Opinions

The Zionist narrative has been a dominating force in the United States for more than seven decades. Promoted by powerful lobbies, nurtured by Christian evangelicals, and echoed by mainstream media, it remained largely unchallenged until the outbreak of the genocide in Gaza.

In nearly two years, the unyielding images of horror, the scale of devastation, and the shocking loss of human lives have created an indomitable record of horror that has challenged the Zionist narrative. Poll after poll is registering a shift in public opinion vis-a-vis Israel. On both sides of the political divide, Americans are growing less enthusiastic about blanket support for the longstanding US ally. So what does this mean for US-Israeli relations?

In the short and medium term, not much. US arms, aid, security cooperation, and diplomatic backing for Israel will barely be affected. The support structure built up over almost eight decades cannot be expected to evaporate overnight.

But in the long term, US backing will be reduced. This means Israel will be forced to reconsider its aggressive posture in the region and roll back its plans to rule over all of historic Palestine.

What the polls say

Polls started picking up a shift in US public opinion, especially among young Democrats, even before the October 7, 2023 attacks. But afterwards, this change appeared to accelerate dramatically.

A poll conducted by Pew Research in March this year suggests that negative attitudes towards Israel have risen from 42 percent to 53 percent of all US adults since 2022. The shift is more pronounced among Democrats, from 53 percent to 69 percent for the same period.

What is remarkable about this change is that it is cross-generational. Among Democrats 50 and older – people who are usually moderate on foreign policy issues – negative attitudes towards Israel increased from 43 percent to 66 percent.

Expressions of sympathy have also changed. According to an August poll (PDF) by The Economist and YouGov, 44 percent of Democrats sympathise more with Palestinians, compared with 15 percent with Israelis; among Independents, these figures are 30 and 21 percent.

The same poll suggests that a plurality of Americans now believes Israel’s continuing bombing of Gaza is unwarranted, and some 78 percent want an immediate ceasefire, including 75 percent of Republicans. The percentage of respondents who said Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians was 43 percent; those who disagreed were just 28 percent.

More significantly, a plurality – 42 percent – favour decreasing support for Israel; among Republicans this number stands at 24 percent.

A Harvard-Harris poll (PDF) from July reveals perhaps the most concerning trend for Israel’s advocates: 40 percent of young Americans now favour Hamas, not Israel. While this is likely a reflection of general sympathy for the Palestinians, it shows significant cracks in the dominance of Israel’s “Palestinian terrorism” narrative among the American youth.

The same poll suggested that only 27 percent support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a disastrous vote of no confidence that is far removed from the welcome he has enjoyed at the White House and Congress.

How policy may change

As older voters – Israel’s last electoral stronghold – make way for younger voters more sympathetic to the cause of Palestinian rights, the political math will shift towards profound political change. The question is no longer if the US will rethink its special relationship with Israel, but when.

The special relationship with Israel is one of those rare issues for which there is bipartisan support. Changing that would take a long time.

Of course, in the short term, there are some possible changes. If there is a sudden rift between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump – perhaps even on a personal level – the latter will have the polls to justify a move away from Israel. The clear shift in public opinion would provide him with the political cover that he is listening to the American people. However, such a dramatic change is not likely.

What is more likely is that, under pressure from the public, members of Congress will increasingly start shifting on Israel-Palestine. Those who stubbornly refuse may be challenged by younger, more energetic candidates who rebuff funding by pro-Israel organisations like AIPAC.

The shift in Congress, however, would take a lot of time, not least because there will be stiff resistance to it. Pro-Israel lobby groups regard this as a pivotal moment in US-Israeli history. They will employ their vast resources to eliminate any candidate expressing sympathy for the Palestinians or questioning automatic support for Israel.

Furthermore, other issues, such as the economy and various social ills, will continue to dominate political agendas; foreign policy rarely shapes US elections.

The transition will not be bipartisan in the near term. Republican support for Israel is more consistent. The Democratic establishment has been under mounting pressure from its base since Joe Biden’s presidency. As younger members gain political ascendancy – as exemplified by the spectacular victory of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary – the Democratic leadership will be forced to change tack.

With more pro-Palestinian officials elected into office, especially in Congress, the progressive bloc will grow and intensify the pressure to change policy from within.

This process, however, will not be quick enough to immediately improve the situation in Palestine or even stop the looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Relief is more likely to come due to international pressure and developments on the ground rather than a change in US policy.

Nevertheless, in the longer term, lessened support for Israel from Congress or even a US president would mean the Israeli government would have to change its overly aggressive posture in the region and rein in its adventurous militarism. It will likely also be forced to make concessions on the Palestinian question. Whether this would be enough to establish a Palestinian state remains to be seen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

President Trump reiterated call to reclaim the huge airbase, but Taliban says US must engage without seeking military presence.

Afghanistan has rejected a call from President Donald Trump for the United States military to return to the country and reclaim the Bagram airbase.

A foreign ministry official declared on social media on Friday that Kabul is ready to engage, but maintained that the US will not be allowed to re-establish a military presence in the central Asian country.

Trump said on Thursday that his administration is pressing to “get back” the base at Bagram. The US president, who has long expressed hope of reclaiming the facility, noted that its position is strategically vital due to its proximity to China.

“We’re trying to get it back,” Trump announced. “We gave it to [the Taliban] for nothing,” he complained, adding that Bagram is “exactly one hour away from where China makes its nuclear missiles”.

However, Taliban officials have dismissed the idea.

“Afghanistan and the United States need to engage with one another … without the United States maintaining any military presence in any part of Afghanistan,” Zakir Jalal, a foreign ministry official, posted on social media.

Kabul is ready to pursue political and economic ties with Washington based on “mutual respect and shared interests,” he added.

Lying just north of Kabul, Bagram, which hosted a notorious prison, served as the centre of the US military’s operations during its two-decade occupation of Afghanistan.

Thousands of people were also imprisoned at the site for years without charge or trial by the United States during its so-called “war on terror”, and many of those were abused or tortured.

The Taliban retook the facility in 2021 following the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan government.

Trump has repeatedly expressed regret that the base was abandoned, arguing that Washington should have maintained a small force, not because of Afghanistan but because of its location near China.

The latest remarks came as Trump confirmed for the first time that his administration has been in talks with Taliban officials.

Over the weekend, Adam Boehler, his special hostage envoy, and Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US envoy for Afghanistan, met Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Kabul. Discussions reportedly centred on American citizens detained in Afghanistan.

US officials have been weighing the possibility of re-establishing a presence at Bagram since at least March, according to reports cited by the US media outlet CNN.

Trump and his advisers argue that the airfield could provide leverage, not only over security, but also allow access to Afghanistan’s valuable mineral resources.

The US does not officially recognise the Taliban government, which returned to power in 2021 after 20 years of conflict with American-led forces.

In April last year, I wrote that, given the genocide it is committing in Gaza, its violent occupation of the West Bank, numerous attacks on its neighbours, and apparent disregard for international and human rights law, it was time for the international community to declare Israel a rogue state. As if we hadn’t received enough confirmation of its rogue status since then, on September 9, Israel went ahead and carried out a strike on Qatar, a key mediator in negotiations between Hamas and Israel. This, while Gaza’s devastation deepens by the day.

The last remaining high rises in Gaza City are now being flattened, and hundreds of thousands of people who had already been displaced multiple times are being pushed towards the south of the enclave. Israel claims the south is a “humanitarian zone”, but we know well that there is nowhere in Gaza where Palestinians are safe.

So, in the midst of all this, it feels futile to celebrate the United Nations General Assembly vote where 142 member states backed “tangible, timebound, and irreversible steps” towards a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The same resolution, rejected by just 12 states including Israel and the United States, also called on Hamas to free all hostages, end its rule in Gaza, and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, in line with the objective of establishing a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.

Gaza is still smouldering, and Palestinian communities are being systematically erased in the occupied West Bank. So how does it make sense to talk about a Palestinian state? Who, or what, would such a state serve?

Before this vote, the vast majority of countries in the world had already recognised the State of Palestine. Those missing from this map of recognition were primarily states in the Global North.

Through the UN General Assembly vote, France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Malta, Belgium, Canada, and Australia have now signalled their support for Palestinian statehood, aligning themselves with the global majority. But let us be clear: these countries have no claim to the moral high ground.

We should remember that they waited through two years of Israeli genocide, which has killed at least 65,000 Palestinians, before voting in favour of a Palestinian state. They were similarly oblivious to the Palestinian right to self-determination during the years of Israeli and Egyptian-imposed military siege in Gaza before October 7, 2023. They did nothing to quell the ever-expanding illegal settlement movement in the occupied West Bank or the sharp increase in settler violence. In fact, they have done nothing to support the Palestinian right to self-determination since 1948.

So, why should this time be any different?

In fact, it is not different at all. As a scholar of international law, Noura Erakat recently told Al Jazeera, “It is way too little, far too late.” And these declarations are only meant to distract from the fact that many of these countries have financially and militarily enabled Israel to carry out its genocide.

The proof is in the pudding: the Palestinian state that is on offer. And what is clear is that Palestinian rights are not a priority.

A few weeks before, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the United Kingdom would recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September 2025 unless Israel took “substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.” There was no mention of Palestinians’ inalienable right to self-determination or of the legitimacy of the Palestinian national struggle. Rather, it was framed as a punishment for Israel. Does this mean that if Israel had stopped the genocide and paid lip service to the (already dead) two-state solution, Britain would have voted differently?

Canada’s promise of recognition came with a long list of caveats. Notably, on the Government of Canada’s website, in the items that make up its “policy on key issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, the first commitment is “support for Israel and its security”.

It adds that Israel has the “right under international law to take the necessary measures, in accordance with human rights and international humanitarian law, to protect the security of its citizens from attacks by terrorist groups.” But what if Israel is already in violation of international law – as it is right now? Will Canada still stand by Israel and its security?

After reaffirming its support for Israel, Canada then declares support for the Palestinians’ “right to self-determination” and “a sovereign, independent, viable, democratic, and territorially contiguous Palestinian state”. But this comes with strings attached, including demands for governance reforms in the Palestinian Authority, the demilitarisation of the Palestinian state, and elections in 2026, “in which Hamas can play no part”.

Australia’s promise of recognition was similarly predicated on the Palestinian Authority pursuing certain reforms, including the termination of prisoner payments, schooling reform, and demilitarisation. It also demanded that Hamas “end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons”.

The joint statement by Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese added: “There is much more work to do in building the Palestinian state. We will work with partners on a credible peace plan that establishes governance and security arrangements for Palestine and ensures the security of Israel.” But what of the security of Palestinians? Will Australia take any measures to protect them from Israel’s mass extermination? Or are Palestinians simply meant to work on building a state that Western powers can tolerate, while hoping that the Israeli government will eventually grow tired of its genocidal campaign?

The unbearable tragedy of it all is that we have already seen what happens when a peace process prioritises Israel’s right to security over Palestinians’ right to self-determination. It was called the Oslo Accords, where a genuine guarantee of a Palestinian state was never on the table.

In his essay The Morning After, Edward Said wrote of the vulgarity of the ceremonial way the Accords were signed at the White House and the diminutive manner in which Yasser Arafat offered thanks. Said rued that the Oslo Accords were not a path to statehood. Rather, they symbolised the “astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation”.

