Welcome to Andy Worthington

Last week, after starving Palestinian civilians for eleven weeks, and bombing them relentlessly for the last two months, Israel stepped up its aggression, launching “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” with even more savage bombing, and announcing its intention to militarily occupy the whole of Gaza, to erase every remaining building, and to force the surviving population into a concentration camp in the south, prior to an illusory program of “voluntary migration.” Plumbing unparalleled depths of depravity, after 19 months of unbearable horror, Israel’s genocidal endgame has finally provoked condemnation from its allies in the west, who, until now, have whispered barely a word of dissent. The foreign ministers of 22 countries and three senior EU officials issued a strongly-worded demand for the resumption of aid to prevent mass starvation, while the governments of the UK, France and Canada specifically threatened “concrete actions” if Israel continued its “wholly disproportionate” escalation, its starvation policies and its plans for the “permanent forced displacement” of the population, which, as they noted, “is a breach of international humanitarian law.” Words mean nothing to Israel, of course, and, if its allies are serious, they must follow up with arms embargoes, sanctions and more, but it remains noteworthy that so many countries are now turning against Israel, no doubt because the extent of its renewed escalation of hostilities and the impact of its starvation siege are so severe that they have suddenly become aware that they need to be seen to have made the right noises for when, inevitably, there will be a legal and moral reckoning. Hopefully, this turning of the tides is significant, reinforcing the recent warning, by opposition politician Yair Golan, that Israel, which is “kill[ing] children as a hobby”, that it “is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was”, and the admission by an Israeli Foreign Ministry official that “the world is not with us” and that “No one will want to be identified with Israel.”

An urgent update on the situation in Gaza, as Israel launches “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, which can only be regarded as its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, with all the historical echoes that entails. Israel’s plan, announced 12 days ago, is to militarily occupy the whole of the Gaza Strip, to destroy all its remaining buildings, and to drive the surviving population to the south, to be held in a concentration camp where vetted individuals, subjected to biometric screening, will be allowed food, provided every two weeks, but only at the barest of subsistence levels to prevent death by starvation. Via posts from those trapped in Gaza, I report on the unprecedented escalation of military activity over the last two nights, as the severity of the attacks, and the death toll, have, shamefully, matched the scale and intensity of the earliest days of the genocide. I condemn western leaders for their continued inaction, and reserve particular contempt for Donald Trump, who, in his four-day tour of the Gulf, failed to say or do anything to help the Palestinians by calling for a renewed ceasefire and the resumption of desperately-needed humanitarian aid to stave off mass starvation, even after Hamas obliged him by releasing the US-Israeli soldier Edan Alexander. Instead, he revived his absurd proposal to remake Gaza — this time as a “freedom zone”, rather than “the Riviera of the Middle East” that he proposed in February, and has continued to endorse the “voluntary migration” of the entire population. Is he wilfully complicit, or just a rambling and incoherent fool? Sadly, no one even seems to know.

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and in London, Brussels and Mexico City on May 7, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for 28 months, and have gained greater resonance under Donald Trump and his “war on migrants”, in which he has cynically used Guantánamo, and, more recently, has also sent migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo that, arguably, wouldn’t exist at all without the template provide by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, and shamefully maintained by every president ever since.

In my latest article, I follow up on Israel’s new plans for an escalation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, cutting through the failures of media commentators to establish what the plans actually reveal, which is nothing less than the extermination of the entire population. Everything about the plans is diabolical, including the screamingly illegal proposal to militarily occupy the whole of the Gaza Strip and to force the surviving population to the south, to be hemmed into a tightly-controlled area in which aid, at the barest of subsistence levels, will be provided by private contractors, but only to those who have submitted to monitoring and the use of facial recognition technology. However, it is the last component of the plan — for the “voluntary migration” of the population — that is even more troubling than the proposals for total military occupation and for a kind of techno-concentration camp. This is because, as few commentators seem to want to acknowledge, no country is willing to take in significant numbers of Palestinian refugees. Egypt and Jordan have persistently refused, because of legitimate fears of massive unrest were they to be complicit in mass ethnic cleansing, and in the countries of the west, as I describe it, “anti-immigrant sentiment is more virulent than at any other time in living memory.” As I proceed to explain, the proposal for “voluntary migration” is, therefore, nothing but an illusion that is being used by Israel to disguise its true intent, which, without any viable escape route for the Palestinians, consists solely of continuing extermination, either “a quick death by Israel’s ongoing military assaults, or a slow death via hunger, dehydration, and the myriad murderous outcomes of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s entire medical system.”

