Official Reports ‘Unprecedented’ Rise in Gaza Miscarriages Amid Israeli Genocide

One US author called the staggering surge a “reproductive genocide that Western feminists can’t be allowed to ignore.”


A worker at Nasser Hospital’s morgue adds the wrapped body of a dead newborn baby to a tray containing 19 other miscarriage victims, on July 13, 2026 in Khan Younis, Gaza, Palestine.
(Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A senior medical official in the Gaza Strip sounded the alarm on Tuesday over a dramatic rise in miscarriages in the Palestinian exclave, with nearly 4,000 cases reported during the first half of 2026 amid Israel’s ongoing genocide.

Gaza Medical Relief Director Bassam Zaqout said that 3,958 miscarriages were recorded in Gaza during the first half of this year—an increase the doctor called “unprecedented,” and a serious risk to the health of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.

Zaqout cited the soaring miscarriage rate to factors in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, including the destruction of the strip’s infrastructure, unsanitary living conditions in camps for forcibly displaced Palestinians—where numerous babies have died of hypothermia—lack of hot water and hygiene supplies, and relentless terror caused by Israel Defense Forces bombing.



The Gaza Health Ministry documented 921 miscarriages and 2,004 live births in April. This staggering ratio—460 miscarriages for every 1,000 live births—is more than double that in neighboring nations Israel and Egypt.

Live births have also dropped dramatically in Gaza this year, from 5,210 in January, to 3,433 in February, 3,233 in March, 2,004 in April, and just 1,701 in May 2026, according to the ministry.

Last month, the Gaza Center for Human Rights said that the alarming rise in miscarriages is due to the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, repeated attacks on hospitals, and widespread deprivation of food, medicine, and essential medical services amid 33 months of what United Nations experts and others have described as a genocide.

The Gaza Center for Human Rights said the following factors are the most significant drivers of the miscarriage crisis:The widespread destruction of hospitals, primary healthcare centers, maternity wards, and fertility clinics;
Repeated attacks on medical personnel, including the killing, detention, and targeting of healthcare workers;
Mass malnutrition caused by Israel’s siege;
The collapse of maternal and child healthcare services; and
Restrictions on the entry of essential medicines and medical supplies needed by pregnant women and newborns.

The center also noted that Article II of the Genocide Convention—the legal basis for the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice—includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” in its definition of the crime.

United Nations officials and other experts have accused Israel of “systematically” using reproductive, sexual, and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians in Gaza and committing “genocidal acts” by deliberately destroying reproductive and healthcare facilities in the strip.

There has also been a documented surge in birth defects among Gaza newborns. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, congenital anomalies doubled in 2025 compared with 2022.



Experts attribute the increase to many of the same factors driving miscarriages, pointing to contaminated water and widespread malnutrition, including the former famine that killed at least hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, many of them children and infants.

Zaqout warned that Gaza’s health crisis is worsening as severe shortages of medicines, equipment, diagnostic tools, and laboratory supplies persist amid the strip’s heavily damaged healthcare infrastructure and ongoing siege. He also noted the epidemics of diseases such as chickenpox, waterborne illnesses, and respiratory infections.



Numerous Palestinian women have lost their pregnancies due to direct acute trauma inflicted by Israeli bombs and bullets, which have often also killed would-be mothers. Israeli invaders have also ordered the evacuation of Gaza’s hospitals, forcing staff to leave prematurely born babies to die and decompose in incubators.

A United Nations commission of inquiry reported last month that approximately 30% of the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed during Israel’s 33-month war on Gaza were children—many of whom were deliberately targeted. Israeli forces have killed more than 21,500 Gazan children, including 1,022 babies, since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.

The United Nations Children’s Fund has called Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”

‘Nowhere Is Safe’: Israel Kills Gaza Families and Bombs Hospital Despite Ceasefire

“I don’t feel like there is a ceasefire at all,” said a man who witnessed an Israeli missile attack on a hospital.


Family members carry the bodies of the Palestinians killed in a July 21, 2026 Israeli airstrike on an apartment in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, Palestine.
(Photo by Omar al-Qatta/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Palestinian officials said an Israel Defense Forces drone strike burned a family of six alive in their Gaza City home on Tuesday, a bombing that followed the massacre of another Palestinian family over the weekend and other attacks—including one on a hospital—as the Israeli genocide continues amid a nominal ceasefire.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said that rescue workers initially recovered the charred bodies of a mother, later identified as Salsabeel el-Masri, and her four children from their home in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City. Husband and father Firas el-Masri was later confirmed killed in the same strike.

The couple’s three daughters and son—Faryal, Salma, Amira, and Naeem—ranged in age from 6 to 13.

(Photo by el-Masri family/X)

At least some members of the family—who were sleeping when their home was bombed—were apparently not killed by the blast.

“They were all burned so much that our crews couldn’t reach them,” said Palestinian Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal. “They were screaming and begging us to get them before they were martyred, but all attempts failed.”

Video recordings of the airstrike’s aftermath show first responders desperately trying to extinguish the blaze caused by the attack and retrieving the burnt victims’ bodies.

Ahmed el-Masri told the Emirati newspaper The National that his brother’s “entire family was wiped out from the civil registry.”

The el-Masri family is one of approximately 2,700 erased from the registry since Israel launched its war on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, according to an Al Jazeera analysis published in January.

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed the bombing, claiming the strike was targeting a Hamas member. The IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement following the October 7 attack, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.

Reuters reported at least six more Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes later on Tuesday, including one targeting a vehicle in the central Gaza Strip.

On Monday, an IDF missile attack on the al-Yemen al-Saeed Hospital in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp killed at least two people and wounded 16 others, including women and children.

“The children were having fun and playing football, and suddenly they started screaming,” eyewitness Youssef Akasha told Drop Site News contributor Mohamed Ahmed. “We found many children lying on the ground, women screaming, and young men running to rescue the wounded.”

Graphic video footage shows children, including infants, being treated for shrapnel embedded in their bodies.

Israel’s attack on the el-Masri family followed a Saturday IDF airstrike on the home of the Nasman family in the al-Nasser neighborhood of Gaza City that killed five people. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Adham Nasman, 42; his wife, Marwa, 40; and three of their children—Arwa, 8, Ibrahim, 16, and Yahya, 18—were killed, and that Adham was apparently the intended target.

