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Senators say US is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza

by Evelyn Reynolds 11 September 2025, 19:39

Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both members of the Senate foreign relations committee, released their findings in a report on Thursday after returning from a congressional delegation to the Middle East where, they note, the destruction goes beyond bombs and bullets. They say they also found a systematic campaign to strangle humanitarian aid, which they call “using food as a weapon of war”.“The Netanyahu government has gone far beyond targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on all the people of Gaza,” Van Hollen said at a Thursday press conference. “What they’re doing, and what we witnessed, is putting those goals into action.”At least one hundred people have died from famine in Gaza, the United Nations said this week, citing the Gaza health ministry.View image in fullscreenThe senators, who visited Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate strategy to ethnically cleanse the local population rather than collateral damage from the war against Hamas. Their report is titled The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.During their visit to the Egyptian-Gaza border, they observed Rafah, the southern Gaza city – once home to 270,000 Palestinians – reduced to rubble. Van Hollen described how both lawmakers climbed an outside fire escape from the Egyptian side of the border to get a clear view of the destruction.The lawmakers also met with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who described participating in “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure”. Their report noted first-hand accounts of “how this was a part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools and other civilian sites”.The senators documented arbitrary restrictions that have left aid groups unable to predict what will be denied entry. Jordanian officials told them that peanut butter, honey and dates had been suddenly banned from convoys, with entire trucks turned away for carrying a single restricted item. Each truck, the report says, is subject to a new $400 customs processing fee, and when the truck is not able to make it through the screening process, the $400 has to be paid again to join a later convoy. Because of those and other restrictions by the Israeli government, humanitarian aid coming in from Jordan was currently operating under 10% of its capacity, according to the report.In Egypt, the senators report, the UN’s fleet of trucks have “sustained severe damage”, with United Nations organizations showing the senators video of their convoys coming under fire from the IDF, “a regular occurrence”. The senators also toured a warehouse run by the Egyptian Red Crescent and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) with goods that had been banned by Israel, including solar-powered water pumps, tents, wheelchairs and even spare parts for trucks under “dual-use” restrictions, according to the report.At the Israeli port of Ashdod, WFP officials told the senators that 2,200 shipping containers of food – enough to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks – sit delayed by screening procedures requiring each pallet to be checked individually.Merkley described the strategy’s two components: “One is to destroy homes so that they cannot be returned to … That second strategy is to deprive Palestinians of essentials to live, food, water, medicine.”Israel replaced the UN’s hundreds of distribution sites with just four aid points for 2 million people, three located only in southern Gaza. The senators heard accounts of malnourished mothers unable to walk miles to distribution sites while carrying children and then lift 40lb food boxes for the return journey. From 22 May to 31 July, 1,373 people were killed in the vicinity of these sites, according to the UN.That Israel and the United States are calling plans for the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza a “voluntary exodus” is one of the “most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told”, the report reads.“There is nothing voluntary about wanting to depart when your home is gone, when your agricultural fields are no longer accessible,” Van Hollen said at the press conference.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBoth senators accused the US government of enabling the described ethnic cleansing. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Van Hollen said. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.”Sentiment in Congress with regards to longstanding US support for Israel has been slow moving, but it has been shifting. A recent Senate vote on arms sales to Israel saw 27 Democratic senators – more than half the caucus – oppose weapons transfers.“The same values that made me a champion for Israel compel me to say what they are doing to the Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza, is absolutely wrong,” said Merkley.Both lawmakers called for immediate action to secure a ceasefire, noting that Israeli hostage families had told them Netanyahu “has prioritized his political survival over the survival of our loved ones”.“The world has a moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing,” their report concludes. “Strong words alone will not be sufficient. The world must impose penalties and costs on those carrying out this plan.” More

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Last month, federal regulators approved the long-anticipated merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, positioning David Ellison – the founder of Skydance and the son of megabillionaire Larry Ellison – as one of the most powerful figures in US media. Paramount Skydance Corporation, as it is now officially known, is one of a small handful of American media conglomerates, with Paramount Pictures, cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, and CBS all under its umbrella. CBS, in turn, runs one of the major US news operations, with nightly news viewership in the millions and 60 Minutes still being the most watched news program on network television.The implications of the merger are far-reaching and were already being felt ahead of its final approval. In July, Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment the president disapproved of, and a few weeks later, CBS controversially cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which many observers speculated was at least partly about jettisoning an outspoken critic of Trump in anticipation of the deal.But one of the most buzzed-about aspects is Paramount’s possible acquisition of the Free Press, the digital media company founded by Bari Weiss as a Substack newsletter in 2021, and Weiss’s potential new role steering CBS’s editorial slant. In July, the Financial Times reported that Weiss was seeking at least $200m for her website – more than double its valuation a year earlier and more than the site’s admittedly impressive 155,000 paid subscribers (roughly a 10th of total subscribers) would seem to justify. That same week, the media newsletter Puck published an anonymously sourced report that Weiss would possibly be advising David Rhodes, a former CBS and Fox News executive and the current chair of Sky News, in the event that Rhodes resumes running CBS. And just last week, Puck reported that the deal was all but finalized, with the Free Press to be acquired for somewhere in the $100m to $200m range (less than Weiss sought but nothing to sneeze at) and with Weiss tasked with “guiding the editorial direction of the [CBS news] division”.If all this comes to pass, it will cement Weiss as a key figure in shaping the national news environment, just five years after her much publicized resignation from the New York Times over what she characterized as a censorious and hostile workplace. This came in the wake of the resignation of the editorial page editor, James Bennet, after a staff uproar over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter protesters.Weiss, 41, is no stranger to publicity; since 2019, she has been the subject of mostly fawning profiles in Vanity Fair, Semafor, Los Angeles Magazine, the Times of London, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, and her former employers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The product of an idyllic and fiercely Zionist upbringing in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, she first gained notice for her campaign against pro-Palestinian faculty during her undergrad years at Columbia University. A stint at the Bret Stephens-run neoconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page followed, before she and Stephens both departed for the New York Times, where her tenure as an opinion editor and writer was stormy well before her resignation. She and her wife, fellow voluntary Times exile Nellie Bowles, decamped to Los Angeles, where she wasted little time launching new projects: she co-founded the “heterodox” University of Austin and launched a Substack, originally dubbed Common Sense and then rebranded as the Free Press, which quickly acquired venture capital backers, a sizable subscriber base, and an editorial staff numbering in the dozens and including many media industry veterans. Her triumphant return to New York City last year marked her as a power broker in her own right. More than any other figure in her age cohort, Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and “woke” progressives, even as she decried “cancel culture” and claimed to champion free speech – and with the Free Press, she has developed a whole newsroom around that mission. The Guardian put detailed claims in this piece to Bari Weiss and the Free Press and did not receive an official response.View image in fullscreenWhen New York Magazine convened 57 of “the most powerful people in media” to discuss the industry’s future last year, Weiss was on the list. A month later, after Trump’s victory, the Free Press co-hosted an inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X and Uber, attended by the former British prime minister Liz Truss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Dr Mehmet Oz. For each of her haters, and there are many, Weiss counts Jeff Bezos, Jerry Seinfeld (whose daughter is on staff at the Free Press), and Sheryl Sandberg among her fans, and Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Howard Schultz among her financial backers. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” the conservative pollster Frank Luntz told the New York Times last year. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”In just a few years, Weiss has gone from a punchline in media circles to one of the most influential names in the industry, one with a genuine popular following beyond insiders and donors. Her stunning comeback is a tribute to her hustle, her oft-acknowledged personal charisma, and above all her unapologetic support for Israel and attacks on progressive social justice dogmas, often disparaged as “wokeness” – both of which align her with some of the most powerful people alive even as they alienate her from many of her generational peers in journalism.But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions, and how her efforts have been turbocharged by Trump’s return to the White House. If Weiss does join CBS, it will only formalize the role she has already carved out as the Trump administration’s de facto ally in its effort to silence progressive and pro-Palestinian voices. Weiss will be an ideological commissar situated within the highest levels of the media business, wielding her considerable platform to help the White House enforce compliance in spaces that fostered resistance during Trump’s first term: the media, academia and civil society.To get a sense of the kind of opportunities Weiss might have to influence decisions and coverage at CBS, it is worth flashing back a year to the fall of 2024. On 30 September, Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS’s morning news show, where he was interviewed by anchor Tony Dokoupil over Coates’s new book, The Message, which includes a scathing firsthand account of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dokoupil questioned Coates aggressively (some would say condescendingly) over what he called a one-sided depiction of Israel, and the interview was litigated on social media for days, pitting supporters of Israel and Palestine against each other on predictable lines.A week later, the Free Press joined the fray with an exclusive from inside CBS News, where the Coates interview was at least as divisive as it was to the wider public. On the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, someone high up at CBS leaked recordings of an editorial meeting to the Free Press, revealing that, as the site’s editors put it, “the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’” Though the article acknowledged that CBS’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, defended Dokoupil’s tough questions, it portrayed the meeting overall as an example of the woke conformity endemic to institutions such as CBS.“The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” the Free Press editorialized, in a sweeping indictment both of CBS and of elite liberalism writ large. “He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful. One can find more sophisticated versions of The Message in the course catalogs of Ivy League universities, the editorial pages of leading newspapers, and in the reports of well-funded NGOs. It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus.”A month later, Trump won the presidential election. Since then, what the Free Press editors termed “this new elite consensus” has been under siege from the federal government, which has openly sought to purge anything it considers “wokeness” from universities, newspapers and NGOs, and in particular has sought to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. Weiss, who has presented herself as a leading defender of free speech, has in effect leveraged her publication to help the government suppress it.The Free Press’s involvement in the administration’s war on Columbia University, Weiss’s alma mater (and, full disclosure, mine; I socialized with Weiss as an undergraduate, though we have not spoken in years) has been a case in point. Trump’s joint task force to combat antisemitism chose the Free Press to break the news on 7 March that the administration was withholding $400m in federal grants to Columbia over the university’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks – essentially the opening volley in Trump’s assault on elite higher education. Two weeks later, on 21 March, Columbia conceded to Trump’s blackmail, agreeing to place its Middle East studies department – which Weiss has been crusading against since she was an undergraduate two decades ago – under academic receivership. Just four days after that, the Free Press published a leaked transcript of a private Zoom call in which the university’s then president, Katrina Armstrong, told about 75 faculty members that she did not intend to comply with all of Trump’s demands, despite her public surrender. Three days later, Armstrong resigned – and according to the New York Times, a key reason why was that Trump’s antisemitism task force expressed concern over the transcript leaked to the Free Press.Weiss’s publication, in short, was the preferred vehicle for conveying information from Columbia insiders who wanted to purge all criticism of Israel from the university to Trump administration officials who were using unprecedented financial pressure to help them do exactly that. Just as with CBS a year ago, Weiss and the Free Press were there to help reactionaries at elite institutions advance their internal turf wars – and unlike a year ago, those reactionaries can now count on the full weight of Trump’s authoritarian administration to back them up.The same playbook can also be seen in the Free Press’s efforts to discredit National Public Radio, which from 1971 until this summer served as America’s major publicly supported broadcaster. Last April, the Free Press published an error-laden article by a disgruntled NPR business editor, Uri Berliner, who accused his employer of pervasive liberal bias and of betraying America’s trust. Berliner was predictably hired by the Free Press two months later, and within a year, he was being invited by House Republicans to testify against his former employer. In July of this year, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill voted to defund NPR, and the Free Press published Berliner’s victory lap. The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.These are the real stakes of Weiss potentially joining CBS. If Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press goes through, Weiss will probably be in a position to recruit a network of snitches and rightwing thought police, both from within existing CBS staff and from her own publication, ensconced throughout one of the four largest US media conglomerates. CBS staffers are reportedly “apoplectic” at the news of her impending role, with some raising concerns about a “hall monitor” approach to coverage and others threatening to resign – resignations Ellison and Weiss might welcome, as it would give them an opportunity to start fresh. Weiss could be responsible for shaping coverage and enforcing her own orthodoxy, especially with regard to Israel and its critics – an issue around which Weiss has consistently provided cover for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government. This would represent a shift for CBS; Paramount’s outgoing chair, Shari Redstone, is an avowed supporter of Israel who has reportedly been outraged by 60 Minutes’s coverage since the 7 October attacks, and has openly expressed hope that the Trump administration could force CBS to clamp down on “anti-Israel bias”, which Weiss is ideally suited to facilitate.View image in fullscreenLast month, the Free Press sparked widespread outrage by publishing an article by staffers Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, who reported that the starving Palestinian children whose images appeared in multiple mainstream outlets were all suffering from pre-existing conditions such as cystic fibrosis or rickets – a clear attempt to bolster a narrative the publication has been pushing for months that widely reported famine conditions in Gaza are a hoax. Reingold and Lukyanova’s article drew condemnation from many quarters, including from the president of Refugees International, who pointed out that it is precisely children with such conditions who are most vulnerable in a famine. But the Free Press brushed off its critics and claimed credit for pushing CNN and the Washington Post to caveat their coverage in light of their reporting. “Journalistic outlets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this story has had more than its share,” wrote the editors. As if to prove their point, Netanyahu himself posted a video of Reingold defending her work, with the caption: “Facts matter.” (The Guardian stands by the stories it published that included the image and says the photo did not act to deceive.)One of the critics the Free Press singled out was Ben Rhodes, a former top adviser to Barack Obama, who, the Free Press noted, was once nicknamed “Hamas”, an epithet used by his Obama administration colleague Rahm Emanuel (who sat for a friendly interview with Weiss in July) for his willingness to criticize Israel. In an appearance on Pod Save the World – which is part of Crooked Media, the independent progressive podcasting network run by former Obama staffers – Rhodes called Reingold and Lukyanova’s reporting “sociopathic” and “grotesque”. “There’s something wrong with you, deeply, deeply fucked up,” he added. These would be harsh words coming from anyone, but Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, who has been floated as CBS’s next executive and who reportedly would be working closely with Weiss. In Ben Rhodes’s 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, he acknowledged political differences with his brother while also saying they have always been close. That he would speak publicly with such undisguised contempt about Weiss’s media company in that context suggests serious alarm at the possible direction of CBS News.Alarm is a justifiable reaction. Weiss has often been underestimated, but the success of the Free Press to date vindicates her seemingly limitless ambition. That is in spite of internal turmoil: in May, the media newsletter Breaker reported that the Free Press had seen a number of notable departures amid its rapid expansion and that staff had been skeptical of Weiss’s “chaotic” management style.But in the context of Trump’s federally funded culture war, it is unclear any of that will matter. In order to avoid the president’s disfavor and present themselves as worthy of access, legacy media companies are desperate to tap into the audience and the relationships that Weiss has so effectively courted.Although the Free Press did not respond on the record to the Guardian’s questions, a source within the Free Press defended the range of views the organization publishes and emphasized that it was not a partisan shop.When Trump first ran for office, Weiss positioned herself as a “Never Trumper”, following the lead of her mentor Stephens and other prominent neoconservatives, and in 2017 she described the first Trump administration as “shambolic”. But this February, as Trump kicked off his second term, Weiss told Fox News’s Howard Kurtz that her stance on Trump had softened. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said, claiming she cried at her desk the first time Trump won. Now, she explained, she had come to appreciate Trump for two main reasons: first, she saw the left’s “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him” as “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”, and second, she approved of some of his actual policies, noting particularly his Israel-aligned moves in the Middle East.The Free Press claims to be independent and non-partisan, and ahead of the 2024 election it canvassed its own staff and determined that it was equally divided between supporters of Trump, Kamala Harris and neither. But during Trump’s second term, the site has been noticeably sympathetic to the administration. As the UnPopulist has carefully documented, Weiss has made a choice in the Trump restoration era – rather than position the Free Press as a heterodox champion of “classical liberalism”, as it was initially presented during the Biden years, she has aligned herself with the White House’s priorities. The hiring of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a formerly left-leaning journalist turned fervent Maga pundit, this April was a clear signal of Weiss’s repositioning. This choice has alienated many of her former champions – for instance, Glenn Greenwald, who achieved a public rapprochement with Weiss in the early days of the Free Press (both Weiss and Greenwald have thrived and handsomely profited on Substack), has since excoriated her for consistently attacking the free speech rights of Israel critics. But it has also set her up well to ascend to even greater influence.Weiss is not afraid to burn bridges, scandalize critics or be branded a hypocrite in pursuit of power. In that sense, she has something in common with the president who has done so much to enable her rise. But Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish. With her education, experience and extensively cultivated networks, she is uniquely well-suited to champion the prerogatives of those in academia, media, publishing and similar sectors who feel threatened by progressive social movements. Liberal institutions produced Bari Weiss, and now at least one could be hers to remake.
David Klion is a columnist for the Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and currently working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism More
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Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’
by Evelyn Reynolds 8 September 2025, 12:00
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View image in fullscreenWhen a history of resistance to the lurching authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s second presidency is written, it could well begin on 11 April 2025, inside a small immigration courtroom in remote, central Louisiana.It was there, in the early afternoon, that a slight young man dressed in a blue uniform jumpsuit spoke calmly but directly to the new administration – away from the gaze of television cameras and 1,000 miles (1,610km) from his friends and family. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organiser, had been arrested a month earlier – snatched from the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building as he returned home with his wife. Now, detained in the small town of Jena, he sat before a judge who had just ruled that he was eligible to be deported from the United States purely for his political views.Khalil asked for permission to speak. He paused for a moment, before sharply rebuking the jurist who continued to hold his fate in her hands by throwing her own words back at her. He reminded her that she had guaranteed that the court would ensure him “due process” and “fundamental fairness”.“Neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process,” he told her, in effect branding the venue a kangaroo court. “This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.”I was one of a handful of journalists in Jena that day. It was a period of particular distress in the US, his arrest being the first of a spate of high-profile detentions of students seized off the streets by immigration agents over their political views. In that moment of fear, when so many were going silent, I was taken aback by the quiet courage that seemed to come so naturally to Khalil even as formal political opposition to Trump’s iron fist had largely faltered.Four months on, and now bailed from detention and back in New York, I ask Khalil where it had come from and whether he would define it as an act of bravery.“No. I have always believed in standing up against injustice,” he says in his gentle voice. “I knew that it was predetermined. That it was a play. It was theatre. I did not want to play within their rules.”On a bright summer’s day in Brooklyn, Khalil invites me to his new apartment that commands a towering view over the borough’s low-rises. The walls are freshly painted white – he had moved in just a few weeks earlier – and we sit on a grey sofa by the window. His four-month-old son, Deen, is crying softly in the next room as Noor Abdalla, his wife, soothes him.It is an archetypal scene of a young New York family: a baby rocker sits beside a large TV, white tulips lean against a ceramic vase, bright artwork adorns the walls. Khalil is warm and candid, he offers me chocolate and water before we start talking. But the grim reality of his situation soon lingers as we dial an attorney from his legal team who listens in to our three-hour conversation as a precaution.Although he is free from detention, the Trump administration’s case against him is still winding through the courts. While he is a legal permanent resident, he acknowledges deportation could still be the ultimate outcome.View image in fullscreen“This administration is trying to do everything in its power – and beyond its power, in fact – to punish me and deport me,” he says. “Up until very recently, they were trying to rearrest me.”He is working on contingency plans for if and when that happens, he acknowledges, without describing specifics. For now, he has attempted to return to a degree of normality. He spends his days with baby Deen, learning to be a father after he missed the birth while detained. He recently rode the subway for the first time since his release, but still finds himself looking over his shoulder. The move to Brooklyn was partly to create distance from Columbia’s campus and all the past wounds of its recent history. But still, it remains difficult to focus.A Palestinian refugee, intimately familiar with the experience of repeated displacement, he remains resolute in the face of a prospective fresh exile.“Even if I am deported, I would continue to speak out for Palestine,” he says.Khalil’s life was changed forever when agents in plainclothes came to his old apartment back in March. His arrest, captured on video by Abdalla, marked a turning point as Trump ramped up his era of mass deportations and began a censorship campaign against the campuses that saw large protests of Israel’s war in Gaza. Khalil remained calm as he was placed in handcuffs and driven away, with his wife – heavily pregnant – left on the sidewalk, desperately calling their lawyer.I wonder if he has ever watched the video back?He shakes his head.“It is a moment I would never want to remember,” he says. “It was one of the most difficult, scariest moments in my life. I do not want to watch a moment where I was helpless to support Noor.”His overwhelming memory of that night is his fear that Abdalla, a US citizen, might also face arrest. He repeated her phone number in his head so as not to forget it. But he also remembers making “chill” small talk with the arresting agents as he was driven away. They spoke about the iftar dinner, the breaking-fast meal taken during Ramadan, he had just eaten.“I did not fear them whatsoever,” he recalls. “I saw them eye to eye.”Shortly after the arrest, he overheard an incoming phone call from the White House, requesting an update. He was then presented with a document that accused him of no crime, but argued his presence in the US compromised foreign policy interests. (A memo signed by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, disclosed later, argued this was due to participation in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities”.)He read it and laughed in disbelief.“Are they really going this far in coming after me?” he thought.After 36 hours of travel under guard, he ended up in Jena, the sprawling centre four hours from New Orleans, hidden away in a pine forest by a country road. It is known as one of the harshest immigration jails in the US. Inside his large detention dormitory, the TV was blaring and he saw Trump at a press conference on the White House lawn perusing Teslas with Elon Musk.The president was asked about Khalil’s arrest.“We ought to get him the hell out of the country,” Trump replied.It was at this point he started to realise the enormity of it all – a public narrative about him spiralling out of his control, laundered through a vast rightwing disinformation infrastructure branding him an antisemite and terrorism supporter.“Who I am has been skewed so much,” he recalls thinking. “I was like: ‘Damn my future is basically done … my reputation, my career aspirations.’”But through the horror, he says he knew his record would ultimately speak for itself. “That was my salvation,” he says. “I was 100% confident I had a very clean history. They would be able to get no dirt on me.”He spoke to Abdalla by phone. She was safe. She told him about an outpouring of support across the world. He sighed with relief.That quiet courage, which Khalil has carried throughout this ordeal, has been forged since childhood, at the multiple junctures he was forced to upend his life.He was born in a small Palestinian refugee camp named Khan Eshieh on the outskirts of Damascus, the youngest of four brothers. His paternal grandparents were displaced from their farmland outside of Tiberias, in what is now Israel, during the Nakba of 1948. His father was a welder who left school at the age of 10. His mother, a low-level civil servant, ended her education at 16.His Palestinian identity was omnipresent growing up; most of his neighbours were displaced from the same region as his grandparents. And his grandmother, who was illiterate, would tell stories of her life in Palestine, always with a view to eventual return.View image in fullscreen“You could see the struggle in her face,” he says.His parents, both largely apolitical, instilled in him the values of a formal education and he excelled, graduating with aspirations to become a commercial pilot. But the forces of history had other plans. The final few years of his schooling in Syria coincided with the pro-democracy movements that swept across the region during the Arab spring. One of his first forays into formal activism came on 15 May 2011, as part of a series of “Nakba Day” demonstrations at Israel’s borders. At least a dozen protesters were killed during the clashes with Israeli forces. Dozens more were injured.Khalil was one of them. Aged 16, he was shot in the leg and spent a number of days in hospital. “That was the first real encounter of violence, direct violence, by Israel against me,” he says.The experience propelled him further into the tumultuous politics of the era – initially heady and full of promise before quickly deteriorating into state brutality and civil war. He witnessed the crackdowns of the Assad regime on close friends and family who helped provide shelter to Syrians fleeing Damascus. Khalil became involved in organising smaller acts of resistance: street protests, spray painting and posting anti-Assad comments on social media.“These things were the very minimum we could do,” he says. “In a time where you know that injustices are happening around you, staying silent is complicity. Pure complicity.”It all intensified after graduating high school. He had been set to study aerospace engineering at the University of Aleppo, but the city was burning as the civil war raged. On 11 January 2013, a week after he turned 18, two of his childhood friends and co-organisers named Bashar and Ali were snatched off the street by Syrian intelligence officers. He feared he would be next.The same night he made plans to flee, crossing the border into Lebanon the next day. “I left everything behind,” he says. “I fled without a plan. My biggest worry was that they would confess the names of the people around them. And you wouldn’t blame them to confess under such torture by the regime.”Bashar and Ali were murdered after their arrest, their deaths confirmed only a few months ago after the Assad regime collapsed at the end of 2024.Khalil recognises the different shades of authoritarianism he has faced throughout his life.“What shocked me at the very beginning, when I was kidnapped [by US immigration], was just how reminiscent that was to cases I witnessed in Syria,” he says. “You would have plainclothed officers without any warrant come and take you just because of your political speech.”View image in fullscreenKhalil languished in Jena for more than 100 days. He had known little about the US’s deportation machine, and the detention center’s reputation as a legal black hole, until he experienced it all.He slept in a large dorm room lined with bunkbeds, holding about 70 men. He spent time dictating well-written dispatches over the phone to his legal team. He read literature: Out of Place, the autobiography of the Palestinian academic Edward Said; Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust. But mostly he shared stories with the other men detained with him. Many had been picked up during routine check-ins with immigration officials. Others were recently apprehended at the southern border. A few had been detained in Jena for more than a year. The majority of people who pass through immigration court in Jena have no lawyers as mandatory legal representation is not guaranteed.One man, a Georgian national, had been held for about eight months, picked