Komunitas
hexbear.net
I could maybe believe that number is accurate for a median dual income family with no major health concerns before the premium increases that hit this year but it’s also absurdly high to begin with. To be basically fine and still pay $4k a year (probably around 5% of gross income) just for basic preventative care is absurd. Edit: or if he only means out of pocket expenses but then you’re probably doubling or tripling that number by adding healthcare premiums for the insurance that doesn’t even kick in until the family wipes their savings out every year.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
Here’s the case on the RECAP Archive (very handy if you ever want to look at documents for federal cases and/or keep tabs on an ongoing case): https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68493840/parizer-v-ajp-educational-foundation-inc/ edit: also here’s the text of the article ::: spoiler Full text (part 1) October 7 Survivors Sue Campus Protesters, Say Students Are “Hamas’s Propaganda Division” Four lawsuits alleging Hamas ties against Students for Justice in Palestine, the AP, UNRWA, and a cryptocurrency exchange share many of the same plaintiffs. Akela Lacy May 10 2024, 2:44 p.m. Survivors of the October 7 attacks filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court last week alleging links between Hamas and the pro-Palestinian student groups leading nationwide protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The survivors claim the student groups are liable for monetary damages because of the purported terrorism links. “When someone tells you they are aiding and abetting terrorists — believe them.” That’s the opening line the suit filed Wednesday against the Palestinian advocacy groups American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group supporting student organizers for Palestine, which supports more than 350 Palestine solidarity groups, including more than 200 campus organizations across the country. The lawsuit is part of a nationwide crackdown on pro-Palestine activism, especially on campus. It was filed a day after police in New York City deployed militarized forces to remove students from campus encampments protesting the war on Gaza and arrested hundreds. Some or all of the nine plaintiffs in the suit are involved in a raft of other civil suits related to the October 7 attacks. Among the defendants they’ve pursued in court are major media organizations and United Nations agencies. The survivors of the October 7 attack alleged that American Muslims for Palestine “serves as Hamas’s propaganda division in the United States.” “Through NSJP, AMP uses propaganda to intimidate, convince, and recruit uninformed, misguided, and impressionable college students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on campus and beyond,” the October 7 survivors wrote in their suit. The lawsuits rely on anti-terrorism laws that made it possible to bring civil cases for acts of international terrorism, including provisions around bans on material support to terrorism that have long been controversially applied. At the time of their passage, members of Congress who pushed the anti-terror laws linked them directly to crackdowns on pro-Palestine activities, according to a recent white paper from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal. “For years, CCR and others have been warning of the abuse of broad ‘material support’ laws to shrink the space for Palestinian rights,” said Diala Shamas, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. The group represented another Palestinian rights organization in what Shamas said was “years-long, meritless litigation” brought by the Jewish National Fund, a group that funds Israeli settlements. “The law’s provision of civil damages means that private actors — including those with seemingly endless resources — can bog you down in costly and distracting litigation,” Shamas said. “This means that Palestinians and those who support their rights become ‘high risk’ — and those who they rely on — charities, funders, banks or social media companies — are chilled from further engagement. The goal is to isolate Palestinians.” Four Survivor Lawsuits The nine plaintiffs include six survivors of the October 7 Hamas attacks. Five people attended the Supernova music festival, and another was attacked at Zikim Beach, where 19 civilians were killed as Hamas militants tried to overrun nearby military outposts. Two other plaintiffs who were not home on October 7 had homes in Kibbutz Holit, the site of additional Hamas attacks. Another plaintiff’s brother was killed at the festival. (Lawyers for the plaintiffs, AMP, and SJP did not respond to requests for comment.) The AMP suit is the fourth federal suit filed this year by members of the group. Last month, eight of the same plaintiffs sued the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, claiming that it gave material support to Hamas by allowing the militant group to fundraise on the platform. In November, the Treasury Department said Hamas and “a range of illicit actors” had used Binance to funnel money to their groups. Binance lawyers asked for an extension to reply to the complaint and have until August to do so. In April, the company’s former chief executive was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering violations. Five of the plaintiffs in the American Muslims for Palestine suit also sued the news agency The Associated Press in February. The plaintiffs alleged that the AP used photographs from “known Hamas associates who were gleefully embedded with the Hamas terrorists during the October 7th attacks.” Lawyers for the AP moved to dismiss the complaint for failing to state a claim and asked to stay discovery pending adjudication of the motion to dismiss. In March, the same group of nine plus another October 7 survivor sued the U.S. committee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNWRA, the largest humanitarian organization operating in Gaza. The suit against UNRWA claims that the group “financed and aided” Hamas, a frequent refrain from Israeli officials that has gone unsubstantiated, according to an independent review released in April. UNRWA lawyers were granted an extension and have until May 28 to respond to the complaint. Following Israeli officials’ allegations, major donors initially cut funding to UNRWA, but later reversed the decisions — except for the United States, the group’s biggest donor, where Congress blocked funding as part of the budget package approved this spring. The major corporate law firm Greenberg Traurig has taken on the latest case. The National Jewish Advocacy Center has taken on the three other cases. The group did not respond to a request for comment. Crackdown on Student Groups Student advocates for Palestine have faced concerted and sometimes violent crackdowns by school administrators and police. Mainstream media outlets uncritically repeat unsubstantiated claims that they support Hamas. Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, which are at the center of much campus organizing, have faced harsh censorship since October. The group was singled out in congressional hearings that have pressured university administrators to further crack down on Palestinian advocacy on campus. Columbia University suspended its SJP chapter and its chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in November. The New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal sued the university over the suspension in March in the New York Supreme Court. The case is pending. American University placed its SJP chapter on probation in April after the group held a silent indoor demonstration; the school banned indoor protests in January. Rutgers University suspended the SJP chapter on its New Brunswick campus in December and claimed that the group had protested in “nonpublic forums” and caused disruption on campus; the suspension was lifted in January. (I am a co-teacher of a class at Rutgers.) George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter in November after the group projected statements onto a library building calling for the university to divest from Israel. The projected images said GWU had blood on its hands and used the phrase “Glory to our martyrs,” a cultural reference to any Palestinian killed by Israel that was interpreted by outsiders as an endorsement of Hamas. Brandeis was the first private university to ban its SJP chapter in November, claiming that the group “openly supports Hamas.” :::
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Some people really will believe anything, as long as you’re trash talking big tech. And this platform is particularly bad. Just say something like you should be paying for YouTube (via ads or premium) and brace for the swarm.
Komunitas
lemm.ee
Ugh. I can’t believe we waited all this time just for them to lie about local play, add a premium cash store where one skin can cost over the price of the game, and LOOTBOXES in a premium game. What a disappointment.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Operated through the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, and paid for by a justice department grant, Erpo is designed to help state and local governments, law enforcement, and others – including behavioral health and social service providers – “optimize” the use of red flag laws, Harris said. It will provide training and technical assistance, including educational opportunities and workshops “for a wide variety of stakeholders”. But the vice-president also acknowledged that red flag laws, which facilitate the temporary removal of firearms from a person a court believes capable of harming themselves or others, are not universally popular. We need actual gun controll on a federal level. Even just a register and requirement for private sales to go thru an FFL for a background check would be huge. Until we close the private sale loophole, gun laws do t mean shit. There’s a reason “new in box” guns get sold at a markup on the private market. Hint: people that can’t but at a store will pay a premium. I like guns, but I have too many buddies who buy guns, then sell them less than a year later and brag about how good of businessmen they are for making profit. All theyre doing is likely funneling guns to people who can’t pass background checks. There’s just the plausible deniability on their end that if it’s not legit, it’s not their fault.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
Finally, in regards to AI, the belief among those polled was that AI could replace human localizations and translations within the next 12-24 months. Yeah throw a separate underapprechiated and extremely exploited workforce under the under the bus instead, fucking asshole morons. How can you talk about “premium games” if the premium experience doesn’t fucking involve the artistic touch of a writer in your own language actually translating it?
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Honestly this is the most interesting thing in the world of mobile for me since I initially heard about GrapheneOS looking to branch out to another OEM as an option. Assuming it is in fact a Motorola phone, it would have to be a big piece of shit or unbelievably expensive for what it is before I wouldn’t be very tempted by it. If it was literally a Moto G Power 2025/2026 with GrapheneOS out of the box for $300-$800 I would probably be on board. Supporting something not Google Play or Apple bound is important enough to me that I will pay some level of a premium price for it to support the mission behind it, like I do with System76.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Remove Your Media LLC (RYM) is believed to have acted frequently on Crunchyroll’s behalf, per testimony on social media and an extensive report by Anime Motivation this year. RYM is also among the top six most active reporting companies in the world (placing fifth), with over 680 million URLs reported. The top six included Link-Busters.com (1.52 billion links reported), MG Premium Ltd. (966 million), Rivendell (900 million), comeso GmbH (728 million) and BPI/British Recorded Music Industry Ltd (627 million). I’ll take entities that the world would be better without for 100, Alex. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the content the same content that they semi-recently made impossible to access in any legal way? The stuff that they’re refusing to even sell access to? Because if so, they can fuck right off even more than most copyright hawks.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
I hate my insurance company. They unironically believe: The myth of consent: Doctor: I consent (it’s time to up your hormones!) Me: I consent Insurance: isn’t there someone you forgot to ask? (How dare you try to use insurance? Didn’t you know you’re supposed to just pay premiums and then never get healthcare so that we can get filthy rich?) Luigi take the wheel
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Zionist terrorists have already committed two brutal massacres of children in Iran, only hours into their colonial assault on the country. An “Israeli strike” slaughtered 85 people in a horrifying attack on an “elementary girls’ school in Minab“. Zionists murdered a further two students at a school in Tehran. Speaking on *Al Jazeera,*Professor of North American Studies at Tehran University Foad Izadi said: [Iranians] understand they are fighting the Epstein class that either rape little girls or bomb little girls. He elaborated on how the brutality of the US/Zionist assault will show younger Iranians the reality of American lawlessness: I think what will happen is that, even if the United States is able to kill illegally Iranian leaders, the next generation of Iranians, the Iranians that did not see American atrocities in Iran before 1979…that did not understand why their parents and grandparents were anti-American, those Iranians will take over. Now they understand why American government is an imperialist, vicious government, and a government that attacks other countries and kills little children. Trump the alleged child abuser now bombing more kids in Iran There is undoubted overlap between those who feature prominently in the Epstein files and those now committing atrocities in Iran. US war-criminal-in-chief Donald Trump is accused of: …orally raping a girl of 13–14 years old — then beating her after she bit him during the ordeal. Trump’s abuse of children may go far beyond that. As reported recently by The Canary: Dozens of FBI files that mention US President Donald Trump are missing from the vast Epstein releases. The files also suggest that the thug squatting in the White House is “compromised by Israel“. This may partly explain his willingness to go along with fellow war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to try and force regime change in Iran. Or it may simply be the case that Mafia Don wants to behave in the mode typical of US gangsterism, and punish Iran for disobedience. The Zionist entity is a convenient tool for US empire, essentially operating as the main war crimes division of the US army. This allows US imperial aims to be facilitated with a brutality that might raise excessive opposition at home, but can be passed off as the West Asian settler-colony going rogue. Other prominent Zionists featured heavily in the files include the Clintons, Alan Dershowitz, Elon Musk and former ‘Israeli’ prime minister Ehud Barak. It is likely Barak is the individual responsible for allegedly raping Virginia Giuffre “more savagely than anyone had before”. https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/canary.mp4 Zionism, racism and cruelty to children are synonymous Epstein himself was, of course, an ardent Zionist. He was pictured wearing an Israeli Genocide Forces sweatshirt, gave money to the genocidaires and was likely a Mossad agent, or at least an asset. The paedophile was, like Barak, a vile racist who believed Black people are less intelligent, and who wanted to carry out “Nazi-like” eugenicist programs to spread his own DNA, based on the deranged idea it was superior. He was a serial child rapist who groomed young girls, then allowed other powerful and sadistic Zionists to rape them. The Zionist land theft project is a hub of child abuse. Israeli Occupation Forces routinely abduct, then molest, Palestinian children. The terror regime gives sanctuary to paedophiles, aided by senior government officials. Epstein was able to operate with impunity. He had disdain for Black and Brown people, and his main pastime was destroying children’s lives. It is this same combination — impunity, racism and serial abuse of children — that the Zionist entity embraces when it carries out its atrocities in Palestine, and now Iran. Featured image via Aljazeera By Robert Freeman From Canary via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Below, we republish an interview with the director of Yesh Din (a human rights organization working in the West Bank), published in “+972 Magazine” — an independent magazine run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists — about the Israeli far-right’s plans to expand settlements and annex the territory. The far-right group, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, details the state support settlers receive to attack the West Bank population amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza. While we do not entirely agree with her opinions, we believe this interview will be of interest to our readers. *** Since the formation of Netanyahu’s sixth government in 2022, Israel has steadily tightened its grip on the West Bank, largely outside the gaze of international media. But on Feb. 8, an avalanche of cabinet decisions prompted unusually direct coverage from media outlets not generally known for their diligent attention to the daily reality of occupation, including the BBC, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Last week’s package includes six measures that the Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit Yesh Din warned will “fundamentally alter the legal framework in the West Bank”: from declassifying confidential land records and opening up land sales to Israelis and foreigners, to expanding Israeli “supervision and enforcement activities” into Area A — nominally under Palestinian civil and security control — as well as Area B. Before attention could drift again, the government took another dramatic step on Sunday by approving a proposal to reopen land registration procedures in the West Bank for the first time since 1967, which will allow the state to register large swaths of territory as “state land.” A day later, it also decided to expand Jerusalem’s municipal borders by establishing a new settlement. Reacting to the land registry decision, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared, “For the first time since the Six Day War, we are restoring order and governance in the management of land in Judea and Samaria.” Though U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated his opposition to formal annexation last Monday, neither he nor other U.S. officials publicly pressed Netanyahu on the latest decisions. And while the EU and Arab countries responded swiftly with familiar expressions of concern, they lacked a clear answer to the implicit question posed by Israel’s provocative moves: Will you do anything to stop this? To make sense of what may prove a consequential fortnight in the long arc of annexation, +972 spoke with Ziv Stahl, executive director of Yesh Din. We discussed the significance of these latest measures, why a formal declaration of annexation seems unlikely, the prospect of a West Bank real estate boom, and what, if anything, could be reversed under a different Israeli government. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you walk us through the new cabinet decisions and their significance? I’d like to start by talking about the context. We are talking about a government that from the very first day declared that one of its main goals is to apply Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and to expand settlements. I think a lot of Israelis, and people generally, miss the fact that this is part of the judicial overhaul: Once the government removes all watchdogs — critics, legal advisors and so on — it makes it much easier to annex the West Bank. It would be a mistake to look at these [most recent decisions] one by one, because the importance is the critical mass of steps that are being taken, and the change in the legal framework of how Israel controls the West Bank. But the two out of these six security cabinet decisions that are most critical are the declassification of the land registry in the occupied territory and the cancellation of the Jordanian law prohibiting the sale of land to Israelis or foreigners. These are two steps that are designed to make it easier for settlers and the state to purchase land, and make it harder for Palestinians to maintain their rights to their lands or to acquire the formal rights to land. I think these two measures go together. Then you have the extension of Israeli law enforcement to areas A and B. We all know that there have been many breaches by Israel of the Oslo Agreement — that Israel enters Area A as it pleases and conducts military operations there. But still, this is basically Israel reempowering itself to have authority that it doesn’t have, officially at least, in those areas. Legally speaking, I don’t know if we can still call it occupation. I think we have been shifting to a reality of annexation: It’s hard to determine where exactly the pivotal moment was, but the physical situation on the ground in the West Bank has completely changed in these three years of this government. Trump said there will be no Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. But knowing that he is not really a man of details, Israel’s government is wise enough not to declare openly that this is annexation. But Smotrich, after the announcement of the cabinet division, said he would “continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state.” Creeping annexation has been underway for decades, but under this government, it really accelerated. I think we’ve reached a kind of critical mass where we can say plainly that this is annexation. It isn’t complete. And I’m not sure if it’s irreversible — few things are — but the deeper it goes, the harder it becomes to undo. In 2024, the International Court of Justice essentially said%20With%20this%20definition,an%20unlawful%20use%20of%20force.) that the distinction between de facto and de jure annexation is a distraction — what matters is the intention to apply sovereignty. Does the distinction between whether Israel has annexed the West Bank legally (de jure) or just de facto matter anymore in your opinion? I stopped differentiating between de jure and de facto annexation, because I think it’s one thing — annexation. What we see on the ground is a joint process. Legal changes and facts on the ground are working toward the same outcome. And for the people who are being annexed, they don’t care so much if it’s done through legal and structural changes [like we see in the recent decisions] or by [Israel] building a lot of settlements and outposts and [settlers] harassing them every day. The reality is that we are seeing a more oppressive system, a narrowing of rights, and deepening violations of international law. In a sense, our job at Yesh Din has actually become easier. In the past, when we tried to show that Israel was taking steps toward annexation, it sounded a bit like a theory — not a conspiracy, but still something we had to infer. Now the government says this is their intention in their coalition agreements, and they have been repeating it ever since. Yesh Din noted that measures like declassifying the land registry can appear benign if not beneficial, as it promotes transparency. Can you explain why the government is taking this step and using this narrative to justify it? When you read the government’s language around the decision to declassify the West Bank land registry, they talk about “transparency” and making everything public. And as for canceling the Jordanian law [that prohibited the sale of West Bank land, except to Palestinian residents], they claim it’s in the interest of “equality.” But this is ridiculous, because in the context of occupation, we know who these measures will serve. Now, it’s not like the settlers don’t already have good ties with the Civil Administration [the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s occupation]. But still, the classification of the registry has made things a bit harder for them. Once it’s out in the open, it can be really problematic for Palestinians. Making this information public can expose Palestinians to privacy violations, harassment, or intimidation. Personal ownership data could be used to extort or otherwise threaten property owners whose names appear in the registry. It’s also a big opportunity for forgery of land acquisitions in the West Bank, something we’ve seen before. For example, there were forgeries of land purchases in Amona, showing that settlers had bought land from Palestinians, but it turned out that the Palestinians were either dead or not in a position to sell. The government just approved a proposal to register large areas of the West Bank as “state property,” for the first time since 1967. How do you view this move in the context of the six measures announced last week? Like many things related to the West Bank and the Israeli occupation, especially land issues, this may sound bureaucratic, complicated, and even boring. But it’s a game changer. Close to a year ago, the cabinet decided to renew land registration in the West Bank, the system that allows land to be officially registered as private property or state land. Before 1967, the Jordanians ran a land registration process in the West Bank that allowed people who had cultivated land for many years to register it in their names. After the occupation began, Israel froze this process, and rightly so. One central reason is that land registration is permanent — it creates irreversible, long-term changes, which are not allowed under international law in a situation of occupation, which is supposed to be temporary. There were additional reasons as well: Many Palestinian landowners were absentees and thus unable to register their land, and the existing records held by the Civil Administration are very partial and incomplete. So that can lead to registries that are seriously inaccurate and the denial of legitimate property rights. And we’re talking about a huge amount of land — around 60 percent of Area C is not registered. For years, settler organizations have lobbied to lift the freeze and to renew land registration. That alone is telling: If the settler movement lobbies for something, you can safely assume it will benefit them. There had already been a lot of progress toward reversing the ban under previous governments, but this latest cabinet decision made it unmistakably clear that this is where we’re going, and the implementation can now move forward quickly. If registration is renewed now, it will be done under Israeli control. Palestinians will not have representation in the decisive bodies, and based on everything we know about Israeli land policy, the process will systematically favor settlements over Palestinians. If you look at land allocation historically, less than 1 percent of land allocated by Israel has gone to Palestinians, while vast areas have been allocated to settlements. What Israel calls “state land” is, in practice, treated as settlement land. So there is no reason to assume that private land registration will be handled differently. Ynet reported that Israel’s defense establishment supported nearly all of the cabinet’s West Bank measures, with the lone exception being a recommendation to delay the transfer of building and planning authorities in Hebron (including the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque) until after Ramadan — not opposition in principle. Have you seen any meaningful pushback from Israel’s political echelon, legal institutions, the security establishment, or the attorney general? I think in the past there was much more pushback on these issues from the army and the military command. But that isn’t the case anymore. Today, the military commander in the West Bank [Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who heads the Central Command], in my view, is very pro-annexation. Or at least, he’s not doing anything to stop it. Even if there are officers who think some of these steps might “rock the boat,” those are not the dominant voices. The broader context is important. We now have Smotrich inside the Defense Ministry, and [Defense Minister Israel] Katz leading this push, alongside lawmakers like [Settlement and National Missions Minister Orit] Strock. They understand that the window of opportunity may be shrinking. They don’t know what will happen after the elections, so they need to move fast. Unlike many other ministers and political figures in Israel, these people actually have an ideology. This isn’t only populism. Controlling the West Bank — and Gaza — is at the core of their worldview. They are trying to create as many irreversible steps as possible. Smotrich calls it “changing the system’s DNA,” and he’s right. You can link this back to Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” from 2017 and the map he presented a few months ago, [where Israel would] annex 82 percent of the West Bank — leaving Palestinian population centers as disconnected islands without access to agricultural land that many families rely on for their livelihood. How do you foresee this playing out with the Supreme Court? Do you think the recent cabinet decisions are an attempt to bypass the court’s 2020 decision to strike down the 2017 Regularization Law, which allowed Israel to expropriate private Palestinian lands in the West Bank for settlements? Some of these decisions — and the one regarding land registry — are essentially meant to bypass the court’s decision to strike down the Regularization Law. Others are more like evolved versions of the law. As for the courts, I don’t know. A few months ago, Yesh Din — together with fellow Israeli civil society organizations ACRI, Bimkom, and HaMoked — filed a petition challenging the renewal of the land registry because of the reasons I mentioned earlier. We argued that this is a dramatic annexation measure. Two weeks ago, the court rejected the petition, claiming it was premature. Basically what the ruling said is that a cabinet decision alone is not yet a practical step, and that no individual rights have been violated so far. So in other words, they told us, “Come back once the policy has been implemented and people are already suffering from it.” So that you understand the frustrating context, in 2024 we filed another petition challenging the transfer of powers from the military to civilian officials under Smotrich. That petition was also rejected. One judge said that after two or three years since the transfer of power was made, “The horses have already left the barn.” So on the one hand we’re told it’s too early; on the other, we’re told it’s too late. As we learned from the latest ruling, we can’t really go to court immediately after a cabinet decision. Basically, we need to wait for implementation — for example, orders by the military commander, or for the moment when they actually begin operating the registry. Each step will have to be challenged separately. If you look at decades of rulings since 1967, the courts have generally approved — or avoided deciding against — almost any policy the Israeli government wanted to implement in the West Bank. So I don’t have high expectations. That said, the courts can still be a useful tool to delay some steps, and maybe to make some measures less harmful. And in individual cases, you can sometimes win and protect someone’s rights, which matters. But you can’t represent every Palestinian in court. So overall, I’m not very optimistic. We don’t have anyone in government who will oppose these measures. Some opposition members understand what’s happening, but they’re powerless to oppose it. But still, some steps can be reversed — if the next government decides it wants to reverse them. The land registry, for example, is permanent, but they won’t be able to register all the unregistered land before