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      Trump issues ‘last warning’ to Hamas to accept Gaza ceasefire deal

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      Donald Trump on Sunday issued what he called his “last warning” to Hamas, urging the Palestinian militant group to accept a deal to release hostages from Gaza.“The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”Hamas said in a later statement that it received some ideas from the US side through mediators to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza.The group said it was discussing with mediators ways to develop those ideas, without giving specifics.Hamas also reiterated its readiness for negotiations to release all hostages in exchange for a “clear announcement of an end to the war” and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the enclave.“I think we’re going to have a deal on Gaza very soon,” Trump told reporters as he traveled back to Washington from New York, without offering any details. He added that he thought all the hostages would be returned, dead or alive. “I think we’re going to get them all.”On Saturday, Israel’s N12 News reported that Trump has put forth a new ceasefire proposal to Hamas.Under the deal, Hamas would free all the remaining 48 hostages on the first day of the truce in exchange for thousands of Palestinian prisoners jailed in Israel and negotiate an end to the war during a ceasefire in the enclave, according to N12.An Israeli official said Israel was “seriously considering” Trump’s proposal but did not elaborate on its details. More

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      One by one, leaders learn that grovelling to Trump leads to disaster. When will it dawn on Starmer? | Simon Tisdall

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      Sucking up to Donald Trump never works for long. Narendra Modi is the latest world leader to learn this lesson the hard way. Wooing his “true friend” in the White House, India’s authoritarian prime minister thought he’d conquered Trump’s inconstant heart. The two men hit peak pals in 2019, holding hands at a “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas. But it’s all gone pear-shaped thanks to Trump’s tariffs and dalliance with Pakistan. Like a jilted lover on the rebound, Modi shamelessly threw himself at Vladimir Putin in China last week. Don and Narendra! It’s over! Although, to be honest, it always felt a little shallow.Other suitors for Trump’s slippery hand have suffered similar heartbreak. France’s Emmanuel Macron turned on the charm, feting him at the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. But Trump cruelly dumped him after they argued over Gaza, calling him a publicity-seeker who “always gets it wrong”. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, desperate for a tete-a-tete, flew to Trump’s Scottish golf course to pay court. Result: perhaps the most humiliating, lopsided trade deal since imperial Britain’s 19th-century “unequal treaties” with Peking’s dragon throne.The list of broken pledges and dashed hopes is lengthy. Relationships between states normally pivot on power, policy and strategic interests. But with faithless, fickle Trump, it’s always personal – and impermanent. Disconcertingly, he told Mexico’s impressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, that he “likes her very much” – then threatened to invade her country, ostensibly in pursuit of drug cartels. Leaders from Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and South Africa have all attempted to ingratiate themselves, to varying degrees. They still haven’t fared well.All this should set red lights flashing for Britain’s Keir Starmer ahead of Trump’s state visit in 10 days’ time. The prime minister’s unedifying Trump-whisperer act has produced little benefit to date, at high reputational cost. Starmer apparently believes his handling of the US relationship is a highlight of his first year in office. Yet Trump ignores his Gaza ceasefire pleas and opposes UK recognition of a Palestinian state. He hugely boosted Putin, Britain’s nemesis, with his half-baked Alaska summit. US security guarantees for postwar Ukraine are more mirage than reality. His steel tariffs and protectionist policies continue to hurt UK workers.His second state visit is an appalling prospect. The honour is utterly undeserved. It’s obvious what Trump will gain: a royal endorsement, a chance to play at being King Donald, a privileged platform from which to deliver his corrosive, divisive populist-nationalist diatribes at a moment of considerable social fragility in the US and UK. Polls suggest many Britons strongly oppose the visit; and most don’t trust the US. So what Starmer thinks he will gain is a mystery. The fleeting goodwill of a would-be dictator who is dismantling US democracy and wrecking the global laws-based order championed by the UK is a poor return.View image in fullscreenAs he demands homage from abject subjects, this spectacle will confirm the UK in the eyes of the world as a lackey state, afraid to stand up for its values. Starmer’s government is now so morally confused that it refuses to acknowledge that Israel, fully backed by Trump, is committing genocide in Gaza, while at the same time making the wearing of a pro-Palestine T-shirt a terrorist act. The Trump travesty will be an embarrassment, signalling a further descent into colonial subservience. As next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence approaches, the chronically unhealthy “special relationship” has finally come full circle.Not everyone is genuflecting to Trump – and evidence mounts that resistance, not grovelling, is by far the best way to handle this schoolyard bully. Modi’s geopolitical fling in China showed he’s learned that when dealing with Trump, firm resolve, supported by alternative options, is the better policy. Last week’s defiant speech by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, reflected a similar realisation. Both he and Putin have discovered that when they dig their heels in, whether the issue is Ukraine, trade or sanctions, Trump backs off. Xi has adopted an uncompromising stance from the start. Putin uses flattery, skilfully manipulating Trump’s frail ego. The result is the same. Like cowards the world over, Trump respects strength because he’s weak. So he caves.The bigger the wolf, the more sheepishly Trump responds. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, like Putin, an indicted war criminal, has shown that by sticking to his guns (literally, in his case), he can face down Trump. More than that, Trump can be co-opted. After Netanyahu attacked Iran in June, against initial US advice, he induced the White House to join in – although, contemptibly, Trump only did so once he was certain who was winning. Then, typically, he claimed credit for a bogus world-changing victory. North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, similarly bamboozled Trump during his first term. Having learned nothing, and nursing his implausible Nobel peace prize ambitions, Trump is again raising the prospect of unconditional engagement with Kim.Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has the right idea. The more Trump tries to bully him with 50% tariffs and a barrage of criticism, the more he resists. Trump is particularly exercised over the fate of Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s hard-right predecessor, who, like Trump, mounted a failed electoral coup. But Lula is not having any of it. “If the United States doesn’t want to buy [from us], we will find new partners,” he said. “The world is big, and it’s eager to do business with Brazil.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the spirit! And guess what? Lula’s poll ratings are soaring. Wake up, Keir Starmer – and dump Trump.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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      US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes investigation

