Welcome to Andy Worthington

Photos from, and my report about the 32nd consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, and in London, Brussels and Belgrade on September 3, 2025. In my report, I also discuss the significance of today being the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which not only led to the extraordinarily ill-advised establishment of the prison at Guantánamo, but also perilously sought to redefine the rules regarding warfare and detention, with baleful and far-reaching effects that, 24 years on, seem particularly to have provided inspiration for Israel’s behaviour over the last 23 months of its genocide in Gaza, and its unjustifiable attacks on numerous neighbouring countries.

Last week, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine and the Guardian into an Israeli military intelligence database from May this year, indicating that 8,900 militants had been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, suggested that, based on the official health ministry death toll of 53,000 at the time, that meant that over 83% of those killed were civilians. This is a startling statistic, but as another investigation, by Adam Rzepka for CounterPunch explained, the true death toll is considerably higher, with researchers having established a 41% undercount in the ministry’s figures, and with “indirect deaths”, added to those caused by traumatic injury, exceeding direct deaths many times over, as analyses of conflicts over the last 30 years have shown. This means that the final death toll will be, at the very minimum, over 350,000, and possibly over 450,000, or even more, and, as a result, a conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed suggests that it is at least 95% of the total, rather than 83%. This is a death toll that, as I describe it, “is almost beyond comprehension”, and is “so grotesque” that the genocidal entity responsible “will, henceforth, be shunned as a deadly pariah state, engaged in the slaughter of civilians on such a significant scale that it will be forever compared to the Nazis.”

Today, as I report, the UN’s mechanism for assessing famine, the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) confirmed, in a brand-new report, that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, that this is an “entirely man-made” disaster, deliberately engineered by the State of Israel, and that it can and must be “halted and reversed”, via an immediate ceasefire “to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip.” The UN’s Tom Fletcher announced the publication of the report with articulate, controlled fury and indignation, and I’m posting a video and a transcript of his speech, as well as some of the report’s main findings, and a history of Israel’s deliberate starvation of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip over the last 22 months. Despite the copious evidence demonstrating Israel’s intent to starve the Palestinians as part of its genocidal assault on Gaza, including rulings by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and mounting evidence of an increase in the starvation policies over the last six months, since Israel broke the six-week ceasefire deal with Hamas at the start of March, Israel has refuted the IPC’s report, with Benjamin Netanyahu calling it “an outright lie”, and with the defense minister, Israel Katz, pledging to “open the gates of hell” in Gaza City via its planned military invasion. This would be an incomparable disaster, as Gaza City was identified by the IPC as the epicenter of the famine, but is there any way that Israel can be stopped?

Two of the most talented artists in Guantánamo, Moath Al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, resettled in Oman in January after being held for nearly 23 years without charge or trial, discuss their artwork and their memories of Guantánamo with their friend, the former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi. Both men’s work has featured in various art exhibitions of prisoners’ art over the last eight years, in the US and in Europe, and Moath’s vast sailing ships, made from recycled and scavenged materials, attracted significant attention — so much so that, for five years after the first exhibition in New York in 2017, the Pentagon petulantly imposed a ban on prisoners leaving with their artwork, and even threatened to destroy it, until the Biden administration capitulated to demands made by two UN Special Rapporteurs. Less well-known, but no less striking, are Khalid’s sculptures and symbolic paintings, some painted on gravel from the prison’s recreation yards, mixed with glue, which, as I describe them, “reveal a tantalizing conceptual fascination with using the elements of Guantánamo itself to tell a story.” The article was published two weeks ago on Spencer Ackerman’s Forever Wars website, and this cross-post features my own detailed introduction. Also included are photos of artwork by both men which hadn’t been seen until the Forever Wars article was published.

