By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | October 15, 2026

Yemeni missiles fired at Saudi Arabia are destroying oil facilities and airports across the country – drawing particular international outrage was the ballistic missile attack on Terminal 3 of King Khalid Intl. Airport, an attack that killed 13 and left another 307 injured. As is usually the case, the corporate media starts the clock where it chooses instead of looking at the context, a similar tactic that is used when reporting on Palestine.

On October 10, a missile fired by the Yemeni missile units of Sana’a’s Ansarallah-led government caused a mass casualty event at Riyadh’s main international airport. It then drew broad condemnation from governments around the world, grabbing headlines across the corporate media.

The Saudi-led coalition’s spokesman, Maj Gen Turki al-Maliki, then called the attack a “full-fledged war crime” and said that striking a civilian airport was a “cowardly terrorist attack”. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also weighed in and expressed his shock at what he called a violation of international law, urging the attacks to stop.

However, Guterres and various government officials never commented on Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes against Sana’a Intl. Airport on July 13, which broke the years-long ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Nor did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who himself ordered airstrikes on Sana’a Intl. Airport in the Yemeni Capital of Sana’a last year.

Unpacking The Lies and Hypocrisy

While the Saudi leadership has attacked its airports to generate international sympathy, it has been launching airstrikes on Yemeni airports for over a decade.

On the first day of Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen, on the 26th of March in 2015, airstrikes struck both Sana’a Intl. Airport and the neighboring Bani Hawat residential neighborhood, killing around 34 civilians, including children. Since then, the Saudi air force has carried out over 227 strikes targeting Yemeni airports.

The breakdown of the ceasefire, which was achieved through UN mediation back in 2022, came as a result of Saudi Arabia bombing the Yemeni Capital City’s main airport, in a bid to stop an Iranian civilian airliner from landing there. Riyadh has imposed a siege on Yemen – by land, air and sea – since 2015, even inflicting a man-made famine on the country.

Saudi Arabia is responsible for killing between 9,000 and 18,000 civilians inside Yemen. Schools, mosques, weddings, hospitals, and even funerals have been struck by the Saudi air force. In total, around 400,000 people have been killed as a result of the Saudi-led war on the country.

However, the international media coverage robs current events of both the historical and current context. Take, for example, the following headline published by Reuters, which is held up as the gold standard of Western journalism:

“Houthis fire missiles at Saudi Arabia, breaking years of calm,” read the headline. However, the story they were covering, admitted through their use of the video of Saudi Arabia’s strikes on Sana’a Intl. Airport, painted Yemen as the aggressor.

In reality, no political entity called the “Houthis” exists; the name of the Party that the corporate media refuses to correctly name is Ansarallah, which heads the government that rules over the majority of the Yemeni population and is based in the nation’s Capital City. Its opposition is called the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), which was officially formed in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, back in 2022. The PLC is a proxy of the Saudi government, and its leaders are all based inside Saudi territory, not Yemen.

The next obvious point to note here is that Yemen’s Armed Forces were responding with missile fire towards Saudi Arabia; they were not the aggressor. In retaliation for Riyadh’s decision to continue violently imposing its blockade on the country, it also declared a blockade on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports.

To specifically address the point about the attacks on King Khalid Intl. Airport, it is important to note why this happened and that the Saudi authorities knew the dangers. In early October, Saudi Arabia conducted 1,000 airstrikes on Yemen, using 100 aircraft, while the forces back in Yemen attempted to launch a counter-offensive on the ground.

The Ansarallah-led government’s Armed Forces then announced, in response to the large-scale assault, that they would be imposing a no-fly zone over Saudi airspace. What proceeded to happen was a number of missile attacks on airports in order to shut them down; at first, these attacks caused no known casualties and were to serve as a warning.

As Saudi Arabia continued its airstrikes across Yemeni territory, the stakes were then raised and Riyadh’s main airport became the target. Missiles were at first fired into targets at the airport as a warning to close it down. The Saudi authorities ignored these warnings. On October 8, Yemeni missiles then struck aircraft while they were grounded at King Khalid International, which destroyed one commercial airliner, damaged two others, and killed 3 people.

Despite this attack and clear warnings to close the airport, the Saudis insisted upon keeping it open. On October 10, then came the mass casualty event that inflicted 13 fatalities along with hundreds of injuries amongst civilians.

Targeting a civilian airport is indeed a violation of international law. Yet, when Israel and Saudi Arabia bomb Yemeni airports, there is no outcry. Which brings us to the heart of this issue: why should it be expected that Ansarallah respect international law in this respect when there is no consequence for Saudi Arabia, Israel, or the United States, for that matter?

Riyadh is currently bombing targets throughout Yemen, using Israeli military intelligence support to do so. Meaning that the Saudis are being backed by a State that is committing genocide. On the other hand, the only State in the Arab World that invoked the Genocide Convention, imposing a blockade and firing munitions directly at Israel, was the Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a.

According to Western leaders, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Ansarallah is a terrorist organization. So why then did Saudi Arabia not close its airport as a precautionary measure, in order to protect civilians following the direct strikes on it and threats to go further? Does Riyadh not have the responsibility to protect civilian passengers?

Why is bombing a Saudi AirPort a terrorist act, but bombing Yemeni AirPorts hundreds of times is not even an issue capable of grabbing a headline? How can anyone expect international law to be respected, when the ones who claim to champion it the most selectively use it only when it favors them? These are simply common sense questions.

What Yemen is now doing is imposing the exact same reality on Saudi Arabia, as has been imposed upon it for over a decade. Only now, when the Israeli-backed Western ally is getting hit, is anyone even noticing.

In so many ways, the predicament of Yemen is like the situation in Palestine. Nobody batted an eye at the conditions in Gaza until the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. Then the media framed the Palestinians as the aggressors.

The corporate media spoke of a “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry” in order to downplay the civilian death toll; similarly, in Yemen, they report on a “Houthi-run Yemeni Health Ministry”. Understanding the attacks on Saudi Arabia is simple if the context is applied. Either a negotiated settlement is to be reached to end this war, or it will continue until regime change on one side occurs.

---

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

Al Mayadeen| October 15, 2026

Irish novelist Sally Rooney has agreed to the withdrawal of her books from the UK market after her support for Palestine Action created legal obstacles to the payment of royalties under British terrorism legislation.

Rooney, the bestselling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, said her publisher, Faber, had concluded that continuing to distribute her work in the UK could expose those involved to criminal liability. The decision was made with her agreement following consultations over the legal implications.

Palestine Action was designated a “terrorist organization” by the UK government in July 2025. The following month, Rooney publicly declared that she intended to continue supporting the group and direct proceeds from her book sales towards it. The organization remains legal in the Republic of Ireland, where Rooney is based.

Rooney was prepared to accept the consequences

In a statement to The Guardian, Rooney explained that her position had placed the publication of her work in Britain at risk.

She said that after expressing her intention to support Palestine Action, fulfilling contracts to publish her books in the UK could constitute a serious criminal offence. Rooney added that she had been transparent about her convictions and was prepared to accept the consequences.

The novelist had previously cancelled a planned UK visit to collect an award over concerns that she could face arrest because of her stated support for the banned group.

Terrorism legislation threatens publishing arrangements

Rooney warned in a statement supporting the legal challenge against the ban that the proscription could prevent her existing books from remaining available in British shops and block the publication of future titles in the country. Her submission to the High Court raised concerns about the consequences for freedom of expression.

The restrictions also extend to royalties from television adaptations of her work. Last year, Rooney said the independent producer behind the BBC adaptations of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends” had advised her that paying her could breach terrorism legislation if it knew or suspected she would use the money to finance Palestine Action. Both series aired before the group was banned.

Section 15 of the UK’s Terrorism Act criminalizes providing money or other property when a person knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that it may be used for terrorist purposes. A conviction can carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

Faber, which publishes Rooney in the UK and Ireland, said the legislation had left it unable to transfer earnings from British sales to the author.

The publisher said selling a writer’s work without being able to pay them was unacceptable. It confirmed that, with Rooney’s full agreement, it would stop supplying her books in Britain in every format, while continuing to publish and sell her work in other markets.

Bestselling novels face uncertain future in Britain

Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim and achieved substantial commercial success. She has been hailed as a voice of her generation.

“Normal People” has sold more than one million copies in the UK, while “Conversations With Friends” and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” have each exceeded 500,000 sales.

The BBC adaptations also attracted large audiences. “Normal People” accumulated 62.7 million views, making it the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020.

Demand was likely to continue

Despite the withdrawal decision, copies of Rooney’s books remained available in central London on Wednesday afternoon. Waterstones said retailers could continue selling copies already in stock.

Booksellers also indicated that they intended to keep offering the novels while existing supplies lasted.

Gian Carlo, a bookseller at Henry Pordes Books, said the shop could sell its copies without generating royalties for Rooney. He added that he understood her position.

At London Review Bookshop, bookseller John Clegg said he had ordered additional copies after learning of the development. He said demand was likely to continue, although the shop would no longer be able to replenish its stock through Faber. Clegg also criticized the legislation and said he hoped the case would encourage the Home Office to reconsider it.

Thousands arrested following Palestine Action ban

The dispute comes amid a wider legal battle over the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action.

More than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in the UK since the ban took effect in July 2025 on suspicion of supporting the organization. Many arrests involved people holding placards bearing the message: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

Approximately 2,500 people have been charged. However, trials have not proceeded while the legal challenge to the proscription remains unresolved. The case is scheduled to reach the Supreme Court next month.

Effect of the ban on freedom of expression

Most arrests and charges have involved Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of six months.

Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action leading the legal challenge, said Rooney’s inability to publish her work in Britain demonstrated the effect of the ban on freedom of expression.

Ammori said Rooney had maintained her position despite the personal and professional consequences. She argued that the author’s books should remain widely available rather than disappear from British shelves because of her refusal to abandon her support for Palestinians.

She added that writers should not have to choose between their political convictions and their ability to publish their work.

By Muhammad Hamid ad-Din – New Eastern Outlook – October 15, 2026

The Gaza Ceasefire Is Falling Apart. And So Is the American Plan to Expand the Abraham Accords.

The Gaza Ceasefire That Is Killing Palestinians

The ceasefire in Gaza, which took effect on October 10, 2025, was supposed to stop a two-year war. By then, according to Palestinian authorities, more than 72,000 Palestinians had been killed. A year after the document was signed, the picture was no more peaceful. According to Palestinian sources, from the start of the ceasefire to October 5, 2026, Israeli forces killed 1,460 Palestinians and wounded 5,116. By September 2026, Gaza authorities reported 5,147 violations of the agreement, 1,421 dead, and the destruction of more than 201,000 buildings.

The second phase of negotiations—the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the enclave and the disarmament of Palestinian factions—stalled almost immediately. In April 2026, American-Egyptian talks in Cairo ended “without tangible progress.” Hamas links disarmament to the end of the occupation. Israel demands disarmament as a precondition for any further step. Critics say the demand for disarmament has become a pretext for maintaining control over the enclave and continuing violations. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry put it bluntly: the occupation government “does not view peace as a goal, but as an obstacle.”

Diktat Instead of Diplomacy

Against this backdrop, the Trump administration is forcing the expansion of the Abraham Accords. In May 2026, the U.S. president publicly demanded that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey join the accords. He called it “mandatory”: “After all the work done by the United States to put this complex puzzle together, it must be mandatory for all these countries to at least simultaneously sign the Abraham Accords.” Pakistan publicly refused. The others remained silent.

Washington’s main interest is Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said at the White House in November 2025: “We want to be part of the Abraham Accords. But we also want to be sure that we secure a clear path to a two-state solution.” Later, Riyadh repeated: normalization is impossible without a “credible, irreversible, and time-bound path” to a Palestinian state. The Israeli government rejects this prospect. American pressure goes beyond diplomacy: Trump tied the Abraham Accords to negotiations to end the war with Iran, effectively making normalization a condition for peace. According to Axios, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan were “caught by surprise.”

Mutual Influence: Gaza as Leverage and as an Obstacle

Gaza and the reshaping of alliances are directly connected. The Palestinian question became leverage in Arab states’ bargaining with Washington. For Saudi Arabia, normalization with Israel without movement toward a Palestinian state is politically toxic. Riyadh is using the fragile ceasefire to postpone an unpopular step. Qatar, a key mediator, took an equally tough position. Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majid al-Ansari said: “If the Palestinian question remains unresolved, joining the Abraham Accords is impossible.” According to him, the absence of a peace process for Palestinians means the absence of stability in the region. Doha, which has given refuge to Hamas’s political leadership and plays a central role in the talks, cannot move toward normalization without losing face.

