“The American people have had enough of endless wars in the Middle East,” Paul told The Intercept by email. “Yet, 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria with no vital U.S. interest at stake, no definition of victory, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization to be there.”

The U.S. conflict in Syria is just one of several forever wars — including conflicts in Niger and Somalia — that continue to smolder more than two decades after 9/11 and more than two years after President Joe Biden declared that, for the first time in 20 years, the United States was “not at war.” 

Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for militarism and human rights for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, welcomed Paul’s effort as a necessary check on the executive branch. “A debate really needs to happen about ‘why are we in Syria?’ and ‘what threat to the U.S. homeland do the groups we are fighting pose?’” she told The Intercept. “The U.S. has been engaged in these wars for two decades and Congress has been derelict in its duties while the executive branch has vastly expanded these wars. So Sen. Paul’s War Powers Resolution is one of the few vehicles that serves to force Congress to take a vote.”

The U.S. military has been conducting operations in Syria since 2014. America’s bases there and in neighboring Iraq ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” despite the fact that the Pentagon concluded in 2021 that the Islamic State in Syria “probably lacks the capability to target the U.S. homeland.” A recent inspectors general report to Congress noted that “ISIS capabilities remained degraded” and that the group now operates in “survival mode” in both Iraq and Syria.

War in the Shadows

For almost 10 years, the U.S. has battled a rotating cast of enemies in Syria, including the Syrian Armed Forces and pro-Syrian government forces; terrorist organizations such as ISIS; Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Iranian-backed militias; the Russian-backed Wagner Group; and the armed forces of Turkey, according to Paul’s bill, which notes that Congress has not declared war against Syria or any group in that country.

“The United States cannot fix Syria. Yet we still have 900 troops in eastern Syria for eight years, going on nine,” said Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria for the Obama administration, in a briefing to congressional staffers this week. “I’m puzzled that we haven’t had a national debate on what U.S. troops are doing in Syria four years after they captured the last territory from ISIS. We need to have that debate about the authorization of military force. There needs to be a definition of the mission of U.S. forces. There needs to be a set of metrics to measure their success or failure. And there need to be benchmarks and timelines. Otherwise, you’re in a forever war.”

Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, bases in both Syria and Iraq have come under regular attack as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

Between October 17 and December 4, U.S. forces on these bases have been attacked at least 76 times — 40 times in Syria, 36 in Iraq — according to figures provided to The Intercept by the Pentagon. The strikes have been conducted by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, and close-range ballistic missiles. The U.S. has increasingly responded by targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran-affiliated militant group facilities and personnel.

U.S. military outposts in Syria and Iraq are also plagued by thefts by criminal gangs and militias, according to an Intercept investigation. The losses of “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including Javelin guided missile launch systems, drones, high-explosive grenades, and armor-piercing rounds — from 2020 to 2022 were detailed in exclusive documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

Paul’s resolution, introduced on November 15, cites the 1973 War Powers Resolution — which was “designed to limit the U.S. president’s ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad” — and directs the Biden administration to remove the U.S. military from hostilities in Syria since there has been neither a declaration of war nor any other specific authorization from the legislative branch. 

Paul’s current legislation follows his October effort to require the U.S. to withdraw its troops from another long-running, undeclared quasi-war in Niger. That effort failed, as did another proposal earlier this year by Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz directing the removal of U.S. troops from Syria. Gaetz’s War Powers Resolution to withdraw most U.S. forces from Somalia received bipartisan support in the spring but did not garner sufficient votes. New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman has also failed in repeated attempts to limit the U.S. military presence in Syria and restore congressional war powers in regard to the U.S. conflict there.

“Some Automatic Pilot Policy”

The Intercept contacted the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — both of whom pledged in 2019 to help bring the forever wars to a “responsible and expedient” end — as well as Rep. Bowman to inquire if they supported Paul’s bid to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. None provided answers in time for publication.

The Biden administration claims that U.S. military personnel are deployed to “strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from Syria.” 

Ford questioned this supposed strategic significance, ticking off the names of Syrian towns and asking if the congressional staffers had heard of them. “There’s a reason you haven’t: because they’re not vital to U.S. national security interests. I simply fail to understand why we have U.S. troops there,” he said. “Troops should be the last resort. It should not be some automatic pilot policy that you carry over from year to year — especially not when these troops are being fired at.”

Paul echoed those sentiments. “If we are going to deploy our young men and women in uniform to Syria to fight and potentially give their life for some supposed cause, shouldn’t we as their elected representatives at least debate the merits of sending them there?” he asked in his statement provided to The Intercept. “Shouldn’t we do our constitutional duty and debate if the mission we are sending them on is achievable?”

The post Rand Paul Wants to End Undeclared War in Syria appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.

In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.

“A die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers has put out a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported in 1977, citing senior State Department officials. When reports of a possible hit on Kissinger first came out, it was believed to be the work of Palestinian militants, but senior officials told the paper that they were certain that the threat was emanating from the Likud party.

The Likud hard-liners who put up the money — described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc” — were reportedly upset at Kissinger’s diplomacy around the end of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. Kissinger had been instrumental in disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria that saw Israel withdrawing from territories it had conquered. On the Israeli side, Likud’s rival Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to agree to the compromises.

The 1973 war had also led to a damaging oil embargo by Arab states against the U.S., and Kissinger was said to be willing to cut any deal necessary to turn the spigot back on — which the 1974 disengagement deals accomplished.

Of the hit, the Daily News reported, “The motive was said to be revenge against Kissinger for allegedly selling out Israel during his Mideast shuttle diplomacy.”

The Likud strongly denied the allegation at the time, as did the State Department. (The reported plot to assassinate Kissinger is just one of several instances in which Israelis displayed intense hostility toward their strongest ally, including a 1967 attack on an American spy ship and an espionage operation in the 1980s.)

While Kissinger succeeded in his short-term goal of ending the oil embargo and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, his efforts at statesmanship intentionally obstructed efforts to find a long-term solution to the permanent occupation of Palestine.

As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote today, Kissinger went against Richard Nixon’s own directive to find a way for lasting peace when everything and anything was on the table. Kissinger believed that a constant state of conflict and instability granted America an upper hand in the Middle East. “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best,” Kissinger told his subordinates at the onset of the Yom Kippur War.

Despite his Jewish heritage, Kissinger showed little regard for the Israeli state or Jewish people beyond their utility to the American empire. Helping Soviet Jews escape to the United States to avoid the Russian crackdown was “not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1973, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Whatever animosity once existed between the Likud party and the former secretary of state was long past them. Today, the party is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first elected to the post in 1996. (That election was prompted by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who many believe was the last great hope for enduring peace in Israel.)

Netanyahu has taken a page out of the Kissinger playbook, using unending conflict to cling to power and inviting ever more extremist politicians into the Likud coalition. In September, just weeks before Israel launched its all-out war on Gaza, the pair had an affectionate meeting in New York.

Israel’s bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip in recent weeks rivals the concentrated bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia that Kissinger oversaw decades ago.

The post Members of Israel’s Ruling Likud Party Once Planned to Assassinate Henry Kissinger appeared first on The Intercept.

Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin. 

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.

As National Security Adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.

In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”

“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.

Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”

North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.

As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.

In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans. In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”

Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.

“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

“He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”

Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.

“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”

Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.

Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.

To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.

“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.

When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”

“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”

“Come on now.”

“No, no, no, were particularly —”

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”

“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war.”

Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.

“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”

Correction: December 1, 2023
An earlier version of this article included a pre-publication title for Carolyn Eisenberg’s book. The story has been updated to reflect the actual title.

The post Henry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100 appeared first on The Intercept.

The indictment alleges that Gupta, after being recruited by the Indian government official, hired a hitman and paid him a $15,000 advance to carry out the murder this past summer. The hitman was actually an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to a report on the indictment in the Washington Post, the intended target of the killing was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikh activist group Sikhs for Justice. In the DEA’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said investigators had “foiled and exposed a dangerous plot to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil.”

The alleged assassination plot against Pannun was in the works around the same time as the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was also a leader in the Sikh separatist movement. Nijjar was murdered outside Vancouver in June; the Canadian government has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence in his death. 

The Indian government has come under scrutiny over an alleged transnational assassination program targeting its opponents in foreign countries. In addition to the murder of Nijjar, The Intercept has also reported on alleged FBI warnings to Sikhs in the U.S. as well as alleged plots by India to assassinate Sikh activists in Pakistan. Both the Nijjar killing and the Gupta plot came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the U.S. in June. 

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil, coinciding with Modi’s White House visit,” said Pritpal Singh, a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee who was among the Sikh American activists who were contacted by the FBI after Nijjar’s killing.

The details in the indictment reveal a murder-for-hire plot gone awry. Gupta, 52, described as being tied to the international weapons and narcotics trade, was alleged to have worked as a co-conspirator to an Indian government official with a background in security and intelligence. Along with others based in India and elsewhere, Gupta helped plan the murder of Pannun over his advocacy for an independent Sikh state and criticisms of the Indian government. In return, the government official indicated he would help secure the dismissal of criminal charges against Gupta in India, including during a meeting in New Delhi to discuss the plot. The Indian government official provided Gupta with details about Pannun, including his address, associated phone numbers, and his daily routine, which Gupta then gave to the DEA agent working undercover as a hitman. 

According to the indictment, the Indian government official told Gupta that he was targeting multiple people in the U.S. In communications, the Indian official told Gupta that he had a “target in New York” as well as another target in California. Gupta replied: ”We will hit our all Targets.” The indictment also indicated that Pannun was surveilled in New York using a cellphone application that tracks GPS coordinates and enables the user to take photographs. The Indian official allegedly agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder of Pannun, with a $15,000 advance paid to the undercover agent around June 9, according to the indictment. Nijjar was fatally shot less than 10 days later outside a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburbs. 

According to the indictment, Gupta instructed the DEA hitman to kill Pannun “as soon as possible,” but not when high-level meetings were expected to take place between U.S. and Indian officials. Modi was scheduled to visit the U.S. on an official trip between June 21 and 23. On June 18, the day of Nijjar’s murder, the Indian government official sent Gupta a video of the Sikh leader slumped dead in his car. The next day, Gupta allegedly contacted the undercover DEA agent to tell them that Nijjar, like Pannun, had also been targeted for his opposition to the Indian government, telling the agent, “We have so many targets.”

Gupta also allegedly promised “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman, referring to more assassinations that would be carried out in the future. In a video call with the DEA agent, roughly a week before the killing of Nijjar, Gupta and a group of men dressed in business attire and seated in a conference room allegedly told the agent, “We are all counting on you.” 

There is mounting evidence that India is running a transnational targeted killing program against dissidents. Documents reported by The Intercept last week alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing was coordinating the murders of individuals in Pakistan, using local criminal networks and assets based in the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. A slew of Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in Pakistan have been killed over the past few years, the pace of which has picked up in recent months. Such killings may be taking place in the West as well. In addition to Nijjar, in recent years a number of Sikh activists have died in mysterious circumstances in the United Kingdom and Canada, prompting accusations from family members and others of Indian government involvement.

According to the indictment, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in late June. He is charged with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Gupta is currently “in jail waiting to answer to these charges,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.

The accusations against Gupta expand the scope of what is publicly known about India’s alleged assassination campaign in Western countries. 

“These revelations are deeply unsettling and have shocked our community,” said Singh. “The Indian rogue regime must be held accountable, and the perpetrators must face justice.”

The post India Accidentally Hired a DEA Agent to Kill Sikh American Activist, Federal Prosecutors Say appeared first on The Intercept.

“There’s an Israel PR blitz happening this week facilitated by a handful of senators,” said a source familiar with the meetings in the upper chamber. “Practically all of the briefings on this issue these last few weeks have been members-only,” meaning congressional staff and the public are not welcome.

One briefing exclusive to members of the Senate scheduled on Monday and organized by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., involved three senior Israel Defense Forces officers stationed at the Israeli Embassy.

“Sen. Duckworth would like to invite your boss to a last-minute meeting with Israeli Defense officials to discuss Israel’s strategy, how they are waging the war and what to expect in the day after the scenarios,” according to a memo obtained by The Intercept. (Duckworth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The briefings are coming as Israel faces an international backlash over its assault on the Gaza Strip. Israel says it is seeking to eliminate Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in its October 7 surprise attack.

The Intercept has learned of around half a dozen events coordinated with Israeli officials during recent weeks. The Intercept reviewed materials relating to four of the briefings. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who said he had not spoken with the Israel Defense Forces in recent days, told The Intercept, “I know there are going to be some folks from the IDF here tomorrow or the day after to brief members of Congress.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept, “I have had private conversations with IDF officials but I didn’t attend any briefings.” (She declined to comment on her meetings.)

In response to the Hamas attack, Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza and undertook a ground invasion. Israel’s offensive has faced criticisms for its death toll, with more than 14,000 Palestinians dying, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and enormous damage to Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Over the weekend, Hamas and Israel agreed to a “pause” in fighting to allow for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The temporary truce is set to expire, but talks for an extension are ongoing.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel.”

Calls for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill started slowly but have gained steam in recent weeks. As of Tuesday morning, a total of 43 members from both chambers of Congress had called for a ceasefire. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who had publicly sided with Israel after the October 7 attack, said on Tuesday he may put forward a bill conditioning aid to Israel, The Intercept reported.

The shifts spurred the increased pace of congressional briefings with IDF officials, some of which were hastily arranged.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. “And, with the prospect of an even longer-term ceasefire, are putting together an all-hands-on-deck PR blitz to keep Senators at bay.”

Frequent and Secret Briefings

While members of Congress and their staff frequently hold meetings with foreign officials, including military officials, the invitations for briefings with current and former Israeli officials have come in rapid succession over recent weeks.

“It isn’t entirely unusual for senators to have member-only meetings or briefings on sensitive or classified issues,” said the source. “What is unusual is the frequency with which they’ve happened recently — especially this week — the secrecy involved, and the single-issue focus.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., appeared to suggest some of the briefings were secret. “My friend, I would not speak about those classified meetings,” Booker told The Intercept when asked about the IDF briefings. (None of the materials reviewed by The Intercept indicated the briefings were classified.)

Briefers in the closed-door meetings were to include several senior Israeli military officials stationed at the embassy, including Maj. Gen. Tal Kelman, former head of the strategic directorate and Iran Division; Col. Itai Shapira, a former senior Israeli Defense Intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Yotam Shefer of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli military unit responsible for mediating between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (The Israeli Embassy referred questions to the IDF, which did not immediately respond.)

One briefing was scheduled to take place in-person on Capitol Hill for an hour on Monday evening.

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday, is slated to have the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, brief Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. Yadlin has issued fiery statements following the Hamas attack, saying that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe.” (Heinrich and Yadlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday morning and organized by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a closed screening of 47 minutes of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on October 7.

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting.”

“It’s important to bear witness in real time,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who helped arrange the viewing, told reporters. “Sometime in the future, we’ll go — there’ll be a museum, there’ll be a memorial, there’ll be another Yad Vashem or Holocaust museum.”

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting and the pressure to corral lawmakers,” the source said, “and the recipients of their campaign contributions.”

The post With Ceasefire Calls Growing, Israeli Military Launches Closed-Door “PR Blitz” on Capitol Hill appeared first on The Intercept.

Sanders spoke to The Intercept minutes before a Senate Democratic caucus luncheon, where the question of placing conditions on $14 billion in aid to Israel is on the agenda. “Yes,” he replied gruffly when asked if there was a chance he would push for a floor vote. 

Sanders’s comment comes as the death toll in Gaza is around 15,000 — with some estimating it to have exceeded 20,000 — and amid a temporary pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Vermont senator has thus far refrained from calling for a permanent ceasefire, a key demand of activist groups that has broad support among the American public and has gained traction among members of Congress. He has instead only gone as far as calling for humanitarian pauses in fighting. 

The Department of Defense has already sent a variety of heavy weapons and ammunition to Israel to support its continuing war in Gaza, according to a leaked list obtained by Bloomberg. Congress is now seeking to approve another $14 billion, requested by President Joe Biden, to provide advanced weapons systems, support for artillery and ammunition production, and more projectiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has also called for restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel. 

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law,” Murphy said on Sunday. “I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws.”

One way the U.S. could place conditions on the aid is through what is known as the Leahy law, named after Sanders’s longtime colleague and former senator from Vermont Patrick Leahy. The Leahy law prohibits U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights violations. 