the elections. They need to set up the bodies and institutions. They have to publicize the process, allow people to submit claims, check aerial photos and documents, determine whether land was cultivated and by whom. It’s not a one-day process, and in theory, the next government could freeze it again. A lot of the steps they’re taking are reversible, but you would need a coalition willing to roll back annexation measures and move toward a political solution — dismantling the occupation in favor of a future that’s secure and respects human rights for everyone. Declassifying the land registry and allowing Palestinians to sell land directly to Israelis is also linked to this idea of privatized annexation. We know most settlers aren’t expressly ideological: Many are secular, middle-class Israelis who want cheaper housing, a yard, a view, cheaper groceries… Education is cheaper. There are tax benefits. There’s lots of reasons. Right — it can be a very comfortable existence. So if Israel has “thrown open the doors to the Judean and Samarian real estate markets,” as right-wing Israeli journalist Amit Segal wrote, how do you see this reshaping the settlement project, including participation by “ordinary Israelis” who are not messianic or ultranationalist? What do you expect happens next if this privatized land market expands? Smotrich talks about doubling the settler population, from about half a million to a million in five years. And many of the plans this government is pushing are designed to attract people to the West Bank — improving roads, making commuting easier, improving cellular reception, and other reforms meant to raise quality of life. On the ground, I don’t think we’re seeing that kind of growth. Settlers take up a lot of space in Israeli public discourse, and they’ve moved closer to the consensus in government and the Knesset. But that doesn’t necessarily reflect where the public is, which I think is mostly indifferent. The main migration we see is Haredi communities moving for cheap housing which is, as you said, financial, not ideological. What we see more of is increased violence from settlers, which is strongly criticized by center and even center-right figures within Israeli society, and more land dispossession through farming outposts. This form of settlement doesn’t require many people — just one or two families, maybe some volunteers, is enough to take over huge areas by force. So could these measures still be consequential by facilitating land acquisition and development? Yes. I’m just not sure it will significantly enlarge the population of Israelis willing to live there. Settlers may own more land privately if the registry opens. And the land acquisition through purchases will expand. But it doesn’t necessarily mean there will be more Israelis living there. Speaking of farming outposts, how should we understand the recent cabinet decisions in the context of surging settler violence? Are they separate phenomena, or do the former enable the latter? I think they work together — like two hands. You have the hand of the government pushing structural and legal changes and removing obstacles to take over land. And then you have what’s happening on the ground: taking land by force. And there is no real law enforcement against settler violence. Ninety-four percent of cases are closed without charges. Then there’s the material support from the government. [Settlers] receive gear: night-vision equipment, off-road vehicles, and what they call “defense packages,” including weapons distributed by [Itamar] Ben Gvir’s National Security Ministry. We see the military providing protection to settlers, accompanying them while they attack Palestinians and doing nothing to stop it. And that’s in the best-case scenario. You alluded earlier to Oslo, and how many of these decisions undermine or cancel key parts of the agreement — including the Hebron Protocol. Where does Oslo stand now? I’m not an expert on Oslo, but I’ll say a few things. First, the division [of the West Bank] into Areas A, B, and C was an interim agreement. It wasn’t designed to last for 30 years. And for many Israelis — especially in government, but also more broadly — Area C is now treated as part of Israel, or a future “Land of Israel.” But under Oslo, Area C was supposed to remain under Israeli control temporarily until a final agreement, where it would become part of a Palestinian state. So in that sense, what we’ve seen is a long regression from what was agreed in Oslo. It’s not new, but every step makes it harder to return to any meaningful framework where Oslo could be implemented. Legally speaking, Oslo still holds. There’s security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military, and in other aspects too. But that’s basically it. Politically, Smotrich is very explicit: He wants to kill not only Oslo, but the very notion that there could ever be a Palestinian state. Do you expect a formal declaration of annexation, given how openly the government expresses its intentions? No. They’d love to, but Trump was very clear, so unless he changes his mind, I don’t see a formal declaration happening. But they don’t need one. They’re doing it through facts on the ground. Maybe in the future they’ll officially apply Israeli law. For now, they maintain an appearance. Take the cabinet decisions: They didn’t specify implementation, but my guess — and I think it’s a safe bet — is [that it will happen] through military orders, which preserves the appearance of a military occupation. If the territory were formally annexed, there would be no need for military law. So if the military carries out the decision, it creates plausible deniability? Exactly. If you look at the laws of occupation under international law, they were designed around the idea of trusteeship. The occupier is supposed to maintain the territory temporarily until it can be returned through a peaceful agreement. The temporary sovereign is supposed to consider the benefit of the land and its people, and avoid long-term changes. Everything Israel is doing violates that, especially when the government makes decisions and then orders the military commander to legislate in a way that serves Israeli civilians, not Palestinians. On Tuesday, Smotrich said the next Israeli government should “encourage the migration” of Palestinians from the West Bank. How does this statement fit into the settler right’s broader agenda? And do you see Trump intervening in any meaningful way, for example in connection to the Abraham Accords? It’s very hard to predict what Trump will do. I think the Abraham Accords are relevant, but also the future of Gaza. These issues are connected now. If Trump wants Arab countries — who oppose annexation — to move forward with normalization and rebuilding Gaza, he might be more active. But since these [latest] government decisions are too bureaucratic, I doubt Trump views them as annexation. Unless there’s a formal declaration, something very explicit, I don’t see him acting. As for Smotrich, he is a Jewish supremacist — a dangerous man who is determined to turn Israel into a fully fledged apartheid state, regardless of the implications for Israelis, Palestinians, or the wider region. But a lot depends on the [Israeli] elections. Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and Strock are getting everything they want right now, and if that changes, it would already be an improvement. I hope at least we’ll get a government that is less aggressive, where the settler lobby has less influence. We’ve never had a government that truly opposed taking over Palestinian land or prioritized Palestinian rights. But we’ve learned there’s bad — and then there’s much worse. The post Has Israel Crossed the Threshold of Annexation in the West Bank? appeared first on Left Voice. From Left Voice via This RSS Feed.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/31311 Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501©(3) tax-deductible donation today. Subscribe now U.S. Army personnel monitor screens displaying maps and imagery of the Gaza Strip during a media tour inside the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) on November 20, 2025 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The screen (above left) shows the use of Palantir’s Gaia application, billed as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view.” Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images. Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza. The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say. “The United Nations already has a humanitarian architecture in place to step in during crises, abiding by humanitarian principles and grounded in international law,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory FrancescaAlbanese told Drop Site. “This profit-driven parallel system involving companies like Palantir, already linked to Israel’s unlawful conduct, can only be regarded as a monstrosity.” The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October, one week after the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Gaza to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” Last week, at the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace in Washington, D.C., Major General Jasper Jeffers—who was tapped in January to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza—announced that the CMCC will serve as the Board of Peace’s operational headquarters. According to the sources, a representative from Palantir sits in the CMCC operations room where aid convoys and distributions inside Gaza are monitored through drone surveillance. The representative integrates convoy and distribution-related data into Palantir’s systems, the sources said. Palantir did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site on its role in the CMCC or in aid distribution in Gaza. Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel with the help of investments from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir is known for its work with government agencies, including the U.S. military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In January 2024, three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palantir announced it had entered into a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military for “war-related missions.” The company’s board meeting that month in Tel Aviv was held “in solidarity” with Israel, Bloomberg reported. Palantir did not disclose what technologies would be provided to Israel but a year earlier the company introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to help militaries rapidly analyze and identify bombing targets. The company’s technology has been described by a Palantir executive as a way of “optimizing the kill chain.” Palantir’s software has also been used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza, according to a biography of its CEO, “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State” by Michael Steinberger. In a June 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese found “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.” The use of Palantir to track aid deliveries to Gaza is of particular concern to observers. “The distinction between death by drone and delivery of aid is being evaporated while we all sit around the same table,” a source from the diplomatic community who attends CMCC sessions told Drop Site. Palantir’s two main platforms are Gotham and Foundry. “Gotham’s targeting offering supports soldiers with an Al-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing,” according to the company’s website. Foundry is Palantir’s platform for supply chain management and is billed as a way to “bridge siloed planning and execution processes, optimize inventory management, and help build supply chain resilience for economic and geopolitical uncertainty.” Palantir does not operate its systems in isolated silos. According to the company’s own documentation, “Palantir AIP and Foundry are designed to interoperate with the full range of data, logic, AI, workflow, and security systems.” A feature called “Type Mapping” allows data entered into the civilian Foundry system to be instantly synchronized and queried by the military’s Gotham platform. This means that, in theory, information that is being gathered at the CMCC—including from participating governments the UN and NGOs regarding the type of aid being distributed, its distribution locations and systems, and truck convoy routes—could be seamlessly pulled into Gotham’s AI targeting matrix. The same software logic used to track aid at the CMCC could be used to optimize and accelerate lethal airstrikes. There is no information available as to whether Gotham and Foundry are the specific products being used to track aid, but publicly available photographic evidence indicates that Palantir’s Gaia—a platform referred to on their website as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view”—is being deployed at the CMCC. In an interview with Drop Site on the role of Palantir in Gaza, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and a former member of Greece’s parliament, described an encounter he had with a Palantir representative who had explained to him the benefit the company gained from Gaza. “He was saying that ‘as the bombs fell we were having a party,’” Varoufakis said. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir representative explained how the chaos of intense violence in a high-density urban area like Gaza generates substantial data for training their AI models on how humans respond under stress. “The more bombardment and havoc, the better the training,” Varoufakis said. “It’s one thing to say that companies like Lockheed Martin make money selling F35s to the Israelis,” he said. “That has been a time-honored way that the military industrial complex has benefited from war and genocide and war crimes.” He continued, “This is the first instance in history where it is the suffering of a people being subjected to genocide and bombing—the suffering itself—which is adding to the capital of a company which then uses that capital to produce commodities to sell elsewhere.” Palantir operates on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, led by Larry Ellison—a major donor to the Israeli military who also funds the Tony Blair Institute, which has itself consulted on governance mechanisms for Gaza. Drop Site News is reader-supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The growing use of Palantir and other private sector companies in Gaza comes as the non-profit sector is being systematically squeezed out. As of March 1, 2026, Israel will ban dozens of aid groups from operating in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under new registration rules, including prominent NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. The new measures require aid groups to register the names and contact information of employees and to provide details about their funding and operations to Israeli authorities. The aid groups said in a joint statement this week that “the demand to transfer personal data raises acute security and legal risks. It exposes national staff to potential retaliation and undermines established data protection and confidentiality safeguards.” “NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza because aid delivered by humanitarian organizations is based on need and is provided to people wherever they are located,” said an aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. “This doesn’t match the vision of the ‘New Gaza’ where Palestinians will need to be displaced again into the zones where reconstruction will be permitted and their access to aid will be controlled through screening.” Not all NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza. Others—on a list of registered and approved organizations—are expanding their role alongside the private sector. These include Christian groups like Samaritan’s Purse and GAiN, both of whom were involved in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and who sources from the diplomatic community have recently seen gathering in a “prayer circle” at the CMCC. These approved NGOs, alongside private firms coordinated through the CMCC like Palantir, stand ready to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza. “Aid in Gaza has been stripped to bare survival and its future delivery appears to be faith based, profit driven, militarized and certainly not to be delivered by anyone that dares to speak out about what Palestinians are being subjected to,” said a senior aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. Gaza’s experience with private delivery mechanisms has been catastrophic. In May 2025, the U.S. and Israeli-backed GHF was contracted to distribute aid in the enclave. During the four and half months the GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites. The former headquarters of the GHF, a large warehouse-style building in Kiryat Gat, is now the headquarters of the CMCC. As aid groups are being banned, U.S. military contractors are also filling the vacuum. According to sources from the diplomatic community who attend the CMCC, the physical presence of Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), a U.S. military contractor that provided security for the GHF, has recently expanded at the center of the facility, with SRS officials taking up more prominent seating space on the operations floor. The company’s representatives now sit behind name tags in seating that had previously been reserved for UN agencies, the sources said. SRS did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site about its role at the CMCC or in Gaza aid distribution. “Given the precedent of the GHF, which turned aid delivery into a killing machine,” Albanese told Drop Site, “and the grave violations of international law embedded in the so-called peace plan—first and foremost the negation of the Palestinian right to self-determination—the risk that companies and states involved in the CMCC may be complicit in, or even direct perpetrators of, international crimes is real.” Arkel International, a longtime U.S. military contractor, has also had representatives at CMCC briefing sessions, according to the sources inside the center. Arkel recruited drivers from Serbia and Georgia to drive supplies into Gaza for the GHF in 2025, according to Haaretz. At the time, Arkel was represented in Israel by businessman Hezi Bezalel, who has served as honorary consul of Rwanda in Israel. The re-emergence of GHF-linked companies, alongside the digital capacity to monitor and monetize the surviving population in Gaza, is now converging with the construction of a new physical infrastructure spearheaded by giant real estate conglomerates. At last week’s Board of Peace meeting, the reconstruction of Gaza was positioned as a massive financial “unlocking” of a distressed asset. Figures like Yakir Gabay, who built a real estate empire in Germany, envisioned the coastline transformed into a “Mediterranean Riviera” featuring 200 hotels and artificial islands. Marc Rowan, a billionaire investor and the CEO of Apollo Global Management, framed the project as the consolidation of Gaza’s “productive assets” into a “unified structure.” A significant addition to the CMCC’s corporate roster is Terra Firma Capital Partners, which sources confirmed now maintains a permanent presence at the CMCC. Founded by British financier Guy Hands, the firm brings experience in managing massive-scale residential assets. Terra Firma has links to the New Labour era, specifically through Lord John Birt, Tony Blair’s former strategy director, who worked for the company after he left government. “The genocide is entering a new phase. After the destruction of Gaza and the erasure of entire family lines, powerful states are now deciding the fate of the survivors without ever listening to their voices,” Albanese said. “If Gaza is not to become a capitalist techno-dystopia, the time to act is now. States and corporations supporting this emerging infrastructure must be stopped, and held accountable. There is no time to lose.” Leave a comment Share From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/31311 Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501©(3) tax-deductible donation today. Subscribe now U.S. Army personnel monitor screens displaying maps and imagery of the Gaza Strip during a media tour inside the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) on November 20, 2025 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The screen (above left) shows the use of Palantir’s Gaia application, billed as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view.” Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images. Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza. The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say. “The United Nations already has a humanitarian architecture in place to step in during crises, abiding by humanitarian principles and grounded in international law,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory FrancescaAlbanese told Drop Site. “This profit-driven parallel system involving companies like Palantir, already linked to Israel’s unlawful conduct, can only be regarded as a monstrosity.” The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October, one week after the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Gaza to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” Last week, at the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace in Washington, D.C., Major General Jasper Jeffers—who was tapped in January to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza—announced that the CMCC will serve as the Board of Peace’s operational headquarters. According to the sources, a representative from Palantir sits in the CMCC operations room where aid convoys and distributions inside Gaza are monitored through drone surveillance. The representative integrates convoy and distribution-related data into Palantir’s systems, the sources said. Palantir did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site on its role in the CMCC or in aid distribution in Gaza. Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel with the help of investments from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir is known for its work with government agencies, including the U.S. military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In January 2024, three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palantir announced it had entered into a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military for “war-related missions.” The company’s board meeting that month in Tel Aviv was held “in solidarity” with Israel, Bloomberg reported. Palantir did not disclose what technologies would be provided to Israel but a year earlier the company introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to help militaries rapidly analyze and identify bombing targets. The company’s technology has been described by a Palantir executive as a way of “optimizing the kill chain.” Palantir’s software has also been used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza, according to a biography of its CEO, “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State” by Michael Steinberger. In a June 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese found “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.” The use of Palantir to track aid deliveries to Gaza is of particular concern to observers. “The distinction between death by drone and delivery of aid is being evaporated while we all sit around the same table,” a source from the diplomatic community who attends CMCC sessions told Drop Site. Palantir’s two main platforms are Gotham and Foundry. “Gotham’s targeting offering supports soldiers with an Al-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing,” according to the company’s website. Foundry is Palantir’s platform for supply chain management and is billed as a way to “bridge siloed planning and execution processes, optimize inventory management, and help build supply chain resilience for economic and geopolitical uncertainty.” Palantir does not operate its systems in isolated silos. According to the company’s own documentation, “Palantir AIP and Foundry are designed to interoperate with the full range of data, logic, AI, workflow, and security systems.” A feature called “Type Mapping” allows data entered into the civilian Foundry system to be instantly synchronized and queried by the military’s Gotham platform. This means that, in theory, information that is being gathered at the CMCC—including from participating governments the UN and NGOs regarding the type of aid being distributed, its distribution locations and systems, and truck convoy routes—could be seamlessly pulled into Gotham’s AI targeting matrix. The same software logic used to track aid at the CMCC could be used to optimize and accelerate lethal airstrikes. There is no information available as to whether Gotham and Foundry are the specific products being used to track aid, but publicly available photographic evidence indicates that Palantir’s Gaia—a platform referred to on their website as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view”—is being deployed at the CMCC. In an interview with Drop Site on the role of Palantir in Gaza, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and a former member of Greece’s parliament, described an encounter he had with a Palantir representative who had explained to him the benefit the company gained from Gaza. “He was saying that ‘as the bombs fell we were having a party,’” Varoufakis said. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir representative explained how the chaos of intense violence in a high-density urban area like Gaza generates substantial data for training their AI models on how humans respond under stress. “The more bombardment and havoc, the better the training,” Varoufakis said. “It’s one thing to say that companies like Lockheed Martin make money selling F35s to the Israelis,” he said. “That has been a time-honored way that the military industrial complex has benefited from war and genocide and war crimes.” He continued, “This is the first instance in history where it is the suffering of a people being subjected to genocide and bombing—the suffering itself—which is adding to the capital of a company which then uses that capital to produce commodities to sell elsewhere.” Palantir operates on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, led by Larry Ellison—a major donor to the Israeli military who also funds the Tony Blair Institute, which has itself consulted on governance mechanisms for Gaza. Drop Site News is reader-supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The growing use of Palantir and other private sector companies in Gaza comes as the non-profit sector is being systematically squeezed out. As of March 1, 2026, Israel will ban dozens of aid groups from operating in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under new registration rules, including prominent NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. The new measures require aid groups to register the names and contact information of employees and to provide details about their funding and operations to Israeli authorities. The aid groups said in a joint statement this week that “the demand to transfer personal data raises acute security and legal risks. It exposes national staff to potential retaliation and undermines established data protection and confidentiality safeguards.” “NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza because aid delivered by humanitarian organizations is based on need and is provided to people wherever they are located,” said an aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. “This doesn’t match the vision of the ‘New Gaza’ where Palestinians will need to be displaced again into the zones where reconstruction will be permitted and their access to aid will be controlled through screening.” Not all NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza. Others—on a list of registered and approved organizations—are expanding their role alongside the private sector. These include Christian groups like Samaritan’s Purse and GAiN, both of whom were involved in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and who sources from the diplomatic community have recently seen gathering in a “prayer circle” at the CMCC. These approved NGOs, alongside private firms coordinated through the CMCC like Palantir, stand ready to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza. “Aid in Gaza has been stripped to bare survival and its future delivery appears to be faith based, profit driven, militarized and certainly not to be delivered by anyone that dares to speak out about what Palestinians are being subjected to,” said a senior aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. Gaza’s experience with private delivery mechanisms has been catastrophic. In May 2025, the U.S. and Israeli-backed GHF was contracted to distribute aid in the enclave. During the four and half months the GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites. The former headquarters of the GHF, a large warehouse-style building in Kiryat Gat, is now the headquarters of the CMCC. As aid groups are being banned, U.S. military contractors are also filling the vacuum. According to sources from the diplomatic community who attend the CMCC, the physical presence of Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), a U.S. military contractor that provided security for the GHF, has recently expanded at the center of the facility, with SRS officials taking up more prominent seating space on the operations floor. The company’s representatives now sit behind name tags in seating that had previously been reserved for UN agencies, the sources said. SRS did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site about its role at the CMCC or in Gaza aid distribution. “Given the precedent of the GHF, which turned aid delivery into a killing machine,” Albanese told Drop Site, “and the grave violations of international law embedded in the so-called peace plan—first and foremost the negation of the Palestinian right to self-determination—the risk that companies and states involved in the CMCC may be complicit in, or even direct perpetrators of, international crimes is real.” Arkel International, a longtime U.S. military contractor, has also had representatives at CMCC briefing sessions, according to the sources inside the center. Arkel recruited drivers from Serbia and Georgia to drive supplies into Gaza for the GHF in 2025, according to Haaretz. At the time, Arkel was represented in Israel by businessman Hezi Bezalel, who has served as honorary consul of Rwanda in Israel. The re-emergence of GHF-linked companies, alongside the digital capacity to monitor and monetize the surviving population in Gaza, is now converging with the construction of a new physical infrastructure spearheaded by giant real estate conglomerates. At last week’s Board of Peace meeting, the reconstruction of Gaza was positioned as a massive financial “unlocking” of a distressed asset. Figures like Yakir Gabay, who built a real estate empire in Germany, envisioned the coastline transformed into a “Mediterranean Riviera” featuring 200 hotels and artificial islands. Marc Rowan, a billionaire investor and the CEO of Apollo Global Management, framed the project as the consolidation of Gaza’s “productive assets” into a “unified structure.” A significant addition to the CMCC’s corporate roster is Terra Firma Capital Partners, which sources confirmed now maintains a permanent presence at the CMCC. Founded by British financier Guy Hands, the firm brings experience in managing massive-scale residential assets. Terra Firma has links to the New Labour era, specifically through Lord John Birt, Tony Blair’s former strategy director, who worked for the company after he left government. “The genocide is entering a new phase. After the destruction of Gaza and the erasure of entire family lines, powerful states are now deciding the fate of the survivors without ever listening to their voices,” Albanese said. “If Gaza is not to become a capitalist techno-dystopia, the time to act is now. States and corporations supporting this emerging infrastructure must be stopped, and held accountable. There is no time to lose.” Leave a comment Share From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.
