I have organized airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.

None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.

It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Biden administration isn’t just complicit by refusing to condemn Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid — an absurd situation leading the U.S. to incur significant costs and unnecessary risks for symbolic airdrops. He’s actively supporting Israel’s oft-stated but ill-defined war aim of eradicating Hamas, a military effort with little concern for Palestinian lives or the fate of Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell got an honest, if muddled, answer from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week. She asked him to explain the “incompatible policy” of being “the leading supplier of weapons to Israel” while, at the same time, “leading an international rescue effort” being impeded by Israeli government officials. Her question laid bare the ugly reality of Biden’s complicity in Israel’s campaign resulting in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Blinken looked into the camera and attempted to make the incompatible compatible. “These two objectives are not in conflict,” he insisted, defending the ongoing flow of no-strings-attached aid to Israel, Washington’s biggest foreign aid recipient. “The question is whether Israel, on the one hand, is and can effectively deal with its security needs in defending the country, while at the same time maximizing every possible effort to ensure that civilians are not harmed and that assistance gets to those who need it.”

Blinken has since ratcheted up that rhetoric, promising a United Nations resolution urging “an immediate ceasefire” — while at the same time sending endless arms to Israel.

Biden Sends Weapons, Not Aid

Israel’s war has already cost the lives of over 31,000 Palestinians and brought Biden closer to electoral peril, with 364,000 Michigan and Super Tuesday voters choosing “uncommitted” on their primary ballots, largely a result of grassroots efforts to generate a political cost for the White House’s support for the Israeli war.

Biden and his advisers’ refusal to change policy on aid to Israel or rethink the diplomatic cover it provides for Israel at the United Nations reveals a U.S. presidency with little regard for civilians in Gaza. There’s nothing beyond a steady trickle of statements of concern about Palestinian civilians and anonymous West Wing officials suggesting ongoing frustration with the execution of the war.

Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza wouldn’t be possible without tens of thousands of bombs and guided munitions sent by the U.S. since October 7. The Biden administration organized more than 100 arms transfers but only notified Congress of two, utilizing a variety of mechanisms to mask the scale and frequency of weapons transfers.

While he provided a steady flow of weapons to Israel, Biden withheld funding from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The largest humanitarian aid body in Gaza, UNRWA was targeted by Israel with unfounded claims — that its employees participated in the October 7 attack in Israel.

Biden’s aid efforts implicitly accept Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings.

Israel has yet to provide any evidence to back up its allegations — Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., called the claims “flat-out lies” — and Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the European Commission have all resumed their funding. The Biden administration, however, continues to withhold financial support, even as UNRWA faces a $450 million budget shortfall. Instead, Biden chose to engage in humanitarian aid theater, endorsing costly, dangerous, and impractical methods for transporting aid into Gaza that won’t require forcing Israel to end its blockade of food and medicine. 

In the short term, Biden’s aid policies won’t deliver any meaningful relief for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The latest effort involves the U.S. military constructing a causeway off the coast of Gaza to deliver as many as 2 million meals per day. The process implicitly accepts Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings. The causeway is expected to take two months to implement, a timeline guaranteeing famine for Gaza’s most vulnerable populations.

Israel, to its credit, has been more honest about its goals in Gaza. Internally, the country has made its goals clear: A leaked October 13 concept paper from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry explored the possibility of mass population transfers from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

In public, the same agenda is stated more crudely. Statements by senior Israeli politicians in the wake of October 7 include calls for mass depopulation of Gaza and exhibited consistent disregard for any distinction between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. One government minister spoke openly of removing up to 90 percent of the Palestinians. Another said Israel was “fighting human animals.” A third said there were no civilians in Gaza and suggested using a nuclear weapon. A top parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party said Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza strip from the face of the earth.”

The statements were used in a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, where a preliminary ruling found enough merit to the allegations to let the case go forward.

By imposing food scarcity on Gaza, and bombing refugee camps, apartment buildings, hospitals, universities, and aid distribution centers, it’s clear that Israel is following through on the words of its political leadership.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s occasional expressions of concern with the civilian death toll in Gaza while enabling the war raises a disturbing question: Is the Biden administration knowingly complicit in maximizing civilian killing in one of the most deadly military campaigns in recent history — or stunningly naive and incompetent?

Either way, hundreds of thousands of Democratic Party voters already came to the same conclusion as Andrea Mitchell: It is incompatible to claim concern for Palestinian lives while actively participating in their extermination.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Amed Khan.

Warning: This article contains graphic images.

Throughout the past five and a half months, Israel has waged a full-spectrum war against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United States and other Western nations have supplied not only the weapons for this war of annihilation against the Palestinians, but also key political and diplomatic support.

The results of the actions of this coalition of the killing have been devastating. Conservative estimates hold that more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children. More than 8,000 people remain missing, many of them believed to have died in the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks. Famine conditions are now present in large swaths of the Gaza Strip. The fact that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza has not deterred the U.S. and its allies from continuing to facilitate Israel’s war.

The massive scale of human destruction caused by the attacks would pose grave challenges to well-equipped hospitals. In Gaza, however, many health care facilities have been decimated by Israeli attacks or evacuated, while a few remain open but severely limited in the care and services they offer. Israeli forces have repeatedly laid siege to hospital facilities, killing hundreds of medical workers and taking captive scores of others, despite thousands of internally displaced Palestinians sheltering in the health care complexes. This week, Israel again launched raids on Al-Shifa Hospital, reportedly killing more than 140 people.

For months, doctors across Gaza have performed amputations and other high-risk procedures without anesthetics or proper operating rooms. Antibiotics are in short supply and often unavailable. Communicable diseases are spreading, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in makeshift shelters with little access to toilets or basic sanitary supplies. Many new mothers are unable to breastfeed and infant formula shortages are common. Israel has repeatedly blocked or delayed aid shipments of vital medical supplies to Gaza. Basic preventative medical care is nearly nonexistent, and medical experts predict that malnutrition will condemn a new generation of young Palestinians to a life of developmental struggles.

The result of the onslaught against medical facilities is that there is only one fully functional hospital remaining in the territory, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon, just left Gaza where he spent 10 days at the hospital performing eye surgeries on victims of Israeli attacks. It was his second medical mission to Gaza since the war began last October.

What follows is a transcript of a lightly edited interview with Khan.

Jeremy Scahill: Before we talk about your latest medical mission to Khan Younis in Gaza, I wanted to ask you a bit about your background and your medical practice.

Yasser Khan: Well, I’m from the greater Toronto area here in Canada, and I’ve been in practice for about 20 years. I’m an ophthalmologist, but I specialize in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery.

So that’s my sub-specialty and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 20 years. And I’m a professor. I’ve been to over 45 different countries on a humanitarian basis where I’ve taught surgery, I’ve done surgery, I’ve established programs. And so I’ve been to many types of areas and zones in Africa, Asia, and South America.

JS: And Dr. Khan, tell us about how you ended up going to Gaza for the first time. I think you went on your first mission over the winter period, but talk about how you ended up even getting on an airplane to go into a war zone where the Israelis were raining scorched earth down on the Palestinians of Gaza.

YK: Well, you know, all these things, you never plan for them. You never plan to go to an area like Gaza. And I was on the first North American mission. It was about eight of us that went, seven or eight of us that went, surgeons from both the U.S. and Canada, and you can never plan for these and it was just a random conversation with one of my surgical colleagues, who’s a thoracic surgeon, by a scrub sink. And, you know, we’ve been watching this mass killing or slaughter for the last — at that point in time for about three months — livestreamed for the first time ever, I think. And so I think a lot of us were suffering, and he caught me in my down moments. He goes, “Listen, I’m going to Gaza.” And I said, “What? How? I mean, how are you getting in? Nobody’s going there, right?” He [says] they’ve been trying for six weeks, and finally the WHO [World Health Organization] gave them the green light and so everything’s fine. “You may not be approved. I know it’s probably too late, but let me send your information in. I mean, who knows? I need your passport, your medical degree, and your blood type.” And to be honest, I didn’t even know what my blood type was. I just guessed AB, and at the time I just sent it to him right away. And two days later, miraculously, I was approved. To get into Gaza, first of all, nobody but a health care worker or a physician or a team can get in, and to get in you have to be approved by the WHO, by the Israeli authorities, and the Egyptian authorities. So that’s how I got in first.

JS: Describe that journey of how you then go from Canada to Gaza. What is it like? How do you end up getting into Gaza?

YK: Well, I had one day to book my flight. I booked my flight. I got as many supplies as I could together, and I flew into Cairo. And from Cairo, you meet a U.N. convoy that leaves every Monday and Wednesday, nowadays, at about 5 a.m., and it’s about an eight, nine-hour journey through the Sinai Desert. It’s long because you go through multiple checkpoints. It’s a demilitarized zone and so there’s Egyptian army checkpoints all the way through. And then we get to the Rafah border, which is right now controlled by Egypt and has been forever. And then you go through your immigration and then you get to the Gaza side and that’s controlled by the Palestinians.

JS: What was your first impression on that first trip once you crossed over from Egypt into Palestinian territory, into Gaza?

YK: I got there at about 6:30 p.m. at night and nobody travels at night. In fact, the U.N.’s time limit is 5:00 p.m. because anything moving at night, the Israeli forces attack through drones or other missile attacks. But, you know, the two guys that came to pick me up from the hospital said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Trust God.” And so I still went.

So just to describe to you, my first 20 minutes were when I was driving through at night. We were the only car on the road. And it was dark because there’s no fuel, there’s no electricity, so it’s dark, and the road was empty. And I mean, that was quite scary. I basically made my peace with God, and was ready to go at any point in time. But, I’ve never been more happy to see the emergency sign at a hospital, and that’s [when] I knew I’d arrived. The first thing I noticed at the time — this was in Khan Younis — Nasser Hospital and European Gaza Hospital were the only hospitals left in the Gaza Strip, fully functioning hospitals at that point in time.

Khan Younis was still a city, an intact city, but there’s battles going on. So when I exited the car, I could hear the 24-hour buzzing of drones, and it was quite loud, 24 hours, it never went away. I never saw the drones myself because they’re high up, but it’s Israeli drones: There’s either spy drones or there’s a quadcopter, which is the weaponized drone that can fire missiles and gunfire. And so they’re humming around. The other thing that I heard was bombs. And like a “boom” of bombs, basically every hour, every two or three hours; there was like bombs that would shake everything up. So that’s the first images I had.

But the other images I had was like a mass refugee camp. So basically at that point in time, two months ago, about 20,000 people had sought refuge both in the hospital and outside the hospital. And these weren’t tents. They’re still not tents. They’re makeshift shelters with bed sheets or plastic bag sheets. The ones outside sleep on the floor. They’re lucky [if] they get a carpet or a mat. There was one bathroom at the time for about 200 people that they have to share. And inside, the hallways of the hospital were also made into shelters. There was hardly any room to walk, and there’s children running around everywhere. It’s important to remember all these people were not homeless. They all had homes that were destroyed. They’re all displaced people that took shelter in the hospital.

“What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine.”

So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come. That was the other thing that at the time shocked me: What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine. I saw scenes that were horrific that I’d never witnessed before and I never want to see again. You have a mother walking in holding her 8, 9-year-old, skinny — because they’re all starving — boy who’s dead, he’s cold and dead and [the mother is] screaming, asking for someone to check his pulse and everybody’s busy in the mass chaos. So that was kind of my initial welcoming scene when I entered Khan Younis the first time.

JS: You’ve just come out now from your second medical mission. You were in Gaza for 10 days. Describe the scenes that you witnessed this time in Gaza, but also specifically in the hospital.

YK: Well, I must admit the first time I went there it was partially getting used to what’s going on, seeing the mass casualties, seeing the hospital, meeting the doctors and the nurses and health care workers, getting familiarized with the surroundings, and also doing the operations. This time, I was over all that introduction.

It was quite demoralizing. You’ve gotta be on the ground to see how bad it is. In two months, things were not only the same in a bad way, but they’re much, much worse because now, two months later, Khan Younis has literally been destroyed as a city. It was an active, hustling, bustling city. The Nasser Hospital, as you know, it’s destroyed now. It’s basically a death zone. And there’s decomposing bodies in the hospital now. It’s been evacuated. And I will add one thing: As a health care worker, I know fully well that to build a major, fully functioning hospital takes years to perfect and build and process, right? So it’s a sheer tragedy that it’s destroyed in mere hours, so it’s really unfortunate.

So now [at European Gaza Hospital] instead of 20,000 people, there’s about 35,000 people seeking shelter in a hospital that’s already beyond capacity. And so now, both outside and inside, there’s a mass of people. There’s no place to move now in the hallways. The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased. The European Gaza Hospital, all you have to do is go online and look at their pictures before. It was a beautiful, gorgeous hospital. Well-built, well-run, good quality control — and now it’s reduced to a place that is a mess. It’s a mess. There’s people cooking inside the hospital hallways, there’s the bathrooms, there’s people mixed in with the people who are sick, with major orthopedic injuries, post op. There’s no beds. So sometimes people go and just sleep in their little makeshift shelters. And so infection is, if you can imagine, infection is rampant. So if you don’t die the first time or if your leg or arm is not amputated the first time, it is for sure with infection. So then they have to amputate it to save your life. So it’s much, much worse.

“They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.”