The couple’s 13-year-old son, also named Adham, was not home at the time of the strike. Video footage published by photojournalist Nahed Hajjaj shows the grieving boy beside the bodies of his slain family.



In another massacre on Saturday, an Israeli drone bombed a funeral in the Nuseirat refugee camp for a man who was allegedly a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who had been killed earlier the same day in another IDF strike. Eight people were killed and 20 others wounded in the second attack, according to Palestinian, Israeli, and international media reports.

Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing since October 2023 and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. Over 21,500 children—1,022 of them babies—are among the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces during the war that scholars, jurists, human rights groups, a panel of United Nations experts, and others say is a genocide.

Israel is facing a genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice and supported by nearly 20 nations, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant—his former defense minister who ordered the “complete siege” on Gaza that fueled famine and disease—are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.

The IDF’s continued attacks come despite a US-backed ceasefire that went into effect last October. Since then, more than 1,160 Palestinians—most of them civilians—have been killed and over 3,750 others wounded by Israeli forces, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

“Nine months after the announcement of a ceasefire, still nowhere is safe for Palestinians in Gaza,” UN human rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday. “The killing of civilians in these attacks raises concerns of continuing violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes in Gaza. Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians is a war crime.”

Akasha, who witnessed the Jabalia hospital bombing, told Drop Site News, “I don’t feel like there is a ceasefire at all.”

Gaza Is in a Water Crisis as Israel’s Blockade Makes Reconstruction Impossible

Water should never be a luxury. Yet, in Gaza, it has become one.

By Hend Salama Abo Helow , 

Truthout

July 20, 2026

A Palestinian child stands next to a wheelchair loaded with water containers near a water distribution truck in Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, Gaza Strip, on July 4, 2026.Ahmed Al Arini / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

Each Tuesday, at exactly 8 a.m., Abo Watan Al-Shararha’s mornings are marked by the distant sirens of humanitarian water trucks. The 39-year-old, who struggles to provide for his family of five, must carry empty jerrycans and venture through the rubble of his neighborhood in al-Zawaida, hoping he will make it to the trucks before the drinking water runs out.

For Al-Shararha, whose name references the Arabic word for “homeland,” home is where he can live with dignity and safety, without battling for life’s most basic necessities. Displaced six times during the genocide, he has reached what he hopes will be his latest refuge.

“But getting water is a matter of luck,” he told Truthout. “Sometimes I manage to fill my containers. Many other times the water runs out before my turn, leaving desperate people who have queued for hours parched and empty-handed. Other times I see the endless line and give up. And sometimes fights erupt over the remaining water, so I am forced to avoid the battle.”

When that happens, Al-Shararha has no choice but to buy water, despite its soaring prices.

“I used to work as a freelancer before the genocide,” Al-Shararha lamented. “We lived a humble life in a residential tower where tap water was available around the clock.”

Babies in Gaza Die Preventable Deaths Due to Medical Shortages Imposed by Israel
Mothers in Gaza are losing their newborns as hospitals struggle to function without adequate supplies and resources. By Shahad Ali & Sojoud Alkhour , Truthout July 16, 2026

Before the genocide, Gaza relied on three main water resources: three seawater desalination plants, providing around 7 percent of the Strip’s drinking water; three pipelines operated by the Israeli water company Mekorot, accounting for nearly 13 percent of Gaza’s drinking water; and a network of around 300 municipal wells tapping the Coastal Aquifer for desalination. Alongside them, three wastewater treatment plants recycled treated wastewater, primarily for agricultural use.

The director of the desalination plant in the Central Governorate of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, Dr. Muhammad Al-Abwini, told Truthout that, before October 7, 2023, the average share of water per person reached around 80 liters per day, including both domestic and drinking water.

“Although it was still far below the World Health Organization’s recommended [optimal] liters per person per day, it was a milestone for us. It was a breakthrough, given Gaza’s longstanding status quo,” he said.

Despite these achievements, a UN report released in 2018 warned that the water produced in Gaza was unfit for human consumption and that, unless urgent action was taken, the crisis would have disastrous consequences, rendering Gaza uninhabitable by 2020.

Al-Abwini explained that Gaza’s water insecurity largely stems from its geographical location along the coast. Seawater continuously leaks into the Coastal Aquifer, increasing the concentration of total dissolved salts and rendering much of the groundwater unfit for drinking.


“Before the genocide, people received 80 liters of water in their homes, with dignity. Today, 20 liters is the best we can offer, and even that reaches people through an exhausting and undignified process.”

“From there, several master plans were proposed to improve both the quality and quantity of water,” Al-Abwini said.

Yet since the first days of genocide, Israel has weaponized water, turning it into a tool of mass suffering. The Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered the cutoff of water supplies to Gaza just days after October 7.

Then the systematic destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure followed. According to a report by Médecins Sans Frontières released in April 2026, about 90 percent of water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. Wastewater treatment plants have been put out of service, leaving sewage overflowing across displacement camps, while Gaza’s largest functioning desalination plants have been decimated.

Speaking in a weary voice, Al-Abwini told Truthout, “The Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) system has been reduced to ashes. Before the genocide, it was designed with remarkable precision, taking into account both Gaza’s geography and its population density. Yet now, people are crammed into the so-called safe zones and al-Mawasi, which was originally designated for agricultural purposes rather than human settlement. That has further deepened the crisis.”

The ordeal extended far beyond the destruction of infrastructure and the deliberate killing of municipal staff. Engineers and water utility staff struggled to keep the plants functioning, but the complete blackout across Gaza hampered any attempt to revive its Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene system.

Al-Abwini elaborated, “Generators in Gaza were originally intended to operate for only a few hours a day. Today, however, the water sector relies on them almost entirely.”

Yet severe fuel shortages have forced many facilities to shut down. Israel’s restrictions on essential equipment, along with its ban on spare parts under the pretext of “dual use,” have further hindered efforts to restore the water system.

“The desalination plant has been plagued by technical failures … forcing us to run the plant manually,” Al-Abwini said. Damage to critical components reduced “production capacity from 2,500 cubic meters to just 1,200. We spent six months pleading with international organizations to facilitate its entry before it was finally allowed in.”


“I have to buy gallons of water for between two and four shekels each, nearly one dollar per gallon.”

Even beyond the severe restrictions on fuel, tight restrictions remain on both the power capacity and the type of generators allowed into Gaza.