While the idea faces opposition within the Democratic caucus, and the U.S. has never before placed conditions on its billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Biden seems to be considering the proposition. He told reporters the day after Thanksgiving — at the start of the temporary truce — that conditioning aid is a “worthwhile thought,” adding that “I don’t think, if I started off with that, we’d [have] ever gotten to where we are today.”

When pressed on whether he might use his position on the Senate Budget Committee to push for reining in the Israeli military’s onslaught, Sanders said, “there are ways we can approach it and that is what we are exploring right now.” 

The post Bernie Sanders May Push Vote on Conditioning Aid to Israel in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel has been widely condemned for its brutal response to the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas. With the coming expiration of the ceasefire, this will only become more vociferous. But many U.S. supporters of Israel have responded to the criticism with a question: What else is the beleaguered country supposed to do?

The answer is simple. Israel should do what it has never done before: agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, based on international law.

This straightforward statement is scarce in mainstream U.S. political culture. In the speeches of politicians and in newspaper op-eds, it’s a matter of faith that Israel has always yearned for peace but has been constantly rebuffed by the Palestinians. The Palestinians, according to this narrative, prefer holding onto a dream of destroying Israel. 

This is not quite 180 degrees the opposite of reality, but close. In the actual world outside of high-level American political rhetoric, Israel could have had peace at many times in the past 75 years. However, such a peace would have required Israel giving up most of the Palestinian land — specifically, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — it conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel has always preferred conflict with stateless Palestinians to that.

Amos Malka, one-time head of Israeli military intelligence, explained it straightforwardly in 2004. “It is possible to reach an agreement,” he said, “under the following conditions: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty on the Temple Mount; 97 percent of the West Bank plus exchanges of territory in the ratio of 1:1 with respect to the remaining territory; some kind of formula that includes the acknowledgement of Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem and a willingness to accept 20,000-30,000 refugees.”

In polite circles of U.S. power, these facts are considered preposterous. Anyone describing them exiles themselves from serious discussion of the issue. It’s similar to the situation before the invasion of Iraq, when there was uniform agreement across the political spectrum that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Any claims to the contrary were seen as self-evidently ludicrous, as ludicrous as now saying that Israel is a huge obstacle to peace.

From the Beginning

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The British Peel Commission was tasked with investigating violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine. It proposed in 1937 that the historic area of Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, making up about 17 percent of the area, and an Arab state, granted 75 percent. The remainder, including Jerusalem, would be under intentional supervision.

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations approved another partition plan. This gave Israel-to-be 56 percent of the area, and a Palestinian nation 43 percent.

In the standard U.S. story, the Zionist movement accepted both two-state solutions, and the Arab world rejected both. In fact, neither side accepted either. 

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The Arab side formally rejected the plans. The Zionist movement rejected the specifics of the Peel proposal and accepted the U.N. plan — but only in public. The founders of Israel privately agreed that once the country came into being, they would consolidate their power and then take over as much additional land as possible. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, put it this way in a famous 1937 letter to his son: “A Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning. … The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.” 

In any case, the U.N. adoption of the partition plan in November 1947 led to a moderate civil war between the Jewish and Arab populations. Then during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 following Israel’s declaration of independence, the new country conquered 78 percent of Palestine, leaving 22 percent in Arab hands. Egypt controlled Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians experienced the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” in which 700,000 people were expelled or fled, and 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Subsequent history shows Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders meant what they said. In 1956, Israel joined with France and the U.K. to invade Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, though it was ultimately forced to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration. In the 1967 war, Israel took over Sinai and Gaza again, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Israel would eventually be forced to return the Sinai Peninsula following the 1973 Arab–Israeli War but has held onto everything else since.

The Early Years

It’s generally believed in the U.S. and Europe that after Israel’s founding, the Arab world spent decades devoted to destroying it. This is not so. There were absolutely factions in Arab politics who wished to reverse the establishment of Israel, and a great deal of blood-curdling Arab rhetoric on this subject. But various leaders of the relevant countries at various times — including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — showed they understood the balance of forces and were willing to consider a compromise.

However, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in 1949 that Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., “sees no need to run after peace. The armistice is sufficient for us; if we run after peace, the Arabs will demand a price of us: borders or refugees or both. Let us wait a few years.” That year Ben-Gurion also told his cabinet, as paraphrased by British–Israeli historian Avi Shlaim: “With the passage of time, the world would get used to Israel’s existing borders, and forget about U.N. borders and the U.N. idea of an independent Palestinian state.” 

The U.S. pushed Israel to participate in a peace conference in Switzerland during the middle of 1949. The Arab position was that Israel’s borders should be not the armistice lines giving it 78 percent of Palestine, but the partition plan’s borders granting it 56 percent. The Arab participants also demanded that refugees from areas designated for an Arab state be able to return to their homes. Israel rejected both concepts. One of the Israeli delegates privately noted that his country’s government “think they can achieve peace without paying any price, maximal or minimal.” A cable from a U.S. State Department delegate asserted, “There never has been a time [during negotiations] when a generous and far-sighted attitude on the part of the Jews would not have unlocked peace. … As an advocate of the new state I hope they come to it eventually. Otherwise there will be no peace in the Middle East.” 

The Emergence of the PLO

The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 and represented the increasing coherence of Palestinian national consciousness.

Following the 1967 war, the international consensus gradually came to be that peace would require the creation of a Palestinian state. At the same time, the PLO accepted internally that the overall war was over, and they had lost: They were therefore willing to make peace in return for a state on the 22 percent of Palestine constituting Gaza and the West Bank. A 1976 draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council called for this and stated that Israel should “withdraw from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967.” The PLO supported the resolution. Every country on the Security Council except the U.S. — including the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden — voted for it. But Israel had no interest in it, and the U.S. vetoed it. Instead of encouraging further moderation from the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with — according to Zeev Maoz, an Israeli historian who served in the military during three of the country’s wars — several goals. The first was to destroy the PLO and hence Palestinian nationalism.

Bill Clinton’s Catastrophic Failure

In 1981, the PLO formally endorsed a Soviet proposal calling for a Palestinian state and “the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel.” In 1988, the PLO officially recognized Israel and accepted its right to exist in peace and security.

Israel still had no interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. And by the beginning of the Clinton administration in 1993, the PLO was not what it once had been. It was headquartered in Tunis, and little respected by younger Palestinians who had led the first intifada of the late 1980s. Then the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat, made the unfortunate decision to back Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War.

The PLO’s weakness made Arafat eager to accept a terrible deal in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While they were greeted with rapture in the U.S. media, there was nothing in them that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Palestinian state and peace. Indeed, one of the signatories, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, soon explicitly explained, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” 

What happened then was exactly what anyone paying attention would anticipate: The PLO essentially took over security for Israel in some 18 percent of occupied territories — Israel solely controlled about 60 percent and shared responsibility for the remainder — and enriched itself, while the occupation and Palestinian misery continued unabated. But by the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term in the summer of 2000, he was eager to leave a legacy other than his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He cajoled Arafat to come to Camp David to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in hopes of conjuring a conflict-ending agreement.

The Palestinian attitude was that they had already made a gigantic compromise by accepting just the 22 percent of historic Palestine for their state. They were willing to compromise still more — but not much more.

Barak had no understanding of this. At Camp David, he offered the Palestinians what were essentially three disconnected bantustans — i.e., the equivalent of the separate black “homelands” in apartheid South Africa — in the West Bank, with Israel occupying and controlling the border with Jordan for some long period of time. Clinton tried to pressure Arafat to accept this; he did not. Long afterward, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a key Israeli negotiator at the talks, said, “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well.”

Clinton had promised Arafat that he would not blame him if the talks failed. He then reneged after the summit ended. Nonetheless, the Israelis and Palestinians continued to negotiate through the fall and narrowed their differences. 

Clinton came up with what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. Several weeks afterward, Clinton proclaimed, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

In the 22 years since, Bill Clinton has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement.

The Israelis and the Palestinians kept talking in late January 2001 in Taba, Egypt. It was not the Palestinians but Barak who terminated the discussions on January 27, a few weeks before Israeli elections. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

This was in fact true: The records of the Taba talks show the Israelis and Palestinians had come agonizingly close to specific solutions to what the territory of a Palestinian state would be and whether and how any Palestinian refugees could return to Israel, with less progress on who would control which parts of Jerusalem.

But Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who did not want a Palestinian state and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Clinton then made a fateful, disastrous decision. In the 22 years since, he has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. This has convinced both Israelis and Americans that Clinton made every effort to give Palestinians a state. But it was impossible, because — in what became a standard formulation — there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton, who was elected to the Senate in 2000 and later became secretary of state, also joined in this key deception.

The Arab Peace Plan

In 2002, Saudi Arabia proposed a solution to the conflict known as the Arab Peace Initiative. The API called for a settlement along the standard lines that had been known for decades: an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with some small adjustments, a fair division of Jerusalem, and “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” The 22 members of the Arab League endorsed it, as did the 57-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Israel, with Sharon leading the country, simply ignored it.

The Olmert Offer

The two sides again came close after Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke and Arafat died. Ehud Olmert became the Israeli prime minister. Olmert was right-wing but had become convinced that Israel had to settle the conflict with Palestinians for its own safety. 

In the standard U.S. narrative, Olmert made a wonderful offer to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and Abbas either rejected it or never responded. In reality, Olmert and Abbas held 36 secret meetings between 2006 and 2008. 

However, Olmert, under investigation for accepting bribes, resigned from his position in 2008. He later said, “If I had remained prime minister for another four to six months, I believe it would have been possible to reach an agreement. The gaps were small.” 

Olmert was succeeded as prime minister by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has consistently opposed a Palestinian state throughout his career and had no interest in continuing the talks with Abbas.

Lost Opportunities With Hamas

In the U.S., Hamas is considered anathema, for understandable reasons. Its original 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the obliteration of Israel. (A new Hamas charter was issued in 2017 and states that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”)

However, there have long been clear signs that factions within Hamas were moderating and open to long-term agreements with Israel. In 1997, Khaled Mashal, then the top Hamas leader, offered a 30-year ceasefire to Israel. Israel did not respond — but did immediately try to assassinate Mashal in Jordan.

In 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s chief religious leader, called for a 10-year truce with Israel if it returned to its pre-1967 borders. Israel assassinated him two months later.

In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian elections over the PLO-affiliated Fatah. The new Palestinian prime minister, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, wrote secretly to President George W. Bush. Haniyeh told Bush, “We are so concerned about stability and security in the area that we don’t mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 border and offering a truce for many years.” Haniyeh also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which he said Palestinians priorities “included resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks.” The Bush administration did not respond.

Around the same time, Mashal said Hamas would not oppose the Arab Peace Initiative. An Israeli spokesman responded that this was irrelevant “verbal gymnastics.”

In 2009, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, wrote that Hamas has recognized “its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” but “Israel, for reasons of its own,” was not interested in such a discussion.

The same year, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, reported that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

There are many more examples of this, along with Israeli disinterest demonstrated in the most extreme ways possible. In 2012, according to an Israeli peace activist, the head of Hamas’s military wing had become convinced that Palestinians should negotiate a long-term truce with Israel. On the same day Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief, was reviewing a draft proposal for such a truce, Israel assassinated him.

It is, of course, possible that this has all been a PR operation by Hamas, and that it has been making the same calculation as the Zionist movement originally did — i.e., that it could accept a partition of Palestine and then later expand to take the whole thing. But given the relative power of the two sides, this seems unlikely — and even if true, largely irrelevant.

Where Things Stand Now

It’s true that it may now be, from a political standpoint, impossible for Israel to make peace. Thanks to decades of nationalist propaganda, most left-of-center Israelis believed even before October 7 that there was no way to make peace with Palestinians. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists and religious conservatives simply want to keep the West Bank and so wouldn’t make peace even if they thought it were possible. 

Now, after last month’s shocking Hamas assault, the situation appears insoluble. Any Israeli leader who tried to do what’s necessary for a two-state solution, especially withdrawing settlers from the West Bank, would face the possibility of a revolt from a faction of the Israeli military and would personally be in great physical danger.

Nevertheless, we are where we are. What hope there is lies in the fact that the world — at least, the world minus the U.S., Israel, and the tiny island of Nauru — recognizes the incredible urgency of peace. The appalling suffering of Palestinians remains what it has been for 75 years: a sanguineous wound, both literally and metaphorically, at the center of the Middle East. If it is never healed, we will continually face the possibility of regional or even larger wars. Long ago, James Baldwin observed that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We don’t know if this horrendous tragedy can be ended, but if it can be, the first thing Americans and everyone else have to do is face reality.

The post All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

Some opposed to Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza think the flyers are propaganda, a crass manipulation of suffering designed to cement a bond between the United States and Israel and ensure that Washington continues to give Israel both a free hand and what it wants in weapons to continue its assault on Gaza, exempt from the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits supplying weapons to states involved in wide-scale human rights violations. As we approach the two-month mark since the hostage-taking, the posters have become rallying points in what is shaping up to be a global war for hearts and minds. Videos of people ripping down the flyers have gone viral, providing evidence that those who claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians are heartless and inhumane. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently said of the posters being ripped down. Some Americans, Tapper said, “are actually rooting for the hostage takers.”

As a New Yorker and historian who has worked on political terror in Latin America, I think there is another way to tell the story of the controversy these posters are causing, why some see them as a plea for help and others a call for war. They exist in a loop. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say it’s an endless return, a vortex of shared, unending trauma, starting with the Holocaust, continuing through death-squad terror in Latin America, onward to 9/11, and now to Gaza and back to the Shoah.

Night and Fog

In Latin America, the repressive tactic of “disappearing” enemies of the state came into widespread use in the early 1960s, as Washington mobilized its allies to ensure the containment of the Cuban Revolution. The tactic itself emulated Adolf Hitler’s famous 1941 Nacht und Nebel, or Night and Fog, decree, which directed security forces operating in occupied territories, mainly France, to capture dissidents and hold them incommunicado. Most were executed. The Nazis coined a neologism for these victims, vernebelt, which loosely translates as transformed into mist. Latin Americans called their missing los desaparecidos, the disappeared. It was an especially cruel method of repression. Family members and friends exhausted their energies dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies trying to find some hint of where their loved ones might have been taken, only to be met with indifference by government officials. “To disappear” is normally an intransitive verb, meaning the object of the sentence is doing the action. “My keys disappeared.” “That book disappeared.” Latin Americans turned it into a transitive verb, used often in what linguists call the adversative passive voice, to indicate an unfortunate occurrence: “She was disappeared.”

By whom? Everyone knew. The sentence’s subject noun was left unstated, underscoring the covert nature of the death squads: Fue desaparecido. Into the mist.

As violence intensified in Guatemala in the early 1980s, relatives and comrades of those taken by security forces would, within days, put up flyers on city walls with their faces, names, and dates of disappearance, along with, often, the unions or political organizations to which they belonged. The walls of union halls were filling with photographs of the missing, yet this was still a moment when it was possible to believe that the Left was in ascendence. Deborah Levenson, a historian who documented the 1985 siege of Guatemala City’s Coca-Cola plant during this period, says that images of the missing were not meant to convey defeat, nor to preserve what later would be called “historical memory.” Levenson, in response to a query for this essay, recalls that the bottling plant’s cafeteria was adorned with large photographs of the vanished staring down on surviving militant unionists as they ate. The missing and the dead alike were understood to be something like Christian martyrs, who had sacrificed their lives for those fighting for a better life. The subtext was clear, she said: “The loss of this person will not stop us but make us stronger.”

But the Left in Guatemala, as throughout Latin America, was defeated, brutally so, and the meaning of the public photographs of the missing changed. They evolved from inspiration to accusation, evidence of crimes against humanity, proof that this person once lived and now is gone. By the end of the 1980s, death squads, police units, and military detachments had, in addition to committing run-of-the-mill extrajudicial assassinations and massacres, disappeared thousands in Chile; tens of thousands in Argentina; around 10,000 in El Salvador; and 45,000 in Guatemala. As Gabriel García Márquez told his Swedish audience in his 1982 Nobel acceptance lecture, it’s “as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala.” This form of repression has outlived the Cold War; more than 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared over the last two decades, victims of a never-ending war on drugs.

