Israel’s deliberate escalation and the total failure of governments to enforce international law.”

The ships keep coming. The navy keeps stopping them. The statements of concern keep being issued. The food does not arrive.

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Amsterdam: When the Cover Story Falls Apart

In November 2024, violence erupted in Amsterdam surrounding a Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The initial narrative, amplified by Israeli officials and much of the Western press, was of a pogrom — Jewish fans hunted through the streets of a European capital by antisemitic mobs.

The fuller picture, which emerged incrementally and received considerably less prominent coverage than the original framing, was somewhat different.

The evening before the match, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed pulling Palestinian flags from houses, making racist anti-Arab chants, assaulting people, and vandalising local property. Violence did follow against Maccabi supporters. Both things are true. What became politically convenient was only one of them.

What was rather less covered, until it wasn’t: Dutch police told their British counterparts that over 200 Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans who wreaked havoc in Amsterdam were “linked to the Israel Defense Forces”, and that hundreds more were “experienced fighters”, “highly organised” and “intent on causing serious violence.”

The original police assessment recorded that Dutch police informed their British counterparts that “500-600 fans” were “experienced fighters who were highly organised and co-ordinated. They were intent on serious violence and were not afraid of fighting with police.”

When the city of Birmingham subsequently banned Maccabi fans from attending their next European fixture based on this intelligence, British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy criticised the ban in parliament, claiming it was “based in no small part on the risk posed to those fans that are attending who support Maccabi Tel Aviv, because they are Israeli and because they are Jewish.” She had the police intelligence. She said this anyway. Jeremy Corbyn, amongst other things, called it a lie.

The narrative of the Amsterdam “pogrom” was then deployed by Israeli officials and their allies in Western governments to deflect attention from everything else on this page. It worked, for a while. Most narratives do.

This is not a collection of failures. This is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The ICC issues warrants and Western governments find procedural reasons not to enforce them. The ICJ issues binding orders and Israel ignores them without consequence. The UN appoints a special rapporteur who documents genocide and the United States sanctions her credit cards. Journalists are killed at a rate that exceeds every recorded conflict in history combined and a law is passed to ensure the survivors can’t report freely on what’s happening. Aid workers are killed in clearly marked vehicles on pre-approved routes and a junior officer loses his job. Civilian ships carrying baby formula and crutches are boarded by armed commandos in international waters and the European Commission issues a statement of grave concern.

And there is the meta-crime — the one that makes all the others possible. The selective application of a rules-based international order that turns out to be neither rules-based nor international when the right governments push back hard enough. Every court, treaty, and framework on this list was built to be universal. The moment it became apparent they would not be applied universally, they stopped being frameworks and became decorations. Expensive, earnestly maintained decorations, behind which the actual business of power continues unchanged.

The Panama Papers showed us the offshore machinery. The Epstein case showed us the protected client list. The Iraq War showed us the cost of manufactured consent. Gaza is showing us all of it simultaneously, in real time, with more documentation than any atrocity in human history, and the lesson is the same lesson it has always been.

The system does not fail to punish the powerful. The system is the powerful. The difference now is that we have the documents. We have the satellite images. We have the flight logs. We have the ICC warrants. We have 262 dead journalists and a UN rapporteur operating from a hotel room with a cancelled credit card. We have civilian ships intercepted by naval commandos hundreds of miles from their destination. We have the Israeli Finance Minister on camera saying that starving two million people is justified and moral.

And we have the statements of grave concern.

And then we have… Nothing.

Until we decide that nothing is no longer acceptable.

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First Published by Truth Decay on May 08, 2026.

Truth Decay

Tip Jar

References:

1. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “The Panama Papers.” ICIJ, 2016. https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/

2. Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation. https://www.daphne.foundation

3. The Iraq Inquiry (Chilcot Report). UK Government, 2016. https://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/

4. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Final Report. US Government, 2011. https://fcic.law.stanford.edu/

5. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Australian Government, 2017. https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/

6. United States v. HSBC Bank USA, N.A. DOJ Press Release, 2012. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-bank-usa-na-admit-anti-money-laundering-and-bank-secrecy-act

7. Sackler family litigation: In re Purdue Pharma L.P., US Bankruptcy Court. https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/InRePurduePharmaLP

8. Leveson Inquiry. UK Government, 2012. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/leveson-inquiry-report-into-the-culture-practices-and-ethics-of-the-press

9. Hillsborough Independent Panel Report. UK Government, 2012. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-hillsborough-independent-panel-report

10. EPA Volkswagen Investigation. US Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/vw

11. United States v. Epstein; Maxwell v. United States. Court documents via PACER. https://www.courtlistener.com/

12. Kotz, Nick. The Deferred Prosecution Agreement: HSBC and the DOJ. Harvard Law School Forum, 2013.

13. Committee to Protect Journalists. “Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War.” Updated April 28, 2026. https://cpj.org/2023/10/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/

14. Committee to Protect Journalists. “Record 129 Press Members Killed in 2025; Israel Responsible for Two-Thirds of Deaths.” February 2026. https://cpj.org/special-reports/record-129-press-members-killed-in-2025-israel-responsible-for-2-of-3-of-deaths/

15. Wikipedia. “List of Journalists Killed in the Gaza War.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_the_Gaza_war

16. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Israel Must Ensure Safety and Liberty of Flotilla Activists After Interception in International Waters.” October 8, 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/israel-must-ensure-safety-and-liberty-flotilla-activists-after-another

17. Al Jazeera. “Gaza Aid Flotilla Vessels Taken to Crete After Israeli Interception.” May 1, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/1/gaza-aid-flotilla-vessels-taken-to-crete-after-israeli-interception

18. Euronews. “Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Flotilla, Arresting 175 Activists.” April 30, 2026. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/30/israel-intercepts-gaza-bound-flotilla-arresting-175-activists

19. Wikipedia. “June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2025_Gaza_Freedom_Flotilla

20. Wikipedia. “Global Sumud Flotilla.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Sumud_Flotilla

21. World Central Kitchen. “7 WCK Team Members Killed in Gaza.” April 1, 2024. https://wck.org/news/gaza-team-update/

22. Wikipedia. “World Central Kitchen Aid Convoy Attack.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Central_Kitchen_aid_convoy_attack

23. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights / Question of Palestine. “Genocide as Colonial Erasure — Report of Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.” October 2024. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/genocide-as-colonial-erasure-report-francesca-albanese-01oct24/

24. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Forever-Occupation, Genocide, and Profit: Special Rapporteur’s Report Exposes Corporate Forces Behind Destruction of Palestine.” July 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/forever-occupation-genocide-and-profit-special-rapporteurs-report-exposes

25. Wikipedia. “ICC Arrest Warrants for Israeli Leaders.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_arrest_warrants_for_Israeli_leaders

26. Al Jazeera. “US Sanctions UN Expert Francesca Albanese Over Israel Criticism.” July 9, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/9/us-sanctions-un-expert-albanese-over-israel-criticism

27. Al Jazeera. “Israel Extends Ban on Al Jazeera’s Operations by 90 Days.” January 25, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/25/israel-extends-ban-on-al-jazeeras-operations-by-90-days

28. Middle East Eye. “Exclusive: Violent Maccabi Fans Were Organised Fighters ‘Linked to IDF’, UK Police Found.” November 4, 2025. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/violent-maccabi-fans-included-organised-fighters-linked-idf-uk-police-found

29. Wikipedia. “November 2024 Amsterdam Riots.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2024_Amsterdam_riots

30. Wikipedia. “Intent and Incitement in the Gaza Genocide.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the_Gaza_genocide

31. Al Jazeera. “We Need to Make It Work: Can International Law Deliver Justice?” December 7, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/7/we-need-to-make-it-work-can-international-law-deliver-justice

32. The Courier (Ballarat). “New Bill May Change Clergy Abuse Compensation Laws.” November 7, 2025. https://www.thecourier.com.au/story/9106093/new-bill-may-change-clergy-abuse-compensation-laws/

33. BishopAccountability.org / transcript. “The Catholic Church’s Legal Loophole for Abuse.” March 20, 2025. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/2025/03/the-catholic-churchs-legal-loophole/​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

34. Wikipedia. “Diesel Emissions Scandal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

35. Insurance Journal / Reuters. “Carmakers Accused in Huge UK Lawsuits of Cheating Diesel Emissions Tests.” October 2025. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2025/10/14/843549.htm​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This wasn’t about any misconduct. It certainly wasn’t about ethics. It wasn’t about “concerns.” Khan’s biggest no no was issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, Ben‑Gvir. Hope dare he do his job. He touched the people the U.S. and Israel treat like they’re above the law. The moment he did that, his job was already gone. Today just made it official.

The vote was a setup from the start. Secret ballot. UN building. 125 states. They needed 63 votes. They got them. Of course they did. Washington wanted him gone. Israel wanted him gone. The ICC bent the knee immediately. No hearing. No defense. No transparency. Just a coordinated removal dressed up as procedure.

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Western media is already sanitizing it — “internal issues,” “governance concerns,” “questions raised.” If this were about governance, Khan would’ve been allowed in the room. If this were about conduct, they wouldn’t have rushed the vote. If this were about ethics, they wouldn’t hide behind a secret ballot. This was never about law. It was about power.

The ICC has always been selective. It goes after Africans, Balkan leftovers, whoever the West doesn’t care about. But the second it touches Israel — the second it touches the U.S. indirectly — the whole institution collapses. Suddenly the prosecutor is the problem. Suddenly the system is “in crisis.” Suddenly the court needs “review.” Same pattern every time.