Al-Abwini condemned the policy, saying, “The generator required to operate our desalination plant has a capacity of 1,600 kilowatts. Yet the only generators allowed to enter Gaza — if they are allowed at all — have a capacity of 30 kilowatts or less.”

Lubricating oil, an essential component for operating and maintaining machinery, has also been barred from entering Gaza.

“If we have a generator, we don’t have the oil to run it. And even when we do, the generator is now operating nearly four times beyond its intended workload, yet the lubricating oil is never changed.”

He put it plainly: “This is not a heroic act. This is a slow death for the generators and the gradual dismantling of the entire system. It’s a closed, hollow circle of suffering.”

All these factors combined have paved the way for a humanitarian crisis. According to a May 2026 report from Oxfam, “By early 2026, the United Nations estimated that drinking water availability in Gaza City had fallen below six litres per person per day, well below even emergency humanitarian standards.”

Dr. Al-Abwini proudly said, “Despite the unprecedented challenges, we managed to improve the quantity, reaching 20 liters per person per day for both drinking and domestic use. We considered it as us having had smashed the target, yet it is still far too little compared with the immense need on the ground. Before the genocide, people received 80 liters of water in their homes, with dignity. Today, 20 liters is the best we can offer, and even that reaches people through an exhausting and undignified process.”

Many families have resorted to compensating for the shortages by retrieving water from small private wells or relying on turning brackish water into potable water.

For Abo Ahmed Abo Ghatrous, a 52-year-old unemployed father of seven, domestic water has not reached him for almost a month and a half.

“My suffering to get domestic water far exceeds my struggle to find drinking water,” he told Truthout. “I have been displaced from Rafah for the third year in a row and now live in a tent pitched on agricultural land. I have to buy gallons of water for between two and four shekels each, nearly one dollar per gallon. We need more than seven gallons every day for bathing and cleaning. That means spending more than $200 every month just to meet our basic water needs. And that’s on top of the skyrocketing prices of the containers.”

Speaking in a broken voice, he said, “I can’t take it anymore. What should we do? Where should we go? Life has become unbearable, and the situation grows worse day by day.”

The water crisis has also profoundly affected Gaza’s social fabric.

“It’s a battle for survival,” Abo Ghatrous added. “Any aggressive reaction is understandable. We need water to live.”

Yet he also recalled how he and his neighbors continue to share what little water they have with one another.


Abo Ghatrous, who once cared for olive, lemon, pomegranate, and guava trees, is now bidding them a final farewell.

On the other hand, Al-Shararha stressed that disputes over water can quickly turn violent. “People have been shot over a single gallon of water,” he said.

Back in 2024, an analytical study released by Euro-Med Monitor found that 66 percent of the sample reported severe diarrhea, intestinal diseases, skin rashes, scabies, and vomiting. Each passing additional day of water insecurity and pollution jeopardizes the health of an already immunocompromised population in Gaza.

That is a predictable consequence, given the deteriorating hygiene conditions and the collapse of the desalination and wastewater treatment systems. As a result, waterborne pathogens spiral out of control, threatening many lives.

Abo Ghatrous remarked, “My daughters have developed gastroenteritis multiple times. I also underwent a chondrectomy shortly before the genocide, but my recovery was compromised because I had to haul heavy containers of water.”

The crops on the remaining agricultural land that survived the Israeli bombardment may not survive the water shortages.

Abo Ghatrous, who once cared for olive, lemon, pomegranate, and guava trees, is now bidding them a final farewell, accepting their fate.

“We are barely finding water to drink, let alone enough to water the trees. All of them have withered,” he said in distress.

Not surprised, Al-Abwini remarked, “This genocide has ruthlessly killed life itself — the marginalized people, the environment, humans, plants, and dignity. This genocide has pulverized 50 years of tireless work and investment in the environment. To restore the kind of water situation we had before the genocide, we will need at least decades.”

Looking for a sustainable solution as the scorching summer heat continues to rise, Hatem Abo Tahoun, a Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene system engineer with extensive experience working with international NGOs during emergencies, said the lack of materials continues to hinder any meaningful recovery plan.

“We are working in reverse,” he explained. “We first assess what is still usable, then build our plans around it.”

Water trucks continue to fall far short of people’s immense needs and are no longer an effective solution, Abo Tahoun said:


For now, portable reverse osmosis desalination plants distributed across overcrowded and densely populated areas are the ideal solution. To avoid overcrowding around the plants themselves, they should be supported by distribution networks that make water accessible to as many people as possible. Displacement has forced people to replace proper water storage containers with thin, makeshift ones that no longer meet their needs. Many humanitarian organizations are now working to provide families with durable jerrycans and equip desalination plants with water storage tanks. It is a complementary process. Each part depends on the other. The goal is to mitigate these harsh conditions and help people reach the bare minimum needed for survival.

Regarding domestic water, Abo Tahoun explained, “One practical solution is to reactivate old, unused wells to provide water for household and sanitation purposes, then connect them to distribution networks. This, in turn, would reduce the demand for drinking water supplied by the desalination plants.”


“Everything we are doing is an emergency measure. We cannot address the root cause. All we can do is take a humanitarian approach to keep people from falling into the abyss.”

As fuel continues to stand as a major roadblock, Abo Tahoun suggested, “If solar panels were allowed to enter at scale, they would completely change the humanitarian situation. Instead of facing a cascade of shortages and operating costs, we could rely on a natural resource — the sun.”

Abo Tahoun added, “Earlier in the genocide, we assessed the needs of the plants and, according to the available budget, distributed fuel to private wells so they could operate and provide water free of charge to marginalized families in the surrounding areas.”

Almost all families are now forced to ration their water use by recycling greywater.

“It’s not an effective solution, but we use it for flushing. My own family does the same,” Abo Tahoun said. “We’re running out of solutions. They are simple solutions that should be easy to implement, but without fuel, materials, and the equipment needed to restore the system, they remain out of reach.”

Given that the so-called reconstruction plan remains little more than ink on paper, Abo Tahoun warned: “We are still in emergency mode. We are simply trying to enhance our people’s resilience and preserve their dignity. Gaza’s future remains uncertain. Everything we are doing is an emergency measure. We cannot address the root cause. All we can do is take a humanitarian approach to keep people from falling into the abyss.”

