The Israelis Left behind in 50 mn. Tons of Bomb-Infested Rubble in Gaza, as Hundreds of Thousands Stream Home

January 31, 2025

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli systemic destruction of civilian building infrastructure in Gaza generated over 50 million tons of debris by 1 December 2024.

 

 “Unexploded Munitions,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Trump's Big, Bad, Destructive, and Unpeaceful Imperialism

January 31, 2025

Phyllis Bennis

Even as Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have seized virtually complete control of the Republican Party, there remain at least two factions competing for dominance of foreign policy: an isolationist gang and a warmongering interventionist cabal. The strains between them seemingly remain unresolved, and there are real strategic debates and disagreements about what direction Trump’s foreign policy should take.

  

U.S. President Donald Trump (looks on as U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks about the mid-air crash between American Airlines and a military helicopter, at the White House on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

A Fools Paradise: Thomas Friedman and the Middle East

June 30, 2025

Melvin Goodman

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ most influential columnist, has comprehensively recorded his dreamscape for the Middle East.  It tells Donald Trump that “you have a chance to reshape this region in ways that could fundamentally enhance the peace and prosperity of Israelis, Palestinians and all the region’s people, as well as the national security interests of America.”  Friedman believes that Benjamin Netanyahu is “ready to complete Israel’s withdrawal and finalize the border” with Lebanon, and that the United States has an “enormous opportunity to truly end the civil war [in Lebanon] and put the country back together.”  Finally, he produces a threat: Iran’s nuclear program and malign regional strategy need to be eliminated, and if Trump can’t do this through “peaceful negotiations,” it needs to be “done kinetically.”  That’s right: Friedman is willing to commit the United States to a war against Iran.

Trump lays out blueprint to deport pro-Palestinian foreign nationals

June 30, 2025

Umar A Farooq

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday issued a new executive order that aims to deport any international students on university campuses who have expressed pro-Palestinian sentiments or participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

 

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the University of Southern California campus, a day before commencement ceremonies, on 7 May 2024 in Los Angeles, California (Mario Tama/AFP)

Passenger plane with 64 on board collides with US Army helicopter

June 30, 2025

A regional passenger plane carrying 60 passengers and for crew collided midair with a US military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) on Wednesday night, prompting the suspension of all flights from the airport and a large-scale emergency response. 

Gaza Hospitals Receive 48 More Bodies, Raising Death Toll

January 28, 2025

Dave DeCamp

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that over the previous 48-hour period, hospitals in the Strip received 48 more bodies of Palestinians who were killed by “Israeli aggression,” raising the recorded death toll.

What Sultan Erdogan is really up to

January 29, 2025

Pepe Escobar

ISTANBUL – The scene is a Circassian restaurant off fabled Istiklal street in historic Beyoglu. On the table, a geopolitical banquet – served by some of the best independent analytical minds from Bursa to Diyarbakir. The menu, apart from a meze feast, is simple: only two broad questions about Sultan Erdogan’s approach to BRICS and to Syria.

7 Reasons Why Age and Alcohol Don’t Mix

January 3, 2025

Sonya Collins

As you add more candles to your birthday cakes, you may notice that your organs don’t work as efficiently as they once did. Your balance might not be as good, and your response time may not be as quick. Perhaps you have more aches and pains than you did last year.

Neofascism in the White House

January 23, 2025

John Bellamy Foster

This piece was originally published in the April 2017 issue of Monthly Review.

 

Memo to Trump: How Dumping 2.2 Million more Palestinians on Jordan would Destabilize the Middle East even More than the Iraq War Did

January 28, 2025

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – First, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet proposed ethnically cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants in the fall of 2023, following many years of such calls from the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

 

What a 20th-century revolutionary can teach us about resisting genocide today

January 27, 2025

Dana Miles

On Jan. 12, thousands joined an annual commemorative march in Berlin to honor the memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — two revolutionaries murdered 106 years ago on Jan. 15, 1919 by centrist-backed proto-fascists. For decades, the march has taken place on the second Sunday of January, bringing together activists, trade unionists, feminists, and others who make up the German radical left. Among the marchers, those who perhaps best embodied Luxemburg’s spirit of anti-imperialism were a bloc of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who walked through the streets chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” before being attacked by German police officers.

 

 Rosa Luxemburg addressing a crowd during the International Socialist Congress, in Stuttgart, 1907. (Wikimedia Commons)

Palestine Through the Lens

January 28, 2025

Jamal Kanj

This is a review of an exceptional photobook, Images of Palestine (1898-1946). The book is a collection of photographs that spans nearly five decades, captured in the period leading up to the Palestine Nakba. Together, these black-and-white images chronicle a vibrant and diverse Palestinian society, highlighting its connection to the land, its achievements in commerce, architecture, and civil society, and its development into a modern socio-political entity chafing to break free from colonial domination.

