You’re scrolling through your feed. A video clip catches your eye — 15 seconds long, emotionally charged, clearly damning. The caption tells you exactly what you’re seeing. Within seconds, you’ve formed an opinion. Maybe you’ve shared it.

Then the full context emerges. The clip was cropped. The caption was misleading. What looked obvious wasn’t.

By then, it’s too late. The distorted version has already traveled further than the correction ever will.

This happens every day. Not because people are gullible, but because the modern information ecosystem rewards speed over accuracy, outrage over nuance, and engagement over truth. And most of us were never taught how to navigate it.

That’s what our new series, UNSPUN, is for.

What This Series Is — and Isn’t

This isn’t another “don’t trust the media” rant. It’s not here to tell you what to think.

It’s here to show you how narratives are built, how manipulation works, and how to verify claims before believing or sharing them.

UNSPUN is an 8-unit media literacy curriculum that will drop Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays over the next three weeks that teaches you:

1. How framing shapes perception before you evaluate evidence

2. What tactics make weak claims feel strong

3. How to verify information in 60 seconds

4. Why platforms reward certain content and bury others

5. How to resist becoming part of the manipulation chain

6. Why real photos can tell false stories

7. How AI deceives through fluency and realism

8. How algorithms shape what you see and believe

Each unit builds on the last. By the end, you’ll have a working framework for navigating media in 2026.

The 8 Units

1. Unit 1: What Media Manipulation Actually Is
   Manipulation isn’t just lies. It’s framing, omission, sequencing, and emotional preload.

2. Unit 2: How Manipulation Works
   The 12 most common rhetorical tactics and how numbers are weaponized to deceive.

3. Unit 3: How to Verify Information in 60 Seconds
   Master SIFT and lateral reading—the tools professional fact-checkers use.

4. Unit 4: Why Online Truth Keeps Breaking Down
   Understand the incentives behind platforms, influencers, and newsrooms.

5. Unit 5: How to Resist Manipulation
   Critical ignoring, breaking-news discipline, and how not to become part of the manipulation chain.

6. Unit 6: Why a Real Photo Can Still Tell a False Story
   Visual literacy for the screenshot age.

7. Unit 7: AI Can Be Fluent and Wrong
   Navigate deepfakes, AI-generated text, and the “liar’s dividend.”

8. Unit 8: How Algorithms Shape What You Believe
   How search results and recommendation systems filter what you see.

Why Now?

The tools of manipulation have evolved faster than our ability to recognize them. AI generates text that sounds more authoritative than truth. Algorithms surface content based on engagement, not accuracy. Screenshots strip context at scale. And the correction never catches up to the lie.

Media literacy isn’t optional anymore. It’s mandatory in today’s broken media landscape.

UNSPUN won’t make you cynical. It doesn’t say “trust nothing.” It will unpack how to ask better questions, recognize manipulation before it takes hold, and verify before amplifying.

Because once you see how the machinery works, you can’t unsee it.

Join us on WhatsApp!

Subscribe to our Telegram channel!

Follow us on Facebook!

More than 4,000 newly recruited fighters reportedly arrived in Amran province on the morning of Saturday, July 18, according to Yemen Window, an account echoed by Yemen Online. A significant portion were allegedly minors, some reportedly no older than 15.

Most of the recruits reportedly came from Saada, Hajjah, and Amran provinces, arriving aboard military vehicles and civilian transport that overwhelmed recruitment camps, hotels, lodgings, and markets across the region. Preparations were reportedly underway to move large numbers of recruits toward confrontation zones within days.

The Houthis allegedly offered recruits up to 400,000 Yemeni rials to join, while withholding details about their destinations and assignments — reportedly to discourage desertion or refusal to serve. According to reporting, the recruits are bound for Al-Jawf, where the Houthis may be preparing to reinforce their positions or open a new front.

The Houthis’ History of Child Recruitment

The Houthis’ use of child soldiers did not begin with the Amran mobilization. Amnesty International documented in 2017 that the group was recruiting fighters as young as 15, in some cases through religious schools and without parental knowledge. A senior Houthi military official told the Associated Press in 2018 that the group had inducted 18,000 child soldiers into its ranks since the war began in 2014, with boys as young as 10 recruited.

In 2021, the Yemeni child-protection organization SEYAJ estimated that the group operated roughly 6,000 summer camps where children were exposed to ideological instruction and, in some cases, combat training. A UN Panel of Experts report separately found that nearly 2,000 children recruited by the Houthis were killed in combat between January 2020 and May 2021 alone, including in Amran and several other provinces.

The Houthis signed a pledge with the UN in April 2022 to end and prevent child recruitment. Despite that commitment, Human Rights Watch reported in February 2024 that recruitment had increased noticeably after October 7, 2023, as the group used the Gaza war to support a broader mobilization campaign.

Documented Basij Recruitment of Children

Documented recruitment by the Basij, an IRGC paramilitary force, offers relevant historical context for how children have been used in combat roles by groups aligned with Iran. In October 2018, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a financial network tied to the Basij for recruiting, training, and deploying children as combatants.

Treasury reported that the Basij had branches across Iran, provided combat training to children as young as 12, and recruited and trained fighters for possible deployment to Syria from at least early 2015, with Iranian children among those sent to support the Assad government. Treasury separately said the Basij recruited Afghan immigrants, including children as young as 14, for the Fatemiyoun Brigade, and recruited Pakistani nationals for the Zainabiyoun Brigade — both militias operating in Syria under the IRGC-Quds Force.

Treasury officials said the financial infrastructure supporting these practices enabled “the Iranian regime’s violent ambitions across the Middle East.”

Treasury said Iran’s state broadcaster aired footage on November 25, 2017, purporting to show a 13-year-old Basij member in the Syrian city of Abu Kamal. The boy described himself as a “defender of the shrine” — the regime’s standard term for fighters sent to Syria — discussed his motivation for joining, and named two fellow fighters killed in the conflict.

In April 2026, Amnesty International documented a separate, IRGC-led mobilization campaign inside Iran that was reportedly open to children as young as 12. Amnesty said recruiting children under 15 into armed forces, or using them in hostilities, constitutes a war crime; international standards separately prohibit nonstate armed groups from recruiting or using anyone under 18.

Child Recruitment Beyond Yemen

Child recruitment has also been documented or alleged among other Iranian proxy groups, including some Iraqi militias. Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, founded in 2013 by Akram al-Kaabi, and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a 2006 offshoot of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army led by Qais al-Khazali, are both Iraqi Shia militias funded, armed, and trained by Iran’s IRGC-Quds Force and organized under Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. The U.S. designated AAH and the Khazali brothers as terrorists in 2020, and designated Nujaba a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019 before adding it to the Foreign Terrorist Organization list in September 2025.

The U.S. State Department has reported allegations that both groups recruited boys under 18, most commonly out of schools, to fight in Syria and Yemen, and said the Iraqi government did not investigate the claims.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations will host the inaugural “CAIR-Con” on September 12-13 in Washington, D.C. — a rebrand of its long-running Policy Conference and 32nd Annual Gala. In its own promotional materials, CAIR pitches the event as bringing together “influential leaders across government, media, and advocacy” for “high-level conversations shaping the issues that impact the Muslim community.”

The confirmed lineup includes the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, which became the subject of a Senate HELP Committee investigation in March 2025 over alleged Hamas-linked ties and its role in campus demonstrations. It also includes a CodePink co-founder whose organization has received substantial support from Neville Roy Singham, a major funder reportedly under federal grand-jury investigation for possible foreign-agent and tax violations.

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From “Impact Weekend” to “CAIR-Con”

CAIR initially announced the 2026 gathering as “CAIR Impact Weekend 2026” before rebranding it as “CAIR-Con.” The 2026 rebrand introduces a dedicated webpage, tiered sponsorship packages soliciting funds from mosques and corporations, and explicit “movement” branding modeled on major American political conventions. CAIR describes CAIR-Con as an “opportunity to be part of real change” that will “bring together hundreds of advocates, organizers, and allies.”

The rebrand comes amid renewed scrutiny of CAIR and organizations within its broader network. In 2007, federal prosecutors included CAIR on a list of “unindicted co-conspirators and/or joint venturers” filed before the Holy Land Foundation trial, although CAIR was never charged in the case. The following year, the Holy Land Foundation and five of its leaders were convicted in a major federal terrorism-financing prosecution involving the provision of material support to Hamas.

Basim Elkarra: The Sitting School Board Trustee Running CAIR’s Political Arm

CAIR has confirmed Basim Elkarra — Executive Director of CAIR Action, the 501(c)(4) political lobbying arm of CAIR — as a CAIR-Con speaker. As Jewish Onliner previously reported, Elkarra simultaneously holds an elected seat on the Twin Rivers Unified School District Board of Trustees in Sacramento County, California, overseeing roughly 25,000 students across 49 schools; he served as board president during the 2024-2025 school year and his term runs through June 2028.

His tenure in Muslim advocacy has been marked by repeated flags. In 2006, Senator Barbara Boxer withdrew a certificate of accomplishment from Elkarra, citing concerns about CAIR’s alleged ties to Hamas. In 2010, then-congressional candidate Ami Bera returned $250 in campaign donations from Elkarra after questions arose about CAIR’s affiliations.

A December 2025 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Intelligent Advocacy Network alleged that CAIR Action lacked required registrations or legal authority in 22 jurisdictions where the report said it was fundraising or conducting political activity. In November 2025, X’s user-location feature revealed that both the CAIR Action account and Elkarra’s personal account were connected to the platform through the Turkish App Store.

Osama Abu Irshaid: Executive Director of a Senate-Investigated Organization

CAIR has confirmed Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid — Executive Director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) — as a CAIR-Con speaker. AMP is the subject of a Senate HELP Committee investigation into reported Hamas-linked ties and its role in campus activism. Separately, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent Abu Irshaid voluntary document requests concerning AMP’s relationship with National Students for Justice in Palestine and communications related to the October 7 attack, warning that compulsory process could follow if the organization failed to comply.

The Senate committee’s letter cited congressional testimony from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies stating that Abu Irshaid previously edited Al-Zaytounah, the newspaper of the Islamic Association for Palestine, and that his writing appeared on the website of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades in 2014. The letter described IAP as an organization that received startup funding from Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook and provided media, communications and fundraising support to the Holy Land Foundation.

In December 2023, Abu Irshaid denied October 7 atrocities at a protest outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington: “Most of the civilians were killed by their own army... There were no rapes.” He has promoted the antisemitic Khazar conspiracy theory, and has praised Hamas on Facebook for staying true to its “doctrine of liberation.” At a November 2025 gathering in Istanbul, Abu Irshaid described Holocaust museums as “false propaganda” and said Jews held “a monopoly on the victim mentality.”