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Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501©(3) tax-deductible donation today. Subscribe now U.S. Army personnel monitor screens displaying maps and imagery of the Gaza Strip during a media tour inside the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) on November 20, 2025 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The screen (above left) shows the use of Palantir’s Gaia application, billed as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view.” Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images. Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza. The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say. “The United Nations already has a humanitarian architecture in place to step in during crises, abiding by humanitarian principles and grounded in international law,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory FrancescaAlbanese told Drop Site. “This profit-driven parallel system involving companies like Palantir, already linked to Israel’s unlawful conduct, can only be regarded as a monstrosity.” The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October, one week after the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Gaza to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” Last week, at the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace in Washington, D.C., Major General Jasper Jeffers—who was tapped in January to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza—announced that the CMCC will serve as the Board of Peace’s operational headquarters. According to the sources, a representative from Palantir sits in the CMCC operations room where aid convoys and distributions inside Gaza are monitored through drone surveillance. The representative integrates convoy and distribution-related data into Palantir’s systems, the sources said. Palantir did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site on its role in the CMCC or in aid distribution in Gaza. Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel with the help of investments from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir is known for its work with government agencies, including the U.S. military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In January 2024, three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palantir announced it had entered into a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military for “war-related missions.” The company’s board meeting that month in Tel Aviv was held “in solidarity” with Israel, Bloomberg reported. Palantir did not disclose what technologies would be provided to Israel but a year earlier the company introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to help militaries rapidly analyze and identify bombing targets. The company’s technology has been described by a Palantir executive as a way of “optimizing the kill chain.” Palantir’s software has also been used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza, according to a biography of its CEO, “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State” by Michael Steinberger. In a June 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese found “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.” The use of Palantir to track aid deliveries to Gaza is of particular concern to observers. “The distinction between death by drone and delivery of aid is being evaporated while we all sit around the same table,” a source from the diplomatic community who attends CMCC sessions told Drop Site. Palantir’s two main platforms are Gotham and Foundry. “Gotham’s targeting offering supports soldiers with an Al-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing,” according to the company’s website. Foundry is Palantir’s platform for supply chain management and is billed as a way to “bridge siloed planning and execution processes, optimize inventory management, and help build supply chain resilience for economic and geopolitical uncertainty.” Palantir does not operate its systems in isolated silos. According to the company’s own documentation, “Palantir AIP and Foundry are designed to interoperate with the full range of data, logic, AI, workflow, and security systems.” A feature called “Type Mapping” allows data entered into the civilian Foundry system to be instantly synchronized and queried by the military’s Gotham platform. This means that, in theory, information that is being gathered at the CMCC—including from participating governments the UN and NGOs regarding the type of aid being distributed, its distribution locations and systems, and truck convoy routes—could be seamlessly pulled into Gotham’s AI targeting matrix. The same software logic used to track aid at the CMCC could be used to optimize and accelerate lethal airstrikes. There is no information available as to whether Gotham and Foundry are the specific products being used to track aid, but publicly available photographic evidence indicates that Palantir’s Gaia—a platform referred to on their website as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view”—is being deployed at the CMCC. In an interview with Drop Site on the role of Palantir in Gaza, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and a former member of Greece’s parliament, described an encounter he had with a Palantir representative who had explained to him the benefit the company gained from Gaza. “He was saying that ‘as the bombs fell we were having a party,’” Varoufakis said. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir representative explained how the chaos of intense violence in a high-density urban area like Gaza generates substantial data for training their AI models on how humans respond under stress. “The more bombardment and havoc, the better the training,” Varoufakis said. “It’s one thing to say that companies like Lockheed Martin make money selling F35s to the Israelis,” he said. “That has been a time-honored way that the military industrial complex has benefited from war and genocide and war crimes.” He continued, “This is the first instance in history where it is the suffering of a people being subjected to genocide and bombing—the suffering itself—which is adding to the capital of a company which then uses that capital to produce commodities to sell elsewhere.” Palantir operates on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, led by Larry Ellison—a major donor to the Israeli military who also funds the Tony Blair Institute, which has itself consulted on governance mechanisms for Gaza. Drop Site News is reader-supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The growing use of Palantir and other private sector companies in Gaza comes as the non-profit sector is being systematically squeezed out. As of March 1, 2026, Israel will ban dozens of aid groups from operating in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under new registration rules, including prominent NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. The new measures require aid groups to register the names and contact information of employees and to provide details about their funding and operations to Israeli authorities. The aid groups said in a joint statement this week that “the demand to transfer personal data raises acute security and legal risks. It exposes national staff to potential retaliation and undermines established data protection and confidentiality safeguards.” “NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza because aid delivered by humanitarian organizations is based on need and is provided to people wherever they are located,” said an aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. “This doesn’t match the vision of the ‘New Gaza’ where Palestinians will need to be displaced again into the zones where reconstruction will be permitted and their access to aid will be controlled through screening.” Not all NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza. Others—on a list of registered and approved organizations—are expanding their role alongside the private sector. These include Christian groups like Samaritan’s Purse and GAiN, both of whom were involved in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and who sources from the diplomatic community have recently seen gathering in a “prayer circle” at the CMCC. These approved NGOs, alongside private firms coordinated through the CMCC like Palantir, stand ready to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza. “Aid in Gaza has been stripped to bare survival and its future delivery appears to be faith based, profit driven, militarized and certainly not to be delivered by anyone that dares to speak out about what Palestinians are being subjected to,” said a senior aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. Gaza’s experience with private delivery mechanisms has been catastrophic. In May 2025, the U.S. and Israeli-backed GHF was contracted to distribute aid in the enclave. During the four and half months the GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites. The former headquarters of the GHF, a large warehouse-style building in Kiryat Gat, is now the headquarters of the CMCC. As aid groups are being banned, U.S. military contractors are also filling the vacuum. According to sources from the diplomatic community who attend the CMCC, the physical presence of Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), a U.S. military contractor that provided security for the GHF, has recently expanded at the center of the facility, with SRS officials taking up more prominent seating space on the operations floor. The company’s representatives now sit behind name tags in seating that had previously been reserved for UN agencies, the sources said. SRS did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site about its role at the CMCC or in Gaza aid distribution. “Given the precedent of the GHF, which turned aid delivery into a killing machine,” Albanese told Drop Site, “and the grave violations of international law embedded in the so-called peace plan—first and foremost the negation of the Palestinian right to self-determination—the risk that companies and states involved in the CMCC may be complicit in, or even direct perpetrators of, international crimes is real.” Arkel International, a longtime U.S. military contractor, has also had representatives at CMCC briefing sessions, according to the sources inside the center. Arkel recruited drivers from Serbia and Georgia to drive supplies into Gaza for the GHF in 2025, according to Haaretz. At the time, Arkel was represented in Israel by businessman Hezi Bezalel, who has served as honorary consul of Rwanda in Israel. The re-emergence of GHF-linked companies, alongside the digital capacity to monitor and monetize the surviving population in Gaza, is now converging with the construction of a new physical infrastructure spearheaded by giant real estate conglomerates. At last week’s Board of Peace meeting, the reconstruction of Gaza was positioned as a massive financial “unlocking” of a distressed asset. Figures like Yakir Gabay, who built a real estate empire in Germany, envisioned the coastline transformed into a “Mediterranean Riviera” featuring 200 hotels and artificial islands. Marc Rowan, a billionaire investor and the CEO of Apollo Global Management, framed the project as the consolidation of Gaza’s “productive assets” into a “unified structure.” A significant addition to the CMCC’s corporate roster is Terra Firma Capital Partners, which sources confirmed now maintains a permanent presence at the CMCC. Founded by British financier Guy Hands, the firm brings experience in managing massive-scale residential assets. Terra Firma has links to the New Labour era, specifically through Lord John Birt, Tony Blair’s former strategy director, who worked for the company after he left government. “The genocide is entering a new phase. After the destruction of Gaza and the erasure of entire family lines, powerful states are now deciding the fate of the survivors without ever listening to their voices,” Albanese said. “If Gaza is not to become a capitalist techno-dystopia, the time to act is now. States and corporations supporting this emerging infrastructure must be stopped, and held accountable. There is no time to lose.” Leave a comment Share From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.
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Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501©(3) tax-deductible donation today. Subscribe now U.S. Army personnel monitor screens displaying maps and imagery of the Gaza Strip during a media tour inside the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) on November 20, 2025 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The screen (above left) shows the use of Palantir’s Gaia application, billed as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view.” Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images. Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza. The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say. “The United Nations already has a humanitarian architecture in place to step in during crises, abiding by humanitarian principles and grounded in international law,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory Francesca Albanese told Drop Site. “This profit-driven parallel system involving companies like Palantir, already linked to Israel’s unlawful conduct, can only be regarded as a monstrosity.” The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October, one week after the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Gaza to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” Last week, at the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace in Washington, D.C., Major General Jasper Jeffers—who was tapped in January to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza—announced that the CMCC will serve as the Board of Peace’s operational headquarters. According to the sources, a representative from Palantir sits in the CMCC operations room where aid convoys and distributions inside Gaza are monitored through drone surveillance. The representative integrates convoy and distribution-related data into Palantir’s systems, the sources said. Palantir did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site on its role in the CMCC or in aid distribution in Gaza. Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel with the help of investments from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir is known for its work with government agencies, including the U.S. military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In January 2024, three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Palantir announced it had entered into a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli military for “war-related missions.” The company’s board meeting that month in Tel Aviv was held “in solidarity” with Israel, Bloomberg reported. Palantir did not disclose what technologies would be provided to Israel but a year earlier the company introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to help militaries rapidly analyze and identify bombing targets. The company’s technology has been described by a Palantir executive as a way of “optimizing the kill chain.” Palantir’s software has also been used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza, according to a biography of its CEO, “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State” by Michael Steinberger. In a June 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese found “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.” The use of Palantir to track aid deliveries to Gaza is of particular concern to observers. “The distinction between death by drone and delivery of aid is being evaporated while we all sit around the same table,” a source from the diplomatic community who attends CMCC sessions told Drop Site. Palantir’s two main platforms are Gotham and Foundry. “Gotham’s targeting offering supports soldiers with an Al-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing,” according to the company’s website. Foundry is Palantir’s platform for supply chain management and is billed as a way to “bridge siloed planning and execution processes, optimize inventory management, and help build supply chain resilience for economic and geopolitical uncertainty.” Palantir does not operate its systems in isolated silos. According to the company’s own documentation, “Palantir AIP and Foundry are designed to interoperate with the full range of data, logic, AI, workflow, and security systems.” A feature called “Type Mapping” allows data entered into the civilian Foundry system to be instantly synchronized and queried by the military’s Gotham platform. This means that, in theory, information that is being gathered at the CMCC—including from participating governments the UN and NGOs regarding the type of aid being distributed, its distribution locations and systems, and truck convoy routes—could be seamlessly pulled into Gotham’s AI targeting matrix. The same software logic used to track aid at the CMCC could be used to optimize and accelerate lethal airstrikes. There is no information available as to whether Gotham and Foundry are the specific products being used to track aid, but publicly available photographic evidence indicates that Palantir’s Gaia—a platform referred to on their website as a tool to “bring the battlefield into view”—is being deployed at the CMCC. In an interview with Drop Site on the role of Palantir in Gaza, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister and a former member of Greece’s parliament, described an encounter he had with a Palantir representative who had explained to him the benefit the company gained from Gaza. “He was saying that ‘as the bombs fell we were having a party,’” Varoufakis said. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir representative explained how the chaos of intense violence in a high-density urban area like Gaza generates substantial data for training their AI models on how humans respond under stress. “The more bombardment and havoc, the better the training,” Varoufakis said. “It’s one thing to say that companies like Lockheed Martin make money selling F35s to the Israelis,” he said. “That has been a time-honored way that the military industrial complex has benefited from war and genocide and war crimes.” He continued, “This is the first instance in history where it is the suffering of a people being subjected to genocide and bombing—the suffering itself—which is adding to the capital of a company which then uses that capital to produce commodities to sell elsewhere.” Palantir operates on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, led by Larry Ellison—a major donor to the Israeli military who also funds the Tony Blair Institute, which has itself consulted on governance mechanisms for Gaza. Drop Site News is reader-supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The growing use of Palantir and other private sector companies in Gaza comes as the non-profit sector is being systematically squeezed out. As of March 1, 2026, Israel will ban dozens of aid groups from operating in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under new registration rules, including prominent NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. The new measures require aid groups to register the names and contact information of employees and to provide details about their funding and operations to Israeli authorities. The aid groups said in a joint statement this week that “the demand to transfer personal data raises acute security and legal risks. It exposes national staff to potential retaliation and undermines established data protection and confidentiality safeguards.” “NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza because aid delivered by humanitarian organizations is based on need and is provided to people wherever they are located,” said an aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. “This doesn’t match the vision of the ‘New Gaza’ where Palestinians will need to be displaced again into the zones where reconstruction will be permitted and their access to aid will be controlled through screening.” Not all NGOs are being pushed out of Gaza. Others—on a list of registered and approved organizations—are expanding their role alongside the private sector. These include Christian groups like Samaritan’s Purse and GAiN, both of whom were involved in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and who sources from the diplomatic community have recently seen gathering in a “prayer circle” at the CMCC. These approved NGOs, alongside private firms coordinated through the CMCC like Palantir, stand ready to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza. “Aid in Gaza has been stripped to bare survival and its future delivery appears to be faith based, profit driven, militarized and certainly not to be delivered by anyone that dares to speak out about what Palestinians are being subjected to,” said a senior aid worker who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity. Gaza’s experience with private delivery mechanisms has been catastrophic. In May 2025, the U.S. and Israeli-backed GHF was contracted to distribute aid in the enclave. During the four and half months the GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites. The former headquarters of the GHF, a large warehouse-style building in Kiryat Gat, is now the headquarters of the CMCC. As aid groups are being banned, U.S. military contractors are also filling the vacuum. According to sources from the diplomatic community who attend the CMCC, the physical presence of Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), a U.S. military contractor that provided security for the GHF, has recently expanded at the center of the facility, with SRS officials taking up more prominent seating space on the operations floor. The company’s representatives now sit behind name tags in seating that had previously been reserved for UN agencies, the sources said. SRS did not respond to an inquiry from Drop Site about its role at the CMCC or in Gaza aid distribution. “Given the precedent of the GHF, which turned aid delivery into a killing machine,” Albanese told Drop Site, “and the grave violations of international law embedded in the so-called peace plan—first and foremost the negation of the Palestinian right to self-determination—the risk that companies and states involved in the CMCC may be complicit in, or even direct perpetrators of, international crimes is real.” Arkel International, a longtime U.S. military contractor, has also had representatives at CMCC briefing sessions, according to the sources inside the center. Arkel recruited drivers from Serbia and Georgia to drive supplies into Gaza for the GHF in 2025, according to Haaretz. At the time, Arkel was represented in Israel by businessman Hezi Bezalel, who has served as honorary consul of Rwanda in Israel. The re-emergence of GHF-linked companies, alongside the digital capacity to monitor and monetize the surviving population in Gaza, is now converging with the construction of a new physical infrastructure spearheaded by giant real estate conglomerates. At last week’s Board of Peace meeting, the reconstruction of Gaza was positioned as a massive financial “unlocking” of a distressed asset. Figures like Yakir Gabay, who built a real estate empire in Germany, envisioned the coastline transformed into a “Mediterranean Riviera” featuring 200 hotels and artificial islands. Marc Rowan, a billionaire investor and the CEO of Apollo Global Management, framed the project as the consolidation of Gaza’s “productive assets” into a “unified structure.” A significant addition to the CMCC’s corporate roster is Terra Firma Capital Partners, which sources confirmed now maintains a permanent presence at the CMCC. Founded by British financier Guy Hands, the firm brings experience in managing massive-scale residential assets. Terra Firma has links to the New Labour era, specifically through Lord John Birt, Tony Blair’s former strategy director, who worked for the company after he left government. “The genocide is entering a new phase. After the destruction of Gaza and the erasure of entire family lines, powerful states are now deciding the fate of the survivors without ever listening to their voices,” Albanese said. “If Gaza is not to become a capitalist techno-dystopia, the time to act is now. States and corporations supporting this emerging infrastructure must be stopped, and held accountable. There is no time to lose.” Leave a comment Share From Drop Site News via this RSS feed
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An Israeli analysis published Tuesday examining the Gaza Health Ministry’s list of Palestinians killed during Israel’s US-backed annihilation of the Gaza Strip largely affirmed the official death count, while noting some imperfections in the 2,000-page document. Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, dissected the Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) database of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, which at the time contained nearly 70,000 names—it’s now over 72,000—in part by using artificial intelligence to analyze the massive file. “A consensus has taken shape: Even if the list has weaknesses, including the fact that it does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, it reflects the scale of the disaster inflicted on Gaza and its people,” article author Nir Hasson wrote. “It also forms the basis for allegations that Israel committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide.” Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who says Israeli is committing genocide in Gaza, told Hasson, “It’s clear that the list isn’t 100% accurate and that it has errors, but I think they’re around 1%.” Gabriel Epstein, an associate at the US-based Israel Policy Forum who was formerly skeptical of the GHM list, “now believes it is largely accurate and may even slightly undercount the dead,” according to Hasson. “Epstein reviewed the list obtained by Haaretz,” the article states. “He found 24 duplicates and 38 entries with problems in the ID numbers. That means 99.91% of the entries were complete, with verified ID numbers. He also found that 64 deaths that had appeared on earlier lists were later removed, while 158 names removed by March of last year were added back.” The GHM list notably only contains the names of people who died from combat-related violence, not from “hunger, disease, accidents, or the collapse of the health system.” It also does not include the thousands of people who are missing and likely dead and buried beneath the rubble of the 80% of Gaza’s buildings that have been destroyed or damaged during the war. Other research, including multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet, have also concluded that the ministry was undercounting the number of people killed by Israel’s war on Gaza. As for the issue of Hamas not differentiating between combatants and civilians on the ministry’s death list, an investigation last year by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison analyzed classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence data showing that 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops through the first 19 months of the war were civilians. The probe obliterated IDF claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio. Last September, Former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who was in command for much of the war—said that “over 10%” of Gaza’s approximately 2.2 million people “were killed or injured” since October 2023. Halevi’s acknowledgment tracked with GHM figures showing at least 228,815 people killed or wounded at the time. In January, Israeli media outlets including Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and the Times of Israel reported that the IDF accepted the accuracy of GHM’s death count, which at the time stood at over 71,000. Israeli officials and media, along with their supportive US counterparts during both the Biden and Trump administrations, once cast doubt upon or outright denied GHM figures because the ministry is under Hamas’ control. These aspersions came in addition to widespread Israeli and US denials of Israel’s forced famine and starvation deaths and IDF war crimes in Gaza. “As the months have passed, claims of fabrication and exaggeration have largely remained confined to Israeli television panels,” Hasson wrote in the new analysis. “At the end of January, an apparent dispute over the number of dead seemed to end in Israel when a senior army source confirmed that the IDF recognizes that 70,000 people died, precisely the figure cited by Gazan authorities.” “Even if the argument over the total number of dead is, for now, largely settled, disagreement in Israel continues over who the dead were,” he continued. “How many were gunmen, how many were affiliated with Hamas, how many were killed under circumstances that meet the conditions of international law?” “None of this alters the stark figures in the table,” Hasson added. “Of the recorded deaths, 20,876, about 30%, are young girls, teenage girls, and women. Another 3,220 were aged 65 and over, including the final name on the list, Tamam al-Batsh, who was 110 when she died.” While Israel officials continue to insist that GHM figures are “misleading and unreliable”—or even “fake”—Hasson noted the general consistency between Israeli and Palestinian tallies across past Israeli attacks on Gaza. During Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), the Palestinian count was 23% higher than Israel’s. For Operation Pillar of Success (2012), Israel’s tally of Gazan deaths was 11% higher than the Palestinian figure. In Operation Protective Edge (2014), the Palestinian count was 8% higher. And during 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, Palestinian officials counted 10% more Gaza deaths than Israel. The United Nations and US administrations of both major political parties have long acknowledged the GHM’s accounting of Palestinian casualties in Israeli attacks, including the assault that began in October 2023. Hasson noted that “it has been increasingly harder to find Israeli officials commenting on the subject” of the GHM death count in the ongoing war as evidence of its accuracy mounts. “Since the war began,” he said, “Israel has made no serious effort to demonstrate that the list is false or to present an alternative. It has not proven even once that a person listed as deceased is in fact alive.” From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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Shortly after the Danish military evacuated a crew member of a US submarine off the Greenlandic coast for urgent medical care on Saturday, President Donald Trump pledged to send a “hospital boat” to the self-governing Danish territory—but officials from Greenland and Denmark declared it unnecessary, given the island’s publicly funded universal healthcare system. “Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!” said Trump, who in December named the Republican governor as his envoy to Greenland while threatening to take over the island. Trump has called the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency a “con,” but global warming is opening up potential shipping routes and access to natural resources in and around Greenland. He has claimed that if he doesn’t seize the island, China or Russia will do so—though last month he announced a “framework of a future deal” for security, temporarily easing fears of a US invasion. In his Truth Social post late Saturday, Trump shared an illustration of a Navy hospital ship, the USNS Mercy. “As of late January, the 1,000-bed hospital ship was firmly in drydock at Alabama Shipyard in Mobile, where it has been undergoing scheduled maintenance since July 2025,” according to the maritime industry news website gC**aptain. “The USNS Mercy, commissioned in 1986, departed San Diego last July for a one-year scheduled maintenance period at Alabama Shipyard under an $18.7 million firm-fixed-price contract for a 153-calendar day mid-term availability, including drydocking.” Responding to the US leader on social media Sunday, Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said: “It will be a no thanks from here. President Trump’s idea of sending an American hospital ship here to Greenland has been noted. But we have a public health service where treatment is free for citizens. It is a conscious choice. And a fundamental part of our society.” “It is not like that in the USA, where it costs money to go to the doctor,” he added. “We are always open to dialogue and cooperation. Also with the USA. But now talk to us instead of just making more or less random outbursts on social media. Dialogue and cooperation require respect for decisions about our country being made here at home.