Auschwitz’s hierarchies of villains and victims

January 27, 2025

Declan Hayes

When I visited Kraków for some dental treatment in late January 2022 just before Putin sent his peace-keeping forces into Ukraine, I made a point of not visiting either Auschwitz or Schindler’s factory for the same reason I did not visit Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum on the two occasions I visited Zion. Quite frankly, not only have I a gut full of hearing about Anne Frank, the boy in the striped pyjamas and Holocaust survivors who, like the old soldiers that they are, refuse to die, but I hate having propaganda of any sort rammed down my neck.

 

PFP statement on Los Angeles wildfires of 2025

January 26, 2025

The tragic wildfires that have taken place since Tuesday, January 7, 2025, have destroyed thousands of homes and structures across Los Angeles, leaving tens of thousands homeless. The death toll continues to rise as bodies are discovered under the ashes of homes. While the corporate mainstream media spotlights the rich who have been impacted, Peace & Freedom Party members have been on the ground, day after day, providing aid and relief to the thousands of working-class families who have lost everything.

Could the Carrington Event happen again?

January 24, 2025

Laura Baisas

On a hot and humid Florida night in late August 1859, the sky suddenly lit up. But it was not from fireflies or a fireswamp. Instead, it was the Northern Lights–or aurora borealis. The aurora is usually seen in far more northern latitudes, but it had somehow reached the subtropics and danced across the night sky. Reports of the aurora came in from as far south as Central America and some in the Rocky Mountains even believed it was morning because the sky was so bright.

لوستر

هوشنگ فاضلی

نزدیک به پنجاه سال پیشدر خانه‌ای دو طبقه در قیطریه شمیران سکونت داشتم. طبقهٔ بالا در اختیار خانواده‌ام بود و طبقهٔ پائین را اجاره داده بودم. یکبار مستاجر جدیدی از طریق آژانس املاک مراجعه، و خود را مهندس وحدتی، مدیر یک شرکت ساختمانی معرفی‌ نمود. قرار شد که وی و همسر و یک دخترش در این طبقه سکونت نمایند. در مورد میزان اجاره هم حساسیتی نشان نداد و گفت می‌تواند اجارهٔ شش ماه را هم یکباره پرداخت نماید.ا

LIVE BLOG: Israel Closes Netzarim | Mobilization on Lebanese-Israeli Border – Day 478

January 26, 2025

Israel continues to maintain a closure around Netzarim despite earlier commitments to withdraw.

Meanwhile, heightened military mobilization along the Israeli-Lebanese border is accompanied by Israeli forces opening fire on civilians attempting to return to their towns.

 

Thousands of displaced Palestinians seek to return to northern Gaza. (Photo: via social media, QNN)

Female Israeli soldiers 'wave and smile' during release by Hamas in Gaza

January 25, 2025

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas released four female Israeli soldiers on 25 January, while Israel is releasing some 200 Palestinians as part of a ceasefire agreement aimed at ending Israel's war on Gaza.

 

Trump’s assault on immigrants is coming—here’s what you need to know

January 25, 2025

Taya Graham and Stephen Janis

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised that, if elected, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Trump’s administration has wasted no time since re-entering the White House on Monday, and communities around the US are currently bracing for a wave of ICE raids. In plans that were publicly leaked ahead of Trump’s inauguration, the city of Chicago was identified as a key target for immigration raids, putting immigrant residents and their neighbors on high alert. To discuss the impending threat to Chicago and cities around the country, and how communities can fight back, The Real News speaks with Moises Zavala, Workplace Justice Campaigns Organizer for Arise Chicago, and Natascha Elena Uhlmann, a writer for Labor Notes and immigrant rights activist from Sonora, Mexico.

 

As Gaza Ceasefire takes hold, Israeli Forces turn to Jenin – a regular Target seen as a Center of Palestinian Resistance

January 24, 2025

Maha Nassar

(The Conversation) – Just two days after a shaky ceasefire took hold in the Gaza Strip, Israel on Jan. 21, 2025, launched a large-scale incursion of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

 

Russia and the Trump Doctrine: Adapting to the ‘Rules of the Strong’

January 24, 2025

Sergey Strokan

The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States is this week’s main news story, not only in America but also in domestic Russian politics. Though all eyes on that day were fixed on Trump, it is telling that he also became the subject of intense discussions in this country, ranging from political circles to ordinary kitchen conversations. This is no anomaly — it is entirely logical.

A federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s executive order redefining birthright citizenship

January 23, 2025

SEATTLE (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order denying U.S. citizenship to the children of parents living in the country illegally, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional” during the first hearing in a multi-state effort challenging the order.

 

Israel continues Jenin raid as two Palestinians killed in West Bank

January 23, 2025

Israeli soldiers have killed two more Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as they continue a military assault on the city of Jenin and its refugee camp.

 

Palestinian women sit across from the rubble of a house where two Palestinians were killed during an Israeli raid in Burqin village near Jenin in the occupied West Bank. [AFP]

For optimists: On the impossibility of global peace under capitalism

January 23, 2025

Murat K. Girgin

Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, as the founders of the theories of Capitalism and Imperialism, explained the dynamics of historical events–once perceptible only as patterns–through the lens of “the science of political economy.” Therefore, when discussing concepts like war or peace, it becomes essential to lend an ear to these two figures and their successors, dust off their books from the shelves, and start revisiting their ideas.

 

Death toll in Gaza rises as ceasefire allows rescuers to search rubble

January 22, 2025

Mera Aladam

As people in Gaza scour what remains of their homes and land following the ceasefire that took effect on Sunday, victims of Israel's heavy bombardment campaign since 7 October 2023 are being recovered from beneath the rubble. 

 

A boy rides his bicycle past destroyed infrastructure east of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 21 January 2025 (Bashar Taleb/AFP)

Sanders Blasts Trump for Ignoring 'Virtually Every Important Issue Facing Working Families'

January 22, 2025

Jake Johnson

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump posed in a garbage truck and performed a staged shift at a McDonald's as he postured as a champion of the working class.

 

 U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders is pictured at President Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump Reportedly Resuming Shipments of 2,000-Pound Bombs to Israel

January 21, 2025

Sharon Zhang

President Donald Trump is slated to resume shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, reports say, despite the fragile Gaza ceasefire deal having been implemented the day before his inauguration on Monday and Israel’s extensive use of the bombs on civilian areas.

 

 Smoke rises from a building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike at the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on January 12, 2025. Eyad Baba / AFP via Getty Images

Palestinians Dig 68 More Bodies Out of Gaza Rubble, Raising Death Toll

January 21, 2025

Dave DeCamp

On Tuesday, Palestinians in Gaza continued digging bodies out of the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas entered its third day.

Palestinians search building rubble in a destroyed neighborhood of Rafah, Gaza, on January 21, 2025, as residents return following a ceasefire deal (Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect)

In the West Bank, Palestinian unemployment is now Israeli policy

January 21, 2025

Haitham S.

Ever since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been suffering from an acute unemployment crisis. In the first six months of the war, the unemployment rate nearly tripled, with over 300,000 workers losing their main source of income. 

 

Israeli settlers harass Palestinian residents of Khirbet Zanuta, South Hebron Hills, occupied West Bank. (Oren Ziv)

7 Reasons Why Age and Alcohol Don’t Mix

January 3, 2025

Sonya Collins

As you add more candles to your birthday cakes, you may notice that your organs don’t work as efficiently as they once did. Your balance might not be as good, and your response time may not be as quick. Perhaps you have more aches and pains than you did last year.

 

Unknown heroes: Memories of a Gaza first responder

January 20, 2025

Mustafa Al-Jarou

Editor’s Note: This reflection was written before the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza on January 15, 2025.

 

 First responders and civilians look for survivors amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following Israeli bombardment in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, December 14, 2023, (Photo: Bashar Taleb/APA Images)

Progressives Say "Billionaires' Row" at Inauguration Ceremony Shows True Winners of Trump Agenda

January 20, 2025

Jake Johnson

While President-elect Donald Trump is expected to hail the "start of a thrilling new era of national success" during his inaugural speech on Monday, progressives said the presence of some of the nation's most powerful billionaires at the event signals that the incoming administration's agenda will prioritize the success the country's wealthiest.

 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L), Apple CEO Tim Cook (C), and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (R) attend services as part of Inauguration ceremonies at St. John's Church on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death

January 20, 2025

Kathy Kelly

Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference announced the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.

 

 President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence look on at the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on MLK day in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2020. NICHOLAS KAMM /AFP via Getty Images

LIVE BLOG: Abu Obeida: The Sacrifices and Blood of Our People Will Not Be in Vain – Day 471

January 19, 2025

 Killed             Wounded          Missing

46,876              110,642            11.000

After 471 days of relentless massacres of innocent Palestinians by Israel, alongside legendary steadfastness and resistance, a ceasefire in Gaza officially begins.