It resulted in a Palestinian Authority — yes, the same Palestinian Authority that Western leaders have hedged their bets on — that had all the bells and whistles of a state. But the real state never arrived. With complete impunity, Israel continued its efforts to erase Palestinians. And the Palestinian Authority became an extension of the settler-colonial project, collaborating with Israeli forces to actively undermine the Palestinian national movement, all in the name of Israel’s security.

So, if Western leaders are sincere about “solving” the crisis, the only good solution is the one that places Palestinian rights on centre stage and involves some mechanism of political leverage and censure that is able to curb Israel’s rogue-like conduct. Without it, any recognition of Palestinian statehood is an empty performance, and the Israeli campaign of genocide and erasure is bound to continue with complete impunity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On Thursday, a Brazilian Supreme Court panel found former President Jair Bolsonaro guilty of multiple charges, including leading a criminal group and attempting the violent overthrow of democratic rule. He was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison.

According to the prosecution, Bolsonaro and members of his cabinet and the military sought to orchestrate a coup after his electoral defeat in November 2022 and assassinate current president and political rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s judiciary associated the former president’s actions with the events that led to the ransacking of the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court in the capital Brasilia by his supporters in January 2023.

While the verdict was welcomed by other Latin American leaders like Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Chilean President Gabriel Boric, United States President Donald Trump’s administration, a staunch ally of Bolsonaro, swiftly condemned it. In the days leading up to the court panel’s verdict, Washington intensified pressure on Brazil’s government by imposing a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods and issuing personal sanctions against Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes under the Magnitsky Act, citing alleged human rights abuses.

But the Brazilian government and institutions were unshaken. Lula hailed the decision as “historic” and rejected US attempts of interference in Brazil’s internal affairs.

The verdict is indeed historic, not only because it marks the first time a Brazilian head of state was convicted on such charges but also because it demonstrates that despite Brazil’s tumultuous history, its democracy is a resilient, dynamic and adaptable system that works.

This may come as a surprise to some. After all, the country’s recent past reflects struggles with authoritarianism and repression. From the seven decades of imperial monarchy in the 19th century after independence from Portugal through the republican period, the revolution of 1930, the unstable parliamentarian regime, the military dictatorship during the Cold War and the impeachment of two presidents in the democratic era, Brazil could easily be labelled as an unstable and unpredictable state.

What is more, the country is situated in a region that has long known coups, dictatorships and authoritarianism, often backed or orchestrated by the US.

Brazil’s own military dictatorship was firmly supported by the US government. Washington encouraged and backed the military coup of 1964, which ushered in an era of bloody repression that would only end two decades later. And yet, the democratic system that followed proved resilient even when confronted with wrongdoing by political leaders.

In 1979, President Joao Baptista Figueiredo signed a law giving amnesty to both military personnel and opponents of the dictatorship in an attempt to pave the way for democratisation. It also served to cover up the military regime’s crimes and protect those responsible.

In 2021, Bolsonaro decided to break with this policy of amnesty for crimes against the state by signing legislation that criminalised coup attempts and attacks on democracy. It is this very provision that was used by the Supreme Court in its ruling against him.

This is not the only time Brazilian courts have used presidents’ own legislative agendas against them. In 2005 during Lula’s first term, the country was shaken by a major scandal of vote-buying in Congress. As part of his efforts to appease the public, the president enacted the Clean Record Law (Lei da Ficha Limpa) in 2010, which rendered any candidate convicted by a collective judicial body (more than one judge) ineligible to hold public office for eight years. In 2018, Lula himself was barred from running for president again under his own law due to a conviction for corruption.

But these are not the only examples of Brazilian democracy weathering political storms linked to its leaders. The country has been through two presidential impeachments without major shocks to the system. Right-wing President Fernando Collor (1990-1992) was removed from office due to corruption involving his campaign treasurer while left-wing President Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) lost her position for manipulating the federal budget.

The removal of both leaders did not lead to institutional instability but instead paved the way for significant reforms. Among them are the Plano Real (Real Plan) of 1994, which finally brought inflation under control, and the labour reform of 2017, which established the primacy of employer-employee agreements over existing labour legislation.

Taken together, these examples show that Brazil’s political system derives institutional strength from the application of the rule of law across the ideological spectrum.

The Brazilian case calls for a reconsideration of the longstanding but inaccurate view that Latin America is a breeding ground for unstable and unpredictable democracies. It shows that institutions are functioning and demonstrate both modernity and adaptability.

Brazil thus offers a reference point for other democracies in the region and beyond.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

India’s most recent encounter with Pakistan in the Asia Cup was celebrated as a patriotic spectacle: a win dedicated to the armed forces and those affected by the Pahalgam attack. Such declarations, however, expose something deeper: a strategy of playing politics with sport, hypocrisy masked as principle.

Beneath this posturing and tokenism lies a contradiction too stark to ignore. This is not just sport. It is cynical theatre in which administrators, players and commentators attempt to ride on two boats at the same time. The hypocrisy is visible to anyone with a sane set of eyes.

At the heart of this contradiction is the relationship between India and Pakistan in cricket. Officially, India refuses bilateral cricket with Pakistan. The line is firm: no tours, no series and no diplomacy. The justification rests on national security, especially after the clash between the South Asian neighbours in May.

Indian artists are banned from collaborating with their Pakistani counterparts. Pakistani singers and actors once popular in India have been cut off on social media and otherwise. Indian celebrities themselves are trolled and shamed for past collaborations done on neutral grounds.

Yet the same ecosystem explodes with excitement when India faces Pakistan in multination tournaments. Matches are packaged as spectacles, marketed as the “greatest rivalry” and cashed in for billions in advertising revenue.

This duality is not accidental. Jay Shah, now serving in International Cricket Council (ICC) leadership, has been accused of pressuring Team India into playing Pakistan despite reluctance from within the camp. Sanjay Raut, a member of parliament in India, recently alleged that Shah’s hand forced the decision, turning the match into an obligation rather than a choice.

If true, this signals how far politics has penetrated Indian cricket administration for the sake of money and clout. The game is no longer simply sport but a vehicle for symbolic battles decided in boardrooms, not dressing rooms.

The hypocrisy becomes sharper when one considers the home environment. While Indians in other spheres faced online lynching for working with Pakistani colleagues even before the war, cricketers are being placed on a pedestal for defeating Pakistan. It is not only about double standards. It is about a calculated exploitation of sentiment.

Cricket is permitted as the only arena of “contact” because cricket sells more than most things in India. The ban on cultural exchange is explained as nationalism, but cricket is exempted in the name of multilateral obligations and commercial survival. Dedications of wins to soldiers and terror victims act as moral cover for what is essentially a business transaction. This is sheer hypocrisy and tokenism.

If India insists on involving politics in sport, consistency demands more. Look at Muslim athletes and countries known for boycotting matches against Israeli opponents. They forfeit games, risk sanctions and face bans. Whatever one thinks of their politics, their actions are clear, uncompromised and costly. They make a stand and face consequences.

India refuses bilateral cricket with Pakistan yet plays them in ICC tournaments because the money is too big to lose, especially when most of it comes home through viewership endorsements and advertisements. It tries to sail on two boats, waving nationalism with one hand while collecting profits with the other. The dedication of victories to the armed forces does not erase that contradiction. It exposes it.

The India-Pakistan rivalry itself is not what it used to be. Competitive balance has tilted drastically. India has dominated recent contests due to the Pakistani team’s poor form. Suspense is long gone, but the manufactured hype remains.

Broadcasters and advertisers pump the match as if it still defines the fate of nations. In reality, it defines the fate of sponsorship deals. The sporting value is hollowed out. The symbolic gestures after each victory only add to the theatre. In their latest match on Sunday, Indian players refused to shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts.

Such dissonance turns patriotism into branding and erodes the dignity of national discourse. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, the ICC leadership and political voices close to the game must confront this contradiction. Cricket cannot remain both business and battlefield. A rivalry stripped of sporting essence but inflated with symbolism cannot endure. The Pahalgam victims deserve solidarity but should not be used as props for cricketing theatre. Sport deserves freedom from tokenism.

Instead of continuing this hybrid model of opportunism, India can opt for one of two choices. It can refuse to play Pakistan entirely, across all formats, including ICC tournaments. That would align deeds with words at the highest level. It would be costly in terms of ICC sanctions and revenues, but it would at least be consistent.

Or India can accept playing Pakistan as part of sport while removing politics and symbolic dedications from the game. That would mean treating cricket as cricket, not as a stage for nationalism.

India’s cricket establishment must choose one path. If it wants politics in sport, it must show the courage of consistency. If it wants to keep politics out, it must strip away the hollow dedications and patriotic posturing. The current approach of trying to sail on two boats is not sustainable. It fools no one, neither at home nor abroad. Cricket is being diminished by this hypocrisy and so is national dignity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday. His suspected killer, identified by law enforcement as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was taken into custody after a substantial manhunt, based on information from people close to Robinson’s family. Utah Governor Spencer Cox said a family member of Robinson had reached out to a friend, who then contacted the authorities, and that friends and relatives interviewed by investigators described Robinson as “full of hate” when speaking about Kirk at a recent gathering. Robinson’s exact motivations for allegedly carrying out the shooting are still being explored.

If past instances of political attacks are any guide, more detailed information about Robinson’s potential motivations may be revealed over time. But we don’t need to read a manifesto or scroll through social media posts to know that any attempt to justify killing Kirk over his words or views is indefensible.

I mostly avoided Kirk’s rhetoric over the years. I found most of the content I heard from him distasteful, both to me and to many other Americans, and offensive to objective facts and discourse. Kirk often cherry-picked and distorted history to push agendas that many of us believe are not only abhorrent but also dangerous to racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and other marginalised people.

But I did not want Kirk to be harmed. When I learned that he had been shot, I did not want him to die. On the contrary, I prayed that God’s will be done in the situation – the same God whom Kirk and I both claimed, whatever our political disagreements may have been. I hoped that he would recover, and that his brush with death might help him gain a new, more constructive perspective on politics and life.

Last summer, I had similar hopes (though perhaps not expectations) that Donald Trump would be changed for the better after he survived an assassination attempt while speaking at a campaign event. “Trump has the opportunity to put the peace and security of the country ahead of his personal ambition,” I wrote at the time. “Perhaps coming so close to death will change his perspective on stirring up his supporters.”

That did not happen. Instead, Trump quickly returned to the same sort of demonising rhetoric and selective outrage that has heightened and polarised American politics. He pardoned the January 6 rioters who attacked Capitol police officers, as well as the Proud Boys members who had been convicted of conspiring against the United States government. And even with Kirk dying from a shooting similar to the one that almost took Trump’s life last year, the president and many of his supporters have mainly doubled down on the type of vitriol that has become all too common in American politics.

This is not to say that the MAGA movement or the right has been alone in condoning political violence or dehumanising others. When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed late last year, his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, became somewhat of a folk hero. While this killing does not appear to be explicitly partisan, many of the comments that mocked Thompson or celebrated Mangione took on the tone of class warfare. And when unsubstantiated rumours about Trump’s health started to circulate recently, many of his detractors seemed to celebrate the possibility that Trump could be incapacitated or worse, and expressed disappointment when he re-emerged in the public eye.

