Israel mistreats Flotilla activists and tortures Palestinian prisoners

Sunday 7 June 2026, by An Gwesped

After the Israeli army’s violent interception of the Gaza flotilla, activists have denounced humiliation and violence — a long-documented glimpse into the torture and sexual violence suffered by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. More than 430 activists from the 50 boats that set out to break the blockade of Gaza were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation army between Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 May, in international waters off the coast of Cyprus, up to 500 km from the coast of Gaza for the most distant boats and about 100 kilometres for the closest.

Turkey, Spain, Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, Libya, the Maldives and even Meloni’s Italy have denounced these abductions as “flagrant violations of international law and international humanitarian law”.

Violence against flotilla activists

On Wednesday, 20 May, Ben Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, released a video of flotilla activists kneeling and with their hands tied, after being detained in southern Israel, at the port of Ashdod. Violence constituting an attack on human dignity.

“Welcome to Israel, we are at home,” the minister says in these images published on X, with the Israeli national anthem playing in the background. An activist is shown stretched in half and violently pushed by a uniformed guard, whose hand holds his head downwards, before being dragged to the ground. Other prisoners were also subjected to violence, forced to move with their backs bent, their hands tied and their heads held to the ground.

In other propaganda images, Ben Gvir, a large Israeli flag in his hand, proudly points to the tied activists, saying: “Oh they were very proud, look at them now, where are they?” Then he addresses Benyamin Netanyahu: “Give them to us, give them to me, so that we can keep these terrorists in prison for a very long time.”

All the kidnapped activists were released at the end of last week, but all of them reported humiliation as well as physical and sexual violence — which is also confirmed by our two comrades from the NPA-Anticapitaliste, Laetitia and Macéo, who are part of this flotilla. This is just a glimpse of the violence against the Palestinian people, especially against prisoners who are subjected to torture and sexual violence on a daily basis.

Torture of Palestinian prisoners

On the eve of Ben Gvir’s intervention, a UN special rapporteur, Alice Jill Edwards, denounced the fact that Palestinian prisoners are subjected to torture, sexual violence and other ill-treatment. It said it had documented 52 cases of torture in various forms, as well as 33 cases of sexual torture and other sexual violence.

Among the reported cases are “beatings, stress positions, excessive restraints, electricity, sleep deprivation, malnutrition and starvation, prolonged secret detention”, as well as conditions of detention deemed “inhumane and degrading”. In a communication to the Israeli authorities, she noted that of the 1,680 complaints lodged against the Israeli intelligence services, none had resulted in an indictment.

As a reminder, according to Addameer, nearly 9,400 Palestinians are detained in Israel, including 2,200 in administrative detention. We must demand that our complicit states stop selling arms to Israel and impose sanctions on this colonial and apartheid state. France banned Ben Gvir from staying in “reprisals”, while condemning “the uselessness of the flotillas” (Jean-Noël Barrot). The fact that the French authorities were forced to take this measure against this Israeli fascist proves that the flotillas were useful — unlike French diplomacy.

29 May 2026

Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.

Attached documents

• israel-mistreats-flotilla-activists-and-tortures_a9587.pdf (PDF - 958.2 KiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article9587]

• An Gwesped

  An Gwesped is a member of the NPA-A in France.

Trump Pentagon secretly deployed paratroopers to Israel: report

Robert Davis
June 8, 2026 

RAW STORY

President Donald Trump's Pentagon has quietly deployed paratroopers from the Army's 82nd Airborne in Israel, the latest sign of escalating tensions in the war in Iran, according to a new report.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on his Substack on Monday, citing a military source involved in war planning, that the deployment is part of a contingency plan between the U.S. and Israel "for seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran." That plan, Klippenstein reported, has been in place since at least February.

"By keeping the deployment quiet, the Pentagon headed off public debate over a joint U.S.-Israeli operation inside Iran — a prospect many considered plausible at the time, amid a fever pitch of mainstream reporting on a potential ground invasion," the report reads. "The secrecy also sidestepped what's euphemistically called "host nation sensitivities." A joint U.S.-Israeli operation raises thorny questions for America's Gulf Arab "partners," especially over logistical support — hence the 82nd, which could launch directly from Israel without any Gulf state's consent to use its territory."

