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Being Assassinated in Your Home by a Killer Robot Sent by a Fascist State Is No Longer Science Fiction

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Article by Thom Hartmann republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“Look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece,” writes Hartmann and you will realize our worst nightmares are coming true. (Credit: Armyinform.com.ua, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

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That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces… Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”

The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.

Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.

She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.

Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.

I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.

Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.

What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.

The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.

Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.

And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”

This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.

Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.

ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.

Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.

And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.

The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”

This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.

Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.

Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”

The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.

Article by Thom Hartmann republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Nigel Farage 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.
Nigel Farage 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.
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/
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/
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don't need people to join wars after they've already won. He's challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.

Continue ReadingBeing Assassinated in Your Home by a Killer Robot Sent by a Fascist State Is No Longer Science Fiction

When Lebanon’s ceasefire still hunts journalists, truth becomes prey

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by Kurniawan Arif Maspul

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

People attend funeral ceremony for journalist Amal Khalil, who was killed in an Israeli military strike targeting the village of Tayri, in Nabatieh, Lebanon on April 23, 2026. [Elif Öztürk – Anadolu Agency]

There is a particular cruelty in silencing those whose sole weapon is a camera, a notebook, or a voice. The killing of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in southern Lebanon is not an isolated tragedy; it is part of a pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore, and even harder to explain away. In a war already saturated with grief, the deliberate or reckless targeting of journalists signals something deeper than battlefield error. It suggests an erosion of the very rules that once attempted to civilise conflict.

On 22nd April 2026, during what was meant to be a brief, US-mediated ceasefire, Israeli strikes hit a civilian vehicle near al-Tayri. When Khalil and her colleague Zeinab Faraj moved to report on the aftermath, a second strike hit the building where they had taken shelter. Rescue teams attempting to reach them were themselves targeted, delaying aid for hours. By the time access was finally granted, Khalil was dead beneath the rubble. 

She became the fourth Lebanese journalist killed in just weeks. The sequence—strike, response, second strike—has been described by observers as a ‘double tap’, a tactic that raises serious legal and moral questions.

The outrage from Lebanese officials was immediate and justified. The language used—“flagrant violation”, “brazen crime”—was not diplomatic excess; it reflected a growing consensus among legal experts and press-freedom organisations that such incidents may constitute grave breaches of international humanitarian law.

Journalists are civilians. That principle is not ambiguous. The Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute are explicit: targeting civilians, including media workers, is a war crime.

Yet the facts on the ground continue to collide with official denials. Israel maintains that it does not target journalists and often asserts that strikes are aimed at militants. In some cases, it has posthumously alleged links between slain reporters and armed groups. These claims, frequently unsubstantiated, have been repeatedly challenged by organisations such as Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which point to video evidence and patterns of strikes on clearly marked media personnel. The dissonance between assertion and evidence is widening, and with it, the credibility gap.

READ: Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil killed in Israeli strike in southern Lebanon

The scale of the violence underscores the urgency. As of March 2026, more than 2,400 people have reportedly been killed in Lebanon, with over a million displaced. Across the broader conflict landscape, including Gaza and the West Bank, dozens of journalists have lost their lives since late 2023. One investigation counted at least 61 journalists killed in that period alone, making it one of the deadliest eras for the profession in modern history. These are not incidental losses; they represent a systemic threat to the flow of information itself.

What is unfolding in Lebanon cannot be disentangled from a far larger and more troubling pattern that has already taken shape in Gaza, where the scale of journalist killings has reached historic proportions.

By late 2025, nearly 250 journalists had been killed since October 2023—more than in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine combined, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and United Nations assessments. 

Gaza has, in effect, become the deadliest environment for media workers ever recorded, a distinction that should unsettle any government that claims allegiance to international humanitarian law. The killing of figures such as Abed Shaat, a clearly identified cameraman struck while documenting an aid convoy, underscores how ambiguity has replaced accountability, and how denial has become routine rather than exceptional. experts warn that this erosion is not contained; it is setting precedent, normalising impunity, and accelerating a global decline in journalist safety, with UNESCO reporting a 67 per cent increase in deaths in conflict zones in recent years. 

In this light, the strike that killed Amal Khalil does not stand alone as an aberration—it sits within an emerging doctrine of war in which the elimination of witnesses risks becoming tacitly permissible. For policymakers, the implication is stark: when the systematic silencing of journalists is absorbed into the background of conflict, the collapse is not only operational but normative, corroding the credibility of the very international order that depends on the visibility of truth.