Israel, however, has already violated the agreement by bombing targets across the Gaza Strip and killing several Palestinians.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 46,876 Palestinians have been killed, and 110,642 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7, 2023.

 

 Heroic medical staff stand tall alongside the police force outside the Maamadani Hospital. (Photo: via QNN)

Gaza Cease-Fire Takes Effect After Deadly Three-Hour Delay

January 19, 2025

Jessica Corbett

Israeli forces killed at least 19 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Sunday morning during a three-hour delay in implementing a cease-fire and hostage-release deal that Israel's Cabinet finally approved the previous day.

  

Palestinians walk through the remnants of the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip as a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel begins on January 19, 2025. (Photo: Karam Hassan/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza to take effect on Sunday morning

January 18, 2025

The ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas will take effect at 08:30am (06:30 GMT) on Sunday, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced in a post on X.

 

Russia-Iran security pact ‘epochal’ – Middle East expert

January 18, 2025

Moscow and Tehran have taken their cooperation to the level of strategic partnership with a “truly epochal” pact, Farhad Ibrahimov, a Middle East expert at the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club, told RT on Friday.

‘Complete surrender’: How gaza defeated Israel and what it means—analysis

January 17, 2025

Ramzy Baroud

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir accused the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu of “a complete surrender to Hamas,” calling the Gaza ceasefire agreement a “surrender deal.”

 

 Hamada Shaqoura, a Palestinian man who used to be a food blogger, distributes food to children after cooking a meal for displaced people, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 16, 2025. BASHAR TALEB / AFP via Getty Images

Dozens of Columbia University law faculty demand inquiry into professor's 'termination'

January 17, 2025

Over 45 Columbia Law School professors have signed a letter calling for a Columbia University Senate inquiry into the controversial departure of their colleague Katherine Franke, marking an escalation in the dispute over academic freedom and protest rights on campuses.

 

 'Persecution': Outpouring of anger after 'termination' of pro-Palestine Columbia professor

Want to defend immigrant workers in your contract? Here are some suggestions.

January 17, 2025

Natascha Elena Uhlmann and Sarah Lazare

The following language was compiled from a series of unions and labor activists. It is intended as a resource for workers looking to include pro-immigrant provisions in their collective bargaining agreements.

 

 Unionized teachers with ASPIRA charter school network rally outside an ASPIRA high school to convince the company's management to come to terms on a contract on March 9, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Fatal Despair of Exile: An Iran they could neither Live in nor Leave Behind

January 17, 2025

Fariba Amini

Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams

to my reality: not dust and not fire. What

will I do without roses from Samarkand? What

will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar

stones? Our weight has become light like our houses

in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange

creatures in the clouds … and we are now loosened

from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what

will we do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water?   — Mahmoud Darwish

 

Israeli Attacks Kill 70+ as Netanyahu Delays Cabinet Vote on Cease-Fire Deal

January 16, 2025

Jake Johnson

Israeli attacks have reportedly killed more than 70 people in the Gaza Strip in the hours since a multiphase cease-fire agreement was announced Wednesday, a deal that sparked cautious hope for an end to a 15-month U.S.-backed assault that has decimated the Palestinian enclave and created one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in modern history.

 

 Relatives of a journalist killed by an Israeli drone attack carry his shrouded body in Khan Younis, Gaza on January 16, 2025. (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Fatal Effort to Dismantle the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees

January 16, 2025

Dan Steinbock

New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Early in the year, State Department officials briefed Joel Rayburn from the Trump transition team there could be a humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza when a new Israeli law barring contact with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians takes effect at the end of the month.

The Gaza ceasefire will not cure the wounds of genocide

January 15, 2025

Roaa Shamallakh

Now that a ceasefire has been agreed to in Gaza, the bombs will stop falling, and the world will breathe a sigh of relief. There will be celebrations of peace, even if temporary, nations will pat themselves on the back, and the media will move on to the next trending crisis. Yet, for those of us who survived, the war hasn’t ended—it has merely transformed. 

 

Genocide

Do we call it genocide, land-grab, racism, or political maneuver? Whatever of these or similar terms we use, such action was the essence of the inception of a country called the United States of America. What the US government is doing in Palestine, aiding the Zionist government in destroying Palestinian communities, is nothing but repeating what culminated the inception of this country. The United States of America was established by European settlers on the graves of indigenous people. It is important to read the history of the United States, especially from the time when white European settles invaded this land.

What do we know about a Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal in Gaza?

January 15, 2025

The Palestinian group Hamas has agreed to a ceasefire deal with Israel after more than 460 days of a war that has devastated Gaza.

 

 Israel has decimated Gaza during its war on the Palestinian enclave [Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP]