Latest from The Intercept
The Intercept
10 hours ago
- Politics
- The Intercept
Who's the Real Bully of the Middle East?
A tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran announced Monday appears to be holding. President Donald Trump made the announcement after unilaterally dragging the U.S. into the conflict and authorizing strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites using 30,000-pound bunker busters. Israel attacked Iran on June 13, just days before Iran and the U.S. were set to resume talks in Oman over the country's nuclear enrichment program. ' You don't have to be anti-war to understand that diplomacy in this case would've been better,' said Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and the author of three books on Iran. Majd is a contributor to NBC News and covered the 2015 Iran deal for the network. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Majd joins host Akela Lacy to discuss what's left of the path to diplomacy after years of sabotage, from Israel's aggressive military posture to Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. The deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aimed to stop Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons development. Majd says that the incentive structure of the deal included increasing transparency, access, and inspections of Iran's nuclear sites and reintegrating the country back into the global economy: What 'Obama recognized was, 'Look, if you guys make this deal with us, your incentive to not build a bomb is very clear. … Inflation will go down. Your people will be happier. The economy won't be suffering the way it is. Sanctions will be lifted. You'll make money from oil sales. We'll have international companies coming and investing in Iran.' In 2018, during his first term, Trump pulled out of the agreement and now, after authorizing military strikes, has obliterated what little trust remained. 'The problem here is that with the Trump administration having once withdrawn from the nuclear deal that was working, and having now agreed to Israel attacking Iran, and then attacking Iran itself — there's no trust in diplomacy anymore on the Iranian side, and that's understandable,' says Hooman. Trump is reportedly set to resume talks with Iran next week. But will the ceasefire hold — given that Israel has repeatedly broken its own truces with other countries, and Trump's own volatility? Is a diplomatic solution still possible? Majd says it may take leaning more into Trump's personal ambitions, 'The only way it could be over, and this is unlikely, is that the U.S. under President Trump makes a deal that makes Mr. Trump, very happy, puts him along the path to his Nobel Peace Prize. And he, who's the only one right now, can prevent Israel from attacking Iran again.' You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The Intercept
12 hours ago
- Politics
- The Intercept
Fetterman Voted With GOP to Make Sure Trump Can Attack Iran Again
In a Friday evening vote, the U.S. Senate rejected a war powers resolution that would have blocked President Donald Trump from making further attacks on Iran, despite widespread disapproval of last week's strikes. Senators voted 47-53, largely along party lines, on a measure offered by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that would have prohibited Trump from offensive measures while preserving his ability to defend U.S. forces. Kaine's resolution drew near-unanimous support from Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. 'I am hoping that the members of this body will stand up for the constitution.' In a floor speech Friday night, Kaine underscored the continuing need for the measure despite a fragile ceasefire, noting that Trump said as recently as Friday that he would be willing to bomb Iran again. 'I am hoping — I am realistic — but I am hoping that the members of this body will stand up for the constitution, will stand up for the proposition that war is too big to be decided by one person,' Kaine said before his measure failed. A single Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who often opposes foreign interventions, supported Kaine's measure. Aside from Paul, the resolution drew pushback from Senate Republicans. Critics said it would prevent the U.S. from defending Israel, despite an amendment from Kaine specifically designed to address that concern. 'President Trump seized the moment — responsibly, constitutionally, and decisively,' said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, the majority whip, on the Senate floor. 'America and our allies are safer today because of it. The resolution from Senator Kaine is not needed — and I oppose it. If passed, it would prevent the president from protecting us in the future.' The strikes revealed divisions within the Democratic caucus. Progressives largely opposed the strikes outright, while some pro-Israel Democrats offered qualified or full support. One of the most full-throated boosters was Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., who voted against Kaine's resolution. Fetterman has emerged as a leading proponent of the use of military force against Iran. 'Blow it up! Blow it up! I think we should waste what's left of their nuclear facilities,' he said in March. His aggressive stance has alienated former donors, who have requested refunds, and staffers, who have resigned at a steady pace. The war powers resolution was always considered a longshot, since it would have required the support of a veto-proof majority of both chambers of Congress. A similar attempt in 2019 to end the Trump administration's involvement in Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen faltered when Trump vetoed it, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, pulled a similar resolution from consideration in 2022 amid pushback from Joe Biden's administration. Kaine's measure, however, did put senators on the record about how they feel about Trump's unpopular strikes. Americans disapproved of the strikes 56 percent to 44 percent, according to a snap CNN poll conducted immediately after the attack. The results mirror other surveys. Many Democrats sought to criticize Trump without directly addressing the strikes by voicing concern over the administration's failure to obtain congressional approval before the attack, or to adequately brief Congress after it. 'The Democratic Party needs to clearly stand up against this war.' In the House, progressives and ranking committee leaders have offered two alternative war powers resolutions. Advocates say the version offered by Democratic leaders would do little to prevent Trump from launching future strikes if he justifies them as defending Israel. At a press conference Wednesday, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said the party should back the tougher resolution, which he cosponsored with Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. 'The Democratic Party,' Khanna said, 'needs to clearly stand up against this war and take the mantle again of being the anti-war party, the party that stands up against wars of choice, against these endless wars in the Middle East.'