There is also a reverse dependency. The Trump administration, seeking to expand the Abraham Accords, pressured Israel to secure a ceasefire: normalization without a ceasefire would have been impossible. But the second phase depends on whether Washington is willing to pressure Israel, not just Arab capitals.

Bombs Instead of Peace

The result of U.S. and Israeli policy looks increasingly contradictory. Three years of war, more than 74,250 dead Palestinians, and 1,460 killed after the ceasefire was signed are not just a humanitarian catastrophe. They are a verdict on America’s strategy in the Middle East. Trump tried to push through the expansion of the Abraham Accords by linking unrelated issues: normalization with Israel, a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, and ending the war with Iran. In July 2026, he stated directly that a U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear agreement “will depend entirely on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords.” Saudi Arabia responded in May 2026: “There will be no normalization without a clear and final path to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.” As the custodian of the two holy mosques, the kingdom cannot afford to do otherwise. Qatar refused. Pakistan publicly rejected it. Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey remained silent.

Criticism of Washington goes far beyond diplomatic missteps. The U.S. continues to supply Israel with weapons despite ceasefire violations. In September 2026, the Trump administration proposed a $2.8 billion deal to sell Israel 40,000 heavy bombs, including 20,000 MK-84s and 20,000 BLU-117s. Senator Chris Van Hollen vowed to block the transfer: “Trump is sending $2.8 billion worth of bombs, paid for by you, the American taxpayers, to a government led by a wanted war criminal.” Congressman Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also vetoed it: “The Trump administration has not provided sufficient assurances that these weapons will be used in accordance with American and international law. Therefore, I will not approve this sale.” Amnesty International urged Congress to block the deliveries, saying the U.S. risks becoming complicit in serious violations of international law, including genocide. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani accused Washington of “complicity with every arms shipment” to Tel Aviv.

What Next: The Results of U.S. and Israeli Policy Against the Arab Region

Washington’s paradox is that it wants to expand the Abraham Accords but continues to support the Israeli occupation, which makes normalization politically impossible for Arab states. The U.S. has blocked UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions for the third time in a row, undermining its role as a “reliable mediator.” Public opinion in the Arab world is sharply opposed to normalization. Polls show that 89% of Moroccans oppose recognizing Israel. Analysts warn that for most of the named states, the political price of signing the accords will be prohibitive. The war in Gaza has strengthened this sentiment, not weakened it.

The main question is whether the ceasefire will hold. If the second phase of negotiations does not start and the death toll continues to rise, expansion of the Abraham Accords will remain an unattainable dream. Saudi Arabia will wait. Qatar will mediate. The UAE will increase oil production. Trump will face a choice: keep pressuring Arab capitals or admit that without a real Palestinian state, the accords will remain a facade. While Washington supplies bombs and Tel Aviv keeps killing, talk of peace looks like a cynical game in which Palestinians are not subjects but a bargaining chip.

---

Muhammad Hamid ad-Din is a well-known Palestinian journalist.

Follow new articles on our Telegram channel.

The Cradle | October 15, 2026

An Israeli digital advertising agency helped run an espionage campaign using a vast network of online ads to track targets and hack their devices, Reuters reported on 15 October, citing two research groups.

Reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant document how the Israeli advertising agency Discover-Tech placed millions of ads online each day for ordinary products such as phones or earpods.

Discover-Tech placed the ads using the advertising services of Google, Comcast, Yandex, and other search engines.

The Israeli ad agency could identify and track internet users who visited websites or used apps with the malicious ads, and at times obtained phone numbers from smartphone users.

Clicking on the ads was not required to allow users to be tracked.

Some ads were used to plant spyware from another Israeli firm, Candiru, ​on users’ devices.

Jerome Dangu of Confiant said Discover-Tech placed at least 10 million online ads per day, affecting more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.

“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise devices of journalists and executives at the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera.

Unidentified media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe were also targeted.

Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious Israeli ads targeted officials at the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Discover-Tech ads also helped to surveil the populations of entire regions, most notably the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab also said the malicious ads were directed at officials in the UN, NATO, the European ⁠Commission, as well as more than a dozen governments.

The ads also helped to track employees and executives of chip-related firms such as Nvidia, SanDisk, Broadcom, and Micron.

As a result of the Confiant and Citizen Lab investigations, Google said it has removed Discover-Tech from its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”

IAB Europe, an association for digital marketing and advertising on the continent, has now suspended Discover-Tech from ​its list of globally approved vendors.

Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax also removed Discover-Tech ​from its platform.

Yandex did not respond to Reuters’‘ requests for comment.

Israel has a well-documented history of using private technology companies for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and cyberespionage.

Some of these companies have close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence services, particularly Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit.

Truths about Israel

ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance | October 13, 2026

What Israel has done, is doing, to Gaza has not sprung ex nihilo from October 7.

Genocide is not a situational counter-response to aggression. It’s a coming-out event of sorts.

Differently put: There are no legitimate antecedents to genocide. Genocide is not a “war crime” to which a set of mitigating or exculpating legal defenses can attach.

Genocide is a stand-alone indefensible crime—“the blackest of all crimes”—for which there are no extenuating circumstances and to which no traditional legal defenses attach.

Ethnocide, depopulation, domicide and daily mass murder can never be explained away or exculpated using argument from law, ethics or history.

In essence, talk to the hand about October 7, 2023; because the face isn’t listening. Just as there are no legal or moral extenuating circumstances for genocide, so it is that there are no historical defenses for this “blackest of all crimes,” for genocide.

To assert that you are just, justified or even coherent as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified—this is to embody a most grotesque incoherence and contradiction.

At minimum, Israel deserves—and has yet to receive—the unanimous revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

Reality is truth, past and present. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. From the facts of this Twenty-First Century Genocide; certain truths immemorial and irrefutable that traverse time have emerged. Truths about Israel.

Through Gaza, the world has come to know Israel’s ways with the Palestinians, with their lands and homesteads—down to what Israeli terrorists habitually do to the intimate bits-and-bobs that make up a household.

Through Gaza, we have come to know Israel’s ways across the Levant and beyond. They unground and salt the earth forever. They uproot ancient communities and their olive groves. For fun. They deform babies and the baby faces of children for life.

The reality on the ground is of genocide ongoing, of daily extermination. In aggregate, a “child has been killed in Gaza every 71 minutes for three years.” This extermination campaign is not only of children—the one segment of Palestinian society which American conservatives are comfortable defending—but of adults, young and old: admirable, valuable adults. Adult lives matter, yes?

Hasbara and official myth-history aside, because of Gaza and the Ghazzawi you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel.

Because of the Palestinians of Gaza, the living, the martyred and those who still resist; the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

To arrive at that truth about Israel, you don’t have to know much about the genesis of the so-called “conflict” between Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine. I hazard that you need to know hardly a thing about this history to arrive at the truth about the lived reality of Palestinians.

You are what you do.

We know the Real Israel through the actions of real Israelis in Gaza. We know how Israel operates and how a preponderance of its people thinks. These realizations came out of the Gaza genocide, which has shown the world in cruel relief how Israel acts and, by extension, what Israel is.

Since October of 2023, the world knows in detail what the untouchable Israel—state and civil society—has done and continues to do to the Strip, to the West Bank and in South Lebanon.

But what have the Ghazzawi, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal. In a manner, Palestine and the Palestinians have won.

Gaza has exposed Israel for the morally and militarily corrupt force that it is. The Genocide of Gaza has, very plainly, invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.

When you are in the writhing coils of a boa constrictor; it is small comfort to know, as Palestinians have always known, that, while outwardly captive, they are, nevertheless, truly liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West.

So, they need to know, too, that they have shown good people around the world the way. For once and for all, Israel’s televised genocide had corroborated the lived reality of the Palestinians; their reasons for rage and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians had been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their lived reality has been irrefutably affirmed, and universally so.

“It’s complicated,” Israel’s supporters keep countering. “Study up before you open your mouth.” The opposite is true. It’s absurdly simple.

A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion.

Israel has had the nerve to play its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house: to the world.

Most galling of all: In the course of this very public genocide, Israel has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to commit genocide.

Think about it:

To deny ongoing, prime-time livestreamed genocidal action at the very same time that you are committing these actions, and then to hound and hurt anyone who dares notice: This is a performative contradiction in a category all of its own, like no other.

Caught in the protracted act of genocide, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to cavalierly claim for itself and be granted the right to keep killing and deceiving without being considered and treated as a killer and con-artist.

In essence, Israel exists among nations us as a privileged, protected, well-funded aberration, carrying out unspeakable evil with universal blessings and absolution.

I belabor the most galling reality, as it really gets me: At the same time that Israel and its cringing Western admirers have killed and deceived; they have instructed The World to deny Israel’s genocide, then deny Israel’s deception about its genocide, and finally to justify both or fear defenestration, cancellation, banishment, arrest and worse.

To no avail. Human action is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted; they’ve revealed themselves. They’ve been exposed.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). As Matthew 7:20 reads, “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

With the exception of the flint-hearted ruling political elites—the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred the hearts of ordinary people across the world. A collective conscience developed around Palestine. Minds not AI became engaged. They said, “We see you, Israel. We revile you. We reject you.”

This is what October 7 will forever mark and signify: The triumph of the Palestinians over the alternate reality mass-marketed to the World by Israel and our ruling elites.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, October 12
LewRockwell.com, October 13

*******

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide.

By Harrison Berger – Responsible Statecraft – October 13, 2026

In August, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) publicly took credit for shaping “multiple provisions” now in this year’s defense policy bill, stating that many were “impacted by prior JINSA policy recommendations,” including “proposals to strengthen U.S.-Israel defense industrial base integration” and “renew pre-existing joint U.S.-Israel programs.”

Among the provisions JINSA takes credit for is the controversial Section 219. In the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), this section mandates the creation of a single executive agent tasked with “synchronizing cooperative efforts” between the U.S. and Israel across nine basket categories, including AI, quantum technology, biotechnology, and virtually every category of weapons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has argued that such provisions would transition the U.S.-Israel security relationship from aid to partnership. But pro-Israel advocates have emphasized the leverage it would provide over Washington’s military policy.

Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, appeared to reference this provision in an article arguing that the U.S. and Israel must “deepen their military, technological, intelligence and economic integration to such an extent that inflicting financial harm on Israel would also carry a significant cost for Washington.”

Other initiatives JINSA has advocated for likewise read like an Israeli government wishlist. They include a pending provision to “extend the existing War Reserve Stockpile Authority for Israel,” which provides a secretive and high-speed pathway for funneling weapons to Israel, as well as Abraham Accords provisions including “Improvements to Air and Missile Defense Acquisition” and a “United States-Abraham Accords Defense Cooperation Initiative.”

The policy wins JINSA is trumpeting are a result of its strong foothold within the military-industrial complex, and are perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of the pro-Israel lobby. The group says it achieves these goals “by conducting both educational programs that build ties among American, Israeli and other Middle Eastern partner military leaders, along with in-depth research and actionable recommendations to influence U.S. policy.” JINSA’s “Our People” webpage includes a long roster of retired U.S. military officials.

One of JINSA’s most important programs, which has existed for more than four decades, is its “Generals and Admirals Program.” The initiative involves flying recently retired U.S. military officials to Israel. Many of the trip’s participants were already sitting on defense-industry boards when they went, while others joined soon afterward. At least 55 of the 83 alumni from the 2019–2026 G&A program cohorts (about 66%) have held or currently hold positions in the defense industry spanning board seats, executive jobs or advisory roles at defense contractors and defense-tech firms, or posts at defense-focused investment funds, consultancies and lobbying shops.

JINSA hopes that, when these former military officials return from Israel, they will use their credentials and defense industry power to become Israel’s advocates.

JINSA describes the program, founded in 1981, as “designed to ensure that the delegation is well briefed on the security concerns of Israel, as well as the key role Israel plays as a friend and ally of the United States.” The Helmsley Charitable Trust, which provided a 13 month grant for the program in 2017 worth $237,846, similarly says the purpose of the program is in part for participants to “return home to share publicly what they learned.”

The itinerary for the Generals and Admirals program includes meetings with Israel’s prime minister, defense minister, IDF chief of staff and the Director of Mossad. According to JINSA, after completing the program, “participants often engage on important policy initiatives through JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy that strengthen…the U.S.-Israel security relationship.” JINSA CEO Michael Makovsky highlighted the program’s influence in 2014, calling U.S. generals and admirals “America’s most admired leaders, who remain very influential even after retirement.”

The JINSA program trains retired military leaders, many of whom go on to work in the defense industry, to be advocates for Israeli interests, both in their public writing and in their work behind the scenes.

