Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.
The U.S. is continuing to build up its military presence in the Middle East ahead of a possible attack on Iran. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is now in the Indian Ocean, a U.S. Navy official told The War Zone on Thursday. The CSG was in the South China Sea until U.S. President Donald Trump ordered it moved west. In addition, more cargo jets and aerial refueling tankers have arrived in the region. Trump on Thursday said a large naval presence is heading to the region.
“We have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters Thursday afternoon. “We have a big force going toward Iran. I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely.”
“We have an armada,” Trump added after claiming he “stopped 837 hangings on Thursday…We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it. We’ll see.”
Trump on Iran:
We have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens. We have a big force going toward Iran. I’d rather not see anything happen.
The influx of additional assets to the region will give Trump a greater range of potential action, and allow for the ability to defend against an Iranian attack, whether in response to U.S. military actions or not.
“If Iranian leadership perceives that regime collapse is imminent, the expectation within this assessment is that Iran would escalate aggressively across multiple vectors,” the Times of Israel recently suggested in an opinion piece. “This would include attacks on American assets throughout the region, coordinated pressure against allies such as Israel, and actions designed to disrupt global energy flows. In particular, the Strait of Hormuz represents one of Iran’s most consequential pressure points. Energy agencies estimate that roughly 20 million barrels per day—about one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption—transit the strait.”
All this depends on the state of Iran’s command and control at the time of such an operation, as well as many other factors. While the specter of major retaliations in the Strait of Hormuz have persisted for years, it did not come to fruition during the war with Israel in June. Still, operations that seek regime change could change this calculus.
As for U.S. force posture in the region, there remains a large number of unknowns, including the exact composition of U.S. forces that are already there and what role, if any, will be played by Israel and other U.S. allies if Trump moves forward with an attack. We do know that the U.S. already had a limited number of fighter aircraft at several bases throughout the Middle East, as well as three Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers and perhaps a submarine plying its waters, among other capabilities, prior to the protests.
The Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Roosevelt is one of three of this class of ship in the Middle East region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Indra Beaufort) Petty Officer 1st Class Indra Beaufort
Many additional assets have poured in since then, but it remains unclear at the moment whether the current force can support in terms of a sustained conflict and what will be added in the coming days or even weeks leading up to an operation. At the same time, an operation could begin any time, so the current picture is quite murky. Even a limited decapitation operation aimed at the regime would require a huge number of contingencies.
The Lincoln CSG, which appears to be several days away from arriving in the Arabian Sea, would boost U.S. striking power in the region. Its embarked CVW-9 Carrier Air Wing consists of eight squadrons flying F-35C Lightning II, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Hawkeyes, CMV-22B Ospreys and MH-60R/S Sea Hawks. Its escorts,Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay and the Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers of Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 21 bring a large number of missile tubes that could be used to strike Iran. These vessels could also be used in the defense of U.S. targets and those of its allies during a reprisal.
So far, there does not appear to have been a major influx of U.S. airpower. Low-resolution satellite imagery observed by The War Zone shows no large deployments to Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island where U.S. bombers have previously been staged amid rising tensions with Iran. However, online flight trackers are reporting that there have been flights of C-17 Globemaster III cargo jets to the region. These would be needed to move materiel and personnel. As we projected, the U.S. is sending additional Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems to the Middle East for increased protection from any Iranian attack, The Wall Street Journal reported.
As we previously mentioned, online flight trackers also noted that F-15E Strike Eagles, accompanied by KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling jets, headed east from RAF Lakenheath in England to the Middle East earlier this week.
The presence of Strike Eagles in the region, especially those coming from RAF Lakenheath, is in itself not new. These jets have maintained a steady presence at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan for nearly a decade, and their recent arrival in the Middle East was largely expected due to the current instability and saber-rattling. F-15Es played a key role in defending against multiple Iranian drone and cruise missile barrages on Israel and they are now more capable of that mission than ever. Beyond its offensive capabilities, if Iran were to launch a major attack on Israel and/or U.S. assets in the region, preemptive or in retaliation, the F-15Es would play a key part in defending against those attacks.
While these are significant additions to the standing force posture in the region, more fighter aircraft would be expected for a major operation against Iran. We have not seen evidence of those kinds of movements just yet, although some movements are not identified via open sources.
Beyond tactical combat aircraft in the region, the U.S. can fly bombers there from the continental United States, as was the case when B-2 Spirits attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer last June.
The U.K. is also sending tactical combat jets to the region.
“The Royal Air Force’s joint Typhoon squadron with Qatar, 12 Squadron, has deployed to the Gulf for defensive purposes, noting regional tensions as part of the UK-Qatar Defence Assurance Agreement, demonstrating the strong and enduring defence relationship between the U.K. and Qatar,” the U.K. Defense Ministry (MoD) announced on Thursday.
“12 Squadron has regularly deployed to Qatar to conduct joint training and share experiences which enhance national and regional security,” MoD added. “Recently, the RAF deployed on exercises such as EPIC SKIES and SOARING FALCON – further reinforcing the operational capability between our two nations.”
RAF Typhoon jets have deployed to Qatar in a defensive capacity.
The UK and Qatar have been close defence partners for decades. This deployment builds on that relationship, supporting regional stability and keeping us secure at home and strong abroad. pic.twitter.com/83FkaBPJng
Israel too remains at a high state of alert for an attack on or from its arch-enemy.
“It is my assessment that a strike will take place,” a high-ranking Israeli Defense Force (IDF) official told The War Zone. “The key variables – timing, method of execution, and the identity of participating forces, whether U.S. assets, the IDF, or additional coalition elements should they be involved, will be subject to strict and aggressive compartmentalization.”
“Likewise, the final decision to proceed with execution rests with a single individual alone,” the official added, referring to Trump.
As the U.S. and allies flow assets into the region and Israel stands at a heightened state of readiness, Iranian officials are ratcheting up their rhetoric.
On Thursday, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander General Mohammad Pakpour warned Israel and the United States “to avoid any miscalculations, by learning from historical experiences and what they learned in the 12-day imposed war, so that they do not face a more painful and regrettable fate.”
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and dear Iran have their finger on the trigger, more prepared than ever, ready to carry out the orders and measures of the supreme commander-in-chief — a leader dearer than their own lives,” he added, referring to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The IRGC also released a video showing the location of U.S. bases in the region.
Iranian Revolutionary Guard media released a video warning the United States, showing the locations of U.S. military bases across the Middle East that are within range of Iranian missiles
Khamenei’s government is also claiming it has suppressed the nationwide unrest that began Dec. 28 over rising prices, devalued currency that saw the rial crater now to basically nothing, a devastating drought, and brutal government crackdowns.
“The sedition is over now,” said Mohammad Movahedi, Iran’s prosecutor general, according to the judiciary’s Mizan News agency. “And we must be grateful, as always, to the people who extinguished this sedition by being in the field in a timely manner.”
However, getting verifiable information out of Iran remains incredibly challenging as the regime has cut off internet and phone service, and it is possible that at least some protests are ongoing.
While there is no indication of any imminent fighting, the regional players are increasingly preparing for conflict. This remains a volatile situation we will continue to monitor it closely.
All That’s Left of You is a film missing from American screens until now. A moving production directed by Cherien Dabis, with Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo as executive producers, leaving the viewers in a state of trance long after the final credit has faded into darkness.
My first introduction to this movie came quietly, through a community post by someone who had watched it at San Diego’s Digital Gym Cinema. The message was simple: bring a box of tissues. Then came a text from a fellow writer in Florida, insistent and unmistakably shaken. “The theater was packed,” she told me. She didn’t say how much she cried, but she added something far more telling: her husband cried too, and he never cries.
“I’ve never seen anything this powerful,” she texted. “You have to write a review.” She even sent me the screening link in San Diego, as if daring me not to.
I hesitated. I have never written a film review before, and I knew watching this story in a theater, in public, would not be easy. I told her that KARAMA, an organization I’m associated with, would be screening the film during the San Diego Arab Film Festival in March. She wouldn’t let it go. “Write a review now,” she insisted. “People need to see this movie.”
