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Palestinians, mainly children, wait in line with water bottles to get clean water from a distribution tank in Nuseirat, Gaza, Palestine on April 28, 2026. [Moiz Salhi – Anadolu Agency]
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Tuesday Israeli authorities are using access to water as a “weapon” of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza, urging the immediate restoration of water supplies and unhindered humanitarian access.
In a new report, the MSF said repeated restrictions on water access form part of a “systematic and cumulative pattern.”
“Israeli authorities know that without water life ends, yet they have deliberately and systematically obliterated water infrastructure in Gaza, whilst consistently blocking water-related supplies from entering,” Claire San Filippo, MSF emergency manager, said.
According to the report, nearly 90% of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, including desalination plants, pipelines and sewage systems.
“Palestinians have been injured and killed simply trying to access water,” San Filippo said, warning the deprivation is fueling disease amid overcrowding and a collapsed health system.
MSF said one in five of its water distributions ran dry between May and November 2025 due to shortages and access restrictions.
The group urged Israel to restore water access “at the required levels,” while calling on allies to pressure Israel to stop impeding humanitarian access, including materials needed for water infrastructure.
“The consequences of this deprivation of access to water are far-reaching on people’s health, hygiene, and dignity,” the report said.
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 …
Article by republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Source: EuroMed Human Rights Monitor
Israeli authorities are reportedly pursuing another extension of the imprisonment of Palestinian pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.
Israeli authorities are reportedly pursuing another six-month extension to the imprisonment of Palestinian pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, taken by Israeli occupation forces from Kamal Adwan Hospital over two years ago, ahead of a hearing announced for Tuesday, April 28. Dr. Abu Safiya has been held in administrative detention – a status that allows Israeli authorities to imprison Palestinians for an undefined amount of time without charge or trial – ever since he was taken captive in December 2024.
Over the past months, family members, health workers, and UN experts have raised the alarm over Dr. Abu Safiya’s condition, warning of torture and deteriorating health. “Dr. Abu Safiya’s lawyer has not been allowed to meet him for more than two months, ever since his transfer to Ketziot Prison and despite reports of violence, significant weight loss and medical neglect,” Physicians for Human Rights Israel recently wrote.
Ahead of the hearing date, the pediatrician’s family appealed again for the international community to mobilize and secure Dr. Abu Safiya’s release. “We cannot understand how a man who saves children can be tortured and imprisoned in a place where children are killed,” his son, Ilyas Abu Safiya said. “We cannot understand how a doctor who dedicated his life to protecting and healing them, can be locked away in a place known for injustice, violence and the death of children.”
“The fear for my father’s fate grows inside us every day,” Ilyas Abu Safiya stated, adding that the feeling is shared by families of all Palestinian political prisoners. The fears have only grown worse, various sources document, since the Israeli Knesset adopted death penalty legislation that foresees death by hanging for Palestinians.
According to information published by Healthcare Workers Watch on April 17, Dr. Abu Safiya is among 83 health workers confirmed to be still imprisoned by Israel. The network documented nearly 446 cases of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other health workers being seized by the occupation since October 7, 2023, of which 323 have apparently been released. Healthcare Workers Watch noted that of the health workers still held, 75 were from Gaza: including 27 senior, 41 mid-level, and 7 junior staff. Sixty among these health workers were kidnapped from inside health facilities.
On average, each of the Gazan health workers “has so far spent 670 days in detention,” Healthcare Workers Watch wrote, with some held for over 880 days. “The currently detained healthcare workers have spent collectively over 152 years in Israeli detention,” the network emphasized.
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
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/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 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.
A protestor was carried away by police awaiting their arrest during the Lift The Ban on Palestine Action protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on 11 April 2026. Loredana Sangiuliano / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
‘We oppose genocide.’
More than 1,000 people, including Irish author Sally Rooney and climate activist Greta Thunberg, have signed a letter in defiance of the ban on Palestine Action, to be delivered to the Court of Appeal as the government attempts to uphold its controversial proscription of the direct action group.
The letter simply states: “We oppose genocide, we support Palestine Action.” It is expected to be hand-delivered to the court on Tuesday 28 April, when the government delivers its arguments appealing against the landmark high court ruling that found the proscription of Palestine Action to be unlawful in February.
The letter is the first time that acclaimed writers, scholars and creatives have come together to defy the ban. Signatories include distinguished professor Judith Butler, musician Brian Eno, Israeli professors Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, author and anti-apartheid campaigner Andrew Feinstein, and Massive Attack frontman Robert Del Naja.
Also adding their names are hundreds of members of the public from all walks of life, including trade union officials, retired prison officers, nurses, architects, teachers, carers and members of the clergy. All signatories risk arrest under UK terror law.
…
The ban on Palestine Action – a direct action group which aims to end global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – remains in force until the government’s appeal is complete, despite it being ruled unlawful. This means anyone showing support for the group can still be punished by up to 14 years in prison under counter-terror legislation.
A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries (DOJ), which has coordinated high-profile demonstrations across the country to protest the ban, told Novara Media: “It takes something out of the ordinary for so many eminent professors, including professors of law, to risk arrest under the Terrorism Act. But when you brand as terrorists your political opponents, who are obviously not terrorists, a red line towards authoritarianism has been crossed.
Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.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.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.
The Labour government will not hold a public inquiry into the influence of pro-Israel groups in British politics, even after more than 114,000 people signed a parliamentary petition calling for a probe.
In a response to the petition, the government said it “does not support a public inquiry on pro-Israeli influence, and does not have plans to hold an inquiry on wider foreign influence and lobbying more generally.”
It added: “However, the government takes concerns about foreign influence in politics and democracy seriously, and is already taking action to address this.”
Last month, the government published an urgent review into foreign financial interference in UK politics. It mentioned Iran, Russia and China but not Israel.
Because the petition got over 100,000 signatures, it will still be considered for debate in the Commons. The petition reads: “We are concerned about reported Israeli state-linked and pro-Israel lobbying activity in UK politics. We believe it is important to determine the scope and impact of any such influence campaigns.”
It adds: “We feel that the horrific devastation in Gaza, the ongoing suppression of Palestinians in the West Bank, and the UK’s political response underline the urgent need to scrutinise how pro-Israel organisations, networks, and lobbying efforts may shape government decisions, party policy, and public debate.”
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 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/
“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.
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.
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/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.