A 2023 Quincy Institute report found that 80% of four-star officers who retired between June 2018 and July 2023 went on to work for the defense industry. Of the 32 officers tracked in the report, nine appear on JINSA’s participant lists, and seven of those nine retired officers hold industry lobbying or defense-tech roles. Gen. Joseph Dunford, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined Lockheed Martin’s board five months after leaving the military and went on JINSA’s Israel junket the following year, 2021. Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the former NSA director and head of U.S. Cyber Command, retired in 2018, became a senior adviser at the lobbying and public relations firm Brunswick Group in 2019 and went on the JINSA trip in 2021.

Gen. Hawk Carlisle participated in the 2019 delegation while serving as president and CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association, the war lobby’s leading trade group, and has served on the board of the U.S. subsidiary of Israel’s largest defense contractor, Elbit Systems of America, which was renamed Twenty-Six Defense in September. Some participants, such as retired Gen. Robert Magnus and Gen. Duncan McNabb, joined the board of Elbit America after their JINSA trips.

Embedded within the highest levels of the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, JINSA’s roster of retired generals and admirals often use their credentials to advocate for pro-Israel policy in Washington.

In 2010, when then-head of U.S. Central Command Gen. David Petraeus testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Israel-Palestine conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” which is used to “mobilize support” for various militant groups in the region, JINSA’s G&A participants rushed to Israel’s defense. Responding to Petraeus, 30 ex-military leaders associated with the program put out an ad claiming that “a strong, secure Israel is an asset,” labeling the country, which has been deemed an apartheid state by numerous human rights groups, as “a democracy” that “shares our commitment to freedom, personal liberty and rule of law.”

In May 2018, a JINSA task force of retired senior officers chaired by Adm. James Stavridis released “Atlas Supported,” urging Washington to elevate Israel to “a top-tier ally” and invest jointly in next-generation military technology — the latter now a central purpose of Section 219. JINSA says the report was also the first to recommend moving Israel from the U.S. European Command to U.S. Central Command, which Trump then ordered on January 15, 2021. JINSA celebrated the fifth anniversary of Israel’s shift into CENTCOM this January by noting that the “Wall Street Journal recognized” it as “the only organization promoting this move,” and by featuring glowing tributes from JINSA G&A participants.

JINSA’s roster of retired military officials was once again mobilized in October 2026 to deny the findings of a trifecta of human rights groups and the U.N. that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, praising what it called a “pattern of law-abiding IDF conduct in Gaza.”

JINSA’s delegates routinely appear on cable news, often without disclosures of their affiliation with the pro-Israel lobby group: Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who commanded CENTCOM from 2019 to 2022 and traveled with JINSA’s 2023 delegation, and became a “distinguished fellow” at JINSA in 2024, is now a CBS News contributor. In July, McKenzie appeared on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, who introduced McKenzie as a retired CENTCOM commander but omitted his fellowship with JINSA. In that appearance, McKenzie recommended Washington consider seizing Kharg Island. Ret. Vice Admiral Robert Harward, a member of JINSA’s “Iran Policy Project,” frequently appears on Fox News too, though his affiliation is generally disclosed.

One of the group’s most consequential efforts was to push the Trump administration to start a war with Iran, with a group of JINSA-aligned military leaders writing a March 2025 letter arguing that “U.S. support for Israeli action to prevent a nuclear Iran should be a top priority,” adding that “time is running out to stop its march to the bomb.” Sixty-six of the 79 signers of that letter appear on JINSA’s Generals and Admirals participant lists. Members of JINSA’s roster of retired military officials subsequently wrote open letters of support for the 12-Day War and the current months-long Iran War.

---

Harrison Berger is an independent journalist who has contributed to Drop Site News, The American Conservative, and The Nation. Previously, he was a researcher and producer for System Update with Glenn Greenwald. His work focuses on civil liberties and U.S. foreign policy. He holds a BA in Political Science and Russian Studies from Union College (NY).

By Freddie Ponton – 21st Century Wire – October 13, 2026

Along Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor, Israeli soldiers concealed themselves inside Palestinian homes and established invisible kill zones. Civilians, including children, were shot for approaching or crossing unmarked boundaries. Military records then counted the dead as terrorists “eliminated.”

The Netzarim Corridor runs across central Gaza immediately south of Gaza City, from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean. Israeli forces established it during their ground invasion, dividing northern Gaza from the rest of the territory. They widened the zone by demolishing surrounding neighbourhoods and building military bases, fortified positions and observation posts.

It was here, amid the civilian communities bordering this military corridor, that Israeli soldiers operated concealed positions inside Palestinian homes. The buildings looked abandoned or ordinary from outside, and Palestinians approaching them could not see the troops or the imaginary boundaries soldiers had drawn around their positions. Crossing one of those invisible lines could mean death.

Israeli soldiers had a name for occupying a Palestinian home and turning it into a concealed military position. Almenat Kash, Hebrew for “Straw Widow.”

Inside the Straw Widow

Straw Widow is a longstanding Israeli military tactic in which soldiers seize a Palestinian home and turn it into an observation post, firing position or ambush site. Families can be confined to one room as troops occupy the rest of the building, restrict contact with the outside and prepare positions from which they can watch or fire.

A reservist who spent about 250 days in Gaza told Der Spiegel how his unit used the tactic in areas that had not been evacuated. Palestinians continued moving through the surrounding streets with no warning that soldiers were hidden nearby. When they approached, the troops attacked them. Those who stepped forward to help were often attacked too.

“Within minutes, five, six or seven people are killed,” he said.

The military report would record seven terrorists eliminated.

“But no,” the soldier said. “It’s just seven people who crossed an intersection.”

The report did more than conceal how they died. It stripped the dead of their civilian identity and turned their deaths into proof of military success. “We don’t kill, we eliminate,” the reservist explained. “That’s how we’ve always put it.”

Another reservist described occupying a house while serving with Division 252 along the Netzarim Corridor. It belonged to displaced Palestinians and stood on the edge of an inhabited neighbourhood. Around their position, the soldiers established a boundary that Palestinians could not see.

VIDEO: An Israeli reservist describes arbitrary killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor. (Source: Sky News)

The Palestinians were somehow expected to know where it was.

“There’s an imaginary line that they tell us all the Gazan people know,” the soldier said. “But how can they know?”

He recalled one man crossing the boundary and being shot. Another approached the body and was detained. Hours later, the order changed again. Anyone crossing the invisible line was to be shot on sight.

The person approaching might be “a teenager riding his bicycle.” The command made no distinction. “Everyone that comes inside needs to die.”

Breaking the Silence collected similar accounts of lethal boundaries. One captain described people crossing a line as “sentenced to death.” Another reservist described the order in three words, “Adult, male, kill.”

Everyone Became a Terrorist

A Division 252 soldier recalled how his unit opened fire after guards spotted someone approaching from the south. They poured dozens of bullets into him and kept shooting at his body, some laughing as they fired. Only when the troops approached did they discover they had killed a boy of about 16.

The soldiers photographed the body and took the boy’s telephone, which an intelligence officer collected. Hours later, they were told he was not a Hamas operative. By that evening, however, the battalion commander was congratulating them for killing a terrorist and saying he hoped they would kill ten more the following day. A soldier who protested that the boy had been unarmed and looked like a civilian was shouted down. The commander’s answer left no room for what they had discovered. Anyone crossing the line was a terrorist. No exceptions. No civilians.

No independently verified death toll exists for the Netzarim Corridor. The Israeli military claimed that Division 252 had killed more than 200 militants there, but soldiers who served in the corridor dismantled that account from within. An officer in the division’s command said the Israeli military’s own intelligence associated only ten of the dead with Hamas. Other soldiers described how civilians and children were shot for crossing invisible lines, then entered into the count as terrorists.

Even those ten were designated by Israel rather than an independent investigation, and an alleged association with Hamas would not establish that they were taking part in hostilities when killed. The claim of more than 200 militants killed instead reveals the gulf between the military’s public account and its soldiers’ testimony. Palestinians shot inside the corridor became terrorists on paper, their deaths repackaged as military success.

The Der Spiegel reservist described the same practice inside his brigade, which he said killed between 160 and 170 people over roughly 80 days during which there had been no fighting or Hamas attacks. Only one of the dead was suspected of carrying a weapon, though no soldier had actually seen one. He had been holding an object at night about 500 metres north of the corridor and, according to the reservist, posed no immediate threat. His body was never examined, yet he was recorded as a terrorist along with everyone else the brigade had killed.

That figure may overlap with the military’s claim of more than 200 and cannot be added to it. The accounts converge on how the dead were classified. Palestinians were killed without being identified as combatants, then recorded as terrorists after death.

The Silence Breaks

Der Spiegel interviewed ten Israelis who had served inside Gaza, operated drones remotely or selected targets for airstrikes. Breaking the Silence helped the reporters contact some of them. Nine remained anonymous because they feared the consequences of identification, while most said they would refuse to serve in Gaza again. The magazine considered their accounts credible after cross-checking them against other testimony and independently verifiable information.

Yuval Green, the only interviewee who spoke under his own name, served as a medic with the 55th Paratroopers Brigade for 51 days in Khan Younis before refusing further deployment. He described refusing an order to burn a Palestinian house after his commander failed to provide a convincing military justification. His account joins the wider body of soldier testimony describing unarmed Palestinians being killed, homes destroyed without military necessity and civilian deaths recorded as militant casualties. Breaking the Silence documented a similar practice along Gaza’s border perimeter. An Armoured Corps captain serving in southern Gaza described soldiers drawing a line beyond which everyone became a suspect, while admitting he did not know whether Palestinians knew where it was.

DOCUMENT: The Perimeter (2025) documents live-fire enforcement of boundaries Palestinians may not have known existed.(Source: breakingthesilence.org)

The same practices surfaced across units and military roles, extending beyond the conduct of any one soldier. Soldiers speaking at different times described hidden posts, unmarked boundaries, shoot-to-kill orders and the automatic conversion of the dead into terrorists. Some admitted participating. Others stood guard while it happened. Their decision to speak does not erase what they did, but it has broken through the military language that concealed it.

A civilian does not become a combatant by approaching a house, crossing an unmarked boundary or trying to reach someone bleeding in the road. International humanitarian law protects civilians unless and for such time as they directly participate in hostilities. Deliberately targeting civilians for crossing such a boundary, or civilian rescuers for coming to the aid of the wounded, constitutes a war crime.

Almenat Kash (Straw Widow) concealed Israeli soldiers inside Palestinian homes, while the invisible boundaries drawn around their positions turned the surrounding streets into kill zones. Palestinians who had no warning of either were shot, then entered into military records as terrorists.

Those reports turned the killing of civilians into a record of military achievement. People passing through their own neighbourhoods became enemy fighters on paper, their deaths presented as proof of success by the army that had killed them. Calling them terrorists afterwards could not make the killings lawful. It served to conceal the crime.

One of Israel’s Leading Think Tanks Put Out a Disturbing “National Security” Doctrine

By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | October 14, 2026

Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, one of it’s leading think tanks, put out a psychotic paper written by Tamir Hayman, the former IDF chief of intelligence from 2018 to 2021, which outlined Israel’s current “national security concept”.

Some concepts outlined in the paper include:

Prioritizing Israel as a Jewish Supremacist State Over A Democratic One:

The paper wrote that “The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government,” adding that “This priority is intended to guarantee Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, even at the cost of eroding its democratic values” and “This principle dictates the need to maintain the primacy of Jewish identity over other national identities (such as Arab-Islamic or Christian).”

Using Peace Deals As A Ruse For War:

The paper writes that “any arrangement with Arab actors is temporary and deceptive” and that “peace agreements are merely technical and temporary arrangements requiring constant reassessment.”

Destabilizing Surrounding Arab States:

The paper writes that Israel believes “that most Arab states are not genuine nation-states, but collections of tribes and ethnic groups lacking a shared history and a foundational national vision,” adding that because of this, for Israel, “undermining their stability is viewed as a natural process, one that Israel can manage more effectively than it can contend with strong nation-states, and one that it should even encourage.”

War As The Basis Of The State:

The paper explicitly states that “War is essential to national security and cannot be replaced by a state of peace,” adding that “War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it secures a significant achievement at the outset.”

Occupation Of All Of Palestine:

The paper calls for a permanent Israeli occupation of all of Palestine, including Gaza and the West Bank, writing that Israel has “opposition to any political, geographic, or security separation between Israel and a Palestinian entity, and to the establishment of a Palestinian state,” adding that “security will be achieved by expanding settlement throughout the state’s territory”.