There is always a first time, I thought. I relented and agreed to watch the film and write my first movie review. Thankfully, through KARAMA’s screening access, I watched it alone, in the stillness of my home office, where tears were free to drift, unpoliced.
All That’s Left of You is the cinema America has been missing, a film that turns away from spectacle and toward remembrance. The large screen becomes a space for lived experience, where memory lingers, mourns, and refuses to die.
What a movie? But it wasn’t a movie. It was the art of using a large screen to bear witness to a life lived. What made it unbearable, and unforgettable, was how intimately it reached into my own life. I was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp. I was no longer watching a film. I was remembering. I saw my mother’s tears. I saw my father’s weathered face, scanning the rain-soaked ground, trying to pitch a tent to shelter his wife, his seven-month-old baby, and his aging parents.
I saw displacement, not as an abstract political word, but as I lived it. My parents ethnically cleansed from home, from country, so someone who was oppressed in Europe could find safety and refuge in their home, claiming that a god had given them a deed of confiscation some 3000 years ago.
It became even more poignant as the saga unfolded scene by scene, my eyes flooded with tears. I had to hit the pause button several times, breathe deeply, and steady myself. The grief on the screen was not distant or symbolic. It was intimate, lived, and overwhelmingly familiar. I was taken back to the camp, to its alleys and schools, from flirting with classmates to resistance and political awareness. The camp was a repository of contradictions: a life of destitution, yet rich in love and community. Each scene felt like a reopening of wounds I had spent a lifetime trying to bury, memories layered with loss, fear, and an unrelenting sense of injustice.
What made it cut even deeper was the realisation that I had written extensively on untold stories of Palestinian displacement. I had co-authored two books with the fellow writer who texted me from Florida, a Jewish American author, where we chronicled a multi-generational family saga from Jafa, uprooted from their orange grove and reduced to existence in a tent. As I watched the film, the lines between fiction, memory, and history collapsed. The faces on the screen merged with the characters we had created, and the families we lived with in the pages of our two novels.
The tears were not only for what was lost, but for what keeps being lost again and again. Palestinians didn’t just mourn the homes, trees, and childhoods erased, but also the quiet human truths that survive despite everything. The ache of parents trying to shield their children from despair, the dignity of people stripped of almost everything except their will. At that moment, the film stopped being something I was watching. It became something I was reliving.
“Your humanity is also resistance.” The line from the movie is more than poetic, but rather a lived truth and a personal indictment. I have spent a lifetime watching how our humanity as Palestinians must first be erased before our suffering can be justified. Demonisation is a prerequisite. Only by denying our humanity can they rationalise starving our children, and when the erasure of a nation can be defended as policy rather than crime.
That line affirms what I have known instinctively and painfully, to remain human, to insist on grief, memory, and dignity, is itself an act of resistance against a system that survives on our dehumanisation. Strip our humanity away, then anything becomes permissible. Recognise it, even for a moment, and the entire moral and legal structure used to justify Israeli inhumanity begins to collapse.
All That’s Left of You is not a movie that comforts. It is a testament to humanity’s stubborn endurance under a malevolent Zionist occupation. It reminds us that what remains of a people is not only found in history books, but in the unspoken bonds between parents and children, in the traditions that outlast catastrophe, and in the Palestinian refusal to forget.
Watching this film will leave you with more questions than answers. What stays with you, however, is not confusion, but a sharpened awareness, an understanding passed into the world beyond the screen. All That’s Left of You is essential cinema, not as escapist entertainment, but as a work of rare scope and moral clarity, one that restores humanity to its rightful place and demands the viewer to carry it forward.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
The armed wing of Hamas, Al-Qassam Brigades, released a video message on Wednesday afternoon showing an Israeli captive currently held in Gaza, the Palestinian Information Centre has reported. The footage shows Omri Miran lighting a candle on what he described as his “second birthday” in captivity.
“This is my second birthday here. I can’t say I’m celebrating; it’s just another day in captivity,” said Miran. “I made this cake for the occasion, but there is no joy. It’s been a year and a half. I miss my daughters and my wife terribly.”
He addressed the Israeli public directly, including his family and friends. “Conditions here are extremely tough. Thank you to everyone demonstrating to bring us home safely.”
The captive also urged Israelis to stage a mass protest outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence. “Bring my daughters so I can see them on TV. Do everything you can now to get us home. Netanyahu’s supporters don’t care about us, they’d rather see us dead.”
Screengrab from footage shows Israeli captive Omri Miran
He asked captives released in previous prisoner exchange deals to protest and speak to the media. “Let the people know how bad it is for us. We live in constant fear of bombings. A deal must be reached soon before we return home in coffins.
Miran urged demonstrators to appeal to US President Donald Trump to put pressure on Netanyahu: “Do not believe Netanyahu. Military pressure is only killing us. A deal — only a deal — will bring us home. Turn to Trump. He seems to be the only powerful person in the world who could push Netanyahu to agree to a deal.”
He also mentioned the worsening humanitarian situation: “The captors told me the crossings are closed; no food or supplies are coming in. As a result, we’re receiving even less food than before.”
In conclusion, the captive sent a pointed message to the Israeli leadership: “Netanyahu, Dermer, Smotrich, Ben Gvir — you are the reason for 7 October. Because of you, I am here. Because of you, we’re all here. You’re bringing the state to collapse.”
In 1948, as the foundations of the Israeli state were being laid upon the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (AFFFI), condemning the growing Zionist militancy within the settler Jewish community. “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the terrorist organisations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”
Einstein — perhaps the most celebrated Jewish intellectual of the 20th century — refused to conflate his Jewish identity with the violence of Zionism. He turned down the offer to become Israel’s president, rejecting the notion that Jewish survival and self-determination should come at the cost of another people’s displacement and suffering. And yet, if Einstein were alive today, his words would likely be condemned under the current definitions of anti-Semitism adopted by many Western governments and institutions, including the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, now endorsed by most Australian universities.
Under the IHRA definition, Einstein’s outspoken criticism of Israel — he called its founding actors “terrorists” and denounced their betrayal of Jewish ethics — would render him suspect. He would be accused not only of delegitimising Israel, but also of anti-Semitism. His moral clarity, once visionary, would today be vilified.
That is why we must untangle the threads of Zionism, colonialism and human rights.
Einstein’s resistance to Zionism was not about denying Jewish belonging or rights; it was about refusing to build those rights on ethno-nationalist violence. He understood what too many people fail to grasp today: that Zionism and Judaism are not synonymous.
Zionism is a political ideology rooted in European colonial logics, one that enforces Jewish supremacy in a land shared historically by Palestinian and other Levantine peoples. To criticise this ideology is not anti-Semitic; it is, rather, a necessary act of justice and a moral act of bearing witness. The religious symbolism that Israel uses is irrelevant in this respect. And yet, in today’s political climate, any critique of Israel — no matter how grounded it might be in international law, historical fact or humanitarian concern — is increasingly branded as anti-Semitism. This conflation shields from accountability a settler-colonial state, and it silences Palestinians and their allies from speaking out on the reality of their oppression. Billions in arms sales, stolen resources and apartheid infrastructure don’t just happen; they’re the reason that legitimate “criticism” gets rebranded as “hate”.
To understand Einstein’s critique, we must confront the truth about Zionism itself. While often framed as a movement for Jewish liberation, Zionism in practice has operated as a colonial project of erasure and domination. The Nakba was not a tragic consequence of war, it was a deliberate blueprint for dispossession and disappearance. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has detailed how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, approved “Plan Dalet” on 10 March, 1948. This included the mass expulsion and execution of Palestinians to create a Jewish-majority state. As Ben-Gurion himself declared chillingly: “Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.”
This is the basis of the Zionist state that we are told not to critique.
