President Donald Trump attends a meeting at the White House Oval Office in Washington, DC on September 9, 2026.
(Photo by White House)
“Even for the notoriously corrupt and lawless Trump, this explicit and desperate attempt to buy votes in the November election is a new low,” said one watchdog leader.
Many Democrats in Congress are on the growing list of critics calling out President Donald Trump for his Wednesday night vow to give US voters $5,000 each if they help Republicans win control of the Senate and House of Representatives—where they already have majorities—in the November midterm elections.
“Nothing says confidence like trying to bribe people for votes,” Congressman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) quipped Thursday.
When Fox News’ Laura Ingraham later asked, “Why not just give the money now?” Trump attempted to blame Democrats.
Noting the president’s jumbled response to that question, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said: “I don’t know what this even means, but I do know the reason Trump won’t give a straight answer is that he doesn’t really mean to send these checks to anyone. He has lied about this over and over again, and he’s lying now. Just like he lied when he said he would lower costs.”
Some critics highlighted other cases of Trump pledging to give Americans money, including alleged savings from the actions of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk.
Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said: “So now it’s $5,000 bribes that Trump will never deliver to attempt to make voters forget what they are paying for gas and food. What ever happened to those promised DOGE checks? Americans are not fools, we know he lies daily.”
Blasting the president as “our pathological liar-in-chief,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also pointed to previous instances of Trump promising money, from a 10% cap on credit card interest rates to $2 for a gallon of gasoline.
“The Trump administration is not about helping working families,” the former presidential candidate stressed. “It’s about giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million Americans off the healthcare they have.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has also sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, shared on social media Groundwork Collaborative’s roundup of 15 times Trump has promised a check, dividend, or rebate—and not delivered.
Some Democratic governors also took aim at Trump. California’s Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, said: “After making you sicker and poorer with his war, Donald Trump now wants to buy your vote with $5,000 in taxpayer-funded blood money. The most corrupt man ever to occupy the Oval Office.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul emphasized that “Trump owes New Yorkers $13.5 billion for his illegal tariffs and hasn’t paid up.”
“Now he’s dangling $5,000 checks if Republicans win Congress. A trillion-dollar campaign bribe from a guy who doesn’t pay his bills,” she added. “Fool me once…”
It’s not just elected Democrats ripping Trump’s new pledge. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a Thursday statement that “even for the notoriously corrupt and lawless Trump, this explicit and desperate attempt to buy votes in the November election is a new low.”
“Trump knows he can’t do this, and yet he’s attempting to bribe voters with the false promise of cash to help his party win an election, which is antithetical to every principle of American democracy,” she continued. “Every Republican at the convention and across the country should loudly and vehemently denounce Trump for proposing this dangerous and transparently illegal scheme. The fact that no one has done that yet is cause for deep alarm about the future of American elections.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza enters a grim third year, the prevailing narrative developed by mainstream Western media serves as a masterclass in institutional complicity; filtering genocide through a lens of manufactured neutrality.
Since October 2025, when the so-called ceasefire – which Israel has repeatedly violated – began, the tragedy in Gaza has been effectively erased from the news cycle. The incredible suffering of the Palestinian people has been treated as if it were unworthy of attention.
Because of this severe marginalization, it is more important than ever to look critically at the media’s role in constructing and perpetuating the ongoing genocide, and restore the crisis to the public prominence it requires.
By adopting Israel’s security-centered narrative without question, major news outlets continue to legitimize state violence. Cloaking its atrocities in the sanitized language of “self-defense” does more than just distort a humanitarian crisis; it creates an ideological shield that hides the true human cost from the public.
Institutional media coverage of the catastrophe, however, cannot simply be dismissed as negligence or professional oversight; it represents a systemic structure of complicity that began eight decades ago.
Well before 7 October 2023, the media laid the ideological and narrative foundation that facilitated Israel’s immediate massive military retaliation and ongoing atrocities in Gaza.
From the beginning of the Zionist enclave, editorial frameworks have been shaped around a singular imperative: safeguard and legitimize, at all cost, Israel’s survival and expansion. By trading critical journalism for propaganda, they systematically manufactured public consent for state-sponsored violence.
To fully grasp the situation in Gaza – a 140-square-mile concentration camp blockaded by air, land and sea – requires historical context that Western editors have actively scrubbed from copy and airwaves. Rarely, if ever, have they presented the current quagmire within the more than 80-year continuum of Israeli land theft, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid.
The institutional media almost never expose the public to the core ideology upon which the Zionist colony was built and on which it sustains its expansionist “logic.” To truly understand Israel, however, it is essential to know that it was founded on the supremacist belief in the expendability of the indigenous Palestinian population.
If journalists had simply examined the agenda and words of Israel’s Zionist founders and its strongest defenders – which abound – public perception would look radically different today:
“We should there [Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” (Theodor Herzl, Austro-Hungarian political founder of modern Zionism; from his political tract, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), 1896.
“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach… And we are…demanding that this outside Power should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.” (Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of modern Likud Party; from his The Iron Wall), 1923.
“We must expel the Arabs and take their places… And, if we have to use force…then we have force at our disposal.” (David Ben-Gurion, Polish-born first Israeli prime minister; letter to his son), 1937.
It [Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” (then-Senator Joe Biden, U.S. Senate), 1986.
“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” (Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister; lecturing troops entering Gaza on 10 October), 2023.
“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 16 October address to Knesset following the attack),
Furthermore, the media have skewed the reality of Palestine by continuing to characterize the Arab-Israeli struggle as a “conflict.” This terminology hides a violent history of Zionist colonization that began in 1948, and perverts the asymmetrical Palestinian response to dispossession. A false equivalence is created that masks the fact that one party (the colonizer) holds absolute power over the lives of the colonized.
Isolating the daily brutality of the occupier from the foundational violence of the occupation warps public perception of the crisis. It falsely casts indigenous resistance as unprovoked aggression, while normalizing an inherently brutal system of subjugation.
The media has also largely neglected to scrutinize diplomatic initiatives like the Oslo Agreements (1993 and 1995) and Abraham Accords (2020). By overlooking their systemic faults, they essentially legitimized the occupation, and normalized the groundwork for ongoing Israeli military dominance and territorial expansion.