Defeat brought forth the need to find an appropriate way to render the disappeared, a way to fully represent both the specific individual who had been taken and the magnitude of what had been lost. In Argentina, the junta had been disappearing people since 1976, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s, in increasingly bold actions taken by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, that people began to openly come out into the street with photographs of their missing. Elías was last seen in the clandestine concentration camp El Vesubio on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978. His son, a friend of mine, remembers his mother making their placard with a heavy black marker. The family had little money, so a human rights organization paid to have the photograph from Elías’s citizenship card enlarged.

In late 1983, a collective of Argentine artists working with relatives of the disappeared decided it was time to defy the generals and stage a large demonstration, and they searched for an artistic medium that could convey the enormity of the suffering, some way to represent both humanity and its loss. One of the organizers landed on panel series titled “Each Day at Auschwitz” by the Polish artist Jerzy Skapski. Skapski had crammed each poster with thousands of silhouettes, meant to represent the people who were killed daily at the death camp.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

It made sense for this group of activists to look to the Holocaust for ideas on how to represent loved ones taken. The Argentine junta was viciously antisemitic, and Latin America was indispensable in the creation of Israel, casting more than a third of the total United Nations votes in 1947 in favor of partition and voting unanimously, all 18 Latin American nations, for Israel’s admission into the U.N. The horror of Hitlerism resonated in Latin America. Pablo Neruda made anti-Nazism a topic in his writings, and Jorge Luis Borges addressed the Holocaust in his short stories. For decades, the Latin American Left understood itself as struggling against local variants of fascism, as if World War II hadn’t ended but merely shifted venues.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

On September 21, 1983, as Buenos Aires’s city center, the Plaza de Mayo, filled with protesters, organizers asked those who had lost family members to lie down on sheets of white paper and let an artist draw outlines of their bodies. The name of the disappeared, along with the date they went missing, was then painted on the silhouette. By the end of the day, thousands — some say 30,000 — silhouettes were plastered on the walls of government buildings surrounding the plaza and adjacent streets. Later, the sheets were turned into stencils and the images spray-painted on walls, making it look as if ghostly shadows were walking the streets of Buenos Aires.

The event was called the siluetazo, which might best be translated as silhouette-a-thon, and it was the largest protest against disappearances in Latin America of its time. Soon, similar silhouettes began to appear in other Latin American cities. Most recently, the silhouette image was used to represent the 43 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who, in 2014, were brutally executed and disappeared by Mexican security forces.

I’ve walked by untold numbers of desaparecido posters. One still sees them today, decades after the worst of Central America’s terror, plastering walls in the center of Guatemala City; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Where are they?” they ask.

The 9/11 Missing

In New York after 9/11, the spontaneous display of “missing” posters seemed familiar. The flyers reportedly started in response to rumors that the city’s hospital beds were filled with thousands of unconscious, unidentified victims and that some people were found walking the streets with amnesia. The first set was done in a rush, with hastily compiled information about a missing person, including their height and weight and the color of their hair and eyes, along with where they worked and on what floor, in either the north or south tower. As the days went by and the rumors of unidentified survivors proved untrue, the posting continued, with physical details giving way to more personal information, including details about their children, their partners, and their hobbies.

Within a week, they were everywhere in the city, taped to chain-link fences, pasted on walls and lamp posts and on subway entrances. The walls of St. Vincent’s — since closed and sold to developers, like so many of New York’s community hospitals in the early 21st century — were covered with them. Many of the victims and left-behind family members were of a different status than the Latin Americans who were disappeared. They lived in the most powerful nation in the world, in history, and presumably most weren’t especially politically active, unlike the majority of Latin America’s disappeared. The World Trade Center, though, employed hundreds of migrant workers, many undocumented, from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. The union UNITE HERE counted 43 immigrant workers at Windows on the World among the dead.

“The whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.”

Class and status mattered nothing in the dust and rubble. All shared a disorientation that was recognized by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer who has devoted himself to considering the problem of Latin America’s “disappeared.” “Suddenly,” he wrote in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times just after the towers fell, “the whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.” Such pain was routine for much of the world, leading Dorfman to hope for a kind of reconciliation, a way to end the “famous exceptionalism” that had kept the United States sequestered from much of the world. “Their suffering is neither unique nor exclusive,” he wrote, but rather connects them “with so many other human beings who have suffered unanticipated and often protracted injury and fury.”

Dorfman was wrong on that score. George W. Bush’s advisers were already determined to “move swiftly” — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the sun set that first day, according to the notes of an aide — to “go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” Liberal and neocon hawks were quick to lay out the case for an expansive war, not just to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice, but also to remake the Middle East in a way that would ensure U.S. global dominance. On September 14, George W. Bush, standing atop a crushed fire truck with a bullhorn in hand and a firefighter by his side, let the world know it would soon hear from the United States.

The “missing” flyers, though, were like flowers pushing up through cracks in cement. Some displays had American flags, but they were small and had nothing of vengeance about them. They conveyed a range of feelings, none of them warlike. It took your breath away, coming upon a wall or a chain-link fence papered with them. The photographs showed victims as their relatives wanted to remember them: holding pets, hugging partners, or playing with their children, or just a close-up portrait. Some had hearts and flowers drawn in yellow, blue, red, and green, perhaps by the victims’ children. They were intimate portraits, handmade by people who knew the missing, and, like their Latin American counterparts, they were affirmations of humanity.

For a few brief weeks, as the country was being prepped for what we were told would be a prolonged campaign, these flyers continued to affirm life’s fragility, as brittle as the tape holding them in place. No doubt many families of the World Trade Center dead did want revenge and were roused by Bush’s rallying cry. Yet judging from the composition of most flyers, the people who made them weren’t thinking about geopolitics or civilizational wars. They weren’t trying to crystalize an us-versus-them absolutism. I don’t remember any of them mentioning Al Qaeda. They were the closest atheist New Yorkers would come to the sacred.

Pointless Provocations

The posters made on behalf of the October 7 Hamas victims are different. Mintz, one of the artists who came up with idea, describes herself as a “visual poet,” but there’s no poetry in this particular work. Moral values are inescapably artistic in nature, as E.L. Doctorow wrote in his 1977 essay “False Documents,” and these flyers convey a martial aesthetic. They are starkly uniform in arrangement, all topped with an uppercase “KIDNAPPED” headline running in block letters. Under the header to the left is a picture of a victim or victims, and to the right, their details. The information, though, is sparse. Sometimes the flyers don’t even give names, but simply say “entire Israeli family” or “young Israeli couple.”

It’s the generic sameness of the posters, complete with QR codes, not the individuality of the missing, that is most striking. Sen. John Fetterman has wallpapered his entire outer office with these flyers, a strident brick-like array of red, black, and white. Fetterman says they are staying up until all the hostages come home. Over 200,000 Arab Muslims, including many Palestinians, live in Pennsylvania; were they to enter that antechamber, would they feel welcomed or excluded by what they saw there?

The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

Over the last few days, after a blessed but limited ceasefire went into effect, Hamas and Israel have exchanged scores of captives. Among those released by Hamas were a number of migrant Thai workers, while both sides have freed children and elderly people. For a moment at least, the joy of family reunions, smiles, tears, and hugs among both Israelis and Palestinians raised hopes that out of shared pain and vulnerability, a common humanity could emerge, a reprieve from the bellicosity of the “kidnapped” posters. As I write this, I can almost hope that the peace will hold. But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has made it clear that “the respite will be short.” Once the ceasefire is over, the Israel Defense Forces will resume its assault on Gaza “with intensity” in a war that may last months more.

Meanwhile, the “kidnapped” posters have been transformed into antagonistic performance art. Supporters of Israel put them up, at times in places intentionally meant to provoke, such as near Palestinian restaurants. And then advocates for Palestinians pull them down, with the video of the act posted online, taken as evidence that what really moves those who claim to care about Palestinians is antisemitism, that they are so coldhearted they can’t bear to leave a memento of a stolen child on the wall. A report in Miami’s New Times found cases in which individuals had put the poster up with a clear intention of videoing someone tearing it down, in a bid to have them fired from their place of employment. Viral videos posted by defenders of Israel show defaced posters, some with feces.

We live in a precarious time of heightened sensitivity. Contretemps over slogans, placards, and posters can deepen schisms, charging routine acts with malicious meaning, transforming every utterance into an insult. We should tread carefully and avoid, at all costs, pointless provocations. 

War does radicalize, so it is useful to keep in mind that even the most obscene slurs and outrages — including painting synagogues with antisemitic graffiti, or Israel’s supporters telling anti-Zionist Jews that Hitler should have gassed them — are byproducts of the main thing: killing and kidnapping; siege; occupation; dispossession; the bombing of hospitals, bakeries, and refugee camps; the denial of water and electricity to civilians; and the massacre and maiming of children.

The post How to Read the Israeli “Kidnapped” Posters appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel. 

Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse. Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts, and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions.

Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts.

If, as Israel alleges, these people have committed violent crimes, particularly against civilians, then Israel should give them full rights to due process, to see the alleged evidence against them, and they should be tried in civilian courts with the same rights afforded Israeli defendants. That would also mean allowing Palestinians who do commit acts of political violence, particularly against the military forces of a violent occupation, to raise the context and legality of the Israeli occupation as part of their defense. Israel is asking the world to believe that these 300 people are all dangerous terrorists, yet it has built a kangaroo military court system for Palestinians that magically churns out a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. All of this from a country that constantly promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Palestinians on this list are from the occupied West Bank and have lived their entire lives under an apartheid regime. Palestinians taken by Israel, including some on the list of prisoners proposed for release, have certainly committed violent acts. But to pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust, given the appalling conditions Palestinians have lived under for decades. Contrast this to the widespread impunity that governs the actions of violent Israeli settlers who mercilessly target Palestinians in an effort to expel them from their homes.

All nations should be judged by how they treat the least powerful, not the most powerful or only those from a certain religion or ethnicity. This is why many leading civil liberties lawyers in the U.S. opposed the use of Guantánamo Bay prison and military tribunals and continue to oppose U.S. laws or rules that deny the accused a fundamental right to a proper defense.

The post Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.

Military investigations launched earlier this year found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems as well as drones — have been stolen in Iraq. This follows hundreds of thousands of dollars in military gear that were purloined from U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, as reported earlier this year by The Intercept.

America’s bases in Iraq and Syria ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” but experts say they are used primarily as a check against Iran. Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, these bases have come under regular rocket and drone attacks as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

The U.S. has increasingly responded to those attacks. In Syria, the U.S. launched “precision strikes” on a “training facility and a safe house” allegedly used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S. has since employed an AC-130 gunship against an “Iranian-backed militia vehicle and a number of Iranian-backed militia personnel” at an undisclosed location, following a ballistic missile attack on Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, justifying U.S. strikes.

But the criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept demonstrate that the U.S. cannot even secure its equipment, much less protect its troops.

“We don’t tend to think nearly critically enough about the ripple effects of such an expansive U.S. military footprint,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, told The Intercept. “The so-called war on terror isn’t over — it’s just morphed. And we can understand these weapons thefts as just one of the many political costs of that ongoing campaign.”

Details about the thefts in Iraq, which were never made public by the military, are found in criminal investigations files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones, valued at about $162,500, were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq, sometime last year. The agents identified no suspects, and no leads are mentioned in the file.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq.

A separate investigation discovered that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” including targeting sight and launcher units for Javelin missiles — a shoulder-fired guided missile that locks on its targets — were stolen at or en route to Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss to the U.S. government was estimated at almost $480,000.

Investigators did not believe the thefts were an inside job. “No known U.S. personnel were involved,” according to a criminal investigations file. The investigators instead refer to locals as the likely suspects. “Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment,” the document stated. “Further there have been systemic issues with U.S. containers being pilfered by these groups and local nationals outside of Union III, due to the lack of security.”

Earlier this year, The Intercept revealed at least four significant thefts and one loss of U.S. weapons and equipment in Iraq and Syria from 2020 to 2022, including 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, specialized field artillery tools and equipment, and unspecified “weapons systems.” Two of the incidents took place at bases in Syria, and three were in Iraq. None of those thefts occurred at Forward Operating Base Union III.

Just how many thefts have occurred is unknown — perhaps even to the Pentagon. After more than two months, both Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, and its parent organization, U.S. Central Command, failed to respond to any of The Intercept’s questions about weapons thefts in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this year, the task force admitted that it does not know the extent of the problem: A spokesperson said the task force has no record of any thefts from U.S. forces. “[W]e do not have the requested information,” Capt. Kevin T. Livingston, then CJTF-OIR’s director of public affairs, told The Intercept when asked if any weapons, ammunition, or equipment were stolen in the last five years.

The thefts and losses uncovered by The Intercept are just the latest weapons accountability woes to afflict the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria. A 2017 investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found $20 million of weapons in Kuwait and Iraq were “vulnerable to loss or theft.” A 2020 audit discovered that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that works with America’s Syrian allies, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for those local surrogates.

Groups like Amnesty International and Conflict Armament Research also found that a substantial portion of the Islamic State group’s arsenal was composed of U.S.-made or U.S.-purchased weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or otherwise obtained from the Iraqi Army and Syrian fighters. 

Losses of weapons and ammunition are significant — and the military has taken pains to prevent them in the past. When the U.S. withdrew forces from an outpost near Kobani, Syria, in 2019, it conducted airstrikes on ammunition that was left behind. The military also destroyed equipment and ammunition during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Still, within weeks of the U.S. defeat, American-made pistols, rifles, grenades, binoculars, and night-vision goggles flooded weapons shops there. Others were exported to Pakistan.

Since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s become ever more apparent that U.S. bases in the Middle East serve as magnets for attack, although far-flung outposts have been periodically targeted in other conflict zones. In 2019, for example, the terrorist group al-Shabab assaulted a U.S. base in Baledogle, Somalia. The next year, the same group raided a longtime American outpost in Kenya, killing three Americans and wounding two others.

In recent weeks, America’s bases in Iraq and Syria have sometimes come under persistent attack, including as many as four strikes by drones and rockets in a 24-hour period. U.S. forces have been attacked more than 70 times — 36 times in Iraq, 37 in Syria — since October 17. More than 60 U.S. personnel have been wounded, according to Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.

The investigation files obtained by The Intercept offer evidence that U.S. military bases also provide tempting targets for criminals. Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on a daring daylight armed robbery of military contractors less than a mile from the entrance of Air Base 201, a large U.S. drone outpost in Niger. In 2013, a U.S. Special Operations compound in Libya was looted of hundreds of weapons along with armored vehicles. And a 2021 Associated Press investigation found that at least 1,900 military weapons were lost or stolen during the 2010s — from bases stretching from Afghanistan to North Carolina — and that some were then used in violent crimes.

The post Missiles and Drones Among Weapons Stolen From U.S. in Iraq and Syria appeared first on The Intercept.

The move to lift restrictions was included in the White House’s supplemental budget request, sent to the Senate on October 20. “This request would,” the proposed budget says, “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles.”

The request pertains to little-known weapons stockpiles in Israel that the Pentagon established for use in regional conflicts, but which Israel has been permitted to access in limited circumstances — the very limits President Joe Biden is seeking to remove.

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.”

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel,” said John Ramming Chappell, a legal fellow with the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Created in the 1980s to supply the U.S. in case of a regional war, the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I, is the largest node in a network of what are effectively foreign U.S. weapons caches. Highly regulated for security, the stockpiles are governed by a set of strict requirements. Under circumstances laid out in these requirements, Israel has been able to draw on the stockpile, purchasing the weapons at little cost if it uses the effective subsidy of U.S. military aid.

With the WRSA-I, Biden is looking to lift virtually all the meaningful restrictions on the stockpile and the transfer of its arms to Israel, with plans to remove limitations to obsolete or surplus weapons, waive an annual spending cap on replenishing the stockpile, remove weapon-specific restrictions, and curtail congressional oversight. All of the changes in the Biden budget plan would be permanent, except for lifting the spending cap, which is limited to the 2024 fiscal year.

The changes would come in an arms-trade relationship that is already shrouded in secrecy, as The Intercept recently reported. Whereas the administration has provided pages of detailed lists of weapons provided to Ukraine, for instance, its disclosure about arms provided to Israel could fit in a single, short sentence. Last week, Bloomberg obtained a leaked list of weapons provided to Israel, revealing that they include thousands of Hellfire missiles — the same kind being used extensively by Israel in Gaza.

