At least 270 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military restarted its ethnic cleansing campaign in the besieged enclave one week ago, according to Save the Children.
“Children are being killed in their sleep in tents; they are being starved and attacked. The only way to ensure children and families are protected is through a definitive ceasefire,” the US-based NGO said in a report on 25 March.
The past week marked “the deadliest days for children since the war began,” Save the Children says, revealing that since the start of the war on 7 October 2023, “over 17,800 children have been killed, with thousands more estimated to be missing, presumed dead under the rubble.”
On Monday, Gaza’s Health Ministry listed the names of over 50,000 Palestinians confirmed killed by Israel in Gaza since 7 October 2023. The 1,516-page document includes 474 pages listing the names of more than 15,600 children.
According to a UN report from November last year, nearly 70 percent of the confirmed number of murdered Palestinians at the time were women and children.
“They should be executed even if they are 16 years old,” Israel’s ambassador to Austria, David Roet, said during a closed-door meeting with the local Jewish community in Innsbruck last week. “If you believe that there are no uninvolved [people] in Gaza … you’re believing that Israel is targeting babies intentionally, which is not correct.”
Israel renewed its bombing campaign of Gaza on 18 March, unilaterally putting an end to a US-brokered ceasefire deal authorities in Tel Aviv had repeatedly violated.
Between Monday and Tuesday, the Israeli onslaught killed at least 62 Palestinians, including seven children.
Ceasefire talks in the Egyptian capital fell apart after an Israeli delegation rejected a new Egyptian proposal and left Cairo on Monday, according to sources cited by Al-Araby al-Jadeed.
“Israel rejected all proposals despite Hamas’s positive response to a humanitarian ceasefire proposal,” the sources said, adding that Tel Aviv is “coordinating with regional parties to exert maximum pressure on Hamas ahead of any new negotiations.”
This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.
The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially bobby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.
Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is massstarvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.
Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.
Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed. This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.
Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.
“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:
The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.
The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18). Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.
The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the sixteenth day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.
Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.
Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza
Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.
The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.
Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.
That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid the asking price for Itamar Ben-Gvir’s return to the government in advance. Not out of his own pocket, of course, but with the blood of the 59 hostages whose fate could be sealed by the resumption of the war, which has already sealed the fate of hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children.
On Tuesday, Eliya Cohen, who was freed from Hamas captivity, called the renewed warfare a “death sentence” for the hostages. But that interests the prime minister less than his reward in the form of the homecoming of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party.
According to the statement released by Netanyahu’s office, the decision to strike Gaza was made with Defense Minister Israel Katz after “Hamas’ repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all the proposals it has received from U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and from the mediators.”
But it must be said, loudly and clearly, that this is a lie. It was Israel, not Hamas, that violated the agreement. On its 16th day, the parties were supposed to begin discussing the second phase, which was supposed to end with the release of all the remaining hostages. Israel refused.
Israel also broke its promise to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor between the 42nd and the 50th day of the cease-fire. Moreover, Israel announced that it was halting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and closing the border crossings. This decision, like the energy minister’s decision to halt the limited amount of electricity Israel provides to Gaza, explicitly violates Israel’s commitment in the agreement that aid will continue entering as long as talks on the second stage are ongoing.
All the proposals that Hamas received from Witkoff stem from Israel’s refusal to uphold its part of the deal. Consequently, the attempt to portray Hamas’ rejection of Witkoff’s proposals as a reason to resume the fighting is nothing but a dishonest manipulation.
Israel – not Hamas – is the one preventing the deal’s implementation and the hostages’ return. The statement issued by Netanyahu’s office also said that the goal of the renewed attack on Gaza is “to achieve the objectives of the war as they have been determined by the political echelon, including the release of all of our hostages, the living and the deceased.”
That’s another lie. Military pressure endangers the hostages, and of course also the lives of Israeli soldiers and Gaza residents, while also destroying what remains of the territory.
Netanyahu abandoned the hostages to save his government. The outcry from the hostages’ families and hostages who have returned interests neither him nor the members of his governing coalition. For them, the main thing is the approval of the state budget. Or as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Ayala Metzger, whose father-in-law Yoram Metzger was abducted on October 7, 2023 and killed in Hamas captivity, “We heard you. Now get out. Thank you very much.”