Consequently, over the years, Western outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and NPR, have consistently served as public relations agents for the Pentagon and Israeli Occupation Forces.
One of the media’s most insidious tools has been language manipulation. From the start of the Gaza war, news outlets have employed a form of linguistic apartheid that dictates how human life and death are valued; essentially who is worthy of mourning.
Hence, the Israeli assault on Gaza has relied on rhetoric calculated and structured to strip Palestinians of their humanity; effectively masking acts of mass violence behind the language of routine administrative tasks.
Such linguistic sleight of hand is mirrored in official, clinical euphemisms designed to shield Israel’s military from accountability – recasting mass atrocities as “operations,” intentional starvation as “logistical challenges,” and the erasure of entire families as mere “collateral damage.” By design, this “functional framing” reduces human beings to mere casualty counts and transforms genocide into a sanitized tragedy.
The media has rendered Palestinian suffering an accidental byproduct, rather than the result of deliberate violence, through the use of the passive voice; in which verbs float free of actors, where lives “are lost,” hospitals “are destroyed,” and buildings “collapse.”
There have been a number of instances in which news outlets have issued directives explicitly instructing reporters to avoid using specific terms such as: occupied territory, refugee camps, ethnic cleansing, and particularly genocide and Palestine.
Journalists and media personalities have understood that straying from the approved Israeli narrative or foreign policy consensus meant career stagnation, professional blacklisting or outright termination.
This starvation of empathy has done more than misrepresent, it has constructed a permissive semantic structure, that covertly shields and absolves perpetrators of their crimes. It ensures that mass devastation is read not as a human catastrophe, but as an abstract, inevitable footnote of geopolitics.
The most damning indictment of the media’s failure is that the truth has survived not because of, but in spite of institutional journalism. The heavy burden of documenting the war has fallen on courageous Palestinian journalists, citizen chroniclers, and independent digital outlets reporting from inside the ruins, often at the cost of their lives. As of mid-2026, international organizations and press watchdogs report that more than 260 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza.
It is now widely recognized that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, numerous media outlets rushed to publish unverified and sensationalized accounts of atrocities. Particularly egregious was the fake, often repeated narrative of “40 beheaded babies.” This fabrication, as well as the accusation of systematic mass rape—later debunked by independent journalists and international organizations – served a singular purpose: to generate the emotional and moral outrage necessary to justify Israel’s indiscriminate retaliation.
For decades, mainstream media has presented Palestinians as inherently menacing, less evolved and obstacles to U.S.-Israeli geopolitical ambitions. Consequently, they created the political conditions and domestic apathy that has allowed billions of dollars in weapons to flow unconditionally from Washington to Tel Aviv.
Following three years of unchecked Israeli devastation in Gaza and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, some news organizations have finally begun to label Israel as the menace and core threat to regional peace.
Under the guise of objective neutrality, mainstream newsrooms have institutionalized a practice of “genocidal blindness” – the refusal to apply legal or historical definitions (as the International Court of Justice has) to the live-streamed destruction of a civilian population.
They have also prioritized official state denials over documented evidence gathered on the ground. By prioritizing political access and government-approved sourcing over accountability and truth, mainstream journalism has forfeited its ethical credibility.
True objectivity requires matching language to verified reality. Over time, however, the media have reduced an ancient-rooted society to a negligible footnote in a biblical or European romance.
The failure of the Fourth Estate to properly contextualize and to voice the outrage that the holocaust in Gaza deserves will be remembered as an historic betrayal of the public trust; a watershed moment signaling its eventual collapse.
Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia. His “Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,” published by University of Utah Press, and still in print, was recognized by Choice as Outstanding Academic Book for 1987–1988.
British foreign minister Ed Miliband has reaffirmed his commitment to Israel as it continues to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. Thomas Krych ZUMA Press Wire/Newscom
British foreign minister Ed Miliband on Tuesday announced plans to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
He called Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their West Bank lands “ethnic cleansing” and finally accepted the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is illegal.
But while his statement in Parliament – and a shorter video on X – were ostensibly about supporting Palestinians, they reveal that Britain’s overriding priority remains protecting Israel as a racist Jewish state.
Miliband begins not with Palestinians but with Israel, his attachment to it and Jewish feelings.
He promises several hundred million dollars to fight “anti-Semitism” – a much-abused term Israel and its lobby have redefined to mean opposition to Israel’s crimes and its racist ideology Zionism. He recalls idyllic childhood visits to Tel Aviv and picking oranges on a kibbutz, but does not mention that the “sanctuary” Israel gave his grandmother and other relatives was only made possible by the Nakba – the deliberate expulsion, under British supervision, of Palestine’s indigenous population to make way for European settlers such as Miliband’s family.
While young Ed was picking oranges, Israel was bombing Palestinian refugees, murdering Palestinian writers and poets and imposing apartheid across historic Palestine.
Pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian
He proclaims himself “unwavering” in support of a state that has spent almost eight decades expelling, occupying, besieging and killing Palestinians – and the last three years perpetrating genocide.
Israel’s supposed “right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people” is sacred and beyond question.
Palestinians, meanwhile, appear mainly as objects of suffering whose future Britain and its allies are entitled to decide, including by admonishing the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to “accelerate reform” – whatever that means.
Miliband repeatedly condemns Hamas, demands that it disarm and bars it from any role in Gaza’s future. He makes no comparable demand that Israel dismantle the army that continues to destroy Gaza and carry out daily massacres there.
Nor does he deign to tell Israel which of its blood-soaked leaders can hold office.
Effectively justifying genocide, Miliband asserts that 7 October “makes plain the grave threats that Israel faces” and that it “has every right to defend itself.”
Echoing Trumpian neocon propaganda, he claims falsely that “Iran continues to threaten Israel and Jews across the world” – when it was Israel that bombed a synagogue in Tehran during the US-Israeli war of aggression, the second such unprovoked attack in less than a year.
Miliband also vows more British sanctions against Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah, which he mislabels as an Iranian “proxy,” as if Lebanese people have no right or interest to defend their land against Israeli massacres and occupation.
