A person receives food aid bags at the Young Family YMCA in Atlanta, Georgia, 6 November 2025. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA
Analysis finds more than 4 million Americans lost Snap benefits, or food stamps, from July 2025 to March 2026
More than a million children across the US have lost access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food benefits since Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
The analysis found that more than 4 millions Americans were removed from Snap from July 2025 to March 2026, marking a significant decline in participation in the federal food assistance program.
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According to the CBPP analysis, children make up a significant portion of those losing benefits, with more than 1 million children across the 19 states studied no longer receiving Snap assistance.
In Louisiana, nearly one in four children receiving Snap benefits lost assistance. Massachusetts and Texas each saw close to one-fifth of children enrolled in the program removed from Snap.
The report comes as participation in the program continues to fall nationwide following major reductions to the federal food assistance program under the Trump administration.
Snap, commonly referred to as food stamps, provides monthly benefits to low-income and no-income households to help pay for groceries and remains the country’s largest food assistance program.
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US Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) joins other members of Congress, FWD.us, and Families Belong Together for a press conference about the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas on July 28, 2026. (Photo by FWD.us/Facebook)
“There’s a 2-month-old baby there and four pregnant women there,” said the Texas Democrat. “It’s no place for a 2-month-old baby to be, or even a 1- or 5-year-old kid.”
Democratic Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro appeared on MS NOW early Wednesday to discuss his recent trip to and persistent efforts to shut down what he called a “trailer prison” where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding families in Dilley.
After leading a letter signed by over 100 other Democrats calling for the closure of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, Castro on Tuesday conducted a congressional oversight visit of the facility with members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, including Reps. Yassamin Ansari (Ariz.), Lizzie Fletcher (Texas), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), and Luz Rivas (Calif.).
During the interview on “Morning Joe,” Castro said that Americans have watched in horror as ICE has killed and brutalized US citizens and immigrants in the streets, “but there’s a brutality behind the prison walls of these detention centers that almost no one gets to see except for members of Congress who have an opportunity to go inspect them.”
While touring the Dilley center seven times recently, “I’ve seen a lot of desperate children. I’ve seen traumatized children. There is a system there that is abusive of people,” Castro said, citing complaints of worms in food, yellow drinking water, and inadequate medical care.
“When I asked, they said the youngest person there is 2 months old—so there’s a 2-month-old baby there and four pregnant women there right now. And, you know, I can tell you that it’s no place for a 2-month-old baby to be, or even a 1- or 5-year-old kid,” he said.
Noting that the Texas facility is run by a private prison company—CoreCivic—and condemning the “commodification of child imprisonment,” Castro declared that “we want the Dilley detention center shut down.”
His comments on MS NOW mirrored those he and other lawmakers delivered outside the facility, also known as the South Texas Family Residential Center, and during a press conference with the organizations FWD.us and Families Belong Together.
The Trump regime is traumatizing children and families with your tax dollars. I can’t shake what I saw and heard at Dilley this week.#ShutDilleyDownhttps://t.co/PG77bYwmiM
The center is currently detaining 539 individuals, from 84 families, according to Pressley. She said that “these are law-abiding people that are our neighbors—people we love, people we live next to, we work and worship with, who were just going about their lives and met with such an aggressive disruption that they will be recovering from for the rest of their lives.”
“Dilley must be shut down. We have to abolish ICE. And then I’m gonna take it one step further and say any of those agents that have contributed to and caused the injury, the harm, and even fatalities, they must also be held accountable, and we should abolish qualified immunity for these federal law enforcement officers,” she argued.
— Congresswoman Luz Rivas (@RepLuzRivas) July 29, 2026
FWD.us president Todd Schulte also called for “shutting down Dilley and releasing these children and families immediately.”
“Dilley reflects a broader pattern that should not be expanded with additional, unprecedented taxpayer funding,” he stressed, denouncing the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the Republican-controlled Congress has poured into President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation campaign, led by ICE and US Customs and Border Protection.
“This will only cause irreparable harm to children and communities,” Schulte warned. “Thank you to the members who continue to call for the release of families, and we join them in their calls for Dilley’s closure.”
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A mother puts cream on a Palestinian child, suffering from skin and dermatological diseases, is seen as hundreds of people, especially children, are diagnosed with scabies, diarrhea, chickenpox, and various skin conditions every day amidst Israeli attacks on Gaza on August 24, 2024 in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on August 24, 2024. [Abed Rahim Khatib – Anadolu Agency]
Chickenpox cases among displaced Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip have continued to rise, with about 9,300 cases recorded over the past two weeks, more than half of them in the densely populated city of Khan Younis, the United Nations said, Reuters reported.
A report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said overcrowded living conditions, accumulating waste, limited access to clean water and the collapse of sewage infrastructure were driving the spread of infectious diseases in displacement camps.
The worsening conditions have turned chickenpox into a growing public health concern in the enclave, the report added.
The United Nations said acute respiratory and skin diseases remained the most commonly reported health problems in Gaza.
The UN also said waterborne diseases continued to spread, particularly around Khan Younis, and reported more than 18,000 new cases last week of chickenpox, external parasite infestation and bacterial skin infection impetigo.
Gaza’s health care system has been devastated by Israel’s genocidal war, which destroyed hospitals and medical infrastructure while creating severe shortages of medicine, fuel and medical supplies.
Israel has continued to violate the ceasefire agreement, which took effect on 10th October 2025, killing 1,127 Palestinians and injuring 3,643 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry on Thursday.
Since Israel’s genocide began on 8th October 2023, at least 73,250 Palestinians have been killed and 173,751 injured, according to the ministry. It added that about 90 percent of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed.
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Keir 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. Will I be replacing Andy Burnham for Starmer behind this speech bubble?
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/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.
Daniele Rugo’s documentary turns the testimony of British and international medics who worked in Gaza into a searing record of what is described in the film as Israel’s “genocidal frenzy”.
Hospitals represent life. The killing of people inside them, the doctors in Life Support say, is a line that should never have been crossed. Daniele Rugo’s 93-minute documentary opens with British doctors talking about Gaza, their connection to it, the resilience of the people there and a love of life that even decades of siege has not extinguished, before showing what happened when that line was crossed, again and again, over two years.
The film had its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest on 13 June 2026, where it was nominated for the festival’s Tim Hetherington Award, followed by a Q&A with Rugo and contributors Dr Ana Jeelani and Prof Nick Maynard. A public premiere follows at Curzon Mayfair on 9 July. Most of what is on screen was shot by the doctors themselves, on their phones, in the middle of treating patients. MEMO was given an early preview of Life Support ahead of its public premiere at Curzon.
Rugo’s starting point, as he puts it, was simple: surgeons, physicians and nurses went to Gaza to support their Palestinian colleagues and ended up as “the sole international observers” of a genocide. Foreign media have been barred from entering Gaza throughout the war. The doctors who passed through Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine and similar routes were, for long stretches, among the only outsiders able to see what was happening inside the enclave.
The names will be familiar to anyone who has followed British medics’ accounts since October 2023: Dr Victoria Rose, the London-based reconstructive surgeon who has worked in Gaza since 2016 and has been on four missions since the war began; Prof Nick Maynard, the Oxford gastrointestinal surgeon who helped set up Gaza’s cancer services; and Dr Tanya Haj Hassan, the paediatric intensive care doctor and one of the few international witnesses to reach the north of the Strip. Dr James Smith, Dr Deborah Harrington, Dr Khaled Dawas and Dr Ana Jeelani also appear.
Their testimonies, painfully delivered, are as heart-wrenching as they are inspirational. Rose recalls using her own initiative to take essential medical kit into Gaza in 23 suitcases. Jeelani describes operating without electricity or proper instruments, on wounded children who often needed repeated surgery. Maynard, who has worked in other war zones, says the scale of destruction in Gaza was on a different level.
Outside the hospitals hours of unseen footages filmed a dystopian landscape of buildings razed as far as the eye can see, alongside the daily life that somehow continues around it. This footage is vital because the film is not only about the wounded, the starving and the dead, but about the destruction of the institutions that make human life possible: hospitals, schools, religious buildings and the civic centres that sustain a people, a culture and a civilisation.
What the doctors describe is not only the bombing of buildings, but the destruction of the conditions that allow human existence to continue. This gives the film its wider charge: it is not only a record of war, but of what the doctors repeatedly understand as genocide.
“This is a war on civilians,” Haj Hassan says, describing wards filled with children and elderly women. The cases the doctors treat reflect Gaza’s population under siege: children, women, the elderly and the displaced. They speak of Palestinian medics operating after being told their own relatives had been killed, and of health workers fainting from hunger and exhaustion mid-shift. The footage from inside Al-Shifa hospital after Israel’s withdrawal, including the mass graves hospital staff were left to exhume themselves, is among the hardest material in the film to sit through.
The film also addresses one of the central justifications used by Israel for its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals: the claim that they were being used by Hamas. The doctors answer this directly. Despite hearing the allegation repeated by Israeli officials and echoed by Western governments, they say they saw no evidence to support it. For them, the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals cannot be explained away as a military necessity. It is part of a wider assault on everything that sustains life.
That is where the film’s argument about genocide becomes unavoidable. Maynard says he did not use the word lightly and initially resisted it. But after what he witnessed in Gaza, he reached a different conclusion. The film follows that moral and intellectual shift carefully, showing how doctors who entered Gaza to provide medical care came out asking how such devastation had been allowed to continue.
The documentary then widens the lens, turning to genocide scholars to explain the role of dehumanisation. They describe it as a common feature of genocides, from Rwanda onwards: a process by which a people are stripped of their humanity before violence against them is normalised. In Gaza, the film suggests, that process has been visible not only in language, but in the targeting of the very environment needed for human life to continue. As one contributor puts it, Palestinians have been dehumanised “in a way that we’ve not seen anywhere else in modern times.”
The doctors do not leave Gaza as they entered it. They arrive to treat the wounded and support Palestinian colleagues, but what they see makes it impossible for them simply to return home and move on. “You cannot witness what is happening in Gaza and not emerge enraged and determined to stop it,” one doctor says. That sense of responsibility runs through the film: having seen what they have seen, the doctors know that silence is no longer possible.
The film also shows how Israel’s policy of starvation became another weapon deployed against Palestinians. We see what that meant for Gaza’s children, and for the parents and doctors trying desperately to keep them alive with almost nothing. The documentary links this suffering to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid distribution system turned the search for food into a life-and-death situation for Palestinians.
Yet Life Support is not only a film about suffering. It also shows how Palestinians continue to hold on to their humanity, dignity and will to live amid conditions designed to break them. The doctors help carry Gaza’s story to the outside world, but they are not the centre of it. At the centre are the Palestinian doctors, nurses and medical teams who keep treating patients with almost nothing, relying on courage, skill and sheer determination to keep people alive.
Rugo brings the same concern with memory and violence that shaped his previous film, The Soil and The Sea, which documented mass graves from Lebanon’s civil war. In Life Support, he works with editor Masahiro Hirakubo to hold together material that is often extremely painful to watch without losing sight of the people at the heart of the film: the doctors, the patients and the Palestinian medical workers trying to keep Gaza alive.
The film’s sound is equally important. Palestinian composer Habib Shehada Hanna is joined by Robert Del Naja and Euan Dickinson of Massive Attack, giving the documentary a soundtrack that deepens its emotional force. The film’s executive producers include Hollywood star Susan Sarandon, Melissa Barrera, Farah Nabulsi and Asif Kapadia. Ken Loach has called the film “compulsory viewing.”
He is right. Life Support does not try to make its subject easier to watch, and it should not. What it leaves you with is a record of who kept Gaza’s hospitals running, what it cost them, and how much of it the world chose not to see.
Keir 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 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.
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A view of Circassian village at the countryside of Quneitra, Syria on March 26, 2026. [Enver Asfur – Anadolu Agency]
An Israeli force entered the village of Al-Rafid in the countryside of Syria’s Quneitra province on Tuesday and conducted bulldozing operations west of the village, according to Syria’s state news agency, SANA, Anadolu reports.
SANA reported that an Israeli military bulldozer advanced toward the village in southern Quneitra before conducting land-clearing operations in areas west of Al-Rafid.
Syrian authorities did not immediately respond to the incident, and the motives for the operations are still unclear.
The incident comes amid continued Israeli violations of Syrian sovereignty, particularly in the south.
Israeli forces have carried out near-daily airstrikes and ground incursions in southern Syria, including setting up checkpoints, searching civilians, raiding homes and detaining residents, among them children and shepherds.
Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on Dec. 8, 2024, Israel declared the collapse of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement between the two sides and occupied the Syrian buffer zone, while Damascus said it remained committed to the agreement.
Despite the new Syrian administration not issuing threats toward Israel, Israeli forces have continued launching airstrikes across Syria since Assad’s removal, killing civilians and destroying military sites, vehicles and ammunition.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.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.