A demonstration by most of the anti-government protest organizations is planned to take place in Jerusalem on Wednesday. The public must join the hostages’ families and demand a resumption of the cease-fire and the signing and implementation of the second stage of the deal. The hostages’ lives are in growing danger. We must save them.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that President Trump “fully supports” Israel’s renewed massive bombing campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 200 children since Tuesday.
“The president made it very clear to Hamas that if they did not release all of the hostages, there would be all hell to pay. Unfortunately, Hamas chose to play games in the media with lives,” Leavitt told reporters.
The US and Israel are blaming Hamas for the lack of a continued ceasefire and hostage releases. But it was Israel that repeatedly violated the deal signed in January, which would have led to the release of all Israeli captives, a permanent truce, and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
US President Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on February 4, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Leavitt said that President Trump “fully supports Israel and the IDF and the actions that they’ve taken in recent days.”
On Wednesday, the State Department also affirmed the administration’s unconditional support for Israel. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said the US will “stand with Israel in every circumstance.”
When asked about the massive child casualties in the Israeli bombing, Bruce pinned the blame on Hamas. “So it’s a shame that Hamas has allowed this to occur, but look nowhere else other than the people who have facilitated this suffering from the beginning,” she said.
Bruce claimed that the administration wants peace, but President Trump has emboldened Netanyahu and his government by supplying huge amounts of military aid and repeatedly calling for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza instead of pressuring Israel to implement the deal it signed in January.
Published date: 19 March 2025 17:22 GMT | Last update:3 hours 1 min ago
Something that separates Ramadan from other times of the year is a change of routine.
That includes waking up for suhoor, a pre-dawn meal which Muslims eat in preparation for fasting.
Families, sometimes including children, rise together during the holy month to eat suhoor and perform Fajrdawn prayers.
On Tuesday, hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli bombs in those early hours of suhoor.
Some had been awake eating with their families. Others were asleep in makeshift displacement camps as food was prepared.
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Entire generations of families were wiped out together by Israel’s devastating strikes.
‘People were killed while they were sleeping. Women were killed whilst they were preparing meals’
– Rachel Cummings, Save the Children, Gaza
“People were killed while they were sleeping. Women were killed whilst they were preparing meals,” Save the Children’s Rachael Cummings, who is currently in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, told Middle East Eye.
“There was no evacuation notice given,” Cummings said. “This was a complete bombardment across the whole of Gaza.”
The timing was reportedly deliberate: Israel launched a surprise attack in the early hours because it believed “Hamas members” would be present at suhoor meals.
Israeli officials continue to insist that Hamas commanders and infrastructure were the targets of the wave of attacks.
But of 436 massacred on Tuesday, over 180 were children.
“I do not spend too much time concerned with who the Israeli military says they targeted in attacks like this,” Miranda Cleland, of Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP), told MEE.
“Instead, look at the evidence: 183 dead children, comprising almost half of yesterday’s death toll, tells me that this is a war on children,” she added.
“Eighteen thousand dead children since 7 October 2023 tells me this is a war on children, regardless of what the Israeli military says.”
Tuesday marked one of the largest one-day child death tolls in Gaza’s history, according to DCIP, which has documented such fatalities in the enclave since 2000.
Over the past 17 months of war, DCIP has monitored child death tolls provided by the Gaza health ministry and cannot recall a day as deadly as 18 March 2025.
‘Gaza is a graveyard for children’
Among the slain children were Omar al-Jamassi, 15, and his sister Layan, 16. They were killed alongside their mother and siblings.
Layan had been excited to start the new school year on Tuesday morning. She was killed by an Israeli air strike hours before it was due to begin.
The political calculations behind Israel’s decision to go back to war
She and Omar had attended a tent school set up as part of the Gaza Great Minds project.
“They were always smiling and share happiness everywhere they go,” said Ahmad Abu Rizik, who founded the project.
Cummings said that children and babies were more at risk of dying from air strikes.
“The risks for children in this context are extraordinary,” she said. “Because they’re so small, they have less blood, so they die much more frequently from blast injuries.”
Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children, making it one the youngest territories in the world.
“Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” Ammar Ammar of Unicef, the UN’s aid agency for children, told MEE.
“Children have been killed, injured, buried under rubble, frozen and starved to death, and many other horrors no child should be subjected to.”
‘Imprint of trauma’
For those children who have survived Israel’s 18-month war up to now, they have faced displacement and deprivation of basic needs.
Unicef estimates that all of Gaza’s one million children are in need of mental health and psychosocial support, too.
“No child will emerge from the horrors of months of relentless bombardment without the imprint of trauma,” said Ammar.
‘No child will emerge from the horrors of months of relentless bombardment without the imprint of trauma’
– Ammar Ammar, Unicef
For over two weeks, Israel has blocked all aid trucks from entering the enclave. Electricity has been cut for the past week.
Ammar said that has left many families struggling to provide enough food and safe water for their children.
“Children are dying of preventable conditions like malnutrition, dehydration, and hypothermia, due to Israel’s siege on Gaza and the mass destruction of homes and the healthcare system,” said Cleland.
She added that Israeli attacks had left minors with lifelong disabilities, without proper follow up care, prosthetics or physical therapy.
Regarding Tuesday’s attack, campaigners are clear that Israel has obligations to protect children.
“Children enjoy special protection under both international humanitarian law and international human rights law. They must never be a target,” said Ammar.
Cleland added: “Yesterday’s attacks were not only a violation of the negotiated truce agreement, but a violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits indiscriminate attacks.
“Bombing densely populated civilian areas is, by definition, indiscriminate.”
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People mourn relatives killed by Israeli airstrikes in central Gaza on March 18, 2025.
(Photo: Hani Alshaer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This return to violence does not come as a surprise,” said one advocacy group. “Netanyahu has, from the beginning, signaled his intention to abandon the cease-fire process before it could become a lasting peace
A barrage of Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip early Tuesday killed more than 400 people and left a fragile cease-fire agreement in tatters just over two months after it was reached, with Israel’s prime minister pledging “increasing military strength” in an enclave already decimated by more than a year of bombing.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the Netanyahu government consulted with the Trump administration ahead of the latest Gaza bombardment. Leavitt expressed the White House’s total support for Israel’s attacks.
While Israel had been carrying out more limited deadly attacks on Gaza despite the cease-fire deal—including strikes over the weekend that killed at least nine—Tuesday’s bombings were described as the “heaviest assault on the territory since the cease-fire took effect in January.”
The cease-fire was a multiphase agreement, with the first phase expiring earlier this month. Talks over the second phase of the agreement had stalled, and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had attempted to impose an alternative deal on Hamas with the backing of the Trump White House. Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip earlier this month in an attempt to force acceptance of its alternative, leaving more than 1 million children in desperate conditions.
The New York Times reported that the Rafah crossing into Egypt “has been shuttered amid the renewed Israeli strikes. The border zone, the Times noted, “had been the main way for sick and wounded Gazans to leave the enclave during the cease-fire.”
Muhannad Hadi, humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement Tuesday that the fresh wave of Israeli airstrikes “is unconscionable” and that a cease-fire “must be reinstated immediately.”
“People in Gaza have endured unimaginable suffering,” said Hadi. “An end to hostilities, sustained humanitarian assistance, release of the hostages, and the restoration of basic services and people’s livelihoods, are the only way forward.”
“From before his first day in office, President Trump has endorsed the Netanyahu government’s return to war.”
Gaza health officials said the Israeli strikes killed at least 400 people, including women and children. Reutersreported that “in hospitals strained by 15 months of bombardment, piles of bodies in white plastic sheets smeared with blood could be seen stacked up as casualties were brought in.”
Netanyahu’s office said in a statement posted to social media that the Israeli military launched the large-scale strikes due to Hamas’ “repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all of the proposals it has received from U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and from the mediators.”
Hamas responded that Israel is “fully responsible for violating and overturning the agreement.”
The Israeli strikes came over a month after the Trump administration approved a $7.4 billion sale of U.S. weaponry to Israel, which has repeatedly used American arms to commit war crimes in Gaza.
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of the U.S.-based advocacy group Win Without War, said in a statement that “we are heartbroken and enraged at the Netanyahu government’s decision to break the cease-fire in Gaza and resume widespread, devastating bombing.”
“This return to violence does not come as a surprise, however,” said Haghdoosti. “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, from the beginning, signaled his intention to abandon the cease-fire process before it could become a lasting peace. From before his first day in office, President Trump has endorsed the Netanyahu government’s return to war. Indeed, we fear that Trump’s vile plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, so welcomed by the far-right members of Netanyahu’s government, will become the blueprint for the war as it goes forward.”
“Both the blockade and the return to bombing appear designed to create conditions in which Palestinians can no longer live in the Gaza Strip,” Haghdoosti added. “We, and every person of conscience around the world, condemn this campaign of ethnic cleansing unequivocally.”
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next.
It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk.
Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support.
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Demostrators from the human rights organization Jewish Voice for Peace hold a civil disobedience action inside Trump Tower in New York on March 13, 2025.
(Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)
“We know what happens when an autocratic regime starts taking away our rights and scapegoating and we will not be silent.”
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updtes…
Nearly a year and a half after the advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace began leading nationwide demonstrations against Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza, hundreds of organizers and supporters of the group risked arrest Thursday as they assembled in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City, demanding the release of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil.
“Three hundred Jews and friends in Trump Tower, because we know what happens when an autocratic regime starts taking away our rights and scapegoating and we will not be silent,” said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director for Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). “Come for one—face us all.”
The latter phrase was emblazoned on banners that were displayed by campaigners, who chanted, “Never again for anyone, never again is now!” and, “Free Mahmoud, free them all!”
New York City police officers began arresting participants in the sit-in early in the afternoon.
Jane Hirschmann, a Jewish New York resident whose grandfather and uncle were abducted by the Nazis in Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power, said Khalil’s detention “is further proof that we are on the brink of a full takeover by an authoritarian regime.”
“As Jews of conscience, we know our history and we know where this leads,” said Hirschmann. “This is what fascists do as they cement control. This moment requires all people of conscience to take bold action to resist state violence and repression. Free Mahmoud now.”
Actors Morgan Spector, Debra Winger, and Arliss Howard were in attendance at the sit-in, along with writer and artist Molly Crabapple and New York City Council member Alexa Aviles.
Khalil was abducted by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last Saturday night as he was returning home to his Columbia-owned apartment with his wife, who is eight months pregnant. He was a graduate student at the university until this past December, and took a central organizing role in student-led protests and negotiations against Columbia’s investment in companies that profit from Israel’s apartheid policy in Gaza, including the bombardment it began in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.
Khalil, a legal U.S. resident and a citizen of Algeria, was detained under the State Department’s “catch and revoke” program, with the Trump administration revoking his green card and threatening to deport him. Administration officials have admitted that they are not accusing Khalil of breaking any laws by participating in Palestinian solidarity protests, but they said he is viewed as “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”
After a hearing Wednesday, a federal judge is considering whether Khalil should be sent back to New York, where he was detained, from the Louisiana ICE facility where he is being held. The same judge blocked Khalil’s deportation this week.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next.
It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk.
Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support.
about:blank
about:blank
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Vice President JD Vance stunned Europe at the Munich Security Conference in February by calling the continent out for serious backsliding on core democratic principles.
He cited annulled elections when the wrong candidate appeared slated to win, digital censorship of opinions that run afoul of the majority or established perspective, and the policing of silent thought (prayer) as exhibits A, B, and C. “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
After acknowledging similar trends in President Biden’s America, Vance boasted that, “In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”
Unless you are a green card holder talking about Israel.
At an Oval Office memo signing/media spray the day of Vance’s Munich speech, the New Sheriff said he completely agreed with Vance’s assessment about the importance of free speech. Less than a month later, though, President Trump dispatched Department of Homeland Security immigration agents to arrest and abduct Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent and lawful resident of the United States, married to an American citizen, when he and his wife returned home from dinner.
His “crime”: participating in the non-violent demonstrations at Columbia University that inspired students across the country to stand up and demand that the U.S. government stop aiding and abetting mass killing in Gaza, including of tens of thousands of women and children.
While anti-war demonstrations have almost always been viewed as — and are — squarely protected by the First Amendment’s free speech and right of assembly guarantees, Trump is painting demonstrations against the Gaza war as “pro-terrorist, anti-semitic, anti-American activity.”
The pro-Israel Free Press quoted an unnamed White House official as acknowledging that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” but that Khalil “is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”
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This was echoed in remarks by White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who said Tuesday in an answer to a question about the administration’s basis for deporting Khalil that, “under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who … are adversarial to the foreign policy and the national security interests of the United States of America.” She added then that Khalil “sided with terrorists” by organizing protests that disrupted classes and harassed Jewish-American students and made them “feel unsafe.” She also accused protesters of handing out fliers “with the logo of Hamas.”
Jewish groups were among those protesting in New York City against Khalil’s pending deportation on Tuesday. Reports dating back to last year indicate that Khalil was not an organizer, but had served as a negotiator on behalf of students who had erected an encampment on campus.
Quite the opposite of strengthening free speech and our democracy, Trump appears to be leading us into a new McCarthyism. The president blasted out on his Truth Social account that, “this is the first of more [arrests and deportations] to come…We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country…We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
Leavitt also ominously foreshadowed a looming clash on Columbia’s campus, saying that university officials are refusing to help DHS identify a list of other individuals on campus the administration has identified — reportedly through a search of students’ social media accounts. “[A]s the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that.”
Meanwhile, Khalil was whisked far away from his wife in New York, who is eight months pregnant, to the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a private prison, according to reports. He would likely have been deported already if not for a fast-acting federal judge in New York who blocked his removal from the United States until after a hearing, expressly forbidding deportation without approval by the court. The initial hearing is slated for Wednesday. Critics worry the administration “shopped” for a judge more sympathetic to its case.
We still do not know what he has been charged with, if anything, or any of the evidence against him.
The prohibition of free speech by student visa holders and permanent citizen green card holders in the United States is a clear and fundamental assault on our democracy — an effort to squelch and chill freedom of speech. It sends the same signal to the rest of the world that Vance and Trump accused Europe of sending: weakness and fear. If peaceful protest by students against a policy poses such a threat to our “national security,” how strong can we really be?
Back at the Munich Security Conference, Vance said: “the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear, and I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still.” The Vice President was right. And now is the time for vehement and loud assertion that free speech is not in retreat in America.
There is a pressing reason to keep our attention focused on the role of the Hannibal directive, writes Jonathan Cook. It relates to what is happening right now.
Palestinians in Gaza on Jan. 29, after the ceasefire announced earlier in the month. (Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Those of us who keep banging on about Israel’s use of the so-called Hannibal directive on Oct. 7, 2023, — in which Israel killed its own citizens to stop them being taken captive by Hamas — have been smeared as excusing Hamas crimes that day.
That is not why we flag the issue.
In part, it is because some of the most horrifying images from Oct. 7 of charred bodies and wrecked cars and homes in Israel — adduced as evidence of an especial barbarism that is supposedly typical of Palestinians — were almost certainly caused by Israel invoking its scorched-earth directive that day.
Those images became central to the propaganda blitz launched by Israel and its apologists to justify the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children over the subsequent 17 months.
But there is also a far more urgent and pressing reason to keep our attention focused on the role of the Hannibal directive. And it relates to what is happening right now.
[President Donald Trump has issued military threats about the consequences of not handing over Israeli hostages that Hamas says, if carried out, break the terms of the ceasefire.]
Israel and the U.S. are still applying the Hannibal directive — against the Israeli captives held in Gaza.
The point of the directive has always been to stop the enemy being able to use Israeli hostages as leverage to draw Israel into negotiations — primarily to pressure it to hand over any of the thousands of Palestinian hostages it holds in its prison-torture camps. Many of them have never been charged or tried.
Israel and the U.S. tell us they need to carpet bomb Gaza — in what amounts to a “plausible” genocide, according to the world’s highest court — to force Hamas to return the Israeli captives. But in fact, Israel and the U.S. are recklessly killing those very same captives through their actions.
Why? So they don’t have to negotiate over a ceasefire. So they can carry on with the genocide, without pressure to deal with the fate of the Israelis held in Gaza.
“Bring Them Home” — a giant lights sign by artist Nadav Barnea at Charles Bronfman Auditorium, Heichal Hatarbut, Tel Aviv, Jan. 3, 2024. (Yossipik, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
It was exactly the same reckless approach on Oct. 7, when Israel showed it was indifferent as to whether Israelis lived or died so long as they weren’t taken captive.
That’s why — in one instance we know about — the Israeli military fired into a home in Kibbutz Be’eri, knowing that there were a dozen or more Israelis inside, including children.
The army was completely indifferent as to whether those Israelis would be killed as a result. All but two were. Those witnesses are the main reason we know what really happened.
That’s why Israel’s Apache helicopters recklessly fired on hundreds of cars fleeing the Nova music festival, indifferent to whether the cars contained Hamas fighters or Israeli citizens.
Even the former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, admits the directive was invoked that day.
We’ll never know how many Israelis were killed – in part because Israel will never let us know. It’s even buried many of the destroyed cars to stop a forensic investigation.
But what we do know with certainty is that the Israeli military killed many Israelis on Oct. 7.
Western media have studiously refused to report on the issue of the Hannibal directive, even though it is all over the Israeli media. (See here, here, here and here.)
That is more than just a failure by Western media outlets. It is a crime against journalism — if not complicity in the genocide itself.
Western publics need to know that the Hannibal directive was invoked for a very simple reason: It is a crucial piece of information for assessing the credibility of Israeli and U.S. claims that they are trying to get the Israeli captives back alive and to properly weigh Israel’s motives in returning to the genocide in Gaza.
Notice how, in Trump’s latest deranged tweet, he accuses Hamas of “murdering” the Israelis held in Gaza. That’s pure, Israeli-inspired disinformation.
It is clear that most, if not all, of the dead captives were killed not by their Hamas captors but by Israel’s massive, reckless 15-month bombardment of the tiny territory of Gaza. That same bombardment, the equivalent of six Hiroshimas, has leveled Gaza and killed many tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of Palestinians.
Why is Trump so eager to misdirect us?
Because he wants to win our support for Israel’s continuation of its slaughter of the people of Gaza and justify his own decision to supply, as his predecessor did, the weapons needed to continue that genocide.
After all, Trump makes his own genocidal intent expressly clear in addressing “the people of Gaza” and telling them that they will all be “DEAD” if the Israeli captives aren’t handed over. Yet “the people of Gaza” have no control over whether the captives are released.
Notice too that Trump calls Hamas “sick and twisted” for holding on to the bodies of dead Israeli captives, even though it is Israel that is violating the ceasefire agreement that would see those bodies returned.
This has become a further rationalisation by Israel and the U.S. for killing “the people of Gaza.” But Hamas learnt the value of using dead bodies as bargaining chips directly from Israel.
For years, the Israeli government has had a policy of refusing to return to their families the corpses of those Palestinians it has killed, including while in its torture camps. This violation of international law long predates Oct. 7. The Israeli courts have repeatedly approved the policy, accepting the government’s view that the bodies should be held as “bargaining chips.” It gave its backing again in January.
So if Hamas is “sick and twisted,” it is only because Israel is even more sick and twisted. If Trump thinks the people of Gaza deserve a genocide because of their leaders’ “sick and twisted” decisions, should he not be consistent and argue that the people of Israel deserve a similar fate for their own leaders’ “sick and twisted” decisions?
A campaign of lies and disinformation have helped to shred international law over the past year and half. And one of the biggest lies is the pretence that, in slaughtering Gaza’s children, Israel has been acting in the interests of Israelis held in the enclave.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
British journalist Owen Jones spoke out against Western media for suppressing coverage of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Jones condemned the silence of Western media, describing it as complicity in the face of unimaginable atrocities and condemned journalists for failing to express solidarity with their colleagues, even in the face of what he described as ‘the biggest massacre of journalists in human history’.
He made these remarks during a demonstration in central London, where over 100,000 people gathered to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, despite last-minute restrictions imposed by the Metropolitan Police, which many viewed as an attempt to stifle the protest. 0:10 / 3:43 8:29 AM · Jan 19, 2025 · 720.6K Views
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
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