Using Settlers As Proxies:

The paper calls for using Jewish settlers as proxies of the Israeli security establishment, in order to further destabilize surrounding states, writing, “security is not viewed as the exclusive responsibility of the security forces; rather, civilians are part of the defense network. Defense is established by creating communities and outposts in all areas of friction with the Arab population, in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), and in security zones in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip,” adding that increased Jewish settlements “further contribute to the destabilization of the ‘synthetic’ Arab states.”

Moving Away From Reliance On The “Declining Power” Of The United States

The paper writes that “The United States is a ‘declining power’ and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event” adding that “Excessive dependence on the United States exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character. Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”

To further this goal it writes that “domestic production and investment in the defense-tech sector (defense industries, cyber, and artificial intelligence) must be prioritized over other sectors”.

Offense Over Defense

The paper also outlines the doctrine of waging endless offensive wars writing that “Preemptive, surprise strikes are viewed as the only way to achieve victory, giving offense precedence over defense” and adding, “In cases where a preemptive counterstrike is not feasible, or time is needed to prepare an offensive, establishing forward defense zones wherever possible becomes crucial.”

The horrors deliverable by Israel that might come next

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • October 14, 2026

Speculation is growing over the sustainability of the United States’ model of global dominance which emerged as Washington ended the Second World War as plausibly the sole superpower. That role was first tested in the Korean War, which produced something of a stalemate in a confrontation that included China, and led to a Ceasefire Agreement which is still in place to this day. More recently the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, even given the disastrous and pointless war in Vietnam, confirmed the US’s superior military, political and financial status, leading to an affirmation of American dominance as an essential element in global political stability in several initiated and mandated policy documents including in the statement of principles spelled out in 1990’s which was later published in September 2000 as the Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century: a Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The final elaboration of the policy was derived from the so-called “Wolfowitz Doctrine” which was the common referral to national defense guidance developed when Paul Wolfowitz, working for Vice President Dick Cheney, was Associate Secretary of Defense. The term is an informal version of the US Department of Defense’s Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for the years 1994-9 dated February 18, 1992.

As the first DPG after the Cold War and first Gulf Wars ended and the draft described the United States as the world’s only superpower it made preventing the emergence (or re-emergence) of a global or regional competitor a top priority. This objective included preventing any hostile power’s dominance of strategically or resource rich important regions that could produce alternative sources of global power. It argued that that the US Military must remain sufficiently strong enough to deter possible competitors, retaining the ability to act unilaterally if necessary. The PNAC declaration called for a continuing global leadership role for the United States which implied the resort to preemptive war against adversaries when needed.

In promoting the new policy, the Project’s Statement of Principles document of June 1997 elaborated how “… America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests… We need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

The statement was signed by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Peter Rodman, Elliot Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Aaron Friedberg, Donald Kagan, I Lewis Libby, and Norman Podhoretz among others. It was considered to be very “Israel friendly” subsequently and it, combined with the awesome and growing political and institutional power of the US Israeli Lobby, was used to justify US interventions in the Middle East during the following decades. Indeed, one might argue that Israel’s form of interaction with its neighbors and even with much of the world today was shaped by the numerous Jews and Israel firsters who participated in the drafting of the critical documents asserting Washington’s need to behave aggressively, to include its participation in conflicts that it would otherwise have been able to avoid such as those occurring in the Middle East which were instigated by Israel’s promotion of its own interests just like is currently taking place with Iran.

What is important to note today is how the documents that were intended to guarantee American military supremacy including interventionism to maintain that edge appear to have taken hold of the President Donald J Trump administration, most particularly in the minds of the president himself and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. So, what went wrong as the United States now appears to be losing on all fronts where it has opted for confrontation instead of negotiation? It is perhaps important to note that the geopolitical missteps are likely the result of a doctrine coming from a different world than 1991 with different means of assessing strength or weakness. Trump and Hegseth might well be perceived as dinosaurs heading for extinction during their own version of the Triassic Period and the country that they have so much abused might be heading for decline and fall. The question becomes “After the US falls, who will be there to pick up the pieces?”

And one might presume that America’s most protected client Israel, which would certainly be joined to the US as the world’s most hated nation, might also be heading in the same direction. The only difference being that Israel has declared that it will use its nuclear arsenal to take much of the world with it if it goes down, the so-called Samson Option. Israel has at least several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions from its submarine delivery capabilities. Most European capitals would certainly be targets for Israeli missiles and warplanes. Former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan served notice of what might come: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” A minority of Israeli leaders might try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible, but those in charge will surely have the capability to take part of the world down with them and that is precisely what will happen as Israel goes under. But before that happens a wave of millions of Jewish “refugees” will roll over the US and Europe primarily. They will insist on creating new nations just like they did to the Palestinians and likely will have their nuclear weapons with them as “insurance.”

Interestingly, Israel is also reported to be developing a biological weapon arsenal which is “ethnically targeting” selective meaning that it will kill only holders of certain DNA or ethnic characteristics, presumably killing those with majority Arab biology while sparing anyone with Jewish traits or characteristics. Interesting. It might be the easy way to “mow the lawn” of objectionable foreigners as Israel’s leaders have frequently carried out in places like Gaza and Lebanon.

But it occurs to me that Israel will follow a slightly different pattern, namely disorienting the playing field by the use of false flag incidents that will encourage Americans and Europeans to support pro-Israel policies that are clearly not in their interest, and applying “Palestinian option” alternatives to reduce and then completely eliminate resistance to its own form of “global dominance.” That means stealing other people’s land while also systematically exterminating them, possibly with the biological bombs. The process of emigrating is already underway among many mostly better educated Israelis who are already rapidly leaving an Israel under threat to recreate their exclusively Jewish ghettos and settlements in places like Crete, Greece and in South America. The local residents frequently complain about the abuse they receive from the newcomers but their governments suffer from the typical Zionist disease, i.e. local governments that are bought or pressured to give way.

America already has discovered the phenomenon in the communities in New York and New Jersey and elsewhere in the country where often Orthodox Jewish religious ritual restrictions control behavior of all citizens and even visitors who dare to defile the enclaves. If Israel in what was once Palestine goes under will that mean that millions of new immigrants, certainly given free entry with no conditions on their behavior by a US Congress which displays Israeli flags in its office spaces on Capitol Hill? The clowns in Congress and the White House may not be bothered by the Israeli Jewish tendency to despise the other 90% of any country’s inhabitants as subhuman, as they do with the Palestinians currently. Florida (of course!) Congressman Brian Mast, who wears his Israeli army uniform when working in his Congressional office, said : “there is no such thing as innocent Palestinians”! And he is not the only congressman or staffer who embraces that view, which is reiterated by 90% of Israeli Jews who support extermination of all Muslims and Christians!

So what comes next? John Gehan has written about the next moves by Israel emigrants and how they will impact on the rest of the world after their regional genocidal campaign to create Greater (Eretz) Israel is either concluded in failure or otherwise goes down in flames: “Essentially what we’ll have are at least hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of psychotically racist terrorists entering the USA. These are ethnically obsessed monsters who don’t consider anyone outside of their pernicious tribe to be human. They’ll have weapons at their disposal and a cemented nationwide network to commit mass murder. Maybe some of these crazies will seek shelter in Europe or Canada or Argentina, etc. But many will choose the USA as a redoubt. At best, murders and acts of terror will spike dramatically in this country. Israeli Zionists are genocidal psychopaths. As we have all seen.”

For those who need further elucidation of what is going on and what drives it, the head of one of Israel’s most prominent think tanks, Major General Tamir Hayman has described in an article further examined by Trita Parsi the Quincy Institute, the harsh reality of Israel’s current and ongoing new national security doctrine: Hayman describes how “The United States is a ‘declining power’ and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. This is compelling Israel to move toward greater self-reliance in order to avoid ‘excessive dependence’ on the US since it ‘exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.’ He concludes: ‘Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.’” Why is that? “Because of the Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.” And it takes precedence over the constitutional rights of any nation that Jews should wind up settling in!

So, we Americans and presumably lots of other people have something to look forward to from an Israel whose leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon have often bragged about how they control “America,” and now it it boasting how it has taken its pound of flesh and then will discard the US donor after it is bled white! It presumes the end of nations as we know them that try to function decently to be replaced by an ethno-religious state armed with nukes and bio weapons that will begin its process of extermination just as it is already carrying out in the Middle East! Mazel Tov to y’all!

---

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

John Mearsheimer – Offensive Realism | October 12, 2026

Al Mayadeen| October 14, 2026

A four-month investigation by Declassified UK has identified a British man who fought with the Israeli occupation army in Gaza and found evidence linking him to a unit involved in the destruction of residential buildings and an incident involving a school that was set on fire.

Jonathan Burman, a Manchester native in his mid-20s, posted photographs on his private Instagram account showing himself serving with the Israeli occupation army in Khan Younis early in the Gaza war, according to the exclusive investigation published by Declassified UK.

Newly obtained photographs show Burman standing beside another soldier in front of a burning primary school in Gaza. The images were posted in January 2024, around six weeks after Israeli forces entered and took control of the school.

The investigation comes after a UN commission said Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza after October 2023 should be considered potential suspects in war crimes investigations.

An analysis of Israeli occupation army documents linked Burman to a unit that repeatedly destroyed residential buildings in Gaza. A former Israeli soldier who served in the same battalion told Declassified UK that the conditions in Gaza amounted to an “absolute apocalypse”.

“You could just go and do whatever you want… You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever,” he said, as per Declassified UK.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which “Israel” has ratified, “extensive destruction…of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a war crime.

An Israeli occupation military spokesperson told Declassified UK that weapons had been found at the school shown in Burman’s photographs but provided footage from a different school as evidence.

Burning school in Khan Younis

According to six witnesses and experts interviewed by Declassified UK, the school shown in Burman’s photographs was Al-Farabi Primary School in the Bani Suheila area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

Palestinian civilians who sheltered there told Declassified UK that they had sought refuge because the school was operated by UNRWA. Satellite imagery from November 2023 showed white tarpaulins covering the playground and the initials “UN” visible on its roof.

The civilians said they were forced to leave in December 2023 as Israeli forces advanced into the area.

Ayman Sahmoud, 56, told Declassified UK that he and his family sought refuge at the school after being forced from their home by Israeli bombardment and evacuation orders.

“We left our home with nothing,” he recalled. “We abandoned everything behind us. When we arrived at the school, it was already overflowing with displaced families… We could barely find a place to sleep.”

Sahmoud said repeated attacks on an area adjacent to the school shook the building and that the surrounding area was systematically demolished.

“After some time, the Israeli military bombed the school’s main gate,” he said. “Two people were killed right before our eyes. At that moment, we understood the message was clear: we had to evacuate the school completely.”

He said Israeli aircraft then dropped leaflets ordering displaced Palestinians to leave, forcing his family and others to flee toward Rafah.

Randa Abu Assi, 42, also told Declassified UK that she remained at the school until December 2023 as bombardment intensified.

“My foot was struck by shrapnel,” she said. “My son, Bahaa, 21 years old, was also wounded by shrapnel that remains lodged in both of his legs to this day.”

“We fled under fire and survived by a miracle,” she added.

Abu Assi later learned that Israeli forces had entered the school on December 12, 2023. Arabic-language reports cited by Declassified UK also documented Israeli troops entering the school and detaining Palestinians there.

Geolocation links photographs to Al-Farabi school

The school lies beyond the “Yellow Line” in Gaza and remains under Israeli military occupation following last year’s ceasefire agreement between “Israel” and Hamas, according to Declassified UK.

Three witnesses identified the building in Burman’s photographs as Al-Farabi School. Declassified UK also submitted the photographs to three geolocation experts, who independently identified the location as the same school.

Ryan Geitner of Airwars compared Burman’s photographs with Reuters footage filmed in April 2024 showing a destroyed school in Khan Younis.

“Reviewing footage from Reuters and the photos posted to social media, we have a high level of certainty that this is the same location.

“Satellite imagery indicates that the school suffered major damage in the months after November 2023, signs of which are visible in both sets of material.”

The Hind Rajab Foundation’s analysis of Israeli occupation army documents further suggested that Burman may not have been stationed at the school until January 8, 2024, weeks after Israeli forces had removed Palestinian civilians.

 ‘Erase them, their families, mothers and children.’

Another photograph posted by Burman and captioned “Khan Yunis” shows him kneeling with a rifle among destroyed residential buildings, with an overturned bed and a child’s bicycle visible in the rubble.

The Israeli occupation military indicated to Declassified UK that Burman served in the 55th Reserve Paratrooper Brigade, while the Hind Rajab Foundation found evidence suggesting he served in its 66th Battalion, B Company.