up with his wife in California. Held in separate detention centres about two hours apart, the couple, who were fleeing Georgia’s new pro-Russia government, had not been able to speak to each other since their arrest. The man, a carpenter, spent hours fashioning improvised rosaries from commissary items, including crayon, ground coffee and bread – hardened into beads by heat in a microwave. Khalil shows me a set, still impressed by the ingenuity.Many of the men, Khalil says, have since been removed from the US.For Khalil, the lowest moment came on the night his son was born. His requests for a furlough to attend the birth were denied and so he was forced to listen on the phone in the middle of the night, whispering quiet words of encouragement as Abdalla laboured. The line cut around 2am, and by the time he called back he heard his newborn son crying in the background. He whispered the call to prayer down the line to welcome baby Deen into the world.“It was a very difficult moment that I don’t wish anyone to go through,” he says, his eyes drifting. “It was a clear act of cruelty just to punish me.”Abdalla emerges to say hello with Deen in her arms. Khalil’s face lights up. At four months, his son has a full head of hair, deep dimples and expressive brown eyes that follow his father around the room.I ask her how it feels to have her husband back.“Not having him for the first two months of Deen’s life was hard,” she says. “We missed a lot of milestones that you can’t get back. So we are catching up on lost time.”The new apartment is their “safe space”, she says. The couple have been largely welcomed with open arms here, receiving spontaneous acts of kindness: an unexpected free lunch, smiles on the street. I am the first journalist they have invited over.Khalil met his future wife, now a dentist, in Lebanon in 2016, while working for a non-profit helping educate Syrian refugees. She visited on an exchange program. He had worked his way up from nothing after fleeing Syria, taking construction jobs during the day and volunteering for a refugee charity in the evenings, which granted him free room and board in their office. Eventually he attended university to study computer science and took remedial English classes. He gradually let go of his dream to fly commercial jets, becoming more immersed in the work of government and bureaucracy.View image in fullscreenKhalil and Abdalla bonded over games of backgammon and stayed in touch after she returned home to Flint, Michigan. He was attracted to her kindness and gentle nature. She found his intellect and ambition appealing, and eventually pushed him to apply for a job at the British embassy, where he worked on Syria policy until moving to New York in 2023. Their long-distance relationship lasted seven years.I ask how fatherhood has changed him since he returned home.“It absolutely makes me think [more] about risks,” he acknowledges. “When you have someone depending on you, you want them to have as normal a life as possible. But at the same time it pushes me towards advocacy. When I see Deen I always remember the children who are being killed because of Israel, who don’t have the luxury of being in New York. [I think of] immigrant children who don’t have the luxury of having an American passport that would somehow protect them.”But Palestinian liberation is never far from his imagination.“I want Deen to be able to visit his home town, his ancestors’ town, and live equally with everyone,” he says.View image in fullscreenThe pro-Gaza protests at Columbia marked the first time Khalil had ever assumed a public-facing role. Having set his sights on a behind-the-scenes job in government bureaucracy, he was instead thrust into a spring of campus tumult in 2024 as students constructed encampments, staged rallies and, in late April, occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall, leading to an overwhelming police response.Khalil served as a negotiator with the university’s administration, presenting students’ demands, including divestment from companies with ties to Israel. He was not present on campus during the Hamilton Hall occupation.The negotiations were protracted but civil. A Columbia administrator, anonymously quoted in the New York Times, later described Khalil as “thoughtful, passionate, and principled, sometimes to the point of rigidity”. It strikes me as apt, but I wonder if he agrees?“Pretty much,” he says, smiling. “I don’t know about rigidity though, because it was not my position, it was the students’.”Unlike many of those on the protest frontlines, Khalil did not wear a face mask, leaving him vulnerable to online doxing from hardline pro-Israel groups, which have supplied the Trump administration with lists of candidates for deportation.“I have never worn a mask during a protest because I knew that the purpose of doxing was to intimidate us, to silence us,” he says. But the campaign ramped up again after the election of Trump, shortly before Khalil’s arrest. He had not foreseen how dangerous it might become.The allegations of antisemitism have never been substantiated with hard evidence. Khalil says Jewish students played an “integral” role in organising the campus protests and argues it is Israel and the Trump administration’s policies that fuel global antisemitism through their policies.So how does he visualise a free Palestine?“I imagine it as a place where everyone lives in dignity, freedom, equality, regardless of who they are, where they come from,” he says. “I don’t think there’s an alternative to that, to have a lasting and just peace in the Middle East.“Liberation doesn’t mean throwing anyone out. Liberation means liberating everyone, whether the oppressed or the oppressors.”Khalil remains scathing of Columbia’s response to the protests and its later capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands it suppress pro-Palestinian protest. Yet he expresses an honest sadness that he was unable to walk the stage to collect his master’s degree in May this year. He is the first in his family to graduate from university. His parents had planned to travel from Germany, where they now live, to witness it. He had bought his gown a year in advance.“I know it would have been an incredibly important moment for my parents, who have fought and sacrificed so much for me to get to this point,” he says. Instead, he received the accolade as an emailed PDF file.View image in fullscreenIt was late June when Khalil emerged from Jena on a sweltering humid afternoon. He raised his fist in the air to celebrate and walked towards a small group of journalists. He had lost about 15lbs (6.8kg). A federal judge in New Jersey had just ordered his release, having found the Trump administration’s foreign policy argument was likely unconstitutional.I had asked him that day to respond in his own words to the “threat” label that Trump had branded him with. “Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this,” he told me.I had not fully comprehended what he meant by “the wrong person” at the time. But as our conversation comes to a close, it becomes clear. The adversity that Khalil has faced – from displacement to detention – in such a short span of life has only fuelled his sense of mission. He will not be forced into submission or silence. He views his past and future as inextricable from the wider Palestinian struggle stretching from 1948 to the current slaughter in Gaza. “It is a drop in the sea of Palestinian sorrow and grief, where families are being erased, children are being killed, houses being raided and dignity is eroded,” he says.He takes a moment before we wrap up, seemingly a little exhausted.“My story is just a small story,” he says. “A story of how violence against Palestinians can be transported around the world.” More
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Trump issues ‘last warning’ to Hamas to accept Gaza ceasefire deal
by Evelyn Reynolds 8 September 2025, 00:01
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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US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes investigation
by Evelyn Reynolds 5 September 2025, 01:37
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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Trump unlawfully cancelled $2.2bn in Harvard research grants, judge rules
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 September 2025, 20:53
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the Ivy League school.The decision by US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the country’s oldest and richest university.The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school became a central focus of the administration’s broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and “radical left” ideologies.Three other Ivy League schools stuck deals with the administration, including Columbia University, which in July agreed to pay $220m to restore federal research money that had been nixed because of allegations the university allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.As with Columbia, the Trump administration took actions against Harvard related to the pro-Palestinian protest movement that roiled its campus and other universities after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza.Trump during a 26 August cabinet meeting demanded Harvard pay “nothing less than $500 million” as part of a settlement. “They’ve been very bad,” he told education secretary, Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.“Among the earliest actions the administration took against Harvard was the cancellation of hundreds of grants awarded to researchers on the grounds that the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.The Trump administration has since sought to bar international students from attending the school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.Harvard has said it has taken steps to ensure its campus is welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students, who it acknowledges experienced “vicious and reprehensible” treatment following the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza.But Harvard president Alan Garber has said the administration’s demands went far beyond addressing antisemitism and unlawfully sought to regulate the “intellectual conditions” on its campus by controlling who it hires and who it teaches.Those demands, which came in an 11 April letter from an administration task force, included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints and end certain academic programs.After Harvard rejected those demands, it said the administration began retaliating against it in violation of the free speech protections of the US constitution’s first amendment by abruptly cutting funding the school says is vital to supporting scientific and medical research.Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic president Barack Obama, in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting its ability to host international students, who comprise about a quarter of Harvard’s student body. More
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Donald Trump could stop Gaza’s famine. Instead he’s following Biden’s lead | Mohamad Bazzi
by Evelyn Reynolds 29 August 2025, 15:36
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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Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Bernie Sanders in urging US to end Gaza famine
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 August 2025, 18:35
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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‘Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine
by Evelyn Reynolds 14 August 2025, 06:05
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

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