The effect of lifting the restrictions on transfers to Israel — such as eliminating the requirement that the weapons be part of a surplus — could harm U.S. interests by diminishing American preparedness for its own conflicts in the region, said Josh Paul, a former official who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Paul, who resigned over U.S. arms assistance to Israel, told The Intercept, “By dropping the requirement that such articles be declared excess, it would also increase the existing strain on U.S. military readiness in order to provide more arms to Israel.”

“Undermine Oversight and Accountability”

The U.S. government is only supposed to spend $200 million per fiscal year restocking the WRSA-I — about half the total cap for all U.S. stockpiles round the globe. The White House request, however, would waive the limit on U.S. contributions to the stockpile in Israel. That would allow the stockpile to be continuously replenished.

“The President’s emergency supplemental funding request,” Paul said, “would essentially create a free-flowing pipeline to provide any defense articles to Israel by the simple act of placing them in the WRSA-I stockpile, or other stockpiles intended for Israel.”

The U.S. currently requires that Israel grant certain concessions in exchange for certain types of arms assistance from the Pentagon, but the White House request would remove this condition as well.

Finally, the White House request would also reduce congressional oversight of U.S. arms transfers by reducing the length of advance notice made to Congress before a weapons transfers. Under current law, there must be 30 days prior notice, but the Biden budget request would allow this to be shortened in “extraordinary” circumstances.

“It will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel.”

“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children,” said Chappell, of Center for Civilians in Conflict.

The House has already passed legislation reflecting the White House’s request last month, and it now stands before the Senate.

“Taken as a package,” said William Hartung, an arms expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it is extraordinary, and it will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel, even as the Israeli government has engaged in massive attacks on civilians, some of which constitute war crimes.”

The post Joe Biden Moves to Lift Nearly Every Restriction on Israel’s Access to U.S. Weapons Stockpile appeared first on The Intercept.

The resurrection of the death penalty is a long-standing goal of Israel’s far-right politicians past and present, whose efforts intensified at the beginning of this year with the introduction of a bill that would mandate the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of terrorism in Israeli courts. 

The bill, which garnered preliminary approval from Netanyahu’s government, defines terrorism as “the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland,” suggesting it will be applied largely toward Palestinians committing terrorism against Israelis, and not the other way around. While existing law already sanctions state executions, the proposed legislation would make the death penalty mandatory in some cases, and it would also remove safeguards preventing executions being handed down by military tribunals that oversee the administration of laws in the occupied West Bank.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, right-wing Israeli politicians have trumpeted the bill as a means to execute the Palestinians detained for their role in the assault and to enshrine Israel’s right to execute people who carry out future attacks. At the same time, family members of the hostages taken from southern Israeli kibbutzim have condemned the move as political theater, intended solely to score political points while simultaneously enraging the Hamas militants who control the hostages’ fate. The debate over the bill came amid Israeli negotiations with Hamas over the release of captives in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians who are imprisoned in Israel; the two sides reached a deal, which includes a temporary ceasefire, on Wednesday.

“Now they will add more ways to kill Palestinians, once again, without real due process.”

Given the expansive definition of terrorism adopted by Israeli politicians and military commanders, the bill could have far-reaching consequences. Israel has wielded terrorism as justification for wide-ranging suppression campaigns, including the branding of some half-dozen Palestinian civil society organizations “terrorists” despite repeated failures to demonstrate any basis for their accusations. 

“This is another political escalation toward death, violence, and chaos by the far-right Israeli government,” Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at the human rights organization DAWN, told The Intercept. “They have sentenced thousands of Palestinians to death in Gaza with no due process by dropping bombs on their homes. They have killed hundreds in the West Bank with no due process by gunning them down in the streets. Now they will add more ways to kill Palestinians, once again, without real due process.” 

In March, the Knesset approved a preliminary version of the bill, which requires three more rounds of voting before it can pass into law. On Monday, the national security committee took up the bill for a hearing, and was met with furious opposition by families who claimed the bill would only endanger the lives of their family members held hostage by Hamas. During the hearing, screaming matches erupted between politicians and aggrieved families. 

Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was taken captive by Hamas, pleaded in the committee to halt the bill. “I asked you already last week and I begged you to stop. I begged you not to make any kind of hay out of us or our suffering,” Dickmann said, according to reporting in the Times of Israel. 

“Please do not have a hearing now on the gallows, please do not have a hearing now on the death penalty. Not when the lives of our loved ones are in the balance, not when the sword is on their necks. I am here in the name of Carmel and for her to remain alive. Please, choose life and ensure they come home alive and whole.” 

After the hearing, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right politician who leads the Jewish Power party, hugged Dickman in a photo-op intended to depict his support for the families. In response, Dickmann wrote online:

“I told you: Don’t hug me but you hugged [me] anyway. I told you: Don’t endanger our beloved ones but you endangered them anyway. All for a picture. Itamar Ben Gvir, you have no boundaries. Everyone sees that you’re making a circus out of the blood of our families. It’s not too late. Stop.”

Yarden Gonen, whose sister was being held in Gaza, told Knesset members that they were “playing along with [the] mind games” of Hamas,” The Guardian reported. “And in return we would get pictures of our loved ones murdered, ended, with the state of Israel and not them [Hamas] being blamed for it. … Don’t pursue this until after they are back here,” she said. “Don’t put my sister’s blood on your hands.”

The proposed legislation would remove an existing requirement that only a three-person panel composed of officials with the rank of lieutenant colonel can hand down a death sentence. Allowing more junior military personnel to hand down such sentences has the potential of putting the determination of who lives and who dies in the hands of more radicalized soldiers. Within the Israeli military, political radicalization tends to follow an inverse relationship with military rank — a dynamic not dissimilar to that of the U.S. military. 

The law would also take away the military chief of staff’s power to commute death sentences, which has occurred multiple times in Israel’s short history. The death sentence has long existed in Israeli law as a punishment for war crimes, but it has not been seen through to completion since 1962, with the execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Earlier this year, United Nations experts condemned the legislative push. Contrary to the justification provided by right-wing politicians claiming it will serve as a deterrent, the experts said, carrying out executions in the occupied territories will only fuel hostilities and detract from ongoing peace efforts. 

For years, right-wing politicians like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have made inflammatory comments about the death penalty, stoking the bloodlust driving their hyper radicalized base. In 2015, upon entering the Knesset, Smotrich — who now oversees parts of the vast Israeli security apparatus occupying the West Bank — told a news anchor that he was prepared to carry out state-sanctioned executions himself.

“I am willing to be the one who carries out that sentence. It will be difficult for me. It’s not easy. But if this is the right decision, if this is what’s right for the people of Israel and what’s right for the state of Israel, and it passes all the judicial proceedings, I am certainly prepared to be the one,” said Smotrich, amid an effort in the Knesset to pass an execution bill. “You’re ready to be the hangman?” the news anchor asked in disbelief. Smotrich replied, “I am prepared to be the one who carries out this suitable and just sentence.”

The post After Hamas Attack, Israeli Politicians Want to Empower Military Tribunals to Execute Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

“These actions reflect great courage because it is the Americans they are fighting, the Americans whose fleets, aircraft carriers, and bases fill the region,” Nasrallah said of his Iraqi allies. “If you Americans want these operations on the supporting fronts to stop, if you don’t want regional war, you must stop the aggression and war on Gaza.”

Nasrallah’s words indicate growing unity among the so-called axis of resistance, a network of Iran-backed actors in the Mideast that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian government, the Houthis in Yemen, and armed groups in Iraq and Syria. Though this unity and the violence it threatens to unleash has not yet translated into major military action, it marks the most significant backlash to the U.S. presence in the region in recent years.

The resistance narrative has found appeal beyond members of the axis, many of whom the U.S. considers terror organizations. Even in more moderate circles, America’s unfettered support for Israel, in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, has fueled anti-American sentiment in a region where many people see Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza as an extension of decades of unjust U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Gut-wrenching images of bombing victims in Gaza have brought back memories of bloody conflicts the U.S. has waged or supported in places like Iraq and Yemen, with Western reluctance to condemn Israel for massive Palestinian casualties reminding Arabs and Muslims how little their lives seem to factor into Western policymaking.

The lackluster response of Arab nations has allowed militant groups to capitalize on popular outrage and bolster their resistance credentials by positioning themselves as the only ones willing to stand up to Israel and its backers. 

In Iraq, Israel’s war on Palestine has regalvanized armed factions that formed in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion, an anti-occupation cause they see as directly linked to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In just the last 24 hours, there have been several engagements between Iraqi militants and U.S. forces.

In his Baghdad office, Kataib Hezbollah military spokesperson Jaafar al-Husseini arrived for our meeting at the end of October in an upbeat mood that seemed at odds with the bloodshed that engulfed the region since October 7. “To the contrary, this is the easiest of times,” he explained. “This is a straightforward battle. Palestine is the fundamental issue.”

Kataib Hezbollah is the most secretive and most powerful of the Iraqi resistance groups. Although they’ve been partly incorporated into the government security apparatus as part of what Iraqi officials describe as a gradual demobilization — critics call it state capture at the hands of Iranian proxies — they relapse into violence during times of perceived Western meddling. The Pentagon’s recent decision to deploy aircraft carriers and personnel to the Middle East was taken as evidence of direct U.S. involvement in the Israel–Palestine conflict.

“America is a partner in this battle and in killing Palestinians, and therefore, they must pay the price,” al-Husseini said. “What is happening now in terms of targeting American bases is a natural response of the resistance fighters.”

Iraq’s “resistance” factions have momentarily put aside rivalries to jointly claim responsibility, via a newly established Telegram channel, for dozens of rocket and drone attacks on American troops stationed in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State group, which the Pentagon says have resulted in several light injuries.

These ripple effects were part of Hamas’s calculus to help shatter what the Palestinian group regarded as an untenable status quo in the occupied territories. The prospect of a political solution had faded in recent years amid increased violence and expulsions by Israelis, especially in the West Bank, under the watch of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.

“The U.S. administration provided full cover for the Netanyahu government to work on the judaization of Jerusalem and attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, to expand settlements, to continue the siege on Gaza and to end the Palestinian cause,” Osama Hamdan, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told The Intercept in an interview in Beirut last week.

With its surprise attack in October and Israel’s predictable retaliation, Hamas has succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the geopolitical table while generating greater unity between allies in a region polarized by decades of conflict and ethnic and sectarian strife. “There is no doubt that there’s an evolution in relations amid this confrontation,” Hamdan said, adding that it has helped bridge the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites.

While the U.S. portrays the “resistance” as Iranian proxies acting at Tehran’s behest, decisions in the alliance aren’t centrally imposed, Hamdan and other resistance officials said; instead, each actor is balancing regional and domestic issues. “We don’t ask for specific actions because we recognize that the environment varies from country to country, and conditions vary from country to country,” said Hamdan. “But we demand efforts to support the Palestinian cause.”

Hezbollah is the most potent non-state actor in the “axis of resistance.” It was formed in 1982 with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to resist Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon at that time. Hezbollah fought a second war against Israel in 2006 and is now engaged in a limited exchange of fire across Lebanon’s southern border, with carefully calibrated strikes aiming to divert Israeli military resources while avoiding a full-scale war.

Nasrallah’s depiction of a united front has been accompanied by some level of operational coordination in Lebanon’s south, with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad being allowed to use Hezbollah’s areas of control to attack Israel amid reports that an operations room has been set up for this purpose.

“This is part of Hezbollah’s battle tactic. It is delivering messages to Israel that the opening of the front is possible at any moment. The presence of non-Shiite groups is part of this message, meaning that the battle will be widespread,” said Azzam al-Ayoubi, the former secretary general of Lebanese Sunni Islamist party al-Jama’ah al-Islamiya, whose previously dormant military wing has also joined the fray, claiming responsibility for several attacks on Israel.  

Relations between Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni groups like al-Jama’ah al-Islamiya and Hamas frayed during the Syrian war, with Hezbollah seen as complicit in the mass killings of Sunnis because it fought alongside President Bashar al-Assad, Ayoubi said. Those differences have been at least temporarily set aside in what some interpret as a sign of sectarian rapprochement. “It is possible that we are now at least somewhat on the side of Hezbollah,” Ayoubi acknowledged. “It is Hezbollah who is facing Israel, and we also have this principle.”

The latest events have ended a period of relative quiet during which the U.S. had hoped to redirect its attention and resources to other parts of the world, especially China. The new tumult risks undermining years of diplomatic efforts to repair strained relations with Arab countries like Iraq and has put on hold a U.S. push to normalize ties between Israel and Arab nations. It has also renewed calls for the withdrawal of American troops stationed in the region.

The operations in Iraq mark the end of a unilateral truce during which the factions ceased attacking American troops in Iraq to let the government, which their political affiliates brought to power, manage the relationship through diplomacy. As part of this latest setback in U.S.–Iraq relations, there have been renewed demands to implement a January 2020 parliamentary vote to oust foreign troops. “These operations will not stop until the last American soldier is removed,” al-Husseini said.

American troops returned to Iraq in 2014 to help the government fight ISIS; the U.S. has since tried to shed its legacy as an occupying force and portray itself as a strategic partner. Those efforts were derailed when a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi paramilitary chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020, an act Iraq viewed as a violation of its sovereignty. Since then, a series of bilateral negotiations has aimed to smooth tensions and ensure continuity of U.S. troop presence in spite of the parliament decision to expel them.

Although Iraqi factions have threatened further escalation, they, like Lebanese Hezbollah, are constrained by domestic interests and do not want a wider war. “They don’t want to get involved in this conflict,” said an Iraqi security official who asked not to be named to speak openly about a sensitive matter. “They have too much to lose,” he added, alluding to political and economic interests that have served to moderate the conduct of some armed groups in recent years.

In an apparent attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2020 unraveling that followed Soleimani’s and Muhandis’s assassination, the Biden administration at first avoided hitting back at factions inside Iraq, only carrying out limited strikes inside Syria, where Iraqi resistance groups also operate. That changed on Tuesday, when an American air strike killed one Kataib Hezbollah operative in Baghdad shortly after the group carried out a missile attack on Ain al-Assad base in Western Iraq, followed hours later by a second, more lethal strike on a Kataib Hezbollah stronghold near Bagdad that left five dead.

In a statement, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the earlier strikes in Syria were “separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas” and urged “all state and non-state entities not to take action that would escalate into a broader regional conflict.” Such remarks fuel the perception among the “resistance” that the U.S. is refusing to acknowledge and fix the root cause of the crisis, instead further inflaming grievances by trying to suppress what these groups, and many Muslims, regard as a legitimate struggle.

Last week’s decision to impose fresh sanctions against seven members of Kataib Hezbollah, including al-Husseini, as well as another group, has been met with defiance and mockery. Nasrallah has also dismissed U.S. appeals to governments in Iraq and Lebanon to rein in the paramilitaries.

“This intimidation did not stop the operations of the Iraqi resistance, did not stop the operations of the Yemeni brothers, did not stop or stop the resistance operations in Lebanon,” the Hezbollah leader said. “The one who can stop the aggression is the one who leads it, and that is America.”

Update: November 22, 2023 9:28 a.m.
This story was updated with news of another U.S. attack in Iraq.

The post America’s Unwavering Support for Israel Fuels Iran-Backed “Axis of Resistance” appeared first on The Intercept.

The two online chairs, as they are called, had decided to solicit an essay from a Palestinian scholar for the journal’s website. Eghbariah was an obvious choice: A Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, he has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court.

Eghbariah submitted a draft of a 2,000-word essay by early November. He argued that Israel’s assault on Gaza should be evaluated within and beyond the “legal framework” of “genocide.”

In line with the Law Review’s standard procedures, the piece was solicited, commissioned, contracted, submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors. Yet it will never be published with the Harvard Law Review.

Following an intervention to delay the publication of Eghbariah’s article by the Harvard Law Review president, the piece went through several committee processes before it was finally killed by an emergency meeting of editors. The essay, “The Ongoing Nakba,” would have been the first from a Palestinian scholar published by the journal.

In an email to Eghbariah and Harvard Law Review President Apsara Iyer, shared with The Intercept, online chair Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, one of the editors who commissioned the essay, called the move an “unprecedented decision.”

“Let’s not dance around it — this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming.”

“As Online Chairs, we have always had full discretion to solicit pieces for publication,” Shahriari-Parsa wrote, informing Eghbariah that his piece would not be published despite following the agreed upon procedure for blog essays. Shahriari-Parsa wrote that concerns had arisen about staffers being offended or harassed, but “a deliberate decision to censor your voice out of fear of backlash would be contrary to the values of academic freedom and uplifting marginalized voices in legal academia that our institution stands for.”

Both Shahriari-Parsa and the other top online editor, Sabrina Ochoa, told The Intercept that they had never seen a piece face this level of scrutiny at the Law Review. Shahriari-Parsa could find no previous examples of other pieces pulled from publication after going through the standard editorial process. Another editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, echoed the view that Eghbariah’s treatment is unprecedented.

The anonymous editor said that, based on their research, Israeli scholars had been well represented in the pages of the magazine, but not Palestinians. The editor also said that they could find no previous examples, based on their research, of a publication-ready article being pulled.

In one of his responses to the editors, Eghbariah wrote, “This is discrimination. Let’s not dance around it — this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming.”

According to emails shared with The Intercept, as well as Shahriari-Parsa and Eghbariah’s accounts, Iyer at first delayed the essay’s publication over what she said were safety concerns and the desire to deliberate with editors. According to an email from Shahriari-Parsa to the author, however, Iyer also said in meetings that “she was personally unwilling to allow the piece to be published.” (Iyer responded in the email chain with Eghbariah that there were “numerous inaccuracies” in the rejection email, claiming the story had gone through the normal process and that the piece had been rejected based on the requested publication timeline.)

Following requests from over 30 editors, an emergency meeting of the entire journal body was called. After nearly six hours, the more than 100 editors voted anonymously on running the piece or not, with a strong majority voting against publication.

“Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece,” the Harvard Law Review said in a statement. “An intrinsic feature of these internal processes is the confidentiality of our 104 editors’ perspectives and deliberations. After a full body meeting and vote of the entire membership last week, a substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.”

Entirely run by students — Iyer and Shahriari-Parsa, like Eghbariah, attend Harvard Law School — Harvard Law Review is a well-known launch pad for estimable legal and political careers. Barack Obama was the journal president during his time at the law school, and graduates regularly go on to clerkships with Supreme Court justices and jobs at top-tier law firms. With careers potentially on the line, the Harvard Law Review’s decision on Eghbariah’s essay came amid a crackdown in academia, in Ivy League schools and elsewhere, against pro-Palestinian speech following the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent onslaught against the Gaza Strip.

“I can only speculate about the reasons of individual editors,” said Ryan Doerfler, a law professor at Harvard who attended a meeting with Law Review staff about the Palestine article. “What I can observe, though, is that the vote took place amidst a climate of suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy.”

A second editor who asked for anonymity to speak freely about the process said that fear of backlash played a key role in their personal decision to vote “no” on Eghbariah’s piece. The editor said they found “substantive flaws” in the piece that were exacerbated by a fear among editors that they would have their names and faces plastered on billboard trucks around campus accusing them of being Hamas supporters — something that happened to pro-Palestine Harvard students who signed a controversial open letter.

The editor said substantive flaws are generally removed from pieces prior to publication, but they did not feel such edits would have been possible in this case because of the lack of agreement on underlying facts. “Reasonable scholarly debate couldn’t happen in that context,” they said. “Partly because we’re not at a point in time where that debate can happen without your face being put on a truck.”

Doerfler praised Eghbariah’s draft amid that climate of fear. “It is a forceful piece of legal scholarship,” he said, “and it articulates a position that takes real courage to put forward.”

Eghbariah’s article was published Tuesday night at The Nation, under the headline “The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza.”

“Threatens Academic Freedom”

For some of the more than 100 editors at the Harvard Law Review, the delay and subsequent killing of Eghbariah’s piece did not hew to the usual process. In a forthcoming public statement viewed by The Intercept, 25 Harvard Law Review editors objected to the move to squash the essay.

“We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way,” the editors wrote. “This unprecedented decision threatens academic freedom and perpetuates the suppression of Palestinian voices. We dissent.”

In an interview, the first anonymous Law Review editor told me that they have evaluated “hundreds of submissions” for the journal and that Eghbariah’s essay is “more than just ‘good enough.’” Both this editor and Shahriari-Parsa said that they believe the primary reason for the “no” votes was fear.

“Editors expressed that they supported the piece and wanted to uplift marginalized voices,” the second editor said, “but were voting against publishing it because they were afraid of the consequences and had worked too hard to now risk their futures. Some also expressed concerns that the blowback to the piece would discriminatorily target editors of color more than others.”

Students, writers, and artists speaking out for Palestinian liberation are facing extreme levels of censorship and censure — especially in academia. Columbia University and Brandeis University have suspended the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace on spurious grounds of violating campus protest policy and risks to campus safety. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered public universities to shut down chapters of the groups. Harvard, too, has faced pressure from major donors to crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. Students have been doxxed and harassed for writing a letter in the aftermath of October 7 saying Israel’s longtime oppression of Palestinians was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“The Law Review specifically had just gone through an incident in which one of its members was doxxed after participating as a safety marshal at a ‘die in’ at the Harvard Business School campus organized by student activists,” said Doerfler, the professor. Doerfler, who had been brought into a meeting with Iyer, Eghbariah, and two Review editors on November 14 to discuss Eghbariah’s essay, said the editor who participated in the “die in” protest has been publicly criticized by a major university donor “as part of his broader criticism of the University’s handling of the crisis.”

“This is exactly the kind of work that good international legal scholarship should do.”

In the essay, Eghbariah argues that the atrocities in Gaza amount to genocide; he considers the frames used to name Israeli policies in Palestine more broadly and calls for a distinctive legal framework for Palestine. According to Eghbariah, just as “the South African experience brought ‘Apartheid’ into the global and legal lexicon,” the distinctive nature of the domination Palestinians have faced should demand a new category of crime: “Nakba,” the word Palestinians use to describe their dispossession and expulsion at the founding of the state of Israel.

Yale Law School professor Aslı Bâli, an international and human rights law expert who said she has never met or worked with Eghbariah but was sent his essay and aware of the Harvard Law Review situation, said in an interview that the article constituted an “excellent piece of legal scholarship.” She noted that the essay’s arguments are no doubt contested, as is the nature of legal argumentation. “This is exactly the kind of work that good international legal scholarship should do,” she said.

Bâli told The Intercept that in her “quarter century” of experience in legal scholarship, she has never heard of a contracted article, which has gone through the editorial process, being pulled before publication. She said, “I’ve never heard of anything of this sort.”

Update: November 22, 2023
This story has been updated to include a reference to the publication of Eghbariah’s essay in The Nation late Tuesday evening.

The post Harvard Law Review Editors Vote to Kill Article About Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The intelligence documents identify a series of threats against people living in Pakistan from RAW, which Pakistani security officials believe is working in conjunction with local criminal and dissident networks to carry out assassinations and other attacks. According to the documents, RAW is targeting individuals and religious institutions alleged to support an armed insurgency in the disputed territory of Kashmir, as well as militant Sikh activists living in Pakistan and wanted by the Indian government.

The documents offer compelling substantiation for the sensational claim that India has been carrying out a transnational assassination program against its political enemies. The Canadian government first made headlines in September with the accusation that Indian intelligence agents orchestrated the assassination of Sikh Canadian activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil. Nijjar was gunned down outside a gurdwara — a Sikh temple — this summer in Surrey, British Columbia.

In October in Britain, the family of activist Avtar Singh Khanda called for an inquest into his sudden death, alleging that he had been poisoned by Indian intelligence agents following a series of public threats to his life. In September, The Intercept reported on threats to Sikh activists in the U.S. after the FBI warned a number of Sikh Americans about intelligence showing that their lives were in danger after the killing of Nijjar. In 2022, a 75-year-old Sikh Canadian man named Ripudaman Singh Malik, who had been acquitted of involvement in a deadly bombing of an Air India flight in 1985, was shot to death in front of his family business in Canada under circumstances that remain unclear. Despite these accusations of involvement in international assassinations, which have caused increased friction in India’s foreign relations, so far little intelligence — Canadian, Pakistani, American, or otherwise — has been made publicly available about these killings.

According to a Pakistani intelligence assessment, this summer RAW was also targeting two Sikh activists in Pakistan for assassination in the cities of Lahore and Islamabad. One alleged target in Islamabad is unnamed, while another is Lakhbir Singh Rode, a prominent Sikh separatist leader living in Pakistan since the 1990s who has long been accused of terrorism by India’s government. Rode was involved in a movement that aimed to create an independent nation in the region of Punjab known as Khalistan in the 1980s and ’90s. That campaign was crushed by a brutal counterinsurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of Sikhs, while forcing many more into exile.

Rode’s son, a Canadian citizen named Bhagat Singh, is, like his father, prominent in the diaspora movement for Sikh separatism. He told The Intercept that his father has long been living under threat from Indian intelligence. 

“It is a well-known fact that he has been on the Indian government’s hit list for years,” Singh said, adding that he was also warned by Canadian intelligence about threats to his own life following the assassination of Nijjar this summer, which he presumes are from Indian intelligence.

“When [Nijjar] was killed, the response from many of us to our governments was, ‘We told you so,’” added Singh, referring to the community of diaspora Sikh activists. “But there is also a lot of anger that a foreign government could simply come here and murder a Canadian citizen.”

The Pakistani, Indian, and Canadian embassies did not provide comment for this story. The pace of suspected attacks inside Pakistan against individuals wanted by India appears to have accelerated in recent weeks. On November 13, India media reported the killing of another militant connected to an Islamist group in Karachi. The possible assassination followed the killings of two other Islamist militants wanted by India that had taken place recently in Pakistan’s tribal regions and the disputed territory of Kashmir. While covered in great detail by the Indian press, these killings have gone almost unmentioned in Pakistan, where local media and civil society are under de facto military control following the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The lack of attention to the suspected assassinations of both political dissidents and militants has prompted calls for more pressure on India from some members of its diaspora. 

“Anyone who speaks out against the Indian government anywhere in the world is under threat,” said Singh.

The secret documents, which were produced by Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, a civilian-controlled security agency somewhat akin to the FBI, show serious concern that Indian intelligence will carry out more killings on its soil in the future.

In May, the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau warned that Indian intelligence agents based in two other countries, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan, are being activated to carry out operations in Pakistan, suggesting that Indian operatives have a footprint throughout the region. In September, an Intelligence Bureau document again warned that the Indian government’s intelligence agency was planning “terrorist attacks” and assassinations against targets inside Pakistan: RAW agents were operating from a militant training camp in the Afghan city of Spin Boldak, it said, “to target wanted / prominent Sikh personalities in Pakistan.”

The documents are marked “Not to be disclosed/Communicated to any unauthorized person,” and The Intercept is not publishing them in full in order to protect the source who provided them. The documents specifically name threats to militants involved in the Kashmiri and Sikh separatist causes, as well as conservative Islamic movements in Pakistan. One document states that, “it has been learnt through reliable sources that hostile intelligence agency (RAW) with the collaboration of sub-nationalist groups / anti-state activists and local criminal networks is already planning to carry out terrorist attacks on the marakiz / masjid / religious seminaries / leaders / notables of Ahl-e-Hadith sect linked with organizations remained active in the Kashmir Jihad.” 

Inside Pakistan, a spate of assassinations and other attacks in recent years targeted people alleged to be involved in Sikh and Kashmiri separatism as well as Islamist militancy inside India. This October, the Pakistani government arrested people it says were involved in targeted killings of suspected militants inside Pakistan. The killings were attributed in public statements to a “hostile spy agency,” a common reference to Indian intelligence in Pakistani official communications. This summer, a former commando in Pakistan’s elite Rangers paramilitary unit was also arrested on accusations of running a network carrying out assassinations of accused militants on behalf of RAW.

“Usually, the truth of these things are only fully known decades later, but India has a long history of these types of actions.”

“The general perception in the West is that India can do no wrong and that when Pakistan accuses India of doing these types of things, they’re just being paranoid. But that is not borne out by history,” said Arif Rafiq, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan. “Usually, the truth of these things are only fully known decades later, but India has a long history of these types of actions. When you piece it all together, it seems clear that there is a campaign today by India’s government to take an offensive strategy against these groups.”

The Pakistani government has periodically accused RAW of involvement in bombings and targeted killings inside Pakistan, including attacks against Chinese nationals working in the country and bombings targeting militant leaders wanted by India. These attacks have often been claimed publicly by separatist or extremist groups at war with the Pakistani state, including in the restive provinces of Balochistan and Sindh, that Pakistan accuses of being supported by India. The Indian government, for its part, has denied involvement in these operations or patronage of Pakistan-based militant groups, while accusing Pakistan of supporting Sikh and Kashmiri militants who have fought against it in the past.

This March, the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, published an anonymous article titled, “Who is Behind the Killings of Kashmiri Militants in Pakistan?” The article pointed to the recent killings of several former Kashmiri insurgents living in Pakistan whom the author claimed had been murdered by Indian intelligence in attacks that were left unsolved, attributed to Pakistan-based separatist groups, or deemed by the police to have been robberies gone wrong. Many of the killings targeted people who had been involved in fighting during the peak of the 1990s-era insurgency in Kashmir, but had later settled down to live and work inside Pakistan. 

The article warned that the killings by Indian intelligence may torpedo attempts at rapprochement between India and Pakistan by inviting reprisals from militant groups themselves, stating, “While militant groups that have operated in Kashmir are not as strong as they used to be, they still possess significant capabilities to strike back. The assassination of their former comrades, whether perceived or real, may trigger an angry response, thus endangering peace and stability in the region.” The article also cited a former militant criticizing Pakistan’s military establishment for turning a blind eye to the killing of ex-militants on its soil as the Kashmir dispute has lost priority in Pakistan’s foreign policy.

The anonymously authored article was subsequently pulled from the Atlantic Council website. The article was replaced with a note stating it had been removed “because it did not go through the Atlantic Council’s standard editorial process prior to publication.” 

Rode, the individual named as a target in Pakistani intelligence documents, is the nephew of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the Sikh militant leader of the 1980s separatist insurrection. That family connection has kept him on the radar of Indian authorities, who announced the confiscation of land belonging to Rode in India this fall amid a broader crackdown on diaspora Sikh dissidents and their families.

Rode, who is living in Lahore, was described in a Pakistani intelligence document as having already been surveilled by Indian intelligence agents at a housing complex and gurdwara in the city. Information about his place of residence and the gurdwara that he frequents are included in the report, which suggests that he and another Sikh activist are at imminent risk from Indian agents or locals acting under Indian instruction. The documents warn Pakistani officials to use “heightened vigilance” and “foolproof security measures” to guard them. 

According to family members, threats to Rode have increased in recent years, forcing him to go deeper into seclusion. His son, Bhagat Singh, says that surveillance photographs of his father’s car and residence had previously been sent to Pakistani authorities by Indian intelligence, as part of a demand by India to Pakistan to turn him over.

Singh said that he himself had been placed on Canada’s no-fly list after the Indian government accused him of involvement in planning terrorist attacks in India. Singh, who is seeking legal means to remove himself from the list, strongly rejects these accusations, saying that they are part of an international campaign by the Indian government to silence dissidents in its diaspora.

“The Sikh diaspora holds protests and lobbies Western governments to speak up against the Indian government, and it is for this that we are being targeted,” Singh said. “They don’t have to prove anything in court when they make these accusations. They simply label anyone as a terrorist who fights for their rights or says that they don’t want to live under their rule anymore after what has been done to them.”

“They don’t have to prove anything in court when they make these accusations. They simply label anyone as a terrorist who fights for their rights.”

Though the Khalistan movement has been mostly suppressed in Indian Punjab, supporters have continued to rally for the cause in the diaspora, including from Pakistan and Western countries. As a result of recent protests in Western countries, some of which have resulted in vandalism and threats to Indian consular staff, the Indian government has angrily accused foreign states of nurturing the Khalistan movement in exile. Many Sikhs themselves reject what they say is an attempt by the Indian government to extend its political authority over them even as they live and gain citizenship in foreign countries.

“The diaspora is an extension of people from Punjab,” said Harinder Singh, senior fellow at the Sikh-related public education organization the Sikh Research Institute. “When dissent is being crushed, even at the level of using extrajudicial killings inside Punjab, the people who manage to escape will of course find ways to talk about these issues from abroad.”