Einstein saw this unfolding and recoiled. In another 1948 open letter to the New York Times, he and other Jewish intellectuals described Israel’s newly formed political parties — like Herut (the precursor to Likud) — as “closely akin in… organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
Einstein’s words were not hyperbole, they were a warning. Having fled Nazi Germany, he had direct experience with the defining traits of Nazi fascism. “From Israel’s past actions,” he wrote, “we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”
Einstein warned about what many still refuse to see: a state established on principles of ethnic supremacy and expulsion could never transcend its foundation ethos. Israel’s creation in occupied Palestine is Zionism in practice; it cannot endure without employing repression until resistance is erased entirely. Hence, the Nakba wasn’t a one-off event in 1948; it evolved, funded by Washington, armed by Berlin and enabled by every government that trades Palestinian blood for political favours.
Zionism cannot be separated from the broader history of European settler-colonialism. As Patrick Wolfe explains, the ideology hijacked the rhetoric of Jewish liberation to mask its colonial reality of re-nativism, with the settlers recasting themselves as “indigenous” while painting resistance as terrorism.
The father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, stated in his manifesto-novel Altneuland, “To build anew, I must demolish before I construct.” To him, Palestine was not seen as a shared homeland, but as a house to be razed to the ground and rebuilt by and for Jews alone. His ideology was made possible by British imperial interests to divide and dominate post-Ottoman territories. Through ethnic partition and military alliances embellished under the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the ironic Zionist-Nazi 1933 Haavara Agreement, the Zionist project aligned perfectly with the West’s goal, as per the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Zionism is a global power structure, not a monolithic ethnic identity.
Many Jews around the world — rabbis, scholars, students and Holocaust survivors and their descendants — continue Einstein’s legacy by saying “Not in our name”. They reject the co-option of Holocaust memory to justify genocide in Gaza. They refuse to be complicit in what the Torah forbids: the theft of land and the murder of innocents. They are not “self-hating Jews”. They are the inheritors of a prophetic tradition of justice. And they are being silenced.
Perhaps the most dangerous development today is, therefore, Israel’s insistence on linking its crimes to Jewish identity. It frames civilian massacres, apartheid policies and violations of international law as acts done in the name of all Jews and Judaism. By tying the Jewish people to the crimes of a state, Israel risks exposing Jews around the world to collective blame and retaliation.
Einstein warned against this. And if Einstein’s vision teaches us anything, it is this: Justice cannot be compromised for comfort and profit. Truth must outlast repression. And freedom must belong to all. In the end, no amount of Israel’s militarisation of terminology, propaganda or geopolitical alliances can suppress a people’s resistance forever or outlast global condemnation. The only question left is: how much more blood will be spilled before justice prevails?
The struggle for clarity today is not just academic, it is existential. Without the ability to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, we cannot build a future where Jews and Palestinians all live in dignity, safety and peace. Reclaiming the term “Semite” in its full meaning, encompassing both Jews and Arabs, is critical. Further isolation of Arabs from their Semitic identity has enabled the dehumanisation of Palestinians and the erasure of shared Jewish-Arab histories, especially the centuries of coexistence, the Jewish-Muslim golden ages in places like Baghdad, Granada/Andalusia, Istanbul, Damascus and Cairo.
Einstein stood up for the future for us to reclaim it.
The way forward must be rooted in truth, justice and accountability. That means unequivocally opposing anti-Semitism in all its forms, but refusing to allow the term to be manipulated as a shield for apartheid, ethnic cleansing and colonial domination. It means affirming that Jewish safety must never come at the price of Palestinian freedom, and that Palestinian resistance is not hatred; it is survival.
And if Einstein would be silenced today, who will speak tomorrow?
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.
As the U.S. is reportedly moving at least one and perhaps more aircraft carrier strike groups to the Middle East ahead of a potential future attack on Iran, open-source tracking is beginning to show some U.S. Air Force assets may be heading that way as well. As we have seen in the past, large numbers of cargo flights and surging fighters into the region, as well as other aircraft, is a common occurrence when a crisis is brewing in the region, and there have been plenty of them in recent years.
You can catch up with our previous coverage of unfolding events in the Middle East here.
All this comes as President Donald Trump is mulling what to do next after reportedly calling off some kind of operation against Iran. Trump repeatedly threatened the regime over its brutal crackdown on anti-government protestors that has left thousands dead, but relented after being told the killings would stop. He also promised protesters that help was on its way. However, the administration at the moment appears to prefer a diplomatic solution. U.S. military planners have reportedly asked for more time to prepare, while Trump has come under intense pressure from Israel and the Gulf states not to attack over fears of regional instability. It should be remembered, though, that the U.S. was also negotiating with the regime ahead of last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The lack of forces in the region, for both effective offensive operations and especially defensive ones, likely impacted his decision to hold off.
Trump on Friday acknowledged he called off the attack, but denied anyone pressured him to.
“Nobody convinced me, I convinced myself,” he told reporters outside the White House when asked if Arab and Israeli officials convinced him not to attack Iran. “You had, yesterday, scheduled, over 800 hangings. They didn’t hang anyone. They cancelled the hangings. That had a big impact.”
President Donald J. Trump spoke to reporters earlier outside the White House about his decision to not carry out military strikes against Iran.
Reporter: “Did Arab and Israeli officials convince you to not strike Iran?”
A military operation may be off the table for now, but Trump has not categorically ruled out striking Iran in the future. Should he decide on a kinetic operation, his options run the gamut from surgical strikes on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) forces and their Basij paramilitary troops killing the protestors to a decapitation strike on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to again striking nuclear facilities. Going after Iran’s air defenses and short-range standoff weapons could be another option in order to make future operations less risky.
Regardless, even though the U.S. has tactical aircraft, six warships and some 30,000 troops in the region, it does not appear to be prepared for any major sustained operations against Iran that could radically alter the status quo, or the expected barrage of missiles and drones that would follow. This is a point we made last night.
The Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Roosevelt is one of three such vessels currently in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Indra Beaufort) Petty Officer 1st Class Indra Beaufort
“There are not enough assets in the Middle East to execute a sustained campaign that will accomplish anything of huge consequence in Iran, TWZ editor-in-chief Tyler Rogoway posted on X. This was never a question.
Yes, the limited U.S. tactical airpower in the region can do some damage, but you need a complete, fully packaged force in order to really get in there and make a big dent. This requires a huge array of capabilities (see what one major night over Venezuela took) to cover contingencies etc. Even TLAMs are limited in the region, with just three destroyers there and possibly a submarine. Yes, bombers flying global airpower missions could play a significant role, B-52s and B-1s with JASSMs and B-2s could potentially go after hardened regime targets, possibly to decapitate the regime, but those sorties would be very low in number. And if a decapitation strike wasn’t successful then what? Huge contingencies need to be in place for what could come after.
Above all that, there is not enough capability to robustly deal with the aftermath of U.S. strikes, which could include massive barrages of short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. These systems were left far more intact after the war with Israel as they did not threaten Israel. This continues to be a reality many do not realize. Additional ground based air defenses and fighters would be needed to deal with a major response, as well as naval assets.
Bottom line here is all this takes time to move and get into place in preparation for something like this. Just in order to mount a major defense, not an offensive operation, it requires a lot of movements. We saw absolutely no movements that indicated such a force was being deployed. We still don’t see those indications. So if an attack was slated to occur, it would have been very limited in nature and would have likely left Iran in a place to respond massively, which we are not ideally prepared for.
Is there room for a very surgical operation likely focused on the regime’s upper echelons, yes, but even then, you need contingencies and capabilities in place if things don’t go right. Very much balancing the risk vs reward.
Taking out some targets using cruise missiles/standoff weapons etc. is certainly doable, but what do you achieve and at what potential cost from a retaliation? What does it actually achieve in real terms on the ground?”
There are not enough assets in the Middle East to execute a sustained campaign that will accomplish anything of huge consequence in Iran. This was never a question.
Yes, the limited U.S. tactical airpower in the region can do some damage, but you need a complete, fully packaged…
A former high-ranking U.S. military official confirmed our analysis.
“It would be massive,” said the official of the scale of what it would take to attack Iran. “First, we have to get forces there; then we would need to stage and employ them; then we need to sustain them … and we would have to be prepared to do all that for a long time. It would dwarf anything we have likely done in the recent past.”
Clearly, the reported movement of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group to the region would boost U.S. striking power when it arrives, likely sometime next week. It’s embarked CVW-9 Carrier Air Wing consists of eight squadrons flying F-35C Lightning II, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Hawkeyes, CMV-22B Ospreys and MH-60R/S Sea Hawks. Its escorts,Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay and the Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers of Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 21 bring a large number of missile tubes that could be used to strike Iran. These vessels could also be used in the defense of U.S. targets and those of its allies during a reprisal.
As tensions rise between U.S. and Iran, the Pentagon is moving a carrier strike group toward Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln, west of the Philippines, turned west yesterday, detected on @CopernicusEU satellite imagery by @oballinger’s computer program. 11.9892, 117.9423. pic.twitter.com/Zz8rokebZq
There are also unconfirmed claims that the George H.W. Bush Carrier group is also headed to the region, which would add similar additional capabilities. The carrier left its homeport of Norfolk on Jan. 13. The Navy declined to comment about any ship movements while CENTCOM has declined to talk about any movements of assets to the region.
There are growing indications of aerial movements to the region. Open-source reporting shows more than a dozen cargo jets are moving toward the Middle East.
There also appears to be an influx of European military aircraft to the region. Online flight trackers show at least four Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon fighters and an Airbus KC-2 Voyager aerial refueling jet possibly heading toward Bahrain. However, we don’t know for sure if this is related to any planned attack on Iran. They could be normal movements in theater.
An RAF Protector RG Mk 1 (MQ-9B) drone appeared over Muwaffaq al Salti Air Base in Jordan. The RAF declined to comment on those movements.
France and Germany appear to be sending aerial assets to the region as well. German officials declined comment and French officials have yet to respond to our request for information.
Interesting movement, not only UK moving from RAF Akrotiri, but also German and French Airforces moving to RAF Akrotiri and Muwaffaq Salti, Jordan.
Will we start seeing a German Air Force participation on the defense of Israel? pic.twitter.com/lxXVdXj2su
However, there does not appear to be any major change in force posture at Al Udeid, the largest U.S. base in the region.
High-definition satellite imagery shows that there has been no significant change in the troop strength at the Udayid Air Base, with refueling and transport aircraft still parked at the base.Via Mizarvision #OSINTpic.twitter.com/TRv6g5ZZhZ
“A heavy police presence and deadly crackdowns on protesters appeared to have largely suppressed demonstrations in many cities and towns across Iran, according to several witnesses and a human rights group,” The New York Times reported on Friday.
“…several residents of Tehran reached by Reuters said the capital had now been comparatively quiet for four days,” Reuters reported on Friday. “Drones were flying over the city, but there had been no sign of major protests on Thursday or Friday. Another resident in a northern city on the Caspian Sea said the streets there also appeared calm. The residents declined to be identified for their safety.”
Still, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince who helped stir up the protests from afar, insists the fight for change is not over.
“The people have not retreated. Their determination has made one thing unmistakably clear: they are not merely rejecting this regime—they are demanding a credible new path forward,” he said.
Given the ongoing Iranian blackout of internet and telephone service, it is impossible to get a full picture of what is taking place there. Whether any ongoing diplomatic efforts or potential future attacks make any difference is something we will be watching to see.
Update: 4:33 PM Eastern –
Pahlavi issued a new call for continuing demonstrations.
“The criminal Islamic Republic regime and its bloodthirsty thugs are trying to deceive the world and buy time by spreading this big lie that everything in Iran is ‘normal,” he stated on X. “But between us and this murderous regime lies an ocean of the blood of Iran’s children. As long as Khamenei and his criminal gang are not thrown into the dustbin of history, and as long as the criminals are not punished, nothing in Iran is normal.”
“The blood of the best and bravest children of our homeland does not allow us to remain silent or retreat,” he added. “If they have raised the cost of the streets through massacres and martial law, then our homes are the trenches of resistance and defiance: through strikes and not going to work, through nighttime chants and cries. Therefore, I ask all of you brave compatriots across Iran to raise your voices of anger and protest on Saturday through Monday, 27 to 29 Dey (January 17–19), at exactly 8 p.m., with national slogans, and show the world that the end of these anti-Iranian and un-Iranian criminals is near. The world sees your courage and will offer clearer and more practical support to your national revolution. I assure you: together we will take Iran back and rebuild it anew.”
هممیهنان دلیرم،
رژیم جنایتکار جمهوری اسلامی و خونشویانش در تلاش برای فریب جهان و خرید زمان، این دروغ بزرگ را میگویند که در ایران همهچیز «عادی» است. اما میان ما و این رژیم قاتل، دریایی از خونِ فرزندان ایران قرار دارد. تا زمانی که خامنهای و رژیم تبهکارش به زبالهدان تاریخ…
There are new indications of aircraft movement out of Al Udeid. The reason remains unclear.
Comparison of Al-Udeid Air Base satellite images from 3 days ago (Sentine-2 on Jan 13) to today (Landsat 8 on Jan 16) shows a reduction in the number of KC-135/KC-46 tankers from 13 to 5. Number of C-17s (4-5) is almost the same and no bomber or RC-135 can be seen in either. pic.twitter.com/gIZ7Wbj8fb
There were also aircraft movements away from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. It is not clear whether this marks an evacuation or the repositioning of assets elsewhere in the region.
The US and Saudi Arabia have evacuated Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia of non-essential aircraft. Satellite imagery reveals from January 15 that only tanker aircraft remain at the base. All other craft have departed. pic.twitter.com/qPP82jYGIx
The European Union’s aviation regulator is warning the bloc’s airlines to stay out of Iran’s airspace, amid simmering tensions over Tehran’s deadly crackdown on protests and U.S. threats of intervention.
“Given the ongoing situation and the potential for U.S. military action, which has placed Iranian air defense forces on a heightened state of alert, there is currently an increased likelihood of misidentification within the FIR Tehran (OIIX),” the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said in a bulletin on Friday.
“The presence and possible use of a wide range of weapons and air-defense systems, combined with unpredictable state responses and the potential activation of SAM systems, creates a high risk to civil flights operating at all altitudes and flight levels,” the bulletin continued. “Considering the overall high level of tensions, Iran is likely to maintain elevated alert levels for its air force and air defence units nationwide.”
“In the event of a U.S. intervention, the possibility of retaliatory actions against its assets in the region cannot be excluded, which could introduce additional risks to the airspace of neighboring countries where the U.S. military bases are located,” EASA added. “EASA, the Commission and Member States, will continue to closely monitor the situation, with a view to assess whether there is an increase or decrease of the risk for EU aircraft operators due to the evolution of the threat and risk situation.”
European Union Aviation Safety Agency On Iran: Presence & Possible Use Wide Range Of Weapons & Air-Defence Systems Creates High Risk To Civil Flights Operating At All Altitudes – @EASAhttps://t.co/xH8r6SLjue
Teaching international law has always required disciplined idealism. For those of us in the academy who reject the conceit of a benign American imperial order, it is an exercise in professional candour. One must teach rules while explaining, without euphemism, that the most powerful states do not feel bound by them and no longer bother to conceal it.
Consider the present moment. The President of the United States can announce designs on foreign territory such as Greenland not through treaty, referendum, or any lawful process, but by blunt invocation of “US interests,” accompanied by the warning that force remains available if persuasion fails. He can order the seizure of a sitting foreign head of state, Nicolás Maduro, from Venezuelan territory and then publicly boast that Venezuela’s oil will be redirected for American benefit. This has long been the practice of the United States in substance, but no previous president has been so candid about the premise. Donald Trump has stated openly that he does not consider himself bound by international law, that the only constraint on American power is his own sense of morality, a position he articulated on January 8 in an interview with the New York Times. What earlier administrations cloaked in the language of norms, necessity, or exceptionalism, he dispenses with altogether.
Intellectual honesty in the academy requires that this be taught for what it is: an explicit threat and a completed act of aggression, the very offence defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime. On that standard, Donald Trump is no less answerable in The Hague than Vladimir Putin, and no less than Western leaders such as George W Bush and Tony Blair should have been for the invasion of Iraq. This is not subtle. It is not a matter of contested interpretation. It is classical aggression and coercion, unembellished and undisguised, stripped of even the pretence of diplomatic restraint.
Yet much of the American mainstream media and pundit class does not describe such conduct for what it plainly is: a clear and unambiguous violation of international law. Instead, the debate is displaced. The question posed is not legality but prudence. Will this alienate allies? Is it strategically wise? Law disappears, replaced by a technocratic discussion of optics. When legality becomes a footnote to strategy, the legal order is debased.
The indulgence is selectively dispensed. The two most militarily assertive powers, the United States and Russia, employ force with a settled expectation that nothing consequential will follow. When American aggression is at issue, condemnation is typically muted or purely ceremonial. Accountability exists largely as abstraction. The lesson conveyed to students is unmistakable. Power confers immunity.
Nowhere is this starker than in the treatment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Genocide is not assessed on the basis of legal definition or evidentiary threshold, but on political permission. If the United States does not wish the word to be used, it becomes unsayable. Language itself is subject to veto. This is not law. It is deference, fear, and self-interest masquerading as restraint.
European governments, meanwhile, are preoccupied with their own security anxieties and therefore reluctant to challenge Washington’s vision of the world. Their caution is understandable. Their silence is not. In moral terms, they have yet to escape the gravitational pull of their colonial pasts. The suffering of Palestinians is viewed through a different lens from that applied to Ukrainians, not because of scale or intensity, but because of race, proximity, and historical comfort. The disparity is glaring.
To sustain this imbalance, Western governments have inverted reality itself. A Zionist settler colonial project is presented as a liberal democracy, while every rule governing occupation, self-determination, and proportionality is bent or ignored. Words are redefined. Violence is reclassified. Victims are rendered abstract.
The same indifference is evident in the United States’ violations of the UN Headquarters Agreement through the denial of visas to officials it disfavors. These are not technical breaches. They strike at the basic functioning of the international system. Yet there is no meaningful pushback. The international community absorbs the insult and moves on.
Nor is this confined to the use of force. The United States has unilaterally torn through trade agreements, destabilising the global trading regime it once championed. But trade disputes, serious as they are, pale beside the ultimate crimes. Aggression, genocide, apartheid and crimes against humanity are not marginal infractions. They are the apex offences of the international legal order. Yet the lesson delivered by practice is stark. When committed by the powerful or their allies, nothing follows.
This is the intellectual terrain on which international law must now be taught. Students are not naïve. They see the contradiction. They understand that rules proclaimed as universal are enforced selectively, if at all. The challenge for the teacher is not to sell illusions, but to explain why law still matters when its breach carries so little consequence.
International law today stands exposed as moribund. It survives less as a constraint on power than as a record of its abuse. Teaching it honestly requires acknowledging that the system was never designed to discipline empires, only to civilise their language. That is a bleak conclusion. It is also preferable to a dishonest syllabus.
If international law is to command authority, it will not come through pious reaffirmations by those who violate it most frequently. It will come through the insistence that legality is not contingent on alliance, race, or convenience. Until then, teaching international law remains a demanding exercise in explaining not only what the law says, but why it is so often ignored by those who wrote it.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deployed a military radar in the Somali region of Puntland as part of a secret deal, amid Abu Dhabi’s ongoing entrenchment of its influence over the region’s security affairs.
According to the London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, sources familiar with the matter told it that the UAE had installed a military radar near Bosaso airport in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region earlier this year, with one unnamed source saying that the “radar’s purpose is to detect and provide early warning against drone or missile threats, particularly those potentially launched by the Houthis, targeting Bosaso from outside”.
The radar’s presence was reportedly confirmed by satellite imagery from early March, which found that an Israeli-made ELM-2084 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array Multi-Mission Radar had indeed been installed near Bosaso airport.
Not only does the radar have the purpose of defending Puntland and its airport from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but air traffic data reportedly indicates it also serves to facilitate the transport of weapons, ammunition, and supplies to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), further fuelling the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
“The UAE installed the radar shortly after the RSF lost control of most of Khartoum in early March”, one source said. Another source was cited as claiming that the radar was deployed at the airport late last year and that Abu Dhabi has used it on a daily basis to supply the RSF, particularly through large cargo planes that frequently carry weapons and ammunition, and which sometimes amount to up to five major shipments at a time.
According to two other Somali sources cited by the report, Puntland’s president Said Abdullahi Deni did not seek approval from Somalia’s federal government nor even the Puntland parliament for the installation of the radar, with one of those sources stressing that it was “a secret deal, and even the highest levels of Puntland’s government, including the cabinet, are unaware of it”.
In 1948, as the foundations of the Israeli state were being laid upon the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (AFFFI), condemning the growing Zionist militancy within the settler Jewish community. “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the terrorist organisations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”
Einstein — perhaps the most celebrated Jewish intellectual of the 20th century — refused to conflate his Jewish identity with the violence of Zionism. He turned down the offer to become Israel’s president, rejecting the notion that Jewish survival and self-determination should come at the cost of another people’s displacement and suffering. And yet, if Einstein were alive today, his words would likely be condemned under the current definitions of anti-Semitism adopted by many Western governments and institutions, including the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, now endorsed by most Australian universities.
Under the IHRA definition, Einstein’s outspoken criticism of Israel — he called its founding actors “terrorists” and denounced their betrayal of Jewish ethics — would render him suspect. He would be accused not only of delegitimising Israel, but also of anti-Semitism. His moral clarity, once visionary, would today be vilified.
That is why we must untangle the threads of Zionism, colonialism and human rights.
Einstein’s resistance to Zionism was not about denying Jewish belonging or rights; it was about refusing to build those rights on ethno-nationalist violence. He understood what too many people fail to grasp today: that Zionism and Judaism are not synonymous.
Zionism is a political ideology rooted in European colonial logics, one that enforces Jewish supremacy in a land shared historically by Palestinian and other Levantine peoples. To criticise this ideology is not anti-Semitic; it is, rather, a necessary act of justice and a moral act of bearing witness. The religious symbolism that Israel uses is irrelevant in this respect. And yet, in today’s political climate, any critique of Israel — no matter how grounded it might be in international law, historical fact or humanitarian concern — is increasingly branded as anti-Semitism. This conflation shields from accountability a settler-colonial state, and it silences Palestinians and their allies from speaking out on the reality of their oppression. Billions in arms sales, stolen resources and apartheid infrastructure don’t just happen; they’re the reason that legitimate “criticism” gets rebranded as “hate”.
To understand Einstein’s critique, we must confront the truth about Zionism itself. While often framed as a movement for Jewish liberation, Zionism in practice has operated as a colonial project of erasure and domination. The Nakba was not a tragic consequence of war, it was a deliberate blueprint for dispossession and disappearance. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has detailed how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, approved “Plan Dalet” on 10 March, 1948. This included the mass expulsion and execution of Palestinians to create a Jewish-majority state. As Ben-Gurion himself declared chillingly: “Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.”
This is the basis of the Zionist state that we are told not to critique.
Einstein saw this unfolding and recoiled. In another 1948 open letter to the New York Times, he and other Jewish intellectuals described Israel’s newly formed political parties — like Herut (the precursor to Likud) — as “closely akin in… organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
Einstein’s words were not hyperbole, they were a warning. Having fled Nazi Germany, he had direct experience with the defining traits of Nazi fascism. “From Israel’s past actions,” he wrote, “we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”
Einstein warned about what many still refuse to see: a state established on principles of ethnic supremacy and expulsion could never transcend its foundation ethos. Israel’s creation in occupied Palestine is Zionism in practice; it cannot endure without employing repression until resistance is erased entirely. Hence, the Nakba wasn’t a one-off event in 1948; it evolved, funded by Washington, armed by Berlin and enabled by every government that trades Palestinian blood for political favours.
Zionism cannot be separated from the broader history of European settler-colonialism. As Patrick Wolfe explains, the ideology hijacked the rhetoric of Jewish liberation to mask its colonial reality of re-nativism, with the settlers recasting themselves as “indigenous” while painting resistance as terrorism.
The father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, stated in his manifesto-novel Altneuland, “To build anew, I must demolish before I construct.” To him, Palestine was not seen as a shared homeland, but as a house to be razed to the ground and rebuilt by and for Jews alone. His ideology was made possible by British imperial interests to divide and dominate post-Ottoman territories. Through ethnic partition and military alliances embellished under the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the ironic Zionist-Nazi 1933 Haavara Agreement, the Zionist project aligned perfectly with the West’s goal, as per the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Zionism is a global power structure, not a monolithic ethnic identity.
Many Jews around the world — rabbis, scholars, students and Holocaust survivors and their descendants — continue Einstein’s legacy by saying “Not in our name”. They reject the co-option of Holocaust memory to justify genocide in Gaza. They refuse to be complicit in what the Torah forbids: the theft of land and the murder of innocents. They are not “self-hating Jews”. They are the inheritors of a prophetic tradition of justice. And they are being silenced.
Perhaps the most dangerous development today is, therefore, Israel’s insistence on linking its crimes to Jewish identity. It frames civilian massacres, apartheid policies and violations of international law as acts done in the name of all Jews and Judaism. By tying the Jewish people to the crimes of a state, Israel risks exposing Jews around the world to collective blame and retaliation.
Einstein warned against this. And if Einstein’s vision teaches us anything, it is this: Justice cannot be compromised for comfort and profit. Truth must outlast repression. And freedom must belong to all. In the end, no amount of Israel’s militarisation of terminology, propaganda or geopolitical alliances can suppress a people’s resistance forever or outlast global condemnation. The only question left is: how much more blood will be spilled before justice prevails?
The struggle for clarity today is not just academic, it is existential. Without the ability to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, we cannot build a future where Jews and Palestinians all live in dignity, safety and peace. Reclaiming the term “Semite” in its full meaning, encompassing both Jews and Arabs, is critical. Further isolation of Arabs from their Semitic identity has enabled the dehumanisation of Palestinians and the erasure of shared Jewish-Arab histories, especially the centuries of coexistence, the Jewish-Muslim golden ages in places like Baghdad, Granada/Andalusia, Istanbul, Damascus and Cairo.
Einstein stood up for the future for us to reclaim it.
The way forward must be rooted in truth, justice and accountability. That means unequivocally opposing anti-Semitism in all its forms, but refusing to allow the term to be manipulated as a shield for apartheid, ethnic cleansing and colonial domination. It means affirming that Jewish safety must never come at the price of Palestinian freedom, and that Palestinian resistance is not hatred; it is survival.
And if Einstein would be silenced today, who will speak tomorrow?
The abduction of Nicolás Maduro is part of a larger pattern. It belongs to the same doctrine that flattened Gaza under the language of “self-defence” and threatened Iran with “locked and loaded” retaliation while bypassing diplomacy and international law. In each case, Washington has used force not as a last resort but as a sharp instrument of statecraft, corroding the norms it once claimed to uphold. From Gaza’s ruins to Tehran’s anxieties and now Caracas’s violation, the message is unmistakable: sovereignty is conditional, law is optional, and power is the ultimate decider, echoing the famous phrase of the Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli: “A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.” This is not containment. It is a contagion designed to restructure the Middle East and the Global South in ways the United States can no longer control.
The world recoiled in horror not because Donald Trump seized Nicolás Maduro, but because the United States kidnapped a sitting head of state. This was not law enforcement. It was a flagrant display of imperial power that shreds the last remaining threads of an international order based on sovereignty and the rule of law. The avalanche of global condemnation gathering force across Latin America, Africa, and much of the Global South reflects a more profound truth. This act cannot be justified under any moral, legal, or strategic framework.
To dress the operation up as a “war on drugs” is a grotesque lie. Washington knows Venezuela is not the primary source of the narcotics devastating American communities. Mexico holds that distinction. Venezuela may be a transit point, but it is not the engine of the crisis. The drug narrative functions as a fig leaf, a familiar pretext used whenever the United States decides to impose its will by force. It is the same feeble justification that accompanied interventions from Panama to Honduras, from Iraq to Afghanistan.
This was not about narcotics. It was about power.
The capture of Maduro marks a dangerous escalation: the extraction of a foreign leader under the banner of domestic prosecution. Even Washington’s refusal to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate president does not grant it the right to violate another country’s territorial integrity. The UN Charter is unambiguous. The use of force against a sovereign state is illegal except in self-defence or with Security Council authorization. Neither condition exists here.
Legal scholars have been blunt. The operation violates Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and risks constituting a crime of aggression. By normalizing regime change through force, the United States invites other powers to follow suit. Washington can abduct leaders it dislikes; why should Beijing, Moscow, or Ankara restrain themselves? The erosion of norms does not stop at one border.
In the US, the constitutional damage is equally severe. Congress alone has the authority to declare war, yet Trump launched what is effectively a regime-change operation without congressional authorization. This is executive overreach of the most dangerous kind, hollowing out the separation of powers and turning military force into a presidential tool of convenience. It is not a strength. It is recklessness.
Trump styles himself as the “President of Peace,” boasting that he ended eight wars. Yet his actions tell a different story. Venezuela is now destabilized, its region inflamed, its sovereignty trampled. The Southern Hemisphere has taken note. For countries long scarred by American interventions, this episode confirms their worst suspicions: that US rhetoric about democracy masks a hunger for control.
The economic implications are impossible to ignore. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Within days of Maduro’s capture, US officials were already discussing Venezuela’s oil future on global markets. This is the Monroe Doctrine reborn in its crudest form: this hemisphere is ours, and we will take what we want.
History offers no comfort here. Vietnam consumed fifteen years and millions of lives. Iraq shattered an entire region and birthed endless war. Panama and Honduras left scars that never healed. Each intervention was justified as necessary, temporary, and righteous. Each ended in strategic failure and moral disgrace.
The ghosts of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba linger. That humiliating fiasco taught the world that American power, when untethered from reality, defeats itself. Today, as Trump eyes Greenland and toys with fantasies that would fracture NATO, the same hubris is on display. The difference is that now the damage spreads faster and wider.
International reaction has been swift. Emergency sessions at the United Nations exposed Washington’s isolation. Allies wavered. Adversaries smiled. As Napoleon once advised, “When your enemy is making mistakes, let him continue”. In Beijing, Moscow, and beyond, leaders are laughing as the United States dismantles its own credibility.
The legal process ahead only deepens the peril. Maduro’s trial, if it proceeds, will inevitably raise questions of head-of-state immunity and jurisdiction. A ruling ordering his release would not merely embarrass Trump; it would detonate his presidency. Trump himself seems to sense this fragility, publicly warning that failure in the upcoming elections could lead to his impeachment. The strongman façade cracks easily when power depends on impunity.
What remains is the damage to America’s standing. This operation tells the world that US law is selective, its principles negotiable, its commitments disposable. It confirms that might has replaced right, and that international law applies only to the weak. Trump, obviously, has not read Dwight D. Eisenhower’s prophetic warning: “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”
Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro will not be remembered as a victory against crime. It will be remembered as a sad chapter when the United States abandoned even the pretence of moral leadership and dismissed the warning of the first American president, George Washington, against “foreign entanglement.” It accelerated the decline of an empire already drowning in debt, addicted to foreign adventures, and blind to the cost of its own arrogance.
The tragedy is not only Venezuela’s. It is America’s. An empire that kidnaps leaders in the name of justice has already lost the very thing it claims to defend.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
The method has has been praised by some but others say it’s a really bad idea
Maria Ortega and Robert Rowlands Deputy editor, Money and lifestyle hub
14:21, 09 Jan 2026
A technique is being shared over how to get the seat you want when flying – but not everyone is keen on it
A controversial technique to avoid getting a seat you do not want has been criticised by a number of passengers. Many airlines charge more for seat selection on the plane – or automatically put you in a middle seat.
However, according to one travel specialist, there is a method that can stop the system from giving you a middle seat. And they say it comes without paying anything on top.