But toxic online rhetoric is one thing, and nearly any popular topic will elicit offensive or hateful commentary on social media. With the MAGA movement led by Trump, the hateful language of its most trollish followers is often indistinguishable from the rhetoric coming from the movement’s loudest and most prominent voices. After breaking the news of Kirk’s death on social media, President Trump posted a four-minute video honouring Kirk and demonising the political left.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonising those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”

Now seems like an appropriate time to remind you that, less than a year ago, Trump appeared on Fox News and referred to leftists as “the enemy from within” and “Marxists and communists and fascists,” specifically naming Adam Schiff and “the Pelosis” and calling them “so sick and so evil.”

“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical Left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Noticeably absent from the president’s list were several violent, sometimes lethal, attacks against Democrats or carried out by self-declared MAGA followers. It is a calculated choice to condemn the shooting of a prominent Republican in 2017 but not the murders of two Democrats and the shooting of two others in Minnesota three months ago, or the torching of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Democrat Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside. Condemning “attacks on ICE agents” after pardoning dozens of people who attacked Capitol police officers is a cynical double standard.

Through the discourse surrounding Kirk’s death, I’ve become familiar with the term “selective empathy,” a succinct phrase that covers a concept with which many of us are familiar. At their worst, President Trump and even Kirk engaged in this type of moral relativism, condoning actions against their opponents that they would condemn if done to their allies. And those of us who reject the MAGA ideology are at our worst when we tolerate, excuse, or even celebrate, violence against those who oppose us or who hold us in disdain.

At his best, Charlie Kirk manifested his core religious and political beliefs by appealing to the universal values of love and human dignity rooted in Christianity and the principle of equality on which the United States was founded. While he often failed to conform his rhetoric to these larger principles, Kirk and others in his ideological camp are still deserving of the empathy embedded in those principles. To deny them such consideration based on their views would be to undermine our own opposition to their divisive and even dangerous rhetoric. For all our sakes, we can and must do better.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Professor Nitasha Kaul, an academic specialising in politics and international relations at the University of Westminster, has been in the United Kingdom since she came to the University of Hull for postgraduate study in 1997. In the years since, she has published several books and more than 150 articles on topics like democracy, right-wing politics, Indian politics and Kashmir.

A British citizen, Kaul retained her connection to the country of her birth as an overseas citizen of India (OCI) until recently. The OCI is a special status granted to individuals of Indian origin who have acquired foreign citizenship. It grants them a multiple-entry, lifelong visa for visiting India, allowing them to travel and stay without restrictions. OCI status is held by more than 4 million people worldwide.

In May, Kaul’s OCI was summarily cancelled. OCI cancellation is allowed under Section 7D of the Citizenship Act 1955 in circumstances of (1) fraud, (2) “disaffection towards the Constitution of India”, (3) communication or trade with an enemy India is engaged with during a war, (4) imprisonment for more than two years or (4) if ‘it is necessary so to do in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of India, friendly relations of India with any foreign country, or in the interests of the general public’.

Although the government is not breaking the law, its actions raise serious legal and human rights concerns. Its actions often blur the line between lawful revocation and punitive censorship. The revocations frequently lack transparency and procedural fairness – thus risking violation of legal norms. Overall, this trend raises significant concerns about freedom of speech, proportionality and adherence to the rule of law. It should be noted that domestic courts are resisting government actions.

In Kaul’s case, she was informed that her OCI status had been revoked with an official notice saying she has been “found indulging in anti-India activities, motivated by malice and complete disregard for facts or history” without referring to any particular such incident. Kaul has been a strong advocate for democracy in India and has often criticised the government for its minority bashing and the right-wing Hindu organisation RSS for its divisive politics.

An examination of global democracy indicators shows that Kaul’s analysis disregards neither facts nor history. Freedom House’s global freedom index ranks India as “partly free” and describes how “the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has presided over discriminatory policies and a rise in persecution affecting the Muslim population.” This trend can also be seen in relation to religious and press freedoms. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said: “India’s media has fallen into an ‘unofficial state of emergency’ since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.” ​

Kaul is not alone in facing retribution for her outspokenness. In the past nine years, the OCIs of more than 120 individuals have been cancelled by the Indian authorities. According to the independent Indian outlet The Wire, this is a trend that is ramping up.

Nearly half (57) were revoked in 2024 alone, and a further 15 were cancelled in the first five months of 2025. Most of those who have had their OCIs cancelled are journalists, activists and academics who have criticised the ruling party and challenged the rhetoric of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).

In 2022, Ashok Swain, a Sweden-based academic, had his OCI cancelled over his social media posts. The authorities accused him of “hurting religious sentiments” and “destabilising the social fabric of India” but provided no specific evidence. Swain successfully challenged the cancellation in the Delhi High Court in 2023, an example of domestic courts resisting government actions.

In December 2023, Raphael Satter, a United States-based journalist for the Reuters news agency who covers cybersecurity, espionage and abuse of power, lost his OCI after critical reporting and is now suing the Indian government.

In recent years, India has witnessed relentless attacks on its democratic institutions. Those who criticise or question the ruling party – whether they are politicians, NGO representatives, campaigners, journalists or community leaders – have often been silenced.

Every week brings new reports of imprisonment, intimidation, physical assault, defamation or deplatforming of critics. This silencing has intensified particularly after India launched Operation Sindoor against Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in response to an attack in Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. In its aftermath, the government ordered X to block nearly 8,000 accounts, many of them belonging to journalists and media outlets, such as Free Press Kashmir, BBC Urdu and The Wire. As critical voices are being silenced at home, the Indian government is turning its attention to the country’s diaspora.

The Indian authorities’ weaponisation of immigration controls is part of a growing pattern, designed to create fear among diaspora members and stifle criticism.

A 2024 report by the RSF found that Indian authorities use the OCI to “effectively blackmail” journalists into silence.

A survey conducted last year by the Platform for Indian Democracy revealed that 54 percent of British Indians are concerned about India’s current trajectory.

From my interactions with members of our community, I can clearly see that many are reluctant to speak out about India’s violations of human rights, fearing it might stop them from travelling to India.

As British Indians – many among us OCI card holders – we must push back against these misuses of immigration controls. British Indians remain deeply connected to India through our families, friends, culture and community. The current treatment of diaspora members by the BJP and the curtailment of their freedoms goes against the values enshrined in India’s post-independence constitution, which guarantees justice, liberty, equality and fraternity.

The UK, despite being home to more than 2 million British Indians, recently concluded a significant trade deal with India without any reference to issues of democratic backsliding in the country. Given the UK’s unique relationship with India and the size and sentiments of its British Indian population, it is in a strong position to ask challenging questions of the current political regime. Silence serves only to strengthen the position of the BJP.

As Modi calls for Indians abroad to contribute to the country’s development, this must include the right to criticise and question without fear of retribution. If the increasing hostility and repression of those who challenge the Indian government continues, we will only be allowed to visit our homeland on the terms of the ruling party, and our ability to be part of India’s progress will diminish. The roots that connect the diaspora to home are key to India’s democratic fabric. Chipping away at them only leaves India’s democracy diminished.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

It was my childhood dream to study medicine. I wanted to be a doctor to help people. I never imagined that I would study medicine not in a university, but in a hospital; not from textbooks, but from raw experience.

After I finished my BA in English last year, I decided to enrol in the medical faculty of al-Azhar University. I started my studies at the end of June. With all universities in Gaza destroyed, we, medical students, are forced to watch lectures on our mobile phones and read medical books under the light of our mobile phones’ flashlights.

Part of our training is to receive lectures from older medical students, who the genocidal war has forced into practice prematurely.

My first such lecture was by a fifth-year medical student called Dr Khaled at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah.

Al-Aqsa looks nothing like a normal hospital. There are no spacious white rooms or privacy for the patients. The corridor is the room, patients lie on beds or the floor, and their groans echo throughout the building.

Due to the overcrowding, we have to take our lectures in a caravan in the hospital yard.

“I’ll teach you what I learned not from lectures,” Dr Khaled began, “but from days when medicine was [something] you had to invent.”

He started with basics: check breathing, open the airway, and perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). But soon, the lesson shifted into something no normal syllabus would have: how to save a life with nothing.

Dr Khaled told us about a recent case: a young man pulled from beneath the rubble – legs shattered, head bleeding. The standard protocol is to immobilise the neck with a stabiliser before moving the patient.

But there was no stabiliser. No splint. No nothing.

So Dr Khaled did what no medical textbook would teach: he sat on the ground, cradled the man’s head between his knees, and held it perfectly still for 20 minutes until equipment arrived.

“That day,” he said, “I wasn’t a student. I was the brace. I was the tool.”

While the supervising doctor was preparing the operating room, Dr Khaled did not move, even when his muscles began aching, because that was all he could do to prevent further injury.

This story was not the only one we heard from Dr Khaled about improvised medical solutions.

There was one which was particularly painful to hear.

A woman in her early thirties was brought into the hospital with a deep pelvic injury. Her flesh was torn. She needed urgent surgery. But first, the wound had to be sterilised.

There was no Betadine. No alcohol. No clean tools. Only chlorine.

Yes, chlorine. The same chemical that burns the skin and stings the eyes.

She was unconscious. There was no alternative. They poured the chlorine in.

Dr Khaled told us this story with a voice that trembled with guilt.

“We used chlorine,” he said, not looking at us. “Not because we didn’t know better. But because there was nothing else.”

We were shocked by what we heard, but perhaps not surprised. Many of us had heard stories of desperate measures doctors in Gaza had had to take. Many of us had seen the gut-wrenching video of Dr Hani Bseiso operating on his niece on a dining table.

Last year, Dr Hani, an orthopaedic surgeon from al-Shifa Medical Complex, found himself in an impossible situation when his 17-year-old niece, Ahed, was injured in an Israeli air strike. They were trapped in their apartment building in Gaza City, unable to move, as the Israeli army had besieged the area.

Ahed’s leg was mangled beyond repair and she was bleeding. Dr Hani did not have much choice.

There was no anaesthesia. No surgical instruments. Only a kitchen knife, a pot with a little water, and a plastic bag.

Ahed lay on the dining table, her face pale and eyes half-closed, while her uncle – his own eyes brimming with tears – prepared to amputate her leg. The moment was captured on video.

“Look,” he cried, voice breaking, “I am amputating her leg without anaesthesia! Where is the mercy? Where is humanity?”

He worked quickly, hands trembling but precise, his surgical training colliding with the raw horror of the moment.

This scene has been repeated countless times across Gaza, as even young children have had to go through amputations without anaesthesia. And we, as medical students, are learning that this could be our reality; that we, too, may have to operate on a relative or a child while watching and hearing their unbearable pain.

But perhaps the hardest lesson we are learning is when not to treat – when the wounds are beyond saving and resources must be spent on those who still have a chance of survival. In other countries, this is a theoretical ethical discussion. Here, it is a decision we need to learn how to make because we may soon have to make it ourselves.

Dr Khaled told us: “In medical school, they teach you to save everyone. In Gaza, you learn you can’t – and you have to live with that.”

This is what it means to be a doctor in Gaza today: to carry the inhuman weight of knowing you cannot save everyone and to keep going; to develop a superhuman level of emotional endurance to absorb loss after loss without breaking and without losing one’s own humanity.

These people continue to treat and teach, even when they are exhausted, even when they are starving.

One day, midway through a trauma lecture, our instructor, Dr Ahmad, stopped mid-sentence, leaned on the table, and sat down. He whispered, “I just need a minute. My sugar’s low.”

We all knew he hadn’t eaten since the previous day. The war is not only depleting medicine – it is consuming the very bodies and minds of those who try to heal others. And we, the students, are learning in real time that medicine here is not just about knowledge and skills. It is about surviving long enough to use them.

