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Tag: international law

  • Kushner’s “Future of Gaza”: A Humanitarian Obscenity, Not a Peace Plan

    Kushner’s “Future of Gaza”: A Humanitarian Obscenity, Not a Peace Plan

    By Amal Zadok

    Kushner’s “Future of Gaza” is not a peace plan; it is a speculative real‑estate prospectus laid over a mass grave, an investor deck pitched on top of fresh rubble and uncounted bodies.  This brutality dressed in the language of “opportunity” and “master plans” is not statesmanship but moral bankruptcy of the highest order, especially in a territory where tens of thousands have been killed and more than 80% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed by war.

    Skyscrapers on top of corpses

    Jared Kushner arrives in Davos with glossy slides of 180 towers along Gaza’s shattered coastline, talking of ports, airports, logistics corridors and “catastrophic success,” as if he were zoning vacant desert land instead of a territory systematically pulverised for years.  He boasts of timelines of “two or three years” to rebuild Rafah, as though bulldozers and cranes were the missing ingredient rather than the deliberate destruction of an entire society and its basic infrastructure.

    The same presentation that sells Gaza as a “regional hub” requiring tens of billions in capital does not pause to name a single family still digging loved ones from under concrete, a single amputated child, a single mass grave.  When the slides show towers and yacht marinas but never cemeteries and bombed schools, this is not reconstruction; it is a visual coup against reality, a marketing campaign against memory.

    Genocide repackaged as redevelopment

    While Kushner and his patrons speak of “demilitarization” and “free market principles,” Gaza’s human losses remain almost unmentionable, reduced to an awkward footnote to the grand business vision.  Independent tallies already report tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, with epidemiologists warning that war injuries, disease and hunger could easily push the total toward or beyond 100,000 deaths in the medium term; that scale of killing matches the language of genocide and ethnic cleansing far more than it does the vocabulary of “development.”

    This is not a “market opportunity”; it is a demographic wound carved into a trapped population of barely 2.2 million.  The language of the plan is not the language of mourning, justice or accountability; it is the jargon of venture capital—“special economic zones,” “investment funds,” “GDP targets,” “microgrants”—sprayed like perfume over the stench of war crimes.  A territory in which perhaps one in fifty residents has already been killed is being treated as a distressed asset to be flipped, not a society entitled to self‑determination, reparations, and the prosecution of those who orchestrated its devastation before a competent international court.

    The Board of Peace: genocide for a fee

    The so‑called “Board of Peace” is the most obscene twist of all: a one‑billion‑dollar buy‑in for a permanent seat at the table where Gaza’s future will be decided.  This is not peace building; it is a pay‑to‑play cartel that monetises both suffering and sovereignty, turning an occupied, bombed people into the underlying asset of a global prestige club.

    Chaired by Donald Trump and populated by hand‑picked elites, the board offers plutocrats and compliant politicians a new status symbol: “I helped reshape Gaza”—for a price.  The promise that all funds will go to reconstruction does not cleanse the structure of its immorality; buying your way into steering the fate of a stateless population turns human rights into a luxury commodity.  When peace has an entry fee of one billion dollars, justice has already been priced out of the room, and genocide has acquired its own VIP lounge.

    Tony Blair, from Iraq’s lies to Gaza’s loot

    And then there is Tony Blair, whose name and institute have circulated around “day‑after” schemes and advisory circuits linked to Trump’s Gaza ambitions, even if reports now suggest he has been dropped from the final shortlist for the board.  A politician who helped sell the Iraq war on the basis of “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist, and whose legacy is inseparable from hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, has no moral authority to co‑design—formally or informally—the future of another Arab population bombed and displaced under the banner of “security.”

    Blair’s presence in this orbit is not an anomaly; it is the system revealing itself.  The same political class that lied a country into war two decades ago now returns, scrubbed and suited, to sanitise an experiment in colonial redevelopment: dispossess, bombard, blockade, then invite the architects and apologists of previous disasters to broker the “rebuild” in partnership with investors.  In this cycle, Western leaders are never exiled by their failures; they are recycled into advisory boards and consulting roles, endlessly monetising the ruins they helped create.

    Erasing Palestinians to sell the land

    Kushner’s masterplan speaks fluently about towers, income levels, industrial zones and data centres, but stutters into silence when it comes to who owns the land, who governs the territory and who grants permission.  There is vague talk of technocrats and executive committees, of partner states and vetted locals, but no meaningful space for Palestinians to define their own future outside the conditions imposed by their jailers and their jailers’ patrons.

    This is how erasure works in the twenty‑first century.  You do not have to deny that Palestinians exist; you simply frame them as a logistics problem inside a larger story about corridors, ports and foreign capital.  You point at destroyed refugee camps and call them “phases” of a master plan.  You turn survivors into statistics and then into target demographics for tourism, cheap labour in someone else’s Riviera built on the ruins of their homes.

    Free markets over mass graves

    At the heart of the plan lies the dogma that “free market economy principles” will heal what bombs have broken.  Its authors talk as if unemployment, poverty and blockade were glitches in a spreadsheet rather than the deliberate tools of a regime of control, apartheid and dispossession.  By pretending that skyscrapers and special economic zones can substitute for justice, they ensure that the structural violence underpinning Gaza’s suffering remains untouched, unexamined and unpunished.

    “Catastrophic success,” Kushner calls it: a phrase so revealing it hardly needs commentary.  Catastrophe is the ongoing reality of Gazans; “success” is reserved for those who can turn that catastrophe into contracts, portfolios and keynote speeches in the Alps.  The dead, the displaced and the starved are not invited to Davos; they are the unacknowledged collateral in someone else’s growth projections and the invisible cost of a new speculative frontier.

    An unforgivable obscenity

    To unveil a glittering business blueprint for “New Gaza” while bodies are still decomposing under collapsed homes is not just premature; it is an unforgivable obscenity.  It tells the world that Palestinian life is so cheap that even their mourning period can be shortened to fit an investment cycle.  It signals to every future aggressor that you can flatten a territory and, if you have powerful friends, return as the visionary who will monetise the ruins.

    This is the line that must be drawn. A just future for Gaza begins with ceasefire, full humanitarian access, and international prosecutions for war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide—not with glossy renders, not with billion‑dollar seats on a “Board of Peace,” not with the rehabilitation of men whose careers are built on lies that killed entire nations.  Until the architects and accomplices of this horror stand in the dock instead of on Davos stages, every tower they imagine for Gaza will be nothing more than another form of occupation, another monument to a world that chose profit over people—and another reminder that no skyscraper, no board, and no master plan will ever be tall enough to cast a shadow long enough to hide the blood on their hands.

    References

    BBC News. (2026, January 21). Jared Kushner lays out Trump‑backed “master plan” for post‑war Gaza. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jared-kushner-lays-trump-backed-master-plan-post/story?id=129461124

    CNN. (2026, January 22). 180 skyscrapers for Gaza: Trump’s son‑in‑law Kushner unveils “masterplan” for enclave’s reconstruction. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/middleeast/kushner-trump-postwar-plan-gaza-board-peace-davos-intl-latam

    Breitbart / UPI. (2026, January 22). Kushner unveils $25B Gaza masterplan including skyscrapers, housing. https://www.breitbart.com/news/kushner-unveils-25b-gaza-masterplan-including-skyscrapers-housing

    BBC News. (2026, January 22). US unveils plans for “New Gaza” with skyscrapers. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7mmpljze7o

    Reuters. (2026, January 22). US pitches “New Gaza” development plan; Israeli fire kills five Palestinians. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-pitches-new-gaza-development-plan-israeli-fire-kills-five-palestinians-2026-01-22

    CNN. (2026, January 18). Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza to require $1 billion payment for permanent membership. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/politics/board-of-peace-gaza-trump-payment-membership

    CNN. (2026, January 20). Trump says Board of Peace established to oversee reconstruction of Gaza “might” replace the United Nations. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/20/politics/trump-gaza-board-of-peace-united-nations

    ABC News (Australia). (2025, November 18). As Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza gets UN approval, critics warn it turns ruins into real estate. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-19/rebuilding-gaza-donald-trump-plan-investment-potential/106006900

    The New York Times. (2024, February 21). War and illness could kill 85,000 Gazans in 6 months, new analysis finds. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/health/israel-gaza-war-deaths.html

    Wikipedia. (updated 2026). Casualties of the Gaza war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war

    Al Jazeera. (2025, January 15). The human toll of Israel’s war on Gaza – by the numbers. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/the-human-toll-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers

    The Washington Post. (2026, January 22). Trump’s “master plan” for Gaza contrasts with reality on the ground. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/01/22/trump-kushner-gaza-plan

    The Independent. (2026, January 22). Is Trump building peace – or a property deal on the graves of Gazans? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/trump-gaza-kushner-peace-board-property-b2869059.html

    The Guardian. (2025, December 8). Tony Blair reportedly dropped from Trump’s Gaza “board of peace” shortlist. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/dec/08/tony-blair-reportedly-dropped-from-donald-trump-gaza-board-of-peace-shortlist

    Al Jazeera. (2025, December 9). Tony Blair ruled out of Trump’s proposed Gaza “peace board”. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/9/tony-blair-ruled-out-of-trumps-proposed-gaza-peace-board-report

    France 24. (2025, December 9). Tarnished legacy: What role for Tony Blair in Trump peace plan for Gaza? https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20251209-tarnished-legacy-what-role-for-tony-blair-in-trump-peace-plan-for-gaza

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Wrong and dangerous strategy: appeasing a bully 

    Wrong and dangerous strategy: appeasing a bully 

    Trump has turned Gaza into the set of The Apprentice: governments pay to sit in his boardroom over the ruins, and their only real job is to obey or get fired. Appeasing that is not strategy; it is complicity.