For Al-Shararha, Abo Ghatrous, Al-Abwini, Abo Tahoun and all Gazan families, the unalienable right to water should never be undermined or weaponized. No one should have to chase the sirens of water trucks, queue for hours, or go to sleep thirsty. Water should never be a luxury. Yet, in Gaza, it has become one



This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Hend Salama Abo Helow

Hend Salama Abo Helow is a researcher, writer and medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. She is also a writer with We Are Not Numbers and has published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Institute for Palestinian Studies, Mondoweiss and Al Jazeera. She believes in writing as a form of resistance, a silent witness to atrocities committed against Palestinians, and a way to achieve liberation.

‘McCarthyite’ Rubio Report Ripped as Attempt to Justify Trump Invasion of Cuba

Critics panned the publication for not only its warmongering but also “unfounded claims seeking to tar domestic movements for social change as agents of a foreign government.”


Protesters demonstrate against the Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela and threats against Cuba in London, England on January 10, 2026.
(Photo by Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

While some Republicans in Congress cheered the US Department of State’s Monday report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” American and Cuban critics blasted it as part of both President Donald Trump’s push to invade the island and his authoritarian crackdown on domestic dissent.

“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” the report begins, “that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

Sharing the document on social media, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime advocate of regime change on the island—similarly claimed that Cuba’s government “has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country. The American people deserve to know.”



Some of the critics responded directly to Rubio, calling the report “justification for the military invasion of Cuba and the new COINTELPRO,” a reference to the Federal Bureau of Investigation program targeting US organizers over half a century ago.

Defense Priorities fellow and Chicago Tribune foreign affairs columnist Daniel DePetris wrote: “This report actually states, in all seriousness, that Cuba’s main goal is to conquer the United States. It’s about as dumb as dumb gets. Don’t be fooled: This is the State Department trying to build the foundational case for US military action, should Trump decide to do it.”

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, urged Rubio, “Before building another casus belli for Cuba, try to solve the strategic disaster that is the Iran War you started but cannot win.”

Trump in recent months has ramped up the United States’ decadeslong and deadly economic assault on Cuba and suggested that he may try to take over the island. However, he’s also signaled such action may come only after an end to his illegal war on Iran, which has been revived in recent days following a failed ceasefire.

In an apparent show of support for Trump taking military action against the island nation, Congressman Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) declared on social media Monday, “Cuba is next!”



Meanwhile, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla said in Spanish that “the latest fallacy from the US Department of State against Cuba forms part of the construction, by the secretary of state, of a pretext for sustaining its cruel and criminal economic war that punishes every Cuban family, and its aspiration to militarily aggress Cuba, for which it desperately seeks the support of US citizens. It is further evidence of the macabre plan designed by that US politician from South Florida, who only satisfies the interests of those who have always paid him.”

US Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), who recently traveled to Cuba to hear firsthand accounts of the humanitarian crisis, said that “Secretary Rubio’s deranged ‘analysis’ leaves out the fact that for more than six decades, the United States’ policies have destabilized our neighbors in Latin America—including Cuba—through sanctions, embargoes, military coups, land control, and colonization.”

“Today, the Trump Department of State, led by Rubio, continues that imperialist tradition while doing what authoritarians do by criminalizing dissent,” she continued. “US foreign policy is responsible for death, destruction, and destabilization. We can change that. We CAN become good neighbors.”

About halfway through the State Department report, it complains about a “constant stream of Western left-wing activists, influencers, and organizers” participating in “solidarity delegations” as well as events such as the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy,” which delivered humanitarian aid to everyday Cubans suffering due to the Trump administration’s intensified blockade.

“Participants included a suite of influential progressives from the United States and across the world, including Hasan Piker; Amazon Labor Union founder Christian Smalls; a delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America; former UK Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn; former Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias; several other current and former members of European Parliament; and Isra Hirsi, campus activist and daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),” the report states. Elsewhere, it takes aim at groups including the peace organization CodePink, Communist Party USA, the National Lawyers Guild, and others.



Some targeted individuals and groups responded to what CodePink called a “conspiracy theory that masquerades as a report on Cuba,” full of “baseless smears and imaginary, contrived links to Russia, China, and Iran.”

“The report attempts to paint the tiny island as a threat but says nothing about the US blockade that starves and punishes 10 million people,” CodePink said. “This latest attempt by the State Department is just one of many politically motivated witch hunts designed to silence anti-war voices who dare to challenge US militarism. It’s about justifying even more aggression against Cuba while turning advocates for peace into suspects. We’ve seen this playbook before. It’s McCarthyism, plain and simple.”

“CodePink is currently under investigation by the Treasury Department simply for bringing medical supplies to serve children’s hospitals in Cuba. We live in a world where, sadly, the people delivering medicine—not those who are enforcing the policies that deprive Cubans of medicine, food, fuel, and electricity—are under investigation,” the group noted.

The organization also nodded to the dozens of United Nations General Assembly votes against the decades of American sanctions, saying that “we stand proudly with the global majority, including 187 UN member nations, who oppose the inhumane US blockade of Cuba. We will not be intimidated for delivering humanitarian aid and advocating for diplomacy over war.”

“End the blockade. End the sanctions. End the economic warfare. End the threats of military intervention,” CodePink declared. “Let Cubans determine their own future. Hands off Cuba.”



Although not mentioned in the administration’s new document, Defending Rights & Dissent joined the organizations publicly lambasting it, with policy director Chip Gibbons saying that his group “objects to the State Department’s McCarthyite report on Cuba, which makes unfounded claims seeking to tar domestic movements for social change as agents of a foreign government.”

Throughout its 100 pages, the publication “goes so far as to cite reports from the long-discredited House Un-American Activities Committee, in order to revive absurd Cold War conspiracy theories and update them for the present,” noted Gibbons the author of The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the US National Security State.

“The report smears activists, organizations, and even elected officials using guilt-by-association techniques. It appears designed to justify both domestic political repression and regime change in Cuba,” he added. “Congress must not only condemn the report but hold hearings examining its authorship and to determine if the claims behind it have been used to facilitate the surveillance of American activists.”


This article has been updated with comment from Congresswoman Delia Ramirez.

Who Speaks for Argentina? Football, Palestine, and the Politics of Representation

The Argentine national football team does not belong to Javier Milei. Nor does it belong to Benjamin Netanyahu. Argentina does not speak with one voice.