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      The United States has imposed sanctions against three Palestinian human rights groups that asked the international criminal court to investigate Israel over allegations of genocide in Gaza, according to a notice posted to the US treasury department’s website on Thursday.The three groups – the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Ramallah-based Al-Haq – were listed under what the treasury department said were international criminal court-related designations.The groups asked the ICC in November 2023 to investigate Israeli air strikes on densely populated civilian areas of Gaza, the siege of the territory and displacement of the population.A year later, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, Yoav Gallant, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.Donald Trump’s administration has imposed sanctions against ICC judges as well as its chief prosecutor over the Israeli arrest warrants and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan.The ICC, which was established in 2002, has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in its 125 member countries. Some nations, including the US, China, Russia and Israel, do not recognise its authority.The US sanctions against the Palestinian groups come days after the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying the legal criteria had been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.Israel called the announcement disgraceful and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies”.Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, after fighters from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the territory, attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza.Since then, Israel’s war has killed 63,000 people, forced nearly all Gaza’s residents to flee their homes at least once, and set off a starvation crisis in parts of the enclave that a global hunger monitor describes as a famine. More

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      Donald Trump could stop Gaza’s famine. Instead he’s following Biden’s lead | Mohamad Bazzi

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      A global hunger-monitoring group declared last week that Gaza’s largest city and its surrounding area were suffering from an “entirely man-made” famine, mostly caused by Israel’s deliberate starvation strategy and continued siege of the territory. This news won’t surprise anyone who has paid even scant attention to the images and videos of emaciated children and desperate parents that have been coming out of Gaza for months.But the first confirmation of famine by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which includes the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and other aid agencies, is an important institutional marker. Years from now, it will serve as a reminder of how Israel used starvation as a weapon of war while western powers did nothing. And it will be a source of shame for all those who will inevitably claim that they didn’t realize the extent of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, despite dozens of Palestinian journalists being killed for conveying that reality to the world.Donald Trump can stop this famine – the US is Israel’s largest weapons supplier and most important political supporter. But he has chosen not to. Instead, Trump is backing the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his latest plan to sow more death and destruction by invading Gaza City and displacing 1 million Palestinians. Last month, the US president said children in Gaza “look very hungry”, adding that scenes of suffering showed “real starvation”. Trump contradicted the Israeli government’s spurious claim that warnings about impending famine were fake news.Yet the Trump administration stayed silent after the IPC issued its latest report last week, confirming that Gaza City and its environs are in the midst of a full-blown famine. In order to declare a famine, the IPC requires that an area must cross three critical thresholds: at least 20% of households face an extreme shortage of food; at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and at least two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people die each day due to starvation, or disease and malnutrition. Since the IPC was founded in 2004 to warn of global food shortages, it had confirmed only three previous famines: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and Sudan last year.By the time a famine is declared, it’s often too late to stop an exponential rise in deaths due to starvation and malnutrition. When a drought-driven famine hit Somalia between 2010 and 2012, about half of the 250,000 people killed had already died by the time the IPC found that the country had crossed famine thresholds.During past famines, the