Linda Sarsour Listed as Speaker

CAIR has listed longtime pro-Palestine activist Linda Sarsour as a speaker at the conference. In 2017, Sarsour said there was “no room for Zionism in the feminist movement.” She left the Women’s March board in 2019 following prolonged controversy over the organization’s handling of antisemitism and its leaders’ response to Louis Farrakhan’s rhetoric. The Coalition for Jewish Values, which says it represents more than 1,000 traditional rabbis, later published an open letter accusing her of antisemitism. In June 2026, Israeli authorities reportedly barred her from entering the country.

Nihad Awad: The Host Who Was “Happy” on October 7

CAIR co-founder and National Executive Director Nihad Awad is another featured speaker for CAIR-Con 2026. Awad attended the 1993 Philadelphia meeting of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Palestine Committee,” which the FBI later identified as coordinating U.S.-based support for Hamas; a recording of the meeting was entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing prosecution, in which CAIR itself was named an unindicted co-conspirator. In 1994, at a Barry University seminar, Awad stated: “I am in support of Hamas.”

In November 2023, he told an American Muslims for Palestine convention that he “was happy to see people breaking the siege” on October 7 — remarks the White House publicly condemned. In April 2024, Awad eulogized Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, whom the U.S. Treasury designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist for recruiting for al-Qaeda training camps and whom the New York Times identified as an early mentor to Osama bin Laden. Three months later, responding to reporting about a separate alleged Iranian plot against Donald Trump, Awad asked on X whether it might instead be “an Israeli plot to ignite another war between the U.S. and other countries in the Middle East.”

Medea Benjamin: Major CodePink Funder Faces Federal Investigation

CAIR has announced CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin as a speaker. On July 16, 2026, CBS News reported that a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York was investigating Neville Roy Singham, a major CodePink funder, for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and potential tax offences. The investigation is examining whether money was unlawfully routed through nonprofits controlled by Singham.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley previously wrote that evidence “suggests that… Code Pink [has] been funded and influenced by Mr. [Neville Roy] Singham and the communist Chinese government.” CodePink has defended China against reports of genocide targeting Uyghur Muslims.

Ryan Grim: The Hamas Interview Outlet

Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim is confirmed as a CAIR-Con speaker. Drop Site has published on-the-record interviews with senior Hamas officials and run articles by Hossam Shabat, whom the IDF identified as a Hamas sniper based on captured documents.

Drop Site’s Gaza contributor Abubaker Abed posted footage of Hamas terrorists entering Israel on the morning of October 7, writing that “glad tidings are spread around Gaza.” Another Drop Site contributor, Mujahed al-Saadi, has also contributed to Palestine Today TV — the media arm of the U.S.-designated Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Cenk Uygur: UK Cancels Travel Authorization

CAIR has announced The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur as a CAIR-Con speaker. In June 2026, the United Kingdom cancelled Uygur’s electronic travel authorization on the grounds that his presence was “not conducive to the public good,” a decision supported by the British Jewish charity Community Security Trust. He is also the uncle of streamer Hasan Piker, whom Rep. Ritchie Torres formally warned Twitch and Amazon executives about for amplifying antisemitism to millions.

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Open-source researchers Salo Aizenberg and Gabriel Epstein have spent recent months mining Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s own martyrdom notices and casualty lists — and identifying Palestinian minors the terror groups themselves have claimed as fighters, including children as young as 12.

Salo Aizenberg, who sits on the board of HonestReporting and has written on Gaza casualty data for NGO Monitor and UN Watch, has documented dozens of such cases in recent months. Among them: Khalil Al-Dhaifi, a 12-year-old whom Hamas’s own casualty list and family photos tie to a fighter, killed in Gaza’s Al-Shati area on September 26, 2025; and Hamza Al-Kurd, initially reported as a child killed by the IDF at a petroleum station in Deir al-Balah on July 12, 2025, whom Aizenberg’s subsequent findings identify as a combatant.

Epstein, a senior policy associate at the Israel Policy Forum, has focused on PIJ’s own serial releases of the names of its dead commanders — releases that have turned up fighters moonlighting as nurses, journalists, and lawyers. Among his findings: Saleh Atef Al-Zamili, listed by PIJ as a 16-year-old member of a rocket unit in its Rafah Brigade, killed alongside his brothers Nael and Muhammad in an October 2023 strike on their family’s home east of Rafah — a strike the independent monitor Airwars still classifies as civilian harm.

Such after-the-fact admissions are not new. Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its military wing publicly commemorated Ahmad Adel Mousa al-Shaer as one of three of the movement’s “mujahideen” killed on May 14, 2018, during the Great March of Return protests along the Gaza border.

UN Reports Document a Pattern

UN Secretary-General reports have tracked a version of this pattern for years. The Secretary-General’s 2020 report, covering 2019, stated that Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades and Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades organized weeklong camps for adults and children as young as 14, exposing participants to military content and activities. A later report covering 2023 documented similar camps involving children.

Separate Secretary-General reports have verified actual recruitment: three 17-year-old boys in 2018, one case attributed to PIJ’s al-Quds Brigades and one to Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, and two boys recruited by the al-Qassam Brigades during 2020.

The nonbinding Paris Principles, a set of UN child-protection guidelines rather than a legal standard, define a “child associated with an armed force or armed group” broadly — anyone under 18 recruited or used in any capacity, not only in direct combat but also as a messenger, porter, or in a support role.

Terror Groups Defend Use of Child Soldiers

At a 2021 press conference launching its “Vanguard of Liberation” camps, a Hamas spokesperson defended the group’s use of children at its military summer camps, saying “the youth have a significant role” and citing international law’s guarantee of self-defense.

A 2021 Palestinian Islamic Jihad recruitment poster advertised its own camps to teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17. FDD’s Long War Journal reported that photographs from the camps appeared to show some younger children participating as well, including in an exercise simulating the abduction of an Israeli soldier — though the younger participants’ ages were not independently verified.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, drawing on material published by Hamas’s own camp organizers, reported that Hamas’s 2018 “Pioneers of the Liberation” camps operated at several al-Qassam Brigades facilities across Gaza. Documented activities included weapons drills, theoretical instruction, and exercises the center described as “tests of courage,” including passing through fire. Photographs showed some apparently young children in uniform bearing the al-Qassam Brigades insignia, though their exact ages were not established.

A Generation at Risk

The systematic exposure of children to military training, radical ideology, and armed-group culture represents what child protection experts describe as a form of exploitation. These children face trauma, loss of educational opportunities, risk of death or injury, and stigmatization. As the UN handbook emphasizes, the consequences can be devastating: “violence places at risk not only their health, but also their ability to learn and grow into adults who can create sound families and communities.”

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An English court has ordered the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) to pay £82,130 toward the legal costs of a British-Israeli IDF reservist, after refusing the organization’s application to bring a private prosecution against him under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870.

The outcome is a significant setback for ICJP’s legal strategy and raises questions about the organization’s institutional conduct, according to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), which supported the soldier’s defense.

Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring ordered the £82,130 payment assessed on an indemnity basis — a heightened standard, above the ordinary rate, reflecting the court’s disapproval of ICJP’s conduct.

The Ruling

ICJP’s application sought to prosecute “Soldier A,” a British-Israeli dual national, arguing that his return to Israel in October 2023 to rejoin his IDF reserve unit after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 amounted to unlawful enlistment in a foreign military. Chief Magistrate Goldspring rejected the application on multiple independent grounds. Central among them: the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 does not reach dual nationals serving in the armed forces of their own second country of nationality — Soldier A was already an IDF reservist fulfilling a pre-existing obligation under Israeli law, not enlisting anew, which the judge found is not “foreign enlistment” in any meaningful sense.

The court also found no evidence that the UK Executive recognized the legal “state of war” the Act requires: the hostilities ICJP pointed to involved Hamas and Hezbollah, which are proscribed terrorist organizations, not foreign states, for the Act’s purposes.

Tayab Ali’s Prior Role With Alleged Hamas-Linked Group

Jewish Onliner previously reported that Companies House records show that ICJP director Mohammad Tayab Ali also previously served as a director of the now-dissolved International Legal Coalition for Palestine (ILCP), incorporated in July 2020 and legally dissolved in March 2021. ICJP and ILCP are separate legal entities: ICJP is registered under company number 13054048 at an address in Harrow; the ILCP was registered under company number 12740649 at a different address in Maidstone, Kent.

In August 2021 (several months after its legal dissolution), Israel’s Defense Ministry designated ILCP a terrorist organization, describing it as an institution established by Hamas and, in practice, “a proxy body for Hamas” intended to expand Hamas’s support and influence internationally.

Breaches of Prosecutorial Duty

Perhaps most damaging to ICJP’s credibility, Chief Magistrate Goldspring found “profound and serious breaches” of the duty of candour that private prosecutors owe to the court. ICJP had failed to disclose the government statements described above, related CPS prosecution guidance, and its own 2022 referral of related allegations to Metropolitan Police counterterrorism officers — a referral whose outcome ICJP did not explain to the court. Despite being aware of the government’s long-standing position, Goldspring found, ICJP never raised it in its application, case summary, or skeleton argument — an omission he called “serious and inexcusable.”

The court also flagged an undisclosed institutional tie between ICJP and its own solicitors: ICJP director Mohammad Tayab Ali is a deputy managing partner at Bindmans LLP, the firm instructed as ICJP’s counsel.

Separately, the judge criticized ICJP’s expert witness, Dr. Mandy Turner, who was found to have participated in an ICJP WhatsApp group despite being presented to the court as independent. Goldspring concluded she was properly considered “a campaigner and activist, not an independent expert,” finding that her report presented unverified material as fact and used language — including the term “IOF” for Israel’s military — that displayed bias. Parts of her evidence, he wrote, were “more akin to propaganda than independent analysis.”

Abuse of Process and Political Motive

Chief Magistrate Goldspring concluded that ICJP’s “dominant motive” was not the pursuit of justice for a specific criminal act but “the advancement of a political and ideological agenda”, using the criminal courts, in his words, as “a platform for political posturing” against UK government policy. He warned that the courts “must not be used as a vehicle for political debate,” adding: “I fear that is close to being the case here.”

The judge found that allowing the proposed prosecution to proceed would have been “truly oppressive,” and separately described the application itself as “vexatious,” noting that ICJP had sought anonymity for itself while simultaneously briefing the press and publishing details of its own application on its website before any judicial determination — a pattern the judge said may have been calculated to allow ICJP to control the narrative and enhance its public profile.