"The Army deployment order, issued April 7, 2026, directs elements of the 2nd Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment — the storied 'Geronimo' battalion — to deploy to Israel on 'temporary duty.' The Israel deployment has not been previously reported," it added.

"The Pentagon has never acknowledged it; in public it has said only that the 82nd was bound for 'CENTCOM,' the military's term for U.S. Central Command, the combatant command responsible for the entire Middle East. The press echoed the vague terminology, suggesting the unit was headed to existing U.S. bases in Kuwait or Qatar," the report continued.

House Rejects Ro Khanna’s Effort to Block US-Israel Military Integration

Khanna introduced an amendment to strike down the proposal on Thursday, but was met with widespread opposition.

By Shireen Akram-Boshar ,

Truthout

June 8, 2026

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) questions U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 29, 2026 in Washington, DC.Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

On Thursday, the House of Representatives pushed forward with a measure to increase military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel despite one congressman’s efforts to block the proposal.

The House Armed Services Committee held a marathon session Thursday on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) budget, concluding after midnight on Friday and ultimately approving $1.15 trillion for defense programs.

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna (California) attempted to remove Section 224 of the NDAA, which calls for an increase in military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel, but was met with opposition, including from fellow Democrats.

Section 224 of the NDAA calls for an increase in military technical cooperation between the U.S. and Israel’s defense industries, with the creation of a position in the Pentagon to “synchroniz[e] cooperative efforts,” and “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.” This would also entail more cooperation on missile defense, AI, and other technology, “joint training exercises,” and more collaboration across “government, private sector, and academic institutions” in the U.S. and Israel.

Khanna introduced an amendment to strike down the proposal on Thursday, but was met with widespread opposition, with only a single Democrat voicing approval.

Khanna attempted to appeal to lawmakers across the political spectrum in his remarks, saying, “Everyone in America – whether you’re a Republican, an independent or a Democrat – says that we need to tell Netanyahu that America calls the shots, not the prime minister of any other country.”

Khanna was referring to a letter penned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that endorsed the measure and called for the U.S.-Israel relationship “to move from aid recipient to partner” under a “new framework of joint defense cooperation.” Khanna claimed that Section 224 echoed Netanyahu’s demand.

“[Americans] want less cooperation and blank checks to Israel, not more. Only the United States Congress would dream up at this moment, ‘Let’s actually do more for Israel,’ not less,” Khanna said.

But eight committee members – including Democrats – spoke against Khanna’s amendment. They said that the creation of the liaison position would ensure U.S. supervision of the program, and that the technology-sharing would allow the U.S. to benefit from Israeli technology.

This technology has been developed through the subjugation of Palestinians – Gaza especially has been used as a “testing ground” for Israeli technology. Since 2024, south Lebanon, too, has become a testing ground for Israeli weapons technologies.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith – the lead Democrat on the committee – said that he was “sympathetic” to Khanna’s argument. “Mr. Netanyahu insisted on this war with Iran that has strengthened Iran and weakened our position. I do not like his leadership of Israel or where he is going,” he said.

But Smith insisted that having a military partnership with Israel is useful “because Israel has actually been having to fight.”

“They have faced drone attacks and missile attacks. They have had to develop new technologies, technologies that we’ve benefitted from,” he continued.

Smith also stated that the framework was not new. “We have three existing programs right now where we do military cooperation with Israel to develop technologies. Those programs already exist,” he said.

Only Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) spoke in favor of the amendment. “The United States should have the same standards for Israel as we do for everyone else,” she said. “If any other country in the world had been credibly accused of violating U.S. and international law again and again, of killing tens of thousands of civilians, of blocking food and medicine from reaching a starving population, we would not be moving to deepen and permanently expand our military ties with them.”

But the lack of support from other Democrats is a reminder that the U.S. sees working more closely with Israel as in its own interests, too, not just Israel’s – and a long line of both Democratic and Republican presidents have maintained this position for decades.

