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BREAKINGBREAKING,

Statement appears to signal about-face from US president, who previously backed Hamas’s crackdown on Gaza gangs.

United States President Donald Trump has threatened to break the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas if the Palestinian group continues to target gangs and alleged Israeli collaborators in Gaza.

“If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Thursday. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The statement appears to signal an about-face from Trump, who earlier this week expressed support for Hamas’s crackdown on gangs in the Palestinian territory.

“They did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad, very, very bad gangs,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “And they did take them out, and they killed a number of gang members. And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s OK.”

More to come…

President Trump has tapped a career government attorney who worked behind the scenes for years to root out misconduct in federal law enforcement to serve as the Justice Department’s next internal watchdog.

The White House on Friday named Don R. Berthiaume to serve as the department’s acting inspector general, a high-profile position that oversees internal investigations into fraud, waste and abuse in the department and its component agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons.

Berthiaume is taking the oversight role at a time the Justice Department is in tumult. Prosecutors, agents and other employees have endured waves of firings and resignations as part of the Republican administration’s purge of those suspected of being disloyal to the president. The department has also dropped several high-profile criminal cases, including the indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams, and Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged and convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, the most sprawling investigation in the department’s history.

Concerns deepened last month that Trump has weaponized the Justice Department to pursue investigations of his perceived enemies following the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.

Berthiaume’s appointment, which takes effect at the end of the month, comes amid Trump’s upending of the federal government, including his firing of more than a dozen IGs on his fourth full day in office. Several of those former watchdogs filed a federal lawsuit seeking reinstatement, saying their dismissals violated the law. That case is pending.

Berthiaume, 51, worked as an attorney in the Justice Department inspector general’s office for 10 years until 2020. Among his highest-profile assignments was detailing errors in the use of wiretaps in the federal investigation into alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The last Senate-confirmed inspector general was Michael Horowitz, a former boss of Berthiaume and one of the few inspectors general who was not fired by Trump. In June, Horowitz was appointed to lead the Federal Reserve Board’s Office of Inspector General.

Created by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, inspectors general serve as the first line of defense within agencies to stop waste, fraud and abuses of power. Their findings often lead to policy changes. Their investigators can also spearhead criminal probes.

Though inspectors general are presidential appointees, some have served presidents of both major political parties. Federal law requires they be hired “without regard to political affiliation and solely on the basis of integrity and demonstrated ability.”

“It’s a very important job, but Trump’s firings have created a threat environment the likes of which IGs have never seen before,” said former Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich, who served in the role from 1994 to 1999. “IGs need to be prepared to investigate credible allegations of waste, fraud, and misconduct. If they are too afraid to do so, IGs are no longer fulfilling their mission.”

Given the recent turmoil, Department of Justice employees could perceive the inspector general’s office as “hostile territory,” said Stacey Young, a former department attorney who founded Justice Connection, an organization supporting the agency’s employees.

“Responsible oversight of DOJ’s actions has never been more important,” Young said, “and I hope the next inspector general will exercise the independence and fortitude required to do it.”

The department’s inspector general handles some of the most explosive and politically sensitive inquiries in Washington.

In 2019, for example, Horowitz released a report faulting the FBI for surveillance warrant applications in Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had coordinated with Russia to interfere in the election. The IG determined the investigation had been opened for a legitimate purpose and did not find evidence that partisan bias had guided investigative decisions.

Special counsel Robert Mueller determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through hacking and a covert social media offensive and that the Trump campaign embraced the help and expected to benefit from it against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. But Mueller found no evidence that Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Moscow to influence the election.

Berthiaume had a role in the inspector general’s review of Crossfire Hurricane and helped write a 2013 report on dysfunction and deep partisan divisions inside the Justice Department’s Civil Rights unit. His other work at the Office of Inspector General included exposing improper hiring of relatives and friends by senior leaders of the U.S. Marshals Service and probing a botched investigation into U.S. firearms traffickers suspected of selling grenades to Mexican cartels, according to his LinkedIn page.

Since 2023, Berthiaume has served as senior counsel to the inspector general at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he oversees attorneys investigating housing fraud and runs the agency’s whistleblower protection program.

Before joining HUD, Berthiaume spent three years at the Drug Enforcement Administration, managing the narcotics agency’s relationship with the Justice Department. He began his legal career prosecuting bank and credit card fraud cases at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Goodman and Mustian write for the Associated Press. Goodman reported from Miami, Mustian from New York.