Retirees, labor unions, and social organizations march in front of the National Congress to demand improved pensions and living conditions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 9, 2025 in protest of Javier Milei’s austerity policies.
(Photo by Luciano Gonzalez/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem
Jul 21, 2026

Common Dreams


One day before the FIFA Men’s World Cup final between Argentina and Spain, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his support for Argentina. In a video released before the match, he said: “I don’t hide that I’m a fan of Argentina. I think most Israeli citizens do. That is because President Milei has revolutionized Israel’s relationship with Argentina, and we have no greater nor better friends. Which is why we support them.”

Both media outlets known for supporting Palestinian solidarity and media outlets affiliated with or supportive of the Israeli state immediately framed the World Cup final as a proxy for the relationship between Palestine and Israel. The final turned into a symbolic contest due to the official state policies of Argentina and Spain toward Palestine and Israel. Acts of individual actors, for example, Lionel Messi’s commercial connection with Israeli companies or his visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank as part of a 2013 “Peace Tour” organized by Barcelona or Lamin Yamal’s waving of a Palestinian flag after the La Liga championship, were turned into symbols of the collective stance of a nation and became reasons enough to support or oppose a specific team in the World Cup final.

As a Bangladeshi-American who grew up in Bangladesh—a country known for its passion for Latin American football powerhouses and its split loyalties between Argentina and Brazil—I have been a fan of the Argentine men’s football team since the age of 10. I have also been in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom since I was old enough to read newspapers. I found it appalling to see the head of a genocidal state publicly endorse my favorite men’s football team and to watch Palestinian solidarity become over simplistically reduced to supporting or opposing a football team. Can we end settler-colonial violence by winning a football match?

While people have argued that symbols matter, I would urge them to consider how such symbolism ignores two important points: First, it overlooks the problem of transforming one of the world’s most celebrated sporting spectacles into a stage upon which Benjamin Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist genocidal project can be publicly performed and normalized. Second, people are not their governments. Argentina’s self-proclaimed “most Zionist president in the world” Javier Milei’s unconditional alignment with Netanyahu’s government does not reflect the fact that Argentina is also the home to a substantial and increasingly visible Palestinian solidarity movement.

To reduce Argentina to its president is to reproduce a colonial logic that erases the vibrant historical and contemporary social movements, labor struggles, Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer organizing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activism, and transnational solidarity engagements that have long shaped political life in Argentina.

Using sports as a platform for promoting geopolitical interests is not new. Sports have always been entangled with powerful states and institutions. They were exported globally as tools of European colonial expansion, serving as instruments of the so-called civilizing mission, mechanisms of control, and tactics of assimilation between the 16th and the 20th centuries. Many colonized and indigenous communities have also turned sports into powerful symbols of defiance, through which they subverted the master’s tools, beat the colonizers at their own game, and transformed stadiums and playing fields into communal spaces for practicing decolonial solidarity and organizing resistance away from colonial surveillance and policing.

Football is no exception. The imperial and colonial legacy still shapes the way football—especially the FIFA Men’s World Cup—is organized, governed, and experienced today. Concerns have been raised about the displacement of the unhoused population by local governments in US host cities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to arbitrarily and violently target, deport, and kill members of communities of color through paramilitary-style operations while World Cup matches were held across US cities. In Canadian and Mexican host cities, marginalized and minoritized communities expressed concerns about disruptions to water supplies, threats to land access, rising living costs, and disruptive infrastructural development.

Even though FIFA has chosen the official slogan “United as One” for the 2026 Men’s World Cup, a series of events has already demonstrated that the powerful and the powerless are not united and that the playing field is not level for everyone. US President Donald Trump has publicly intervened in FIFA’s disciplinary process, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s cozy relationship with Trump has raised serious concerns. Unusually strict travel restrictions disproportionately affected the Iranian team’s World Cup experience. The 2026 FIFA World Cup has repeatedly been used and abused to exert both hard and soft neoliberal, disciplinary, and diplomatic power.

By expressing support for the Argentine men’s football team, Netanyahu also utilized the World Cup to manufacture legitimacy for the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid state that has a long history of systematically evicting, segregating, displacing, and killing Indigenous Palestinians. He has appropriated this transnational sporting spectacle as an instrument for promoting and normalizing his settler-colonial mission.

What is at stake, however, extends beyond the universalization of a violent settler-colonial regime.

Drawing on Edward Said, I would argue that Netanyahu’s embrace of Argentina illustrates how the Israeli settler-colonial project is not just about colonizing Palestinian land and annihilating the Indigenous Palestinian population. The settler-colonial project involves careful production of knowledge through a politics of representation, turning representation into a technology of discursive and political rule. Through his symbolic embrace, Netanyahu deliberately erases complexities and contradictions, propagating an oversimplified and monolithic discourse about the state of Argentina and its communities. In his representation, Argentina is no longer a society of millions negotiating overlapping and competing political traditions; it becomes merely an extension of President Javier Milei’s geopolitical loyalties.

Yet Milei does not constitute Argentina.

To reduce Argentina to its president is to reproduce a colonial logic that erases the vibrant historical and contemporary social movements, labor struggles, Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer organizing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activism, and transnational solidarity engagements that have long shaped political life in Argentina. It renders invisible the thousands of Argentines who have mobilized in solidarity with Palestinians despite President Milei’s continuing unabashed support for Israel, including members of Argentine Jewish organizations critical of Israeli state-sponsored settler-colonial violence, as well as union organizers, students, artists, and social justice activists who refuse to equate support for Palestinian liberation with hostility toward Jewish lives and communities.

For example, the Comité Argentino de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Palestino (Argentine Solidarity Committee with the Palestinian People) organizes national demonstrations, educational events, BDS campaigns, and solidarity actions across Argentina. It ran a nationwide campaign under the slogan, “Argentina Rejects Genocide in Gaza” and mobilized a massive demonstration involving thousands of people in Buenos Aires in July 2025. A diverse collective of Argentine lawyers, doctors, educators, politicians, journalists, and activists participated in the Global Sumud Flotilla, which attempted to break the Israeli criminal blockade and carried humanitarian aid to Gaza. Judíos por Palestina (Jews for Palestine) operates in Argentina as part of the Global Jews for Palestine Network, which is known for its rejection of Zionism, Israeli apartheid, and genocidal state policies.