In addition to high-profile suspected murders in Western countries, recent years have also seen at least two killings of supporters of the Khalistan movement in Pakistan. In May, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the leader of a Pakistan-based Sikh militant organization was shot to death by an assailant on a motorcycle while out for a walk near his home in Lahore. His killing came two years after the murder of another Sikh activist in Pakistan named Harmeet Singh, who was also shot to death in Lahore near the same gurdwara frequented by Rode.

“India has been carrying out activities like this in South Asia for years. The only difference is that today they have been discovered doing it in a Western democracy,” said Harinder Singh. “Despite many hypocrisies among Western democracies, one thing that they still do take very seriously is a foreign power taking the lives of their own citizens.”

Following the assassination of Nijjar in Canada this summer, Pakistan again publicly alleged that India was running a “network of extra-territorial killings” that had now gone global. The Indian government has responded angrily to accusations from Canada and other Five Eyes countries that it is running a transnational assassination program. 

But as more details on the scope and nature of its operations come to light, the crisis over the killing of Nijjar, and potentially other Sikh dissidents, seems unlikely to disappear. The targeting of Rode and other Sikhs in foreign countries suggest that India is taking a more aggressive stance in targeting perceived enemies across borders, including through violent means.

“These killings show that India feels emboldened and that it has the geopolitical space to take these kinds of risks. There has never been an instance where it has been held to account for its excesses,” said Middle East Institute’s Rafiq. “Frankly, nobody would care if they were only killing people in Pakistan. It’s only until something happens on the other side of the world that people start paying attention.”

The post Secret Intelligence Documents Show Global Reach of India’s Death Squads appeared first on The Intercept.

The submitted ads, in both Hebrew and Arabic, included flagrant violations of policies for Facebook and its parent company Meta. Some contained violent content directly calling for the murder of Palestinian civilians, like ads demanding a “holocaust for the Palestinians” and to wipe out “Gazan women and children and the elderly.” Other posts, like those describing kids from Gaza as “future terrorists” and a reference to “Arab pigs,” contained dehumanizing language.

“The approval of these ads is just the latest in a series of Meta’s failures towards the Palestinian people.”

“The approval of these ads is just the latest in a series of Meta’s failures towards the Palestinian people,” Nadim Nashif, founder of the Palestinian social media research and advocacy group 7amleh, which submitted the test ads, told The Intercept. “Throughout this crisis, we have seen a continued pattern of Meta’s clear bias and discrimination against Palestinians.”

7amleh’s idea to test Facebook’s machine-learning censorship apparatus arose last month, when Nashif discovered an ad on his Facebook feed explicitly calling for the assassination of American activist Paul Larudee, a co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement. Facebook’s automatic translation of the text ad read: “It’s time to assassinate Paul Larudi [sic], the anti-Semitic and ‘human rights’ terrorist from the United States.” Nashif reported the ad to Facebook, and it was taken down.

The ad had been placed by Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli group founded by former Israel Defense Force and intelligence officers to combat “anti-Israeli organizations” whose funding comes from purportedly antisemitic sources, according to its website. (Neither Larudee nor Ad Kan immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Calling for the assassination of a political activist is a violation of Facebook’s advertising rules. That the post sponsored by Ad Kan appeared on the platform indicates Facebook approved it despite those rules. The ad likely passed through filtering by Facebook’s automated process, based on machine-learning, that allows its global advertising business to operate at a rapid clip.

“Our ad review system is designed to review all ads before they go live,” according to a Facebook ad policy overview. As Meta’s human-based moderation, which historically relied almost entirely on outsourced contractor labor, has drawn greater scrutiny and criticism, the company has come to lean more heavily on automated text-scanning software to enforce its speech rules and censorship policies.

While these technologies allow the company to skirt the labor issues associated with human moderators, they also obscure how moderation decisions are made behind secret algorithms.

Last year, an external audit commissioned by Meta found that while the company was routinely using algorithmic censorship to delete Arabic posts, the company had no equivalent algorithm in place to detect “Hebrew hostile speech” like racist rhetoric and violent incitement. Following the audit, Meta claimed it had “launched a Hebrew ‘hostile speech’ classifier to help us proactively detect more violating Hebrew content.” Content, that is, like an ad espousing murder.

Incitement to Violence on Facebook

Amid the Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza, Nashif was troubled enough by the explicit call in the ad to murder Larudee that he worried similar paid posts might contribute to violence against Palestinians.

Large-scale incitement to violence jumping from social media into the real world is not a mere hypothetical: In 2018, United Nations investigators found violently inflammatory Facebook posts played a “determining role” in Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide. (Last year, another group ran test ads inciting against Rohingya, a project along the same lines as 7amleh’s experiment; in that case, all the ads were also approved.)

The quick removal of the Larudee post didn’t explain how the ad was approved in the first place. In light of assurances from Facebook that safeguards were in place, Nashif and 7amleh, which formally partners with Meta on censorship and free expression issues, were puzzled.

“Meta has a track record of not doing enough to protect marginalized communities.”

Curious if the approval was a fluke, 7amleh created and submitted 19 ads, in both Hebrew and Arabic, with text deliberately, flagrantly violating company rules — a test for Meta and Facebook. 7amleh’s ads were designed to test the approval process and see whether Meta’s ability to automatically screen violent and racist incitement had gotten better, even with unambiguous examples of violent incitement.

“We knew from the example of what happened to the Rohingya in Myanmar that Meta has a track record of not doing enough to protect marginalized communities,” Nashif said, “and that their ads manager system was particularly vulnerable.”

Meta’s appears to have failed 7amleh’s test.

The company’s Community Standards rulebook — which ads are supposed to comply with to be approved — prohibit not just text advocating for violence, but also any dehumanizing statements against people based on their race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Despite this, confirmation emails shared with The Intercept show Facebook approved every single ad.

Though 7amleh told The Intercept the organization had no intention to actually run these ads and was going to pull them before they were scheduled to appear, it believes their approval demonstrates the social platform remains fundamentally myopic around non-English speech — languages used by a great majority of its over 4 billion users. (Meta retroactively rejected 7amleh’s Hebrew ads after The Intercept brought them to the company’s attention, but the Arabic versions remain approved within Facebook’s ad system.)

Facebook spokesperson Erin McPike confirmed the ads had been approved accidentally. “Despite our ongoing investments, we know that there will be examples of things we miss or we take down in error, as both machines and people make mistakes,” she said. “That’s why ads can be reviewed multiple times, including once they go live.”

Just days after its own experimental ads were approved, 7amleh discovered an Arabic ad run by a group calling itself “Migrate Now” calling on “Arabs in Judea and Sumaria” — the name Israelis, particularly settlers, use to refer to the occupied Palestinian West Bank — to relocate to Jordan.

According to Facebook documentation, automated, software-based screening is the “primary method” used to approve or deny ads. But it’s unclear if the “hostile speech” algorithms used to detect violent or racist posts are also used in the ad approval process. In its official response to last year’s audit, Facebook said its new Hebrew-language classifier would “significantly improve” its ability to handle “major spikes in violating content,” such as around flare-ups of conflict between Israel and Palestine. Based on 7amleh’s experiment, however, this classifier either doesn’t work very well or is for some reason not being used to screen advertisements. (McPike did not answer when asked if the approval of 7amleh’s ads reflected an underlying issue with the hostile speech classifier.)

Either way, according to Nashif, the fact that these ads were approved points to an overall problem: Meta claims it can effectively use machine learning to deter explicit incitement to violence, while it clearly cannot.

“We know that Meta’s Hebrew classifiers are not operating effectively, and we have not seen the company respond to almost any of our concerns,” Nashif said in his statement. “Due to this lack of action, we feel that Meta may hold at least partial responsibility for some of the harm and violence Palestinians are suffering on the ground.”

The approval of the Arabic versions of the ads come as a particular surprise following a recent report by the Wall Street Journal that Meta had lowered the level of certainty its algorithmic censorship system needed to remove Arabic posts — from 80 percent confidence that the post broke the rules, to just 25 percent. In other words, Meta was less sure that the Arabic posts it was suppressing or deleting actually contained policy violations.

Nashif said, “There have been sustained actions resulting in the silencing of Palestinian voices.”

The post Facebook Approved an Israeli Ad Calling for Assassination of Pro-Palestine Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

Both Israel and the White House, including President Joe Biden personally, have staked their credibility on the claim that there is a massive smoking gun lying below Al-Shifa Hospital. The U.S. said publicly it was not relying exclusively on Israel to back up its own assertions. Leaving aside the fact that both the U.S. and Israel have track records as long as the Gaza Strip of lying about the alleged crimes of their adversaries, the key question is not whether a tunnel or rooms exist under Al-Shifa, but whether they were being used for a clear military or combat purpose by Hamas, as the U.S. and Israel have alleged.

Since the October 7 raids led by Hamas in Israel that resulted in the deaths of more than 845 Israeli civilians, along with some 350 soldiers and police, and saw more than 240 people taken as hostages, the IDF has placed an intense focus on Hamas’s underground infrastructure. Israel’s allegation that Hamas’s main headquarters was housed in or under the sprawling Al-Shifa Hospital compound is not new. But the zealous focus on it is an indication that Israel wants to make it the central issue in its case to push back against critics of its indiscriminate campaign of civilian death and destruction in Gaza. Israel has sought to make Al-Shifa a Rorschach test in its narrative war, and Israel has accused journalists, the United Nations, doctors, and nurses of being part of the conspiracy to hide Hamas’s use of the hospital as a military command center from the world.

To date, this propaganda campaign has not gone well.

After initially claiming that Al-Shifa Hospital was effectively Hamas’s Pentagon — a narrative publicly bolstered by the Biden administration — the IDF released its first round of purported evidence, which more or less consisted of a smattering of automatic rifles, some nestled behind an MRI machine, and a conveniently placed combat vest with a Hamas logo on it. With the exception of Israel’s most die-hard supporters, this effort appeared to convince almost no one of the sweeping assertions about Al-Shifa’s importance to Hamas’s current operations. After all, the IDF had already shown the public a slick 3D video model purporting to be a depiction of an advanced underground command and control lair used by Hamas. So Israel’s first effort at selling the case fell flat.

Several other efforts to produce videos of what Israel claimed to be evidence of a significant Hamas base at hospitals have been met with widespread derision and skepticism, including from Western media outlets that historically report Israeli military assertions about its operations against Palestinians as fact. The IDF videos have been mocked across social media and compared to Geraldo Rivera’s much-hyped — and utterly disastrous — live 1986 nationally televised special promising to reveal the secrets hidden in Al Capone’s underground vault.

Al-Shifa staff, as well as a European doctor who worked there for years, vehemently deny that the hospital is used by Hamas for any military purpose. For what it’s worth, Hamas also denies it.

On Sunday, Israel released two new videos that it claimed document a 55-meter fortified tunnel 10 meters below Al-Shifa. The camera footage, presumably filmed using a remotely piloted vehicle, ends with what Israel said is a blast-proof door equipped with a shooting hole allowing Hamas to attack IDF forces should they seek to breach the purported Hamas command and control center. “The findings prove beyond all doubt that buildings in the hospital complex are used as infrastructure for the Hamas terror organization, for terror activity. This is further proof of the cynical use that the Hamas terror organization makes of the residents of the Gaza Strip as a human shield for its murderous terror activities,” the IDF said in a statement.

It’s no secret that Gaza houses extensive underground tunnels. Over the past two decades, Israel has repeatedly conducted operations aimed at destroying parts of the underground tunnel networks and has often boasted of its successes in doing so. Tunnels stretching from southern Gaza into Egypt served as smuggling lines for many years. Israel claimed their primary purpose was to move weapons, while other observers portrayed them as a lifeline to smuggle in food and other supplies to the blockaded population of Gaza. It’s likely that both assertions are true. In recent years, both Israel and Egypt have taken measures to block or flood tunnels that penetrated their territory, and Israel reportedly installed underground concrete walls and subterranean sensors around its border with Gaza to stop Hamas or other militants from using them to enter Israel to conduct operations. In 2006, Hamas operatives used such a tunnel to take IDF soldier Gilad Shalit back to Gaza after capturing him. Shalit was freed as part of a prisoner exchange in 2011.

Al-Shifa’s Tunnels Were Built by Israel

It’s also well known that there are, in fact, tunnels and rooms under Al-Shifa. We know that because Israel admits that it built them in the early 1980s. According to Israeli media reports, the underground facilities were designed by Tel Aviv architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson. “Israel renovated and expanded the hospital complex with American assistance, in a project that also included the excavation of an underground concrete floor,” according to Zvi Elhyani, founder of the Israel Architecture Archive, writing in Israel’s Ynetnews.

The underground infrastructure was part of a modernization and expansion effort at Al-Shifa commissioned by Israel’s Public Works Department. “The Israeli civil administration in the territories constructed the hospital complex’s Building Number 2, which has a large cement basement that housed the hospital’s laundry and various administrative services,” according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The room and tunnels under Al-Shifa were reportedly completed in 1983. Tablet magazine described the space as “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network.” Zippor’s son Barak, who began working at his father’s architecture firm in the 1990s, said that during the construction at Al-Shifa in the 1980s, the Israeli construction contractors hired Hamas to provide security guards to prevent attacks on the building site.

“You know, decades ago we were running the place, so we helped them — it was decades, many decades ago, probably four decades ago that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told a visibly stunned CNN host Christiane Amanpour.

Israel has claimed that following Hamas’s consolidation of power in Gaza in 2006, the group took over the Israeli-built facilities beneath Al-Shifa and modernized and expanded them into a full-fledged command and control operations center. During this period, some international journalists have described being called to meetings with Hamas officials on the hospital grounds, and Israel has long referred to it as a vital Hamas headquarters. During the 2014 war in Gaza, the Washington Post’s William Booth asserted that Al-Shifa “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Assuming these claims are true, it is both shameful and logical that Hamas would choose to meet journalists at a civilian hospital given Israel’s well-known campaign to systematically assassinate them. Shameful as it may be, this is quite different than using a secret facility buried beneath the hospital as a military command and control center.

The fact that Israel built tunnels and rooms under Al-Shifa does not prove anything. Many modern hospitals, especially in war zones, have underground infrastructure, including Israeli hospitals. Nor do past reports about Hamas members being spotted inside the hospital. Israel will need to present much more convincing evidence, particularly to back up its claim that the site was of immense military and operational significance during this specific war.

The standard for such evidence should be extremely high, particularly because of the extent of civilian death and suffering caused by Israel’s operations. The Biden administration made allegations about Al-Shifa Hospital to offer preemptive cover for Israel to raid it, and the onus is on the administration to provide irrefutable, clear evidence to support its specific claims.

Propaganda vs. International Law

As Israel wages its propaganda war over Al-Shifa, it is simultaneously laying siege to yet another medical facility, the Indonesian Hospital, which is now the sole remaining medical facility in northern Gaza. Israeli artillery fire has killed at least 12 people at the hospital, according to local officials. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, has accused Israel of violating international law. “All countries, especially those that have close relations with Israel, must use all their influence and capabilities to urge Israel to stop its atrocities,” she said Monday.

International humanitarian law is clear that in case of any doubt as to whether the hospital is being used as a party to a conflict to “commit an act harmful to the enemy,” then it remains a protected site. Even if there were clear evidence that the hospital’s protected status had been abused, there are a range of rules governing any military action against the hospital — and the civilian patients would remain protected individuals.

“Even if the building loses its special protection, all the people inside retain theirs,” said Adil Haque, the Judge Jon O. Newman scholar at Rutgers Law School, in an interview with the Washington Post. “Anything that the attacking force can do to allow the humanitarian functions of that hospital to continue, they’re obligated to do, even if there’s some office somewhere in the building where there is maybe a fighter holed up.”

The staff at Al-Shifa have directly accused Israel of causing the deaths of civilians at the hospital, including several babies in the neonatal intensive care unit whose incubators were rendered useless after electricity was severely restricted as a result of the Israeli siege. On November 18, a U.N. humanitarian team led by the World Health Organization visited Al-Shifa. According to the WHO, its staff on the delegation described the hospital as a “death zone,” saying in a statement, “Signs of shelling and gunfire were evident. The team saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and were told more than 80 people were buried there.”

Israel has also released what it says is CCTV footage from within Al-Shifa recorded in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas raid into Israel. It claims that the video depicts armed fighters entering the hospital with two international hostages, one Thai and one Nepali. The footage shows one of the alleged hostages injured on a stretcher.

Assuming that this footage is genuine and armed Hamas militants brought a wounded hostage in for treatment, what does Israel believe the hospital staff should have done in this case? Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat all wounded individuals, and it is not their job to serve as police or intelligence operatives.

“Given what the Israeli occupation reported, this confirms that the hospitals of the Ministry of Health provide their medical services to everyone who deserves them, regardless of their gender and race,” Gaza’s Ministry of Health said in a statement after the videos were released. The ministry added that it could not verify the videos. Hamas spokesperson Izzat Al-Rishq said that Hamas had previously acknowledged that it had taken wounded hostages to Al-Shifa on October 7. “We have released images of all that and the [Israeli] army spokesman is acting as if he has discovered something incredible,” he said. Rishq also claimed some of the hostages Hamas took to Al-Shifa had been wounded in Israeli strikes. Israel has also claimed, without evidence, that some hostages were murdered by Hamas inside the hospital grounds, though the IDF’s own maps indicate their bodies were recovered from locations outside Al-Shifa’s campus.

The onus is on both the Israeli government and its sponsors in the Biden administration to prove the sweeping claims about Hamas’s alleged use of Al-Shifa Hospital. This evidence should be strong enough to irrefutably prove that all of the suffering and death inflicted on the patients, doctors, and nurses at Al-Shifa was justifiable under the law, as well as basic principles of proportionality and morality. Such a conclusion is unfathomable when placed in the context of the civilian suffering caused by Israel’s siege on the hospital.

If Hamas is decisively proven to have intentionally abused the hospital’s protected status and did, in fact, actively operate a command center hidden beneath it, then it should face war crimes charges for having done so. Hamas, not innocent civilians, should be held accountable for these actions.

At the same time, if it is proven that Israel perpetrated fraud in its relentless campaign to portray the most important hospital in Gaza as a secret Hamas military base, then the world should hold Israeli officials accountable for this grave and lethal propaganda. So, too, should the Biden administration — including the president himself — be made to answer for the U.S. role.

Israel is seeking to justify its industrial-scale killing of civilians in Gaza with accusations that Hamas is hiding among civilians and using them as shields. Yet Israel’s leading human rights group B’Tselem has documented how the IDF has engaged in this very activity for decades. “Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives,” according to a 2017 report. 

In the bigger picture, the controversy around Hamas and Al-Shifa has served mostly as a distraction from the overarching, indisputable facts about Israel’s war against Gaza: Using U.S. weapons, financing, and political support, Israel has waged a campaign of violent collective punishment against the civilians of Gaza.

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Who pays for these trips has, until now, remained largely a mystery. According to an unredacted tax filing for 2019 obtained by The Intercept, the financiers are a clutch of large foundations and nonprofits, some of which are family-run, that also give to a wide range of other political and cultural groups.

The trips are organized through a cutout called the American Israel Education Fund, a charitable organization founded by AIPAC, from which it borrows its offices, board members, and even part of its logo. Like other tax-exempt nonprofits, AIEF must file a Form 990 every year with the IRS, but donors are redacted from the version that is made accessible to the public.

According to the unredacted 2019 tax filing, AIEF drew millions of dollars from eight philanthropic groups, estates, and family foundations: the Koret Foundation, the Swartz Foundation, the Jewish Communal Fund, the One8 Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Paul E. Singer Foundation, Milton Cooper 2013 Revocable Trust, and the estate of Hedy Orden. These donors helped finance 129 AIEF-sponsored trips to Israel in 2019, totaling $2.32 million, according to the public records database LegiStorm.

The all-expenses-paid trips are crucial to how AIPAC keeps both Republican and Democratic lawmakers firmly on Israel’s side. That allegiance has been on full display as the Biden administration and most members of Congress have backed Israel amid its war against the occupied Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 12,000 Palestinians in the last five weeks. 

“The trips clearly have an impact, as personal experiences in Israel often show up in congressional narratives justifying support for pro-Israel policies,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center Washington DC, told The Intercept. “It’s part of a broader strategy to keep U.S.–Israel ties close.”

“The trips clearly have an impact, as personal experiences in Israel often show up in congressional narratives justifying support for pro-Israel policies.”

In a statement, AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Wittmann told The Intercept, “AIPAC and AIEF are distinct entities and strictly adhere to all relevant governmental guidelines, regulations, and statutes.” (An email address for AIEF did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did any of the foundations listed as donors on the tax filing.)

In addition to pro-Israel causes, some of the AIEF donors also fund a wide spectrum of other political initiatives. The Paul E. Singer Foundation, which gave AIEF $1.25 million in 2019, has been a prolific contributor to conservative causes in the U.S. for years. Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is a major donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or FDD, a hawkish, pro-Israel think tank that pushes Israel’s national security perspective to U.S. policymakers.

The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which gave $1.5 million to AIEF in 2019, portrays itself as heavily focused on progressive issues, including education, voting rights, criminal justice, and reproductive rights. The foundation also funded a number of hawkish, pro-Israel groups in the same year, including FDD; the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors foreign language press in the Middle East and has been criticized for bias and misleading translations; the Investigative Project on Terrorism, led by the discredited extremism expert Steve Emerson, who has been repeatedly invited to speak at AIPAC summits despite allegations of Islamophobia; and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a D.C. think tank that was itself spun off from AIPAC.

Among the donors who gave the largest amounts to AIEF are the Bay Area-based Koret Foundation ($5 million), the Jewish Communal Fund ($3.5 million), and a trust established in the name of real estate tycoon Milton Cooper ($2.475 million). The Swartz Foundation, which contributed $1.45 million, is notable for its founder Sidney Swartz, the former chair and CEO of the Timberland Company, a popular manufacturer of work boots and outerwear.

In 2022, the Paul E. Singer Foundation and Swartz Foundation also donated $1 million and $25,000, respectively, to United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC that backs challengers to progressive candidates who are critical of Israel, according to itemized tax receipts from that year.

AIPAC and AIEF’s Relationship

The millions of dollars AIEF gets from its funders goes toward AIPAC’s goal of securing bipartisan consensus on Israel. In 2019, the year for which The Intercept has unredacted tax records, AIEF sponsored trips for 64 Democrats and 65 Republicans, who left for Israel on 14 separate dates, according to LegiStorm. Each trip can cost upward of $10,000 per person, and members of Congress can also bring senior members of staff, spouses, or children.

These expenditures appear to have been made possible with some creative legal maneuvering from AIPAC. The group has used AIEF to fund congressional junkets and to bypass an anti-corruption law that bans lobbyists from taking politicians on paid trips abroad. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act responded to a major lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff, a D.C. lobbyist who had for years funded lavish trips and given expensive gifts to politicians as a means of influence peddling.

After the law was enacted in 2007, AIPAC, which had sponsored congressional trips to Israel since the 1990s, campaigned to create an exception for 501(c)(3) organizations that lobbying groups could use to get around the law. Both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups are tax-exempt nonprofits, but 501(c)(4) groups — including AIPAC — are considered “social welfare” organizations, which are allowed to spend more than 20 percent of their resources on lobbying the government.

Craig Holman, an expert on governmental ethics and campaign finance at the public interest advocacy organization Public Citizen, said AIPAC undermined the lobbying reform.

“AIPAC successfully inserted an exception to the rule for 501(c)(3) organizations,” Holman said. The use of AIEF has “allowed it to continue funneling money to members of Congress for travel to Israel.” Holman, who was involved in drafting and promoting the 2007 law, added, “These trips would be illegal otherwise.”

The murky relationship between AIEF and AIPAC has come under scrutiny in the past. Before AIPAC moved to use AIEF to fund the congressional junkets, the nonprofit was incorporated as a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC in 1988, likely to solicit tax-deductible contributions, Holman said.

In 2019, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy published research showing that, over the prior decade, AIEF and other pro-Israel nonprofits had funded hundreds of trips for members of Congress and their staff, covering over $10 million in expenses. The study’s analysis of gift travel filings found that serving members of Congress had been on nearly 600 Israel junkets; many had been multiple times, including current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.

“When an organization lobbies Congress for support on making public policy, one of the most effective means of achieving victory is by befriending members of Congress through gifts and travel,” Holman told The Intercept. “This is a loophole that is being heavily exploited now.”

Congressional Junkets

Once an unassailable powerbroker on Capitol Hill, AIPAC and policymakers who work to further its interests have faced increasing criticism in recent years, as some members of Congress and the American public question the U.S.’s blanket support for Israel.

In addition to AIPAC’s heavy hand in elections, legislation, and military spending, the congressional trips to Israel have also been put under the microscope.

Since 2019, AIEF has spent a total of $6.1 million on 309 trips to Israel, 144 for Republicans and 165 for Democrats.

Since 2019, AIEF has spent a total of $6.1 million on 309 trips to Israel, 144 for Republicans and 165 for Democrats, according to LegiStorm. During the trips, members of Congress have met with high-level Israeli politicians and security officials, toured historical sites, and attended information sessions tailored to Israel’s view of the region. Past trips have also included occasional meetings with members of the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“For members of Congress, AIPAC is a very important player on the Hill,” said Munayyer, of Arab Center. “These trips are seen as routine and have only become more controversial over the past 10 years or so as AIPAC has come to be seen as a more partisan actor.”

Democrats have been increasingly divided over U.S. support for Israel, with the rift widening significantly during the Obama administration. Progressives have taken a stronger stance against unconditional aid to the country and, more recently, called for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

The party’s centrist leadership, meanwhile, has toed the line. In August, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who led a delegation of two dozen Democrats on an AIEF-sponsored trip to Israel, pushed back on the growing chorus of criticism of the U.S.–Israel relationship within his party.

“The Democratic Party in the House of Representatives will continue to stand with Israel,” Jeffries said at a press conference during the trip, “and lift up the special relationship between our two countries and in support of Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people, and as a Jewish democratic state, period, full stop.”

AIPAC celebrated the trip on its website, posting a host of straight-to-camera, gushing testimonials on the AIPAC YouTube channel.

As an alternative to the AIPAC junkets, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian American member of Congress, had attempted to lead a delegation in 2018 to the West Bank that would center Palestinians’ experiences under Israeli occupation.

“I want us to see that segregation and how that has really harmed us being able to achieve real peace in that region. I don’t think AIPAC provides a real, fair lens into this issue. It’s one-sided,” Tlaib told The Intercept at the time. “[They] have these lavish trips to Israel, but they don’t show the side that I know is real, which is what’s happening to my grandmother and what’s happening to my family there.”

Tlaib was forced to cancel the trip after the Israeli government barred her from entering the country. Under pressure, Israel reversed course and said Tlaib could go on condition that she not express support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement while there, a condition she rejected.

Last week, Tlaib was formally censured in the House for expressing support for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli assault of Gaza. Almost all of the 22 Democrats who voted in favor of the measure received money from AIPAC in the last election cycle.

Despite greater scrutiny of pro-Israel influence in U.S. politics in recent weeks, American politicians continue to accept paid trips to Israel. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, came under fire for going to Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on a trip sponsored by the UJA-Federation of New York. UJA, a local Jewish philanthropic organization, has sent over half a million dollars to groups in Israel that support its illegal settlement program in the West Bank, The Intercept reported. Hochul’s office later said it would cover the cost of a trip, citing a delay in a state ethics review.

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Two of the organizations sent cease-and-desist letters to union shops considering resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Another group called staffers into meetings with human resources for using work channels to share links about Palestine and proposing to do fundraising for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in lieu of an annual holiday party.

Management at several of the offices said statements on Gaza under consideration by their unions were jeopardizing funding. Pro-Israel activists launched a petition to defund the Bronx Defenders after its union issued a statement opposing Israel’s “genocidal intent in Gaza.” Public defender offices across the country are already severely underfunded. While most rely heavily on public funding, many also receive support from private institutions, including major law firms. Several firms have responded to criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza by rescinding job offers and threatening to curb recruiting efforts at law schools. 

On Thursday, ahead of the unionwide vote on a statement, the Legal Aid Society called a staff meeting. According to a partial recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept, Chief Executive Officer Twyla Carter said the resolution’s language was antisemitic. Staff could vote how they wanted, she said, but she had an obligation to warn them about the impact on the organization’s work. 

Four law firms had already threatened to pull funding from the office over the resolution, Carter said. In discouraging union members to vote for the statement, she said, “I’m not trying to lose a dime.” 

A vote on the union resolution was halted by a court on Friday after members of the organizations, including union membership, sued. The union received the restraining order before it was over and could not tally the results.

The suppression of speech at publicly funded legal defense agencies comes as governments and workplaces around the world have disciplined and fired staffers for criticizing Israel’s nonstop bombing of Gaza. Suppression of speech about Palestine has come in the form of bans on rallies and vigils, suspensions of student groups, doxxing and death threats, and the cancellation of television interviews with Palestinian commentators. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not. I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.”

The fight brewing in public defender offices escalated after recent union efforts to issue statements condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians. Since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis last month, mostly civilians, Israel has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one out of every 200 people. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not,” said Sophia Gurulé, a staff attorney in the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders and a member of the Bronx Defenders Union – UAW Local 2325. “I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.” 

Stop the Count

The legal fight revolved around a statement from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys – UAW Local 2325, which covers more than 25 organizations, including the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Service, and the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Staffers across the four offices, as well as the New York County Defender Services, which is not represented by the union, have been retaliated against, reprimanded, surveilled, and encouraged to oppose the union resolution. 

The staffers spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. In total, the five agencies provide legal and social services to more than 360,000 people each year.

The resolution expresses solidarity with Palestinians, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and demands an end to Israel’s occupation, decrying apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. With a “yes” vote, the union would also oppose future military aid to Israel and endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. 

At the Legal Aid all-staff meeting on Thursday, Carter, the CEO, said the resolution was antisemitic. “These statements call for the elimination of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people,” Carter said. “You don’t have to agree, but that’s how some of our colleagues feel, and some of our supporters.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism,” she said. She suggested Jewish readers of the statement might see it the same way Black people would see pro-police sloganeering: “And, again, as a Black woman, my closest analogy is hearing how people talk about ‘blue lives matter’ or other things that land on me differently.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the Legal Aid Society said it has a long-standing policy against taking positions on international political events and that it was focused on its mission to provide legal services to low-income New Yorkers. The organization said it rejected the union’s resolution, found it antisemitic, and hoped union members would vote against it: “The resolution is laden with coded antisemitic language and thinly veiled calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. At a time when our attorneys and staff should be united in support of the people we serve, the resolution does not advance the legal interests of our clients, does not comport with our mission and values, and is divisive and hurtful.”

Several hours after the meeting on Thursday, attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued in New York State Supreme Court to stop the vote, saying it posed an ethical dilemma for attorneys that would make it “impossible for them to properly do their job as Public Defenders.” 

On Friday, the court granted a temporary restraining order enjoining the vote. Voting had gotten underway at 9 a.m. and only 15 minutes were left on the clock when the injunction was issued. The tally never got underway.

Cease-and-Desist Letters

On October 18, two days before the union at Bronx Defenders issued a statement opposing Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing, and “genocidal intent in Gaza,” management at the group sent a cease-and-desist letter warning that it would enforce trademark rights against any use of the organization’s name in the forthcoming statement. 

On Wednesday, the Bronx Defenders issued its own statement distancing itself from the union. The group said its union’s statement did not recognize the humanity of Israelis and was not consistent with the values or mission of the Bronx Defenders. 

Bronx Defenders staffers also reported to the union that human resources informed them that their draft emails were in violation of policies on internal communications. Management later apologized and said they hadn’t intended to look at staffers’ drafts. (Asked for comment, the Bronx Defenders referred The Intercept to its Wednesday statement.)

As staff at the Neighborhood Defender Services, a public defense group covering Harlem, considered putting out a union statement on Gaza in early November, they also received a cease-and-desist letter. The letter came attached to an email from managing director Alice Fontier, who said a public statement on Israel and Gaza fell outside the scope of the organization’s work. The attached letter, from an outside law firm, urged the union not to use Neighborhood Defender Services or any other trademarked nomenclature.

“We have seen the impact of a similar statement issued by Union members at the Bronx Defenders,” said the attached cease-and-desist letter. The letter noted that the petition to defund the Bronx Defenders had already gathered more than 1,500 signatures and was picked up by the New York Post, “which, unfortunately, is read widely by those in power in New York City government.” The city, the letter said, would soon be considering two major funding proposals for Neighborhood Defender Services. 

Neighborhood Defender Services’s Helmis Ortega Santana, who helped write the union’s draft statement, resigned on November 6 as union president after receiving the cease-and-desist letter. In his resignation letter, Santana said he was concerned that the statement would jeopardize the organization’s funding and its ability to serve clients, as well as ongoing contract negotiations.

Policies against international political speech in work channels weren’t previously enforced around discussion of the war in Ukraine, participation with pro-Israel groups, or international migration issues, according to public defense staffers who spoke to The Intercept. Now, these policies are being enforced for the first time in the case of speech related to Palestine, staffers said. Several of the public defense group have a record of putting out statements on major political events, including police brutality such as the murder of George Floyd, the movement to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

In the Legal Aid staff meeting Thursday ahead of the union vote, Carter referred to an organizational policy to “not talk about sociopolitical views or anything outside of our mission and our clients.”

Correction: November 17, 2023, 11:32 p.m. ET
This article previously stated that Lisa Ohta, who is the president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, was a plaintiff in a suit brought against the union. Ohta was named as a defendant.

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But the KST’s lax security protocols appear to have accidentally doxxed up to 8,000 people, including activists, sexual assault survivors, United Nations staff, Congolese government officials, local journalists, and victims of attacks, an Intercept analysis found. Hundreds of documents — including 165 spreadsheets — that were on a public server contained the names, locations, phone numbers, and organizational affiliations of those sources, as well as sensitive information about some 17,000 “security incidents,” such as mass killings, torture, and attacks on peaceful protesters.

The data was available via KST’s main website, and anyone with an internet connection could access it. The information appears to have been publicly available on the internet for more than four years.

Experts told The Intercept that a leak of this magnitude would constitute one of the most egregious instances ever of the online exposure of personal data from a vulnerable, conflict-affected population.

“This was a serious violation of research ethics and privacy by KST and its sponsoring organizations,” said Daniel Fahey, former coordinator of the United Nations Security Council’s Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after he was told about the error. “KST’s failure to secure its data poses serious risks to every person and entity listed in the database. The database puts thousands of people and hundreds of organizations at risk of retaliatory violence, harassment, and reputational damage.”

“If you’re trying to protect people but you’re doing more harm than good, then you shouldn’t be doing the work in the first place.”

“If you’re an NGO working in conflict zones with high-risk individuals and you’re not managing their data right, you’re putting the very people that you are trying to protect at risk of death,” said Adrien Ogée, the chief operations officer at the CyberPeace Institute, which provides cybersecurity assistance and threat detection and analysis to humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. Speaking generally about lax security protocols, Ogée added, “If you’re trying to protect people but you’re doing more harm than good, then you shouldn’t be doing the work in the first place.”

The dangers extend to what the database refers to as Congolese “focal points” who conducted field interviews and gathered information for the KST. “The level of risk that local KST staff have been exposed to is hard to describe,” said a researcher close to the project who asked not to be identified because they feared professional reprisal. “It’s unbelievable that a serious human rights or conflict research organization could ever throw their staff in the lion’s den just like that. Militias wanting to take revenge, governments of repressive neighboring states, ill-tempered security services — the list of the dangers that this exposes them to is very long.”

The spreadsheets, along with the main KST website, were taken offline on October 28, after investigative journalist Robert Flummerfelt, one of the authors of this story, discovered the leak and informed Human Rights Watch and New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. HRW subsequently assembled what one source close to the project described as a “crisis team.”

Last week, HRW and NYU’s Congo Research Group, the entity within the Center on International Cooperation that maintains the KST website, issued a statement that announced the takedown and referred in vague terms to “a security vulnerability in its database,” adding, “Our organizations are reviewing the security and privacy of our data and website, including how we gather and store information and our research methodology.” The statement made no mention of publicly exposing the identities of sources who provided information on a confidential basis.

In an internal statement sent to HRW employees on November 9 and obtained by The Intercept, Sari Bashi, the organization’s program director, informed staff of “a security vulnerability with respect to the KST database which contains personal data, such as the names and phone numbers of sources who provided information to KST researchers and some details of the incidents they reported.” She added that HRW had “convened a team to manage this incident,” including senior leadership, security and communications staff, and the organization’s general counsel.

The internal statement also noted that one of HRW’s partners in managing the KST had “hired a third-party cyber security company to investigate the extent of the exposure of the confidential data and to help us to better understand the potential implications.” 

“We are still discussing with our partner organizations the steps needed to fulfill our responsibilities to KST sources in the DRC whose personal information was compromised,” reads the statement, noting that HRW is working with staff in Congo to “understand, prepare for, and respond to any increase in security risks that may arise from this situation.” HRW directed staffers not to post on social media about the leak or publicly share any press stories about it due to “the very sensitive nature of the data and the possible security risks.”

The internal statement also said that “neither HRW, our partners, nor KST researchers in the DRC have received any information to suggest that anybody has been threatened or harmed as a result of this database vulnerability.”

The Intercept has not found any instances of individuals affected by the security failures, but it’s currently unknown if any of the thousands of people involved were harmed. 

“We deeply regret the security vulnerability in the KST database and share concerns about the wider security implications,” Human Rights Watch’s chief communications officer, Mei Fong, told The Intercept. Fong said in an email that the organization is “treating the data vulnerability in the KST database, and concerns around research methodology on the KST project, with the utmost seriousness.” Fong added, “Human Rights Watch did not set up or manage the KST website. We are working with our partners to support an investigation to establish how many people — other than the limited number we are so far aware of — may have accessed the KST data, what risks this may pose to others, and next steps. The security and confidentiality of those affected is our primary concern.” 

Bridgeway Foundation

Two sources associated with the KST told The Intercept that, internally, KST staff are blaming the security lapse on the Bridgeway Foundation, one of the donors that helped conceive and fund the KST and has publicly taken credit for being a “founding partner” of the project.

Bridgeway is the philanthropic wing of a Texas-based investment firm. Best known for its support for the “Kony 2012” campaign, the organization was involved in what a U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s historian called “intense activism and lobbying” that paved the way for U.S. military intervention in Central Africa. Those efforts by Bridgeway and others helped facilitate a failed $780 million U.S. military effort to hunt down Joseph Kony, the leader of a Ugandan armed group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA.

More recently, the foundation was accused of partnering with Uganda’s security forces in an effort to drag the United States into “another dangerous quagmire” in Congo. “Why,” asked Helen Epstein in a 2021 investigation for The Nation, “is Bridgeway, a foundation that claims to be working to end crimes against humanity, involved with one of Africa’s most ruthless security agencies?”

One Congo expert said that Bridgeway has played the role of a “humanitarian privateer” for the U.S. government and employed tactics such as “private intelligence and military training.” As part of Bridgeway’s efforts to track down Kony, it helped create the LRA Crisis Tracker, a platform nearly identical to the KST that tracks attacks by the Ugandan militia. After taking an interest in armed groups in Congo, Bridgeway quietly pushed for the creation of a similar platform for Congo, partnering with NYU and HRW to launch the KST in 2017.

While NYU’s Congo Research Group oversaw the “collection and triangulation of data” for the KST, and HRW provided training and other support to KST researchers, the Bridgeway Foundation offered “technical and financial support,” according to a 2022 report by top foundation personnel, including Tara Candland, Bridgeway’s vice president of research and analysis, and Laren Poole, its chief operations officer. In a report published earlier this year, Poole and others wrote that the foundation had “no role in the incident tracking process.” 

Several sources with ties to KST staff told The Intercept that Bridgeway was responsible for contracting the companies that designed the KST website and data collection system, including a tech company called Semantic AI. Semantic’s website mentions a partnership with Bridgeway to analyze violence in Congo, referring to their product as “intelligence software” that “allows Bridgeway and their partners to take action to protect the region.” The case study adds that the KST platform helps Bridgeway “track, analyze, and counter” armed groups in Congo.

Poole said that the KST had hired a cybersecurity firm to conduct a “comprehensive security assessment of the servers and hosting environment with the goal of better understanding the nature and extent of the exposure.” But it appears that answers to the most basic questions are not yet known. “We cannot currently determine when the security vulnerability occurred or how long the data was exposed,” Poole told The Intercept via email. “As recently as last year, an audit of the site was conducted that included assessing security threats, and this vulnerability was not identified.”

Like HRW, Bridgeway disclaimed direct responsibility for management of the KST’s website, attributing that work to two web development firms, Fifty and Fifty, which built and managed the KST from its inception until 2022, and Boldcode. That year, Poole said, “Boldcode was contracted to assume management and security responsibilities of the site.” But Poole said that “KST project leadership has had oversight over firms contracted for website development and maintenance since its inception.”

The Intercept did not receive a response to multiple messages sent to Fifty and Fifty. Boldcode did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Warnings of Harm

Experts have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of humanitarian data leaks for years. “Critical incidents – such as breaches of platforms and networks, weaponisation of humanitarian data to aid attacks on vulnerable populations, and exploitation of humanitarian systems against responders and beneficiaries – may already be occurring and causing grievous harm without public accountability,” wrote a trio of researchers from the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in 2017, the same year the KST was launched.

A 2022 analysis by the CyberPeace Institute identified 157 “cyber incidents” that affected the not-for-profit sector between July 2020 and June 2022. In at least 60 cases, personal data was exposed, and in at least 28, it was taken. “This type of sensitive personal information can be monetized or simply used to cause further harm,” the report says. “Such exploitation has a strong potential for re-victimization of individuals as well as the organizations themselves.”

In 2021, HRW itself criticized the United Nations Refugee Agency for having “improperly collected and shared personal information from ethnic Rohingya refugees.” In some cases, according to HRW, the agency had “failed to obtain refugees’ informed consent to share their data,” exposing refugees to further risk.

Earlier this year, HRW criticized the Egyptian government and a private British company, Academic Assessment, for leaving the personal information of children unprotected on the open web for at least eight months. “The exposure violates children’s privacy, exposes them to the risk of serious harm, and appears to violate the data protection laws in both Egypt and the United Kingdom,” reads the April report.

In that case, 72,000 records — including children’s names, birth dates, phone numbers, and photo identification — were left vulnerable. “By carelessly exposing children’s private information, the Egyptian government and Academic Assessment put children at risk of serious harm,” said Hye Jung Han, children’s rights and technology researcher and advocate at HRW at the time.

The threats posed by the release of the KST information are far greater than the Egyptian breach. For decades, Congo has been beset by armed violence, from wars involving the neighboring nations of Rwanda and Uganda to attacks by machete-wielding militias. More recently, in the country’s far east, millions have been killed, raped, or driven from their homes by more than 120 armed groups.

Almost all the individuals in the database, as well as their interviewers, appear to have confidentially provided sensitive information about armed groups, militias, or state security forces, all of which are implicated in grave human rights violations. Given the lawlessness and insecurity of eastern Congo, the most vulnerable individuals — members of local civil society organizations, activists, and residents living in conflict areas — are at risk of arrest, kidnapping, sexual assault, or death at the hands of these groups.

“For an organization working with people in a conflict zone, this is the most important type of data that they have, so it should be critically protected,” said CyberPeace Institute’s Ogée, who previously worked at European cybersecurity agencies and the World Economic Forum.

The KST’s sensitive files were hosted on an open “bucket”: a cloud storage server accessible to the open internet. Because the project posted monthly public reports on the same server that contained the sensitive information, the server’s URL was often produced in search engine results related to the project.

“The primary methodology in the humanitarian sector is ‘do no harm.’ If you’re not able to come into a conflict zone and do your work without creating any more harm, then you shouldn’t be doing it,” Ogée said. “The day that database is created and uploaded on that bucket, an NGO that is security-minded and thinks about ‘do no harm’ should have every process in place to make sure that this database never gets accessed from the outside.”

The leak exposed the identities of 6,000 to 8,000 individuals, according to The Intercept’s analysis. The dataset references thousands of sources labeled “civil society” and “inhabitants” of villages where violent incidents occurred, as well as hundreds of “youth” and “human rights defenders.” Congolese health professionals and teachers are cited hundreds of times, and there are multiple references to students, lawyers, psychologists, “women leaders,” magistrates, and Congolese civil society groups, including prominent activist organizations regularly targeted by the government.

“It’s really shocking,” said a humanitarian researcher with long experience conducting interviews with vulnerable people in African conflict zones. “The most important thing to me is the security of my sources. I would rather not document a massacre than endanger my sources. So to leave their information in the open is incredibly negligent. Someone needs to take responsibility.”

Breach of Ethics

Since being contacted by The Intercept, the organizations involved have sought to distance themselves from the project’s lax security protocols. 

In its internal statement to staff, HRW emphasized that it was not responsible for collecting information or supervising activities for KST, but was “involved in designing the research methodology, provided training, guidance and logistical support to KST researchers, and spot-checked some information.”

“HRW does not manage the KST website and did not set up, manage or maintain the database,” the internal statement said.

The Intercept spoke with multiple people exposed in the data leak who said they did not consent to any information being stored in a database. This was confirmed by four sources who worked closely with the KST, who said that gaining informed consent from people who were interviewed, including advising them that they were being interviewed for the KST, was not a part of the research methodology.

Sources close to the KST noted that its researchers didn’t identify who they were working for. The failure to obtain consent to collect personal information was likely an institutional oversight, they said.

“Obtaining informed consent is an undisputed core principle of research ethics,” the researcher who collaborated with the KST told The Intercept. “Not telling people who you work for and what happens to the information you provide to them amounts to lying. And that’s what has happened here at an unimaginable scale.”

In an email to NYU’s Center on International Cooperation and their Human Research Protections Program obtained by The Intercept, Fahey, the former coordinator of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, charged that KST staff “apparently failed to disclose that they were working for KST when soliciting information and did not tell sources how their information would be cataloged or used.”

In response, Sarah Cliffe, the executive director of NYU’s Center on International Cooperation, did not acknowledge Fahey’s concerns about informed consent, but noted that the institution takes “very seriously” concerns about the security of sources and KST staff exposed in the leak, according to an email seen by The Intercept. “We can assure you that we are taking immediate steps to investigate this and decide on the best course of action,” Cliffe wrote on November 1. 

Fahey told The Intercept that NYU’s Human Research Protections Program did not respond to his questions about KST’s compliance with accepted academic standards and securing informed consent from Congolese informants. That NYU office includes the university’s institutional review board, or IRB, the body comprised of faculty and staff who review research protocols to ensure protection of human subjects and compliance with state and federal regulations as well as university policies.

NYU spokesperson John Beckman confirmed that while the KST’s researchers received training on security, research methodology, and research ethics, “including the importance of informed consent,” some of the people interviewed “were not informed that their personally identifiable information would be recorded in the database and were unaware that the information was to be used for the KST.” 

Beckman added, “NYU is convening an investigative panel to review these human subject-related issues.”

Beckman also stated that the failure of Congolese “focal points” to provide informed consent tended to occur in situations that may have affected their own security. “Nevertheless, this raises troubling issues,” Beckman said, noting that all the partners involved in the KST “will be working together to review what happened, to identify what needs to be corrected going forward, and to determine how best to safeguard those involved in collecting and providing information about the incidents the KST is meant to track.”

Fong, of HRW, also acknowledged failures to provide informed consent in all instances. “We are aware that, while the KST researchers appropriately identified themselves as working for Congolese civil society organizations, some KST researchers did not in all cases identify themselves as working for KST, for security reasons,” she told The Intercept. “We are reviewing the research protocols and their implementation.”

“The partners have been working hard to try to address what happened and mitigate it,” Beckman told The Intercept, specifying that all involved were working to determine the safest method to inform those exposed in the leak.

Both NYU and HRW named their Congolese partner organization as being involved in some of the original errors and the institutional response. 

The fallout from the exposure of the data may extend far beyond the breach of academic or NGO protocols. “Given the lack of security on KST’s website, it’s possible that intelligence agencies in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, DRC, and elsewhere have been accessing and mining this data for years,” Fahey said. “It is also possible that Congolese armed groups and national security forces have monitored who said what to KST staff.”

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