The Intercept
a day ago
- Politics
- The Intercept
'No Right Is Safe.' SCOTUS Bars Judges From Reining in Trump
Since President Donald Trump's first day back in office, Republicans in Congress have been desperate to gut federal judges' power to block his administration's unlawful executive orders, policies, and threats. On Friday, the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority gave them what they wanted, further weakening the judiciary as an effective check on a White House that was already ignoring court orders with impunity. 'No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,' wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent she read from the bench, calling the ruling 'an attack on our system of law.' The case stems from the Trump administration's attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via an executive order issued hours after Trump was sworn in. Three different district court judges quickly blocked the executive order as unconstitutional under both the text of the Constitution and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent. Friday's decision did not address the merits of the executive order, but instead how the judges went about ensuring the core constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court's six-member conservative wing drastically limited courts' authority to issue injunctions even in the face of galling illegality affecting millions of people. The three judges had issued a 'universal' injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order, which meant the Trump administration could not enforce it anywhere in the country. A more limited injunction would have protected just the rights of the specific plaintiffs who sued — leaving the Trump regime free to target anyone who hadn't gone to court themselves. But from today forward, district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, which conservatives gleefully sought and obtained during the Biden administration to block student loan forgiveness and other policies. 'Curiously, this same Supreme Court never thought to say all the injunctions it upheld and stays it granted against Biden administration actions were outside its power,' observed Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley on social media. 'But now apparently they are.' Instead, federal courts may only use injunctions to block presidents and their administrations from violating the rights of the specific parties that filed suit. In effect, judges will have no ability to offer immediate relief to however many people outside the courtroom are suffering from illegal actions of the executive branch. The ruling is certain to spur more class-action lawsuits against the federal government, which are still allowed but carry significant procedural hurdles and additional costs. 'Today's ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,' wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent. Eliminating universal injunctions 'requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness,' Jackson wrote. 'This decision is devastating for U.S. families who are not protected by the limited injunction the Supreme Court left in place,' said Monica, a pregnant mother, asylum-seeker, and named plaintiff challenging the birthright citizenship executive order, in an emailed statement. 'Hundreds of thousands of other U.S.-born children are in danger of not receiving U.S. citizenship. I know that every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U.S. citizenship — that is why I filed this lawsuit to not only protect my child's rights, but the constitutional rights of all U.S.-born children of immigrants.' The conservative supermajority framed the ruling as grounded in history and ancient principles about the limits of judicial authority. Jackson called this 'legalese' a 'smokescreen' that 'obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?' The court's three liberal dissenters — Justices Elena Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor — framed the decision in catastrophic terms. 'Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,' wrote Jackson. 'But this Court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.' Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, wrote that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court failed to recognize that the 'current administration is a unique threat to the rule of law,' and that it was disastrous to remove such 'a useful tool for the judiciary to constrain the president at this particular moment.' 'It empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law.' 'It's such a threat because it empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law,' Dorf wrote. The plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration. In one of the cases, the plaintiffs quickly filed a motion in Maryland district court to certify their lawsuit as a class action. 'Even without a universal injunction, we will continue to litigate this case to ensure that every child born in the United States receives the citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment promises them, regardless of their parents' immigration status,' said William Powell, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, in an emailed statement. 'The Executive Order is unconstitutional, and nothing in the Supreme Court's decision today calls that ultimate conclusion into question.'