A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 55% of Argentines hold “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” views of Israel. Only 21% view the country favorably. Argentina recognized Palestine as a “free and independent state” under former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner back in 2010—more than 13 years before Spain formally recognized the state of Palestine. The Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, who famously said, “In my heart, I am Palestinian,” was known for his vocal critiques of the settler-colonial violence of the Israeli state.

The issue is not whether a political leader may cheer for Argentina. The issue is how the imperial and settler-colonial power repeatedly attempts to equate a diplomatic alliance between Milei and Netanyahu with the political imagination of the entire population of Argentina.

The Argentine national football team does not belong to Javier Milei. Nor does it belong to Benjamin Netanyahu. Argentina does not speak with one voice. The Argentine football team belongs to generations of communities that have transformed football into an archive of collective memory—of neighborhood life, working-class identity, migration, anti-authoritarian and democratic struggles, joy, grief, and resistance. To appropriate that symbolic inheritance for the purpose of normalizing settler-colonial violence is to strip football of its decolonial legacy. No geopolitical alliance—and no World Cup final—can or should erase that legacy.


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Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem
About Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem (she/her) is an educator, researcher, writer, and activist. Currently, she works as associate professor and chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, United States.
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Rights Group Demands US Investigation Into Reported Bombing of Ecuadorian Fishing Boat

“The families of the eight individuals whose whereabouts are unknown fear that this is a case of enforced disappearance at the hands of the United States,” said an advocate at Amnesty International.


Family members hold photos of their loved ones, who have been missing at sea since January 20, 2026, when their fishing boat “went up in smoke” in international waters.
(Photo by Billy Navarrete/CDH Guayaquil)

Julia Conley
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Amnesty International is calling for a full investigation by the US government into the alleged bombing of an Ecuadorian fishing boat, the Fiorella, last January, as the family members of eight disappeared fishermen have spent months demanding answers about what happened to their loved ones in the midst of the Trump administration’s boat bombing campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

In “Operation Southern Spear,” which the Trump administration has said is aimed at stopping drug trafficking from Latin America and in which at least 221 people have been killed in more than 60 bombings, US Southern Command has frequently announced strikes in the region since they began in September.

In the case of the Fiorella, the US military did not issue an announcement of a bombing after the boat “went up in smoke” on January 20, after which eight fishermen who were on board went missing in the midst of Operation Southern Spear.

Amnesty noted on Monday that in the case of two other Ecuadorian fishing vessels, Negra Francisca Duarte II and Don Maca, which were reportedly struck by drones in March and whose surviving crew members said they were captured and tortured by US forces, US Southern Command also did not publicly acknowledge the strikes, “despite reports from survivors stating that both vessels were allegedly sunk by unmanned aerial vehicles bearing markings attributed to the United States.”

“If it were confirmed that the United States was responsible for the strike on the Fiorella, as well as for the strikes against the Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca, the total number of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and other serious human rights violations associated with these operations could be much higher than previously estimated,” said Amnesty.




The group’s Evidence Lab used a vessel monitoring system to reconstruct the route covered by the Fiorella, finding the boat set sail from Jaramijó with 10 crew members on January 15.

The boat lost its internet connection shortly after setting out and went in and out of international waters, also sailing in the Galapagos Exclusive Economic Zone, between January 15-19.

“During the first days of the trip, no major incidents were reported,” said Amnesty. “However, from the fourth day onwards, the Fiorella was allegedly subjected to sustained monitoring by aircraft, patrol boats and drones bearing United States markings. Juan Carlos Valencia, the fishing boat’s captain, sent daily satellite messages to his family expressing his growing concern about the surveillance.”

On the morning of January 20, the boat sent two skiffs out with baited hooks, and at around 1:00 pm the two crew members on one of the boats saw “a large column of smoke in the distance in the direction of the Fiorella.” The two crew members on the skiff were rescued by another fishing boat two days later, but “nothing more has been heard of the Fiorella or the second skiff since,” said Amnesty.

Three months after the Fiorella disappeared following the apparent attack, the local organization Standing Committee for the Defense of Human Rights reported that the 36 crew members who had been aboard the Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca had been detained by US personnel after their boats were struck by drones, before being eventually returned to Ecuador.

Amnesty International, which met with the families of the disappeared crew members from the Fiorella, said the relatives suspect their loved ones may also have been captured and transferred to another country by the US.

“The families of the eight individuals whose whereabouts are unknown fear that this is a case of enforced disappearance at the hands of the United States,” said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International. “The US and Ecuadorian authorities must confirm or deny whether state agents from either country were involved, take all necessary steps to ascertain the fate and whereabouts of the victims, and provide reliable evidence showing what happened to them.”

Family members reported that Ecuadorian officials have alluded to allegations that their loved ones were involved in drug trafficking and were therefore attacked by the US as part of Operation Southern Spear.

“The commander said to us: ‘You know what they went to do, so why are you looking for them?’” the daughter of one missing fisherman told Amnesty. “This made me really angry, and I said to him: ‘I’m here to look for my dad, all they did was go fishing. You should show some compassion and tell us the truth.’ The next day we went again [to the port authority] and they simply closed the door on us.”

The Ecuadorian Public Prosecutor’s office has not submitted a formal request to the US for information to complete an investigation into the Fiorella‘s disappearance, said Amnesty.

“It’s as if the ship simply vanished and no one cares how it happened or what became of the people on board. Perhaps it just flew away? More than six months on from the disappearance, the Ecuadorian authorities must provide a clear account of what actions they have taken to establish the facts, what they know, what they do not know, and how they intend to address the legitimate demands of the families of those disappeared. The criminal investigation into these events must continue until those potentially responsible are identified and brought to justice,” said Piquer.

She added that “the Department of Justice and the investigative authorities of the US armed forces must investigate and establish possible criminal responsibility not only in relation to the Fiorella, but also for all other strikes on vessels on the high seas.”

“Similarly, the US Congress must drive a parliamentary inquiry into this serious incident, with hearings and reports designed to establish the facts and determine the possible involvement of public agencies or private entities under its authority,” she said. “In addition, all states must suspend international cooperation on intelligence and military equipment that could be used in such illegal operations.”

US-Ecuador Military Partnership Brings Torture, Deadly Drone Strikes, and Disappearances

“US-Ecuador cooperation on security has been too opaque and too dangerous for Ecuadorians,” said a representative for Human Rights Watch.