Secret ballot.

Defense barred.

Absolute majority.

Immediate result.

Prosecutor removed.

This isn't a real judicial process. It’s a political removal carried out by states that never wanted the ICC touching Israel in the first place. It's a corrupt system.

Khan was removed because he broke the golden rule: international law only applies to people the U.S. and Israel don’t like. The moment it applies to them, it stops being “law” and becomes “political.” The moment it threatens their officials, the entire system bends.

International law is a farce. This isn't a slogan. It's a literal description of what just happened. A court that fires its own prosecutor for doing his job is not a court. It’s an weapon. And that weapon is used my whoever holds it. Right now, that’s the U.S. and Israel. Everyone else is just acting on a world stage.

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What happened in Tal today wasn’t a “raid,” wasn’t a “clash,” wasn’t a “security incident.” It was a pogrom carried out by armed parasites and murderous thieves who walked into a Palestinian village under the full protection of IOF terrorist soldiers and unleashed violence on families who were still waking up.

Around 7:30–8:00 a.m., roughly twenty armed parasites and murderous thieves from the Havat Gilad outpost marched straight into Tal, southwest of Nablus, heading toward the al‑Qabbala area. They opened fire on Palestinian homes — including the houses of Karim Abd al‑Mun’im Ramadan and Khaled Sa’id Ramadan — because that’s what these parasites and murderous thieves do: they invade, they shoot, they terrorize, and they expect the IOF terrorist soldiers to clean up after them.

Palestinians ran out to defend their village because no one else ever does. And during that confrontation, Sheikh Farouq Adnan Ali Ramadan managed to seize an assault rifle from one of the Havat Gilad murderous thieves. He opened fire, killing Benayahu Mellet, a 32‑year‑old parasite who fancied himself part of an “armed civilian defense squad” and ran the outpost’s agricultural program — agricultural, of course, on stolen land.

A second Israeli, Major Yuval Ezra, 27, a battery commander in the occupation’s 411th Battalion of the 282nd Artillery Brigade, was also shot and later died. Several other murderous thieves were wounded.

And then the IOF terrorist soldiers arrived — not to stop the parasites and murderous thieves, but to reinforce them. To merge into one armed formation with them. To finish the job.

By the end of the assault, four Palestinians were executed, all cousins from the Ramadan family:

• Sheikh Farouq Adnan Ali Ramadan

• Ibrahim Hussein Ali Ramadan

• Jawad Hussein Ali Ramadan

• Imran Ahmad Ali Ramadan

Local reporting says they were shot at close range — field executions — after the IOF terrorist soldiers joined the parasites and murderous thieves in firing live rounds at Palestinians defending their homes. Four others were wounded, three critically.

Tal’s mayor, Walid Zaidan, told Ultra Palestine that the parasites and murderous thieves entered Areas A and B without authorization, stormed the village, and opened fire on homes. Even the occupation’s own preliminary investigation admits that dozens of parasites and murderous thieves entered without coordination and that the murderous thieves fired first. Only afterward did Havat Gilad personnel and IOF terrorist soldiers arrive, blending seamlessly into one violent bloc.

Because that’s what they are:

parasites with rifles, murderous thieves with uniforms, one machinery of dispossession.

After the killings, the occupation sealed the entrances to Tal and Nablus, deployed more IOF terrorist soldiers around Havat Gilad, and began the usual PR laundering — “investigations,” “reviews,” “concerns.” Meanwhile, Palestinians buried four cousins.

Havat Gilad: A Nest of Parasites

Havat Gilad isn’t a “community.” It’s an illegal outpost built on stolen West Bank land, notorious for armed attacks across the Nablus region. Its militias operate openly, often escorted by IOF terrorist soldiers, conducting assaults that everyone sees but no one stops. Today’s pogrom is not an exception — it’s the system functioning exactly as intended.

The field execution of the four Palestinian cousins.

A Wider Uprising, A Wider Betrayal

Hours after the killings, Qassam spokesman Abu Obeida praised the “rebellious youth” of the “West Bank of Ayyash,” framing the West Bank as the central arena of Palestinian resistance. The phrase “rebel youth” carries weight — it was the banner of the September 2023 Gaza protests, when young Palestinians rose against occupation brutality and internal repression. Journalist Wissam Abu Shamala wrote then that Gaza’s youth uprising was a response to the revolutionary energy in the West Bank — a unity of arenas forged through shared suffering.

That unity is visible again today. Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora watched the videos from Tal — parasites and murderous thieves marching in with rifles, IOF terrorist soldiers arriving to reinforce them, Palestinians shot dead in their own village — and felt the same rage, the same exhaustion, the same question:

How is the world still doing nothing?

Israeli parasites set fire to homes and businesses in and around the village of Urif, south of Nablus.

We Are Watching a Pogrom in 4K

Everyone saw it. Everyone sees it every day. The parasites and murderous thieves livestream their attacks. IOF terrorist soldiers film themselves shooting unarmed Palestinians. Journalists document every detail. Palestinians upload the evidence in real time. And still, governments issue statements about “restraint” and “concern,” as if concern has ever stopped a bullet.

Four cousins were executed today. A man was shot point‑blank in the head. Homes were attacked. Land was seized. Parasites and murderous thieves walked in armed, walked out protected, and the IOF terrorist soldiers sealed the area to ensure no one could challenge their version of events.

This is a pogrom.

This is theft backed by military power.

This is murder carried out in daylight.

And the world is watching it on their phones and doing nothing.

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Palestinian. Rina Hassan is of Palestinian descent and Europe is set to prove being of Palestine is in itself a crime.

Rima Hassan’s rise to the European Parliament in 2024 marked a rupture in France’s political landscape. A refugee from Syria, a trained jurist, and a long‑time advocate for Palestinian rights, she entered Brussels backed by young voters, left‑wing activists, and diaspora communities who felt France had become the openly hostile to criticism of Israel. Her election collided with a France that has steadily tightened its “apology for terrorism” laws since 2015, expanding them into a tool that increasingly targets political speech rather than concrete acts. Hassan herself has described her role as “breaking Europe’s silence on Palestine,” a stance that has made her both a symbol and a target.

Her newest prosecution accuses her of “apology for terrorism” over a deleted social‑media post referencing Kozo Okamoto, a Japanese militant involved in a 1972 attack in Tel Aviv. Hassan clarified her intent, but prosecutors insist the post valorized terrorism. French outlets including Le Monde and Mediapart report that the case was filed by civil parties aligned with pro‑Israel advocacy groups, many of whom have repeatedly pursued legal action against her. Hassan’s lawyer calls the prosecution political, pointing to the sheer volume of cases: sixteen judicial proceedings since she took office, thirteen already dismissed for lack of evidence, several filed within days of her public speeches on Gaza or Israel’s military operations. The pattern looks like legal attrition — constant investigations, sudden filings, and public accusations designed to drain her time, resources, and political capital.

Her July hearing in Paris was supposed to be decisive. Instead, civil parties dropped new documents at the last minute, prompting her lawyer to request a postponement on due‑process grounds. The judge agreed, pushing the trial to October 19–20. Outside the courthouse, hundreds gathered with Palestinian flags. Figures from La France Insoumise, including Jean‑Luc Mélenchon, condemned the prosecution as part of a broader campaign to criminalize pro‑Palestinian speech.

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To understand Hassan’s case, you have to understand France’s political climate. Since the 2015 attacks, France has expanded counter‑terrorism laws to include broad categories of speech. Statements about Palestinian resistance are increasingly scrutinized, especially if they reference armed groups. The government has dissolved several pro‑Palestinian organizations, citing “public order” concerns. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has repeatedly equated anti‑occupation activism with extremism. Human‑rights groups — including Amnesty International and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme — warn that France is drifting toward a model where political speech about Palestine is treated as a security threat rather than a civil liberty.

Hassan says the state has used disproportionate tools against her. She was detained earlier in 2026 under circumstances her lawyer described as illegal. During that detention, false allegations were leaked to the press — allegations later disproven — a pattern she says reflects the use of surveillance and investigative measures typically reserved for individuals suspected of violent extremism. These claims have not been independently verified, but they align with concerns raised by French civil‑liberties groups about the state’s expanding surveillance powers.

Meanwhile, Hassan has become one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s war in Gaza inside the European Parliament. Her most significant achievement so far is a European Citizens’ Initiative demanding suspension of the EU‑Israel Association Agreement — signed by 1.3 million people. That forced the European Commission to formally respond, something that happens only when an initiative crosses the one‑million threshold. The agreement governs trade, political cooperation, and preferential access between Israel and the EU. Suspending it would be a major diplomatic rupture. Her opponents argue she is destabilizing EU foreign policy. Her supporters say she is finally forcing Europe to confront its contradictions on human rights.

Hassan’s case is not just about one politician. It reflects a broader European trend: Germany has banned or restricted multiple Palestinian events; the UK has expanded surveillance of pro‑Palestinian student groups; the EU has struggled to maintain a unified position on Israel’s war in Gaza. Her trial will test whether Europe’s institutions can protect dissenting voices at a moment when political speech about Palestine is increasingly policed.

If Hassan is convicted, it will set a precedent that elected officials can be criminally prosecuted for political speech about Palestine — even when that speech does not call for violence. If she is acquitted, it will expose the fragility of France’s legal campaign and raise questions about whether the state has overreached. Either way, the October trial will be a defining moment for political freedoms in France and for Europe’s handling of Palestine advocacy.

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Palantir didn’t get into the British state because it had some groundbreaking system or because anyone in government actually understood what they were buying. It got in because the people who were supposed to guard the door weren’t paying attention, and the company knew exactly how to move through the gaps. There’s nothing impressive about that. It’s just the kind of slow institutional decay that lets a surveillance‑heavy American firm slide into the NHS without anyone stopping to ask basic questions.

Palantir went looking for political access, not technical credibility. They found Global Counsel — Mandelson’s outfit, Wegg‑Prosser — and paid them £30,000 a month. That kind of money isn’t for advice. It’s for introductions and shortcuts. They hid the contract behind a code name, Project Onion, because even inside the firm they didn’t want staff asking why this particular client needed to be handled quietly. You don’t bother with code names unless you’re already worried about how something will look when someone eventually stumbles across it.

Then the Epstein emails surfaced. Suddenly Epstein’s private secretary is putting together glossy presentations for Global Counsel. You’ve got Mandelson talking to Epstein about the firm’s founding. You’ve got a lobbying shop that later collapses into administration, but not before it helps Palantir build a pipeline straight into the British government.

The UK’s lobbying laws make all of this easier than it should be. You only have to declare lobbying if you directly contact a minister with a specific request. Everything else — events, panels, “conversations,” introductions — doesn’t count. So a lobbying firm can host an event about AI in healthcare, seat a minister next to Palantir executives, let everyone chat, let everyone exchange contact details, and none of it is considered lobbying. Once Palantir has the minister’s number, they can call them directly. That still doesn’t count. It’s a loophole that Palantir uses to its full advantage.

They didn’t stop there. They hired people straight out of the NHS. You had people who actually understood the internal politics — the ones who knew which trusts were falling apart, who could tell you which civil servants hesitated, which ones were climbing, and which ones folded the second someone important looked their way. People who wrote policy one year and were selling software the next. It’s not illegal, but it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder why anyone bothers pretending the system has integrity. When public knowledge becomes private leverage, you don’t need good technology. You just need the right phone numbers.

The tender for the Federated Data Platform — the £330 million NHS contract — is where alarm bells should get going off for everyone. The Financial Times found that the tender documents mirrored Palantir’s own language. It’s the kind of thing that happens when a company whispers in the right ears long enough that the people writing the tender start using the company’s own language without even realising they’ve been coached.

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One person interviewed said: you don’t rig the tender; you influence how the tender is written. Once the tender is written a certain way, the winner is basically predetermined. That’s how Palantir got the contract. Not because they were the best option. Because they were already inside the room when the criteria were being shaped.

And then there’s the platform itself. The FDP was supposed to be the big fix, the thing that finally drags NHS data into the present. Instead, whistleblowers described a system so slow they had time to boil water and make tea while waiting for basic tasks. Analysts posted tumbleweed GIFs because Palantir didn’t respond to technical issues for a week. Some trusts never logged in for a year. The ones with real data teams already had better systems they built themselves. One analyst said the platform “looks absolutely rubbish,” and that wasn’t an exaggeration.

The money behind the contract is just as bleak. The £330 million headline number isn’t even real. It’s higher. Chelsea and Westminster — one of the “flagship” FDP trusts — got £3 million just to help with adaptation. KPMG got £8.5 million to push adoption across the NHS because uptake was so bad. Other trusts got money to try to make the system usable. This isn’t a rollout. It’s a very expensive patch job.

Thiel talks about democracy like it’s beneath him. Karp shouts about Israel like he’s their mascot. They brag about working with ICE. They brag about helping the Israeli terrorist military. They brag about being involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden — something people inside the defense world have dismissed for years. It’s all part of the act. If you act dangerous enough, people assume you’re competent. If you act indispensable, people stop checking whether you actually are. And when ministers don’t understand the technology, they lean on the myth instead of the reality.

Palantir isn’t a genius company. It’s not an all‑seeing machine. It’s not the terrifying intelligence system it pretends to be. It’s a company that figured out how to get close to power, and once it’s close, it stays. Not because it’s brilliant. Because nobody wants to admit they let it in without asking the right questions. The NHS didn’t choose Palantir because the software was good. It chose Palantir because the company was already inside the room, and the people inside the room were paid not to push back.

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Aya has been outside with her six children for days. Not hours — days. No shelter. No protection. Nothing to shield them from the cold at night or the insects that crawl over everything. Their belongings are on the ground because that’s all they have left. This isn’t a temporary inconvenience. This is a family stuck in the open with nowhere to go after being evicted when they couldn't pay the rent. It's cruel.

You can hear the anger, the fear, the humiliation of having to beg for basic safety from Aya:

“We’ve managed to raise £40, but we still desperately need £440 to get a roof over our heads. I’m out in the freezing open with my children sobbing around me.”

She’s right — £440 isn’t a huge amount. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a dream. It’s literally the cost of getting her children out of the open and into a place where they can sleep without the insects, the mosquitoes biting, the mice crawling everywhere.

This family has been exposed for days. If you can donate, please do. If you can’t, please share. Every share matters.

Campaign link:

https://chuffed.org/project/138820-helping-ayas-family

Donate to Aya

Mayar, Rose, and Baby Kamal

Mayar is 25 and raising two babies. Her toddler, Rose, is suffering because the environment around her is destroying children’s health. The heat, the contaminated water — it’s all showing up on her skin, in her tears. Can you imagine standing by watching your baby cry and being him helpless to do anything about it?

“This is my little daughter Rose’s body… and these are her tears, caused by the unbearable heat and contaminated water. Rose needs medical care and treatment, but I cannot afford them.”

She’s not being dramatic. Her daughter needs medical care, and she can’t pay for it.

Then there’s Kamal, her baby boy. Every two days he needs another can of formula. Diapers costs money…money she doesn't have. These are basics — not extras, not nice‑to‑haves. Basics.

Her fundraiser has been open for six weeks and has only reached $512. That’s about $85 a week. It doesn’t even cover Kamal’s formula, let alone food, clean water, or medical treatment for Rose, herself or her husband.

There is only so much Mayar can do, Israel has destroyed everything in Gaza. If you can donate, please do. If you can’t, please share. Someone out there might be able to help.

Campaign link:

https://chuffed.org/project/mayar06

Donate to Mayar

A Woman Who Has Helped Everyone — Now in Her Own Crisis

This last story is about a woman who has spent months helping other people quietly, consistently, without ever asking for anything for herself. She’s the one who answers messages in the middle of the night. The one who organizes support. The one who listens to people’s trauma and doesn’t turn away. She’s been carrying so many people through their worst moments.

Now she’s stuck in a situation she can’t fix on her own.

Her bank froze her accounts overnight. No warning. No explanation. Everything she has — her income, her savings, every bit of money she relies on — is locked inside those accounts. She can’t touch any of it. She can’t pay her rent. She can’t buy food. She can’t cover basic living costs because the bank has her entire financial life on hold.

Our team can vouch for her. She’s a close friend, and we’ve seen firsthand how much she’s done for others. She’s never asked for anything for herself. She’s always been the one helping everyone else stay afloat.

She’s fighting the bank. She’s confident she’ll get her access back. But right now she’s in a month‑long standstill with no way to use her own money. She’s proud and private, and she hates being in this position, which is why she wants to stay anonymous.

She’s not asking for charity. She’s asking for a temporary bridge — enough to keep her stable for a couple of months while the bank sorts out her accounts. She estimates she needs about $7,000 to cover rent, food, and basic living costs for three months. Just enough to stay afloat until she can access her own funds again.

And she’s made a promise: once her accounts are restored, every dollar raised will be donated back to families in need. She will provide receipts. She wants people to know their help will eventually go right back into helping others.

She’s helped so many people. Now she needs help herself. If you can donate, please do. If you can’t, please share. There are moments in everyone's lives they need help, she's needing it right now.

Campaign link:

https://chuffed.org/project/188615-temporary-support-for-gazas-behind-the-scenes-advocate

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When people talk about Gaza, they often focus on the bombings, hunger, and lack of water. But there is another crisis that receives far less attention, even though it shapes people’s lives every single day: the struggle to find a place to call home.

Today, I want to tell you about another side of life in Gaza—one that rarely makes headlines, even though it affects peyople every day and every night.

In most parts of the world, housing is considered a basic necessity. In Gaza, simply finding a place to sleep has become a battle in itself. The daily question is no longer, “How will we live?” but rather, “Where will we live?”

After the destruction of thousands of homes, hundreds of thousands of families were forced to start over from nothing, searching for any place that could protect them from the sun, the cold, and the rain—or at least give them a small sense of safety.

Some people are living in the streets, with no walls to protect them and no door to close at the end of the day.

Others live in displacement camps. These camps are free to enter, but “free” does not mean dignified or comfortable. The real cost is living an entire life inside a tent.

A tent is not a home.

It is a piece of fabric trying to withstand the scorching summer heat, the bitter winter cold, the wind, the rain, insects, and the complete absence of privacy. It has become a place that embodies waiting, exhaustion, and uncertainty, where families spend months without knowing when they will ever leave.

Some families choose to rent an empty plot of land so they can set up their own tent and have at least a small amount of privacy.

But even the ground beneath their feet has become a financial burden.

The cost of renting land ranges from 2 to 5 Israeli shekels per square meter each month.

A family needing about 150 square meters could end up paying approximately 525 shekels (around $175 USD) every month, based on an average rate of 3.5 shekels per square meter.

Paying that much money simply for an empty piece of land is difficult to imagine under normal circumstances, yet it has become reality in Gaza.

Others are forced to rent apartments—not because they are affordable or easy to find, but because they are trying to hold on to what remains of a normal life, because they still have some source of income, or because they desperately want to provide their children with something safer than a tent.

Today, apartment rents in Gaza range from $333 to $1,000 per month, depending on the location, size, and condition of the apartment.

These prices would be considered high almost anywhere. In Gaza, where countless people have lost their jobs and livelihoods, they are nearly impossible.

Others live inside warehouses that were once commercial buildings but have now become homes for displaced families, like the warehouse where my own family and I live.

The monthly rent for these warehouses ranges from $233 to $600, depending on their size and condition.

The warehouse where we live is relatively large and even has a loft, but at the end of the day, it is still a warehouse—not a home.

Before moving here, I spent much of the war living in the streets.

Everything changed because of an old friend of my father’s. I pray every day that my father returns to us safely.

He allowed me to rent this warehouse for $400 per month.

The rent used to be a little lower, but he told me someone else had offered to pay more.

Even so, I have held on to this place.

Not because it is comfortable, but because it protects my family from many of the hardships faced by those who do not even have a roof over their heads.

The hardest part is not paying rent.

The hardest part is paying rent because the home you once owned no longer exists.

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Every family in Gaza once had a house filled with memories, photographs, dreams, and a sense of belonging.

Then one day, so many of those homes were reduced to rubble.

I wish my home were still standing, even if only a few walls remained.

I would return without hesitation, even if it were inside the yellow zone.

Because a home is not just concrete and bricks.

A home is where you feel that you belong.

My home was my paradise.

Many people believe Gaza’s suffering is limited to hunger and the lack of clean water.

The truth is far greater than that.

There is the struggle to find shelter, the burden of impossible rent, the loss of privacy, raising children inside tents, and the constant fear of losing even the temporary place you managed to find after losing everything else.

Behind every closed door in Gaza is a story.

Behind every tent is a family.

And behind every family paying rent today is a home they once had and never imagined they would lose.

If you truly want to understand Gaza, do not look only at the images of destruction.

Look at the people trying to rebuild a life among the ruins.

Look at the father searching every month for rent on a place he never needed before the war.

Look at the mother trying to turn a tent into a home.

Look at the child who no longer knows what it feels like to have a bedroom of their own.

This is Gaza today.

A place where simply finding a roof over your family’s head has become yet another battle for survival.

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The interview with Seyed Araghchi is not a recounting of events. It is a diagnostic report on the failure of American strategy. Every detail he gives — from the coded contingency plans to the diplomatic calls on day four, to the collapse of the building he was in, to the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei — is evidence of how Iran functions under existential pressure. The United States expected Iran to behave like a brittle state. Iran behaved like a state that had already internalized the worst‑case scenario and built systems to absorb it.

1. The U.S. Assumed Iran Had No Succession Plan. Iran Had Code 110.

Araghchi’s revelation that Iran had a written, approved, and rehearsed plan for the assassination of the Leader is one of the most important details in the entire interview. The U.S. believed killing the Leader would create a vacuum. Iran treated it as a scenario to be executed. Code 110 wasn’t symbolic. It was operational. When the strike happened, Iran didn’t improvise. It implemented a plan.

This alone shows a level of institutional maturity Washington did not expect. The U.S. assumed Iran’s political system was built around one man. Iran demonstrated that its system was built around continuity.

2. The Decapitation Strike Failed Because Iran’s Institutions Reassembled in Six Days.

Araghchi describes being inside the building when it was hit. The building collapsed. He escaped through the wreckage. For three days he had no contact with anyone. Six days later, the first meeting reconvened. Some of the men in that room were later martyred.

It is evidence that Iran’s political system can reconstitute itself under catastrophic conditions. The U.S. expected paralysis. Iran delivered functionality.

3. Iran’s Officials Stayed Above Ground — Not in Tunnels — and Continued Working.

This detail matters because it contradicts the American assumption that Iranian leadership would hide. Araghchi says officials stayed above ground, kept their routines, and refused to disappear. He told his protection detail there was no point in them being there — a missile strike would kill them all. They stayed anyway.

Iran’s political class chose visibility over survival. That is not the behavior of a state collapsing. It is the behavior of a state asserting legitimacy under fire.

4. Iran’s Diplomatic Corps Did Not Break — Not One Official Abandoned Their Post.

Araghchi says every Iranian official abroad stayed at their post. No one fled. No one asked to be evacuated. No one disappeared. This matters because the U.S. expected diplomatic collapse. Instead, Iran’s embassies became active centers of messaging, pushing out animated videos that reached millions and outperformed American propaganda.

5. Iran Warned Gulf States Directly — and Forced Them to Choose.

Before the war, Araghchi called Gulf foreign ministers and told them clearly:

• If your territory is used to attack Iran, Iran will strike American bases on your soil.

• If you refuse to let your bases be used, Iran will not target you.

This is direct statecraft. It forced regional governments to make a choice: allow the U.S. to use their territory and face Iranian retaliation, or refuse and stay out of the conflict. The fact that several governments gave assurances they would not allow attacks from their soil shows Iran’s deterrence worked.

6. The Partition Plan Collapsed Because Iran Moved Immediately.

On day four, calls went out to figures in Iraqi Kurdistan. Weapons had already been moved. The U.S. and Israel were preparing a partition scenario. Araghchi called regional governments the same day and warned that any threat from Kurdistan would be answered. They backed off.

He also names the exiled Pahlavi figure who allegedly struck a deal in Israel: “you take the edges, I take Tehran.” It fits decades of external fantasies about dividing Iran. The plan failed because Iran responded instantly and decisively.

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7. The U.S. Misread Iran’s Psychological Threshold.

Araghchi says some strikes had no military purpose. They were designed to terrify civilians, empty hearts, and create despair. The U.S. expected psychological collapse. Iran did not collapse. The hardest days were the first ones, when reports were only about casualties and destruction, while Trump demanded unconditional surrender.

For forty days, the U.S. watched for the moment Iran would break. It never came.

8. Iran’s Nuclear Program Was Never Negotiable — and the U.S. Misunderstood That Entirely.

Araghchi says the U.S. came with incentives: build this, invest in that. He rejected all of it. He said enrichment is not for sale. Iranians endured twenty years of sanctions for it. Scientists were martyred. Blood was spilled. The program is not a bargaining chip.

The U.S. treated it like something Iran might trade away for economic relief. Iran treated it like a national achievement built through sacrifice. This misreading is one of the core reasons American diplomacy keeps failing.

9. The Selection of Mojtaba Khamenei Proved Iran’s Strategic Continuity.

Araghchi says the Assembly of Experts choosing Mojtaba Khamenei sent a message the enemy could not miss: nothing had changed. Policies, principles, and ideals were intact. The U.S. killed a Khamenei and got a younger one.

This is not rhetoric. It is a demonstration that Iran’s political system is not dependent on one personality. Succession was smooth, fast, and aligned with the system’s ideological continuity.

10. Iran Accepted the Ceasefire Because Its Hand Was Stronger — Not Because It Was Weak.

Araghchi rejects the idea that Iran accepted the ceasefire because it could no longer fight. He says Iran had already secured its strategic objectives. Another fifteen days of war would have produced more damage than leverage. The military agreed to the ceasefire. Without their vote, it would not have been accepted.

This is critical: Iran did not stop because it was forced to. Iran stopped because it had achieved what it needed.

11. The U.S. Entered the War Expecting Surrender — and Ended Up Accepting Iran’s Framework.

The first American proposal was a fifteen‑point surrender plan. Iran rejected it and submitted its own ten‑point framework. Iran said: if you accept our ten points as the basis for negotiations, we will accept the ceasefire.

The U.S. accepted.

Iran’s framework became the foundation of the talks that produced the fourteen‑point MoU. This is the clearest indicator of who held leverage at the end of the war.

What the Interview Actually Proves

When you assemble all the details Araghchi gives, the picture is clear:

• Iran had contingency plans for the loss of its Leader.

• Iran’s institutions reassembled themselves in six days.

• Iran’s officials stayed above ground.

• Iran’s diplomats stayed at their posts.

• Iran deterred regional governments.

• Iran shut down a partition attempt.

• Iran’s public did not break under psychological warfare.

• Iran refused bribery and threats.

• Iran maintained ideological continuity.

• Iran accepted a ceasefire from a position of strength.

• Iran forced the U.S. to negotiate on Iranian terms.

This is not a story of survival.

It is a story of strategic competence and American miscalculation.

The U.S. expected Iran to collapse.

Iran demonstrated that the tools Washington relies on — fear, pressure, incentives, and foreign‑drawn maps — no longer work.

Araghchi’s interview shows a country that was marked for decapitation and partition, subjected to psychological and physical assault, and still forced the United States to climb down from its own demands and negotiate on Iranian terms. Iran did not just endure the war. It demonstrated that the U.S. strategy was built on assumptions that no longer apply.

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As Gaza's water crisis deepens, both of our teams on the ground shifted their efforts to delivering clean drinking water to camps that have been repeatedly overlooked. Every day brought new requests for help. Every day brought another camp with empty containers.

This initiative raised $4,214.

After

• $143.28 (3.4%) in Chuffed/Stripe processing fees,

• $30 international wire fee

• $40 in Kraken exchange fees

We transferred $2,000 to Alaa in Central Gaza and $2,000 to Abood in Northern Gaza.

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Central Gaza – Alaa

Alaa distributed:

• 40,000 liters of fresh drinking water

• 8 water trucks

• 1,150 families/tents served

• 8 Forgotten camps reached

Camps served:

• Hamama Al Salam - 7/14/26

• Al Waad -7/15/26

• Al-Fayrouz- 7/16/26

• Al-Aman 7/16/26

• Al-Baraka - 7/17/26

• Al-Aman - 7/18/26

• Al Insan -7/18/26

• Al Manara -7/18/26

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After all distributions, $96.08 remained, which will be rolled into Emergency Water Initiative #10 which rolled out this week.

Because of the security situation in Central Gaza, Alaa continues using 5,000-liter trucks instead of larger 12,000-liter trucks. Although the larger trucks are cheaper per liter, they also draw much more attention from the occupation and increase the risk being an Israeli strike target. The smaller trucks reduce visibility and give the team a better chance of reaching remote camps safely.

On July 14, while traveling to fill one of the water trucks, an airstrike landed near the team.

While traveling to the desalination plant to fill the water truck, an airstrike occurred near our location. By the grace and protection of God, every member of the team remained safe. Despite this difficult and stressful situation, the team continued the mission after confirming it was safe to proceed.

Despite the danger, they completed the mission.

On another distribution, the team handed out small gifts to children waiting in the scorching heat for water—a small moment of joy in the middle of unimaginable hardship.

Alaa's receipts.

Funds transferred to Alaa.

Funds received by Alaa.

Currency exchange.

Team commission

Water Truck Receipts

Poster Printing Receipts

Northern Gaza –

Abood distributed:

• 49,500 liters of fresh drinking water

• 6 water trucks

  • Three 12,000-liter trucks

  • Three 4,500-liter trucks

• 1,415 families/tents served

• 9 camps reached

Camps served:

• Al Qawqa and Al Shati - 7/14/26

• Al Siraj - 7//15/26

• Al Waha and Al Awda - 7/16/26

• Al Duha - 7/17/26

• Al Muqousi and Al Shati - 7/19/26

• Al Masri - 7/20/26

After all distributions, $191 remained, which will be rolled into Emergency Water Initiative #10 which rolled out this week.

Throughout the week, Abood repeatedly found camps that had gone without water.

Today, we were able to secure 12,000 liters of fresh drinking water... I noticed that most of these camps had not received any water at all today—it was as if the water trucks had disappeared."

In another camp, families told him they had survived ten days without a water truck.

Every day, five people would pull a single cart to fetch a small amount of water. Then they would divide it equally among themselves.

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On July 20, while on the way to fill another water truck, Abood's team narrowly escaped an airstrike only about 100 meters behind them. They continued the mission, filled the truck, and delivered the water.

Abood's Receipts

Funds transferred to Abood.

Funds received by Abood.

Currency exchange.

Water Truck Receipts

Impact Statement (Initiatives 1–9)

As we close Emergency Water Initiative #9, we wanted to step back and share what this community has accomplished together.

Since launching Gaza's Forgotten Families, you have raised $18,629 in total donations for initiatives 1 - 9. We have launched emergency water initiative #10 this week ($4,000).

Financial Breakdown

• 83.45% ($15,546) → Direct humanitarian aid (food, water, medicine, and essential supplies)

• 8.03% ($1,496) → Commission paid to our Palestinian team on the ground for coordinating, purchasing, transporting, documenting, and distributing aid

• 3.64% ($678.80) → Local currency exchange fees

• 3.05% ($568.57) → Chuffed/Stripe processing fees

• 1.61% ($300) → International bank wire fees

• 1% ($40) → Kraken exchange fees (charged after exceeding $10,000 in exchanges)

Together, we have reached:

• 36 displacement camps

• 4,356 families/tents

• Approximately 21,942 Palestinians (using an average of five people per tent)

These numbers represent far more than statistics.

They represent mothers who no longer have to choose which child drinks first.

Children who don't have to go to sleep thirsty for another night.

Elderly men and women who no longer have to wait in unbearable heat hoping a water truck might come.

They represent communities that had been forgotten—until you showed up.

One message from Alaa captures why this work continues:

Our main priority was delivering water to the truly forgotten families. People thanked Substack's supporters, and we saw the joy in their eyes as we distributed the water... But the painful truth is that thousands of families are still waiting. Children go to sleep thirsty, mothers stand for hours searching for a drop of water, and the elderly find no one to lend them a helping hand. Don't let these voices be silenced by the war."

To every person who donated, shared an article, encouraged someone else to give, or simply chose not to look away—

Thank you.

Because of you, thousands of Palestinians have received food, medicine, emergency supplies, and now life-saving drinking water.

There is still much more work to do. Please continue to help and share this campaign.

https://chuffed.org/project/183781-gaza-forgotten-families-fund

Donate to Gaza's Forgotten Families

We'll continue going where the gaps are, seeking out the families many aid agencies cannot reach, and documenting every initiative with complete transparency.

While Gaza’s Forgotten Families funds the aid, Abood and Alaa are the ones risking their lives to make every distribution possible. If you’d like to thank and bless them personally for their extraordinary work, you can support their individual campaigns below.

Alaa:

https://chuffed.org/project/171331-alaa-and-his-two-little-ones-seek-hope

Donate to Alaa

Abood:

https://chuffed.org/project/174135-seven-lives-one-20-year-old-help-abood-survive-this

Donate to Abood

From all of us at Gaza's Forgotten Families, and from every family who received a meal, a medical supply, or a drop of clean water.

THANK YOU FOR STANDING WITH GAZA

We are a fully reader - and subscriber - supported publication. We feature citizen journalists unapologetically. Help us grow and fuel honest, citizen journalism by becoming a paid member.

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Membership Plans

Sky News spent four months pulling apart the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab — the strike that instantly became the most notorious moment of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It happened on day one. The school was hit again and again, and 168 children were killed, along with teachers and staff whose identities were traced through painstaking open‑source work. Most of the dead were girls between seven and twelve. Their families have waited four months for the U.S. investigation that was promised, and nothing has been released.

With Iran’s internet shut down and travel into the country nearly impossible, Sky News’ Data and Forensics team turned to whatever evidence could be gathered remotely: satellite archives, CCTV, witness videos, old maps, school records, anything that could be verified. They worked with Forensic Architecture to rebuild the school in 3D and reconstruct the attack second by second.

What they found wasn’t a mystery. It was a failure that had been built into the system long before the missiles were launched.

The Pentagon had satellite imagery of the site going back to 1987. They had decades of overhead surveillance showing exactly what the compound was. They had images from December 2025 where you can literally see children’s shadows in the playground. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, with its own perimeter, its own website, its own public footprint. Any analyst with basic tools could have confirmed it was a civilian school in minutes.

But on February 28, three Tomahawk missiles were fired from the USS Spruance, roughly 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea. CCTV shows the compound being hit nine times at 11:22 a.m. The school itself was struck about ten seconds after the first impact. Witnesses say the second missile landed exactly where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same spot. The crater matches a Tomahawk. The pattern of impacts matches a Tomahawk. The launch platform matches a Tomahawk. There is no serious doubt left about what was used or who fired it.

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The question isn’t whether the U.S. did it. The question is how it was allowed to happen when every safeguard on paper existed to stop exactly this.

Months before the war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted the offices meant to prevent civilian deaths. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence had its workforce cut by around ninety percent. CENTCOM’s civilian casualty assessment team was slashed from ten people to one. A Pentagon Inspector General report in May described the civilian protection structure as a shell — no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then later blamed for not warning anyone.

Four months on, CENTCOM’s commander has told reporters the investigation into the Minab strike is nearly complete, yet nothing has been released. No findings, no accountability, no names of those who signed off on the target. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question and said war is nasty and mistakes are made. But the “mistake” started when they chose not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one.

A military that surveilled a schoolyard for forty years didn’t suddenly fail to see the children. It decided in advance that seeing them wouldn’t change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information. They had the satellite history, the courtyard shadows, the separation wall, the school’s online presence, the open‑source proof that this was a girls’ primary school. They had all of it.

And they fired anyway.

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When Alex Wagner pressed him with, “So no funding to ensure the survival or future of a Jewish state?”

El‑Sayed pushed the premise right back, answering, “I turn it back around on you, Alex: Why is it our responsibility to ensure that?”

And people in Michigan feel that question in their bones, because they’re living in a state where basic needs aren’t met, public systems are collapsing, families are barely staying afloat, and Washington keeps shoveling billions overseas like it’s automatic.

The U.S. Isn’t Funding “A Few Allies.” The U.S. Is Funding a Whole Damn Global Network.

Here’s a non‑exhaustive list of countries receiving U.S. foreign aid, military financing, weapons packages, and “security cooperation”:

• Israel – $3.8B

• Jordan – $1.45–$1.65B

• Egypt – $1.3B

• Ukraine – tens of billions

• Iraq – hundreds of millions

• Afghanistan – billions over 20 years

• Pakistan – hundreds of millions

• Lebanon – hundreds of millions

• Tunisia – hundreds of millions

• Morocco – hundreds of millions

• Kenya – over $1B

• Ethiopia – over $1B

• Nigeria – hundreds of millions

• Somalia – hundreds of millions

• South Sudan – hundreds of millions

• Yemen – hundreds of millions

• Bangladesh – hundreds of millions

• Nepal – hundreds of millions

• Philippines – hundreds of millions

• Colombia – hundreds of millions

• Haiti – hundreds of millions

• Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador – hundreds of millions combined

Gulf States — the part nobody talks about

These aren’t “aid” in the traditional sense — they’re massive U.S. military support pipelines, weapons deals, training programs, and security guarantees worth billions:

• Saudi Arabia

• UAE

• Qatar

• Bahrain

• Kuwait

These governments aren’t broke. They’re loaded. They buy U.S. weapons like candy. They get U.S. military protection. They get U.S. training. They get U.S. intelligence support. Meanwhile Americans can’t afford rent.

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Jordan: a billion‑dollar “ally” with a monarchy sitting on luxury property

Jordan receives $1.45–$1.65 billion every single year under the current U.S. aid agreement. In FY2024, the actual number was even higher — about $1.82 billion once all programs were counted.

A massive chunk of that isn’t humanitarian. It’s direct cash transfers to the Jordanian government and military financing that U.S. taxpayers cover entirely. One recent year included an $845 million cash transfer straight to the Jordanian state budget and $425 million in U.S.-funded weapons and equipment.

Jordan’s population is around 11–12 million, which makes it one of the top per‑capita recipients of American taxpayer money on Earth.

Meanwhile:

• The Pandora Papers documented over $100 million in luxury real‑estate purchases linked to King Abdullah — Malibu, London, Washington D.C., all held through offshore companies.

• These properties were hidden behind shell companies while the monarchy publicly claimed financial strain and relied on U.S. aid to “maintain stability.”

So Americans are told Jordan needs billions to “stay stable,” while the king is buying beachfront mansions through shell companies.

How the fuck does that make sense?

Meanwhile, the U.S. Is Falling Apart

Homelessness

• 600,000+ people homeless

• Tent cities everywhere

• Families living in cars

• Veterans sleeping under bridges

• Kids doing homework in shelters

Child Poverty

• Child poverty doubled after Congress let the expanded Child Tax Credit expire

• Millions of kids lost food, housing, medical care

• The U.S. has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world

Food Insecurity

• 44 million people food insecure

• Food banks overwhelmed

• Working families skipping meals

• Kids relying on school lunches as their only real food

Paycheck‑to‑Paycheck

• 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck

• One missed shift = disaster

• One car repair = crisis

• One rent increase = eviction

Health Care Bankruptcy

• The U.S. has the most expensive health care system on Earth

• Medical debt = #1 cause of bankruptcy

• Over 100 million Americans carry medical debt

• People ration insulin

• People die because they can’t afford treatment

• One emergency room visit can wipe out a family

• Ambulance rides cost $1,000+

• People avoid hospitals because they can’t afford to survive them

For anyone fighting ridiculous hospital bills, read this:

Manufacturing Dissent

Hospitals Don’t Want You Seeing the Real Bill — And Yes, You Can Negotiate It Down

Hospitals send you a one‑line bill because they know if you saw the details, you’d lose your mind. That single number hides the garbage underneath — the $83 Tylenol, the $482 chair, the $1,400 “doctor consult” from a doctor who never walked into the room, the $312 stitches that cost them maybe a dollar. They’re counting on you to panic, pay, or ignore i…

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a month ago · 67 likes · 15 comments · Kathy

Child Hunger

• Millions of kids rely on school meals

• Summer = hunger spike

• Congress refuses to fund universal school meals

• Meanwhile billions go overseas

Higher Education

• College costs are obscene

• Students drown in debt

• Kids join the military just to afford college

• Recruiters target poor communities

• The U.S. treats education like a luxury

No Social Safety Net

• No universal health care

• No universal childcare

• No universal paid leave

• No universal housing support

• No universal school meals

• No universal higher education

• No universal elder care

• No universal disability support

The U.S. basically tells its citizens: good luck, you’re on your own. But somehow there’s always money for foreign governments.

And Then There’s the Pentagon — the Biggest Money Vacuum on Earth

The U.S. military budget is over $1 trillion when you include:

• DoD base budget

• Overseas operations

• Nuclear weapons

• Intelligence agencies

• Veterans Affairs

• Homeland Security

• Interest on past wars

The Pentagon fails audits, loses money, misplaces money, and still gets more money every year.

The U.S. spends more on its military than China + Russia + India + UK + Germany + France + Japan combined.

And what do Americans get?

• No health care

• No housing

• No safety net

• No affordable education

• No functioning infrastructure

But plenty of bombs. Plenty of weapons. Plenty of foreign governments armed to the teeth. Plenty of dead brown babies in countries Americans couldn’t find on a map.

Michigan’s Senate Race Is Sitting Right on Top of This Rage

Michigan has lived through factory closures, poisoned water, rising costs, stagnant wages, broken schools, failing hospitals, and political abandonment. So when voters hear that Congress is sending billions to foreign governments — some corrupt, some wealthy, some sitting on luxury real estate — they react exactly how anyone would:

How the fuck does this make sense?

The Real Question El‑Sayed Raised

Not “Should Israel get funding?”

Not “Should Jordan get funding?”

Not “Should Egypt get funding?”

The question is: why is this automatically our job?

Why is the U.S. government more committed to foreign governments than to Detroit? Why does Congress move faster to fund the Jordanian monarchy than to fix school lunches? Why is foreign aid treated as mandatory while domestic poverty is treated as normal? Why does the Pentagon get a trillion dollars while Americans drown?

Again, I ask…how the fuck does this make any sense?

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

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On 3 July 2026, as the war on Gaza passed its one-thousandth day, Israel’s security cabinet approved thirteen new settlements in the occupied West Bank — a plan its own architects said was designed to sever East Jerusalem from the Palestinian towns around it. Days later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid a foundation stone for an Israeli “heritage center” on the runway of the former Qalandia airport, once the only airport Palestinians had.

Those were small gestures beside the numbers — more than 73,000 Palestinians killed and over 90 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed — but they name a logic that the diplomacy around the war works hard to avoid naming.

Stripped of euphemism, the record describes a settler-colonial project — the displacement and replacement of one people by another, justified by a claim of divine or historical right. Israel rejects the description; most Western governments decline to speak it. It is, nonetheless, the most accurate one available, and it has a familiar shape to anyone who knows how the American West was won.

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Zionism, defined precisely

Precision is crucial because most bad-faith arguments about Palestine begins by blurring a definition. Zionism is a political movement, formalized in the late nineteenth century, dedicated to establishing and maintaining a Jewish nation-state in the land then called Palestine.

Zionism’s founding premise was that centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, could be answered only by a Jewish state. The persecution was real and the fear it left is rational. The difficulty was that the land was not empty.

In 1948, with the founding of Israel, roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in the catastrophe they call the Nakba); most were never allowed to return.

The 1967 war brought a military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza that has since outlasted most of the people living under it.

The Manifest Destiny parallel

The United States offers the textbook case. Manifest Destiny — the nineteenth-century doctrine that American settlers were divinely ordained to take the continent — turned conquest into duty.

American exceptionalism cannot survive an honest reckoning with the two crimes at the country’s foundation — the enslavement of Black people and the genocide of Native Americans — so the reckoning is refused, kept out of textbooks, filed under ancient history. The same reflex now shields Israel: to examine what a settler-colonial project requires is to indict the model as well as the imitation.

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A theology with a lobby

Zionism’s political durability in the United States rests on an unlikely alliance. Alongside its Jewish nationalist base sits Christian Zionism, an evangelical strand that reads the return of Jews to Israel as biblical prophecy — a precondition for the Second Coming.

October 7, and the story built on top of it

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage. The killing of civilians that day was real, and Israel’s claim to a right of self-defense against a group sworn to its destruction is a serious one. But the version of October 7 that circulated in Western media — the version that attempted to unconscionably frame Gaza’s population as collectively deserving of what followed — has not survived scrutiny, and the reasons are documented.

The most influential atrocity story, The New York Times’ December 2023 investigation “Screams Without Words,” alleged that Hamas had systematically “weaponized” mass rape. It was challenged by The Intercept, contradicted by the families of its own central subjects, and, by October 2025, denounced by more than 300 Times contributors who demanded its retraction, citing its reliance on unnamed sources and unverifiable accounts and comparing it to the paper’s discredited Iraq-WMD reporting. The Times’ flagship podcast reportedly shelved an episode built on the story after it failed a fact-check. The viral “forty beheaded babies” claim of the war’s first days was never substantiated.

Drawing on military documents and soldiers’ testimony, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz established that the IDF invoked the “Hannibal Directive” that day — a protocol permitting overwhelming force to prevent soldiers being taken captive, even at the cost of their lives — issuing an order that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”

The UN’s own Commission of Inquiry documented “strong indications” the directive was applied in several instances, harming Israelis alongside Palestinians. How many of the day’s dead fell to Israeli fire remains unknown; Israel conducted no autopsies.

What is clear is that the atrocity narrative was amplified and the friendly-fire record was not — an asymmetry that most likely tracks which side of this war the Western mainstream media instinctively believes.

What the record says

- In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder and persecution.

- In December 2024, [ Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide; Human Rights Watch reached a parallel finding on the deliberate deprivation of water.

- In September 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, finding four of the five acts defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

- In June 2026, the same commission found Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian children as part of that genocide, documenting more than 20,000 killed — roughly 30 percent of the dead.

- South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice, which in January 2024 found a plausible risk to Palestinians’ rights under the Genocide Convention, remains pending; a final judgment is not expected before 2028.²

The pivot of any genocide charge is intent, and here Israel’s own officials are the record’s most damaging witnesses. The commission cited, among much else, Gallant announcing a “complete siege” and describing the enemy as “human animals” to be treated “accordingly,” and President Isaac Herzog’s insistence, days into the war, that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Those are not descriptions of a war against a militia.

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The world names it “genocide” — but for the United States, Hungary, and Fiji — as Israel continues nearly alone

South Africa’s genocide case, treated as a lonely provocation when it was filed at the end of 2023, has since drawn one of the largest waves of third-party intervention in the court’s history — 22 states in all.

The sharpest reversal came from Israel’s most reliable European patron. In March 2026, Germany — which had pledged to intervene on Israel’s behalf — withdrew and said it would no longer file in Israel’s defense, as it confronted its own ICJ case, brought by Nicaragua, over arming Israel. Namibia, a nation that survived Germany’s genocide of the Herero and Nama a century ago, had condemned Berlin for backing “the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”

Outside the courtroom, the condemnations are blunter. Bolivia severed relations with Israel in November 2023; in 2024 Colombia’s president cut ties, calling Israel’s government “genocidal,” and Brazil’s president likened the campaign to the Holocaust, prompting Israel to declare him persona non grata; Chile and Belize recalled or suspended envoys. Even Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, mid-normalization, and Pope Francis reached for the word — the pontiff urging an investigation into whether Israel’s conduct met the definition of genocide. Beneath the governments sit hundreds of humanitarian and legal organizations that reached the same conclusion.

The enabler

The war is sustained by a superpower’s supply line: the United States has maintained large-scale arms transfers and diplomatic cover throughout, the single indispensable enabler of a campaign the rest of the world is increasingly willing to call a genocide.

But the consensus is cracking.

On 15 July 2026, the House rejected an amendment to strike $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel, 104–314 — but 103 Democrats voted for it, against 98 opposed and 10 voting present, the first time a majority of the party’s members who took a side backed cutting the aid, up from just 37 two years earlier.

The ceasefire that isn’t

The October 2025 ceasefire did not end the killing. More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the nine months since the truce took effect, which Israel has violated on most days, and Israeli forces now control between 70 percent, by Netanyahu’s own account, and 80 percent of Gaza , refusing to withdraw and instead widening their zone of control. “Ceasefire,” one bereaved relative told Reuters, is “an illusion.”

Closing

A UN commission, the world’s leading human rights organizations, an international court, and a growing majority of the world’s governments have converged on the same conclusion, in the same language, drawn from Israel’s own conduct and its officials’ own words. The gap is between that record and the vocabulary its Western sponsors are willing to use — a refusal that is itself a policy, and one measured in lives. A hundred years ago the American version of this logic finished its work before the word for it was permitted; the question now, with the record already written and the weapons still shipping, is whether the naming will come in time to change the ending.

This reporting is part of an ongoing project at Shadows of Empire, where I cover the machinery of imperial power — how it justifies conquest and launders atrocity into policy; my work also runs at Manufacturing Dissent. A free or paid subscription at either keeps the reporting coming. If you’d like to support the sourcing behind pieces like this directly, you can buy me a coffee. If you feel this information is important, please — pass it on.

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Thank you for your support.

— Dede Bell

Manufacturing Dissent exists because of you. We’re independent—powered only by readers and listeners. For less than a coffee, you can join us. Annual memberships are 30% off. Stand with us. Fuel citizen journalism. Keep dissent alive.

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Notes

¹ A note on terms, because they are weaponized constantly. “Zionism” here means the political ideology of the Jewish nation-state and its maintenance — not Judaism (a religion and people) and not “Jews” (among whom opinion on Zionism has always been divided). Criticism of a state ideology is not, in itself, antisemitism. Genuine antisemitism — the hatred or dehumanization of Jews as Jews — is real and must be named; it is not what this reporting does. Collapsing the two is a tactic, and refusing that collapse is a basic obligation of honest coverage.

² These findings come from different bodies carrying different weight. The UN Commission of Inquiry and Amnesty International are, respectively, an independent body established by the UN Human Rights Council and a non-governmental organization; their genocide conclusions are authoritative expert findings, not binding verdicts. The ICC arrest warrants are binding judicial acts, but they charge war crimes and crimes against humanity, not (yet) genocide. The ICJ case brought by South Africa is the one that could produce a binding state-level genocide ruling; it remains pending — Israel filed its counter-memorial in March 2026 challenging the court’s jurisdiction, South Africa’s reply is not due until November 2027, and a final judgment is not expected until roughly 2028. Emergency provisional measures are in force meanwhile, and one judge dissented from them. Israel denies all of it; the United States, Hungary, and Fiji have intervened to defend it, and some European governments dispute the genocide characterization. That dispute is represented here rather than hidden — while noting that the weight of independent legal and humanitarian assessment now runs heavily one way.

Works Cited

- “Justice for Gaza: who is doing what?” Justice Info. https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/151753-justice-for-gaza-who-is-doing-what.html

- “Amnesty International concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” Amnesty International, 5 December 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/

- “Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues unabated despite ceasefire.” Amnesty International, November 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/11/israels-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza-continues-unabated-despite-ceasefire/

- “Israel continues to commit genocide, atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children, UN independent commission finds.” UN News, 23 June 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167790

- “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.” International Criminal Court, 21 November 2024. https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges

- “Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza, which Israel strongly denies.” NPR, 5 December 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/05/nx-s1-5217774/amnesty-accuses-israel-genocide-palestinians-gaza

- “Gaza war’s 1,000 days: 90% of strip ‘destroyed’, 80% ‘seized’ by Israel.” Al Jazeera, 2 July 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/2/gaza-wars-1000-days-90-of-strip-destroyed-80-seized-by-israel

- “Palestine weekly: One thousand days of genocide in Gaza.” Al Jazeera, 7 July 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/7/palestine-weekly-one-thousand-days-of-genocide-in-gaza

- “Israeli attacks kill at least five Palestinians in Gaza despite ‘ceasefire.’” Al Jazeera, 16 July 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/16/israeli-attacks-kill-at-least-five-palestinians-in-gaza-despite-ceasefire

- “9 months into a ceasefire, Israel now controls nearly 70% of Gaza.” NPR, 10 July 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5887357/israel-gaza-war-trump-ceasefire-military-control

- “Over 100 House Democrats vote to block billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.” CNN, 15 July 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/15/politics/military-aid-israel-democrats-split-vote

- “Screams Without Words.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screams_Without_Words

- “The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé.” The Intercept, 28 February 2024. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/

- “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive.” Haaretz, 7 July 2024. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-ordered-hannibal-directive-on-october-7-to-prevent-hamas-taking-soldiers-captive/00000190-89a2-d776-a3b1-fdbe45520000

- “Why did Israel deploy Hannibal Directive, allowing killing of own citizens?” Al Jazeera, 9 July 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/9/why-did-israel-deploy-hannibal-directive-allowing-killing-of-own-citizens

- “US defends Israel in new ICJ intervention in South Africa genocide case.” Middle East Eye, March 2026. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-defends-israel-new-icj-interventions-south-africa-genocide-case

- “Iceland & Netherlands intervene in ICJ Israel genocide case.” Genocide Watch. https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/iceland-netherlands-intervene-in-icj-israel-genocide-case

- “South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa%27s_genocide_case_against_Israel

- “Bolivia cuts ties with Israel, accusing it of ‘crimes against humanity’ in Gaza.” The Times of Israel, 1 November 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/bolivia-cuts-ties-with-israel-accusing-it-of-crimes-against-humanity-in-gaza/

- “Colombia breaks diplomatic ties with Israel. President calls actions in Gaza a ‘genocide.’” PBS NewsHour, 1 May 2024. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/colombia-breaks-diplomatic-ties-with-israel-calls-actions-in-gaza-a-genocide

- “Colombia cuts ties with Israel over Gaza genocide.” World Socialist Web Site, 3 May 2024. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/03/cnlq-m03.html

We cannot do justice by paraphrasing what he told us today. We'll let you read his words.

"I just got back from delivering today's water truck, and right now all I can say is: Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. God saved me and my team from the bombing. Praise be to God for sparing our lives.

We were on our way to fill the truck with water. About 100 meters behind us, there was a jeep, and it was struck directly by an airstrike. The truck driver immediately accelerated to get us away from the attack, which could easily have hit us as well. Despite that, we continued to the water station and filled the truck. Then, on our way to the camp, we had to drive back through the same street where the strike had happened. I saw the vehicle that had been hit, and I filmed it.

There was one martyr. They couldn't find his body intact and had to collect his remains from the scene using bags. There were also more than 14 people injured who happened to be passing by on the road."

And yet they kept going.

They filled the truck.

They delivered the water.

That is what it takes to keep people alive in Gaza.

Those of us sitting in comfortable homes, with food on the table and clean water whenever we want it, cannot truly understand what Palestinians endure. Not even for a moment.

And we want to pause on that.

Because it's not just "comfort." It's the thousand tiny things we don't even register as blessings. We sit behind windows that keep out the dust and heat. We have electricity humming in the background, powering our lights, refrigerators, fans, and phones. We have walls that keep out mosquitoes, flies, and pests instead of fighting them every night in a tent. We have roofs that don't leak, floors that aren't dirt, and the luxury of silence instead of drones and explosions.

These are privileges so ordinary that we forget they're privileges at all.

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Meanwhile, in Central Gaza, Alaa is facing a different challenge.

In Alaa's words:

"My phone hasn't stopped ringing. Camp leaders we've visited over the past several days are calling, pleading with us to send them more water trucks.

The situation is becoming more difficult by the hour.

In this relentless heat, water is no longer simply a necessity. It is survival.

Thousands of families, children, and elderly people are facing severe shortages of clean water. Some water stations have stopped operating altogether, and the crisis grows worse every day."

This is why we cannot stop.

Donate to Gaza's Forgotten Families

Every day Abood leaves his home knowing he may not come back.

Every day Alaa does the same.

Because of the danger in Central Gaza, Alaa cannot use the larger 12,000-liter trucks, even though they are significantly cheaper per liter. The larger trucks draw too much attention, increasing the risk to the team. Instead, he uses smaller 5,000-liter trucks because minimizing visibility gives them the best chance of reaching the camps safely—and making it home alive.

These are calculations no humanitarian team should ever have to make.

But this is the reality of Gaza.

We created Gaza's Forgotten Families because too many camps were being overlooked. We go where the gaps are. We seek out the families that many aid agencies cannot reach, and we continue returning because the need never ends.

Water is life.

Every truck means another camp survives another day.

Every donation becomes clean drinking water.

If you are able, please help us keep these trucks on the road. The need is urgent, and the calls for help are only growing.

Donate to Gaza's Forgotten Families

We appreciate each and every one of you who supports the people of Gaza. We truly do.

But…

The people of Gaza will cease to exist if we don’t do more.

If you have any voice, use it to scream from the rooftops about what’s happening.

Use it like this was happening to your family. Use it so your voice goes hoarse.

We have to lift our voices higher than ever. Because if we don’t, ours will be the only voices left in a desert of silence filled with dead bodies that once was Gaza.

We’re reaching that point and there is no one to stop them but you. All of you.

Do whatever you can - please.

🔗 https://chuffed.org/project/183781-gaza-forgotten-families-fund

Donate to Gaza's Forgotten Families

And for these two young men, one barely out of his teens… if you want to show them appreciation and love, please support them and their families. Links are below. Thank you.

Abood:

https://chuffed.org/project/174135-seven-lives-one-20-year-old-help-abood-survive-this

Donate to Abood

Alaa:

https://chuffed.org/project/171331-alaa-and-his-two-little-ones-seek-hope

Donate to Alaa

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Introduction

Irbak is a new digital platform created after months of daily work by volunteers across the Middle East. Its purpose is to collect, verify, and publish information about companies and institutions that support Israel’s military, economy, and global Zionist agenda, especially during the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing attacks in the West Bank.

The platform is built for individual boycott, public pressure, and collective organizing. It gives people verified information they can use to make ethical choices, pressure investors, and organize actions at company offices.

The name “Irbak” means “disrupt” in Arabic, inspired by the Palestinian “Night Confusion” resistance actions — sustained pressure carried out by ordinary people.

What Irbak Is

Irbak is a collaborative data platform and digital community space. It brings together individuals, grassroots groups, and institutions who want to turn scattered efforts into coordinated action.

The platform provides:

• Organized data on companies tied to Israel or Zionist institutions

• Tools for activists to plan demonstrations and pressure campaigns

• Information on Zionist propaganda events designed to whitewash Israel’s actions

• A submission system where users can report companies or events anonymously

A volunteer team verifies all submissions before publication.

Why Irbak Was Created

The creator explains a personal incident that sparked the idea.

A friend exposed a local company supplying Israel during the genocide. The evidence came directly from the company’s own website. Despite this, the company owner sued him. He was detained, banned from travel, and dragged through long legal trouble — even though the company admitted the information was true.

This is common in many Arab countries: the whistleblower gets punished, not the company helping Israel or Zionist networks.

Irbak was created to protect people who expose corporate support for Israel, while still making the information public and actionable.

What Irbak Tracks

Irbak documents two main areas:

1. Economic and Military Support

   Companies that import from Israel, export to Israel, invest in Israeli firms, supply Israel with military equipment, partner with Israeli government bodies, or operate in illegal settlements.

2. Zionist Propaganda and Public Diplomacy

   Institutions and events that promote Zionist narratives, host pro‑Israel or pro‑settlement conferences, run workshops or campaigns to legitimize Israel’s actions, or spread “Hasbara” (Israeli public diplomacy).

The goal is to give activists enough information to organize counter‑actions and expose these networks.

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How the Platform Works

When you enter Irbak, it automatically shows companies operating in your country — whether they’re international brands with local branches or local companies tied to Israel or Zionist institutions.

Each company page includes:

• Evidence of involvement

• Type of support (economic, military, propaganda, etc.)

• Stock exchange listings

• Sovereign wealth fund investments

• Product categories

• Clear instructions on what action you can take

Actions include boycotting consumer products, boycotting the company’s stock, pressuring sovereign wealth funds to divest, and organizing collective actions at company offices.

Example: Toyota

Toyota manufactures pickup trucks used as the base for Israel’s David Urban Light Armored Vehicle. These vehicles are assembled by MDT Armor, a U.S. subsidiary of an Israeli company.

Toyota is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (7203) and is backed by major sovereign wealth funds like NBIM and GPIF.

Actions recommended:

• Boycott Toyota products

• Boycott Toyota stock

• Pressure sovereign funds to divest

• Organize public actions at Toyota offices

Israeli Companies and Depopulated Palestinian Villages

Some companies listed on Irbak are Israeli and located only inside occupied Palestine. Adding their addresses inspired a new idea: reviving the memory of the 650 depopulated Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 by Zionist militias.

Irbak now includes these villages, organized by district, and uses them to identify the historical land where Israeli companies or settlements now sit.

This helps document Israeli companies for international institutions and shows how Zionist‑linked companies operate globally under different names or partnerships.

Example: Merkavim

Merkavim is Israel’s largest bus manufacturer. They produce tourism buses, urban buses, long‑distance buses, minibuses, bullet‑proof buses, and prisoner‑transport vehicles.

The UN listed Merkavim in its 2020 database of companies operating in illegal settlements.

Merkavim also developed prisoner‑transport buses used to move Palestinian detainees inside the West Bank and into prisons inside Israel.

Action recommended: Document their violations and submit them to international organizations.

Example: SK Group

SK Group is a major Israeli private defense and tech holding company owned by Samy Katsav. It specializes in small arms, electro‑optics, naval vessels, and tactical equipment.

Its subsidiaries include Israel Weapon Industries (IWI), Meprolight, Israel Shipyards, Camero-Tech, Uni‑Scope Optical Systems, and Oshira.

These companies supply militaries, police forces, and paramilitary organizations worldwide — all part of Israel’s broader Zionist military‑industrial network.

Israeli Apps and Data Collection

Many people unknowingly use Israeli apps, giving Israel and Zionist‑aligned tech companies access to their personal data. Irbak includes a section listing these apps, with details about the companies behind them.

Most Israeli high‑tech companies were founded by former members of Unit 8200, Israel’s intelligence and cyber‑surveillance unit.

The platform encourages users to identify Israeli apps, understand their data practices, choose alternatives, and stop feeding personal data into Israeli tech pipelines.

The Purpose of Irbak

Irbak is built on a simple belief: real change starts with accurate information and organized participation.

The platform helps people make ethical consumer choices, understand how companies support Israel or Zionist institutions, organize collective pressure, expose propaganda networks, and build sustained public pressure.

Every choice — boycotting a product, refusing a stock, attending a protest — contributes to a larger movement.

Closing

Irbak is not just a database. It’s a tool for disruption, documentation, and collective action. It gives people the information they need to stand against genocide, occupation, and global Zionist influence.

It’s built by volunteers who believe in protecting whistleblowers, exposing corporate ties, and empowering ordinary people to act.

Credit:

This article is based on information shared publicly by Tamer (@tamerqdh/x), the creator of Irbak.

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Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi describes a war the U.S. thought would be easy — and a country that refused to kneel. He says the U.S. went in convinced Iran was weak, convinced Iran would surrender in days, convinced the public would turn on the government. None of that happened. Iran didn’t break. Iran didn’t fold. Iran fought, rebuilt, and came back stronger.

Araghchi says the first miscalculation was the American belief that Iran could be forced into concessions through pressure and negotiation. When that failed, they launched the 12‑day war. Iran won that fight, and instead of collapsing, it used the aftermath to rebuild at speed. In the six months between the 12‑day war and the 40‑day war, Iran tripled its missile power. U.S. think tanks claimed Iran was losing launchers daily, but they didn’t know Iran had redesigned its system so anything destroyed could be replaced immediately. Washington thought Iran was weakening. Iran was rearming.

He says Iran saw the second war coming long before it started. The U.S. buildup in the region made the plan obvious, and the request for new talks was just cover for an attack already scheduled. Iran went to the talks anyway — not to beg, but to buy time. Araghchi told the armed forces not to wait on him and not to wait on the government: fill every warehouse, build every stockpile, prepare for war. When the 40‑day war started, Iran was fully ready.

Inside the talks, Araghchi says Iran held its ground. The U.S. demanded surrender of enrichment, then demanded Iran hand over its nuclear material, then shifted to demanding suspension. Iran refused. Iran told them plainly: you hit our buildings, but you didn’t hit our knowledge, our technology, or our material. The program wasn’t in the buildings. Three rounds were held before the suspension demand collapsed the process.

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Araghchi says Iran followed the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s standard: you only fight when the cost of not fighting becomes greater than the cost of war. Iran applied that principle in both wars. Surrendering at the table would have cost more than resisting.

He says Netanyahu convinced Trump that Iran was weak enough to finish in two days. Trump bought it — until the war dragged on and Iran didn’t break. The U.S. started the conflict demanding unconditional surrender. Iran ended it with a memorandum in which the United States committed not to start a war against Iran, not to threaten Iran, to respect Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to stay out of its internal affairs.

The U.S. bet everything on Iran being weak. Iran proved it wasn’t — twice.

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