The UK foreign minister’s efforts to swaddle his mild sanctions in love for Israel were – as expected – to no avail. Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar swiftly announced retaliation, including the closure of Britain’s consulate in occupied East Jerusalem and travel bans on British officials.
Supporting genocide
Substantive discussion of Gaza is buried deep in the statement, after Miliband’s declarations of love for Israel and lengthy discussion of West Bank settlements.
Even then, he begins by repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda, claiming that on 7 October: “Men, women, children and babies killed, mutilated, and tortured by Hamas terrorists.”
In Gaza, Miliband acknowledges mass killing, deliberate deprivation, forced displacement and wholesale destruction. He notes that more than 70,000 people have been killed, including at least 20,000 children.
Yet he refuses to call it genocide, despite repeated declarations by Israeli leaders that their goal is to destroy Gaza and expel its people.
Instead, Miliband claims Britain must await a final judgment from an international court. This is cowardly and depraved political evasion dressed up as respect for law. Under the Genocide Convention, governments must act once a serious risk is apparent – not after a court confirms the extermination has occurred. Britain does not await final judgments before naming alleged international crimes when the accused is an official enemy. Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared unequivocally that President Vladimir Putin and his army were “committing war crimes.”
British police are investigating alleged war crimes in Ukraine while arresting thousands of British citizens for opposing genocide in Gaza.
Miliband himself called Russia’s intervention in Ukraine “illegal,” although no international court has ruled it so.
Nor does he promise to end British military support for Israel. He refers to suspended arms licenses and restrictions on exports that “materially contribute to the occupation” – a vague standard if ever there was one – but announces no comprehensive arms embargo, end to military cooperation or halt to British assistance enabling Israel’s crimes, including ongoing British military overflights of Gaza shrouded in official secrecy. Miliband offers no plan to identify, arrest and prosecute Israeli officials and soldiers responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, or any pledge to arrest the already indicted war crimes fugitives Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
Israeli perpetrators are not threatened with the “full force” of British sanctions. Miliband reserves that language only for those involved in settlements.
Rescuing racist Israel
This, apparently, is the post-Keir Starmer reset – the “better” policy Prime Minister Andy Burnham promised after admitting Labour “didn’t get it right” on Gaza.
The reality was exposed before Miliband spoke. Bloomberg reported that British diplomats had privately assured Washington the measures were “largely symbolic” and would have no material impact on Britain’s wider trade or security relationship with Israel.
Burnham’s PR push is likely meant to placate angry Labour voters without disturbing the relationship sustaining Israeli apartheid and genocide and the regime of Jewish supremacy these crimes perpetuate.
The narrow focus on settlements reflects the real purpose – candidly stated by Miliband – of rescuing the so-called two-state solution.
This “solution” offers Palestinians disconnected enclaves under permanent Israeli military, economic and political domination – the equivalent of apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans. They would be expected to call these fragments a state, renounce their right to return and accept Israel’s permanent existence as a Jewish supremacist entity.
Consequently, Western governments treat settlements as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate Israel, rather than one expression of a brutal settler-colonial project founded on mass expulsion.
Their disagreement with Israel is only over how much Palestinians should be dispossessed.
Israel’s government and much of its Jewish population support total dispossession, including through mass expulsion and extermination, to take over all of historic Palestine.
By contrast, Britain and other Western governments believe that the Zionist theft of 78 percent of the land of the Palestinians in 1948 should be enough. Canada, France and several other European countries are joining Britain for the same reason.
Their joint official statement explicitly says the objective is to “protect” the two-state solution.
This is coordinated action to rescue a segregation plan, not end Israel’s racism. That is why Miliband can recognize an imaginary “State of Palestine” and condemn settlements while maintaining his “unwavering” support for Israel and proclaiming: “I wholeheartedly oppose the boycott, divestment, sanctions or BDS campaign.”
Miliband says the British will no longer be “bystanders.” But that has never been the case. Britain will continue protecting Israeli apartheid, rejecting meaningful pressure and refusing to name the genocide it enables.
This is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is just the latest Western attempt to rescue the genocidal Jewish supremacist state that Britain created.
The US-Iran war entered a new phase on Tuesday, with Washington and Tehran exchanging missile strikes that included attacks on shipping and threats of further escalation across the Middle East.
The US destroyed five Iranian oil tankers after Iran reportedly launched ballistic missiles at a US Navy warship. Iran responded with missile attacks on a US military installation in Jordan along with threats against American-linked shipping in the Persian Gulf.
This image from video released by U.S. Central Command shows an explosion at Bandar Abbas Naval Base, Iran, as three Corsair unmanned surface vessels, also called one-way attack surface drones, fired by the US military, hit the port, July 12, 2026. [AP Photo/U.S. Central Command]
The latest escalation demonstrates the collapse of every claim by the White House that the war is being wound up through limited military actions, economic sanctions or temporary ceasefires. The conflict is spreading geographically and increasingly targeting the infrastructure upon which the global economy depends.
On Tuesday, US Central Command said American forces struck five Iranian crude-oil carriers, four in the Gulf of Oman and one near Kharg Island. One tanker was sunk, while the remaining vessels were described by the Pentagon as disabled or rendered inoperable.
The attacks followed what Washington said were two Iranian ballistic-missile attacks against a US Navy warship over the previous two days. CENTCOM said the American vessel evaded the missiles and no US personnel were injured. Iranian state media and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) gave a different account, claiming that Iranian forces had damaged US destroyers carrying cruise missiles and Aegis air-defense systems.
The US military’s action follows an increasingly explicit policy of reprisal against Iranian shipping. American officials have threatened to strike multiple Iranian vessels for every US ship attacked by Tehran. The policy amounts to a declaration that Washington will use military force to enforce its control over Iranian maritime trade, regardless of the consequences for global commercial shipping.
Iran has threatened to prevent vessels linked to the US and its allies from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC urged crews to abandon tankers in waters near Kuwait and Bahrain and warned that additional ships could be attacked.
Roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum supply passes through the strait. Any sustained disruption will affect fuel prices, transportation, food production and industrial supply chains throughout the world.