What is at stake extends beyond individual lives. When journalists are killed, the immediate effect is silence. Stories go untold, evidence goes unrecorded, and accountability becomes more elusive. In conflicts where narratives are fiercely contested, controlling information can be as strategically valuable as controlling territory. Analysts have noted that targeting journalists reflects a shift towards ‘information warfare’, where the aim is not only to defeat an opponent but to shape the story that reaches the outside world.

This dynamic is not unique to Lebanon, but the current context is particularly stark. The perception—widely held in Beirut and increasingly echoed in international circles—is that impunity persists. Despite repeated condemnations from the United Nations, UNESCO, and global NGOs, meaningful accountability remains elusive. The continued military support provided to Israel by key allies, including the United States and several European nations, complicates efforts to enforce compliance with international norms. 

READ: Lebanon urges UN action over Israel targeting of journalists

It raises uncomfortable questions about whether the so-called rules-based order applies equally to all, or only to those without powerful backers.

For policymakers everywhere, this is no longer a distant or containable crisis but a direct test of the integrity of the international system itself. States that claim fidelity to international law, press freedom and a rules-based order cannot afford the luxury of selective consistency without paying a strategic price.

When the killing of journalists provokes outrage in one theatre yet equivocation in another, the signal sent is not nuance but hierarchy—of whose lives, whose truths, and whose laws matter. 

That inconsistency does more than weaken moral authority; it actively erodes deterrence, inviting repetition by those who see that consequences are negotiable. In such an environment, silence is not restraint but complicity, and credibility—once fractured—rarely returns intact.

There is also a strategic dimension. Erosion of international norms does not occur in isolation; it invites replication. If one state can target journalists without consequence, others may follow. The result is a more dangerous world for reporters, and by extension, for anyone who relies on accurate information to make decisions—governments included. Intelligence, diplomacy, and humanitarian response all depend on credible reporting from conflict zones.

The human dimension, however, remains central. Amal Khalil was not a statistic. She was a witness, a storyteller, and a participant in the essential democratic function of informing the public. Her death resonates not only in Lebanon but across a global community of journalists who increasingly find themselves on the front lines. The message her killing sends—to hesitate, to withdraw, to remain silent—is precisely the message that must be resisted.

There are practical steps that can and should be taken. Ceasefire agreements must include explicit protections for journalists and humanitarian workers, with mechanisms for real-time coordination and verification. Independent investigations into alleged violations must be supported, not obstructed. Military aid and cooperation should be conditioned on adherence to international humanitarian law, with clear consequences for breaches. These measures are not radical; they are the minimum required to preserve a semblance of order in war.

Ultimately, the question is not only about legality but about values. The protection of journalists is a proxy for the protection of truth itself. When that protection erodes, so too does the capacity of the international community to respond effectively to crises. Decisions become less informed, debates more polarised, and solutions more elusive.

The killing of Amal Khalil is a warning. It signals that the boundaries of acceptable conduct in war are being tested, and perhaps redrawn. Whether those boundaries hold will depend on the willingness of states—large and small—to insist that they matter. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality. It is acquiescence.

In the end, wars are remembered not only for their outcomes but for the principles they uphold or abandon. The fate of journalists in Lebanon will be one measure of that legacy.

OPINION: Why should the Middle East trust a superpower that breaks its own rules?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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/
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/
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don't need people to join wars after they've already won. He's challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.

Continue ReadingWhen Lebanon’s ceasefire still hunts journalists, truth becomes prey

‘Territorial Theft With Better Branding’: Israel Keeps Advancing Its ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza

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Article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A Palestinian family walks near a large yellow concrete block symbolizing the beginning of Israel’s post-ceasefire occupation zone in Gaza on November 21, 2025. (Photo by Saeed MMT Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)

One Palestinian American researcher warned that Israel is seeking “annexation without legal burden.”

Israel’s gradual advancement of its “yellow line” to occupy more territory in the Gaza Strip is fueling concerns that it is seeking to effectively annex and colonize the majority of the territory without any formal agreement.

The Guardian reported on Wednesday that Israel has been steadily pushing the truce line to take control of more Palestinian territory in the six months since a “ceasefire” was reached in October.

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The yellow line drawn on the ceasefire maps had Israeli troops in control of about 53% of Gaza’s territory, cramming nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians into a territory less than half the size of the one they inhabited before.

But an analysis by Forensic Architecture shows Israel has unilaterally shifted the line westward over the past six months to the point where it controlled about 58% of the strip by December in an occupation zone that continues to grow.