IPC’s declaration helped drive global attention and prompted international donors to rush aid to affected regions. But the world’s attention is already focused on Gaza, and the UN and other aid groups say they have enough food near Gaza’s borders to feed its entire population of 2.1 million for nearly three months. Israel simply refuses to allow much of that aid into the besieged territory – a deliberate starvation campaign supported by the Trump administration.As Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, put it last week: “Food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.” He added that the Gaza famine was “caused by cruelty, justified by revenge, enabled by indifference and sustained by complicity”. Fletcher then appealed to world leaders to pressure Netanyahu to lift the siege.That plea was ultimately intended for Trump, the only leader who can force Netanyahu to end Gaza’s suffering. But the Israeli prime minister and his government continue to defy global outrage, largely because they have Trump’s unwavering support.Since early 2024, the UN and international relief groups have been sounding alarms about the potential for widespread starvation in Gaza because of the Israeli military blockade that started within days of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden ignored these warnings while his administration tried to undermine criticism of its unconditional weapons shipments to Israel. Throughout 2024, when parts of Gaza reached the brink of starvation, Israel would ease its siege allowing some food and supplies to reach desperate Palestinians – and averting a descent into full-blow famine.But Netanyahu abandoned that strategy in early March, when he imposed a new siege on Gaza, with Trump’s tacit approval, depriving Palestinians of food, medicine and other basic needs. Netanyahu, who worried that his extremist government coalition would collapse if he agreed to a permanent truce with Hamas, quickly resumed Israel’s war, breaking a ceasefire that was in place for two months. Since then, Israel has inflicted a more severe siege and starvation campaign on Gaza.On 18 August, Hamas announced that it had accepted a ceasefire deal that is virtually identical to one that Israel and the US had proposed a few weeks earlier. But as he has done for nearly two years, Netanyahu is dragging his feet and making new demands to obstruct negotiations and torpedo any potential deal. Ultimately, Netanyahu wants to prolong the war and stay in power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt seems Trump has been seduced by Netanyahu’s promise of a decisive victory with his latest plan to conquer Gaza City and other parts of the territory that are not yet occupied by the Israeli military. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said the Gaza war would reach “a conclusive ending” in the next two or three weeks.Netanyahu has been promising – and failing to deliver – a “total victory” over Hamas for more than a year. “Total victory over Hamas will not take years,” he said confidently in a speech in February 2024. “It will take months.” Since then, Netanyahu expressed lofty ambitions to reshape the entire Middle East, but he continued to defy international and domestic pressure to specify Israel’s postwar plans for Gaza or how the war could end short of his amorphous goal of “total victory”. And that was a deliberate tactic: from the beginning, Netanyahu’s allies wanted a protracted war that would end with Israel occupying Gaza and ethnically cleansing its Palestinian inhabitants.Last week, a top Biden administration official confirmed in an interview aired by an Israeli TV channel that, soon after the October 2023 Hamas attack, Netanyahu was preparing for a grinding guerrilla war in Gaza which could last “for decades”. Matthew Miller, the former state department spokesperson who often defended the administration’s unconditional support for Israel, also said that Netanyahu had repeatedly sabotaged US-brokered ceasefire negotiations. (An Israeli TV report found the prime minister nixed deals or near-agreements seven times.) But the Biden administration consistently blamed Hamas for refusing to accept a ceasefire, and rarely called out Netanyahu for his obstinacy, thinking it would harden Hamas’s position.For 15 months, Biden provided the Israeli premier with political cover and billions of dollars in US arms, becoming more deeply complicit in Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon and other war crimes. Today, Trump is repeating the same ineffective and immoral strategy, enticed by Netanyahu’s empty promise of victory while famine spreads in Gaza.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University More

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      Burner phones, wiped socials: the extreme precautions for visitors to Trump’s America

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      Keith Serry was set to bring a show to New York City’s Fringe festival this year, but pulled the plug a few weeks out. After 35 years of traveling to the United States, he says he no longer feels safe making the trip.“The fact that we’re being evaluated for our opinions entering a country that, at least until very recently, purported to be an example of democracy. Yeah, these are things that make me highly uncomfortable,” said Serry, a Canadian performer and attorney.“You’re left thinking that you don’t want to leave evidence of ‘bad opinions’ on your person.”Serry is among a substantial cohort of foreign nationals reconsidering travel to the US under the Trump administration, after troubling reports of visitors facing intense scrutiny and detention on arrival.In March, a French scientist who had been critical of Donald Trump was refused entry to the US after his phone was searched. An Australian writer who was detained and denied entry in June said he was initially grilled about his articles on pro-Palestinian protests, and then watched as a border agent probed even the most personal images on his phone. He was told the search uncovered evidence of past drug use, which he had not acknowledged on his visa waiver application, leading to his rejection. German, British and other European tourists have also been detained and sent home.More than a dozen countries have updated their travel guidance to the US. In Australia and Canada, government advisories were changed to specifically mention the potential for electronic device searches.On the advice of various experts, people are locking down social media, deleting photos and private messages, removing facial recognition, or even traveling with “burner” phones to protect themselves.In Canada, multiple public institutions have urged employees to avoid travel to the US, and at least one reportedly told staff to leave their usual devices at home and bring a second device with limited personal information instead.“Everybody feels guilty, but they don’t know exactly what they’re guilty of,” said Heather Segal, founding partner of Segal Immigration Law in Toronto, describing the influx of concerns she’s been hearing.“‘Did I do something wrong? Is there something on me? Did I say something that’s going to be a problem?’”She advised travelers to assess their risk appetite by reviewing both the private data stored on their devices and any information about them that’s publicly accessible, and to consider what measures to take accordingly.US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has broad powers to search devices with minimal justification. Travelers can refuse to comply, but non-citizens risk being denied entry. CBP data shows such searches are rare; last year, just over 47,000 out of 420 million international travelers had their devices examined. This year’s figures show a significant increase, with the third quarter of 2025 reflecting an uptick in electronic device searches higher than any single quarter since 2018, when available data begins.“Anecdotally, it seems like these searches have been increasing, and I think the reason why that’s true is, undoubtedly, I think they are more targeted than before,” said Tom McBrien, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.“It seems like they are targeting people who they just don’t generally like politically.”Travelers who are concerned about their privacy should consider minimizing the amount of data they carry, McBrien said.“The less data you have on you, the less there is to search, and the less there is to collect,” he said. Beyond using a secondary device, he suggested securely deleting data, moving it to a hard drive or storing it in a password-protected cloud account.A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson rejected claims that CBP had stepped up device searches under the new administration or singled out travelers over their political views.“These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security,” the spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement.“Allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible.”The statement acknowledged, however, that there had been heightened vetting under Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Under the leadership of the Trump Administration and Secretary Noem, we have the most secure border in American history,” it said. “This has allowed CBP to focus to actually vet and interview the people attempting to come into our country.”Alistair Kitchen, the Australian writer who was denied entry to the US in June, said the DHS’s denial of political targeting directly contradicts what he was told on arrival.Border officials “bragged actively that the reason for my targeting, for my being pulled out of line for my detainment, was explicitly because of what I’d written online about the protests at Columbia University”, he told the Guardian.While he doesn’t plan to return to the US under the Trump administration, Kitchen said that if he ever did, he would either not take a phone or bring a burner.“Under no conditions would I ever hand over the passcode to that phone,” he added. “I would accept immediate deportation rather than hand over the passcode. People should think seriously before booking travel, especially if they are journalists or writers or activists.”Various foreign nationals told the Guardian they are rethinking travel plans for tourism, family visits, academic events and work.Donald Rothwell, a professor who teaches international law at the Australian National University, says he no longer plans to accept speaking invitations to the US over fears of being detained or denied entry – which, he noted, could also trigger red flags on his record for future travel.He’s even considered traveling without a device at all, but is concerned his academic commentary in the media could be used against him regardless.“I might be commenting on matters that could be quite critical of the United States,” he said. “For example, I was very critical of the legal or lack of legal justification for the US military strikes on Iran in June.”Kate, a Canadian whose name has been withheld due to privacy concerns, said she has wrestled with complicated decisions about whether to travel across the border to see American relatives, including for an upcoming wedding. During a trip earlier this year, she deleted her social media apps before going through customs.Despite DHS assurances that travelers are not flagged for political beliefs, she said “it’s hard to believe things that this government is saying”.“It would be really nice to have trust that those kinds of things were true, and that these kinds of stories that you hear, while absolutely horrific, are isolated incidents,” she said.“But I do feel like in many ways, the United States has sort of lost its goodwill.” More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Bernie Sanders in urging US to end Gaza famine