Iran claimed that its missiles struck facilities used for aircraft maintenance, deployment and shelter. US officials said the attack was ineffective and that all American personnel were accounted for. Jordanian authorities reported that 20 ballistic missiles were fired toward the country. Eighteen were intercepted by Jordanian air defenses, while two fell in unpopulated areas. No casualties were reported.
Iran also claimed that it had targeted American warships and other military assets in the region. The competing accounts of events could not be independently confirmed.
The attack nevertheless marks a significant expansion of the war. Jordan has attempted to avoid becoming a direct combatant, but its hosting of US forces makes it a potential target in any confrontation between Washington and Tehran. The same is true of US bases and military facilities across Iraq, the Gulf monarchies and the eastern Mediterranean.
The US military installation is generally identified as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, located near Al-Azraq in eastern Jordan. The base is a major Jordanian air facility that hosts US military personnel and supports American air operations.
Iranian officials said their missiles targeted aircraft-maintenance and preparation facilities, deployment areas and hardened shelters associated with US F-35, F-16 and F-15 fighter aircraft. Some reports also referred to the nearby Prince Hassan Air Base as a target, but the precise facilities struck remain unclear.
Iranian officials have warned that the Middle East is “practically on the brink of World War Three,” according to The Independent. The statement, made by Tehran parliamentarian Kamran Ghazanfari, cited the widening conflict involving the United States, Iran and other regional and international powers. The war is drawing in US allies, Iranian-backed forces, commercial shipping and the global energy market.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday before leaving for Dallas, President Donald Trump predicted that the war would end “immediately after” the US midterm elections in November. “I think war is going to end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer,” Trump said.
The US President accused Tehran of being “desperate to try and affect the election,” while insisting that Iran was weakening under American economic pressure. Trump also indicated that Washington was not seeking to restart negotiations after the collapse of earlier ceasefires.
The timing of Trump’s prediction reveals some of the political calculations behind the war. The president is presenting the conflict simultaneously as a military campaign, an economic siege and an election issue. Claiming that Iran will soon capitulate, Trump offers no explanation for why a government supposedly on the verge of collapse has been able to continue missile attacks, threaten shipping and deny Washington its stated objectives after six months of bombing.
Earlier this week, Trump declared on social media that oil prices would “drop precipitously” when the United States “WIN[s] the war with Iran.” This statement connects the administration’s effort to portray military domination of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s energy exports with a claimed solution to the economic inflationary consequences of the war.
Oil markets have responded to each new military escalation with sharp price increases. Brent crude rose to about $99 a barrel Tuesday after reports of renewed attacks on US Navy vessels and the destruction of Iranian tankers. West Texas Intermediate crude reached approximately $94 a barrel. Brent had already climbed above $90 earlier in September after the fighting intensified, while prices in August reached their highest levels in nearly a month after Trump threatened retaliation against countries supporting Iran.
The impact of the war is being felt by the working class internationally through higher gasoline, heating and transportation costs. The Independent cited an estimate from Brown University that the war had added $100 billion to US energy costs, or roughly $763 per household, with the total increasing by about $1 million every two minutes.
The price surge has created opportunities for energy corporations and financial speculators, including those with direct connections in the White House, to cash in on the market instability. Trump’s nine largest disclosed oil and gas holdings reportedly gained between $1.5 million and $4.4 million during the first six months of the war. His investment accounts continued buying and selling shares in companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.
These disclosures show that the president is running a war that directly affects asset values held by him and his family. The White House denies that Trump or his relatives have any role in investment decisions, saying the holdings are managed independently through discretionary accounts and automated investment models.
This denial does not resolve the issue since the president need not personally place every trade for the financial interests of his family and the entire ruling oligarchy to benefit from the war. Energy companies, defense contractors, shipping firms and banks are all profiting from the destruction of productive resources and the militarization of economic life. This is a fundamental tendency of imperialism.
While the Trump administration claims that military pressure will force Tehran to surrender, the facts point in the opposite direction. After months of bombing and blockade, Iran has not capitulated, the Strait of Hormuz remains contested and American forces are increasingly exposed across the region.
The latest developments confirm the analysis of the World Socialist Web Site, which has described the war as part of a broader imperialist struggle for control of energy resources, strategic chokepoints and global economic power, particularly against China, which had been the principal buyer of Iranian oil.
The war will not be ended by Trump’s election timetable. Washington’s objective is not simply about shipping in the Strait of Hormuz but the strategic imperative that US imperialism must assert its domination over Iran and the entire Middle East.
Meanwhile, Tehran’s response is incapable of ending the conflict and reflects the dead end of bourgeois nationalism under conditions of an escalating imperialist military siege.
The alternative to this spiral toward a new world war is the independent mobilization of the working class in the United States, Iran and internationally against imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces it. The immediate demand must be the end of all US military operations, the withdrawal of American forces from the Middle East and the lifting of sanctions and the naval blockade.
The government must look at how it can provide accountability, reparation, and investment in Palestine commensurate with the damage the UK has caused
Pro-Palestinian protesters take part in the “National March to Labour’s in Liverpool on 21 September, 2024 (AFP)
Shortly before taking office, Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, apologised for our party’s initial response to Israel’s war on Gaza, saying we got it wrong.
He was right to apologise, but in the face of overwhelming evidence of Israel’s genocide and war crimes, and the UK’s long complicity, it is far from enough.
Today, the foreign secretary has announced a sanctions regime banning trade with Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, a step that I and more than 140 Labour MPs have called for.
This is welcome and long overdue, not just because it puts pressure on the Israeli government, nor simply because it is what is required of us under international law, but also because it is only fair given the UK’s role in creating a situation where Palestinians are systematically denied their fundamental rights and subjected to the most violent repression by Israel.
A first step
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However, this would only be the first step in reversing the Labour Party’s weak position on the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and its refusal to stand up to Israel.
Given the UK’s history, it is also beyond time for us to right the wrongs that the British state has inflicted on the Palestinian people.
UK trade ban on illegal settlements is a welcome first step to justice for Palestinians
On 7 September last year, 14 Palestinians lodged a 400-page legal petition with the government. Written by two of this country’s leading human rights KCs with the help of historians of the period, it sets out the ways in which Britain breached international law in Palestine between 1917 and 1948, and it asks the government to look at the evidence, state plainly what was done, apologise for it in Parliament and provide meaningful reparations.
A year later there has been no reply.
In March, I was one of 45 parliamentarians who wrote to the previous prime minister urging him to provide one. This letter also went unanswered.
The UK promised a national home in a country whose population was overwhelmingly Arab, having already promised those same people independence, and then governed the territory for three decades under a Mandate it had no lawful authority to hold.
Palestinians were denied any meaningful say in how they were ruled, and when they rebelled between 1936 and 1939, the response was further tyranny.
A war that never ended
Villages were demolished, thousands were detained without appeal, prisoners were tortured, and at al-Bassa in 1938 there are strong grounds to conclude that British forces killed around 50 villagers in reprisal for a roadside bomb.
Given the UK’s history, it is also beyond time for us to right the wrongs that the British state has inflicted on the Palestinian people
Britain’s own colonial secretary privately conceded to the Cabinet that the police had committed atrocities and kept this from the House.
When the UK withdrew in 1948, it left behind a war it had helped facilitate and some 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed of their homes.
That did not end with the Mandate.
The people expelled are the grandparents of the refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied West Bank and Gaza today, and the instruments Britain perfected in Palestine – house demolitions, punitive raids, detention without trial and impunity – are in use in the occupied West Bank now, where the United Nations records Israeli settler violence at its highest level yet.
Munib Al Masri, the petition’s lead signatory, is now in his nineties. As a young child in Nablus, he witnessed the harassment and violence carried out during searches by occupying forces, and at 13 he was shot in the leg by British troops during a demonstration.
He and 13 other petitioners have now waited a year for a response from the UK government to their letter, adding further insult to the injuries they have suffered at the hands of the British state.
A necessary apology
In March 2025, a Foreign Office minister acknowledged the tragedy of the killing of 24 men by British troops at Batang Kali in Malaya in 1948 and accepted that official narratives portraying the victims as supporters of the insurgency were incorrect and had compounded their families’ suffering.
Danny Friedman KC and John Halford, who acted for those families, represent the Palestinian petitioners now.
Analysis: Ed Miliband is becoming the UK’s most formidable foreign secretary in decades
Batang Kali was carried out under a Labour government and answered by a Labour one.
Palestine is the gap in that reckoning, and it is a Labour-shaped gap, because it was a Labour government that handed the question to the United Nations in 1947 and then walked away from what followed.
Labour members will arrive at conference next month expecting a government that leads on this issue rather than one that has to be dragged.
This is not just about what our party has got wrong over recent years, but what it has got wrong repeatedly throughout our history and the devastating repercussions that Palestinians continue to face because of these decisions.
This is why a full apology that covers the wrongdoing that successive UK governments subjected the Palestinian people to is necessary.
And an apology has to be matched with action: the government must look at how it can provide accountability, reparation, and investment in Palestine commensurate with the damage the UK has caused.
Banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements is a start, but we must not stop there: we have a very long way to go to address the UK’s deep-rooted complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Nadia Whittome is a British politician serving as Member of Parliament for Nottingham East since 2019. A member of the Labour Party, she was previously the youngest MP upon her election at the age of 23
Iranian military personnel take part in an exercise titled “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz”, launched by the Naval Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is being carried out in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz on February 16, 2026. [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Anadolu Agency]
Iranian state television has broadcast footage it said showed ballistic missile attacks on a US aircraft carrier and destroyer, as Iran and the United States exchanged strikes on military and oil-related targets in and around the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the two US warships were targeted with Iranian-made Qasem Basir ballistic missiles, alleging that the vessels had participated in a naval blockade of Iranian shipping.
The IRGC claimed the missiles damaged both vessels and forced them to withdraw from the area. The footage broadcast by Iranian state media was presented as documenting the attacks, but the claims of direct hits and damage could not be independently verified.
The Iranian military described the strikes as retaliation for US attacks on three Iranian oil tankers.
The US military said on Saturday that it had targeted three tankers linked to the Revolutionary Guard, permanently disabling two and destroying a third. It described the vessels as part of a network generating funds for the IRGC and Iran-aligned groups in the region.
According to the US military, one tanker was targeted off Kharg Island, the site of Iran’s largest oil export terminal, another near the Strait of Hormuz, and the third in the Gulf of Oman.
The Revolutionary Guard confirmed that three Iranian tankers had been attacked and subsequently announced retaliatory operations against US naval assets.
In a separate statement on Sunday, the IRGC said its naval forces had targeted a US unmanned surface vessel that it claimed was attempting to enter a restricted area of the Strait of Hormuz. The outcome of that attack was not independently confirmed.
Iranian authorities also said their forces had targeted three oil tankers that were allegedly transiting the strait without authorization, as well as several US warships in other locations.
The exchanges come amid heightened military tensions between Washington and Tehran and stalled diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. The United States has also intensified economic pressure on Iran through sanctions and restrictions targeting Iranian oil revenues and entities linked to the Revolutionary Guard.
Israel launched a brutal and deadly escalation against south Lebanon on 6 September, killing four people and injuring at least 20 while destroying a medical facility with its strikes.
Airstrikes hit areas including Nabatieh al-Fawqa, Arab Salim, and Kfar Rumman.
At least two were killed in Nabatieh al-Fawqa, while another two were killed and six injured in Arab Salim, including two children, the Lebanese Health Ministry said in a statement.
In Nabatieh’s Rahibat neighborhood, eight were wounded, including a woman and a child. Meanwhile, four women were injured in Kfar Rumman, the ministry added.
Israel’s brutal attacks directly targeted and destroyed in its entirety the Ghandour Hospital in Nabatieh al-Fawqa. According to Lebanese media reports, no patients or medical staff were inside the hospital at the time of the attack.
A Lebanese Finance Ministry building was damaged in Israel’s latest wave of violence.
“With the renewed Israeli attacks on the city of Nabatieh, the ministry’s building in the city was damaged at dawn today as a result of shelling that targeted the area,” Lebanon’s Finance Ministry said in a statement.
Israel continued detonation operations on Sunday as well, blowing up more homes as part of its illegal campaign of ethnic cleansing, which has resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of homes and civilian buildings.
The violent wave of deadly Israeli strikes came after Tel Aviv said Hezbollah launched drones at its occupation troops in south Lebanon.
“Hezbollah terrorists launched two explosive drones toward our forces in the security area,” the Israeli army said in a statement, referring to the so-called security zone that remains inhabited by resistance fighters despite months of bombing.
“This constitutes a blatant violation by the Hezbollah terrorist organization.” The statement added that Israeli forces began striking Hezbollah targets in response.
Just two days ago, Israel claimed operational control over the strategic Ali al-Taher Hill in south Lebanon.
The sensitive area is believed to host a key underground Hezbollah facility. Hezbollah has been resisting Israeli operations in the area for months.
“If Israel had fully captured Ali al-Taher, it would have raised its flag there … and released footage from inside the hills showing the installations it claims are there,” said retired Lebanese army general Mounir Shehadeh.
“No Lebanese party can confirm that the hills have fallen,” he added. “The Israeli fire cordon is preventing anyone from advancing to verify what has happened. The Lebanese army cannot move forward, nor can anyone else.”
Hezbollah MP Ihab Hamadeh asked, “How can the Israeli enemy claim to have captured Ali al-Taher while it continues to bombard and strike it?”
Since 2 March, over 4,000 Lebanese have been killed and over a million displaced. Entire southern villages have been erased by the Israeli army.
Israeli occupation forces have faced heavy losses in south Lebanon since starting their latest ground operation and campaign to expand Israeli occupation, admitting to the deaths of 38 soldiers as well as a civilian contractor who was helping destroy homes.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Wednesday, September 2 that it had set a record for the number of arrests of immigrants for the third straight month. The department, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), claimed it kidnapped 50,925 people in August, exceeding the nearly 50,000 the month before and the 49,000 in June.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents make an arrest during an early morning operation in Park Ridge, Illinois, Sept. 19, 2025. [AP Photo/Erin Hooley]
“For the third straight month, ICE set a new record for the highest number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month, nearly 51,000,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gloated in a DHS press release.
DHS claims over 3 million people have left the country since Trump returned to the White House. This includes those who were deported, illegally renditioned to a third country, or, under threat of being kidnapped and held in a for-profit concentration camp, “voluntarily” left the country.
While the Trump administration scapegoats immigrants for all the problems created by the capitalist system—from rising home prices and stagnant wages to every form of criminality—ICE arrest data analyzed by Cato Institute immigration analyst David Bier showed that 79 percent of those arrested had no criminal conviction. Fifty-five percent had neither a conviction nor a pending criminal charge, while only 4 percent had been convicted of a violent offense. Bier testified before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
The assault on immigrants is part of a broader attack by the ruling class directed against the entire working class. Under conditions where the national debt has soared past $40 trillion and workers and young people are increasingly interested in socialist politics, the US government is criminalizing opposition and making people “illegal” who had lived legally in the country for years.
In July, the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and TPS protection is scheduled to end for roughly 170,000 Salvadorans on September 9.
In Springfield, Ohio, some Haitian immigrants have gone underground while more than 100 have been fitted with GPS trackers, typically reserved for violent felons under criminal supervision. ICE has imposed restrictions on many Haitians as to where they can travel or if they can leave the state.
One of the Haitians fitted with the equivalent of a modern-day yellow star, Wright State University college student Pierre Damas Bel, died August 31 in what his family calls a suicide, when he was struck by a tractor trailer on Interstate 70 near Springfield.
“After my son was outfitted with an ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal,” his father, Pierre Ronal Bel, said in a written statement. “He took two trips to Cincinnati and Westerville to plead with the officers to remove the bracelet since he’s a soccer player and he felt embarrassed and humiliated. When he’s among his classmates at the university—he’s a student at Wright State—he was bullied a lot with a lot of people telling him he’s a criminal.”
In a July 30 Instagram carousel post, Pierre Damas Bel highlighted his accomplishments and spoke in defense of immigrants and Haitians.
“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote.
Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience. I came here to study, to build my future and to live a better [life], not to be treated like a criminal. So now, how am I supposed to play college sports with a GPS monitor on my leg?
Screenshot of Pierre Damas Bel’s July 30 Instagram post describing the shame and humiliation of being forced to wear an ICE GPS ankle monitor.
On Thursday, the Trump administration carried out its third consecutive weekly deportation flight to Haiti since TPS ended, and at least the 11th flight this year. The flight originated in Alexandria, Louisiana and landed in Cap-Haïtien with 101 deportees aboard, according to a Haitian Foreign Affairs Ministry official.
In a fascistic post celebrating the deportation, DHS Secretary Mullin shared an image on X featuring black men in chains, with the caption, “Good morning, America. Today’s deportation destination: HAITI.”
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s September 3 post on X gloating over a deportation flight to Haiti, accompanied by an image of men in chains waiting to board a plane.
Haiti remains under a State Department Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory due to “crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest and limited healthcare.” As the World Socialist Web Site previously reported, war criminal and Trump ally Erik Prince’s private military company Vectus Global is carrying out an undeclared drone war with Haitian government forces against the population, which has resulted in over 1,000 deaths.
As ICE is increasing its kidnapping operations, resistance is growing among workers, students and community members throughout the country.
Last Wednesday, September 2, more than 1,000 people protested against ICE kidnapping operations in Danbury, Connecticut. In the week prior, Connecticut Mirror reported that ICE had taken over 100 people in the state, a majority from Danbury. The town is located about 50 miles north of New York City and is home to just under 90,000 people.
Danbury, Connecticut residents gather outside a courthouse to protest ICE kidnappings in the area, Thursday, August 27, 2026. [AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey]
Residents report that ICE thugs have been going after immigrants at work, while shopping for groceries and even while dropping off their kids at school bus stops. Juliana Soares, a lead organizer of the group “Danbury Unites for Immigrants,” told NBC that at least 65 families in the community had been impacted by ICE operations.
Speaking with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!,” Soares surmised that Danbury was being targeted by ICE because “Danbury is a diverse city, it’s one of the most diverse cities in the country.” Roughly one third of the city’s population is Latino, according to the US Census Bureau, including a large Brazilian population.
Describing the police terror, Soares said, “The streets were empty, kids stayed home from practice, kids stayed home from school, kids were seeing [their parents taken] from inside the bus, as agents, masked agents often, would shut down the street to just abduct people.”
In Colorado on Friday, September 4, students from more than 200 high schools throughout the state walked out of class to protest attacks on immigrants. Walkouts featuring dozens to hundreds of students occurred in Denver, the surrounding suburbs, Colorado Springs and, significantly, Greeley, where some 3,800 meatpacking workers went on strike earlier this year in the largest meatpacking struggle in decades.
A majority of the workers at the JBS plant in Greeley are immigrants, with dozens of languages spoken inside the plant. During the strike, a worker at the plant told WSWS reporters, “We represent the immigrants and all the people of color. That’s us, that’s the people that are doing these jobs.
“Without immigrants, there is no food, there is no work.”
Video from Friday’s protest in Greeley shows students marching while chanting, “Get ICE out!” Students carried handmade signs that read, “Immigrants make America great!” and “Abolish ICE.”
In an interview with the Greeley Tribune, Greeley Central High School student Josely Vazquez said, “People shouldn’t be scared to leave their houses.” Vazquez is originally from Mexico and moved to Greeley when she was 9.
The students marched to Lincoln Park. Along the way, drivers honked in support and flew flags from many countries, including Mexico and Palestine.
In Denver, hundreds of students rallied at La Alma-Lincoln Park to protest ICE kidnapping operations. In an interview with ColoradoNewsline, 15-year-old student Macy Brown said, “I think human rights are really important, and I think we all need to speak up against injustices that are happening right in front of us.”
Naya Ferguson, a 16-year-old student at Bear Creek High School in Jefferson County, said she drove to the park to attend the protest after seeing students walking out of her school. She told ColoradoNewsLine, “What ICE is doing is just unconstitutional, unlawful. It’s inhumane, and I just don’t want to sit back and just watch it happen. It’s not who I am.”
On Friday, on the other side of the country, in Fredrick, Maryland, ICE thugs, with police watching, bludgeoned and assaulted non-violent protesters who had formed a human chain around a house targeted by the immigration Gestapo. Residents and local reporters claim ICE began menacing residents in Fredrick on Monday, August 31, and specifically in the Taskers Chance neighborhood beginning on Wednesday.
Residents reported seeing SUVs with tinted windows and masked and armed men on street corners and parked outside houses. In response, residents began organizing shifts to observe the agents and their activities.
On Friday night, after agents had occupied a section of the neighborhood for more than 40 hours, ICE thugs lined up several vehicles and began to surround a house. Observers on the sidewalk were forced to move out of the path of the ICE vehicles, which drove onto the sidewalk, nearly striking several observers.
César Díaz, Frederick City Council president, told the Baltimore Banner he witnessed Katie Nash, vice president of the Frederick City Council, nearly run over by an ICE agent. “People had to move or risk getting run over,” he said, identifying Nash as a person at risk. “I had to step back to avoid from getting hit by the car.”
In front of the home, several community members and anti-ICE protesters were seated with locked arms to prevent ICE officers from entering. It is unclear if ICE agents ever presented a warrant of any kind, judicial or administrative.
With local police watching, ICE goons began attacking the nonviolent protesters in front of the house. Video taken by bystanders shows ICE agents swinging batons at people seated on the ground.
After clearing a path to the door, ICE agents entered the house but left without making any arrests.
The Trump administration is able to carry out the mass deportation operation only because of the collaboration of the Democratic Party. Last week the House, in a resounding bipartisan 370-48 vote, passed legislation to fund the federal government, including DHS, through December 11.
The bill, which was supported by Trump, had already cleared the Senate. It was signed by Trump on September 2.
The necessity of building an independent movement in the working class against both parties and the capitalist system they represent could not be any clearer. While posturing against Trump’s fascistic regime, the Democrats do everything in their power to ensure that his legislative and police state agenda moves forward.
The protests against ICE in Colorado, Maryland and throughout the country point the way forward. But protesting is not enough. The protests must become the starting point for uniting the working class, immigrant and native-born, and mobilizing its social power independently of both capitalist parties on the basis of a socialist perspective.
There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning — when spending becomes detached from arithmetic, presidential power becomes detached from law, and Congress and the courts become detached from the Constitution.
That’s where America is today.
The fiscal warning could hardly be clearer. The government’s debt has now passed $40 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion federal deficit for fiscal year 2026, with annual deficits rising to $3.1 trillion by 2036.
Worse, borrowing itself is becoming more expensive. Ten-year Treasury yields recently reached 4.6% and 30-year yields 5.2%, as investors demand greater compensation for lending money to Washington. The July 2026 deficit alone reached $432 billion.
The uniparty government in the past 110 years has produced a vicious circle: It spends more than it collects, borrows the difference, pays interest on the borrowing and borrows still more to pay the interest. Eventually, arithmetic becomes destiny.
But fiscal insolvency is only half the story. What is more frightening is the simultaneous deterioration of constitutional norms.
The president increasingly acts as though his personality is the source of his legal authority.
The United States has gone to war without the congressional authorization that the Constitution was designed to require. And the U.S. has attacked speedboats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with more than 220 people murdered and no legal basis for killing and dispensing with due process.
In January, the United States military killed 47 persons in Venezuela during its violent kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Whatever one’s opinion of Maduro, the fundamental question remains: By what constitutional authority does an American president decide that a foreign head of state may be violently seized by the United States? None.
This is not a defense of Maduro. It is a defense of the principle that American presidents do not possess a roving commission to decide whom the United States may depose, kidnap or kill.
The distinction matters because constitutional government is supposed to stand between political power and its targets. The president is supposed to enforce the law, not create it. Congress is supposed to write the laws, not ignore them. The courts are supposed to enforce the Constitution, not evade it.
Yet Congress increasingly behaves as though presidential power is someone else’s problem.
Members of Congress complain loudly when the other party occupies the White House and become remarkably accommodating when their own party holds it. The result is an informal bipartisan transfer of power from the legislative to the executive. Every president inherits the precedents accumulated by his predecessor and then adds a few of his own. The next president inherits those precedents and stretches them further.