Farmer Jose Pena looks for belongings amid rubble after a bomb dropped by the Ecuadorian army in the Lago Agrio region, Sucumbios province, Ecuador, on the border with Colombia, on March 18, 2026.
(Photo by Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Human rights advocates are urging Congress to investigate the deepening military relationship between the US and Ecuador, which they say has been marred by severe abuses against civilians, including torture, arbitrary detentions, unexplained drone strikes, and disappearances.

A report out Tuesday from Human Rights Watch documents how the Trump administration’s cooperation with the right-wing government of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa in response to organized crime in the country has been carried out under a veil of secrecy that has left few safeguards in place to protect human rights.

Dozens of victims, witnesses, lawyers, and others were interviewed for the report, which provides details about four incidents in which ordinary people were subject to abuse allegedly by Ecuadorian forces trained and armed by the United States as part of what the governments have called “Operation Total Extermination.”

In one case—which was reported on by Common Dreams after being documented by local outlets in early March—Ecuadorian soldiers partnered with the US and stormed into the rural town of San Martín along the Colombian border in search of facilities owned by an armed group known as the Border Commandos.

Soldiers detained four dairy farmers without evidence of a crime and interrogated them for hours while beating, kicking, and striking them with rifle butts. One of the men said he was taken to the main house on the farm and waterboarded. According to the men, the soldiers doused the house with gasoline and set the property on fire.

Soldiers fired their weapons at another group of villagers who’d come to ask about the workers, which caused them to flee.

The four men were later taken to an unidentified military facility, where they said they were doused with water and electrocuted. Two of the men said soldiers pointed guns at them and threatened to kill them and cut off their fingers unless they confessed where they were keeping drugs and arms.

The men were released hours later without charges, and prosecutors said the soldiers failed to provide sufficient evidence to charge them. Human Rights Watch found they had no criminal records.

Days later, the military returned and dropped munitions on the remnants of the burned property and two others that had been abandoned. Human Rights Watch did not find evidence that the destroyed properties had any connection to armed criminal groups.

In a hearing before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Francis L. Donovan described the operation as a “success” and said Ecuadorian forces had acted “professionally.” The Trump administration has said US forces were “present” for the operation, but has not disclosed their role in the bombing of the houses or the torture of the farmworkers.




The Human Rights Watch report also details three attacks on fishing boats between January and March off the coast of the Galápagos Islands, which are possessed by Ecuador.

On January 20, the Fiorella disappeared along with eight crew members who remain missing more than six months later. Two surviving crew members, who’d left the main vessel to set fishing lines, said they suddenly lost contact with the ship while they were waiting to be picked up. As they searched for the vessel, they saw a “column of smoke” off in the distance, but no sign of the Fiorella.

They added that in the days before the ship went missing, they had seen what they thought were surveillance drones flying overhead as well as a gray patrol vessel flying an American flag nearby.

The families of the eight missing sailors have been demanding answers about their whereabouts for months with little response from the Ecuadorian government. The United Nations has issued urgent actions on behalf of the fishermen, calling on Ecuador to immediately search for them.

“The families of the eight individuals whose whereabouts are unknown fear that this is a case of enforced disappearance at the hands of the United States,” said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International, on Monday. “The US and Ecuadorian authorities must confirm or deny whether state agents from either country were involved, take all necessary steps to ascertain the fate and whereabouts of the victims, and provide reliable evidence showing what happened to them.”

In March, two other boats—La Negra Francisca Duarte II and Don Maca—were hit with drones off the Galápagos. In both cases, the shipwrecked men were picked up by a blue and white ship by armed personnel wearing American military attire.

The fishermen were hooded, tied up, and in some cases beaten before being left on a hot metal deck for several hours without food, water, or adequate medical care.

Members of both crews said they saw the alleged US personnel destroy their fishing boats. They were then handed off to Salvadoran authorities and later sent back to Ecuador. Several of the men sustained serious injuries from the drone attacks, including severe burns, hearing loss, vision loss, broken and dislocated bones, and wounds from drone propellers.

Ecuadorian authorities have not confirmed that the attacks took place. According to the captain of La Negra Francisca Duarte II, and later an Ecuadorian port captain, Ecuadorian Coast Guard officers had boarded their ship for a routine inspection and found no evidence of illicit activity, just eight hours before the vessel was struck. No such inspections were reported aboard Don Maca.

The attacks closely resemble the ongoing campaign of extrajudicial boat bombings carried out by the United States, known as “Operation Southern Spear,” in which at least 221 people have been killed across more than 60 attacks.

Though 13 of the survivors said they were detained by what appeared to be US personnel, the Department of Defense and Coast Guard denied involvement in all three attacks off the Galápagos.

“US-Ecuador cooperation on security has been too opaque and too dangerous for Ecuadorians,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Before more harm is done, the US Congress should demand real answers and effective safeguards.”

“Joint security operations against organized crime,” Goebertus added, “should not become a cover for abuses.”

Report Exposes Decades of Climate Polluters Pushing the ‘Fraud of Clean Natural Gas’

“Big Oil and the gas industry knew decades ago that methane was a harmful climate pollutant, but they manufactured the myth of ‘clean’ natural gas in order to protect and expand their business.”


The Ruby Pipeline runs through the area where the Stratos Project, a proposed data center, will be built in Box Elder County on May 15, 2026 near Snowville, Utah.
(Photo by Natalie Behring/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Gas companies knew about the climate harms of natural gas much earlier than previously thought and downplayed them to the public, according to a new trove of documents unearthed by an environmental activist group on Monday.

A report released Monday by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) found that—much like Big Oil had deceived the public about the planet-heating impact of oil—gas companies that pushed their product as a “clean” alternative had downplayed natural gas’ production of methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years.

The report, which was created through an examination of newly discovered documents and confidential reports, as well as expert interviews, determines that the industry was aware of these harms as far back as 1968, when a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute found that methane in the atmosphere was connected to “oil fields” and “[gas] distribution system leakage.”

“Big Oil and the gas industry knew decades ago that methane was a harmful climate pollutant, but they manufactured the myth of ‘clean’ natural gas in order to protect and expand their business, with no regard for public health or the climate impacts that they knew would result,” said Richard Wiles, president of CCI.

The report examines how the American Gas Association (AGA), an industry group representing many industry giants, hired top public relations firms to change the nation’s perceptions of gas as a dangerous pollutant.

Despite acknowledging behind the scenes that they lacked “clear, simple, substantiating facts” to vouch for its safety, industry ad campaigns sought to associate gas with nature, simplicity, and cleanliness. One campaign emphasized that it was “cleaner than coal” and created “virtually no emissions.”

The industry also created its own research institute to peddle studies to the public that disrupted a growing consensus around the dangers of methane by emphasizing the uncertainty of the findings and casting doubt on their connection to natural gas.

All the while, internal industry research was finding that methane was not only a major driver of the greenhouse effect, but was being released in far greater quantities than previously known, to the point where it was just as dirty, if not dirtier than coal.

Despite this, the industry helped to keep the “myth” of clean natural gas alive for decades. In the 1990s, the industry funded and provided much of the underlying data for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study concluding that the amount of methane produced by natural gas was low enough that it could be considered a “bridge fuel” to reduce emissions.

Though later research would demonstrate that the study had vastly underestimated the amount of methane being emitted by gas producers, the damage had been done, and the number was cited by the industry for decades to promote its product as a green alternative.

According to a poll conducted by CCI with Data for Progress, 50% of likely voters still believe that natural gas is a form of “clean energy.”

“The fraud of clean natural gas has been essential to the industry’s success in the marketplace, and the idea that gas is climate-friendly has been at the heart of the rapid expansion of gas infrastructure over the last two decades,” the report says.

The Center for Climate Integrity has argued that fossil fuel companies should be required to compensate the public for decades of deception that has contributed to the climate crisis.

“Officials who continue to justify expanding natural gas reliance by still claiming it’s clean or safe for the climate are using the same script and manipulated science that gas executives and their PR teams concocted decades ago,” Wiles said. “It’s time that these profoundly dangerous lies are finally put to rest. By exposing the gas industry’s deception, we can get one step closer to accountability.”

True Universal Healthcare Means Medicare For All, Not a ‘Public Option’

As politicians debate “universal healthcare,” we need those two words to be much more than a campaign slogan or an empty promise. Healthcare must be a true human right, easily exercised by every single person in America.

     
Bill Weber of Portland, Maine and Marie Follayttar of South Portland unfurl a see-through banner at the start of a rally at Lincoln Park in Portland on Saturday as part of a national effort to demand improved and expanded Medicare for everyone. Follayttar is the director of Mainers for Accountable Leadership.
(Staff photo by Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Dr. Sanjeev K. Sriram
Jul 21, 2026

Common Dreams

As a Maryland pediatrician, I serve patients and communities who struggle at the broken edges of the American healthcare “system.” My patients are from families working three or four jobs with no benefits, just barely getting by. With more grace than I could ever summon, these families diligently follow the protocols to determine their children’s “eligibility” for healthcare. The American healthcare system scrutinizes a family’s pay stubs, bank statements, and employment status—a process called means testing—to determine if they are eligible for Medicaid or a pittance of help to purchase a private insurance plan. It is not enough to be a human being. Our healthcare system must determine where you are on the spectrum of worthy to unworthy before you can get any medical care.

My pediatric patients whose parents get health insurance through their employment are not doing much better. An inhaler that helps an asthmatic breathe easier is covered by the insurance corporation one year, but not the next. Similarly, a specialist who has masterfully managed a patient’s seizures for several years is suddenly “out of network.” Never mind that the patient’s parents are paying premiums from every single paycheck to that multibillion-dollar insurance corporation. Playing by the corporate greed machine’s rules does not protect patients from arbitrary decisions that are supposedly good for business.




Over the course of my 20 years working in healthcare, I have seen more and more patients with supposedly good insurance avoid necessary medical care because the out-of-pocket costs keep increasing. In the richest country in the world, families are stuck between the false choices of paying for rent, groceries, utilities, or healthcare. Choosing healthcare can cost anywhere from feeding your family to putting a roof over their head.

All of us are trapped in this infuriating maze of puzzles and peril. Looking at this cruel mess of a system, we have politicians saying a “public option” is enough to fix things. There are think tanks describing a system of “universal healthcare” where the expensive (and yet, worthless) plans from private insurance corporations, the 50 shades of Medicaid, and a public option somehow achieve a magical harmony. To make things even more complicated, it is unclear what exactly a public option could look like. It could mean patients have the option of buying into Medicare or Medicaid. Or it could mean a separate public insurance plan at the federal level, possibly available to everyone or possibly just the ones deemed needy enough.

Medicare For All is true universal healthcare, where patients and families have peace of mind whenever and wherever they need medical help.

We need to be clear about what “universal healthcare” ought to mean. Everybody getting expensive-but-worthless plans from insurance corporations is universal financial stress, not universal healthcare. Similarly, adding any kind of “public option” fragment to a ridiculously fragmented system is universal confusion, not universal healthcare.

Insurance corporations have a long track record of deploying lobbyists and misinformation to undermine provisions of the Affordable Care Act. It is foolish to think these greed machines will become good-faith partners in our healthcare, competing fair and square with any kind of public option. Corporate lobbyists will see to it that any public option uses complicated means testing to determine which members of the public are worthy or unworthy of the care. These corporations will also manipulate their own plans to shut out patients who need healthcare the most, leaving them to a public option struggling to pay doctors and hospitals. Insurance greed machines do not want competition, and will undermine a public option any way they can.

Rather than tinker with a corporate-driven healthcare system determined to put profits before patients, let’s build universal healthcare through Medicare For All. Because healthcare is a human right, Medicare For All guarantees every single person living in America is eligible. We can save billions of dollars when we stop scrutinizing who is worthy or unworthy. Medicare For All provides the kind of coverage that stays with people from cradle to grave. It is mobile coverage, staying with patients from state to state, or job to job. Hospitals and clinics will remain open and properly staffed because Medicare For All puts patients first, not profits. Because all 342 million of us are covered, Medicare For All will have powerful leverage to negotiate with Big Pharma about the cost of prescriptions. Medicare For All is true universal healthcare, where patients and families have peace of mind whenever and wherever they need medical help.

We have tolerated an intolerable healthcare system for far too long. In the coming years, as politicians debate “universal healthcare,” we need those two words to be much more than a campaign slogan or an empty promise. Healthcare must be a true human right, easily exercised by every single person in America. We can and we will make that right a reality with Medicare For All.