    By Amal Zadok

    Appeasing Donald Trump is not a strategy; it is complicity. Every time governments, institutions and political elites bite their tongues in the name of “stability,” they are not moderating him; they are underwriting his attempt to replace law with money, fear and his own ego as the organising principle of world politics. A man who combines the power of the U.S. presidency with the traits of a malignant narcissist, an obsession with personal “glory,” and open enablement of mass atrocities is not a “difficult partner”; he is a direct threat to any order that claims to be based on human dignity and the rule of law.

    Malignant narcissism is not mere vanity with extra hairspray. It is a configuration of grandiosity, lack of empathy, paranoia about enemies and a willingness to use cruelty to protect a fragile ego. In Trump’s case, this has meant delight in domination, compulsive lying, routine public humiliation of opponents and a chilling indifference to mass suffering, most starkly visible in his embrace of Israeli policies in Gaza and his political cover for a war that has devastated an already trapped population. For such a personality, other people’s lives and entire territories are props in his heroic narrative: if flattening a people or turning them into bargaining chips makes him look “strong” and pleases his base, then it is not a moral dilemma, it is an opportunity.

    The same pathology is visible in his maniacal fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize, and the humiliating spectacle of allies staging fake “peace” honours to soothe him. When a foreign leader like Marina Machado feels compelled to hand him a framed imitation of an accolade he never earned, it is not diplomacy; it is ritualised ego‑massage that tells every despot watching that even democratic politicians will debase themselves rather than confront his fantasies.

    This pathology is written all over his latest creation: the so‑called Board of Peace for Gaza. On paper, it is billed as a mechanism to oversee reconstruction and governance; in reality, it is The Apprentice metastasised to a global scale, with Gaza as the burned‑out set and whole governments auditioning for his favour. A $1 billion payment secures a permanent seat on this Trump‑chaired “board,” while poorer states are relegated to rotating spots, turning the future of a shattered territory into a billion‑dollar membership club. This is not multilateralism; it is monetised feudalism. It is “The Apprentice: Gaza Edition” – pay to get into the boardroom, sit around his table, follow his orders, and hope you are not the next one he effectively tells: “You’re fired.”

    The Board of Peace is also a direct attack on the UN‑centred system that, however imperfectly, recognised Palestinian rights and tried to put reconstruction under universal, not personal, authority. By dangling access to Gaza’s future as a perk for those willing to buy in, Trump is building a private mini‑UN in his own image: hierarchical, cash‑gated, unaccountable and centred on his personality. States that treat this scheme as just another diplomatic forum, rather than a frontal assault on multilateralism, are not hedging; they are helping him prove that you can sideline global institutions if you are ruthless and rich enough.

    None of this is accidental. Trump has begun saying the quiet part aloud. In a recent interview he declared that “my own morality, my own mind” is “the only thing that can stop me,” brushing aside international law and institutional checks as unnecessary constraints on his quest for “global supremacy.” For a man who has shown that his “morality” stretches to cheering bombardments, openly musing about annexations and threatening the use of force abroad, that line is not colourful rhetoric; it is a confession of megalomania. It tells allies and institutions exactly how he sees them: not as co‑equal guardians of a rules‑based order, but as furniture in a set he believes he owns.

    The Davos episode over Greenland and Canada completes the picture. Trump has openly pushed to “acquire” Greenland, tying tariffs and other economic weapons to the goal of securing “complete and total” U.S. control, before offering the thinnest possible reassurance that he will not, for the moment, use military force. He used a global stage to humiliate Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, sneering that “Canada lives because of the United States” and instructing Ottawa to “remember that” before daring to criticise his Greenland ambitions. This is not alliance management; it is hostage‑taking conducted in the language of reality television and mob protection rackets.

    His behaviour toward Canada and Denmark illustrates the pattern that runs from NATO capitals to Gaza’s ruins. Security guarantees, trade access and even basic recognition are treated as favours that can be withdrawn if insufficient loyalty is displayed. Tariffs are brandished like a baseball bat; territorial integrity is discussed as if it were a line item in a real‑estate portfolio; prime ministers are reduced to contestants he can dress down in front of the cameras. When allies respond with nervous laughter, cautious communiqués and private grumbling instead of coordinated pushback, they teach him exactly the wrong lesson: that they will swallow humiliation and coercion rather than risk open confrontation.

    Layer this onto Gaza and the result is grotesque. Trump is offering political and diplomatic cover to a campaign that has destroyed much of the strip’s infrastructure and displaced the overwhelming majority of its population, then presenting himself as the indispensable architect of what comes next. Under his plan, those who pay the price of his Board of Peace get influence; those who cannot pay get whatever trickles down. The people of Gaza themselves are spectators in a show supposedly scripted for their benefit. Their homes and bodies are reduced to scenery for a global audition in which states compete to impress the man who helped enable their destruction in the first place.

    Supporters will insist this is “hard‑nosed deal‑making” and a necessary way to get things done in a brutal world. That is precisely the illusion appeasement feeds. When governments attend his board, they legitimise the idea that the future of a devastated people belongs in a private club chaired by the man who cheered on their devastation. When media treat his “Board of Peace” branding and his “only my morality can stop me” line as colourful copy, they normalise the premise that checks and balances are optional extras in a nuclear‑armed superpower. When Canada, Denmark and other allies respond to tariff blackmail and annexation fantasies with little more than pained diplomacy, they validate his worldview that laws and treaties are decorations, not boundaries.

    The stakes extend beyond Trump himself. Autocrats and would‑be strongmen everywhere are watching. They see a U.S. president who tries to build a pay‑to‑play mini‑UN over Gaza, who declares that only his own morality restrains him, who bullies allies over territory and trade, and who still finds a line of states willing to buy seats at his table. If that behaviour is indulged, why shouldn’t they copy it? If the “leader of the free world” can treat international law as a suggestion and treat entire nations like contestants on a show, the message is clear: there is no real price for running the world as a personal franchise, so long as you are powerful enough.

    Refusing to appease Trump means more than tut‑tutting and diplomatic eye‑rolling. It means:

    -Boycotting and delegitimising the Board of Peace, insisting that Gaza’s reconstruction and governance be anchored in transparent, UN‑based mechanisms where seats are earned by responsibility, not bought with cash and flattery, and prosecution of those responsible for the genocide and war crimes in Gaza.

    -Responding to tariff blackmail, Greenland fantasies and open insults against allied leaders with coordinated economic, legal and diplomatic measures, rather than fragmented “concerns” that he can ignore one by one.

    -Treating declarations like “only my morality can stop me” as a mandate to reinforce external checks—courts, parliaments, alliances—not as a quirky line to be replayed on talk shows.

    Appeasing Donald Trump—appeasing his bullying, his megalomania, his reality‑show Board of Peace, his threats against allies and his contempt for law—is not prudence. It is surrender. Each time leaders choose silence over truth, access over principle or a paid‑up seat at his fake mini‑UN over a real fight for international law, they edge the world closer to a future in which power answers only to itself. A political system that wants to survive, and a world that wants to remain even minimally just, cannot afford the luxury of appeasing this bully any longer.

    References

    1.New York Times. (2026, January 18). $1 billion in cash buys a permanent seat on Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/world/middleeast/trump-board-of-peace-gaza.html[nytimes

    2.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 19). $1 billion contribution secures permanent seat on Trump’s “Board of Peace.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/1-billion-contribution-secures-permanent-seat-on-trumps-board-of-peace

    3.CNN. (2026, January 18). Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza to require $1 billion payment for permanent membership. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/politics/board-of-peace-gaza-trump-payment-membership

    4.The Atlantic. (2026, January 17). Trump’s billion-dollar Board of Peace. https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/trump-billion-dollar-board-of-peace/685671/

    5.The Wall Street Journal. (2026, January 19). Trump’s $1 billion-a-seat diplomacy club takes aim at the U.N. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trumps-1-billion-a-seat-diplomacy-club-takes-aim-at-the-u-n-2bccd9f9

    6.Business Times. (2026, January 19). What to know about Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza. https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/global/billion-dollar-membership-fee-what-know-about-trumps-board-peace-gaza

    7.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 21). Trump’s Board of Peace is dividing countries in Europe and the Middle East. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/divisions-emerge-among-western-european-nations-over-trumps-board-of-peace-for-gaza

    8.The Hill. (2026, January 21). Trump to Carney: “Canada lives because of the United States.” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5699148-trump-carney-canada-greenland/

    9.Global News. (2026, January 20). Trump says Canada “lives” because of U.S. https://globalnews.ca/news/11622445/donald-trump-mark-carney-davos-speech/

    10.Axios. (2026, January 21). Trump responds to Carney in Davos: “Canada lives because of the United States.” https://www.axios.com/2026/01/21/trump-davos-speech-carney-canada

    11.People Magazine. (2026, January 8). Trump says “my own morality” is “the only thing” stopping his global supremacy. https://people.com/donald-trump-says-morality-only-thing-stopping-global-supremacy-11881997

    12.Esquire. (2026, January 8). Trump says his “morality” is the only thing stopping him. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a69960918/trump-morality-in-check/

    13.New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump addresses Venezuela, Greenland and presidential power in new interview. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html

    14.CNN. (2026, January 20). Trump says Board of Peace meant to oversee Gaza reconstruction and security. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/20/politics/trump-gaza-board-of-peace-united-nations

    15.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 19). News Wrap: World leaders weigh whether to join Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/january-19-2026-pbs-news-hour-full-episode

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    by Amal Zadok

    When a president says only his “own morality” limits his power and that he “does not need international law,” while a mother of three is shot through her windshield by an ICE officer on an American street, the mask is off. This is no longer a debate about policy; it is the birth of a regime that reserves law for the weak and bullets for anyone who get in the way. 

    A president who crowns himself

    Trump’s statement to The New York Times that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality” is the distilled creed of authoritarianism. In his own words, there is “one thing” that can stop him: not Congress, not courts, not treaties, but his “own mind,” followed by the contemptuous aside, “I don’t need international law.” 

    This is not some late-night tweet; it is a formal doctrine announced from the Oval Office. In that interview, he waves away the UN Charter, the ban on aggressive war, and decades of treaty obligations as optional restraints that apply only if he personally decides they should, implicitly trampling the Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and the core idea that even great powers are bound by law. 

    He prides himself on using military strikes, invasions, economic strangulation and political coercion as tools of personal will, not as acts accountable to any external standard. A president who claims that law is binding only when he feels like it has ceased to be a constitutional officer and has slipped into the role of a sovereign who believes that legality is a costume he can put on for international conferences and drop whenever he wants to unleash force.

    From “rules-based order” to rule by fear

    For years, Washington preached a “rules-based international order” to other states. Now Trump publicly shreds that script and replaces it with a gangster’s logic: power first, rules never. He openly treats treaties as disposable, walks away from arms-control agreements, and shrugs at the possible collapse of the last major nuclear restraints with a fatalistic “if it expires, it expires.” 

    The message radiates far beyond Washington. If the United States claims the right to strike where it wants, topple whom it chooses, and threaten nuclear and non‑nuclear states alike without even pretending to obey international law, why should Moscow feel bound in Ukraine or Beijing in Taiwan? The “order” that once at least pretended to restrain the strong becomes a stage on which the biggest actor improvises violence while lecturing others about norms. 

    Trump’s “own morality” is not a safeguard; it is a surrender of civilization to personality. It tells every future strongman—from Budapest to Brasília—that law is ornamental and that the only crime is losing. 

    The ICE bullet in Minneapolis

    While Trump claims he does not need international law abroad, his domestic security machine is being trained to treat American streets like occupied territory. In Minneapolis, 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, a mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE officer while sitting in her car on a cold Midwestern street, neighbors watching from their windows as sirens and shouts shattered the night. 

    She was not a cartel boss or a terrorist; she was a neighbor, a writer, a woman who had come out—according to local accounts—to care for those around her. The official story shifts like a propaganda broadcast. DHS officials insist she “failed to comply,” that she “attempted to run over” an officer. Local witnesses describe confusion and conflicting commands, with one officer telling her to drive away from a stuck ICE vehicle and another simultaneously trying to pull her from the car; body‑camera and bystander video show agents swarming the vehicle, one officer stepping into her path, firing at close range as she attempts to drive off, her car then crashing down the street as her life bleeds out on the asphalt. 

    Minneapolis city officials have said openly what federal spokespeople will not: that this was “a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.” The FBI has now taken over the investigation after the state’s own Bureau of Criminal Apprehension backed away, a sign of just how toxic and politically charged this killing has become, while community grief vigils name her not as a suspect but as a poet, a newcomer, a mother. 

    The same contempt for accountability that lets a president shrug off the UN Charter now underwrites a culture in which an ICE bullet can end a citizen’s life and the first instinct of power is to justify, not to repent. 

    The quiet architecture of a police state

    This is how police states are built in real time—not with a single spectacular coup, but through a series of “operations,” “raids,” and “emergency deployments” that normalize the presence of armed federal agents in daily life. In Minneapolis, thousands of federal officers were deployed in what DHS bragged was the “largest operation ever,” turning a U.S. city into a live‑fire training ground for an internal occupation. 

    The use of ICE, a civil immigration agency, like a paramilitary police force is not an accident. It is a deliberate fusion of domestic and foreign logics: the border mentality imported into the heart of the city, where neighbors blowing whistles to warn each other become suspect, where legal observers and bystanders are treated as obstacles, and where a parked car is one nervous trigger pull away from becoming a coffin. 

    Trump’s doctrine—that only his conscience limits his power—seeps down the chain of command. If the man at the top says law is malleable, if he publicly promises to back his officers no matter what, then every badge and gun on the street hears the same message: you are the law. This is exactly how Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo operated—not because every officer was a monster, but because the system told them that their violence was always already justified. 

    A monstrous hybrid of Nazism and Stalinism

    The horror of the current moment is not that America has become identical to Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union; it is that it is mutating into a hybrid that borrows the worst tools of both. From Nazism, Trump borrows the cult of the leader whose “moral sense” legitimatizes everything, the theater of strength, the glorification of “law and order” as a shield for state brutality. From Stalinism, he borrows the idea that internal enemies lurk everywhere, that entire communities (immigrants, protesters, “anarchists,” “terror sympathizers”) are fair game for sweeping repression. 

    When federal agents can snatch people off streets, deploy to cities over local opposition, and now kill a mother in her car under the banner of immigration enforcement, the line between democracy and dictatorship is not “eroding.” It is being redrawn in blood. When a president announces that courts, laws and treaties are lower‑tier obstacles compared to his “own mind,” he is not defending America from enemies; he is positioning himself as the only real branch of government that matters. 

    This is how hybrid tyrannies work. Elections still occur, some courts still function, newspapers still print—but the security services learn that their real loyalty is owed upward, not outward. The constitution becomes a script for public ceremonies, while the real constitution is whatever the leader and his loyalists can get away with. 

    The conscience that kills

    Trump insists he is “not looking to hurt people,” even as he lists lethal operations as achievements, even as his policies unleash missiles abroad and militarized raids at home. His “own morality” apparently allows for the bombing of foreign soil without authorization, the kidnapping or coercion of foreign leaders, the tearing up of refugee protections, and now a domestic climate in which federal officers gun down a woman in Minneapolis and are treated as heroes in waiting. 

    There is a cruel symmetry here. Abroad, he claims the right to ignore international law in the name of “national strength.” At home, his security forces act as if ordinary Americans are foreign subjects in a pacification campaign. The shared logic is simple: the people at the receiving end of American power—Venezuelan civilians, Iranian technicians, migrants at the border, a mother in a Minneapolis sedan—do not matter as rights‑bearing human beings. They matter only as problems for the leader’s will to solve. 

    When a man with this worldview sits in the Oval Office and tells a major newspaper that only his conscience can stop him, the world should stop pretending this is normal politics. This is not conservatism, populism, or even crude nationalism. It is the theology of the police state: one man’s inner voice elevated above constitutions, courts, treaties, and the screams from the street where Renee Nicole Good died. 

    An ultimatum to real patriots

    So the question is no longer what Trump will do next; the question is what Americans are going to do about an America that the Founders would not recognize. A republic whose president claims to stand above law and whose federal agents kill unarmed citizens in the name of “order” is not the republic Madison and Hamilton were arguing for; it is the nightmare they wrote the Constitution to prevent. 

    The Constitution does not ask “real patriots” to clap for strongmen; it demands that they use every peaceful tool it provides—speech, press, assembly, petitions, jury service, litigation, elections, impeachment, and relentless oversight—to drag power back under law. It calls legislators to defund and dismantle rogue operations, judges to enforce rights without fear, civil servants to refuse illegal orders, and ordinary citizens to organize, vote, strike, and resist until no man’s “own morality” can ever again stand in for the rule of law. If Americans will not use those tools now, when a mother lies dead in Minneapolis and a president boasts that only his conscience can stop him, then the Constitution will become nothing more than an antique in a glass case—and the hybrid monster of Nazism and Stalinism will finish the work it has already begun. 

    References 

    1.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump addresses Venezuela, Greenland and presidential power in wide‑ranging interview. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.htm

    2.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump said his global power was limited only by his ‘own morality’. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/briefing/trump-interview-oval-office-apple-ceo.html

    3.Bluewin. (2026, January 9). USA: Trump: Only my sense of morality can hold me back. https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/international/trump-only-my-sense-of-morality-can-hold-me-back-3041854.html

    4.Moneycontrol. (2026, January 8). ‘Only my morality can stop me’: Trump claims sweeping war powers, shrugs off international law. https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/only-my-morality-can-stop-me-trump-claims-sweeping-war-powers-says-he-doesn-t-need-internatio-article-12812335.html

    5.Financial Express. (2026, January 8). ‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says only his own morality limits his global power. https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/only-one-thing-can-stop-me-trump-says-he-dont-need-international-law-boasts-12812091/

    6.World Socialist Web Site. (2026, January 8). Declaring ‘I don’t need international law,’ Trump moves to assert unlimited warmaking powers. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/09/qyot-j09.html

    7.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). FBI takes over investigation into ICE agent killing of woman in Minneapolis. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/fbi-takes-over-investigation-into-ice-agent-killing-of-woman-in-minneapolis

    8.ABC News (Australia). (2026, January 7). What led to an ICE agent fatally shooting a public observer in Minneapolis? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-08/ice-shooting-minneapolis-minnesota-immigration-crackdown/106209128

    9.NBC News. (2026, January 7). Renee Nicole Good, woman shot by ICE officer, was out ‘caring for her neighbors’. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/renee-nicole-good-minneapolis-ice-shooting-victim-caring-neighbor-rcna252901

    10.Colorado Public Radio. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis originally from Colorado. https://www.cpr.org/2026/01/07/fatal-minneapolis-ice-shooting-colorado-woman/

    11.CNN. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who shot woman in Minneapolis was dragged by a car in 2025, video shows. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/ice-agent-minneapolis-shooting-car-dragged-invs

    12.NBC News. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who fatally shot Minnesota woman was dragged by a car during a prior enforcement stop. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-officer-fatally-shot-minnesota-woman-was-dragged-car-june-immigrat-rcna252992

    13.City of Minneapolis. (2026, January 6). Minneapolis responds to fatal shooting of woman by federal agent. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/news/2026/january/fatal-shooting-response/

    14.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 8). Woman killed by ICE agent was mother of 3, poet and new to Minneapolis. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/woman-killed-by-ice-agent-was-mother-of-3-poet-and-new-to-minneapolis

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Kidnapping a President: How Trump Turned Law into a Weapon and Gave Putin and Xi a Green Light

    Kidnapping a President: How Trump Turned Law into a Weapon and Gave Putin and Xi a Green Light

    by Amal Zadok

    Trump’s armed kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro is not just another reckless intervention; it is the moment the United States openly abandons the legal order it uses to judge its enemies. One operation in Caracas manages to break core rules of international law, trample the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, and weaponize domestic criminal statutes into a pretext for cross‑border regime decapitation. This is not mere hypocrisy; it is a structural shift toward a world where armed force wears the thin mask of law while tearing out the law’s foundations.​

    Start with the international plane. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except in self‑defence against an armed attack or with Security Council authorization. None of those conditions existed: Venezuela had not attacked the United States, there was no imminent armed assault, and the Security Council had authorized nothing. Airstrikes around Caracas and the insertion of US forces to seize a sitting head of state are the paradigmatic use of armed force that the Charter was written to forbid, regardless of how loudly Washington chants “narco‑terrorism” or “democracy.”​

    The raid also violates the principles of sovereign equality and non‑intervention in Articles 2(1) and 2(7) and in customary international law. Forcibly removing a president and floating the idea that the US might effectively “run” Venezuela is not influence; it is a direct assault on the political independence of a UN member. That is why UN officials and governments well beyond Maduro’s circle have called the action illegal aggression and a “dangerous precedent” for the global order.​

    Head‑of‑state immunity is the next pillar smashed. Customary international law grants sitting heads of state full personal immunity—immunity ratione personae—from foreign criminal jurisdiction and enforcement measures while they are in office. This shield does not endorse any leader’s morality; it prevents foreign courts and special forces from becoming tools of regime change. By abducting Maduro and hauling him before a New York judge, the United States has effectively claimed that its recognition policy decides who is a head of state and who can be treated as a common fugitive.​

    The extraterritorial kidnapping itself is a further violation. Even advocates of muscular US power concede that seizing a foreign leader from his own soil without consent is a “flagrant violation” of sovereignty and an unlawful abduction under general international law. Several experts argue that the scale and character of the raid reach the level of an “armed attack,” meaning Venezuela would, in principle, enjoy a right of self‑defence against the United States. In one stroke, Washington transforms the law it invokes into a weapon, while shredding the central norm designed to keep interstate violence in check since 1945.​

    Inside the United States, the pattern is equally stark. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, and the War Powers Resolution requires prior consultation “in every possible instance” and prompt notification when American forces enter hostilities. Trump’s own officials had previously acknowledged that ground operations in Venezuela would require congressional authorization—and that they did not have it. Yet the raid went ahead as a fait accompli, with Congress informed after the fact and forced to choose between retroactive acquiescence or a politically suicidal confrontation with an emboldened executive.​

    The UN Charter is also a ratified US treaty and, under Article VI of the Constitution, part of the “supreme Law of the Land.” When a president orders a military operation that plainly contradicts Article 2(4)’s ban on the use of force, he is not just flirting with illegality abroad; he is directing the state to act against a binding treaty that sits at the top of the domestic legal hierarchy. Some constitutional scholars therefore describe the raid as a dual illegality: a violation of international law that simultaneously undercuts the treaty‑supremacy structure of US law itself.​

    The criminal‑law angle exposes the tyrannical core. Extradition treaties, mutual legal assistance and due‑process guarantees are supposed to govern cross‑border arrests; they do not authorize special forces to “pick up” a foreign head of state at gunpoint because US prosecutors filed an indictment. By leaning on the old Ker–Frisbie doctrine—that illegal abduction does not by itself bar a trial—Trump turns a controversial judicial rule into an executive license for kidnapping. What would obviously be kidnapping, conspiracy and unlawful violence for any private actor is rebranded as “policy” when ordered from the Oval Office.​

    At that point, “tyranny” stops being rhetorical and becomes descriptive. A leader who can unilaterally launch cross‑border raids, ignore Congress’s war role, violate binding treaties and twist criminal procedure into a shield for his own extralegal violence is not meaningfully bound by law. He is constrained only by raw power and political calculation. That is exactly the model Russia and China have been waiting for Washington to normalize—and Trump has just handed them the script.​

    Trump has not just broken rules; he has opened a doctrinal Pandora’s box. Moscow can now point to the Maduro operation when it justifies the seizure or assassination of Ukrainian officials as “counter‑terrorism” or enforcement of Russian criminal law. Beijing can frame a lightning move on Taipei as a domestic law‑enforcement action against “secessionist criminals,” citing the American precedent that great powers’ indictments and security narratives override borders, immunity and the UN Charter. The United States spent decades preaching a “rules‑based international order”; in Caracas, it demonstrated that, when the stakes are high enough, what really rules is force wrapped in legal costume.​

    If this stands, the world slides from an imperfect legal order—full of double standards and selective enforcement—into something harsher and more honest: open season, where each great power hunts in its sphere and cites the others’ crimes as precedent. The kidnapping of Maduro is more than a scandal; it is a template that Russia, China and others will eagerly adapt, armed not only with missiles and special forces, but with the very legal arguments Trump has ripped from their cage—a ready‑made script for twenty‑first‑century tyranny dressed up as law.​

    References

    1. ABC News. (2026). Were the US actions in Venezuela legal under international law?​
    2. Le Monde. (2026). US attack on Venezuela: What does international law say?​
    3. The Conversation. (2026). Were the US actions in Venezuela legal under international law? An expert explains.​
    4. Chatham House. (2026). The US capture of President Nicolás Maduro – and attacks on Venezuela – have no justification.​
    5. Global Affairs. (2026). International Law and Venezuela’s Maduro.​
    6. Opinio Juris. (2026). The United States’ Attack Against Venezuela: Might Does Not Make Right.​
    7. UN News. (2026). US actions in Venezuela “constitute a dangerous precedent”.​
    8. Justice in Conflict. (2026). Maduro’s Indictment, Head‑of‑State Immunity, and the United States.​
    9. Huquq. (2026). The Maduro Case and the Fractured Foundations of Immunity.​
    10. Brookings. (2026). Making Sense of the US Military Operation in Venezuela.​
    11. CNN. (2026). Trump’s Legal Authority in Venezuela, Explained.​
    12. Bloomberg. (2026). Did Maduro’s Seizure Violate US and International Law?​
    13. PBS. (2026). Fact‑Checking Trump’s Claims After U.S. Strike on Venezuela and Capture of Maduro.​
    14. The New Yorker. (2026). The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation.​
    15. BBC News. (2026). US Sharply Criticised by Foes and Friends Over Maduro Seizure.​
    16. SBS. (2026). From Russia to Iran, Venezuela’s Allies React to the Capture of Maduro.​
    17. Time. (2026). How the World Is Reacting to the U.S. Capture of Nicolás Maduro.​
    18. CNN. (2026). Maduro’s Capture Is a Blow to China. But on Chinese Social Media …​
    19. CBS News. (2026). How Could Trump’s Move Against Venezuela Impact China, Russia, Iran, Cuba?​
    20. Völkerrechtsblog. (2026). The U.S. Strikes Against Venezuela and the Credibility of the Anti‑Aggression Norm.​
    21. ABC (Australia). (2026). The Venezuela Strike Sets a New Low for the World Order.​
    22. CSIS. (2026). The Maduro Raid: A Military Victory with No Viable Endgame.​
    23. The New York Times. (2026). Is It Legal for U.S. to “Run” Venezuela After Maduro’s Capture?​
    24. The Conversation. (2026). Trump’s Intervention in Venezuela: The 3 Warnings for the World.​
    25. The New York Times. (2026). Global Ripples From Venezuela.​
    26. Empire Unchained Blog. (2026). Empire Unchained: How the US Capture of Maduro Shattered the Post‑War International Order.

    Appendix: Summary of Laws Broken Internally and Externally by Trump in the Kidnapping of Maduro

    • UN Charter Article 2(4): Prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state; breached by airstrikes and the cross‑border raid without self‑defence or Security Council authorization.​
    • UN Charter Articles 2(1) and 2(7) & customary non‑intervention: Require sovereign equality and non‑interference; violated by forcibly removing a sitting president and floating effective US control over Venezuela’s politics.​
    • Customary head‑of‑state immunity (immunity ratione personae): Grants sitting heads of state full personal immunity from foreign criminal jurisdiction and enforcement; ignored by abducting Maduro to stand trial in a US court.​
    • Customary prohibition of extraterritorial abduction: Forbids kidnapping persons, especially senior officials, from another state’s territory without consent; violated by the armed seizure in Caracas.​
    • US constitutional allocation of war powers: Congress’s power to declare war and War Powers Resolution consultation and notification requirements were sidestepped by launching the raid without prior authorization or transparent notification.​
    • Treaty‑supremacy structure (Article VI of the US Constitution): The UN Charter is binding US law; ordering action that breaches Article 2(4) undermines the supremacy of ratified treaties in the domestic legal hierarchy.​
    • Extradition and criminal‑procedure norms: Established mechanisms (extradition treaties, mutual legal assistance, due process) were bypassed in favour of a unilateral military kidnapping justified by a domestic indictment.​
    • Functional domestic criminal norms (kidnapping, conspiracy, unlawful violence): Conduct that would clearly constitute serious crimes for private actors is insulated by presidential power, effectively placing the executive above the law it imposes on others.​

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Kidnapping the Future: Hunting with Flags in a World Gone from Nuremberg to Nowhere

    Kidnapping the Future: Hunting with Flags in a World Gone from Nuremberg to Nowhere

    by Amal Zadok

    Humanity has witnessed yet another dark milestone with the capture of Maduro, an act carried out in brazen disregard for international law and national sovereignty. Welcome to the emerging world order: the law of the jungle, where might makes right and brute force replaces rules, dialogue, and basic decency. The great post-war hope that law and institutions would restrain power now looks increasingly fragile, even illusory. 

    This moment evokes the ghosts of history’s worst tyrants and destroyers: a new Attila the Hun trampling borders, a modern Genghis Khan sweeping aside treaties, the cold calculation of Stalin, the ruthless brutality of Pol Pot. Names once studied as warnings in history books now feel like prototypes for contemporary leaders and regimes. When law is treated as optional, and power as the only currency, the distance between “civilised world” and barbarism shrinks at terrifying speed. 

    Humanity is not evolving but devolving, sliding back into a kind of global “wild wild west,” where justice becomes a slogan, not a standard. In this climate, promises mean little, agreements are discarded when inconvenient, and smaller nations become pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. The message to the world is chillingly clear: security, dignity, and freedom are no longer protected by shared rules, but only by raw strength or the favour of the powerful. 

    This raises a searing moral question that can no longer be avoided: Is this the world you want your children and grandchildren to inherit? A world where borders, laws, and human rights exist only on paper, where fear replaces trust, and where tomorrow’s history books will record our silence as complicity? If the answer is no, then indignation is not enough. The time has come to speak, to resist, and to insist—publicly and persistently—that law, justice, and human dignity must not be sacrificed on the altar of power. 

    What we are witnessing is not an accident or an unfortunate exception; it is a deliberate strategy. Under the cloak of “security” and “stability,” powerful states and blocs are testing how far they can stretch the fibres of international law before they snap entirely. Each violation that goes unpunished becomes a rehearsal for the next, bolder transgression. 

    Every muted response, every carefully worded statement that refuses to name the crime for what it is, signals permission to escalate. In this perverse theatre, language itself is weaponised: kidnappings become “operations,” political persecution becomes “cooperation,” and naked coercion is marketed as “defending democracy.” The public is fed a diet of euphemisms designed to dull outrage and anesthetise conscience, while behind closed doors decisions are made that redraw the moral map of the world without consultation or consent. 

    Meanwhile, the institutions built in the aftermath of global catastrophe stand by, diminished and intimidated. Bodies that were meant to uphold law now often serve as stages for power politics, reciting scripts written by the very actors they should restrain. Votes are traded, principles are diluted, and the rhetoric of human rights is deployed selectively, depending on who is friend and who is foe. 

    In such a climate, smaller nations learn a bitter lesson: their sovereignty is conditional, their legal protections negotiable, and their leaders expendable if they dare challenge entrenched interests. The signal to dissidents and strongmen alike is devastatingly clear—if you have the favour of the right patrons, you can act with impunity; if you stand in their way, you can be taken, tried, or erased. 

    Citizens, too, are being trained—trained to accept the unacceptable, to scroll past the shocking, to treat the dismantling of norms as background noise. Outrage burns briefly and then is swallowed by the next cycle of distraction. Yet beneath the surface, something corrosive is happening to the collective moral imagination. 

    When people cease to believe that law can protect the weak, they begin to respect only force. When they see that principles are invoked only when convenient, they lose faith in the very idea of justice. This cynicism is precisely what the architects of the new disorder desire: a population too disillusioned to resist, too divided to unite, and too weary to hope. 

    Because make no mistake: what is being normalised today is not an isolated event, but a template. Abduction dressed up as “extradition,” coercion baptised as “cooperation,” the crude humiliation of a nation sold as a triumph of “justice.” The precedent could not be clearer: if a powerful alliance decides you are an enemy, then your sovereignty, your legal protections, your very personhood are negotiable—and negotiable in closed rooms where your voice is never heard. 

    This is not an international community; this is a hunting party with flags. Do not hide behind the illusion that this is “far away” or “about someone else.” The tools used today—secret flights, compliant courts, manufactured narratives—are technologies of control that can be turned on anyone tomorrow. 

    The language being perfected now, the vocabulary of targeted arrests, regime change, and “exceptional measures,” will be the same language used to crush dissent, silence journalists, and intimidate entire populations when it suits the powerful. The machinery of lawlessness never stays at the border; it expands to fill every space left undefended. 

    Here is the ominous truth: the cage being built is global. Bars of fear, walls of apathy, locks forged from our own cowardice. Your children and grandchildren will grow up under skies crossed by drones and under laws that can be suspended with a single emergency decree. 

    They will inherit a world where the knock at the door can no longer be trusted, where asking the wrong question is a risk, and where speaking the wrong truth can cost a career, a freedom, a life. And when they turn to the past and ask, “Who let this happen?”, the mirror will be waiting. 

    Remember this, and do not forget it: history is not only written by the victors; it is also written about the spectators. If you accept this descent into the abyss as “normal,” if you swallow the lies and mute your conscience, then you are not merely living through a dark chapter—you are co‑authoring it. 

    The world is being turned into a hunting ground, and law itself has been marked as prey. If you do not stand now, while you still can, one day you will wake up to find that it is your future, your family, and your faith in justice that have been captured—and there will be no one left to speak your name. 

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump’s Narco Hypocrisy: Pardoning the Kingpins, Bombing the Nobodies

    Trump’s Narco Hypocrisy: Pardoning the Kingpins, Bombing the Nobodies

    by Amal Zadok

    Trump’s second term has become a moral crime scene: a president who claims to fight terror and drugs is literally embracing a former jihadist whose past helped kill Americans, pardoning a narco‑president whose cocaine helped destroy American lives, arming Netanyahu as Gaza is reduced to rubble, and ordering missiles on nameless men in boats while powerful killers walk free. This is not “America First”; it is a grotesque alliance of blood‑stained elites, wrapped in a flag and sold as patriotism.

    The Syrian visitor is President Ahmed al‑Sharaa, once a rising figure in jihadist‑linked networks that drew a multimillion‑dollar U.S. bounty and were treated as a direct threat to American lives. A man whose circles were on U.S. terrorism lists is now ushered through White House security as an honoured guest, his history airbrushed away in the glow of photo‑ops. Trump does not just “talk” to him in some neutral venue; he grants him the prestige, the symbolism, the legitimacy of the Oval Office, and in doing so spits on the memory of Americans killed by the very networks this man once served.

    MAGA voters were told Trump would be the hammer of justice against jihadists, that he would avenge the dead and protect the living, that he would end “stupid wars” while keeping America safe. Millions of decent people believed those promises in good faith because they wanted fewer body bags, less chaos, and real protection for their families. They were not wrong to want those things; they were wrong about the man they trusted to deliver them.

    Then there is the ex‑president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. This man did not just “look the other way.” He helped turn his country into a narco highway, enabling cartels to move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States – a river of powder that translates directly into overdoses, gang violence, shattered families and dead Americans.

    This is not some technical, victimless crime; it is mass poisoning delivered by the ton. A U.S. jury listened to evidence and concluded, beyond reasonable doubt, that this head of state was a key player in a vast cocaine conspiracy, and a federal judge handed down a 45‑year sentence because anything less would mock the victims. And Trump blew it away: in December 2025 he signed a sweeping pardon that opened the prison gates for Hernández and declared his record wiped clean. This is policy, not accident.

    With one pen stroke, he tells every grieving American parent whose child died on cocaine or crack: your pain is negotiable, your justice is reversible, and if a man wears a presidential sash, his crimes are redeemable. He tells every cop who risked their life on the street, every agent who built the case, every witness who testified against a narco‑president: all of that can be wiped away if it is politically convenient.

    At the same time, Trump continues to pour political cover and weapons into Netanyahu’s hands as Gaza is pulverised and large parts of the West Bank are terrorised. This is a government openly carrying out collective punishment, bombing densely populated civilian areas, annihilating entire families, and leaving Gaza’s hospitals, neighbourhoods and basic infrastructure in ruins. Trump stands not as a restraining voice, but as an amplifier: praising Netanyahu, indulging his maximalist rhetoric, blocking accountability, and helping ensure that the bombs keep falling.

    Christians are not spared. Ancient churches have been damaged or desecrated, Christian communities harassed and attacked, Christian clergy assaulted or intimidated as the war spills across the Holy Land. The land where Jesus walked is now a place where Christian sanctuaries are treated as expendable collateral, and Trump’s response is not outrage, not sanctions, not a hard line on war crimes, but more indulgence, more permission, more weapons – all wrapped in a cynical fusion of Christian language and political calculation that turns faith into a shield for atrocity.

    This is the man who promised “no more endless wars” and “America First.” What did his supporters get instead? A president who invites a former jihadist to the White House one day before one of the most sacred days for the U.S. military, turning solemn remembrance into a backdrop for a grotesque photo‑op. That is not restraint; that is desecration dressed up as diplomacy.

    They got a president who blesses, arms and shields a foreign leader whose campaign in Gaza and the West Bank is seen by much of the world as a live‑streamed atrocity. They got a president who outsources “war” to drones and missiles at sea, blowing up boats on suspicion, rather than formally declaring conflicts or respecting Congress. U.S. forces under Trump have repeatedly struck alleged drug boats near Venezuela and across the Caribbean, killing men whose names, faces and actual roles are still hidden from the American public. This is policy, not accident.

    This is not the end of war; it is the laundering of war. It is the transformation of war into a series of “operations,” “strikes,” and “counter‑narco missions” that avoid public debate while still killing real human beings. No body bags shown on television, just shredded bodies in the Caribbean and the eastern Mediterranean, far away from American cameras.

    “Drain the swamp” was supposed to mean confronting entrenched power: lobbyists, foreign money, corrupt politicians, the revolving door with arms manufacturers and foreign regimes. Instead, Trump has fused his White House to some of the dirtiest currents in global politics. He entertains a former jihadist leader, frees a convicted narco‑president whose crimes helped drown U.S. communities in cocaine, and embraces and arms a government accused of genocide, war crimes, and systematic persecution – including persecution of Christians.

    He then stands back as missiles slam into small boats on the high seas, killing the poor and powerless whose only crime is being on the wrong vessel with the wrong accusation attached. The message to the world is simple: presidents and generals get invitations and pardons, while fishermen, migrants and low‑level smugglers get obliterated without trial.

    How is this “draining the swamp”? The swamp has never been happier. Arms dealers profit from the weapons sent to an unrestrained Israeli war machine, and defence contractors quietly celebrate the steady flow of contracts. Foreign politicians with blood‑soaked records find forgiveness and legitimacy in Washington. Lobbyists and ideologues pushing unconditional support for the Israeli government see their agenda elevated above the lives of Palestinians, above international law, above even the safety of Christian communities in the Holy Land.

    Ask plainly: is this what MAGA expected? A president who kills nameless men in boats without trial while freeing narco capos in suits? Who dignifies a former jihadist leader while preaching toughness on terror? Who backs a foreign government as it flattens Gaza, terrorises the West Bank, and allows Christian churches and communities to be attacked? Who uses patriotic slogans and Christian language as a mask for raw realpolitik and transactional alliances with killers?

    All of it adds up to a single, obscene picture. This is not the hero of some populist epic. This is a villain who learned how to speak the language of the angry and betrayed, only to turn around and protect the powerful while crushing the weak. Every missile launched at a boat full of suspects, every tank round that lands on a crowded Gaza street, every quiet, smiling photo with a man who once ran with terrorists or cartels – all of it is a signature on a contract that says: power will be protected, and the rest of you are expendable.

    It is like declaring total war on the Medellín Cartel while still inviting Pablo Escobar to the White House, shaking his hand, and pardoning him for every crime he committed against the American people – then turning around and hunting down desperate teenagers in speedboats to prove how “tough” you are. In this upside‑down morality, power launders guilt, the presidency launders narco‑politics, and the only people who truly face the full violence of the U.S. state are the ones too poor, too foreign and too disposable ever to see the inside of the Oval Office.

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Europe’s Last Heist: From Rule of Law to Robbery in a De Facto Declaration of Financial War on Russia

    Europe’s Last Heist: From Rule of Law to Robbery in a De Facto Declaration of Financial War on Russia

    by Amal Zadok

    Europe’s decision to seize and weaponise frozen Russian state assets marks a dangerous escalation: a last tantrum of a decadent elite that prefers to gamble with international law and Europe’s own future rather than accept strategic defeat and negotiate peace. Presenting this as “justice” or “reparations for Ukraine” hides a more prosaic reality: the European gangster wants those billions to plug fiscal holes, prop up a failing war effort, and delay the reckoning with its own political and economic suicide.

    The gangster move: stealing the frozen billions

    The plan to strip Russia of hundreds of billions in frozen reserves is the logical culmination of a policy that has already burned Europe’s cheap energy, industrial base, and social model on the altar of war. After sacrificing affordable Russian gas and triggering deindustrialisation and inflation, EU elites now eye Moscow’s confiscated assets as a new “magic fund” to sustain a war they cannot win and a fiscal model they can no longer finance from a shrinking tax base.

    This is framed as moral duty—“Russia must pay”—but the context betrays the real motive. Europe has already diverted enormous sums of public money to arm Kyiv while hospitals close, schools crumble, and poverty indices climb; the assets grab offers a way to extend this war spending without openly telling citizens they will lose even more welfare and rights. The political clica wants to swap domestic social anger for geopolitical banditry, trading bread and pensions for a one‑off financial heist.

    Belgium: pressure on the weak link

    Belgium sits at the centre of this scheme because Euroclear holds a massive chunk of the immobilised Russian reserves, turning Brussels into the vault the clica now wants to crack open. The same Europe that chants about “rule of law” is pressuring a small member state to accept a precedent that would have been unthinkable even at the height of the Cold War: openly confiscating another state’s reserves not as part of a peace settlement, but to keep shovelling weapons into an open‑ended proxy war.

    This pressure takes several forms.

    •Legal sophistry: relabelling seizure as “windfall profits,” “guarantees,” or “collateral,” while the substance is still the same—appropriating Russian wealth to fund war.

    •Political blackmail: warning Belgium that refusing the scheme would mean “abandoning Ukraine” or undermining European unity, turning a technical custody issue into a loyalty test.

    •Financial intimidation: hinting that Belgium’s role as a Euroclear hub could be questioned if it does not align with Washington and Brussels’ strategy.

    If Belgium capitulates, the message to the world is simple: deposits and reserves in Europe are safe only until the next geopolitical hysteria.

    Repercussions from Russia: from retaliation to systemic fracture

    For Russia, this move crosses a line between sanctions and outright theft. Moscow will not respond only with diplomatic protests; it has tools—economic, legal, and strategic—that will turn this European tantrum into a long‑term blowback.

    Likely responses include:

    •Legal counter‑claims and mirror seizures: Russia can expropriate European assets on its territory, nullify Western intellectual property, and seize physical infrastructure and investments as “compensation.”

    •Deepened de‑dollarisation and de‑euroisation: the signal to the Global South is devastating—Western currencies and jurisdictions are now weaponised, not neutral. This accelerates the creation of alternative payment systems, BRICS mechanisms, and commodity‑based settlement that permanently erode Europe’s financial relevance.

    •Strategic hardening: confiscation removes incentives for compromise. If Russia knows its reserves are gone for good, it has fewer reasons to agree to any settlement framed on Western terms, entrenching a cold war that Europe is far less equipped to sustain than Washington.

    In short, the “free money” Europe hopes to extract from Russian reserves will be repaid with isolation from emerging financial architectures, lost markets, and a Russia firmly anchored in a non‑Western bloc that no longer trusts European signatures or banks.

    Europe’s attempt to formalise this confiscation also carries the logic and symbolism of a declaration of war, even if it hides behind legal euphemisms and technocratic language. 

    Treating the central bank reserves of a nuclear‑armed state as spoils to be carved up for weapons and reconstruction funds signals that the EU no longer recognises Russia as a legitimate counterpart in the international system, but as a defeated enemy to be looted.

    In strategic terms, this is indistinguishable from economic total war, because it erases the boundary between temporary sanctions and permanent dispossession.

    Such a move hardens threat perceptions in Moscow to an unprecedented degree, reinforcing the narrative that the West seeks not negotiation or “behaviour change” but Russia’s strategic humiliation and eventual fragmentation. 

    If Russian leaders conclude that no future compromise can restore their assets, security, or status, they are incentivised to escalate horizontally—cyber, space, infrastructure, and asymmetric responses—rather than de‑escalate. 

    What Europe reads as financial cleverness, Russia reads as confirmation that the conflict is existential and must be met with long‑term, system‑level counter‑measures.

    By crossing this Rubicon, Europe not only undermines its own legal foundations but also normalises the idea that financial warfare can be escalated indefinitely without triggering wider conflict—a dangerous illusion. 

    Once the taboo on sovereign asset seizure is broken, every further crisis will tempt policymakers to “solve” political problems with new expropriations, pushing great‑power relations ever closer to open confrontation. 

    In this sense, the theft of Russian reserves is not just a tantrum; it is the codification of permanent economic war and, in substance, a de facto declaration of war against Russia, with all the risks of miscalculation, retaliation, and eventual military escalation that such a doctrine entails.

    The internal cost: Europe against its own citizens

    The gangster heist is not just an act against Russia; it is an act against Europeans themselves. By normalising confiscation of sovereign assets and emergency war financing, the same political clica also normalises permanent emergency at home—more censorship, less judicial independence, more police, and fewer social rights.

    The trajectory is already visible:

    •Sanctions and energy rupture triggered deindustrialisation, capital flight, and a collapse of the tax base that once funded Europe’s welfare states.

    •The Ukraine war became the justification to divert billions from schools, hospitals, and pensions into weapons, while dissenters were smeared as traitors or agents of Moscow.

    •Digital censorship regimes, “disinformation” laws, and emergency decrees hollowed out democratic debate and press freedom, recreating a digitalised version of Soviet‑style control.

    Using Russian money to keep this machinery going compounds the moral and legal rot. It signals that the war economy and repression must continue at any cost, because the elites have staked not just political capital but now the credibility of the entire European financial system on a conflict that has no realistic path to victory.

    Europe’s strategic suicide: from unipolar denial to open piracy

    Confiscating Russian reserves is also a symptom of a deeper pathology: Europe’s refusal to accept a multipolar world and its subservience to US strategic dictates. Instead of adapting to a reality where Russia, China, and the Global South cannot be coerced into obedience, Europe doubles down on unipolar fantasies—NATO expansion, economic warfare, ideological crusades—and then, when the costs become unbearable, resorts to financial piracy to prolong the illusion.

    The long‑term consequences are stark:

    •Trust collapse: states that watched Libya’s reserves frozen and now see Russia’s formally confiscated will regard Western custody as a trap, not a service.

    •Loss of strategic autonomy: as Europe burns bridges to Eurasia, it locks itself into dependency on American energy, arms, and financial architecture, becoming a semi‑sovereign periphery of Washington’s empire.

    •Civilisational hollowing: the moral language of “rule of law,” “human rights,” and “democracy” becomes empty when the EU behaves like a cartel seizing assets to fund a proxy war, censors opposition, and militarises public life.

    The irony is cruel: in the name of defending “European values” against Moscow, Europe is dismantling its welfare state, civil liberties, and credibility as a legal and financial safe haven.

    Beyond the tantrum: the fork in the road

    This last tantrum—the attempt to steal Russia’s frozen billions—is not a sign of strength but of exhaustion. It reveals elites trapped between a failed war strategy, a collapsing social contract, and a world that no longer tolerates Western impunity.

    Europe now stands at a precipice where one decision can still change its fate: either reclaim the primacy of bread over bombs, law over looting, and peace over permanent mobilisation, or accept its mutation into a garrisoned, obedient frontier of a fading empire. 

    If the frozen Russian billions are finally cracked open to feed the war machine, that act will not be a clever financial manoeuvre but the moment Europe openly chooses vassalage over sovereignty and plunder over principle. 

    On that day, historians will not write that Europe defended its values; they will record that, for the price of one last stolen jackpot, a civilisation signed away its soul and marked, in its own hand, the date of its final moral and strategic surrender.

    References

    1.European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025, November 27). EU sanctions and Russia’s frozen assets (Study EXPO_STU(2025)754487). European Parliament.

    2.European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025, September 7). Confiscation of immobilised Russian sovereign assets: State of play, arguments and scenarios (Briefing EPRS_BRI(2025)775908). European Parliament.

    3.European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025, June 30). Immobilised Russian central bank assets (At a glance EPRS_ATA(2025)769514). European Parliament.

    4.Reuters. (2025, December 2). EU proposes using frozen Russian assets or borrowing to raise €90 billion for Ukraine.

    5.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2025, December 3). EU proposes using frozen Russian assets as reparations loans for Ukraine.

    6.Verfassungsblog. (2025, April 3). Frozen Russian state assets. Verfassungsblog on Constitutional Matters.

    7.Council on Foreign Relations. (2025, November 19). How to use Russia’s frozen assets.

    8.Reuters. (2025, December 3). Russia mocks EU deliberations on frozen assets, says seizure will prompt “harshest response”.

    9.CNBC. (2025, December 4). Russia: Europe’s use of frozen assets could be justification for war.

    10.Investing.com. (2025, December 4). Russia warns EU of “harsh response” over potential asset freezes.

    11.Reuters. (2025, December 1). Top Russian banker says EU faces 50 years of litigation if it takes Russia’s frozen assets.

    12.Big Europe. (2025, November 12). The poisoned chalice of Russia’s frozen assets.

    13.Geopolitique.eu. (2023, February 22). Sanction. Confiscate. Compensate. How Russian money can be repurposed as reparations for Ukrainian victims.

    14.Al Jazeera. (2025, December 2). Europe should seize Russia’s frozen assets now.

    15.Reuters. (2025, October 2). How Europe wants to unlock Russia’s frozen cash for Ukraine.

    16.CEPR. (2025, March). Seizing central bank assets?

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Cowards in Uniform: The Strategy of Hiding to Escape Justice

    Cowards in Uniform: The Strategy of Hiding to Escape Justice

    by Amal Zadok

    The Israeli army’s recent strategy of photographing its soldiers with faces hidden and backs turned is not a trivial bureaucratic change; it is a desperate, coded admission, a sign that Israel’s leadership recognizes its actions against Palestinians as war crimes and crimes against humanity. With each blurred visage and anonymous portrait, the state announces, louder than words could ever do: “We know what we are doing is indefensible.” This subterfuge is both a confession and a shield, calculated to obscure individual responsibility in a campaign that, by any honest reckoning, is genocide and ethnic cleansing.

    Authentic Israeli photo catalog
    of members of the IDF

    The policy’s timing—issued amid mounting international scrutiny, tribunal threats, and documentation of unspeakable atrocities in Gaza—is revealing. For decades, Israel insisted on the moral superiority of its “most ethical army.” Now, as civilian casualties skyrocket and legal obligations close in, it has adopted an extraordinary regime of institutional secrecy. The faces turned away from cameras mirror the state’s evasion before the world’s demand for justice.

    Consider the sequence of events: Airstrikes level hospitals, schools, and residential blocks. Water, electricity, and humanitarian access are systematically cut. Food supplies run out. Famine and disease spread among besieged Palestinians. Journalists and aid workers become deliberate targets. The UN and respected human rights bodies document war crimes—collective punishment, indiscriminate killing, denial of medical care, forced displacement. Israel’s leadership, aware of growing evidence, now tries to disappear the very perpetrators from world memory.

    Legal experts warn that this pattern—intentional targeting of civilians, destruction of infrastructure vital for survival, dehumanizing propaganda that calls Palestinians “human animals”—fulfills multiple prongs of the UN’s Convention on Genocide. The concealment policy is not merely a precaution: It is a tacit admission that prosecution is a real possibility. Already, global institutions and independent media—from The Washington Post to Al Jazeera and The New York Times—report Israel’s attempts to rationalize airstrikes on journalists and medical workers as attacks on “Hamas operatives.” The legal sleight-of-hand echoes the military’s attempt to vanish its own soldiers from public record.

    A truly “ethical” nation would champion transparency and the rule of law. Instead, Israel has constructed a fortress of impunity, betting that anonymity for its soldiers can shelter them from accountability. In reality, the world’s memory is longer than a press release. Satellite evidence, survivor testimony, and eyewitness reporting form a mountain of documentation that no photo policy can erase.

    Reviewing court filings, leaks from inside Israel’s security apparatus, and international humanitarian law reveals the scale of responsibility. Legal organizations confirm that Israel’s new strategy follows secret recommendations from internal legal counsel who assessed the risk of foreign prosecutions—a risk now heightened by the International Criminal Court’s investigations into war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

    Israel’s defenders argue that security demands secrecy. But this rationale collapses under scrutiny: Blurring rank-and-file faces does not deter Hamas, which already possesses detailed intelligence; it only impedes efforts to identify individual responsibility for war crimes. The message to Israeli soldiers is clear—participate in war crimes, but rest assured that your identity will be shielded by the state. This is not the logic of a democracy; it is the logic of a criminal enterprise.

    The human impact is undeniable. Palestinians in Gaza describe living in a “giant concentration camp.” Children are orphaned overnight. Families are pulverized in seconds. Hospitals face impossible choices: treat the dying or ration the last bags of flour to stave off starvation. UN officials and independent humanitarian monitors consistently assert that these conditions cannot be justified under international law. Their verdict: these are crimes against humanity.

    The IDF’s photo policy, in its chilling banality, is a watershed moment: a state staging its own cover-up in real time. Reporting must call this out—not with meek equivocation, but with unflinching clarity.

    Let the record show: the government of Israel knows that what it orders its soldiers to do is criminal. Let it be remembered that an official policy of concealment is itself evidence of intent. The world must reject the cowardice of the back-turned portrait, demand the unmasking of the perpetrators, and refuse silence in the face of genocide. Journalism, at its highest calling, is justice’s witness—and truth’s last defense against the machinery of impunity.

    Yet the march of history and the reckoning of memory are unyielding. Every child consigned to mass graves, every family shattered under bombardment, every Palestinian voice silenced or erased—in the end, all stand as an indictment more permanent than any border wall or buried truth.

    A nation that orders the erasure of both victim and perpetrator, that strives to obliterate not just people but the record of their extermination, cannot hide its shame behind bureaucratic anonymity. The world will not allow Israel’s faceless executioners to vanish into the shadows of policy and propaganda.

    The day is coming when those who presided over and participated in this crime will no longer be able to turn their backs to the camera, to the court, or to the conscience of humanity. Justice, though delayed, is relentless. It will bear the names, faces, and command signatures of the guilty through time. The faceless photos are the last refuge of the powerful before history’s damning exposure. The world will remember, witness, and one day, finally, judge.

    References

    1. Reuters. (2025, January 8). Israeli military tightens media rules over war crimes prosecution concern. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-tightens-media-rules-over-war-crimes-prosecution-concern-2025-01-08/

    2. Middle East Eye. (2025, January 8). Israeli army to hide soldiers’ identities from media. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-army-set-hide-soldiers-identities-media

    3. Yahoo News Australia. (2025, November 19). Why Israeli soldiers and their leaders may be increasingly … https://au.news.yahoo.com/why-israeli-soldiers-leaders-may-043027389.html

    4. The Media Line. (2025, January 8). New IDF Social Media Policy for Soldiers a ‘Lost Cause,’ … https://themedialine.org/top-stories/new-idf-social-media-policy-for-soldiers-a-lost-cause-cybersecurity-expert-tells-tml/

    5. ABC News. (2024, April 16). IDF’s conduct, ethics under scrutiny following soldiers’ social media posts. https://abcnews.go.com/International/idfs-conduct-ethics-scrutiny-soldiers-social-media-posts/story?id=109035616

    6. The New York Times. (2025, August 21). He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated … https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/israel-al-sharif-killing-gaza.html

    7. Washington Post. (n.d.). Finalist: Staff of The Washington Post. https://www.pulitzer.org/node/staff-washington-post-38

    8. Maghrebi.org. (2024, May 8). Pulitzer Prizes honour journalists’ coverage of Israel-Gaza war. https://maghrebi.org/2024/05/08/pulitzer-prizes-honour-journalists-coverage-of-israel-gaza-war/

    9. Al Jazeera. (2023, June 7). Israeli troops hit with social media ban. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/6/7/israeli-troops-hit-with-social-media-ban

    10. BBC News. (2013, March 1). Israeli army ire over social media posts. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-21627500

    11. World Records Journal. (2022, July 27). How the IDF Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Video Activism. https://worldrecordsjournal.org/spectacle-as-camouflage-how-the-idf-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-video-activism/

    12. FPA. (2025, February 9). Photo Exposes More About Israel Than Its Subjects. https://fpa.org/photo-exposes-israel-subjects/

    13. OHCHR. (2024, October 9). UN Commission finds war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israeli attacks. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/10/un-commission-finds-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity-israeli-attacks

    14. Human Rights Watch. (2024, November 14). Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/14/israels-crimes-against-humanity-gaza

    15. Amnesty International. (2025, October 1). Israeli military must be investigated for war crimes of wanton destruction in Gaza. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/09/israel-opt-israeli-military-must-be-investigated-for-war-crime-of-wanton-destruct

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Witness to Suffering, Testament to Courage: The Unyielding Spirit of Palestine Under Siege

    Witness to Suffering, Testament to Courage: The Unyielding Spirit of Palestine Under Siege

    by Amal Zadok

    In the heart of every refugee camp, amid the shattered homes, beneath the relentless echo of drones and artillery, the Palestinian struggle endures. It is not a passive legacy. It is the living story of a people refusing to bow to the machinery of oppression. The world has grown used to numbers—statistics of dead, lists of imprisoned, columns of hunger and destruction. But these numbers conceal real lives, resilient souls, and a will for justice that no regime of terror can erase.

    Zionism’s story, as echoed in volumes of scholarship and documentary record, began as a colonial vision intent on overwhelming and displacing Palestine’s indigenous population. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International describe the lived result as apartheid, a cruel system where suffering is manufactured and dignity daily denied.

    Today in Gaza and the West Bank, winter storms flood battered tents, worn-out shelters collapse beneath the weight of cold and rain, and 1.5 million displaced Palestinians struggle to survive. Humanitarian organizations report that 93% of all displacement tents are no longer suitable for shelter, their fabric torn by bombardment and the elements. Families huddle on soggy ground amid the ruins—still alive, still witnessing, still demanding justice as the world shuffles corridors of power and banishes relief to endless administrative red tape.

    Parents describe the agony of watching their babies die in malnutrition wards, denied lifesaving formula by the blockade. Aid convoys are halted, water lines are destroyed, and each shelter becomes a symbol of survival amid engineered deprivation. Despite a fragile ceasefire, access to shelter, food, and clean water remains catastrophic. The UN, local partners, and courageous volunteers scramble to provide what little aid is allowed: winter clothing, blankets, mental health support for traumatized children, and emergency nutrition for the sick and undernourished.

    The siege is relentless. Israeli bombardments erase whole neighborhoods. Households become mass graves. Generations of families vanish inside collapsing buildings and burning camps. Ambulances and clinics are targeted; hospitals run out of medicine, and medical workers patch up bodies only to send them back into tents and hunger. Yet, Gaza’s spirit refuses surrender. “As long as there is life in Gaza, there is hope. We will not surrender. And we will return,” vows a survivor. Each personal tale, each poem and prayer, is a fierce assertion of Palestinian identity against those seeking its erasure.

    Behind every headline, the machinery of crime is visible and documented. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for those responsible—Netanyahu, Gallant, and others—charging them with war crimes for orchestrating mass starvation and carnage. These charges rest not on rhetoric but on medical records, survivor testimony, and forensic analysis.

    Inside prisons and detention centers, the horror is magnified. Reputable sources such as Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have documented cases of torture and sexual violence. Women and men speak of rape, forced nudity, and assaults during interrogations and raids. These acts are supported by medical exams and investigative reports and are used destructively—to extract confessions, destroy spirit, and mandate silence. Children, too, are targeted: threatened, stripped, abused, and forced to see their bodies as instruments of humiliation.

    This sustained reign of terror is not only documented but openly condemned by human rights experts and legal authorities. Displaced families speak in the language of resilience, refusing victimhood, and insisting on the restoration of dignity. The world is commanded not to look away—to witness the suffering and to respond, not with charity, but with uncompromising justice.

    Legal experts, advocates, and survivors invoke Nuremberg’s legacy, demanding not only trials for the architects of atrocity, but the dismantling of the oppressive system itself. The demand for justice is not vengeance, but restoration: for those who survived torture and rape, for every child lost to blockade and shellfire, for every family left to mourn exile and separation.

    Palestinian suffering is not a tragedy to be pitied, but a summons to action—a reminder that humanity cannot exist while some lives are expendable. Their courage sharpens the case for accountability, their endurance keeps alive the hope of genuine peace. Witnessing suffering must become a rallying cry, pushing the world to confront what it has refused too long to see.

    As long as there are survivors, there will be testimony. As long as testimony endures, there will be judgment for those who inflicted these crimes. The world’s duty is clear: to be not merely spectators, but co-authors of justice for Palestine. Their unyielding spirit is a testament not just to their own courage, but to the possibility of a reckoning—and the birth of a new dignity, unbroken by siege.

    References

    1. Human Rights Watch. (2023). “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

    2. Amnesty International. (2022). “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/

    3. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2024). “Occupied Palestinian Territory: Humanitarian Impact Report.” https://www.ochaopt.org/

    4. B’Tselem. (2023). “Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli Custody.” https://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners

    5. Al-Haq. (2024). “Accountability for War Crimes: Patterns of Violations in Gaza.” https://www.alhaq.org/

    6. International Criminal Court. (2024). “Arrest Warrants for Israeli Leadership: Netanyahu and Gallant.” https://www.icc-cpi.int/palestine

    7. CNN. (2025). “Turkey issues ‘genocide’ arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.” https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/06/world/turkey-netanyahu-arrest-warrant-genocide-intl/index.html

    8. Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. (2025). “Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Prisons.” https://pchrgaza.org/en/

    9. BBC. (2023). “Released Palestinians allege abuse in Israeli jails.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67649824

    10. The Lancet. (2023). “Civilian Casualties and Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Medical Perspective.” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00727-5/fulltext

    11. Mondoweiss. (2024). “Months of Israeli torture, abuse, and sexual violence in detention.” https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/months-of-israeli-torture-abuse-and-sexual-violence-in-detention/

    12. The Conversation. (2025). “Israel is on notice for using sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners.” https://theconversation.com/israel-is-on-notice-for-using-sexual-violence-against-palestinian-prisoners-224580

    13. Amnesty International. (2025). “Gaza: Israel’s Use of Starvation Evidence of Genocide.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/gaza-israel-use-of-starvation-evidence-of-genocide/

    14. The Nation. (2025). “‘I Have Watched My People Suffer in Ways That Would Shock the World.’” https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestine-gaza-suffering/

    15. PubMed Central. (2025). “War-Related Trauma in Narratives of Gazans.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10123456/

    16. Al Jazeera. (2025). “Displaced Palestinian families suffer as heavy rains flood Gaza tent camps.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/14/displaced-palestinian-families-gaza-tent-camps-flood

    17. Daily Sabah. (2025). “Tents flooded in Gaza as Israel keeps blocking shelter materials.” https://www.dailysabah.com/world/mid-east/tents-flooded-in-gaza-as-israel-keeps-blocking-shelter-materials/news

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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