Yuval Green, a former medic in the same battalion, described the atmosphere among soldiers before and during the Gaza operation.

The battalion commander, Ofir Adani, reportedly told soldiers before they entered Gaza, “I want you to be angry. I want you to rage. I want you to have a deep sense of revenge. Anyone who messes with us should die. He and his family. And his relatives. And everyone who supported him.”

Green also recalled a speech by Ezra Yachin, who had been involved in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians.

“This guy comes to us, a group of soldiers, and he’s just telling the story of how he massacred villagers… and no one blinks an eye. And I think this shows you very very well what type of atmosphere we’ve had before we went into Gaza. The writing was on the wall.”

Footage from another event shows Yachin telling soldiers, “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”

Asked about Burman’s photographs in front of the burning school, Green said he “felt awful. [It] really takes me back to one of the worst times of my life.”

“Look at their smiles. It’s just, you know, that’s the first time they’re burning down a building. For them, it’s some type of a crazy experience. And they don’t think about the consequences because it’s a place without rules.”

Green also described the destruction of residential properties during his deployment. “Fifty days after we went into Gaza, they’re telling us to burn down the houses we were at.

“And I go to my commander and ask him, why are we burning down those houses? And he has no good answer. Absolutely no good answer. If you were to destroy a house in London, you live in a country of law. You live in an organized country. No one can just go and burn down the house.”

“But this war zone is a wild west. No rules. Absolute apocalypse. So you could just go and do whatever you want. You can go and steal whatever you want from those houses. You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever. And I went to him and I told him, if we’re burning down those houses, I’m leaving the next day. I’m not willing to be a part of it. This is the last straw. And, that’s what happened. They burnt down the houses. I went back, and this was it.”

Burman later served in Lebanon and Syria

Burman’s Instagram photographs also show him relaxing with fellow soldiers during his deployment, including a December 31, 2023 photograph of him in occupation military uniform sitting inside the ruins of a house. He captioned it “happy new year” and identified the location as the “Gaza Strip.”

On January 31, 2024, he wrote, “I’ve been out of Gaza for a few days now.”

Israeli Army Radio reported that the 55th Brigade had withdrawn from Gaza on January 28.

Declassified UK also found evidence suggesting Burman later served in Lebanon and Syria. In November 2024, he posted photographs identifying his location as Lebanon, including one showing him with his weapon beside him. A post dated October 6, 2025, showed him in Syria.

Burman later returned to Britain, where his social media showed him attending a Manchester United match at Old Trafford on May 17.

According to Declassified UK, Burman grew up in Manchester, attended Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, and moved to “Israel” in 2019, where he joined the Israeli occupation army.

UN investigator calls for further investigation

Burman is among more than 2,000 British nationals who served in the Israeli occupation army during the Gaza genocide, according to a previous Declassified UK investigation.

The British government does not track British nationals serving in the Israeli army, while returning soldiers have not been routinely questioned about their activities. The Metropolitan Police previously declined to investigate 10 British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza before reopening probes into four of them.

More than 25,000 people have signed a letter calling on the British government to track British nationals who have served in the Israeli army, screen them at ports of entry, and support investigations into alleged war crimes.

Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and member of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told Declassified UK that its investigative methodology was consistent with that used by the commission.

“We have found that there are very large numbers of digital material published by Israeli soldiers or soldiers serving with the Israeli forces about their exploits.

“The boastfulness of these soldiers is quite incredible but they produce material like the material that you describe that put themselves at places where war crimes have been committed or at least serious events have occurred that give rise to the possibility of war crimes, crimes against humanity and post it openly on social media accounts.

“So that information is important information, it’s almost confessional information and in many cases it is confessional. I note that you’re not saying this person is guilty of war crimes, we don’t say that either, we say that the evidence is sufficient to support further investigation and prosecution where warranted. I think that’s exactly correct.”

Sidoti said the Metropolitan Police’s war crimes unit should examine Burman’s activities, adding, “There is the obligation that when this person is within the jurisdiction of that state there should be an investigation and prosecution when warranted.”

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 14, 2026

It’s hard to know whether to break the TV set or throw up when listening to the European governments rushing to condemn the air strike by Yemeni forces on Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid international airport.

The blast from a ballistic missile that slammed into the airport at the weekend, October 12, killed at least 13 civilians and injured scores of other travellers. Horrific video footage shows the moment the missile explosion ripped through a terminal lounge.

European leaders immediately in a coordinated fashion trotted out condemnations of Yemeni “terrorism” and vowed solidarity and support for Saudi Arabia. U.S. President Donald Trump called it “a terrible thing.” (As if bombing schoolchildren is not quite a terrible thing.)

Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and Spain all issued strident denunciations of the Yemeni attack.

The strike on the Saudi capital came after the Ansar Allah-led Yemen Armed Forces had given ample warning to the Saudis that their airports would be targeted and for civilians to avoid the areas. The airports were kept open for business as usual. The Yemenis have said that the attack on Riyadh and other Saudi airports are retaliation for weeks of multiple air strikes by the Saudis on Yemeni civilian centers.

Hundreds of Yemeni civilians have been killed since Saudi Arabia broke a four-year truce with an air strike on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, on July 13. Saudi warplanes, U.S.-supplied F-15s and European Typhoon jets, have been continously bombing homes across Yemen. This week, two days after the Riyadh strike, at least nine people including five children were killed in air raids on houses in Taiz city and in northern al Jawf province. Al Masirah TV footage showed a distraught father holding up a child’s shredded body amid rubble. There was no condemnation of that atrocity from any European leader.

As Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, former Irish Members of the European Parliament, point out in their podcast this week, the official European reaction is utter hypocrisy and a cynical distortion of the conflict on the Arabian Peninsula.

Britain and France in particular, along with the United States, have backed the Saudi aggression against Yemen beginning in 2015. Over seven years, that aggression killed up to 400,000 Yemenis through air strikes and a blockade on humanitarian needs.

The European Union remained largely silent for seven years. No protests were made to Washington, Paris or London. Ambassadors were not summoned, sanctions were not imposed.

The return to hostilities that began with Saudi air strikes on Sanaa in July have been enabled by U.S. and Britain supplying warplanes, military advisors and intelligence.

None of the European governments have bothered to condemn this recent U.S. and UK-backed slaughter.

So, it is nauseating when one hears British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband saying he is “appalled” by the strike on Riyadh airport. And other European leaders vowing “full solidarity with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul condemned Yemen’s “terrorist act.”

His French counterpart said France stood with Saudi Arabia “in defending its territory and infrastructue.” (No mention of what the Saudis have been doing for years to Yemen’s territory.)

Referring to the strike on Riyadh without any context, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni said: “Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are unacceptable and must cease.” (Yes, indeed, so why not tell that to the Saudis who are doing it deliberately on a massive scale with support from Washington and London?)

What is instructive here is not just the sickening hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. It is the manifestation of a systematic corruption and criminal responsibility. This is not just one more example of a flawed European political class whose judgement is suspect. What is increasingly apparent is the totality of the corruption.

The same European supporters of Saudi monarchs waging a genocidal war on Yemen are also contemporaneously supporting the Israeli Zionist regime in its extermination of Palestinians. They are complicit in enabling the U.S. aggression against Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. They are sponsors of the NeoNazi regime in Kiev to keep fighting a proxy war against Russia despite more than one million Ukrainian military casualties and the risk of nuclear conflagration.

The death cult of Western capitalism is on full display in multiple theaters, exposing the organic evil at work. There is sense that all of Western imperialist history is now on display in one final orgy of barbarity.

In previous times, the death cult operated discreetly in seemingly disparate conflict scenarios. Wars on different continents seemed somehow unconnected. The Western media would in the past reliably cover up the crimes by distorting the motives and objectives with false narratives and (laughable) claims of noble purpose. The West was “defending democracy,” “fighting communism,” “protecting human rights,” or “waging war on terrorism,” or some other pretext that in isolation and with loads of media propaganda managed to fool a lot of people as somehow plausible.

What’s happening now, it seems, is a concatenation of wars that ultimately exposes the essential system that drives the violence, and its insatiable lust for human suffering.

It is impossible to work for such a vile system, the death cult of capitalism, without also being oblivious to its evil ways. To remain oblivious necessitates denial or lies. That deception might be tenable for occasional and seemingly disparate scenarios. But not when the system is exposed in its infernal entirety.

American and European wars in the past might have succeeded in being sold to the Western public as one-off wars and misadventures. We think of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Latin American, Africa, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more recently Libya.

In more recent years, as consciousness evolved, the public began discerning and decrying “endless wars”.

But now the world is witnessing a totalizing of the war machine that goes by the name of “Western democracy”.

What’s happening in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Yemen is not coincidence. It is the death cult on display and unable to hide itself. It manifests too in attacking and locking up Western citizens who condemn genocide or who simply call for peace.

Capitalism, fascism, wars, the Epstein class, endemic poverty and suffering – it’s a death cult in a theater near you.

The politicians, governments, media and pundits who promote it or serve it are seen for what they are.

RT | October 14, 2026

Did Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers destroy the Kremlin’s pro-MAGA bot army? Or are Vladimir Zelensky and his European patrons insulting their citizens with remedial-grade propaganda? RT takes a trip down the rabbit hole.

Ukrainian forces hit three Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google) data centers with long-range drones between October 8 and 11. Yandex confirmed that operations were “completely halted” at the facility struck on October 8, and temporarily halted at the center struck on October 11. This much is true, but the story that followed veers into NAFO fiction.

How did the ‘Russian bots’ story begin?

On October 8, American cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler posted a Cloudflare graph showing a dramatic drop in “bot traffic” after the first Yandex center was hit. As Yandex is primarily a search company, its bots crawl the internet indexing content for users. All search engines function in this way, but Fowler – either through malice or ignorance – conflated this search bot activity with social media bot activity, claiming that the drop in traffic could “disrupt the midterm elections in the US.”

The story spread, hitting the mainstream media on October 11 when Tom’s Hardware published an article claiming that “Russian disinformation bot traffic” had been “nearly eliminated” after the strikes. The word “disinformation” was later pulled from the headline, but the tale had already taken on a life of its own.

That same day, an AI-created graph began circulating, claiming that “Russian bots” were making 56% fewer posts in support of Germany’s right-wing AfD party in the aftermath of the strikes. The graph, which was unsourced and had one axis unlabeled, measured the “decline in activity of Russian bots” up to October 15, four days in the future at the time it appeared online.

Regardless, the graph was shared by a Green Party councillor in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, and by Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky. “This is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets,” Zdechovsky wrote on social media. “So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down.”

Who spread the lie?

By October 12, the story had been reported by Germany’s Der Standard and Focus. That morning, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky spread it further, claiming at the Warsaw Security Forum that his strikes on Yandex data centers had made it “a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.”

“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” Zelensky continued. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from. If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems,” he added.

Speaking on the sidelines of the forum, Polish minister Tomasz Siemoniak claimed that the country’s domestic intelligence agency was “observing a significant, radical decline in Russian bot activity online,” while Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said that “we should ask Mr. Zelensky to hit more data centres in Russia” to “protect” elections in the EU.

Anti-Kremlin activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov weighed in, claiming that “the Russian troll bots” in his X feed had “dropped dramatically,” while former US ambassador Michael McFaul thanked the Ukrainian weapons industry for granting him reprieve from “daily” harassment by “armies of Russian bots.”

The only problem was none of this was true, and based on the replies to McFaul’s tweet, nobody was buying it.

How was the bots story debunked?

The story didn’t take long to fall apart. Common Consultancy, a Scandinavian NGO that has previously accused Russia of orchestrating social media influence campaigns, concluded that there was “no visible effect” on pro-MAGA or pro-AfD social media posts after the Yandex strikes. Leonid Volkov, an anti-Kremlin activist associated with deceased opposition figure Alexey Navalny, slammed Zdechovsky for spreading “nonsense and falsehood.”

CeMAS, a liberal German think tank, stated that it was “not seeing a drop in the number of posts that could be explained by an attack on data centers.” The Hasso Plattner Institute and Polisphere, two tech nonprofits, concurred, and German newspapers began quietly editing their articles on Monday night.

Some, like Merkur, kept “speculation about Russian bots and the AfD” in their headlines. Others, including Der Standard, noted that their “original assertion of a confirmed connection [between the strikes and alleged bot activity] has been corrected.” The Verge, a tech-focused American news site, admitted that “the Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots.”

Is this hybrid war?

By the time the story was debunked and corrected, the damage was done. In the public’s eye, the strikes were tied to a drop in “Russian bot” activity, and none of the speakers at the Warsaw Security Forum, including senior Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian officials, bothered to correct the record.