Photos from, and my report about the 31st coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and in London, Brussels, Mexico City and Belgrade on August 6, 2025. I describe Guantánamo as doubly forgotten because, as we continue to campaign for justice for the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison, who now seem largely to have receded from memory, Trump’s recent reanimation of Guantánamo as a venue for his “war on migrants” seems also to have drifted from view, after a flurry of media activity in the first few months of his baleful second presidency. This is in spite of the fact that, six weeks ago, it was reported that 72 migrants were being held at Guantánamo, and that 26 of them, including a British national, had been identified as having criminal records for serious crimes. Since then, however, the trail has gone cold, even though it is reasonable to fear that the administration is planning a one-way trip for these men to obliging third countries. This recently happened with South Sudan and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), where the men disposed of by the administration were given no safeguards that they would not be subjected to torture, “disappearance” or even death, as required under the Torture Convention, to which the US is a signatory.

My report about Israel’s monstrous targeted murder last night of the extraordinarily hard-working Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif and four of his colleagues from Al Jazeera Arabic, in which I mourn their loss, dissect Israel’s lies about their involvement with Hamas, and criticize the western media for never having platformed Palestinian journalists in their reporting. I also express my fears that the murders were deliberately intended to create a media blackout for the imminent planned invasion and occupation of Gaza City, home to a million surviving Palestinians, where, it seems horribly probable, Israel is planning to replicate the “genocide within a genocide” that took place in northern Gaza from October last year until the ceasefire in January this year, which both Anas Al-Sharif and another murdered colleague, Hossam Shabat, covered assiduously. As I ask, “Is there any hope left, or will Israel’s darkness engulf us all?”

Israel’s deliberate campaign of mass starvation in Gaza has finally prompted outrage in western political and media circles, putting pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to finally lift the deadly siege on all supplies into Gaza that has been in place for nearly five months. This seems like positive news, but, predictably, Netanyahu is seeking to provide nothing more than “minimal” aid — enough, he hopes, to placate his critics, but, crucially, not enough to address the desperate crisis unfolding in Gaza, which requires nothing less than the delivery of food, water, medical supplies, medical equipment and trained personnel on a colossal scale. It remains to be seen if he can get away with this almost incalculable cynicism, but it seems unlikely, as the death toll will inexorably rise in the weeks to come even if all the borders were opened today and unfettered aid was allowed in. Will western leaders and the media stay focused, or will their attention drift away once more? It’s clear that maintaining pressure on Israel is essential, because, behind the provision of “minimal” aid, Israel remains intent on continuing its starvation policy and its relentless bombing campaign. This is because its ultimate aim is nothing less than the extermination of the Palestinian people, and, as recent political developments within Israel have revealed, the complete military occupation of both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — colossal crimes that it has only been able to contemplate implementing because of the west’s persistence indulgence of its genocidal actions for the last 663 days.

My new article has one purpose: to highlight the fact that Israel is now engaged in the “mass death” phase of its genocidal assault on the trapped civilian population of the Gaza Strip, brought about through a ban on all supplies of food (and water, fuel and medical supplies), in place since the start of March, and, since May 26, through the replacement of the well-established aid systems provided by UNWRA and other international aid agencies with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli initiative that, from the beginning, has involved desperate starving civilians, on a daily basis, being shot at and killed. I also point out how the combination of starvation, relentless and ongoing bombing, and the ban on fuel and medical supplies (including formula milk for babies) is creating a nightmare in Gaza’s few surviving hospitals, and I also cover other depraved aspects of Israel’s ongoing campaign. These include the ongoing evacuation orders, which have led to a situation in which 85% of the Gaza Strip is now militarily occupied by Israel, the deliberate erasure of entire towns and most surviving buildings, and the long-term aims, still touted by Israel’s leaders, of squeezing the remaining population into a “concentration camp” in the south, and the ongoing efforts to locate third countries willing to support the “voluntary migration” of the remaining population, a grotesque form of enforced displacement and ethnic cleansing, which should be seen for what it really is — a smokescreen for further extermination. As was revealed last week, the only countries that Israel claims to be engaged with regarding this unforgivably illegal plan are Ethiopia and Libya, which are both unsuitably unstable, and Indonesia, which is too far away. I close by reiterating the only demand that counts — for Israel to stop the killing, and for vast amounts of humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza, via the UN and other reputable agencies.

My definitive overview of the first six months of Trump’s “war on migrants”, with a particular focus on the administration’s recent and truly alarming drive to deport, to third countries, migrants with criminal records, who have served prison sentences, often for serious crimes. The administration claims that it is being forced to act because these ex-prisoners’ home countries won’t take them back. However, even if this is sometimes true, it is essentially an intractable political problem, to which the answer cannot, and must not be to eviscerate the post-WWII consensus — involving the Refugee Convention and the Torture Convention — that there must be robust mechanisms preventing foreign nationals from being deported, either to their home countries, or to third countries, where they face the risk of torture or death. I also examine how Trump’s declared pursuit of migrants with criminal records (roughly 4% of the 11 million undocumented migrants in the US) is a smokescreen seeking to disguise a blunter and much more violent truth — that all eleven million are a target, because entering the US illegally is being regarded as a crime worthy of deportation. I also examine how there must always be a balance between a desire to stem uncontrolled immigration and the need for a significant number of immigrants to do numerous essential jobs, and run through the sordid back story of the administration holding Venezuelan migrants at Guantánamo, and then sending others on a one-way trip to a mega-Guantánamo in El Salvador, on the basis of allegations about their criminality that were largely exposed as lies. I proceed to explain how this new focus on finding migrants with criminal records and sending them on a one-way trip to third countries (South Sudan and Eswatini in the last week) has been cynically implemented to forestall any sympathy for these men, to enable a program that can be effected without attracting the outrage it deserves, with its horrific echoes of the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” policies in the “war on terror”, which may well also constitute the reviled international crime of enforced disappearance. I end with some good news, with polls showing that Americans are increasingly turning against Trumps’s excesses, although that alone is not sufficient to prevent an ever-increasing humanitarian and moral disaster without serious resistance.

My report about the disturbing news that, in recent weeks, around 60 migrants, from 26 countries including the UK, have been flown to Guantánamo, apparently reviving the use of detention facilities on the naval base, which began with the arrival of 178 Venezuelans in February, but then tailed off after legal challenges, and after the administration was embarrassed by research establishing that, although they were all described as dangerous gang members, this was demonstrably untrue. In a new twist, seeking to overcome these earlier embarrassments, the Department of Homeland Security has published a list naming 26 of these men, and alleging that all of them, including the British national, have been convicted of serious crimes, although, via an internet search, I was unable to verify any of these claims. What the administration’s intention is remains unclear, but two options seem probable. Sending men with criminal convictions to Guantánamo (if these claims are true) may enable the administration to claim that it can hold them without charge or trial, replicating the model used in the existing “war on terror” prison, or it may be a prominent way to deport them to third countries, as recently happened when eight men from a variety of countries, all allegedly with criminal convictions, were sent to an unknown fate in war-torn South Sudan. Drawing analogies with the “extraordinary rendition” program of the Bush administration, and the often flawed resettlements of Guantánamo prisoners in third countries under Obama and Biden, I examine a recent and commendable New York Times investigation into the 58 countries that administration officials have approached, or want to approach, regarding taking in migrants who are not their own nationals. I also discuss the seven countries who have already agreed, and raise the alarm about the threat of the worst abuses of the “war on terror” being revived under Trump and his senior officials, who seem particularly motivated not to safely repatriate migrants, but to defy protections against torture or even death by sending them to unsafe destinations where any rights they should have will be unenforceable. I also sound a similar alarm about the increasing expansion of unaccountable hit squads “disappearing” people on the US mainland, and the creation of new detention facilities, reminiscent of Guantánamo, with “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida as the first example, and highlight the very real prospect that, without ferocious resistance, the $175 billion allocated to ICE in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will lead to a horrendous police state expansion of “disappearances” and gulags across the entire country. As I state in my conclusion, “Resistance is necessary, by all means available.”