Being a doctor in Gaza means reinventing medicine every day with what is available to you, treating without tools, resuscitating without equipment, and bandaging with your own body.

It is not just a crisis of resources. It is a moral test.

And in that test, the wounds run deep – through flesh, through dignity, through hope itself.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The United States and Europe have long used unilateral sanctions as a tool of imperial power, to discipline and even destroy Global South governments that seek to shake off Western domination, chart an independent path, and establish any kind of meaningful sovereignty.

During the 1970s, there were, on average, about 15 countries under Western unilateral sanctions in any given year. In many cases, these sanctions sought to strangle access to finance and international trade, destabilise industries, and inflame crises to provoke state collapse.

For instance, when the popular socialist Salvador Allende was elected to power in Chile in 1970, the US government imposed brutal sanctions on the country. At a September 1970 meeting at the White House, US President Richard Nixon explained the objective was to “make [Chile’s] economy scream”. The historian Peter Kornbluh describes the sanctions as an “invisible blockade” that cut Chile off from international finance, created social unrest, and paved the way for the US-backed coup that installed the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Since then, the US and Europe have dramatically increased their use of sanctions. During the 1990s and 2000s, an average of 30 countries were under Western unilateral sanctions in any given year.  And now, as of the 2020s, it is more than 60 – a strikingly high proportion of the countries of the Global South.

Sanctions often have a huge human toll.  Scholars have demonstrated this in several well-known cases, such as the US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s that led to widespread malnutrition, lack of clean water, and shortages of medicine and electricity. More recently, US economic warfare against Venezuela has resulted in a severe economic crisis, with one study estimating that sanctions caused 40,000 excess deaths in just one year, from 2017 to 2018.

Until now, researchers have sought to understand the human toll of sanctions on a case-by-case basis. This is difficult work and can only ever give us a partial picture. But that has changed with new research published this year in The Lancet Global Health, which gives us a global view for the first time. Led by the economist Francisco Rodriguez at the University of Denver, the study calculates the total number of excess deaths associated with international sanctions from 1970 to 2021.

The results are staggering. In their central estimate, the authors find that unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and EU since 1970 are associated with 38 million deaths. In some years, during the 1990s, more than a million people were killed. In 2021, the most recent year of data, sanctions caused more than 800,000 deaths.

According to these results, several times more people are killed by sanctions each year than are killed as direct casualties of war (on average, about 100,000 people per year). More than half of the victims are children and the elderly, people who are most vulnerable to malnutrition. The study finds that, since 2012 alone, sanctions have killed more than one million children.

Hunger and deprivation are not an accidental by-product of Western sanctions; they are a key objective. This is clear from a State Department memo written in April 1960, which explains the purpose of US sanctions against Cuba. The memo noted that Fidel Castro – and the revolution more broadly – enjoyed widespread popularity in Cuba. It argued that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” by “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”.

The power of Western sanctions hinges on their control over the world’s reserve currencies (the US dollar and the Euro), their control over international payment systems (SWIFT), and their monopoly over essential technologies (eg satellites, cloud computation, software). If countries in the Global South wish to chart a more independent path towards a multipolar world, they will need to take steps to limit their dependence in these respects and thus insulate themselves from backlash. The recent experience of Russia shows that such an approach can succeed.

Governments can achieve greater independence by building South-South trade and swap lines outside the core currencies, using regional planning to develop necessary technologies, and establishing new payment systems outside Western control. Indeed, several countries are already taking steps in this direction. Importantly, new systems that have been developed in China (eg CIPS for international payments, BeiDou for satellites, Huawei for telecom) now provide other global South countries alternative options that can become a pathway out of Western dependence and the sanctions net.

These steps are necessary for countries that wish to achieve sovereign development, but they are also a moral imperative. We cannot accept a world where half a million people are killed each year to prop up Western hegemony. An international order that relies on this kind of violence must be dismantled and replaced.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The flare-up of violence in Syria’s southern province of Suwayda in July has once again raised fears that the country may slip back into conflict. Media headlines were quick to paint this as another episode in the region’s longstanding “sectarian strife” between Druze and Sunni Bedouin communities. But such framing obscures more than it reveals.

The reality is more complex. While sectarian identities have been invoked during periods of tension, the root causes of this conflict lie elsewhere: in historical disputes over land and pastures, in competition over smuggling routes and state patronage, and in economic collapse exacerbated by prolonged drought and climate change. To reduce this flare-up to a matter of religious hatred is to erase the deeper political ecology and social history of the region and obfuscate ways to resolve tensions.

Druze migration

In the 18th century, the Druze began migrating to Jabal al-Arab, a mountainous region in what was then the Hauran Sanjak of the Ottoman Empire, as a result of contestations among the various Druze tribes in Mount Lebanon. They established villages, cultivated land, and eventually asserted political and military dominance in the region.

The Druze saw their settlement of the area as reclaiming barren terrain — a land they described in their oral tradition as “empty”. But this narrative has been deeply contested by the Bedouin herding communities, who had a presence in the region centuries earlier.

The Bedouin were a mobile society and did not establish permanent settlements; they used the land seasonally to graze their herds, navigating ancient migration routes and relying on water sources that could not be owned privately. To them, these were not vacant spaces but ancestral landscapes, and the Druze tribes were the newcomers.

This inevitably led to conflict. Skirmishes over pasture rights, access to wells, and control of borderlands were a recurring feature of the region’s social fabric. Historical accounts refer to these confrontations as ghazawat — tribal raids and counterraids that were as much about resource competition as they were about honour and survival. Druze oral history tended to depict Bedouins as marauders, prone to betrayal. Bedouin narratives portrayed Druze expansion as a form of territorial encroachment.

And yet, the relationship was never exclusively hostile. There were periods of coexistence and cooperation: Druze farmers hired Bedouin herders, and Bedouin communities relied on Druze markets and grain supplies. But this fragile equilibrium often collapsed during times of stress, particularly during drought, state collapse, or political interference.

A history of political manipulation

Over the course of the past two centuries, successive regimes — from the Ottomans to the French Mandate and then the rule of the Assad family — exploited and entrenched local tensions to serve broader strategies of control.

To reassert its authority over the increasingly autonomous Druze of Jabal al-Arab, the Ottoman Empire turned to the Bedouin tribes and encouraged their raids on rebellious Druze villages. The aim was not only to punish dissent among the Druze but also to counterbalance their growing influence without committing large imperial forces. The result was a deliberate deepening of intercommunal hostilities between the Druze and the Bedouin at the turn of the 20th century.

France, which took control of Syria after World War I, also sought to control the region by exploiting existing fault lines. It gave special privileges to the Druze by establishing the Jabal Druze State, but that did not placate the community.

In 1925, a revolt broke out in Jabal al-Arab led by Druze commander Sultan al-Atrash. Bedouin groups joined forces with the Druze, fighting together in major engagements such as the battles of al-Kafr and al-Mazraa. This moment of cooperation between Druze and Bedouin communities was born out of shared grievances and a collective opposition to colonial rule. It demonstrated the potential for intercommunal unity in resistance.

After independence in 1946, this fragile relationship deteriorated once more when President Adib Shishakli launched a violent campaign against the Druze, portraying them as a threat to national unity. His forces occupied the Jabal and reportedly encouraged Bedouin tribes to raid Druze villages, rekindling fears of collusion and solidifying a narrative of betrayal.

During this same era of early independence, the Syrian constitution set out to settle all Bedouin communities and remove many privileges they had been granted during the French Mandate. In 1958, during Syria’s union with Egypt, the Law of the Tribes was repealed, and Bedouin tribes ceased to possess any separate legal identity. They were also seen as a threat to national unity alongside the Druze.

In the decades that followed, especially under the rule of the Assad family, the state maintained stability by suppressing open conflict without addressing underlying grievances. In the 1980s and 90s, Druze and Bedouin communities coexisted uneasily, having minimal interaction and occasional land or grazing disputes.

This uneasy calm collapsed in 2000, when a localised altercation escalated into deadly clashes in Suwayda. The violence reignited historical tensions, hardened communal boundaries, and exposed the limits of authoritarian stability.

The outbreak of civil war in 2011 further destabilised Druze-Bedouin relations as Islamist factions, particularly ISIL (ISIS) and al-Nusra Front, exploited Bedouin marginalisation to recruit fighters and establish footholds in the Syrian desert. While not all Bedouin communities aligned with these groups, the association between some Bedouin tribes and Islamist armed groups deepened Druze suspicions and intensified the perception of the Bedouin as a security threat.

The massacre in Suwayda in 2018, which was carried out by ISIL and reportedly facilitated by “sleeper cells” in nearby Bedouin communities, reinforced this narrative of betrayal. Islamist manipulation of Bedouin discontent thus served to fracture already fragile intercommunal relations, undoing years of fragile coexistence between two historically entangled groups.

Economic collapse and climate stress

While historical grievances and state manipulation set the stage, it is the present-day economic collapse and environmental stress that have exacerbated Druze-Bedouin tensions in Suwayda. The civil war brought the Syrian economy to the brink, which badly affected the south, long neglected by the central government. For both communities, survival has come to depend not on formal employment or agriculture alone, but on informal economies that intersect and compete in dangerous ways.

In the absence of state services, many parts of southern Syria have become reliant on smuggling routes, especially across the porous Jordanian border. Fuel, narcotics, and basic goods all move through these corridors.

Controlling a checkpoint or a smuggling route today can mean the difference between subsistence and destitution. For Druze factions in Suwayda and Bedouin groups operating on the desert fringes, this has translated into conflict over territory, disguised as security enforcement or tribal honour.

These are strategic contests over mobility and access. A Bedouin group accused of cooperating with traffickers may clash with a Druze militia that seeks to police the area, or vice versa. Accusations of betrayal, retaliatory killings, and road closures follow. What might appear externally as communal violence is, in practice, a struggle over the spoils of an informal economy in a lawless zone.

Compounding this is the region’s increasing vulnerability to climate change. Recurrent droughts have devastated traditional forms of livelihood. Druze farmers have seen crop yields collapse; Bedouin pastoralists can no longer sustain herds on shrinking grasslands. What was once a seasonal rhythm of co-dependence — grazing on open land in winter, planting and harvest in summer — has broken down. Both communities now compete over increasingly scarce and degraded land.

In this context, to frame the violence purely as a sectarian feud is not only inaccurate; it is politically dangerous. Such a narrative serves those who benefit from fragmentation. Portraying local conflicts as ancient hatreds justifies repression and delays any serious efforts to implement decentralisation or pursue reconciliation. It erases the long history of cooperation, trade, and even shared struggle between Druze and Bedouin tribal communities. And it silences the real, material demands at stake: secure land rights, sustainable economic opportunities, and an end to imposed political marginality.

Understanding this conflict as economic and political, rather than a religious or tribal one, is the first step towards ending it.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

A few days ago, my 30-year-old daughter Yasmin, who has special needs, walked up to me in our little place at the school shelter. Her steps were gentle, but determined. And I could see her eyes glittering with joy. I listened intently as she was struggling to speak.

“Dad…, I ate…chocolate!” she said triumphantly.

My mind started to race, trying to work out what I had heard. Where did Yasmin get chocolate?

For many years, Yasmin has lived in a world that has its own rhythm, its own language of affection and wonder. Unfortunately, when she was just four months old, a severe fever left her with a developmental disability. And at the age of seven, she suffered chronic bronchitis and underwent lung surgery in Egypt, which further affected her health and development.