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen somewhat indirectly pushed back against Trump with a social media post, saying that she is “happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to health for all. Where it’s not insurances and wealth that determine whether you get proper treatment. You have the same approach in Greenland. Happy Sunday to you all.” Denmark’s defense minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, similarly told Danish broadcaster DR: “The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialized treatment, they receive it in Denmark.” “It’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland,” he added. The Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers website states that in “a number of services are provided, which are free at point of use to everyone with permanent residence in Greenland. If a doctor has prescribed treatment, and the service is not available nearby, you have the right to have the transport covered to the nearest hospital.” The site also notes that island’s health service is “challenged by a shortage of staff, particularly in the most sparsely populated areas.” Aaja Chemnitz, one of the two Greenlandic politicians in the Danish Parliament, said on social media: “Another day. Another crazy news story. Donald Trump wants to send a poorly maintained hospital ship to Greenland. It seems rather desperate and does not contribute to the permanent and sustainable strengthening of the healthcare system that we need.” “Since the last election, where I campaigned for closer healthcare cooperation… we have succeeded in allocating DKK 35 million annually, and this year an additional DKK 185 million, for treatment of Greenlanders in Denmark,” she continued. Those figures in US dollars are roughly $5.5 million and $29 million, respectively. Chemnitz added: I believe there is one thing we are missing in our understanding of health and welfare in Greenland. We should have equal access to doctors, cancer treatment pathways, and healthcare assistance like those available in Denmark. Our healthcare system is deeply challenged—more so than what is seen in Denmark. And this is best solved together with Denmark, as one of the richest and most highly educated countries, for example in the healthcare sector. Not the United States, which has its own problems with healthcare. This requires closer and more committed efforts from Denmark in the field of healthcare in Greenland. More doctors from the Danish regions taking a turn in Greenland. Faster access to treatment in Denmark. And a crystal-clear prioritization of children and young people, cancer and heart diseases, and a significant improvement in psychiatry. Is Denmark ready for that? The United States has often ranked dead last among peer nations on metrics such as access to care and health outcomes, fueling Americans’ demands for a transition from the current for-profit healthcare system to one that is publicly funded and universal. Massive cuts to the social safety net in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump last July and federal Republicans’ failure to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that helped tens of millions of people afford health insurance premiums—before they expired at the end of December—have further fueled calls for Medicare for All. From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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Late last month, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) published 3.5 million pages about convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. On top of the grotesque and horrifying photos and emails that appear to offer more evidence of systemic and widespread child abuse, the Epstein files revealed further allegations of his ties to Israel and its intelligence agency Mossad. London Times (2/8/26) The Epstein/Israel revelations have been covered at length by independent and overseas media outlets: “The Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building” that Epstein managed (Drop Site News, 2/18/26). Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli spy Yoni Koren were frequent guests at the apartment, and Rafi Shlomo, then–director of protective service at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, “controlled access to the apartment for guests, and even conducted background checks on cleaners and Epstein’s employees.” An informant told the FBI he “became convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent” (Middle East Monitor, 2/8/26). Epstein emailed Barak in December 2018: “You should make clear that I don’t work for Mossad :)” (Dissident, 2/2/26). Barak responded, “You or I?” Epstein replied, “That I don’t :).” Epstein emailed Barak twice in November 2017 (London Times, 2/8/26): “Did Boies ask you to help obtain former Mossad agents to do dirty investigations?” and “Boies said he got to the Mossad guys through you? True? This is getting a lot of press.” Barak responded, “Call me. [Redacted] in Paris.” (Epstein was likely referring to attorney David Boies, who was facing scrutiny at the time for hiring a private firm, run largely by former Mossad officers, to investigate women who accused his client Harvey Weinstein of rape, and journalists trying to expose the allegations—New Yorker, 11/6/17.) Epstein’s foundation backed pro-Israel projects like Friends of Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish National Fund, which buys land in Palestine to build settlements (Middle East Eye, 2/7/26). Adding to existing evidence Al Jazeera (2/9/26) It is important to note that the Epstein emails contain allegations and intimations, and don’t prove that Epstein was an Israeli agent, formally or informally. However, they do add to the existing evidence that Epstein used his considerable connections and wealth to assist the Israeli state. The Epstein/Israel ties were reported before the latest DoJ release by various independent media outlets, particularly Drop Site News. Drop Site’s reporting received scant coverage by US corporate media, as I documented at the time (FAIR.org. 11/14/25). Drop Site based its reporting on a hack purportedly emanating from Iran’s government. The hack’s source seemed to have explained—at least in part—the lack of US corporate media coverage. The latest Epstein/Mossad ties, on the other hand, were uncovered in a release by the DoJ—a more acceptable source by US corporate media standards. (The Justice release confirmed some of the details in Drop Site‘s reporting based on the Iranian hack, such as Epstein’s close ties to the Israeli spy Yoni Koren—Drop Site, 11/11/25; Al Jazeera, 2/9/26.) And yet only a few US corporate media outlets—most notably Axios, New York magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Atlantic—have referenced the latest Epstein/Israel revelations. Even then, these outlets cast doubt on the legitimacy of the connections by framing them as conspiracy theories, or conspiracy-adjacent—hardly a surprise, given previous US corporate media coverage. ‘Ample fodder for speculation’ New York (2/6/26) Axios (2/3/26) wrote: FBI source reports and internal emails contain unverified claims and secondhand suspicions about Epstein’s possible ties to Mossad and other intelligence services—material that stops well short of proof, but offers ample fodder for speculation. A week later, Axios (2/10/26) acknowledged that Barak and his wife “stayed at Epstein’s apartment multiple times from 2015 to 2019,” citing Israeli media reports. Axios‘ Rebecca Falconer wrote that Barak “has said he ‘deeply regrets’ his past relationship with Epstein, and that he never saw nor participated in any inappropriate behavior during their meetings.” Falconer added: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected conspiracy theories peddled online that his longtime political rival Barak’s “unusual close relationship” indicated that Epstein was an Israeli spy. Although New York features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood (2/6/26) mentioned “former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak” as one of the “seemingly endless list of VIPs” corresponding with Epstein, it warned against looking too hard at Epstein’s ties to the Israeli state by linking an interest in the issue to antisemitism: The horseshoe nature of the scandal makes it hard to untangle speculation about, say, Epstein’s intelligence ties from the antisemitism that is pervasive in Epstein discourse. “Yes, we are ruled by Satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” announced the YouTuber Candace Owens, who may have been reading the same emails that prompted the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur to post, “To my knowledge no one in legacy media has ever even discussed the possibility that Epstein was Mossad when it is all over the files.” Right-wing conspiracy theories based in antisemitism (like Owens’) are a toxic form of discourse. But the latest batch of files—and Drop Site’s previous coverage, which Uygur has previously covered—is not hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and does more than just offer “ample fodder for speculation.” ‘Dark workings of cabals’ Atlantic (2/7/26) Still, pundits like the Wall Street Journal‘s Barton Swaim (2/11/26) treated questions of Epstein and Israel as necessarily conspiratorial, heaping scorn on “influencers and politicos determined to attribute all bad things to the dark workings of cabals,” and citing how “Tucker Carlson conjectured that Epstein worked with the Mossad to blackmail its enemies.” And the Atlantic (2/7/26) wrote that, “in death, Epstein has taken on far more significance than he did in life”: Some Americans were already primed to believe in international pedophilia rings. Bonus points if they were run by wealthy Jews—Jews who were perhaps on the Mossad payroll, as many conspiracists have insisted Epstein was. Jacob Shamsian of Business Insider (2/14/26) asked whether “there were any truth to the rumored connections to the CIA or the Mossad,” only to handwave away those connections by citing anonymous sources. Shamsian pointed to “four people who had access to the Justice Department’s files,” who “said there was no trace of intelligence material, which would have been the case if Epstein or Maxwell’s crimes were tied to the CIA or Mossad.” To Compact editor Matthew Schmitz (Washington Post, 2/12/26), the “scourge of rising antisemitism in recent years has found its latest manifestation in the government’s release of millions of files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” Schmitz referenced “antiestablishment voices” that “have advanced the claim that Jewish networks and interests are corrupting American society.” He lumped together “antisemites on the left and right,” linking Owens and Tucker Carlson with “progressive influencers” Ana Kasparian and Briahna Joy Gray. But Schmitz omitted any mention of Epstein and Barak’s very real relationship. A selective list of ‘powerful men’ New York Times (2/5/26) The New York Times, for its part, largely downplayed the relationship between Epstein and Barak, and omitted key context. A Times article (2/5/26) on Epstein’s ties with tech start-ups briefly mentioned that Epstein “suggested to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, that he speak with Mr. Thiel about an advisory role” at Palantir. The Times quoted a Palantir spokesperson as denying “Epstein ever investing in or being a shareholder in Palantir,” and asserting that Palantir “has never had a business relationship with Ehud Barak.” They failed to mention that Palantir signed its first contract with the Israeli government a year after the Epstein/Barak conversation. Less than a week later, the Times (2/11/26) wrote that “political score-settling has played a part in the reaction in other countries,” including in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “played up disclosures of emails” between Epstein and Barak. The Times noted in that piece that “India’s foreign ministry dismissed an email from Mr. Epstein, in which he appeared to take credit for the ingratiating approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a landmark state visit to Israel in 2017.” The paper omitted the detail that Epstein had connected Barak to Anil Ambani, an Indian billionaire close to Modi, ahead of the trip. Drop Site (1/31/26) reported that the introduction “helped accelerate the burgeoning relationship” between Israel, India and the US. More tangible ties Guardian (5/28/22) The sparse US corporate media coverage of the Epstein/Israel angle sharply contrasts with the extensive reporting of Epstein’s alleged ties to Russia. Epstein visited Russia at least three times during the 2000s. He maintained a network of recruiters in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, whom he tasked with finding “girls”—often using modeling agencies as a front to traffic them to the US or Europe. He maintained Russian bank accounts and sought investments in Russia. Although Russia was referenced somewhat more often than Israel in the files—about 5,400 to 4,800 times—Epstein’s connections to Barak were far more tangible than his ties to Russian government figures. Epstein tried to meet with Putin multiple times, but there is no evidence that he ever succeeded (Washington Post, 2/7/26). Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors and former Russian government officials, but there isn’t a Russian equivalent to Barak, with whom Epstein shared over 4,000 email messages. Indeed, Epstein and Barak arranged to meet face-to-face more than 60 times between September 2010 to March 2019. At least seven of these meetings took place while Barak was serving as minister of Defense for Israel (Jacobin, 2/6/26). ‘Might replace Putin’ Kyiv Independent (2/5/26) At least one email thread even connected Epstein to an anti-Putin dissident. Politician Ilya Ponomarev sent an email in 2011 to Bill Gates’ adviser Boris Nikolic, asking how he could gain access to the World Economic Forum in Davos “to communicate what is going on, so that not only official Putin’s voice is heard.” His email came as Ponomarev was participating in mass protests against Putin and his reelection during the 2011 Russian presidential election. Nikolic forwarded Ponomarev’s email to Epstein, writing: “We should go soon to Russia and you should meet my friend Ilya Ponomarev,” who he described as the “main organizer of the uprising against Putin.” He “might replace Putin and become a president by himself” if “he does not get killed before,” Nikolic said. He asked how Epstein could help, “not with Davos but with the other stuff in general.” Epstein replied: “I can do end of March.” It’s not clear from the files whether Epstein ever met with Ponomarev, but the email thread was noteworthy, showing Epstein’s willingness to meet with an anti-Putin dissident. Yet it received only one mention in the US corporate media—from Yahoo (2/5/26), which republished an article from the Kyiv Independent (2/5/26), a Ukraine-based news outlet that receives funding from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy. Beyond including the email in the article, the Kyiv Independent didn’t bother expanding on its significance. Instead, the outlet wrote: The documents do not prove that Epstein worked for Russian intelligence. They do, however, reveal sustained, multi-year efforts by Epstein to embed himself in Russia’s political, financial and diplomatic circles—efforts marked by persistence, access-seeking and repeated attempts to present himself as useful to the Kremlin. ‘Whom Epstein was really working for’ New York Post (2/2/26) Among the US corporate media outlets to cover the Epstein/Russia connection in-depth are the New York Post, Washington Post and New York Times. A headline in the New York Post (2/2/26) read: “Emails Reveal New Theory About Whom Jeffrey Epstein Was Really Working For.” The right-wing outlet relied on two anonymous sources—”people close to the Russian tyrant” and “US security officials”—and an article by the British tabloid Daily Mail (1/31/26), which based its reporting on “intelligence sources.” In the final four paragraphs of the article, the New York Post acknowledged Epstein’s well-established connections to Israel—noting that his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was the daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, widely reported to be a Mossad agent—but excluded any mention of the recent revelations. Two days later, the New York Post ran an article (2/4/26) that detailed how Poland was launching a probe into whether Epstein was working as a Russian spy. The right-wing outlet also published an article (2/7/26) about Epstein’s ties to “key Russian government figures.” These figures included Sergey Belyakov, who the Post described as “Russia’s deputy economic minister at the time, and a Kremlin secret service–trained spy who Epstein often appeared to use as his personal fixer in Moscow,” as well as Vitaly Churkin, “Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, between 2015 and his 2017 death.” The New York Post did not mention that Epstein introduced Belyakov to Barak in April 2015 (Reason, 8/27/25; Drop Site, 10/30/25; Washington Post, 2/7/26). ‘Added momentum to previous suspicions’ Washington Post (2/7/26) The Washington Post (2/7/26) similarly hyped up a Russia connection under the headline “Epstein Built Ties to Russians and Sought to Meet Putin, Files Show.” Jeff Bezos’ Post—which recently largely gutted its foreign reporting desk—wrote that the files “show repeated attempts in the 2010s to arrange a meeting” with Putin, but added that there was “no evidence in the Justice Department files that such a meeting ever took place.” The Post (2/6/26) ran another article about the Russia ties, this time about “Russian expatriate tech investors who have drawn scrutiny from US intelligence agencies over their past ties with the Kremlin.” The Post speculated: The newly revealed extent of Epstein’s Russian connections, which also include senior Russian government officials, has added momentum to previous suspicions that he worked with or was targeted by intelligence agencies because of his personal connections to international elites. In its own longform article on the Epstein/Russia connection, the New York Times (2/10/26) similarly wrote that the latest batch of files have “raised new questions among Russia’s critics about whether the relationships opened the door to Russian intelligence activity.” It is possible that Epstein was a Russian intelligence asset. However, there is no good reason for the US corporate media to frame these allegations as a real possibility, while ignoring the Epstein/Israel ties, or continuing to paint them as a far-fetched conspiracy theory. The latest batch of files deepens the evidence, documented by Drop Site and others, that Epstein was engaged in assisting the Israeli state, serving as a go-between on commercial, diplomatic and intelligence matters. Although Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors and former Russian government officials, no evidence has yet surfaced that he advocated on behalf of Russian interests. The only reasons to think that the former is more newsworthy than the latter are purely political. From FAIR via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
There are actually some people in China who believe that COVID was a conspiracy weaponized to destroy China’s economy. Since the central government allowed local governments to officially issue government bonds (debt) back in 2014, many local governments - which already saw increasing debt burden back then - had jumped on a property investment scheme, took out huge loans and banked on the property developers building new cities so the local governments can profit off selling the land with rising value in 10 years. They were betting on the land premium rising by so much by 2025 that it could pay off their outstanding debt. Then COVID came in 2020 and crashed everything - consumption was driven down, people unwilling to invest their savings, and the property sector boom was over by 2021 (in some cities, prices have fallen by as much as 40% by 2024 - it’s so over). Local governments had to take on strenuous debt to finance the measures taken against COVID, which decimated their budgets and many of them have since been saddled in outrageous amounts of debt (in Heilongjiang, for example, 500-600% of their GDP) with no easy way out. Figure: Provincial GDP contribution (gray bars) is highly uneven, with most of the economy concentrated in the coastal manufacturing regions in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang (left four). Blue line shows the debt to GDP ratio and many of the poorer regions have exceptionally high debt burden (e.g. Yunnan (云南), Guangxi (广西), Heilongjiang (黑龙江) all having 500-700% debt to GDP ratio). Only Shanghai has less than 100% debt to GDP ratio. Extremely good timing if you want to engineer an economic downturn in China. You can get very conspiratorial about it but chances are the pandemic likely happened due to factors including climate change coupled with poor sanitary measures.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Gentlemen. Be it not said that I’ve been idle these past weeks. Rather, what I’ve been doing for the last little while is dramatically brooding here in the dark, fingers intertwined in my very best Gendo Ikari pose, contemplating how the hell I’m going to explain all of this to you. (And no part of it was due to me being too lazy to dismount the Bird Lens from my camera and find somewhere to put it away. Honest.) A while ago a good friend of mine said to me in reference to Moxy Früvous’ iconic historical ballad, Video Bargainville, “I’ve figured it out. In Video Bargainville, you’re Roger!” Thus upon reflection and a bit of inspiration from another recent conversation here in the Fediverse, I’ve finally come to another important realization: I’m not Mr. Ikari, regardless of how mysterious and interesting I may be. No. I’m Mr. Dink. Always with the latest gadget or toy in hand. Like, for instance and no particular reason whatsoever, this fuckin’ thing. This, gentle readers, is the Terrain 365 Invictus-Bali Ti. It costs $325, and it’s got a hyphen in it because it’s somehow an offshoot of Terrain 365’s largely erstwhile Invictus Series despite not appearing there when you search for the same on their website. Except obviously it’s a balisong version, and not only that but it’s one of the apparently dwindling number of EDC sized offerings in that category, coming complete with a pocket clip (a vanishingly rare phenomenon), ceramic ball bearing pivots, and a spring loaded latch. All of this, as you know, has me written all over it in six inch high letters. The Invictus-Bali is 8-1/8" long from tip to tail when it’s open not including the latch, and 4-3/4" by my measure when closed. The blade is 3-11/16" long from the ends of the handles to its point, with let’s call it 3-1/8" of usable edge in a spear point kind of profile complete with a fancy fuller and a back bevel in it. Despite as much of it as possible being made from titanium, it’s a dense little number at 130.6 grams in total or 4.61 ounces. So not, with the best will in the world, the absolute lightest and most ephemeral of EDC balisong options. (That distinction probably still belongs to the Benchmade 32 Mini Morpho, or at least so far as I am aware and able to empirically observe via the expedient of apparently doing my level best to own at least one example of every damn fool balisong knife on Earth.) So what’s so bloody weird about it, then? Neon Genesis Unobtainium Well, in order to explain that we’ll have to get into what the rest of this thing is made out of. It’s Terrain 365’s “Terravantium Dendritic Cobalt Super-Alloy,” which is something that the manufacturer makes an awful lot of noise about. Their claims about it, for instance in the blurb, are incessantly in triplicate, thus: that it’s rust proof, non-magnetic, and they go on to boast that it will “hold an edge longer than virtually any blade steel and stainless steel alloys.” Maybe says I on the first and third points, but the second one is trivially easy to verify. Verily, a magnet doesn’t stick to the stuff, whatever it’s ultimately made out of. For their part, Terrain 365 are suspiciously mum about what, exactly, goes into the secret blend of herbs and spices in their particular “Terravanium” alloy that makes it different from anyone else’s. Various dendritic cobalt alloys, or possibly the same one, have sporadically seen use in knife blades from various manufacturers over the years. Boye Knives by way of David Boye seems to be the progenitor of the concept or at the very least certainly the major contributor to whatever minimal popularity it’s got. It seems we can neither confirm nor deny whether or not the Terravantium flavor is the same stuff or is somehow appreciably different. For whatever it’s worth, Terrain 365 claim that they at least used to sell their alloy in bar stock form for others to fiddle with, but that product category on their site (linked above) is now conspicuously empty. It’s tough to find any definitive answers about the stuff online. Various punters only seem to refer to it as "dendritic cobalt steel" out of sheer force of habit. It’s not entirely clear that it contains much if any iron at all, so referring to it as “steel” is probably wrong. Nobody will admit to its full composition. There is some verbiage on how it’s supposed to work here on the Boye Knives site, for a start. The general gist of it seems to be that there are ultra hard carbides suspended more-or-less uniformly throughout a cobalt alloy matrix. It’s supposed to be those carbides sawing away at the material you’re cutting like so many tiny teeth that make all the performance happen. Thus the scuttlebutt online is that the dendritic cobalt alloys are supposed to somehow keep cutting even after your edge feels dull, and apparently it’s supposed to be the bee’s own knees for cutting cord and rope in particular. With its purported total rustproofness plus excellence at rope cutting, it seems the Invictus-Bali is angling to be the ultimate seafarer’s knife, and the fact that a balisong based stab at that idea exists is so clearly prima facie absurd that there was absolutely no way I couldn’t participate. And so, you see, here we are. Of course everyone makes the same claims about whatever the hell their knife is made out of, vis-a-vis superior edge retention, corrosion resistance, sharpenability, toughness, and if you believe the marketing department they’ll try to tell you it’ll make your more handsome and have better luck with the ladies, too. As far as the Terravantium alloy goes, it’s hard to say how much of it is bullshit. For whatever it’s worth, the factory edge doesn’t feel that sharp. It’s got a decidedly obtuse angle, probably for durability’s sake, and when I threw it at my dinkum Post-It note slicing test it peaked at 126.8 grams before ultimately crushing the note without completing the cut. But if you draw the edge against any surface rather than just press, it cuts inexplicably well. Maybe there’s something to all that suspended carbide malarkey. It’s probably misguided to regard this dendritic cobalt stuff using the same metrics as steel. It’s dead soft, for a start. Trepidatiously, I attacked it with my graded hardness file set and discovered that it succumbs to the second softest file, just 45 HRC. And yet, they claim it’ll hold an edge better than typical steel. You have to wonder about that. One thing I’m sure about, or at least I’m pretty sure about, or at minimum I can be pretty sure I’m pretty sure about is that the Invictus-Bali’s blade is shaped like that because it’s not machined but cast that way. A consistent unique property of the various dendritic cobalt alloys is that they can be moulded into shape via an investment casting process. Apparently this actually works, much unlike steel which would result in absolutely disastrous mechanical properties if anyone were dumb enough to try it. So you can dispense with all that forging, rolling, milling, and machining. Just squirt the stuff into a mould, whack two holes in it and grind the edge, and off you go! The blade’s surface finish has a distinctive textured finish you can see under high magnification, and a complete dearth of the machine marks you would expect to see on the primary bevel of any production knife. One wonders if this allowed Terrain 365 to save any cash at all in the Invictus-Bali’s production, and if so why they didn’t see quite clear to passing any of those savings on to the buyer. Bali Bebop The Invictus-Bali puts on quite a display convincing you it’s an ultra premium knife, which you’d damn well expect it to thanks to it also arriving at such an eye-watering price. It’s extremely solid feeling in the hand and covered in tiny fine details like the jimping in the ears on the blade, plus matching patches of it on its titanium handle spacers. It’s so refined that it almost feels like one of those knives that’s too nice to use. Perhaps it’s just as well, then, that when you look closely you’ll notice that the grooves in the latch head are machined crooked. Thanks a lot, guys. If I were a more vindictive kind of bird I might complain to the manufacturer about this. But do you know what? I’m almost glad the Invictus-Bali has at least one wart on it, because otherwise I’d never use it and thus I’d never get the chance over the upcoming weeks to determine whether or not Terrain 365’s intrepid claims about its edge retention were just so many fiddlesticks. The Invictus-Bali isn’t a Zen pin knife, but rather has a traditional dual kicker pin design. I’m assuming the pins are titanium just like the handles are, since they appear to be pressed through and not cast out of the same dendritic stuff as the rest of the blade. My suspicions are furthered by the noise it makes on the rebound, or rather lack thereof, which would be readily explained by the contact bits being titanium-on-titanium. We’ve covered several highly bombastic and noisy knives here before. I’m not entirely sure which one is the current frontrunner between the Kershaw Moonsault or the Revo Nexus, but it’s got to be one or the other of them. The Invictus-Bali, conversely, is easily the quietest balisong I’ve ever flipped. There’s a titanium pocket clip on here which Terrain 365 bill as billet machined. It’s held on with a single screw and recessed into a pocket on that one handle scale which is absent on the other side, so it’s not reversible. It’s also on the wrong side of the knife as usual, gods damn it, and there isn’t a single thing you can do about it. It’s kind of football shaped in cross section (that’d be an American football, not the other kind) and also feels distressingly thin. I’m not sure if it’s actually thin enough to be a problem or not, but if you’re one of those oiks who insists on dangling your knife backwards off of your belt you’ll certainly want to rethink that strategy with this one. The Invictus-Bali’s most immediate comparison is obvious. It’s a little bigger than a Model 32 but certainly much smaller than practically everything else in the category. I can’t find anything to gripe about with the action. Uncanny, I think, is the best descriptor of the Invictus-Bali’s mechanics. Despite their short stature the handles carry a significant amount of inertia and thanks to the ceramic ball bearings inside the pivots are absolutely, unquestionably, unerringly without any wiggle whatsoever. There is no tap and not a single molecule of blade play. Even if you shake the whole knife vigorously and regardless of whether it’s open or closed, the only thing that rattles is the tiny torsion spring for the latch, where it’s slotted into its equally minuscule mounting hole. The latch is skeletonized and, yes, spring loaded. It’s under spring motive all the time, so after you squeeze the handles and it boings out into its open position it’ll stay there, and the spring prevents it from clashing with the handles or blade. For some reason Terrain 365 play up the Invictus-Bali’s nonmagnetism heavily. I have no idea why that would be a compelling feature for anyone on their knife, or what use case such a thing could possibly benefit. But it’s true — as far as I can tell, the only thing that even vaguely responds to a magnet is the latch spring itself. The blade is of course made out of that funky Terravanium stuff, the scales and handle spacers are titanium, and Terrain claims that the Invictus-Bali has “titanium hardware” as well. I imagine they’re talking about the latch and clip, because the screws certainly aren’t. But in dedication to the theme, whatever steel they’re made out of seems to be a high nickel or chromium content one, probably for anti-corrosion purposes, and thus they’re nonmagnetic as well. Terrain 365’s maker’s mark lives on one side of the blade and the reverse is unadorned. Aria: The Disassembly There’s not a whole heck of a lot inside the Invictus-Bali. It’s held together with a grand total of six screws, two of which are the pivots. For $325 you might wish for a longer bill of materials, but that’s your lot. In fact, after taking apart the latch side handle I concluded I’d already seen all there is to see, and didn’t even bother with the other side. I had an ulterior motive for picking that handle, of course. I wanted to see if one could cheat their way into a clip reversal, by way of swapping the upper and lower scales on that side. Well, you can’t. The handle spacer is retained by a pin which sinks into a recess in each scale. And it’s offset, so you can’t flip the scales over and still be able to put it back in the right way 'round. There’s no mechanical reason for that other than sheer obstreperousness. Foiled again. Eternal is my wrath, and wicked shall be my vengeance. Well, okay. Maybe not the second part. They’ve dealt with the obvious conflict of materials with the ceramic bearings riding on soft titanium by sticking a thin shim washer in between. I presume this is also some type of hyper corrosion resistant stainless alloy, because it too does not respond to a magnet. The Inevitable Conclusion It’s tough to tell just who, exactly, Terrain’s marketing is trying to aim this thing at. Is it salty fishermen, or tactical operators, or the flannel and beard wax crowd? Half of the blurb is talking about shedding unnecessary weight, which combined with the tree makes you think they’re expecting you to go backpacking with it. But the other half of it goes on to mention “those who demand reliability from every component of their knife,” so who the hell knows? It’s just possible, at the outside, that if it’s half as good as the very select band of weirdos are saying then some day this dendritic cobalt stuff will become the next big thing in cutlery. But it also hasn’t set the world on fire yet, and maybe that says everything about it we need to know. There’s no denying that it’s damn strange, though. So I’m here for it.