We Should Not ‘Integrate’ Our Military With Any Foreign Nation!

by Ron Paul | Jun 9, 2026 | Antiwar.com

Not since the notorious 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provided for indefinite detention of American citizens, has the annual funding bill been as misused as this year. Embedded in the bill is an insult to every American who values our national sovereignty. The NDAA’s Section 224, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” would “integrate” the Israeli military with our own, fusing technology, production, intelligence-sharing, and more.

As Ben Freeman wrote last week in Responsible Statecraft:

“The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”

It is hard to think of a more “America last” position than handing the keys to the Pentagon (and our intelligence community) to a foreign country.

The insanity of Section 224 is made even more clear with news over the weekend that the Pentagon has raised to “critical” the threat level of Israel spying on the United States and its officials!

We should not “integrate” our military with any foreign country or organization, but integrating with a country that is a “critical” espionage threat to our national security? How does this make any sense?

The “problem” for American lawmakers is that after the killing in Gaza and now Lebanon, the American people – particularly younger Americans – have turned sharply against the US relationship with Israel. This foreign entanglement has sucked billions from the US treasury over the decades, and it has sucked us into endless conflict in the Middle East, including the current US war on Iran.

Rather than listen to the will of their constituents, Congress has decided to defy the wishes of Americans in favor of the wishes of a foreign government. AIPAC largely controls our Congress and passing Section 224 would be a great victory for the foreign lobby.

It should come as no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorses Section 224. He may have written it for all we know!

Should Section 224 remain in the NDAA, it would essentially remove future Congresses from any role in determining what level of support, cooperation, and oversight should be included in the US relationship with Israel. It would be worse even than President Obama’s 10 year guaranteed US financial support for Israel. Funding would not only be on autopilot, but the US would be further drawn into Israel’s multiple wars with its neighbors. Worse even than backing up Israel in its regional wars, the wars themselves would become ours.

Americans must speak out against plans to integrate our military with any foreign country. What we should be doing is disentangling from these overseas obligations, whether they be NATO or support for Ukraine or backing Taiwan against China.

We already spend more than a trillion dollars a year on our own military and our national debt is nearing $40 trillion. Taking on the obligation to fight even more wars overseas will hasten our bankruptcy. Section 224 must be stricken from the NDAA and it is up to every American who cares about our sovereignty to demand that Congress do so.

Ron Paul is a former Republican congressman from Texas. He was the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president.

Genocide the Non Profit Industrial Complex and the Democratic Party

Russell Mokhiber

 June 8, 2026

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Over the past couple of years, a hybrid type of activist has emerged in Washington, D.C.

To get a paycheck and pay the bills, they toil away inside the non-profit industrial complex – made up of non-profit organizations generally aligned with the Democratic Party.

Then they have side gigs, where they go on Substack and podcasts and rip away at the beast, without mentioning their employment with the public interest group in question.

In the May/June 2026 edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen, we interviewed one of these public interest warriors – Aaron Regunberg.

During the day, Regunberg works on climate change for Public Citizen.

At night, he goes on podcasts and speaks out on topics Public Citizen dares not touch. While Regunberg has repeatedly condemned Israeli genocide in Gaza, Public Citizen has not.

On March 19, 2026, Public Citizen put out a press release titled – $200 Billion for Trump’s Iran War is Grotesque Beyond Words.

But Public Citizen has said nothing that we could find about the billions the Biden and Trump administrations have been shoveling to Israel to commit Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

And that’s true for most of the inside the beltway public interest groups – with few exceptions.

We asked Regunberg – Why is that?

“Liberal groups might be scared of running up against the Democratic establishment,” Regunberg told the Capitol Hill Citizen.

Might be scared?

Just this week, Public Citizen held its annual gala at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

And the keynote speaker?

AIPAC recipient and friend and defender of the nuclear power industry Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island).

In a Capitol Hill Citizen front page article in the May/June 2026 issue – Big Tech Campaign to Fast Track Nuke Energy – our reporter Peter Castagno laid out how Senator Whitehouse and Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) “were the primary architects of the legislative architecture that the Trump administration has since used for maximal deregulation.”