Jorden Tually explained the technique in a video on his TikTok account (@jordentually). He said low-cost airlines often automatically assign middle seats to those who select “random seat allocation”.
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He says that this encourages passengers to pay for a window or aisle seat. Yet he argues that there is a technique that can help here – although it has been criticised by some online.
He says the method stops the airline’s system from automatically assigning you a middle seat. First up, he said he looks at how many seats of this type are still available on the flight when checking in.
In a test of the method, he said he found a total of 10 middle seats available on a flight. He said the next step is to simulate the purchase of that number of tickets.
“I go straight to the website and pretend to buy 10 more middle seats,” he said. He said when doing this, he enters the name of each made-up passenger.
You can just put in ‘a bunch of letters in there,’ he said. Then, in the seat assignment, he selects all the middle seats or those he wants to avoid and clicks ‘continue’.
He said ‘the system is going to hold those seats for about 10 to 15 minutes.’ This is the amount of time users will have to actually check in and get a better seat.
When passengers select ‘random seat allocation,’ the system will not be able to assign the seats it has previously blocked. He said: ‘It only took me two minutes, and now I have a window seat. It has never failed me and is 100% successful when done correctly.”
He advises completing the process from a computer and says it is more effective if done as close to the check-in date as possible, as there are fewer seats available.
But while some praised the technique, others pointed out the obvious consequences it would have. One commenter online said: “OMG, the self-entitled brigade again. If this does work, everyone will now try it, freezing up loads of seats and could stop genuine people wanting to book that flight, all because you think you deserve a better seat than those who have paid.”
Others criticised the idea and said it would lead to prices going up where dynamic pricing is used, which sees prices fluctuate according to demand. One person commented on the YouTube post put up late last month to say: “Don’t you know about airlines’ dynamic pricing??” Yet another echoed this, saying: “Damn, that will spike up cost by 10-20%”
Another person said: “Now you delayed your flight 10 minutes while they wait for the computer queue to clear so other passengers can select their seats.” A further commenter agreed, saying: “This is not a good hack, cause your ticket costs more when the system thinks it’s fully booked.”
Another added: “Congrats. Due to dynamic pricing, you’ve just raised the price of your ticket by 50%”
Last week, a prominent Saudi Sheikh, Mohammed Al-Issa, visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation, which signalled the end of the Nazi Holocaust. Although dozens of Muslim scholars have visited the site, where about one million Jews were killed during World War Two, according to the Auschwitz Memorial Centre’s press office, Al-Issa is the most senior Muslim religious leader to do so.
Visiting Auschwitz is not a problem for a Muslim; Islam orders Muslims to reject unjustified killing of any human being, no matter what their faith is. Al-Issa is a senior ally of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who apparently cares little for the sanctity of human life, though, and the visit to Auschwitz has very definite political connotations beyond any Islamic context.
By sending Al-Issa to the camp, Bin Salman wanted to show his support for Israel, which exploits the Holocaust for geopolitical colonial purposes. “The Israeli government decided that it alone was permitted to mark the 75th anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz [in modern day Poland] in 1945,” wrote journalist Richard Silverstein recently when he commented on the gathering of world leaders in Jerusalem for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Holocaust event.
Bin Salman uses Al Issa for such purposes, as if to demonstrate his own Zionist credentials. For example, the head of the Makkah-based Muslim World League is leading rapprochement efforts with Evangelical Christians who are, in the US at least, firm Zionists in their backing for the state of Israel. Al-Issa has called for a Muslim-Christian-Jewish interfaith delegation to travel to Jerusalem in what would, in effect, be a Zionist troika.
Zionism is not a religion, and there are many non-Jewish Zionists who desire or support the establishment of a Jewish state in occupied Palestine. The definition of Zionism does not mention the religion of its supporters, and Israeli writer Sheri Oz, is just one author who insists that non-Jews can be Zionists.
Mohammad Bin Salman and Netanyahu – Cartoon [Tasnimnews.com/Wikipedia]
We should not be shocked, therefore, to see a Zionist Muslim leader in these trying times. It is reasonable to say that Bin Salman’s grandfather and father were Zionists, as close friends of Zionist leaders. Logic suggests that Bin Salman comes from a Zionist dynasty.
This has been evident from his close relationship with Zionists and positive approaches to the Israeli occupation and establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, calling it “[the Jews’] ancestral homeland”. This means that he has no issue with the ethnic cleansing of almost 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, during which thousands were killed and their homes demolished in order to establish the Zionist state of Israel.
“The ‘Jewish state’ claim is how Zionism has tried to mask its intrinsic Apartheid, under the veil of a supposed ‘self-determination of the Jewish people’,” wrote Israeli blogger Jonathan Ofir in Mondoweiss in 2018, “and for the Palestinians it has meant their dispossession.”
As the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Bin Salman has imprisoned dozens of Palestinians, including representatives of Hamas. In doing so he is serving Israel’s interests. Moreover, he has blamed the Palestinians for not making peace with the occupation state. Bin Salman “excoriated the Palestinians for missing key opportunities,” wrote Danial Benjamin in Moment magazine. He pointed out that the prince’s father, King Salman, has played the role of counterweight by saying that Saudi Arabia “permanently stands by Palestine and its people’s right to an independent state with occupied East Jerusalem as its capital.”
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid of Israel’s Channel 13News reported Bin Salman as saying: “In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given. It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.” This is reminiscent of the words of the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, one of the Zionist founders of Israel, that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Bin Salman’s Zionism is also very clear in his bold support for US President Donald Trump’s deal of the century, which achieves Zionist goals in Palestine at the expense of Palestinian rights. He participated in the Bahrain conference, the forum where the economic side of the US deal was announced, where he gave “cover to several other Arab countries to attend the event and infuriated the Palestinians.”
US President Donald Trump looks over at Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman al-Saud as they line up for the family photo during the opening day of Argentina G20 Leaders’ Summit 2018 at Costa Salguero on 30 November 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina [Daniel Jayo/Getty Images]
While discussing the issue of the current Saudi support for Israeli policies and practices in Palestine with a credible Palestinian official last week, he told me that the Palestinians had contacted the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to ask him not to relocate his country’s embassy to Jerusalem. “The Saudis have been putting pressure on us in order to relocate our embassy to Jerusalem,” replied the Brazilian leader. What more evidence of Mohammad Bin Salman’s Zionism do we need?
The founder of Friends of Zion Museum is American Evangelical Christian Mike Evans. He said, after visiting a number of the Gulf States, that, “The leaders [there] are more pro-Israel than a lot of Jews.” This was a specific reference to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, and his counterpart in the UAE, Mohammed Bin Zayed.
“All versions of Zionism lead to the same reactionary end of unbridled expansionism and continued settler colonial genocide of [the] Palestinian people,” Israeli-American writer and photographer Yoav Litvin wrote for Al Jazeera. We may well see an Israeli Embassy opened in Riyadh in the near future, and a Saudi Embassy in Tel Aviv or, more likely, Jerusalem. Is Mohammad Bin Salman a Zionist? There’s no doubt about it.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Egypt has been ranked as the leading African country in global soft power influence for 2024, according to a report by Business Insider Africa. The report, based on the Global Soft Power Index published by Brand Finance, places Egypt 39th worldwide with a soft power score of 44.9 points.
South Africa and Morocco follow Egypt in the continent’s rankings, securing second and third place with scores of 43.7 and 40.6 points, respectively. The index also noted that “Egypt secures the gold for its ‘rich heritage’” while the UAE ranks number one in the Middle East and 10th globally. Globally, the US leads with a record-high score of 78.8 points, an increase from 74.8 in 2023.
The Global Soft Power Index assesses the perceptions of all 193 UN member states, evaluating countries based on eight pillars: business and trade, international relations, education and science, culture and heritage, governance, media and communication, sustainable future, and people and values.
Soft power is defined as a country’s ability to influence others through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. Countries like Egypt are leveraging diplomacy, culture, and education to enhance their global reputation and build goodwill.
Meanwhile, China which sits on third place on the global index has been expanding its influence in Africa over the past decade and is currently hosting the China-Africa forum, with African leaders keen to explore investment and loan opportunities. China, the world’s number two economy, is Africa’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade hitting $167.8 billion in the first half of this year.