I write to bear witness, to be counted as someone who didn’t stay silent as the most grotesque western-backed atrocities in most of our lifetimes were taking place in Gaza, but my heart has been breaking for the last two months as Israel resumed its genocide after breaking the six-week ceasefire, firstly via the reimposition of a complete siege on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel, and then, for the last six weeks, via a resumption of its intensive bombing of the civilian population. In my latest long read, I repeatedly condemn western politicians and the mainstream media for their persistent failure to challenge Israel, or to tell the truth about the genocide, and, with no end in sight to Israel’s screamingly illegal project, over the last two months, of coercion and murder to pressurize Hamas to free all the hostages and to surrender, with the only “reward” being the supposed “voluntary migration” of the rest of the population, I turn to Israel itself as perhaps our best hope, as, over the last month, over 140,000 former officials, members of the military and academics have openly condemned the resumption of the genocide. I also highlight the baleful role played by Donald Trump, both in his support for the resumption of Israel’s genocide, and in his assault on freedom of speech in the US via the kidnapping and intended deportation of peaceful students whose only “crime” has been to oppose the genocide, and I provide a warning about how “a depraved darkness within Israel itself has been deliberately spread so thoroughly throughout the western world that we are left gazing at the face of a renascent fascism, leeringly suggesting that there is nothing to protect any of us.”

A week is a long time in Donald Trump’s “war on migrants”, and in my latest long read I provide a detailed analysis of the last seven days of ongoing legal challenges, up to and including the Supreme Court, to prevent the administration from sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, which I have previously described as a mega-Guantánamo, where tens of thousands of men are held indefinitely without charge or trial. I also report on interventions by elected representatives of Congress in an effort to secure the return of men wrongly sent to the CECOT prison. The Supreme Court has previously issued rulings demanding that no one be deported without a habeas hearing, and that a Maryland resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador because of an “administrative error”, be returned. However, both rulings have been shamefully ignored by the Trump administration, which has continued to send men to El Salvador without a hearing, and without any effort by the executive branch to demonstrate that it has evidence establishing that they are gang members, as alleged. In cahoots with El Salvador’s dictatorial president Nayib Bukele, the administration has also refused to secure the return of Abrego Garcia. In a third ruling, on April 19, the Supreme Court imposed a temporary ban on any Venezuelans being sent to El Salvador, pending further review. The administration has not yet sought to imperiously sweep that ban aside, but their every action to date has shown complete contempt for the Supreme Court, and for the many other lower courts across the country that have been resisting its outrageous claims to have the right to send Venezuelans to the CECOT prison without providing any evidence that they are gang members, and with every indication that, in fact, the deportations are fundamentally arbitrary, based largely on ICE officials’ flawed assessments of the significance of the men’s tattoos, and with many of the men deported from ICE facilities despite having ongoing hearings regarding their asylum claims. The battle here, as I discussed this week with Chris Cook, on his Gorilla Radio show in Canada, which I link to in my article, is very clearly one in which the Trump administration believes it has the right to deport migrants on a one-way trip to a brutal and unaccountable prison in another country, without any due process, and without any interest in whether or not they are guilty of any crime whatsoever, and is also determined to try to crush any and all opposition in the courts to what it regards as its right to exercise unfettered executive power — or, as we might want to more accurately describe it, executive tyranny.

My latest long read, a detailed account of Trump’s “war on migrants”, from the slew of “Presidential Actions” to Guantánamo and then, most monstrously, the deal with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador involving a one-way trip for Venezuelan migrants from the US to Bukele’s horrendous CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo, where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial in brutal conditions. I run through the legal challenges, up to and including the Supreme Court, and the horrendous reality that most of the men transferred are not gang members, as alleged, and that the Trump administration has no evidence that they are, that it doesn’t care, and that it is trying to hide this truth behind claims of “national security” secrecy. I also focus on two particularly egregious cases of injustice: that of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela, who was sent to the CECOT prison despite having an ongoing asylum claim in the US, and the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian resident of Maryland, who had protected status explicitly preventing his deportation to El Salvador, but who was sent to the CECOT prison because of an “administrative error”, and the truly chilling implications of the refusal of both the Trump administration and Bukele to bring him back, defying an order by the Supreme Court. As I say, “If the courts don’t prevail, and if the majority of the Justices in the Conservative-dominated Supreme Court don’t firmly grasp the enormity of how they are being snubbed and sidelined, and thoroughly assert their authority, the US will be entering truly perilous and lawless territory, in which no one — or, at least, no one who isn’t, essentially, a powerful white supremacist — will be safe.”

My assessment of the almost inestimably important case of Mahmoud Khalil, the legal US resident abducted on March 8 and taken to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana for deportation. Targeted for his involvement in student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza at Columbia University, Khalil’s abduction and his intended deportation are a glaring example of the Trump administration’s intention to shred the First Amendment to support Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza, although they are framing it as a “national security” matter. The Secretary of State, the pliant and dim-witted Marco Rubio, seeks to justify Khalil’s deportation by invoking a barely-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which gives him the authority to deport non-citizens if he has “reasonable ground to believe that [their] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” If successful, the Trump administration will be able to deport any green card holder or visa holder who has engaged in any kind of non-violent opposition to Israel’s genocide, a startling development which would not only formally make the US into a dictatorship, in which freedom of speech (or even thought) is not allowed; it would also do so in the service of a foreign country, Israel. This is a position that, as I describe it, “lays bare how the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, prioritizes Israel’s interests over its own, in what really ought to be seen as a betrayal of America’s self-interest — or even as an act of treason.” Although an immigration judge rubber-stamped Khalil’s deportation on Friday, a legal challenge is ongoing in federal court in New Jersey, and we must all hope that it is successful, although it seems certain that it will be a protracted process that will last for many years. Its importance, however, cannot be underestimated. As I say, “It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of the US depends on it.”

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and in London and Brussels on April 2, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for more than two years, and are, of course, continuing under Donald Trump, after he has cynically, cruelly and illegally decided to use the prison to hold migrants as part of the racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office.

Three weeks into Israel’s renewed genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, and five weeks since all supplies of food, water, medicines and fuel were cut off, Israel’s primary objective is now nothing less than the extermination of the Palestinian people, with the only other option being a plan to military occupy the whole of Gaza, and to herd the remaining population into concentration camps. A third option being pushed by Israel, encouraged by Donald Trump, is for the “voluntary migration” of the entire population of two million people. I repeat my previous beliefs that this is a fantasy, because it would be politically suicidal for Egypt and Jordan, and because anti-refugee sentiment is so dominant in the west. However, I also pay close attention to a recent post on X by Dr. Ezzideen, who runs a clinic in Gaza, and who recently posted an important appeal for help, on behalf of the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who responded enthusiastically to the rumor that other countries might take them in. As he stated in his post, “Please understand, we didn’t want to leave. We loved our land more than our lungs. But we love our children more. We love the ones we still have”, and “we are asking … for a way out.” As he also stated, “If you hear us, if you read our comments, if you hold power or voice or kindness, answer us. Not tomorrow. Not in theory. Now.” I raise Dr. Ezzideen’s request because those whose voices he is amplifying — those suffering unprecedented levels of deprivation and fear in Gaza — can truly see no end to the slaughter and destruction, and nor can I. Those countries and organizations that are not actively supporting Israel’s genocide have, like the UN, found themselves powerless to do anything to bring it to an end. Faced with only two options — death or imprisonment in a concentration camp — we are being asked to mobilize in support of an alternative that, although legally abhorrent, may also be the only guarantor of life: coming together, throughout the countries of the world, to push our governments to offer new homes to those who, otherwise, see nothing but death.