(Early in its existence, Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy Project was a lead campaigner against nuclear power in the United States. It has since been shuttered.)

In March 2024, Whitehouse voted to defund UNRWA, the key organization in Gaza that delivered food, water, and medical supplies to Gaza. And he has voted in favor of Israel’s yearly military aid package.

In October 2024, members of Jewish Voice for Peace disrupted speeches by Senators Whitehouse and Jack Reed in Providence at a fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

The protesters called on the Senators to stop funding the Israeli genocide in Gaza — to no avail.

Or take the case of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), the national organization pushing for single payer healthcare in the United States.

Like Public Citizen, PNHP is tightly aligned with the Democratic Party and has refused to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

When asked about this, PNHP executive director Ken Snyder said that the organization does not make statements or take positions outside of their main issues – health care and national Medicare for All.

Snyder said that while the Israeli genocide has been raised by PNHP members, it never came before the board because of the focus of the organization is on single payer.

Bett Capehart is a single payer advocate and for fifteen years was a board member of the PNHP chapter in the state of Washington. Then in January 2024, she resigned from the PNHP board because, she said, the board voted against a resolution to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“I’m still a member of PNHP, but I’m not on the board anymore,” Capehart told an early May gathering for Kshama Sawant’s Congressional run in Washington’s ninth Congressional district. “I put my faith in the medical students who are members of PNHP, and when I donate, I donate to the medical students, not the whole PNHP organization,” Capehart told the gathering.

“I had to leave my board position with PNHP over the issue of a genocide,” she said. “The medical students brought a petition to the board. It was from Healthcare Workers for Palestine, and it was at the very beginning of the genocide.”

The board voted down the resolution in January 2024, Capehart said.

“I couldn’t sit with that. I thought – I’m kind of not doing what I’m supposed to do. But that experience is very similar to the disappointment that a lot of us have around organizations and nonprofits during this genocide who have not stepped up and taken a position and instead sort of still cowering before the Democrats.”

“After all, it was the Democrats who gave us the genocide,” Capehart said. “Let’s not forget that.”

Capehart told Capitol Hill Citizen last week that the medical students’ petition “was rather benign, calling for solidarity with the Palestinians, condemnation of the genocide and an end US arm sales to Israel.”

Capehart recalls that her and two other board members supported the resolution, while five other board members opposed it. Those who voted against the resolution told Capehart “this is between Israel and Hamas.”

Capehart said that the national PNHP has said nothing about the genocide.

While medical organizations like PNHP are refusing to speak out, individual doctors are another story.

Take the case of Dr. Diana Lapp. Dr. Lapp is a practicing family physician currently working at a community health center in Portland, Maine.

For 25 years, she was an active member of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). Earlier this year, she renounced her AAFP membership.

Why?

“For over two years, I and some of my colleagues urged the AAFP leadership to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its deliberate destruction of the Palestinian health care system,” Dr. Lapp wrote in an op-ed in January in the Portland Press Herald. “We believe it is our ethical obligation as physicians to insist on the protection of health care workers according to humanitarian international law – without exception.”

“Between October 7, 2023, and October 20, 2025, Israel killed at least 1,700 Palestinian health care workers and detained 431 from Gaza and the West Bank. While 309 are now confirmed to have been released, we know that at least another five died in detention, including two senior physicians, and 95 remain in Israeli custody.”

“AAFP’s response? Nothing but a toothless resolution passed in July 2024. The resolution purported to ‘support the safety of health care and humanitarian aid workers along with safe access to health care, health care facilities and humanitarian aid for all civilians in areas of armed conflict.’”

Dr. Lapp says that AAFP is not alone in its failure to condemn the genocide.

“The American Medical Association and all other major U.S. medical professional organizations have remained silent,” Dr. Lapp wrote. “Rather than supporting this complicity, I will stand behind the Hippocratic Oath I took 28 years ago. I will not support any medical professional organization’s silence.”

Both Code Pink and Doctors Against Genocide have been active in protesting the AMA and other medical associations who have failed to condemn the ongoing genocide.

But to this date, no major American medical organization has condemned the Israeli genocide.

Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter..