Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted of his efforts to convince the US to launch a war against Iran, crediting his frequent appearances on US television networks and his “intimate knowledge” of US leaders.
Netanyahu made the comments Sunday night on Israel’s Channel 14, and a clip of his appearance was posted on X by the account Clash Report, which Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi later shared.
The Israeli leader said that he had been against Iran for “nearly 40 years” and that it took him a long time to get the Israeli security establishment and the US on board.
“It took a long time to bring the US in,” he said, according to Channel 14. “I was able to do this because I had close to a thousand hours on American television, influence in the United States, and intimate knowledge of all its leaders – both those who support us and those who do not.”
The New York Timesreported in April that 17 days before the US and Israel launched the war on February 28, Netanyahu presented President Trump with an intelligence briefing at the White House and made a “hard sell” for the war. The report said that Netanyahu had been “pressing for months” for the US to agree to a major attack on the Islamic Republic.
Sources told the Times that during the briefing, Netanyahu made a series of predictions about the potential war that proved to be wrong, including the idea that Iran was ripe for regime change, that its ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks, that it would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran’s missile strikes on US interests in regional countries would be minimal.
Responding to Netanyahu’s comments about his influence on the US, Aragchi said that the Israeli leader was openly bragging about how he “suckered” the US into the war.
“In Hebrew, Netanyahu openly crows that he suckered the US Administration into a war on Iran on behalf of Israel. Netanyahu explicitly laughs about how he ‘influenced’ America through 1,000 hours of airtime on US networks,” the Iranian diplomat wrote on X. “In English, he praises POTUS’ leadership. Serpent.”
Palestinian groups condemn prison footage as humiliation and intimidation.
Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir visits the site of a rocket attack on March 1, 2026 in Tel Aviv, Israe[Erik Marmor/Getty Images]
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has posted footage from a prison holding Palestinian women on social media, boasting that he is responsible for the harsh conditions imposed on them.
The video, posted on Ben-Gvir’s X account on Sunday, shows him entering a section holding female prisoners and confronting them about their complaints regarding detention conditions.
One prisoner tells him: “This is our third day without showering. We are not receiving medical treatment, and our clothes are not clean.”
Ben-Gvir responds: “The good conditions in the prisons are over. This is the current situation, and I am directly responsible for everything. I am pleased with these conditions.”
In a post accompanying the video, the far-right minister wrote that the “whining” of prisoners over their conditions would not influence him, arguing that Israeli captives held in Gaza had not enjoyed adequate conditions.
“I’ll continue to lead a policy of the bare minimum of the minimum,” he said.
Palestinian groups condemn footage
Gaza’s Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs condemned Ben-Gvir’s visit, saying the filming of female prisoners amounted to intimidation and humiliation.
It said his entry into the women’s section of the facility was “not an inspection visit”, but rather a “political spectacle and public incitement against the female prisoners” aimed at intimidating them and breaking their will in front of cameras.
The Palestinian agency said Ben-Gvir’s remarks showed that conditions inside Israeli prisons were part of what it described as a systematic policy of retaliation based on “humiliation, torture, starvation and deprivation”.
An Israeli police officer outside Ofer military prison near Jerusalem, October 13, 2025 [Mahmoud Illean/AP Photo]
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society also condemned the footage, telling Al Jazeera that Ben-Gvir’s filming and publication of the women constituted “an assault on their human dignity”.
It said hundreds of testimonies from released detainees and prisoners had documented serious abuses inside Israeli prisons and detention facilities.
Push for harsher conditions
Since becoming national security minister in late 2022, Ben-Gvir has pushed for tougher conditions for Palestinian prisoners, including reducing food and water supplies, restricting family visits, limiting shower times and removing privileges inside prison sections.
He has also overseen the transfer of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners between facilities.
Ben-Gvir has previously rejected efforts to improve conditions for prisoners. In 2025, he publicly opposed an Israeli court ruling requiring authorities to ensure Palestinian prisoners received adequate food, insisting that harsh conditions should continue.
According to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, about 9,400 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons, including 88 women and more than 350 children.
Pretoria says that Israel’s flouting of the ICJ’s orders undermines the court’s legitimacy and is paving the way for the destruction of the Palestinian people
South Africa submitted a detailed dossier to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 25 August, formally accusing Israel of defying legally binding provisional measures requiring it to prevent genocide and safeguard essential aid in Gaza.