We tried to provide a comfortable life for Yasmin as much as we could. We equipped her room with a computer, a tablet, colouring books, and toys of all sorts – building blocks, teddies, balloons, and even a swing suspended from the ceiling.

We also consulted specialists who prescribed Yasmin special medication. We organised various indoor and outdoor activities for her. Hide-and-seek was her favourite game, which gave her thrills of excitement.

Fortunately, for years, we were considerably able to manage Yasmin’s condition.

However, in October 2023, an Israeli warplane attacked our beautiful house, turning it into a pile of rubble. Our belongings and resources, including Yasmin’s kingdom (her room), disappeared altogether.

Since then, we have been forcibly displaced multiple times, taking refuge in schools-turned-shelters.

Where we are staying now, Yasmin sleeps on a thin mattress in crammed conditions. There is no privacy, no quiet, no comfort.

Caring for Yasmin at the shelter has been an exhausting and draining experience. She needs help dressing, navigating the toilet queue, walking through the chaotic courtyard. We have struggled to get her even a few toys and colouring pencils. And her medications have been very hard to find.

Yasmin is a good-looking and very sociable girl. Interestingly, people don’t have much difficulty getting used to how her tongue dances differently with words. Sometimes she misbehaves, which causes annoyance. But most people show empathy towards her.

Yasmin is also very kind. She often shares her food with friends, and on different occasions, she insists on preparing gifts for them. During Eid al-Adha last year, we decorated a tray of candies, each with a note reading, “Eid is happier with Yasmin!” She distributed the gifts with pride, lighting up the gloomy atmosphere of the shelter.

Unfortunately, now the situation has only gotten worse. Israel has tightened its merciless siege on the Gaza Strip, impeding the delivery of basic food supplies, fuel, and medical and sanitation aid. The markets have seen no trace of so many things for months. No vegetables, no fruit, no meat, no fish, no chicken, no eggs, no milk, no sugar, no chocolate!

The lack of nourishment has been a serious problem for all people in Gaza. Everyone I know has grown much thinner, with pale skin and an emaciated body. My wife and I have suffered from spells of dizziness.

Yasmin has been especially vulnerable. She has lost a lot of weight, and her health has deteriorated.

In July, nearly 12,000 Palestinian children under the age of five were officially diagnosed as malnourished.

On August 22, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reported that Gaza City is officially experiencing a “man-made famine” and that an immediate, at-scale response is needed. The report marked the first time famine was declared in the Middle East.

According to the IPC, more than 500,000 people in the Gaza Strip, roughly a quarter of the population, are either close to or have already reached catastrophic levels of famine. Unless the situation on the ground changes quickly, that number is expected to rise to more than 640,000 by the end of September, while those in emergency-level food insecurity will likely rise to 1.14 million.

In addition to the casualties of the ongoing war – more than 62,000 killed and 140,000 injured – more than 315 Palestinians have already died as a result of the forced starvation, half of them children.

At this critical time, Yasmin surprisingly stood before me, carrying the lightness of a secret. With a glowing face, she declared she had eaten chocolate!

Startled, I turned to her. “You ate chocolate, Yasmin? Where? Who gave it to you?”

Sensing my confusion, she smiled and her face lit up with more delight. She gently shook her head and explained, “No, no, Dad. I…didn’t eat…chocolate. I said…I dreamed!”

I jumped up and gave Yasmin a big hug, bursting into laughter – laughter that was louder and longer than I had in months. My laughter, however, was laced with extreme sorrow and fatigue.

Amid the horrors of war and widespread famine, Yasmin had a dream of something sweet. And the dream was sweet enough to make her highly delighted.

Yasmin, a child/young woman with special needs, was not aware of the political meaning of her dream. She didn’t know that her dream, where she tasted something unreachable, was an act of rebellion against Israel’s atrocities and defiant hope to live freely in peace and dignity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Sri Lanka is undergoing one of the most complex economic recoveries in its history. The country’s financial collapse in 2022 was precipitated by a toxic mix of unsustainable borrowing, poor fiscal management, and external shocks.

Mass protests erupted under the banner of Aragalaya, a broad-based citizens’ movement demanding accountability, economic justice, and an end to political corruption.

The uprising ultimately forced the resignation of the sitting president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. However, following his resignation, the administration of Ranil Wickremesinghe recaptured power.

Delaying calls for new elections, in 2023 the Wickremesinghe administration negotiated $3bn of support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under its New Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement. Later that year, to unlock a second instalment of this bailout package, Sri Lanka also reached a debt restructuring agreement with a group of creditors including China, India, and Japan.

Even though, by September 2024, the Sri Lankan people elected a progressive government led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, with a historic mandate, the new administration has since been trapped within the constraints imposed by the IMF and the previous political establishment.

The mainstream neoliberal narrative has been quick to highlight the arrangement with the IMF, known as the 17th IMF program, as a sign of stabilisation, praising the debt restructuring agreement and compliance with IMF conditions.

But what of the human cost of this “recovery”?

The punitive structural adjustment process includes privatising state-owned enterprises, disconnecting the Central Bank from state control, curtailing the state’s capacity to borrow, and subordinating national development aspirations to the interests of creditors. It has placed the burden of its Domestic Debt Optimisation on working people’s retirement savings, specifically the Employees Provident Fund (EPF), raising concerns among salaried workers whose current real incomes have already been cut by high inflation and higher taxes.

Public sector hiring has been frozen, major rural infrastructure projects in transport and irrigation have been delayed or cancelled, and funding for health and education has stagnated even as costs rise. The reforms undertaken to achieve macroeconomic stability, including interest rate hikes, tax adjustments, the removal of subsidies, increased energy pricing, and the erosion of workers’ pensions, have demanded a great deal from citizens.

The IMF program has also ushered in neoliberal legal reforms that erode the public accountability of the Central Bank, limit the government’s fiscal capabilities, and encourage the privatisation of land, water, and seeds through agribusiness.

To meet IMF targets – most notably, the goal of achieving a 2.3 percent primary budget surplus by 2025 – the Sri Lankan government has introduced sweeping austerity measures. Where else will that surplus come from if not from the money pots of the poor? Bankers may welcome this austerity, but for those living and working in rural areas and coastal villages, it spells hardship and fear. The imbalances within the debt restructuring program prioritise investor profit over the public interest, shrinking the fiscal space needed to rebuild essential services.

Civil society groups estimate that 6.3 million people are now skipping meals, and at least 65,600 are experiencing severe food shortages.

In a noteworthy move, newly elected President Anura Dissanayake has instructed the treasury to reinstate subsidies for the agricultural and fishing sectors. While welcome, this may not be enough. Fishermen report that fuel costs remain steep, eating into their incomes.

Farmers, many locked into chemical input-intensive production, are struggling with rising costs, climate catastrophes, and reduced state support.

Sri Lanka’s 2025 public health allocation accounts for just 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product – five times smaller than the amount allocated to service the interest on public debt. This stark disparity highlights the fiscal constraints placed on basic social spending.

But this is not just a Sri Lankan story.

It is part of a broader global debt emergency draining public finances across the Global South. A vast number of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Central Europe have been forced to cede national policymaking autonomy to international financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank (ADB).

A recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report reveals that half of the world’s population – approximately 3.3 billion people – now live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education. In 2024 alone, developing countries paid a staggering $921bn in interest, with African nations among the hardest hit.

UNCTAD warns that rising global interest rates and a fundamentally unjust financial architecture are entrenching a cycle of dependency and underdevelopment.

Developing countries routinely pay interest rates several times higher than those charged to wealthy nations, yet existing debt relief mechanisms remain inadequate – ad hoc, fragmented, and overwhelmingly tilted in favour of creditors. The demand for a permanent, transparent debt resolution mechanism – centred on justice, development, and national sovereignty – is gaining momentum among Global South governments.

This issue is also drawing serious attention from global grassroots movements.

In September this year, more than 500 delegates from around the world will convene in Kandy, Sri Lanka, for the 3rd Nyeleni Global Forum for food sovereignty. The gathering will bring together small-scale food producers, Indigenous peoples, trade unions, researchers, and progressive policy think tanks. One of the key themes will be the global debt crisis and how it undermines basic rights to food, education, health, and land.

The forum is expected to serve as a space to chart alternatives. Rather than relying solely on state-led negotiations or technocratic financial institutions, movements will strategise to build grassroots power.

They aim to link local struggles – such as farmers resisting land grabs or workers organising for living wages – with global campaigns demanding debt cancellation, climate reparations, and a transformation of the international financial system.

It is clear to those of us in the Global South that a just recovery cannot be built on fiscal targets and compliance checklists alone. We demand the reclaiming of public space for investment in social goods, the democratisation of debt governance, and the prioritisation of people’s dignity above creditors’ profit margins.

For Sri Lanka – and for countless other countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America – this may be the most urgent and necessary restructuring of all.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The nuclear danger today is greater than at any time since the Cold War. The world faces the prospect of a renewed arms race, this time unconstrained by the agreements that for decades kept catastrophe at bay. It is estimated that there are now 12,241 nuclear warheads worldwide. Arms control is unravelling before our eyes: Inspections under the New START treaty, the last remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, remain suspended, and with its expiration in February 2026, there is no successor in sight. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is gone, the Treaty on Open Skies has been abandoned, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty has still not entered into force. At the same time, the world’s geopolitical landscape is more volatile than ever.

Deep down, everyone knows nuclear weapons are a danger. We know their destructive power: Instant annihilation, radiation sickness, cancers, poisoned land, and generations of suffering. Yet the international community increasingly accepts the idea that nuclear weapons make countries safe. It is true that, at the level of geopolitics, they can provide a shield of deterrence. But on a global scale, they are a sword of Damocles hanging over all of humanity. The longer we pretend they guarantee security, the greater the danger that one day deterrence will fail. This danger is becoming even more disturbing with the growing reliance on artificial intelligence in military technologies.

I know this danger all too well, not in theory, but in my body and in my country’s history. I was born without arms, a legacy of nuclear testing carried out by the Soviet Union in my homeland of Kazakhstan. From 1949 to 1989, more than 450 nuclear tests were conducted at the Semipalatinsk test site. More than a million people were directly exposed to radiation, and the consequences are still felt today in the third and fourth generations: Cancers, birth defects, environmental destruction, and intergenerational trauma. My own life is a testimony to the human price paid for so-called “national security”. I became an artist, painting with my mouth and feet, and an activist so my country’s tragedy will not be repeated anywhere else.

What Kazakhstan went through is the reason why, since independence, my country has been a leading proponent of nuclear disarmament. We inherited the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal and chose to give it up voluntarily. We shut down the Semipalatinsk test site permanently. We established the International Low-Enriched Uranium Bank in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, creating a global backstop against nuclear fuel crises. And today, Kazakhstan is preparing to build its first nuclear power plant. This is an important distinction: Our country is not against nuclear energy, which can be harnessed peacefully to meet the growing demand for electricity and reduce carbon emissions. But nuclear weapons are a different matter entirely. They do not light homes; they only destroy them. That is why it was Kazakhstan’s initiative at the United Nations that led to the proclamation of August 29, the date on which the Semipalatinsk test site was officially closed, as the International Day against Nuclear Tests.