These same leaders have spent the last two months amping up their accusations of “hybrid war” – acts of sabotage, disinformation, and cyber-harassment that do not rise to the level of actual war – against Russia, with Berlin’s foreign intelligence chief warning last week that Moscow’s supposed “shadow war” against the West could see Germany “becoming embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia.”

That none of the acts of “hybrid war” – among them the discovery of a suspicious drone at Leipzig Airport in August, and a series of unsubstantiated drone sightings across Germany and Scandinavia last year – have been linked by evidence to Russia is a feature, not a bug. “Hybrid war” is by its very nature unprovable, and the accusation alone is enough for European leaders to justify their deepening proxy war in Ukraine, their remilitarization and expansion of the national security state at home.

Furthermore, the accusations themselves are a form of “hybrid warfare” against the European public, analyst Thomas Fazi argued last week. “Europeans,” he wrote, “are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia.”

Who stands to gain?

For Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), accusations of ‘hybrid warfare” and “AfD bots” serve a much more petty and venal political end. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is less popular now than at any point in his political career, and with the AfD trouncing the CDU in state elections and leading his party by ten points in opinion polls, Merz has taken every opportunity available to tie his opponents to Russia.

“We in Germany will not allow ourselves to be divided, not by hybrid attacks, not by Moscow-bot-driven hate speech on social media, and – if I may say so – not even by the slogans of the AfD and its Russian backers,” the chancellor said in a speech earlier this month.

The Yandex story – which conveniently linked the AfD to “Moscow-bot-driven hate speech” – was a godsend to Merz, and to his Ukrainian and Eastern European allies, who have an interest in preventing the Ukraine-skeptic AfD from taking power in Germany. Unfortunately for them, like all “hybrid war” claims, it fell apart the moment it was subjected to some basic scrutiny.

RT | October 14, 2026

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s attempt to blame Russia for the Brexit vote is a crude attempt to undo the referendum and tie the UK back to Brussels. It’s also imploding dramatically.

In an appearance on the ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast on Sunday, Burnham said that he sought answers about alleged meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum after taking office this summer.

“I asked the question coming to Downing Street: Well, was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”

Burnham did not identify who had provided the assessment or present any evidence to back it up. Nor did he say whether the alleged interference actually affected the result of the referendum. However, he insisted that anti-establishment movements in Britain, France, and Germany – where Chancellor Friedrich Merz has claimed that the right-wing AfD are “Russian-backed” – are “instigated via our enemies, namely Russia.”

Haven’t we heard this all before?

On June 23, 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU by a margin of 51.89% to 48.11%. The vote was largely driven by a public desire to reclaim sovereignty, control immigration, and humiliate the country’s political elites, the majority of whom favored continued EU membership.

Six months later, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw announced in parliament that Russia “probably interfered” in the vote. Bradshaw conceded that “we do not have the evidence for that yet, but it is highly probable.” His claims were picked up by media outlets in Britain and the US, where the ‘Russiagate’ hoax was taking root in Washington.

A parliamentary committee stated in April 2017 that the collapse of a voter-registration website in the runup to the referendum could have been the work of a Russian or Chinese denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. In November of that year, City University alleged that 13,000 bot accounts – some of them Russian – were tweeting about Brexit before and after the referendum.

X, then called Twitter, rejected the City University study, stating that it found no evidence linking the bot accounts with Russia; separate research tying Russia to the ‘leave’ campaign was found to be fabricated by an anti-Brexit group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros; and in 2020, a parliamentary report found “no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum.” At the time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that “a retrospective assessment of the EU referendum is not necessary” in light of the report.

All of this begs the question: ten years after the Brexit vote, why is Burnham conjuring up the specter of “Russian interference” again?

Burnham’s big break

Burnham’s political maneuvering is obvious here. The British PM has repeatedly said that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU, and two weeks before appearing on ‘The Rest is Politics’, he opened his speech at the UN General Assembly with a reference to Brexit, lamenting that “my country has lived through the disruption it brought.”

Speaking at his Labour Party’s annual conference a week later, Burnham argued that “Brexit has done more harm than good.” The following day he pledged to forge closer relations with Brussels and, if politically feasible, “go all the way” and rejoin the union.

Burnham has refused to say whether he intends to run his next election campaign on a platform of EU membership. However, he has promised to have “a serious dialogue about the different options for our relationship in the long-term” when he meets EU leaders in Brussels next month.

With the UK and EU both embroiled in a proxy war with Russia, there is no more effective way to delegitimize the Brexit vote at the moment than by tying it to Moscow. Burnham made this explicit in an address to Parliament on October 12, arguing that it would be “a dereliction of duty” not to pursue closer relations with the EU, given Russia’s alleged interference in the referendum.

The hoax crumbles

The prime minister’s confidence began to crumble under questioning. Asked by Conservative MP Julian Lewis “exactly how he thinks Russia was able to alter the result of the referendum,” Burnham replied that Moscow’s interference in British elections was “a matter of record,” without elaborating further.

Responding to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Burnham claimed that he never implied that the result of the referendum was invalid, before repeating the same “matter of record” line.

Burnham’s lack of evidence became clear when his foreign secretary, Stephen Doughty, appeared on ITV’s ‘Good Morning Britain’ the same day.

“What did Russia do during that Brexit referendum?” host Susanna Reid asked Doughty, who responded that he was “not going to get into the specifics.”

“Why are you not getting into specifics when the Prime Minister has just got into the specifics on the podcast?” Reid pressed.

Asked repeatedly about Russian interference in the Brexit vote, Doughty gave a variation on “Russia attempts to interfere in all of our democratic processes. They’ve been doing this for many, many years” every time.

“This is embarrassing,” co-host Ed Balls interjected. “It’s really bad for politics when you just blatantly don’t answer the question on something so important and go back to a nonsensical line, which is contradicted by what the prime minister just said.”

The final nail in the coffin came from MI5 Director Ken McCallum. McCallum is no stranger to anti-Russian opportunism, having pushed for mass internet surveillance to prevent Russia causing “mayhem on British and European streets.” However, he warned on Tuesday against exaggerating “Russian influence” on Brexit, arguing that debating the influence of “Russian trolls” on the vote “play[s] into our adversaries’ hands by making these trolls look 10ft tall.”

The Burnham playbook

Burnham has a habit of making extraordinary claims without the extraordinary evidence to back them up. After five Londoners were arrested outside RAF Fairford in an apparent terror bust last month, the British PM told the BBC that there are “strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened.”

The five men – plus two more suspects arrested afterwards – have all been released on bail. No explosives were found in their vehicles, and no link between the men and the Iranian government has been established, according to all available information. However, Burnham told the BBC that “we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part,” before telling Parliament that the supposed terror plot was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Tehran has described the incident as “a clumsy false-flag operation,” aimed at “advancing an anti-Iran campaign and evading accountability for Britain’s involvement in the US-Israeli military aggression against the Iranian people.”

Likewise, Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the Brexit referendum. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described Burnham’s allegations as “the latest baseless accusations made without any proof.”

One final irony

Burnham’s claim would never have been torn apart in parliament, in the media, and by his own domestic intelligence agency had ‘The Rest is Politics’ host Alastair Campbell [not] pushed back and demanded evidence or elaboration. However, Campbell has a track record of embellishing facts to suit political narratives, with disastrous consequences.

Campbell was serving as then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications adviser in 2002 when he ordered a dossier on “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction” to be “sexed up” in order to make a stronger case for joining the US-led invasion, according to Defense Ministry expert Dr David Kelly.

An inquiry found that Campbell changed multiple lines within the dossier to make Iraq appear more threatening. Among them was a line stating that Iraqi forces “may be able to deploy” chemical weapons against British troops within 45 minutes of receiving an order, which became “are able to deploy.”

Campbell then compiled a second dossier, now known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” This document contained plagiarized and fabricated claims about Iraq’s intelligence services, alleging that they were concealing weapons of mass destruction and “supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes.” None of these claims were true.

The second dossier was published in February 2003. Five weeks later, Parliament held a vote to join the invasion, with Burnham one of 139 Labour MPs voting in favor of the war. Burnham has since said that, if he could go back to 2003, he “wouldn’t have voted for it.”

More than two decades later, Burnham is once again making “dodgy dossier”-tier accusations in service of two foreign conflicts, and in aid of his own political ambitions.

By Lucas Leiroz | October 14, 2026

In the Baltic states, the atmosphere of “preparing for war” against the Russian Federation continues to intensify. Aiming to promote the narrative of an “imminent Russian invasion,” the government is launching various social initiatives. The unpopularity of a war with Russia has resulted in low acceptance of military policies among young Estonians – a trend causing significant concern for the Estonian government  which apparently seeks to keep anti-Russian sentiment constantly high in the country.

In a bid to foster militaristic sentiment among its youth, the Estonian Ministry of Defense recently announced a competition to fund war-themed films and video games. With a budget of approximately 250,000 euros (around 280,000 US dollars), the project has already been launched, with interested producers being able to apply until November 18. Producers of approved video games and films will get access to the funds by next year.

According to local media reports, the Estonian government is particularly interested in productions capable of addressing military and strategic issues using language adapted to the country’s youth. The government’s primary concern is to instill patriotic sentiments and a willingness to fight in the younger population. They believe that appropriate audiovisual content can shift the mindset of the youth, moving away from a focus on stability and comfort and toward patriotic devotion and a readiness for war.

Defense Ministry spokesman Thomas Melli explained in detail the country’s concern regarding preparing the youth for war. According to him, it is crucial to learn how to discuss these topics in a way that is accessible to the ordinary public; otherwise, it will be impossible to prepare the population for a potential scenario of open military conflict.

Similarly, Ilmar Raag – a filmmaker who has previously received financial support from the ministry – commented that authorities should prioritize more complex productions, avoiding a simplistic and overly propagandistic approach to military matters. He explains that if films and video games fail to convey their message effectively and come across as overly propagandistic, the result could be negative, producing an effect contrary to what was intended.

“Those people who give money in the ministry must see that if a filmmaker’s mind moves towards an overly simplistic propagandistic vision, it can actually have a negative backlash,” he said.

In fact, Raag’s concern is quite significant. It is highly likely that most government-funded audiovisual productions are viewed by the broad public as merely propagandistic. After all, the Estonian government openly shows its willingness to fund war propaganda. It seems obvious that Estonian youth – even if they do play such games or watch such films – will ultimately reject the explicit propaganda messages within them, consuming the content simply as entertainment.

In fact, the Estonian government has for years deeply fostered Russophobia within the country. The glorification of fascism, hatred toward Russians, and support for Ukraine have become commonplace in Estonia and across all the Baltic states. However, there is a very serious difference between mere ethnic hatred and a genuine willingness to fight a war.

Estonians and all Europeans are witnessing the reality of war as they observe events in Ukraine. A real armed conflict is far more difficult than it appears in theory. Few people are truly willing to fight a war. Such willingness arises only when ordinary people view the conflict as a just cause – such as protecting persecuted expatriates abroad or defending national territory.

Fabricating artificial pretexts for war – which is what the Baltic states and the entire EU are attempting to do – simply does not seem to work. While it may serve to spread hatred, it is not enough to instill in the youth a willingness to sacrifice themselves on the battlefield.

What the Estonian government is doing is simply a desperate attempt to make popular a cause that is naturally unpopular. Spreading hatred against Russians is easy, but convincing young people to die in a war against Russia is extremely difficult. And state-funded movies or video games won’t change that reality.

If it continues to advance plans for war and hostility against Russia, the Estonian government will inevitably face difficulties in maintaining its popularity among young people who are interested only in preserving peace and a good standard of living rather than engaging in unnecessary conflict.

Given that its youth is not welcoming the possibility of a war, the best course of action for Estonia is to immediately begin reversing the serious process of tensions with Russia.

---

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.

RT | October 14, 2026

Foreign nationals have filled 80% of new UK jobs over the past decade, while millions of Britons have remained on out-of-work benefits, according to a new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).

The UK think tank said on Tuesday that British nationals accounted for just 734,000 of the 3.7 million jobs added to payrolls between 2014 and the end of 2025. EU nationals accounted for 408,000 new jobs, while migrants from the rest of the world filled around 2.5 million.

“Employers have gained unprecedented access to overseas labour while taxpayers have absorbed the growing cost of domestic worklessness,” the report said.

The findings are part of a major inquiry chaired by former UK Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. The report argues that successive governments have relied on low-skilled migrant labor while millions of Britons have been “written off” by the welfare system.

Since 2020, payroll employment among non-EU nationals has surged by 2.1 million, while the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits has risen by 2.3 million. Much of the employment growth was concentrated in health and social care, administrative services, hospitality and retail.

“Compounding this, ministers have repeatedly pulled the easy lever of immigration rather than providing a better deal for left behind communities,” Duncan Smith said, urging coordinated reforms to welfare, immigration and regional development.

Around 6.7 million people in England, Wales and Scotland now receive at least one out-of-work benefit, equivalent to roughly one in six working-age adults, according to the CSJ. Since 2019, the number of claimants exempt from requirements to seek or prepare for work has climbed by nearly 1.7 million.

Annual spending on working-age benefits is projected to reach £136.1 billion ($181 billion) in 2026-27.

The report comes amid mounting political pressure over immigration. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly accused successive governments of favoring migrants and minorities over the white working class, demanding tighter border controls and denouncing what he calls a “two-tier” system of unequal treatment.

Britain has also struggled to stop illegal crossings of the English Channel. Some 33,374 people arrived in small boats in the year ending June 2026, down 23% from the previous year, according to the Home Office. The crossings accounted for 88% of detected arrivals via illegal routes.

Public concern remains widespread. An August YouGov poll found that 69% of Britons believed immigration over the previous decade has been too high, while 43% considered it mostly bad for the country, up from 33% in 2016.

By Fyodor Lukyanov | RT | October 12, 2026

The latest turn in Russia-US relations has shocked Kiev, outraged the EU, provoked discontent among a considerable number of politicians in the US, and left many observers around the world perplexed.

The Trump administration’s sudden decision to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel supplies appears to contradict its recent actions, including the adoption of tough new sanctions legislation intended to increase pressure on Moscow, and while some attribute the reversal to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, others see the beginnings of a new policy, or evidence of a fundamental change in the administration’s approach to Ukraine.

To understand what’s happening, however, we must look beyond the peculiarities of the US president’s public behavior. Trump’s extravagance, which frequently borders on the absurd, often conceals a relatively clear set of objectives, but whether those objectives are sensible is another question.

The most likely explanation for his latest reversal lies in domestic American politics, as the congressional midterm elections are less than a month away, and the Republican Party faces difficult prospects. Trump maintains an air of indifference, but losing control of both houses of Congress would condemn him to two years of political confrontation and considerable frustration.

He probably understands that there’s little prospect of fundamentally improving the economic situation, particularly consumer prices, before voters go to the polls, so for now, the emphasis is on psychological impact.

Russia isn’t the first country Washington has approached about increasing fuel supplies to international markets, and the more agreements Trump can announce, the more opportunities he has to proclaim that the White House is working tirelessly to protect ordinary Americans from rising prices.

The expectation, presumably, is that voters will forget how much of the present difficulty stems from Trump’s own actions in the Persian Gulf.

We shall soon discover whether this approach works, but there’s nothing particularly irrational about it, and Trump is pursuing a deliberate political objective. The fact that his latest decision contradicts previous statements doesn’t trouble him because he’s long operated on the assumption that words have value at the moment they’re spoken, but impose few obligations thereafter.

What does this mean for Russia, beyond the welcome prospect of additional budget revenues?

Colleagues from the Vatfor project have identified an important development, in that for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, the US president has made a significant decision regarding Russia without making Ukraine the determining consideration.

Until now, the Ukrainian question has been inseparable from virtually every aspect of Washington’s policy towards Moscow, but this time, not only has it been set aside, the decision directly contradicts Kiev’s interests at a particularly difficult moment.

Hence the indignation of the Ukrainian leadership, as from its perspective, the Americans have behaved unfairly.

There are probably several reasons for this change, but the principal one appears to be Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s unwillingness to accommodate Washington’s demands that Ukraine stop attacking Russian energy infrastructure.

The strikes have become one of Kiev’s principal instruments of warfare, and American requests to curtail them have largely gone unanswered.

Trump, meanwhile, has become fixated on Russian oil supplies as a means of addressing rising fuel prices, and their importance shouldn’t be exaggerated, even if additional Russian supplies alone are unlikely to transform the global market. Nevertheless, Trump has evidently decided that Zelensky bears responsibility for aggravating the situation.

Once the US president reaches this conclusion, persuading him otherwise becomes extremely difficult. Therefore, for the moment, Kiev’s objections have simply been disregarded.

The more consequential question concerns American intelligence assistance, because to stop, or at least substantially reduce, Ukrainian attacks on Russian targets, Washington would have to restrict the intelligence it provides to Kiev, and much of this information amounts, in practical terms, to targeting assistance.

Trump already demonstrated willingness to use this instrument when around a year and a half ago, he temporarily suspended intelligence cooperation for several days to put pressure on the Ukrainian leadership.

A longer interruption would be a different matter and it would represent a genuine change in Washington’s approach to the conflict, effectively distancing the US from its Ukrainian partner, but whether Trump is prepared to take this step is uncertain.

There is, after all, an extensive informal coalition interested in maintaining the present course, and it includes the US defense industry, increasingly influential technology companies, European governments, and their political allies in Washington.

Trump encountered these forces during his previous attempt to advance his preferred settlement following the Anchorage summit, and that initiative ultimately produced little, so it remains to be seen whether the present effort will fare any better.

If Washington proves unwilling to exert sustained pressure on Kiev, the latest initiative could gradually lose momentum, and this is especially likely after the congressional elections, when the immediate political value of announcing presidential achievements will diminish.

The decisive question, therefore, is whether the US leadership can compel its partners to move in the direction it considers necessary, and if it can, an opportunity for further negotiations on a settlement could emerge.

There’s also a second conclusion which is particularly important for Russia, because Washington’s latest actions offer a glimpse of how Russia-US relations could develop after the military phase of the conflict ends.

The enormous collection of sanctions imposed on Russia is unlikely to disappear, and removing them would be exceptionally difficult, both procedurally and politically, given too many restrictions have become embedded in law and institutional practice.

Instead, the sanctions will probably remain formally in place, while decisions about their enforcement are taken according to circumstances; thus, when a particular restriction conflicts with US interests, Washington could suspend its application, but when the circumstances change, it can be restored.

In other words, sanctions will become instruments to be activated or deactivated according to immediate political and economic requirements, rather than permanent expressions of an immutable policy, and this is an important distinction between the American and European approaches.

The Americans generally display a greater degree of pragmatism as they are perfectly capable of proclaiming principles with great conviction, abandoning them when circumstances demand it, and returning to the same principles when doing so becomes convenient. European governments, by contrast, have increasingly bound themselves to political commitments from which retreat is both institutionally complicated and publicly embarrassing.

For Moscow, understanding this difference will be essential when constructing its future relationship with Washington now that the confrontation over Ukraine has reached a stage at which its consequences extend far beyond the immediate military and territorial questions.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it will help determine the structure of future political relations between Russia and the various components of the Western world, and while that structure is already beginning to emerge, its geometry remains unsettled, and the lines are still moving.

---

Fyodor Lukyanov is the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

José Niño Unfiltered | October 11, 2026

In September 2026, Ansar Allah, derisively labeled as the Houthis in Western foreign policy circles, redrew the map of western Yemen in a matter of days. Its fighters swept down the Red Sea coast, seized Mocha on September 10, then pushed through Dhubab and took Mayyun Island at the heart of the Bab el-Mandeb strait the following day, consolidating control over Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline and roughly 5,400 square kilometers of newly gained territory. Yemen’s Saudi-backed government answered on October 4 when Presidential Leadership Council head Rashad al-Alimi announced Operation Dawn of Yemen, vowing to keep fighting until the country was “liberated from the grip of the terrorist militia,” with 100 Saudi coalition fighter jets providing air cover and Ansar Allah firing missiles at targets inside the kingdom in response.

Washington reached for a familiar script. Secretary of State Marco Rubio branded Ansarh an Iranian proxy, and Tehran fired back on September 9. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei wrote on X, “Marco Rubio’s lies cannot replace facts. Ansarallah is an independent Yemeni actor that makes its own decisions; it takes orders from no one and acts as nobody’s proxy.”

On the question of Ansar Allah’s relationship to Iran, the record sides with those who emphasize the movement’s homegrown roots. In the 1980s, Zaydi religious networks in the northern province of Saada organized study groups and summer camps to resist the Wahhabi and Salafi outreach that Saudi money spread across the region. Around 1992, those networks crystallized as the Believing Youth, an educational and social revival movement dedicated to Zaydi theology and the preservation of a tradition stretching back a millennium. Saada’s poverty and its chronic neglect by Sanaa fueled the grievances that eventually became a military force.

Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi sharpened that network into a political cause after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He accused President Ali Abdullah Saleh of running a corrupt government that neglected Saada, sidelined Zaydis, and surrendered Yemeni sovereignty to Saudi and American interests. His followers adopted a chant that read in full: “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” The chant named foreign powers, but its domestic meaning was clear: Yemeni authorities understood that a movement chanting “death to America” today could be chanting “death to the president” tomorrow. Palestine and the Second Intifada also featured prominently in Hussein’s sermons, which cast Israel as an occupying power and the United States as its enabler. The antisemitism in the Yemeni resistance’s messaging reflected a long-held hostility to Jewry’s machinations among the Yemeni population.

Saleh went to war against the movement in 2004, and his forces killed Hussein on September 10. Leadership passed to his younger brother Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. During the 2011 uprising the movement took the name Ansar Allah and pitched itself as a national force against corruption and inequality.

The episode that best exposes the proxy myth unfolded in September 2014. Iranian representatives reportedly urged Ansar Allah not to seize the capital, and Ansar Allah marched in anyway. HuffPost broke the story in April 2015, citing American officials familiar with the intelligence. One official told the outlet “It is wrong to think of the Houthis as a proxy force for Iran.” National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan added: “It remains our assessment that Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen.” The Wilson Center also called attention to the aforementioned restraint Iran advocated for: “In 2014, Iran reportedly advised the Houthis against taking over Sanaa, but they pressed on.”

Thomas Juneau of the University of Ottawa built the academic foundation for this view. His 2016 study in International Affairs argued that “the Houthis are not Iranian proxies; Tehran’s influence in Yemen is marginal.” In a Washington Post op-ed that same year, he wrote: “It is simply inaccurate to claim that the Houthis are Iranian proxies.” Juneau has since acknowledged deeper cooperation, yet he told The Iran Primer : “The Houthis are fiercely nationalist, and do not take orders from Iran. Instead, they work together, closely, on the basis of their common interests.”

Helen Lackner, among the most respected Western scholars of Yemen, put it plainly on Democracy Now: “The Houthis are not Iranian proxies. They are not Iranian servants. They don’t do what the Iranians tell them to do. They make their own decisions.” She described how the alliance functions: “If their decisions and their policies coincide with those of Iran, then there’s no issue. But if they don’t, they don’t do it.”

Allison Minor challenged the proxy narrative directly in a Brookings essay: “Rigorous definitions of the term ‘proxy’ require that the sponsor has some means of controlling the proxy, as this is what differentiates a proxy from a partner/ally. In truth, the Houthis are not an Iranian proxy, even though they benefit from Iranian support.” Minor pointed to the unilateral ceasefire Ansar Allah declared with Saudi Arabia in 2019, even as Iran sought escalation, and stressed their possession of independent revenue, local arms production, and diverse supply lines as other indicators of autonomous production and decision-making.

Others well-versed in Yemeni affairs reached the same conclusion years earlier. Saudi journalist and filmmaker Safa al-Ahmad, who reported from inside Ansar Allah territory, told PBS Frontline that Iran’s ties to the group were “vastly overblown” and that “the Iranians can’t just pick up the phone and tell the Houthis what to do.”

Even the hawkish Institute for the Study of War agrees. Its September 18 update stated, “The Houthis are not an Iranian proxy, although their objectives often overlap with Iran’s strategic interests.” It added, “The Houthis are an independent partner of Iran and may resist potential Iranian pressure to halt their campaigns, however.”

None of this means Iran sits on the sidelines. The Associated Press reported in late September that officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps helped Ansar Allah with planning during the coastal offensive. Yet researcher Nicholas Brumfield told Al Jazeera that the campaign reportedly involved 76,000 Yemeni fighters, raised “using their own governance apparatuses,” and that mounting evidence points to Ansar Allah boasting a burgeoning domestic arms industry.

Ansar Allah ultimately behaves as a national liberation movement that shares many of Iran’s enemies and welcomes Iranian assistance, yet it charts its own course whenever its interests diverge. It does not need Tehran to steer it any more than any serious and credible resistance movement needs a foreign master. It grew from Yemeni grievances, and it will naturally seek allies such as Iran that oppose the same aggressive powers—Israel and the United States—that work tirelessly to destabilize West Asia. Movements like it already shake the foundations of the regional order. If the current momentum holds, Ansar Allah could reshape not only Yemen but also the Saudi provinces of Asir, Jizan and Najran, lands that many Yemenis still regard as their own and that Saudi Arabia locked down after the 1934 war between the two countries.