“The Court’s orders are binding on Israel, and the international community also has an obligation to protect the Palestinian people from genocide, including to take all necessary action to prevent and punish genocide,” South Africa’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Pretoria says Israel has failed to comply with the ICJ’s three sets of legally binding provisional measures issued in January, March, and May 2024.
Those measures included requirements concerning the prevention of acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention, the delivery of humanitarian assistance, the halting of an offensive that destroyed the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, and the granting of access to the strip for UN investigators.
“Regrettably, Israel has not complied with the Orders. South Africa continues to pursue all avenues available to it to seek Israel’s full and immediate compliance with the Court’s Orders,” the statement added.
The dossier provided evidence of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, including the killing of at least 73,407 Palestinians and injuring of 174,335 more since October 2023.
The total dead and injured amounts to over 10 percent of Gaza’s entire population, the dossier noted.
Some estimates of the dead in Gaza are much higher, reaching the hundreds of thousands due to the indirect effects of Israel’s bombing and demolition campaign.
Pretoria highlighted Israel’s ongoing atrocities against Palestinians, including arbitrary detentions, widespread torture, sexual violence, and a threefold spike in miscarriages among pregnant women due to Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s critical health and other infrastructure.
The dossier noted that despite the alleged ceasefire reached in October 2025 between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli military has continued to kill an average of one Palestinian child per day.
South Africa says that Israel’s ongoing non-compliance directly threatens the court’s legitimacy while paving the way for the destruction of the Palestinian people.
“Israel’s failure to comply with the Provisional Measures Ordered by the Court undermines their protective function and entails further destruction of the Palestinian group,” the ministry’s statement warned.
Israeli leaders say they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its roughly 2 million inhabitants to make way for the annexation and Jewish settlement of the strip. To accomplish this, they say they wish to make life in Gaza so dangerous and unbearable that Palestinians “choose” to “voluntarily migrate” to third countries.
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, during a meeting with US oil companies executives in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on January 9, 2026.
(Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
“This is proof Trump put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies,” one Democratic senator said. “Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty.”
President Donald Trumpannounced on Truth Social on Friday that his government had “secured majority US control” of Venezuelan oil reserves containing 65 billion barrels of oil.
The announcement followed on reporting from Axios that a deal was in the works, prompting criticisms that such a move would be “colonial” and calls for Congress to reject any such proposal.
“Let’s be clear: This isn’t a win,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote on social media in response to the announcement. “This is proof Trump put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies. Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty.”
When US forces invaded Caracas and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife First Combatant Cilia Fores on January 3, Trump’s own words following the invasion confirmed suspicions that he acted largely to gain access to the country’s oil.
“These are some of the largest crimes of our lifetimes.”
“We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he said in a press conference following the attack.
Friday’s deal, which seems like an attempt to make good on that promise, was also announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, who provided more details.
Rodríguez stated that the deal will involve private corporations developing 17 “strategic fields” with 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. She echoed Rubio’s $100 billion investment claim and pledged that the projects would yield $209 billion in tax revenues. According to the acting president, the announced agreement “ushers in a new era of growth and prosperity.”
However, economist Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that the agreement was actually a bad deal for Venezuelans.
“President: According to your figures, this agreement will generate tax revenues of just $3.22 per barrel of Venezuelan oil. This represents 4.7% of the current price, and less than half of the royalty rate contemplated in concessions granted by Juan Vicente Gómez,” he wrote on social media, addressing the current Venezuelan leader and referring to a Venezuelan dictator from the early 20th century.
Joseph Bouchard, a journalist and researcher who focuses on Latin America, agreed with Rodriguez’s criticism of the deal, writing on social media that “Trump [was] ‘generously’ buying billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil at less than 5% its market price. He’s stealing their oil for his own family and cronies’ profit. Guessing this may be used as a chip to manipulate the midterms. These are some of the largest crimes of our lifetimes.”
Francisco Rodriguez had earlier pointed out that the deal violated the Venezuelan Constitution, which holds that all minerals and hydrocarbons are “inalienable public domain,” according to Venezuelanalysis. For the deal to go through, therefore, Venezula would have to alter its Constitution.
Former head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth noted on social media that “senior Venezuelan officials, all fearing arrest, are hardly in a position to negotiate vigorously, making the whole thing seems like one big military theft.”
Trump is under pressure to lower gas prices that have spiked due to the fallout of his war on Iran, which entered its sixth month on Friday, and promised in his announcement, “This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future.”
However, The Associated Press pointed out: “A significant drop in US gas prices tied to the agreement should not be expected immediately. Experts have repeatedly warned that a substantial boost in Venezuelan oil production will not happen quickly as repairing and expanding infrastructure takes years and requires billions of dollars.”
Exploiting Venezuela’s oil reserves would also exacerbate the climate crisis, which just this summer intensified a deadly heatwave in Europe and is supercharging an El Niño that could contribute to a significant increase in food prices in 2026 and 2027.
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More than 7,250 people have been pulled from the rubble of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran since the war began on February 28, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.
Pirhossein Kolivand, head of the Iranian branch of the humanitarian agency, said rescuers had to operate under extremely difficult conditions, including during air strikes.
Kolivand added that the Iranian Red Crescent would not remain silent in the face of what he described as war crimes and violations of humanitarian law.
He said evidence of attacks on humanitarian infrastructure had been sent to international legal bodies and that the appropriate legal channels would be pursued.
Police arrest protesters at a sit-in opposing the U.K. government’s crackdown on Palestine Action in London on April 11, 2026.Photo: Andrea Domeniconi/LightRocket via Getty Images
When police in Kent, United Kingdom, arrested American peace activist Max Geller in 2021 for chaining himself to a van parked in front of an Israeli-owned weapons factory, he knew he might be jailed and face charges for his protest.
What he didn’t realize was that he could be hit with U.S. sanctions five years later for his past ties to a so-called terrorist organization.
The Trump administration on Wednesday announced sanctions against the U.K.-based anti-genocide protest group Palestine Action, which organized the 2021 demonstration and dozens of subsequent actions at U.K. factories owned by Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. The goal, in the U.S. government’s words, is to “protect Americans from the risks posed by far-left terrorism.”
“A major threshold has been crossed,” said Geller, who was previously Palestine Action’s spokesperson but left the group in 2025, when the British government made membership punishable by 14 years in prison. “They’re now treating regular Americans who want to effectively oppose genocide as terrorists.”
The specific parameters of the U.S. sanctions are not yet clear, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pledged the government would “continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.” Sanctioned groups and individuals cannot receive funds, goods, or services from American people or business — meaning they’re cut off from both the U.S. banking system and from any donations from Americans who might want to support them. They can have an isolating global effect: Financial institutions outside the U.S. that do business with American companies are often hesitant to affiliate with sanctioned individuals.
As a result, the sanctions could severely curtail their organizing abilities — and restrict their ability to try to stop the flow of weapons that Israel is using to carry out its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
“We are facing unprecedented attacks on dissent by the same powers that are committing genocide in Gaza,” said Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, in an interview with The Intercept. “We are at a point in history where it’s extremely crucial to continue to resist and grow in our movement, rather than back down and to adapt and become less reliant on institutions which are essentially controlled by the powers we’re fighting against.”
While the new U.S. sanctions are a part of a long history of post-9/11 policies in its so-called war on terror, the U.K. government has made itself notorious for its specific draconian crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent. Last year, as Palestine Action members began to face terror charges in court for their demonstrations, the U.K. government proscribed the group as a terrorist organization. The organization in the U.K. immediately ceased operations after the terror proscription. Dozens of members in the U.K. are facing criminal trials for their actions at Elbit weapons factories, and more than 1,200 people have been arrested and charged under the U.K.’s Terror Act for attending rallies merely supporting the group.
Reporting from The Telegraph, which first reported the sanctions, suggested Ammori and fellow co-founder Richard Barnard would face lifetime bans from traveling to the U.S., and that British citizens who continue to support the group would be met with harsh visa restrictions.
Geller, who lives in London, wondered if his bank accounts would be frozen, along with his Venmo and PayPal accounts. He said he normally travels back and forth between the U.S. and U.K. to visit his elderly parents — and the thought of doing so now “suddenly has become scary.”
“They want people scared to even think about supporting or engaging in this kind of work,” Geller said. “This is about materially hurting Palestine.”
The new sanctions against Palestine Action, which were announced alongside sanctions against Autistici/Inventati and Masar Badil, were the latest attack in President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Last year, Trump issued sanctions against the International Criminal Court after the court ordered war crime arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders. Those sanctions targeted people and organizations that work with the court, such as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, who has been outspoken about the crippling effects of the sanctions. The administration has also sanctioned long-standing Palestinian human rights organizations for their work with the ICC.
“The Trump administration is once again weaponizing counterterrorism authorities to criminalize Palestinian political organizing and solidarity,” said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now, which last month sued to reverse the Trump sanctions on the ICC. “Sanctions are supposed to target genuine threats to national security, not serve as a political weapon against movements challenging Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”
The vagueness of the new sanctions is meant to strike fear in anyone who is considering support for the sanctioned group, civil liberties advocates told The Intercept. Does a social media post expressing support violate sanctions? How about hosting a talk with an individual in the group?
“Treasury hasn’t been clear on where the line is, and that’s part of the chilling effect,” said Xiangnong (George) Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute who specializes in U.S. sanctions. “In sanctioning Palestine Action, I think their target is more broadly a community of people and groups, including Americans who engage with Palestine Action.”
The sanctions also follow the government’s case against pro-Palestine organizer Fergie Chambers, a past supporter of Palestine Action who was detained for extradition in Spain last month on alleged charges of funding terror groups. The humanitarian aid group Sameer Project, which provided meals and services to Palestinians in Gaza, previously received financial support from Chambers and this month announced it had paused operations in Gaza due to lack of funds.
The repression, said Ammori, has “expanded much more overtly to be used to crush any type of dissent.”
Despite the U.K.’s crackdown on Palestine Action, support for the group and Palestine remains energetic. Rallies in solidarity with Palestine Action and Palestinian rights continue to sprout up across the country even as the government has arrested at least 3,000 people for simple actions such as holding signs that read “I support Palestine Action.” And last year, Elbit closed its facility in Bristol after being targeted by Palestine Action, days before the government outlawed the group.
In the U.S., the group formerly known as Palestine Action U.S., now called Unity Fields as of August 2024, no longer has ties to the U.K.-based group. Though Palestine Action in the U.K. is dormant, secretive cells of Palestine Action are based throughout the U.S. and are continuing to carry out actions. Other Palestine Action cells are targeting the Israeli weapons supply chain in other countries such as Spain, Germany, Ireland, and Poland.
“We have a responsibility to create a huge dent in the Israeli war machine,” Ammori said. “They need to be profitable to operate, and if they’re operating, they’re killing Palestinians — it’s really as simple as that.”
As pressure mounts to disarm and incorporate it into a reconstructed Palestinian order, the movement needs strategic patience to preserve its independence and resistance identity
Hamas fighters secure the area as Egyptian workers and Red Cross officials search for the remains of the last Israeli captive, in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, on 8 December 2025 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP)
Some moments in the history of liberation movements require courage to act; others require equal courage to wait.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on 7 October 2023, was a daring decision that shattered assumptions that had governed the Palestinian question for years.
It brought Palestine back to the centre of world politics, exposed the illusion that it could be managed or bypassed, and confronted Israel and its western supporters with a conflict they had convinced themselves could be contained indefinitely.
Nothing that followed can justify transferring responsibility for Gaza’s destruction from those who destroyed it to those who resisted them.
Responsibility for the devastation of Gaza, the killing of its civilians and the ruin of its homes, hospitals, universities and schools belongs to those who carried it out. Criticism of Palestinian strategy must never become a mechanism for absolving the perpetrators and their supporters.
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The scale of that sacrifice demands a harder look at how it is being managed politically.
Hamas today faces perhaps the most difficult transition in its history. The movement that entered Al-Aqsa Flood as an armed resistance organisation now confronts enormous pressure to emerge from the war disarmed, removed from governing Gaza, integrated into a reconstructed Palestinian political system and dependent upon arrangements designed principally by the US and Israel with the tacit support of regional mediators.
Tactical flexibility is indispensable to any resistance movement, but it must serve a coherent strategy rather than gradually displace it.
Four developments should concern anyone who believes the resistance must preserve its independence: the political trajectory signalled by Hamas’s 2017 document, the handling of postwar negotiations, the mounting pressure for disarmament and the movement’s re-engagement with its old Fatah-aligned rivals.
A political wager
Hamas’s 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies, issued well before Al-Aqsa Flood, was widely understood as an effort to present a more pragmatic face to the world. It accepted a sovereign Palestinian state along the 4 June 1967 lines as a formula of national consensus, while refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the Zionist state and maintaining the right of resistance.
The position had a long pedigree. As early as 2009, Khaled Meshaal, then the head of Hamas’s political bureau, told the New York Times that his group “had accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] based on a long-term truce”.