The other thing I noticed was now, more so than even before, the health care workers and nurses and the doctors, they’re just burnt out. I mean, they’re just spent. They’ve witnessed so much in almost six months now. They’ve seen so much on a regular, hourly, daily basis. When I operate [at a hospital in Canada], typically speaking, I’ve got a few mostly elective lists, elective kind of not urgent problems that you gotta fix. And then there’s some trauma, or something that comes in that’s a bit more urgent once in a while, right? That’s my usual list. But [Palestinian medical workers], they are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen. They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.

The thing I try to emphasize to people is that it’s not only the actual medical trauma, it’s the other trauma associated with it in that these patients come in, if you’ve been involved in an explosive injury, and you come in injured, guaranteed you’ve lost loved ones. Guaranteed. So you’ve either lost a father, a mother, a child, all your children, all your family, your uncle, aunt, grandparents, your house, whatever. You’ve lost something. So every patient that comes in, not only is severely injured, is dealing with this trauma.

I had one girl who basically lost all her siblings, 8-year-old beautiful girl, lost her siblings. She came in for a leg fracture, was under the rubble for 12 hours. And her mother died, all her siblings gone. And all her family [were] gone, her aunts and uncles. As you know, it’s a generational killing, like slaughter. Generations. There’s about 2,000 families that have been erased now completely, are gone. Nonexistent. So it’s generational trauma or death or slaughter, and so her father was out burying his wife and his killed children while she was by herself getting her leg fracture repaired. And while she was under there for 12 hours, this 8-year-old girl, next to her was her grandmother and her aunt, dead, lying next to her for 12 hours.

I saw this one guy who had his face split open, and he was under the bubble for eight days. I don’t know how he survived, and they were able to get him out. He lost both his eyes, but they were able to put his face back together again, and he survived. So, they’re dealing with this, all this.

So two months ago it was bad, and two months later, it’s even worse. I could see, actually feel the burnout [among Palestinian medical workers], but they’re superhuman. They keep on going when the rest of us will lose our crap, the rest of us lose it. But they keep on going because it’s their steadfastness and it’s their faith. And they still consider their mere survival as their resistance. You know, they will survive the Israeli bombing no matter what because that’s their form of resistance. No matter what they tried, no matter how much they try to kill them, basically is their attitude.

JS: Dr. Khan, as I’m listening to you, I’m also recalling over these past five-plus months all of the episodes where Israeli forces have attacked or laid siege to hospitals and other medical facilities in Gaza. And I’m specifically thinking of the medical staff at Nasser Hospital, which was raided on February 15 by Israeli forces, and scores of medical personnel were snatched, taken prisoner by the Israelis. And the BBC recently did an exposé documenting what I think can clearly be called the torture of these medical workers, including holding them for prolonged periods in stress positions, dousing them with cold water, using muzzled dogs to menace them, blindfolding them, and leaving them in isolation.

And I’m thinking of the testimony you’re offering about the steadfastness of the doctors and then imagining after months and months of just amputating limbs from children, sometimes without any anesthesia, then having this occupation force come in; snatch doctors, nurses, other medical workers; and then subject them to torture under interrogation aimed at getting them to confess that somehow Hamas is using their hospital as a Pentagon, basically, to plot attacks against the Israeli occupation forces. What kinds of stories did you hear from Palestinian colleagues about these types of raids and actions by the Israelis against medical facilities, doctors, nurses, et cetera?

YK: This has been a systematic, intentional attack on the health care system. The bizarre thing of all of this is that the Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics. There’s been tons of open statements about what they intend to do. So you can’t even make this stuff up. It’s bizarre how they have openly said this, right? But having said that, I think over 450 health care workers have been killed — doctors, nurses, paramedics, over 450 — when they’re not supposed to be a target, right? They’re protected by international law. Doctors have been kidnapped, specific doctors who are of unique specialties have been targeted and killed.

Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon. That’s it, just a medical professional. The assistant director of the hospital was basically declothed and beat up in front of all the other hospital workers just to kind of insult and degrade him because he’s their boss. And they’re beating him up and kicking him and swearing at him, and everybody witnessed this, and they did it purposely in front of his workers. So, it’s a further dehumanization of a human being. These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore. For me, as a surgeon, it’s really heartbreaking for me to see that. As a surgeon, we have people’s lives in our hands and we heal. And then to see them mentally reduced to nothing is hard to take. Yeah. It’s hard to stomach.

JS: I wanted to ask you about an op-ed that a colleague of yours wrote. It was an American doctor, Irfan Galaria, who penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on February 16 after returning from Gaza, and I believe that doctor was at the European Gaza Hospital and described a scene and I’ll just read from their experience at the hospital:

“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”

This should be shocking to the soul of everyone who hears those words from an American doctor describing children between the ages of 5 to 8, arriving in that emergency room with, according to the doctor, single sniper shots to the head. Talk about the kinds of injuries or fatalities that you witnessed during your time there.

YK: Yeah. I know Irfan, and he’s a really good guy and he saw a lot there and I spoke to him when he got back. I myself did not see, when I was there, what he described. But definitely the doctor spoke about it for sure, and it was well known that that indeed was happening on the ground. We hear reports from the West Bank as well, where 12-year-olds or 13-year-olds are shot for nothing really, for no reason at all, just for the sake of being shot. So, it’s not something which is far-fetched, and it is going on.

What I saw — I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual.

Dr. Khan performed surgeries to remove eyes of multiple children wounded in Israeli strikes, calling the injuries “the Gaza shrapnel face.”

Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out. So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes. And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.

And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. And the thing is that the emergency does not have room, so they’re all over the floor. So you have these massive trauma, and [the patients] are on the floor. And sometimes they get forgotten in the mass chaos.

There was a 2-year-old baby who came in from a fresh bombing. He lost his aunt and his sibling, and his mother was in the OR being amputated. And she was actually a U.N. worker, by the way, a Palestinian U.N. worker. So he was just forgotten on the floor somewhere with major, major head trauma. Fortunately, after about two hours, they found him. And, because he had no — I mean, his mother wasn’t there, his father wasn’t there, there’s no family there — and fortunately, they found him. And they took him up to neurosurgery, but I don’t know what happened to him because that was on my last day that I was leaving. So I remember that very well. So it was just injuries that you have never seen before and the degree to it was amazing.

UNICEF said in December — and this was a low number — that there was over 1,000 children that had either double amputation or single amputation. This is only in December. It’s a very conservative estimate. Some people have said about 5,000 children. This is in January. So if you look at two months later, it must be 7,000, 8,000 now, either double amputees or single amputee, like arm, leg, both legs, both arms, mostly children. The thing is that in any normal amputation, in a normal circumstance, a child who gets amputated goes through about eight or nine operations until they’re adults, to revise the stump and fix the stump. Who is going to do that now? Not only have they lost their supports, their entire family structure, they don’t have the family structure or the infrastructure to do that because it’s all been destroyed.

JS: Were you just in one hospital, or did you go to multiple hospitals?

YK: No, so I stayed in European. The first time I was going to go to Nasser, but it got too dangerous and I think the fear was that the Israelis would just close off the road and then I’d be stuck in Nasser Hospital, so I didn’t go, but I went to European. And now there’s only one hospital, really, left, which is the European Hospital. One fully functional hospital exactly. They have these clinics across the city — I mean, they call them hospitals sometimes, like the Indonesian field hospital, things like that, but they really aren’t fully functioning hospitals. They’re clinics that have one or two services that kind of are more than just a clinic, but they’re mostly just clinics. So there’s really only one fully functioning hospital now, which is the European hospital, and therefore the impending invasion of Rafah is quite worrisome for me.

JS: At the European Hospital, are there sufficient supplies to manage the influx of patients? You’re describing an apocalyptic scene, particularly with these amputations among children. Are there adequate supplies to handle the demand in that hospital where you were?

YK: Definitely two months ago there weren’t. On my last day when I was leaving, they ran out of morphine, and morphine is needed in a lot of orthopedic and major trauma. You need morphine for pain control. So they ran out of morphine, and they ran out of a lot of the antibiotics as well, about two months ago. Now, two months later, supplies have come in. So they do have supplies that are running out pretty fast and they do run out. So, they’re coming in, but their equipment is rusted, new equipment is harder to come in, because anything that’s dual purpose, for example, the Israelis stop from coming.

So a lot of medical equipment is not coming in, unfortunately, and as a result a lot of equipment is rusted and it’s old, and it needs to be replaced, but these Palestinian doctors are very innovative and they’re geniuses, all of them are. What they’re going through, what they’ve done is amazing. I mean, hats off to them for sure. But yeah, it’s a mess. I mean, even the ORs are a mess. They’re a disorganized mess. People are frustrated. There’s a lot of frustrations, and I don’t blame them.

JS: Talk about the conversations you were having with Palestinian colleagues. You described a bit of this, but you are coming from Canada. You had colleagues that also came from the United States, and you’re going for these 10-day periods or so. I know there are some doctors that have stayed longer, but relatively short periods of time. And we all have to remember the Palestinian doctors and nurses and medical workers that are there, they’re simultaneously doing their job and many of them have lost their families, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren. This is their reality. They don’t leave. And I’m wondering as a medical professional from Canada, what that’s like to talk then to your Palestinian colleagues and what impression it has left on your heart?

YK: It’s left a huge impression, Jeremy, especially this time. This time I felt the emotional burden more than I did the last time. But, you know, I’ll tell you one thing. I know we talk about the death and the disease and all that, but one thing that we also need to more talk about — and this relates to how they’re doing is the death of their culture and their civilization, which is a genocide or plausible — that’s part of the definition of a genocide, is it not? Every single playground, hangout place, café, restaurant, 500-year-old ancient mosque, 500-year-old ancient church, destroyed. There’s schools destroyed, there’s stadiums, sports facilities destroyed, their hospitals destroyed, their cinemas destroyed, museums destroyed, archives, where they kept their archives, erased, destroyed, burnt, their homes, 80 percent of homes, are all gone now. And even though the homes are empty, they do not need to be destroyed. They’ve been TikToked on for the whole world to see. The Israeli forces have TikToked this and have shown destruction of these homes, of these beautiful people, and then dedicated destruction to their spouses or their children or whatever.

We’ve seen all this. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all out there that we’ve seen. So they’ve witnessed all this. What the Israeli forces have also done is that once they’ve come in, they’ve depaved the roads. Even in Khan Younis, many of the roads have been depaved. So there’s no roads left. So they’ve seen a complete destruction of their culture and their civilization and their lives, a complete erasure of their culture. And so that by itself is a tremendous tragedy. If we all look at ourselves and see if that happens to us, how would we feel?

So in the backdrop, despite that, they remain hopeful. They really do. There are some that have lost hope and want to get out. There’s a lot of patients that come in, and they may have like a dry eye, and they want a referral to be referred out, like a medical referral, because that’s one way to get out. But first of all, even people with serious medical conditions are not getting out so easily, but they’re all trying to leave just to save their lives, but they all say that they want to leave and come back. They all want to come back, right? Because there’s something magical about the land. Palestinians have been there for thousands and thousands of years, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians. They have a very strong connection to their land, and they don’t want to leave. They’d rather die than leave, but at this point in time, they want to leave, be safe. So that’s their philosophy. In the end, I think what holds them together is their faith. They have faith in God. They have faith in justice. God’s justice. They have no faith in humanity’s justice at all. And I don’t blame them. We have really abandoned them. Not us, as in the average person who’s been protesting and advocating for them. But at an elitist or governmental level. They’re encouraged and touched by everybody in the world who has fought for them and advocated for them. They know this, and they are touched by this. But at the other hand, they don’t know what to do. There’s no certainty. So they don’t know how to plan for the future because they don’t know whether there’ll be a Rafah invasion.

“Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence.”

I was on the ground, I toured the refugee camps, I went around Rafah, I saw, and if there’s an Israeli invasion, I can’t emphasize enough how catastrophic it’s going to be. It’ll be mass killing, mass destruction, because all these figures come in, 50 dead, 100 wounded. But what people don’t realize is, being wounded is a death sentence. Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence. And the wounded often will lose everybody, like all family members, so they have no supports, especially children, have nobody left to take care of them, not even aunts and uncles. It will be catastrophic. I don’t know what to say to the world to stop an impending invasion. You’ve got to rein this prime minister of Israel in. You got to do something to stop this stupid invasion that he still wants to do, because it’ll be catastrophic.

JS: I was just thinking back to your description of having to remove eyes from children or adults who’ve been hit with shrapnel. I think any of us who’ve ever had an operation or surgery, or we’ve helped a loved one that went into surgery, knows that the path to recovery is often a long one where you have to have physical therapy, you have to come to terms with a body part that you’ve lost and are going to have to live your life without. What’s your understanding of what happens to the patients you operated on who now are entering a reality where they no longer can see? They don’t have eyes, or children that no longer have a leg. What happens to those people after the acute situation is dealt with, that the surgery happens, the amputation happens, the eyes are removed?

YK: Well, Jeremy, that’s what keeps me up at night, and that’s what bears on me a lot. The overall simple answer is, I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is because they’re living in tents and structures. Many of them have lost their family and support, especially children have lost their family and support. Even adults.

I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.

There’s tons of children like this as well. So what happens to them? I don’t know. What’s going to happen to the double amputee child who has no home, no parents and no uncles and aunts or grandparents left, no siblings left either? What’s going to happen to them? Then there’s some kids who have an older sibling that’s 11 years old and they’re like 5 years old. I saw one girl who lost an arm and the only living relative she has is an 11- or 12-year old sibling who’s taking care of her. So I don’t know what’s going to happen because in the current infrastructure, there is no infrastructure, there is no care for these stumps. Many of them are getting infected, these stumps are, after they’ve been amputated — and where are they discharged to? Usually when they’re discharged, because the hospital is trying to discharge them to make room for more people to come in, they’re discharged out to the shelters or tents. That’s where they’re discharged. It’s not like they’re discharged home where there’s proper care.

I will emphasize this, Jeremy, that Palestinians were in an open-air concentration camp for decades. This is not new. It was a struggle, but they were still able to make their life. And because they couldn’t go anywhere, because they’re restricted by Israel and by Egypt on the other side, they couldn’t go anywhere, they put everything into their homes. So their homes were their castles, were their life, were their center of their life and their universe, and they really took a lot of care and attention to their homes. And so now all these people who are homeless, their homes are gone. So, it’s a tremendous effect, and they’re living in tents, and I can only imagine what they must go through. Only a year ago, life was normal so to speak, even though you’re in a concentration camp, but life was still normal. It was their normal, right? And they’re living and they make the best of things. They’re very grateful and gracious people, and steadfast people, and they make the best of every scenario, and they did make the best of even being in a concentration camp. They made the best of it. But now it’s heartbreaking.

JS: I’m thinking of this too, and like anyone who’s a parent, imagine that terror when you lose your kid, you’re at a theme park or you’re out somewhere. And all of a sudden, you can’t see your child and all the thoughts that go through your head and then imagine your child alone in the world, completely alone. And, by the way, they’ve lost their sight. Or they’re a double amputee. I haven’t been to Gaza and seen what you’ve seen, but I have these thoughts all the time, and I think everyone who really has internalized this as a human catastrophe that was preventable, that didn’t need to happen, you think about those children and what does it mean to be alone in this world as a child? But then on top of it, to be alone in this world and it’s hell on earth. It’s bombs. It’s everyone trying to survive. It’s starvation. It’s famine. It’s people fighting over the morsels of food that get dropped from the sky along with the bombs. And as I listen to you, it just punctuates how unconscionable this is to the core of humanity, how unconscionable it is. What is your message to the world right now?

YK: Well, Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth right now, is what it is, and I think that it’s never too late. If the Israeli invasion of Rafah occurs, it’ll be catastrophic. We have to do all that we can to stop that from happening, put all the pressure we can on our politicians, on the powers that be, to stop this from happening because the health care and the human toll will be unimaginable. The fact is that it’s been 75 years of occupation. In the end, out of all of this death and destruction that’s happened, they need to have their independence, and they need to have their independent state so that they can live their lives with dignity and freedom.

And I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been to 45 different countries, and Palestinians are among the best people that I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’re the most generous, gracious, kind-hearted, intelligent, and wise people that I’ve ever met. And so they’re worth fighting for. I think it’s an issue of humanity. I will side on the side of humanity anytime. And they are worth fighting for. So I want us all to continue the fight and continue advocating for them until this war stops and they are free.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

The House of Representatives voted on Friday to defund the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians through next year — even as 1.1 million people in Gaza face threats of famine in coming months — on the basis of flimsy allegations by Israel against a tiny minority of the agency’s staff that have yet to be proven.

The vote came as part of a $1.2 trillion spending package to avert a partial government shutdown. In addition to stripping funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, through March 2025, the bill includes the $3.8 billion the U.S. sends to Israel every year.

The bill also contains a long-standing provision that would limit aid to the Palestinian Authority, which governs the occupied West Bank, if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively supports such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

The Senate is debating the bill ahead of a Friday midnight deadline, and President Joe Biden has said he will sign it when it comes to his desk. 

The U.S. first suspended aid to UNRWA in late January, when the Israeli government leveled allegations that 12 of the agency’s 30,000 employees — or 0.04 percent — were involved in Hamas’s attacks on October 7 (Israel later accused two additional employees of involvement, bringing the total number to 14).

In response, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, immediately terminated the accused staff members and launched an investigation. The U.S. decision to cut aid to the 74-year-old aid agency, which was founded amid the creation of Israel and the ensuing Nakba — the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes — prompted much of the West to follow suit, including other top donors such as Germany, the European Union, and Sweden.

While several of those donors have recently announced their intention to resume funding, the U.S. government, which has historically been a top donor to UNRWA, has instead doubled down. The spending bill passed the House with a 286-135 vote. Twenty-three Democrats voted against the bill, with several issuing statements directly linking their “no” votes to the UNRWA provision.

Even in the lead-up to the Friday vote, several members of Congress slammed the idea of continuing to penalize UNRWA.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told The Independent that members of Congress have intelligence assessments that suggest halting funding is “not grounded in solid facts.” 

“We should not be restricting, we should be restoring, I’ve been saying that on public record,” Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., added. “The idea that people are literally starving to death and we are contributing to that is a problem.” Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Dick Durbin of Illinois expressed similar concerns.

“Tragically, many members of Congress seem to be happy to be part of this starvation caucus.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., put it more harshly earlier this week. “Sadly, tragically, many members of Congress seem to be happy to be part of this starvation caucus,” Sanders said, “happy to cut funding to UNRWA and make it harder to get aid to Palestinians in the midst of this crisis.” 

UNRWA announced Israel’s allegations against its employees on January 26, the same day the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide. It didn’t take very long for the allegations to start to fall apart.

On January 30, Sky News reported that it had seen Israeli intelligence documents fielding the allegations and that they “make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.” 

That same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the allegations were “highly, highly credible,” while also admitting the U.S. hadn’t done its own investigation.

On February 3, the Financial Times wrote that Israel’s intelligence assessment “provides no evidence for the claims.” Shortly thereafter, British outlet Channel 4 reported that a confidential Israeli document detailing the allegations “provides no evidence to support its explosive new claim.” Two days later, CBC reported that Canada — another top UNRWA donor — suspended its funding without seeing any evidence to substantiate the allegation against the UNRWA staff members.

Within a few days, Lazzarini admitted that he followed “reverse due process” by firing staff members implicated in the allegations before conducting an investigation. 

“Indeed, I have terminated without due process because I felt at the time that not only the reputation but the ability of the entire agency to continue to operate and deliver critical humanitarian assistance was at stake if I did not take such a decision,” he said, explaining that the agency was already subject to “fierce and ugly attacks.”

“My judgment, based on this going public, true or untrue, was I need to take the swiftest and boldest decision to show that as an agency we take this allegation seriously.”

Just last week, the European Union’s top humanitarian aid official said he has still not seen evidence from Israel to back its accusations — nearly two months after they were made.

Even if the allegations were found to be true, many have argued cutting funding to UNRWA is tantamount to collective punishment. “We should investigate it,” Van Hollen said this week. “But for goodness’ sake, let’s not hold 2 million innocent Palestinian civilians who are dying of starvation … accountable for the bad acts of 14 people.”

Meanwhile, UNRWA’s internal investigation turned out horrific reports that Israel tortured UNRWA staff in order to force false confessions that they were involved in the October 7 attack and are members of Hamas. Staffers were allegedly beaten, waterboarded, and had their family members threatened by Israeli soldiers. UNRWA also alleged that Israeli soldiers used a nail gun on Palestinians’ knees and sexually abused the prisoners, including through “the insertion of what appears to be an electrified metal stick into prisoners’ rectums.” Israel has denied the allegations.

Over the past couple weeks, many Western states have reinstated their funding to UNRWA, including the European Union, Sweden, Canada, and Australia. The State Department, meanwhile, has continued to find ways to justify its ongoing suspension of funding to the agency.

On March 14, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller was asked about statements by U.N. officials that Israel has still not provided evidence showing that the UNRWA staff were involved with the October 7 attack. Miller responded that the initial U.S. decision to pause funding was prompted not by Israel, but by UNRWA. 

“We hadn’t heard from the government of Israel about these allegations,” Miller said. “It was about allegations that UNRWA brought to us. And when they brought us these allegations, they told us that they had investigated them and found them to be credible, and that’s why they had taken action to fire the employees in question.”

He concluded: “With respect to the ongoing investigation, we do have faith in their ability to get to the bottom of what happened.”

Yet Miller’s response evades a crucial detail: It was Israel that brought the allegations to UNRWA in the first place. And though UNRWA’s initial statement may have prompted the pause in U.S. funding, the U.S. has not shifted course even after UNRWA’s own chief said he fired the staff without full-on investigation due to external pressure. 

The paradox is telling: The U.S. apparently found UNRWA credible based on the agency’s serious response to the allegations against it. Yet UNRWA’s follow-up statements — that the agency was overzealous in its response and that it has reason to believe Israeli soldiers have tortured its staffers — don’t seem to carry the same credibility.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.

Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.

The budget — co-signed by more than 170 House Republicans — calls to eliminate “the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) from the School Lunch Program.” The CEP, the Republicans note, “allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.” 

“Additionally,” the Republicans continue, “the RSC Budget would limit spending in the program to truly needy households.”

The CEP allows schools and districts in low-income areas to provide breakfast and lunch to all students, free of charge. The program thus relieves both schools and families from administrative paperwork, removing the inefficiencies and barriers of means-testing, all on the pathway to feeding more children and lifting all boats.

This year, the Biden administration further expanded the CEP, allowing another estimated 3,000 school districts to serve students breakfast and lunch at no cost.

Instead of universality, the RSC suggests sending block grants for child nutrition programs to states, to give them “needed flexibility” to “promote the efficient allocation of funds to those who need it most,” while avoiding “widespread fraud.” Such a proposal, which has been pitched before without gaining much traction, could theoretically eliminate the baseline standards for nutrition standards and basic access, said Crystal FitzSimons, the child nutrition programs and policy director at the Food Research & Action Center. 

“At this point, we have over 40,000 schools participating in community eligibility, and that allows them to offer breakfast and lunch to all students at no charge,” FitzSimons said about CEP. “There have been year after year increases in participation because the option is so popular to eligible schools across the country.”

Republicans have worked for years to undermine school lunch programs, but the staying focus on the goal, even in rhetoric, is notable given the warm reception some states have received in instituting universal school lunch. In Minnesota, for example, 70 percent of Minnesotans, including 57 percent of conservatives and 54 percent of senior citizens, were found to have approved of the policy change that took effect last summer — even after reports that the program was proving to be more costly than anticipated, due to greater-than-expected demand. Statewide polling in Pennsylvania last year found 82 percent of people supporting expanding their free school breakfast program to include lunch too, while 87 percent of Ohio K-12 parents were found in 2022 to support school meals for all, regardless of ability to pay.

Another seven states — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Vermont — have also passed universal school lunch programs, while at least 26 more states (including Washington, D.C.) are considering ways to achieve the policy too. Nevada, meanwhile, used leftover Covid-19 relief funding to offer one more year of free school meals to all students through this school year. The ambition is endorsed by an increasingly large coalition of groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, the American Heart Association, and the National Education Association.

Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.

“If the program is designed to offer free meals to all students,” FitzSimons said, “that question about fraud really disappears if you’re allowed to serve every single child.”

The Republican Study Committee is the largest ideological caucus in Congress, and for the past 51 years, it has served as a principle priority-setter for the party. The committee was chaired as recently as three years ago by House Speaker Mike Johnson. He and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise still sit on the Executive Committee, while Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern serves as chair. Its annual budget is not binding, but it does offer a useful window into conservatives’ policy priorities, which can best be summarized as accelerating the planet’s burning, an indifference to mass shootings, and actively threatening consumers and workers.

On the environment — amid the hottest year recorded on Earth — the word “climate” appears 110 times and the word “environment” 53 times in the budget. Not one of those instances has anything to do with a positive Republican vision to address climate change or protect the environment. The RSC instead opposes the creation of a carbon tax and wants to give oil and gas companies deductions on costs like labor and safety, ramp up oil and gas projects on federal lands, and defund the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The Republicans also throw their weight behind bills like Virginia Rep. Bob Good’s “No American Climate Corps Act,” to stop federal funds from being used for the American Climate Corps — a revolutionary clean energy jobs program whose applications open next month. While millions of Americans have been surrounded by throat-scratching smog, livelihood-destroying wildfires, and relentless flooding and heat waves, the Republicans call to prohibit the use of emergency disaster or public health emergency declarations “from being used to address purported climate change.” 

On guns, Republicans call to undercut or block an array of gun regulations. For instance, the budget supports “defunding the constitutionally dubious red flag provisions in the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.” That law allocates $750 million to support ongoing state implementation of red-flag laws that remove firearms from individuals who are deemed a threat to themselves or others; it doesn’t force any state to do anything.

On reproductive rights, Republicans call for the passage of an array of anti-choice bills, like Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’s “Ending Chemical Abortions Act of 2023,” which would federally outlaw the use of abortion pills, and West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney’s “Life at Conception Act,” which would designate embryos made through in vitro fertilization as being alive — even as many of the same Republicans have scrambled to claim they support IVF in the aftermath of a similar Alabama Supreme Court ruling that led multiple clinics to halt IVF procedures.

Like every good Republican fiscal document, the RSC budget threatens changes to Social Security, including by raising the retirement age. Other Republican budget priorities include eliminating all future funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees; prohibiting federal subsidies for high-speed rail; getting rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; reducing funding for the famously under-supported Occupational Safety and Health Administration; and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board, which, under President Joe Biden, has done much to protect workers’ right to organize.

Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.

“As in previous years,” the Republicans say about their master plan, “the RSC budget also celebrates the work of House conservatives who have fought for legislation that preserves American values, combats Biden’s woke and weaponized government, and protects the freedoms that should be enjoyed by every American.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

When 25-year-old U.S. Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell took his life in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. this February, the phone lines at the anti-war organization Veterans for Peace started lighting up. Current and recently retired members of the military were calling to say they were disturbed by Bushnell’s act of self-immolation. Many of them had been privately nursing their own angst and misgivings about U.S. support for the war in Gaza. 

“We have been receiving many calls from concerned active duty and recently discharged veterans talking about their personal disgust with our foreign policy in light of recent events, and also talking about how these are effecting them psychologically,” said Mike Ferner, the director of Veterans for Peace.

Members of Veterans for Peace, like other anti-war veterans groups, have mobilized around the Israeli war in Gaza, organizing protests across the country and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Following Bushnell’s death by self-immolation, veterans at a protest in Oregon burned their uniforms in tribute to the deceased airman and to register their opposition to the war. Anger over the civilian carnage from the war, coming on the heels of two decades of disastrous U.S. military involvement in the region, has galvanized some veterans who experienced these conflicts up close.

“It’s fair to say that people’s psychological trauma is being activated again by what they are seeing in the news,” Ferner said, “especially people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been through the meat grinder once already with the U.S. military.”

The U.S. has indeed been intimately involved in Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians since last October, providing its Middle East ally with extensive military aid and diplomatic cover, despite widespread public opposition. For years, Israel has received billions of dollars in military aid from the United States annually. The Biden administration has maintained that support and also asked Congress to approve another $14 billion in the wake of the war, while bypassing Congress to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel.

The U.S. has also provided intelligence support for Israel during the offensive, much of it focused on efforts to deter Iranian-backed militants across the region. As The Intercept previously reported, the U.S. had begun quietly expanding a military base it operates in Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, in the months prior to the war. That base, known as “Site 512,” is believed to help Israel track missile strikes, including from Iranian-backed groups in the region.

Despite the desire of most Americans to stay out of the Middle East, blowback from the Israeli war in Gaza is directly dragging U.S. troops back in — with military casualties as the consequence. Earlier this year, Iraqi militias attacked a base in Jordan that was being used to help deter Iranian-backed groups seeking to build up their forces near Israel’s borders, killing three service members.

Many military veterans who have sacrificed their physical and mental health over two decades of disastrous U.S. wars in the Middle East have been enraged by the continued waste of U.S. lives, resources, and moral credibility in the region. Following Bushnell’s death, Dennis Fritz, who served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years, traveled to D.C. to attend a vigil at the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation. Fritz, who worked for years with wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following his resignation from active duty, said that he felt an obligation to pay tribute to Bushnell’s sacrifice.

“As a former senior enlisted leader in the air force, Aaron would have been my responsibility,” Fritz said. “As an officer I would have been the one who would have checked on him to make sure he was OK. So the news of his death struck me very hard.”

Since leaving the military Fritz has worked in anti-war activism as part of the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military officers critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.” Fritz said that he and other former U.S. military officers who had already been critical of U.S. policy in the region are angered by what they are seeing unfold in Gaza. They now believe that the U.S. government is assisting in the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza.

“They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”

“When we are in the military we are taught the Geneva Convention and the law of armed conflict. This teaches us not just that we must do everything we can to protect civilian life, but even the property of innocent people,” Fritz said. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “is definitely not doing that. They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”

Bushnell himself has become well-known for his sacrifice, both in the U.S. and abroad where his image has often appeared at protests denouncing U.S. complicity in the Gaza war. After attending Bushnell’s vigil, Fritz himself said that he holds the U.S. government responsible for Bushnell’s sacrifice, given its lockstep support for Israel in its assault on Gaza.

Fritz said, “Aaron died for the sins of our Congress and the Biden administration.”

The Intercept’s coverage of veterans’ health is made possible in part by a grant from the A-Mark Foundation.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Retired Navy four-star Adm. William McRaven — highly paid leadership guru, business consultant, and special operations commander — received a $50 million “Courage and Civility Award” from richest-person-on-Earth Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this past week. Actress Eva Longoria received the other half of the $100 million grant: the exact amount the Bezos-owned Washington Post lost last year before cutting nearly 10 percent of its staff. 

For Bezos, the Post’s financial woes are mere pocket change. (With his net worth of $200 billion, covering the Washington Post’s financial deficit would be the equivalent of a person making $100,000 a year paying $50 to save over 200 jobs.) All of which is ironic given that Bezos says his motivation for buying the newspaper was “stewardship.”

“Support of American democracy through stewardship of the Washington Post, and financial contributions to the dedicated and innovative champions of a variety of causes,” Bezos said in 2018, demonstrates his “investment in the future of our planet and civilization.” 

Now, he is focused on repairing America’s descent into division, searching for leaders who “aim high, pursue solutions with courage, and always do so with civility.” The three-year-old award follows Bezos’s vow to donate most of his fortune toward reducing inequality and combating climate change.

Bezos is also a growing defense contractor who sat on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board during the Obama administration, an advisory panel that McRaven was also on at the same time. The admiral — famous for overseeing the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, and for his commencement address at the University of Texas where he told graduates to start by making their beds — retired in 2014 and has been making a killing in the civilian world. He sits on the board of oil giant ConocoPhillips, is senior adviser to investment firm Lazard, and on the federal advisory board of Palantir, the Pentagon contractor founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. McRaven has also parlayed his military career into paid speaker and bestselling author of motivational titles like “The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived” and “The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy),” paper-thin books that each dispense featherweight advice on civil life.

All of this has turned the friendly admiral into a multimillionaire, making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from board membership, publishing, and speaking. He holds $2 million worth of stock from ConocoPhillips according to a January 17 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. As chancellor for the University of Texas System, he raked in $2.5 million, making him the highest-paid public university official in the U.S. in 2018. He is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau and the Celebrity Speakers Bureau, where his fees range between $50,000 and $100,000 per speech. He owns two homes: one in Alexandria, Virginia, and another in Austin, Texas, worth some $5 million, property records reviewed by The Intercept show.

“Man’s compassion far exceeds his greed,” McRaven writes in his book “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations,” one of his many treatises that sprinkles the telling of his career from the first Gulf War through the death of bin Laden.

Since 2021, the Courage and Civility Award has found five recipients, all of whom, in their own ways, have taken a stand against Donald Trump and amassed vast personal fortunes — attributes that Bezos seems to value. The 2021 award recipient Van Jones has blasted the former president for years, alongside chef José Andrés who sued the president after comments he made about Mexican Americans. The 2022 recipient Dolly Parton rejected Trump’s offer for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and this year, Eva Longoria used her celebrity status to mobilize Latino voters against the former president.

Following this pattern, McRaven is also a very political admiral, writing multiple op-eds in Bezos’s Washington Post denouncing Trump. He has said that Trump’s criticisms of the news media represent “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.” In an opinion piece that took the form of a letter to the president, he denounced Trump’s own incivility. “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”

His partisanship doesn’t necessarily disqualify him from receiving millions in a charity grant that will in theory give others a leg up in the world and level the playing field, but it does raise the questions: Why him, and why can Bezos be so generous while starving a top-tier newspaper that is clearly in need of his benevolence?

Among his duties as paragon of civility, McRaven has declared his alliance with his national security blood brothers. When Trump stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance, McRaven jumped to his defense, daring Trump to “revoke my security clearance, too,” in the pages of the Washington Post. McRaven called Brennan, who is a vociferous Trump hater, “a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question.”

McRaven also took to the Washington Post defending Acting Director of National Intelligence Joe Maguire, whom Trump had just fired after his subordinate, Shelby Pierson, briefed Congress that the Russian government appeared to prefer Trump over Democratic candidates for the 2020 election. CNN later reported that Pierson had “overstated” the findings of the intelligence community.

Similarly when an obscure Navy Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was passed up for a second star, McRaven again went public, decrying Congress’s “trend of disrespect to the military.” Mr. Civility just didn’t mention why Congress blocked Losey’s promotion: Multiple investigations found he had retaliated against whistleblowers. 

When it comes to national security, McRaven is deployed everywhere. He sits on the board of the Gates Global Policy Center founded by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He sits on the board of the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation Advisory Council. He is an honorary board member of the International Spy Museum. He is on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Washington Post reports that McRaven will split the money from his Bezos award between the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which supports the families of fallen service members, and the BrainHealth Project, which provides mental health resources to veterans. 

The racket goes something like this: A billionaire pays a famous admiral, to pay charities that he is connected with (McRaven’s wife Georgeann is on the board of the Warrior Foundation), to pay disabled veterans, who are the victims of the failures of the national security elite to begin with. It is a modern trickle-down parable that, as always, leaves the worst off with a shiny consolation prize for sacrificing life and limb to their country. 

The national security-obsessed, veteran-loving, cowboy-hat-adorned Bezos has become the ultimate commander in chief of the national security elite, an ersatz Mr. Magoo with a trillion-dollar business that actually tears at the seams of America’s mottled social fabric, decimating small businesses that, unlike McRaven, cannot survive on “courage” and “civility” alone. 

Alongside Bezos, McRaven has formulated a certain conception of civility in which niceties that maintain the status quo emerge as the highest form of service. The destruction of the working class and the injuries sustained in their mad-man wars go unexamined as the admirals hand out Band-Aids. They perpetuate a certain elite consensus with regard to national security, one that drowns out every attempt to impact the societal needs like inequality and climate change which Bezos claims to address. (Bezos evidently doesn’t care that McRaven collects millions from the oil industry.)

One can read McRaven’s “Sea Stories,” review his speeches, and search through the Bezos philanthropy for a sense of who these blood brothers are, what they really believe in. But following the money is a far more telling endeavor.

Who is McRaven really? Former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condensed his storied military career into a G.I. Joe caricature, writing in his autobiography “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace” that “Bill made a big impression with his booming baritone, wide smile, and huge biceps.”

McRaven did not respond to a request for comment.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Five days before Georgia planned to kill Willie Pye by lethal injection, Assistant Federal Public Defender Nathan Potek stood before a U.S. district judge and made a final pitch to save his client. Everyone, even a man condemned to die, was entitled to equal protection under the law, Potek said. Yet his client was a member of a “disfavored class” thanks to discriminatory actions by the state. And it was about to cost him his life.

Pye was sentenced to die in 1996 for murdering his former girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. His conviction raised red flags, from Pye’s low IQ score to his trial attorney’s alleged racism toward his own clients. Yet Potek wasn’t arguing that Pye faced racial discrimination or that his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As far as the law was concerned, those claims were null and void.

Instead, Potek proposed a novel argument. Of the 41 people on Georgia’s death row, Pye was one of several who had exhausted their appeals. Yet Pye alone faced imminent execution while the others were shielded by a legal agreement with the state that had placed executions on hold. “There is no meaningful difference” between Pye and these other men, Potek said.

In many ways, Pye’s predicament came down to bad timing. Georgia’s moratorium dated back to March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic led the Georgia Supreme Court to declare a judicial emergency, halting executions. As months passed, death penalty lawyers became concerned over the growing number of clients whose cases were reaching their final appeals — and who would be hamstrung by restrictions on prison visitation that prevented their attorneys from preparing for clemency applications and late-stage litigation once executions restarted.

The eventual result was a written agreement in April 2021 between the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta and the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, which promised not to seek any new execution dates until the judicial emergency had been lifted, normal visitation had resumed, and the Covid vaccine had been made available to “all members of the public.”

Still, there was a catch: The agreement only applied to people whose appeals were exhausted during the judicial emergency, which was officially lifted in June 2021.

Today, the same visitation restrictions remain in place. The Georgia Department of Corrections does not allow as many visits as it did before the pandemic, which has “impaired counsel’s ability to … prepare for clemency proceedings and adequately represent their clients,” as the Georgia Supreme Court found. Yet Pye is not protected by the Covid-era contract. Because his appeals were exhausted in 2023, his execution will almost certainly move forward.

It was not long ago that Pye stood a good chance of getting off death row. As the federal defenders were negotiating the April 2021 agreement, a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was considering a legal challenge alleging that Pye’s trial attorney had provided ineffective representation. It was a long shot; although Pye’s attorney had failed him in profound ways, the barriers standing in the way of relief are hard to overcome. But that same month, the panel vacated Pye’s death sentence, sending the case back for resentencing. It was rare for a federal court to intervene when it came to such a Sixth Amendment claim, the panel acknowledged. “This is one of those rare cases.”

Pye’s victory was short-lived. At the urging of the attorney general’s office, the full circuit court reversed the panel’s order the following year on procedural grounds. Whatever the failures of Pye’s trial lawyer, it ruled, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Pye was not entitled to relief after all.

If the reinstatement of Pye’s death sentence was devastating, there was an additional irony that proved especially cruel. Had the 11th Circuit simply rejected his appeal, Pye would have been protected by the agreement between the federal defenders and the state. Instead, the temporary relief led his case to fall through the cracks, placing him in line for execution. His trial lawyer’s failures had doomed him a second time.

With few good options, Pye’s lawyers challenged the looming execution using a civil rights claim ordinarily associated with class-action lawsuits. Under the 14th Amendment, Pye was entitled to equal protection under the law. By excluding Pye from the agreement, the state had created “a distinct, disfavored class of death row prisoners, one without the baseline guarantee of adequate representation,” Potek wrote in a federal court filing. This further violated Pye’s Fifth Amendment right to due process and deprived him of the fundamental right to life.