MINNEAPOLIS — Ken Martin is in the fight of his life.

The low-profile political operative from Minnesota, just six months on the job as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is charged with leading his party’s formal resistance to President Trump and fixing the Democratic brand.

“I think the greatest divide right now in our party, frankly, is not ideological,” Martin told The Associated Press. “The greatest divide is those people who are standing up and fighting and those who are sitting on the sidelines.”

“We’re using every single lever of power we have to take the fight to Donald Trump,” he said of the DNC.

And yet, as hundreds of Democratic officials gather in Martin’s Minneapolis hometown on Monday for the first official DNC meeting since he became chair, there is evidence that Martin’s fight may extend well beyond the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Big Democratic donors are unhappy with the direction of their own party and not writing checks. Political factions are fragmented over issues such as the Israel-Hamas war. The party’s message is murky. Key segments of the Democratic base — working-class voters and young people, among them — have drifted away.

And there is deep frustration that the Democratic Party under Martin’s leadership is not doing enough to stop the Republican president — no matter how tough his rhetoric may be.

“There are no magic fixes,” said Jeanna Repass, the chair of the Kansas Democratic Party, who praised Martin’s performance so far. “He is trying to lead at a time where everyone wants it to be fixed right now. And it’s just not going to happen.”

At this week’s three-day summer meeting, DNC officials hope to make real progress in reversing the sense of pessimism and frustration that has consumed Democrats since Republicans seized the White House and control of Congress last fall.

It may not be so easy.

Confidence questions and money trouble

At least a couple of DNC members privately considered bringing a vote of no confidence against Martin this week in part because of the committee’s underwhelming fundraising, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation who was granted anonymity to share internal discussions. Ultimately, the no confidence vote will not move forward because Martin’s critics couldn’t get sufficient support from the party’s broader membership, which includes more than 400 elected officials from every state and several territories.

Still, the committee’s financial situation is weak compared with the opposition’s.

The most recent federal filings reveal that the DNC has $14 million in the bank at the end of July compared with the Republican National Committee’s $84 million. The Democrats’ figure represents its lowest level of cash on hand in at least the last five years.

Martin and his allies, including his predecessor Jaime Harrison, insist it’s not fair to compare the party’s current financial health with recent years, when Democratic President Joe Biden was in the White House.

Harrison pointed to 2017 as a more accurate comparison. That year, the committee struggled to raise money in the months after losing to Trump the first time. And in the 2018 midterm elections that followed, Harrison noted, Democrats overcame their fundraising problems and won the House majority and several Senate seats.

“These are just the normal pains of being a Democrat when we don’t have the White House,” Harrison said. “Ken is finding his footing.”

Martin acknowledged that big donors are burnt out after the last election, which has forced the committee to turn to smaller-dollar donors, who have responded well.

“Money will not be the ultimate determinant in this (midterm) election,” Martin said. “We’ve been making investments, record investments, in our state parties. … We have the money to operate. We’re not in a bad position.”

Gaza debate could get ugly

While Martin is broadly popular among the DNC’s rank and file, internal divisions may flare publicly this week when the committee considers competing resolutions about the Israel-Hamas war.

One proposed resolution would have the DNC encourage Democratic members of Congress to suspend military aid to Israel, establish an arms embargo and recognize Palestine as a country, according to draft language reviewed by the AP. The measure also states that the crisis in Gaza has resulted in the loss of over 60,000 lives and the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians “at the hands of the Israeli government.”

The DNC leadership, led by Martin, introduced a competing resolution that adds more context about Israel’s challenges.

One line, for example, refers to “the suffering of both Palestinians and Israelis” and notes the number of Israelis killed in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Martin’s version calls for a two-state solution, but there is no reference to the number of Palestinians killed or displaced, nor is there a call for an end to military aid or an arms embargo.

Meanwhile, another proposed resolution would reaffirm the DNC’s commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Many Democrats, businesses and educational institutions have distanced themselves from DEI programs after Trump and other Republicans attacked them as Democrats’ “woke” policies.

Ultimately, Martin said the party needs to focus its message on the economy.