(Graphic by The Guardian. Source: Planet Labs PBC, March 6, 2026.)

Palestinians living in Gaza reportedly woke up to learn that large yellow concrete blocks denoting the ceasefire line had suddenly moved and that they were now living in a free-fire area, where the Israeli military considers any Palestinian person or vehicle a legitimate target.

The Associated Press found in January that at least 77 Palestinians have been shot on sight when they’ve found themselves on the wrong side of the yellow line or even just near it, even though the line’s boundaries are ill-defined and fluid.

They are among more than 730 Palestinians who have been killed since the “ceasefire” began in October, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which has accused Israel of thousands of violations.

According to The Guardian, some displaced people, such as those who lived near the Salah al-Din road, which spans the length of Gaza from north to south, suddenly found themselves targeted by Israeli forces, who also began demolishing homes and other buildings and constructing new ones.

Though the yellow line was supposed to be set up as a temporary measure under US President Donald Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza before control of the strip is transferred back to Palestinians, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Eyal Zamir described it as a “new border” with Gaza back in December, around the time it reportedly began to move.

Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and the head of Forensic Architecture’s research agency, recently wrote that the IDF appears to be turning this portion of Gaza into a permanent occupation zone.

The group found that seven new military outposts have been built along the yellow line, including one on what was once a cemetery.

While these areas began as “piles of earth and rubble” organized into crude enclosures, Weizman said that in recent months the roads leading to them have been asphalted, electricity poles have been erected, and buildings and communications towers have gone up inside the bases.

“The bases no longer appear to be the provisional arrangements that Trump’s ceasefire plan claims them to be, but permanent instruments of occupation,” he wrote. “The newly paved roads connect the bases to a matrix of control that is linked to Israel’s road network and communications grid.”

He noted that Israel’s illegal settler movement, which has several powerful representatives in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been “lobbying hard for the Israeli government to start constructing settlements within the vastly expanded buffer zone.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz said in December that Israel would “never leave Gaza” and spoke of plans to turn IDF military outposts into civilian settlements similar to those that have gradually taken over the West Bank through the violent displacement of Palestinian residents.

Ahmad Ibsais, Palestinian American law student and author of the newsletter State of Siege, wrote for the Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network that by drawing a yellow line, Israel is seeking to consolidate its control over Palestinian land without formally annexing it—in other words, “annexation without legal burden.”

“Borders are typically established through bilateral agreements, adjudication, or mutual recognition under international law,” he wrote. “By contrast, the so-called Yellow Line in Gaza functions as a de facto military demarcation associated with ceasefire arrangements and enforced through Israeli operational control.”

“It shapes civilian movement and territorial control without constituting a formally delimited boundary,” he continued. “In effect, it constitutes territorial theft with better branding, operationalizing US President Donald Trump’s plan for the continued colonization of Gaza.”

Israel declared a similar yellow line about 5-10 kilometers into Lebanese territory, giving the IDF effective control over around 55 towns and villages. The military has reduced many homes and entire villages south of this line to rubble in what Katz has described as a “Gaza model” being applied to Lebanon.

Assistant editor Maya Rosen recently wrote for Jewish Currents that the policy of conquering and settling Lebanon has become “mainstream” in Israeli politics and enjoys broad public support.

Ahmad Baydoun, an architect and open-source intelligence researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has warned that with this land grab, Israel was seeking to take control of the valuable Qana Gas Field, which is estimated to be capable of producing between $20 billion-$40 billion worth of natural gas exports for Israel. In 2022, a maritime agreement brokered by the US established that control of the field belonged to Lebanon.

Like in Gaza, the Israeli military has forbidden the more than 600,000 Lebanese inhabitants of villages below the line or within a newly established “buffer zone” from returning indefinitely. Katz has said they’ll be allowed to return once the “safety and security of the residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured.”

Given that Israeli settler groups have already begun mapping out new settlements and advertising plots of land for sale in southern Lebanon, Weizman said Katz was making what is by design “an impossible demand” meant to entrench the land grab.

“This exemplifies the circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack, and so a buffer zone is established to protect them,” he said. “Afterward, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary.”

Article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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.
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.
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it's fun to kill everyone ...
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone …

Continue Reading‘Territorial Theft With Better Branding’: Israel Keeps Advancing Its ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza

Hamas says Israel tightening “engineered starvation” in Gaza by closing Rafah crossing

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Ambulances belonging to Egypt’s Ministry of Health stand ready on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing for the transfer of Palestinian patients from Gaza and possible emergency needs, in Rafah, Egypt, on February 8, 2026. [Ahmed Sayed – Anadolu Agency]

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said Israel is continuing to tighten its blockade on the Gaza Strip by closing crossings and controlling the entry of aid and the number of travellers through the Rafah crossing.

In a video statement on Monday, Qassem said the Rafah crossing had been closed while severe restrictions on aid deliveries remain in place. He added that Israel had not met the agreed number of aid trucks allowed into Gaza, with fewer than half entering, alongside continued limits on the number of travellers.

Qassem said Israel is pursuing a policy of “engineering starvation” in Gaza, pointing to rising prices of basic goods as hunger deepens, as well as ongoing violations including shelling and killings, such as those reported early on Monday.

He added that what is happening reflects a systematic Israeli policy of violations, calling for a “genuine stance” from mediators and guarantor states, as well as what he described as the “Board of Peace”, to put an end to these actions and lift the blockade on Gaza after two years of what he described as genocide.

Meanwhile, Ismail Al-Thawabta, Director General of the Government Media Office, said the humanitarian crisis in the enclave has reached unprecedented levels amid the continued closure of crossings, particularly the Rafah crossing.

UN Special Coordinator Nikolay Mladenov: Gaza plan requires rapid progress

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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/
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/
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.
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.
Donald Trump warns against following the https://onaquietday.org blog, says that it's easy atm, she only needs to report war crimes supporting Israel's genocidal expansion.
Donald Trump warns against following the https://onaquietday.org blog, says that it’s easy atm, she only needs to report war crimes supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion.

Continue ReadingHamas says Israel tightening “engineered starvation” in Gaza by closing Rafah crossing

In Third Boat Strike This Week, US Kills 3 People in ‘Entirely Make-Believe’ Armed Conflict Against Cartels

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Original article by Julia Conley republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on April 8, 2026. a(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Customs and Border Protection data offers little evidence that the killing of at least 177 people in recent months has stopped drugs from reaching the US.

As Republicans and several Democrats in the US Senate gave the go-ahead for the US to send more bombs and military equipment to Israel for its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon on Wednesday, the Trump administration was continuing what it claims is an effort to rid Latin American countries of drug traffickers—killing three people aboard a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean in the US military’s third boat bombing in three days.

The US Southern Command posted a video on social media of the bombing, which it said targeted a boat that was “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

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As with the 50 previous attacks on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea, the military did not publicize any evidence that the boat was carrying drugs or that its passengers were “narco-terrorists.”

A small number of the at least 177 victims of the Trump administration’s boat bombings have been identified. The Associated Press reported in November that Robert Sánchez, who was killed in the Caribbean, was a 42-year-old fisherman who made $100 per month and had started helping cocaine traffickers navigate the sea due to economic pressures. Juan Carlos Fuentes was an out-of-work bus driver who also worked as a “drug runner” to make ends meet.

The families of at least two victims have filed legal complaints over the killings of their family members, saying they were fishermen.

Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America has compared the boat bombings, assuming they have targeted people involved in the drug trade at all, to “straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”

On Wednesday, Isacson noted that while Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have defended the boat bombings as attacks that will protect Americans from the flow of drugs like cocaine and fentanyl into the US—with the president informing Congress that the White House views the country as being in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels—data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows little evidence that the strikes are stopping drugs from reaching the US.

“CBP’s seizures of fentanyl at the US-Mexico border had been declining, often sharply, since mid-2023. But since early 2025, the declines stopped,” said Isacson. “Halfway into fiscal 2026, seizures are almost exactly half of 2025’s full-year total: a flat trendline.”

Following Wednesday’s bombing, at least 14 people have been killed in boat strikes in five days.

Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group emphasized Wednesday night that “despite the administration’s rhetoric and bogus legal theories, the supposed armed conflict with ‘narco-terrorists’ appears to be entirely make-believe.”

Under international law, drug trafficking is treated as a crime, with US law enforcement agencies in the past intercepting boats suspected of smuggling drugs and arresting those on board. A coalition of rights organizations sued the Trump administration in December, demanding documentation of the White House’s legal justification for the boat bombings and arguing that for any organization to be considered part of “armed conflict” with the US, it must be an “organized armed group” that is engaged in “protracted armed violence” with the country.

“Murder,” said Finucane, “is the general term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it's fun to kill everyone ...
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone …
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
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.
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.
Continue ReadingIn Third Boat Strike This Week, US Kills 3 People in ‘Entirely Make-Believe’ Armed Conflict Against Cartels