The Intercept
a day ago
- Politics
- The Intercept
Pete Hegseth Is Mad the Media Won't Celebrate U.S. War With Iran
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had a meltdown on Thursday during a Pentagon press conference, excoriating reporters for failing to act as cheerleaders for his boss, President Donald Trump. In a briefing about U.S. strikes on Iran, Hegseth criticized the press for not following the Pentagon line and called on journalists to 'wave an American flag.' His statements harken back to past Pentagon calls for fawning coverage in the name of patriotism. 'The press corps,' Hegseth complained, 'cheer against Trump so hard, it's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad.' Hegseth's tantrum stemmed from reporting that cast doubt on Trump's assertion that recent U.S. air strikes had 'obliterated' Iranian nuclear facilities last Saturday. The Intercept reported on skepticism about Trump's claims by current and former defense officials on Monday. On Tuesday, multiple media outlets disclosed information from a preliminary classified Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, report that said the attacks set back Iran's nuclear program by only a few months. 'You have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope,' Hegseth said at his second-ever news conference, claiming that the media assembled 'half truths, spun information, leaked information' to 'manipulate … the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful.' Before and after Hegseth's atomic meltdown on Thursday, Trump unleashed a paroxysm of posts on Truth Social. 'FAKE NEWS CNN IS SO DISGUSTING AND INCOMPETENT. SOME OF THE DUMBEST ANCHORS IN THE BUSINESS!,' he shout-typed. 'Rumor is that the Failing New York Times and Fake News CNN will be firing the reporters who made up the FAKE stories on the Iran Nuclear sites because they got it so wrong. Lets see what happens?' It remains unclear whether the U.S. strikes significantly damaged Iran's nuclear program — which, according to American intelligence organizations, did not involve an active effort to produce a nuclear weapon. 'To me, it still appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months,' Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said following a classified briefing on Thursday. 'There's no doubt there was damage done to the program. But the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don't seem to stand up to reason.' Complaints by the White House about the press during unpopular wars have a long history. As TV news increasingly showed the Vietnam War to be an intractable stalemate, if not an outright failure, President Lyndon Johnson complained about their coverage, 'I can prove that Ho Chi Minh is a son-of-a-bitch if you let me put it on the screen,' he told a group of reporters, referring to the leader of North Vietnam, but said that the networks 'want me to be the son-of-a-bitch.' His successor, Richard Nixon, was even more vitriolic about coverage of the war — and more succinct in his criticism. 'Our worst enemy seems to be the press!' he barked in 1971. In 1965, CBS News sent Morley Safer to Vietnam to cover the escalating American war. In July, Marines entered the village of Cam Ne and met stiff resistance, suffering three dead and four wounded. The next month, with Safer and a cameraman in tow, the troops set out for the area in armored vehicles. Safer recalled: The troops walked abreast toward this village and started firing. They said that there was some incoming fire. I didn't witness it, but it was a fairly large front, so it could have happened down the line. There were two guys wounded in our group, both in the ass, so that meant it was 'friendly fire.' They moved into the village and they systematically began torching every house— every house as far as I could see, getting people out in some cases, using flamethrowers in others. No Vietnamese speakers, by the way, were among the group with the flamethrower. About 150 homes in Cam Ne were burned; others were bulldozed, as Marines razed two entire hamlets. Artillery was then called in on the wreckage. According to reports, one child was killed and four women were wounded. In actuality, many more may have died. Safer's segment, 'The Burning of Cam Ne Village,' sparked public outrage. The Defense Department demanded CBS recall Safer from Vietnam, and Johnson called CBS President Frank Stanton. 'Are you trying to fuck me,' the U.S. president barked. 'Who is this?' Stanton asked, according to reporting by David Halberstam and others. Johnson replied, 'Frank, this is your president and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag.' A year later, Safer wrote a newspaper column about a visit to Saigon by Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. Per Safer, Sylvester laid into the press: 'I can't understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,' he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good. A network television correspondent said, 'Surely, Arthur, you don't expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.' 'That's exactly what I expect,' came the reply. Sylvester also told the reporters: 'Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid.' Sylvester later denied the 'handmaiden' comment, but others present backed Safer. 'Sylvester engaged specific correspondents in near name-calling, twice telling Jack Langguth [of The New York Times] he was stupid,' another attendee noted. 'At one point Sylvester actually made the statement he thought press should be 'handmaiden' of government.' In his press conference, Hegseth called on journalists to publish stories lauding troops for doing their jobs, asking rhetorically if outlets had written on the difficulty of flying a plane for 36 hours, manning a Patriot missile battery, or executing mid-air refueling. 'Time and time again, classified information is leaked or peddled for political purposes to try to make the president look bad. And what's really happening is you're undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots and incredible F-35 pilots and incredible refuelers and incredible air defenders who accomplish their mission,' he groused. 'How about we celebrate that?' 'Premising entire stories on biased leaks to biased publications trying to make something look bad,' Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, griped. 'How about we take a beat, recognize first the success of our warriors, hold them up, tell their stories, celebrate that, wave an American flag, be proud of what we accomplished.' The Intercept followed up with the Pentagon to ask if Hegseth would help facilitate this type of reporting. A Pentagon spokesperson instead offered the opportunity to speak with Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson off the record. When The Intercept called to set up a time to speak with Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson refused to do so. 'Kingsley will reach out to you if she's got anything to provide you,' said the official. 'I would just stand by. That's the best thing I can offer you right now.' The Office of the Secretary of Defense refused to provide further clarification about Hegseth's views on the role of the press and how the media ought to cover him, the president, and the military. 'We have nothing more to provide,' a spokesperson said after providing nothing. Hegseth is, notably, calling on the press to celebrate a war which Americans are overwhelmingly against. Americans disapprove of the strikes on Iran 56 percent to 44 percent, according to a CNN/SSRS poll conducted after the strikes. An even greater number distrust Trump's decision-making on the use of force in Iran, with 58 percent saying the strikes will make Iran more of a threat to the U.S. and only 27 percent believing the attacks will lessen the threat. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found only 39 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling on the Israel–Iran war, while 53 percent disapprove. Hegseth's antagonism toward the news media began well before Thursday's press conference. Since his appointment, he has conducted a war on whistleblowers despite the fact that he inadvertently shared detailed attack plans — of far more import than the DIA report because they preceded military strikes — with a journalist on a messaging app. Hegseth has reportedly accused high-ranking military officers of leaks and threatened to subject them to polygraph tests. Joe Kasper, Hegseth's former chief of staff, called out 'unauthorized disclosures of national security information involving sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense' and threatened that parties found responsible would be 'referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution,' in a March memo. Speaking in April with quasi-journalist Megyn Kelly, another former Fox News host, ex-Hegseth aide Colin Carroll said that the secretary and his team have been 'consumed' by his leaky Department of Defense. 'If you look at a pie chart of the secretary's day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably a leak investigation,' Carroll said. The FBI is now investigating how the DIA report became public. 'We are doing a leak investigation with the FBI now, because this information is for internal purposes — battle damage investigation — and CNN and others are trying to spin it to try and make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success,' Hegseth told reporters. At his Thursday press conference, Hegseth urged the media to do more to herald American exceptionalism, at least in terms of military prowess. 'How about we talk about how special America is, that we — only we — have these capabilities? I think it's too much to ask, unfortunately, for the fake news,' said Hegseth in aggrieved tones. 'So, we're used to that, but we also have an opportunity to stand at the podium and read the truth of what's really happening.'
The Intercept
a day ago
- Health
- The Intercept
Israeli Soldiers Killed At Least 410 People at Food Aid Sites in Gaza This Month
Support Us © THE INTERCEPT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED A man carries a flour sack from the World Health Organization warehouse, in Gaza City, Gaza, on June 26, 2025. Photo: Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu/Getty Images The Israeli military has killed at least 410 people trying to get food at Israeli-run aid sites in Gaza in the past month. This constitutes 'a likely war crime' that violates international standards on aid distribution, according to the United Nations. 'Desperate, hungry people in Gaza continue to face the inhumane choice of either starving to death or risk being killed while trying to get food,' the U.N. human rights office said. Palestinian health authorities reported that Israel killed 44 people waiting for aid in separate incidents in southern and central Gaza just on Tuesday this week. Israeli soldiers have reportedly killed aid-seekers with bullets, tank shells, and drone-mounted weapons. Israeli officers and soldiers said that they were ordered to deliberately fire at unarmed civilians waiting for humanitarian aid in an investigation published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Friday; the military prosecution has called for a review into possible war crimes, according to Haaretz. The Israeli military has said reports about casualties at aid sites have prompted 'thorough examinations…in the Southern command' and that 'instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned.' 'The aforementioned incidents are under review by the competent authorities,' an unnamed spokesperson for the Israeli military said in a statement emailed to The Intercept. The aid distribution sites are run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit formed earlier this year for the purpose of distributing aid in collaboration with the Israeli government and American private military and security companies, under a plan created by the U.S. and Israeli governments. An open letter published earlier this week by more than a dozen human rights and legal advocacy groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Commission of Jurists, condemned the organization. The letter stated that the privatized, militarized aid distribution system — and close collaboration with Israeli authorities — undermines 'the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.' They urged corporate entities, donors, and individuals to suspend action or support that undermines international humanitarian law and 'to reject any model that outsources life-saving aid to private, politically-affiliated actors and to press for the urgent restoration of independent, rights-based humanitarian access for all civilians in Gaza.' The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been marred with controversy from the start; the former head, Jake Wood, quit in May, worrying that 'it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.' Boston Consulting Group, which helped run the business, also backed out. The Israeli military said that they allow 'the American civilian organization (GHF) to distribute aid to Gaza residents independently, and operate in proximity to the new distribution zones to enable the distribution alongside the continuation of IDF operational activities in the Gaza Strip' in a statement to the Intercept. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation did not respond to a request for comment. The American government, however, appears to be committed to this way of providing aid. On Tuesday, the Trump administration authorized a $30 million grant for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to documents viewed by Reuters. Security guards ride aboard trucks carrying humanitarian aid in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, on June 25, 2025. Photo: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg/Getty Images Finding food has become a horrific risk for many in Gaza. Rolla Alaydi, a Palestinian American, provided The Intercept with a voice note from her cousin, Maher Ahmed, detailing how he went to an aid site on June 1 and witnessed a fatal bullet strike his friend. Maher had gone three days without flour, so when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation first opened its facilities, he went with three friends, prompted by an invitation from a food bank. At 6 a.m., on June 1, they went to Dewar Al'aalam for food distribution, and the Americans started to signal to them with their hands to enter and take the food, by shouting on a mic 'Take only one box and go home,' Mahar said in the voice note. A group of about 1,000 people went inside. Suddenly, they heard the chaotic sound of gunfire. His friend, Mohammed, was shot in the head, chest, and belly — and killed immediately. They couldn't move for about an hour because of heavy gunfire, so they tried to give Mohammed first aid but failed. The three of them managed to get Mohammed onto a donkey carriage before taking him to Nasser Hospital. 'I survived by a miracle, by a big miracle,' Maher says. 'And I lost my friend, Mohammed. Mohammed was only dreaming of getting a bag of flour for his mother and family.' Maher wrote in a June 11 Instagram post accompanying a video of Mohammed's funeral that they 'survived the worst together … until a bag of flour took him from me.' For months, environmental researcher Yaakov Garb has been using satellite data to analyze the design, location, and expansion of these facilities. Garb, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, found in an analysis published earlier this month on Harvard Dataverse that most of Gaza's population cannot access these centers in a safe and practical way. Doing so requires crossing the dangerous Netzarim Corridor, entering a buffer zone from which Israel has banned them from entering, or a long walk across a barren rubble field, while carrying a heavy box of food. Four Israeli-run aid compounds have already been widely reported on by the media, and Garb suspects a fifth is being formed on the coast —given that its construction features appear identical to the other four. All are close to fortified Israeli military positions, he says. 'The fact that four of the five compounds lie south of the Morag corridor — repeatedly indicated by Israeli officials as the intended destination for concentration of Palestinians to be displaced from the remainder of Gaza in an impending intensification of the military attacks — is not reassuring,' Garb notes in his analysis. Israel's upheaval of Gaza's existing aid distribution system amid warnings of famine has angered Garb. 'To cloak this kind of tactical intervention in humanitarian wrapping rubs me the wrong way,' Garb says. 'If you can't do it properly then get out of the way and let the people who can do it get to work.' Humanitarian aid experts agree. 'We all saw this coming. To anyone that knows this stuff, it's not a surprise. It is tragic,' says Maryam Z. Deloffre, an associate professor of international affairs at George Washington University who has researched aid distribution systems globally; she explains that this is why multiple nongovernmental organizations and the U.N. said they would not be involved in this way of distributing aid. Before the war in Gaza broke out, Garb was focused on reviewing satellite imagery to look into waste burning and land contamination in the West Bank and Gaza. But over the last year, he started posting his observations about confusing evacuation warnings, which did not clearly describe which areas populations should flee from, or the so-called humanitarian safe areas, as well as the expansion of these aid compounds. 'They are part and parcel of the same callousness,' he says. 'These evacuation maps — if a student gave me a map like that in an introductory GIS course they would fail — and these are maps where people's lives are hanging in the balance.' Garb has grown increasingly skeptical of the Israeli government's actions. 'I learned to trust less what people are saying and instead trust what I could see from the satellite,' he says. 'I learned to trust less what people are saying and instead trust what I could see from the satellite.' Garb first started seeing the emergence of these compounds in late April, when he spotted intensive work on some big clearings that seemed different in size and formation to other military installations. He wasn't sure if they would be used to relocate refugees instead. But as Israeli government declarations and media reports started mentioning an alternative aid distribution model in Gaza, he realized that is what these sites were going to be. Garb's report unpacks how the physical layout of the compounds prioritizes control and surveillance over safety. The aid sites appear to lack key facilities — such as toilets, water, and shade for recipients — and involve crowds moving in narrow lines through fenced aisles. This creates a 'chokepoint': a predictable movement path that allows for no cover or concealment. For the visitor, this kind of design is supposed to induce stress and fear. 'This setup would be particularly distressing for an already traumatized population, especially given the compound's proximity to the Israeli army forces that have been sources of violence they have experienced for almost a year and a half,' Garb writes. Aid sites should ideally have multiple exit points and freedom of movement, as well as facilities, trained deescalation facilitators, and dedicated lanes for vulnerable groups. Read our complete coverage Asked to respond to Garb's study and broader criticisms of their conduct around aid sites, an unnamed spokesperson with the Israeli military said it had 'recently worked to reorganize the area through the installation of fences, signage placement, the opening of additional routes, and other measures.' It did not provide further detail on how many routes have opened up, or where the routes are located. A small detail from Garb's most recent paper has been turned into a meme in recent days. Some readers have interpreted population estimates he included in his report as proof that 377,000 people in Gaza are missing per official Israeli military statistics; Garb clarified to The Intercept that this is a misinterpretation. The numbers in his report refer to estimates for just three particular areas of Gaza, not its entirety; he also noted there was a typo in the map for the al-Mawasi area that he would promptly correct. The official death toll of Israel's war on Gaza, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, stands at more than 55,000. Two reports published in the British medical journal Lancet estimated that the real number is likely closer to 64,000 dead from direct attacks, with the number of deaths from disease, malnutrition, and other health issues related to the conflict potentially climbing above 180,000. Deloffre, the GWU professor, points out that military involvement in handing out food can be problematic. Two of the key principles of humanitarian work are neutrality (not taking sides in a conflict) and impartiality (providing assistance to everyone without discrimination), Deloffre says. Militaries can't be impartial and neutral when they are party to the conflict, she adds. What's more, 'people are generally afraid of the military; you don't see the military and feel you can approach them.' Deloffre worries more broadly about backsliding to a time when humanitarian need was not the main driving force behind humanitarian action and decisions about who to help were driven by political interests. She also notes that the core humanitarian principles — mentioned in the open letter — are not legally binding, and are instead adopted by nonstate actors such as NGOs and the Internatinoal Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The principles are part of a Red Cross code of conduct, which was codified in the early 90s. Israel claims that it needs this level of control to ensure aid doesn't get diverted to Hamas. But humanitarian experts say that Israel could have used a good-faith effort to address any such concern through the existing system. Join The Conversation