Kazakhstan has done its part. But this fight is bigger than us. The world needs much wider support if we are to reduce the risk posed by nuclear weapons. I acknowledge that the dream of a world free of nuclear weapons may feel distant today. But there are concrete steps the international community can take right now to reduce the danger, if only the will can be found.

First, we must address the madness of keeping thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert. About 2,100 nuclear weapons remain on short-notice alert, with leaders given only minutes to decide whether to unleash them. In such a compressed timeframe, the risk of false alarms, technical glitches, or even AI-driven misjudgments grows intolerably high. De-alerting these weapons is the most obvious near-term risk-reduction step. Human survival should not rest on a rushed decision made in mere moments.

Second, nuclear-armed states must publicly reaffirm their moratorium on nuclear testing, regardless of treaty politics. If they cannot yet ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, they should at least pledge never to test again. That is the bare minimum owed to the victims of past testing, from Semey to the Pacific and beyond.

Third, we must reaffirm the humanitarian principle that nuclear weapons are inhumane by their very nature. That is the moral heart of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Even if governments cannot yet sign or ratify it, they can embrace its spirit, recognising that no state, no people, can ever respond adequately to the detonation of a nuclear device in a populated area.

Fourth, the world must prevent new frontiers of nuclear danger. We must reaffirm the ban on nuclear weapons in orbit, ensuring that outer space remains free of these doomsday devices. And all states should commit that decisions on nuclear use will never be delegated to artificial intelligence.

Finally, we must fight the greatest danger of all: Forgetting. Each August 29, we should not only mark the International Day against Nuclear Tests but also commit to education and remembrance. Every schoolchild should know what happened at Semey, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at Bikini Atoll. Only when the world remembers our suffering will it choose never to repeat it.

The vision of a world free of nuclear weapons is not naive, and it is not impossible. Kazakhstan showed what is possible when it closed the Semipalatinsk test site and renounced its nuclear arsenal. If a nation that endured hundreds of nuclear tests could choose a nuclear-weapon-free path, others can too. The question is whether humanity has the courage to do it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

And so the verdict is out. United States President Donald Trump’s name has been cleared of ignominious association with the late disgraced financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. This is according to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years behind bars on sex trafficking charges.

Earlier this year, US Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly informed the president that his name appeared in the so-called “Epstein files”, the content of which Trump had said on the campaign trail he would be quite keen on releasing.

Once in office, however, he spontaneously decided that the Epstein case was old news, going so far as to reprimand those in his own MAGA base who were “stupid” and “foolish” enough to continue insisting that the files be declassified.

Now, the US Justice Department has released transcripts of a July interview between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, and Maxwell, who had nothing but praise for the president’s moral solidity:

“I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

There was no limit, it seemed, to Maxwell’s admiration for the president. “Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me… I like him, and I’ve always liked him,” she declared.

Never mind Maxwell’s reputation as a serial liar who was charged with two counts of perjury for lying under oath – charges that were dropped following her conviction on other counts. Surely the obsequious tribute to Trump’s allegedly upstanding nature has nothing to do with the fact that Maxwell is presently seeking a presidential pardon from the same man.

At any rate, the shining appraisal should at least help un-bunch the panties of many Trump supporters who have been dissatisfied with his handling of the Epstein matter. Far-right influencer and self-categorised “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer, for example – whom Trump has praised as “terrific” and “very special” – welcomed Maxwell’s testimony as proof that the president “has always been an honourable person”.

Expressing her hope that “these transcripts will quell a lot of the nasty, salacious lies and rumors that were spread by bad actors online”, Loomer appeared confident that harmony would soon be restored among MAGA adherents.

To be sure, there’s nothing more uplifting than the members of a movement founded on hatred and discord getting along with each other.

For his part, Trump has now announced that he “couldn’t care less” about the US Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files to Congress.

Speaking to reporters, the president nonetheless maintained that the “whole Epstein thing is a Democrat hoax” – a result of the Democratic Party’s inability to cope with Trump’s spectacular success at the helm of America: “So we had the greatest six months, seven months in the history of the presidency, and the Democrats don’t know what to do, so they keep bringing up that stuff.”

As with most calculations emanating from the president’s brain, the proclamation of the “greatest” time period bears no correlation with reality. Indeed, pretty much everything that has transpired over the past six or seven months has been decidedly less than “great” – not that Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden presided over anything particularly inspiring.

On the domestic scene, Americans continue to be plagued by rising costs of living that for many folks make existence itself unsustainable. Basic rights like healthcare, education, nutrition, and housing have long been converted into for-profit industries, and gun violence constitutes a veritable national pastime.

Under Trump’s guidance, US law enforcement agencies have gone about abducting and disappearing undocumented workers, international scholars, and US citizens alike. The nation’s capital, Washington, DC, has also been militarised with the deployment of National Guard troops to supposedly “fight crime” in the mostly safe parts of the city.

On the international front, meanwhile, the past six or seven months have not only seen Trump bomb Iran in egregious violation of international law but also persist in sustaining Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars.

Just days ago, the United Nations officially declared famine in Gaza – a logical result of the US-backed Israeli policy of enforced starvation.

And all of this against a backdrop of planetary self-combustion that is only being sped up by the Trump administration’s prioritisation of climate change denial.

Considering the rather apocalyptic panorama, Trump’s de facto character certificate from Maxwell is at best entirely irrelevant – a political soap opera in which one convicted criminal kisses the rear end of another convicted criminal who happens to be president of the United States.

Maxwell’s testimony is simply icing on the dystopian cake. And as the world goes up in flames, the character certificate at least sums up where the US is currently at – however many “greatest” months into 2025.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

You try to buy a kilo of flour in Gaza.

You open your wallet; what’s inside?  A faded 10-shekel note, barely held together by a strip of tape. No one wants it; it is all rubbish now.

The 10-shekel note, normally worth about $3, was once the most commonly used bill in daily life. Now, it is no longer in circulation. Not officially—only practically. It has been worn out beyond recognition. Sellers will not accept it. Buyers cannot use it.

There is no fresh cash. No replenishment.

Other banknotes are following the fate of the 10 shekels, especially the smaller ones.

If you pay with a 100-shekel note for an 80-shekel purchase, the seller will likely be unable to return the remaining 20 due to the poor physical state of the banknotes.

Many notes are torn or taped together, and entire stalls now exist just to repair damaged currency so it can be used again. Anything is better than nothing.

But the disintegration of banknotes is not the only problem we have in Gaza.

Civil servants have gone months without pay. NGOs are unable to transfer salaries to their employees. Families cannot send remittances. What once supported Gaza’s financial structure has vanished. There is no mention of when it will return. Just silence.

Money is stuck. Trapped behind closed systems and political barriers.

If you manage to obtain money from outside sources — perhaps from a cousin in Ramallah or a sibling in Egypt — it comes at a cost. A brutal one. If you get sent 1,000 shekels ($300), the agent will hand you 500. That’s right, the commission rate on cash withdrawals in Gaza is now 50 percent.

There are no banks to offer such withdrawals or oversee transfers.

The signs are still there. Bank of Palestine. Cairo Amman Bank. Al Quds Bank. But the doors are shut, the windows are dusty, and the inside is empty. No ATMs work.

There are only brokers, some with connections to the black market and smugglers, who are somehow able to obtain cash. They take huge cuts to dispense it, in exchange for a bank transfer to their accounts.

Every withdrawal feels like theft disguised as a transaction. Even so, people continue to use this system. They have no choice.

Do you have a bank card? Great. Try using it?

There is no power. There’s no internet. No POS machines. When you show your card to a seller, they shake their head.

People print screenshots of account balances that they cannot access. Some walk around with expired bank documents, hoping someone will think they’re “good enough” as a pay guarantee.

Nobody does.

There are a few sellers who accept so-called “digital wallets”, but those are few, and so are people who have them.

In Gaza today, money you can’t touch is equivalent to no money at all.

And so people have to resort to other means.

At the market, I saw a woman standing with a plastic bag of sugar. Another was holding a bottle of cooking oil. They did not speak much. I just nodded. Traded. Left.

This is what “shopping” in Gaza looks like right now.  Trade what you’ve got. A kilo of lentils for two kilos of flour. A bottle of bleach for some rice. A baby’s jacket for several onions.

There is no stability. One day, your item will be worth something. The next day, nobody wants it. Prices are guesses. Value is emotional. Everything is negotiable.

“I traded my coat for a bag of diapers,” my uncle Waleed, a father of twins, told me. “He looked at me as if I were a beggar. I felt like I was giving up a part of my life.”

This is not a throwback to simpler times. This is what happens when systems disappear. When money dies. When families are forced to sacrifice dignity for survival.

People don’t just suffer—they shrink. They lower their expectations. They stop dreaming. They stop planning. What future can you plan when you can’t afford tomorrow?

“I sold my gold bracelet,” Lina, my neighbour by tent, told me. “It was for emergencies. But now, every day is an emergency.”

Gaza’s economy did not collapse due to bad policy or internal mismanagement. It was broken on purpose.

The occupation has not just blocked goods entering Gaza; it has also blocked currency and with it, any sense of financial control. It has destroyed the banking system. It has made liquidity a weapon.

Cutting off Gaza’s money is part of a larger siege. There is no need to fire a bullet to destroy a people. Simply deny them the ability to live.

You can’t pay for bread, for water, for medicine, so how do you sustain life?

If this trend continues, Gaza will be the first modern society to completely return to barter. There are no salaries. There is no official market. Only personal trades and informal deals. And even those will not last forever. Because what happens when there is nothing left to trade?

If this isn’t addressed, Gaza will be more than just a siege zone. It will be a place where the concepts of money, economy, and fairness will die forever.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

In January, just before Donald Trump resumed command of the United States on a bevy of sociopathic promises, incoming US border czar Tom Homan announced that the new administration would be “shutting down the Darien Gap” in the interests of “national security”.

The Darien Gap, of course, is the notorious 106km (66-mile) stretch of roadless territory and treacherous jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia at the crossroads of the Americas. For the past several years, it has served as one of the only available pathways to potential refuge for hundreds of thousands of global have-nots who are essentially criminalised by virtue of their poverty and denied the opportunity to engage in “legal” migration to the US.

In 2023 alone, about 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, which left them with thousands of kilometres still to go to the border of the US – the very country responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that forces folks to flee their homes in the first place.

In a testament to the inherent deadliness of borders – not to mention of existence in general for the impoverished of the world – countless refuge seekers have ended up unburied corpses in the jungle, denied dignity in death as in life. Lethal obstacles abound, ranging from fierce river currents to steep ravines to attacks by armed assailants to the sheer physical exhaustion that attends days or weeks of trekking through hostile terrain without adequate food or water.

And while literally “shutting down” the Darien Gap is about as feasible as shutting down the Mediterranean Sea or the Sahara Desert, the jungle has become drastically less trafficked in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s machinations to shut down the US border itself, essentially scrapping the whole right to asylum in violation of both international and domestic law.

In March, two months into Trump’s term, Panama’s immigration service registered a mere 194 arrivals from Colombia via the Darien Gap – compared with 36,841 arrivals in March of the previous year. This is no doubt music to the xenophobic ears of the US establishment, whose members delight in eternally bleating about the “immigration crisis”.

However, it does not remotely constitute any sort of solution to the real crisis – which is that, thanks in large part to decades of pernicious US foreign policy, life is simply unliveable in a whole lot of places. And “shutting down” the Darien Gap won’t deter desperate people with nothing to lose from pursuing other perilous paths in the direction of perceived physical and economic safety.

Nor can the enduring psychological impact of the Darien trajectory on the survivors of its horrors be understated. While conducting research for my book The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, published this month by Rutgers University Press, I found it next to impossible to speak with anyone who had made the journey without receiving a rundown of all of the bodies they had encountered en route.

In Panama in February 2023, for example, I spoke with a young Venezuelan woman named Guailis, who had spent 10 days crossing the jungle in the rain with her husband and two-year-old son. Among the numerous corpses they stumbled upon was an elderly man curled up under a tree “like he was cold”. Guailis said she had also made the acquaintance of a bereaved Haitian woman whose six-month-old baby had just drowned right before her eyes.

Guailis’s husband, Jesus, meanwhile, had experienced a more intimate interaction with a lifeless body when, tumbling down a formidable hill, he had grabbed onto what he thought was a tree root but turned out to be a human hand protruding from the mud. Recounting the incident to me, Jesus reasoned: “That hand saved my life.”

I heard about bloated corpses floating in the river, about a dead woman sprawled in a tent with her two dead newborn twins and about another dead woman with two dead children and a man who had hanged himself nearby – presumably the children’s father.

A Venezuelan woman named Yurbis, part of an extended family of 10 that I spent a good deal of time with in Mexico in late 2023, offered the following calculation regarding the prevalence of bodies in the jungle: “I can say that we have all stepped on dead people.”

For pretty much every step of the way, then, refuge seekers transiting the Darien Gap were reminded of the disconcerting proximity of death – and the negligible value assigned to their own lives in a US-led world order.

Add to that the surge in rapes and other forms of sexual violence with The New York Times reporting in April 2024 that the “sexual assault of migrants” on the Panamanian side of the jungle had risen to a “level rarely seen outside war” – and it becomes painfully clear that the individual and collective trauma signified by the Darien Gap is not something that will be summarily resolved by its ostensible “shutting-down”.

That said, the Darien Gap has also served as a venue for the display of incredible solidarity in the face of structural dehumanisation. I met a young Colombian man who had personally saved an infant from being swept away in a river. I was also told of a Venezuelan man who had carried an ailing one-year-old Ecuadorean girl through the jungle when her mother, too weak to move at a rapid pace, feared she wouldn’t make it out in time to seek medical help.

When I myself staged an incursion into the Darien Gap in January 2024, two refuge seekers from Yemen complimented me on my Palestine football shirt and did their best to assuage my apparently visible terror at entering the jungle: “If you need anything, we are here.” This from folks who had for more than two decades been on the receiving end of quite literal terror, courtesy of my own country, as successive US administrations went about waging covert war on Yemen.

The Darien Gap, too, has functioned as a de facto warzone in its own right where punitive US policy plays out on vulnerable human bodies in the interests of maintaining systemic inequality. Widely referred to in Spanish as “el infierno verde”, or The Green Hell, the gap has certainly lived up to its nickname.

And while the heyday of the Darien Gap may be at least temporarily over, the territory remains an enduring symbol of one of the defining crises of the modern era in which the global poor must risk their lives to live and are criminalised for doing so. In that sense, then, the Darien Gap is the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

As global plastic treaty talks end in failure, with no agreement, all is not lost in the global momentum to cut plastic pollution. United States lawmakers recently introduced the Microplastics Safety Act, for example, mandating the Department of Health and Human Services to study microplastics exposure and health impacts. The bill reflects growing concern in Congress about the plastics health crisis and the broad bipartisan support to address it.

However, given that plastic production, use, and hence exposure, continue to increase every year, we should not wait idly for the US report’s findings or more failed global plastic treaty talks. There is enough evidence to take action now. Below, we highlight three areas that can help reduce everyone’s exposure to microplastics: culture, business and policy.

In culture, there are many default behaviours that we can rethink and re-norm. What if we saw more people bringing their own metal or wooden cutlery to the next barbecue, more shoppers bringing home whole fruit instead of plastic-wrapped pre-cut, and more kids and employees bringing their own refillable water bottles and coffee mugs to school and work? The more we see it normalised, the more we’ll do it. That’s how social norming works.

And having Hollywood in on this would certainly help. Two years ago, Citywide, a feature film shot in Philadelphia was Hollywood’s first zero-waste film, which is a great start. More of this is welcome, including walking the talk within movie, television and advertising scenes by swapping in refillable and reusable containers where single-use plastics would otherwise be the default or showcasing repeat outfits on characters to decentre environmentally harmful fast fashion, much of which is made from plastic.

In business, thankfully, some local grocers allow shoppers to go plastic-free. More grocers should make this shift because consumers want it. Providing staples like cereal, oats, nuts and beans in bulk bins and letting shoppers bring their own containers is a good start. Buying in bulk tends to be more affordable but unfortunately, few stores offer that option, especially stores that target shoppers with lower incomes. Even shoppers with higher incomes lack options: Whole Foods, for example, has bulk bins but in most of its locations requires customers to use the provided plastic containers or bags, which defeats the purpose.

More low-hanging fruit for grocers: try using the milk bottle approach. In some grocery stores, milk is still available in glass bottles, which is good, albeit it comes with a steep deposit. Let’s extend that model of returnable containers to other products, and at a more affordable rate. Take yoghurt, for example. Stores could have an option to buy it in returnable glass containers, since the current plastic containers aren’t recyclable. This is not a fantasy but a possibility: a newly opened grocery store in France offers all of their items plastic-free.

For restaurants, more and more businesses across the US are supporting the use of returnable containers and cities like the District of Columbia offer grants to help ditch disposables. This is exactly what we need more of. People want the option to bring their own containers or use a returnable container so that they can have take-out without risking their health and the environment with exposure to plastic. Let’s give the people what they want.

Policy is arguably the hardest of the three paths to tackle since culture and business track more closely and immediately with consumer demand. To be clear, most Americans, in a bipartisan way, are sick of single-use plastics, which is why plastic bag bans are popping up across the US, and state capitals are seeing more legislative proposals to hold producers of plastic responsible for the life cycle of plastic. What makes policy the more difficult space is the petrochemical lobby that often stands in the way, keeping policymakers mum about the human health and environmental impacts while encouraging industry subsidies: the US has spent $9bn in tax subsidies on the construction of new plastics factories over the past 12 years.

Given the health and environmental harms associated with plastics production, the obvious policy fix is to make the producers responsible for the pollution, forcing them to clean up in places locally like Beaver Creek, Pennsylvania, where the local economy suffered after an ethane cracker plant started operating there. And then to clean up globally for the harm done, since governments are left with the tab of $32bn while the public is left with the costs of health impacts from endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastic.

The industry, meanwhile, is fighting tooth and nail to keep selling its harmful products, misleading the public into thinking recycling is an effective solution to plastic waste. It’s not, of course, which is why California is suing ExxonMobil for deception about plastics recycling. Meanwhile, the industry continues to interfere with United Nations global plastics treaty negotiations.

It’s time we diverted those billions of dollars that taxpayers spend subsidising deadly plastics production and, instead, develop products, companies and systems that make the low-plastic life the default option for everyone. That’s the healthier future we want to live in.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Washington, DC, youth activist Afeni Evans has become the most recent symbol of US President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the city’s police.

On August 15, Metro Transit Police officers pepper-sprayed and forced the 28-year-old Evans to the ground at the Navy Yard subway stop for allegedly committing fare evasion. Evans and other Harriet’s Wildest Dreams volunteers were at the station on “cop watch” to ensure the federal takeover would not lead to harassment of Black youth. Yet, it happened to three Black youths anyway, prompting Evans to intervene, which led to her arrest.

After public protests in DC and on social media, she was released to cheering crowds outside the court, and the charges against her were dropped the next day.

Like with so many other issues related to Trump and his attempts at autocracy, his use of the National Guard and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stifle community ecosystems especially impacts Washington’s Black, Brown and Queer residents. This effort to squash potential dissent is more than a distraction from the Epstein files controversy or America’s economic troubles.

Locally, it is a partial end to the District of Columbia’s half-century of home rule, which otherwise makes the city independent of direct federal oversight. Nationally, it is an open question about whether DC can remain a site of protest, a place where marches and other gatherings can effect change or even occur at all in the current autocratic climate.

Trump’s executive order announcing his takeover of DC’s police force on August 11 should not have come as a surprise, especially given his attempts to bring the federal government’s power to bear in California back in June. “Crime is out of control in the District of Columbia”, the order reads, stating that the “increase in violent crime in the heart of our Republic… poses intolerable risks to the vital federal functions that take place in the District of Columbia”.

But the truth is, Trump’s executive order manufactured a crisis out of far-right fantasies. Six days before Trump’s announcement, two teenagers carjacked Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency, in DC’s Logan Circle. “We’re going to do something about it. That includes bringing in the National Guard,” Trump said in the aftermath of the incident.

However, the two alleged carjackers in police custody were from Hyattsville, Maryland, in Prince George’s County, and not DC.

Trump’s moves also fly in the face of another truth: Crime is no bigger an issue in DC than it is anywhere else in the United States. At the beginning of the year, a joint report from the US Attorney’s Office in DC and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) showed that the city’s violent crime rate had dropped by 35 percent in 2024, reaching its lowest rate since the mid-1990s. “Armed carjackings are down 53%,” according to the report.

Washington, DC, is a great stage for beta-testing how willing the rest of the US is to go to achieve Trump’s dream of autocratic rule. DC remains a majority-minority city, with Black Washingtonians making up a plurality (43 percent) of the population, despite 30 years of middle-class (mostly white) gentrification – white Washingtonians make up 39 percent of DC’s population.

So, it is not that surprising Trump would attempt such heavy-handed tactics in a soft occupation of DC, particularly in a city that was once famously nicknamed “Chocolate City”. In a capital where more than 90 percent of voters chose former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Trump is also sending the unvarnished and racist message that Black folk, and especially Black youth, are criminals.

Imposing a heightened police presence and hundreds of National Guard soldiers on a multiracial city is nothing but a wannabe strongman’s attempt to appear strong to his anti-Black supporters.

DC is also known as a place that holds significance for Queer Americans. One out of every seven adults in the nation’s capital identifies as LGBTQIA+, roughly 80,000 Washingtonians in all. Northwest DC, particularly communities like Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Adams Morgan, and parts of Shaw and Columbia Heights, became a relatively safe space in the 1960s and 1970s for Queer culture and businesses to thrive. The inaugural National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights began in DC in 1979.

It should not shock anyone that an anti-Queer Trump administration would also target DC’s Queer and migrant spaces. The federalised police presence in DC has been especially noticeable along the 14th Street and U Street corridors, including the installation of not-so-random checkpoints over the past couple of weeks. Inevitably – between the National Guard, federal law enforcement and anti-immigrant agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in conjunction with the MPD – they have made dozens of arrests, and smothered nightlife and business traffic in these communities.

Trump, in his own ham-fisted way, is also attempting to erase DC’s history as one of protest and resistance. As the US evolved into a superpower, and DC transformed into the international community’s superpower city during and after World War II, the city also became a place for protest, particularly for racial justice and civil rights. Examples include the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, as well as a series of antiwar protests against Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Marches and protests for the Equal Rights Amendment, for a Gay Rights Bill, for Chicano rights, Indigenous rights, and migrant and refugee rights came alongside civil rights marches and protests throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Massive protests like the 2017 Women’s March, the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the Free Palestine protests last year have made DC a target ripe for government overreach.

But what Trump is doing to DC in 2025 is not quite unprecedented – not for him, and not for the federal government. In 2018, during Trump’s first term as president, the US National Park Service (NPS) sought to shrink the available sidewalk space around the White House for protests “by 80 percent”, and to charge demonstrators permit fees “to allow the NPS to recover some of the costs” of public safety provisions. On June 1, 2020, the National Guard and the US Park Police tear-gassed, lobbed concussion grenades and violently arrested George Floyd protesters at Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House – all so that Trump could do a photo-op nearby on the steps of St John’s Church, calling himself “your president of law and order” along the way.

Trump has followed in the footsteps of another “law and order” president, Richard Nixon. In May 1971, Nixon unleashed the National Guard and local police against thousands of antiwar demonstrators in DC, in what became known as the Mayday protests, leading to more than 12,000 arrests over a three-day period.

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover authorised the use of military force against a ragtag group of 20,000 unemployed and unhoused World War I veterans known as the Bonus Army. At the height of the Great Depression and looking for the bonus money Congress owed them, the military responded with gas grenades, bayonets, flamethrowers and tanks, destroying their shantytowns along the National Mall and Anacostia River. Two veterans died, while the Army injured thousands of others. The resulting tear gas cloud over the city also led to the death of an infant.

Trump and his small army of occupiers are trying to make an example out of the nation’s capital, to destroy the DC of the past century, its vibrancy and resistance. The irony, of course, is that one of Trump’s first acts in his second term was to pardon more than 1,500 insurrectionists who had been part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, a deadly and treasonous event.

Now, Trump wants to cower Washingtonians into accepting autocracy.

DC’s legacy as the national seat of power, as an international city, and as the centre of the so-called Free World, is in peril. But its most vulnerable and marginalised residents continue to resist, despite the dangers of Trump as a despot.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On August 5, Rwanda announced it had agreed to accept 250 migrants under the Trump administration’s expanding third-country deportation programme.

Speaking from Kigali, government spokesperson Yolande Makolo said Rwanda would retain the right to decide which deportees to admit for “resettlement”. Those accepted, she added, would receive training, healthcare, and housing to help them “rebuild their lives”.

The programme forms part of President Donald Trump’s controversial pledge to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
It also marks the third deportation agreement of its kind on the African continent.

On July 16, the US sent five convicted criminals from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba, and Yemen to Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland.

Described as “barbaric and violent” and rejected by their countries of origin, they are confined to isolated units at the Matsapha Correctional Complex, near the capital Mbabane, pending eventual repatriation.

Eleven days earlier, on July 5, eight men convicted of murder, sexual assault, and robbery were deported to South Sudan. Reports differ on whether any deportee was South Sudanese.

The deportations have already provoked widespread outrage – from civil society groups in Eswatini, to lawyers in South Sudan, who denounce them as illegal.

South Africa’s government has even lodged a formal protest with Eswatini.

Nigeria, meanwhile, has rebuffed US pressure to accept 300 Venezuelans, with Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar saying the country already has “enough problems” and “over 230 million people” to care for.

These deals are unfair.

The US is strong-arming others at the expense of vulnerable people.

Trump’s established brutality is horrifying. His family separations in 2019 left children terrified and alone, all in the name of policy.

The US is now sending people to Rwanda, Eswatini, and South Sudan – countries already struggling to care for their own citizens.

This truth exposes Trump’s Victorian view of Africa: a desolate, irredeemable continent unworthy of respect or equal partnership. His vision echoes a Western tradition, crystallised in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Africa is portrayed as “dark” and “primeval” – a land deemed oppressive and violent, its people cast as incapable of understanding, feeling, or compassion.

That is not who we are.

Yes, Africa has challenges.

Nonetheless, we do not turn the marginalised into pawns, nor do we disguise exile as policy. Our humanity is unshakable and beyond reproach.

Today, Uganda hosts about 1.7 million refugees, making it Africa’s largest refugee-hosting country. This figure exceeds the combined refugee populations under UNHCR’s mandate in the UK, France, and Belgium today.

Europe must assume a far greater share of responsibility for asylum seekers and refugees.

These third-country deportation deals are not credible policy.

They are colonialism reborn.

No self-respecting African leader should ever agree to participate in an organised atrocity – not when Africa still bleeds from the wounds inflicted by the West: Sudan’s civil war, civic unrest in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, environmental devastation in Nigeria’s Delta, and the continuing reach of French monetary imperialism through the CFA.

“Uncle Sam” now plans to send both convicted criminals and desperate asylum seekers to Africa’s shores, instead of the warships of old. Both groups deserve support at home in the US, with extensive rehabilitation for offenders and safe sanctuary for the vulnerable.

If not, Europe can be the only alternative.

Let the architects of empire face the heat.

Let the wealthy, politically obnoxious allies of Washington carry the burden for once.

Rwanda, Eswatini, and South Sudan are among the poorest nations in the world, with per capita incomes just a tiny fraction of their former colonial rulers in Europe. Expecting them to carry the burden of America’s deportees is not only unjust – it is absurd.

A May 2025 study, Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations, undertaken by Gaston Nievas and Thomas Piketty, analysed foreign wealth accumulation over more than two centuries. It shows that by 1914, European powers held net foreign assets approaching 140 percent of GDP, underscoring how colonial transfers, artificially low commodity prices, forced labour, and exploitation fuelled Europe’s enrichment.

From Juba to Kigali, colonial plunder still drives global inequality.

A return to the systemic brutalities unleashed after the disastrous Berlin Conference of 1885, when European powers carved up Africa, cannot be accepted.

No matter what officials in Rwanda, South Sudan, or Eswatini claim in public, sending America’s cast-offs to Africa is colonial exploitation repackaged for today.

This is not a new strategy.

Beginning in the 19th century, many European colonies were reduced to offshore extraction centres and dumping grounds. France banished convicts and political exiles to territories such as present-day Gabon and Djibouti. Spain used Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea as a penal settlement for deportees from Cuba.

The US has revived that same imperial entitlement, delivering a fresh blow to both Africa and the Americas. Most irregular migrants in the US come from Venezuela, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti – nations scarred by centuries of European colonialism and US imperial interference.

These countries embody the ongoing impact of colonial legacies and geopolitical meddling that propel migration.

Yet the West, and Europe above all, denies and disowns the consequences of its crimes, past and present.

European nations have certainly prospered through centuries of colonial exploitation. The UK, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, for instance, boast robust welfare systems, public health networks, and prison rehabilitation programmes – magnificent structures built on centuries of colonial extraction.

They have both the means and the institutions to absorb deportees.

They also have the record.

These same powers have eagerly joined the US in targeting and destabilising sovereign nations across Africa, as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – in wars widely condemned as violations of international law.

Every intervention has unleashed fresh waves of refugees and asylum seekers, hapless men, women, and children fleeing the very chaos Western armies engineered: powerless people whom the West openly ignores or despises.

Africa, by contrast, plays by the rules and adheres to the UN Charter. We honour sovereignty, respect international law, and strive for peace, even while shackled by colonial debt designed to keep us dependent.

Europe breaks the rules, Africa abides by them – yet Africa is asked to shoulder the burden.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

We will not bankroll, legitimise, or inherit the crimes of empire.

After all, we barely control our own destinies. The IMF and World Bank dictate our economies. The UN Security Council enforces old hierarchies. The G7 protects the West’s interests over us, Africans left impoverished and starving. Structural oppression allows the West to keep interfering in the lives of people across Africa and the Americas.

But we will not be complicit.

We will not be silent.

Western policies and interventions drive poverty, displacement, and instability in the Global South.

If the US insists on offloading its deportees, let it send them to those who built and still profit from this system of oppression.

The West must reckon with its spoils.

Leave Africa out of it.

Send Trump’s deportees to Europe.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

When I heard about the killing of Mohammed Noufal and his colleagues from Al Jazeera, my first thoughts were with his sister, Janat. I knew her vaguely in university; she is a polite girl with a beautiful smile, who was studying digital media at the Islamic University of Gaza and ran an online shop where she sold girls’ accessories.

She had already lost several members of her family when she received the news of her brother’s martyrdom. I thought of her and the devastating pain she must be in. I thought of how her story reflects the fate of so many Palestinian families who, over the past almost two years, have faced slow death, member by member.

On October 30, 2023, just three weeks after the start of the war, a missile struck Janat’s family house in Jabalia. She and her sisters and brothers survived, although Mohammed had serious injuries. Their aunt and uncle were killed.

A year later, on October 7, 2024, Omar, Janat’s eldest brother, was martyred while he was trying to rescue the injured from a bombed house; the Israeli army hit the same spot again, killing him.

Then, on June 22 of this year, her mother, Muneera, passed away. She was visiting relatives when the Israeli army bombarded the area. Muneera was hit by shrapnel; she arrived at the hospital still alive but passed away 39 hours later.

On August 10, Israel bombed a media tent near al-Shifa Hospital, killing Janat’s brother Mohammed and six other journalists.

Now, Janat has only her father Riyad, her brother Ibrahim and her sisters Ola, Hadeel, Hanan left.

“[When] my older brother Omar passed away, we heard our father groan and say, “You’ve broken my back, oh God,” Janat told me when I reached out to her.

“When we lost my mother Muneera, my father said in a hoarse voice, ‘We have been struck down’,” she continued.

“When my brother Mohammed, the journalist, was martyred, he said nothing. He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry, he didn’t utter a word. And that’s when fear began to creep into my heart … I feared that his silence might break him forever. I feared his stillness more than I feared his grief.”

After Mohammed was martyred, Janat tried to convince her brother Ibrahim to leave his work as a journalist, because she was afraid for him. He was the last one left to support her, their father, and her sisters. But he refused, saying that nothing would befall them except what God had written for them. He told her that he wanted to follow the legacy of their martyred brother and his colleagues.

For Janat, the pain of losing her loved ones has become unbearable. “Whenever we thought we could breathe a little, the next loss would bring us back to the same darkness. Fear is no longer a passing feeling, but a constant companion, watching us from every corner of our lives. Loss has become part of our existence, and grief has settled into the details of daily life, in every paused smile and every prolonged silence,” she told me.

Her words echo the suffering of so many families here in Gaza.

According to the Government Media Office, as of March this year, 2,200 Palestinian families were completely wiped out from the civil registry, all of their members killed. More than 5,120 families had only one member left.

Palestinian families are constantly under the threat of extinction with each wave of bombing.

My own relatives have also been erased from the civil registry. My father, Ghassan, had eight cousins – Mohammed, Omar, Ismail, Firas, Khaled, Abdullah, Ali, and Marah – who formed a large branch of our extended family. After the outbreak of war, we began losing them one after another. Each loss left a new void, as if we were being pulled into a spiral of recurring grief.

Only the wives of Omar and Ismail and their two children remain now. My father carries this immense pain quietly, holding his sorrow deep inside.

Today, we face another Israeli offensive on northern Gaza. Last year, the Israeli onslaught killed tens of thousands. Those who defied forced displacement to the south paid a heavy price.

Many of us who have lost loved ones do not want to live through the horror again. Last year, my family stayed in the north, but we are now exhausted. We are worn out from the bombing, death, and terror we experienced. We will leave this time. Janat’s family, who proudly held on to their half-destroyed home in Jabalia, will also leave.

We have experienced atrocities that no human being can endure. We cannot take any more death.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.