Significance and Pattern of Targeting

In a comment to Jewish Onliner, Daniel Berke, the solicitor acting for Soldier A at 3D Solicitors and director of UKLFI, highlighted the broader implications of the ruling:

“UKLFI were fully prepared for attempts by anti-Israel groups to target IDF soldiers. We had a team ready, with expert knowledge of criminal law, international law and the law of armed conflict, and with expertise in the relevant history and facts. The team was able to swiftly respond to draw the attention of the Court to false and misleading contents of the application by ICJP.”

Berke cautioned that further attempts may follow, emphasizing the ruling’s deterrent effect:

“There may be further attempts to prosecute IDF soldiers, but the ruling will have come as a harsh lesson for those groups who seek to misuse the courts and the criminal justice process for improper purposes. It has exposed the efforts that organisations committed to targeting Israel will go to. This includes presenting false information including in a discredited ‘expert’ report, withholding disclosure and misleading the Court, in order to control the narrative.”

He concluded with a stark assessment of ICJP’s conduct: “The conduct of the ICJP was unscrupulous and it is right that they were ordered to pay the full costs of Soldier A.

UKLFI Calls Ruling a Complete Vindication

UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), which supported Soldier A’s defense, praised his legal team: solicitor Daniel Berke of 3D Solicitors, also a UKLFI director, and barristers Natasha Hausdorff, Legal Director of UKLFI’s charitable trust, and Peter Wright KC. A UKLFI spokesperson called the ruling “a complete vindication” of the position that British-Israeli dual nationals may serve in the IDF without committing any offence, adding that the court “rejected ICJP’s case on every point.”

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Europol’s 2026 assessment identifies anti-Semitism as a cross-ideological narrative among some jihadist, right-wing, and left-wing terrorist and violent extremist actors. It says the conflict following the October 7 Hamas attack was used to mobilize support and reinforce anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western narratives, in some cases contributing to violence against Jewish targets.

The assessment says anti-Semitism served as a “unifying narrative among diverse terrorist and violent extremist actors.” Among left-wing and anarchist actors, anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist sentiment was explicitly expressed in seven of 10 reported responsibility claims.

Jihadist Exploitation of Gaza Conflict

Jihadist organizations have systematically weaponized the Gaza conflict to fuel anti-Semitic radicalization. The Islamic State’s weekly Arabic newsletter al-Naba’ dedicated multiple editions to instrumentalizing the conflict, explicitly calling for targeting of Jewish individuals, communities, and institutions. A December 2025 editorial promoted autonomous attacks by sympathizers, leveraging grievances as a motivating framework for violence.

Europol documented 24 jihadist terrorist attacks across the EU in 2025—approximately half of all incidents—resulting in five fatalities and 81 injuries. Nine attacks were completed, with four in Germany, two in France, and individual incidents in Austria, Ireland, and Spain. The vast majority utilized simple methodologies—stabbing accounted for eight of nine completed attacks—directed at civilians in public spaces.

Among 347 individuals arrested for jihadist terrorism offences in 2025, 108 were 18 or younger, indicating that anti-Semitic narratives are proving particularly effective at radicalizing youth. A 16-year-old arrested in Italy in October 2025 exemplified this trend: investigators discovered he administered a messaging app channel disseminating anti-Semitic content while encouraging violence against Jewish people and foreign nationals.

Left-Wing and Anarchist Anti-Semitism

Europol recorded 12 attacks classified as left-wing or anarchist terrorism in 2025. Eleven were completed, including 10 in Italy and one in Greece, and no casualties were reported because the targets were primarily buildings or vehicles. Anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist sentiment was explicit in seven of 10 reported responsibility claims.

One concrete example: on January 18, 2025, an improvised explosive device damaged a travel agency in Italy. Responsibility was claimed on January 24 through a parcel sent to the company containing a bullet and a letter stating that transporting “goods and weapons” to Israel was “certainly profitable, but extremely dangerous.”

The claim placed opposition to alleged commercial and weapons links with Israel within the attackers’ broader anti-capitalist and anti-Israel rhetoric.

Rapid Youth Radicalization Through Online Platforms

Europol says young radicalized individuals often display only a superficial understanding of established ideologies, making them susceptible to fluid mixtures of unstable, fragmented and ambiguous ideas. Elsewhere, the report identifies anti-Semitism as one narrative capable of crossing ideological boundaries.

Europol says borderline content on mainstream social media can serve as an entry point, with some interested users progressing to networks sharing explicit terrorist and violent-extremist material before moving to more secure and private platforms.

The report says terrorist and violent-extremist propaganda is tailored to particular platforms and audiences, including young users. It cites mash-ups, memes and GIFs, and says user-generated material was sometimes preferred because it was harder to detect and remove. Users also edited branded propaganda to expand its reach.

Iran’s Proxy Networks and Direct Threats

Europol says Iran-aligned groups mainly used the EU for fundraising and logistical support through 2025, but warns that some may increasingly consider attacks against Jewish, Israeli or other targets. It cites suspected Hamas-linked weapons-procurement cases in Austria and Germany as examples of the potential threat.

In early October 2025, Austrian authorities uncovered a weapons cache in Vienna containing several pistols and linked it to alleged Hamas members connected to a weapons-procurement network in Germany. Europol says a 39-year-old with close ties to Hamas leadership was linked to the cache and was suspected of planning attacks.

That same month, on October 1, 2025, German authorities arrested three suspected Hamas foreign operatives who, according to federal prosecutors, had been procuring firearms and ammunition intended for attacks on Israeli or Jewish institutions in Germany.

The European Union formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization on February 19, 2026.

On March 25, 2026, Berlin’s Higher Regional Court sentenced four men for membership in a foreign terrorist organization. The court found that Hamas conducts operational measures in Europe to prepare for possible future attacks on Israeli or Jewish institutions, while noting that no concrete European attack plan had been established. The judgment was not yet final.

Outlook

Europol expects the terrorism and violent-extremism threat to remain highly dynamic. It says international conflicts, hostile rhetoric and online ecosystems will continue to shape radicalization, although the precise form of future threats remains uncertain. The assessment warns that while low-level attacks will persist and potentially increase in frequency, the interaction of strategic factors and identified risk elements points toward possible escalation in attack sophistication and scale.

Jewish Onliner is an independent publication. If you find our work valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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A shareholder in The New York Times Company is pressing the publisher to turn over internal “books and records” for an investigation into whether the company’s board failed to oversee editorial standards after a string of contested news reports and opinion pieces.

The dispute, detailed in a Washington Free Beacon report and the underlying July 14 demand letter, could move to court if the company neither produces the requested records nor commits in writing to a concrete production schedule by July 21.

The demand was made on behalf of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which the demand letter identifies as a beneficial shareholder of the company. According to the letter, the legal effort now includes the National Jewish Advocacy Center, Grant & Eisenhofer, Schall, Brown & Schwartz, and Schoen Law Firm.

Focus on Israel Coverage and Editorial Standards

The shareholder demand asks for board and committee minutes, materials, presentations and reports concerning editorial oversight, along with reports, escalations or communications sent to the board or its committees about specified coverage controversies.

It specifically seeks documents related to several stories that drew public scrutiny, including the Times’s coverage of Israel, the spouses of Democratic politicians, and the Maine Senate race involving Graham Platner. The demand also asks for documents showing what policies exist to ensure that editorial standards are applied uniformly regardless of the political affiliation of a story’s subject, according to the demand.

The demand revisits the Times’s Israel coverage, citing its editors’ note on the 2023 al-Ahli hospital report and a 2024 Bar-Ilan University study that identified 72 errors the authors said the paper acknowledged in its war coverage through June 7, 2024.

It also seeks records tied to a May 21 Times Opinion response defending Nicholas Kristof’s earlier column, which included allegations that Israeli forces used dogs to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, claims the demand says were not independently corroborated.

In that follow-up, Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury said Kristof’s reporting went through a “rigorous vetting process” and that editors found no errors after reviewing criticism. The shareholder letter, however, cites that episode as one of several it says should have triggered board attention to standards oversight, particularly given the sensitivity of Israel-related reporting and the public backlash that followed.

Platner Reporting Moved the Dispute Forward

A major part of the supplemental demand centers on the Times’s June 4 report on Platner, then a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. In that article, the Times said several former partners described “unsettling” behavior and reported that ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield had made claims the paper said it “could not corroborate.” The article described Platner as “charming and charismatic” in some accounts, while also reporting that women described him as demeaning, heavy-drinking, and, in one case, physically threatening.

The supplemental demand points to what followed. In a later Mediaite report, Fifield said she had supplied Times reporters with names of friends, former roommates, screenshots, diary entries, and other material she believed supported her account. A Times spokesperson responded to Mediaite by saying the June 4 article included details that were “on the record and confirmable.”

The issue escalated further after Politico reported on July 6 that another former partner, Jenny Racicot, accused Platner of sexual assault. According to the demand letter, Racicot had spoken with Times reporters before the June 4 piece appeared. The demand argues that the contrast between the Times’s earlier framing and the later Politico report is among the reasons the shareholder is now seeking internal records.

The Times later published a public Q&A explaining how it reported the Platner story. In that piece, deputy politics editor Felice Belman said Times reporters spent weeks interviewing women in Platner’s orbit and sought corroboration beyond the core interviews before deciding what to publish.

A Broader Test of Editorial Oversight

The demand also cites the Times’s March coverage of the spouses of two Democratic politicians with sharply different relationships to Israel. In its March 4 article on Corinne Goldman, the Times reported that some social media activity by the wife of Rep. Daniel Goldman was seen as “insensitive or hateful” toward Palestinians and critics of Israel. In its March 6 article on Rama Duwaji, the paper described posts liked by the wife of Zohran Mamdani as supportive of the Palestinian cause after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks.

Those stories are listed in the shareholder demand as part of the broader request for records concerning how standards are applied in politically charged coverage involving Israel.

The dispute has placed renewed scrutiny on how the Times applies its editorial standards in politically sensitive coverage and what role, if any, its board plays in overseeing the systems designed to enforce them.

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Rapid Response Mechanism Canada has directly linked a viral social media influence operation using AI-generated Lego-style characters to the Iranian state, concluding that the campaign promoted Tehran’s messaging during the March 2026 U.S.-Iran conflict while targeting Western audiences in English.

In its report, “Explosive Media: Iranian state-linked AI Lego-style videos claiming that Tehran has ‘won the propaganda war’”, released on July 10, RRM Canada said the operation criticized U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of the hostilities and at times expanded its focus to include Israel and Gulf Arab states.

The report identifies the campaign’s central vehicle as Explosive Media, a Tehran-based outlet that published short-form AI videos designed for mass sharing across mainstream platforms. Based on open-source analysis, RRM Canada assessed that Explosive Media was likely linked to Saeed Jalili, the supreme leader’s representative on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council

Explosive Media denies being state-run and describes itself as an independent outlet supported by cryptocurrency donations. However, a representative separately told the BBC that the Iranian government was a customer of the group, while denying that its members were government employees.

A Rapid Pivot from Farsi to English

According to RRM Canada’s findings, Explosive Media first established a presence on Telegram and Instagram on June 25, 2025, publishing Farsi-language vertical videos about the so-called “12 Day War.” Those early videos used human hosts, drew limited engagement, and were aimed primarily at domestic or Farsi-speaking audiences.

That changed on March 7, 2026, when the outlet shifted from Farsi commentary to English-language generative AI videos built around Lego-style figures. The change sharply increased engagement, especially among Western users. RRM Canada said the content was soon distributed not only on Telegram and Instagram but also on TikTok, Rumble, Threads, BlueSky, UpScrolled, Spotify, and SoundCloud. Of those platforms, TikTok generated the highest number of views.

The operation’s core message was consistent: Iran had outperformed its adversaries in the information space and had, in the report’s phrasing, “won the propaganda war” in the Persian Gulf.

How Ottawa Traced the network

The most consequential part of the Canadian assessment is its attribution chain. RRM Canada reviewed Explosive Media’s Telegram output and identified a recurring male host, described in the report as “Individual 1,” who appeared in more than 20 Farsi-language videos from the outlet’s early phase. Investigators then found a March 17, 2026, AI Lego-style video on Explosive Media’s Instagram account listing “M. Taha Ansari Mohseri” as a collaborator. Under Meta’s system, RRM Canada noted, that the collaborator tag would have required approval.

Canadian analysts said Mohseri strongly resembles the recurring host featured in Explosive Media’s earlier Farsi videos. The report then links Mohseri to Jalili’s political apparatus, stating that he was part of Saeed Jalili’s social media team during Jalili’s unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign and continued to appear in Jalili’s official Telegram and Instagram presence.

The report also cites posts from Jalili’s “aqaye.president” Instagram account and “aqaye_president” Telegram channel, dated December 2024 and January 2025, which it says directed followers toward Mohseri and Explosive Media.

Scale, Virality, and Platform Spread

RRM Canada estimates that at least 83 million users globally viewed the videos in the first month of the U.S.-Iran conflict in March 2026. Because many videos were later removed for violating platform rules, the report says the true number is likely higher. Its broader estimate is that roughly 200 million users viewed at least one AI Lego-style video in March alone.

The report says Russian and Iranian state-controlled media helped boost the first video on X in the first 12 hours, citing accounts including RT and Iran Radio PS. But it also concludes that those state amplifiers played only a limited role in sustaining the campaign’s reach. Just 4 million views, 4.38 percent of the 83 million total views measured in the report’s first-month window, came from accounts with IP locations in Russia or Iran, suggesting the operation achieved mainstream traction far beyond its initial state-aligned push.

RRM Canada goes further, assessing that the Explosive Media campaign was likely the most widely viewed foreign information operation since the start of 2026, surpassing comparable malign activity linked to Russia or other state actors.

The report also cites estimates from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that Iran’s wider AI-driven media ecosystem that includes Minecraft-style and Pixar-like content may have amassed more than 1 billion views in the conflict’s opening month.

Why the Format Mattered

The Canadian report attributes much of the campaign’s success to format as much as message. It cites analysis from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which said the videos used humor and stylistic familiarity to reach “politically uninvested” users who might otherwise ignore war content.

RRM Canada assessed that many Canadian users under 16 were likely among those who encountered the content between March and June, given its use of youth-oriented intellectual property. The growing number of copycat accounts could make it more difficult to distinguish state-linked content from independent imitation in future campaigns.

RRM Canada’s findings suggest that the campaign was significant not simply because Iranian propaganda adopted generative AI, but because a state-linked network used familiar entertainment aesthetics to place wartime narratives before vast global audiences far beyond its original political base.

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The 16th Anti-Capitalist Summer University, scheduled for August 25-30 at Puerta del Campo farm school near Segovia, will feature two individuals sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury on May 19, 2026 as speakers on a panel titled “Palestine and the Struggle for Liberation Against Zionism.” The event is organized annually by Anticapitalistas, a Spanish revolutionary socialist group affiliated with the Fourth International.

Saif Abukishek and Jaldia Abubakra are listed as panelists for the August 30 speaking event. Both were separately designated by the U.S. Treasury for holding leadership roles in organizations Treasury says are controlled by or act on behalf of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), respectively: Abukishek in PCPA’s General Secretariat, Aueda as Samidoun’s coordinator in Madrid.

Abukishek’s Role in PCPA and Flotilla Operations

According to Treasury’s May 2026 designation, Abukishek “is a central figure in the so-called humanitarian flotilla recently enroute to Gaza, serving as a member of the flotilla’s Steering Committee.” Treasury identified the PCPA as an organization “established with funding from Hamas’s International Relations Bureau” where “Hamas directs its activity through the placement of Hamas officials throughout the organization, including its executive body, the General Secretariat.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has identified Abukishek as a leading PCPA member and alleged that he “serves as a liaison between senior Hamas officials and international actors” and “assists the terrorist organization in facilitating financial transfers.”

PCPA’s Documented Hamas Control

Treasury documents specified that “the PCPA was established with funding from Hamas’s International Relations Bureau and Hamas directs its activity through the placement of Hamas officials throughout the organization, including its executive body, the General Secretariat.” The organization organized the flotilla — identified in independent reporting as the Global Sumud Flotilla — which falls into a category Treasury said represents “a significant compliance risk for financial institutions” when organized by or supporting designated parties.

Abubakra’s Samidoun Leadership

Treasury designated Abubakra “for being [a] leader or official of Samidoun.” Samidoun is characterized by U.S. authorities as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization. Aueda played a “key role in establishing a Samidoun partner organization in 2021,” according to Treasury documents.

Other Scheduled Speakers

The August 30 panel also includes Saida Ghodaieh of the Hispano-Palestinian Association of Jerusalem, Diego Checa of Andalusia Coordination with Palestine, and Héctor Grad, described in event materials as affiliated with Anticapitalistas and the BDS movement.

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A detailed report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism reveals how the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—the group infamous for airline hijackings in the 1970s—has rebuilt a significant support and influence network in the United States, not through spectacular attacks, but through a sophisticated web of prisoner solidarity campaigns, campus activism, and international fundraising that has grown largely unmonitored for over a decade.

The July 2026 report, titled “The Forgotten Threat: The PFLP’s Return with a Proven Playbook“ authored by Lara Burns, Leonel Caraciki, Zeynep Ozharat, Asher Stern, and Samantha Wampold, documents how the PFLP established what the U.S. government now describes as an “external support infrastructure” centered on Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an organization sanctioned by the United States as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, listed as a terrorist entity by Canada, and designated as a terrorist organization by Israel.

A Terrorist Group That Went Unnoticed

Despite being designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 1997 and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2001, the PFLP largely faded from American counter-terrorism focus after 9/11. As the authors detail in their research, law enforcement and intelligence agencies prioritized Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, leaving the PFLP’s propaganda and support infrastructure to operate “with impunity” on U.S. soil by the mid-2010s.

That changed in October 2024 when the U.S. Department of Treasury and Canada jointly designated Samidoun as a “sham charity” serving as an international fundraiser for the PFLP. The same action targeted Khaled Barakat, a Canadian citizen identified as part of the PFLP’s leadership abroad, for his role in fundraising and recruitment.

The GWU researchers trace how this blind spot occurred: “After the 2008 conviction of the Holy Land Foundation and its officers for material support to Hamas, the U.S. government largely looked away from Palestinian terror organizations and their propaganda apparatuses. But by the mid-2010s, those propaganda apparatuses were operating on U.S. soil with impunity.”

The Samidoun Network: Prisoner Solidarity as Cover

The report demonstrates that Samidoun’s public identity as a prisoner solidarity organization masks its operational function as a PFLP fundraising and recruitment platform. Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing made this assessment explicit in February 2021, stating that Samidoun’s formal prisoner-support work operated “in practice as a PFLP front abroad” and supported “the PFLP’s propaganda, fundraising, and recruitment activity.”

U.S. enforcement actions have continued tracking this network since the initial October 2024 designations. In June 2025, Treasury designated Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a West Bank-based organization, for being “owned, controlled, directed by, or acting for or on behalf of the PFLP.” The designation record noted that Barakat coordinated with the PFLP to send funds to Addameer and arrange meetings between Addameer and Samidoun.

In May 2026, the same pattern appeared again when Treasury designated Mohammed Khatib and Jaldia Abubakra Aueda as leaders of Samidoun’s European operations, further demonstrating the organization’s transnational structure.

Icons as Organizing Tools

The authors document a sophisticated strategy: Samidoun and allied activist organizations repackaged historical PFLP figures—Leila Khaled, Ghassan Kanafani, Ahmad Sa’adat, and Rasmea Odeh—as symbols of resistance, women’s liberation, and political imprisonment within U.S. activist spaces.

Rasmea Odeh exemplifies this approach. According to U.S. prosecutors, Odeh was convicted in Israel for participating in PFLP bombings in Jerusalem in 1969, including the Supersol supermarket bombing that killed two people, and the bombing of the British Consulate. She served over 10 years in Israeli prison before being released in a prisoner exchange. After entering the United States without disclosing her terrorism convictions, she became active in Chicago’s Palestinian community and was eventually deported after admitting in court that she had falsely denied her Israeli convictions on immigration forms.

Despite this documented history, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) promoted Odeh as a movement elder, “living legend,” and “community icon.” Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) invited her to speak at its 2017 national membership meeting, while Northwestern University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hosted her during Israeli Apartheid Week. Samidoun and PYM circulated statements supporting her, and USPCN featured her in a 2020 Nakba Day webinar.

“The repackaging happened inside ordinary U.S. activist settings: conferences, campus events, legal-defense campaigns, webinars, and community organizations,” the authors write.

Similarly, Leila Khaled—who participated in the 1969 hijacking of TWA Flight 840 and the attempted hijacking of El Al Flight 219 in 1970—was rebranded in 2020 by Jewish Voice for Peace as a “Palestinian resistance icon.” And Ghassan Kanafani, a PFLP spokesman killed in 1972, was presented through a Resistance Arts Scholarship run by the Palestinian Youth Movement without foregrounding his PFLP affiliation.

The Alliance Structure: Campus to Community

The report maps a recurring pattern of collaboration among U.S. organizations: the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Within Our Lifetime (WOL), and others appearing repeatedly in prisoner campaigns, campus activism, protest coalitions, and fundraising efforts alongside the designated Samidoun network.

These relationships are not necessarily formal alliances, the authors explain, but rather coordinated activity centered on “anti-Western themes, conferences, prisoner support, protest campaigns, campus activism, fiscal sponsors, calls for ‘resistance,’ and donation platforms.”

PYM appears particularly central. The Palestinian Youth Movement, which describes itself as a grassroots organization of young Palestinians in exile, co-sponsored at least 450 anti-Israel rallies since October 7, 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The organization has co-hosted prisoner release campaigns with Samidoun, and supplied students with “political, strategic, and logistical support.”

USPCN, founded in 2006, similarly bridges community and campus organizing. Its Student Committee, created in 2010 after the Second U.S. Palestinian Popular Conference in Chicago, was explicitly designed to function as a liaison between USPCN’s coordinating committee and the SJP student movement across the United States. In 2011, USPCN encouraged its members to attend American Muslims for Palestine’s national conference, placing the organizations in the same ecosystem.

After October 7, 2023, USPCN’s messaging escalated. Its statement described the Hamas-led attack—which killed over 1,200 people and involved mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking—as “self-defense operations” by the “unified Palestinian Resistance.” USPCN’s national chair, Hatem Abudayyeh, cast the attacks as a legitimate response to Israeli violence. By April 2024, USPCN stated it “unequivocally supports” SJP and other student groups building campus encampments.

“Resistance 101” and Legitimizing Violence

A March 2024 Columbia University event crystallized how these networks operationalize PFLP ideology. Khaled Barakat and his wife Charlotte Kates, Samidoun’s international coordinator, held an online conference titled “Resistance 101” where the October 7 attack was explicitly lauded as resistance and attendees were encouraged to serve “the resistance movements.”

Barakat praised “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP” and referenced the PFLP’s hijackings approvingly. WOL founder Nirdeen Kiswani spoke about destroying the country of Israel. Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine promoted the event.

Kates, for her work in this arena, received the Islamic Human Rights and Human Dignity Award from the Iranian regime, reportedly attending the official ceremony in Iran—a nation that has long-term alliances with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP.

Donation Infrastructure and Fiscal Sponsorship

The authors document how these organizations obscure their financing through fiscal sponsorship arrangements. Samidoun lacks its own 501(c)(3) status and was described by the House Ways and Means Committee in 2024 as a fiscally sponsored project of Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ). Canada’s corporate records list Samidoun’s Canadian not-for-profit corporation as dissolved for non-compliance as of March 27, 2026.

Following its designation, Samidoun’s donation page now accepts cryptocurrency, listing Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, and Monero options after U.S. sanctions restricted its access to international banking systems and payment processors.

PYM routes donations through GoodBricks and previously through WESPAC Foundation and Honor the Earth. The researchers note that Nadya Tannous sits on PYM’s national executive board while serving as deputy director of Honor the Earth, and that PYM lead organizer Lenna Zahran Nasr sits on Honor the Earth’s board of directors. USPCN accepts donations only through Zeffy via a fiscal sponsor called “IT IS APARTHEID INC.”

International Enforcement Context

Beyond U.S. action, the authors document parallel enforcement in Europe. Germany banned both Hamas and Samidoun in November 2023, with the German Interior Ministry stating that Samidoun “operated internationally under the cover of prisoner solidarity while spreading anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda.”

France dissolved Collectif Palestine Vaincra, a French pro-Palestinian group that Samidoun itself identified as a network member, in March 2022. In February 2025, France’s Conseil d’État upheld the dissolution, finding that the group’s social media activity generated “especially aggressive and hateful comments targeting Jewish Israeli citizens, including comments that were explicitly antisemitic,” and that the group had not sufficiently moderated them.

The Armed Connection

The report also documents how the ideological alliance between Islamist and Marxist Palestinian factions extends to the military sphere. An October 2025 federal complaint describes the Joint Operations Room, a Gaza-based coordination mechanism established by Hamas around 2018 to unite Hamas, PFLP, DFLP, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The complaint against Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi, a Gaza native arrested in Louisiana for alleged involvement in the October 7 attack, cited a June 2023 interview describing how these groups coordinated “communications, operational and intelligence assessments, logistical support, armaments, and annual joint training exercises.”

While the authors do not allege that U.S. organizations are directed by this command structure, they note the significance: “What has manifested in the U.S. is a support network where Islamist-aligned, secular-left, student, prisoner-solidarity, and community actors appear in the same campaigns driving the same pro-terror, anti-imperialist, anti-Western narratives.”

Adaptation Not Decline

The GWU researchers conclude that the PFLP represents not a relic of the 1970s but a group that has successfully adapted its operational model. Rather than pursuing spectacular attacks, the PFLP shifted emphasis “from spectacular terrorist attacks to influence operations built around propaganda, prisoner campaigns, activist alliances, and transnational support networks.”

They note that recent U.S., Canadian, and European enforcement actions “suggest governments are increasingly recognizing these networks as part of the broader infrastructure that sustains and legitimizes designated terrorist organizations.”

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More than 70 million Christians across 175 countries are expected to unite on October 4, 2026, for the 24th Annual Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem, according to organizers. The global initiative, organized by the Christian ministry Eagles’ Wings, will connect churches and believers around the world with a central gathering broadcast live from Jerusalem’s Tower of David Museum. More than 500 senior Christian leaders from 50 countries are expected to attend in person, creating what organizers describe as the largest annual Christian prayer gathering for Israel in history.

A Worldwide Movement Centered on Jerusalem

The Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem is held each year on the first Sunday of October. Eagles’ Wings has scheduled the 2026 observance for October 4, when participating churches will dedicate services, prayers and livestream programs to Jerusalem and Israel.

Although most participants will join from their own countries rather than travel to Jerusalem, the coordinated nature of the event gives the gathering its extraordinary reach. Congregations separated by continents, languages and denominations will pray on the same day, united around the biblical call in Psalm 122 to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

Organizers expect the central gathering to bring more than 500 Christian leaders from 50 countries to Israel. The Jerusalem program is expected to feature prayer, worship, Scripture readings and messages from international faith leaders before being shared with participating communities worldwide.

From a Prayer Initiative to a Global Network

Bishop Robert Stearns and the late Pastor Jack Hayford launched the initiative in 2002 following meetings with religious and political leaders in Israel and the United States.

What began as an effort to mobilize Christian prayer for Jerusalem has since developed into an international movement. Eagles’ Wings says more than 1,400 prominent evangelical leaders have supported the initiative, while earlier organizational materials reported representation in more than 175 nations and involvement from hundreds of thousands of churches.

The 2026 gathering will mark the initiative’s 24th year. Its growth reflects the expanding network of Christian communities that see prayer for Jerusalem, friendship with the Jewish people and support for Israel as central expressions of their faith.

For many participants, the day is both deeply spiritual and joyfully communal: a chance to sing, pray and stand alongside millions of fellow believers while focusing global attention on Jerusalem.

The Organization Behind the Gathering

Eagles’ Wings is a New York-based Christian nonprofit founded and led by Stearns. For more than three decades, the organization has worked to strengthen Christian engagement with Israel and build relationships between Christian and Jewish communities.

Its activities extend beyond the annual prayer day. Eagles’ Wings brings pastors and emerging ministry leaders to Israel, provides educational resources for churches, organizes advocacy initiatives and supports humanitarian programs inside the country.

The organization says its pastors’ trips have brought more than 1,000 Christian leaders to Israel from dozens of countries and across much of the United States. Many participants later return with members of their congregations, expanding the network of churches with direct experience of Israel.

Eagles’ Wings also operates feeding initiatives in Jerusalem and Tiberias that provide hot meals to people in need. Through its Frontlines campaign, the organization has mobilized practical assistance and solidarity efforts for Israelis affected by war and terrorism.

Jerusalem’s Old City as the Global Stage

The central broadcast is expected to originate from the Tower of David Museum beside Jaffa Gate, placing Jerusalem’s history and distinctive skyline at the heart of the worldwide event.

The setting has already served as a gathering point for Eagles’ Wings. In October 2025, the organization hosted its Day of Prayer and Awake Jerusalem events at the Tower of David, bringing together pastors, artists, influencers and believers from around the world. Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion participated alongside international Christian leaders in a public expression of prayer and solidarity.

The 2026 gathering is expected to build on that event with an even broader international presence.

Organizers have announced delegations from Africa and Latin America, including 175 Latin American Christian leaders led by the Rev. José Wellington Costa Jr., president of Brazil’s Assemblies of God. Eagles’ Wings says the participating Latin American delegations collectively represent more than 51 million Christians.

Delegations from Nigeria, Kenya and Togo are also expected, illustrating the growing prominence of African and Latin American churches within the international movement supporting Israel.

Millions Preparing to Pray Together

The projected figure of 70 million participants is an estimate supplied by Eagles’ Wings and represents Christians joining through congregations, ministries, broadcasts and online platforms—not the number physically assembled in Jerusalem.

Even with that distinction, the anticipated reach is striking. A prayer gathering launched less than a quarter-century ago is now preparing to connect believers in 175 countries with a live event from the heart of Jerusalem.

As October 4 approaches, churches around the world will prepare their own services while hundreds of leaders travel to Israel. Together, they will send an uplifting message across borders and denominations: Jerusalem and the Jewish people are not standing alone, and millions of Christians remain ready to pray, celebrate and express their friendship with Israel.

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The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)—a Marxist-Leninist organization that openly defends China and characterizes Hamas terror attacks as “resistance”—is coordinating an unprecedented push into electoral politics this cycle. The party is fielding candidates for U.S. Senate in Ohio and Massachusetts, California statewide offices, and a congressional challenge in New York’s Bronx.

According to findings from a Neuron report on foreign influence in American politics, this represents the first multi-state congressional campaign the PSL has attempted in a midterm election cycle. The timing coincides with accelerating federal scrutiny.

Fox News reported that a federal grand jury was examining possible financial crimes involving Singham and organizations within his funding network. Public reporting has documented substantial personnel and operational overlap between several Singham-funded organizations and PSL.

The Neuron report documents that Singham has channeled more than $100 million through opaque intermediaries to groups that have organized coordinated protests, produced propaganda aligned with Chinese Communist Party messaging, and now are organizing electoral campaigns.

The 2026 Slate

The PSL candidates include Andre Easton (challenging Democrat Ritchie Torres in New York’s 15th District), Greg Levy (Ohio Senate), Joe Tache (Massachusetts Senate), and a California joint ticket of Ramsey Robinson (Governor), Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas (Insurance Commissioner), and Frank Lara (State Superintendent).

Easton, a Bronx teacher, explicitly frames his campaign around removing pro-Israel officials, calling capitalism a “system where billionaires bribe our politicians to fund genocide in Gaza.” He delivered remarks at The People’s Forum, a Manhattan organization at the center of Singham’s network, directly linking his candidacy to the primary funding infrastructure.

Levy’s platform calls for “cutting all aid to the racist, genocidal state of Israel,” lifting sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, and slashing the Pentagon budget by 90%. Tache has stated his campaign serves “primarily as a tool of building the movement,” and wrote for the PSL’s Liberation News that October 7 represented “Palestinian national liberation” and “resistance.”

Robinson, a San Francisco social worker, was a key organizer of post-October 7 anti-Israel rallies and pledges to mandate “full divestment of state retirement plans from companies enabling Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.” Vargas organized with the Palestinian Youth Movement during a 2024 Los Angeles City Council run. Lara, vice president of the San Francisco teachers’ union, opposed California’s proposed antisemitism legislation, characterizing it as a free speech violation.

The Singham Network

The Neuron report details how the PSL operates within an interconnected ecosystem funded by Singham since at least 2019. The network includes ANSWER Coalition (which organized more than 1,700 anti-Israel rallies since October 7), The People’s Forum (described as a “movement incubator”), BreakThrough News (whose editor-in-chief is the son of PSL founder Brian Becker), CODEPINK, and 1804 Books.

A 2023 New York Times investigation reported that Singham had served as a strategic technical consultant to Huawei from 2001 to 2008, had attended a Chinese Communist Party workshop on international messaging, and at the time shared Shanghai office space with the Maku Group, a media company displaying pro-Xi messaging to which he had contributed nearly $1.8 million. The Times also found that Chinese state-media accounts had amplified accounts in Singham’s network at least 122 times since February 2020

From Streets to Ballot

In February 2026, a witness at a House Ways & Means hearing characterized the Singham-backed infrastructure as a “repeatable system for paralyzing American infrastructure on demand, financed through U.S. tax law, and aligned with a hostile foreign power.”

At a February 2026 House Ways and Means hearing, Narravance co-founder Adam Sohn testified that ANSWER and PSL mobilized protesters, The People’s Forum trained and coordinated activists, and BreakThrough News amplified messaging. He linked this system to demonstrations during which federal property was vandalized, flags were burned, police officers were assaulted and transportation routes were blocked

The Neuron report identifies the transition to electoral politics as a significant escalation. The organizations now fielding candidates are the same entities that orchestrated large-scale disruptions of American cities. PSL candidates embrace openly anti-American foreign policy positions—ending Israel support, lifting sanctions on adversarial regimes, dismantling NATO—positions aligned with documented CCP messaging priorities.

The 2026 campaign represents the Singham network’s shift from street mobilization to institutional politics while under federal investigation, testing whether American campaign finance regulations can constrain a movement that has operated largely unimpeded while distributing nine figures in funding through tax-exempt structures.

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A senior United Nations official has condemned what his office described as “armed personnel affiliated with the de facto authorities” in Gaza for forcibly entering a food-distribution point and a World Food Programme warehouse, intimidating aid workers and assaulting two truck drivers. The July 12 statement by Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said the incidents reflected an “increasingly dangerous pattern of intimidation, violence and obstruction.”

Yet the statement never used the word “Hamas,” continuing a UN practice of documenting coercion in institutional language that stops short of naming the organization most commonly understood to be responsible.

The disclosure adds to a longer record of Hamas-linked confiscation and pressure on humanitarian operations, even as UNRWA has publicly maintained that it has received no specific allegations of “systemic diversion” of the aid it distributes.

Hamas Terrorists Shut Down a Food Distribution Point

According to the statement, Hamas-linked armed personnel, described by the UN only as “armed personnel affiliated with the de facto authorities,” forcibly entered the Abu Rashid food-distribution point in Jabalia, North Gaza, on July 11 and intimidated humanitarian workers, forcing food distribution at the site to be suspended. The personnel also entered a nearby World Food Programme warehouse and reportedly assaulted two truck drivers delivering supplies.

Alakbarov said the incidents were not isolated and reflected a broader pattern of interference, smuggling attempts and abuse directed at humanitarian operations across Gaza, warning that it was placing aid workers at risk and constraining organizations’ ability to operate.

Although the statement never named Hamas, contemporary reporting characterized it as describing Hamas’s conduct — one outlet’s own headline read that the UN official said Hamas was obstructing Gaza aid.

A Documented History of Confiscation

The latest confrontation is not the first time the UN has acknowledged Hamas interference with humanitarian aid — nor the first time it named Hamas directly in doing so.

On February 3, 2009, Hamas terrorists took roughly 3,500 blankets and more than 400 food parcels at gunpoint from an UNRWA distribution store in Gaza’s Beach Camp. Two nights later, ten truckloads carrying a combined 300 metric tons of rice and flour — imported through the Kerem Shalom crossing for UNRWA collection — were seized by trucks contracted to Gaza’s Ministry of Social Affairs.

UNRWA suspended all aid imports into Gaza until the material was returned and it received assurances from “the Hamas government in Gaza” that the thefts would not recur. The supplies were returned within days and deliveries resumed.

That 2009 statement named Hamas outright — a contrast with 2026’s “de facto authorities.” It established, more than seventeen years before the Abu Rashid confrontation, that Hamas possessed both the capacity and the willingness to seize UN-controlled humanitarian supplies.

What “Systemic Diversion” Leaves Out

In a February 2024 “claims versus facts” document, UNRWA stated that it was not aware of and had received no specific allegations regarding any systemic diversion of aid in Gaza by Hamas or other armed groups. The same document said UNRWA used a direct-implementation model with no intermediaries and, as a result, had “full control” of its supply chain from the crossing points into Gaza to the point of distribution.

Those statements are narrowly framed. They address whether UNRWA possesses evidence of a systematic program diverting aid from its own formal distribution system. They do not address every form of humanitarian interference — temporary confiscation, armed intimidation, pressure on contractors, disruption at distribution sites, manipulation after delivery, or seizure of supplies handled by other organizations such as the World Food Programme.

The difference allows UNRWA to deny specific allegations of “systemic diversion” without denying that Hamas members have confiscated aid or interfered with its delivery. Without that context, the agency’s public assurances risk leaving donors with the impression that concerns about exploitation of aid have no factual foundation.

Audits Documented Weaknesses in Gaza Controls

UNRWA’s claims of tight operational control also warrant scrutiny in light of its historical audit record.

A UN Board of Auditors report covering the 2008–2009 biennium, published in 2010, identified weaknesses at UNRWA’s Gaza field office involving long-outstanding purchase orders, emergency advance payments, delayed invoices and goods-received notes, and incomplete physical verification of assets. Auditors recommended that the Gaza office reconcile asset records against physical counts, investigate discrepancies and better document the movement of equipment between locations. The same report flagged a data-entry error in the Gaza office’s fixed-asset register — an item worth $19,580 had been recorded as $195,800, an overstatement of $176,220 — rather than evidence that assets of that value had gone missing.

Oversight Without Full Disclosure

In an investigative summary, USAID’s Office of Inspector General said it had independently connected three current or former UNRWA employees to the October 7 attacks and affiliated fourteen more with Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades. The inspector general’s office said the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services allowed it to review OIOS’s own investigation into the broader allegations but redacted the names of the subjects, rendering that report unusable for the Americans’ purposes.

On June 5, 2026, USAID’s inspector general went further, referring 101 additional current or former UNRWA employees — among them school principals, teachers, security personnel and medical staff — to the State Department for consideration of suspension or debarment from future US-funded aid work, citing evidence of October 7 participation or al-Qassam affiliation. Combined with earlier referrals, the office said its investigation had by then produced suspension-or-debarment referrals for 108 individuals.

The Question the UN Has Not Answered

The July 12 statement raises a narrower, more answerable question than whether Hamas is stealing aid at scale: how consistently have UN agencies been willing to name the actors responsible for interference with humanitarian operations, and what more can they disclose about individual incidents without endangering the aid workers and civilians who depend on them?

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On Friday, Senior Policy Associate at the Israel Policy Forum Gabriel Epstein said that he had identified a fourth Gaza-based employee of Turkey’s IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation who was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative, adding to a growing open-source record of aid workers, medical personnel, journalists, and civil-sector employees claimed by the U.S.-designated terror group following their deaths.

Epstein’s latest identification was Ibrahim Rizq Nimr Arshi, whom he described as director of IHH’s nutrition program in Gaza and a squad leader in PIJ’s Gaza Brigade. The new IHH-linked cases sharpen the question facing international aid agencies in Gaza: how many humanitarian roles overlapped with terror groups, and how much did employers, donors, or partner organizations know?

IHH’s ties to terrorism

IHH’s alleged ties to terror networks extend beyond Hamas. A Turkish police investigation in January 2014 uncovered that IHH had smuggled arms to al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists in Syria, with prosecutors concluding through wiretaps and surveillance that the organization’s Kayseri and Kilis branches were sending funds, medical supplies, and household goods to jihadists with assistance from Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization.

Intelligence documents presented to the UN Security Council in February 2016 by Russian authorities identified IHH trucks—complete with license plates—transporting weapons and equipment to jihadist factions in Syria, including the Nusra Front.

In July 2010, thirteen members of Congress introduced House Resolution 1532, which urged an investigation into IHH’s role in providing “financial, logistical, and material support to terrorists.” The resolution cited a 2006 Danish Institute for International Studies report describing IHH as a front for funding terrorist organizations and sending jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya, and noted that in 2001, IHH was named in a U.S. federal court trial as having played an “important role” in al-Qaeda’s failed millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

Ibrahim Rizq Nimr Arshi

Epstein’s latest thread identified Ibrahim Rizq Nimr Arshi as director of IHH’s nutrition program in Gaza. According to Epstein, Arshi was also a squad leader in the training section of PIJ’s central operations unit in the Gaza Brigade and was killed in June 2025 with another PIJ terrorist.

Epstein documented that Arshi appeared as IHH’s nutrition program director in multiple Al Jazeera interviews from March to May 2025, while Lebanon’s An-Nahar described him as a social protection officer with IHH and the Hamas-affiliated Shehab agency also identified him in that civilian-aid context. Epstein further said family memorial posts showed Arshi wearing an IHH vest during food distributions.

Mohammed Jamal Faraj al-Mubayyad

Epstein previously reported that PIJ claimed Mohammed Jamal Faraj al-Mubayyad as a commander in the Gaza Brigade’s Central Mobilization Unit. In a follow-up, Epstein stated that al-Mubayyad was also a program director at IHH.

Earlier, Epstein wrote that al-Mubayyad’s social media included praise for PIJ figures including Khalil al-Bahtini, PIJ leader Ziyad al-Nakhala, and prisoner Khader Adnan. That material does not, by itself, prove operational membership. PIJ’s own later claim is the more consequential evidence.

Ahmed Matar Bustan

Ahmed Matar Bustan was one of the men Epstein listed in the same March 2026 thread on the IHH-linked cluster. Epstein wrote that Bustan, al-Mubayyad, and IHH employee Ishaq Assad al-Tayf were mourned after a May 28, 2025 strike by a PIJ channel dedicated to slain PIJ leader Khalil al-Bahtini.

The combination of the mourning channel, the shared incident, and Epstein’s subsequent categorization places him inside the documented pattern.

Ishaq Assad al-Tayf

Epstein’s March 2026 post identified Ishaq Assad al-Tayf as an IHH employee. He was reportedly killed in the same May 28, 2025 incident involving al-Mubayyad and Bustan and was subsequently mourned by the PIJ-linked channel. A separate PIJ obituary channel later published a poster identifying al-Tayf as a fighter in PIJ’s Tuffah Battalion, Gaza Brigade.

Why the pattern matters

The IHH cases raise a concrete vetting problem. If PIJ’s own posthumous materials and open-source records identify aid workers as commanders, squad leaders, or operatives, humanitarian agencies and their partners face a basic accountability question: whether their staffing systems can detect armed-group affiliation in a territory where terrorist organizations are embedded across civilian institutions.

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The pattern assembled by Epstein is no longer anecdotal. It now includes multiple named men, specific ID numbers, civilian job descriptions, terrorist-unit labels, and visual records linking some of the same individuals to both aid work and armed organizations.

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Palestine Action, proscribed as a terrorist organization by then–Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in July 2025 and confirmed as lawfully banned by the Court of Appeal on 15 June 2026, is currently soliciting cryptocurrency donations denominated in Monero — a “privacy coin” designed to obscure senders, receivers, and transaction amounts.

CAGE International, named by UK House of Lords member Michael Gove in March 2024 as a group that “give[s] rise to concern because of their Islamist orientation and views” under the government’s new — and explicitly non-statutory — extremism framework, is publicly soliciting donations in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. A new NGO Monitor report published on 8 July 2026 identifies both organizations’ crypto fundraising as part of a wider transparency gap in the UK’s post–October 7th protest ecosystem — one current UK guidance does not adequately address.

The Proscribed Terror Group

Palestine Action was added to Schedule 2 of the Terrorism Act 2000 on 5 July 2025, days after three activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged two military aircraft with spray paint. Offences including membership, inviting support, or recklessly expressing support for the group can carry up to 14 years’ imprisonment on indictment.

The High Court briefly ruled the proscription unlawful in February 2026, but the Home Secretary appealed, and a five-judge Court of Appeal panel held that the decision to proscribe Palestine Action “was lawful.” The judgment found that “Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism,” characterizing the group as a covert organization operating through secret cells to avoid detection.

Palestine Action’s global website solicits cryptocurrency donations in Monero (XMR), which is designed to resist ordinary blockchain tracing by obscuring the sender, recipient, and transaction amount using ring signatures and stealth addresses — making donor identification far harder than with transparent blockchains such as Bitcoin. The currency is also documented as seeing rising use in illicit finance, including money laundering and ransomware payments.

CAGE: Flagged, Not Proscribed

CAGE International is a London-based advocacy organization whose history has drawn sustained scrutiny. According to NGO Monitor’s report, the group invited Anwar al-Awlaki to address a Ramadan fundraising dinner via videolink in 2008, after he had been barred from entering the UK; the U.S.

Treasury later designated him a “key leader” of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. CAGE also worked on behalf of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed 9/11 mastermind, NGO Monitor found. In 2015, CAGE described ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi — “Jihadi John” — as “a beautiful young man.” CAGE spokesman Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, was reportedly classified in a Joint Task Force Guantanamo assessment as a “high threat to the US, its interests and its allies.”

CAGE’s crypto page currently publishes wallet addresses for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP as part of a Ramadan donation drive, and recommends donors send stablecoins where possible, noting that other cryptocurrency donations “will be promptly converted to USDC or USDT upon receipt.”

The Regulatory Black Hole

The UK Charity Commission has acknowledged since 2022 that identifying donors can be difficult with cryptoassets, since blockchain technology is designed to guarantee “anonymity and secrecy.” Written evidence the Commission later submitted to Parliament confirmed cryptoasset donations are “usually made anonymously,” and that charities are advised to watch for suspicious circumstances.

The Fundraising Regulator’s guidance does list cryptoassets as a due-diligence risk factor — but neither regulator has issued binding rules or a dedicated enforcement mechanism covering crypto donations to advocacy groups linked to terrorism and extremism.

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What the Report Recommends

The NGO Monitor report calls on the UK government to “establish monitoring, guidance and regulations regarding cryptocurrency funding,” after identifying that at least two of the forty organizations it mapped raise money this way. It frames CAGE’s and Palestine Action’s crypto fundraising as especially concerning given CAGE’s documented ties to extremist actors and Palestine Action’s proscribed status, and concludes separately that current UK regulations cannot adequately address the wider protest network’s transparency gaps.

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International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan committed sexual harassment by engaging in a sexual relationship with a subordinate and then attempting to dissuade her from pursuing misconduct allegations, according to an internal ICC report obtained by The New York Times.

The confidential findings by the court’s 21-member executive body concluded that Khan’s denials were “devoid of credibility” after he failed to clearly deny the sexual relationship in 30 opportunities. The scandal threatens to further destabilize the highly controversial legal body.

The Findings

The Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties determined Khan engaged in coercive and nonconsensual sexual behavior with a female ICC staffer between 2023 and 2024. A UN investigation found evidence of “nonconsensual sexual contact” in Khan’s office, at his private residence, and during official missions.

According to whistleblower documents, Khan allegedly moved the woman from another ICC department into his office, made her a regular presence on trips, and engaged in repeated unwanted advances — including allegedly touching her sexually on a hotel bed and knocking on her room door at 3 a.m. for ten minutes. He also allegedly locked his office door and stuck his hand in her pocket, and repeatedly asked her to vacation with him.

Credibility Crisis

The internal report highlighted a stunning detail: Khan’s primary concern during the investigation was whether his accuser had made recordings implicating him, rather than clearly denying the misconduct. Only after the evidentiary record showed no recordings existed did Khan issue denials — which the bureau found lacked credibility.

Khan was suspended in June 2026 as member states prepare to vote on whether to remove him — an unprecedented move for the court. Through his lawyer, Khan has denied “every specific allegation of sexual interaction of any kind.”

Qatar-Linked Targeting Operation

The alleged victim became the target of a Qatar-linked covert intelligence operation aimed at discrediting her claims. Two British private intelligence firms, Highgate and Elicius Intelligence, sought her passport details, information about her child, and attempted to establish connections between her and Israel — though no such evidence was found. The operation obtained sensitive information about her private life, financial situation, and even her passwords from hacked data on the dark web. The woman, who was placed on suicide watch at one point, told The Guardian the targeting was “as incomprehensible as it is heartbreaking.”

Timing and Context

The allegations first surfaced in October 2024, weeks before Khan sought arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The ICC issued those warrants in November 2024, accusing Israeli leaders of war crimes in Gaza. Qatar allegedly promised to “look after” Khan after he issued the warrants, according to witness testimony submitted to the FBI.

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The scandal compounds the court’s crisis as it faces sanctions from President Trump over investigations targeting Israelis and Americans. Trump sanctioned eleven ICC staff members, including Khan, resulting in closed bank accounts and revoked U.S. visas. The ICC’s 125 member states will meet this month to decide Khan’s fate.

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In the first week of July 2026, a wave of articles, advocacy statements, and social media posts flooded digital platforms with a unified demand: Israel must release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the detained director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Military Hospital who holds the rank of colonel in Hamas.

Within roughly 36 hours, major news outlets and advocacy organizations issued analogous statements and petitions with matching talking points.

What distinguishes this from typical news coverage is the timing, uniformity of messaging, and potentially coordinated rollout across advocacy and media ecosystems — all centered on a figure whose Hamas affiliation has been documented by Israeli intelligence, independent researchers, and even Hamas-controlled sources.

Narratives Promoted in Tandem

The campaign’s trigger was a July 2 prison visit by attorney Nasser Odeh, arranged by Physicians for Human Rights Israel. By July 5, the narrative had propagated across continents with remarkable uniformity. Qatar’s state-run Al Jazeera published a story, as did the Washington Post and Associated Press, and The Guardian.

Drop Site News, Qatar-linked Middle East Eye, Sky News, BBC, and CNN all covered the story using near-identical framing — with minimal or no mention of Israeli allegations that he held the rank of colonel in Hamas’s “Military Medical Services.”

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The highly similar messaging extended beyond news coverage. MENA Rights Group filed the complaint to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, while Amnesty International launched a petition calling Abu Safiya “a prominent voice of Gaza’s decimated healthcare sector.”

On July 7, UN Special Rapporteurs urged Israel to immediately release Abu Safiya. The UN statement was immediately amplified by media outlets and advocacy groups as independent validation.

The Social Media Surge

Social media tracking data reveals the campaign’s extraordinary reach and its most effective amplifiers. The mobilization generated 259,000 mentions, produced 1.5 million engagements, and reached a potential audience of 3 billion people. The close proximity of the articles produced a dramatic spike in mentions during the first week of July, far exceeding baseline discussion of Abu Safiya’s detention.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese generated 114,200 engagements across three posts on X, reaching 1.8 million people. CNN’s Instagram account drove 51,500 engagements with a single post. Ryan Grim, whose Drop Site News outlet defended Abu Safiya against “propaganda” after his Hamas uniform photo surfaced, generated 32,500 engagements. Qatar-linked Middle East Eye (34,100 engagements), and Turkey state-run TRHaber (36,700 engagements) rounded out the top influencers, collectively amplifying the campaign to tens of millions.

Highly Organized Advocacy-Media Ecosystem

Taken together, the timing, repetition, and amplification patterns suggest a highly organized advocacy-media ecosystem rather than a purely organic news cycle.

The Abu Safiya campaign generated more than a quarter-million mentions and 1.5 million engagements in a matter of days, amplified by UN officials, advocacy organizations, and major news outlets that advanced broadly similar narratives on closely aligned timelines.

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The effect was to push Abu Safiya’s detention to the center of global attention while giving far less prominence to his documented Hamas rank and Israel’s allegations regarding Kamal Adwan Hospital. The episode shows how fast, disciplined messaging can shape international perception and make the line between independent journalism and advocacy harder to distinguish.

Key Findings:

• An anonymous operator claiming to be American but based in Saudi Arabia runs one of the largest Gaza “war crimes” archives—82,000+ videos and images—whose authenticity and chain of custody remain unverified.

• The operator feeds purported evidence to the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, which has been linked to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.

• Despite claiming American identity, the operator calls Americans “complicit in genocide,” urges U.S. soldiers to disobey orders, and demands U.S. officials stand trial at The Hague.

• The operation runs from Saudi Arabia—a kingdom that has received extensive U.S. and Israeli security assistance, including protection during the 2026 Iran conflict.

• The archive’s sophisticated infrastructure—dual websites, 2.4 terabytes of torrents, encrypted submissions, Icelandic privacy protection—suggests resources beyond typical grassroots activism.

• The operator’s language shifted from singular “I” to plural “we,” raising questions about who is actually running the operation and whether it represents a coordinated network.

Introduction

An anonymous operator claiming to be American, but running from Saudi Arabia, has built one of the largest online archives purporting to document alleged “Israeli war crimes” in Gaza, a Jewish Onliner investigation has found. The collection, which includes more than 82,000 videos and images, remains unverified. Its authenticity, context, and chain of custody are largely unverifiable. Yet the archive is being used to target Israeli soldiers and officials by funneling the supposed evidence to terror-linked organizations pursuing cases at the International Criminal Court.

The operation aggressively promotes anti-American messaging, calls the U.S. “complicit in genocide,” and has called for American officials to be sent to The Hague. Over time, the account has also shifted from speaking as an individual to presenting itself as a collective operation, moving from “I” to “we” as its infrastructure expanded.

The shift raises basic questions about who is actually behind the project, how it is being resourced, and why a large archive targeting Israelis and feeding international legal campaigns is being run from inside Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Location Confirmed by X Device Telemetry

The operation, branding itself “Israel Exposed — War Crimes Archive,” runs two identical websites—archivegenocide.com and watermeloncrimes.com—that deploy simultaneously from the same codebase and claim to forward footage to the ICC, the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, and South Africa’s legal team at the International Court of Justice.

X’s own device telemetry confirms the operator of the main account, @xIsraelExposedx, is based in Saudi Arabia, with the platform’s intelligence panel showing “Connected via: Saudi Arabia Android App.”

Claims American Identity While Targeting U.S. Military

The operator has openly acknowledged the Saudi location multiple times, writing in November 2024, “I’m american and I moved to Saudi Arabia” and “Also hey, also in Saudi. Good to see more of us on twitter.”

Yet despite claiming American identity, in March 2026, the operator posted a graphic urging U.S. military personnel to disobey orders, writing “You do not have to partake in war crimes for Israel.” The post directed soldiers to the GI Rights Hotline and accumulated over 240,000 views.

The account has also declared Americans collectively guilty of genocide, writing in June 2026, “It doesnt matter what you want, you are still legally complicit in genocide.” Days later, the operator stated, “The correct thing to do is call out the genocide we are complicit in”—using the first-person plural “we” to refer to Americans while operating from Saudi territory.

In July 2025, the account called then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken “a war criminal” who “should be at the Hague.” More recently, in June 2026, the operator wrote, “Anything Israel and the US touch is corrupted.”

From “I” to “We”

The operation’s presentation has evolved in ways that suggest deliberate image-crafting: early posts used singular first-person language—”what am I missing?” and “I’m just in Saudi”—while the official X profile and website now exclusively use collective plural framing: “We archive & publish Israeli war crimes,” “our team,” and “our researchers.”

This linguistic shift from individual to collective occurred as the operation expanded from an X account created in October 2024 to a full web infrastructure launched in June 2025. The account’s bio now describes a group operation, stating “We are a group of researchers dedicated to archiving war crimes footage from Gaza and the West Bank.”

Feeding Evidence to Alleged Hezbollah Front

The Hind Rajab Foundation, which the archive claims to supply with evidence, faces widespread allegations of serving as a Hezbollah front organization.

Founded in September 2024 by Dyab Abou Jahjah and Karim Hassoun, the Brussels-based NGO has filed complaints with the ICC naming over 1,000 Israeli soldiers and pursued legal cases in at least 12 countries. Abou Jahjah claimed in a 2003 New York Times interview that he “joined the Hezbollah resistance against Israel” and “had some military training, I’m still very proud of that.” In a 2024 eulogy for Hassan Nasrallah, Jahjah claimed he met the Hezbollah leader in 2001.

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According to information provided by Israeli security officials to the Jerusalem Post in February 2025, Abou Jahjah is linked by family and business ties to actors designated as part of Hezbollah’s terror funding network and is included on the U.S. government’s “No Fly” list. Over 1,000 cases have been filed against Israeli soldiers across the globe,” a source told The Jerusalem Post.

Operating From Saudi Kingdom Protected by U.S.-Israeli Security

That a Saudi-based operator claiming American identity channels evidence to an organization with alleged Hezbollah connections while urging U.S. soldiers to refuse orders creates a striking irony: Saudi Arabia has received extensive U.S. and Israeli security assistance, particularly during the 2026 Iran conflict.

During Operation Epic Fury—the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran that began February 28, 2026—American and Israeli forces struck Iranian military infrastructure that had directly threatened Saudi Arabia. Iran had attacked a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia on March 27, 2026, injuring at least 15 American service members. Israeli strikes during the campaign dismantled much of Iran’s arsenal, eliminating threats to Gulf monarchies including Saudi Arabia.

Beyond direct military operations, Israel reportedly supplied Saudi Arabia’s F-15SA program with advanced pilot gear, including helmet-mounted cueing systems and night-vision goggles, through U.S.-backed defense channels. The reported sale is notable because Riyadh and Jerusalem still lack formal diplomatic ties.

Sophisticated Infrastructure Suggests Significant Resources

The infrastructure behind the archive operation reveals resources and technical sophistication uncommon in individual activism.

Both domains—watermeloncrimes.com, registered June 4, 2025, and archivegenocide.com, registered July 1, 2026—share identical Cloudflare nameservers, the same BunnyCDN media delivery zone (agenocidecdn.b-cdn.net), and last-modified timestamps that match to the exact second, confirming a single operator deploying updates to both sites simultaneously. The Downloads page offers 2.4 terabytes of video archives distributed via cryptographically signed torrents hosted on Distributed Denial of Secrets, a transparency collective modeled after WikiLeaks.

The operation maintains strong operational security: no Google Analytics or tracking pixels, Icelandic privacy protection on domain registrations, Cloudflare proxying to hide origin servers, and a Telegram channel for footage submissions.

The operator appears to run a YouTube channel that claims to be U.S.-based, as well as a Substack newsletter. The operator also runs a Discord server with nearly 3,000 members, where their community likely coordinates the operation.

Growing Archive, Unresolved Questions

The operation’s growth continues. As of publication, archivegenocide.com displays a notice that the group is “actively adding the rest of our archives.” The site offers geolocation data, a live map with “minute-to-minute updates,” a searchable index, and a curated list of over 300 “journalists” and social media sources, including members of U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.

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Its shift from individual posts written in the first person to an expansive web operation speaking in terms of “we” suggests something more complex than the grassroots project it presents itself as. That impression is reinforced by its multi-platform presence, technical infrastructure, and growing archive of searchable material.

Key questions remain unanswered: whether the Saudi-based operator is in fact an American citizen, whether it is acting alone or as part of a team, and whether there is any real coordination with the Hezbollah-linked recipients it claims to supply. What is clear is that the scale of the archive, the sophistication of the site, and the operation’s security practices appear to go beyond ordinary individual activism, raising unresolved questions about funding, coordination, and accountability for a project being run from inside Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. State Department and Israel’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

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A new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute says Candace Owens helped build what it calls a “digital assassination culture” around Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, timed to the July 6 preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson, charged with aggravated murder in Kirk’s September 2025 killing at Utah Valley University.

The report, Permission to Kill, argues that Owens’ claims about the assassination, TPUSA, Israel, and Erika Kirk did not remain mere speculation. According to NCRI, they hardened into a harassment ecosystem. The report concludes that Owens has “caused a measurable, statistically significant surge in death threats and calls for violence” against Erika Kirk over the past nine months.

The issue is not simply that Owens trafficked in lurid theories around a high-profile killing. It is that, according to NCRI, she helped convert those theories into a climate where a grieving widow could be recast as an object of mass suspicion and abuse.

From commentary to campaign

Owens has spent months challenging the official account of Charlie Kirk’s killing. Outlets have reported that she suggested Robinson was not the real killer and floated theories involving TPUSA insiders, pro-Israel interests, and even the French military.

According to the report, NCRI assesses that Owens served as the “dominant permission structure” for violence against Erika Kirk, identifying 1,034 explicit threats in the ecosystem it studied. Of the 1,034 tweets NCRI classified as explicit threats against Erika Kirk, 249 mentioned at least one prominent public figure. Because some named multiple people, that produced 336 total mentions across 14 figures. Candace Owens was named most often, with 95 mentions, followed by Laura Loomer with 83 and Donald Trump with 51. But most threat tweets, 785 of 1,034, named none of those figures and targeted Erika directly.

NCRI argues that Owens gradually shifted her audience’s attention toward Erika Kirk herself, even after Erika asked her to stop. An X thread by DataRepublican argued that Owens initially presented herself as sympathetic to Erika before moving to portray her as untrustworthy.

The antisemitic frame

For Jewish audiences, the most revealing part of this episode is how Israel and “Zionists” were folded into the story. This is not new territory for Owens. The ADL and the American Jewish Committee have both identified her as a major amplifier of antisemitic conspiracy theories. She has claimed Israel was behind the JFK assassination, the September 11 attacks, that Jews were behind the slave trade, and that Judaism is a “pedophilic” religion, drawing criticism from Jews and Christians alike.

Those claims matter because they place the Kirk case within a broader conspiratorial framework, one in which Jewish or pro-Israel influence is treated as a hidden explanatory force behind American political events. In that framing, conflicting evidence can be dismissed as compromised, and denials or corrections can be interpreted as further proof of a cover-up.

What this says about Owens

The issue is not that Owens is controversial. It is that she appears to have turned a murder and its aftermath into content, and a widow’s grief into material for a political narrative. Based on NCRI’s findings, this was not just reckless commentary that attracted an ugly response. It was a sustained campaign of insinuation that helped make Erika Kirk visible to a large audience as someone to distrust, blame, and target.

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If NCRI’s assessment is correct, the case illustrates how digital influence can operate in practice: not through explicit instruction, but through sustained framing that encourages audiences to see an individual as suspect, complicit, or deserving of scrutiny beyond any established evidence. That is the broader significance of the report, and the reason its findings are likely to draw attention well beyond this specific case.

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