“There’s no doubt we have to get back to a message that resonates with voters,” he said. “And focusing on an economic agenda is the thing that brings all parts of our coalition and Americans into the conversation.”

“We have work to do for sure,” he added.

Presidential prospects on the agenda

The DNC is years away from deciding which states vote first on the 2028 presidential primary calendar, but that discussion will begin in earnest at the Minneapolis gathering, where at least three presidential prospects will be featured speakers: Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Martin said the DNC is open to changes from the 2024 calendar, which kicked off in South Carolina, while pushing back traditional openers Iowa and New Hampshire. In recent days, Iowa Democrats have publicly threatened to go rogue and ignore the wishes of the DNC if they are skipped over again in 2028.

The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws committee this week is expected to outline what the next calendar selection process would look like, although the calendar itself likely won’t be completed until 2027.

“We’re going to make sure that the process is open, that any state that wants to make a bid to be in the early window can do so,” Martin said.

Peoples writes for the Associated Press.

In a police department with a long tradition of colorful nicknames — from “Jigsaw John” to “Captain Hollywood” — LAPD Sgt. Joseph Lloyd stands out.

“The Grim Reaper.”

At least that’s what some on the force have taken to calling the veteran Internal Affairs detective, usually out of earshot.

According to officers who have found themselves under investigation by Lloyd, he seems to relish the moniker and takes pleasure in ending careers, even if it means twisting facts and ignoring evidence.

But Lloyd’s backers maintain his dogged pursuit of the truth is why he has been entrusted with some of the department’s most politically sensitive and potentially embarrassing cases.

Lloyd, 52, declined to comment. But The Times spoke to more than half a dozen current or former police officials who either worked alongside him or fell under his scrutiny.

During the near decade that he’s been in Internal Affairs, Lloyd has investigated cops of all ranks.

When a since-retired LAPD officer was suspected of running guns across the Mexican border, the department turned to Lloyd to bust him.

In 2020, when it came out that members of the elite Metropolitan Division were falsely labeling civilians as gang members in a police database, Lloyd was tapped to help unravel the mess.

And when a San Fernando Valley anti-gang squad was accused in 2023 of covering up shakedowns of motorists, in swooped the Reaper again.

Recently he was assigned to a department task force looking into allegations of excessive force by police against activists who oppose the government’s immigration crackdown.

At the LAPD, as in most big-city police departments across the country, Internal Affairs investigators tend to be viewed with suspicion and contempt by their colleagues. They usually try to operate in relative anonymity.

Not Lloyd.

The 24-year LAPD veteran has inadvertently become the face of a pitched debate over the LAPD’s long-maligned disciplinary system. The union that represents most officers has long complained that well-connected senior leaders get favorable treatment. Others counter that rank-and-file cops who commit misconduct are routinely let off the hook.

A recent study commissioned by Chief Jim McDonnell found that perceived unfairness in internal investigations is a “serious point of contention” among officers that has contributed to low morale. McDonnell has said he wants to speed up investigations and better screen complaints, but efforts by past chiefs and the City Council to overhaul the system have repeatedly stalled.

Sarah Dunster, 40, was a sergeant working in the LAPD’s Hollywood division in 2021 when she learned she was under investigation for allegedly mishandling a complaint against one of her officers, who was accused of groping a woman he arrested.

Dunster said she remembers being interviewed by Lloyd, whose questions seemed designed to trip her up and catch her in a lie, rather than aimed at hearing her account of what happened, she said. Some of her responses never made it into Lloyd’s report, she said.

“He wanted to fire me,” she said.

Dunster was terminated over the incident, but she appealed and last week a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted a reprieve that allows her to potentially get her job back.

Others who have worked with Lloyd say he is regarded as a savvy investigator who is unfairly being vilified for discipline decisions that are ultimately made by the chief of police. A supervisor who oversaw Lloyd at Internal Affairs — and requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media — described him as smart, meticulous and “a bulldog.”

“Joe just goes where the facts lead him and he doesn’t have an issue asking the hard questions,” the supervisor said.

On more than one occasion, the supervisor added, Internal Affairs received complaints from senior department officials who thought that Lloyd didn’t show them enough deference during interrogations. Other supporters point to his willingness to take on controversial cases to hold officers accountable, even while facing character attacks from his colleagues, their attorneys and the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League.