An oral argument on the matter was set for March 15 at the federal courthouse in Newnan, Georgia. Presiding over the hearing was Timothy Batten, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. A former trial attorney nominated by George W. Bush, Batten had presided over Pye’s federal appeals since 2013. He did not hide his skepticism of Potek’s argument.

“He’s already lost his right to life, right?” Batten asked. Potek conceded that while it was a lawful execution order, Pye was entitled to constitutional rights as long as he was still alive — and his disparate treatment ahead of his clemency hearing violated those rights. “I’m sure you would have cited it if there was any case in the country that was like this,” Batten said.

“Every card was stacked against him.”

Potek tried to impress upon the judge how hastily and opportunistically the state had moved to execute his client. As recently as late February, Pye’s lawyers were negotiating a potential settlement with the attorney general’s office to apply the Covid-era agreement to his case. But on February 27, lawyers for the attorney general abruptly ended the negotiations. Two days later, “with no notice,” the state obtained an execution order. Pye’s date was set for March 20 at 7 p.m. “They didn’t have to provide any notice, did they?” Batten said. “Not statutorily,” Potek said, but it was nonetheless “alarming” behavior. “That wasn’t alarming to me,” Batten replied bluntly. “So go on.”

The hearing lasted less than an hour. Pye’s argument was nothing more than a delay tactic, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office told the judge. “All of it is about more time to get ready for an execution he has known about for over 25 years.”

Outside the courtroom, anti-death penalty activist Cathy Harmon-Christian expressed dismay. The executive director of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, she was working to get word out about Pye’s case while organizing vigils for the night of the execution.

“There’s just so many problems with the case,” she said, none of which had been discussed at the hearing. And for all the ways in which the case was cast as unique, it was actually emblematic of problems that have plagued Georgia’s death penalty for generations. Pye’s trial attorney was not only ineffective. “He was a known racist,” Harmon-Christian said. “He spent very little time defending Willie.”

“Every card was stacked against him.”

The federal courthouse where the hearing took place is some 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, just off the historic town square in Newnan. The city has long boasted its claim as “the city of homes,” a nod to the antebellum architecture of its treasured old houses, a number of which survived the Civil War. A marble statue of a Confederate soldier still stands at the center of the original courthouse lawn. The memorial was vandalized in 2021, damaging the soldier’s musket. “It’s just there to piss off Black folks,” a county commissioner who proposed removing the statue told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People are still fighting that war in their minds and in their hearts.”

The town of Griffin in neighboring Spalding County, where Pye was tried and convicted, moved its own Confederate monument to a cemetery in the 1960s, but local leaders have been loath to break with the past. In 2018, a video went viral of a former city commissioner repeatedly using the N-word while endorsing the designation of April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. The official, who was directing his comments at a Black commissioner, followed up by clarifying, “I don’t use that word anymore.”

Racism and the American death penalty have always been inextricable, particularly in the South, where historians have traced a line connecting slavery, lynchings, and executions. Georgia, whose earliest death penalty statutes applied to crimes committed by slaves or free people of color, has done more to shape the “modern” death penalty than perhaps any other state. It was a Georgia case that led to McCleskey v. Kemp, a Supreme Court ruling that insulated the death penalty from race-based legal challenges by forcing defendants to prove that racial bias had been intentional.

McCleskey was decided less than a decade before a jury dominated by white men sent Pye to death row. He was one of several Black men sentenced to death in Spalding County after being represented by Johnny Mostiler, a lawyer alleged to be openly racist toward his clients. In 2008, Georgia executed a man named Curtis Osborne despite allegations that Mostiler had repeatedly referred to him as a “little n–” who deserved to die. A lawyer who was briefly appointed to represent Osborne alongside Mostiler recalled a conversation in which Mostiler “said he thought young black men were lazy and asked me why I thought that was so.” In 2016, Kenneth Fults was executed despite accounts that Mostiler had slept through much of his trial — and despite statements from a juror who later said he was committed to voting for death “because that’s what that n– deserved.”

Mostiler, who died in 2000, was questioned by a trial judge about his use of racial slurs after one of his clients raised concerns. According to the transcript, Mostiler said that he did not “use those terms out in public.”

Colleagues and contemporaries of Mostiler’s have denied that he was racist against his clients. In a phone call, William McBroom, the former district attorney who tried both Pye and Fults, adamantly rejected the idea that racism infected the cases. “Johnny Mostiler did more for minorities in Spalding County than any other lawyer that I know of,” he said. Mostiler was always willing to give free legal advice, McBroom added. “I don’t see how he made a living until he got the public defender job.”

Whether Mostiler was motivated by prejudice or not, the record in Pye’s case reveals staggering failures. Pye was convicted after a three-day trial in which Mostiler called no witnesses apart from Pye himself. While he called several of Pye’s family members to testify at the sentencing stage, Mostiler failed to investigate and present crucial mitigating evidence that could have led the jury to spare his client’s life.

There is also reason to question the theory the state presented at trial. Pye’s previous appellate attorneys uncovered evidence showing that the star witness in the case — a teenager named Anthony Freeman, who agreed to testify against Pye as part of a plea deal — gave shifting accounts of the crime in the years leading up to Pye’s trial. Years after Pye was sentenced to die, Freeman told Pye’s attorneys that his testimony was coerced by the district attorney and law enforcement, who “made it clear that Willie Pye was the person they were after.”

In the early morning hours of November 16, 1993, a local farmer in Griffin went out to check on his livestock when he spotted a body lying on the dirt road. A sheriff’s deputy identified the body as Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, who was just short of her 21st birthday. She had been shot three times, the fatal shot tearing through her abdomen.

The mother of three young children, Yarbrough had struggled with addiction and abusive relationships. Police quickly zeroed in on her ex-boyfriend, 28-year-old Willie Pye, who was known to sell drugs around town. After hearing that police were looking for him, he went to the station to be interviewed the same day, telling investigators that he had not seen Yarbrough for about two weeks.

But this was a lie. As Pye would later admit, he’d seen Yarbrough the night before, at a local motel where he sometimes stayed under an alias. Pye had been hanging out that night with a man named Chester Adams and a teenager named Anthony Freeman. According to Pye, the pair dropped him off at the motel and later returned accompanied by Yarbrough. Although Pye and Yarbrough were no longer together, they still hooked up from time to time. Yarbrough had sex with all three of them that night in exchange for crack cocaine, Pye said. After that, she left with Adams and Freeman. Pye swore he never saw her again.

Adams was questioned on the same day as Pye. He denied his involvement but later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life. But Freeman, who was being held in jail on a separate charge, implicated both men and himself. Although he was 15, he was only in 8th grade and small for his age. “When I saw him, I thought he was about 12 years old,” one sheriff’s investigator later testified. Freeman said that Pye had gone to the house Yarbrough shared with another man, robbed it, and then forced Yarbrough to the motel, where all three of them raped her. Afterward, he said, Pye drove her to a field and shot her. On the basis of Freeman’s account, Pye was indicted for malice murder. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.

Representing Pye was 49-year-old Mostiler, Spalding County’s lone public defender. The chain-smoking, handlebar mustache-wearing son of a Georgia lawmaker, Mostiler “never conformed to the stereotype of the public defender,” as The American Prospect recounted in a lengthy profile published after his death. “Decked out in flashy jewelry and a black cowboy hat, he arrived at the Spalding Courthouse in a mustard green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado convertible.”

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes.”

Mostiler had made a lucrative deal with the county to take over the entire indigent defense docket for a flat fee. The goal, he said, was to save money for the county. But for many of Mostiler’s clients, the result was life-ruining. His caseload was preposterous even without the addition of private clients. Spalding County had higher crime rates than many neighboring jurisdictions, and Mostiler was handling up to 900 cases a year. He solved this problem through a steady stream of guilty pleas.

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes,” Mostiler told the Prospect. Many of the pleas came at the last minute, he added, since “defendants don’t get the fear of God in them ’til a trial is coming up.”

Pye refused to make a deal with the state. “I’m guilty of … not turning in what I know that night about Adams and Freeman bringing Alicia Yarbrough to my motel room,” he insisted on the stand. “But I never considered making no kind of deal because I did not commit no murder.”

Prosecuting the case was McBroom, Griffin’s judicial circuit district attorney, who had a reputation for aggressively seeking death sentences. In his first five years in office, McBroom sent five people to death row, including three of Mostiler’s clients. In his opening statement, McBroom laid out the evidence, along with Pye’s motive: He harbored a grudge against Yarbrough and her live-in boyfriend, Charles Puckett, because Yarbrough had recently given birth to a baby and Puckett signed the birth certificate. “Pye thinks it’s his child, and he’s mad about it,” McBroom said. Pye decided to rob the two, then raped and killed Yarbrough in a brutal act of vengeance.

The evidence against Pye was considerable. There was DNA from sperm matching Pye, along with witnesses who saw him with a distinctive .22 caliber gun that allegedly matched the bullets used to kill Yarbrough. But the case turned on the testimony of Freeman, the only one who claimed to have witnessed the murder. In convoluted testimony, he said that he, Pye, and Chester abducted Yarbrough from her home, gang raped her at the motel, drove around, and then returned to rape her again. Later, they drove Yarbrough to a cow pasture. “All of us got out. He told her to lay flat on the ground, face down, and he shot her.”

Pye was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die.

Pye arrived on death row as executions were peaking across the country. During his first decade at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, the state killed 19 of his neighbors. Although executions have declined ever since, in the nearly 30 years Pye has spent on death row, 56 people have been put to death.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that might have allowed Pye to get off death row. In Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a series of mental health evaluations, Pye’s post-conviction attorneys found that he had an IQ score of 68. But efforts to challenge his conviction on that basis were denied.

Post-conviction attorneys found that Pye had an IQ score of 68.

The question of Pye’s intellectual abilities was one of many things that Mostiler should have investigated before trial. But there was no record of a mental health evaluation or efforts to obtain Pye’s educational records.

The more Pye’s post-conviction attorneys learned about Mostiler’s work, the more disturbing it became. Despite his client’s insistence that he did not shoot Yarbrough, Mostiler did not appear to have investigated an alternate theory of the crime. The lawyers uncovered additional statements given by Freeman between his initial arrest in 1993 and Pye’s 1996 trial, which were never turned over to the defense. In one, given during a mental health evaluation, Freeman told a psychiatrist that he and Adams had picked up Yarbrough on the night in question, and she had gone with them willingly, later doing cocaine and having sex with them and Pye. The account echoed what Pye said at trial.

The lawyers also spoke to a friend and neighbor of Yarbrough’s, who said that on the night she was killed, Yarbrough came over to use the phone. “Lynn made some calls to a hotel and asked for Willie’s room,” the friend said. She assumed Yarbrough was asking to be picked up so that she could go get drugs.

Pye’s lawyers also collected dozens of affidavits from Pye’s relatives, neighbors, social workers, and others who filled in the harrowing details of his family history, which was marked by generational trauma, extreme poverty, and violence. Pye’s mother, Lolla Mae, was raised by her grandparents, who lived on a white man’s farm where her grandfather worked the land “in exchange for some of the food and a place for the family to stay.” By the time she was 8 years old, she picked peanuts and cotton alongside her siblings.

Pye’s father, who spent years working on a chain gang, was incarcerated when Pye was born. According to affidavits given to Pye’s attorneys, he drank heavily and beat his wife and kids. In one affidavit, a neighbor recalled seeing family fights spill outside. “You would see the boys attacking their father on the porch to get him away from their mother. … As the older boys grew up, they too began to drink heavily and that made the situation in the house more explosive.”

Uncovering evidence of family trauma is a critical component of any modern death penalty trial. Capital defense teams often include a mitigation specialist, who is tasked with investigating a client’s family history, particularly any evidence of abuse or neglect. But in the mid-1990s, most death penalty jurisdictions had not meaningfully incorporated such work into capital defense. In Spalding County, Mostiler handled death penalty cases without so much as a second attorney, let alone a mitigation specialist.

Billing records reviewed by Pye’s post-conviction attorneys showed a shocking lack of attention to the case. With the trial just weeks away, Mostiler had not yet pursued “a single lead provided by Mr. Pye,” the attorneys wrote in a petition challenging Pye’s conviction. “And it was not until five days before the scheduled start of jury selection that [Mostiler] began to identify mitigation witnesses.”

Pye’s case was described as “a shocking relic of the past.”

This work mostly fell to Mostiler’s investigator, a former cop named Dewey Yarbrough (no relation to Alicia). According to one of Pye’s sisters, Yarbrough asked her to think of good character witnesses for him. “It was short notice, but I tried,” she told Pye’s attorneys. In a deposition, Yarbrough estimated that he met with “maybe four” of Pye’s family members and “even tried to make arrangements” for them to attend the trial. But he did not find them particularly helpful. “I can remember thinking, and I want to say this was during, right before the sentencing phase, you know, I don’t care about going back over there and trying to get them here.”

Justice Judith Pryor, part of the original three-judge panel that vacated Pye’s death sentence, rejected Yarbrough’s characterization in a lengthy dissent to the 11th Circuit’s reversal. “The record unmistakably demonstrates that any failure to marshal family support … was due not to the family’s unwillingness to cooperate but rather to Mr. Yarbrough’s lack of care,” she wrote.

Yarbrough did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

McBroom vociferously denied withholding evidence from Pye’s defense, including the shifting statements from Freeman. “That’s a bunch of baloney,” he said. Besides, he added, the issue had been litigated and the courts upheld Pye’s conviction anyway. He rejected the notion that Freeman’s testimony had been coerced and defended his selection of a nearly all-white jury, pointing out that the victim was Black. “Race is not an issue in this case.”

As for Pye’s upbringing and concerns over insufficient mitigation, McBroom was unmoved. “The family was just a crime family,” he said. He knew plenty of people who grew up impoverished and abused and did not go on to commit murder. Finally, he dismissed the notion that Pye’s IQ should have precluded him from getting the death penalty. “The only intellectual disability he has is a condition called MAH — Mean as Hell.”

Barring any last-minute intervention, Pye, now 59, will die at 7 p.m. tonight.

Judge Timothy Batten denied Pye’s appeal a few hours after the hearing in Newnan. “While one might characterize Pye’s plight as unfair in relation to the few death row inmates covered by the agreement, it does not shock the conscience,” he wrote. Potek appealed to the 11th Circuit, which declined to grant a stay of execution.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles held a clemency hearing for Pye. The board members have the sole authority to grant clemency — the governor cannot act alone. In a press release, the board rejected Pye’s appeal for mercy.

Clemency proceedings are closed to the public, but the Department of Corrections released the clemency application prepared by Pye’s attorneys. It called Pye’s case “a shocking relic of the past” and included letters from three jurors who sent him to death row but now oppose his execution. “Many of the jurors felt his attorney Johnny Mostiler did an inadequate job of defending him at trial,” one woman wrote. “It was a serious case but Mostiler could not have cared less.”

Another woman, who was the only Black member of the jury, said she wished jurors had heard about Pye’s background and cognitive impairments. “Mental health is so critical to why people behave the way they do,” she wrote. “How someone is raised matters.”

Through Cathy Harmon-Christian, the anti-death penalty activist, Pye’s relatives declined to be interviewed. According to the clemency petition, “Mr. Pye and his family were relieved and overjoyed” when the 11th Circuit briefly vacated his death sentence. Those who remain in touch with Pye described his positive impact on their lives and those of his neighbors on death row.

“I’ve spent 30 years or so in the prison visitation room with Uncle Will,” one niece wrote. “I’ve seen the way other inmates greet him with a smile, constantly introduce their visitors to him, and share with me how Uncle Will keeps them laughing and has been a source of hope and inspiration.”

“A child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Family members on the other side of the case feel differently about Pye. In a phone call, Alicia Yarbrough’s oldest daughter, Tawanna Bell, described how her mother’s murder impacted her and her siblings: “She got took away before she got a chance to even be a mom. Before she even got a chance to make memories with me.” Bell was just 5 years old and living with her grandmother when Yarbrough was killed. But it was her mom who did her hair and got her ready for her first day of school that fall. “She had me looking like a doll,” she said.

The murder devastated Yarbrough’s mother. Gernetta Starks, Bell’s cousin, said the crime “ate away” at her for the rest of her life. “When the police came to inform her that her daughter was murdered — the way she was murdered — the whole family had to console her,” she said. Now Pye’s looming execution was opening old wounds. For Bell, seeing the case back in the news has revealed horrific details of her mother’s murder that she’d never heard before. “I feel like they didn’t explain a lot of stuff to the kids because they wanted to protect them,” Starks said. “But a child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Although they support Pye’s execution, both women said his death sentence has done little to ease the trauma the family has lived with for 30 years. A few years ago, Starks launched an advocacy organization inspired by Yarbrough called When She Survives, which seeks to help victims of domestic violence and provide the kind of support they never received. Bell plans to witness the execution alongside her siblings. But she does not expect it to heal her pain.

“We are a forgiving family. But how do you forgive somebody that simply didn’t have any regard for your family member?”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

The backlash against even the mildest-mannered protests for Gaza at the Oscars was predictable. Artists, musicians, and actors who wore a pin symbolizing a call for a ceasefire in Israel–Palestine are being called antisemitic.

“The Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer, however, went further in his Oscars acceptance speech: He actually said something. After winning the Academy Award for best international film, Glazer objected that his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust were “being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

The largest offense here, if the backlash is to be believed, was that Glazer dared speak of context — of the Israeli occupation. He was so bold as to suggest that history did not begin on October 7.

As a letter signed by more than 900 people, described as Hollywood “creatives and professionals,” and published Monday made clear: The very word “occupation” was off limits.

“The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history,” the letter said, never mind that the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, has been recognized as such by the United Nations since 1967.

But the letter went on to say that “occupation” did more than just distort history, it invoked history’s worst antisemitic tropes: “It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.”

The indisputable fact of Israeli occupation on Palestinian land is now apparently a “blood libel”: a millennia-old antisemitic canard, which rose to prominence in the Middle Ages, that Jews murder Christians to use their blood for cultish rituals.

To be against virtually any policy that Israel can claim to justify as self-defense would be antisemitic.

By the letter’s logic, it would therefore be “blood libel” to oppose virtually any Israeli policy, from permanent control of all Palestinians “from the river to the sea” — which is what Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants — to what human rights groups have recognized as an apartheid system. To be against virtually any policy that Israel can claim to justify as self-defense would be antisemitic.

If that were not enough, the letter is extraordinary in the sheer extent of its denialism. “Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas,” the authors wrote. Unmentioned, however, is that Israeli forces have killed over 31,000 people, including 13,000 children, decimated every form of civilian infrastructure, brought Gaza to the brink of mass starvation, and displaced over 1.7 million people — to say nothing of the credible reports of journalists and academics being individually targeted.

Of course, these people are Palestinians: a word that the Hollywood letter doesn’t explicitly bar, but that nonetheless goes unmentioned.

The most well-known among the “creatives” are horror film director Eli Roth and actors Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport, who have been outspoken in their support of Israel’s war on Gaza.

More notable are the list of executives and producers who have added their names — unknown to most of us industry outsiders. They included Spyglass Media Group head and former MGM CEO Gary Barber, former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, producer and major television executive Gail Berman, as well as former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America Hawk Koch.

Many on the list are screenwriters and showrunners. The agents, producers, and executives denouncing Glazer, however, are engaging in no less than a bullying campaign, leveraging their Jewishness specifically against his, in their numbers, to make baseless and extreme claims.

The Jewish writer Sarah Schulman, commenting on the letter signatories, said that the backlash betrays a “strange childishness — an inability to imagine that they could be part of anything wrong. A total inability to be self-critical.” 

It is the Zionist equivalent of what the late Jamaican-British philosopher Charles Mills called “white ignorance” — by which he did not mean things people with white skin do not know. Rather, it is “​​a cognitive tendency” that functions as an epistemic block, resistant to facts that challenge white supremacy and expose its violence. It leaves the person “aprioristically intent on denying what is before them” — no matter how unassailable the thing is. Mills stressed that “what makes such denial possible, of course, is the management of memory.”

Glazer’s film — about how the family of SS officer and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss built a domestic idyll at the gates of the concentration camp — depicted this sort of entrenched, ideological, and willful ignorance. The knee-jerk backlash to Glazer’s speech exposes it once again.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Wadea al-Fayoume was an adorable 6-year-old Muslim boy — killed by his landlord in his suburban Chicago home on October 14, with 26 stab wounds. Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad are three college students — shot over Thanksgiving weekend in Vermont last year; Hisham is paralyzed from the chest down. Zacharia Doar, a 23-year-old Muslim father living in Texas, was stabbed in Austin on February 8 after a protest.

Politicians, especially prominent liberals, have responded to these and other violent attacks with somber statements condemning Islamophobia. To mark the start of Ramadan, President Joe Biden reminded Americans that “Islamophobia has absolutely no place in the United States.” A few weeks after al-Fayoume’s brutal killing, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris announced “the First-Ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia.” At the local level, New York City Public Schools Chancellor David Banks established an “Interfaith Advisory Council,” and several other public and private schools have established Muslim affinity groups.

On the surface, these appear to be substantive, positive moves taken by officials who appear genuinely concerned about a rise in anti-Muslim violence since October 7.

Yet Wadea al-Fayoume wasn’t killed just because he was Muslim. Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen weren’t shot because they’re Muslim. And Zacharia wasn’t stabbed just because he’s Muslim. They were all targeted for being Palestinian.

The responses to this wave of violence haven’t emphasized that fact. It’s politically safer to speak generically about “countering Islamophobia” than to confront the phenomenon that has gripped America even tighter since October 2023: anti-Palestinianism.

Obscuring the victims’ Palestinian identity allows liberal politicians to profess decency and nod to identity politics. Biden, for instance, dispatched his administration’s top-ranking Muslim, Dilawar Syed, to al-Fayoume’s memorial service. Dilawar is not of Palestinian heritage, or even Arab. And he is the deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration; the killing of the small child has no connection to the administration of small businesses.

The willingness to let anti-Palestinianism go unmentioned is on more stark display in situations that don’t generate as many headlines as a slain child. The same liberal officials who paid homage to al-Fayoume often choose silence when Palestinians or supporters of Palestinian freedom are targeted with harassment and retaliation for their activism.

The sleight of hand that would elevate the fight to eliminate anti-Muslim bias, but not anti-Palestinian animus, can be seen in some of the groups that stand up to Islamophobia. Even groups with a track record of opposition to pro-Palestinian activism are willing to jump on the anti-Islamophobia bandwagon. The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, is no friend of Palestinian freedom, yet it responded to al-Fayoume’s death much like Biden: by condemning Islamophobia while ignoring his identity as a Palestinian child.

By focusing instead on Islamophobia, liberal American politicians believe they can maintain the balancing act of supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza while appearing to care for their domestic constituencies. If these liberals were to confront anti-Palestinianism head on, it would put them on a collision course with America’s powerful anti-Palestinian faction, a long existing force in American life that was kicked into overdrive after October 7.

It is exactly the pressures brought to bear by these pro-Israel forces that would shunt the mere words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” to oblivion — let alone the notion of Palestinian people. A well-meaning liberal can attract controversy by, say, just mentioning “Gaza” or “the occupation” in an Oscar speech without so much as uttering the word “Palestine.”

That Palestinians shouldn’t, can’t, or don’t exist is a common refrain of pro-Israel figures. The Zionist motto of “a land without a people for a people without a land” has been around for more than a century and a half. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared in 1969, “There were no such thing as Palestinians.” The mantra gets repeated everywhere from the Israeli halls of power to contemporary American campus disputes. Ignoring anti-Palestinianism cannot be separated from this campaign of total erasure.

Avoiding anti-Palestinianism is not just incorrect; it also has damaging side effects. The lack of acknowledgment casts the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a battle between Jews and Muslims. It is ahistorical, reductive, and foolish to view the troubling recent instances of anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S. through this lens. And even the most well-intentioned liberals can fall prey to it. While not the fault of his guests, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” episode on Israel–Palestine didn’t feature any Palestinians: only an American Muslim and an American Jew.

This dangerous sectarian narrative also negates Palestinian Christians. An influential minority roughly divided between orthodoxy and Catholicism, Palestinian Christians are just as passionate about their liberation as Palestinian Muslims. As are non-Palestinian Americans — including Arab Americans of other national origins, African Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, non-Muslim LGBTQ+ folks, and countless others — who have stood shoulder to shoulder with their Palestinian compatriots. (In an example of how the conflation of Palestinians and Islam gets tricky, the three college students shot in Vermont have not been identified by their religion in media reports.)

Many of these people have also suffered personal and professional consequences that would not attract the support of officials who are “confronting Islamophobia.” Viewing the consequences meted out to this diverse coalition shines a light on the unifying factor: not that they took Islamic positions, but rather pro-Palestine stances.

Islamophobia, of course, is very real. It existed before the attacks of September 11, 2001, and intensified afterward. It’s a global force so strong that, marking the fifth anniversary of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings, the U.N. General Assembly voted two years ago to recognize March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. In the U.S., anti-Muslim bigotry has consistently boiled beneath the surface, with incidents spiking periodically following incitement related to various, sometimes contrived, current events, from the campaign against the “Ground Zero Mosque” to Donald Trump’s ascension to power.

Israeli bombs don’t distinguish between Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

There is often overlap between anti-Palestinianism and Islamophobia. When former Obama administration official Stuart Seldowitz repeatedly harassed an Egyptian food cart vendor in New York, his bigotry cut across both.

Liberals should by all means combat Islamophobia and be commended for it when appropriate. (Today’s MAGA-era conservatism is at its core so anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian that an appeal to them would be foolish.) The liberal body politic, though, should recognize that Israeli bombs don’t distinguish between Palestinian Muslims and Christians. The occupation and its hateful vigilantes done care whether they are subjugating believers or nonbelievers. And here at home, the enforcers of pro-Israel norms rail against Palestinians and non-Palestinians, Jews and Christians, Muslims and atheists; so long as they fight for Palestinian rights, they are targets.

This is why liberals must recognize anti-Palestinianism for what it is. If they are legitimately concerned, they should combat it however they can. One place to start would be by opposing Israel’s war on Gaza.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Hani Sabra.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Shawn Musgrave.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Shawn Musgrave.

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., gave a speech that provoked anger from right-wing supporters of Israel, many who described it as a regime-change effort targeting Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The roughly 40-minute speech, delivered by Schumer on the floor of the Senate, attacked Hamas as well as critics of Israel, while vowing that the U.S. would defend and support Israel through any crises it faced. But Schumer also took direct aim at Netanyahu, describing his government as “an obstacle to peace” and saying that his coalition government “no longer fits the needs of Israel.”

Schumer went further in his remarks, calling for elections in Israel to bring a new government to power and saying that Netanyahu had “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Despite its otherwise pro-Israel tone, Schumer’s speech predictably triggered outrage among staunch pro-Israel Republicans, including many neoconservatives. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams, of Iran–Contra fame, hysterically accused Schumer of attempting to turn Israel into an “American colony” by intervening in its politics. “It’s a shameful and unprecedented way to treat an ally,” he wrote, “and an “unconscionable interference in the internal politics of another democracy.” His views were echoed by Israeli officials like former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who took to social media to denounce his comments as “external political intervention” in Israeli affairs.

These arguments could perhaps be respected were it not for the massive, regular, and institutionalized intervention in U.S. political life carried about by the Israeli government and its supporters, which has successfully turned the affairs of a small country on the eastern Mediterranean into one of the most important domestic political issues in America. Netanyahu himself has shown no embarrassment about his own intervention in American politics, delivering rapturous speeches lobbying the U.S. Congress to legislate in favor of Israel and essentially endorsing his favored political candidates for office during U.S. elections.

American foreign policy is today effectively handcuffed by the lobbying efforts of powerful special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. These organizations are hellbent on ensuring that the U.S. provide Israel unstinting military, economic, and diplomatic support, even as its government rebuffs repeated U.S. requests to allow the creation of a Palestinian state in accordance with international law.

The complaints of people like Abrams and Bennett that the U.S. is intervening in Israeli affairs seem utterly myopic at best, given that extensive U.S. intervention is not just welcomed but also demanded by Israel and its supporters so long as it is in accordance with the security and political needs of the Israeli government.

Now More Than Ever

Schumer’s speech comes at a moment in which Israel has perhaps never been more isolated, or more dependent on U.S. support. The U.S. today has pivoted back to the Middle East against its own wishes, fighting the Houthis on behalf of Israel, providing arms for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, and deterring Hezbollah in Lebanon by parking its aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. When three American military service members were killed in Jordan earlier this year, the assailants were clear that their motive was retaliating against U.S. support of Israel.

The U.S. has used its veto powers at the United Nations to shield Israel from an onslaught of global outrage over the scenes of mass killing and starvation in Gaza. As Israel has faced diplomatic assaults from Brazil, South Africa, China, and across the Muslim world, the U.S. has remained steadfast as its most important and often only defender in international fora.

All this support has come with very little reciprocation from Israel. In the wake of President Joe Biden’s comments expressing rhetorical support for an eventual two-state solution, Netanyahu publicly humiliated his most important patron by publicly vowing that no Palestinian state would ever be created. The right-wing prime minister even bragged about his own historic role in preventing one from coming into existence.

Netanyahu’s steadfast commitment to defying international law and overwhelming global opinion to pursue a project of continued colonization of the West Bank is only made possible thanks to his and his supporters’ tremendously successful campaign at bending U.S. politics in Israel’s favor. No country has been a greater beneficiary of U.S. support, nor has any country given less back for the tremendous black checks that the U.S. has written it for decades, up until the present day.

Schumer’s comments on the Senate floor, despite their opposition to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition government, were resoundingly supportive of Israel and hostile to its enemies. But in calling for a two-state solution to the conflict, he contradicted not just Netanyahu but also a majority of the Israeli public who today oppose such an outcome and prefer the status quo, which requires systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinians that human rights groups have classified as apartheid.

In this light, the Senate majority leader’s comments should not be taken as an effort to engineer a color revolution on the streets of Tel Aviv, but rather a last attempt to prevent Israel from descending to a level of ostracism from which even the U.S. would strain to rescue it. “Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world,” Schumer said.

Israel’s supporters who were incensed by his words would be better off taking them as wise counsel.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

This article was originally published as a newsletter from Ryan Grim. Sign up to get the next one in your inbox.

Once in a while, it’s nice to get a reminder that journalism still matters. The latest one came in the form of a remarkable all-staff email sent by World Bank President Ajay Banga, which was quickly leaked to me. 

If you’ve been following our reporting, you know that over the past year, Neha Wadekar and I unearthed a whistleblower’s shocking claim of a cover-up of a child sex abuse scandal, a who’s who of international do-good financiers, and a for-profit education chain operating mostly in Africa called Bridge International Academies. (Bridge didn’t get back right away to my emails for comment.)

Our subsequent report showed in detail how an investigator working for the World Bank was stymied and retaliated against. (An official with the World Bank said he resisted moves to slow down the investigation and he was bound a confidentiality provision, which allowed the World Bank to obtain information that “was essential for the investigation.”) We got notes from a critical phone call between World Bank officials and company executives showing a plan to “neutralize Adler” — the lead internal investigator who had uncovered the allegations — and slow down the process. “Time matters,” as one person on the call put it. “Need to delay until Series F.” (That’s a name for a financing round.)

Following our reporting, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., sent multiple letters to the World Bank, warning the new president that how he responded to the scandal would be used by Congress as a proxy for his broader seriousness about reforming the bank. “We view the Bridge case as a litmus test for the conversation currently taking place around IFC’s responsibility to remedy social and environmental harm caused by its projects, especially those where IFC is not following its own policies, which we see as an important foundation for any proposal to increase the funds available to the World Bank Group,” the senators wrote, referring to the World Bank’s private financing arm, the International Finance Corporation. (The World Bank declined to comment.)

The Guardian and the New York Times wrote follow-up articles, and earlier this week California Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen similarly slamming the Bank.

Over the past several months, however, Banga was strangely resistant to taking action. At a conference in February, he pushed back on the notion there was a “legal effort to cover it up.”  

“I think there’s a series of things management could have done better,” he said. “And that’s the discussion we’re going to have with the board shortly. So I’m not going to preempt that. I just disagree that there was a legal effort to cover it up — that I will not accept as a question — because I don’t agree with it. If it is proven to be so, I will take all the action that’s necessary, but really conjecturing that is so in a public space, I will refuse to sign up for it. That’s who I am. I’m sorry if you don’t like it.” He added: “I’d be happy to be fired by the way. I can go back to my private sector life.”

Bridge International Academies was backed by the World Bank’s IFC, as well as prominent Silicon Valley and venture capital leaders, including private funds linked to Bill Ackman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Pierre Omidyar (whose foundation was the founding donor of The Intercept, but has since stepped back). 

Banga didn’t start his term as World Bank president until June 2023, long after the scandal and the claimed cover-up began, meaning it was handled — or mishandled — exclusively by bank officials appointed by Donald Trump. Why he went to the mat for those Trump officials remains a mystery.

Regardless, that’s over, with Banga now apologizing, acknowledging “mistakes were made,” and pledging to “do better.” What that better looks like remains a focus of contention. The IFC proposed a remedial plan Thursday, but civil society groups have been quick to condemn it as inadequate. 

Read his full apology below. It’s a classic of the corporate genre. 

Our first exposé.

Our follow-up, which blew the lid off the cover-up. 

Our produced podcast version. 

Banga’s email to staff:

Colleagues, 

Ten years ago, the World Bank Group invested in Bridge International Academies with the ambition of helping children in Kenya gain access to quality education and the opportunities that come as a result. Early on we received reports of child sexual abuse, but protocols were not followed and children were hurt. Put simply, mistakes were made.

On behalf of the World Bank Group, I am sorry for the trauma these children experienced, committed to supporting the survivors, and determined to ensure we do better going forward. 

The change we are pursuing requires action but begins with self-reflection. 

Tomorrow, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman will publish findings that resulted from a years long independent investigation into this tragedy. The report comes with an opportunity to take another step down that road of reform, but it won’t be easy and demands we each take ownership. 

Those findings will be accompanied by a Management Action Plan that our shareholders have approved, under which IFC will develop a remediation program with input from survivors, civil society, and child abuse experts. I encourage everyone to read the report and sincerely consider its conclusions. 

But already we know areas that need to be addressed and preliminary next steps. We should have responded earlier and more aggressively. We should have onboarded learnings across the World Bank Group on how to properly address allegations. And we should have pulled in the other investors at the onset and encouraged them to be partners in the response. 

In the near future, IFC – with child safety experts – will begin having important conversations with survivors in a way that ensures their well-being. Additionally, in order to make certain the CAO investigation is received with the credibility it deserves, we will ask an outside investigator to ensure that this was conducted in a manner that was free from interference. 

This is a difficult moment for our institution, but it must be a moment of introspection. I know each of you care for the World Bank Group – and the people we serve – as deeply as I do. We are all here for a purpose, that purpose must guide us to do better.

Ajay

Update: March 14, 2024, 7:22 p.m. ET
This newsletter has been updated to include comments from a World Bank official.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

In November, Columbia University students staged a protest against Israel’s war on Gaza. There was a “die-in,” an art installation, and a list of demands, among them that the school administration publicly call for a ceasefire and divest from companies implicated in Israel’s violence. The protest concluded with students singing “We Shall Overcome.”

A day later, Columbia suspended two of the student groups who had co-sponsored the demonstration. Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg called it an “unauthorized event” that “proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

Now, those groups have sued the school. On Tuesday, the New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal filed a lawsuit against Columbia University, “for the unlawful suspension of its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for engaging in peaceful protest.” The groups seek reinstatement and a declaration that the school violated state law in carrying out the suspensions.

The suit — brought on behalf of the SJP and JVP chapters, as well as one Palestinian and one Jewish student — notes that the November 9 protest was “sponsored by a coalition comprised of over 20 groups,” and that nevertheless, the “two groups were given no notice of the planned suspensions and no opportunity to respond to the charges or to contest them. None of the other groups involved in the event faced disciplinary action.”

The plaintiffs draw attention to a “Special Committee on Campus Safety,” created in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on October 7, which carried out the suspensions (Rosberg is its chair). They say that the suspended student groups, the university senate, and broader school community only learned of the committee’s existence after it took action. The suit adds “the Petitioner students had previously been warned by their student advisor about a so-called ‘protest-shutting-down committee’ that had been regularly meeting and purportedly waiting for SJP, especially, to make a wrong move.”

The suit notes that Rosberg told SJP and JVP in a November 30 meeting — also attended by other administrators, university senators, and faculty members — that they had not been suspended for a violation of the university code of conduct. According to the students, he did not specify what exactly accounted for the decision, or why it was conducted in such a public manner. “When pressed to specify which of the student groups’ actions constituted ‘threatening rhetoric and intimidation,’ VP Rosberg proffered that protestors’ accusations that Israel was ‘a racist state committing genocide’ and ‘is an apartheid state’ could upset some people and ‘seem … like an incitement of violence,’” the suit reads. (In December, students confronted Rosberg, asking him, “Are Palestinians human?” He responded, “I refuse to be intimidated.”)

“Clearly, Columbia has the capacity to act quickly to enact unilateral policy changes and take extreme actions, but only insofar as they can preserve the interests of their investments in Israel and their donors.”

Columbia declined to comment on the pending litigation. The university still has an open investigation into a January protest on campus where pro-Palestinian students were attacked with chemicals. Students maintained to The Intercept that the university had disregarded their complaints about the attack at the protest. The demonstration had also been labeled “unsanctioned.”

“It was incredibly frustrating to see a ‘Special Committee on Campus Safety’ weaponize the notion of safety to restrict dissent when, in doing so, they in fact compromised the safety of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students,” one of the plaintiffs, Maryam Alwan, told The Intercept. “Clearly, Columbia has the capacity to act quickly to enact unilateral policy changes and take extreme actions, but only insofar as they can preserve the interests of their investments in Israel and their donors — not when it comes to the physical safety of pro-Palestinian students.”

Penn Sued to Block “Witch Hunt”

At the University of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, campus affiliates are also taking their school to court. Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine — made up of professors, staff, and graduate students — filed a legal complaint on Saturday pressing the university to not hand over teaching files, emails, and other documents to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. (Penn did not respond to a request for comment on the complaint.)

The committee is investigating what it claims is “rampant antisemitism” on college campuses, namely Ivy League schools like Penn and Harvard University, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s the same committee — with Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., at the helm — that held hearings in December that led to the resignation of Penn President Elizabeth Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

The Penn faculty group said, “The Committee is engaged in a partisan witch hunt by seeking syllabi, academic papers, and other material from Penn faculty of all ranks, with the search highlighting keywords like Jew, Israel, antisemitism, Palestine, Gaza, resistance, settler colonialism and diversity, equity and inclusion, to name most of their criteria.”

The “would-be McCarthyesque House of Representatives is behaving as if it never heard of the First Amendment,” the complaint continues. The faculty members cited the passage of House Resolution 894 — which equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism — and the fact that the committee is seeking to obtain student information deemed confidential under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Plaintiff Eve Troutt Powell, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Penn, told The Intercept that the university was in a difficult position, being under attack from Congress and donor pressure, but that the school should have stood firm. “We have been doxxed and we have been harassed and the university has promised it would protect us,” she said, “but we now understand that the university has been giving over documents, perhaps in hopes that this congressional committee will not subpoena the university, and we don’t accept it.”

Troutt Powell noted that Penn faculty and students are already feeling pressure after Magill’s resignation and from statements by Marc Rowan, the billionaire CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, who is chair of the board of advisers of the university’s Wharton School of Business.

Rowan has advanced an assault on academic freedom at Penn, all while smearing its students for their views on Israel. He suggested the university eliminate certain departments — including the arts and sciences school — and revise policies surrounding hiring and campus speech. He has derided students as antisemitic for using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” while at the same time calling them ignorant: “If you ask these kids what river and what sea, they don’t know. Who lives between the river and the sea? They don’t know. How did they get there? They don’t know,” he said at the Economic Club of Washington last month.

Rowan is also among the “critical Penn donors” who shelled out tens of thousands of dollars in January to Foxx, the Virginia House member, after her crusade against colleges including Penn began.

“We’re not hearing enough of a response” from the school administration, Troutt Powell said. “I feel like I wouldn’t tell a graduate student to come here if you’re going to work on Middle East stuff. I’m worried about my junior colleagues very much and I’ve never seen a university go from safe to unsafe so quickly.”

A week after Magill’s resignation in December, and in response to comments by Rowan, over 900 school faculty signed a letter railing against “attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.”

The lawsuit takes this a step further, asking a judge to issue an injunction to stop the university from cooperating with the House investigation.

Faculty for Justice in Palestine said, “Penn FJP hopes that this lawsuit will encourage Penn to … protect its faculty from a committee that forced the resignation of former president M. Liz Magill — for the first time in both the House Congressional Committee’s history and that of the university.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

The Jewish Communal Fund is one of the country’s largest donor-advised funds: a type of charity that collects often large donations, then lets the contributor direct the funds to nonprofits. Now, the Jewish Communal Fund has barred its members from directing their own contributions to the organization Jewish Voice for Peace, according to an interview with a Jewish Communal Fund member, backed up by correspondence reviewed by The Intercept.

In December, Jordan Bollag, who uses the Jewish Communal Fund to organize his contributions, began making distributions from his accounts. As had always been the case, they all went through, except for the contribution to JVP, a progressive Jewish American group that criticizes Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Bollag assumed there must be some mistake — the money is effectively his, after all. He contacted the organization and eventually got a call back in January from Rachel Schnoll, the Jewish Communal Fund CEO.

Schnoll explained to Bollag that, in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel and subsequent war on the Gaza Strip, there had been a policy change, and donors were no longer allowed to support JVP. (“I’m not going to comment on our grant-making, thanks,” Schnoll told The Intercept.)

“This is all just because JVP believes that everyone should have equal rights and a right to vote for the state that rules them — that’s it.”

That left Bollag in a jam, as he had already moved his money to the fund — since moving money in bulk to a donor-advised fund is the reason the funds exist in the first place.

“Jewish Communal Fund is blocking one of its Jewish fundholders from donating to Jewish Voice for Peace — how ironic is that?” Bollag told The Intercept. “And this is all just because JVP believes that everyone should have equal rights and a right to vote for the state that rules them — that’s it.”

A donor-advised fund is a philanthropic innovation that provides donors with significant tax advantages relative to their charitable contributions. By giving to a donor-advised fund, someone can immediately write off the entire amount of their donation, even while the money sits in the fund. When the donor has identified an organization they wish to support, the donor directs the fund to transfer the money, much as one would with a bank account.

Donor-advised funds generally serve as a pass-through entity and do not exert control over the funds parked in their accounts, though it is within their legal rights to do so, depending on their charter documents.

According to its tax documents, the Jewish Communal Fund recorded just under $1 billion in revenue in 2022.

In response to a request for comment, JVP said the organization had received other reports that the Jewish Communal Fund was blocking donations.

“Apartheid Communal Fund”

Schnoll told Bollag that JVP ran afoul of at least one of three criteria an organization must meet to be eligible for donations made through the Jewish Communal Fund. If an organization is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist, or engages in illegal activity, it is ineligible, she explained.

JVP rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state — the group opposes Zionism, the ideological foundation of such a Jewish ethno-state — but not as a state in general. The group calls for a single state with universal civil and political rights for all, regardless of religion or ethnicity. (Bollag said that, as far as he knows, the Jewish Communal Fund does not restrict contributions from going to organizations involved with illegal settlements in the West Bank; Schnoll did not respond to a question regarding settlement donations.)

Schnoll told Bollag that if, for instance, he attempted to contribute to the American Nazi Party, such a gift would similarly be barred. She quickly added, Bollag said, that she did not mean to compare JVP and Nazis. Still, she said, the decision was final. The money was stuck.

The Jewish Communal Fund moves a lot of cash. After the March for Israel in Washington last November, Schnoll sent a letter to members — known as Fundholders — noting that more than $50 million had been passed through the group in support of Israel.

Before October 7, Bollag had successfully moved his money from the fund to JVP. He also made other regular contributions that touch on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including to the organization IfNotNow — which, like JVP, is committed to equality, albeit while “grappling” with Zionism rather than explicitly opposing it — and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

The donations to IfNotNow and PCRF went through even after October 7. Only Jewish Voice for Peace was forbidden.

“By shutting down Jews who support equal rights for all, Jewish Communal Fund is transgressing the Jewish values of debate and social justice,” Bollag said. “They should cease calling themselves Jewish Communal Fund and start going by Apartheid Communal Fund. I am currently exploring options to take my money out of JCF into a fund that is either unbiased or aligns with my values. I support a boycott of JCF until they change their policy.” 

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Eli Clifton.

In November 2020, Los Angeles voters moved to radically transform the way the county handled incarceration. That year, Angelenos filled the streets, joining worldwide protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The mood was ripe for change, and a ballot initiative known as Measure J passed with 57 percent support, amending the LA County charter so that jailing people before trial would be treated as a last resort. Ten percent of the county’s general fund would be allocated to community-led alternatives to incarceration that prioritized diversion, job training, and health programs. 

But years later, as Measure J finally, slowly, gets implemented, advocates say that changes meant to divert money from law enforcement might instead just funnel it back to them. 

Case in point: In June, LA County signed over the handling of changes to pretrial detention under Measure J to the consulting firm Accenture, a behemoth in the world of biometric databases and predictive policing. Accenture has led the development of “intelligent public safety” platforms and tech-enabled risk assessment tools for national security and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world, including in Israel and India. An Accenture advisory panel working on the Measure J implementation includes former federal and local law enforcement agents.

Accenture’s role was further publicized Monday after Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit focused on injustice in the legal system, sent a letter to the LA County Board of Supervisors calling on them to immediately cancel the company’s contract. The contract takes the county away from its stated vision for a “care first, jails last” approach and toward carceral policies, CRC wrote in the letter. “Already, Accenture has concluded that electronic monitoring is a ‘favorable alternative’ to incarceration, ignoring the reality that electronic monitoring is expensive, unsupported by social science, and demonstrably racially biased as applied in Los Angeles,” the letter adds. “This is unsurprising: the consultants working on the Contract have deep ties to police departments and prisons.”

Measure J was one of at least 20 local criminal justice reform efforts that passed nationwide in the six months after Floyd’s murder. It was also part of a string of major wins by advocates in Los Angeles, who had been pushing alternatives to incarceration and investment in social services long before 2020. 

Measure J ran into predictable opposition: A group including the union for Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies sued to block the measure and delayed it from going into effect in 2021, but it was put back on track after a judge upheld it on appeal last year. Nationally, despite widespread support, the criminal justice reform wave was met by a well-funded and bipartisan opposition led by police, sheriffs, and conservative Republicans and Democrats who fearmongered about rising crime. In the years since the 2020 uprisings, efforts to reallocate police funding, implement federal and local police reforms, and invest in social services have been undone or derailed. Many of those who cheered the reform movement are frustrated that they haven’t seen the impact of so many policy wins. Accenture’s contract for Measure J shows another reason why. 

Criminal justice reforms are “being cannibalized,” said Matyos Kidane, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an abolitionist community group based in Skid Row. Kidane said the group organizes against reforms because of the way corporations and law enforcement groups exploit and defang such initiatives. He pointed to Axon, which has profited massively from the push to get police equipped with body cameras. 

“It’s a golden opportunity for them,” Kidane said. When Measure J passed, “Accenture was ready to go once this opportunity presented itself.” 

Accenture has not publicly announced the contract with Los Angeles County, which was signed in June 2023 without a competitive bidding process for a total of $8.6 million over two and a half years. The contract exceeded the $200,000 limit in state law and county charter for a sole-source contract, and the board of supervisors created a motion to allow the requirement to be skirted in order to implement Measure J. But that motion allowed for a contract of up to $3 million, far less than the final signing price. The county told The Intercept it had paid $2 million to Accenture so far. (The supervisors who signed the motion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Even if it were entered into legally — which it was not — the Contract is duplicative, wasteful, and harmful to Los Angeles and should be canceled on policy grounds alone,” the Civil Rights Corp letter states. 

In presentations made in August to the Los Angeles Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department, which is administering the contract (published in September by the accountability group Expose Accenture) the firm gave an overview of its project timeline and plans to engage stakeholders in focus groups, interviews, workshops, and site visits. The firm highlighted targets for “quick wins” by October 1, 2023, such as creating a county website and launching marketing and communications for “Justice Involved Individuals” (i.e., people who have been arrested) and summarized top lines of conversations with 50 such people, including the observation that there was wide support for electronic monitoring as an alternative to custody. 

A spokesperson for the county CEO, which controls county budget decisions, directed questions about the CRC letter to JCOD, as did Accenture. Department spokesperson Avi Bernard did not answer specific questions about how the county raised the limit for the contract but told The Intercept that JCOD had used approved county procedures and consulted with county counsel throughout the contract process. Bernard said CRC had previously raised similar concerns. “County Counsel and Board reviewed these concerns and found no issues with continuing the contract,” Bernard said. He added that there had been “no conversations with Accenture” and JCOD related to the use of electronic monitoring. 

Bernard said that so far, Accenture had designed an independent pretrial services agency for the county, incorporated input from stakeholders, and supported a hotline, website, and marketing campaign. Bernard said the firm has now deployed a three-person implementation team to launch the independent pretrial services agency and is helping JCOD develop a case management IT system.

“It’s talking left while running off with the profiteers of mass surveillance and detention.”

The fact that Accenture was even an option for implementing Measure J came as a shock to many of its supporters, who had watched the county meet with community partners interested in helping carry out its implementation. The contract was also news to some county supervisors, according to advocates with knowledge of the contract process.

“It’s worse than talk left, walk right politics,” said Nika Soon-Shiong, founder and executive director at the Fund for Guaranteed Income and a Ph.D. researcher on digital identification systems. “It’s talking left while running off with the profiteers of mass surveillance and detention.”

Accenture has pushed counterterror and policing strategies around the globe: The company built the world’s biggest biometric identification system in India, which has used similar technologies to surveil protesters and conduct crowd control as part of efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to investigate the citizenship of Muslim residents. And in Israel, Accenture acquired the cybersecurity firm Maglan in 2016 and has worked to facilitate collaboration between India and Israel aimed at “fostering inclusive economic growth and maximizing human potential.” 

Accenture ballooned into a giant in federal consulting over the course of the “war on terror,” winning hundreds of millions of dollars in lucrative contracts from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security for projects from a “virtual border” to recruiting and hiring Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. In 2006, Accenture won a $10 million contract for a DHS biometric ID program, the world’s second biggest, to collect and share biometric data on foreign nationals entering or leaving the U.S. The company has also worked with police departments in Seattle and in the United Kingdom. Jimmy Etheredge, Accenture’s former CEO for North America, sits on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation. 

Asked about Accenture’s international work on biometric identification, predictive policing, and national security, Bernard, the JCOD spokesperson, said the firm was involved in many different kinds of work. “Accenture is a large, international consulting firm with many lines of business. The specific consultants assigned to this project are part of a team in Accenture dedicated to the public sector. Their team comes from a variety of backgrounds, primarily in the health and human services industry.” 

But several LA-based advocates told The Intercept that the contract is yet another development that calls into question the county’s commitment to real criminal justice reform. The county has missed all of its deadlines for a plan to close the notoriously inhumane Men’s Central Jail, even as deaths in custody continue apace. In August, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued a Request for Information for a biometric identification system.

“I’m genuinely confused about how we ended up with this Accenture contract, especially as someone who participated in the development of the Care First, Jails Last (ATI) report,” said Danielle Dupuy-Watson, CEO of CRC, referring to an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group commissioned by the county. “We hoped for transparency and accountability but instead we were gaslit.” 

Behind-the-scenes deals like the one with Accenture are one reason that popular reforms haven’t come to fruition, said Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network. 

“There’s the performance of democracy on the front end where a policy gets pressured into place, and on the back end there’s no governance.”

“People vote in that direction, and then it doesn’t happen. And they chalk it up to, ‘Well, politicians ain’t shit,’” Steppling said. People assume, he added, that when policy is passed, bureaucrats work out its implementation. “What we’re learning is there’s the performance of democracy on the front end where a policy gets pressured into place, and on the back end there’s no governance. It just simply gets procured and contracted away to these consulting firms.” 

That the county took a historic progressive reform and contracted it out to a firm that put the community’s plans back into the hands of law enforcement is a perfect expression of the problem, Steppling said. “There’s no democracy there. There’s no transparency there. Nobody even knows it’s happening.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

After decades of avoiding direct involvement in electoral politics, the country’s flagship Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, formed a pair of political action committees in recent years and has been spending millions on political races.