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Flags of Israel and Saudi Arabia
Defense and intelligence officials from Israel and Saudi Arabia are visiting the US this week to discuss Iran amid a US military buildup in the region, Axios reported Thursday, citing sources.
Gen. Shlomi Binder, the head of Israel’s military intelligence, conducted a series of high-level consultations on Tuesday and Wednesday with top leadership at the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House, according to two American officials.
The general’s visit was said to be centered on delivering specific intelligence requested by the Trump administration, including data on potential strike targets within Iran.
In contrast, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman is expected to emphasize diplomatic avenues during his Thursday and Friday meetings with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, envoy Steve Witkoff and Defense Department officials.
Saudi Arabia, who have been passing messages between Washington and Tehran, said earlier it would not allow the US to use its airspace in any attack.
The diplomatic friction occurs as the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group arrives to finalize a naval “armada” that President Donald Trump recently claimed is “bigger than” the force previously deployed toward Venezuela.
“The directive at the moment is to prepare,” a US official noted, suggesting that the president is rapidly approaching a final decision regarding military action.
Neither sides has provided a public information regarding the ongoing meetings reported by the news outlet.
Trump has called on Iran to make a deal on its nuclear program before it is too late, warning that this time the attack would be “far worse.” The US had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025 during Tehran’s 12-day war with Israel.
Iran says its civil nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the West argues it is developing a nuclear weapon. The US has also expressed concerns over Iran’s ballistic missile program.
The developments come amid recent unrest and protests in Iran over worsening economic conditions due to a sharp depreciation in the local currency.
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Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
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Israeli forces detain a photojournalist and distrain his equipment as they enclose the area around Jewish Brigade base where they ‘neutralized’ a Palestinian for allegedly carrying a knife according to their announcement in Hebron, West Bank on October 03, 2024. [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency]
A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has ranked Israel as the third worst jailer of journalists in the world, behind only China and Myanmar, in a damning indictment of the state’s escalating war on press freedom.
The CPJ’s annual global census, released this week, recorded 320 journalists imprisoned worldwide as of 1 December 2025, with authoritarian governments using detention, legal harassment and violence to stifle independent reporting and silence dissent.
While China and Myanmar retained the top two spots, Israel’s position as the third worst jailer of journalists reflects its entrenched and systematic repression of Palestinian media workers, carried out through arbitrary arrests, administrative detention, and sweeping military censorship.
The report highlights the growing use of vague security charges, prolonged pretrial detentions, and denial of access to lawyers—tactics long used by Israel against Palestinian media workers.
Many of the journalists imprisoned by Israel are held under administrative detention, without formal charges or trial, a practice widely condemned by human rights organisations as a violation of international law.
The CPJ also confirmed that Israel continues to bar international journalists from entering Gaza, denying independent access to a war zone where it is conducting what leading legal scholars, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, have described as a genocide.
CPJ found that since 7 October 2023, Israel has Israel arrested more than 90 journalists during the course of the genocide and according to Reporters Without Borders killed at least 210.
Despite the mass killing of civilians and destruction of media infrastructure in Gaza, Israel has refused to allow international press into the territory, even as it claims to be a democratic state with “the most moral army in the world”.
“Israel, the only country on the worst jailers’ list that is traditionally considered a democracy, began imprisoning Palestinian journalists rapidly following the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023,” the report said.
Regarding torture of prisoners CPJ said that the “greatest number of torture and beating claims since 1992 have occurred in Iran, followed by Israel and Egypt”.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
The bodies of victims of the October 31, 2023 Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip are lined up outside the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City.(Photo by Fadi Alwhidi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The real figure is much higher,” said one UK lawmaker. “This is a ‘ceasefire’ in name only. The slaughter goes on.”
After two years of denial and deception, the Israel Defense Forces acknowledged Wednesday for the first time that over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, while continuing to deny the famine Israel caused by blocking humanitarian aid from entering the obliterated strip.
Israeli media including the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and others reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accepts the accuracy of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) death toll, which currently stands at least 71,667, with more than 171,000 others wounded and 9,500 missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings.
“How many years did we spend screaming, with checked and re-checked figures, lists showing names and ID numbers, being told the numbers were completely fanciful despite rigorous, transparent verification, and now the IDF quietly accepts that they were correct all along,” Beirut-based journalist Séamus Malekafzali said on X in response to the IDF admission.
Experts—including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—assert that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than reported. Last June, a study published in Nature reported 84,000 deaths in Gaza. Others say the toll could be even higher, with one Economist study estimating between 77,000-109,000 Gazans killed by Israeli forces.
“We should not care what the IDF accepts or not—they perpetrated the genocide,” said Jake Romm, the US representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation, which tracks suspected IDF war criminals and is named after a 5-year-old Palestinian girl massacred along with relatives and rescue workers by Israeli occupation forces on January 29, 2024. “Their communications are in service of that project.”
“This is, in any event, an admission that will only be used to discredit the real, much higher death toll as the scale of the atrocity becomes known,” Romm added.
After more than 2 years of Hasbara efforts to label journalists and NGOs as “useful idiots of Hamas” for using this data, the IDF has confirmed its accuracy. Yet with Gaza’s health system destroyed and long-standing aid restrictions, this estimate is only the tip of the iceberg. https://t.co/GDxppEr3ir
Israeli academic Ori Goldberg was also skeptical of the IDF’s admission, asserting on X: “’Accepts’ means that even the vast network of lies no longer holds. If the IDF ‘accepts’ 70,000, it has killed innumerably more.”
While the IDF accepted GHM’s death toll, it argued that the famine in Gaza—which officially lasted from August-December 2025, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the standard international framework for classifying food insecurity and malnutrition—did not happen.
GHM says at least 453 Palestinians, including 150 children, have died of malnutrition in Gaza since October 2023. The IDF contends that the figure is a mix of lies and misleading reporting about people who had preexisting health conditions before they starved to death.
However, famine experts argue that Israel orchestrated a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in Gaza.
Throughout the war, Israeli leaders, their supporters abroad, and mainstream US media attempted to discredit GHM casualty figures by casting aspersions upon the “Hamas-run” ministry. This, despite Israeli military intelligence deeming the figures accurate and historical confirmations of their reliability.
“The phrase *Hamas* Health Ministry was used as a slur for years to signal unreliability, even though it was pointed out again and again that its numbers had always held up,” noted journalist Jasper Nathaniel, adding sardonically that “I’m sure the ‘Pallywood’ crowd will be rushing to apologize today.”
Well this is truly appalling:
The IDF now accepts the Gaza Health Ministry’s conservative official death toll figure of 71,000 Palestinians. Yet, for 2 years of a genocide it claimed those same figures were false – and the BBC News and other media insisted on seeding doubt in… https://t.co/D5W7vj9huL
The International Center for Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said on social media that “every media outlet that cast doubt over these figures with dogwhistling phrases like ‘Hamas-run MoH’ is complicit in these killings.”
“In truth, the 71,000+ figure is conservative,” ICJP added. “Palestinian bodies are buried under the rubble and can’t be counted and many more have died from malnutrition due to Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians. Different tools, same outcome: Israeli genocide of Palestinians.”
In the United States—which has supported Israel’s annihilation of Gaza with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid and diplomatic cover including vetoes of numerous United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions during both the Biden and Trump administrations—the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan amendment in June 2024 that banned US officials from using State Department resources to cite GHM casualty figures.
The amendment’s lead sponsor, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.)—whose all-time top campaign contributor is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—contended that “at the end of the day, the Gaza Ministry of Health is the Hamas Ministry of Health.”
Jared Moskowitz wrote the legislation to bar the state department from citing data from the Gaza Health Ministry. Now even the IDF accepts these numbers. The real death toll is certainly much higher.
A senior IDF official told the Times of Israel that the military is in the process of determining how many of the Gaza dead were members of Hamas or other militant groups.
While the Israeli government has claimed a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, classified IDF intelligence data obtained last year during an investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians—or 83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were civilians.
Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who led the IDF through most of the war—acknowledged after retiring last year that “over 10%” of Gaza’s population, or about 220,000 Palestinians, had been killed or wounded as of September 2025.
“This is not a gentle war,” Halevi said at the time, “we took the gloves off from the first minute.”
Following the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.
The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks, and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes.
The killing isn’t over. Since a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect last October 10, Israeli forces have killed more than 500 Palestinians in over 1,200 violations of the truce. Palestinians—mostly children and infants—are also still dying of exposure to cold weather as Israel continues to restrict the entry of aid into Gaza.
“They said Palestinians were exaggerating. Lying. Propagandists,” Independent UK Member of Parliament Shockat Adam said on X Thursday. “Now, even the IDF accepts 70,000+ killed in Gaza. The real figure is much higher. This is a ‘ceasefire’ in name only. The slaughter goes on.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Border czar Tom Homan speaks during a news conference about ongoing immigration enforcement operations on January 29, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“’In theater’ is an expression that has no place anywhere within the United States,” said one critic.
White House border czar Tom Homan on Thursday sparked alarm when he used terminology associated with overseas war to describe federal immigration operations taking place in Minnesota.
“3,000,” Homan replied. “There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.”
Q: Can you be specific about how many ICE and Border Patrol agents are currently operating in the state?
HOMAN: 3,000. There's been some rotations. They've been in theater a long time. Day after day, can't eat in restaurants, people spin on you, blowing whistles at you. But my… pic.twitter.com/1Vz8mKYCAv
Typically terms such as “rotations” and “theater” are not used to describe domestic law enforcement operations, but overseas military deployments.
Many critics were quick to notice Homan’s use of war jargon to describe actions being taken in a US city and said it was reflective of how the Trump administration sees itself as an occupying force in its own country.
“’In theater’ like they’re landing marines at Guadalcanal or something,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), in a post on X. “This stuff is happening in suburban American communities, that’s where they’re sending violent, masked invaders.”
Northwestern University historian Kathleen Belew also expressed shock at Homan’s rhetoric.
“’In theater’ is an expression that has no place anywhere within the United States,” she wrote on Bluesky. “’In theater’ means in a war.”
Andrew Lawrence, deputy director of rapid response as Media Matters, said Homan’s war talk was “a crazy way to describe Minneapolis,” while documentary filmmaker John Darwin Kurc described it as a “frightening characterization.”
Shelby Edwards, a retired US Army major, also recognized the violent implications of Homan’s words.
“Incredibly damaging how military language has infiltrated these agencies,” she observed. “’In theater’ is used for deployments into foreign nations, when we deploy soldiers we say things like this. This is America. This is an American agency assigned to an American city.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
A protestor holds up a sign as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing about US policy toward Venezuela on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 28, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“Rubio’s dangerously expansive vision to transform the United States into a colonizing power in the Americas must be challenged,” one watchdog leader said of the US secretary of state.
In addition to asserting that “there is no war against Venezuela,” despite US forces killing scores of people there while abducting its president earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday laid out for a Senate panel how the Trump administration intends to continue controlling the South American nation’s oil and related profits.
Legal experts have argued that US President Donald Trump’s blockade of Venezuela’s oil, abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—and bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean all violate international law.
“The ongoing military actions in the Caribbean and South America, including the abduction of Venezuela’s president, are wrong, illegal under US and international law, and unconstitutional,” Robert Weissman, co-president of the group Public Citizen, said before the Senate hearing. “Congressional Republicans have blocked war powers resolutions that would end the US aggression in Venezuela, an extremely dangerous abdication of congressional responsibility to check presidential unlawfulness.”
“Marco Rubio’s central role in the planning and execution of the scheme to violate the sovereignty of Venezuela and steal the country’s oil merits a deep investigation by Congress, and potentially the removal of Rubio as secretary of state,” Weissman continued. “Rubio’s dangerously expansive vision to transform the United States into a colonizing power in the Americas must be challenged.”
Testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—Rubio said that “Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker, not a legal head of state,” described his abduction as “an operation to aid law enforcement,” and declared that “the United States is prepared to help oversee Venezuela’s transition from a criminal state to a responsible partner.”
Rubio, the acting national security adviser, insisted that Trump wasn’t planning for any more military action in Venezuela—but also would not rule out such action, potentially without congressional authorization, in “self-defense” against an “imminent” threat.
Trump has repeatedly made clear through public statements that his Venezuela policy is focused on its petroleum reserves, seemingly to enrich the fossil fuel leaders who helped him return to power. American forces have seized several tankers in the Caribbean Sea linked to the country—which critics have condemned as “piracy”—and the first US sale of Venezuelan oil went to the company of a trader who donated millions to the president’s 2024 campaign, which Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) last week called “yet another example of his unchecked corruption.”
Describing US control of Venezuela’s nationalized petroleum industry, Rubio told the committee:
Objective number one was stability… And one of the tools that’s available to us is the fact that we have sanctions on oil. There is oil that is sanctioned that cannot move from Venezuela because of our quarantine. And so what we did is we entered into an arrangement with them, and the arrangement is this: On the oil that is sanctioned and quarantined, we will allow you to move it to market. We will allow you to move it to market at market prices—not at the discount China was getting. In return, the funds from that will be deposited into an account that we will have oversight over, and you will spend that money for the benefit of the Venezuelan people…
This is not going to be the permanent mechanism, but this is a short-term mechanism in which the needs of the Venezuelan people can be met through a process that we’ve created, where they will submit every month a budget of this is what we need funded. We will provide for them at the front end what that money cannot be used for. And they have been very cooperative in this regard. In fact, they have pledged to use a substantial amount of those funds to purchase medicine and equipment directly from the United States.
In an exchange with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Rubio said that an “audit process” has not yet been set up but will be, adding that “we’ve only made one payment” and it “retrospectively will be audited, but it was important we made that payment because they had to meet payroll. They had to keep sanitation workers, police officers, government workers on staff.”
Shaheen noted that the oil reportedly sold for $500 million, but only $300 million went to Venezuela’s government, now led by Maduro’s former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, and asked Rubio about the remaining $200 million. The secretary said that the rest of the money was in a temporary account in Qatar that will ultimately become a US Treasury blocked account.
Summarizing the Trump administration’s plans, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said: “I think the scope of the project that you are undertaking in Venezuela is without precedent. You are taking their oil at gunpoint; you are holding and selling that oil; putting, for now, the receipts in an offshore Middle Eastern account; you’re deciding how and for what purposes that money is gonna be used in a country of 30 million people. I think a lot of us believe that that is destined for failure.”
Highlighting that “a month later, we have no information on a timetable for a democratic transition, Maduro’s people are still in charge, most of the political prisoners are in jail—and by the way, those that have been let out have a gag order on them from the government—the opposition leader is still in exile,” Murphy added, “this looks, already, like it is a failure.”
At one point during the nearly three-hour hearing, Leonardo Flores, a Venezuelan-American with the anti-war group CodePink, shouted, “Marco Rubio, you and Trump are thugs!”
US Capitol Police removed Flores from the hearing. As he was being led away, the protester said that “sanctions are a form of collective punishment of Venezuelan citizens. That’s a war crime. Hands off Venezuela! Hands off Cuba!”
Asked by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) on Wednesday, “Will you make a public commitment today to rule out US regime change in Cuba,” Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants—replied: “Regime change? Oh no, I think we would like to see the regime there change. That doesn’t mean that we’re gonna to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.”
Since the abduction operation, there have been “free Maduro” protests in both Venezuela and Cuba, which lost 32 citizens in the Trump administration’s attack on Caracas. Speaking to thousands of people gathered outside the US Embassy in Havana earlier this month, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that “the current US administration has opened the door to an era of barbarism, plunder, and neo-fascism.”
“No one here surrenders,” he continued, taking aim at not only Trump but also Rubio. “The current emperor of the White House and his infamous secretary of state haven’t stopped threatening me.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