Officers have sniped about his burly build, tendency to smile during interviews and other eccentricities. He wears two watches — one on each wrist, a habit he has been heard saying he picked up moonlighting as a high school lacrosse referee.

But he has also been criticized as rigid and uncompromising, seeming to fixate only on details that point to an officer’s guilt. People he has grilled say that when he doesn’t get the answer he’s looking for, he has a Columbo-esque tendency to ask the same question in different ways in an attempt to elicit something incriminating.

And instead of asking officers to clarify any discrepancies in their statements, Lloyd automatically assumes they are lying, some critics said.

Mario Munoz, a former LAPD Internal Affairs lieutenant who opened a boutique firm that assists officers fighting employment and disciplinary cases, recently released a scathing 60-page report questioning what he called a series of troubling lapses in the LAPD’s 2023 investigation of the Mission gang unit. The report name-drops Lloyd several times.

The department accused several Mission officers of stealing brass knuckles and other items from motorists in the San Fernando Valley, and attempting to hide their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body-worn cameras.

Munoz said he received calls from officers who said Lloyd had violated their due process rights, which potentially opens the city up to liability. Several have since lodged complaints against Lloyd with the department. He alleged Lloyd ultimately singled out several “scapegoats to shield higher-level leadership from scrutiny.”

Until he retired from the LAPD in 2014, Munoz worked as both an investigator and an auditor who reviewed landmark internal investigations into the beating of Black motorist Rodney King and the Rampart gang scandal in which officers were accused of robbing people and planting evidence, among other crimes.

Munoz now echoes a complaint from current officers that Internal Affairs in general, and Lloyd in particular, operate to protect the department’s image at all costs.

“He’s the guy that they choose because he doesn’t question management,” Munoz said of Lloyd.

In the Mission case, Munoz pointed to inconsistent outcomes for two captains who oversaw the police division accused of wrongdoing: One was transferred and later promoted, while another is fighting for his job amid accusations that he failed to rein in his officers.

Two other supervisors — Lt. Mark Garza and Sgt. Jorge “George” Gonzalez — were accused by the department of creating a “working environment that resulted in the creation of a police gang,” according to an internal LAPD report. Both Garza and Gonzalez have sued the city, alleging that even though they reported the wrongdoing as soon as they became aware of it, they were instead punished by the LAPD after the scandal became public.

According to Munoz’s report and interviews with department sources, Lloyd was almost single-handedly responsible for breaking the Mission case open.

It began with a complaint in late December 2022 made by a motorist who said he was pulled over and searched without reason in a neighboring patrol area. Lloyd learned that the officers involved had a pattern of not documenting traffic stops — exploiting loopholes in the department’s auditing system for dashboard and body cameras. The more Lloyd dug, the more instances he uncovered of these so-called “ghost stops.”

A few months later, undercover Internal Affairs detectives began tailing the two involved officers — something that Garza and Gonzalez both claimed they were kept in the dark about.

As of last month, four officers involved had been fired and another four had pending disciplinary hearings where their jobs hung in the balance. Three others resigned before the department could take action. The alleged ringleader, Officer Alan Carrillo, faces charges of theft and “altering, planting or concealing evidence.” Court records show he was recently offered pretrial diversion by L.A. County prosecutors, which could spare him jail but require him to stop working in law enforcement. Carrillo has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In an interview with The Times, Gonzalez — the sergeant who is facing termination — recalled a moment during a recorded interrogation that he found so troubling he contacted the police union director Jamie McBride, to express concern. McBride, he said, went to Lloyd’s boss, then-deputy chief Michael Rimkunas, seeking Lloyd’s removal from Internal Affairs.

The move failed. Lloyd kept his job.

Rimkunas confirmed the exchange with the police union leader in an interview with The Times.

He said that while he couldn’t discuss Lloyd specifically due to state personnel privacy laws, in general the department assigns higher-profile Internal Affairs cases to detectives with a proven track record.

Gonzalez, though, can’t shake the feeling that Lloyd crossed the line in trying to crack him during an interrogation.

He said that at one point while Lloyd was asking questions, the detective casually flipped over his phone, which had been sitting on the table. On the back of the protective case, Gonzalez said, was a grim reaper sticker.

“And then as he turned it he looked at me as if to get a reaction from me,” Gonzalez said. “It was definitely a way of trying to intimidate me for sure.”