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      Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”Sanders, who also pushed resolutions to ban selling US weapons to Israel, has long been consistent about his concern regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid the war.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outspoken, far-right Georgia Republican, also called for greater compassion for Palestinians in a social media post Saturday, a day after UN secretary general António Gutteres described the famine in the territory as a “failure of humanity”.The US representative, in a departure from the majority of her peers in Congress, described the Gaza humanitarian crisis as a genocide last month. In a long post on X, she then said that while Israel’s war against Hamas was justified, the suffering of civilians was not.“Does Hamas deserve it? Yes,” Greene wrote, in part. “Do innocent people and children deserve it? No.”“The innocent people in Gaza did not kill and kidnap the innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th,” she continued. “Just as we spoke out and had compassion for the victims and families of Oct7, how can Americans not speak out and have compassion for the masses of innocent people and children in Gaza?”Greene linked the entirety of US financial and military aid to Israel to the conflict, arguing that it “means every U.S. tax payer is contributing to Israel’s military actions”.“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with,” Greene concluded. “And I will not be silent about it.”The post received an almost immediate response from far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who reportedly petitioned the White House to suspend the entry of injured Palestinian children from Gaza to the US.Greene and Loomer, both claiming the mantle of Maga authenticity, have bitterly clashed on the issue, with Loomer falsely describing Palestinian children as a “national security threat” and “Islamic invaders”.Loomer, who is Jewish, once claimed that her ban from social media platforms for anti-Muslim hate speech was antisemitic, while Greene infamously shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory that wildfires in California might have been started by Jewish space lasers.On Saturday, Loomer hit out at Greene, falsely accusing her of calling for Palestinians from Gaza to be resettled in the US and asking: “Why are you advocating for GAZANS to come to the US? How is Islamic immigration ‘America First’?”The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said last week that parts of Gaza are experiencing a “man-made” famine in the Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City, site of a new Israeli offensive.“As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the report said. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed.”The Israeli agency heading aid distribution in Gaza, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), rejected the report, saying it “relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas”.On Saturday, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said on X that “the [international] media is missing the real story of ‘famine’ in Gaza. Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas. Meanwhile UN food sits rotting in sun. The UN should declare itself corrupt & incompetent.”In her post, Greene wrote that if the US were being bombed day and night, with millions killed or injured, and the world said “Americans voted for their government so they deserve it… How would you feel? What would you think? What would you do?” More

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      US state department stops issuing visas for Gaza’s children to get medical care after far-right campaign

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      The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump who has described herself as “a proud Islamophobe”.“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the state department said in a message posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, from which Loomer was banned before it was purchased by Elon Musk.In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, Loomer had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with false claims that their shouts of joy were “jihadi chants” and that they were “doing the HAMAS terror whistle”.View image in fullscreenLoomer also falsely claimed that she had “exclusively obtained” the two video clips she shared. One was copied from a medical aid charity’s public Instagram account and the other was from the Houston Chronicle’s YouTube channel.After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone”, Loomer demanded to know “who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone”.“Is Rubio even aware of this?” Loomer wrote, in reference to the secretary of state who was at the time in Alaska meeting Vladimir Putin. “Why would anyone at the State Department give visas to individuals who live in Gaza, which is run by HAMAS?” Loomer wrote, before falsely stating that “95% of GAZANS voted for HAMAS.”In fact, Hamas got 44% of party list votes in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections across Gaza and the West Bank, and lost three of the five districts in Gaza to the secular Fatah party. There has been no election since then.After the visa program was halted, Loomer declared victory. “This is fantastic news,” she wrote in response to the state department announcement. “Hopefully all GAZANS will be added to President Trump’s travel ban. There are doctors in other countries. The US is not the world’s hospital!”Republican Congressman Randy Fine explicitly commended Loomer after the visa change was announced, in a sign of her sway over some US policy. “Massive credit needs to be given to @LauraLoomer for uncovering this and making me and other officials aware. Well done, Laura,” Fine wrote on X.The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, a US-based charity, called on the Trump administration to “reverse this dangerous and inhumane decision.” Over the last 30 years the charity has evacuated thousands of Palestinian children to the US for medical care, it said in a statement.“Medical evacuations are a lifeline for the children of Gaza who would otherwise face unimaginable suffering or death due to the collapse of medical infrastructure in Gaza.”The Council on Islamic-American Relations said the block on visas was “the latest sign that the intentional cruelty of President Trump’s ‘Israel First’ administration knows no bounds” and added that it was “deeply ironic” that the Trump administration was meanwhile “rolling out the red carpet for racists and indicted war criminals from the Israeli government.”“This ban is just the latest example of our government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, which is increasingly rejected by the American people,” it continued.Paul Graham, co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X after the visa halt was announced: “If Laura Loomer had been around in 1940, she’d have been trying to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the US. You know she would. And if Trump had been president then, she’d have succeeded.” More