Eight European nations, Japan, and Canada on Tuesday expressed “serious concerns” about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, Anadolu reports.
In a joint statement, foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK recalled the “catastrophic” humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave.
The statement mentioned the appalling conditions that are exacerbated by winter, noting that 1.3 million Gazans still require urgent shelter assistance.
The foreign ministers cited the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, which was published earlier in December, as evidence that the situation remains desperate.
The statement expressed their appreciation for the ceasefire in Gaza but stated that they will not lose sight of the plight of Gaza’s civilian population.
It called on Israel to ensure that the UN, its partners, and NGOs can continue their vital work and lift unreasonable restrictions on imports considered to have a dual use.
Saying that many established international NGO partners are at risk of being deregistered because of Israel’s restrictive new requirements, it warned that deregistration could result in the forced closure of humanitarian operations within 60 days in Gaza and the West Bank.
“This would have a severe impact on access to essential services including healthcare,” said the statement.
Ensuring UN, its partners can continue their vital work is ‘essential’
It also underlined that ensuring the UN and its partners can continue their vital work is “essential” to the impartial, neutral, and independent delivery of aid throughout Gaza.
“This includes UNRWA, which provides essential services, such as healthcare and education, to millions of Palestinian refugees,” said the foreign ministers.
The statement also called on Tel Aviv to open crossings and increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
“The target of 4,200 trucks per week, including an allocation of 250 UN trucks per day, should be a floor not a ceiling,” it said, adding that these targets should be lifted so they can be sure the vital supplies are getting in at the vast scale needed.
The nations also underlined that ongoing restrictions limit the capacity for aid to be delivered at the scale needed, in accordance with international humanitarian law, or for repairs to be made to support recovery and reconstruction efforts.
“We now urge the Government of Israel to remove these humanitarian access constraints, and to deliver and honour the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” it added.
Despite the ceasefire, Israel continues to keep Gaza’s crossings largely closed, preventing the entry of mobile homes and reconstruction materials and worsening the humanitarian crisis affecting over 2 million people.
Palestinian officials say that at least 414 people in Gaza have been killed since the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas took place on Oct. 10.
Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed over 71,000 Palestinians in the enclave, most of them women and children, and rendered it largely uninhabitable.
For “Malcolm in the Middle” fans and the Walt Disney Co., 151 episodes weren’t enough.
The beloved sitcom, which ran seven seasons on Fox in the early aughts, is returning for a four-episode arc on Hulu April 10. The reunion brings back such viewer favorites as Bryan Cranston as Hal, Frankie Muniz as Malcolm, Jane Kaczmarek as Lois, and a couple of Malcolm’s TV siblings.
The limited series — “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” — is set nearly 20 years after the original went off the air. Muniz’s character, Malcolm, is beckoned back to his dysfunctional family to help celebrate Hal and Lois’ 40th wedding anniversary.
Disney acquired the rights to 20th Century Fox studio programs after buying much of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment assets in 2019. The deal gave Disney such blockbusters as “The Simpsons” and “Avatar.” Recently, the Burbank entertainment giant has dipped into the Fox vault to mine the trend of comfort food TV for millennials, boomers and Gen Z. Executives have watched nostalgic programming take off on streaming services, including Disney+ and Hulu.
Jane Kaczmarek as Lois, Bryan Cranston as Hal, and Erik Per Sullivan who played Dewey in the original “Malcolm in the Middle” on Fox.
(FOX)
A recent study from National Research Group found that about 60% of all TV consumed is library content.
The NRG study found that, among Gen Z, 40% of respondents said they gravitated to older shows because they are comforting and nostalgic. Disney’s own research has shown that a quarter of the shows young people list as their favorites were produced before 2010.
Disney’s ABC is also bringing back the quirky hospital sitcom, “Scrubs,” on Feb. 25. That comedy, set in the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital, will reprise the bromance between Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s characters, which the pair have recreated recently in T-Mobile TV commercials.
The show, which ran from October 2001 to March 2010, was also produced by 20th Television along with Bill Lawrence’s Doozer Productions.
Sarah Chalke will return, and John C. McGinley will guest star. The show will run on ABC, and a day later on Disney’s Hulu.
Most of the original “Malcolm” cast returns for the limited series except notably Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey. He’s no longer an actor so the part now is played by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark.
In the show, Malcolm has a daughter, played by Keeley Karsten, and a girlfriend, played by Kiana Madeira.
The Wilkerson’s classic mid-century house in Studio City, which served as an exterior for the show, reportedly was renovated years ago.
The original series ran on Fox from January 2000 to May 2006. Those episodes stream on Hulu.
Los Angeles Times’ former television critic, Howard Rosenberg, in 2000 called “Malcolm in the Middle” the “smartest, sharpest-written, most original comedy of the season.”
The reboot is produced by Disney Television Studios and New Regency. Linwood Boomer, who created the original series, also returned as writer and executive producer. Ken Kwapis directs the four episodes and also serves as an executive producer.
Beyond reviving the shows, Disney has also collaborated with advertisers to make throwback commercials to run in classic films on its streaming platforms and TV networks.
Staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.
Here’s where you’ll be able to stream the new episodes of the Malcolm in the Middle reboot.
15:03, 29 Dec 2025Updated 15:06, 29 Dec 2025
A new trailer has given fans the first look at the Malcolm in the Middle sequel series, confirming the new show’s release date.
Titled Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, the special four-episode event will see the majority of the cast reunite almost two decades later. The original series lasted for seven seasons between 2000 and 2006.
Over the years, the series followed Malcolm, a bright and intelligent boy, who had to put up with the rest of his dysfunctional family, including his quirky parents, and three older brothers. All while dealing with the troubles of being the middle child and a teenager.
Frankie Muniz, whose acting career began with the series, is set to reprise his role as Malcolm. Alongside him will be Justin Berfield and Christopher Masterson who are also returning as two of his brothers, Reece and Francis respectively.
Bryan Cranston, who went on to star in hit drama Breaking Bad once the show ended will also make his comeback as father Hal, with Jane Kaczmarek returning as strict matriarch Lois.
The first trailer has confirmed a number of other familiar faces will be returning to our screens for the reboot. This includes, Gary Anthony Williams as Abe Kenarban, a friend of Hal’s and father of Malcolm’s mate Stevie. There’s also Emy Coligado as Francis’ wife Piama.
One original cast member who is not returning is former child actor Erik Per Sullivan, who played Malcolm’s younger sibling Dewey. The star has since quit acting and is now studying for a masters degree at Harvard. His character has since been recast.
According to the synopsis for the sequel series, Malcom has successfully been shielding himself from his family for over a decade. However, he along with his own wife and daughter end up dragged back into their orbit when Hal and Lois demand his presence at their 40th anniversary party. Judging by the short clips shown in the trailer, very little is set to go as planned leading up to the big event.
The original series is held in high regard by those who remember it fondly, with an impressive 90% fan score on Rotten Tomatoes. Indeed some mention how they still binge watch the older show regularly and so the sequel will need to meet high expectations.
Fans did not take long to share their thoughts about the trailer, which also confirmed the release date of April 16. All episodes will be made available to stream on Disney Plus, via the Hulu brand.
One fan commented: “One of my most rewatched shows. I hope there’s more seasons or something after Life’s Still Unfair.”
Another added: “It’s good that everyone is still the same character personality wise, I thought they’d change the tone because they’re all older but looks like the original.”
“Used to watch the original all the time with my own dysfunctional family! Honestly it’s nice seeing everyone doing their thing again,” someone else replied, while one fan hoped: “Please be good please be good. The original creators are involved so I have faith!”
And there were some doubts, as a fan said: “Doesn’t look to be shot in the same way as the rest of the series. That could go against this… Hopefully the writing is just as good though.”
Malcolm In The Middle Life’s Still Unfair is streaming on Disney+ from April 16. For the latest showbiz, TV, movie and streaming news, go to the new **Everything Gossip** website.