The Taliban’s leader has warned that Afghans ungrateful for its hardline rule will be severely punished by God in a statement marking the fourth anniversary of the group’s return to power.

The statement from Haibatullah Akhunzada was made in a social media post on Friday to commemorate “Victory Day”, four years on from the chaotic United States and NATO withdrawal from the country after more than 20 years of war as the Taliban retook the capital, Kabul.

The threat was a stark reminder of the sweeping restrictions and repression of rights, especially of women and girls, that has taken place under the Taliban’s rule, which is based on its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

In his statement, Akhunzada said Afghans had faced hardships for decades in the name of establishing religious law in the country, which he said had saved citizens from “corruption, oppression, usurpation, drugs, theft, robbery and plunder”.

“These are great divine blessings that our people should not forget and, during the commemoration of Victory Day, express great gratitude to Allah Almighty so that the blessings will increase,” his statement said.

“If, against God’s will, we fail to express gratitude for blessings and are ungrateful for them, we will be subjected to the severe punishment of Allah Almighty.”

He also advised government ministers to remove the word “acting” from their job titles, signalling the consolidation of his administration’s rule in the country amid a lack of internal opposition.

Victory Day

Four years on from its return to power, the Taliban government remains largely isolated in the international arena over the severe rights restrictions imposed under its rule although Russia became the first country to officially recognise the Taliban administration in early July.

It also has close ties with China, the United Arab Emirates and a number of Central Asian states although none of these officially recognises the Taliban administration.

Victory Day parades were planned in several Afghan cities on Friday, and in Kabul, helicopters were scheduled to drop flowers across the city. Photographs of an official ceremony in Kabul to open the commemorations showed a hall filled exclusively with male delegates.

‘An open wound of history’

Rather than celebrating, members of the activist group United Afghan Women’s Movement for Freedom staged an indoor protest in the northeastern province of Takhar against the Taliban’s oppressive rule, The Associated Press news agency reported.

“This day marked the beginning of a black domination that excluded women from work, education and social life,” the group said in a statement to the agency.

“We, the protesting women, remember this day not as a memory, but as an open wound of history, a wound that has not yet healed. The fall of Afghanistan was not the fall of our will. We stand, even in the darkness.”

Afghan women also held an indoor protest in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, the agency reported.

Repression and death threats

The United Nations, foreign governments and human rights groups have condemned the Taliban for their treatment of women and girls, who are banned from most education and work, as well as parks, gyms and travelling without a male guardian.

Inspectors from the Vice and Virtue Ministry require women to wear a chador, a full-body cloak covering the head, while a law announced a year ago ordered women not to sing or recite poetry in public and for their voices and bodies to be “concealed” outside the home.

Last month, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Akhunzada and the country’s chief justice on charges of committing gender-based persecution against women and girls.

ICC judges said the Taliban had “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy, family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion.

At least 1.4 million girls have been “deliberately deprived” of their right to an education by the Taliban government, a UN report from August 2024 found.

Among the restrictions imposed on women is a ban on working for nongovernmental groups, among other jobs. A UN report this month revealed that dozens of Afghan women working for the organisation in the country had received direct death threats.

The report said the Taliban had told the UN mission that its cadres were not responsible for the threats and a Ministry of Interior Affairs investigation is under way. An Interior Ministry spokesman, Abdul Mateen Qani, later told The Associated Press news agency that no threats had been made.

In the meantime, Iran, Pakistan and the US have been sending Afghan refugees back to Taliban rule, where they risk persecution.

July 11 (UPI) — Employees of the U.S. State Department could receive a layoff notice via email very soon as part of the Trump administration’s plan to downsize the government, according to an in ternal memo.

The Washington Post reported late Thursday night it had obtained a memo from Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Michael Rigas that informed State Department employees to be on the lookout for an email “in the coming days” in regard to layoffs. CNN reported Thursday that the email would come from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that will say “Soon, the Department will be communicating to individuals affected by the reduction in force,” and that firings could begin as soon as Friday. A draft reduction-in-force notice acquired by CBS News said the objective is “streamlining domestic operations to focus on diplomatic priorities,” and that the terminations “have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions.”

The State Department had told Congress in May it planned to fire more than 1,870 people within its domestic workforce of 18,730, and over 1,570 have said they would voluntarily exit.

More than 300 offices and bureaus would be impacted and will include members of the foreign and civil service whose offices are being either retooled or outright eliminated.

Uncertainty over the status of the plan has negatively impacted morale at the department, as workers wait to see if they are to receive the axe, some of which have worked there for years or even decades, The Washington Post reported.

CBS also reported that the department told reporters it intends to conduct the reductions-in-force over a single day.

One State Department employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post last month that the move showed the department’s leadership “either doesn’t appreciate or just doesn’t care” about its workforce.

“We will continue to move forward with our historic reorganization plan at the State Department, as announced earlier this year,” Rubio said in a X post Tuesday.

“When you reorganize the State Department, there were certain bureaus we wanted to empower, the regional bureaus, and there were certain bureaus, these functional bureaus, that were closed,” he told reporters Thursday.

The State Department officially told Congress in May that it planned to eliminate around 3,400 U.S.-based jobs and will either close or merge nearly half of its domestic offices.

However, those working at overseas posts are reportedly safe from termination.

American Foreign Service Association President Thomas Yazdgerdi told CNN Wednesday that the expected layoffs are coming at “a particularly bad time.”

“There are horrible things that are happening in the world that require a tried-and-true diplomatic workforce that’s able to address that,” he continued. “The ability to maintain a presence in the areas of the world that are incredibly important, dealing with issues like Ukraine, like Gaza, like Iran right now that require great diplomatic attention.”

The plan will also integrate the functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department.

The State Department had told Congress it planned to complete its reorganization by July 1, but those plans were temporarily paused by rulings from a lower court until earlier this week, when the Supreme Court cleared a path for the Trump administration to begin mass firings and changes at 19 departments and agencies.

The lower court had blocked the layoffs, as the administration did not first consult with Congress.

As Israel’s devastating war on Gaza grinds on, pushed forward by a prime minister insistent that a goal of total military victory be met, the divisions within Israeli society are growing increasingly deeper.

In the last few weeks, as Israeli peace activists and antiwar groups have stepped up their campaign against the conflict, supporters of the war have also increased their pressure to continue, whatever its humanitarian, political or diplomatic cost.

Members of the military have published open letters protesting the political motivations for continuing the war on Gaza, or claiming that the latest offensive, which is systematically razing Gaza, risks the remaining Israeli captives held in the Palestinian territory.

Another open letter has come from within Israel’s universities and colleges, with its signatories doing a rare thing within Israel since the war began in October 2023: focusing on Palestinian suffering.

Elsewhere, campaigns of protest and refusal of military service have spread – a result of a mixture of pro-peace sentiment and more prevalent anger at the government’s handling of the war – posing a risk to Israel’s war effort, which is reliant upon the active participation of the country’s youth.

The war’s critics say that the man they oppose, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has become reliant upon the extreme right to maintain his coalition, and an opposition too cowardly to confront him in the face of mounting international accusations of genocide.

Powerful far right

It is important not to confuse the growing domestic criticism of the Israeli government’s handling of the war with any mass sympathy for the Palestinian people.

A recent poll reported that 82 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents would still like to see Gaza cleared of its Palestinian population, with almost 50 percent also backing what they said was the “mass killing” of civilians in enemy cities occupied by the Israeli army.

And on Monday, thousands of Israelis led by the country’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, rampaged through occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City, chanting “death to Arabs” and attacking anyone perceived to be either Palestinian or defending them.

Also addressing the crowd at the “Jerusalem Day” march was the country’s ultranationalist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who has been vocal in his push for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, and the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.

Smotrich asked the crowd: “Are we afraid of victory?”; “Are we afraid of the word ‘occupation?’” The crowd – described as “revellers” within parts of Israeli media – responded with a resounding “no”.

“There’s a cohort of the extreme right who feel vindicated by a year and a half of war,” the former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera. “They think their message that, if you blink you lose; if you pause, you lose; if you waver, you lose, has been borne out.”

Growing dissent

Alongside the intensifying of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has now killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, voices of dissent have grown louder. In April, more than 1,000 serving and retired pilots issued an open letter protesting a war they said served “political and personal interests” rather than security ones. Further letters, as well as an organised campaign encouraging young Israelis to refuse to show up for military service, have followed.

Perhaps sensing the direction the wind was blowing, the leader of Israel’s left-wing Democrats Party, Yair Golan – who initially supported the war and took a hardline position on allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza – launched a stark broadside against the conflict earlier this month, claiming that Israel risked becoming a “pariah state” that killed “babies as a hobby” while giving itself the aim of “expelling populations”.

While welcomed by some, the comments of the former army major-general were rounded upon by others. Speaking at a conference in southern Israel alongside noted antiwar lawmaker Ofer Cassif, Golan was heckled and called a traitor by far-right members of the audience, before he had to be escorted off the premises by security.

Cassif, who refers to himself as an anti-Zionist, has long attracted the outrage of mainstream Israeli society for his loud denunciation of the way Israel treats Palestinians.

“There have always been threats against me,” Cassif, who has been alone among Israeli lawmakers in opposing the war from its onset, told Al Jazeera. “I can’t walk down my own street. I was attacked twice before October 7 and it’s gotten much worse since.

“But it’s not just me. All the peace activists risk being physically attacked or threatened, even the families of the hostages are at risk of attack by these bigots,” he said.

“Many people are coming to realise that this government and even the mainstream opposition aren’t fighting a war for security reasons, or even to recover the hostages, but are carrying out the kind of genocidal mission advocated by Smotrich and the other messianic bigots,” Cassif said of the finance minister and his supporters.

“This has been allowed by people like [Benny] Gantz, [Yair] Lapid and [Yoav] Gallant,” he said, citing prominent politicians opposed to the prime minister, “who didn’t dare criticise it [the war] and Netanyahu, who has manipulated it for his own ends.”

Cassif’s comments were echoed by one of the signatories to the academics’ open letter criticising the war, Ayelet Ben-Yishai, an associate professor at the University of Haifa.

“The opposition has nothing,” she told Al Jazeera. “I get that it’s hard to argue for a complicated future, but they do and say nothing. All they’ve left us with is a choice between managing the war and the occupation and Smotrich and his followers. That’s it. What kind of future is that?”

Inherent within Israel

Many members of the government and opposition have previously served in senior roles within the army, either engaging in or overseeing combat operations against Palestinians, and maintaining the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

Democrats Party head Golan was even previously criticised by the army in 2007 for repeatedly using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

“What we’re seeing right now is a struggle between two Zionist elites over who is the greater fascist in different forms,” Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, a professor at Tel Aviv University, said of the political struggles at play within Israel.

“On the one hand, there are the Ashkenazi Jews, who settled Israel, imposed the occupation and have killed thousands,” he said of Israel’s traditional military and governing elites, many of whom might describe themselves as liberal and democratic, and were originally from central and Eastern Europe. “Or [you have] the current religious Zionists, like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who [the old Ashkenazi elite] now accuse of being fascists.

“You can’t reduce this to left and right. I don’t buy into that,” Shenhav-Shahrabani said. “It goes deeper. Both sides are oblivious to the genocide in Gaza.”

While resistance against the war has grown both at home and abroad, so too has the intensity of the attacks being protested against.

Since Israel unilaterally broke a ceasefire in March, almost 4,000 Palestinians have been killed, hundreds of them children. In addition, a siege, imposed upon the decimated enclave on March 2, has pushed what remains of its pre-war population of more than two million to the point of famine, international agencies, including the United Nations, have warned.

At the same time as Israel’s war on Gaza has intensified, so too have its actions in the West Bank. Under the guise of another military operation, the Israeli army has occupied and levelled large parts of the occupied territory displacing a reported 40,000 of its inhabitants as it establishes its own military network there.

On Thursday, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz, alongside Smotrich, who as finance minister enjoys significant control over the West Bank, announced the establishment of a further 22 Israeli settlements, all in defiance of international law.

Smotrich’s announcement came as a surprise to few. The far-right minister – himself a settler on Palestinian land – has previously been clear about his intention to see the West Bank annexed, even ordering preparations to do so in advance of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, who he expected to support the idea. He has also said Gaza will be “totally destroyed” and its population expelled to a tiny strip of land along the Egyptian border.

For Shenhav-Shahrabani, little of it was surprising.

“I went with some others to South Africa in 1994. I met a justice of the Supreme Court, a Jew, who’d been injured by an Afrikaner bomb [during the struggle against apartheid],” Shenhav-Shahrabani said. “He told me that nothing will change for Palestinians until Israelis are ready to go to jail for them. We’re not there yet.”