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      ‘Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine

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      More than 115 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies.”The writers note that the issue’s censorship is also an example of “anti-Palestinian discrimination, obstructing the dissemination of knowledge on Palestine at the height of the genocide in Gaza”.The special issue of the prestigious education journal was planned six months into Israel’s war in Gaza to tackle questions about the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US, as the Guardian previously reported.“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts – which came against the backdrop of the devastation of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, including the shuttering of hundreds of schools and destruction of all of the territory’s universities.More than a year later, the special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether. In an email obtained by the Guardian, the group’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, cited what she described as an inadequate review process and the need for “considerable copy editing” as well as a “lack of internal alignment” about the special issue. She said that the decision was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.The authors and editors flatly rejected that characterization, telling the Guardian that the cancellation set a dangerous precedent and was an example of what many scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.“The decision by HEPG to abandon their own institutional mission – as well as the responsibilities that their world-leading stature demands – is scholasticide in action,” the dozens of scholars who signed the recent letter also wrote, using a term coined by Palestinian scholars to describe Israel’s “deliberate and systematic destruction” of Palestine’s educational system.“It is unconscionable that HEPG have chosen to publicly frame their cancellation of the special issue as a matter of academic quality, while omitting key publicly-reported facts that point to censorship.”Arathi Sriprakash, a professor of sociology and education at the University of Oxford and one of the letter’s signatories, told the Guardian that the special issue’s cancellation has mobilised so many education scholars “precisely because we recognise the grave consequences of such threats to academic freedom and academic integrity”.“The ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza has involved the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many education institutions around the world there are active attempts to shut down learning about what’s happening altogether. As educationalists, we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and learning without fear or threat.”‘Assault on academic freedom’The ordeal around the special Palestine issue played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s crackdown on US higher education institutions’ autonomy on the basis of combating alleged antisemitism on campuses.Harvard is the only university that has sued the administration in response to it cutting billions of dollars in federal funds and other punishing measures it has unleashed on universities. But internally, Harvard has pre-empted many of the administration’s demands, including by demoting scholars, scrapping initiatives giving space to Palestinian narratives and adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism that critics say is antithetical to academic inquiry.In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.Harvard is reportedly close to finalizing a settlement with the Trump administration along the lines of those reached by other top universities.Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at Barnard College and one of 21 contributors to the cancelled special issue, criticized the university’s handling of the matter as yet another sign of institutional capitulation.“If the universities – or in this case a university press – are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing,” she told the Guardian last month. “What’s the point?”A spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest letter but in an earlier statement to the Guardian wrote that the publisher “remains deeply committed to our robust editorial process”.Last month, the free speech group PEN America also condemned the special issue’s cancellation as a “blatant assault on academic freedom”.“Canceling an entire issue so close to publication is highly unusual, virtually unheard of,” Kristen Shahverdian, the program director for the group’s Campus Free Speech initiative, said in a statement.“Silencing these scholarly voices robs academics, students, and the public of the opportunity to engage with their insights. It also sends a chilling message in the context of the Trump administration’s unrelenting pressure on Harvard University and mounting political interference in higher education, including efforts that target scholarship on Palestine.” More