What started as a revolt against a corrupt president in a neglected mountain province has become a war that stretches from Taiz to Riyadh. With Ansar Allah astride the Bab el-Mandeb and Iran pressing on the Strait of Hormuz, two of the world’s most vital chokepoints now sit within reach of forces Washington cannot push back. If Asir, Jizan and Najran ever slip from Riyadh’s grip, historians will trace the new map back to Saada, not to Tehran.

By Freddie Ponton | 21st Century Wire | October 12, 2026

For four years, Europe presented its energy break with Russia as a strategic and moral necessity, with Brussels expanding sanctions, promising to cut Moscow’s revenues and preparing a complete ban on Russian liquefied natural gas. Yet European companies bought more LNG from Russia’s Yamal project in the first nine months of 2026 than in the same period of 2025.

EU ports received a record 12.18 million tonnes of Yamal LNG between January and September 2026, an increase of 9.5% over the same period in 2025. The gas arrived in 167 cargoes, roughly one every 1.6 days. The EU received 85% of Yamal’s recorded deliveries by volume even as the project’s worldwide shipments fell by 1.3%.

Urgewald, a German environmental and human rights organisation, placed the estimated benchmark value of those deliveries at €7.88 billion, using cargo volumes and monthly European TTF gas prices rather than disclosed contract payments. European leaders spoke of economic separation while EU ports remained the destination for a multibillion-euro Russian LNG trade.

Sanctions that preserved trade

The EU’s ban on Russian LNG under existing short-term contracts took effect on 25 April 2026. Eligible long-term agreements signed before 17 June 2025 could continue supplying Europe through the end of 2026, with the prohibition taking effect on 1 January 2027. Brussels could announce the coming break while established contracts kept Russian cargoes moving.

Five months after the ban on imports under eligible short-term LNG contracts took effect, EU ports received 792,440 tonnes of Yamal LNG in September, slightly more than a year earlier.

Yamal sold most of its output under long-term contracts signed before the war. TotalEnergies agreed to buy 4 million tonnes a year directly from the project, CNPC contracted 3 million, Germany’s SEFE inherited a 2.9 million tonne agreement, and Spain’s Naturgy held another for 2.5 million tonnes. Novatek sold part of its own allocation through separate agreements with TotalEnergies, Shell and Gunvor, now known as Centalion Group Ltd, These contracts kept major European energy companies commercially tied to Yamal after the political rupture with Moscow, securing supplies that could be sold or traded through their international portfolios, with destination flexibility varying by agreement.

TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanné confirmed that its Yamal agreements were linked to Brent crude. During periods of extreme volatility, those long-term contracts secured supplies that could cost less than replacement gas on the European spot market. When spot prices outpaced oil-linked purchase prices, the gap created an opportunity to earn more from selling the contracted cargoes.

Buyers could exploit that opportunity through global portfolios spanning ships, terminals, storage facilities and supplies from several producing countries. They could exchange cargoes, redirect available gas and meet customer obligations from alternative sources, freeing supplies for sale in markets offering stronger returns.

Russian officials acknowledged that portfolio buyers could swap Yamal supplies against gas from other sources and direct available cargoes towards the most lucrative markets. A Yamal cargo could fulfil one obligation while freeing another supply for sale elsewhere, allowing traders to earn from price differences across markets.

The contracts that bound companies to Russian suppliers also secured access to gas that could cost less than replacement cargoes bought at crisis prices. Keeping those agreements meant preserving both the supply and the trading opportunities it created.

The profits behind the policy

TotalEnergies owns 20% of Yamal LNG and holds 19.4% of Novatek, the project’s controlling shareholder. It also buys and markets Yamal cargoes, giving it commercial interests as both a shareholder and a cargo trader.

In July 2026, chief executive Patrick Pouyanné told analysts that lifting and selling Yamal cargoes generated an average of about $400 million annually. TotalEnergies had direct access to the cash booked through its UK trading entity. The income fluctuated with Brent crude prices because the contracts were linked to oil.

TotalEnergies also retained rights to dividends through its ownership positions, although sanctions limited its ability to transfer those funds from Russia to Europe. Pouyanné confirmed that some cash flows had been distributed without disclosing how much had been repatriated, while the company’s Novatek dividends, which he had valued at around $600 million annually in 2024, had previously remained stuck abroad.

The commercial incentive extended beyond the immediate Yamal income, as continued deliveries preserved access to contracted gas while removing Russian LNG before replacement supplies became available could drive prices higher across the wider market. Pouyanné warned at a French Senate hearing that replacing those supplies would force Europe to pay more, and told analysts in April 2024 that sanctions on Yamal would benefit TotalEnergies’ global portfolio by pushing LNG prices higher.

TotalEnergies had commercial interests under either outcome, as continued Yamal trade generated sales income while a sudden prohibition could tighten supply and raise the value of gas sold elsewhere in its portfolio. Continued access and greater scarcity offered different routes to income, leaving the company with a potential financial benefit even if Russian deliveries stopped.

A French Senate inquiry called in 2024 for France to lead efforts to sanction Russian LNG and end its own imports as soon as possible, yet two years later TotalEnergies was still earning about $400 million annually from Yamal sales.

Germany’s retained Russian contract

Germany’s state-owned energy group SEFE inherited a contract for about 2.9 million tonnes of Yamal LNG annually through the former Gazprom Marketing & Trading business, after Berlin nationalised its parent company, Gazprom Germania, in 2022. The group became Securing Energy for Europe, retaining the Russian supply agreement under German state ownership.

SEFE’s trading operation later attributed substantial profits across its LNG portfolio to contractual flexibility, freight optimisation and arbitrage, while its 2024 financial report recorded £411.2 million in EBITDA and £199.4 million in profit after tax. Those figures covered SEFE Marketing & Trading and its subsidiaries, without isolating the contribution from Yamal.

That flexibility extended to its Indian supply obligations, for which Reuters reported that the business had arranged cargoes from other sources to reduce freight costs. SEFE’s chief executive also explained that it could retain Yamal supplies in Europe and serve India from elsewhere in its portfolio when doing so was cheaper, although that account described an available trading option rather than documenting individual cargo swaps.

Under German state ownership, SEFE retained a long-term agreement for about 2.9 million tonnes of Yamal LNG annually, even as Europe sought to reduce its dependence on Russian energy. Berlin’s nationalisation changed the ownership of Gazprom’s former German business, but the Russian supply agreement remained in place, preserving its commercial ties to Yamal inside a state-owned international trader.

Shell’s phased withdrawal

On 8 March 2022, Shell announced a phased withdrawal from Russian hydrocarbons, including oil, gas and LNG, but later acknowledged that long-term contractual commitments remained despite the end of its spot purchases of Russian LNG.

Among those commitments was a 2015 agreement with Novatek for approximately 900,000 tonnes of Yamal LNG annually, with a term exceeding 20 years. In February 2023, a Shell spokesperson confirmed that the company was still receiving Russian LNG cargoes under that contract, almost a year after announcing its withdrawal.

Shell’s Yamal agreement sat within a global LNG portfolio, with its cargoes passing through a contractual transhipment point at Montoir-de-Bretagne in France. Across the wider business, Shell used its international operations to capture differences in regional demand and prices, and chief executive Wael Sawan attributed strong late-2023 trading results to arbitrage between eastern and western markets. Those results demonstrate the commercial value of portfolio flexibility, without identifying how much came from Yamal.

Naturgy and former Gunvor also retained access to Yamal supplies through long-term agreements, with Naturgy contracted for 2.5 million tonnes annually and Centalion Group Ltd,  for about 500,000 tonnes through Novatek. Reporting on Yamal’s portfolio buyers describes how companies could exchange those supplies with gas sourced elsewhere and direct cargoes towards more lucrative markets.

The contracts therefore carried commercial opportunities alongside their obligations, preserving access to gas that could be sold or exchanged within wider portfolios. Remaining in the trade could generate value even where companies presented their continuing purchases as a contractual constraint, although that potential should not be confused with a verified profit from each agreement.

Russian gas beyond Nord Stream

On 7 February 2022, then US President Joe Biden stood beside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and said that a Russian invasion would bring Nord Stream 2 to an end. Asked how Washington could achieve that when Germany controlled the project, he maintained that the United States could ensure the outcome without explaining the mechanism.

Germany halted Nord Stream 2’s certification on 22 February 2022, preventing a pipeline that had never entered commercial service from beginning operations. Nord Stream 1 had already stopped delivering gas when explosions ruptured three of the system’s four pipeline strings on 26 September 2022, leaving only one Nord Stream 2 string intact. With the Nord Stream route out of operation, Russian LNG continued reaching European terminals through the contracts held by companies such as TotalEnergies, SEFE and Shell.

Yamal had begun exporting LNG in December 2017, almost five years before the Nord Stream explosions, and its seaborne supply network survived the loss of the pipelines. European companies continued buying Russian gas under long-term contracts, receiving by-sea supplies that remained commercially valuable even as the direct pipeline connection between Russia and Germany stood idle.

America captured the market

The decline of Russian pipeline supplies opened a larger European market for American LNG, and Washington worked with Brussels to expand the trade. In their 25 March 2022 agreement, the United States pledged to work towards at least 15 billion cubic metres of additional LNG for the EU that year, including supplies from international partners, while maintaining a regulatory environment that would support additional export capacity. The European Commission committed to working with member states to secure demand for approximately 50 billion cubic metres of additional American LNG annually until at least 2030, giving the effort to reduce Russian dependence a long-term market for US supplies.

American deliveries to the EU rose from 22 billion cubic metres in 2021 to 56 billion in 2022, exceeding the initial expansion target. By the second quarter of 2026, the United States supplied 63.2% of EU LNG imports, with Russia second at 17.3%. Europe’s retreat from Russian pipeline gas had been accompanied by a US-European policy effort to expand American supply, while Russian LNG retained a substantial place in the same market.

Dependence became leverage

Europe’s reliance on American supplies extended beyond LNG, giving Washington leverage over another essential fuel when the Trump administration asked the EU to release 120 million barrels of emergency diesel over six months. Washington presented reserve releases as an alternative to restricting American diesel exports, a threat with considerable force because the United States supplied around half of the EU’s diesel imports in August 2026.

Washington was pressing Europe to release finished diesel that could reach consumers without further refining, while its own emergency contribution consisted of crude offered to companies under loan arrangements requiring repayment in oil with additional barrels. The US Department of Energy’s September solicitation explicitly built replenishment into those contracts, leaving Europe under pressure to draw on immediately usable fuel while American releases carried a contractual obligation to restore its crude reserves.

The pressure was followed by a G7 agreement on 2 October 2026 to coordinate the release of 100 million barrels over four months, with a substantial diesel release brought forward into the first 20 days. G7 leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to refrain from energy export restrictions against one another, placing continued access to supplies alongside the agreement to draw down emergency stocks.

Washington had helped build a larger European market for American energy as part of the effort to reduce dependence on Russia, then used the prospect of restricting diesel exports to press European governments to release their reserves. Europe’s reliance on an allied supplier had left it exposed to pressure over access to fuel, with emergency stocks becoming part of the negotiation over keeping those supplies flowing.

A credibility crisis

European leaders need to explain how their effort to cut Russia’s energy revenues can be reconciled with rising Yamal deliveries to EU ports and European traders earning income from the cargoes. TotalEnergies’ disclosure of about $400 million in annual income makes continued trade harder to present solely as an unwanted contractual obligation, when the same agreement also sustained a valuable business. Compliance with the sanctions timetable does not resolve the political contradiction; it shows how much commerce that timetable allowed to continue.

Brussels also committed to building long-term demand for American LNG, while Washington later demonstrated its willingness to use fuel exports as leverage over European governments.

Whose interests are being served when Europe distances itself from Russian pipeline supplies, remains a paying customer for Russian LNG and becomes more exposed to American pressure?

European leaders owe their citizens an explanation of why Russia remained an acceptable supplier for profitable LNG contracts while economic separation was presented as a strategic necessity. They must also explain whose interests were served by replacing that dependence with greater exposure to Washington.

One person has died as stormy weather with high volumes of water is sweeping across Greece, affecting mostly Greek islands. Rhodes is one of the Greek islands severely hit by the bad weather front, while Evia and the Sporades islands (Skiathos, Skopelos and Alonissos) are also at the mercy of the intense weather phenomena. RHODES […]

The post One dead as stormy weather sweeps across Greek islands appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.