The document represented a political wager: that moderation would break the movement’s isolation and open doors in Europe and beyond.
Hamas should study Fatah’s experience and refuse ever to surrender a strategic position in exchange for a promise of future reciprocity
European figures discussed whether it justified engagement. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair after leaving his post as the envoy for the Middle East Quartet – which includes the US, EU, UN and Russia – courted Hamas’s leadership, and later acknowledged that the boycott imposed after the movement won the 2006 elections had been a mistake. Yet the broader political opening never came.
Therein lies the lesson: a liberation movement should distinguish between flexibility exchanged for concrete political gains and concessions offered in anticipation of western acceptance. The real danger is a process in which each concession becomes the starting point for the next.
Fatah travelled down that road decades earlier, with each concession presented as the gateway to the next diplomatic breakthrough: recognition was to produce reciprocity, negotiation to deliver statehood and security cooperation to build confidence, while Oslo itself was supposed to be transitional.
Instead, the transitional became permanent as settlements expanded, the occupation deepened and sovereignty receded, leaving Fatah today a shadow of its past.
Hamas should study that experience and refuse ever to surrender a strategic position in exchange for a promise of future reciprocity. Western approval is not a Palestinian national objective.
Squandered leverage
The second concern is more immediate. Negotiations are a contest over interests conducted through bargaining power, yet since the war entered its diplomatic phase, Hamas has repeatedly appeared willing to relinquish leverage before securing reciprocal, enforceable gains.
The release of the Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander in May 2025 was presented as a goodwill gesture intended to reopen diplomatic space, but goodwill has value in negotiation only when the other side treats it as something to reciprocate.
The larger test came with US President Donald Trump‘s Gaza initiative in September 2025. In its initial response, Hamas agreed to release the Israeli captives, living and dead, under the exchange formula, and accepted the transfer of Gaza’s administration to an independent Palestinian technocratic body.
As the world fixates on Hamas, who will disarm the Israeli settlers storming West Bank villages?
On the broader future of Gaza and fundamental Palestinian rights, however, it insisted that such questions belonged within a comprehensive national framework.
I had argued for precisely this approach days before the movement issued its response on 3 October 2025.
Once the captives were exchanged and that undertaking fulfilled, Hamas should have considered stepping back from direct negotiation over the larger questions, since a resistance leadership does not have to conduct every negotiation itself.
It could have entrusted the bargaining to experienced independent Palestinian negotiators versed in international law, diplomacy, American politics, Israeli negotiating practice, maps and security arrangements, while itself defining the objectives and the red lines.
One of the tragedies of the Palestinian negotiating experience since the 1980s has been the repeated confusion of revolutionary legitimacy with negotiating competence, which was among Fatah’s costliest mistakes under Yasser Arafat.
The record of Oslo makes the asymmetry plain. Israel fielded specialised teams, serving generals and the seasoned foreign ministry lawyer Joel Singer; as Mahmoud Abbas himself later acknowledged, the Palestinians were negotiating against “an experienced, capable delegation” without comparable expertise of their own. Negotiation is a profession, and recognising that a movement lacks it costs far less than pretending otherwise.
The Vietnamese understood this well. Throughout the long Paris talks, Hanoi treated diplomacy as one instrument within a larger political and military strategy: the Politburo set the objectives and the permissible concessions, while veteran negotiators such as Le Duc Tho conducted the bargaining.
When the talks moved beyond positions the leadership was prepared to accept, the negotiators were instructed to return to the earlier agreement as the basis for settlement. The art lay in knowing what could be traded, what had to be preserved and when compromise served the wider goal.
More than weapons
These questions have become urgent because Hamas has moved from discussing governance to entertaining formulas concerning its weapons.
Recent proposals would see them stored or transferred as part of a demilitarisation arrangement tied to Israeli withdrawal, an approach Israel has rejected while insisting on complete disarmament first. Are Palestinians really expected to hand over their weapons while the tanks are still at the border?
The pattern is familiar from the Oslo years: a Palestinian concession enters the diplomatic record, Israel rejects the arrangement as insufficient, and the next negotiation begins from the concession rather than from the position that preceded it. The reward for an unreciprocated concession is usually another demand.
Disarmament therefore goes to the identity and strategic purpose of the movement itself. Restraint can itself be a form of resistance, and Hamas need not return to governing Gaza: relinquishing direct administration might even free the movement from the contradiction between governing a besieged population and functioning as a resistance organisation. Leaving government and abandoning resistance are entirely different propositions.
The greater danger is that a movement exhausted by war and subjected to extraordinary pressure from mediators and international powers could be transformed, incrementally, into merely another Palestinian faction seeking a place in an electoral order whose parameters others have designed.
Fatah’s transformation came about exactly that way. A concession was justified as tactical, another was required to preserve the political process, and another was demanded to demonstrate seriousness, until an organisation established to liberate Palestine became the governing component of an authority operating under occupation.
The movement’s re-engagement with its old rivals in Fatah’s orbit belongs to the same set of concerns. In August, Hamas met officials from the Democratic Reform bloc of the former Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan, in contacts a Hamas official confirmed to Al Jazeera, ahead of Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for November.
Weeks earlier, a senior aide had said that Dahlan intervened in the disarmament negotiations through direct contacts with the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Political circumstances change, and old adversaries meet. Yet Hamas should ask what purpose these returns are designed to serve, and why the very powers now pressing for its disarmament appear so comfortable with them.
Strategic patience
Defenders of the present course will ask what the alternative is, and the answer is strategic patience: a movement under immense pressure does not have to resolve every question immediately. Hamas can fulfil the limited agreements it has made while declining to negotiate away questions that belong to the Palestinian people as a whole, using the intervening period to reorganise while the environment becomes clearer.
The region has changed since 2023 in ways in which the consequences are still unfolding. A growing number of analysts argue that the confrontation involving Iran, Israel and the US may leave Tehran strategically stronger than many anticipated. Washington and Tel Aviv, meanwhile, have expended enormous military, political and diplomatic capital.
Gaza itself remains under a fragile ceasefire, with the sequencing of Israeli withdrawal and disarmament unresolved. Why should Hamas negotiate as though today’s balance of power were permanent?
There is a time to fight, a time to negotiate and a time simply to hold one’s position
Elections are a legitimate instrument of popular representation, and Palestinian institutions desperately need renewal after years of stagnation and eroded democratic legitimacy. Taking part in them is one thing; allowing them to redefine the movement’s relationship to resistance is another. Hamas needs to state clearly what it now considers its strategic constants, and how armed, popular, political, legal and diplomatic forms of resistance fit within them. Such questions cannot be answered through piecemeal agreements negotiated under pressure.
There is a time to fight, a time to negotiate and a time simply to hold one’s position, which is sometimes nothing more than the refusal to make irreversible concessions under temporary pressure.
Al-Aqsa Flood came at an almost unimaginable human cost to Gaza, and that cost must never be used to delegitimise Palestinian resistance or shift responsibility from those who devastated the Strip. Neither does the magnitude of Palestinian sacrifice exempt Palestinian leaders from strategic accountability: a resistance movement has to protect the political value of the sacrifices made in the name of its cause.
Hamas can leave the government of Gaza, contest elections under the right conditions and negotiate when circumstances require, without allowing tactical concessions made under extraordinary pressure to redefine its principles. Where its own negotiating capacity is inadequate, it should have the confidence to entrust the bargaining to professionals while retaining the authority to set the red lines.
The gravest danger facing Hamas now lies beyond the battlefield. Having survived one of the most destructive wars in modern history, it could gradually concede at the negotiating table what its adversaries failed to attain by force.
What Israel could not extinguish through military might and genocide should not be surrendered through the fine print of an agreement concocted in Washington.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
The United States Air Force emblem appears on a circular surface in Walnut Creek, California, April 18, 2023.
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The United States Air Force has issued multiple charges against a decorated airman over his public statements earlier this summer calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Watson’s arrest at the U.S. Capitol in early July occurred during a protest involving multiple organizations and speakers who were critical of the White House’s decision to start a war in Iran without congressional authorization and other military actions. Watson held a sign at that event that read, “impeach, convict, remove.”
“When the president of the United States orders military action against foreign countries — absent an emergency scenario where American interests are under imminent dire threats, as was done with Venezuela, Cuba and Iran — that’s an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s authority and a violation of the War Powers Clause,” Watson said at the event.
There are growing fears that Israel may be creating the conditions for local atrocities in Gaza “reminiscent of the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” according to a report by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz.
During the 1982 massacre, Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalangist forces slaughtered up to 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians as Israeli troops surrounded the Beirut refugee camps and oversaw the killing.
In a report publish on Wednesday Haaretz warned that the Israeli army is expanding its use of mercenaries, criminal gangs and drug dealers to commit “war crimes” on Israel’s behalf in Gaza.
Based on testimony from Israeli soldiers, UN reports and satellite imagery, the investigation found that increasingly well-armed collaborator militias have expelled Palestinians from their homes and carried out operations across Gaza.
Israel has trained at least five militia groups, and potentially a sixth, operating from heavily fortified bases inside Israeli-occupied areas of the enclave.
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One Israeli soldier described how the state, army and Shin Bet intelligence service send armed and “trained militias to commit war crimes, and I’m the one who has to protect them during their operations so they don’t get hurt”.
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, while the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
At least one militia armed and supported by Israel had links to the Islamic State group. Its leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was killed by Hamas in December 2025.
Many Palestinians celebrated Abu Shabab’s death, while his own family had renounced him as a traitor for collaborating with Israel.
“But the militia project he came to symbolize continues to evolve and expand – particularly since the October 2025 ceasefire was announced,” Haaretz reported.
Another militia leader, Shawqi Abu Nasira, openly acknowledged his collaboration with Israel in a video posted online.
“I made the decision to liberate the land from Hamas. If people say that makes me a collaborator, then I’m a collaborator.”
The vast majority of Palestinians view collaboration with Israel as treason and betrayal, regardless of their position on Hamas.
‘They entered every structure, looted everything they could get their hands on, came out with piles of stuff – and then burned down the house’
– Unnamed Israeli soldier
Israel has also built infrastructure for the gangs amid Gaza’s widespread destruction. Near a militia base in Shujaiya, Israeli forces levelled a large Palestinian cemetery and replaced it with an extensive training ground.
The relationship between the gangs and the Israeli military has become increasingly intertwined. Fighters roam freely around Israeli army outposts, according to soldiers who spoke to Haaretz.
“The gunmen stage displays of force, film them and upload the footage to their Facebook pages for propaganda and recruitment purposes,” the investigation said.
Israel supplies the gangs with weapons and provides artillery and drone support during their operations.
‘Reminiscent of Sabra and Shatila ‘
The mercenaries also serve another purpose. They attack Palestinians struggling to survive Israel’s genocide, drive families from their homes, loot their belongings and burn their houses.
Israeli ministers have repeatedly called for making life in Gaza unbearable as part of efforts to ethnically cleanse the enclave and replace its Palestinian population with Jewish settlers.
In one account, Israeli soldiers said the mercenaries arrived in pickup trucks before “they just ran and shot at people”.
“They entered every structure, looted everything they could get their hands on, came out with piles of stuff – and then burned down the house,” one unnamed Israeli soldier said.
Boys fly a kite against the backdrop of smoke rising from the Gath shelter for displaced Palestinians, after an Israeli air strike in Gaza, on 31 January (AFP/Bashar Taleb)
Reports that Israel has used local gangs to outsource parts of its strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza are not new. Their activities have been documented for more than a year.
The soldiers’ testimony, however, provides further evidence that the mercenaries now function as an “operational arm” of the Israeli army and Shin Bet.
Israel continues to arm criminal gangs while demanding that Hamas disarm and opposing the formation of any independent Palestinian security force in Gaza. The arrangement allows Israel to use the militias against anyone it labels a Hamas member while unleashing them against ordinary Palestinians.
Hamas sources told Haaretz that they would not surrender their “defensive weapons” while the militias remain armed and receive Israeli support, because the groups would seek to target them.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to members of the media outside the White House in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026. [AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin]
The Trump administration on Monday launched what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called an “economic D-Day” against Iran—a campaign of secondary sanctions aimed at every country, bank and company that trades with Tehran, above all China, which took roughly nine-tenths of Iran’s oil exports before the US blockade choked them off.
Six months of US and Israeli bombardment, which killed at least 3,468 people in Iran by June 10, has not brought down the government in Tehran, and most shipping still avoids the Strait of Hormuz. The administration is now carrying the war into the world economy, on a course that leads to confrontation with China.
The campaign Bessent announced at a Washington press conference Monday adds shipping, gold, digital assets, aviation and technology to the sectors covered by US secondary sanctions, which already reach Iran’s oil and banks.
Among the nearly 60 companies, people and ships sanctioned Monday are trading and logistics firms in China and Hong Kong and entities in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Switzerland, Britain, France, Greece, Syria, Ukraine and the Marshall Islands, according to Al Jazeera’s tally of the Treasury list.
“Every country has a defined timeline to shut down activities we have identified,” Bessent said, without naming them. China, India, Turkey, Iraq and the UAE are the most exposed, experts told CNN.
Asked by reporters whether Chinese banks would be hit, Bessent replied that “no one is above the reach of US sanctions” and said to expect “a major announcement of a financial institution being sanctioned by the end of this week.”
Bessent followed on CNBC on Thursday, calling the campaign “a one-two punch” of blockade and sanctions and saying that Washington was telling other governments, “You’re either with us or against us.” He added, “Keep in mind that the Chinese get 50 percent… of their energy from inside the Gulf.”
Three days before the announcement, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, in a lead editorial printed Saturday, made clear that the central target is China. “After six months of war with Iran, President Trump has a credibility problem,” it wrote. “No President has yet climbed the Iran sanctions ladder with China, moving from the isolated ‘teapot’ refineries that buy Iran’s oil to the Chinese state-owned enterprises that support them. Nor has any President given Dubai an ultimatum to shut down Iran’s illicit financial network and meant it.”
The editorial’s final paragraph warned that “Iran may lash out militarily in response, targeting Gulf energy again, and the US will have to be ready with a firm response.”
The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote Monday evening that delivering Bessent’s “zero-leakage approach… will require picking a big fight with China, the largest buyer of Iranian oil.” The editorial noted that US sanctions so far have fallen on “independent refiners and intermediaries rather than major Chinese banks or state-owned companies.”
The Post continued: “The Trump team cannot help but describe its recalibrated approach in martial terms… But D-Day evokes a military campaign with a clear objective: the enemy’s unconditional surrender. Economic pressure rarely works that way… That’s why containment is not really about regime change. Its immediate goal is to make an already battered Iran weaker so that it’s less capable of threatening its neighbors and developing nuclear weapons.”
This is a testament to the deepening political crisis triggered by the failure of US imperialism to achieve its strategic objectives in its war against Iran.
The war was conceived as a means of seizing the chokepoint of the world’s oil supply and gaining a decisive advantage over China. Instead, the United States confronts a political debacle, and it is China’s position that has been strengthened.
The sanctions campaign is an attempt to recoup by economic force what could not be won by bombing, and it aims that force at Beijing. Washington has paused the bombing since late July but has not renounced it; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that “by no means are we foreclosing using kinetic strikes anywhere in the Strait of Hormuz or around Iran.”
The war the sanctions are meant to salvage began on February 28, when Washington and Tel Aviv started the bombing. A cease-fire in April and a June 17 memorandum with Tehran lifted the blockade and let Iran export oil until Washington broke the arrangement in early July by sending ships through a route in the strait to which Iran had not agreed. When Iran fired on the ships the US struck back, and on July 8 Trump declared the cease-fire over. The blockade was reimposed. On August 17, the day the memorandum expired, Trump said of Oman, with which Iran is negotiating a shipping corridor, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
To “sever every economic lifeline” of Iran, as Bessent put it, means to sanction the Chinese refineries, shipping companies and banks that buy and move its oil, and behind them the Chinese state. Behind the refineries stands the largest manufacturing economy in the world, whose trade in raw materials and finished goods a “zero-leakage” sanctions regime would have to police.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said at a briefing Tuesday that “China will do everything necessary to firmly safeguard its rights and interests.” Asked by Bloomberg whether China would change course, he said its cooperation with Iran “should not be disrupted.” Beijing, the Financial Times reported Tuesday, has told Washington that any broad extension of the sanctions to Chinese companies will bring retaliation.
Asked on Monday why the sanctions were not being imposed at once, Bessent replied: “Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
Bessent’s statements are an admission of the provocative character of US actions. Desperate to shore up its geopolitical position, it is taking a series of increasingly reckless and desperate steps, whose impact is to widen the global scope of the war.
The Financial Times wrote in an editorial Tuesday that the operation “seemed more like a series of warning shots fired from far offshore,” and concluded that it “amounts to another risky gamble on a road that, for both sides, ultimately has to lead back to the negotiating table.”
However, the sequence Washington has followed does not lead to a negotiating table. It leads to a widening global conflagration, centrally targeting Russia and China.
(Photo credit: REUTERS, Creator: THILO SCHMUELGEN)
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