Eventually, there are no meaningful limits.
The same disease infects the courts. Judicial review remains theoretically formidable, but judicial intervention often comes after the government has already exercised power unconstitutionally. A constitutional right that can be violated first and litigated later is a fragile right. The person who has been silenced, imprisoned, deported, injured or killed cannot be restored to his previous condition merely because a court eventually announces that the government acted unlawfully and awards damages. Nor can a half-built, never-congressionally-authorized, $1 billion ballroom-for-billionaires be feasibly demolished.
The central question should be: What are the government’s legal authorities and what are their limits?
Instead that question has become: What can the president get away with?
A free people should not have to depend upon the temperament of the person occupying the Oval Office. The Constitution was designed precisely because the founders understood that limited government cannot depend upon a few good people. They assumed that presidents would sometimes be venal and unscrupulous, Congress sometimes pliant and cowardly, and judges sometimes wrong. So they constructed competing institutions, with divided authorities and checks and balances, making governing difficult.
That difficulty was intentional.
A government that can spend without limit, wage war without Congress, kill without trial, kidnap without consequence and employ overwhelming force without due process is a government behaving outside the Constitution.
And the financial numbers make the constitutional deterioration even more ominous. A government approaching $40 trillion in debt cannot endlessly promise every constituency that someone else will pay.
This is how great powers decline — not necessarily with a dramatic explosion, but through accumulated exemptions, exceptions and evasions.
The president says the Constitution permits whatever he wants to do because the national security demands it. Congress permits the president to do what he wants because confronting him is politically inconvenient. The courts intervene only after it is too late to undo the damage and strain at a gnat to avoid hard decisions. The Treasury borrows another trillion dollars because balancing the books would be a nightmare.
The public becomes accustomed to extraordinary government power because yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s precedent.
Then, one morning, people wake up and discover that the constitutional republic they inherited exists mostly on paper.
But the night before this realization — at twilight’s last gleaming — the nation that once possessed protections for personal freedoms, opportunities for wealth, and a unique cultural environment sees its former fidelity to the first principles that made those things possible slipping away.
A republic survives only when the passionate among us light brushfires of freedom by insisting that the U.S. stays out of other countries’ business, presidents obey the law, Congresses exercise constitutional powers, courts enforce constitutional limits, war is a last resort, and governments acknowledge that borrowed money is not free money.
The alternative is gradual normalization of unlimited debt, unlimited executive discretion and unlimited rationalizations.
The twilight of our constitutional republic has not arrived because the sun suddenly disappeared. It has arrived because, little by little, nearly everyone became accustomed to the darkness.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent isSuicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Vessels have begun international port-to-port voyage to Gaza.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) today announced that a new international mission to challenge Israel’s illegal and deadly blockade of Gaza is underway.
The violence and torture that Israel inflicted on hundreds of flotilla volunteers this past spring, including severe beatings, repeated tasering, and sexual assault, has not deterred the FFC, just as Israel’s murder of 10 flotilla activists aboard the Mavi Marmara, in 2010 did not stop the movement. If anything, action is needed now more than ever. While much of the world has moved on from Gaza, believing a supposed “ceasefire” has ended the genocide, Israel continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza at will; use its blockade to restrict and manipulate the entry of the food, medicine, and fuel that a besieged population depends on to survive; and deny Palestinians their fundamental right to freedom.
The new mission involves a port-to-port voyage throughout Europe, bringing together human rights advocates, union activists, elected representatives, journalists, medical professionals, and other supporters of Palestinian freedom. In June and July 2026, FFC vessel, Handala II, sailed around Scandinavia, making stops at ports in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Earlier this month, the vessel, Kate, launched from Bristol, UK and has made port calls in Ireland, Germany, and France. Upcoming stops include ports in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, before the flotilla continues on to Gaza. At every stop, the flotilla will stand with local communities to press their own governments to end their complicity in genocide by blocking weapons and energy shipments that arm Israel’s aggression, ending diplomatic and military cooperation, and imposing real sanctions. The journey will build public support and international pressure ahead of the flotilla’s planned attempt to reach Gaza in October 2026.
“The Freedom Flotilla sails again because our governments continue to fail to uphold their obligations,” said Zohar Chamberlain Regev, FFC Steering Committee member. “At every port, we will carry the demand that Palestinians be free to live with dignity. In October, we intend to carry that demand and the solidarity of people around the world to Gaza’s shores.” Throughout the port-to-port journey, FFC and its local partners will organize public welcomes, community gatherings, media events, and opportunities for supporters to visit the vessels. Details of port calls and public events will be released as arrangements are confirmed. Since 2010, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition has brought together civil-society organizations and grassroots campaigns from around the world to challenge the blockade by sea. Its work continues the precedent established by the Free Gaza Movement, whose vessels began sailing to Gaza in 2008.
The FFC calls on governments to:
Demand safe, unimpeded passage of the flotilla to Gaza, including by making clear that any attack, seizure, or unlawful detention will have consequences;
Demand immediate and unrestricted access to Gaza and an end to Israel’s obstruction of food, water, medicine, and other essential no
Defend the freedom of navigation by declaring that any attack, boarding, seizure, diversion, or other use of force against flotilla vessels will trigger immediate diplomatic action;
Use diplomatic, economic, legal, and other available measures to end Israel’s unlawful blockade and prevent further violations of Palestinians’ fundamental rights and international humanitarian law; and Commit publicly to holding accountable any state or actor responsible for attacking, unlawfully detaining, or otherwise endangering flotilla participants.
“We know that sailing toward Gaza carries serious risks,” said Edward Digilio, an engineer from Maryland, United States. “But silence and inaction carry a much greater cost for Palestinians and the world. This mission is an expression of shared humanity and a refusal to accept the destruction of an entire people as normal.”
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![Iranian military personnel take part in an exercise titled "Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz", launched by the Naval Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is being carried out in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz on February 16, 2026. [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/AA-20260216-40574970-40574965-IRAN_LAUNCHES_MILITARY_EXERCISE_IN_THE_STRAIT_OF_HORMUZ_AGAINST_SECURITY_THREATS.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
(Photo credit: AFP)
